I'm A Rebel Just For Kicks...

I'm still uncertain as to where this piece is taking me, taking us to be honest. The inspiration was simple - a run in Balboa Park, singing along to Portugal the Man's "Feel it Still" then immediately getting buzzed by a red-tailed hawk as I sang "I'm a rebel just for kicks." I've written about sacred rebellion (When Love Comes To Town...) the sacrifice, the rewards, the joy, and the sorrow. To walk that path is no easy task and you must hold both sides - you become, dare I say, a Judge.

The Judge, not the judgey wudgey was a bear where you clock folks for tragic fashion choices and heinous makeup and hairstyles - although that's certainly not verboten or anything. If you like, I can reference Othniel, Ehud, Deborah, Gideon, Jephthah, and Samson - all Judges in biblical texts - leaders who delivered the Israelites from oppression and maintained law and order before the establishment of the monarchy. Sacred rebellion transcends human laws and blurs lines into the divine.

I chose Castiel as the cover for this piece because he made manifest much of what one, I think, encounters when dealing with angelic warriors.  When we first meet Castiel, he does not always help people, and is willing, at least when he is first introduced, to kill innocents if needed. Angelic warriors are mission-driven, but as we see the evolution of Castiel as he interacts more and more with humanity - he begins to form a deep compassion and dare I say, free will. That's the truth about sacred rebellion, you know, it's holding the sword of truth in your hand, yet it is unmoved when the compassion of your heart is its guiding light.

This last week as we steamed full-speed ahead into Spring Equinox, I've been turning ideas upon its head all week. Pondering, re-pondering, and then circling back again. Humanity has reduced itself to a looping feedback cycle of confines, chains, and traumas. If we are to evolve, we must first untangle ourselves. Not in Darwin’s sense—this is soul evolution. A kind of divine unraveling where questioning becomes communion. Where suffering is not a lesson—but a signal.
We are not here to suffer. We are here to inform. And the divine within us?
It informs the divine we belong to. That’s the secret nobody talks about.
That we are not only shaped by the gods—we shape them, too.

All week, one word danced in my head as it began to shape and mold itself that hot metal that word was LUST. Not shame. Not sin. Not control. I mean real, pre-Christian, animistic LUST—the flame that drives discovery, passion, maps, and movement. Without lust, we never would’ve dared to leave the cave.
We would never explore, touch, taste, or rebel. There must be LUST, beloveds.
And if we are to name its matron, then let me kneel before her now: Frigg, Queen of Asgard.

When I began to journey through the Nine Realms, reconnecting with my Germanic and Norse ancestry, I noticed something: Most feminine practitioners I encountered focused on the Vanir—with maybe a little Jotun energy sprinkled in. And that’s fine. Beautiful, even. But when I asked a respected practitioner about Frigg, she said:

“Oh, she’s just a queen.”

JUST? A queen?!

I was so violently repelled by that dismissal, I never took another class with her again. Because when I petitioned Odin and Frigg to be my Padrino and Madrina—
Frigg came through. Not as a gentle royal… but as the Divine Mystery. The Unseen Power. And let me tell you something—Frigg is deeply in lust with Odin. This isn’t some polite political union. This is sacred combustion. This is power merged with wisdom. The fruit of their union is the embodiment of light, beauty, love, and happiness - Baldur. In the Sagas, only Freyr is spoken of as being as fair and as light (if you want to see your garden explode put an effigy of Freyr out there and pour a wee dram of mead for him).

Frigg, the prophetess who knows everyone's fate, yet tells none - save in some texts she tells Fulla, one of her handmaidens. I dismiss that - she's the one that informs Odin of who's naughty or nice - the Wild Hunt - are you getting coal or goodies? Not only does she KNOW what you've done, but she's the one who passes judgment - Odin is, well, the executioner - hopelessly devoted to her. He may wander, but he is always returning to his beloved, Frigg. Sometimes, I wonder if Odin didn't sacrifice his right eye to her ultimately, to Frigg. It would be fitting to be honest. What has a warrior to give - his heart? his sword, his shield? his word? For a prophetess what does she have need of his sword and shield - she already has his heart. Oh, but I'm not following the Saga! Nope, and they were meant to be living and breathing like the very wind that gives us life.

This leads to the final bit of magick of sacred rebellion, the trickster. We know these folks as Comedians. "Fight a war for peace" as Feel It Still tells us - makes me think of the Ex-Presidents in Point Break (the 1991 original, thank you ever so). Surfers with a lavish Southern California lifestyle robbing banks to fund it.

Bodhi explains - "It was never about money for us it was about us against the system. That system that kills the human spirit..." Maybe in another piece, I'll go into how Bodhi was Utah's shadow - but that aside, this line is pure delusion, Bodhi. The ex-Presidents were stealing to fund a continent-hopping lifestyle. That's not sacred rebellion, folks, that's just criminal. Yet in a way, I can see the absurdity of it all - fighting a war for peace, or robbing a bank as an illustration of rebellion against the banking system.

The sacred rebel walks the line between Judge and Fool. Between Sword and Mercy. Between Lust and Restraint. And they must always ask—
"Am I burning down the system? Or just fueling another ego trip?”

That leads us back to what so many of my pieces have touched on - shadow work. You cannot avoid it no matter how much spiritual bypassing or Starbucks spirituality rituals you undergo. Is it easy? Hell no. Is it worth it? Yes! There was yet another feminine practitioner that I've taken courses from who claimed she did not believe women have egos, and thus do not have to suffer ego deaths. I wish I could live in that level of delusion. I have a Master's in Chemistry and served in the United States Army under the Clinton administration - I've suffered misogyny so vicious it deserved a parade and even with all that, I can absolutely say without a shadow of a doubt that I have endured ego deaths- deservedly - necessary. So yes, ladies, if you walk this path, get tombstones ready for your egos.

So I have to end this piece by shattering your precious little ego. All sacred rebels are cycle breakers, but not all cycle breakers are sacred rebels. It's not that cycle breaking is easy - FAR from from it. The cycle breaker path is noble, vital, and world-shifting, but it can still be walked within the system's confines. Some cycle breakers just want peace, just want out, just want to close the wound and rest. If that's you, you deserve that, but that doesn’t mean you’re a rebel.

Now, sacred rebels? We don’t just break cycles - we stand in the ruins and demand that the gods who have chosen us as their children come down and witness. We rebuild, loudly and reimagine what should have been. In fact, we weep profusely for it. We create new stories, new rituals, and new languages. We don't just say “No more.”
We say:

“Watch me remake the world. And if the old gods don't approve, let them be reborn too.”

Sacred rebellion is creative fire. It is holy rage. It is ancestral laughter echoing through broken systems. It’s prophetic. Mythic. Terrifying in its beauty.

How does one define the difference?

• A cycle breaker may want to heal quietly.
• A sacred rebel wants to liberate generations and torch the systems that demanded silence.

One is a beautiful act of survival.
The other is a cosmic act of war and worship.

I leave you with Carl Sandburg - The Four Brothers

MAKE war songs out of these;
Make chants that repeat and weave.

Make rhythms up to the ragtime chatter of the machine guns;
Make slow-booming psalms up to the boom of the big guns.

Make a marching song of swinging arms and swinging legs,
Going along,
Going along,
On the roads from San Antonio to Athens, from Seattle to Bagdad—
The boys and men in winding lines of khaki, the circling squares of bayonet points.


Cowpunchers, cornhuskers, shopmen, ready in khaki;
Ballplayers, lumberjacks, ironworkers, ready in khaki;
A million, ten million, singing, “I am ready.
”
This the sun looks on between two seaboards,
In the land of Lincoln, in the land of Grant and Lee.


I heard one say, “I am ready to be killed.
”
I heard another say, “I am ready to be killed.
”
O sunburned clear-eyed boys!
I stand on sidewalks and you go by with drums and guns and bugles,
You—and the flag!
And my heart tightens, a fist of something feels my throat
When you go by,
You on the kaiser hunt, you and your faces saying, “I am ready to be killed.
”

They are hunting death,
Death for the one-armed mastoid kaiser.

They are after a Hohenzollern head:
There is no man-hunt of men remembered like this.


The four big brothers are out to kill.

France, Russia, Britain, America—
The four republics are sworn brothers to kill the kaiser.


Yes, this is the great man-hunt;
And the sun has never seen till now
Such a line of toothed and tusked man-killers,
In the blue of the upper sky,
In the green of the undersea,
In the red of winter dawns.

Eating to kill,
Sleeping to kill,
Asked by their mothers to kill,
Wished by four-fifths of the world to kill—
To cut the kaiser’s throat,
To hack the kaiser’s head,
To hang the kaiser on a high-horizon gibbet.


And is it nothing else than this?
Three times ten million men thirsting the blood
Of a half-cracked one-armed child of the German kings?
Three times ten million men asking the blood
Of a child born with his head wrong-shaped,
The blood of rotted kings in his veins?
If this were all, O God,
I would go to the far timbers
And look on the gray wolves
Tearing the throats of moose:
I would ask a wilder drunk of blood.


Look! It is four brothers in joined hands together.

The people of bleeding France,
The people of bleeding Russia,
The people of Britain, the people of America—
These are the four brothers, these are the four republics.


At first I said it in anger as one who clenches his fist in wrath to fling his knuckles into the face of some one taunting;
Now I say it calmly as one who has thought it over and over again at night, among the mountains, by the seacombers in storm.

I say now, by God, only fighters to-day will save the world, nothing but fighters will keep alive the names of those who left red prints of bleeding feet at Valley Forge in Christmas snow.

On the cross of Jesus, the sword of Napoleon, the skull of Shakespeare, the pen of Tom Jefferson, the ashes of Abraham Lincoln, or any sign of the red and running life poured out by the mothers of the world,
By the God of morning glories climbing blue the doors of quiet homes, by the God of tall hollyhocks laughing glad to children in peaceful valleys, by the God of new mothers wishing peace to sit at windows nursing babies,
I swear only reckless men, ready to throw away their lives by hunger, deprivation, desperate clinging to a single purpose imperturbable and undaunted, men with the primitive guts of rebellion,
Only fighters gaunt with the red brand of labor’s sorrow on their brows and labor’s terrible pride in their blood, men with souls asking danger—only these will save and keep the four big brothers.


Good-night is the word, good-night to the kings, to the czars,
Good-night to the kaiser.

The breakdown and the fade-away begins.

The shadow of a great broom, ready to sweep out the trash, is here.


One finger is raised that counts the czar,
The ghost who beckoned men who come no more—
The czar gone to the winds on God’s great dustpan,
The czar a pinch of nothing,
The last of the gibbering Romanoffs.


Out and good-night—
The ghosts of the summer palaces
And the ghosts of the winter palaces!
Out and out, good-night to the kings, the czars, the kaisers.


Another finger will speak,
And the kaiser, the ghost who gestures a hundred million sleeping-waking ghosts,
The kaiser will go onto God’s great dustpan—
The last of the gibbering Hohenzollerns.

Look! God pities this trash, God waits with a broom and a dustpan,
God knows a finger will speak and count them out.


It is written in the stars;
It is spoken on the walls;
It clicks in the fire-white zigzag of the Atlantic wireless;
It mutters in the bastions of thousand-mile continents;
It sings in a whistle on the midnight winds from Walla Walla to Mesopotamia:
Out and good-night.


The millions slow in khaki,
The millions learning Turkey in the Straw and John Brown’s Body,
The millions remembering windrows of dead at Gettysburg, Chickamauga, and Spottsylvania Court House,
The millions dreaming of the morning star of Appomattox,
The millions easy and calm with guns and steel, planes and prows:
There is a hammering, drumming hell to come.

The killing gangs are on the way.


God takes one year for a job.

God takes ten years or a million.

God knows when a doom is written.

God knows this job will be done and the words spoken:
Out and good-night.

The red tubes will run,
And the great price be paid,
And the homes empty,
And the wives wishing,
And the mothers wishing.


There is only one way now, only the way of the red tubes and the great price.


Well…
Maybe the morning sun is a five-cent yellow balloon,
And the evening stars the joke of a God gone crazy.

Maybe the mothers of the world,
And the life that pours from their torsal folds—
Maybe it’s all a lie sworn by liars,
And a God with a cackling laughter says:
“I, the Almighty God,
I have made all this,
I have made it for kaisers, czars, and kings.
”

Three times ten million men say: No.

Three times ten million men say:
God is a God of the People.

And the God who made the world
And fixed the morning sun,
And flung the evening stars,
And shaped the baby hands of life,
This is the God of the Four Brothers;
This is the God of bleeding France and bleeding Russia;
This is the God of the people of Britain and America.


The graves from the Irish Sea to the Caucasus peaks are ten times a million.

The stubs and stumps of arms and legs, the eyesockets empty, the cripples, ten times a million.

The crimson thumb-print of this anathema is on the door panels of a hundred million homes.

Cows gone, mothers on sick-beds, children cry a hunger and no milk comes in the noon-time or at night.

The death-yells of it all, the torn throats of men in ditches calling for water, the shadows and the hacking lungs in dugouts, the steel paws that clutch and squeeze a scarlet drain day by day—the storm of it is hell.

But look! child! the storm is blowing for a clean air.


Look! the four brothers march
And hurl their big shoulders
And swear the job shall be done.


Out of the wild finger-writing north and south, east and west, over the blood-crossed, blood-dusty ball of earth,
Out of it all a God who knows is sweeping clean,
Out of it all a God who sees and pierces through, is breaking and cleaning out an old thousand years, is making ready for a new thousand years.

The four brothers shall be five and more.


Under the chimneys of the winter time the children of the world shall sing new songs.

Among the rocking restless cradles the mothers of the world shall sing new sleepy-time songs.