Coffee, Cigarettes and Self-reflection

Photo by Ralph Crane

I have always loved this vintage photo of Lauren Becall by Ralph Crane. It reminds me of myself when I was in my 20s and still chain-smoking. The only thing missing is a notebook and pen. So many hours I sat with pen and paper, a cup of coffee and a cigarette hanging out of my mouth. You were just as likely to find me in a bar drinking coffee and writing rather than having an alcoholic beverage and talking to people. I have old order tickets, napkins and other random pieces of paper with whole poems or fragments I started.

The other day I was thinking about my old dream of singing (I have blogged about it here) and how, since I started this journey, my guides have told me to sing over and over. My thoughts wandered to my old dreams of wanting to be a successful singer and I thought to myself, "But I don't want to be on stage and it is no longer my dream."

And there was a realized truth...an "aha" moment.

And as I stood there in the kitchen making myself lunch and watching my hands do their work, I thought to myself, "But I already sing. I sing through my fingers with my words. My words are my song."

And that is the truth hidden in plain sight.

I love writing, but I stopped for many years. I used to write poems, lyrics, start stories, letters to friends and in my journal....but I stopped. I don't know how or why I stopped, but I did. And with the stopping, something in me felt like it died.

It took me 30 years to share my old poems with the world on my blog. I was proud of myself for taking that step because they always felt so personal and I wasn't ready back then to share such an inner part of me openly.

I didn't know if I would be able to write again the way I used to, but I just tried and I was pleased with the first attempt. 5 years later and it seems my song has come back and it is even stronger than before. I can easily look at a picture and start to hear words formulate that are inspired by what I see...in images, art, and the things around me.

People have warned me that others might try to steal my work and my response is, "So." They have warned me that someone might attach their own name to my words and again I say, "So." I will not let fear keep me from sharing my creations with everyone who cares to read them. I share my words to provoke thought and feeling. I share them to put something beautiful out into the world. I put them out there because putting them out there is putting myself out there, which is the new open version of me. So what if someone attaches their names to my words? It doesn't matter. I don't even know who I really am at my core so even the name "Oktobre" is just a false identity.

Photo by Irving Penn

And what about all the money I could make if I were to write and publish books? Most of the information I share about my journey I would never charge for...ever...and the reason is because I think people are more important than profit. I think helping nudge humanity in a new direction is more important than making a buck on what I have to offer. I give my knowledge for free. Maybe it will resonate for some and help make their journey just a little easier than my own has been...which brings us one step closer to tipping the balance in favor of a heart centered society rather than a self centered one that focuses on division, survival and greed.

Would I like to be able to be comfortable for the time I have left here? That would be lovely, but it isn't what drives me. Maybe some day just the right musician will find me and want to put music to my poems and lyrics and together we can form a partnership we can mutually benefit from. To have music put with my words would be the absolute icing on the cake. If there is eventually money that comes with that, I wouldn't turn it down.

Duality, Reincarnation, Simultaneous Lives, Jean Seberg

Last night, on a hunch, I did a search of actresses who killed themselves because I had had so many dreams about having dropped out of school that felt more like a reference to suicide than actual 3D reality school. The first photo I saw was the above one of Jean Seberg and I just knew. Rose is a symbol that comes up over and over again in dreams, signs and syncs and I had just had a conversation with a friend about roses coming up for us. In fact, days before, I had a sync show up that gave me pause so I did a screenshot of what I saw. I often do this as I am collecting my puzzle pieces and trying to put them all together.

This particular synchronicity had multiple connections. Many of my dreams have a fairy tale connection and the story of Snow White and Rose Red, which is a Beauty and the Beast variation, is highly significant to me in figuring all of this out. I remember through dreams splitting apart into two... basically identical twins, which is probably why I see identical twins in my dreams so often. I believe this is how duality is achieved in this reality. One twin embodies light and one embodies dark but they are very similar. The only variation is personality.

I believe, also, that the dual aspects of self choose similar vocations and have similar personal issues within their lives only they approach them slightly differently. I believe this is true based on the guidance I have been given and the people I have been guided to. For instance, River Phoenix and Brandon Lee are the two who came to me in spirit. Both are actors and both died the exact same year. I kept being told that they were "two sides of the same coin". And then later I was shown in a dream having a piece of cake that was four layers and it had split in half on my plate. People thought I had two pieces of cake, but I told them that, no, this was actually a single piece of cake. Later in the dream I saw two lamps and discovered that their cords met and they were powered by a single source. I think the same is true for most of us.

I was guided to Deryck Whibley of Sum 41 and later to Laura Jane Grace of Against Me!. Both are considered a type of punk by fans and both are the primary song writers of their bands. Without them, the band essentially would not exist. I was drawn to studying Nikola Tesla and Thomas Edison and again I was seeing two people who were the same but different.

Over and over I was seeing this pattern emerge that the average person would not be aware of or think to consider. So after having discovered my life as Ava, I considered that there must be another actress I hadn't discovered who was the light part of the duo as I believe fully that Ava is the dark one. I searched for an actress who had killed herself because it is such a big theme pervading my own life. That combined with the whole "dropping out of school" in my dreams and then coming back to finish made me feel there was something to be discovered in that search.

I read the whole list of actresses on that specific page and the only one I felt drawn to was Jean, so I explored more about her specifically.

As I explored her life, just like with Ava, I could see aspects of myself in Jean. Jean grew up in the Midwest and naturally had a strong sense of fairness and strived hard to to be inclusive to those who were considered minorities. She had a kind, gentle and giving heart, and in many respects, it was also her downfall because she didn't have a lot of balance. She didn't always make the best choices with her philanthropy and often got taken advantage of. I could see in her the kind, gentle sensitive me I was as a child. But life took its toll and the kind hearted me, the Snow White me, became buried in layers of ice and snow and the darker me "rose" to the surface and took over for her sister. In dreams there is a person named Rose and Rosie. And once I heard, "Rose Top died fairly." I didn't understand what that meant at the time, but I think it was showing me that the dark aspect had given way to Snow White so she could sit beside her sister in the driver's seat. I don't think Rose literally died, just stepped back and allowed some of that gentleness and kindness back to the surface. I had become angry, bitter and mean in order to survive my life.

Ava would eventually die alone with very few people actually caring that she had died. Frank Sinatra was one of two celebrity people who sent flowers to her funeral. She had pushed everyone away and let her addiction, bitterness, and regrets consume her. She didn't kill herself directly, but her choices led to her early death at 67.

Jean always felt misplaced and like she didn't belong here and I can relate so much to this feeling as I have always felt it too. Jean's life helped me understand some of the choices I made for this life. She had a string of romantic relationships where some were worse than others. But it was one after the others and sometimes overlapping because she was legally married while involved with some of the men. Ava had similar issues. I, however, have been largely commitment phobic where I think "love = pain" and I either sabotage myself, run away or choose people who are unattainable like all the crushes I had on gay men. They were safe. I could safely be affectionate without any expectations. When exploring the North Node in my astrological chart, I learned a lot about why I chose this life and the way I am living it. Finding Ava and Jean and learning about them confirmed exactly what the North Node exploration showed me. In this life I wanted to explore independence and not be so overwhelmed and mired in muck by relationships. In this life the person I wanted a relationship most with is myself.

On further exploration, I learned that Jean had two children. The first son was raised away from her in Spain by a nanny. I gasped at this and said to myself, "No wonder!" Later, she would have a daughter on August 23, 1970 which is also River Phoenix's birthday. Two days later her daughter died. She was heartbroken and devastated. She would never fully get over the loss and her partners would later reveal that she had tried to take her own life around the date of her daughter's birth and death. It explains why I am so drawn to mothers who have lost children. Ava had gotten pregnant once while married to Frank and, because of strict penalties she would face with her contract with MGM, she opted to terminate the pregnancy. Both women suffered a loss and both dealt with those losses in their own ways. Ava drank everything away. Jean became depressed and withdrawn. She became suicidal and would eventually succeed in taking her own life in 1979 at the age of 40.

I can understand completely why my whole adult life has been dedicated to raising children. First I raised other people's children for 17 years because someone else had raised my son, and then I stopped everything and sacrificed a lot so I can be home raising my own child. She has barely had a baby sitter. I can count on one hand how many times we asked friends to care for our daughter while we went out for a few hours. And is it any coincidence that I was determined to have a little girl even if I never married? I think not.

Night before last I had a dream where I had come upon a woman who was crying that her baby girl wasn't breathing. She held her baby out to me and I wasn't sure what to do. I was trying to find my way out of this place and I didn't want to be delayed. I asked her if she knew CPR or maybe there was some emergency assistance on campus that could help her baby. I believe fully that woman was Jean Seberg, an aspect of me, trying to help give me the clues so I could help her and her baby by putting the pieces together and healing all of our lives by restoring balance within this vehicle.

Clues are around us all the time trying to show us what we need to know about who we have been. We tend to ignore and brush it away. Everyone wants to have a celebrity past life, right? Not me. I have a strong distaste and loathing for celebrity. I can't think of anything I would like less than living in a fishbowl with no real privacy, which actually lends more weight to the idea that these two women are a part of me. They lived that life and it didn't end well for either of them. It seems understandable that I would choose a life as a "nobody"this time around.

Edited to add:

Yesterday I said the below to a friend as a response:

Ditto! I love you so much too. ❤ I know there are those scattered here and there who get it. They hear what I am saying and they understand the language I am speaking. But it is when we go into the trenches in "enemy" territory and speak openly about what we believe that it can get pretty difficult to endure the flames licking you, taunting you to see if you will run from them. I didn't come to preach to the choir. Fuck. I didn't come to preach at all but I share my journey, I share my ideas and opinions in places that are unfriendly because I know those places need the seeds in my pocket the most. I know you do the same as well. And when we brave those fires and walk away, we don't walk away unscathed. We walk away transformed and changed for all that we learned from those difficulties.

I didn't know why I was typing what I did at the time, but as I researched Jean, I learned that she had been badly burned during the filming of her first film, Saint Joan where she played Joan of Arc. Suddenly the words I selected had so much more meaning and gave validation to the idea that she was within me, helping me and guiding me.

Sexuality and Spirituality

I'm a little hot and bothered about something....and not in a good way.

Ceramic sculpture by Kim Reyes (detail)

I did a search for the above image to find out who the artist is and was dismayed to see it attached to a whole lot of new age bullshit about having sex with people and soul ties and why women are so crazy now. I would laugh except it is disgusting that they would use a beautiful piece of art by Kim Reyes titled "Self Discovery", not to mention the complete garbage they are feeding people about sex.

Ceramic sculpture by Kim Reyes

Dear new age spiritual people who fear monger about soul ties and sex....

...FUCK OFF!!!

Dear religious people who promise eternal damnation for masturbation and other forms of sex...

...FUCK OFF!!!

Each community thinks they are better than the other and they are both so full of shit it isn't even funny. It is time for me to speak out about sex, fucking making love, masturbating or whatever you want to call it.

Why, why, why do so many people from all sides make sex out to be "evil" and something to be repressed? It is the very repression by self righteous, pious zealots that is causing perversions. Repression is causing people to act on impulses in ways that hurt other people.

One of my Facebook friends shared the soul ties bit and asked his readers:

"I would like to hear your thoughts feelings and responses to this post. There is no wrong ones. We are all in this soup together."

My response:

"I would argue that if "we are all one" then really anything you take on from someone else is actually yours anyway.. 😉"

Him:

"in one sense that is true  but this brings it down to a more personal level . I think you feel it different here"

Me:

"To me it feels like a different community but the same song and dance where we demonize women and sex. I am not saying go out and sleep with everything that moves, but why do we have to put so much fear around sex? Why do we have to put this in the lap (womb) of the female and not give equal responsibility for creating balance to the men? The men are participating, afterall. If we were balanced as a society in regard to sexual relationships, I think there would be a natural progression to choosing deeper and more connected sexual relationships. If there was less repression, maybe sex wouldn't be such a hot commodity and sell. Human trafficking is often about sex. And what about priests who take a vow of celibacy and then go out and molest children? Repression of sex and placing fear, guilt, shame, and blame around it is only causing more imbalance. What the author of this share is doing is exactly the same as many of the religious organizations around the globe only with different terminology and different fear tactics. If we were a balanced society, we would teach our children about connection and healthy sexual connections and they would naturally gravitate towards those kinds of relationships. But we are so polarized. We demonize and blame women for their own rapes. This is not an issue for one individual or one gender, but for our entire society to take a look at what we are teaching and putting out there for our young. Our thoughts create and polarization too far in one direction or the other is imbalance."

We crave connection, which is not necessarily romantic love. I believe fully that if we felt more connection in our day to day lives within our community, we wouldn't be seeking it through acts of sex only to feel more empty and less connected when we do. Fear, blame, guilt and shame doled out by religious and spiritual groups are twisting our thoughts and beliefs which, in turn, are holding us hostage from being able to make the leap in evolution collectively we should have made ages ago.

I fully reject the idea of taking on soul ties from all of your sexual partners. Thought and belief create your reality and if you buy into that bullshit, then it will be true for you but not me. And what about sex in the afterlife? You are talking about taking on energy of all the people you have slept with in the physical, but we are nothing but energy in the afterlife and there is plenty of sex and energy merging over there, I can assure you. Why are they not afraid of getting energetic cooties? Because they understand that thoughts and beliefs create.

I would go a step further and propose that the imbalance and repression of sex is what caused STDs to manifest in the first place. I don't think they existed until we started feeling fear, shame, guilt and blame around the act. Illness starts in the energetic body first and later manifests in the physical body. Our feelings and emotions are capable of creating fertile ground for cancer and a whole host of other illness. Our thoughts give illness an energetic permission slip. That is not to say that there are not those who come in to be a canary in the coal mine to show us there is a very serious problem. There are those who agree to go through hell for the purpose of helping those around them learn profound lessons.

Sex creates. Sacred sex is beautiful. What if true sacred sex where there is connection between every chakra and on every level is actually the gateway home? What if it is a key meeting the lock that opens a door to a different realm and a different way of being? I believe that is the case and we are being kept away from opening the door by false information surrounding sex.

Sacred sex requires self love.

Sacred sex requires balance.

Sacred sex requires education and knowledge about empathy and creating healthy connections.

What thoughts and beliefs are you allowing to hold you hostage and which ones will you let go of so you can be free?

Dreaming About Past Lives and Ava Gardner

Let's talk about past lives and how we come to discover our other lives.

There was one time I had two people approach me separately and say they were given the message to tell me to do past life work. I never could afford a regression and I never tried the self regression CD I bought. Later I was told by intuitive Jeannie Barnes that I should start reading about past life work and that where I needed to go would stem from there. She said my guides wanted me to read a specific Brian L. Weiss book. I did read the book my guides mentioned and Dolores Cannon soon followed. Their work opened me like a can of worms... especially Dolores' work.

It was reading those books that made me realize I was dreaming about my other selves pretty consistently, but it wasn't always a scene from that life that I witnessed. Sometimes it was more subtle and bits and parts of personas came through. I have had lots of lives as ordinary people...a slave girl, a boy dying from the plague, a Nazi soldier, a girl who was murdered and buried alive, and an African American girl whose mother abandoned her so she could be with her boyfriend.

I never really had a desire to lay claim to any celebrity personas. So many people do and we all roll our eyes at them, don't we? But you absolutely must follow the clues and breadcrumbs you are being given, even if they land in the lap of a famous person.

That is what happened to me recently. I was following my breadcrumbs from my dreams. Once I dreamed about a guy I adored. I see what I identify as Caesar's Palace and the house of the guy who liked me showed me where he lived and his house had a giant grilled cheese on top. I laughed at the symbol which was kind of a pun..."the big cheese". For some reason I did a search to see if there were any celebrities who liked grilled cheese and the main hit I got was Frank Sinatra. Apparently he loved them and that was the last thing he ate before he died. He also spent a good deal of time performing at Caesar's Palace. I was amused but didn't chase it any further than that.

I can't even remember how or why I later looked up Ava Gardner on a hunch. Maybe it was the dream I had that was set in 1941 that caused me to look up information about her to see if I could find anything that fit. Much to my amazement and surprise, I found information that matched her life in such a way that I was absolutely convinced that she was another aspect and she is very much on board in this current vessel. I shared those dreams on my FB page and Instagram. I sometimes dream AS her like when I was back in London showing my old apartment to someone. This version of me has never lived in London but Ava did. The information was accurate to what I learned about where she lived before she died. I dreamed about having issues with one of my legs and how much harder everything was for me to navigate now. Near the end, Ava had suffered two strokes and her left side took the hit. It is my left side I always injure. Ava had been a heavy smoker and she eventually died from pneumonia. I developed asthma in my 30s from acid reflux. Do you see the parallel?

By klimbims at DeviantArt

So I sat there going, okay, now what? How is her life relevant? Why make me aware now and what do I need to know? I have checked out several books about her and have just started studying her today like a subject in school. 10 chapters into the first book and I see so much of myself in her. She is funny, honest, raw and says "fuck" a lot. What I have come to know about her so far, I love. I love her candor and her personality. Don't get me wrong, she was a class A fuck up, but she was charming. I believe I am supposed to somehow understand why I chose this current life in order to kind of balance out what she had experienced in her life. But that is the key word.... balance. I can see how Ava swung too far in one direction with how sexual she was and I swing too far in the other direction with how frigid I am. I think I somehow need to find the middle and apply it to my life. There might be other things I have to learn and gain about her life as I go deeper into studying her.

Tonight I was rereading a dream I shared in a past blog post. I was stunned to see certain little bits that prove to me I was dreaming through her persona, seeing through her eyes and hearing her voice. It didn't make sense to me before because I knew nothing about the woman then. In the dream I was talking with a southern accent and I couldn't understand why. Also the way I spoke and the terms I used was so Ava. She seemed to call everyone "honey" and would end her sentences this way frequently and I did this in the dream. There are some things I waffle on and am uncertain of in regard to information that comes through in dreams, but this, Ava being one of my other lives, I am absolutely certain of. With each new thing I discover in old dreams, it makes it more solid and concrete.

What are your dreams trying to show you? Do you have another life you are being handed to help you understand your current life? It isn't always easy to extract, but follow your hunches and the bread crumbs.

We are all on a fucking Scooby Doo adventure, honey. The adventure of self discovery that leads us back to ourselves.