spirituality

Sacred Objects: Giving Life and Meaning to Everyday Things– a Writing Workshop, October 18

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These Sacred Objects:

Giving Life and Meaning to Everyday Things

A writing workshop exploring the meaning and importance we give things, and how consecrating those objects change, heal, and empower us. Bring your Sacred Objects to class (if you can, or photos).

October 18: 10:30-1:30

$40

Join a 1-day writing workshop exploring how we make everyday things sacred. Saturday, October 18, 10:30am-1:30pm at the Sacred Owl and Salt Room in Knoxville, TN!

As humans, we can’t help but collect objects as we go through life.  Perhaps we are given something from a family member or friend. Maybe we find something at a turning point in our lives. Perhaps it is a stone, a feather, a scarf, a ring, a painting, a photo. The significance and power of an object grows over time, and can say a lot about our spiritual lives, our relationships, and what is important to us.  The sacredness that we impart to objects in our lives — this consecrating of objects–is part of the map of our spiritual journey.  This workshop will explore your spiritual journey through sacred objects.

Participants will bring 3-7 objects that have spiritual significance or deep resonance for them and will use them to write about their lives.  This can be a deeply satisfying workshop for those who want to explore themselves, and others, through sacred objects and through writing. You will learn more about your spiritual journey through sacred objects, and the journeys of others.

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Little Red Riding Hood Gets a Tarot Reading

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Imagine if Little Red Riding Hood had gotten a tarot reading right after she met the Wolf, but before she got to Grandma’s House?

I am working on a video where I gave LRRH that Tarot reading. I did this to show people how tarot works–even in a fictional setting. This might take a bit of the Woo-Woo away from Tarot, but I also found it pretty cool that the cards came out in such a way that you could give LRRH an accurate reading at this moment in her life. Despite her being fictional. I tried hard to ignore what I knew might come up– but the cards were pretty straightforward anyway.

We know this tale has been through several versions, some where she gets away, some where she dies, some where she is rescued by a hunter after she and grandma are eaten by the wolf, others that slap the wolf on the hand. Charles Perrault used the story as a warning to young women not to trust strange men (or maybe men in general). Though the wolf in my picture may have a flower in hand and has talked to LRRH, I know she is a child. While the cards can indicate that she is intrigued by the stranger and may even recognize some flirting as a possible interpretation, I don’t want to encourage a romance between a child and a stranger no matter how much sexy LRRH material is out there.

In my tarot reading, I think the cards are building her up to listen to her intuition, to that voice in her head that says that she should be cautious, and so I tell LRRH to be careful because all is not what it seems, and she needs to be more skeptical of strangers in the woods.

This is consistent to an earlier French version of the tale called “The Story of Grandmother,” where the girl is clever enough to escape!

I would have loved to tell her–don’t go to grandma’s, don’t think the wolf is nice, because I know an ending of the story, but this is about what you can and can’t know through tarot, not about this tale in particular. I won’t know the ending of your story or any future things for sure—Tarot is good for getting us to see the NOW better.

What did I learn about her:

She’s growing up and resisting being treated like a baby by her parents. She thinks her parents rules are outdated and old. She reminded me that she is a teen.

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7 Ways Tarot Can Inspire and Revive Your Writing

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7 Ways Tarot Can Inspire and Revive Your Writing

Learn how a simple deck of divination cards can unstick your plots, deepen your characters, and surprise you by unblocking your thoughts, building your intuition, and releasing your storytelling skills from tired patterns.

11am-1pm EST OR 7pm-9pm EST
Sept 21 or Oct 12, 2024

$30

Grab your favorite deck and join us in two weeks! Or, if you don’t own a deck, bring your questions, story blockages, character conundrums and we will do the spreads for you!

Tarot Decks have been used to guide seekers for hundreds of years. Why couldn’t they be used to guide writers? We write about lives, about choices, about being human. With 78 cards, there is, at the very least, a lovely randomization to the process, but at its most potent, tarot cards have wisdom in them to guide you along your writerly way too.

I’d like to show you ways you can get insight on stories, and how you can get insight into YOU as a writer.

Maybe you are stuck on a chapter and you can’t get through: Why am I stuck in Chapter 7? What is happening in my head that makes me stop here and not move on?

Maybe you are having trouble with creating complexity in your characters— there are spreads that will give you some beautiful complexity to characters you don’t want to have too flat or simple.

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Talking Dog gives Gay Christian Resources: my other project

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via Flickr and the Creative Commons licenseTalking Dog is one of my other blogs, hopefully a good resource for gay Christians.  There are a lot of good gay christian websites out there, and so I decided merely to become a portal so that you could find resources.  Mostly I wanted to provide all the information that anyone might need to investigate the whole issue for themselves.  Debates swirl about and people need to know the truth.  It was websites like the one I created that helped me when I needed information.  I needed resources.  I couldn’t ask anyone out loud about them, and I didn’t know a gay Christian.

Many of you might recognize the Talking Dog in my title–it comes from “Believing in the Dog” which was the short story that I entered into PSAC’s Anti-Homophobia Week’s contest over two years ago.  In the story, I had a man go out into the woods in January at night to kill himself–just sit out under a tree and freeze.  There was a talking dog in there–and as the author, I knew I couldn’t save the man’s life without making the black lab into a talking dog.  That I had to bend reality into fantasy to save the character.  I had wished that there were more talking dogs in the world–or that we would become the talking dogs in someone’s life.  The story won the contest, and Darrell Hookey, always encouraging me forward, helped me (i.e. pulled me off the floor crying) when it came time to print my name beside it in What’s Up Yukon.

It’s my way of giving back to the community what it gave me.  Maybe there’s someone else out there who’s questioning their faith and their sexuality.  Who knows?   They might just need a Talking Dog.

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For more on the blog, I have this page.