Tag Archives: challenge

Philosophy Student and Occasional Fruitloop

23 Tuesday Nov 2010

Posted by in Philosophy

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A new project you say? Really???

Yes. I’m going to be posting some of my philosophy essays and writings online at a new blog. In order to keep things simple, I’m going to post the beginnings of those posts here also, and if you like the look of it you are welcome to follow the link to the rest of the essay.

For example… I have written an introductory post explaining why I called this blog ‘Academic Edgewalker’. If you would like to read more click here.

The reasons for this are twofold. Firstly the occasional person has requested a closer look at what I’ve written in these essays. Secondly, the idea terrifies me. I wrote most of whats going on here initially over the four years of my undergraduate degree, and some of them are very weird, some of them are rubbish, and some of them ended in conclusions which run contrary to my actual opinions (or they at least appear to). Its also a risk to put them out there, not only because people might actually read them (which is possible) and think they’re wrong, rubbish or offensive (thats their opinion) but also because part of me would quite like to be an academic, and linking my academic thoughts to my less academic ideas (like the Faery heart project, I mean, what logic lets you believe in faeries, really?) might get me in trouble there.

But, you know, life is short, and I’m either going to be myself, or I’m going to hide and be sad. So, sod that for a laugh. If it gets me laughed at, then I can laugh too, I have written some pretty silly things. If it means I’m seen as unfit for academia, then maybe I don’t actually want to be involved in academia anyway. And if my friends read these and think I’m crazy, well, they know that anyway and still love me. So whats to lose?

And you know what, I’ve actually got some logic that’ll let me argue that believing in Faeries is rational. Maybe one day I’ll share it!

The FeyHearted Book

16 Monday Aug 2010

Posted by in Faery

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With absolute pleasure I can now share that my book is completely and utterly finished!

I’ve spent most of the past year working on it and now that it is done it feels like I am full of the softest clouds, all gently and unstoppably rising. I have had a copy printed for myself, and I am incredibly excited to see how it looks when it arrives!

Here is the cover:

Faery Heart Book Cover Image

Finding the Fey within and without, the
heart of our hearts, and the Beginning
of the FeyHearted Path.

Here is the description I’ve inscribed on the dust jacket  inside the front cover:

Fey Ones!
You of the wildest
hearts!
You of the sacred
glades!
You dancers,
enchanters,
lovers!
Fey ones!
May we dance through
the world together!

Are you Enchanted?
Have you been touched by the heart of the wild
and wonderous world?
Those that are feykissed feel it in their
bones… tell me, is your heart Fey?

The Faery Heart outlines the beginnings
of the path to knowing, accepting and expressing your Fey
heart, for those who are enchanted by the heart
of nature, by The Fey themselves, those who
are both Enchanted and
Enchanting.

And now it is time to let my book fly into the world… to take on a life of its own in other’s hands, and minds, and hearts. A book is a living thing, and a book on something as untamed as the Fey and our own deep hearts is liable to take on a life of its own. With that in mind, and in honour of the Faery Queen, who has guided my hands as I crafted this small fey creature, containing hopes and dreams, words from other worlds, the story of how the world became, glimpses of the Fey realms and the beginnings of a map to guide you into your own Fey-Heartedness, I will have printed 13 hardback copies which I will sign and number just for you.

13 special copies of this magical book… because I would like the people who give it a home to treasure it, and to treasure their own path.

13 special copies of this treasure trove.

If you would like a signed, numbered, very, very limited edition hardback copy of this Fey book, please contact me.

EDITED: Thank you for all your support. You can now buy paperback or PDF copies in my Etsy shop 🙂

 

The high cost of printing means that I will only have them printed once I have payment for all 13 copies, and I ask, please, for £25 per book, which includes shipping the book to you. £25 is close to cost price for these books, so if you would like to sponsor this project and you can afford to give more for your copy, then by all means, please do. Each person who buys one of these thirteen will get a special mention in any further editions (though there will be no more hardcovers) and every person that can offer a little more will have an extra gift with their book, as a thank you for your support.

If you would like to preorder a limited edition, signed and numbered hardback copy of The Faery Heart please email me at: Haloquin (at) googlemail (dot) com. Once I have payment for 13 copies I will contact all those who have preordered one and let you know how long your Fey-Book will take to find its way into your loving arms!

 

This is both the end of a long project, and the beginning of an adventure, thank you for being here with me!

Green Fingers

14 Thursday Jan 2010

Posted by in Faery

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Having been thinking up ways I might be able to grow my own food while living in rented accomodation (last summer’s experiment in growing food in pots communally failed due to no-one knowing whose responsibility anything was, and the plants all getting moved permanently into the shade when the sun was too strong, rather than somewhere they could have both sun and shade…) and after my successive happy failures to kill my potted roses, (Yay!) which I am assured are difficult to keep alive, I’ve started looking at growing food indoors. And then I found this post: a vertical indoor garden.
Nothing short of inspirational.

I’ve kept an old plastic aquarium (which used to house my two mice) and am collecting milk bottles (square, tall, free, these should fit neatly together in a rectangular space) to plant plants in. I figure that trying different plants means I’ve a better chance of having something survive.

Next payday, I go hunting seeds and soil!

One of my housemates also seems enthused about the idea of a wormery… I’m considering it. Good idea, but is it too much responsibility? Looking after all those hundreds of lives?!?! Making sure it all rots down without encouraging flies? Probably better than a regular bin for that I guess… And, of course, how shall I transport them at the end of my contract in a student house? Maybe better to wait till I know I’m not moving for a year before I start a project like that!

Photos of set-up to follow once its set-up… and I’ve a working camera!

5 Minute Post – Lucid Dreaming

03 Sunday Jan 2010

Posted by in Philosophy

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(Topic suggested in a comment by philosophe007, here. Feel free to comment with suggestions for more topics!)

5 minutes, 1 topic… get set: go!

Lucid Dreaming

I’ve tried lucid dreaming before, but I’ve always gotten locked into dreaming that I’m dreaming lucidly and should try and do one fo the cool things that can eb done in dreams, like fly, or be invisible, or something. But I always end up dreaming that I’ve become lucid, and then just dreaming that I can try and fly, without actually becoming conscious of whats going on… and then the dream shifts and it all changes.

There’re lots of questions I could ask about dreams: what if they’re really being awake, and being awake is asleep? What if dreams are another life we step into when we sleep? What if…? But none of these seem interesting to me anymore,* I’m rather more interested in how we dream. How is it that we build up these worlds so vividly, and can have coherent stories that we are completely immersed in, and yet they somehow have a different quality to them to waking life?

Technically I assume dreams are built up by the brain playing, but then why aren’t the images just random flashes of things, rather than actual narratives (albeit often fragmented)? Maybe because the impulses follow particular patterns through the brain, ok… but then why do dreams have a different quality to waking life, if its all just what happens when impulses fire?

Could it be that life actually is more than just impulses, that the quality is actually embodiment, say?

We are more than just neurons, and life is more than just what happens when impulses fire, more than the experiences we have because neurons have fired… life is embodied experience. (Perhaps.)

*Post-5-minute comment: these questions are less interesting to me now because I’ve spent several years in academic philosophy classes in which ‘we might all be dreaming’ is an all-to-often recurring thought experiment, and they don’t make sense. We not awake because ‘awake’ is classified as the bit we call being awake, ‘reality’ is the classification of the bit while we’re awake (although certain versions of ‘awake’ and ‘reality’ can be argued for other than the everyday ones) and we are, it seems to me, creatures that live and move and do, and part of that is being embodied. As we don’t take our bodies, which lie sleeping, into dreams with us (or do we?) then its only a part of us that go into that dream-life…  so the interesting questions there, I suppose, are about what makes us us, whether that can be disembodied and if we are still the same people we are when embodied if disembodied, or instead are in part the same, but are different? I mean, don’t we experience the world as embodied beings? And if we’re experienceing the world differently, then how can we be the same kind of being, and thus the same person? Identity, identity… the question of dreams brings these issues up.

(And so I cheat and this becomes a 10 minute post!)

5 Minute Post – Writing as Creation

07 Monday Dec 2009

Posted by in Creative Process, Philosophy

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I have 5 minutes, one topic, and a blog: GO!

Writing as Creation

Clearly writing can be creative, I mean, its pactically creating something from nothing! You have all the elements mentioned in my post on the Philosophy of Creativity: The Urge to Create something, the resistance to it, the influences from the world around… plus the all important thing to write with. But what are you creating? Are the words themselves the creation? Is it the actual physical thing you write on? The digital blog-page? Is that what is created?

Lets take a song: say you write a song with a narrative.

What have you made? A song, a story, a piece of paper/digital page with words on it, marks, a shape picked out by the lines of words…

But if you then sing it, is that singing the same thing? Did you make that sung song too, in the first act of writing? If you copy it and someone else sings it, what then? If you email it to all your friends, are all those copies part of that first creation?

And the story… the narrative, you made that too.

Creation is amazing. One act can result in soemthing so huge.

Or it can result in a rambling muse on a blog floating in cyberspace.

And thats 5 minutes gone. Time to go out. Thoughts anyone? Anyone like to see more of these?

If you guys suggest topics, I’ll pick them randomly according to mood and give it a go, see what comes out. 🙂

Here Be Dragons…

04 Friday Sep 2009

Posted by in Magic, Storytelling

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Every day the sun rises.

Every day the sun sets.

This year the sun rose and set on the very first Sunrise Camp. A beautiful new venture in magic… a rising of dragons.

A camp which held itself together through sheer determination, and not a little magic. It took a dragon-hearted commitment from the organising team to pull the dragon out of the hat, but we did it. And I’m proud of this fledgling camp.

This was my first year teaching at a Witchcamp, and I’m so grateful Sunrise was my first time.

Let me tell you a story, a story of campers who chose to be dragons.

A story of magic and wonder and strength.

Once upon a time that was, is and shall be, two new campers came away from a Witchcamp in the heart of South West England so inspired that they plotted another camp, one a little different to the gorgeous and luxurious Camp which filled them with such magic.

The years passed and the inspiration became a dream, and the two campers grew a little older (though not much) and a little wiser (and a little more foolish, although who can truly say which is which?) Time danced circles with them, and new relationships grew like flowers in fertile soil.

And one day the dream was planted, like a seed, in the same soil that nurtured the friendships, and so an organising team came together.

Plans hatched and grew and died, and soon, one plan stood out from the rest as yeilding a harvest.

But now Time danced smaller circles, and the dates chosen were so close, with so much to do! But magic has a wondrous way of bringing everything together, and the organisers chose, like the dragons that they are, to make the Sun Rise.

And, of course, it had to.

Sunrise began and the campers came. A new place, a new adventure, new faces, and some that had been around since before the camp-dream was a twinkle of inspiration. Every individual brought something beautiful to the mix, themselves.

They made perfectly imperfect offerings to the Spirit of Dragon, nurturing that force within themselves. They wove a nest of starlight and wonder and love and community and everything that they had to offer. And the egg hatched, and the dragon took flight!

And on wings of magic, the dragon-hearts of the campers also spread their wings, they were challenged, and met the challenges, and received gifts.

They learnt to read the world around them for directions, and to see their own desires in their deepest of dragon hearts.

And each one made a choice, to be themselves, in a world which shies from shining-dragon-hearted people.

We all made a choice to step into the world under our own terms, to shine with our own colours, knowing a little more about ourselves, and claiming our power to shape the world a little to our own designs, so that dragons can fly free and wild again!

Final Faery Card!!!

03 Thursday Sep 2009

Posted by in Art Craft and Beauty, Faery, Storytelling

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Finally I have done the last card for my creative obsession! Wow.

The journey so far is chronicled here.

And so, I present to you… Card 7: Storytellers

And the storytellers weave a web of stardust, taking us full circle through the story that these cards illustrate…

And we are storytellers.

Since I started these cards I’ve done quite a bit, so there is a real sense of something here. The DragonHeartedness of Sunrise Camp, (which was wonderful!) has carried into my life a little bit of determination, a little bit of willpower, and a little bit of courage… and I look over these cards and see, even over a few months, my skill has grown, as has my confidence.

These cards are part of many stories, the story of my life, the story of art, a story for the Fey, the story of magic… and now, also, your story.  I hope they were a happy paragraph… and perhaps, soon, there will be more like this… perhaps I will craft a chapter in these cards.

But Now I go to print them out so I can hold them in my hands and play!

Faery Card 5

07 Sunday Jun 2009

Posted by in Art Craft and Beauty, Faery, Magic

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Jumping to card 5 this week, I focussed on the moment when we become fascinated by our own potential, by the power we can harness, and begin to pay more attention to that rather than our connection with other beings. Of course, this power is represented by fire:

Card 5 – Fascination-Distraction

Questions that this brings to mind:

What are you concentrating on to the exclusion of all else?

What are you distracted by when you should eb focussed?

What are your personal strengths, and how can you develop these in rigth relationship to the world?

I’m really enjoying this process, the feeling of satisfaction which comes from seeing the steps come together, from actually following through with a long-term plan, and from being able to share with you all, is delightful! Thanks for sharing in my adventure!

This card is from a series of cards illustrating this story. Find the first 2 cards here, and the sketches here. The larger project of which this is a part is to be found at www.feyhearted.wordpress.com, and the post announcing this project is here. Thank you CollageDiva for getting me kick started!