Ramblings of a troubled mind
I went to bed at 8 last night and got up at 9 this morning.
13 hours.
Slept like the dead.
Before I went to bed my friend and boss called me babbling about Katrina's fury in the Gulf and the mousepad I'd bought a couple months ago. I didn't really get what she was on about and when she started blaming the President for the hurricane I just got quiet.
Quiet calms and soothes crazy people. I've always found it's best to just let them talk.
Which is kind of hard when your two bosses are bugging you to get off the phone with a client who is crying hysterically and threatening suicide.
But this essay isn't about how much I love my job. I guess I should explain about the mousepad.
For July 4th weekend we went down to the beach to see fireworks and incidentally celebrate my 41st birthday. One afternoon we 'did' the shops along the waterfront in Wilmington. At one place there was a whole array of 'dead' stuff: small tables and chests, boxes, CD towers, lots of stuff with skeletons and skulls on it. This stuff attracted me like anything, but not with the morbid fascination I've had before. This was a beautiful fascination of wonder. I felt the immanence of the 'present', that this stuff was important. The shopkeeper tried valiantly to dash my intuition by claiming that the crafts people of Indonesia (or wherever he got the stuff) only made it because of the demand, that there was no cultural or mythological or spiritual significance to it.
Fine. But you can't tell me that some dude sitting in a shop carving skulls all day hasn't put something of his personal thought and energy into it. That skulls and skeletons are not universal symbols of death and ending and transformation, and that the carver wasn't aware of it and putting his personal mythology and spirituality into his craft along with his sweat and energy.
Whatever, dude.
I was especially drawn to what I term a scrying mirror. The frame is black with 12 skulls around it like a macabre clock face. You can't see a skull without becoming conscious of the passage of time. The mirror is normal and shiny rather than black and shallow. Your face of course, makes the 13th skull.
:-)
I tried to put it down and walk away from it but I was intensely drawn to it and finally bought it. Back in the spring I (finally!) acquired a copy of the Day of the Dead tarot. Ever since the deer bones came to me, I've just been more open and calm about dead stuff. It used to creep me out. And Kernunnos, the Lord of the Underworld is my dedicated Deity this year. So nice how everything works out. So I was in this space, at least in the shops of Wilmington, where I was seeing cute little dead things everywhere.
In another shop there was a beautiful black African proprietress. She had tons of tiny little 'dead' dolls and dioramas. A skeleton taking a bubble bath, a skeleton Santa Claus. All just riotously funny, while reminding us of our mortality, and helping us remember our dead.
It was the Katrina mousepad that did me in. I'm what's known as a techno-pagan: intensely drawn to the old natural ways of gardening, being out in nature, working with elementals in a tangible way; and yet also 'plugged in' to modern technology by doing internet tarot readings, sharing spells, research, etc. So to see a combination of the ancient tradition of the Day of the Dead combined with the modern tech of a mousepad was just perfect!
Like so much in my life, I shelved both the mousepad and the mirror, until this morning! I googled "Day of the Dead" and read a nice summary of the history and celebration. I added Katrina to that search and got 1,720,000 hits, mostly about the hurricane that decimated the Gulf Coast of the US this week.
That's when it hit me, the connections between nature's destructive fury and the power of a name.
Well, whether they learned their lesson or not, there won't ever be a another hurricane named Katrina. . . .
So the lady in the store mentioned a painting from the 1800's I think it was depicting a feast of the dead and that many or most pictures you see are snippets from this painting. I'm looking for that as well as the connections to Santeria, voo-doo, Halloween, etc.
Yes, I did get my Halloween Barbie yesterday!
But who is this elusive mysterious creature, Katrina, and why did she totally fuck over New Orleans?
http://muertos.palomar.edu/posdad.htm
José Guadalupe Posada "La Catrina or the Female Dandy was originally intended to poke fun at the upper class, during the autocratic rule of Porfirio Diaz.
So, is Hurricane Katrina poking fun at the dandified wealth and lifestyle of New Orleans?
I'm not getting that she is a deity of some religion but rather a personification of the dead empty lifestyle of materialism.
Soooooooooo... what do you think?
Thanks,
Lorelei
13 hours.
Slept like the dead.
Before I went to bed my friend and boss called me babbling about Katrina's fury in the Gulf and the mousepad I'd bought a couple months ago. I didn't really get what she was on about and when she started blaming the President for the hurricane I just got quiet.
Quiet calms and soothes crazy people. I've always found it's best to just let them talk.
Which is kind of hard when your two bosses are bugging you to get off the phone with a client who is crying hysterically and threatening suicide.
But this essay isn't about how much I love my job. I guess I should explain about the mousepad.
For July 4th weekend we went down to the beach to see fireworks and incidentally celebrate my 41st birthday. One afternoon we 'did' the shops along the waterfront in Wilmington. At one place there was a whole array of 'dead' stuff: small tables and chests, boxes, CD towers, lots of stuff with skeletons and skulls on it. This stuff attracted me like anything, but not with the morbid fascination I've had before. This was a beautiful fascination of wonder. I felt the immanence of the 'present', that this stuff was important. The shopkeeper tried valiantly to dash my intuition by claiming that the crafts people of Indonesia (or wherever he got the stuff) only made it because of the demand, that there was no cultural or mythological or spiritual significance to it.
Fine. But you can't tell me that some dude sitting in a shop carving skulls all day hasn't put something of his personal thought and energy into it. That skulls and skeletons are not universal symbols of death and ending and transformation, and that the carver wasn't aware of it and putting his personal mythology and spirituality into his craft along with his sweat and energy.
Whatever, dude.
I was especially drawn to what I term a scrying mirror. The frame is black with 12 skulls around it like a macabre clock face. You can't see a skull without becoming conscious of the passage of time. The mirror is normal and shiny rather than black and shallow. Your face of course, makes the 13th skull.
:-)
I tried to put it down and walk away from it but I was intensely drawn to it and finally bought it. Back in the spring I (finally!) acquired a copy of the Day of the Dead tarot. Ever since the deer bones came to me, I've just been more open and calm about dead stuff. It used to creep me out. And Kernunnos, the Lord of the Underworld is my dedicated Deity this year. So nice how everything works out. So I was in this space, at least in the shops of Wilmington, where I was seeing cute little dead things everywhere.
In another shop there was a beautiful black African proprietress. She had tons of tiny little 'dead' dolls and dioramas. A skeleton taking a bubble bath, a skeleton Santa Claus. All just riotously funny, while reminding us of our mortality, and helping us remember our dead.
It was the Katrina mousepad that did me in. I'm what's known as a techno-pagan: intensely drawn to the old natural ways of gardening, being out in nature, working with elementals in a tangible way; and yet also 'plugged in' to modern technology by doing internet tarot readings, sharing spells, research, etc. So to see a combination of the ancient tradition of the Day of the Dead combined with the modern tech of a mousepad was just perfect!
Like so much in my life, I shelved both the mousepad and the mirror, until this morning! I googled "Day of the Dead" and read a nice summary of the history and celebration. I added Katrina to that search and got 1,720,000 hits, mostly about the hurricane that decimated the Gulf Coast of the US this week.
That's when it hit me, the connections between nature's destructive fury and the power of a name.
Well, whether they learned their lesson or not, there won't ever be a another hurricane named Katrina. . . .
So the lady in the store mentioned a painting from the 1800's I think it was depicting a feast of the dead and that many or most pictures you see are snippets from this painting. I'm looking for that as well as the connections to Santeria, voo-doo, Halloween, etc.
Yes, I did get my Halloween Barbie yesterday!
But who is this elusive mysterious creature, Katrina, and why did she totally fuck over New Orleans?
http://muertos.palomar.edu/posdad.htm
José Guadalupe Posada "La Catrina or the Female Dandy was originally intended to poke fun at the upper class, during the autocratic rule of Porfirio Diaz.
So, is Hurricane Katrina poking fun at the dandified wealth and lifestyle of New Orleans?
I'm not getting that she is a deity of some religion but rather a personification of the dead empty lifestyle of materialism.
Soooooooooo... what do you think?
Thanks,
Lorelei