The Ink-Pot and the Palette

I've been working with sigil magic lately. I don't know if it works, but it's turning into a form of creative expression that I didn't expect.

The concept is that written words have power (they don't call 'em "spells" for nothing). You distill a statement of intention down to a simple clear phrase, then remove the vowels, then remove any duplicate consonants, so "My intention is to find a five dollar bill" becomes:


Then you take the remaining consonants and create a glyph from them, something that abstracts them enough that they aren't really "readable" anymore, like so.
Once you have your sigil, you launch or activate it through meditation, focused intention, ritual, etc. Then you're supposed to basically forget it. Let it go out into the world. It should be difficult to remember which sigil means what after a short time has passed. The idea is to let it melt into your unconscious mind, which will then act on it. Some magicians burn theirs.

But not me.

After a couple of dozen sigils, I began to develop a personal style. I got some paint pens and a stack of blank black business cards and a circular punch. My activation ritual morphed into the act of coloring, then photographing, cropping, and stylizing each sigil image with a drop shadow, then storing the image in a special file. I stick the paper original on my wall with Blu-Tac.

Pretty soon I had a collection.So I decided to make magical house art out of them. In a further act of activation-consecration-launch, I'm now gluing them between glass bezels and hanging them on my front door jamb.

One hundred moments of magic, synchronicity, interesting coincidence...I started doing this meme back in May when my life was seeming magical. Not that it hasn't been awesome since, but that special awareness seemed to fade, and only three things got recorded here.

There was a fourth one today.

Graydie the not-so-stray cat disappeared three weeks ago. She was a peripatetic creature with a checkered past, but she seemed to have settled in with me, never vanishing for more than a day. When I didn't see her for three days, I gave her up as very likely dead. She had a wide range, the neighborhood is not without traffic and dogs, and I knew for certain that if she could have come home, she would have.

I had to force myself to stop looking for her in the usual places--on my porch when I come home from work, underfoot and mostly invisible against my black kitchen floor, following me to the grocery store up the street. I had to have stern talks with myself about looking out the front door in the middle of the night in case she was out there and looking for food.

You know how this ends.

I rode up to my path today from the grocery shopping run, and the neighbor's big tabby was hovering there. I was delighted to see a cat--I usually am; I like cats a lot--and I pulled my bike up as Big Tabby skittered off. When I turned around with my grocery baskets, there was Graydie.

She feels like she's lost a pound or so, and was hungry, but not starving, sick, or hurt, as far as I can tell. I guess she just went walkabout. I don't even know.

Anyway, I was awfully glad to see her. Good thing I kept the cat food, huh?

I was out hacking down the overgrowth in the north forty (aka my side yard) yesterday , bleeding freely from a couple of rose-thorn pokes, avoiding a hornets' nest, taxing my hands by removing ceanothus branches that were a bit too big for the loppers, and generally enjoying the heck out of a gorgeous October afternoon, when my phone gave the sonar ping of G-chat notification.

I continued hacking for a bit, and the phone pinged about four more times.

It was ravurian, pitching a story idea so gobsmackingly wonderful that I might have to take sedatives to keep from dwelling on it. Either that, or I'll have to write it.

It would be a crossover or fusion piece. It would branch off from Restraint in a kind of Sliding Doors parallel universe. It would involve magic.

It would be amazing.

Tra-la-la. I'm at work on a Sunday morning because I just couldn't bring myself to come in on a dry Saturday. Somehow, yesterday, between sleeping till the crack of 10:30, and having a typically revelatory conversation with ravurian that lasted through the middle of the day, and writing, as a result of said conversation (thank you, R!) a couple of brilliant-if-I-do-say-so-myself paragraphs of the new novel, and a mad bout of wool-winding (not, as ravurian himself would say, a euphemism: I was frogging some unsuccessful knitting projects and putting the yarn up for another day, and to say that I became a bit obsessed with the balls my new ball-winder makes would be to state the case mildly), and knitting practice swatches for my hyacinth Arpeggio, and watching Sherlock, it was suddenly 3:00 a.m. and not only was my Saturday gone, but also three hours of my Sunday.

So anyway.

Here I am in my gray cubicle at 11:30 on a rainy (OMG rainy again) Sunday morning. And yet still procrastinating. I couldn't find the light switches, and of course this is the World's Tallest Basement, so it's not as if light pours in at the tiny and widely-spaced windows near one of which my desk is not situated, so I'm in the gloom with a desk lamp and the comforting glow of my high-productivity dual monitors. And we don't run the HVAC on weekends, so I've got my little hot-flash fan running. And we also don't open the garage on weekends, just to inconvenience those pesky Sunday terrorists, so Eleanor O is parked down on the porch instead of safely indoors.

And Eleanor O is wearing all her baskets because as soon as I'm done procrastinating and I get an ass-covering-modicum of work done, I need to go to Trader Joe's, New Seasons, Fred Meyer and Sally Beauty Supply to buy all my crap for the week, and then stop at my mom's to drop off Sherlock, because fandom knows no age limits and she's a huge Bendy fan and bought the DVD as soon as it came out. For the subtitles. Uh huh.

So anyway.

Work. I can do this. I can! I focus my mind, and as I do, I begin to remember what the hell task I'm supposed to be accomplishing. It's coming to me now...