Researches

It has been a slothful Sunday morning.  I woke up a little sore, and elected to transition form sleep to waking in a hot bath.  Further indulgences included an outside breakfast of half an avocado, black tea, and Pop Tarts.  

Mark, ever more industrious than I am, especially in the early mornings, has already varnished a new bench he is building, planted lavender seeds, reduced a pint of raspberries for a desert topping, harvested some poppies and foxglove seeds, and done general weeding.  

Spurred to some action, since breakfasting, I've photographed some new sunflowers, photographed some violet flox, trained stray grape vines back onto their "arbor," spread a few poppy and foxglove seeds, and now I'm writing while finishing up the last remains of the tea.

On the writing front, "Doors of the Past" has been released at Abyss and Apex Magazine.  So far the reader feedback I've gotten has been very good, and I'm pleased that the story has found a home.  

On the NeoPagan Readings Front, I picked up a copy of Storm Faerywolf's Betwixt and Between (2017).  No Hot Gay Male Pagan Secrets so far--and it may be a bad assumption on my part, based on Faerywolf's orientation, that there are.  Some of the "poetry is truth" and pedigree statements about Feri in the introductory chapters in B&B prompted me to dig up my old copy of Fifty Years in the Feri Tradition (1994), by Cora Anderson.   I'm not the biggest fan of the testimonial style in Fifty Years, (although it does remind me a little of the cloak and dagger insinuations of Dion Fortune) and Anderson has a whole pile of axes she grinds in her sixty-three page book.  But it does explain some of secret traditions and midichlorian count faerie-blood claims (and in turn reminds me of some of the writings of William Butler Yeats on Fairy Doctors).  I'm also tempted to contrast and compare with Starhawk's Spiral Dance (1979).  B&B appears to pick up in chapter three; I really appreciated the part where Faerywolf brings up time management as a skill witches should have in their toolkits.  

In other news, I'm taking an on-line introductory course in reading Middle Kingdom Egyptian hieroglyphs.  I'm telling myself it's Story Research, but really, it's so I can have a better idea what is written on various artifacts at the MET.  The biggest insight so far (which I should have realized before the class) is that Middle Kingdom Scribes had a C.S. Lewis-Discarded-Image-esque symbolically mystic relationship to their written language that is different from the modern, Western, information-revolution, scientific tool of description relationship with our modern alphabet and written English.