Review of Power

A mixed media collage reviewing my third week of revisiting the artist way.
Painter IX

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This image is rather murky - except for the yin-yang in the centre. This reflects a rather murky week.

In the book this week is about using anger and defusing shame.

It forgot to mention the weather... on Thursday I happily put up a picture boldly called "Singing up a Storm" I was thinking of it as musical... but the storm hit Bristol fiercely at the weekend... then there was Blogger's strange claim with the "I Power Blogger" icon turning up unexpectedly in today's weather for Santa... and my blog completely disappearing throughout most of today until I republished it. As Tinker commented it wasn't visible through those Blogger clouds. Now I'm wondering about moving to typepad as a result of this.

Other things that have happened include:

• We moved my computer from one room to another - when put back together again the keyboard tended to eat up my words. Not especially strange maybe - but two other bloggers had keyboard problems too - Reluctant Nomad who commented that his wouldn't delete until he cleaned it, and Melba who blogged that hers got damp and she had to replace it.
  
  
• Today I went to the hairdressers. My appointment was for 11 a.m. I was at the car park at 20 minutes to 11, allowing plenty of time, I thought, for full car parks and Christmas queues. There were two barriers and after about 5 minutes I got to the barrier in front of my lane. And there I sat. The other queue carried on getting let in whenever a car left.
  
  I pressed the button for a ticket - nothing happened.
  
  I pressed the button again. Nothing.
  
  I pressed the Help button. Expecting a voice to come through the speaker but NOTHING HAPPENED.
  
  Eventually a car park attendant appeared and told me I had to wait for the "FULL" light to go out and I said it was.... he came down out of the multi-story car park and eventually worked out that the barrier wasn't working.
  
  So he coned me in!
  
  This was to keep other cars from getting behind me - these other cars had been keeping me trapped at the barrier and now were getting through the other one.... he said he'd let me though with his pass card... it didn't work... eventually he let me out of the trap and into the other side... I was only 7 minutes late for my hair appointment... sigh...
  
  
• On Friday Jim and I were celebrating our wedding anniversary a day early. He took the day off and we went to Bath. We went into a camera shop to look for a small digital compact that I can carry with me when my SLR is too big / heavy. The salesman talked to us and suggested a Panasonic of some sort (I do not remember unmeaningful strings of numbers and letters well... it might have been the Lumix DMC-FX01). To show us what it was like he tried putting in an SD card. The first one appeared to be full. And the next. He was getting frustrated so he eventually got a new card out and then the camera said that it too was full... the salesman said
  
  "He couldn't lie to us because we'd seen it go wrong"
  
  which struck me as an implicit confession that he'd have happily lied otherwise...
  
  We didn't buy that camera.
  
  
• Today Jim met me for a late lunch and a look around the camera shops in Bristol. There was one he rather fancied but no-one seemed to have it in stock. One shop said they could get it in but only if we were definitely going to buy it - what I wonder do they think separates them from websites? If we were prepared to buy it without seeing it we'd have bought it on line already!
  
  
• On Friday when coming back from Bath we got the train from Bath to Temple Meads - it arrived in Bristol too late for our connection to our local station. But that hardly mattered as that train had been canceled anyway. We went to the information desk and they gave groups of us taxi passes. It takes 8 minutes to go by train from Temple Meads to Montpelier. It took over an hour to queue and travel by taxi on a wet Friday evening...
  

I could go on (even more) but you get the picture. And just in case the world is always like this for you, it really isn't normal for me.

Here are a couple of details from the murk:



This is the Mountain King Pudding. He turned up in a morning doodle. His crown is made of mountains.

And this one is of a Doorway between the worlds, I rotated it 90 degrees here:



This week I have again been working with tarot images, one per day. This morning I got my first duplicate since I started - the 6 of trees - the card I'd pulled last Tuesday in answer to the question: "Who am I?" But I'd decided then that what it had really told me was who I was going to be. Now its come up again and I'm happy to own it this time.

I've arranged the cards in a medicine wheel. This is a form that I've used before for doing major readings. To read it you start in the bottom right hand corner, the South East.

SE - the direction of the ancestors - Card: 21 The World - Shining Woman

This card signifies success.

S - the direction of the inner child - Card: Place of Trees

This card signifies good health. (Yippee!)

SW - the direction of self-image - Card: Knower of Birds

This is the card of the diviner - one who can divine the meaning of what happens, with or without a system like the tarot to provide the meanings.

W - the direction of rock and groundedness, also the direction of introspection - Card: 4 of Stones

This is the card on the front of the book that goes with these cards.

The image is of a doorway between other worlds. It indicates stability.

NW - the direction of karma - Card: Ace of Stones

Connecting many levels of life and being well-anchored in ordinary things.

N - the direction of the adult - Card: 6 of Trees

The card that I thought I wasn't ready for last week.

This is the card of the person who uses the Tarot confidently. (It does mean more than that but given the other cards that's how I'm interpreting it here - tarot readings are always context dependent.)

NE - the direction of the design of energy - no card I was only doing one a day so one direction out of the 8 had to be missed - instead two images

The Pudding and a Power woman. The message is to get in shape and relax more!

E - the direction of Fire and Spirit - Card: Gift of Birds

Art and inspiration!

If you are still with me after all that - thank you!

And I forgot to mention this is my Illustration Friday - seeing as Might might mean Power!