In The Garden Living an RPG Life

Finally settled on the title of the blog.  What happened?  Well, I finally decided who I am and how I want to present myself in the rest of this lifetime.  Yeah, the knitting is still important to me.  It’s part of how I think on some days.  It’s a tool, a grounding agent.  And it’s  a symbolic reference to story.

As for Living an RPG Life… Role playing games are another symbolic reference.  They represent life itself.  To live my life as an RPG, a role playing game, is to acknowledge the features of the game being active in my ordinary day.  In this moment, I can’t think of anything that relates.  That is not to say that in the next moment something won’t manifest.

This is a kind of coming out for me, a commitment to telling stories. The stories I am committing to tell are not necessarily ones I make up.   Some of the stories I will be telling are true. They might sound made up, though.  That’s because they come from focusing on the world differently.  I am thinking of Douglas Adams and his description of moving into Valhalla in The Long Dark Tea-time of the Soul.  I don’t intend to go that far.  But the feeling of turning to look at the side of a molecule, and telling what I see there… That’s the feeling.

I used to think I would get lost if I did that.  If I let myself really look and not just close my eyes and guess at what I was experiencing.  I found a blog, Shift Your Spirits, whose author, Slade Roberson, seems to have been where I have wanted to go and writes to tell that it’s ok.  It’s not so scary and there are ways of not becoming lost.

I heard Bill Plotkin on KVMR.org the other day and followed him to his website.  He had a similar tale and provided a compass.  Between those two explorers and the itinerary that Serge Kahili King provided me that long time ago in Urban Shaman, I finally feel that I can take off.

Call this post, handing out a key to the house-sitter.

Stripes of rain

make empty

streets cozy;

drench trees so

they bow and

tickle snails;

make puddles

and me a

rain dancer.

When I was writing on Huna Trainer regularly, a few of us started writing three-word comments.  It was so much fun that I decided (as a good logarrheatician would) that the three words could be cubed into three lines of three words each.  Well, today I thought I was doing the original “cubes” but realized I was focused on syllables instead.  And then I realized that three sets of nine syllables made an American Sentence.  So, you can read it either way:  As three cubes or as one American Sentence.

Breathing in

breathing out…

the top of my head expands under

the hedge of my hair

the soles of my feet tingle.

Breathing in

breathing out…

chest expands

thoughts contract

into breathing alone.

Breathing in

breathing out…

looming clouds enter

leaves dripping rain move through

wet streets emerge.

Breathing in

breathing out….

stars on one horizon

stars on the other horizon

bones in between.

Breathing in

breathing out…

stars inhaled into bones

bone songs vibrate being

stars exhaled into bones.

Breathing in

breathing out…

stars inhaled into bones

bone songs vibrate being

stars exhaled into bones.

Breathing in

breathing out….

stars inhaled

bones vibrate

stars exhaled.

Breathing in

breathing out….

being vibrates

bones sing

being vibrates.

Breathing in

breathing out…

the wave expands

the bones sing

the wave vibrates.

Breathing in

breathing out…

the wave

the bones

the song.

Breathing in

breathing out…

the song

the wave

the song.

Breathing in

breathing out…

the wave.

Breathing in

breathing out…

being.

Breathing in

breathing out…

the song.

Breathing

in

breathing

out…

Breathing…

I wrote this after a Huna Healing class in Second Life.  Lots of breathing, of course, and also a huge insight.  It’s the Wave again.  It was the Wave in Aikido that brought me first to take classes in electronics.  I didn’t quite understand what the point was.  As it turned out, I got to finish some things I didn’t believe I could even start: my FCC Radiotelephone License and my Amateur Radio License to be specific.  Childhood dreams I didn’t think even belonged to me.

So now that I have them, what next?  That was my question till now.  More wave stuff evidently.  Yes, I used my understanding of communication electronics to build an analogy for interpersonal communication effects, but that seemed really obvious. I was talking to fellow travellers on the Huna Training podcasts, and we mostly knew all that from Serge King’s Urban Shaman.

It was the idea of the breath activating the Wave that was new today.  And from that point, the universe of my novels took a whole and enormous step deeper.  I was so focused on justifying the effects in the world through physics that I didn’t see the truth of things:  It’s the Wave.  Listening to Martha Beck helped me put the few things together.  Again, a confluence of Huna (as shamanism) and Aikido and the Wave of the Dreaming.  That’s all I can say for now since I still haven’t got it all put together myself yet.  Maybe by this year’s NaNoWriMo, it will make sense to me.

Word count- 0000: Took tonight off from writing as well as last night.  What did I do instead?  I hung out with friends online.  I also got to talk with Serge.  Those two events are not the same thing.  “Friends “means Adriaan mostly.

We spent time together and I met another person in the Furry crowd.  Adri also confided personal stuff to me.  Serge asked for my input as well.  I got to feel connected to people in virtual life as well as in real life. Writing? Gone.  In its place was experience.  I recognized no plans means no product.

I’m sure I’ve said this numerous times before.  I’m saying it over and over again until I can’t ask it anymore.  I don’t know where to start.  I feel confused by how much there is to look at before I even pick up a pencil, a pen,  a needle, a book.

I have the analogy of a tangled ball of string, of yarn.  I had to unwind and rewind a skein of lace weight yarn.  I ended up breaking the thing into pieces before I got is wound into balls.

How do I break my life into pieces?  Stop living?

So… I’ve been spending even more time in Second Life. Now that I have land and gardens, I feel at home. That means that I have places to work and bring guests to talk. Or walk on the moon!

I was brought to Second Life by the presence of Serge King and Aloha International. Pali Uli (Samoans call it Bali Hai!) is where I call my spirit home. It is another place I get to talk. This talking is telling stories and showing off our avatars and other gadgets. Nothing like sitting in the starlight and sending off little bursts of light that look like fireflies.

From time to time, I get to sit and send up firefly looking things with my friend, Kahu (Graeme Kapono Urlich in Real Life), a Huna healer. Other times we just hang out and chat. Ever sit and just chat with a healer? It’s some of the loveliest energy. It’s the fragrance of a garden in the early morning, a subtle green scent with the hint of flowers. It’s the sharp scent of geraniums when he holds my casual comments to the principles of Huna.

The other night I got to sit with him and Serge King. It was at the end of an interesting day of telling personal stories. A couple of days before that, I had been reading Wallace D. Wattles’ The Science of Getting Rich and wrote out what I wanted my wealth to be. I’ve been frustrated by my inability to choose or focus on a single path. That’s what we’re supposed to do, right? Pick a career and devote our attention to it?

My feeling has always been that I wanted to do something creative and that I wanted to change the world, make it feel better. Wattles helped me see that the energy to do all this didn’t come from me or anything I was born with. It comes from the universe itself, its desire to become, to increase and grow. It was just for me to organize it into my own actions and environments. I had to choose where to focus my attention so it would know where to grow, what to shape itself into and flourish.

I had two lists. I had matched up all but the last item on each. The ones that were left? Healer and story. I’d felt that connection before but didn’t know what to do with it. After that night of telling and listening to stories, I knew.I’ve wanted to put the shaman perspective into writing for a long time. At first it was the idea of creating a shaman critical theory, reading texts through a shaman’s perspective. I didn’t because I didn’t know enough. I let it go. Now, after the connection between healer and story this time, after the night of story sharing in Pali Uli, after spending the last year and some working with Huna, I am ready to take the next step and bring Huna fully into my writing.How? Easy! Rather than engaging the Hero’s Journey in story, look for the path of the Adventurer. The idea that the seven principles formed a path came to me during one of Serge’s Talk Stories, a couple of months ago. That idea has finally resolved into this next step. I don’t know how it will turn out, of course. This is only one more stone on the path.

Meanwhile, I’ve got a lot of clearing out to do. It’s time to make space and time for the work of writing. Later!

Spending so much time in SL means that I am sitting still in my body, so still that when I finally get up I am craving motion.  My physical body doesn’t really know it’s not been moving since I seem to be doing all kinds of other things with it.  I eat less being filled up by the cretive activities in SL between conversations.  When I finally get outside after work usually or before work when I’m on at night, it’s the Real Air that Im most conscious of. I don’t remember noticing how sweet it smells!

I look at trees differently, wondering how they might be reproduced in SL or how the landscaping might be copied with what I have in my inventory.  I really love looking at the houses in my neighborhood.  Always have, and now I do it with a builder’s eye.  Around my house, I look at textures, collections of things, wondering how I might use them as avatars, skins and particles.

So what am I doing? I’ve said in the past that I want to tell my story.  I didn’t then and don’t now know what I meant by that.  A picture is emerging, though, of an ongoing process.  This SL stuff seems to be part of it.  SL allows me to tell parts of my story in a way that other media wouldn’t.  I tell the story in each conversation I have with people I meet casually, each class I participate in, each attempt I make to build or script, each teleport.

Just before I entered the world, I had decided that I would take my final degree in Creative Writing.  I quickly realized that I really don’t have a creative writing background, just talent and desire.  I don’t have a writing practice.  Enter Second Life and this realization of telling my own story.  I’d felt that SL was not a detour or distraction from writing.  Rather, it’s trying to show me something about myself that I didn’t yet know and that I needed to.  It’s answering my need for background.

I’m not investigating how, though. Not yet.  I know though that it’s working out perfectly. The limits I’ve sought to contain my ideas and creativty have been put aside while I find new and more effective ones.  My attention is still on creativity, on storymaking as I explore this new media and ask how its tools contribute to storytelling and story making.  Letting myself live in the moment of the play, of being in or out of the world, of doing research or housework, I don’t add judgement or stress to my life.

I get to see how play really feels and what it contributes to creativity.  Not play as distraction but play as a means to go deeper. Mostly I am happy.  And everyone around me in or out of the Life knows it.  I have home and family to play with and around.  There is not the same opportunity for fear in SL, of course.  I can’t break things I play with, can’t get hurt by falling, so… I get to do things like fall from 500 meters up! and indulge my tendency to “see what happens if I…”!Boy does that leave me feeling happy.

The most challenging part of this adventure, though, is what to do with what I discover.  That’s where the power to create the path through an MFA, or anything else I want, will come from.  I get to re-view my planning behavior in this new environment.  I get to see how effective old habits are and if necessary start building new ones.

Building things is what this world is about after all.  I can either accept what others have built, learn how to build from others, or do things on my own.  Whichever way I choose and proceed on, I’ll know that the path is true for me, because it will work.Things will continue to improve in my ordinary life without my direct attention, and I’ll find myself on the receiving end of that MFA degree!

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.