7. You are the jewel, the compass, and the fuel
Continue forward to your destination of liberation, of vast open space, no matter what tries to cling to you. Fasten your eye on true (impersonal) desire. If they want to come with you, let them come in your groundswell. It is not noble to accommodate the fear of those who are not moved by the higher order of desire.
8. Hit bottom on autopilot
Admit it. The default setting for the everyday world is misery. Society, left to its own devices, devolves into hate quickly. Our minds in regular contact with society become misery-making machines if we do not deliberately inject consciousness, if we do not grab the wheel and steer. No, it’s not fair. And no, we do not have the luxury of even a moment of checking out, to be honest. You can check out of your mind, but you can never leave. And, if you do check out, if you do give into the forces of sloth, turgor, defeat, and resignation and give your vehicle over to unconscious forces just remember that you have a drunk driver at the wheel.
9. Operate like a made woman with your friends
Find a syndicate of women who operate by your hero’s code. Lock and load.
In this postmodern infected world with no truth and no loyalty, get a code of honor. Ride or die for and with your chosen circle. Go hard. Cowardice passes as “equanimity,” inaction, non-involvement. Sideline sitters are not your friends. Is that who you want in the field next to you? The women who stop to consider how they will look associating with you, whether they want to show up in the war on ignorance, and if they are too tired, too sad, or too traumatized to kick down a door that you are locked behind?
Fuck the teacups. Get yourself women of the warrior class who know first how to wield their sword on their own afflictions and then how to ride in and save their friends’ asses without a second thought. Women who you know, in your bones and cells, are for you. Women who don’t sell you why they had to talk shit, not show up, not participate. Those are not your people because those are not anyone’s people. They are the ones who hope only to get through life unscathed. Heroes get scathed, that’s part of the job description. But they can live with themselves and find friendship unlike most people will ever know. Sure, there are those bound in collusion, but have you ever been bound in ending greed, hatred, and delusion, for real? Not the TV version? Now that is the cosa nostra you want to be part of.
10. Be steel to the wrecking ball, not cloth
Take a stance, hold an opinion, and serve something. Don’t be willing to die for a belief (that’s called zealotry) but do be willing to go to the death carrying out the activity of what you believe in. Be neither the wrecking ball bombastic provocateur nor the meek “How can I accommodate the opinions of everyone at the garden party?” Find the truth, the deepest truth you possibly can.
*Hint: it will suggest that life is impermanent, dynamic, intense, and interconnected.
Pledge fidelity to what you find. It will pledge fidelity back and quickly become the wind at your back, the capacity to be in your conviction, to say what you see and know without imposing it on another, meekly acquiescing, or doing a spin doctor on it in order to be agreeable. Demonstrate the truth you stand by, by standing irrespective of the knocks and lures. “You will,” as my dear friend Topeka says (quoting her dear friend), “find your kind” if you do.
11. Just don’t
Give it up. Don’t convince, prove, passively-aggressively “suggest,” defend, or attack. Don’t don’t don’t don’t don’t.
Stake your claim. Own your place. And don’t be a jerk.
If you hurt someone, drop down to the sensing organ of your heart, feel the hurt you induced, feel it hard, and then say what is there to be said. Something like, if you cuss, “Shit, I fucked up.” If you don’t, “Boy did I goof.” Say it, let them feel that you felt it, and get on with it. The world becomes half a gladiator colosseum of “defenders” or a confession booth of weeping Marys. Face and be rid of. Fast. Flick the spider off of you (hopefully into a nice grassy area).
12. If you want something just say it
“I want that orange.” That is a complete statement. Not “Oh noble ones of great birth, please grant me that orange.” “I know you don’t want me to have oranges! But I deserve it!” “You have too many oranges and you are greedy, you owe me oranges!” “I am traumatized and depressed that I do not have oranges and must take medication.”
Have the fricking orange. Remember that sailors were the first to discover that vitamin C cured the teeth-rotting disease of scurvy that no one could isolate a cure for. They just had the orange. Or the lime.
Think of Eros, desire, and sex, as the orange. Keep your beautiful smile.
13. All efforts to the real revolution
Anais Nin wrote, “When one is pretending, the entire body revolts.” Make your revolution one that makes it so no woman ever feels the compunction to pretend again. Be one who welcomes the wild gods and the harlots, the tricksters, and the tigers. Grow strong enough in your own backbone that when the ones worth their salt—the real ones—arrive, you can receive them with neither fear nor supplication. Don’t go for the ones in pretty uniforms who march lockstep but the ones—a bit scrappy—that others fear or fawn over, who they want to fuck or fight—be a real one and the real ones will come and you will find yourself as Durga or Arjuna on the battlefield fighting the only war there is to be fought—the one that turns arrows into flowers, and wakes a sleeping world to the vibrant animated display that thrills and delights; where all is of OneTaste, the taste of bliss.