AUUUUUUUUUUUUUGHHHHHHHHHH! Deletion!

The book I’m writing on Wiccan divorce rituals has been mysteriously deleted again. In fact, my entire up to date writing file including some significant work I’d done on Urban Wicca is similarly disappeared. I am frankly suicidal again at the moment, and I’m feeling very persecuted and angry, like some asshole is there to swipe the football from me just as I’m about to make a kick. Charlie Brown, I feel you. And someday, I’m totally going to just kick Lucy.

Check-In

I thought I’d do a check in since it’s been awhile, and I’ve had some major events in the past year, obviously. Yay me for keeping on trucking and using Julia Cameron’s ideas as tools for support through the hard stuff rather than as “one more thing I gotta do.” I’m pretty sure I’m 25% less certifiable as a direct result.

I’m at the end of Vein of Gold, but there are lurching stops and starts along the way. Artist’s walks, also, are not nearly as safe to do in Minneapolis, MN in winter as they are in New York, NY or Albuquerque, New Mexico, so I am not doing them daily – I am doing them weekly, from inside the safety of the Como Conservatory. Once spring breaks for real I will once again hit the pavement. I have the pictures for the risk collage torn out and waiting, but a slew of Real Live Creative Projects have caused me to set it aside. I’m assuming this is good, since the entire point of these exercises is to help an artist get to work.

As those of you who follow me on Twitter know, I’m good about the morning pages. They’ve become an important part of my morning meditation/magick/workout sessions, and those sessions have become an imperative. When I’m in a space to write more about it, I’ll tell you the whole story, but right now my magical life has reasserted its importance in a big way – but not in a way that other magical people in my life will find convenient to their purposes.

I still have trouble keeping to my artist’s dates, and wow, the excuses I give are really overtly lame. I am, however, truly fighting off overscheduling – a lot of people have taken an interest in me. Some for their purposes, some because they want to support mine. Having allies is good, but managing allies is hard work sometimes. Fortunately/unfortunately, my Friday night writer’s group got moved to Thursdays in a distant suburb. It’s a bit uncomfortable especially since I have to juggle car-use with my husband, but I’m working with it because the group members are thoroughly in each others’ court, and I’m hoping that the Muses will intervene and find a place that suits everyone, that’s free and that is easily accessible by mass transit. (Putting it out there. Maybe I should offer some poetry and ask?) There is the additional frustration that all the REALLY cool free arts/networking events in Minneapolis happen on Thursday nights.

While I may have some frustration with the above, my writing career takes precedence over fun, and there are art crawls a-plenty in the spring, especially in Saint Paul. This also leaves me Friday completely free (except when I have 1:1s with a buddy – which I’m hoping we can move to another day.) This leaves me free to do an artist’s walk, have an artist’s date, and come home before Mike returns from the lab to do all the fussy feminine stuff I need to do once a week – manicure, pedicure, hair oil treatment, facial, etc. – while watching a horrendously girly movie, something with young Elvis, or anything with “Beach Blanket” in the title. Week one went pretty well. Next week, I’m leaning towards a visit to the Weisman or doing my “artist’s walk” in the Minneapolis skyway, assuming I find something else interesting there, too – which, I probably will.

Kingdom of Possibility: 100 Things I Love

100 Things I Love
1. Mike
2. Joel
3. Stella
4. Kris
5. Mom
6. Dad
7. Warm quilts
8. Meals that make you feel nourished
9. Brasa restaurant
10. Brunches
11. Ginger and whiskey
12. Mangoes
13. The smell of baked bread
14. Baking cookies
15. Fingerpaint!
16. Doctor Who
17. Daria
18. The secrets chats in Daria fandom, back in the day
19. Getting positive reviews on fanfic
20. Writing a really fun, self-indulgent fanfic (like the Slacker Within)
21. Singing in the Rain
22. Kid from Brooklyn
23. Danny Kaye, in anything (but everyone things of the Court Jester.)
24. Bright blue
25. Pink and red together
26. Satin
27. Silk
28. Going by myself to see a chick flick
29. Clear space
30. Bellydancing
31. the Bodeans
32. Mike Doughty’s music
33. Jet
34. Vampire Weekend
35. Wine
36. Looking at all the bottles and labels at Surdzyk’s (gorgeous drink packaging)
37. Blue Christmas lights
38. Roses
39. Waterfalls
40. Palm trees
41. Running water
42. the IT Crowd
43. Veronica Mars
44. Dr. Horrible’s Sing-a-long Blog
45. Finnian’s Rainbow
46. Moulin Rouge
47. Hot chocolate
48. Ballet style slippers
49. Just-right fitting jeans
50. Jon English de-frizzer
51. Muguet perfume
52. Love’s Baby Soft Jasmine perfume
53. Love’s Baby Soft Musk perfume
54. Flea markets
55. Thrift stores
56. Somerset magazines
57. Bookstores
58. Lace
59. Little bottles
60. Tropical flowers
61. Sand
62. The Pacific Ocean
63. Airplane lift-off
64. Red
65. Yoga pants
66. Rose quartz
67. Real yellow topaz
68.Amethysts
69. Pearls
70. Penguins
71. Elephants
72. Dolphins
73. Foxes
74. Dogs
75. Herbs
76. Gardens
77. Kafe’ 421
78. Coriander
79. Ethnic grocery stores
80. 7 day candles
81. Perfume atomizers
82. Vintage ads
83. My camera
84. Libraries
85. Clean sheets
86. National Geographic
87. Clean House
88. The Soup
89. Cooking
90. Springy shoes
91. Conservatories
92. Museum gift shops
93. Playing dress-up
94. Greek gods
95. the Mississippi River
96. Marquette Avenue
97. Central Avenue
98. Minneapolis
99. Hawaii
100. the Roomba

Kingdom of Possibility: a Valentine to my first love

I admit I’ve had plenty of loves in my life, many unrequited or just plain unstated. Also, although my relationship to my husband is five years old, we did just get married, and creating a valentine to a past love is awkward, even though he knew I didn’t exactly get around before him but I definitely had a life. Hey, I’m kinda cute. Some people dig me.

But a)I worship Eros, primarily and b)I love Valentine’s Day – and loved it a bit more fiercely when I was single, because love is so vast and interesting that the Greeks even gave out different kinds of it (platonic, erotic, agape) and I always take it as permission to express all my kinds of love to all my kinds of loved ones.

So when this exercise came along – to make a valentine to my first love – it gave me a pause. What was the first person (aside from Mommy, Daddy and Sis) that I loved? And then I realized…my first love was an idea. And that idea, that first thing that sparked real passion, inspiration and adoration in my heart was the Doctor, or more specifically Doctor Who. I think I first started seeing episodes at 8 or 9, and within weeks I was dreaming of riding the TARDIS with the Doctor, occasionally running for my life, and sharing that world of wonder. I even used to draw K-9 and the TARDIS to post on my walls.

While I did have little crushes on Christopher Eccleston, ultimately, though, none of this affection was sexual or romantic. The passion was purely intellectual, and stays with me to this day with the modernized, more adult-marketed series (no, it’s not a kid’s show, it hasn’t been since the sixties.) The Doctor has all my core values bundled into one being who I fervently and not-so-secretly hope is actually real and in the stars somewhere: you do not explore and conquer the universe. You explore, and wonder. Learning is the most important and useful thing in the world. Always ask questions, and leave assumptions behind. This has led to me finding the spate of Doctor-snogging rather irritating, as the Doctor represents something much too important to snog: he represents the spirit of absolute possibility. And you don’t make out with possibility, you pursue it.

The Doctor is still a flame in my heart, and I do think a lot of values picked up in Doctor Who have helped me become a stronger person who refused to accept that my parents’ lives had to be my life. With such a universe out there to explore, why just repeat the familiar?

Because he is my awesomespiration

I will have a bit more to post – soon! I know a few of you really want to see some wedding updates from me (it went really well, in fact!) and I have a bit more of Vein of Gold to complete before I start Walking in this World. I’ve also persuaded my friends and neighbors to give a try to the Artist’s Way, and put a copy in their hot little hands. I’ll just pick up another one again, soon. I know xiane had mentioned giving it a do-over, and in the meantime I have  a copy of Walking in this World that I’d bought.

But I digress. I just wanted to share this link to some postcards offered by Paolo Coelho – each one is so inspiring I’m going to make them some sort of screensaver or rotating desktop wallpaper. I wish to give the man a detailed artist shout-out; both the Alchemist and Witch of Portobello gave me a moving sense of confidence and spiritual reassurance.

Kingdom of Spirituality: some general comments

I may not share as much as I’d hoped (and that some of you had hoped) on this particular section. My wedding looms – it’s less than a week now. And also, spirituality is an intense, complex subject for me. My spirituality has never been separate from my identity as an artist, and the “who I am” in relation to G.O.D has always been a bit…tricky. My family’s true, fearful and controlling nature was thrown into stark relief when they invaded my privacy and found me going down the witchcraft path – the controlling behaviors had always been there, but I could no longer ignore it, nor could I forgive it when it became patently clear they weren’t concerned for my well-being, they were upset that they no longer had control over my ideas and beliefs. My first successes as a writer came directly from writing about Wicca, and some could say they’ve been my only successes to date, in part because it’s one area of my life that my family has been completely unable to influence. Because they can’t reach it, they can’t sabotage it, and Wicca has allowed me an avenue of expression my family actively set out to block on any other route.

My personal choice as a spiritual adult established me as an adult, and since my mother had intended to try to maintain some control over me as an adult that no mother of an adult child has any right to, it became a flag of rebellion to her in a way I had never intended. For me to rebel against my mother’s authority would have indicated that she had authority for me to rebel against; in truth she was simply irrelevant, willfully ignorant and relentlessly rude. I still mourn for some relationship to my mother, but since I haven’t seen “Mommy” since I was about three (and glimpses when I’ve seen her on Xanax) I’m pretty much marking that ship as sailed. Eros alone is my only parent, and he’s done a pretty good job when I’ve been willing to shut up and listen.

The role of God goes only to who I consent to give it to. I give it to Eros, willingly and with full consent.

I realize this is a heretical opinion.

I say all this as a byway that I may skip the exercises in this latest section on spirituality. It’s not that they’re not important and invaluable – it’s that I do them all the time, and some I’ve already gone around doing for years. I’m not sure I can find anything new and self-revelatory in these exercises because they’re a standard experience for me.

Julia Cameron came upon Goddess spirituality in the course of her work; I was there already when I started the Artist’s Way. Both have brought improvements and serious challenges to my life; both reveal damage that needs fixing. Certainly Cameron’s work has enhanced my spirituality in an unexpected way, and to find out that she’s been operating from a similar principle all along is absolutely wonderful. If you haven’t tried them, these are great Wiccan training tools that need not be Wiccan only. And knowing me, I’ll backtrack and do them anyway, sooner or later.

FWIW, my totem animals are the fox and the elephant.

Vein of Gold: Kingdom of Spirituality: Collages

the bare-butted god just spoke to me

First of all, I have to confess: I love uploading large images here. I know it’s not great for the attention span, but for some strange reason I just like seeing my images LARGE. My second confession is that I’m finding Julia Cameron’s adoption of goddess spirituality strangely gratifying, sort of an “oh, I was on my own path all along” revelation. I don’t know if Cameron is still a goddess practitioner, but to discover that she was at one point is peculiarly like being found especially since I’ve been feeling very lost within my own spiritual community lately.

Within my own Wiccan faith, I am dedicated to the god Eros. The god not just of sexual love but of progenitive creation of the universe, he’s very much a creativity god already and was quite vocal about having me get on this path and stick to it. (Any god will talk to anyone, you just have to shut up and listen. And accept that these conversations generally happen on their schedule and not yours.)  Since my religion is what I’ve written about the most, and where the most conflicts about me writing have arisen – from within and without the faith – this is an area that I tend to think of as “whole” that’s really a bit damaged. I am unhappy with my faith, but I am not unhappy with my gods.

I do feel like there’s a lot of paranoia surrounding me writing anything. And it’s not my paranoia. It gets quite frustrating, really. It is a form of the inner critic, and the crazymaker combined: “If you publish, the sky will fall! If you publish, someone will take your simple treatise on circle casting and bring Cthulhu into this world!” (I have nothing to do with the Chthulhu mythos, and I need to find it in me to say “Bring on the calamari!”

the bare-butted god just spoke to me

Artist’s Way applied: why am I afraid to write this project?

I’m having trouble making myself write a fanfic. I know it’s eyebrow raising, but let’s set this aside. I do fanfic to fulfill my frivolity needs because I’m very straightforward and much of my life is Serious Business. So, in the course of my block, I took a page from the Artist’s Way exercise where you ask yourself: “Why am I afraid of this project?” And then you answer and proceed to poke some holes in your inner critic.

Why am I having trouble with this fanfiction?

• It’s frivolous

So?

• What if the other fans don’t like it and are mean?

They might wound my ego, but there’s a good chance someone will read it and like it.

• What if what I’m saying has already been  said?

Tropes are common in fanfiction and beyond. If I’m entertained by the trope, yay.

• It’s plagiarism (?)

Borrowing characters that don’t belong to me do dread on creative principles and a few laws. You got me there. But a fair number of  TV shows/producers nowadays consciously overlook fanfiction because it enhances Internet presence and the kind of social community that can get rabid fans to buy merchandise and help keep programming on the air. My playing around with someone else’s characters can lead them to making more money in a peculiar way. This would NOT be true if I were borrowing characters from books.

• I can’t get paid for it

There’s a lot of things I do that I don’t get paid for that still pay off. Look at my life in Daria fandom.

• I am much too Serious a Writer to do fanfic

The things that have succeeded and brought me the most success were the things I did when I let go and enjoyed myself. This includes fandom. Serious writers are not successful writers – they put all that energy into being serious. I think I’ll be a fun, funny writer and let all the serious stuff roost elsewhere, maybe in a vacuum cleaner.

Kingdom of Spirituality: My creativity God

The qualities of my creativity God:

• Easygoing
• Powerful sense of humor – loves a good laugh best of all
• Good dancer, great smile
• Compassion, lots of
• Loves me
• Encouraging, but not demanding
• Considers impossibilities
• Great imagination
• Places high importance on fun
• Eclectic – likes comics just as much as classic novels, classical as much as punk

Kingdom of Spirituality: 5 moments of divine guidance

sky encircled by trees - a shot I took at Father Hennepin Park

 

1. Moving to Mankato. Admittedly, it wasn’t the best reason (a boy) but after we broke up I continued to receive signs indicating I should head that direction. It was the only direction in which at the end, I could be my own person.
2. Quitting Q Corporation two hours before the department shut down. I was sick and they were being excessively strict about my illness, and I chose myself. Apparently that would have been the only choice anyway.
3. Walking into the occult bookstore and immediately finding J standing there.
4. Brenda walking into my workplace after we’d been out of touch for nearly two years.
5. Lots of small synchronicities I can’t specifically recall at the moment, like spending my last dollar on a scratch off and getting what I needed to get through the week, etc.