In The Garden Living an RPG Life

Guess not if you are a hibernating bear!  And I’m not so sure I am not.

So… where have I been?  Writing actually.  And making my mind up that I am a writer and not a knitter.  All that means is that the needles get dropped and left behind for the pen more than the other way around.  It also means that the pen gets picked up for other things that the needles don’t.  Like drawing.  I think.

I had high hopes of making a writerly space there, but something else got in the way.  Yet another writing pursuit in the form of an online technical writing class.  That has been more troublesome than I thought it would be.  I think it’s because the universe of technical writing has nothing to do with what I actually might right about.  OK, so that’s a bit of exaggeration, but still.  I don’t work in a field where office memos are part of my everyday speech pattern.  As it is I had to create a Second Life project for one assignment.  I also ended up using the Comic Kazes blog for another.  And somewhere along the line I discovered that it might do me well to learn Adobe Acrobat for real.  Something about on-demand publishing.

Which of course sent me running back to my NaNo-novels to see how ready they might be for publishing.

Only if by publishing you mean getting someone to put them into print for me so that I can use them like I would any novel I would want to analyse.  Only this time I would be quite critical and tell the author how she might improve the story and the obvious typos.  I think that would be quite satisfying since I know the author would listen to me.  Nothing like talking back to an author knowing you will be heard!  Gives reading with a pencil much more impact.  More power.

Now, I want to shift the blog to where it was heading anyway. Shift it visually away from knitting.  And I just got something.

I wrote a couple of comments in response to a couple of my grandmother’s fans.  In one of them I was remembering reading Mae’s book of poetry and I wrote that I was sitting in her mother’s chair and my mother was sitting nearby knitting.  That’s the connection and I never saw it till now.  My mother didn’t write. Neither did my great-grandmother.  Granny crocheted and Mommy knitted.  I suspect, though, that Mommy knitted instead of writing.  I suspect a lot of women did needle work instead of something else they wanted to do more.  Which makes Mae’s book even more remarkable.  I know that my mother had the desire to write and to make other kinds of art.  For one reason or another, she didn’t.

So much for returns and revelations.

Why do we keep turning away from home to feed our desires?  Perhaps because they get buried at home.  More revelation.   I am looking outside myself for source and sustenance.  At the moment, I am also looking at what appears to be some Granny wrapped in a lace shawl. It’s just photos of my first lace piece draped over a chair.

Proof that I can follow directions as well as finish a complex task.

I think I’m doing battle with ghosts here.  Letting them out so they can go home and leave me to play.  I know this lace thing is good.  I also like the practical stuff, like sweaters and socks.  I just don’t know how to put it all together with the writing and drawing and the rest of my life’s tasks.

Oh well.  That’s what Second Life is for!  Taking me away from all this.  You can’t really knit in SL.  And besides, I get to be a Shaman Bunny.  Can’t do that in Real Life, and while a bunny

can write in Second Life, it can’t in Real Life….

So there!

OK… done venting.  Will be back with more about the Shaman Bunny or another story.  Meanwhile, I’ll be changing things around a bit.

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.

Word count- 1794:  Flashback—Word war.  I did my first and I think only word war tonight.  Second Life has its own group, of course, and I answered the call to come hang out.  It’s not the same as writing in a café though.  I can’t feel people.  I know they are off writing somewhere else and it feels empty.

I didn’t win the war.  I started late for one thing and for another, someone else types like mad.  It was enough momentum to get me going and make my daily count.  I’m still behind, but I’m not losing ground.

Today is the third of three days off.  I go to work tomorrow and then have another two days off.  Strange days.  I don’t know what to do with myself with so much free time.  I’m not going to plan much though.  I’m not actively planning anyway.  Today, I decided on impulse, to go to the Weatherstone today.   There wasn’t the crowd I would have usually seen, there.  Things have changed a lot since the change of ownership.  It’s not such a bad thing for me though.  I don’t seek engagement outside of myself so much.  Except in Second Life!

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?

It’s challenging for me to take steps forward that land on areas I can’t see.  Yes, there are people that are on the landscape I am heading to.  And yes, they are willing to guide me.  However, they can’t take the steps for me, they can’t see where my feet are heading.  Could very well be that the very stones they stepped on are holes under my feet.

First of all, the people in question are both men.  I don’t know if that really matters in the long run.  It could affect the shape of the stepping though.  We’ll see.

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!

On the map, it looks like there are normal city blocks. That’s another of the illusions in this virtual world. There are no areas that correspond to what I think of as city blocks. I look around me to find something that looks like a corner to orient myself to and can only find rocks and trees. How do I get across the street? How do I move from this location on my map to that other one when it doesn’t correspond to my personal references? And I don’t have someone on the other side that can teleport me anywhere.

I’ve been thinking about how to describe myself lately. Being in Second Life has put me in the position of seeing myself in such a different perspective that I really have to think about it. Think about telling me as I feel myself to be. My avatar in the world is as much like me as I think I want. My hair is longer. I’m a little thinner. Generally though, it looks something likes me. But, who am I other than my appearance? What am I interested in? What is my profile to tell the world about both of me?