Maebius Musing

This year, we are returning to the Great Festival that started my love of drumming, and fully cemented, solidified, and otherwise convinced me that this Path of mine was ‘Me’.  Yep, Starwood.  That bastion of revelry and fun, which can be described, as the website so reads: A place where Scientists sit with Shamans and Druids dance with Deadheads. Where African drums jam with bluegrass fiddles, and political activism meets Earth spirituality - where theatre and life meld - where days are spent in exploration of inner and outer space, and nights blaze with laser lights and bonfire flames.

I found this image form the last time we went, in 2002, thus proving my existance there at the opening spiral dance ‘ceremony’.  That guy in the white shirt and black shorts?  Yep, me.  That cute chick in the green shirt and flowery purplish skirt?  Yep, the wife.   (this is pre-sprogling times of course) The guy in the robes and blue scarf?  no clue, but friendly! 

This year we are going with some friends of ours, who generally attend the S.C.A. event known as Pennsic.  While this wonderful festival is over ten times the size of Starwood, and has all sorts of cool costumes, workshops, and such, I am totally looking forward to the more laid back and spiritual festival event this year.   It may not be the most serious spiritual gathering, and have more of a party flair, but I’m really really looking forward to “coming Ohm”.
All night drumming bonfire circles, fireworks one night, and the freedom to go skyclad if one so chooses, is simply indescribable for those who have not attended.  (Heck, even this usually conservative person felt no real hesitation to joining the spontaneous “dance naked in the rain shower” that happened last time.)

There are 18 days left as of this posting, which means our next weeks will be full of meal planning,  double-triple-quadruple checking the packing lists, and otherwise getting things in gear to spend and entire week living out of our tent with a bunch of strange folks, many hours from our land.

Otherwise, there’s no real deeper meaning to this poist, other than to say…I can’t wait!

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Related as a followup to this post right here.

I had planned to go a full 2 weeks with only checking online for work-related emails, and friend-related messages.  No other blogsurfing, no online gaming, nothing beyond quick scans and email replies to my close real-life contacts (who mostly also read this blog).

I broke my intarweb exile a two days early, mostly because I actually stopped looking at all my blogs and felt a pretty solid down-shift from the stress of “gotta check my email, gotta check my blogfeed, gotta check something else.  ZOMG I’m bored, lets surf the web for random shit“.

Honestly, I’ve read about “those people” and realized I’d started to become one.   Before leaving work, refresh feed reader after JUST refreshing it 2 minutes ago, froth at mouth, rinse, repeat….  Life is NOT that important to stay glued to my monitor, and I’m glad I did it.

I took a solid week and a half off from world of Warcraft and actually miss it, or, certain parts of it.   I found I missed the social aspect, chatting with some hilarious officers in my guild, being particularly punny with my Troll Nookni, and making bags free for the new alts we have in the guild.    That’s a huge reason I only recently hit max level on only one character after 3 years. I don’t play to kill things and quest. I play to network and RP after work.
What I did NOT miss was some other officers bailing because “Their Healer” was offline for over week and thus they wanted a better chance at seeing bosses die in instances.   Not a slam against them really, but I wish them well in their new home.  Dudes, just say you were looking around for progression, don’t just “Screw this I’m outa here!” in the middle of the week, M’Kay?  I won’t miss them much if they were truly relying on my character to make their gameplay fun.  That’s a good lesson from disconnecting….Perspective!

I also enjoyed a bit more time at home, just doing stuff with the family.   We went camping at Watkin’s Glen (beautiful!!), we gardened a bit, and I helped the sprog play LEGO Indiana Jones on PS2, or random imagination-games in his room.  I didn’t feel really rushed to bedtime, like I sometimes was.  I’ll admit, some nights if work was stressful, I jsut wanted to come home, put kid to bed and play online, not just WoW but random blogg-feeding.  It surprised me the selfishness that implied, and I’m glad for the escape from that escapism this week.

So, for now, I’m limiteing my online time to work for blog-reading, and two hours at night for home-computer.  If It’s Warcraft, that’s cool.  If I want to fiddle with other stuff like this cool online hand-drum lesson site?  Thats’ cool too.

The main lesson I took away from this experiement is I was overstretching my attention.  Started to feel crushed by “I didn’t read XYZ yet tonight?!?!”

and more importantly…..32 days until Starwood!

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It’s not often I find myself navel-gazing too closely when doing meditations. (see mirror-phobia)

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I found this little quiz through a new blog I’m reading, and thought I’d post the results.

As always, I encourage readers to view these statistics with a rather large bowl of salt (ie: a bunch of grains!) since many questions are phrased in a somewhat both/and way yet still require an Either/Or answer, so I had to pick one. A better more accurate representation of my thoughts would require essay-type questions and a real-life moderator picking through my results….even then it might be slanted due to moderator bias. *grin*

Here you go.

My Pagan Practice

Pagan Faith Practices Survey created by Otherworld Apothecary

I was actually somewhat surprised that the “New Age” correspondences scored slightly lower than my “Ceremonial” practices. I tend to think of myself as fairly distanced from Ceremonial types, which may have been due to some bad experiences in the past while still forming my proto-pagan spirituality. (Today, I could meet those types on much better footing.)

Still, the quiz was fun and gave me a chance to pause and reflect on a few things. I also got to look up and research my own musings on this topic.
(see here, or here.)

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This is generally a short musing for now, since I am recovering from a fun and guest-filled Easter weekend, and my co-worker is expecting his third child in about….now. (Actually, his wife has not given birth yet, but the due date is here and she’s starting feel initial contractions, so this week is expected to see me here alone at work)

However, my musing for the day is one I’d like to see comments and engage in a hearty discussion with someone on. Mostly for the somewhat belittling humor I initially felt when reading the linked article, and how it reflects my own archaeological paradigm.

Question: Given a set of data-points and artifacts which appear to deviate from the local norm, construct a reasoned hypothesis to explain their existence in relation to historically localized phenomena.

http://english.pravda.ru/science/mysteries/104631-tunguska_meteorite-0

Putting aside my own “rational” thoughts on the Tunguska incident, the article linked above is quite interesting.

Not just because it seems highly implausible to my worldview and my own understanding of the reported ‘facts’, but in terms of the potential propaganda-slant this takes, and it’s ability to be read in terms of being myth.

On one hand, the article may be taking some unusual objects and applying a non-mainstream scientific viewpoint to explain it. If that is the case, it is simply a misguided attempt to delude the local population in the area.

However, what’s the harm in the story, if it is at least superficially plausable? Will the locals there sleep any worse thinking that instead of some random rock almost destroying their landscape, a sentient being helped save their landscape? Isn’t that the root of what religions do? Unite a culture with common mythology, in order to better the community? (controlling-the-community trends of organized religion aside).

Interesting thought….and one I’m going to ponder over the next day or so.

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