General Consumption Weekend Writeup

[kiya]

Expecting length.


I managed to get out of the house after a couple of brief panics about packing (as I discovered as I was about to leave that the suitcase I had put together had a broken zipper. Augh. Picked up the bus at the corner and started to read. Wound up with secondary panic when the bus turned up somewhere that wasn't on its normal route (the sign for the route number had been blown out, but I was pretty sure that there were only two busses that went by that stop, both of which went where I needed to go) -- it turned out that the bus driver got lost and confused. :P

Made it to the T, made the transfer to the Green line (with the assistance of a fellow who helped me get the suitcase up the stairs, to which I murmured a "Muchisimas gracias." I would have taken the escalator, but it stopped working just before I got to it . . .). Another fellow helped me escape Arlington, and I started wandering around looking for the hotel.

When I realised I'd booked myself into the Arisia hotel I had a nice giggle. They had no non-smoking rooms, but the smoking floor had just been renovated, so it actually wasn't an issue.

I erad for a bit, played Civ 3 for a bit, went hunting food. (I wound up getting creamy garlic noodles at CPK because I didn't have enough cope to go somewhere crowded.) Got in touch with teinedreugan and brooksmoses to let them know I was in all right, went to bed early. Not that it helped much, as the people next door were apparently having a threesome with someone with the giggles early in the evening that dwindled into a merely enthusiastically noisy twosome. :}



The wake-up call in the hotel was very startling. I'd put together my bag to head to the island the night before because I didn't expect to be coherent in the AM. I got myself sorted, hiked out into the rain, and headed for South Station, where I got breakfast. As I was packing up to go look for a cab to get down to the dock, I ran into leafshimmer, who was planning on taking the bus. We headed down to the Silver Line (I need to write to Chay and see if his alum email address works . . .) and talked Egyptology and caught the bus to the waterfront. A man who worked on the island was there, so we knew where to get off. :}

We got picked up by Sarai and ferried over to where people were hiding from the rain. I told queenofhalves I had the music I said I'd bring her, but wasn't gonna fish it out. Eventually we hiked back to the dock and got on the boat, which was very full and somewhat stuffy (especially since it was unpleasant enough outside that people weren't much on the deck).

We got in and milled about. Someone asked me if I was lilairen, which startled me immensely; I think that's the first time I've been pegged by LJ username. (I believe that was laurelinde.) I got queenofhalves the disc, and peered at all the food that people had brought, and made a label for the soup canister. I forget when I got into a conversation with ninevrise about the bageish (she came up with the brilliant "vaguels" for the same concept), but that happened somewhere. I also developed a profound need to ogle cangelo's ink, and discovered in the course of that conversation that he knows netbard from Camarilla.

Oh, and I ogled drums, too.

We started with music:

We are the rising sun
We are the change
We are the ones we've been waiting for
We are dawning

Very Khepri.

Honestly, a lot of the day is a bit of a blur; bits and pieces are there but I'm not sure about the order. We worked with blue fire practice. The blade keshwyn gave me got several compliments in there. I wound up talking with someone at some length about the netjeru and gave her a link to fyrekat's journal for the writings about Sekhmet. We did breathing work and kala ritual and ha prayer. I felt a lot more compatible with the group energy than I did with the Triple Soul workshop -- I think partly it's because I knew people there and wasn't a complete stranger to the work and the folk, but I don't think that's all there was to it.

In the initial circle casting, yezida began the invocation of Nimue by leaping out and poking various of the students. "Nimue! Nimue! Nimue!" The chaos spread, in among giggles and generalised good humor. Somewhere in there I acquired a daffodil, and wound up bonking another one of the students on the head with it several times before passing it on. I have a strange suspicion that Nimue may be AC's head. I invited the fae; I hadn't felt right with doing so at Triple Soul, but I wanted to acknowledge the understanding of their place in my spiritual life that I got from lysana's ritual at PantheaCon, and that seemed appropriate. I actually managed to start parsing the energies of the Guardians this time -- I hadn't at TS -- and I'm not sure how much of that is because I made the commitment to study between then and now and now much is familiarity. (I suspect some level of combination.)

At one point we all went outside to practice learning how to notice things on the edges and bring that to centre. The first thing I spotted was a white rock the size of double fists pressed together, and I studied it in place for a while. I considered moving it and setting it upright like a standing stone, but eventually I decided that was wrong and left it. After that it was, for a while, all white things on the ground -- one of them a seashell, a couple of times the reflections of the cloudy sky in puddles, but a lot of litter. I decided to pick up litter for a bit, and after I'd done that for a while I got a tree calling my attention, so I went to see what the tree was up to. The bark was beautiful, browns and golds and sprays of green.

After dinner we did a place-of-power meditation and a seeking of a fae ally. My p-o-p was structure differently from the way it has been in the past; I'm not sure what to make of that. (I have a semi-strange history with place of power meditations.) I also met a very strange faery; this will take a great deal of processing.

We scurried down and caught the ferry back; I decided to walk back to South Station with folks, and then caught the T around to Arlington and got back to the hotel. Showered, got a packet of pretzels, assisted a couple of British tourists with the denominations of the coinage for the vending machine, slept not as well as I would have liked especially given the timeshift -- noisy people shrieking in the halls and my brain utterly consumed by the need to write a Twins ritual.



Considered getting up later, but I wanted to go hunting milk because I really didn't get enough fats into my system on Saturday. I wasn't sure how long that would take, so I got up at the same time, checked out of the hotel, wandered around for a while trying to find someone who would let me check my suitcase into their storage room, then headed off. Found an open 7-Eleven while walking from Park Street to South Station, got to the Silver Line fairly early. Wound up joined by cangelo for the bus ride and talking about various things -- getting ridden by gods, the Twins, masks, all sorts.

The stuff Sunday was a lot like a compressed and abbreviated form of the Triple Soul workshop, we did a lot of the same exercises, though a couple of them slightly differently. The sticky-one manifestation one got entertaining -- I wound up going systematically around the circle of art supplies sampling all the sources of green. Got about three-quarters of the way around before I stopped (distracted by shiny objects). Someone had made a paper airplane that was making its way around the room, and it kept drifting by me, and I couldn't make it fly, so obviously I had to make one that worked. I wound up, through an odd set of circumstances, biting the original one, and also wound up chucking the new one at yezida when she started pulling us out of trance. (I missed.)

yezida asked people to keep drumming. And the drumming went around the circle, and people started dancing. Some very cool dancers -- I wonder if I should learn how to dance properly as opposed to my usual incoherent bouncing around. I wound up watching queenofhalves dance in an odd sort of fascinated way when she got up -- it was very cool. :) I was playing tambourine -- I think that was leafshimmer's suggestion -- I'd left the drum at the hotel because I hadn't been playing it well the day before. yezida had everyone get up, and eventually I put it down becacuse clapping was more appropriate than chiming, and then it all morphed into the Sticky One devotional dance Thorn has, and that was very cool. Even if I still have a tendency to get all snarled up in that one. :}

Eventually we were done and packed up to head back. I had to grab the two o'clock ferry because teinedreugan had scheduling conflicts otherwise, so I warned people that I didn't have the container to bring the soup back and actually worked up the nerve to climb up on a chair and make a general announcment that anyone who wanted to take some iwth them could do so. Sat with ninevrise on the way back talking about grad school stuff and martial arts and needing to get back into physical shape; gave her a lift to the T.

Then I went home and was vigorously snuggled by cats.


Yup. That was long.

Comments

[queenofhalves]

sounds like you had as good a time as i did. :>

[leanne-opaskar.livejournal.com]

*reads over the post carefully*

It does sound like you had a great time, sleep issues aside. (: Glad to hear it.

I'm unfamiliar with the "sticky one" concept. Can you explain that further? *looks curious*

[ardaniel]

I'll cite briefly and let lilairen take up all my slack, as I'm running out the door to go try to grab a Darth Tater Mr. Potato Head. ;)

http://www.lilithslantern.com/fetch.htm

"Fetch" is another name for "sticky one," one of the three souls in the Feri Tradtion's Triple Soul paradigm. Responsible for instinct, emotional reaction, care of the vital resources, and there's my ride sorry would love to go on but that's a good article, K? :)

[leanne-opaskar.livejournal.com]

Thanks! That was a useful link. I've bookmarked it so that I can read the rest of the site later. It looks like a much better site on the tradition than ones I've found previously.

[kiya]

The 'sticky one' is the term yezida uses for one of the three Feri souls, also called "fetch", "vital body", "younger self", "animal soul", and so on. (It's actually very close to the Egyptian ka-concept, a better match than the other two.)

I forget if you see aura? If you do, and look at the structure, you might notice two broad 'parts', one tight in, denser, and keeping close to the contours of the body, and then a more coronal region with less defined edges? Those are the first two Feri souls; the inner one is the vital body. (The third is, roughly, the halo.)

The book written on this stuff is Etheric Anatomy; I'm told that Victor (who wrote it) didn't keep all its points as his practice changed over the years, but it's a good groundwork for the structures and concepts. (It also is the only book on aura and aura structure that actually addresses what I perceive.)

[leanne-opaskar.livejournal.com]

I don't see aura ... well .... more accurately, sometimes I think I do, but it requires significant effort and usually doesn't match what others perceive. So I'm never quite sure if I'm making it up. ^_^;

Then again, I tend to perceive energy itself in only a few bands of "color" (red, gold, white, navy, and teal-green, mostly), so I wonder if I'm energy-colorblind!

Does that book contain information on how to process aura as well as what the makeup is? If so, it might be a useful thing for me to read to help me work on that aspect. (Although it sounds like an interesting read anyway ... but that would help move it up the list faster.)

[kiya]

No, it doesn't. Here, let me haul up the post I made the other day about how I learned to process aura data . . .

Honestly, I find them easier to locate by touch. I can see them, somewhat (never with colour), which I actually trained myself into through exercises from one of those 'Develop your Psycheek Powurz!!1!' books I bought when I was a teenager. ;)

What I remember about how I did it was that I watched people -- mostly the spaces around them -- especially when they had plain walls behind them. (This was actually fairly easy to do since I was in high school at the time and had a lot of stare-at-teacher time.) I let my eyes unfocus a little while doing it. Eventually I got to the point that I could sometimes pick out a two-layered haze around people -- one close in to the body and dense, one more like a corona. I find it's easier to do when I've been doing a lot of energy work -- I was getting them very easily this weekend while in a training circle, especially after we did energy-raising exercises.

If you have a partner you can work with, you can practice doing it by touch, which may help developing seeing them -- slowly bringing your hand closer to your partner then and further away, trying to find the energetic boundaries. I find it harder to be able to do on myself, though I *can*; I wouldn't recommend this for practice if there's an alternative.

[leanne-opaskar.livejournal.com]

Hmm. Sounds useful. I will give it a try. (:

[netbard.livejournal.com]

Heh. cangelo is awesome. He plays the Scariest Twelve Year Old Evar.