Tuesday, January 14, 2014

Week 1 with Study Group

I am going to the make-up initial study group meeting on Thursday, but here's what the group is doing this week (copied directly from the study group post):
At this point, I've done all the readings (at least once) and, obviously, started the blog/journal.  I'm going to do the OOD reading again tomorrow morning with the physical book.  While reading it as an ebook is more convenient for work, carrying it with me, and doing a quick read through, I don't feel that I'm going to do as well for actually learning unless I can take margin notes, highlight, etc.  I'm out of practice at this whole studying/ read for content/ notes thing as it is, learning a new way of doing it might not be the best plan either.

Journalling is probably going to be an amalgam (really, that's how that's spelled?) of physical paper journalling and online. If I do the notes and initial pass on paper, then I can clean it up and actually make it legible online.  Typing things makes me actually do the mental work to make scholarly sense of things anyway.

Right now, I expect the most difficult parts of this to be the regular meditation practice and creating a relationship with patrons.

I've been trying, off and on, for 20 years to start and maintain a daily meditation practice.  It never seems to go anywhere.  It might be time to admit defeat on the standard western meditation style of sitting crosslegged and clearing ones mind.  So back to the beginning, and what is probably the nerdiest calling to paganism ever: the Jedi calming breath. Which actually isn't Jedi at all, but vaguely Buddhist (I think?  The site I learned it from went defunct so long ago that the Internet Archive doesn't even know what I'm talking about).

Patrons/ Deities/ Gods.  I've never had a relationship with them.  Even when I was young enough to be going to church and sunday school every sunday... I never got it.  Never felt like there was a personal connection with any deity or spirit.  I spent most of late elementary and junior high searching for the force (ok, apparently Star Wars had a bigger impact on my personal development than I thought) before discovering paganism and Tolkien.

I might come back to this in the morning, I might not.  But right now, it's long past my bedtime and my cat is freaking out that we've not commenced the routine yet.
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