Believe it or not those two things are quite connected. The business in the world I’ve created to write about is all things fiber related. Think Silk Road. And, the fiber business is also my real life RPG goal.
Quick review: I like the order that playing Dungeons and Dragons imposes on keeping track of lots of different personal (in the form of the characters) material. The only place I can think that would have such useful tools as a skills sheet would be a school counselor’s office. Unfortunately, the school counselor’s office wouldn’t have a place on that sheet for magic spells or equipment.
Funny. I’ve never made that connection before. The connection between school and RPGs. OK, I have, but not in the way of what kinds of information I might actually get from school. From a counselor or good teacher. For me, the structure of the RPG fills in blanks I didn’t really recognize till now. Mostly, I think, because I have a friend with some of the same blanks that I feel. Like how to have so many ideas and not get overwhelmed by them.
I think this is what life coaches are supposed to be good for. Me, I’d rather make up my own character sheet and do a personal inventory of all the skills I have to see if I have enough to level up. I also need to find other Adventurers who want to take this –what would you call it? No one has aksed us (me) to slay a dragon or search for something or rescue someone. Ooo. That’s what I need to figure out? Not what the task is, but who is asking it to be done! Cool.
Meanwhile, I have my project completed for the next Spoonflower contest. It’s a doll panel. Nice combination of what they are asking for and what I like. It helps that I also want to give it as a gift. Or, that the actual image has sparked a few more ideas. I don’t know what goes into the Etsy shop, now. Have to take the Spoonflower market into account for fabric. Final products? I still have a few of those ideas to develop.
And this last novel will give me ideas and help focus my plans. It’s about the business of the world and how it collapses. We also get to hear more about goblins and dragons. Drawing, too. It’s all in there. Isn’t that what Nano is about? Getting it all in and editing later?
And am I worried? I don’t know. Lots of things have happened in the last week. I went to ITP last Tuesday. That’s the Institute of Transpersonal Psychology for the rest of the world. It was founded by a practitioner of aikido. At this writing he’s a Seventh Degree black belt in the practice. What I discovered at the Open House on Tuesday… He’s also a practitioner of RPG.
That was more than a delight. My whole attitude has been shifted.
I am a First Degree aikidoka–aikido practioner/player. That was my connection to Bob. (Until you read the novel, you won’t realize the significance of the name “Bob”. It’s ok.) Then, after a bit of awkward-on-my-part conversation, we started talking about gaming. My part of conversing got lost, went silent, fell away… He’s been playing since the first edition of Dungeions and Dragons. Much longer than I have. And he still plays games. He has also used the game in classes. Do you feel my sense of inclusion? I hope so.
The program he’s getting accredited is an extension of what I’ve been doing for a year or so. It’s called “spiritual guidance”. I thought I was doing a kind of “life coaching”, but from the description of the program, spiritual guidance is a better fit.
OK. You won’t think that from the name of the program. I had to look up “spiritual” in Wikidpedia. When I saw the word “intuition” I stopped reading. I think of intuition as a kind of internal compass. If intuition is also a connection to “spirit”, this is what I have been trying to guide people to. Bottom line, I have been trying–over the last several years–to help my friends find their way to the Way I’ve been travelling. Not Religious. Not Affiliated with any formal practice. The most organized thinking I can relate to is … Gaming. The world of Worldbuilding and RolePlaying. My “spiritual practice” is Magic, but in the world as we experience it in our everyday existence.
That’s what Living an RPG Life means. To me at least. Somewhere in that line of letters that become words is a new way…. No, a new Way. Bob agrees: Gamers are different. My belief? We have something to give the world that the world doesn’t recognize as being important, yet. For all of our involvement in our endeavors, we produce nothing the world around us sees as useful. And yet…. And yet we persist. We even thrive in our pursuit. What is it that comes through our play, that wants to be recognized?
I finally figured out that the difference between gaming obsession and the other obsessions is that we don’t produce anything remotely useful. Knitters produce stuff to wear. Engineers produce … engineered stuff. OK. So, Readers don’t produce anything either, but reading is considered something “educational”. Gamers play. We (and I include myself lightly) don’t produce anything, and don’t seem to connect with others (like Readers do) in a productive way. What separates us? Why are we not eaisly understood?
I think that is a big question. One aspect of the question is related to “what is a shaman?”. We don’t recognize the working of intuition in our culture. I’m not saying that gaming is the same as being a shaman. I’m just considereing the quality of attention in a game as being similar to that of shamanic practice. Or at least suggested by shamanic practice. Isn’t religion a kind of world building? A way of playing a character? An action evaluated by seemingly arbitrary consequences?
Hmmm. I need to think about that a bit more.
Meanwhile.. I am working on a couple of other adventure bits.
Spoonflower is hosting a new competition. This one is for doll panels. I missed out the Hallloween one so I am paying extra attention to this one. I did a bunch of research for the imagery yesterday. I am printing it out tonight so that I can build my own image from the source imagery. I”m not telling what the imagery is because I am sending the sample to my friend Gretchen as a gift.
The only thing I can say about the panel is that it is a Doll Panel and a fat quarter. Oh and it is seasonal.. last hint.
I’ll post the final image here when it’s posted on Spoonflower.
With One Thread is the name of my Etsy shop. There’s nothing there at the moment. The name is all there is of an idea that came from the devastation of 9/11. I wanted to know, for myself, what it was that I could do to heal the world. It came to me that the women of the world at risk might be empowered through their ability to process cloth. The idea of the fabric trade comes from the ancient Silk Road. It also comes from hearing an article about someone I like a lot–Kaffe Fasset–who was commissioned by an organization to license his designs to a Third World women’s community. His designs were to be used in their work and sold to create a viable economic practice.
I wanted to be him, to be someone whose work of the mind would be such that others might find empowerment.
This is the source of my novels’ world. Yes, my novels’ world is also the world I created for playing my Dungeons and Dragons characters. The nature of the breach that 9/11 created in my heart needed more than just a game. It needed some kind of personal commitment. I didn’t then and don’t think now that I can serve with my best as I am now. While I could teach English with the best of the others who volunteer for the Peace Corps (my model for world service), I don’t think that is what I am best suited for. No, I don’t know what else I can do better. However, it came to me that the world I want to create as my own reality, the world of fiber, is the world serves the women of the world best.
Writing this now seems to have lost it’s power, somehow. I don’t think that I have failed my intention, or that I have failed in my intention to serve. I firmly believe that, given some other impressions and coincidences, that I have only begun the true Adventure of Service. This last novel presents definitions and suggestions that, without the direction of a world service of fiber, would not feel so powerful. There is something deeper that wants to speak through my intent, my focus. I am willing to let it come out; I am willing to be dissatisfied with the appearance of my ordinary life in order for the extraordinary to seep through.
I don’t know what the outcome of The Falyns and its inspirations will be. I am willing to risk certainty in order to discover the power of the bigger picture, the design that creates opportunities for all.
I am listening to the latest season of Cast-On, the knitting podcast. It’s referring to the post WWII world of Make Do and Mend . It’s the closest we have–we of the post 9/11 century–to understanding what to do with what happened. What do we do now? How do we go on?
By “we” I don’t really know who I mean. I identify with creative people. With knitters and makers and hackers of all descriptions. I identify with the Rogue archetype, the persona that believes the rules of ordinary life do not apply. I am the one who steals your ideas and transforms them to serve The Greater Good.
So, With One Thread, what mischief might I achieve? What might be achieved at all?
I lost the post I had just written. It was a lovely post about my adventure with my local art supply store and how I flowed into mentioning my involvement in drawing.
Gone, is the visual poetry. Gone now, is all the reference to anything significant. That’s what I get for not saving the text when I create it. So, now what do I say?
It was a bright, sunny day in Sacramento. I was waiting for the local library to open so that I could get some documents created to allow me to renew a professional license. Yeah, that’s it. And this is the part where I enter the art supply store. It is a different branch from my usual haunt. My local supplier is within a few walking blocks of my flat. And very familiar. But today, I feel adventurous and explore the more distant University Arts store.
This is a new shape and a new encounter with old supplies. As I was checking out I mentioned that I was “coaching” a friend in drawing. This led to a blather about Comic Kazes, my under sedation blog about visual narrative or graphic novels.
I don’t, now, remember all that I was intending to remark about either the blog or the concept of visual narrative. It’s important to me to only remember that I am intending to continue the work. Drawing is still important to me. It represents a way of thinking that words …. fill in the blank.
By filling in the blank you are participating in the non-verbal process that visual narrative draws up and into consciousness.
I bought a bunch of drawing supplies at University Art, today. Mostly supports for receiving the marks that make images. Big books of pages to hold a large scale of imagery. I don’t know what I will be doing with this collection of tool marks. That’s the beauty of the practice! The not knowing part! As for the visual narrative… There are new bits coming into the blog. For instance…
Did you know the Old Masters used a kind of visual “Fake Book”? A fake book is a collection of tunes with chords that musicians use. They apply their personal knowledge of the appropriate style to the chords and melodies in the books and, when you hear them, you are entranced. The old masters of painting did the same thing. They had books of freguently used images that they could copy, in their own style of course, and fill in the blank spaces of their paintings.
How might we use that kind of drawing jazz in our own stories, I will be asking in Comic Kazes. My partner in the endeavor is off doing her own thing, so I have to regroup and proceed on my own. No problem. Unless I drop my own drawing intentions.
Oooo! Less than 30 days till NaNoWriMo begins and I can start writing for real. I’ve got lots of notes and ideas for the last of the five novels in this set. The first one is The Tailor’s Tale, the one that started it all. I’ve already told some of the story behind the story, though, so I’ll spare us the retelling.
I had a revelation this morning. Not just another idea, but the kind of revelation that I feel with my whole body, a feeling of living the idea rather than just having it wriggling about inside my skull.
I was thinking about some of the ideas I had for Spoonflower fabric and Etsy. With Spoonflower working on a marketplace, I need to rethink what I want to use Etsy for. This is where the RPG meets Real Life. I’ve been talking about role playing a little mystically, invoking the world of magic that is usually associated with gaming while trying to keep it on this side of fantasy. There’s more to my idea of what a role-playing game can be, though.
It’s no coincidence that the world I built is made from the fabric trade. It’s a medium I have a lot of lust for. I can practically hear and feel the rustle of embroidered silks and velvets when watching The Tudors for example. The weight of the swirling cape in the opening credits is very nearly fabric-pron. You wouldn’t know this about me if we met however. All I talk about is the magic-leaning stuff. I am, on a day to day basis, an advocate of empowerment, a fool for personal transformation, a getting-to-good type geek. In another life, I used to tell myself (too keep myself sane), I would probably be a shaman. Now, though, with the chasm of retirement looming before me, I’m thinking that I should consider myself a shaman with a fabric shop!
The RPG part? Well, I don’t know nothin’ ’bout birthin’ no business, to misquote another nurse/nanny type. For me the format of the role-playing game is perfect for organizing what I know and what I need to find out, while keeping the whole process on the higher side of fun. NPC’s are in place as the creators of Ravelry, Etsy and Spoonflower, for example. My Adventuring party? So far there is only one other person, I think. We’re friends and kind of on the same path. Whether we are on the same Adventure…? I don’t know yet. Only the encounters and the traveling through the landscape will tell.
The first part of my journey will be finishing the novel. Part of finishing the novel, I discovered, is finding out more about money and economics. The other part, a continuing part, is taking the magic part seriously. I have always taken it seriously as a study. I’ve just not practiced it in any formal way, with any kind of focus. Now it’s time to turn information into knowledge and knowledge into skill.
Talking to Gretchen about all of this, we came to the conclusion that this is one way to change a life, to become someone different. With that in mind, and since documentation is also part of the RPG, I’ll be keeping track of my process. One reason is that it’s fun. Another, more important reason, is that some of what I am planning to do is inspired by questions from many non-RPG places. Some of the questions are those Gretchen and I have asked each other and together of systems we’ve both investigated.
My plan is to show how I move from the system, through the questions, and into some kind of tool to be used in my Game. The name of my game? I guess it’s Retirement. Retirement, the Game. Ok… Maybe that’s just the working title. I have an idea that there is another title waiting to be revealed, but that’s another post.
Meanwhile, consider this the first of the pre-NaNoWriMo posts.
Yeah… I actually have made progress. Not what I was expecting either, when this idea came to me. And it keeps unfolding.
There is this boundary area between the real world and the imagined world that is not easliy accessed or understood. I figured out today, that’s where the Adventures are. Getting through there is what a Guide is needed for. And why would anyone even consider going into that place, whatever it is? Ahh. That’s just it. We usually choose to avoid going there. It’s the place where our ideas of who we are and what we’re doing get stretched out of recognition. We usually just barely cross the boundary when we’re dreaming. And you know how quickly you want to get out of that state, don’t you.
But. What if you took a different approach? What if, instead of taking it all so grown-up seriously, you decided to play?
That’s the idea. That’s what makes me happy. Playing in the Boundary and taking friends there with me. Wonder if there is room for all of us to play there?
So the Garden in the title is a place I am learning to use as a developmental tool. Learned it from King’s Urban Shaman. Of course it’s an imaginary place, but so is everything in our minds till we let them out. Or take them seriously.
I haven’t taken the Garden seriously, till now. It’s been there, and I’ve paid it a few visits. But, I’ve never really let the process fill up my body.
The first Image of my Garden is of a dark space. The only spot of light it the bit of landscape where I contact my big guide. I managed to find a bit of water in a little wall fountain. And there is a way under the garden that I can access.
I’ve started paying visits to ask for help of my Guide. I didn’t think anything would come of it, as usual. I was wrong. Something in my has evidently shifted. I’m learning what to expect from the encounter. What it feels like in my body. What the images look like. What the “stories” are and how they come. What the “answers” are to the questions I ask.
So, today, I start with the Garden report.
Foggy. With a patch of green.
A definite improvement over the complete darkness.
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.
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