In The Garden Living an RPG Life

That is the name of the comic book text book.  It is also what I think I’ll be doing this year for NaNoWriMo.  I seem to have let go of everything that keeps me from being happy with a coloring tool in my hand.  Spent a while today coloring in a friend’s coloring book. Working out the shading for the princess’ dress.  Getting the shadows on the faces right.  Choosing the right colors.  Checking out what the mark-making effects of crayons are when I use the drawing signature of DaVinci and Gorey.

What does this have to do with novel writing?  Well, the main characters keep drawing journals as part of their work practice.  A lot of my character creation has been through illustrations in old children’s story books.  I’m just realizing how much keeping a journal figures in my novels.

In the first novel, the journal full of visual ideas, sparks the consequences, literally.  In the second novel, it’s both journals (the ones belonging to the same person as in the first) and children’s books.  In the third, hmmm.  I don’t remember having journals but now that I think of it, why not?  The fields of music and knitting both have journal keeping as their practice, if not exactly as we think of them.  In the fourth book, its those journals again plus another person whose work requires them.

Whew!   I thought the retrospective didn’t occur till after one was dead, and then not for a long time!

I don’t know if I will be making pictures while I’m writing. I will wait and see what happens.   The one thing I’ve learned from my own renewed attraction to drawing is to not push it.  Most of the re-acquaintance came from my conversations with Gretchen about her own relationship with drawing.  I got to feel lonely for drawing.  Mind you, I haven’t let it go completely.  My journals are organized around making some kind of pictorial mark.  I make a rectangle on the top right corner of each new page and put a nice border around it.  Only after I write the date next to the frame do I start my entry for the day.  There are still blank frames on some pages.  I’m not committed to filling them up.  I just acknowledge that there is a place for drawing in my writing life.

Between my Catrina figure and my desire to build a fabric design practice, I’m realizing the perhaps I have really only thought of drawing as a tool and not something to do just for the heck of it.  I am not, even though I might like to be, someone who loves drawing.  Just as I am not a musician.  Or an electronic technician.  I may not even be a writer, for all that I write.  I am a person who can do all of these things toward some other end.  Or because of some other inspiration.  I don’t know how to talk about it any better than that.  I am expecting things to come together though, as I age a little more.

Something about how the spirit moves or can be perceived to move through all my interests and endeavors, seems to bring me peace.   There are people for whom all those activities are roads to spirit.  For many practitioners, art, electronics, music and the like are their path to something much larger than themselves.  This something gives them comfort when their Adventures take them deep into dungeons where they need to find their way past familiar and unfamiliar monsters.  I think, for me, writing is the Way.  The other activities seem to be just a way to see into the Mystery through eyes that are only partially focused through music, electronics, drawing and the like.

Fine.  Now I’ve gone and got deep.  Not to worry.  It’s Day of the Dead eve and these are perfectly good thoughts to have tonight.  The souls of those who know more about these things are about to be let loose to visit in our dreams and desires.  Might as well get things properly lined up.  Who knows what gifts of insight my Mae might bring me, what experiences of the other side I might receive from Ricky or Darryl.  And mom and dad and all the others behind them might have stories I can use to clarify my purpose.  Sam, dear Sam, might even bring me closer to the forge and show me how the center of the earth creates, what the Earth Dragon dreams about.  I can use that in my story tomorrow night.

Night all.

Blessings on us all.

This is what I get for feeling overwhelmed by all the ideas and plans and interests I have for my life.  I wondered how all the things might go together or which ones I let go and why.  Like, where does Japanese go in the whole scheme of things?  And how does it fit with Psychology?

Fortunately, the RPG takes all of this and makes it into a story, a living adventure (and yeah, I will make a post defining what RPG is, for me anyway).  I don’t like the “life coach” title.  It just doesn’t suit me.  Where’s the play factor?  That’s the guiding feeling for me: play.  Most of what I want to accomplish is best talked about through imagination and play, through fantasy and creative activities.  Why?  Dunno!  It’s just how it feels best to me.  And trust me, I’ve tried to avoid behaving like a child for a long time now, tried to be serious, get focused, be a grown-up.

Not working.  Even when I am serious, the feeling that underlies being serious is imagination, making stuff up.  Granted, I’m sure it’s just a way of experiencing intuition, but still… the feeling of play lurks beneath it all.  Could be that intuition just feels good.  Being in the flow.

uhhh…. what was I talking about?

Oh, yeah.. Adventure Guide.

So what is that?  Making up a game setting, I think a Guide is the person who hires him or herself out to the party.  It’s the person who has all the information about the locale.  For a fee, he (let’s say it’s Pod this time) will take the party wherever it wants to go, and help them through the local customs, paperwork, and hopefully out the other side.  Of course, the Guide has to participate in the Adventure with the party.

All the other “rules” of adventuring still apply.  The party can accept the Guide as another member or leave him out altogether.  He also has his own agenda which he may or may not share with them.  Hmmm… getting interesting.  Will be a story in this eventually, I’m sure.

The thing about making this a Real Life experience is that I will be finding the correlation between powers and parties in the RPG landscape and RL.  So far, I’ve Guided one group (through aikido) and some individuals.  Guess that’s the place to start, to build the Adventure elements.

I’m blathering a bit, I know.  Still finding out what I am doing, what my plans are.  Making it up as I go along.  Fortunately, I have my inner world to help, my own Guide and Adventure landscape.  More on that next time.

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.

So writing poems is not the same as posting poems.  I ‘ve got the whole month done.

They are in my journal.

OH.  And I was wrong about American Sentences being 27 syllables. They are 17, just like Haiku.  I’ve had the priviledge of trying to explain the concept to a couple of people lately.  Need to brush up on what I know for sure and what I think I know.  Having certainty in both would be helpful and build confidence.

Meanwhile, I’m back on Second Life on Saturdays leading the Global Healing Circle. That means creating more Heart Meditations.  I am thinking of publishing them in one form or another.  I like the sound of my own voice (in a non-ego kinda way) and doing a set of recordings might be nice.

Writing down my ideas for a set of stories about shamanic kids.  Thought of the idea a long time ago when I was reading more about Navajo and Hopi legends.  It was meeting Kahu and Brun in Second Life and Kuel on Huna Trainer that inspired me to finally put the idea into words.  I could see them in their adult struggles to be like children still.  Struggles with the shamanic things, anyway.  I’m having fun thinking of how to bring the world to life.  I don’t think of them as children’s stories, by the way.  Just stories about children.  I’m looking forward to seeing how they all come out.  I did a recording of the draft of the first one and like what I’ve heard.  Too much information in it, though.

I’m taking an online writing course–Holly Lisle’s “How to Think Sideways” and the lessons I’ve got through so far are really cool!  I like how she thinks and what she’s focusing on.  Since I am coaching a couple of other people in their writing endeavors, it’s nice to have someone coaching me.

Well, this is family weekend and it’s time to pay attention and visit!

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!

Whew! It’s been a long time it seems. I’m not counting NaNoWriMo though it’s a significant amount of writing. I’m thinking about the incidental writing I started on 100words.com, that exactly 100 word post we are supposed to create. I’ve found since I started that practice (and let it slip for a while) that I like the idea of using the form to write stories. There is just enough room in that many words to create a complete, if very short, story. There’s room to establish place and time and person. There’s room to finish with some emotion. What there isn’t very much room for is build up to action, character devleopment, maybe a couple of other things.

I decided that I would pursue the story idea by setting up a single situation that has a beginning, middle and end: crossing the street. You must admit there is a lot of potential for all kinds of things to unfold in such a storyscape. I already published a few for the month of February. I’m going to keep it as my theme for this month and see how it goes. In another place I did something similar, writing one hundred words at a time to create a story. I hadn’t been able to squeeze the whole thing in a single hundred words, though. Ended up with, I think, three hundred. Still very short.

I know I started a knitting theme here and I haven’t dropped it. Knitting is both a practice and a metaphor, though. The blog is where all gets knitted together into a single garment. Kinda like the knitted shirts in the story. Don’t ask me which story! There are a few versions. The one I know it by is The Seven Swans. I watch on Jim Henson’s The Storyteller as some smaller number of ravens, three I think. Anyway, the point is that I see those finished garments as somehow representing aspects of themselves that the boys had lost or forgotten with the death of their mother and father’s remarriage. Or at least that’s what came to me just now! I hadn’t given the idea a single thought before this moment. Wonder why now?

Meanwhile, I have to start dusting off my writing since I decided that I am applying for an MFA in creative writing. This is almost out of the blue, not quite. Remember that call to adventure Chris Baty posted on the NaNoWriMo site? That’s all it takes. Someone putting out a call that resonates with me at the right time and “poof!”, it all comes together. Kinda like being an overnight sensation after working at it for twenty-odd years. I’ve been gradually going public with the decision since moving too fast usually had the result of pushing me into my fear zone and not letting me out. Almost got stuck in there earlier today. I was feeling like I was just dreaming of something that I couldn’t have, wasn’t qualified for, when I got into conversation with a friend, who studies art. There was something about sitting with her and just talking that got me seeing what it means to be a writer. No, strike that: what it means for me to be a writer.

First of all, it finally registered that I prefer writing to anything else. I will write, albeit posts in forums, when I will only dream about knitting or quilting or any of the other creative things I do. I used to complain that my drawing journals filled up with words faster than with drawings. I guess I’m letting go the idea that I will have drawing journals anymore, right? Nope! In fact, the way I knew that this decision was probably not just another daydream is the way other elements in my life stepped back in importance. Suddenly all were willing to serve the writing in a way I’ve never experienced before. That’s the experience I hold onto when I am in doubt.

The hardest thing in the process may be defining myself as a writer. And then again, it may not. There may be no hard thing in the process, just things I haven’t addressed yet. I’m trusting my greater self here. It’s not let me down before, so I don’t expect that it will this time. I just have to remember how to hold my mind in patience. There’s lots of stuff to do between now and whenever I send the application in. My plan is to make the January 2009 application date (and yes, I will triple check that that’s the right date). I was briefly considering November, but that’s saved for NaNo. Who knows! Maybe writing a novel every November is what I’m meant to do with my life. It wouldn’t be a bad purpose.

OK. That’s enough catching up for now. Gotta write more stories.