In Pursuit of Mysteries

I Live!

So, I’m at ’s parents place in Berkeley, CA. We had our mighty turkey day feast earlier and I got exposed to thirteen (!) of her relatives. I seem to be passing the appropriate parental tests as her parents are speaking to me and making small talk and such. I’ve got them snowed as to my worth! ;-)

I’m using R’s mother’s imac and squeaky modem collection to check my e-mail and write this. I feel very 1995.

R’s brother and his girlfriend leave town tomorrow afternoon and we have the car for most of the weekend after that. We heard that Thelema Lodge was doing 2nd degree initiations on Saturday but we didn’t bring our regalia and aren’t sure that we’d want to go anyway, it being vacation and us having just gone to them (mine) a couple of weeks ago.

Yesterday we went down to Telegraph and his Shambhala Books, one of my favorite little bookshops. I picked up a copy of Chagdud Rinpoche’s book on Buddhist practices and teachings (his only general one) that I didn’t have. We hit a used bookstore and I picked up a book by Kevin Kelly (??), the original editor of Wired magazine. I managed to get a reviewer’s copy of Bruce Sterling’s upcoming non-fiction, futurist book Tomorrow Now last week (it doesn’t come out until late December) and am almost done with it. He highly recommends Kevin (or is it Ken?) Kelly’s work and says it is very underrated. Since I found a hardcover for $4 of one of his books, I figured “Why not?”

Sterling’s book is quite good and I’m going to recommend it to my friends though it will be a while until a cheap edition is out. I quite like his work, especially his non-fiction, and I’m on the Viridian e-mail list he maintains. A lot of his themes from his novels are echoed in these books. His short story, Green Days in Brunei has always been strangely inspirational to me. It’s in one of his main short story collections (his short work is quite good) and I recommend. Sterling, along with Freeman Dyson, and a few others is one of my personal saints.

I’m also reading a novel (rule: when flying all over and staying with “family” for holidays, bring twice as many books as you think you’ll need…) called Gates of Fire which is about the Spartan battle against the Persians at Thermopylae. I can’t emphasize how excellent that book is. It’s incredible and I’ve almost completely devoured it in the last two days of travel and such. I’m told the author has written a second period book set during a famous Greek naval engagement but I don’t recall the details. If you’re a classics geek at all, read this…

Nothing much was open today, the downside of the holidays…R and I put our diet off for the day so we could enjoy the meal with the family and there was the typical load o’ food. Tomorrow we’re going to look around shops and get out. I saw some wonderful Buddhist import places with nice statuary though I might have trouble bringing one of the nice phurbas back on the plane… I’ve made my desire to go to one of the huge flea markets that they have around here known as well.

R’s mother told us that one of the museums in San Francisco has an Egyptian exhibit from the British Museum. Apparantly, the British Museum is being redone so they have parts of their Egyptian collection all over the world right now. I want to try to go see that and we still might go down to San Jose to see the AMORC museum. R’s mom has been there and she recommended it when it got brought up as well. R wants to visit with some old friends so we may go out for drinks in the evening as well.

Sadly, the one friend that I did try to get in touch with, Sam Webster, hasn’t gotten back to me. I left him a message saying I’d be in town until Sunday as I’d like to meet up for coffee. I didn’t plan a lot around this trip or I’d be trying to hook up with more Thelemites or pagans that I’ve met in the area. Ah well.

Berkeley, CA

So, I’m going to be in the Bay Area Wednesday evening through Sunday with R…Other than scaring up the locals that I know, anyone have anything in particular that they suggest to do?

Whew! Cleaning…

This is a kind of cheese sandwich entry…

I spent most of the morning cleaning before R got home from Portland. We have a weekly sheet and we’re supposed to alternate chores and such so things both get done and no one person gets stuck doing them. I kind of suck at this sometime so I’d promised to do more this weekend. I can’t say cleaning it fun but I did get a bunch of stuff done.

We’ve been in our house since July and still haven’t put everything away, up on the walls or down into storage. I cleaned up a bunch of my old books and put them away. I need to get a box together of all of the old books, mostly Germanic ones, that I don’t want anymore. I’ll take them some place to trade in. I don’t expect to get much for them but something is better than nothing and they just take up valuable space now.

The Citadel of the Ouroboros, the Ogdoadic (Ordo Astrum Sophiae) group that I’m in, met tonight. We use the ritual space in my house normally since I’ve partitioned off a 12′ by 12′ section of the basement into a ritual space. The ritual working went well and we chatted a bit about an upcoming public ritual and the class that we’re going to do.

I meander from feeling satisfied with my spiritual activities to feeling dissatisfied. Sometimes I feel like I’ve been on this path for 13 years now and haven’t accomplished a lot. Oftentimes, I have too many disparate interests and do not go as deeply into things as I should. I don’t feel like an accomplished ritualist or practitioner. I mean, my basic skills are good enough but I don’t often feel that spark of contact that tells me that I’m really there and connected. I’m not sure what to do about it. Sitting down and blindly doing ritual work isn’t going to help it necessarily because if you don’t do ritual with the right intent and awareness, it can be empty and without real value.

I think working on my day to day meditation and ritual habits in order for them to be more realiable will probably make the most difference. I’ve always struggled with the discipline of daily work, often losing, even though I know its value and tell other people to focus on it. (heh…) It’s hard to walk the walk. I think that’s true of everyone though, I just need to keep on it and focused.

I’m also trying to figure out how to do my Buddhist work in the context of my Western work. Perhaps one in the morning and one in the evening will work. I suppose that we shall see. At the very least, I want to start doing the Red Tara sadhana on a daily basis.