Maebius Musings

After reading Scott Adams’ blog today (Of Dilbert comic fame), I had to actually laugh out loud at the final line.

Still, there’s a hint of interesting muse going on there, beyond the witty humor.    Could such an experiment be done?

I’ve just emailed the local community college to get the name of the psychology proffs.   I’ll propose the situation, since it sounds like just the sort of thing my own psych teacher would jump all over when I attended college.   Our class experiment was about cultural appearances.  We all did the classic “Dress down and go into a fancy jewelry store to see if we get sneered at, then return later all dolled up and were shows much more respect”.

I imagine that if test scores have a remote chance to be affected (even positively) this will get shot down.

Still, doesn’t hurt to try!   That’s how progress is made, breaking down the old to make way for the new….

How are you today?   I, myself, am great, thanks! 

1 Comment »

Nettle mentioned in a prior comment, that I tend to describe things in terms of “doing” rather than simply “experiencing” stuff when it comes to esoteric and metaphysical experiences.   This got me thinking about some other observations I’d had (which could be totally off-base).

With no insult intended to either group, I think this difference we have may have some roots in gender-differences, though whether it is genetic or childhood nurturing I can not say.

For myself, as I wrote previously, I have always wanted to “do” stuff with energy.  Tai Chi practice continually challenged us students to harness our inner Chi and direct it around ourselves as we went through our practices and Kata. Likewise, the bit of experience I have with Reiki was explained to us as reaching out to the Universal Light and gathering/drawing it down to the person we are healing.     Yet as much as I can see such things in my head, it is tough to feel a sense of physicality in such workings, beyond rare almost unplanned moments of successful synergy.

Outside the realm of those energy-practices, I’ve noticed similar trends within the fragments of pagan-scene I’ve been able to participate or observe.   I really enjoy Drum circles.   I mean Really.   I could probably live an entire month by myself, foraging for food and building a sleeping structure, and be totally happy if evenings included even the distant sounds of a drum circle.

Drum circles also tend to be predominantly ‘male’ things.    Granted, I know quite a few wonderful drummers who happen to be women, but they also tend to be, with no insult intended, more “butch” than the average lady.  More Yang than Yin, if that makes sense.

This dichotomy came up once before, many years ago at a gathering.  I tried attuning myself to the Universe through some pretty specific practices, and wanted only to spin glow-stick Poi all night.  I needed to move, to ‘dance’ as it were, and to Create something, even if it were only in my own mind and body.   My wife and friend prefered to sit more quietly in the tent, listening to the sounds of the wilderness, taking in the Lights and communing with the fabric of reality.   Receiving, in a sense, instead of Doing.

Interesting, hmm?

For this reason, I am putting out an intention to find a Male Mystery group sometime.  I’m curious what such a group would offer, (beyond talking sports, hunting prowess, and good-natured snarking about our wives).

Any other readers (men or women) care to comment on this topic as a friendly discussion?

5 Comments »

*UPDATE* it seems the new blog feed worked!  approx 15 minutes after publishing the post here, my RSS reader lit up with “new bost on Maebius Musing”.   w00t!

As the first actual post to be entered in the new WordPress site, I figured I would keep it simple. That, plus it’s been a while since I updated here, due to technical difficulties, life-events, and other such things.

On the World of Warcraft game, my priestess healer has been at max-level for quite a while, and is all-but retired lately, other than to craft new bags for any alts, or sometimes join a few instance dungeons whne I’m feeling like being online for more than an hour or so.   Otherwise, my troll hunter Nookni just turned lvl 79 and is slowly working his way up to lvl 80.    Besides Nookni, still working slooooowly on Pohatu the druid, hoping to get him to lvl 40 by the end of June.  I’m only logging in about an hour or two, a few times a week, but not nearly as much time as usual, or necessary to actually concentrate on levelling up and such.  I’ve semi-lost interest in the meta-game itself, and just enjoy logging in to unwind before bed, alone, just me and my pixels, solo in an MMO.

The garden is doing good so far, with everything planted, and the only thing left is to allow the passage of time.  Very few weeds so far this year, and what did start to pop up got nipped in the sproutling stage so far.  My son’s been helping with that chore too, since he learned about gardens in schoool and now understands hte interest in making sure the plants grow so we get food later in the autumn.    Unfortunately, all the squash/zucchini plants wilted overnight on Monday for some unknown reason, since all the other plants were fine.

Once the full moon rolls around, I plan on re-starting my outdoor MoonMuse experiment, and document such thoughts every single day.  Wish me luck.

Spiritually, I’ve been in a bit of a funk myself.  Blogs have been quiet, which seems to indicate either the feeling is shared among those I read, or life got exciting for everyone too.  Either way, it’s interesting pattern, though potentially unrelated, since it is also exam time for school-age folks, and vacation season for us family-types.

Nothing great to report lately.  However nothing overtly bad either, outside of a few ‘cryptic’ events to some good friends that we are still sending energy too until the situation resolves or re-balances out.

For now, for me,  it’s good enough to be just good enough.

No Comments »

UPDATE: Site has now been completely migrated to the new location. I lost a few of the most recent entries here (Day 9, Day10, and Day11) but they were short unimportant posts in the large scale. I’ll be re-doing my month-long outdoor zen experiment next moon-cycle. I’m still spending time outside now, but not blogging about it on a daily basis due to the issues here recently.

After a few days of research by my web-host, we discovered the database for the blog was slightly corrupt, which is what was causing the RSS feed errors.

I tried to re-create the entire blog from an old backup, wiping it and re-uploading the entries, but the RSS still is borked. This means a post, or blog entry, or comment somewhere in the past has some sort of weirdness going on with it, which essentially broke the feed from that point forward.

In order to figure out where, I am in the process of making a second blog database, and copying over each post one at a time, to see where it stops working. We think it was a spam comment or an accidental mis-type in a user comment, since first glance at the entry database itself looks clean.

Thus, at worst case, I will have to wipe the comments from the older blog entries, and manually re-enter a few of the better and important-to-the-discussion ones myself. If this fixes things, I will direct this blog to the other database, and copy over the theme and other style sheet files so it looks the same as this version.

Keep your fingers crossed. I hope to have RSS functionality again in the next few days Currently working again, YAY!.

PS: send my friend Nettle any extra warm fuzzies and strength if you have some extra fuzz. She’s being a mighty battle-druid in a stressful life-situation I am not at liberty to expand upon. Suffice it to say, I’m sending her as many good vibes as I can this week.

No Comments »

Not much to report on the Daily Outdoor Zen project, other than it’s starting to be a nice habit (though I forgot one day already).

One nice thing I did today was have a wonderful breakfast entirely from our backyard. I snipped a small asparagus plant into little teensy bits, added some Garlic Mustard and Chives from the literal backyard, and then collected three eggs from the chicken coop. Sauted the greenery in a pan with some olive oil, then de-yolked one of the eggs (3 eggs, 2 yolks).
Other than the olive oil used to grease the pan, everything for that breakfast was from my yard, which tasted YUMMY and felt really healthy and natural. Great way to start the day!

And in other garden news, this year’s hops bine[sic] is doing much more vigorous growing than it did it’s first year. The tentacle-beast (as I call it now) is well over 8 ft tall as it wraps around it’s support pole, and has a lot more tentacles, plus is a good deal thicker than a pencil, approaching sharpie-marker thickness on the main tendril! Should be a great Hops harvest this fall. Woot!

No Comments »

I must admit, only 5 days into my attempt at sitting outdoors for 15 minutes every night, I skilled last night.

Technically, I suppose I could say I spent at least 5 minutes staring up at the cloudy sky in the evening, listening to the wind rustle in the poplar branches and sighing through the maples and pines in our front yard. But such technicalities skip the whole Deeper Intent thing that failed to happen.

We planned to get up early the next day, for S.H.A.R.E. Fest camping, and were packing,. plus my head was just too chaotic to ground properly and settle down before bed, other than lying in my bed quietly, at which point I woke up and it was the next day. Must have been either overtired, or just so spaced out and semi-stressed (in a good way) to get more serious quiet-time in. *Le Sigh*.

The Blog theme problem didn’t resolve itself, so I will try a full re-install of this site once I am satisfied that things are backed up in triplicate on multiple forms of media.

For now, the green theme is back, with all it’s flaws and fun. Enjoy!

No Comments »

Last night’s sitting outside was cold, wet, and windy as all heck, so became more of a sitting on the porch with the windows open. I did not do much thinking of deep thoughts, nor have any brilliant insights. It was simply a nice stress-freeing bit of down-time, which was really the reason I started this daily practice.

In other news, I reset the theme for this blog temporarily, in order to try and get the RSS feeds working. I had put in a support ticket to my web-host, but they said they do not support WordPress plugins, so I’m on my own. The strange thing is the provider SUPPLIES an automated install of WordPress, which I used, yet am now told they don’t actually support it and I should just try to uninstall/reinstall.

I’m too worried about the effort of backup up the entire website database and re-installing it from scratch. I have everything backed up on a weekly basis anyway, but the effort to go through and re-create the databases initially is not worth it just quite yet.

Hopefully the old green theme will be back next week, once I troubleshoot some things on this end first.

No Comments »

Yesterday, I was cleaning up my desk at work and re-arranged the little semi-altar spot with a few less wintery things and a few more springy things, but somehow it turned out less Brightly Spring and more “Spring evening“. I do this either when the muse strikes me, or about four times a year. I don’t actually adhere to a strict calendar of Beltaine/Samhain decorations at work, but keep it more subdued and only change it when I look and think “Oh, I should change that“. It’s better that way, I think. (click pictures for full-size)

To the ever-present cactus pot and ficus sproutling (raised from a cutting of a cutting of a cutting, with the ‘parent cuttings’ also visible on my desk), I had added a clam-shell that I found in a box of random junk from home while spring cleaning there, and a chicken bone we found in my back yard and picked up so the dog wouldn’t, plus replaced a few assorted rocks from the “bunch of collected rocks” I have.

To the clam shell, I added 4 chunks of rock-salt that were still sitting in the sandy gravel in the parking lot. (Usually, our workplace de-ices the lot with sand and slag-ash, which I then collect in buckets to augment our soil or fill flowerpots for seedlings. Unfortunately, in the last big unexpected freezing rain, the trucks apparently flung rock-salt crystals, which means the tonnes of sand still being swept into piles around the lot are useless for planting in now.)

While puttering this morning, I noticed the mood was rather darker (not necessarily bad) than the original “spring brightness”, but continued fiddling with things until it felt right. To the shell, I added about a half ounce of tap-water which started dissolving the salt crystals and made a really neat swirly pattern as the different densities swirled and mingled in the ‘bowl’. After watching this for few moments, I was inspired to drip a few drops of 100% Pomegranate juice into the shell.

Let me say the effect of that crimson liquid was immediate, unexpected, and powerful. My fingers tingled, the hair on my neck tingled, and I got that “Real Magic” feeling. My eyes were drawn into the impossibly deep pool of water as the pigments swirled and spread out. I felt myself lean into the pool, hesitate a moment to consider the fact I’m still at work, then shrugged and allowed myself to ‘fall in’ visually. Quite a visceral scrying experience!

In the depths, I saw a hillside bathed in just-morning light, red and welcoming, then a huge bonfire sprung up off to the side. Then a series of smaller fires flickered in and out over the course of a few seconds, as if an assembled army or pagan gathering were making cookfires in the field where a central Drumcircle-fire was built, but the cookfires sped up to fire-fly flashes while the central bonfire burned ‘normally’. Then, as fast as that happened, the vision swooped upwards like a barn swallow wheeling towards the distant cloudy horizon, and I had leaned back upright here at my work desk, an idiot grin on my face.

The whole thing took probably 20 seconds, but felt much longer, and by now, the Pom juice had evened throughout the water, and it was a simple shell filled with pinkish water.

However, the thing that made this experience even more entertaining and caused me to have this almost idiot-grin this morning, was when I looked up from the shell and saw the after-image on my mostly white computer monitor.

It was a blue shell-thing, hovering across some work-note about our timecards.

Blue Thing. (referenced from this dream)
I laughed.

…of course it makes sense that the thing I was supposed to be looking for wasn’t a Thing at all. Tricksy Fae!

No Comments »

(original Mom-image link)

I just received the slightly inaccurately named “Mom of the Year Award” from my e-friend down in beautiful Rio de Janeiro, Nydia of the Bringing up Salamanders blog. Being a dad myself, I cant quite live up to the full Mom title, though I did share my part in bringing our little bundle of joy into the world (literally), and am happily married to the actual Mom. The image has now been added to the “awards” page for this blog. Thanks!!
Here are the rules:
First, Admit one thing you feel awful about involving being a mom dad. Get it off your shoulders. Once you’ve written it down, you are No Longer allowed to feel bad. It’s over with, it’s in the past. Remember, you’re a good mom dad!

Hmm…I wrote it down, and burned the paper. While I believe the spirit of this rule is to share the frustrations on Parenting as a show of unity and solidarity among all awarded parents, I feel that actual public airing of any grievances on my blog would only come back to bite me years later (when I become president or something). Plus, I don’t want to encourage the sharing of my own dirty laundry. The magic of getting it off my shoulders has been worked. I’m a good dad.

Then, Remind yourself you are a good mom dad, list seven things you love about your kids, you love doing with your kids, or that your kids love about you. These are the things to remind yourself everyday that you Rock!

Without further adu:

1. I love coming home from work and getting immediately accosted to “Help me with this Craft/Homework/Toy/Game”. He looks forward to seeing me return.
2. I love the fact that he’s created an entire fantasy world, with surprising consistency, for us to play in on rainy days or long car rides. Warrior Brothers are we.
3. I love the fact that he is a voracious reader, with a mastery far above his grade level, and a willingness to devour everything at the library. An evening without a book is a sad evening indeed, at our house.
4. I love going hiking outside, swimming, camping, and all the outdoor stuff, and knowing that my little one already understands basic ecological principles. Leaves are worm food and become dirt, the chickens eat bugs and lay eggs, and litter in the water hurts our garden food when we irrigate. Those are important skills to know, and he doesn’t shy away from such “boring science talks” usually.
5. I love boy-time, even when it makes my wife shake her head in soft-hearted confusion. Beating up, and getting beat up by my son until one of us is defeated is fun. The punishment for losing being a tickle-torture or “zerbert” is totally worth surrendering, even if I could overpower him easily.
6. I love the fact that this weekend, my son said “Dad, I love you best cause you help me and are the best video game player in the world!”.
7. I also love the fact that this same weekend, my son said “Mom, I love you best because you snuggle me at night and let me read you stories!”.

Finally, I am supposed to link 5 other mothers across the Blog-o-sphere, to nominate them for this award. Unfortunately, the blogs I actively follow are either already members of this prestigious club, are not mothers themselves, or have blog focuses which seem a bit out of place for such a “parent-centric” award.

So, I will have to possibly break a few rules and try to list just the few blogs who I do not immediately recall having been nominated already, and are parental-types, and are awesome. If you have this award already, my bad… If not, now you do!

• Of course, Anne Johnson of The Gods are Bored. Especially with her latest post.
• Barefoot Kitchen Witch,source of inspirational foodstuffs and awesome kids.
• The Hillbilly Fairy, maker of nifty little purse/pouches and generally nifty blogger.
• Having the word Muse in their blog, Magical Musing gets bonus points from me here.
• Two and a Half Orcs is a young couple with a dedication to family beyond the MMO.
• Pom Wonderful (who I must admit I associate now with delicious anti-oxidant-rich beverages in the goddess-shaped bottle. Sorry, I just love pomegranates !!)

No Comments »

First, sorry for the lapse in posting. We’ve had a cycle of pneumonia, flu, and other plagues that worked its way through the entire family, and back through.. again. Poor little one was out of school all last week with a fever, and we are finally on the upside of illness, though not quite totally healthy yet.

Now on the the musing!

In this age of Facebook, ubiquitous mobile cell phones (is it even Cellular anymore?), and bluetooth Live Online IM (“I AM” not, thank you), it seems like the youth and upwardly mobile of today are more connected to each other’s personal daily lives than ever before. Folks are commonly known to Text, Twitter, Twirp?, and such from almost anywhere, any time.

In relation to this information overload, I’ve heard and read Op-Ed articles ranging the topics from the invasion of personal privacy, to the detachment to personal relations.

Yet one thing I pondered this weekend, which I had not really seen on the media sites I frequent, is that this interconnectedness and online availability of personal frivolities, may simply be a return to the small town community, redefined by current technology.

Back in “The Good old Days”, you hear some talk of the small towns, where everyone knows everyone, and the gossip grapevine bore plentiful fruit. It may have been true that everyone KNOWS old man Maebius likes to play some damned MMO computer game or hated tomatoes, but it didn’t matter in the overall scheme of things, since if you alternately needed gardening advice or cheap farm-fresh eggs, Maebius could hook you up.

I don’t recall the recollection-minded mentioning huge inroads on the personal privacy lawn, like online information does now (except in references to Big Brother or “the commies” depending on era).

Today’s mobile-connected are looking more and more like those communities, where the intimate details are available if you care to look, but most people aren’t looking anymore, because it’s so available. The communities are essentially becoming the Small Town Mind again, but instead of geographical locality as a border, it is self-limiting by Network Interest.

Imagine, if you would, if technology advanced to where sunglass cameras, or RFID devices on every person’s common gadget were hooked up to a Global Database. At a glance, if you wish, you could pass by some stranger in the hall, queue up their info, and instantly know marital status, favorite hobbies, and name (as described by that person’s self-described bio profile).

To make it more current and specific, the cellphone signal on that guy next to you on the bus would load their Facebook page and display it on your phone, if you loaded the appropriate app. In this case, nothing you would find out would be “private” as it is culled from the stranger’s public profile. They could even lie about things.

But why would you care? Just because information is available, does not mean it is necessary to see by everyone and by everyone at all times, like some folks have stated while decrying such social networking sites.

Such transparency in your personal life is only created, if you, yourself, choose to create it. And in doing so, you join the Little Big Town of today’s Network-Now.

I think overall, this just shows humanities intrinsic desire to belong to a Clan/Tribe/Family. We just keep shifting the lines on who gets included to ours, and how it is defined.

The trick though, is to forge communties as best we can, using whatever method we can. For those of the druidic persuasion, that may involve physicality again for the event of a technological network outage. For some folks though, such a situation is too far in the future, and the online communty still has value Now.
In the end, I don’t think it’s that big a deal, potentially knowing the minutiae of Maebius. I don’t update my Facebook anyway.

…and if you do need fresh eggs, stop over to Everthorn Farms for a cup of mint tea from my garden. I’ll share that with you strangers anytime.

2 Comments »