Technomagic

First, obviously, this is not the second Thresholds post. This is something else I just wanted to write down real quick before I forget. Inspired by some stuff from Thresholds, however.

One of my favorite technopagans, tlttlotd was talking about his habit of collecting things charged with the energy of a place/event. I tend to do something very similar with the objects I consider my ritual tools... many of them represent particular places or events in my life. One of them, for example, is simply a stone from a driveway in west virginia that a friend happened to charge with a particular energy signature many years ago. Another is a tiny bone from a deer which was shot on my old property in New Jersey and left to rot by one of our neighbors... I did some metaphysical work to attempt to help the deer's spirit pass on peacefully, and I was invited to take the bone later when the bones were all that were left. Still another is a dogtag from my brief but eventful time in the US Army before receiving an entry level discharge.

I've thought of another way to do this. I just got a rather nice digital SLR. So far, I've just been using it for regular photographs, but I think it would work rather nicely to attempt to capture some of the energy of certain places in images that represent them. Putting those images on a usb key could create a virtual equivalent of the bag I use to hold my ritual tools. And it would be able to hold hundreds of images. This would even work nicely for capturing the energies of a given place at a particular time, as I've been noticing that some places seem more magical at particular times while others feel magical all the time. Urban magic seems particularly sensitive to timing if what I've been observing in the past week holds true; a lot of people milling around seem to disrupt the energies, but after the stores close and the people go home, when the streets are abandoned, some places feel significantly more powerful than they do during the day. Digital photographs would nicely capture the energies of such a place during that time of power.

Random thoughts

My brain is going in weird directions today, I will get to the second Thresholds post soon, but other things feel more pressing...

Do you remember the era of urban gardens? The ones where people turned abandoned lots and such into food sources for their neighborhoods? Little plots of green hidden inside the concrete jungle, nurturing and somehow magical...

They died out, as I understand it, largely due to liability concerns. But I wonder... could the idea be revived in some form? How many tiny, abandoned plots of land are there in the cities these days? How much do people generally want for a plot of land so tiny that not much else other than a garden could be done with it? Could one or a few people, maybe even a small community, scrape together the funds to buy a very small plot of land and turn it green in the heart of urbania? An intentional microcommunity, in a way?

And what if we take that idea further... from one plot, spread to two... from two to four... from four to eight... perhaps selling some of the produce we generate, perhaps simply reinvesting our savings from not having to buy our produce in stores any longer... slowly spreading patches of green filling our cities, our homes... changing the local environment, inspiring others.... Viral sustainability.

What if?

Paging foxgrrl

Not sure if you ever saw my reply: yes, I have your cell charger. Please contact me at my email address: my lj username @ gmail dot com, and we can work out a way to get it back to you ASAP.