![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
Conjuctions, connections and confluence
Dec. 31st, 2020 01:01 am(Apologies, this is very rambly and vaguewidth-y, even for me)
I'm an occasional believer in shufflemancy. Take a bunch of songs and put them on shuffle. Fade out, observe, but don't connect, like you're staring at clouds. Witness what shapes and thoughts leap out at you. It's not unlike Tarot or any other divination; at its least mystical, it's just another tool that acts as a roundabout way to ask your brain what it's thinking. At it's most, it's messages creeping up on you when you least expect it.
Any sort of media is shufflemancy if you let it. And sometimes when you're just hammered by coincidences, it can be a trigger to focus yourself on a central theme that's been buzzing at the back of your head for an age.
One other useful practice I've noticed is that when I'm going through an emotional state that I don't know how I'll handle, I'll write it here. Even when I don't think it's going to be read, I write it here, and when I publish it, it's frequently easier. Sometimes it turns into a non-issue. It doesn't always work, but forcing me to put something to words means that I have to dismantle a thing into something smaller that I can describe in words.
I think it's sometimes useful to do that with coincidences.
When I buy books in a store, I tend to buy at least 2. There's always one that I intend to read as soon as possible, and there are others that look interesting but I put on the back burner. Or rather, one serves an immediate purpose (whether I intend to read it or to give it as a gift), and the other's deferred.
Last year I bought some books. One I devoured, along with others. Any time I looked at the other, I remembered that I bought it because I'd enjoyed some of the author's short stories, but never one of her novels. But I kept ignoring it because while it was interesting, it didn't feel time.
This time was different. I had specific plans before COVID. I still have those plans, but all the restrictions forced me to slow down. Sometimes I feel like the restrictions will lift and I'll be no more prepared, even though I'm still making progress, slow as it is. Then, at the start of my leave, I did two things. I signed up to Duolingo, and I found this book while trying to cut down on the amount of stuff in my room.
I found "The Parable of the Sower" by Octavia E. Butler, and even just looking at it, it felt right to read. I'd forgotten about it, only knowing that I'd devoured the other book in that bag, and left that one to ripen. Now I'm reading it, and the mood matches a lot of what I feel. That cardinal energy restlessness, the survivor mode saying, "Sure, it's fine now... but am I prepared for what's next". It's a well-written reminder that What's Next will happen regardless of how prepared you are, and that it may be overwhelming no matter how you've conditioned your body and mind. But it doesn't make that preparation useless. It just means that real life is different from training, no matter how much you do.
(I also found it funny how, just a day before I found the book, I thought, "If I was ever famous enough to have an audience for a book about my life, I'd write it as a set of short stories, all focused around specific parts of my life, rather than a linear narrative". Even though the parable is written as a diary, I feel the spirit of it would allow for it. It's just a minor conjunction, but it feels worth mentioning.)
Literary Shufflemancy.
Makes sense in a way. I recently bought a Tarot deck that I feel I can connect to. One that doesn't just remix the RW imagery, trying to cling to ancient symbols and hidden mysticism, but one that uses different archetypes, and raw imagery to represent the same energies. I feel good when I use it. It doesn't feel grumpy, it just feels like it's trying to use a better language to work with me.
So the book appearing feels like a notable coincidence. Something that reminds me of that feeling of stuckness, and that feeling of that Jupiter-Saturn conjunction; the bonsai kitten of the solar system's energies... bound growth. The focus on what's next when you can't just step into it.
Then last night I watched one of the new episodes Big Mouth. It's not a show that delves deep, but it can lay the occasional gut-punch. But this was different. This episode had a nod to "Earthseed", and it seemed to be lifted directly from the book, to the point that the character they chose could easily have been the book's protagonist.
Another coincidence, no huge insight, but I'm writing it down. Sometimes you just have to acknowledge it.
I've honestly got no clue what's going to happen, but I realise I'm slowly building some level of confidence. And it feels like part of this is because I'm slowly, with the help of friends, beginning to ((re-)re-?)discover a connection with me... and, god forbid, my body. The Duolingo course is doing more than I thought it would; I'm rediscovering the joy of learning, and I'm in love with the idea of slowly teaching my brain to express itself differently. I love looking at words, and slowly piecing together what some of them mean, like how a rhino translates to "Nose Horn", or how the verb to walk sounds like a type of lazy walk that's made its way into the English language. It's kind of cool.
But I'm also building confidence in other aspects of myself. It's different this time. It doesn't feel like finally finding a sense of flow in life, but it feels like I could. It feels like the point of training isn't just to have reflexive responses to a situation, but that they're something where the competency is unconscious, but the control is very conscious. It's not just stimulus and reflex.
It's a full moon tonight, the moon in its home on the last day of the year. It seems fitting. Something to propel us into the year, rather than an eclipse (although this year's eclipses feels like the closing parenthesis to the opening parenthesis of last year's eclipses)
I've never tracked with the idea of New Year's resolutions. But I never felt I had a goal. Personally, a resolution doesn't stand unless it's part of something bigger. It can't just be erected as a vanity piece, it needs to be erected to bear load. Then it becomes something else.
I'm still not making resolutions, but I've got a goal, so I'll do things to support that goal. But I need to remember that the goal isn't the end, it's just a beginning. It's probably only the beginning of an experiment that, itself, may succeed or fail. But I hope that any resolution, or action I take, props up that experiment's chances of success.
I'm an occasional believer in shufflemancy. Take a bunch of songs and put them on shuffle. Fade out, observe, but don't connect, like you're staring at clouds. Witness what shapes and thoughts leap out at you. It's not unlike Tarot or any other divination; at its least mystical, it's just another tool that acts as a roundabout way to ask your brain what it's thinking. At it's most, it's messages creeping up on you when you least expect it.
Any sort of media is shufflemancy if you let it. And sometimes when you're just hammered by coincidences, it can be a trigger to focus yourself on a central theme that's been buzzing at the back of your head for an age.
One other useful practice I've noticed is that when I'm going through an emotional state that I don't know how I'll handle, I'll write it here. Even when I don't think it's going to be read, I write it here, and when I publish it, it's frequently easier. Sometimes it turns into a non-issue. It doesn't always work, but forcing me to put something to words means that I have to dismantle a thing into something smaller that I can describe in words.
I think it's sometimes useful to do that with coincidences.
When I buy books in a store, I tend to buy at least 2. There's always one that I intend to read as soon as possible, and there are others that look interesting but I put on the back burner. Or rather, one serves an immediate purpose (whether I intend to read it or to give it as a gift), and the other's deferred.
Last year I bought some books. One I devoured, along with others. Any time I looked at the other, I remembered that I bought it because I'd enjoyed some of the author's short stories, but never one of her novels. But I kept ignoring it because while it was interesting, it didn't feel time.
This time was different. I had specific plans before COVID. I still have those plans, but all the restrictions forced me to slow down. Sometimes I feel like the restrictions will lift and I'll be no more prepared, even though I'm still making progress, slow as it is. Then, at the start of my leave, I did two things. I signed up to Duolingo, and I found this book while trying to cut down on the amount of stuff in my room.
I found "The Parable of the Sower" by Octavia E. Butler, and even just looking at it, it felt right to read. I'd forgotten about it, only knowing that I'd devoured the other book in that bag, and left that one to ripen. Now I'm reading it, and the mood matches a lot of what I feel. That cardinal energy restlessness, the survivor mode saying, "Sure, it's fine now... but am I prepared for what's next". It's a well-written reminder that What's Next will happen regardless of how prepared you are, and that it may be overwhelming no matter how you've conditioned your body and mind. But it doesn't make that preparation useless. It just means that real life is different from training, no matter how much you do.
(I also found it funny how, just a day before I found the book, I thought, "If I was ever famous enough to have an audience for a book about my life, I'd write it as a set of short stories, all focused around specific parts of my life, rather than a linear narrative". Even though the parable is written as a diary, I feel the spirit of it would allow for it. It's just a minor conjunction, but it feels worth mentioning.)
Literary Shufflemancy.
Makes sense in a way. I recently bought a Tarot deck that I feel I can connect to. One that doesn't just remix the RW imagery, trying to cling to ancient symbols and hidden mysticism, but one that uses different archetypes, and raw imagery to represent the same energies. I feel good when I use it. It doesn't feel grumpy, it just feels like it's trying to use a better language to work with me.
So the book appearing feels like a notable coincidence. Something that reminds me of that feeling of stuckness, and that feeling of that Jupiter-Saturn conjunction; the bonsai kitten of the solar system's energies... bound growth. The focus on what's next when you can't just step into it.
Then last night I watched one of the new episodes Big Mouth. It's not a show that delves deep, but it can lay the occasional gut-punch. But this was different. This episode had a nod to "Earthseed", and it seemed to be lifted directly from the book, to the point that the character they chose could easily have been the book's protagonist.
Another coincidence, no huge insight, but I'm writing it down. Sometimes you just have to acknowledge it.
I've honestly got no clue what's going to happen, but I realise I'm slowly building some level of confidence. And it feels like part of this is because I'm slowly, with the help of friends, beginning to ((re-)re-?)discover a connection with me... and, god forbid, my body. The Duolingo course is doing more than I thought it would; I'm rediscovering the joy of learning, and I'm in love with the idea of slowly teaching my brain to express itself differently. I love looking at words, and slowly piecing together what some of them mean, like how a rhino translates to "Nose Horn", or how the verb to walk sounds like a type of lazy walk that's made its way into the English language. It's kind of cool.
But I'm also building confidence in other aspects of myself. It's different this time. It doesn't feel like finally finding a sense of flow in life, but it feels like I could. It feels like the point of training isn't just to have reflexive responses to a situation, but that they're something where the competency is unconscious, but the control is very conscious. It's not just stimulus and reflex.
It's a full moon tonight, the moon in its home on the last day of the year. It seems fitting. Something to propel us into the year, rather than an eclipse (although this year's eclipses feels like the closing parenthesis to the opening parenthesis of last year's eclipses)
I've never tracked with the idea of New Year's resolutions. But I never felt I had a goal. Personally, a resolution doesn't stand unless it's part of something bigger. It can't just be erected as a vanity piece, it needs to be erected to bear load. Then it becomes something else.
I'm still not making resolutions, but I've got a goal, so I'll do things to support that goal. But I need to remember that the goal isn't the end, it's just a beginning. It's probably only the beginning of an experiment that, itself, may succeed or fail. But I hope that any resolution, or action I take, props up that experiment's chances of success.
