Review Turbulence / Quest

Cinderella dancing with her broomstick - Painter IX based on a photo of a ballerina.

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The whole week was definitely one of turbulence... my quest to find my soul essence card may have been completed or maybe not... I'm just not sure... its close... but is it really me? Well I'm not showing it anyway!

And so onto Cinderella...

One of the types of cards that I've been making are story cards.

I've done Cinderella, Sleeping Beauty and Snow White.

Sleeping Beauty and Snow White are both all too relevant to someone who has had M.E. and spent half her life asleep... but what has Cinderella to tell me?

Here, in no particular order, are some of my associations with the story:

• Cinderella dances with a broomstick and calls up a magic helper - but no-one calls her a witch


• In British Pantomime both Cinders and the Prince are played by young women - is their final union a symbol for both the feminine and masculine sides of a woman becoming one?


• Does "Happy Ever After" mean enlightenment? Or, as in the Terry Pratchett book, Thud!, endarkenment?


• How could only Cinderella's foot be the only one to fit the shoe - I've always thought the Prince was lucky not to end up betrothed to a four year old...
  


• Jane Austen's Mansfield Park (or if you have no Austen consider this set - I've got it and love it - Jane Austen 6-book Boxed Set) is a clear Cinderella story - I've always thought it funny that Sir Thomas gets to be the Fairy Godmother as he provides the white dress and carriage... a little sexual role reversal worked in and only apparent if you see the connection... and of course Prince Charming (Henry Crawford described as "though not handsome, had air and countenance") turns out to be unworthy of her and she ends up marrying her cousin instead which is also a good twist if you are reading it as Cinderella; Edmund Bertram is more like Buttons in the pantomime and I always feel sorry for kind, helpful Buttons.


• On a more personal note, as a teenager I went to London, with a friend and her mother, to see Twiggy in Cinderella but Twiggy wasn't on that day so we saw her understudy and felt cheated!

Words for this card are on my card blog.

This review is a bit late in being published - I started writing it yesterday but only posted it today (Wednesday)... blame it on the turbulence.

IF - Sprout

Watercolour and pencil of Potatoes Chitting - sorry the photo is a little off centre but it was hard to avoid reflections - this is one of the few pictures of mine that's framed - probably dates from the 1980s.

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What week is it?

On Wednesday I got that the word for the week was "Turbulance" but not to post it. When there is turbulance its hard to know exactly where one is going... though if you've got enough momentum up before you hit it there's a good chance you'll still be travelling in the right direction....

Then yesterday I got an update and that the word was now "Quest".

All my dreams recently have been about my cards. I wake up having been shuffling them and looking at them all night long.

I've got rather a lot now... 78 are backed on card and another 70 or so printed out and ready to be backed. I was in a frenzy of making them until yesterday when suddenly I felt the pressure had stopped. Now it is time to look at them. And this morning I figured out what the quest was for... its for what my own essence is... the essential me... if I had to make a single card that represented me what it would be. So I'm looking at what I've got and trying to see where this leads me.


A card that was crucial in getting here was one I started off calling "Can't see the wood for the trees". I started off with a dense evergreen forest. I then added leaf after leaf until I'd covered it up and there was no forest showing. So now this card is called "Can't see the wood for the leaves". And yes I know that the number of cards I've made is excessive... but a tree has many leaves.

See the words for it on my card blog.

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I'm currently reading S Is for Silence which is the last of the Kinsey Millhone books available - I've been really enjoying my re-read of the series and then the two that I'd not read before R and S. Maybe I'll need a bit of time off from fiction after this marathon!

I've ordered the most recent Julia Cameron book Finding Water: The Art of Perseverance and am planning on joining Leah et al in going through it starting in 2 weeks on Saturday February 17th.

Are you planning on joining in too?

Update: The place to go to join in is Finding Water