John Burridge

Sunday was a new moon.  Sunday was a cleaning day.  

One of the drawbacks of not having a craft room or a library is that my side of the bedroom gets cluttered with books, artistic projects, and stray papers.  At one point in the past, I purchased some project boxes, and that helps a little, except that the boxes tend to end up underneath our bed along with stray summer shoes, and collect dust-bunnies and hairballs.  

The tchotchkes and pocket detritus, I'm sorry to say, even winds up on the top of my dresser, which is supposed to be my altar.  The dresser was also doubling as my vanity table and necklace display.  

Mark worked on another project and walked the dog while I reshelved books.  Then I reviewed a few old textbooks.  It was very hard, but I threw away a thirty-five year old S Statistics Package manual from 1986.  I haven't analyzed data with S (on a PDP-11 VAX) since I wrote my undergraduate Psychology thesis.   I think even S+ is old and this was just plain old S --  they've moved onto calling it R -- and my old Statistics Instructor, Albyn Jones, retired just the other year.   It was very weird getting rid of it -- I felt like I had betrayed the Spirit of the Library of Alexandria, or tossed out a children's tattered magic kit, or burnt an old lover's letters -- and I had to sit down with Cicero afterward.  

But I soon carried on, vacuuming, cleaning out old receipts, storing some items in the garage, and even tossing a few periodicals from the late 1900's, which allowed me to actually shelve a few more books instead of stacking them.   And yes, some things were shook out, wiped off, and returned to newly dust-free nooks.  

I figured out a better way to store and display my necklaces:  only one is a proper talisman,  two I'd call amulets, about half are charms, and the rest are merely theatrical -- so moving them off of my altar area made sense.  I do like wearing them, but over the last year with COVID and not going out as much, I've fallen off of choosing one in the morning.

With more space, I moved the Portable Stonehenge to be more central.  Continuing with the "less is more" theme, I cleared away most of the junk jewelry and all but a few of my elemental emblems and ritual tools.  The end result feels calmer and less frenetic, and I'll have to see if I can continue to just take 30 seconds in the morning to ground, center, and move the day, moon and sun pegs around their courses.

It's been rainy here the last two weeks or so. The up side of all the rain is that we're getting a lot of snow in the mountains, too. The down side is that the mornings have been socked in, so I haven't been able to see the string of five planets in the morning.

Over the holiday, I cleared off the top of my chest of drawers of all the hats and receipts and paper projects and spent batteries and spare change and and turned it into a kind of altar space. I've placed some tokens at the cardinal directions: an athame to the east, a green lava-lamp to the north-east, a shell to the west, crystals to the north, some Egyptian-themed boxes, and other assorted items. In the south is my gym pass... Against the north wall I put up a mini stand for my necklaces and pendants; I used to wear them more, and I'm hoping that having them out will remind me to wear them more often.

In the center is a finger labyrinth. It takes about fifteen seconds to run my finger through the course; usually I hum "Center of the Sun." While this isn't a full-blown ritual, which the rest of the family probably appreciates, I suppose it counts as a daily prayer.

I've fallen out of observing full moon and the stations of the sun with ritual... which comes with being a solitary. But being aware of the cycles of the seasons is sort of the point to Earth-based mystery religion... Now of course, while I'm thinking about it, there isn't enough room for Portable Stonehenge. Hmmm. If I re-arranged some of the boxes, I might have room for it. I'm sure having too many symbolic, ritual items on one's altar is a metaphor.

And don't forget the cat -- it's only a matter of time before Smokey decides that jumping up onto the chest of drawers is a good way to get us to spring out of bed and pick him up before he knocks something over.


Working Out: Went to the gym Saturday morning and opened the place up. Did my regular routine at my latest high weights (except the barbell curl), and I think I pulled my lats. On the plus side, when I clench my back, I'm just barely beginning to look like those guys with a V-shaped chest. I probably look U-shaped.