Transport

This morning I wake up with this image in my mind alongside memories of last night’s minibus ride and it makes me smile a lot…

Let’s talk about the image first, I’ll ramble about the ride later…

So! Yggdrasil… The Norse version of the tree of life… The way into the 9 Worlds.

This version has always appealed to me more than the Kabbalistic TOL. It fires my imagination more to think of lands filled with Ice Giants, Gods, Dark Elves etc. as opposed to the overly scholarly feel of sephawotsits and other Hebrew words that refuse to stick in my mind or if they do then I’m probably sounding them out incorrectly anyway… And that feels as though it could go disastrously wrong…

But more than that, as a Mathemagician 9 is a symphony of wonders that 10 just doesn’t top… 9 throwing it’s patterns through the mathverse… Multiplications and symmetries, dancing digit sums… Maths is ART! 9… See, if 3 is a magic number, then 9 is magic squared…

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Keep this between you and me, as I have a reputation to live down to… But sometimes when noone is watching, I study… Above is my imagination experiment that sealed the deal for me for once and for all (or until you can elegantly convince me otherwise) that 9 was indeed the number of the sacred tree…

I looked at the diagram of the K TOL and it kind of looked familiar but somehow off… What was it that it reminded me of? Something from childhood… Of playground games… Oh! Water bombs! Origami missiles! Hmmm… But that 10 distorts the pattern… It stretches it out of shape… Like a forced forceps delivery elongating a baby’s head as it’s dragged from the mother world onto earth…

Now 9, that’s a perfect transposition… 9 the 3×3 magic squared flat on paper, blow in the breath of life and flattened 2 dimensions become 3D. 3x3x3D. Breath births magic cubed to perfection! A universe is born! A universe of 9 worlds with 22 paths to travel… A confirmation (possibly fabricated) that 22 was the number goal for the cards in the D. 0.

This delights me but I’ll go on no further as…

In the words of Dan Brown

Telling someone about what a symbol means is like telling someone how music should make them feel

Moving from one quote to another…

We live in strange times. We also live in strange places: each in a universe of our own. Douglas Adams.

This lands me back in the minibus… Yesterday morning’s adventure after blown tyre went down well with my crew of 6. Arriving at home time in the big white Renault, pleased them more. Sure, my Galaxy is a sweet ride but filled with 7, it ain’t heaven as logistics are applied factoring in leg lengths and drop off points to see how we can load and unload with minimum scrambling… So… A nifty 9 seater! Oh joy!

“Hey Karen! You only had to change the tyre! Not the whole vehicle! I’m calling shotgun!”

Fully loaded, with 2 seats to spare, I call out “Hey kiddos! Where do you want to go?”

“Hooooooooome!”

“Pub!”

“Argghhh! Pubs are shut!”

“C’mon kiddos! Momma’s gotta full tank! Try harder!”

“Camping!”

“Yeah, camping! There’s enough room in here for us all to sleep!”

“Camping where?”

“Wales?”

“Gower Peninsula?”

Mr Hoooooome changes to “Beaches! Oh yeah! I’m in!”

We transport ourselves through realms of imagination and enjoy a 2 week summer vacation during our mundane half hour commute… A commute that for a while became an escape route from this world and all its problems…

I wake up this morning smiling about this. Ah! My pals are flexing their imaginations… I’m driving but now they’re taking me places! In their world, they’ve often called me a strange little thing as none of them really understood why I never got bored of driving… But now topsy turvy world has them rolling into my world, letting slip their eccentricities, and exploring the

I Magi Nation…

It’s a good place to be!