Open enemies. Week 1. Blogging for survival.

The ancient Astrologers had a name for those who would bring you undone. The ones that wished you harm, the ones who would happily see you slip on a banana peel during your campaign speech or inaugural oration. The ones who have heat blisters from their boiling core temperatures just thinking about you ever being happy, the ones who just loathe you. Publicly, loudly and daily. These charmers they named ‘open enemies’.

I have a compelling kind of admiration for these guys. They are the burlesque of the hater world. Lots of colour, some snappy moves and a baring of the breast when required. So open are they about the pursuit of your painful and embarrassing demise that they make no secret of their hopes in the matter and often share their vision of a better world. Without you in it.

It’s the hater pantomime that curdles the milk in my morning tea. The benign seeming someone who is really an icy machine, calculating the ways you can be made to suffer. The quiet achiever who during their work hours is researching how to hex you with interminable itching and have you buried alive with your hands tied behind your back. The one who is not in a hurry because they have all the time in the world to think about you. And not in a, shall we say, really uplifting kind of way.

It’s all energy. And I’m thinking a lot about energy lately. How to keep it moving. A bit like a pass the parcel. So even if you unwrap a real stinker, you don’t have to hold onto it for too long. Not so much about shifting responsibility but more a strategic feint. Just moving sideways so that energy doesn’t hit you like a medicine ball.

Open enemies aren’t my beef. I stand a fighting chance with someone so transparent. And although war games do not appeal to me, a couple of strategic hip and shoulders are never out of the question. It’s like bringing in Lion pooh from the Zoo and sprinkling it around your perimeter to ward off the tom cats. I’m not big. But I’ve watched the movies.

So it’s these other someone’s I’m learning how to be in the world with. Learning how not to share my energy with, or send my energy to. Trying to master the Zen of ‘that felt really bad and I’m going to teleport myself to somewhere else right now’. And you know, I really think I’m getting somewhere with the energy thing. Which is good.

Because I need all the energy I have to practice untying myself while buried alive.