No, you haven’t landed on the wrong blog. Though I usually only post about Tarot on my other blog, Spirit Blooms, in honor of World Tarot Day, I’d like to share my love of Tarot a bit more broadly, and also to honor some of the people of Tarot, including writers and artists that I think are rather special. So here it is, more than you ever thought you wanted to know about Tarot. At the same time I hope to dispel some misconceptions.

By the way, I understand that today is also World Towel Day for Arthur Dent fans (The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy).

Tarot Writers and Artists
First, I want to introduce you to the blogs of two women and one man who’ve contributed a great deal to the study of Tarot, for me personally and for a lot of others. Mary K. Greer is the author of Tarot For Your Self and The Complete Book of Tarot Reversals, along with many other insightful books on Tarot. Rachel Pollack is an award-winning novelist as well as author of numerous books on Tarot and the Kabbalah, including Seventy-Eight Degrees of Wisdom, The Forest of Souls, and a pair of detailed companion books for the Haindl Tarot created by Hermann Haindl. Ms. Pollack also created the Shining Tribe Tarot.

In addition to those who write books about Tarot are a number of people who write articles, publish newsletters, review Tarot decks and books, and operate online forums. Then there are the deck creators who continue to color the lives of Tarot lovers with new and fascinating decks, beautiful images, and deep symbolism. James Wanless, Ph.D., or Captain Pick A Card (notice I’m linking to two different blogs here), is the creator of the Voyager Tarot, which is the first Tarot I owned and learned with, back in the late 80s. It’s a photo collage deck, and it still resonates for me in its beauty and usefulness.

Some of the most innovative modern Tarot decks include Mark McElroy’s Bright Idea Deck, and Emily Carding’s Transparent Tarot. While my preference is for a more traditional look and feel to Tarot, it’s decks like these that bring Tarot to people who never considered it before, and have helped carry it into the 21st century.

Sometimes an established artist decides to create a Tarot deck. Hermann Haindl is a great example of an artist who is also knowledgeable about Tarot, and I find his Haindl Tarot to be phenomenal. Artist decks are sometimes disappointments, either because the artists haven’t studied Tarot in depth, don’t have the right feeling for it, or because some aspect we expect of Tarot is missing. It’s not enough for a Tarot to just have pretty pictures or a novel theme. The best art-based decks are fabulous for reading, as is Elisabetta Trevisan’s deck, the Crystal Tarots.

History and Structure
Tarot is a centuries old phenomenon, the earliest European decks having appeared by the 15th century. No one really knows its origin, or its original purpose, but we know that it’s been used both as a deck of playing cards and as a system of divination for hundreds of years. It’s the precursor to our standard modern playing cards.

A Tarot deck is defined primarily by its structure. The deck typically contains 78 cards and includes two parts, a Major Arcana and a Minor Arcana. The Major Arcana contains 22 archetypal images, or Trumps, and the Minor Arcana is more like a deck of ordinary playing cards, with four suits of numbered and Court cards. Whereas a deck of playing cards includes only three face cards in each suit, a Tarot deck has four Courts, traditionally titled Page or Knave (the Jack in a playing card deck), Knight, Queen, and King. The Joker in modern playing cards is derived from the Fool archetype in the Tarot’s Major Arcana.

Three styles of Tarot decks have developed in modern times. Some use only pip cards, with non-scenic illustrations of the given number of suit elements for the numbered Minor Arcana. Others contain scenic illustrations in the Minors, which many people find richer in symbolism and easier to use in readings.

But enough of the technical details and history. I’m positive that if you’re interested in learning more, you’ll find plenty to intrigue you with a simple online search. For more about Tarot history, check out Trionfi.com or Tarotpedia. You can also learn about the history of specific decks at Wikipedia, such as the Rider-Waite-Smith Tarot and the much more ancient Tarot de Marseille.

The Art of Tarot
The draw for many people who love Tarot is the artwork. Some collectors don’t read with the cards at all. I won’t post any images here, for reasons of copyright. But I’ll provide a link or two to get you started at sites where samples of both ancient and modern decks can be viewed.

Golden Tarot by Kat Black (Use links at left to view the Majors, Coins, Cups, Swords, Wands.)

Tarot of Transformation by Jasmin Cori and Willow Arlenea is “an innovative deck by two psychotherapists offering an integrated and embodied spirituality.”

If you want to spend about two full days browsing samples of Tarot decks, you might want to try Aeclectic Tarot. This site also links to the Aeclectic Tarot Forum, one of the biggest and best places on the Internet to learn about and discuss Tarot, thanks to its most generous hostess, Solandia.

Last but not least, the German site Albideuter.de
compares the same cards from a staggering number of different Tarot decks.

Uses of Tarot
Tarot is most useful for gaining valuable insight into our lives, which is something that can’t be measured except through the experiences of those who use it or benefit from it. I don’t typically set out to use Tarot to predict the future, though there are times when it does that anyway, a mystery I won’t go into here in any depth, because frankly I can’t explain it. If someone is interested in how Tarot might do that, or how any kind of psychic ability or extra-sensory perception works, there are many theories, ranging from spiritual beliefs to quantum physics, and there are scientific studies going on all the time. Carl Jung experienced events that he classified as ESP, and as a scientist he thought the subject deserved further study. He also coined the term Synchronicity, or “meaningful coincidence,” which is what a lot of students of Tarot, including me, tend to think is at least partially behind how Tarot works.

If you’re interested in following some of the latest research into psychic and other related phenomena, you might want to check out these links:

Institute of Noetic Sciences
American Society for Psychical Research
Consciousness Research Laboratory
The Veritas Research Project, University of Arizona

I find that my personal use of Tarot helps me most with insight, helping me to understand what’s going on in my life — especially inside my own psyche. It sometimes helps me make decisions by pointing out options or perspectives that I hadn’t thought of on my own, and it helps me by pointing out where I have either deluded myself about something or I have a lot of unconscious stuff going on that I need to be more aware of. I’ve also at times used it as a tool for meditation. Some psychologists and therapists use Tarot in their practices to help clients understand their projections, archetypes at work in their lives, and other unconscious issues. Sometimes an image is much better than words at bringing unconscious material into the open or into greater clarity. Tarot could be compared to dreams in its symbolism, and to literature in how it provides a metaphor for typical situations and processes that all humans experience.

I’ve used Tarot to spark my creativity, either to inspire the topic of an essay or to help me work out plotting puzzles in my fiction. The solution to the mystery in Snow Angels came almost entirely from a series of Tarot readings. I’ve read of other Tarot users who also find Tarot helpful in their creative work.

Additionally, Tarot is used, mostly in Europe, to play a card game known as Tarock, Trionfi, or Tarocchi (more instructions here). I’ve never played this game, and the instructions look complex to me. (I grew up playing Canasta and Cribbage.) My understanding is that it’s something like Bridge.

I discovered my love of Tarot more than 20 years ago, and to this day it remains my favorite mystery.

Happy World Tarot Day!

click to enlarge

Our home office is in the second bedroom, where we’ve removed the closet doors and added storage shelves. As soon as she was big enough to jump that high, Tara began insisting that one particular spot, on a shelf at about my eye level, was hers. She started pushing things out of the way, and wouldn’t leave it alone. Finally I gave in and cleared a space for her. (The shelf doesn’t really sag, that’s a trick of the lens.)

She’s asleep there right now, so shhh!

Cats always know their place. Humans can only get out of the way.

It doesn’t seem possible that we can already be one month and six days into 2009. I’ve been posting so infrequently that the blog barely has a pulse. But it is alive I assure you. It’s just been sleeping, dreaming if you will.

It’s raining and stormy today and I’m grateful for that. I think this is only our fourth big rain of the season so far. My cat Tara had a bath a few days ago on a warm, sunny, dry day that got to 80 degrees and seems to have become typical weather this winter. At least it’s been easy on the heating bill. Not so easy on the water bill or my sinuses.

I’ve been away from blogs except to post my ramblings about Tarot at Spirit Blooms. I’ve worked off-line at my other computer on artwork, read or posted on a couple of favorite Internet forums (more than I should), and searched out alternatives on- and off-line to spending money that I don’t have on books that I dearly want. I started out reading about Carl Gustav Jung; now I’m reading the writings of Jung himself, beginning with his autobiography written late in life, Memories, Dreams, Reflections. Still deep in my J. R. R. Tolkien adventure, I recently finished reading The Annotated Hobbit, and now I’m savoring The Lord of the Rings. I’m a little shocked by how much watching the movies in the interim has botched my memory of the original story. Still they’re excellent movies. One should appreciate each on its own merits, the novel and the movies as separate creative entities. To do the written story complete justice there would’ve had to be nine or more movies instead of three. Not that I would complain, but not everyone is the Tolkien fiend that I am. Up ahead I plan to continue with The Silmarillion and The Children of Hurin. Perhaps others, who knows? I’m taking my time, reading mostly late in the evening before sleep, if I’m not too tired by then.

Eric Mayer mentioned, in his comment on my earlier post about rereading favorites, that he almost never rereads books. I’ve been the same way most of my adult life. I reread a lot when I was a teen and young adult, but at some point I realized there was plenty in print to read the first time around, and life was short. I felt that I’d miss out on too many other things if I spent my time rereading favorites.

I’ve changed my attitude about that again only recently. This has to do partly with some of the newer fiction that I’ve been dissatisfied with, partly with my budget, and partly with the tiny library here in town where the tastes of the librarians don’t seem to mesh with my own — or I’m just quirky in my reading tastes. I’m sure they have some Tolkien and maybe some Jung, but I’ve come to prefer to take my time and not feel constrained by a return date anyway. I tried writing reviews here for a while, and I found that if the book was a library book I had to return it too quickly, and if I tried to write a review after that, I kept wanting to refer to the book. If I like it, I want it to stay around for a while. I also tried our library’s on-line interconnection with an ebook download system, but that didn’t work for me. Old computer or aging human brain inside user? Either way it didn’t work and I didn’t want to waste time fussing with it. I wanted to read the book. You know, just open a cover and start reading. If something is going to slow me down I want it to be the savor of words.

That brings me to the fourth reason I’ve gotten back into rereading. Mostly it has to do with wanting to read slowly. I’ve given up on reading everything out there. I’ve finally accepted that’s impossible. I’ve decided to hone down my reading list and read what I love — slowly, and as many times as I want.

When I reread an old favorite I don’t have to be in such a hurry to get to the end. I already know how it ends. There is something to the first bloom of a new story, that first time through when it’s a path of discovery, recognition, and suspense. But this time I can pause and enjoy the language along the way, let the suspense build again slowly. My old favorites have language worth pausing for. The more commercial books today tend to be heavy on suspense and bizarre plots and twists, while they seem too often short on the kind of writing I savor. Many feel to me as if they’re written in too much of a hurry, or as if the writer didn’t even like the story he was writing. The secret to great writing, I think, is for the writer to so love the story that he’s reluctant to leave it. Chances are the reader won’t want to leave it either.

But then I’m not a hurrier, never have been. I think it’s too easy to get into an “I’ll miss something if I slow down” mindset in our day and age, though it’s a valid concern to some degree. In the work world, one must hurry enough to show up when needed, and if one slows down one is in danger of not getting important work done, of missing opportunities, or of not being able to do one’s job anymore because one hasn’t kept up with hyperactive technology. There are sometimes valid reasons to hurry. I don’t want the emergency room team to dawdle, or firefighters to take their time arriving at a fire. For readers who want to keep up, there’s such a huge amount being published, in spite of aspiring writers’ concerns that no one is publishing what they write, that it’s easy to think one has no time to reread or to read slowly the first time. There are also such a great number of people who want to be writers that it doesn’t appear we’ll ever have a shortage of reading material, even very good reading material leaving out the bad. It’s a crowded world full of people with something to say, many of them excellent writers.

Still I think we miss out on too much by trying to do or read everything. I’m not well-read, mainly because I’m a slow reader. Maybe that’s why I appreciate books that take a long time to produce. I can sense the love and time that was put into them. I can linger, relish, and wonder why. I can spend a relatively equal time enjoying them, and feel gratitude that the authors took the time to do it right.

Tolkien took something like 13 years to write The Lord of the Rings between 1937 and 1949. He took longer, when one considers all the thought prior to beginning it that he put into creating the world of Middle-Earth, from the time he was a boy, and the time between 1949 and 1954 that he worked with his publisher to get everything just right. That time shows. And it’s not as if by taking that long he missed out on sales, which seem these days so unforgiving of anyone lagging behind. The only time any of his books went out of print was during Word War II and the after-war years, when paper was rationed in England. Oh, and there was the problem of some proofs being destroyed in a bombing or a fire (I don’t remember which) that caused further delay in getting one edition of The Hobbit back into print. Of course one important factor in his print longevity was in being Tolkien. There have been many imitators and, as Eric seemed to hint in his comment, most imitations have not held up very well. Time is, I think, one reason.

I’m certain that the biggest problems with many books is that they’re devised and written in too much of a hurry, and because they aren’t true to the writer’s own creative promptings. I can see some publisher urging a writer to create something like Tolkien wrote, but to do it right now. Imitation done in a hurry can rarely hold up to the proper process of creation. Sometimes, but not usually. Imitation as a whole is an iffy and questionable practice. Readers may say they want another story like The Lord of the Rings, but they’re not saying they want an imitation. They want more Tolkien, and that’s simply the best possible compliment to the original creator, not to any would-be imitator. Perhaps we sometimes, as readers, make the mistake of confusing the two ideas ourselves and go looking for another Tolkien when we should be looking for something else that’s new and fresh, and over which someone labored long and lovingly.

It’s been said that most of a writer’s work doesn’t take place at the typewriter or keyboard, or even necessarily with paper in hand. It happens inside the mind of the writer. I personally think every writer’s workspace needs a comfy couch, or a bed, and a window with a view of a natural setting or garden, as well as an immense library. I also think it’s safe to say that most great fiction writers have lived what they write. By that I don’t mean they’ve experienced it in physical reality. I mean they have a fertile and active imagination, an ability to visualize the experiences they haven’t actually lived. A relentless imagination at that. We use our imaginations to read, but the writer uses his imagination far more, over and over again, actively reliving the scenes he writes in his mind, working them out until they feel right, until he’s ready to translate them into written language. They get to know their own unconscious realms and facets of their own characters, as well as the archetypes of the collective unconscious, even more than we do ordinarily when we dream at night.

Now I know that some writers create at the keyboard on the fly. I’ve done that too. But the stories I’ve written that I felt best about were usually those that I had in mind for a long time before I dared to put any words down. They were an integrated collection of many things that occurred to me, including some fantasies, day dreams, things I wondered about, and even whole scenes, characters, or settings that occupied my mind well before I realized they’d formed anything close to a story worth sharing or writing down. Some were ideas I couldn’t put away because they begged to be told.

Fast writing may be part of the problem. I once rewrote a novel (Snow Angels) in the course of a few weeks, retyped the whole thing from scratch, from my head. But that story had been in my mind for a long time, in various forms, and even on paper in a few forms, before I did that. I’ve never taken part in NaNoWriMo, but I think it is possible for it to produce something of value, provided there’s something already percolating in the writer’s mind before they begin, perhaps for years before they begin typing it out. I’ve done fast writing exercises, and I know they have their value. But I wonder if the trend in fast writing is the reason so many new books I read leave me flat these days.

There is fast writing that’s great, and there have been many great prolific writers. But if we make the mistake of thinking their greatness lay in their proliferation, we do them a disservice. The secret to great writing also doesn’t lie in taking forever to produce something. I’m sure there are plenty of slowly written pieces of rubbish passing for fiction. But prolific writers are the exceptions to the slow writing rule, I think, and like Mozart’s music, great fast writing is great for other reasons than its speed of production or lack of revision. Of course everyone should write at their own speed, but fast writing of a single draft usually requires slow thinking up front, and long, slow revisions afterward. If one doesn’t take the time to do it right, to follow through, to consider it worth some effort, then even that smaller portion of fast writing time is wasted, not to mention the time anyone else takes to read the result. If it’s not worth spending lots of time writing, then maybe it’s not worth reading either.

In spite of how long Tolkien’s work has remained in print, it’s still possible that work of this kind is best done for oneself, with any idea or intent of publishing as a mere afterthought. One should, after all, consider oneself worth writing well and respectfully for. From what I understand of Tolkien, he only shared what he created with a few colleagues, friends, and his children, until the friend of a friend mentioned the possibility of publishing The Hobbit. Maybe that’s why it’s so good. He took time to shape and polish it to be what he wanted for himself and those he loved. Only after that did he shape and polish it for publication. Surely that provided him a great deal of satisfaction in what he wrote, regardless of whether strangers in his own land or across the pond liked it later on. He was also a real-life expert regarding myths of a world similar to the one he created and regarding the language he used to create it. But was he an expert who happened to come up with a story he was best suited to write, or was he a writer in the making, even as a child, who lived in his head creating a world first and who worked all his life to become expert at just what he needed to recreate that world on paper? Either way, he took his loving time about it, and that’s a good thing for all of us. After all, what’s the rush?

I received a link to this news article in an email:
Melbourne writer jailed for insulting Thai royals

“FOR writing three ill-conceived sentences in a novel that sold fewer than 10 copies, Melbourne man Harry Nicolaides was yesterday sentenced to three years in a Thai prison.” (click to read entire news story)

Consider what would result in the world if everyone reacted to a perceived insult in this manner.

Imagine the silencing effect.

Even more disturbing, in another article on this topic — Thailand sentences writer for insults — it seems clear that this is probably a case of a writer getting caught in the middle of political maneuvering that has nothing much to do with insulting the royal family or with three sentences in the writer’s self-published work of fiction that only sold 10 copies. It has much more to do with someone else’s power play, or their fears about what will happen when the current Thai monarch dies.

Still it’s enough to make every writer in the world think hard about what freedom is and how much freedom of expression he or she really has. And on the Internet, we’re all writers.

Our summer weather has set in, likely until mid to late October, so I have to wake up early to get all my outdoor work done. I’m amazed how fast things can grow in the warm weather and get away from me — mostly things I don’t want to grow, like weeds.

My usual care to wear gloves when working in the yard had lapsed recently, but working outside earlier than usual this morning meant that I happened across two black widow spiders. One, on the lower rock wall, was attempting to kill a big iridescent green June Beetle, or what we call a June Beetle here, aka Fig Eater Beetle. The beetle was 10 to 15 times the spider’s size. Their struggle mesmerized me for a moment as I wondered who would win, the beetle snapping spider silk as quickly as it wrapped around it. It was the noise he made that drew my attention in the first place. I would’ve intervened, if I’d had something handy to kill the spider with, but the next time I walked past, the spider — hiding from me, no doubt — was nowhere to be seen and the beetle was bumbling away. I’ll be more careful to wear gloves and not work in flip-flops anymore, unless I’m only watering. Black widows usually hide from people, but I don’t want to surprise one.

My little friend Tara is growing fast. A kitten in the house means lots of interruptions to play, or to stop misbehavior in its tracks, or just to cuddle. I’ll try to post an updated photo later, but it might be a blur unless I catch her when she slows down to nap, bask in a sunny window, or watch TV. She’s now more than three times the size she was when I took these pictures, and darker since her kitten fluff has been replaced by a true dark tabby coat. She’s a Siamese mix, but you wouldn’t know that to look at her.

Tara watched Mikhail Baryshnikov dance, in an older video on the arts channel last night, and I think she decided he’s the most cat-like human she’s seen. I hope she doesn’t expect us to move like that! But maybe it’s good that she knows some humans are capable of it, just to help us keep the upper hand. Sometimes we call her Rocket Cat, and one day recently, as the dog and I watched in glazed over amazement while she raced around and up and down a room, I commented to him, “You know, cats can almost fly.” Indi seemed to agree.

I’m not really sure what all else keeps me busy, but there’s a lot of it, whatever it is. I don’t work in the garden enough to excuse not blogging, but I do spend some time finding things to do with the excess produce.

We’ve had loads of squash from just four plants, so far, some of it now in the freezer and some given away. We may need a bigger freezer if I keep gardening. One way that we like zucchini is simply sautéed in a little olive oil with basil, oregano, salt, and pepper. We’ve had some cucumbers, which I personally think would make a good breakfast food, because just one bite seems to wake me up with its fresh, clean crispness. The tomatoes got a late start (from seed), so we haven’t had any to eat yet, but they’re blooming and setting fruit, growing like mad in the heat. There’s a San Marzano Roma about the size of the end of my thumb that I predict will be the first to the table, unless that little cluster of marble sized cherry tomatoes beats it to perfect redness. With the salmonella scare still pretty much a mystery I’m looking forward, even more than I expected when I planted them, to fresh homegrown tomatoes.

Yesterday we discovered how well extra garden produce can pay off, when we gave a large zucchini to a neighbor boy to take home, and later his mom sent over four of the most perfect little quesadillas I’ve ever tasted. Oh. My. God. These were not the quesadillas you find in Mexican restaurants, or the floppy things we usually concoct with flour tortillas and cheddar cheese, in a skillet. Every part of hers was homemade, including flaky six-inch corn flour shells folded in half and crisped. They were filled with chicken, some kind of white cheese, possibly one of the Mexican cheeses described here, and fresh cabbage, and they came with a magical homemade chili sauce to pour over them. I am positive we got the better end of that exchange. You can’t get food like that in any restaurant, and I’m in heaven just remembering them. It’s odd how a really good hot sauce can actually cool you. As my mouth heated up, my body seemed to cool right off. Must’ve been all my pores and sinuses opening. It was positively delicious. Mmmmh!

No, I did not mis-spell “sweater” in the title. We’re having a summery spring, with hot, dry Santa Ana conditions interspersed with normal spring weather, and it’s confusing our poor little seedlings.

I’m actually doing a tiny bit of gardening. Though I’m a plant — especially flower — lover, and I’ve hankered for some fresh garden produce for a long time, I’m shamefully lazy at doing anything about it. Any yard we’ve had that looked good in the past was entirely my spouse’s doing, except for a little weeding here and there on my part, and even now with my surge of interest in finally getting a real garden started here, I’m quite a bit lazier than he is. I’m much better at mental or creative, sedentary work than physical labor. But I’ve had my bursts of productive activity too, and I’ve gotten a little spring cleaning done indoors as well. Not enough to suit me just yet. There’s a lot of catching up to do around here. Thus my long absence, which has been partly rest periods due to the early lapses into summer. Hot weather tends to make me just want to lie down in a dark room with an icy drink of something and whine about the heat. When the thermometer rises above 80 degrees Fahrenheit, my brain even seems to go on vacation. Hopefully that helps explain the long absence from blogs — mine and yours.

How’s your spring going so far?

Had any summer yet?

Want some of mine?

We’d seen it before, many weeks ago. A big bird of prey with black and white bands on its tail. The rest of it was paler than a Red-tailed Hawk, but we only caught glimpses of it flying over, and not a long enough look to identify it. We thought it was stalking the ground squirrel that moved in last summer. Maybe it was, because the ground squirrel hasn’t been around for a few days now.

Day before yesterday, we saw the big bird perch on top of the nearby telephone pole, and we got binoculars out for a really good look. Its breast, the undersides of it wings, and its beak are indeed paler than a Red-tailed Hawk’s. Its breast is almost pinkish or strawberry blond.

It’s a Red-shouldered Hawk, which is apparently found all over the eastern part of the country and along the California coast. I’d never seen one here before, not close enough to identify anyway. Our dominant hawk is the Red-tailed.

I wonder how long it’s been here, because last summer we watched what we think was a clutch of young hawks taking their first flight from a neighbor’s palm tree. Maybe this is one of the parents, back again to nest in the same tree. Or looking for the squirrel, or more squirrels. Poor squirrel, if so.

Our local birds continue to intrigue me with their variety and number. I’ve read, in a Harvard study, that this area is one of the most biologically diverse in the continental US, and that doesn’t surprise me, just basing my opinion on the birds.

I saw lots of owls from the road, when I used to leave for work while it was still dark. I’ve seen plenty of Black Phoebes here the past few weeks. I can’t seem to walk outside without spotting one of them. We have what I think may be Purple Finches, a variation from the House Finches we knew in San Diego, though I’m not certain. Some kind of small woodpecker likes the neighbor’s palm tree. We even have a small flock of feral parrots in the neighborhood, though I haven’t seen or heard them yet this year.

I’ve also seen lots of Mourning Doves, all my life, as I’m sure most people in North America have who pay any attention to wild birds. I’ve heard their mournful song since I was a girl and learned to recognize it. But this morning I heard a dove that sounded different, so I looked out the back window and saw a Ringneck Dove, also known as a Ringed Turtle Dove, under our pine trees. These doves aren’t natives. In fact they’re supposed to have been domestic for the past 3,000 years or so. But I suppose quite a few may have escaped into the wild at one time or another.

I just heard it again, out there, hiding in the pines and cooing, reminding me to post this. I wonder if it’s moved in to nest. If so, I guess it had better watch out for the Red-shouldered Hawk.

We’ve had a few more days of rain, enough to soak the ground, and this storm came before the ground dried out from the last rain, which is good — and unfortunately unusual for us in our past few drought years. So I really shouldn’t complain about the weather, but . . . it’s awfully dark out there.

I balk at turning on lights in the middle of the day, but that’s what I’ve had to do the past two days in order to get any work done. I’m sorting through files, which is a bit scary, especially in the dark. I’ve also hibernated through these dark days to some extent because I’ve been under the weather. We both had the flu over the Solstice and Christmas, and though we’ve recovered, it tried to come back on me a few days ago, sending me once again in search of my vitamin bottles and throat lozenges, and whining about an earache.

It’s a good, wet winter, good for staying indoors and drinking hot beverages, celebrating the fact that we’re actually having winter, even if it is most people’s idea of spring or fall. The more wet winters we have, the less likely we are to have such horrible fire seasons.

Meanwhile, because I’ve decided to keep politics mostly off this blog, whenever I get the urge to wax political I post my views at my other blog, Spirit Blooms. I am putting my political blogging efforts into support of Dennis Kucinich for President.

Don’t worry, I haven’t given up this blog, and I don’t intend to. I’m still somewhat of a mystery to me, and I intend to keep writing, even if not mystery novels. I’m also still opinionated and have lots to say about writing, books, and lots of other stuff you might find interesting. Mystery of a Shrinking Violet will live on until the bitter end of my blogging adventure, whenever that is, sometime in the far future. I’ll be back in a day or two, hopefully with more to write about than the weather — or politics, which I honestly hate but can’t avoid in good conscience these days.

Happy New Year!

Today entered with a beautiful sunrise and left with a gorgeous sunset. What more could we want for the first of the year?

I’ve come to think that the day I enter a new year should be almost like any other day, that making resolutions for the entire year ahead isn’t really sensible. Anything can happen in the course of 12 months, and sometimes our focus changes completely due to forces outside our control. So instead of thinking about resolutions, I spent a lot of time in the past few days reviewing not only this past year, but my entire adult life. The whole-life review has partly to do with a journal project, basically sorting through a mass of accumulated pages from years of personal journal keeping and coming up with a way to edit them down to their essence and organize them, to preserve the memories without all the bulk. In the process I’ve read back through pages that I wrote at 18, 19, and 20 years of age. Wow, what a kid I was — and still am, in some ways. But it made me think a lot about choices and where they lead us, and how we define happiness and success at different times in our lives, especially how our focus shifts, sometimes suddenly, and what we spend our thoughts on. It made me face some of my regrets that I hadn’t considered or thought about in years.

Those regrets include hurting people’s feelings in any way — and I’ve committed some doozies, usually by accident but in hurtful, unthinking ways just the same. I regret changing my college major from English, leaving college without a degree, spending too much time in college distracted by and pining over young men, imagining potential relationships where it should’ve been obvious to me they didn’t exist, joining a church at 19, which distracted me even more from school and may have been what finally drew me away from it altogether — there were boys there (gag me with another repetitive, pining journal page) — and taking religion too seriously for even those few years, mistaking it for a deeper form of spirituality that it was not. Let me say right here, young women put far too much emphasis, or at least we did back then, on finding mates. It’s absurd. Though I eventually did, and have been with him for going on 25 years now, he wasn’t one of those responsible for distracting me in school, so you see all that pining back then was a complete waste. Later in life, I regret not buying a house sooner (though I’m not sure how that would’ve been possible earlier), not taking more vacations when I could afford them, buying even half of the magazines I ever purchased, spending rather than saving most of the excess I finally earned for a few years (and still not spending it on vacations), not buying a new car before I retired, and not giving up on being a novelist sooner. I’m serious about that — seven novels with no sale is too much — enough already!

In spite of those regrets, I’m pretty happy with most of my choices, especially in my spouse, and even in some of the jobs I didn’t like at the time but which were worth the opportunities and the friends they brought me. In fact all my experiences, including many I regret, taught me something of value.

Regrets are a waste too, so I won’t dwell on them, or on dreams or plans for the future. Instead I want to focus on now, on how I’m doing and what I plan in just the next few days or weeks. If there’s anything else I need to focus on more of the time, at this point in my life, it’s the same things I think we should always focus on, all our lives. Most of the people I know spend too much worry on whether we’re good enough, or what we’d change about the past. And some of us spend too much time worrying what others should do, or what should happen that’s out of our control, to make us happy. So I’m reminding myself yet again:

Be happy with myself, as I am

Don’t worry whether others like or approve of me

Treat myself and others kindly and with respect

Don’t let anyone tell me how I should live my life, and don’t tell anyone how to live theirs, as long as they’re not harming anyone

Stand up for myself and for the rights of others

Love life, and live it with passion and an open mind to possible outcomes

Have no regrets — let them go

Follow my bliss and enjoy seeing others follow theirs

Own my life

Don’t worry at all, let tomorrow take care of itself

Learn from everything

All my best regards to you for 2008, and good luck in the coming year.

A lot of people have been stressing over holiday preparations. I decided a few years ago that I would no longer fall into that trap. This is the first year I’ve managed to do it without much residual guilt, so this year is sort of a strange witnessing experience for me, where instead of being caught up in my own holiday madness, I have the opportunity to be aware how everyone else runs around doing what they think must be done or . . . or what? The holiday will fall on our heads like a big rock? Santa will fall out of the sky? Rudolph’s red nose will explode? The days will keep getting shorter instead of lengthening again, until they disappear? The Solstice is past now, so we can rest assured that didn’t happen. Whew!

In truth, each person tends to accomplish the things that are most important to that person. I know that sometimes in the past I wasn’t even conscious of what was really important to me. I was more conscious of what I thought was expected of me, or what everyone else seemed to consider important. I wanted everything for the people I loved, forgetting that what everyone really wants is . . . love. I felt guilty about what I didn’t do, or sometimes even resentful about what someone else didn’t do to help. But the important things got done just the same. Why can’t we be content with that and spend the rest of the time enjoying each other’s presence, or our memories of those who can’t be with us? (more…)