Kyril's Journal -- July 16, 2005

Vision Quest: Day 6

Saturday July 16, 2005

I woke up early from an unpleasant dream related to Faol. Then I spent some time gremlining while trying to go back to sleep. The dream was really about needing to stop beating myself up emotionally through gremlining so I need to renew my efforts to break that habit. Finally dragging myself out of bed I headed to the house for tea and exercise. Although I manged them it was much slower than usual. And I am hungry. It is expected to be hot and humid again today. My mood is down.

I meditated and feel better now. I am still hungry though. Faol said that he had heard the hunger goes away after a few days. Fat chance, that! Sigh… It isn’t really that bad especially since I am not in the house when Tom makes his food.

I did the TimeLine process again. Then I began a goals list related to my values. I would like to have goals that relate to more than one value, for example, exercising is a physical health goal but also contributes to psychological health since it affects mood and neurotransmitters. It also makes me more functional contributing to productivity. Improved mood can have an impact on relationships, etc.

I listened to the two hour extra session for Lesson 4. Apparently people had difficulty with the values hierarchy and doing the time line process. Listening to the problems and explanations was interesting and while it didn’t apply to me in regards to the lesson I did gain insight in to some other life patterns.

Basically I had a pretty lazy day and on and off, felt like I might as well be done with my retreat, that I’d gotten all I was going to get out of it. The Great Above Altar fell over because insects have been working on the birch log pedestal, which attracted a woodpecker who had shredded the pedestal on one side quite a lot. One part of me wants to be stuperstitious and see it as the future collapsing but the rest of me thought about creating new altars. For the Earth altar I thought of a Shiela na Gig on a pedestal of rock, with a rock ledge, and a rock niche like a Madonna Shrine around Her, and for Fire, The God statue with the large phallus (I can't remember what it is called) on a metal pedestal with a brazier for Fire, and for the Great Above (the future altar), a canopy made out of a frame of metal pipe with metal cut outs of the sun and the stars in Pleaides on one side and perhaps Ursa Major on the the other side with pictures of descendants dangling from it. This description doesn’t really do it justice.

I just had an idea for next year’s Oracle rite. Have participants write down a question on a piece of paper to put in the Cauldron, and then choose 3-4 of them randomly. Give everyone paper and pencil. After creating sacred space do guided trance work. The question is read out loud and everyone writes down an image that comes to them, not I think they should, or questions intended to elicit psychological insight, an image. We go through all 4 questions, one after another. Then we take all the images for a question and synthesize it into a tarot card like image with a little brainstorming on what the integrated image might mean. The description of the image is available for the questioner to take with for his or her own work

I read some articles in Mountain Astrologer and later around our nightly fire discussed them with Tom. A neighboring town had fireworks and we stood at the edge of the orchard to watch tehm far off in the distance. I had to stand on tippie toes thought to see them. Between the fireworks and the starry night sky we had quite a light show. Tom and I have very much enjoyed the quiet times around the fire. It surprised me that he wanted to join me for it each night but he described it as relationship time.