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erl_queen has picked for me to explicate, I realised exactly how many of my interests were antiquated or out-of-date. Perhaps some revision is in order.
If you would like your turn, comment on this post saying you'd like to play. I will choose seven interests from your profile, and it's your turn to explain yourself. Post instructions along with your answers so that others can play, too.
1. finishing my goddamn novel
This one is still, alas, relevant. There may be other novels in my life – such as codename "Blue Hair" – or looming on the horizon – I can see you, NaNoWriMo – but this interest will always and forever, amen, mean Shadow Boys (well, or until I finish it. Whichever comes first).
I have now been working on said novel since 2003, through friendship changes, a YA writing class, and two novel classes with the acerbic and brilliant Olga Lorenzo. Novel classes, I might add, which have produced at least two published authors, damn their eyes: Chris and Toni. I can't really say nasty things about Chris or Toni; they're both singularly gifted writers, and Toni is one of those amazingly nice people who exude pleasantness and fellow-feeling from every pore like Captain Carrot.
My novel has been around longer than Steph and I have been together; it predates my veganism. Heck, it predates my expulsion from my former coven. I've been through a lot of changes in those last few years, I realise as I write this.
Anyway, for those of you who don't know, Shadow Boys is a YA urban fantasy (if the term 'urban' can be applied to a small seaside town), which centres on a female protagonist, title notwithstanding (It's like Wee Free Men in that regard). It could be described as a Girl Underground story, to tie this back to the post which sired it (because I like playing these sort of intellectual games). It also has pseudo-Parisian/Roman catacombs, liminal coins, Sweeney Todd's piemaker conspirator, flying horses and a sane-ish mad doctor, all of which seemed to make sense at the time.
I think I included this interest when I was stalled on my novel – as I am at the moment, not-so-coincidentally. Perhaps it's the lack of a foppish, ineffectual British (or British-ish) male main character, as "Blue Hair" is limping along at present. Good thing my NaNo novel's protagonist covers all those bases except male.
2. leto's children
Ah, an antique interest.
I have long felt some fellow-feeling for Artemis, as might any young Sapphic, especially if she's feeling the sore lack of a nymph retinue and wishes her asthma allowed her to run. Before Steph and I were an item, we were extremely close friends and magical/spiritual partners. Steph was working with Apollon a lot at that stage, too.
I still like Artemis, though I don't feel as close to her as I once did.
3. living forever through veganism
This one's tongue-in-cheek. It was a deliberate play on 1950s "Better living through SCIENCE!" rhetoric. It allude to the reading I've done that suggests a vegan or near-vegan diet is much healthier than the common one. Veganism also helped me lose my uni-fat and get into a healthy weight range again.
My amusement in this interest also keeps me warm at night through my mother's "Where do you get your iron/calcium" doubty-faces that don't want to listen to my explanations.
4. neoedwardianism & neovictorianism
I love the aesthetics of much of the Edwardian and Victorian periods. I love corsetry and button-up boots. I love fountain pens and bustles and lorgnettes and women in poufed trousers on bicycles. I love engraved illustrations and even their nutty anthropomorphic fruits and vegetables on St. Valentine's cards. I love top hats (on both sexes) and morning coats, post-mortem photographs and locks of hair. I love tea parties and engraved visiting cards. I love the illustrations from the Police Gazette. I love Art Nouveau, and the aesthetics of steampunk.
And I love my modern sensibilities (which were not as widely held as they are now) that women are equal to men and deserving of education and equal pay; that being non-white does not make you inferior in any way; that being queer is not a disease or anything shameful.
Hence, "NeoEdwardianism" and "NeoVictorianism": the aesthetics of an old age with the spirituality, ethics and outlook of the new. I borrowed the term NeoVictorianism from![[livejournal.com profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/external/lj-community.gif)
neovictoria and have extended it to include the Edwardian era.
5. nereid house
Where I went to high school, the four houses were named for nymphs (Oreads, Naiads, Dryads, and Nereids), and our school symbol was Pallas Athena/Minerva (depending on who you speak to) above a very Athenian Latin motto: Potens Sui, which has been variously translated in my hearing as "Potent Self", "Self-Mastery" and "Self-Discipline". This background coloured my spiritual development, so it is perhaps not much of a surprise that I have come, finally, to Hellenic Polytheism.
I have been interested in the nymphs for awhile, but until I readerl_queen's thoughs, I hadn't thought of paying them cult. I wish I had before we moved where we are now; at my previous house I could have honoured the naiads during one of my frequent short walks to the Maribyrnong River. Ihave river-water nearby here too, but Merri Creek is a much longer walk away, making it more of an event to go visiting.
I have loved the sea for a long time; all our Christmas holidays were taken at surf beaches. Even when visiting our Queensland relatives, beaches usually featured in an abbreviated form – summer is Box Jellyfish season there. I have swum in waves, boogie-boarded and bodysurfed, snorkelled, climbed beach cliffs and rocks, peered in rock pools, hunted for crabs by torchlight. I have been dumped by waves with sufficient violence that several times I nearly drowned. And there is such a power in the sea that one can't help but be awed. So I want to honour the nereids in particular.
And finally, my first year at Mac.Rob turned Nereids last-place losing streak into a winning one. I wouldn't want to claim sole credit, but we trumped all the other houses in nearly everything the whole time I was there. I'm pretty sure we won the House Shield all four years, beating Oreads – our long-time rivals and only nearest competitors. This is because Nereids are superior by far, of course. I am pleased to report that my littlest sister is continuing the good work, and will guide Nereids to further victory next year as house captain.
6. the subterranean river
Clarissa Pinkola Estés uses the phrase Rio abaja rio:
It's an image that holds a lot of inexplicable meaning and power for me.
As a pagan writer, I once invented a pantheon of gods for a world, drawing on archetypes and comparative mythology. They were based on the Aristotlean four elements, and the goddess I connected to most was based on water, a seeress in a dark cave. The river beneath the earth. Real Jungian stuff. It's funny what forgotten fragments of my past are being brought to the fore again by this.
The subterranean river, or as I usually refer to it, the river beneath, refers to a goddess I used to pay cult to, back when I was a Wiccan-influenced pagan. She was a goddess of earthly waters, and in one dubious online text, partnered the storm god I also worked with, completing a snake-like circle of water. I always visualised her as underground, him as overground. That's something else I'd forgotten – exactly how khthonic minded I used to me. I really used to have one foot below ground at all times.
The river beneath also refers to the river that runs underground through the Buchan caves system. When I was there last year in autumn, we took tours through the Royal and Fairy show caves and I had quite profound feelings of Ereshkigal – at least, the best you can while teenage girls are asking you if you prefer Seth or Ryan. We went for Mabon, which should have been the off-season, but what we didn't think of was that the school holidays had been shifted as Melbourne was holding the Commonwealth Games.
It is very dark underground. Darker than it ever gets above ground. It's cold, and it presses in on you.
The underground river in Buchan feeds into (of all things) an icy, icy swimming pool. Nothing says spiritual baptism in honour of a khthonic goddess like water so cold your heart nearly stops.
Steph and I collected a little water from the spring just above the pool at my request. I felt it was going to be significant. So I have cave-water in a small bottle below my altar, waiting to be used.
7. yoga of the elements
Another antiquated interest! Around the time that we were cleaning Liam's house, Steph introduced me to a yoga sequence she'd invented based on the four elements. There was one like an archer for air or fire (I forget which), the fish pose for water, and the child's pose or the corpse pose (or perhaps both?) for earth. Again, my memory fails me. It's been a few years.
It was a clever idea in any case, and allowed you to fully embody a circle casting. It would also be helpful if you wanted to meditate on one of the elements – you could put together a sequence appropriate to that element.
Having just read Pagan Prayer Beads by John Michael Greer and Clare Vaughn, my brain started working out poses for the liminal spaces between the Druidic three realms. There'd be the tree pose for land and sky, and I'd add tadasana as well; and I'm pretty sure there's a pose named for Garuda, king of birds, that would do for sea and sky. I don't know offhand what pose you'd choose for land and sea. Intellectual exercises.
I don't work with the elements the way I used to. And I'm sadly not doing yoga at all. I wanted to take up a class at my local gym, but the same week I was going to start I got pleurisy, making such bodily contortions as sitting up incredibly painful, so I wait to get better.
erl_queen has picked for me to explicate, I realised exactly how many of my interests were antiquated or out-of-date. Perhaps some revision is in order.If you would like your turn, comment on this post saying you'd like to play. I will choose seven interests from your profile, and it's your turn to explain yourself. Post instructions along with your answers so that others can play, too.
1. finishing my goddamn novel
This one is still, alas, relevant. There may be other novels in my life – such as codename "Blue Hair" – or looming on the horizon – I can see you, NaNoWriMo – but this interest will always and forever, amen, mean Shadow Boys (well, or until I finish it. Whichever comes first).
I have now been working on said novel since 2003, through friendship changes, a YA writing class, and two novel classes with the acerbic and brilliant Olga Lorenzo. Novel classes, I might add, which have produced at least two published authors, damn their eyes: Chris and Toni. I can't really say nasty things about Chris or Toni; they're both singularly gifted writers, and Toni is one of those amazingly nice people who exude pleasantness and fellow-feeling from every pore like Captain Carrot.
My novel has been around longer than Steph and I have been together; it predates my veganism. Heck, it predates my expulsion from my former coven. I've been through a lot of changes in those last few years, I realise as I write this.
Anyway, for those of you who don't know, Shadow Boys is a YA urban fantasy (if the term 'urban' can be applied to a small seaside town), which centres on a female protagonist, title notwithstanding (It's like Wee Free Men in that regard). It could be described as a Girl Underground story, to tie this back to the post which sired it (because I like playing these sort of intellectual games). It also has pseudo-Parisian/Roman catacombs, liminal coins, Sweeney Todd's piemaker conspirator, flying horses and a sane-ish mad doctor, all of which seemed to make sense at the time.
I think I included this interest when I was stalled on my novel – as I am at the moment, not-so-coincidentally. Perhaps it's the lack of a foppish, ineffectual British (or British-ish) male main character, as "Blue Hair" is limping along at present. Good thing my NaNo novel's protagonist covers all those bases except male.
2. leto's children
Ah, an antique interest.
I have long felt some fellow-feeling for Artemis, as might any young Sapphic, especially if she's feeling the sore lack of a nymph retinue and wishes her asthma allowed her to run. Before Steph and I were an item, we were extremely close friends and magical/spiritual partners. Steph was working with Apollon a lot at that stage, too.
I still like Artemis, though I don't feel as close to her as I once did.
3. living forever through veganism
This one's tongue-in-cheek. It was a deliberate play on 1950s "Better living through SCIENCE!" rhetoric. It allude to the reading I've done that suggests a vegan or near-vegan diet is much healthier than the common one. Veganism also helped me lose my uni-fat and get into a healthy weight range again.
My amusement in this interest also keeps me warm at night through my mother's "Where do you get your iron/calcium" doubty-faces that don't want to listen to my explanations.
4. neoedwardianism & neovictorianism
I love the aesthetics of much of the Edwardian and Victorian periods. I love corsetry and button-up boots. I love fountain pens and bustles and lorgnettes and women in poufed trousers on bicycles. I love engraved illustrations and even their nutty anthropomorphic fruits and vegetables on St. Valentine's cards. I love top hats (on both sexes) and morning coats, post-mortem photographs and locks of hair. I love tea parties and engraved visiting cards. I love the illustrations from the Police Gazette. I love Art Nouveau, and the aesthetics of steampunk.
And I love my modern sensibilities (which were not as widely held as they are now) that women are equal to men and deserving of education and equal pay; that being non-white does not make you inferior in any way; that being queer is not a disease or anything shameful.
Hence, "NeoEdwardianism" and "NeoVictorianism": the aesthetics of an old age with the spirituality, ethics and outlook of the new. I borrowed the term NeoVictorianism from
neovictoria and have extended it to include the Edwardian era.5. nereid house
Where I went to high school, the four houses were named for nymphs (Oreads, Naiads, Dryads, and Nereids), and our school symbol was Pallas Athena/Minerva (depending on who you speak to) above a very Athenian Latin motto: Potens Sui, which has been variously translated in my hearing as "Potent Self", "Self-Mastery" and "Self-Discipline". This background coloured my spiritual development, so it is perhaps not much of a surprise that I have come, finally, to Hellenic Polytheism.
I have been interested in the nymphs for awhile, but until I read
erl_queen's thoughs, I hadn't thought of paying them cult. I wish I had before we moved where we are now; at my previous house I could have honoured the naiads during one of my frequent short walks to the Maribyrnong River. Ihave river-water nearby here too, but Merri Creek is a much longer walk away, making it more of an event to go visiting.I have loved the sea for a long time; all our Christmas holidays were taken at surf beaches. Even when visiting our Queensland relatives, beaches usually featured in an abbreviated form – summer is Box Jellyfish season there. I have swum in waves, boogie-boarded and bodysurfed, snorkelled, climbed beach cliffs and rocks, peered in rock pools, hunted for crabs by torchlight. I have been dumped by waves with sufficient violence that several times I nearly drowned. And there is such a power in the sea that one can't help but be awed. So I want to honour the nereids in particular.
And finally, my first year at Mac.Rob turned Nereids last-place losing streak into a winning one. I wouldn't want to claim sole credit, but we trumped all the other houses in nearly everything the whole time I was there. I'm pretty sure we won the House Shield all four years, beating Oreads – our long-time rivals and only nearest competitors. This is because Nereids are superior by far, of course. I am pleased to report that my littlest sister is continuing the good work, and will guide Nereids to further victory next year as house captain.
6. the subterranean river
Clarissa Pinkola Estés uses the phrase Rio abaja rio:
"Each woman has potential access to Rio Abajo Rio, this river beneath the river. She arrives there through deep meditation, dance, writing, painting, prayermaking, singing, drumming, active imagination, or any activity which requires an intense altered consciousness. A woman arrives in this world-between worlds through yearning and by seeking something she can see just out of the corner of her eye. She arrives there by deeply creative acts, through intentional solitude, and by practice of any of the arts. And even with these well-crafted practices, much of what occurs in this ineffable world remains forever mysterious to us, for it breaks physical laws and rational laws as we know them."
It's an image that holds a lot of inexplicable meaning and power for me.
As a pagan writer, I once invented a pantheon of gods for a world, drawing on archetypes and comparative mythology. They were based on the Aristotlean four elements, and the goddess I connected to most was based on water, a seeress in a dark cave. The river beneath the earth. Real Jungian stuff. It's funny what forgotten fragments of my past are being brought to the fore again by this.
The subterranean river, or as I usually refer to it, the river beneath, refers to a goddess I used to pay cult to, back when I was a Wiccan-influenced pagan. She was a goddess of earthly waters, and in one dubious online text, partnered the storm god I also worked with, completing a snake-like circle of water. I always visualised her as underground, him as overground. That's something else I'd forgotten – exactly how khthonic minded I used to me. I really used to have one foot below ground at all times.
The river beneath also refers to the river that runs underground through the Buchan caves system. When I was there last year in autumn, we took tours through the Royal and Fairy show caves and I had quite profound feelings of Ereshkigal – at least, the best you can while teenage girls are asking you if you prefer Seth or Ryan. We went for Mabon, which should have been the off-season, but what we didn't think of was that the school holidays had been shifted as Melbourne was holding the Commonwealth Games.
It is very dark underground. Darker than it ever gets above ground. It's cold, and it presses in on you.
The underground river in Buchan feeds into (of all things) an icy, icy swimming pool. Nothing says spiritual baptism in honour of a khthonic goddess like water so cold your heart nearly stops.
Steph and I collected a little water from the spring just above the pool at my request. I felt it was going to be significant. So I have cave-water in a small bottle below my altar, waiting to be used.
7. yoga of the elements
Another antiquated interest! Around the time that we were cleaning Liam's house, Steph introduced me to a yoga sequence she'd invented based on the four elements. There was one like an archer for air or fire (I forget which), the fish pose for water, and the child's pose or the corpse pose (or perhaps both?) for earth. Again, my memory fails me. It's been a few years.
It was a clever idea in any case, and allowed you to fully embody a circle casting. It would also be helpful if you wanted to meditate on one of the elements – you could put together a sequence appropriate to that element.
Having just read Pagan Prayer Beads by John Michael Greer and Clare Vaughn, my brain started working out poses for the liminal spaces between the Druidic three realms. There'd be the tree pose for land and sky, and I'd add tadasana as well; and I'm pretty sure there's a pose named for Garuda, king of birds, that would do for sea and sky. I don't know offhand what pose you'd choose for land and sea. Intellectual exercises.
I don't work with the elements the way I used to. And I'm sadly not doing yoga at all. I wanted to take up a class at my local gym, but the same week I was going to start I got pleurisy, making such bodily contortions as sitting up incredibly painful, so I wait to get better.
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no subject
Date: 2007-10-09 12:33 am (UTC)Are you going to update your interests now
, you antiquated old bat?no subject
Date: 2007-10-09 01:19 am (UTC)I've already begun.
no subject
Date: 2007-10-09 01:42 am (UTC)I would love to read your novel, if you ever finish it, or even if you don't.
I'm glad to see I helped inspire you re: the nymphs. That's what I'd hoped for with my articles and such.
Love that subterranean river imagery. And caves... oooh cave water. One of the best experiences I ever had was going into the Lewis & Clark show cave in Montana, way deep down, and the guide then turns off all the lights and tells everyone to shut up for a minute. For one beautiful minute, I was completely submerged in the earth, in utter darkness and silence like nowhere else on earth.
I like the elemental yoga idea. It reminds me of the system someone invented for using body positions to express the runes. I like the idea of involving the whole body in such work.
no subject
Date: 2007-10-09 01:54 am (UTC)I really will have to finish it, or my writing/best-friend Jess will never forgive me. :) Maybe if I fill up a fountain pen with fresh ink and take out a notebook and just try to write it, dammit I'll get that little bit closer to being done. I think I'm closer to the end than it feels. I'd be honoured if you'd read it.
*nods* It's great being able to write things and really move people. And it's great on my part to be able to communicate with people who inspire me. I'd like to be on the other end some day, and be able to write something that inspires others in their spiritual practice.
Yes, they did that to us in the *thinks* Fairy cave when I first walked down with my family. I couldn't believe that I could even see the movement of my hand in front of my face. Quite profound. I've been thinking in the last few weeks of going back to Buchan again. It's only a five hour drive to get there ... :)
Oh, I think I may have come across the body-runes before. Doesn't Thorsson include it in one of his books? The physical body can be such a powerful thing.
no subject
Date: 2007-10-09 04:05 am (UTC)The elemental yoga idea was also pulling in the concept of the stages of man, so Child Pose was in the East, Warrior in the North (which is where the Southern Hemisphereans place fire), I can't remember what I used for West and then Corpse in the South.
Nothing like putting me in a dark cave underground to give me the wibblies. One of the few things I don't share with