We're on the last day of National Poetry Month and here I am thinking about stories. Like many people this month, I've been doing daily writing sessions. Actually, just the last week and a half or so—the group I'm writing with starts in earnest in May, but some of us started in conjunction with the counting of the Omer, the ritual period between Passover and the feast of Shavuot. It's not that I'm observant or anything, but writing seems to have the power to sanctify any time you dedicate yourself to it. I said about as much in my first short extract I produced. I feel it more now than I ever did before: that I am one with the writing, that everything that I do flows into the writing and th
Both big springtime holidays fall on the same weekend this year, and I'm in kind of a mood: feeling definitely overworked and also coming down with a low-grade cold. It's lead to some weird thoughts. Both these holidays rely so much on the reiteration of the past, and in that way, they try to produce a recurrence of those events. What happens, both in the mass and at the seder, is a kind of time displacement. There is a level of reenactment that doesn't occur on other holidays, or is more intense than others. There might be a Nativity play around Christmas, but you're not necessarily in it. Not so much with Passover and Easter. There are roles, with speaking parts. Time is a thin sheet, we'r
Before this month gets too far away from us, I better post the Card-a-Month for April. This time, I am using the Marseilles restoration by artist, director, and tarot-seer Alejandro Jodorowsky and Phillipe Camoin, scion of the original Marseilles deck creators, it seems. Early on in my card reading, I started to prefer using Marseilles decks over Rider-Waite versions, but I only discovered the Jodorowsky deck a couple of years ago. I don't think that I've ever worked with a deck and a reading system as intuitive and generous as the one Jodorowsky and Marianne Costa laid out in The Way of Tarot. This deck talks to you, and it's trusted advice. The card to guide us for the month for April: The
