Any Change may bear seeds of benefit

Any Change may bear seeds of benefit.

Seek them out.

Any Change may bear seeds of harm.

Beware,

God is infinitely malleable.

God is Change.

—Earthseed: The Books of the Living

Sword, Stone, Hourglass, and Hearth

River Rock Triangle Shawl

3 Skeins of Woolstok 150

Ten Days to complete

52” selvedge edge

Gravel Road, Grey Harbor, and Storm Cloud

Prime

Slowly, I am regaining my mornings, now, welcoming the hour of Prime.

This seems just right as the earth tips into Autumn, a gentle easing through the predawn dark.

The darkness holds me as I check news and texts, lends a sense of ritual to making tea and putting on gym clothes. My trainers feel like a uniform as I secure the laces and walk out of the building with the first rays of light. 

This is my favorite time of year.

The air is a perfect chill, inviting me to walk around one block, then another, before going up the steps to the gym, the glass doors sliding open to spill cool light onto the concrete steps. Inside, the October greetings are quieter than summer greetings, but no less welcoming. Good morning, good morning, hi girl, good morning, good to see you our convocation litany invoking the new day and tolling the canonical hour. The laps around the track are walking meditations -- jogging seems reserved for brighter hours. The sun comes up fully as I leave the track and head to the steam room, the sauna, this restoration before I face the day's toils. 

There is reading, and then there is writing, but before either, there is tea, comfort in a cup as I kick off the trainers and shed the gym clothes, molting into my awake self, dropping the clothes into the washer. 

Reading.

Then writing.

Then, with a second cup of tea, the day begins. 

Slow Sunday

Another Slow Sunday, and Lord, how I needed it.

In the House of Elrond

Arcanaloth

Arcanaloths are sly, jackal-headed beings with humanoid bodies, but they can employ magic to take any humanoid form. They do so to gain the trust of creatures with whom they negotiate, replacing jackal snarls with winsome smiles.

Regardless of its chosen form, an arcanaloth appears well groomed, clothing itself in fine robes. Highly intelligent spellcasters who hunger for knowledge and power, arcanaloths command units of lesser yugoloths and maintain the contracts, records, and accounts of their kind.

Arcanaloths speak and write all languages, making them cunning diplomats and negotiators. An arcanaloth properly paid can broker treaties or alliances with subtlety and finesse, just as an arcanaloth who changes sides can easily turn the best-laid peace talks into all-out war. What the fiend demands in exchange for its time and talent is information, as well as powerful magic items that it can trade for even more information.

 

Nidificate

The last week has been a lot, and there have been moments of profound grace.

It's time for me to nidificate for a spell.

May Autumn be beautiful for us all.

Freedom walk

After work I read an essay, then felt the need to move.

It's a gorgeous October day, so I put on my trainers and bopped out the  door and walked down to the Henrietta Lacks statue and garden and then the Freedom Plaza.

At home at the home game

The Healing Wisdom of Self-Respect

“The most magical healing elixir I found is curing self judgment. Then you don’t have a weapon within yourself that someone else’s judgment can ignite. But it’s not about putting up walls like ‘This doesn’t affect me.’ No, I understand, I totally get it. That’s just not where I’m at now. You might think that way about me but I know I’m not that.”

Blue

 

Becoming

"I am not what happened to me, I am what I choose to become." - Carl Jung

Unpunishable

For reasons I don't understand, I am unpunishable.

When I was in the seventh grade, the same as Vivian is now, I was sent to a hyper religious fundamental private school. One afternoon after being forced to spend my recess cleaning the blackboard because I hadn't done my homework, I took the chalk and wrote The Declaration of Independence from Homework on the pristine board. The next day I was in the headmaster's office for my crime . He pulled out a paddle and told me to drop my jeans. I was appalled and said "you're an adult. And you're going to hit a child. With a board. For writing." "Yes" he replied. I complied and he hit me. I waited, silently, because Holy Mary that stung like sitting on a red anthill, something I had done back when I was six and wow. It took my breath away. Just as I figured he was waiting on me, he did it again. This time it didn't sting so much as it just *hurt*, and I was confused. While I was trying to figure out what the difference was, he did it again, and I wondered how long this would go on. I turned and looked at him, the sunlight slanting across his face and the paddle as he stood at the ready, behind me. "How long will this go on?" I asked. He sighed as if he were tired.

He was a quiet man, tall and thin and usually unseen in the halls of the small school. When he did make an appearance he often seemed uncomfortable at addressing the student body or parents, and usually had few words, quickly retreating off the stage. He looked like he wanted to do that now. "Until you cry," he said wearily. Oh. I took a deep sigh, and faced front again, squaring my bony hips up against the desk, spreading my fingers and planting my palms on the cold unfeeling surface. I looked out the window and said, not really to him, "this is going to take a while."

Perfect Storm Book Club

Aldus Huxley's Brave New World reinterprets Shakespeare's Tempest with a then-modern twist of displaying technology as the poisonous vehicle that spawns the new world order, a division wrought by imperious, impersonal logic, the depiction of our twentieth century unshakeable faith in the redemptive power of technology, all answers cloaked in science as we are shown "the best society." This new order is one no less hateful than Prospero's passionate machinations, and perhaps even more horrific for its sterility. Emily St. John Mandel continues the Bard's legacy in Station Eleven, leaving off of either magic or science, and giving us, instead, art and a cultish adherence to our own role in the story at hand. Mandel opens the scene onstage with King Lear, an immediate signpost to the folly of imagining ourselves kings, making divisions among those who flatter him and banishing those who loves him, courting rejection of everyone in the process, leaving us to wander alone in the storm.

In many ways, I believe Mandel's work succeeds more genuinely for placing our own egos in the middle, reflecting the post-apocalyptic mire as a snare we set for ourselves, and one we could not help but spring, with the ego at the helm. 

William Gibson continues the tempestuous theme (though with less of the Bard on display) in his Jackpot series, again returning to the ugliness and destruction that ensures after a perfect storm destroys the planet, rendering it nearly uninhabitable, and the deployment of technology to save us, all while creating a better new world, sterile and deadly and false. 

I confess that I wasn't a fan of Neuromancer when it came out; I fond it a bit predictable, unsatisfactory, and superficial. I did like Pattern Recognition,  though, and if this series makes good on the themes and depth Gibson introduced then, this will be a nice addition to works that plunge into the depths of our need to sacrifice our souls on the altar of science and technology.

It feels like today would be a perfect day to launch a Perfect Storm Book Club.

Hold your applause

Applause is the spur of noble minds, the end and aim of weak ones.
----Edmund Burke

Induction

"Every successful business is full of people who spent money nurturing unremarkable talent."
Industry, S1:E1

The haunting of the qualifier

I adore everything about this piece from Benjamin Dreyer. The topics, the brevity, the pacing, the low-key passion, and the unshakable belief that I, his reader, am a writer worth his cautions. I love the way he takes very to task, outing it as fraudulent, casting harsh light on the thin wateriness of qualification, and presenting us a moment to which any of us can aspire: an unqualified compliment.

This is crafty writing.

Well done.

Writers, be wary of Throat-Clearers and Wan Intensifiers. Very, very wary.

Fall Festival and Hunters Moon

The Devil in Your Eyes

When your mother sees the devil in your eyes, it's a hard assessment to abandon. -- Louis de Pointe du Lac