Word has crashed thanks to Track Changes yet again. At least now I automatically hit Save after every major edit. I keep having to reboot the damn computer to access the document again, though. I’m so close to being done with it – so close! Just the hundred-page Chapter From Hell to clean up and rewrite!
I had tea with an old friend this morning, which was a lovely way to start the day. If I’d plunged right into editing, I think I’d be suicidal by now.
We had two people over last night for dinner.
We had to call Skippy and borrow chairs for the dining room table, because we only have two.
Hmm. Evidently we don’t do sit-down dinners for our guests very often, or we’d have noticed this lack sometime over the past thirteen months.
Note to self: Invest in two more chairs for the dining room table to avoid looking like a dork in the future.
Today was the weekly writing jam in which I participate, where three of us get into the same room and hunch over our laptops, typing madly. It’s creativity insurance: for at least one afternoon each week, we get some writing done, because if the sound of your fingers hitting the keys ceases, someone bullies you into starting again. (“No retreat, no revision, no regret!” Ceri announced during a writing lull this afternoon. “No words,” t! replied succinctly. This is funny on several levels, for t! is the original author of the writer’s threefold war cry Ceri quoted. If you know t! in any way, you also know the idea of having no words is a paradox in his world.) Last week Ceri worked on developing content for her web site, and this week I decided that since I’d been uploading a ton of stuff to Owldaughter, I’d take her work as inspiration and use the afternoon to work on some sort of introduction for the spirituality section. I pulled off fifteen hundred words this afternoon, which wasn’t bad at all. Then tonight, after my husband went to bed, I pulled off another seventeen hundred. That brings my total to just over 3,200 words for the day.
Awesome.
I also got another couple of chapters of that manuscript edited. Tomorrow morning I’ll draw up the editorial memo, run it past my contact at the publisher, then send it and the first third of the book off to the author.
Making progress, yes, indeed…
In another one of those synchronous miracles that really isn’t because I believe that we create our own coincidences, I taught a class yesterday that compared and contrasted group work with solitary worship, and the students asked very perceptive questions about the group mind and how it forms. Then I came home to a ritual with my new still-gelling group which celebrated the group mind and the wonders of being an individual, while simultaneously being a part of something greater.
It was a fabulous ritual which took the concepts of balance (Vernal Equinox, equal day and night, God/Goddess), co-operation, frolic, and reverence, blended them together, and created a terrific experience through which everyone learned something about themselves and each other. And all this came from an individual who had never written/led a group Sabbat before. (I might be wrong, but I am fairly certain I’m not. If so, then the individual had certainly never written/led a Wicca-based rit for a group.)
Heck, yeah. The invocations raised chills, the raising of energy focused on control instead of quantity, and the whole thing took less than half an hour. That, dear readers, is a sign of a well-managed ritual. Focused, moving, thought-provoking, engages emotional-mental-physical levels, and doesn’t drag on.
And every single one of us walked away with a new understanding of the words “spring” and “balance”.
The group mind. It’s the greater-than-the-sum-of-its-parts entity/identity that arises independently from the regular interaction of a group of people. Your clique in high school had a group mind. Your family has a group mind. Your softball team has a group mind. A group mind takes a while to form while everyone gets to know each other socially and within the context of the group’s performance, but when it’s there, whoa baby, it’s a powerful thing. Yesterday’s exercise in circle did a lot to demonstrate that a group mind can not only be formed sooner with intention, but refined through attention and careful management.
I’ve also discovered one of the uses of a coven Book of Shadows. It’s a HPS’ brag book and scrapbook. Years from now we’ll go back over it and say, “Do you remember the day so-and-so led such-and-such ritual?”
So yes: spring. The celebration of new beginnings. One of the affirmations used in yesterday’s ritual was, “I’m glad you’re here.” I’d like to take this opportunity to say to my coven dedicants who have chosen to study with HRH and me: I’m glad you’re here.
And, dear readers, I’m glad you’re here too. After all, what’s a regular literary exploration of words and ideas without an audience?
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.
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.