In The Garden Living an RPG Life

It’s challenging for me to take steps forward that land on areas I can’t see.  Yes, there are people that are on the landscape I am heading to.  And yes, they are willing to guide me.  However, they can’t take the steps for me, they can’t see where my feet are heading.  Could very well be that the very stones they stepped on are holes under my feet.

First of all, the people in question are both men.  I don’t know if that really matters in the long run.  It could affect the shape of the stepping though.  We’ll see.

So… I’ve been spending even more time in Second Life. Now that I have land and gardens, I feel at home. That means that I have places to work and bring guests to talk. Or walk on the moon!

I was brought to Second Life by the presence of Serge King and Aloha International. Pali Uli (Samoans call it Bali Hai!) is where I call my spirit home. It is another place I get to talk. This talking is telling stories and showing off our avatars and other gadgets. Nothing like sitting in the starlight and sending off little bursts of light that look like fireflies.

From time to time, I get to sit and send up firefly looking things with my friend, Kahu (Graeme Kapono Urlich in Real Life), a Huna healer. Other times we just hang out and chat. Ever sit and just chat with a healer? It’s some of the loveliest energy. It’s the fragrance of a garden in the early morning, a subtle green scent with the hint of flowers. It’s the sharp scent of geraniums when he holds my casual comments to the principles of Huna.

The other night I got to sit with him and Serge King. It was at the end of an interesting day of telling personal stories. A couple of days before that, I had been reading Wallace D. Wattles’ The Science of Getting Rich and wrote out what I wanted my wealth to be. I’ve been frustrated by my inability to choose or focus on a single path. That’s what we’re supposed to do, right? Pick a career and devote our attention to it?

My feeling has always been that I wanted to do something creative and that I wanted to change the world, make it feel better. Wattles helped me see that the energy to do all this didn’t come from me or anything I was born with. It comes from the universe itself, its desire to become, to increase and grow. It was just for me to organize it into my own actions and environments. I had to choose where to focus my attention so it would know where to grow, what to shape itself into and flourish.

I had two lists. I had matched up all but the last item on each. The ones that were left? Healer and story. I’d felt that connection before but didn’t know what to do with it. After that night of telling and listening to stories, I knew.I’ve wanted to put the shaman perspective into writing for a long time. At first it was the idea of creating a shaman critical theory, reading texts through a shaman’s perspective. I didn’t because I didn’t know enough. I let it go. Now, after the connection between healer and story this time, after the night of story sharing in Pali Uli, after spending the last year and some working with Huna, I am ready to take the next step and bring Huna fully into my writing.How? Easy! Rather than engaging the Hero’s Journey in story, look for the path of the Adventurer. The idea that the seven principles formed a path came to me during one of Serge’s Talk Stories, a couple of months ago. That idea has finally resolved into this next step. I don’t know how it will turn out, of course. This is only one more stone on the path.

Meanwhile, I’ve got a lot of clearing out to do. It’s time to make space and time for the work of writing. Later!

Spending so much time in SL means that I am sitting still in my body, so still that when I finally get up I am craving motion.  My physical body doesn’t really know it’s not been moving since I seem to be doing all kinds of other things with it.  I eat less being filled up by the cretive activities in SL between conversations.  When I finally get outside after work usually or before work when I’m on at night, it’s the Real Air that Im most conscious of. I don’t remember noticing how sweet it smells!

I look at trees differently, wondering how they might be reproduced in SL or how the landscaping might be copied with what I have in my inventory.  I really love looking at the houses in my neighborhood.  Always have, and now I do it with a builder’s eye.  Around my house, I look at textures, collections of things, wondering how I might use them as avatars, skins and particles.

So what am I doing? I’ve said in the past that I want to tell my story.  I didn’t then and don’t now know what I meant by that.  A picture is emerging, though, of an ongoing process.  This SL stuff seems to be part of it.  SL allows me to tell parts of my story in a way that other media wouldn’t.  I tell the story in each conversation I have with people I meet casually, each class I participate in, each attempt I make to build or script, each teleport.

Just before I entered the world, I had decided that I would take my final degree in Creative Writing.  I quickly realized that I really don’t have a creative writing background, just talent and desire.  I don’t have a writing practice.  Enter Second Life and this realization of telling my own story.  I’d felt that SL was not a detour or distraction from writing.  Rather, it’s trying to show me something about myself that I didn’t yet know and that I needed to.  It’s answering my need for background.

I’m not investigating how, though. Not yet.  I know though that it’s working out perfectly. The limits I’ve sought to contain my ideas and creativty have been put aside while I find new and more effective ones.  My attention is still on creativity, on storymaking as I explore this new media and ask how its tools contribute to storytelling and story making.  Letting myself live in the moment of the play, of being in or out of the world, of doing research or housework, I don’t add judgement or stress to my life.

I get to see how play really feels and what it contributes to creativity.  Not play as distraction but play as a means to go deeper. Mostly I am happy.  And everyone around me in or out of the Life knows it.  I have home and family to play with and around.  There is not the same opportunity for fear in SL, of course.  I can’t break things I play with, can’t get hurt by falling, so… I get to do things like fall from 500 meters up! and indulge my tendency to “see what happens if I…”!Boy does that leave me feeling happy.

The most challenging part of this adventure, though, is what to do with what I discover.  That’s where the power to create the path through an MFA, or anything else I want, will come from.  I get to re-view my planning behavior in this new environment.  I get to see how effective old habits are and if necessary start building new ones.

Building things is what this world is about after all.  I can either accept what others have built, learn how to build from others, or do things on my own.  Whichever way I choose and proceed on, I’ll know that the path is true for me, because it will work.Things will continue to improve in my ordinary life without my direct attention, and I’ll find myself on the receiving end of that MFA degree!

On the map, it looks like there are normal city blocks. That’s another of the illusions in this virtual world. There are no areas that correspond to what I think of as city blocks. I look around me to find something that looks like a corner to orient myself to and can only find rocks and trees. How do I get across the street? How do I move from this location on my map to that other one when it doesn’t correspond to my personal references? And I don’t have someone on the other side that can teleport me anywhere.

I’ve been thinking about how to describe myself lately. Being in Second Life has put me in the position of seeing myself in such a different perspective that I really have to think about it. Think about telling me as I feel myself to be. My avatar in the world is as much like me as I think I want. My hair is longer. I’m a little thinner. Generally though, it looks something likes me. But, who am I other than my appearance? What am I interested in? What is my profile to tell the world about both of me?

I don’t play video games so this Second Life thing is as much a game as anything else seems to be.  The difference is that the game I’m playing is still my life.  Interesting.  I spend more time among spirit workers than I do among partyers, though.  I’ve taken a couple of classes.  I’ve also had a really deep relaxation.  These are not the kinds of things one might find in a video game.  Why not?  What would such a game be like?  Why isn’t there such a game?  Of course, it’s because the economics don’t support it.  What if?

I’m still not sure about my voyage into Second Life. It’s a little too familiar already. It too much mirrors my own waking dream states. The beauty is that I can visit with friends there. Friends I’ve made in other places on the internet. This means that there is not such a stretch between one form of visiting and another. In one world, I am chatting through text. In another I am chatting through speech because I’m on Skype. In the third world, the one of Second Life, I’m doing both and watching it while it happens. I seem real.

Whew! It’s been a long time it seems. I’m not counting NaNoWriMo though it’s a significant amount of writing. I’m thinking about the incidental writing I started on 100words.com, that exactly 100 word post we are supposed to create. I’ve found since I started that practice (and let it slip for a while) that I like the idea of using the form to write stories. There is just enough room in that many words to create a complete, if very short, story. There’s room to establish place and time and person. There’s room to finish with some emotion. What there isn’t very much room for is build up to action, character devleopment, maybe a couple of other things.

I decided that I would pursue the story idea by setting up a single situation that has a beginning, middle and end: crossing the street. You must admit there is a lot of potential for all kinds of things to unfold in such a storyscape. I already published a few for the month of February. I’m going to keep it as my theme for this month and see how it goes. In another place I did something similar, writing one hundred words at a time to create a story. I hadn’t been able to squeeze the whole thing in a single hundred words, though. Ended up with, I think, three hundred. Still very short.

I know I started a knitting theme here and I haven’t dropped it. Knitting is both a practice and a metaphor, though. The blog is where all gets knitted together into a single garment. Kinda like the knitted shirts in the story. Don’t ask me which story! There are a few versions. The one I know it by is The Seven Swans. I watch on Jim Henson’s The Storyteller as some smaller number of ravens, three I think. Anyway, the point is that I see those finished garments as somehow representing aspects of themselves that the boys had lost or forgotten with the death of their mother and father’s remarriage. Or at least that’s what came to me just now! I hadn’t given the idea a single thought before this moment. Wonder why now?

Meanwhile, I have to start dusting off my writing since I decided that I am applying for an MFA in creative writing. This is almost out of the blue, not quite. Remember that call to adventure Chris Baty posted on the NaNoWriMo site? That’s all it takes. Someone putting out a call that resonates with me at the right time and “poof!”, it all comes together. Kinda like being an overnight sensation after working at it for twenty-odd years. I’ve been gradually going public with the decision since moving too fast usually had the result of pushing me into my fear zone and not letting me out. Almost got stuck in there earlier today. I was feeling like I was just dreaming of something that I couldn’t have, wasn’t qualified for, when I got into conversation with a friend, who studies art. There was something about sitting with her and just talking that got me seeing what it means to be a writer. No, strike that: what it means for me to be a writer.

First of all, it finally registered that I prefer writing to anything else. I will write, albeit posts in forums, when I will only dream about knitting or quilting or any of the other creative things I do. I used to complain that my drawing journals filled up with words faster than with drawings. I guess I’m letting go the idea that I will have drawing journals anymore, right? Nope! In fact, the way I knew that this decision was probably not just another daydream is the way other elements in my life stepped back in importance. Suddenly all were willing to serve the writing in a way I’ve never experienced before. That’s the experience I hold onto when I am in doubt.

The hardest thing in the process may be defining myself as a writer. And then again, it may not. There may be no hard thing in the process, just things I haven’t addressed yet. I’m trusting my greater self here. It’s not let me down before, so I don’t expect that it will this time. I just have to remember how to hold my mind in patience. There’s lots of stuff to do between now and whenever I send the application in. My plan is to make the January 2009 application date (and yes, I will triple check that that’s the right date). I was briefly considering November, but that’s saved for NaNo. Who knows! Maybe writing a novel every November is what I’m meant to do with my life. It wouldn’t be a bad purpose.

OK. That’s enough catching up for now. Gotta write more stories.

I’ve been off the blog attending to other matters, matters that seemed as though they had nothing to do with knitting.  Now that the shift in attention is more or less complete, I’m finding that since everything is connected, I might as well come out.

I’ve been in pursuit of Magic since I first noticed that I looked at the world a little differently.  I remember sitting in my grandmother’s living room watching dust motes and wondering which of them were really fairies.  In junior high, I would stop at the same place on the way to the bus stop and know that fairies lived there and wanted my attention.  No, I was not expecting little flying things to show up.  Even the dust mote leavings were not going to be little winged things.

Over time, atomic occurrences of another behavior collected themselves into proper molecule.  Daydreaming.  I remember my father snapping me out of daydreaming when we rode the subway together on our way to the playground where he worked.  He didn’t like that one of my eyes wandered off.  Apparently this is how I kept my attention on both worlds at the same time.  Where was I?  Still have no idea all these decades later.  I’m getting closer to understanding, though.  I still don’t have a name for it.

I remember an occasion when I was in Elementary school.  What I remember about it is that I was walking down the front stairway and a girl went by going the other way.  “Oh.  That’s what it was”, or something like that was my thought.  I had had a Daydream, reverie or whatever you call it, that showed me something.  This was that something.

I’m not someone who is so fluid as to be always immersed in such seeing.  I don’t know if that’s because I ‘m not wired for it or because the circumstances of my growing up put a resistor on it, keeping me from going there very often.  It wasn’t until I was away at college that the amount of daydreaming I was doing seemed overwhelming.  I had begun to feel that there was much more to what I was doing.  Not just the occaisional, and up to then, passive and just before sleep, stuff.  I began to feel that work could be done.

That was when I began considering myself as a shaman.  No, not in this culture.  I imagined that in another place or another time the attitude of daydreaming would have indicated some kind of spiritual intelligence that would be fostered and put to use for the benefit of a community.  I would have some work tasks that allowed me to be both physically and spiritually productive.  Then I got the Call.

It came in the form of a not very big breakdown.  An anxiety state, is what the doctor called it.  Its effect was to pry me loose from what was safe and familiar and allow me to leave on my first real Adventure.  I’d been away to college, out of state, and as far from the life of the city as I could get.  This was different.  I got on a bus and moved to California with nothing planned.  Ended up in San Francisco where I began to notice that there was, in print anyway, a Neo-shaman movement. At least the word shaman was mentioned and it wasn’t in the context of traditional practice.  I was on the right track thinking that I would have to be a different kind of shaman, if indeed I was to be one.

After a few years of feeling my way around the new neighborhood, and taking the step of following my Shadow into a new career, I met Debora.  She was the first person I’d met that I felt connected to.  And she was an Adventurer.  He is the one through whom I found the first description of Magic that made sense to me.  I just read it a couple of days ago.  It was from Max Freedom Long’s book — .  I’d found my touchstone.  Too bad, I thought, that it was such an old one and that I was quite unlikely to find something more modern.

Wrong.  Thanks to Debora, I met Abraham Kawai’I, and had the dreaming experience of my life!  When I finally agreed to go to hear him speak, I was both elated and disappointed.  I was elated at the amount of information I was saying yes to.  Don’t remember a word of it now, though.  Oh, wait!  I do.  There was the idea that you could “tell fortunes” just looking at pages in a magazine.  (Note to Self:  A good thing to revisit).  Just hold the question in mind and open at random.  Not a new idea now, but at the time, over twenty years ago, it was.  Generally, it was this idea, that things weren’t needed to do the work, that it was the person, who used the world as it was.  The disappointment was that I was told, “You already know this,” and was back on my own.

For the following years, I tried to figure out what the heck that meant.  Exactly what did I know and how do I apply it?  How do I organize my life so that I am not in the way of what has to happen?  Most importantly, whom do I serve?  That last one is still kind of odd to me, that sense that I must serve someone.

Much of the questioning has been answered, finally, by the several years I spent training in Aikido.  Through that practice with its emphasis on Ki and the community’s inclusion of the Pathwork system, I acquired experience and some skill with Being Me.  I learned, for instance, just how sensitive I was to Ki, or The Force, if you will.  Probably, of all that discovery, recognizing how much information was also being communicated to someone sensitive enough to notice it was the most important.  I wasn’t daydreaming in class.  You can’t in that kind of environment.  In moments of meditation though, I could fill my field with roses, say, and Sensei might respond, “The scent of flowers”.  Or, I might have a question, and forming it into a ball, “bounce pass” it to Sensei, who would answer.    I learned that I could prepare myself for teaching a class by visiting with them in my head first.  I would then be prepared for practical issues.

In fact, this being prepared is what I’ve come to believe being moderately psychic is good for.  The attack on the Twin Towers was one of those visits, one of those, Oh, that’s what that was about” moments.  Another purpose, I learned in the dojo, seems to be helpful in creating or soothing relationships.  I’d spent some time imagining I was playing one of our games with someone I was having a hard time getting to know or feeling comfortable working with.  Taking a clue from Sensei, I engaged him in the game with no other intent.  Next day, he comes up to me and sits down and starts talking with me.  We were so engaged that Sensei had to tell us to be quiet!  When it was time to sit on the mat, my newly made friend plopped himself next to me.  We had a great time working together that day.  Absolutely a first for us and a totally different side of him, for me.

All of this is still casual, still not purposeful, not in service.  Even my communication with people on the Huna forum is like this.  Um, Huna is what Long called Hawai’ian Magic.  In between Long and Huna Trainer, I’d found Serge Kahili King’s Urban Shaman.  Exactly the thing I was looking for.  At least the title was.  And some of the stuff inside.  Between King and Huna Trainer, came Aikido.  I thought I had finally found my community of service.  I was a first level black belt, had started working with the children’s class, and had even co-created a couple of workshops for a women’s class.  Evidently, this was not the place, either.  Oh, did I mention I’d met a Cherokee shaman while I was there?  Yep.  More interesting stuff happened.  I learned more about reading the environment .  This time it was cars on the road as messengers.  (Note to Self: There’s a pattern here.  Find it.)

Ok. Now I’m up to Huna Trainer.  It started as a podcast and became an online forum that I became part of as quickly as I could by submitting pieces for the podcasts second incarnation.  The forum is part of the reason I’m writing this.  It’s a group of people who are in similar practice.  But it’s more than that.  It’s also a group of people with experiences similar to mine.   And now that I feel settled in and more connected to the people rather than the group, some old questions are floating to the surface.  What exactly do I know and what do I do with it?  How does it work?

I’m back in pursuit of Magic.  Reading the original words in this changed context is telling me that now’s the time to put things into perspective.  When I started this journey, I was on my own.  I didn’t know how to talk about my experiences or sometimes even form the questions.  Since I’ve heard others’ stories framed in a common language I have a place to start.

Here.  Now.

I’m only a little surprised that I have already made the first steps on my Adventure.  I found some much needed advice and a toolkit to carry.  DIYplanner.com and 43Folders.com are delightfully geeky and just what I need.  Between them I’ve accumulated both the reasons and the means for having and organizing ideas without sitting down with the big book and figuring it all out.

The treasure is a deconstruction of productivity concepts embedded in a constructed daily planner.  It’s as if I ordered a bunch of spirit helpers to go out and find/create the tools I needed to get on with my plans and ideas.

My favorite part so far, ok one of my favorite parts, is the collection of writer’s pages complete with variations on story boards. One of my other favorite parts is the templates.  These are the patterns the pages were created from.  The idea is to either modify (hack) the pages to better suit your own needs or to create pages of your own design to enclose activities no one else is working on.

I spent the last few days reading and evaluating the sites for myself while taking in a little bit at a time.  One of my favorite people seems to be a hero on the sites–Ben Franklin.  Not that I’ve studied him or anything.  Just something about his creativity and the profusion of his ideas and adventures.  He was my kind of Adventurer and this seems to be my time for trying to follow his trail.

Finally finding a use for all the 3×5 cards I’ve piled up, I printed out the Hipster PDA.  This is a good idea since I use my PDA so often that the battery totally drained and I lost all my data.  The thing about digital systems is that they are inflexible.  They force us to bend to their limits instead of serving ours.  This is probably why the people on these sites are techies–programmers and the like.  They know better than anyone the value of working on paper and the need for a flexible system.

My new motto is going to be: Look to the Geek!

Oh, and one of the page designs seems to suit itself really well for jotting down knitting patterns as I make them up!  The layout is perfect.  Since I’m using the 3×5 cards as a carry-around, I may have to scan the little pages to do something else with them.  We’ll see.  That the pages are loose and can be moved around with ease makes using the system more functional than my usual journal.  The 3×5 system is a simple way to start, a way to find out what works and what doesn’t.

Meanwhile, the basis for much of what got all of this started is reading about Getting Things Done.  Evidently there’s a big book about it, productivity, and lots of people have read it.  The people I’m reading have digested it and put it to use and simplified it.  In other words, hacked it.  Life Hacker is where I got directed to from Ravelry.

Knitting and writing: two worlds that provide more than just entertainment and relaxation.  The creator of DIYplanner also does NaNoWriMo.  That’s it! Anyone worth knowing will be found either writing in November or knitting anytime.

More on the Adventure as I go.  Meanwhile, I have a yellow sweater to finish.