LS Harteveld

There she f* is | Part 2: Death & Sexus

DESPERATELY SEEKING  SUSAN
Keep the faith. Tuesday 10 a.m. 
Battery Park. Gangway 1.
Love Jim

Once upon a time I was aware that all my interests stemmed from only two sources; Madonna or Men.
“Men” not as in 50% of world population, but as in love interests, writers and other idols.
And Madonna not as in the Virgin Mary, although admittedly her sacred nature will soon become relevant to this story, but Madonna as in the queen of pop who has inspired me for intense time periods after which, similarly to my relationship to men, the connection slowly fizzled out but never completely died.

Even when I think I’m over them, years later, the affection has a way to suddenly flare up.
Off to the races. But although my love for Madonna has recently been slowly on the rise, it’s nowhere near what it used to be, in the late 2010s.
Yet the call with Sara revealed Madonna had never really left.

Because in the call we discussed my new, expansive, borderline religious dedication to my own spiritual path. My deep desire to carve out a life, create a clarity, a rhythm, a space of devotion. To be the vessel, but also to maintain it.
And before we knew it, we were already knee-deep into discussing Broadway actors, who have to go home immediately after the show, protecting tomorrow’s performance by going to bed early.
I too go to bed early, so I can rise when others are still asleep. The early morning are my most important hours of the day.

We were discussing my fascination with the idea of tending to the space surrounding sexuality. The atmosphere. And how that has become its own standalone thing, that has become incredibly fulfilling.
I have a sexual practice, but its not something that has to do with physical pleasure but a mental one. It’s a devotion to beauty, and a refusal to open the door for low-effort or course anything.

I am obsessed with my own literal (night time) dreams, which are still not coming through as clearly as decades ago (before internet on our phones!)
But I can already ask for guidance before I fall asleep, and get actual answers.
I am making peace with being alone, and it’s thrilling.

I binge watch one channeler and a Tarot reader.
Hundreds, hundreds and hundreds of videos, month after month.
My cheeks are flushed in an insatiable hunger.
I wake up at 4 and am on my yoga mat at 5 without an alarm.
I am happy.

And yet, it is only the beginning.
Because when I spoke with Sara I also shared that my conscious effort was going to be in ancient Egyptian spirituality.

In retrospect I was also assuming this meant I had finally become a serious spiritual practitioner, instead of someone who was only here for the falling in love and obsessing over men part. 

I didn’t say it, nor was I looking for approval from Sara that I was finally legit in my spiritual practice, but I was happy that for once things seemed to be solid, congruent, and profound.
Perhaps a bit boring, and it would certainly never amount to anything worth writing about, but still solid, right?
Wrong. 

Soon we were chatting about how I had always had this fascination with erotic space, and sexual atmosphere. And with all the roles women could play, such as mistress, artist, writer, as long as those roles were a hundred thousand miles outside of the orbit of everyday life.
And had nothing to do with caregiving (unless it was to cats or other magical creatures) nor with doing patriarchy’s silent labor.
Roles where you were no longer an accessory to the systems you were born into, and not even a product of your own personal history.
Roles that had left their entire history behind, and were now rooted in freedom.

And for a reason I no longer recall, we started talking about Desperately Seeking Susan, the 1985 Madonna movie, and how Madonna’s Susan was a symbol of that freedom.
We all wanted to be her, sitting on that rail, her back facing the ocean so she could overlook the park, looking out for Jim.
She’s wearing pitchblack sunglasses, and lights a match at the sole of her shoe (those are wax matches, if I recall correctly) and then lights a cigarette taking a sip just as Jim approaches.

She kisses him deeply, immediately wrapping her arms and legs around him.

The past week or so she’s lived with a lover in a hotelroom. Someone who has been found dead but who, as she insists, was breathing when she left.
Technically she does not have a home, and yet she is at home everywhere, enjoying herself with men along the way.
She is free.

Also: She wears a jacket with a pyramid on the back.
Also: She has stolen a pair of earrings from her late lover. As we will find out soon, those are the earrings from Nefertiti.

And that was effectively the moment I could just flush any idea of me having sovereign spiritual ideas down the toilet, because obviously, I wasn’t.
Yes, I was free. Just like I had learned in 1985, from Madonna.
Yes, I no longer belonged to the world, but my early morning hours were Susan’s nomad lifestyle. A rhythm that made us unreachable.

Susan carried a round black suitcase, with white skulls printed onto it.
It was her mobile altar. She wore rhinestone boots that had been on display like a religious artifact. Because they were.
I got up from my desk and came back showing Sara my current vision board cards;
One card had Susan’s skull suitecase on it.
One her rhinestone boots.
I had actively bound myself to this movie, to this Madonna, months ago, and yet had managed to miss that I was recreating the lifestyle, including an obsession with ancient Egypt.

So in many ways, I am back to where I always was.
Everything real about me is either inspired by Madonna, or by men.
Even the parts you think are about ancient Egypt.

But I am finally, and by all standards, free..

~Lauren
An unexamined life is not worth living

There she f* is

In the weeks leading up to the call there was a lot of bad stuff to unpack, but since the call I’m facing a different “problem” because things just kept unfolding.
In a positive way, like a puzzle automatically falling into place.

The pieces were falling in line with my daily routines, glued themselves onto my identity, and before I knew it there was this whole new being to admire where a pretty bland, work-in-progress part of my life and identity used to be.

She was wearing black and sporting a pair of horns, and I credit binge watching a ton of Capricorn videos for her spectacular appearance on a Monday morning.

Now before I dive in about who she is, and why I’m so happy to see her, I have to cut back a bit to how my horoscope looks.

My horoscope has four different points of gravity, four different signs that are extremely significant.
All in a different element; One fire, one air, one earth and one water.

The four points of gravity are four different houses.
A house is 1/12 of a circle representing the sky.
A house is visualized as 1/12 piece of a pie, and it carries one of the 12 zodiac signs.
So in telling this story, what I am referring to is four of the 12 houses in my birth chart carrying 99% of the weight in the form of planet placements and important points in the sky.
A full circle with eight almost empty houses, 8 empty pieces of the pie.
And then four houses spread over the zodiac, all marked by a zodiacal sign.
All four host to planets and important astrological points.

Two houses/signs are squaring each other, this means they don’t go together.
If I was two people, an astrologer would say about dating the sign of that other part of me;
“I see some challenges here.”
But it’s not another person, it’s not an optional thing. It’s two parts of me, at odds.

On the bright side, squared signs are always the same modality* (* not sure if modality is the right word);
Both signs Fixed, both Mutable or both Cardinal signs.
So they may bud heads, but squared signs are by definition in a way of equal strength. They fight the same way.
Like similar Pokémon cards. I think, because I don’t play Pokémon, but you get the idea.

So there is that, two parts of my charts going head to head and neither one budging.
But this is not nearly as complicated as the relationship the three other houses have.

Now in case you counted, you will probably see that one sign is both in a square standoff with another sign, as well part of my Triangle of Chaos.
And this is true.
But it is the sign with the most planets in it, and it doesn’t show any sign of fatigue. They have it handled.

So the Triangle of Chaos: These three signs are all important (being 3 of the 4 points of gravity, as established).
They don’t share an element, because they’re Earth, Fire and Air.
And they don’t share their modality* (* not sure if modality is the right word), because one is fixed, one is cardinal and one is mutual.
If I was playing the game Set!, which as opposed to Pokémon I do know how to play, well then these three signs would be a Set.
Because they are different on all identifiable characteristics.

One of them, one of the three signs in the Triangle of Chaos, is Capricorn.
And this morning, sparked by a video on my feed, I was inspired to study her again. From all the four signs/points gravity in my chart, I pay the least attention to Capricorn.
A Capricorn is hardworking and built for harsh conditions. She doesn’t care not being noticed, as long as I don’t bother her with stuff or include her in frivolous activities, she’s perfectly fine with me obsessing, drooling and self-indulging over the other three signs.
It’s all Whatever to her.

But today I started studying her, and made a playlist from all Capricorn videos from my favorite astrologer. Shorts, reels, longer form content, some dating back years.
And I fell in love with her, because something in me just broke open and a whole flood of emotions came out, making the most unwelcome gift to my neglected Capricorn-self because Capricorns like to keep things clean and functional.

I saw the Capricorn woman shaking her horns, but allowing the other three signs in me their little moment.
Not because she felt akin to them, but because she figured not saying anything was the best strategy to get this moment of oversharing over the soonest.

I was happy to have such a clear image of the Capricorn side of me, that feisty horned woman, because I knew the “face”, the archetype, of the other three, but Capricorn had always been a little vague to me.
And then later today, the final piece of the puzzle fell!!
And guess what?
My Triangle of Chaos, is not chaos at all!

She, Capricorn me, was actually in all three of them.
She, has been the one holding the chart together all along.

First the place where she was most obvious; The house that had some mighty inhabitants, and that was in her sign of Capricorn.
This was of course, where I had located “Her” first.

But I could now see, that the other two points in my Triangle of Chaos were also under her command.
Because another one was the 10th House, which is the House of Capricorn because Capricorn is the tenth sign of the zodiac.
Any placements in your 10th house are automatically linked to the sign of Capricorn.
Connected to your own little beastie, to quote quite appropriately Maleficent.

And then the third and final point of this triangle was not in the sign of Capricorn, nor was it the House of Capricorn, but it had Saturn there;
The planet that rules Capricorn.
Meaning that what had looked like a triangle of chaos, were three strong houses spread over the sky and they were all connected through one sign;
The sign of Capricorn.

By being present in all three of these houses, Capricorn had never been a side-note to my chart. Never a nice to have aspect to feed everything to I do not want to do, from herculean works to mundane tasks.
She was the one underneath it all, carrying the whole chart. 

And she totally digs the lady of that first house I talked about.
Remember the one? 
The one who was in a staring contest, in a square, a power battle.
I didn’t name her, but that was Scorpio.

My chart is not a battlefield, it is not pulled into four different directions as I understood it in the past. I am not four different women.
I am only two.

One Scorpio, who rules the night, the depths, and all the worlds of the unseen.
And one Capricorn.

Who rules, in my case, everything else.

.
~Lauren
An unexamined life is not worth living

The Nature of Reality

Our call was so abstract and complex, I already knew it would be impossible to come up with a catchy title, and still cover its essence. (and not be empty clickbait)

So to compensate for its lack of juicy content, I will try to keep it short, and therefor sweet.
And who knows!
Maybe these findings are the missing keys to your life, and you’ll find them fascinating and just what you need to turn everything around for the better.

To understand the conclusion, I first need to draw a picture of the impossible task I present Sara with, every time we start a call.
Which is that I barge into it, Kramer from Seinfield- style, and open with an unfinished but for some reason incredibly important-to-me model of reality, that I drop on our proverbial table.
My energy says: “Look Sara! Don’t mind the mess, I know there’s something brilliant in there somewhere, but I’m stuck.”
And then, without missing a beat, I take her deep into the rabbit-hole of some sort of highly abstract model of reality, that would explain my most pressing problem, if only I could find the final missing piece.

I often have moments when I fear she’ll one day say she’s tired of coaching me, because it is just too much. And she would be right.
But to me, her coachee, it is so welcome to have that one time every month, and that one person, with whom I can share these new inventions without holding back.

And low and behold! We always finish them.

Having an extra pair of eyes to assess what it is we’re really looking at, always turns out to be extremely helpful.

Maybe you too are someone for whom the solution lies with understanding how things came to be a certain way in the first place.
Someone who does not need, nor want, nor is in any way helped by, a conversation about how it makes you feel, but should instead wonder things like:
– How did I get here?
– Why is this in my life?
– Is it part of the larger constructs or contexts I have agreed to, or is it an intruder?

For example – and I really mean just any random example because this is not judgement but just the first thing that pops to mind – a preventative screening for diseases can cause a lot of complicated situations.

But if you had beforehand made a decision at a more abstract level that you personally believe in and endorse preventative screening, and that it is part of your life, then you can act much calmer if something shows up, because you’ve done the groundwork.
Whereas if you’re in the midst of medical unrest, it may be because you never bothered to make the principal decision if you want to even engage with that part of (preventative) medicine.

Very often we find ourselves in difficult situations that actually have multiple causes or are composed out of multiple layers.
Some of them could have been smoothed out, and dealt with, as if they were a separate chapter. Because they are.

Abstract problem solving, and abstract living according to your own values, makes life far less chaotic, stressed, and like you’re at the mercy of other people’s ideas and interventions.
It enables you to make conscious decisions, and push your own agenda.

For me personally, pulling a problem apart into its components has proven to be the only real way to solve it. And some have taken me decades, but now that I know what I’m doing, and also have Sara to look over my shoulder, the process has sped up for sure.
And new problems actually excite me, because they’re like a puzzle.

With the medical stuff I mentioned, my decision is to reject screening, but I would have been equally happy if I had decided to be pro-screening, and might have gotten more screenings than Dutch government offers for free.
So the secret is not in the choice itself but in the fact that I’ve made a conscious choice to begin with.
And these are choices at an abstract level, before you take it down to execution level.

But the catch is that most problems and situations are not singular, but have many moving parts!
Which means that before you can make a decision or understand why something did not or does not work, you need to develop a working model of reality.

You have to come up with an abstraction of your problem;
Only then, can you make this decision or understand what to change for better results.
And making new models takes a lot of times. And, in my case, a lot of calls with Sara.

“My only task is to help someone to keep on going,” Sara said.
She wasn’t looking for the satisfaction of providing magical quick fixes or in being able to claim miracle results thanks to her amazing coaching skills.

If what I needed to keep going were meta conversations, centered around a pile of unfinished ideas;
Then she was happy to help.

~Lauren
An unexamined life is not worth living