Haus of Rhi

It takes bravery and courage to move forward through life. Over and through and under and around all the obstacles and resistance rising up to thwart us. Courage is not the absence of fear, but rather the assessment that something else is more important. - Theodore Roosevelt  Confronting fears and pushing forward despite them takes strength. I like to think the Fool isn't unaware of the cliff before them, or the precipice of unknown. Instead, they're choosing to focus on the possibilities, the positive, and the potential gain of flight. They've stopped second guessing. They've stopped doubting. They've stopped asking "what if" and decided to find out what they're capable of. "The Fool's Journey" is often described as the parallel of "The Hero's Journey" which most avid readers would agree is a staple framework for the majority of literature out there, as well as movies. But as the calendar turns and offers an opportuni...

(From L: Mary-el, Arcana, Lumina, Darkana, Wooden) The Wheel of Fortune in the traditional tarot structure is customarily portrayed as a wheel construct or form. The cyclic nature of life, of seasons, the constancy of only one thing -- change -- is inherent in this card's meaning and interpretation. For me personally, this card evokes a theme introduced early in life while still beneath the influence of religious upbringing. And despite the deviation of my spiritual path away from those teachings, I find that some truths are simply universal and cannot be claimed, contained, or constrained by any particular faith or path. In Hinduism, it is dharma, the principle of cosmic order. In the West, it is Ecclesiastes 3, written by Solomon, recognized as a king of Israel by both Muslims and Judeo-Christians. There is a time and a place for everything, a season for everything under the sun. The Wheel: Fortuna, the heartless and unbiased goddess of Luck and Chance. The Orbweav...

I should make an update, shouldn't I? Especially since it's been over a month since my last post, and my self-imposed deadline has expired. I bought seed starter kits and entirely too many packets of seeds, all of them the same thing: sage. I decided, back at the beginning of March, that since I buy so much of it to dry and burn, that I should really just grow my own. My seeds are actually sprouting! I have a tray of them in the kitchen window, and they are happily doing their thing. The packet said they needed to germinate for a few weeks, so imagine my surprise when I noticed them popping out after only a week. I will have a LOT of sage to plant outside in May. If I don't manage to kill the seedlings somehow, between now and then. I'm not ruling it out. After all, I do have a black thumb, haha. On to the latest writing news. That last push through the end of March actually went well. I won't pretend that I'm exorbitantly satisfied with the current state...

Camp Nano had actually been chugging along reasonably well through the middle of the month. Halfway through June, I managed to stay on track and broke the 25k barrier only a day or so late. And I did hit 50k... for the year. The irony is that, well, the day I broke the halfway mark? I received an email from my Riptide editor. Yep. I am wading through edits, my focus on a completely different project. And switching gears between them doesn't happen easily enough for me to try finishing out the month goal of 50k. Especially not when all my creative energy is going into polishing. It takes a lot of elbow grease. Can I count the 2k+ that I've added in the edits? So! August Camp Nano it is, then! I'll take the year-milestone of 50k as a technical victory, putting me at the halfway point for that. I set an annual goal of 100k for this year for a couple reasons -- the greatest being a matter of quality over quantity, but editing processes contributed heavily as well. I knew ...

Earlier this past week, I grabbed a special collector's edition of Scientific American Mind titled "His Mind, Her Mind: How We're Different" off the magazine rack. Because, in all seriousness, I wanted to see how they tackled a headline I caught on the contents page. An article titled, "The Third Gender." I'll admit, though I had high hopes, just seeing that title gave me a queasy feeling. I knew deep down that it was going to be rough reading before I even started. Guess I'm a masochist, because I read it anyway. And you know what? I was right. I realize that Scientific American isn't a scientific journal where the foremost minds in their fields publish those papers that you need a comparable doctorate to parse through. That being said, the author of this particular article still contradicted himself so often that I began to suspect he was confusing himself. Or perhaps was confused himself already, and it simply presented that way in the ...