Learning Life Lessons from the Labyrinth

While in Calgary visiting my mum in hospital, I discovered a finger labyrinth in the Foothills Hospital chapel. It was really a lesson in life to make use of this incredible meditation tool. Their version was in wood, and I could stand and trace the pathways with my finger. Don’t go too fast or you miss the turn. Just when you think you have it made, there is a sudden change, and you have to go with it. All this mirrored the ups and downs of mum’s good days and bad days, and so helped my linear logical mind to accept that these things have their own path and method.

Direct is not the way of the heart. I’m so grateful to have found this labyrinth at that time, and I really recommend that anyone who is looking for a “good work” to do: please donate a finger labyrinth to your local hospital chapel. It is a teaching beyond words.

Fooling around

My name from Spell with Flickr – try it yourself!
Okay, this worked fine when I first did it, but checking back on it I see it now reads SCAROL ILL, rather than the simple Carol Sill I had intended. Well, it was scary, when my mum was ill, and this little flickr polterguest has confirmed it! and it might change around other times too. No doubt this became glitchy from the WP upgrade, or is it from BEYOND!

Under New Management

A friend once described the changes she had gone through as being “under new management” – just like the restaurant that closes for a few days, then re-opens with new red checked tablecloths and a different menu. Well, it now happened to me. I’m under new management, partly due to being away for a time. Funny how taking a step back can actually be a step forward, in the scheme of things.

New Management ideas are percolating through my mind and I’ll share a few of them here in the next few blog postings. I’ve been involved in so many different blogs and activities that I’ve been a mite neglectful of this one blog that is mine and mine alone. New management may migrate this blog over to self-hosting. I can’t help but notice that the number of blogs hosted by wordpress.com seem to be diminishing – where are they all going to? Is there a purge I’m not aware of, or is the word that blogging is dead filtering through even those of us who really do care about it. I recall when I first began and the number of blogs that wordpress.com hosted was around 25000 or so. I was, in that sense, a late adopter. Watching the numbers rise over time, I couldn’t help but feel that this was an ongoing surging wave. But like so many things in this current economy, there are now changes even in the blogosphere.

We don’t know where we’re going with all this change in the economy, the climate, the blogosphere, or our own selves. All I can say is that I’m under new management, and I hope this restaurant is going to survive with its new decor, two-for-one coupons and a lot of wishing.

Love that Experimental Micro-Psychokinesis

In the last edition of the Wholphin DVD series, there was a Select Your Intention experiment using random event generation. Data collected went to Psyleron.com – and what a world this is, one which sets out to prove that our intention does actually affect events.

PEAR research, experimental micro-psychokinesis, find out more at the Psyleron site, and on the stripmind video channel. Videos there explore the work of the Princeton Engineering Anomalies Research laboratory and also are part of a new consciousness course – so I wonder how much longer they will be on Blip.tv for free. Catch them while you can.

Resonance was such a strong understanding of the poets down through the ages, and the effects of powerful intention are seen all through our physical world. It’s great that people are quantifying some of what we have always known.

Interestingly, the video DVD experiment asks us to not only affect the baseline, high, low random event generator readout, but – here’s the kick – our present consciousness could affect it in the past. Time travel by quantum attention? Trippy stuff!

8000 Sacred Drums Ceremony in Vancouver

8,000 Sacred Drums Ceremony

March 21, 2009 2:00-5:00 pm Victory Square Park (Cambie and E. Hastings)

This is a worldwide call to Indigenous Peoples and Humankind to join together. According to a 500 year old Otomi (Mexico) Prophecy, the day when the sounds of eight thousand sacred drums join together an intense healing Healing of Mother Earth will commence. The earth we share today is in total disequilibrium. Let’s work together so we can live together on the road to Sacred Peace, in harmony with the Universe, Mother Nature, the Community, the Family and our own Hearts.

** PROGRAM:** – Gather at 2 pm – Elders opening, followed by speakers – 3 pm: Drumming circle (ALL NATIONS, PLEASE JOIN US!) – 4 pm: Elders/youth storytelling and sharing circle hosted by Indigenous Action Movement and No One Is Illegal

Organized by the Indigenous Action Movement with the support of No One Is Illegal, Anti Poverty Committee, and BCGEU.

Email: powwowlistings@gmail.com or see Event page on Facebook:

http://www.facebook.com/event.php?eid=56178215317&ref=nf

Women in Film Festival New Media Day

A fantastic lineup of remarkable women digerati will be sharing their expertise and enthusiasm on Wed. March 4th for a full day of immersion in new media.

Erica Hargreave of Bridging Media, and the whole organizing team have created varied and fascinating panels that include leaders in the Canadian new media environment. It’s a great opportunity to get a wide overview of what’s happening digitally in media, art, business, community, then use this info to get cooking and apply it to your own projects.  Panel details are outlined here on the Bridging Media site. So much to learn and share throughout this day, in the company of such amazingly accomplished and extraordinary women in media.

I’ll be there, on the Social Media How-To panel, along with Erica Hargreave, Monica Hamburg and Gillian Shaw.

WIFF New Media Day is part of Vancouver’s annual Women in Film Festival. More about the event here on their site.

Gillian Shaw’s Vancouver Sun Digital Life article

Too Much Cuteness!!

I couldn’t resist. This is best cuteness ever! I love that fireplace for kittens…

“Fifteen Thousand Useful Words and Phrases” from 1910

R. sent me this via email:

The land of copyright free books…. Gutenberg and ipod meet in one and I now have access to “Fifteen Thousand Useful Words and Phrases” from 1910.

Do not consider this to be “Antiquated Prudery” or full of “appalling difficulties”, this book has “apparent significance” and “assiduously cultivated” “apparent genius”… What an antidote to the “barbarous statecraft” of “bellicose humanity”, at times this might be “burdensome business” of a “bygone period”. Each “celebrated instance” has “characteristic audacity” and “charming radiance”….

oh, the hours one could waste in the “collective wisdom” of this “colossal failure”, with its “complacent platitudes” – and yet I have a “consuming zeal” for it. Is there a “crucifying irony” (what?!) here on this “crumbling precipice” of “decadent poets” and “deceiving mists”? Or does my “dazed brain” perceive a “dazzling triumph”?

LOL! I could go on, but this is a “droning worl”

So I asked her if I could blog this, and she replied:

Would it have “doubtful authenticity” if you blogged it instead of me? Well the “effervescent multitude” shall not mind. These “embellished truths” have an “elusive charm”. You shall not be the recipient of my “embittered gaze”, nor are you under “enforced silence”…. If you are also concerned about potential “eviscerating shrieks”, remember you shall experience the “exact antithesis” of an “excretory secretion”. Instead, in an “exultant condition” I shall break forth in “ejaculatory prayer”. In other words, use your “girlish spriteliness” and “glorious freedom”.

…I can’t stop! I descend from “gushing enthusiasm” to “gutteral incoherence”…. ahhhhhhH

From Cliche to Archetype, indeed!

One Step Beyond!

We picked up this incredible bargain at Costco: entire collection of 33 Episodes on an 8 DVD set – “Before the Twilight Zone there was One Step Beyond.” All for $9.99!

Each half hour is a dramatization of a true psychic story or episode. The reproduction/transfer is so poor sometimes it is a murky thing indeed to peer into the world of the psychic in black and white. And the drama in the teleplays sometimes takes a long drawn-out path to reach its conclusion, but it is fun to pick out actors like Cloris Leachman in the casts. They say it is “13 hours of the strange, unexpected and mysterious” and based on true stories. The attitude is a little like the point of view of “Fate Magazine” – another popular artifact of those early days. And all presented by Alcoa Aluminum!

You can see a murky episode here. And there are many others populating the web.

Just after posting this, I saw this link in which “The host travels to Mexico with Andrija Puharich who wrote the 1959 book, The Sacred Mushroom: Key to the Door of Eternity. He also subjects himself to an on-camera ESP test while on psilocybin, and succeeds beyond expectation.”

Lotte Reiniger in ’51

I just watched a charming old hygiene video made by Lotte Reiniger, whose 1926 Adventures of Prince Achmed was the first full-length animated film, magically created with hand-cut silhouettes.

The animation here was made for the BFI 25 years later. If she created Achmed when she was in her 20s, then she may have been in her early-mid 50s when this one was done.