Month: March 2024

Where Demons Tread

Diversification

Candid Corvid Productions

“I can’t stop.

This looming roller coaster is zooming in twisting, cacophanous spiraling.

All I can do is direct my attention, hold onto re-invention, and ride out through the looping hoops.

Fragmenting at the seams while pushing internal boundaries outward in many directions helps to reclaim by muted extremes.

My movements create trends projecting into the future, imprinting expectations upon the surrounding atmosphere to make space for when I will get there.”

The Accident - As Of 10/10/25 Early AM Named "Clyde" (Short For Collide) Because It's Funny And I Deserve Mirth At Its Expense, Where Demons Tread

The Concept Of Suing

Candid Corvid Productions

“Why would I wish to ruin another person’s life because they have “ruined” mine?

This grabbing at each other in ‘taking’ for restoration/compensation repositioning is not a real state of justice – nor restitution.

Accounting for ‘loss’ by causing more loss energetically propagates loss in the system.”

The Accident - As Of 10/10/25 Early AM Named "Clyde" (Short For Collide) Because It's Funny And I Deserve Mirth At Its Expense, Where Demons Tread

Affection Reception

Candid Corvid Productions

“Due to pain and muscle overstim with lockdown, can I even feel pleasure of physical connection anymore?

In stating this, two cats and a dog come up to greet me and be petted while purring, rubbing against, and leaning into me.

Maybe part of the issue is that I’m moving too fast to soak in time with those who love me.

I am also having to manage too much performance pressure.”

Spoken Word

“To Bitter End” (Spoken Word)

Candid Corvid Productions

By Athena Stairs, March 6, 2024

The vagaries of decision-making are many rather than few.

It’s difficult if really perused to know exactly if any decision is the right one.

It’s more like there’s a number of factors involved, and those that are seen and can be defined have a certain weight to each one of them.

And you can categorize to a certain extent and place percentages (as I may have said) and feel the weight of them balanced on a scale to help determine direction.

I didn’t know how anything was gonna to turn out.

Had I assessed it by how it began, I would have left.

It’s easier to say that now.

But the reality of it is that it all happened back then.

And I couldn’t have left…and I wouldn’t have left…when finding so injured a dearest friend.

Where Demons Tread

The Terrible Lie

Candid Corvid Productions

“From the outside, the older woman promoted a decent bargain.

But once you bought it and moved in, it was going to the bathroom in buckets she would ‘gracefully’ attend for avoidance of sewer reparations.

It was cringing at the inability to avoid the dawning horror of watching white-capsuled tapeworm eggs dropping off from untreated cat bums and littering all over the furniture, tables, and carpet surfaces.

It was the morning, noon, and evening times wretchingly vomitous smell of the unnecessarily now permanent colostomy bag being emptied as its fumes filled nearly the entire house with no escape granted.

And it was the continuous, stalking-in-wait insanity of chances being begged for for family reunification – at the same time all efforts were being rejected, laughed at, and sabotaged.”

Where Demons Tread

Another Sad Truth

Candid Corvid Productions

“PTSD, or hypervigilant shock syndrome, is something I frequently waded through while looking for hope of some safe shore to climb out onto in order to get away from being targeted when I was a child.

I suppose at some point, I stopped looking for loving acceptance.

Because somewhere amid the harsh words, criticizing looks, and undeserved categorical rejection in the 70’s, tremors now attempting to release from my body tell of a once constant fear’s twitching to avoid being randomly hit.”

Nature

A Sad Truth

Candid Corvid Productions

I didn’t want to say it, but the little injured mouse perished.

And this evening when “freeing” another one out into the cold, wet elements, the hound brought something in from along the back fence in the dark.

It was another dead one, and I realized tbat my desire and effort to grant a second chance to the mouslings may have been resulting in a different version of doom.

Nature

An Injured Mouse

Candid Corvid Productions

There was a mouselet slowly flipping around on the kitchen floor this morning.

I think a cat had gotten to it.

I couldn’t put it outside in that condition, for it definitely would not be able to fend for itself.

Might as well put it in a baggy in the freezer instead (more humane) if I was going to commit.

But I didn’t.

Instead, I put the poor love into a terrarium with a towel, food, and water to see if it can self regulate.

Soon after, I found it lying on the cold glass floor of the enclosure, and put it back into the towel.

Hours later, I found it struggling feebly in the shallow jar lid full of 1/4″ of water.

So with gloves on, I pulled it out gently by its tail and patted it dry as I redeposited it into folds of the towel.

At last evening check, it was still in the towel with its face peeking out.

I want it to be comfortable.

I want it to feel cherished.

I hope it recovers.

Where Demons Tread

“Shit” Happens: Clean It Up

Candid Corvid Productions

“Many friends (especially one recently, which greatly dissapointed the optimist in me) have said in casting their chips that life is harsh and hard – and that’s all it is.

I do not agree with this sentiment – no matter how “negativity” keeps plying at my resolve to be positive with its unarguably painful and disruptive experiences.

There seems to be a definite paradigm effect working diligently against many of us – but that doesn’t mean that we should give into it.

Yes, I suffer.

Constantly and frequently.

Pain and extreme discomfort take turns shuffling around and between places in my body’s psycho-physio-emotional ecology.

The pain last night in my neck was so bad, for example, I almost gave into just flat out frustrated crying.

And I’m not sure which is worse – the pain or the numbness? The disconnection throughout my joints and limbs that I clamber against.

If I’m not feeling intense pain somewhere in my head or body and/or that pressure causing such a red, inflamed haze, I am pushing hard against these other limitations – willing connections in harmony to grow again.”

Where Demons Tread

The Agate’s Mirror

Candid Corvid Productions

“I just bought it the other day. This gorgeous dark beast, smooth and polished, soaked in deep, rich colors, and shaped in the abstract hinting of a dragon’s head.

The alarm that struck through me when I heard the hard-solid clang of my pocket’s contents impacting against the unyielding metal pole of the workout machine as I draped my coat over it signalled injury.

No! I love this stone – I appreciate it!

It’s now cracked across its skull, just like I was. Only there are no cells present to aid its healing. None that is, except the energy of its caretaker, holding it in apology.”

Where Demons Tread

Spectral Haunting

Candid Corvid Productions

“I do not know to what extent the man was real – whether truly an inky-black, thin-shaped spirit with a black hat that he would tip in irony and dark humor – or if he was just the amalgamation of fragments of experience that my mind put together to represent all the ill will of/inside humans that I’d been feeling.

Like the tarry cancer that fills lungs of those people who were smoking. That sense of “wrong” that never goes right despite all the efforts we’re doing.

Does he haunt me still? Is that why my life never seems to be getting better?

I keep trudging forward against the odds, creating sunbeams in absence of the sun – only barely rebooting when it shines upon me. And when darkness descends again, I come undone.”

Where Demons Tread

Looking Back

Candid Corvid Productions

“Understanding the factors at work back then – such as a mother’s having severe post-partum depression and a father’s avoidant behavior of her while giving love to their newborn child causing the mother to feel unloved and rejected –  would seem to help resolve trauma as revisiting the event for analysis.

But I think I’ve always understood the influences upon people to some extent. I could feel, if not see, the factors present. The issue for me is how to expunge physical and energetic imbedded experience of the situation’s impact.

The pain and danger signals. The unhealed scars and mixed negative messaging imprints that my body’s been carrying.

That stuff now shaking free to quiver constantly – overpinging my brain and spinal cord since the accident.”

Where Demons Tread

Trauma Baby

Candid Corvid Productions

“I don’t know if she really meant it. Not wanting me, that is. I was very aware when an infant. Not sure if I understood the exact words – but I definitely understood implications of unhappiness.

So when my world was upended as the car’s sudden-screaching stop barely missed the cliff’s edge and my soft, still open fontanels impacted into the gas peddle’s region, the searing pain ‘s compression sent me out of my body in order to live through it.

It was my first dissociative experience. Why was I being punished?”

Compositions, Nature

Tones Of Fealty

Candid Corvid Productions

I called the “Jack of Trades” to come help me.

I had known that the mice were beginning to move into the garage due to the extended freeze we had experienced recently.

And now I had just seen one very fat adult mouse inside the house – perched on top of our dryer!

We needed to intervene immediately – but I was not ok with ‘Jack’s” initial outright assertion that we would kill the critters.

To me, this did not feel right.

I could understand that when working in agriculture, mice can be so devastating to crops (and thus human livelihoods) that survival can come to an “us or them” battle by applicable philosophy.

But that was not the case here.

We just needed to round the mice up and prevent their returned entry.

Yet, initially, I was confused by the panicked discovery of “invasion” having gone too far.

As we waited for landlord approval to install a basket-sealed dryer vent in order to effectively address the situation, I internally prevaricated, unsure of the best decision.

Then, upon returning home one evening, I found a young mouse’s dead body curved along the inside of the cat food bowl.

The sadness and regret I felt in finding life taken in this manner tugged at me.

The next morning, as I sat down briefly onto the toilet in groggy awakening, what must have been a sibling to the prior youth darted into the bathroom near my feet from under the door, looked up and saw me – then darted out again.

With that unnerving “what the?!” it was time to make a decision!

As I prepped to drive to the Home Depot to determine which traps to purchase, I was suddenly drawn into the most recent “great worm harvest” experience, where I rescued likely over 200 worms from incoming snow exposure and redistributed them to planted pots in my garden.

While gathering them one-by-one for about an hour and shivering from cold as the insides of my nose melted, I had eased into a state of meditation and soon found myself sometimes humming – as if crooning to the worms to gain their cooperation.

I was certainly quietly talking to them when tbey resisted!

A sense of peace and wonder filled my core about how the many forms of life on our planet exist for purposes, and that we are all dependsnt upon one another for our own species’ continued survival.

And it felt right that I wanted to help preserve life – in fact, I would want forces greater than humanity to also offer me/us the same consideration!

During this process, my compassion was able to work past the cognitive dissonance of societal programming’s assertion that my duty as a human was to defend my home violently.

For I remembered my family’s decision to be gentle with nature during those challenging three years on the mountain – and how, in return, nature and its wildlings had also found ways to live with us peacefully.