Mindscape Reflections

Oh flippin’ ‘eck! What’s going on with WordPress? I’ve just logged in via laptop this morning to find that I’ve got to learn how to use it all over again. On an average day I’d probably be a bit more frustrated than I’m feeling now… Now, I’m feeling amused as it feels like a punchline to a cosmic joke.

A couple of days ago, I had a, what should have been a zoom but ended up being a messenger, consultation with the truly amazing Kate Choppen. I’ve known Kate a good many years now and every meeting we’ve had has been time well spent. I’ve always been a fan but the fandom upped a notch due to her helping me to be set free of back pain

Kate has quite a bag of tricks up her sleeve… We were supposed to have a session about a week ago, but we knocked it back as neither of us were feeling the vibe… At that time, I kind of knew what I wanted to exlpore but I’d not really nailed down the question… Between original slot and updated slot, the prod I needed came via my spam…

While divergent thinking can help your brain find unexpected relationships, convergent thinking is the process of evaluating and refining your options, to help you select and develop the most promising ones. Both are fundamental to the creative process.

(Argghhhhh! Cover your ears whilst I cuss out wp! This joke is wearing a little thin now…)

So my focus for the session was that I was more than OK on the divergent front… To complete the D. O. I would need to get convergent. I needed to learn how to write again… (hahaha wordpress!)

Kate asked me if I wanted to try creating a Mindscape… I don’t need asking twice, so we cracked on. An hour later, I’d unleashed in my head a couple of new members of staff to work with me and I’d got a map… In my head, a vision of what my writing space looked like. The idea, I think, I’m not the expert, so you’d probably be better off asking Kate, is that you create this space in your head and your subconscious already knows what you need to do and so those thoughts turn into actions and you create what it is that you want to create… At the end of the exercise, before coming back into the room, it was suggested that in my hands, I had lots of gifts that I could place around my map… Kate asked me what I had in my hands, I told her that I’d already flung the gifts unexamined to scatter across the mindscape and that they’d reveal themselves and what they were for, as and when the time was right…

Time! Oh! Time! Yesterday was the last day of May and I realised that I was rapidly heading into the June 1st. start date that I’d given myself for starting the formal writing up of the D.O. I looked over to my desk that had been set up with good intentions and which was clear a week ago… Ooops… Things were gathering… things that had escaped from my pirate’s chest, things that were new arrivals… lots of things piling up, ready for my next project.

Will I ever turn this D.O. to DONE?!

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Oh! Some post had come! In the piles, there was a new frame… O.K. let’s get Freyr in place…

I looked him in the eye and he started back at me… What are you doing? Why are you worrying about your desk right now, when you need to empty your car out ready to trade in, in the morning? Sort your Focus out!

I’m a lot less argumentative these days, so in the midnight hours, I emptied out the old banger… Giving my hands a final sweep around, I found this…

Oh! My Acorn! I’d found it in a park some time ago… It looked very bright, much brighter than the rest and I decided that it belonged to me… Why had I kept that? It was because when I picked it up, it reminded me of something I’d written…

Whatever stage of our cycle we are in or whatever form we take, in the whole of creation every living thing starts as just one single cell… so whatever we are capable of becoming is contained within us at genesis… _{Karen Sealey}

It was good to see my old friend… I rolled it around in my hand and then wondered what had happened to the cup that it used to sit in? Oh, yes… the acorn had shrank a little and the cup had become lose and fallen off…I’d thrown it under the contorted Hazel in my front garden, saying – there you go fairies! Have a new hat!

Fairies like to 6 of Pentacles reciprocate, they’d spoken to me in dreams… Gather 9 nuts from beneath the tree and source a salmon… The nuts were easy… the salmon took a little longer… Once gathered they showed me symbols to burn (though I’m guessing they didn’t intend me to also brand the end of one of my fingers in the process… but you never know…)

I’d half forgotten about my Salmon of Wisdom Oracle… I dug it out… I played around and took lots of photos… I remembered my cloth was glow in the dark, so of course… a few more photos… The image took me back to my Mindscape. During the session, I kept making reference to something that looked like a air hockey puck… shiny and slippy… Ah… my scrying mirror… Maybe that would be coming in useful sometime soon…

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Realising that I was now a couple of hours into 1st June and probably not going to get a lot of sleep… I reined in. I didn’t want to fail before I started with my new focus writing… Ok… let’s pop down some kind of quick skeleton. I remebered that I had at some point created an online notebook… I searched and found it and there was a photo of each of the 22 cards. Alongside each, 3 runes laid down… I wrote key words for each set. Ok, so if nothing else gets done today, then at last I have a tentative 1st draft in place or as placeholder.

I scrolled up and down…Wait a minute? What was that? I scrolled back… a link with the heading ‘Useful resources???’. Hmmm? That doesn’t belong here… let’s have a closer look… I laughed out loud… Back in October, I’d spent an hour each day, working with runes and by the end of the month had come up with a novel way of reading… but it would need quite a bit of background research for me to flesh it out to be usable by anyone else… I knew exactly what I wanted to research but couldn’t find any books on the subject for love nor money…. The ‘Useful resources???’ that’s what I’d hidden for myself, two years before I knew what I’d want them for…

I skimmed through the link… Instantly, I saw a very easy and obvious way to complete the idea in the bag… It had been on hold as the other ways of doing it that I’d considered were too lenghty… too much work… potentially a deck of 216 cards… Bloody Norah! The D.O. 22 started 2014… 216 cards working at that pace… I’m not sure I’m going to live that long… My new idea… oh yes, no need to draw any cards… a system to play, I just need to write up the scenes and I’m willing to bet that if I get my head down, then I can knock that out within a month…

But… What’s in the bag, can stay in the bag for now…

For now… I need to get a lid on the box and shift D.O. to DONE! so it can fly the nest…

(Oh and update my wp skills… I’ve previewed this post and it looks like crap! It’s wonky… but hey… I’ve got bigger fish to fry… I’ll mistress this all in good time! )