More ruminations...

As some know, I prefer the night and the dark. I personally feel as though the light is overrated. The dark...is me. More and more aspects of my true self are beginning to come to the surface.

I am *indeed* not a naturally timid, docile person. Giggles was a trauma response-she was not the true me at all, and to this day I'm just sorry that there were so few people around who were trained to recognize a trauma victim who wanted to please. But at the same time...I'm not a gung-ho warrior. I'm a protector, a sentinel, a guardian. There's a reason that I was disqualified from the Army and had to go into the state defense force instead.

This is somewhat where the dark ties in. I want to bring up some moments of my life where I felt the most powerful, most natural, and most in my element. One are the times when I'm staying overnight at the armory and am assigned to "fire watch" duty-for those of you who have never served, it's when you're assigned an hour during the night to sit guard. During that time, you're the only one awake, the world is pitch black and silent-and you're standing guard, protecting the rest while they sleep. If someone or something bursts through, you're the first-and pretty much *only*-line of defense. For quite a few, and they're not afraid to admit it, such a job seriously has them on edge. But not me. "Fire watch" in the dead of the night has been one of the times when I have truly felt in my true, natural element. (Somewhat going along with that, I was also my first year at AT assigned with guarding a door for General Harris when he was on post-it was broad daylight, but I still got the empowering feeling.)

Then there was the feeling that I had just one night a while back. I wasn't guarding anything, but I'm trying to hold onto the feeling as long as I can. In the black of the night, I had just completed Dark Yoga after catching the replay of a livestream put on by Wardruna (First Flight of the White Raven.) (Lindy Fay Hella in her raven dress!!!...yes please) The show had totally both enlightened me and put me into some sort of trance (ancestral memories, I think?) Anyway, said night was a terrific experience for me, and I want to come back to that feeling whenever I can.

But as I am saying, more and more is starting to come up about my "true self." A protector, a sentinel-maybe even a seeress? (I've been toying with the idea of studying Anglo-Saxon seidr for a while.) I feel that I really am beginning to know who and what I truly am.