Returning to Cyberspace

Yes, I know, I've been gone for a while. I should hang my head in shame.

It's a long story. Some time ago, I came by this laptop (in the nick of time, my eight-year-old desktop was dying), and leapt on it gleefully. Being the top-of-the-range, flagship model of a well-respected brand, I expected it to behave for at least the length of the warranty, n'est-ce pas?

No. A few months into my use of it, it perished. So I rang the mob that had the warranty contract with the manufacturer, and spoke to an "engineer" who walked me through a few simple diagnostics, deciding that its memory chip had failed. It had two such chips, a two-gig and a one-gig. The company ordered a replacement part, and a visiting engineer came out to replace it a week later.

Nup.

The one-gig chip had failed. The two-gig chip had been ordered. So the guy took it back to the office and ordered another chip, taking another week, then fitted it at his leisure, and delivered it back. I relaxed slightly, and started using the laptop normally.

Not long afterwards, the computer stopped working. Over-the-phone diagnostics told them that the motherboard had failed, on the heels of the memory chip failure. So they ordered in a motherboard, and when it arrived in the offfice a week later, came and fitted it.

Or tried to. It was the wrong motherboard. So it and my laptop went back to the office for another week to await the right motherboard. By this time I had been paying for an internet connection that I hadn't properly used in weeks, and the thin trickle of additional income I derive from the internet had ceased entirely.

Another week-and-a-half, and my computer came back home on a Friday afternoon, and worked for a whole five hours. Office hours were over, so I couldn't ring the warranty people until the following Monday. When I did ring, I didn't have to quote my job number of the serial number of the laptop - the folks there were getting to know me and my computer.

The brand-new motherboard had failed.

Yes, I reacted exactly as you'd think I would.

So away it went again, though not for a few days as there were a lot of jobs already lined up and the courier couldn't get out to me until late in the week. Then another week passed as they waited for the parent-company to supply the correct motherboard.

Filled with anxiety and knowing their internal delivery-times by now, I rang up to check on the progress of the job. This time I didn't speak to the receptionist who knew me, but to the technician, who also knew me, who happened to pick up the phone.

"Hi, Brett, how are you doing?"

"Good, Nisaba, but I've got some bad news. They sent the wrong motherboard again. I've just ordered the right part an hour or two ago."

"So, another week before it arrives?"

(In a weary voice) "Yes, another week before it arrives."

Eight days later, I rang again. This time they had the right part, but they had a backlogue of jobs lined up ahead of mine. I explained, as calmly as I could, that I was still paying for an utterly unused internet feed, and I'd had no internet-based income at all - I was getting used to the net at least paying for itself and I wasn't all that happy. She understood, she'd ask the technician (Brett) if he could queue-jump it for me.

A weekend passed.

Monday passed.

On Tuesday I rang. "I'm fixing it this afternoon," Brett said.

On Thursday I was told Brett had left the office, and that they'd leave an email with my contact details.

On Monday morning he spoke to me. He had just fitted the correct motherboard. He hadn't had to ask me for my password - he remembered it from the succession of previous occasions (it is a pretty unusual word), and the computer seemed to be running just fine. That was this Monday, two days ago. He promised the courier would bring it back to me "tomorrow" - yesterday. So I waited home all day and, knowing their office hours ended at five-thirty, I called at four forty-five. The answering machine was on.

This morning I rang and said I'd spent all yesterday housebound waiting, and that I hadn't been able to either use my feed or negotiate a discount from my ISP, and could they give me a time? No, the courier would ring me when he was half an hour away.

And he did, but I was three-quarters of an hour away. When I came back up the street, there was a familiar car parked outside my home, and paperwork to sign, and a laptop.

It and I are tentatively getting to know each other again, like nervous new lovers. As a peace offering, I gave the laptop a new timber computer-table. Hopefully it is the start of a new cycle of success: in other ways karma has been particularly good to me these last two weeks, and one of the results of that is that I'm starting to read publicly out of a new and very local venue this Friday. It is my plan, when clients want a reading, to use the audio software on the laptop to record the reading, then email them the sound-file. For that, I'll need a working laptop, and I have no reason to suppose the computer will fail again.

After all, things happen in threes, right? I've had three failures and six replacement parts - you could say, a Trial by Electricity. The Winter Solstice, a time of endings and beginnings has come and gone. The sun - and the world generally - is in a growth-phase. It can't get any better - it's all up from here!

The Dream

Last night I went travelling, and when I looked around, I found myself in some sort of dormitory-type homeless shelter: a huge room with steel-blue synthetic carpet of the easy-clean variety, single beds everywhere in rows with a small three-drawer cabinet next to them, and a kitchenette at the very end of the hall furthest from the entrance. In one of the beds that were closer to the kitchenette (and thus, more sheltered from the world) was a person who in the dream was a friend of mine, but looked like an older, thinner, sicker, more bearded version of the New Zealand actor Roger Oakley.

In the dream I knew he was dying of liver cancer, and in fact his skin had that same deep orange-brown colour that my father's skin had when he was dying of liver cancer many, many years ago, a colour that still makes me cringe when I see outdoor advertisements on TV or billboards done by pretty young models who have been spray-tanned with exactly that shade in an effort to look "healthy", which has only resulted in them looking as if they are close to death from liver failure.

And I knew he was dying. I have seen the image of energy of impending death occasionally: it looks nothing like a ferryman or a hooded guy with a scythe, but it is irremediably what it is. And death was with him. It was only a matter of time. He was bedridden, drifting in and out of consciousness, and muttering occasionally. I had a great deal of concern and compassion for him (after all, in the dream he was a friend), so I took off my shoes and, fully-clothed, slipped into the narrow bed beside him. He was lying up in a foetal position, and I curled up around him, resting my arm lightly on his hip. Through his many layers of clothes I could feel the pointy ends of his bones, and I could feel the coldness of his flesh despite a lot of clothes and bedclothes. I was happy to share my healthy warmth.

I passed the time by dozing, waking every so often to check on him. Over a very long time he drifted further and further away from life, rousing and muttering less often, weeping for painkillers less often, even moving slightly in the bed less often. He became colder, but I knew he felt my warmth and was grateful for it. I was the only person who was prepared to give him the closeness he needed on this last, most important journey of his life.

And when it was over and I woke up out of the dream, I knew what I must do. I've been getting hint after hint for decades, but the pressure is really piling on, now.

13th May, 2011

This video aired on 13th May, 2011, on ABC-1, an Australian TV station. It was a part of their regular programme, "The Collectors". We had enormous fun filming it - the whole story from the very beginning can be found here.

Feeling Rapturous, Anyone?

Well, it's that time again. Every eight years or so, yet another fool predicts that, based on mistranslations of mistranslations of mistranslations of the Bible or else based on mistranslations of Nostradamus, our world is going to end.

Here is what I wrote elsewhere on the net before the latest so-called Rapture was supposed to happen. It was in response to someone asking whether we were all preparing for the end of the world.

~~~~

Last night at my regular weekly meditation group, we did a tree meditation. Trouble was, for some reason I manifested as a frangipanni tree, and as it is winter here, it/I had no leaves or flowers. My friend was leading the meditation this week so I was free to sink right into it, and as she told us to grow our tree higher and higher, my frangipanni said "Are you kidding?" I'm a frangipanni. Three metres high is about my limit in these soils!" And as she told us to unfurl leaves and flowers, it replied "In winter? I'm deciduous! Who does she think I am?" So I left it bare, and climbed up through the structure of its branches.

Pretty soon I ran out of tree. Now, it just happens that I have bought some lengths of green plastic ivy for a particular purpose and haven't yet set it to work, and when I ran out of tree, the plastic ivy (still very, very plastic!) came up beside me and said "Here - you can climb on me". So I did. Unfortunately, I had only bought three two-metre lengths which isn't very much (a metre is slightly longer than a yard), so when I got up to the stratosphere, I ran out of plastic ivy, too, even though it had been very accommodating.

We were also at my friend's place with a woodfire in the fireplace, and as I ran out of plastic ivy I noticed a tendril of smoke next to me, so I grabbed that, and continued climbing up on the fluid, graceful smoke. In the distance I could still hear my friend leading the meditation, and she asked us to look back at the earth, and really *look* at it, and notice if - and where - it needed healing. Well, I turned around on my tendril of smoke and looked very hard for a painful, discoloured Japan, but all I saw was this glowing blue/white/green/brown jewel swimming contentedly in space, like a cosmic opal. So I kept climbing, and after a while I ran out of smoke.

But now there were stepping-stones beside me, lovely solid round ones, all glittery and swirly, so I stepped onto one of them, and found they were a perfect distance apart for my individual stride, and I kept walking through space on these glittery, white stepping-stones. After a while, I realised they were all spiral galaxies, not with the gorgeous colours you see in Hubble Space Telescope photos, but with an even more beautiful-for-being-simple white-on-white sparkly look. And they were good and solid and safe to walk on.

Now the family whose house this was held at have two dogs, both part-malamute. One of them is considered by everyone to be intelligent and deeply magical, and the other one is considered by everyone but me to be a dumb blonde <grin>. Guess who was keeping me company? Right, the dumb blonde, loping alongside me in spirit-form easily and comfortably, as if I took her on dog-walks through the sky every day of her life. After the meditation she stuck to my side like glue.

Her owner eventually led us back down, so I turned around on the sparkly stepping-stones, then climbed down the smoke, then the ivy, then the tree. We all went inside our trees to receive a gift from the tree-spirit, and once again my frangipanni muttered-and-complained about the season and being inconsiderately woken up in winter, and eventually gave me a tiny parcel of its white sap smaller than a game-playing dice, still liquid and living, and holding the promise of future growth in the spring-to-come, and thus, a commitment that the world would continue to exist. Then my friend led us back to our bodies.

The frangipanni thought it was going to grow, and unfurl leaves and flowers next spring - it didn't think the world was going to end. The planet floating in space felt all beautiful and calm, and wasn't even bothered by the whole Japan thing very much - it certainly doesn't think it's going to end tomorrow. So no, everything will continue.

And everyone else in the goup, although they all had individual journeys, had a sense that the planet didn't really need all that much healing, and that it was here for the long haul.

Humans are such silly creatures - if they are worried about the planet, why don't they just go and look?

~~~~~~

And now, post-rapture, I stand by my comments. The world wants to keep existing, and it will keep existing, It is up to us to exist with and on it. Take responsibility for your own existence or non-existence, people - don't blame an ancient book!

Review: The 7th World Tarot Deck

Title: The 7th World Tarot Deck
Illustrations by Terry Whidborne
Booklet written by Debra-Mary MacInnes
Website: http://www.the7thworld.com/

After the episode of "The Collectors" featuring my Tarot collection was aired on ABC-1 a short while ago, I was contacted by the creator of this deck, who was happy to give me a copy to keep in my collection. Self-published in a print-run of just 100 copies, it has not found distribution outlets or a mainstream publisher yet, and I think it richly deserves to find an outlet, plus mass-publication.

The deck as it is in this first print-run, is presented in a simple white box with no artwork, sealed with stickers on which the title of the deck, contact details and a simple logo of a bug with outstretched wings are printed very simply and plainly.

 On opening the deck, I was pleasantly surprised to find that the Minor Arcana are the first cards you see, with the Major Arcana at the rear of the deck. For some reason which I haven't really analysed yet, this pleased me greatly; it's as if the deck doesn't need to show off its more glamorous side to attract one in the first place.

And overall, it is an attractive deck. The cardstock is sturdy and gently laminated, and its new-deck-smell is different to the variety of chemical smells that most laminated decks gas-off, instead smelling refreshing and somewhat citrusy. The backs are a simple design in red-ochre, yellow-ochre and black featuring that same bug, in the manner of a woven mat, and are warm and appealing.

Throughout the deck, Majors and Minors all have a broad, elaborate border in ochres, yellows and browns, with a scorched and slightly fantastical edging, placing the image at one remove from the observer and set deep within their own world.

The Minor Arcana cards are unillustrated but subtlely decorated, allowing one's intuition more free rein than illustrated pictures do in my opinion, as the observer is not locked into the artist's idea of what the card is about. Wands feature freehand-drawn rods with a burst of ripening grain at the end, simple and more appealing than if the artist had used a ruler to make them perfectly straight. Swords feature a simple, double-sided blade with a basic hilt and a spiral handle forged from the same piece of metal, again drawn freehand. But attractive as these suits are, Pentacles and Cups are where the Minors come into their own. Cups feature cafe-style coffee-cups. I don't know why that surprised and pleased me so much, but it really did. It's as if this deck is more down to earth than decks with showier goblets. And Pentacles are a brown circle, infilled with yellow-ochre, centred with a four-petalled purple flower with a red centre. The floral nature of these Pentacles again veers away from the showy, ceremonious nature of many other Pentacles, towards an earth-based, fertility-based idea, bedded deep in the colours of the country the deck was designed in.

The Court Cards are reversible, busts of individuals usually seen in profile around the symbol of their suit, rather like the court cards in playing decks. Unlike playing cards, though, there is plenty to go on in the expressions and postures of these people to give you divinatory clues. What I like is the cohesiveness of the Court Card characters: cards like the Queen Pentacles and the Knave Pentacles (this deck has Knaves instead of Pages) could be members of almost any race on earth, cards like the King Wands could be anything from Asian to Native American, while the King Pentacles is unashamedly Aboriginal - yet all of the faces, different though they are, seem to come from the same reality the same culture, even the same race - Human.

Along with the reversible, mirror-image Courts, there is something else marrying this deck to commonplace playing cards - the two Jokers. Yes, we have an eighty-card deck here, with no title cards but instead two Jokers. They are identical - I am not even going to begin to describe this card to you - it looks different every time I see it. Needless to say, in my copy and my use of it I'm treating it as a twenty-third Major Arcana card, and leaving both of them in the deck. I've often thought that the Fool card as we experience it in most other decks should really be two separate cards: one indicating the beginning of human consciousness, ignorance, the start of the learning process, and another indicating a state of being experienced but being untouched and uncorrupted by the world. In my own deck which I haven't found an artist for yet, I call the former "The Barbarian" and the latter "The Jester". In this deck, they are The Fool and the Joker, and the cards work well on that level.

In the Major Arcana the range of humans we see in the Court Cards gives way to the non-human, undeniably removing us from the day-to-day and dumping us slap-bang in the middle of the archetypal. Throughout, the "human" roles in the Major Arcana are filled by skinny, long-limbed, floppy-eared, cherry-nosed Tolkienesque earthern-folk who are really very appealing.

Cards I am particularly drawn to? Justice is naked and evidently male, blindfolded and balancing a Sword on his forehead, pieces of a broken yin-yang symbol spinning on strings from its hilt. The Hanged Man is a marionette, hung from strings attached to his elbows, knees and pointy hat. Death is a fantastical crysalis with teeth (and an overbite), with a fat, juicy, delicious moth hovering in the background. The Tower is an unstable stone structure balanced on a wagon and a fork, tipping and crumbling. The Star is an Edward Lear-like bird on a bicycle with a Star on a stick. The Hierophant is old and eccentric, standing on a book and wearing a Papal mitre. The Lovers are Zaphod-Beeblebrox-like: one body, two heads. The Fool is prancing and playing his stick like a flute with his long fingers. The Hermit reverts back to the original concept of Father Time for this card, standing on a clockface and carrying a scythe from which, yes, a lantern dangles, but a double-ended two-candled lantern recalling the shape of hourglasses.

Cards I dislike? It would be hard to name one. Perhaps I am not so fond of the fairly conventional, cutsie dinosaur used in The Chariot, but even that card is attractive in its own way. This is a deck that has a great deal of charm.

I have only had my copy a very short time so far, but I am finding that each of the images gets deeper and more meaningful every time I look at it, which is what you want from a divinatory tool. This is a worthy deck, and I am proud of the fact that it was developed in my country, Australia, and while not labouring its Australianness, has a feel of red earth throughout.

I hope that in the very near future, Terry is able to find a conventional publisher for this deck, as it is a deck that will appeal to many, many people from all over the world and deserves very wide distribution.

To Kill or Not to Kill?

I was just arguing with a friend of mine about the ethics of killing, and it was an interesting discussion, so I thought I'd bring it here. I haven't asked my friend and thus don't have permission to quote them, but I can reveal my own ideas.

I am a mostly-vegetarian, not a vegetarian-through-conviction, although I see the suffering of many of the animals we raise for consumption and do not think it is a good thing. I choose to eat meat only occasionally because I simply think to eat meat only occasionally. I might go a few weeks without buying meat or meat-based products - there is plenty of protein in the legumes I love to eat, and plenty of vitamin B-12 in the mushrooms I love to eat, so there is really nothing meat supplies that is necessary to health that I don't routinely get from the rest of my diet, anyway.

When I eat meat I generally eat meat that has come from a butcher or supermarket. Someone else has killed the animal. Someone else has gutted it, and removed all the stinky-bits. Someone else has skinned it, and sold the leather. The stinky-bits, the shed blood, and structures like feet and heads have usually been sold off to fertiliser producers, making most of the so-called vegan products people buy not animal-free at all.

However. Much though I dislike fishing, I have had a partner who enjoyed it, and I killed fish that I later ate. I also once shot an emu with extensive truck-related injuries, which I then dismembered and ate later - emu meat is redder than beef, richer in iron, protein and B-12, and lower in fat, making it far healthier, as well as far less damaging to the Australian environemnt than any lifestock animal. After all, it is designed to be here, they aren't. Also, because the animal died suddenly rather than being carted around the country in terrifying trucks for many hours then chased down a race to its death, its flesh's flavour hadn't been tainted with terror-hormones.

If you are going to eat meat at all, it is much more ethical to kill - or be prepared to kill - your food yourself, than to pay someone else to do it for you so that you don't have to face the realities of the sacrifice that another living creature makes for your meal, so that you can pretend you had nothing to do with its death, and so that everything can be "nice" and you can lie to yourself about not being a killer. If you are not prepared to kill, don't pay someone to kill on your behalf, soullessly.

I have a friend who doesn't believe in killing. Mutual friends have told me that since their conversion to Buddhism, a conversion that is perfectly fine to me, they now spent a lot of time and effort chasing mosquitoes out of the house instead of slapping them against walls, because "mosquitoes have souls too". Do they refuse to take antibiotics, or herbs, or even refuse to get better and fight off infection through their unaided immune system, because microbes have souls, too? Do they examine the ground carefully instead of just walking, to make sure that every step doesn't take the life if an ant? I have seen them walk, and no, they don't look down and clear every foot-sized piece of ground before they tread on it. So there's hypocracy straight away - why is a mosquito's soul and life-force more important than an ant's, when mosquitoes prey on us and are our natural enemies, and ants don't and aren't?

Then, this same person still eats meat. The same mutual friends have assured me that this is okay, because he doesn't kill the meat himself. All that tells me is that he doesn't have the honesty and integrity to look the animal in the eye and face the reality of the impact that he is having on the life of that animal. Without killing it, he doesn't have a chance to own the impact he is having on the life of that creature, to breathe a silent apology to it as he kills it, to make the killing as clean and painless as possible, to go into trance and guide its soul to the afterlife. Instead, he condemns it to terror in a cold and unfeeling abbatoir where nobody gives a damn about it.

Strangely, as an unenlightened non-Buddhist, I have a big problem with this!

How lucky am I!

How lucky am I! I can sit in my living room in eastern Australia and talk to friends in Canada and New Zealand, friends I have never met and probably never will meet, but will certainly not forget.

My garden, largely untended, has some pumpkins coming along, and I've just doscovered that as well as edible fruit, my prolific rosella plants have edible leaves. They're great fresh - I'm about to experiment with steaming them.

It's getting colder - so while I complain and have to rug up, I am no longer feeble, breathless and swollen with the heat, and don't have to mop up great pools of sweat on a regular basis.

There is a roof over my head and people in my world who give a damn. And next Friday, 13th May, ABC-1 will be showing my Tarot collection on the show "The Collectors".

Life just doesn't get any better than this.