Thinking of which:

I mentioned about all my astro and tarot people and I do follow a lot, but I have mixed feelings about it as a general thing. My science background is highly skeptical of it as a pseudo-science and the MORE pseudo-science language a person uses, the more skeptical I get and the more I want to explain it away logically. And there's a LOT about it that can be logically explained, especially if you're looking at vague statements or things ANYONE wants to be true about them. I like to play the game with astro descriptions to try applying a statement to people who don't have that placement and asking if it could be true of them AND if they would want to believe it true of them, especially if they thought they were born into it.  I laugh really hard whenever I see someone post "this is for these signs smrv" and then list half dozen or so signs that could be on your sun, moon, rising, Venus because odds are most people will have a hit at least somewhere with something that broad. But the thing that I LIKE about scientific method is that it's about asking questions and based on observation, hypothesis, experiment, result analysis -- so when you observe or experience something I don't like just dismissing it because it's not deemed science... I think there's something to be said about both seasonality and collective unconscious and there's times where however they arrived there, astor/tarot things are just too precise on the money to completely dismiss. Just because you can't logically explain something doesn't mean it isn't a path to truths. And I don't feel right questioning or disbelieving in other people's claims of mediumship or clair- gifts given how many I have and how wyrd they are and how hard they would be to prove in a scientific setting or to someone else who has never experienced them. I believe in being critical about what a person says and what they claim to know and especially what they expect or ask of you for it (I would never pay anyone money for anything related to astro or tarot for example, that to me is scammy) and I think it's important to understand the way that anxieties and learned patterns and unexamined premises affect EVERY person's subconscious readings of everything they encounter or think about... But I don't feel comfortable completely dismissing it unless it's obviously scammy or too broad or very clearly biased. So I listen and observe and learn and I compare the predictions with the reality and how it compares to other methods of predicting and there are definitely some who have a higher accuracy than you would expect with statistics, but I don't blindly BELIEVE it.  Then again, I don't always believe my own dreams and clairsentience and calirvoyance and precogs -- sometimes I try to intentionally fight a precog rather than have it be a self-fulfilling prophecy, I try to make other things happen (usually this is only with little things such as dressing in something other than I precog saw me in or letting plans be made for food somewhere other than where I precog saw us eating) and it just makes everything more difficult take longer and inevitably I end up having to change because something spills or gets torn/breaks or we get to the restaurant we tried to go to and it's crazy busy or randomly closed or something and sometimes we will try several restaurants before ending up where I precogged  and I could have saved a lot of time and frustration by just listening to the precog in the first place.... But if I assume it true than I made it true even if it wasn't before my assumption so sometimes I have to fight it try to falsify what I saw. So I would say I'm cautiously curious and observe a lot about it and gather a lot of data when it comes to astro & tarot, but I don't say I BELIEVE it even though I own tarot/oracle cards and can read a chart and tend to know what's going on in astro weather at any given time. And it also means that I make note of when astro/tarot are all saying one thing and it's not at all aligned with my personal experiences in that moment. 

I also referred to my chart for where I get my fidelity to truth (with a little t, the subjective experiential "to the best of my knowledge" truth, not the truth with a capital T objective gods eye view unchanging Truth) and those are truths about my natal chart (which you can believe astrology has meaning or not as you choose, but still the map of the heavens when/where you were born is a fact about that moment in time) but it's not where it comes from that I choose to personally keep fae rules about always truth speaking and only lying by omission, changing subject, or speaking a literal truth that others interpret differently. But there is a story behind how I arrived at that conclusion about keeping fae rules of truth speaking and honesty with myself and others, just as there is the story with my grandftaher of how my nature has grafted into it such a strong streak of "question everything everyone tells you, even me, until you've thought about it made it make sense to you." In short version, after my grandfather died when I was in third grade, I spent a long time in the hollows and one of the things about the hollows is all emotions are numbed up so you can't feel how deep you're hurting. And with no emotions at all, you have to fake the smiles for everyone and you don't really feel guilt about if the thing you're doing is right or wrong or what the motives are and there's a lot of white lies like "I'm fine" when you're not. The hollows are a part of grieving process and some people go through it as a form of depression when they have existential things in their inner or outer lives they are refusing to examine. For me, personally, it only happens when grief/loss/hurt threatens to drown me and I have to go to the emotional hollows so I don't drown in the sorrowing. So while I was in the hollows after grandpa died and putting a lot of my energy into trying to add joy and laughter into the lives of the rest of my family (because everyone was hurting and grieving and missing him) I realized that MOST people couldn't tell the difference between truth and a lie as long as you spoke it with enough conviction and that they wouldn't even question it if you sounded convincing enough. So I had observed this and decided to question it in the manner my grandpa had taught me and I found it true that most people couldn't tell truth from lie if the person speaking had enough conviction BUT that the discovery of a lie caused hurt to everyone created fractures in trust between the two people. Even a white lie to keep the peace or to make someone feel better caused such fractures in trust. So I came to the conclusion that the act of lying itself was unimportant BUT doing things that would fracture trust was greatly important when interacting with people. And I concluded that the only way to ever have any connection that is REAL or MEANINGFUL with another soul's subjective life experiencing itself REQUIRES that you have trust solid in the foundations of everything you build between you. And I concluded that SINCE trust was so integral to any real or meaningful connection with another, the only way to make sure you weren't putting weaknesses and cracks in from the start is to consciously choose a course of honesty to the best your knowledge at all times so you will never be guilty of knowingly undermining or putting in weak foundations between you and another. I decided that there is no point in putting the effort into building connections with others if you're going to knowingly destroy and undermine the very foundations of those connections. I suppose I could have decided that connections I consider worth investing in shouldn't have lies in them, not even white lies, but that they're fine for other situations but that seemed a stupid solution because why would someone deserve putting energy into them being an exception if they didn't deserve honesty? Like, why should I dirty myself for someone unless they deserve it somehow? 

I save my lies for fictions I write (which my real writing tends to spark from me asking a question then developing characters/plot/world building to discover the answer(s) to my question(s) and I really need excited readers asking for new chapters to keep me writing to finish projects and publuish -- once I find my answers I'm happy to let it just sit in my head and not get a finished out on paper or drive to publish; I'm MEANT to be publishing my books as my purpose in this life, but I have adhd so my time blindness, excitement for exploring new ideas, and occasional paralysis in battles with executive function unless I'm up against a time crunch means I'm not very good at the finishing or push to publish/release no matter how great my real writing is. And my real writing IS ridiculously good. All of it, across all the genres I write in. And I say that as a very well-read recovering perfectionist with a LOT of opinions and who reads a LOT all the time.) But I only lie in my fictions (just as I only put the great truths set in fictional framework settings for philosophical reasons) and I won't knowingly lie, not even white lie, in my connections to living beings or unincarnated spirit beings. (I don't know if I would lie to an ai or android, is it a connection or is it anthropomorphism?)

And that's also why, no matter what it is, if you ask me for an answer and don't let me distract you, you will always receive truth from me (to the best of my knowing) even if it's a painful truth I didn't want to speak because I don't like hurting people. (It's why I can be guilty of lies by omission where I don't tell someone a truth they might want to know or don't correct them or give them the rest of the entire truth; I AM still a Libra sun and Mercury with a Pisces rising, I actively dislike hurting people unnecessarily and will only do so if the only other option is the greater cruelty of lying to them.)  But if you ask me any question and keep asking until you get the answer if I've switched subjects, I'll always give you my truth. It's also a good way to make me examine what I've never examined or a truth I haven't wanted to face, just ask me questions about it and it will force me to face it until I can answer as honestly as I can. 

But it's worth knowing about me, that if you want a to know my truth, you just have to ask. Because to lie is the greatest cruelty you can do to another, it is the double hurt of the hard truth itself and the act of lying (when it's discovering) and the betrayal of trust that engenders.

Doesn't mean I can't be wrong or mistaken, and I will always own up to it apologize once I realize or learn I was wrong, but it means that whatever I do speak will be my truth to the best of my knowledge at the time. And if it's my silences that are the problem, then just ask. It's all you ever had to do. 

Also, I genuinely LIKE asking questions and being questioned and finding new ways to look at things and new things to learn and new ways to think about things -- I'm insatiably curious and I love being asked to think about hard questions (especially those that don't have facile answers) and examining it from all different views. I LIKE being called out on where I have unexamined premises or assumptions or bad logic so I can toss out the bad and replace my mental superstructures with something better. It's part of why I fall into the category of spiritual but not religious -- I like questions seeking answers better than the dogma of answers that aren't to be questioned....

I'm over on hours for the week, so I'm punched out just finishing this cuppa and watching SkyNews (talking about potato crop failures across the UK) before heading home.  Tomorrow night I have plans for dinner and then to go see Madison Opera's production of Candide. It's technically an opera, but very musical theatre, written by Leonard Bernstein based on the Voltaire novel. I'm actually quite excited for it because I love me some Voltaire -- I first read Candide in high school and it made me laugh so hard especially Pangloss as the voice of the philosophical-theological schools of optimism so popular in Europe that Candide is satirizing by confronting it with the real world and some outlandish real world scenarios. I'm also excited that James Ridge (one of the core actors with APT) is doing his first opera in the character of Voltaire who is apparently like a narrator in Bernstein's musical/operatic version of the novel. 

Warning: There's a high likelihood I may have to re-read some Voltaire jump the queue after seeing the opera version! It's been a couple years since I last did a Voltaire re-read. So I'm overdue.

Then Saturday is Indie Book Store Day and a group of 8 indie bookstores in and around Madison area have a poster for it are holding events and gift card raffles. (Arcadia in Spring Green, Kismet Books in Verona, and Republic of Letters in Mineral Point are the out of towners; I adore Arcadia because it's small but wonderfully curated so always stop there at least once during APT season. Kismet Books looks delightful and adorable and I want to go visit it at some point in Verona.)  I think all we're going to do is Book Deal first (used bookstore, will have cookies and refreshments and a prize wheel as well as free posters and the raffle entry) and then Leopold's Bookstore (new bookstore that's books up front then in back is also a cafe, wine bar, and craft cocktails bar, open til midnight every night) who are offering free glass of prosecco if you buy books. I've bought a LOT of books the last couple months (more than I've read) and money is tight so I shouldn't spend it, but it's indie book store day. And I'll just plan to be good about book buying until late June/July when APT season starts up which means buying plays in the gift shops at the theatre and visiting Arcadia Bookstore.

P. S. Yes, in the name of complete honesty I had a small mini wobble late last night and earlier today. But it was fairly small. Mostly it was some part of me getting it into my head that there is someone else he's fallen for had over and me getting petulant inside reacting, "fine. If you want someone else, you should be with who you want to be with. Go be happy and just leave me be if that's what you want." And really down the bond his response was from a place of love and bemusement that eventually got some mild annoyance through it of, "Okay then. I will be with who I want. Come here." And then just holding me in his love and every time I tried to argue he just held the bond tighter flooded stronger with love. When I went to bed, I don't remember much of my dreams, both my sleep and my dreams are rather fractured when I force myself to healing sleep through migraine phases, but I remember in all of them the theme of holding hands tightly kept coming up.

Now that I'm no longer in that mood, I find his reaction adorable and sweet and really clever funny to disarm that way of reacting. It was not a very good argument on my side given his ease of refutation and so didn't cause much of a wobble because it couldn't get any traction with the way he responded to it. I've read that knee jerk reactionary is always a product of our conditioning rather than our inner child or the versions of ourselves we want to be. And so if we want to deprogram our conditioning (even if it's of our own creation) we need to not only wait til we are calm centered to make our actionable choices, but we also need to pay attention to the ways we want d to reactionary respond in order to know what to dismantle. I already knew I need to dismantle the conditioning I put in me that there's someone or something else he wants more than me, but the brief petulance wobble showed me that I still have more work to do dismantling it. Luckily, there really isn't much that holds that reactionary conditioning into a cohesive argument EXCEPT when he chooses "not me" so if he's not doing that to feed it with new evidence then it's less insidiously difficult to dismantle than it could be. 

Also. Me getting argumentative pouty wobble like that it started around the time the auras and prodrome of migraine from the barometric shift before the weekend storms. I had been restlessly feeling I should be somewhere else all day Wednesday til Mikaela told me to sit or go in the other room I was giving her anxiety -- and aimless restlessness is often one of my earliest prodrome symptoms. But along with aura, inexplicable moody over sensitivity can happen in prodrome.  After I realized I couldn't win my argument of a wobble and he was right, I decided to do something about the signs of future migraine coming on so preemptively took some Tylenol then sent me to bed to hope to circumvent a full blown dry motion and light sensitive migraine. Then I didn't let me get out of bed tile the motion sensitivity light headedness was completely gone. It worked -- I have learned about myself that if I try to stoic push through migraines or signs I will soon have one, then I get full blown mobile of razors in a tornado wind inside my head so bad that sitting up or rolling over can set me off dry heaving. But if I pay attention and listen to the signs make me rest and hydrate and preemptively take pain meds and self care, I rarely get really bad ones where my body makes me shut down everything until it's healed enough to face the vertical world. I do wonder how many times my reactionary volatility pulling away or trying to convince me to let him go right now have occurred across these last six years while I'm in prodrome for a migraine.... Because like most people, my reaction to hurting is to self protective feel I can't pile more hurt on top of it and the conditioned response I created in my head around making me let him go... And I wonder how many times I've done that if there's been other hurts on me (including the physical of immanent migraine) that have caused the "need to act right now" force behind that reactionary pulling away from the bond.... 

This was the first time that he responded to me being petulant pushing him away saying "you should go be with who you want to be with" by him saying, "you're right, come here" then pulling me closer via the bond flooding me with love down the bond. It was  a very clever reaction, as well as being his truth, and it completely disarmed me broke right through that reactionary conditioning trying to make a mess in me.

Brains are stupid. Even the smartest brains are electrical protein jellies sending chemicals to receptors and sometimes things get messed up and the smartest brain thinks stupid things. Sometimes they even lie to you. Healing is when something breaks the old patterns of lies so you don't get stuck in old cycles. Whether you believe me about the bond to him or the third eye flow of love communication of it or think it all delulu woo-woo, it's still mental healing when you break free by recognition of the old toxic behaviors ways of thinking patterns rather than getting stuck in them yet again. 

I haven't yet followed him again on insta though, I don't trust me not to get reactionary again over anything mentioning his sister or the band both of which still have me blocked ostracized "you're not welcome to sit with us" wish not to exist to me. And I have no right to expect him not to bring up people/collectives he is a part of that mattered so deeply to him. My solution is non-attention and to treat anything involving his sister or the band as not existing at all, past present or future, because that is what is asked of me based on the choices made in October 2018 and defensively standing behind those choices ghosting any attempt to talk about them.  To follow him again on insta means every time he mentions his sister or the band it creates a conflict with me trying to comply to the boundaries his sister created for herself and the entire band as a collective at that time, and in the past that conflict I can't solve agitates me brings out my reactionary conditioning to push him away sever ties to him and be angry at him for forcing me into that condition. So I do not choose to follow him there at this time. I also haven't unfollowed him on his mailing list, x (which I'm never one), Facebook (which he's never on) or youtube (which has nothing posted on the account.) but I'm not willing to try following him again on insta given that's where the conflict started and it's where he becomes the focus of the hurt/anger and me pulling away from him trying to completely detach from him when I am reminded how he is caught in the middle of the bullying mind games his sister's choices created. And I've made progress in healing and dismantling conditioning I created in response to what happened in October 2018, but I don't think it's progress enough to stop me reactionary cutting ties to him and running over him mentioning his sister or the band on the very platform where the acts of ostracism occurred and are perpetuated from the past into the present by never being made right or even acknowledged. So I won't (yet) go back to following him on insta or giving him my attention there in my socials. I don't see it leading to anything healthy at this time and I do think it could destroy some of the recent healing progress that has been made and is still happening.

P. P. S. Also. Tonight, he's just all love with a thread of a slightly defensive possessive protectiveness holding the bond extra tight that feels like, "this is ours and you're not taking it away from me again, not even a little bit." It's actually incredibly endearing to me makes me react by wanting to hug the bond closer and send reassurance and love back to him, and not just because there's so much headiness of love light flowing in.