Interesting few days

Just got done a very enjoyable weekend with kyoudai02 and technobushi, who came down and stayed at my place for the weekend.

We hung out, watched The Descent (really good horror movie, though the dvd version we watched had kind of a bad ending... I hate horror movies where the heroine passes out, wakes up, escapes, then wakes up again to find it was all a dream and she's still trapped after all and probably about to die), fiddled with their new MacBook and their old laptop (now freshly reinstalled with Windows XP Pro so they can give it to their dad as a clean slate), went out to a great japanese dinner over at the Asahi Kaiten Sushibar in Ballston-Common Mall, and spent most of saturday in DC re-exploring the museums.

Besides catching the Air and Space Museum and Natural History Museum, we hung out for a good while at the National Museum of the American Indian (always a favorite), where I purchased two new books on native-american spirituality/shamanism. Both of them look to dovetail very nicely with my own practices, and with some things I have been working on recently. The first, which I'm currently reading, is Medicine of the Cherokee: The Way of Right Relationship by J.T. Garrett and Michael Garrett. The second is Dreamways of the Iroquois: Honoring the Secret Wishes of the Soul by Robert Moss. Both look to be very informative and thought provoking, and I believe they will syncretize with my current practices quite nicely in many respects. I have been increasingly looking at things from the standpoint of relationships for a few years now, originally inspired by rialian's talks at Walking the Thresholds on working with the Fae and recently rekindled by some of my own practices and musings coupled with comments/suggestions by tlttlotd. Among other things, I've been paying attention lately to the principle that the more familiar you become with something the easier it is to affect that thing. One very famous example of this is found in hacker culture in the form of this "koan":

Tom Knight and the Lisp Machine

A novice was trying to fix a broken Lisp machine by turning the power off and on.

Knight, seeing what the student was doing, spoke sternly: "You cannot fix a machine by just power-cycling it with no understanding of what is going wrong."

Knight turned the machine off and on.

The machine worked.

This is a common occurrence in the IT field: newbies are often unable to fix computer errors, even when they follow the exact same steps that are followed by a more experienced user. A related problem is the bug that mysteriously disappears when the admin/techie/guru is called over to look at it. This is a form of unexplained, even magical, phenomena that happens on a daily basis in the IT field. For a while, I was trying to figure out if there was some form of "magical law", akin to the formal laws of similarity and contagion, which would account for this; then I talked to tlttlotd. He suggested that it is the law of contagion itself that accounts for this: the more contact you have with something, the more of a connection between yourself and that thing there will be. This very neatly dovetails, for me, with the Huna concept of aka threads. Establishing and maintaining aka threads, while happening automatically to some degree in all human interaction, is a form of relationship which needs to be tended and cultivated in the same manner as any other relationship. I think these new books are going to tie into that way of looking at things very neatly, and offer additional perspectives on the same phenomena. At any rate, I've got some interesting reading to do.