Category Archives: Words Words Words

Synchronicity Strikes

I keep a Hanson-Roberts tarot deck on my desk to play with when I get stuck on something. A couple of days ago I shuffled and drew three cards: Justice, the Empress, and the Star.

They’re still on my desk, because something’s been niggling at me. Namely, the fact that as soon as I saw the Empress, I said, “Ooh, Brid!”

Now, Brid is usually seen as a Maiden figure. (Paradoxical association has Saint Brigit being a matron of pregnant women. Go figure.) She is associated with the first stirrings of spring, creativity, healing, and crafts, among other things. The Hanson-Roberts deck (which isn’t my favourite by a long shot; it’s just slightly smaller than the average tarot deck and fits my hands comfortably) portrays the Empress as a golden brown-haired woman crowned with twelve tiny flames, gowned in a dress of brown-red, white, and soft blue, sitting in a chair that has a back with a large round headrest. The blue headrest is outlined in gold, and provides a frame for her face. Traditionally the Empress indicates a woman of mid-age, and is associated with fruitfulness, family, motherhood, abundance, progress and such things.

So my immediate recognition of the Empress card as Brid stumped me for a moment. Then I looked at the card again, thought about my research, and began to understand why.

I’ve been doing some key research on the concept of Brid as figure of Sovereignity, a representative of the energy of the land itself. In that respect, the figure of the Empress and her associations of fertility and abundance work quite well. The tiny flames crowning her head are of course associated with Brid’s fire aspect. The blues of the card call to mind Brid’s water affiliation through her healing aspect. The grain growing around the Empress is not only used to feed the people of the land, but the cattle and other domestic herds who are under Brid’s protection also. The round disk of the chair back brings to mind the possible solar connection Brid has, as well.

If someone had asked me to choose a Major Arcana card to represent Brid before this happened, I’d likely have chosen only the Star. I’m a writer; I tend to relate to Brid in her creative aspect first and foremost. These three cards together, though, seem to show me the three sides of Brid: the brightness of inspiration in the Star, the fertile Sovereignity aspect of the Empress, and the rulership/warrior aspect of Justice.

A good writer and researcher keeps her mind open to possibilities. And since in my world I choose to believe that there is no such thing as coincidence, and since it was the Empress card that really jumped out at me, I think I’ll be following this line of Sovereignity research for a while.

Noooo!

I left my printer paper and brand-new sticky tabs at work last night.

I think I’ll go back to bed. Or make a cup of hazelnut hot chocolate and curl up with an Anne Rice novel or something. You know, the complete antithesis of academic application.

Research Crisis

I woke up with way too much pep at a ridiculous hour this morning. Got up, dragged all my notebooks and research texts and my pencil case to bed in order to work…

and discovered that I had only one coloured sticky index tab left.

Woe!

You cannot possibly imagine the depths of my despair, because you’re not me. I’m a stationery geek – no, not as in immobile, that’s stationary. I mean stationery as in paper and office products. Notebooks, pens, pencils, staplers, paper clips, Post-It notes, coloured sticky index tabs that you position on a page to indicate An Important Point You’ll Want to Refer To Later.

These things have been my life lately. Yellow for references to the Brigantii tribe; red for references to the goddess Brid; green for healing references; purple for general goddessy stuff I’ll work in later. Blue for whatever. It’s a system. Every academic has his or her system. Ceri has index cards. I have sticky tabs.

When I’m stuck for inspiration, I buy a new pen. When I begin a new research project, I buy new coloured sticky tabs.

I ought to look upon this crisis as a Meaningful Milestone, namely that I’ve done so much research that I’ve come across a couple of hundred important points. At the moment, however, I’m just glum. Even promising myself a trip to Bureau en Gros on the way to work isn’t brightening my day as much as it could.

Although I do need new highlighters; my current ones fade out after thirty seconds of use. And I need a new package of paper for the printer, too.

Well, fine. So I’ll stop and pick things up. If I leave now. I’ll have an extra twenty minutes to poke about before I have to be at the store for noon for my shift.

The Other Side of the Fence

Isn’t it ironic how when we begin a cold, on our way down we hit a certain stage of illness where we operate at 80% efficiency and we moan about how I feel just awful, awful. Then when we hit the same efficiency level on the way to getting well again, we rejoice and say, Isn’t it wonderful! I feel so good!

It’s all relative.

Human Again

After waking up with a low-grade fever yesterday morning and exhibiting even lower energy than I’d had all week, HRH forbade me to go out for my Sunday afternoon class and ordered me back to bed. I slept until we had to leave for our scheduled dinner with my in-laws, where I sat zoning out in the rocking chair with a quilt over my legs. Matching socks after a load of laundry was pretty much all I could manage to do. Bless them, they fed me and lit candles in the living room and understood.

When we got home I caught the sixth end of the Brier final, assumed all was lost, and took a bath. I emerged just in time to see the tenth end, where Dacey stuck it to Ferby after something apparently miraculous happened in the three ends I’d missed. That final end was sweet and more than made up for last year’s disappointment. I cried.

So today I actually feel human once more, thank goodness. After a week of not being able to do much more than sit staring at a box of Kleenex (a heartfelt apology to all my students, but I honestly don’t remember teaching the two classes I did last week), I’ve touched base with my publisher, and I foresee a huge push forward on the Brighid book today.

And… I’m hungry. Glory be, I’m actually hungry. I’m so sick of tea and juice and water and toast that I might do something reckless today like have a piece of chocolate. Or a soda. I think my taste buds are back in the game.

Indecision Lass

‘Tis the birthday of the reknowned Tal today. There’s the usual birthday thang over at the Irish pub. Thing is, it’s a Friday night, and Friday nights are always busy at the pub. It’s also St Patrick’s Day weekend here in Montreal, known for its hard-core green insanity. And as the icing on the cake, the Toronto Maple Leafs are in town to play the Montreal Canadiens.

And me with my crowd thing? Yeah, right.

I’ve decided to go, then changed my mind half a dozen times now. I mean, it’s Tal’s birthday – I have to at least stop by. Downtown will be the beginnings of a madhouse, though. The pub will be solid people from wall to wall.

Why, oh, why didn’t we think of this earlier? Why, oh, why didn’t we act in a sane and reasonable fashion and say, no, let’s celebrate on the Monday after?

My cold’s reached the point of rare coughs. The coughs have given me a nasty headache, however, and the thought of walking into the loud pub in my state makes me whimper and wish for my head to be safely underneath my pillow. At least there I’ll be comfortable when I cough and split my head in two.

See? I’m firmly in the camp of No Way Am I Going at the moment. If I wait long enough, I’ll think that the pub won’t be bad, a cider would be nice, it’s not cold outside, and go to put my shoes on again. And then I’ll imagine the roar of music and voices hitting me as I open the pub door, and I’ll cringe again.

I’ve just missed my second bus downtown. I wonder what camp I’ll occupy when the next one rolls by in half an hour.