Some more great POETRY from my sis

Yes. Everyone likes poetry. Or is that coffee? I forget. Here we have some of both. Click on them to see larger versions. Cheers!

Poetry Corner, finally cornered.

After months, perhaps years of neglect, I finally put some of my sister's great poetry into designs. Here are four of the most interesting. I hope you agree. Click on each to see a larger view.

Train Nomad   

Harmony

The Desert

Purity

Internet Art Collage

Here's something fun I made from art I found online, mostly from terragalleria.com and Deviantart.com. Click on a page to see a larger vesion.

The Language of Magic

As long as I've been alive, I've loved the idea of magic. The power, the thrill, the mastery, the mystery. Consequently I spent my formative years reading every fantasy book I could get my hands on. One notable thing, though, was that with one exception, no author ever spelled out what exactly the verbal component of a spell was, nor what magic runes looked like. That always rankled. I wanted specifics!

The closest to rules for magic came in the form of D&D, and although I admired it from afar, I never had a chance to play it. However, in the last six years I've collected almost all of the v.3 D&D books, and I came to the conclusion that they, too, missed an opportunity to specify what magic sounded like and what a mage actually said when casting a spell. So, I decided to do it myself.

Now that I have unlimited amounts of time I have embarked on a project to give voice to magic and to show an example of what a complete spell book might look like.

I listed all the spells in the D&D Player's Manual and the Spell Compendium. Then I had to figure out what a person would be saying in terms of content. The Transmutation spell "Mage Hand" which allows a magic user to move small objects I decided said, "move by my power". This would be the content of the spell.

Then I had to find a magical language which would be the actually spoken word. I decided to use the only explicit magical language I'd ever read of, from Margaret Weis and Tracy Hickman's Dragonlance series, where wizards speak Magius, the language of magic.

That language, however, is only partially translated and has a small and incomplete lexicon. So, I have been making new words to go along with the verse of the spell. I'm literally creating a new langauge! Although it's really just a cypher of English.

Finally, I used Blambot's "Dark Arts" font to make a written version of the magical language, and the final result of all this is a table laying it all out.

Here is the first page which contains all of the level 0 spells.

And to complete the project, I'm also making an example of what a mage's spellbook might look like. It's composed of various layers, and the circles and glowing runes I pulled from redheadstock's Deviant Art page. The fonts vary, but I reused Blambot's Dark Arts and their Wizard Speak font.

Everything on the page has meaning: the top left rune is the spell level (0) in Wizard Speak. The script at the top is the written version of Magius. Below that (right) is the Magius translation and below that is the verse. On the left side is the rule book's description of the spell, and on the bottom right is the reagent used for the spell (if any) as well as any focus used. And of course, at the very bottom is the name of the spell. If you could highlight all the magic script and change it to a regular font, you'd see normal, readable prose. The rune in the center is the rune I chose to represent the Transmutation school of magic, to which this spell belongs.

Anywho, I know it's the ultimate in nerdishness, but it's a fun project. And a long one. I've now done all the level 0 and level 1 spells, and it's taken me two weeks. *whew. Only 859 more spells to go. Wish me luck!

Lessons in the note that is Reiki

When I was 15, I took Level I Reiki from a great teacher, Beth Gray, and Level II from an even greater teacher, Colleen Kennard. I practiced it for 12 years. It has made me, in many ways, the person I am, both for good and ill. Here are my life lessons from that reality, in my own words!


"Some things I have learned about Reiki, and through Reiki a little about life and myself . . ."

Reiki is not a philosophy or a religion or even a spiritual path. It is a form of healing that requires no scalpel or needle or pill. As it was given to Usui, it is a powerful, complete and simple way of restoring the body to health, if given enough time. Do not mistake it for metaphysics or mysticism.

Reiki is not an exercise in techniques, it is a system so simple that a child can learn it, and apply it with as much success as an adult. There are the attunements, there are the hand positions, and there is the patience to thoroughly cover a person’s entire body with the hands to fill it with Reiki. That is all.

Boredom and creativity are the anti-Christ’s of Reiki. To come to the massage table with just your hands and your intention to do Reiki, without getting caught up in the impulse to “be creative” and use entertaining techniques and extra symbols and all the other forms of alternative healing – to simply sit there, for minutes or hours at a time and just let the Reiki flow THAT is bravery and discipline. Are you up to trying some discipline?

When you are attuned to Reiki, your hands become the most powerful diagnostic tools that a human can have. Through them, you can feel the pull of the energy in the client’s body. You can feel where they need more, and you gently slip your hand to cover that area. Some people can feel vibrations or tingling or pulsing or even movement, but they all boil down to the same event – the client’s body pulling Reiki through you, and your hands telling how and why it’s doing so. Listen to your hands. I say again, listen to your hands.

Being a Reiki channel does not make you healer. Many are called, few are chosen. If you were not born with the personality and the constitution of someone who is here to “heal” people, Reiki will not give it to you. But, that does not mean that Reiki will not help you or help others through you. Simply recognize the truth of whether you are genuinely here to make sick people well, or if you are simply trying something new and interesting.

Power is a dangerous reality to be given, and Reiki is actual, REAL power. It can literally change living things. Because of this, people have abused its simplicity and manifested all kinds of unhelpful energies, using the symbols and initiations to make them real. There is no real benefit in this. Look to the way Usui, Hayashi and Takata practiced Reiki – with discipline, simplicity, patience and integrity.

Reiki heals best that which it is made to heal. What is Reiki? It is a concentrated form of life-force energy. If the cause, or the effect, of an illness is the depletion of life-force, Reiki often creates what appear to be miraculous recoveries. I have seen it. But, more often than not, life-force is not the cause, or the effect, of the problem, and Reiki requires time, sometimes lots of it, to make a significant difference. This is where patience and discipline, of both the channel and the client, are required to make Usui Shiki Ryoho work.

Perhaps the most important thing to be forewarned about being a Reiki channel is this – if you do not practice the Triangle of Giving, Reiki will lead you astray. There are three aspects of Reiki that should be practiced – giving Reiki to yourself, giving Reiki to others, and receiving Reiki PASSIVELY from other people. Each is has an important role in keeping both the energy and the activity of Reiki balanced in your life. Not only your body, your life.

- When we give Reiki to ourselves, we keep ourselves tuned in to the ebbs and flows of our own bodies. We fill ourselves up so that we are always ready to give Reiki to others.

- When we give Reiki to others, especially those who actually need it (hint – people with genuine illness, esp severe ones), we learn the life lessons of humanity: birth, death, tragedy, recovery, growth, connection and above all simply being a presence in someone else’s life. No amount of reading, seminars or seat-warming at Reiki conferences will give you that. I suggest you go out, find someone with AIDS or cancer or leukemia, and give them Reiki, every day for three months. And prove to yourself that Reiki is here to heal bodies, not titillate your spiritual curiosity.

- And finally, receiving Reiki passively from others is the ultimate way of giving to yourself. You can let go and let someone else do the driving, and this lets us experience rest. Real rest. From burdens, from cares, from responsibilities and from internal conflicts. Giving to yourself by receiving Reiki is good for your soul AND your self-identity, and it builds trust, it builds Reiki communities, and it just feels . . . good.

Let me end by saying that becoming a Reiki channel was the most miraculous thing that has ever happened to me, but I’m also glad that I don’t practice it any more because I know better. My life has been the lessons learned above, and I did it the hard way.

Namaste

ZULE!

Yes, we're somebody

So, I don't normally go in for political rhetoric, nor am I prone to soap-box preaching, but after watching the Wal-mart Documentary, I felt I should express something that has long been in my heart - we are losing the freedom to have Unions and to therefore negotiate with companies as equals.

For twenty years, in the early part of the last century, people fought and actually died so that American citizens could have the right to create unions, the purpose of which was to guarantee good wages, decent working conditions, and give us all some moderate leverage over our corporate masters. Now, that right is all but extinct.

Most people now can't even name a union, the purpose of a union, or name anyone they know that's in a union. Corporate America has made it seem like unionizing is immoral and undesirable. And, from their point of view that's very true. However, if we as a people do not exercise and flex that right to negotiate as equals with businesses, then it is a right that will wither and die, and we will be no better off than the mill workers of Victorian England, who lost hands, eyes, lives and limbs for mere pennies a day and with no hope for recourse. And, sadly, that's not as big an exaggeration as you might think.

At my present job, the few people I've ever heard talk about unions do so in a dead-whisper; no one dares to even suggest that people should unionize in current corporations. Yes, it's true that unions have earned bad reputations by becoming their own bureaucratic nightmares but that's true of just about any human institution, and is sort of inevitable. The actual right to group-negotiate is a hard won freedom that is not being employed, pursued, or reinforced.

Sadly, I'm reminded of the fact that our culture is, in many ways, backsliding into allowing fewer freedoms in the name and sake of global economy and greater profits. In some sense, the Dilbert comic strip (which I happen to love) is a sad commentary of our lives because it satirizes, and unfortunately in doing so validates, the fact that the people at the top of companies care nothing for those who work for them, but only of the "bottom line" and their shareholders.

In short, Americans have given up thinking we have the right to control our own work-lives. And it may well be, in x number of years from now, we will be no better off than people in other countries who can fired or harmed for presuming to have as many rights as a corporation.

Think about it.

ps. The pluralization of friends in the slogan is intended - I feel that friendship and unionization go hand-in-hand, because they're both something we do for both ourselves AND each other. Friendship is the first step in a collective identity.