Chop wood, carry water

Sometimes I wonder why I want to be a writer. It would be so much easier if I didn't. And part of me actually believes that I could just forget all about it and pretend that it doesn't make me feel alive, that it isn't the one thing in my life I know is right.

But it is a small part. Most of me knows that this is what I have to do. Perhaps I am guided by fate and truly have little say in it. I have been reading Wild Mind: Living the Writer's Life by Natalie Goldberg. It is a strange little book - bursting with wisdom and throbbing with a sort of dull ache. It makes me sad, even as it releases me. There are many exercises to try but at the moment I am just at the reading and digesting phase.

I seem to be having problems finishing books lately. I did finish The Intuitive Writer by Gail Sher, a book which literally fell apart in my hands as I read it. It is now in about 7 different parts and I am wondering if the librarian will think I have treated the book harshly. I have not. I am looking for a hidden meaning in the book falling paper (I meant to write apart and wrote "paper" so perhaps the book is giving me the hint to write and even supplying the paper!) and after typing this I seem to have found it.

I am interested in Zen thought, but I find it very very very hard to reconcile in my brain that ticks and buzzes and screams and looks for meaning in every. little. thing. Chop wood and carry water. It could take me the rest of my life to live that.

Maybe that is okay.

Sunday Scribblings - Miscellaneous

There are ingredients required for bone singing. The first is bones. Big surprise, huh? The second is 'graveyard dust' which is just a fancy expression for graveyard dirt. The third is darkness. I remember asking Michael why darkness was required, and the answer was typical of Michael. He said "because we are birthed from darkness into light and when we die, we return to the darkness." How very non-helpful. How very confusing. How very mysterious. How very Michael. There are also a lot of other miscellaneous ingredients which are not technically required, but are useful to have around. I like to have a blood relative of the deceased present. I'm not sure exactly why, but it strengthens the magic somehow - possibly because the living bones call to the dead bones through some kind of blood link. It is strongest between children and their parents, as one formed the other. But it works for Grandparents, Aunts and Uncles, that sort of thing. I like to have candles lit. I know from reading the Aveda Necropolis that the ancient Bone Singers would have flaming torches mounted on the wall, but I prefer small pinpoints of light in the darkness, as opposed to great roaring flames. It seems more respectful, like the candles in the darkness are like stars twinkling in the night sky. It comforts me.

The singing itself is hard to describe, and I've tried. No one really understands how it works, or why. Michael reminds me frequently that it doesn't matter why it works, only that it does. But it is in my nature to question "why?" and "how?" so I muse over the process from time to time. The best I've come up with so far is that all living things have their own music - and I don't mean that in a hippie flower power earth hugging sort of way. It isn't music as we know it. It is a sort of universal chord - like "om" splintered into millions of different patters and tunes, and each living thing sings. Our bones have their own song - each unique and different. My gift is to hear how bones sing. "Hear" is a misnomer, though, as I don't use my ears to listen. I use a part of my mind, a centre of stillness in which all I hear is the sound of bones singing.

Sunday Scribblings: New Year

I am using the Sunday Scribblings prompt for his week as a prompt for a story I am writing.

I was in Mexico last new year. Michael convinced me that there was a Brujo who could each me necromancy. Necromancy is different than Bone Singing. My gift is to sing to the bones of someone who has died, and bring their soul back to life, usually for a short time. What I bring back is the essence of the person, and not their body. It's not like I lay my hands on a dead person and they get up and start walking around. Basically the essence of the person rises from the bones like a cloud of sparkling dust. It's all very ethereal and ghost-like I guess.

Necromancy, on the other hand, is the magical art of raising a body, not a soul. Sometimes there is a little of the soul left, but it is like trying to communicate with an echo of the person. Sort of like trying to make a sandwich with crumbs instead of the loaf of bread. The Ministry frown upon necromancy and treat it like a poor relation of Bone Singing. This is what I had been told, and this is the attitude I had going into meeting the Brujo.

The Brujo's house in Mexico was in a small town, not unlike the one I had visited a few years ago with my girlfriends - before I knew Michael, before I knew the Ministry and before I was a Bone Singer. We were looking for a good time back then and instead I ended up being kidnapped and branded. Some holiday.