ritual werewolf an individual would never survive on their own in the wild. They say we can separate church and state, but maybe they go back, maybe they are just cognitive appraisals of the same functions and drives. For instance, the strange rituals we perform, bows, pledges of alliegance, hands across our chest, nods, eyes cast away, all of these are the physical manifestation of meaning. All are to make sure we are on the same page. We often make gestures that otherwise have no purpose in everyday life, broad hand gestures, the clasping of our hands together. In church rituals are rhythmic and communal and filled with familiarity so that the brain may dissolve it's comprehension of the unique and the stark and in that vein, the self. Transcendence to something beyond oneself is sought. However, the same could be said of stopping at red lights, at putting a turn signal on. Rituals are how we recognize others who could be significant in our lives, and who's behavior when combined with ours could enhance or protect our lives. War drums, the cheering of a crowd, whistles, all are things which draw the focus of our internal world to a combined source, so that our mind can focus only on it, and loses track of the tedious work it does almost imperceptibly of constantly creating what we experience as our individual perceptions. That is to say that rather than inform us with memories or rather than creating our own rhythm for us, our mind focuses on an external rhythm and tries to match it. It is a way of showing that we are neurologically and conceptually on the same wavelength, in harmony like tuning forks so that our normal self protective defenses can be dropped and we can reap the benefits of social interaction. This is why we mirror each other in ways that make little sense to us if we think about it consciously. We are like butterflies mating, they perform elaborate dances that go through many steps and all of the steps must match up, but do they know they are dancing? No, it is a matter of neurological impulses unlocking one another. When one is satisfactorily completed another begins, leading to the eventual mating. Having to have the ritual responded to or mirrored, confirms that they have a common purpose, confirms that they are part of something beyond their individual appraisal (whatever that means for butterflies) and eases them of the fear that they were trying to mate with the wrong type of butterfly or a fluttering leaf or something. It was this physical assonance that allowed them to transcend their restricting protective instincts and instead of avoiding others as they normally would, interact and thereby reap survival benefits they could not possibly have reaped on their own. This physiological ritual is seen in our own culture, although the more powerful rituals are ones we have accompanied with conceptual value and meaning. This is why i feel church and state are not the same though perhaps they stem from the same drive, the same method of achieving a balance between self and other in the world. We will never escape the grasp of ritual, habit is often the sole means of existence in this world, it is the slight subtle staticness of an individual against the greater flow of life that draws boundries. That is, to define oneself in terms that are informed but not superflous with nature is how organisms have identity. When these boundries are overwhelming with the anxiety they create, or are not beneficial, ritual can help us find agreement with others or with nature itself, we can find its frequency and seek to match it. It's as simple as a handshake. I respect you, you respect me. 020503 ... werewolf and a parable on creation that i remember.....in one world there is an author, and she writes about us....she creates our loves, our joys, our lives, she has seen them all on a timeline already past us. All of our struggles have eventual resolutions, though they are not always what we wish. But our struggles matter for they are the story, they are the eventual resolution, and we are reading them now. Now in our world, we are also authors, we create our own stories, we create a world with people who have their own struggles, their own loves and hates and triumphs and faults of reason. Two worlds, you still with me? Now...the world we created has its own authors, and they create a world too, with its own love and joy and its own author. The author they create is the author of the first world, the author of our lives. It's a parable about circular worlds. I always find it helpful when i'm thinking about things, and if nothing else, it fills me with a sense of awe, which means my amygdala is in action. Now is it in action because i am in awe? or am i in awe because it is in action? Well...write on, because it's the only way we'll have any effect on the author of our lives. 020503 ... lobsterman one of my rituals is clicking on the little who link when blather comes up...then running over to the wall and doing ten handstand pushups whilst i wait to see who is stirring in the blather cupboard 020505 ... BrotherDB What seperates Fraternity men from every other man out there. For some the oaths we pledge might simply be a thing that is easily forgotten the next day. But, for me, I swore to before myself, before god, and before my brothers, that I would be the best man possible, and I plan on following that till the day I die. 020506 ... BrotherDB What seperates Fraternity men from every other man out there. For some the oaths we pledge might simply be a thing that is easily forgotten the next day. But, for me, I swore before myself, before god, and before my brothers, that I would be the best man possible, and I plan on following that oath till the day I die. 020506 ... stork daddy or else you risk the paddle right? 020506 ... werewolf children's cries are ignored or quieted indignantly for hours. business tabs are kept locked away in a coat room. men with an agreement of sorts. that's how it's started, though now it seems gentile. a father passes his daughter like a baton, sometimes begrudingly. and people share stories, some of them written the night before. but this isn't the event. it is the night afterwards. still drunk with wine, they enter this house which is new to them. she and he are confronted suddenly with the strangeness of lives they had imagined shutting down on all sides of them. there is for that however, newfound lucidity in every object in their room, the looming of each other in reflections caught in clocks and dresser mirrors that have lost a discrete owner. there was a time historically, when bloody sheets were hung out a window. they were cleaned later, presumably by her. there was some distancing in that, from herself. someone else must've dirtied these. why would the person who was cleaning them? years would pass. he was tired of losing again and again the exactness of any given moment, the relationship always adding and subtracting. the centers struggling to hold. he visited a prostitute once. asked to just talk. he asked her if love wasn't just a cease fire. not the peace of a martyr but the peace of a coward. she said that if you weren't god or the devil, there was always someone you couldn't have, and someone who couldn't have you. he ended up inside her. she ended up charging him. he returned home. the sheets were sterile and crisp. his wife was sleeping, her face looked like their daughter's. it seemed an unbearable offense to wake it. it would be awakening intense eyes within him, forgotten muscles moving again with confidence. a self it was tiring to surrender to. the same self that so many years ago was proud to hang from the windows a sordid bloody sheet, a metaphorical losing and gaining of boundries as if he was conquering the entire skyline with it. and for her, what did she remember expecting only now when she had time in her sleep. wasn't it to everyday wash away as much as she did that first week? for each night's sleep to leave behind such a harvest of self, of other, of celebration? the distance between them is palatable. junctions of their skin still reach out to one another, those parts which cannot forget, and form, the essence of the struggle encrypted in aisles, the restrained march of men, the twisting of sheets, the inherited wisdom of the bride. 030204 ... werewolf tomorrow night, it will be her who turns off the light, a strange parallel to the first time they entered that house and turned on the light filling the room, accenting the darkness all around it. 030204 ... Staind_And_Souless Everytime I log onto the internet. I check your Xanga. I check my deviantart. I check you blather account. Once a week. I check your photobucket for pictures of you. I check your LiveJournal. I let myself look at your picture. Once a second. I think about you. I miss you. I want you. I need you. All the time. I love you. 050122 what's it to you? who go blather from