In The Garden Living an RPG Life

I’ve been off the blog attending to other matters, matters that seemed as though they had nothing to do with knitting.  Now that the shift in attention is more or less complete, I’m finding that since everything is connected, I might as well come out.

I’ve been in pursuit of Magic since I first noticed that I looked at the world a little differently.  I remember sitting in my grandmother’s living room watching dust motes and wondering which of them were really fairies.  In junior high, I would stop at the same place on the way to the bus stop and know that fairies lived there and wanted my attention.  No, I was not expecting little flying things to show up.  Even the dust mote leavings were not going to be little winged things.

Over time, atomic occurrences of another behavior collected themselves into proper molecule.  Daydreaming.  I remember my father snapping me out of daydreaming when we rode the subway together on our way to the playground where he worked.  He didn’t like that one of my eyes wandered off.  Apparently this is how I kept my attention on both worlds at the same time.  Where was I?  Still have no idea all these decades later.  I’m getting closer to understanding, though.  I still don’t have a name for it.

I remember an occasion when I was in Elementary school.  What I remember about it is that I was walking down the front stairway and a girl went by going the other way.  “Oh.  That’s what it was”, or something like that was my thought.  I had had a Daydream, reverie or whatever you call it, that showed me something.  This was that something.

I’m not someone who is so fluid as to be always immersed in such seeing.  I don’t know if that’s because I ‘m not wired for it or because the circumstances of my growing up put a resistor on it, keeping me from going there very often.  It wasn’t until I was away at college that the amount of daydreaming I was doing seemed overwhelming.  I had begun to feel that there was much more to what I was doing.  Not just the occaisional, and up to then, passive and just before sleep, stuff.  I began to feel that work could be done.

That was when I began considering myself as a shaman.  No, not in this culture.  I imagined that in another place or another time the attitude of daydreaming would have indicated some kind of spiritual intelligence that would be fostered and put to use for the benefit of a community.  I would have some work tasks that allowed me to be both physically and spiritually productive.  Then I got the Call.

It came in the form of a not very big breakdown.  An anxiety state, is what the doctor called it.  Its effect was to pry me loose from what was safe and familiar and allow me to leave on my first real Adventure.  I’d been away to college, out of state, and as far from the life of the city as I could get.  This was different.  I got on a bus and moved to California with nothing planned.  Ended up in San Francisco where I began to notice that there was, in print anyway, a Neo-shaman movement. At least the word shaman was mentioned and it wasn’t in the context of traditional practice.  I was on the right track thinking that I would have to be a different kind of shaman, if indeed I was to be one.

After a few years of feeling my way around the new neighborhood, and taking the step of following my Shadow into a new career, I met Debora.  She was the first person I’d met that I felt connected to.  And she was an Adventurer.  He is the one through whom I found the first description of Magic that made sense to me.  I just read it a couple of days ago.  It was from Max Freedom Long’s book — .  I’d found my touchstone.  Too bad, I thought, that it was such an old one and that I was quite unlikely to find something more modern.

Wrong.  Thanks to Debora, I met Abraham Kawai’I, and had the dreaming experience of my life!  When I finally agreed to go to hear him speak, I was both elated and disappointed.  I was elated at the amount of information I was saying yes to.  Don’t remember a word of it now, though.  Oh, wait!  I do.  There was the idea that you could “tell fortunes” just looking at pages in a magazine.  (Note to Self:  A good thing to revisit).  Just hold the question in mind and open at random.  Not a new idea now, but at the time, over twenty years ago, it was.  Generally, it was this idea, that things weren’t needed to do the work, that it was the person, who used the world as it was.  The disappointment was that I was told, “You already know this,” and was back on my own.

For the following years, I tried to figure out what the heck that meant.  Exactly what did I know and how do I apply it?  How do I organize my life so that I am not in the way of what has to happen?  Most importantly, whom do I serve?  That last one is still kind of odd to me, that sense that I must serve someone.

Much of the questioning has been answered, finally, by the several years I spent training in Aikido.  Through that practice with its emphasis on Ki and the community’s inclusion of the Pathwork system, I acquired experience and some skill with Being Me.  I learned, for instance, just how sensitive I was to Ki, or The Force, if you will.  Probably, of all that discovery, recognizing how much information was also being communicated to someone sensitive enough to notice it was the most important.  I wasn’t daydreaming in class.  You can’t in that kind of environment.  In moments of meditation though, I could fill my field with roses, say, and Sensei might respond, “The scent of flowers”.  Or, I might have a question, and forming it into a ball, “bounce pass” it to Sensei, who would answer.    I learned that I could prepare myself for teaching a class by visiting with them in my head first.  I would then be prepared for practical issues.

In fact, this being prepared is what I’ve come to believe being moderately psychic is good for.  The attack on the Twin Towers was one of those visits, one of those, Oh, that’s what that was about” moments.  Another purpose, I learned in the dojo, seems to be helpful in creating or soothing relationships.  I’d spent some time imagining I was playing one of our games with someone I was having a hard time getting to know or feeling comfortable working with.  Taking a clue from Sensei, I engaged him in the game with no other intent.  Next day, he comes up to me and sits down and starts talking with me.  We were so engaged that Sensei had to tell us to be quiet!  When it was time to sit on the mat, my newly made friend plopped himself next to me.  We had a great time working together that day.  Absolutely a first for us and a totally different side of him, for me.

All of this is still casual, still not purposeful, not in service.  Even my communication with people on the Huna forum is like this.  Um, Huna is what Long called Hawai’ian Magic.  In between Long and Huna Trainer, I’d found Serge Kahili King’s Urban Shaman.  Exactly the thing I was looking for.  At least the title was.  And some of the stuff inside.  Between King and Huna Trainer, came Aikido.  I thought I had finally found my community of service.  I was a first level black belt, had started working with the children’s class, and had even co-created a couple of workshops for a women’s class.  Evidently, this was not the place, either.  Oh, did I mention I’d met a Cherokee shaman while I was there?  Yep.  More interesting stuff happened.  I learned more about reading the environment .  This time it was cars on the road as messengers.  (Note to Self: There’s a pattern here.  Find it.)

Ok. Now I’m up to Huna Trainer.  It started as a podcast and became an online forum that I became part of as quickly as I could by submitting pieces for the podcasts second incarnation.  The forum is part of the reason I’m writing this.  It’s a group of people who are in similar practice.  But it’s more than that.  It’s also a group of people with experiences similar to mine.   And now that I feel settled in and more connected to the people rather than the group, some old questions are floating to the surface.  What exactly do I know and what do I do with it?  How does it work?

I’m back in pursuit of Magic.  Reading the original words in this changed context is telling me that now’s the time to put things into perspective.  When I started this journey, I was on my own.  I didn’t know how to talk about my experiences or sometimes even form the questions.  Since I’ve heard others’ stories framed in a common language I have a place to start.

Here.  Now.

The LifeHacker, DIYplanner and 43Folders stuff is working. For example: since I knew exactly the right web address to go to, I got my credit report for the last year.  Found that on LifeHacker.
I guess some of my procrastination has been the result of disorganization.  Just where do I put the ideas that clutter my brain?  And when do I do this thing since I’m waiting for something else to happen?  Or, perhaps more useful, of all the things that I know need to get done, which ones go together?  That’s the issue that seems to be the most hindering.  Mostly because I didn’t know how much of a problem it was.

Having the customized pocket-sized planner (the hipster PDA from DIYplanner and 43Folders) is only part of the solution.  Building it, sorting out the pages that I think I will need most and putting them in order, might have been the main part.  I haven’t said anywhere else that I’m primarily intuitive.  I also have the challenge of being an outside-in, or upside-down thinker.  I am much more likely to get the big picture than the details.  I crave context that I can sort details into.

Context in this case was reading the sites before I committed to the planner.  All of that worked below ground while I printed and sorted the pages.  And I ended up with something that works for me rather than something I have to work for.

I ran errands yesterday.  I forgot something I needed to complete one item on the list so it gets rolled over to today.  In the course of getting the other things done, I learned that I need to take location into consideration a little bit more and that as long as I have the list, I can be spontaneous.  I had to wait for the mechanic to come off break before I could get my tires looked at.  So, I went to the bookstore (which also got my banking done) and bought Mum a coffee (which was on the way back to the auto shop).  Before, I would have held all that in my head and fussed about how much effort it was to get things done.  The effort, I see now, has been holding on to the stuff with brain power.

I’ve used planners before.  The difference now is that this planner system is  more flexible.  It’s been used and revised by real people rather than by some company.  This is what it means to be a hacker these days.  You take the best of all that is offered and tweak it until you’ve got the details right for your own needs, until the system supports you as you are and want to be.  For most people, those who think in steps and from the inside out, the systems out there are good enough.  For the rest of us, long live the hacker!

I’m only a little surprised that I have already made the first steps on my Adventure.  I found some much needed advice and a toolkit to carry.  DIYplanner.com and 43Folders.com are delightfully geeky and just what I need.  Between them I’ve accumulated both the reasons and the means for having and organizing ideas without sitting down with the big book and figuring it all out.

The treasure is a deconstruction of productivity concepts embedded in a constructed daily planner.  It’s as if I ordered a bunch of spirit helpers to go out and find/create the tools I needed to get on with my plans and ideas.

My favorite part so far, ok one of my favorite parts, is the collection of writer’s pages complete with variations on story boards. One of my other favorite parts is the templates.  These are the patterns the pages were created from.  The idea is to either modify (hack) the pages to better suit your own needs or to create pages of your own design to enclose activities no one else is working on.

I spent the last few days reading and evaluating the sites for myself while taking in a little bit at a time.  One of my favorite people seems to be a hero on the sites–Ben Franklin.  Not that I’ve studied him or anything.  Just something about his creativity and the profusion of his ideas and adventures.  He was my kind of Adventurer and this seems to be my time for trying to follow his trail.

Finally finding a use for all the 3×5 cards I’ve piled up, I printed out the Hipster PDA.  This is a good idea since I use my PDA so often that the battery totally drained and I lost all my data.  The thing about digital systems is that they are inflexible.  They force us to bend to their limits instead of serving ours.  This is probably why the people on these sites are techies–programmers and the like.  They know better than anyone the value of working on paper and the need for a flexible system.

My new motto is going to be: Look to the Geek!

Oh, and one of the page designs seems to suit itself really well for jotting down knitting patterns as I make them up!  The layout is perfect.  Since I’m using the 3×5 cards as a carry-around, I may have to scan the little pages to do something else with them.  We’ll see.  That the pages are loose and can be moved around with ease makes using the system more functional than my usual journal.  The 3×5 system is a simple way to start, a way to find out what works and what doesn’t.

Meanwhile, the basis for much of what got all of this started is reading about Getting Things Done.  Evidently there’s a big book about it, productivity, and lots of people have read it.  The people I’m reading have digested it and put it to use and simplified it.  In other words, hacked it.  Life Hacker is where I got directed to from Ravelry.

Knitting and writing: two worlds that provide more than just entertainment and relaxation.  The creator of DIYplanner also does NaNoWriMo.  That’s it! Anyone worth knowing will be found either writing in November or knitting anytime.

More on the Adventure as I go.  Meanwhile, I have a yellow sweater to finish.

I don’t know if others have such moments, but I remember when I became ordinary, when I stepped off the path of wondering and into the street of just doing.  I buried my other self so that I can only really hear her when I’m dreaming.  Not, sleep dreaming, but in a reverie in which my daydreamed self dreams.  This is beginning to change.  I am beginning to recognize (one of my own magic words) how to feel that other self’s feelings.

I remember, when I was about 5, a sensation that felt like a round soft ball being squeezed between two fingers until it could compress no more and then expanding to its former size.  Over and over I allowed myself to feel that.  I haven’t been able to feel that sensation for a long time.  I have felt it since my childhood, but not recently.  Is this my flexibility?  Is this what I need to recover?  I don’t know.

OK.  What do I know, in this moment?  I gave my power away the day I stepped away from myself.  I did it in the way most of us do so that we can feel safe in this world.  We didn’t know how to believe that we had made this world ourselves. We might have remembered how to do special things, but we didn’t know the other part, the power of acting in the present part.  Adults still call it magical thinking.  “You didn’t make us divorce”.  “It’s not your fault your brother died”.  But it is.  Not in a first world, Newtonian physics, kind of way, the way the adults talk about.  We know we are responsible because we know we are powerful.  We know there is magic and that the magic is real.

This is where I am at the moment.  Trying to remember the feeling of stepping away from myself.  I’ve got it caught in my body as a memory.  It’s holding me still in a way that doesn’t feel good anymore, like an anchor holding the boat still in a storm.  How many of these anchors have I thrown out in my life?  What parts of me are now stiffened because of the salt hardened on the ropes?  How do I let go?  Do I cut the ropes?  Do I try to raise the anchors?  Do I just let the anchors go from the boat itself and go on?

I like those images.  I like the way they feel in me.  Just finding them leaves me feeling a little more fluid.  A little softer.  A little more sure that I am leaving the street and headed back onto the path.