Category Archives: Spirituality

Cosmic Clue-By-Four Heard And Understood

Awesome coven meeting tonight! It’s always good when everyone deviates independently from the original theme of the project and ends up on the same new page. ( “Okay,” we said, “we get it, universe, thank you!”) Tonnes of work were done in only two hours. Also, I got to introduce some very cool poetry to everyone else; I had no idea they were unfamiliar with it.

I really, really like the new direction and style we’ve chosen to explore this year. I hope it ends up working for our collective energy.

Weekend Roundup

Cats woke me up at four AM by knocking over an empty glass in another room. I got up four times in the next half hour to handle various cat issues. I gave up trying to fall asleep again and have been working since five.

We had a wonderful weekend! Thank you to everyone who shared it with us in some way or another. Not only did we pick up groceries (very necessary) and really really really clean the house (everything except washing floors and windows, including laundry and mowing the lawn and gardening, although by Sunday the bathroom was dirty again, possibly because of the latter two tasks), but Saturday I went on a lovely UK-foodstuffs-import recon and purchasing jaunt with Pdaughter (no Penguin bars in stock at our newly-discovered Bramble House, alas, but I have a packet of real dolly mixtures and Jacob’s club bars and Fry’s chocolate tablets, joy!), and then we had a visit with Ceri and Scott (who have a stunning new car, rendering us victims of new-car envy, and they also spoiled the boy by bringing him a Cars puzzle; “Picture Lightning and Mater broken, Mama, help Liam fix” is therefore the newest order I am given when he wants to play). Sunday morning saw us doing yard work at the in-laws’ house, then we went out to the farm roadside stall on the south shore that HRH has been going to since he was ten in order to buy strawberries and cherries and peaches and peas and peppers and corn. There the boy was carried around by the farmer himself and given a half-pint of blueberries and raspberries and strawberries to eat as he did; the child proceeded to stuff five huge blueberries in his mouth at once, and ate the rest of the fruit while sitting on the cart piled with corn watching the activity around him. He said “Bye bye farmer and strawberries!” when we left. We ended the weekend with a lovely co-coven Lughnassadh BBQ with piles and piles of seasonal food and excellent company all around.

I finally got that month-late baby gift in the mail on Saturday, as well as another small parcel that had been sitting around for just as long.

Despite the fact that the days were full, everything was relaxed and we didn’t feel rushed or overwhelmed at all. The weekend went so well that everyone woke up in a vaguely bad mood today because it was back the work routine again. The boy was cranky because he knew he was going back to daycare (he loves his caregiver and playmates and always has fun, but he misses us and we miss him too), HRH was cranky, and I was already in not such a terrific mood thanks to waking up two hours early. But this week we return to a more normal rhythm as HRH drops back to part-time and I deliver the current project. And then next weekend we’re in ON visiting with my parents, so there’s plenty to look forward to in the next fortnight.

Also this week: a trip to my bank branch on the West Island to deposit this US cheque that’s been sitting here for two weeks, so there will be money again. As it’s in that neighbourhood I’ll be stopping by the Bramble House for those Penguin bars, and possibly some whiskey fudge as well. The fretless bass will also be taken into the local music shop for its set-up, maintenance, new strings, and case that day. It feels good to be catching up on things.

Sigh…

Just sent in the first part of the project, and I’m all wibbly because I don’t think it’s as reduced as they hoped it would be. The problem is these characters talk to one another a lot — the dialogue is kind of the point of playing, as in many social simulation games. It’s been incredibly difficult to rewrite the dialogue so that it says the same thing in fewer words, while keeping the age of the characters and the age of the audience in mind. I effectively lost the last two days of work too, because there was a miscommunication between us and I’d been cutting out entire useless scenes, only to discover two days later that everything had to remain intact: there had to be the exact same number of lines in the final product. So Friday, yesterday, and today were spent restoring and rewriting those deleted scenes to use the fewest possible words.

Argh.

If I could have deleted scenes that don’t affect the action, I could have reduced the script by a fifth! They would have loved it!

Now I shall mope until I hear back from the client. And maybe eat lunch, as I’ve been working since five this morning to meet this deadline, with only a pancake and a cup of tea to keep me going.

[LATER: Yup. They’re disappointed. My hands are tied! Tell me I can delete entire lines — nay, entire unnecessary scenes! — and it will work!]

Excellent ritual last night, lovely and grounding and introspective (which is what we all needed). It ended up coming to me remarkably easily in plenty of time, thank goodness. An excellent meeting all in all, actually. I’m excited about studying something again, which is nice. It’s draining to constantly provide something for others to do, and for everyone’s good intentions about holding workshops or presenting research it rarely seems to actually happen. It’s a relief to have a topic to cover the next few months’ worth of meetings, and a topic I can learn about too.

Blessed Solstice

This is the poem I read every Summer Solstice. And I should probably read it when I’m down and depressed and throughout the winter, because it’s life-affirming in so many ways. You don’t need to see the sun to feel its power. I forget that a lot. Not because I don’t know that it’s there, just that the sensation of sunlight on skin is such a physical presence that when it’s overcast my psyche feels cloudy, too. My subconscious just needs a gentle reminder of the sun’s energy now and again.

Hail to Sunna
– by Kvedulf Gundarsson, from Teutonic Magic

Sunrise:
Hail to Sunna / shining in rising
Hail the burning / bringer of day.
Dawn-breaking light / is life of the earth.
Whirls the sun-wheel ever onwards.
Hail to thee in the dawn!

Midday:
Hail to Sunna / shining in brightness
Hail in holy / heavens of day
Mid-day light shining / is life of the earth.
Whirls the sun-wheel ever onwards
Hail to thee in the day!

Sunset:
Hail to Sunna / shining in setting
Hail in darkening / death of the day
Evening’s red light / blood and fire of life.
Whirls the sun-wheel ever onwards
Hail to thee in the evening!

Midnight:
Hail to Sunna / shining in darkness
Hail to thee / in night’s blackest hour
Shroud of dark water / and earth hides thy shining
Whirls the sun-wheel ever onwards,
Hail to thee in the night!

(The virgules [known colloquially as ‘forward slashes’] indicate a larger space separating the halves of each phrase in the first three lines of each stanza. I can’t get my formatting to reflect spaces properly. You’ll just have to imagine them to obtain the proper effect.)

Monday Miscellania

The aqueduc truck just went by sounding the water-off alarm. There’s roadwork happening the next street over. I wonder how often this will happen; it’s the second time in two weeks.

The interview I did last week is up. Gwinevere says of me that “She is totally wise to the Wiccan ways, and I loved reading her books!”, which is very sweet of her and made me feel all warm inside.

I’m back to sequential nights of poor sleep. Last night HRH woke me up by saying “What was that?” after a loud sound on the back steps around twelve-thirty, and that was it; I was up for the next four hours. I reread most of the first Harry Dresden book while awake in the wee smas of Saturday night, and last night I got a third of Busman’s Honeymoon read. (How on earth was this book ever done as a play?). I read Shannon Hale’s latest paperback Princess Academy last Friday and was mildly disappointed that it wasn’t as rich as her Bayern books; it felt less deep, and I wasn’t as drawn into the characters or the style of the storytelling. I’m less intrigued now about her newest books Book of a Thousand Days and Austenland.

We had a lovely visit with the ADZO household Saturday afternoon where Liam had his first experience with a wagon and adored it enthusiastically, as I suspected he would: he pushed it, pulled it, and talked about riding in it the whole time we pulled him along. Thumbs up, Self, for the suggestion of a wagon as birthday gift to the grandparent contingent. (Pats self on the back.) Sunday afternoon was coven, and we roughly outlined stuff we’d like to do over the next few months and how we’d like to approach it, as well as roughing out the Midsummer ritual at the end of the month. Unfortunately HRH scheduled the meeting to begin right at the end of Liam’s nap time, so he spent most of his time chasing after the boy. This is what frustrates me about daytime coven meets: we constantly lose one person to childcare. Fortunately as it is now summer we are shifting to Monday evening meetings, because so much happens over the weekends that it gets nigh-impossible to schedule everyone on a weekend afternoon, so the boy will be in bed. Much easier to have everyone participate when one of us isn’t fielding/entertaining a toddler.

I made brownies Saturday morning from a new UK recipe (Nigella, natch), which meant I got to use my little scale as well as my funky measuring glass with the different weight measurements for various ingredients on the side. I used dark Tolberone for the chocolate. Divine. Very buttery, though. Liam called them “magic”, which was hugely amusing.

Three-word sentences are becoming the norm where Sparky is concerned. It’s mildly astonishing every time he produces one.

The Jam Sessions release date seems to have been pushed back to September. I am irked. I played through the first chapter of Phoenix Wright last evening and enjoyed it immensely.

And now, I go to clean my office window. On grey days such as this, one needs to maximise the amount of light coming in at all costs. Also, where is the rain? We were promised a downpour. Perhaps HRH jinxed it by saying, “See you in a couple of hours!” as he pulled out of the driveway this morning. I was kind of looking forward to going to the party store later with him to look at candles and such for a certain birthday cake, and maybe a new large sheet cake tin and a cake board. (Things I will never do: make a 3D owl cake. Yikes. How do you serve something like that?)

It Never Gets Any Easier

Today I’m working on a set of interview questions, and as always when I do something like this I’m staring at the screen and wondering what on earth to say in response to questions I’ve answered elsewhere, or how to encapsulate huge philosophical rambles in a paragraph or two. And to my amusement I just found this in an online horoscope today:

You may feel as if you are right, but explaining your point of view can be quite a challenge. It’s not that you are an ineffective communicator; it’s just that your feelings are outside the normal sphere of language. There just aren’t any words to describe the subtlety of your emotions. Talking about them can actually alter your mood and change the direction of your day. Act on what you know now, but don’t try to justify yourself until after the Full Moon tomorrow night.

The deadline is Friday, which is after the full moon. How convenient.

Interviews make me fret, because they represent a very narrow and static slice of an author’s philosophy. I’m never sure when I sound grounded and confident, and when I sound mildly delusional or out of touch.

LATER: There, four pages of first draft: all questions except one answered (one of those only in point form, but the outline is there) and the missing question is one that needs research in the form of going back to one of my books and checking to see what I said the first time so as not to completely repeat myself. Now, off to see a movie with HRH.

It’s What You Do Right

… and yikes, do I ever need to work on some of the orchestra stuff. Once again, it’s the Broadway medley giving me grief. I know how the Les Miserables themes go, backwards and forwards. Maybe that’s part of the problem; this is an arrangement, and so it’s not exactly what I remember. Also, key changes from A flat major to F major to E flat major to B flat major to D flat major (probably B flat minor, now that I think about it) back to B flat major to D major to F major again to finally return to and end in A flat major are more than enough to reduce me to a desperate wittering fool. Particularly when it all has to be played in a sprightly, dissonant, or expressive mode.

I just have to play it over and over. And trust myself in the higher registers, as the celli play in the encore we’re working on. It’s hard to feel good about a beautiful piece when you’re massacring it the first time you play it through in rehearsal.

Scott and I were trading reassurances about our musical ears and playing skills yesterday, with support and reality checks from t! thrown in as well, and I thought of the subject again when I read this post from Matociquala this morning:

Book report #42: Richard Restak, MD; Mozart’s Brain and the Fighter Pilot

This is all right for what it is, I guess. I am more interested in the mechanisms of neuroplasticity than self-help books on how to be smarter, but hey, it did give me this little passage:

First, avoid playing over negative scenarios in your mind in which all of your worst fears are realized. As Freud pointed out in 1925 in an insufficiently appreciated paper, “On Negation,” the brain doesn’t deal well with negatives. If you concentrate on ways of avoiding a bad outcome rather than bringing about a good one, your brain will lock onto the negative. As every tennis player knows, the surest way of coming up with a bad serve results from energy wasted on avoiding gaffes rather than concentrating on the intended ace. Concentrate on your ideas and your goals rather than focusing on the bad things that could happen, or on how nervous you’re feeling.

Or in other words, it’s not what you don’t do wrong. It’s what you do right.

It’s what you do right. It’s so easy to say. But it’s hard to look at a piece of writing, or listen to a recording of a musical performance, or look at a drawing, and see what you did right in it, because we look for the errors in order to improve upon them. And that’s not a bad thing. What’s bad and self-destructive is when we can’t see the good things at all, or stress too much about the mistakes. Why do we expect perfection? The only entity who can manage perfection is God, and I’m not at all certain the Divine doesn’t fall short a lot of the time too. Why do we beat ourselves up over what could have been done better instead of celebrating the much larger percentage of what we did right?

It’s ironic, too, that we notice errors more when things are going well, because they jar us out of a sense of security and comfort. And why is it that as soon as you think, “Hey, this is going pretty well”, you trip? How can it be hubris to allow yourself to cautiously appreciate something you are creating?

Did I mention that the gig was fabulous, by the way?