On Monday, I accompanied my dear spirit-brother M. to Santa Fe! We got home last night (Wednesday) around 1am, having put over 1100 miles on his trusty trooper of a car, having experienced awe-inspiring (and awe-ful and inspiring) natural and manmade beauty through all our senses, having experienced non-beautiful aspects of nature and man also, and having recognized that this, too, is part of the beauty that is existence.

This lady pictured, in her Egyptian-esque skirt, is a ponderosa-tall witness on the side of the highway through Malpais National Monument. Always watching, if we care to notice.

My primary role for this trip was as witness to M. as he checked out the school program and the place that might be--that, turns out, surely will be--host to the next stage in his unfolding. However, I had also to witness myself witnessing, and to see myself, normally a singleton, in constant company for three days.

In this spell so far, "it is what it is" is not the whole story, and a chiasmus, like that phrase, is an arrangement in the shape of the Greek letter chi χ, or of the cross.

Nice timing, yes? We're looking at the shape of the cross on Easter. Easter which coincides with Pesach this year, unusually but perhaps unsurprisingly in a year already so replete with astrological coincidences and cooccurrences.

Since the first part of this spell was about remembrance as a tool for creating boundaries, the spell's word is

remember

*The picture is of Mnemosyne, the ancient world's personification of memory, as portrayed by Rosetti.
This looks like an easy one, doesn't it?

• Re = "back"/"again"
• Member = "a part of an organized whole; literally a limb"

And with dis = "apart" and dismember as an apparent opposite, meaning "to break down into constituent parts," we can tell a fine story of how "remember" is a process of putting things back together, taking the separated parts and putting them back together, how all parts of a memory are essential constituents.

It's a great story, and I think it can be a valid story, but it's not the actual etymology of "remember."

Yesterday was my birthday, my personal new year. A good time to restart the broken Gong and to learn the lessons from having it break.

The Internet hasn't been available when I've needed it in recent days. An opportunity to go inward and let what's needed for this next phase bubble up spontaneously.

What does that mean for the blog? I'll tell you, and then I'll show you with the first post in the series, tomorrow..

I'll be continuing with the "cycles within cycles" format, including three blog posts in each nine-day period. This one, the introduction, is extra. But now, each of these nine-day periods will have a theme. Each nine-day period will SPELL something.

The spectacle of the Gem Show--the enormous, the ancient, the dazzlingly polished, the uniquely colored, and all the buying and selling--is the ultimate celebration of bright and shiny objects.

Literally.

Of course, a bright and shiny object can be anything that catches your eye, holds your attention, and comes to represent something else. The "something else" could be simply beauty (is that why magpies hoard tinsel and aluminum foil in their nests?), or prestige ("I want people to see me wearing this expensive diamond"), or commitment to a practice or community or relationship ("I wear this shawl because I'm of this religion"/"This crystal will clear my psychic space"/"With this ring I thee wed").

Acquiring the bright shiny object is a dopamine hit--excitement of taking possession of the item, significance of time and place and intention. The more symbolic the object, the more of a "hit" you get when acquiring it. Symbolic could just mean "more expensive," but it could be a gift that cost no money. Some of my very favorite "gems" I picked up hiking beaches and hills.

So, how do we keep our bright shiny objects shiny?

I took off from my routine again on Tuesday and took in some more of the Gem Show. Whereas last time was inside a convention center, this time was the more grass roots, street party face of the show, the sprawl and hustle and bright colors and sunshine lining the motels that line the frontage road on the west side of the I-10.

So much is happening at the moment, and as I said before, it would be so easy to miss out on this. During my wanderings, replete of course with conversations with strangers, I ran into people who've lived in or close to Tucson for decades who were finally coming to see what all the fuss was about with the gems.

Even the way I got myself out to the show was a beautiful illustration of how life converges. I experience myself as the center of my own web, giving meaning to the connections between different parts of my life.

Every year from January 31 to February 15, Tucson plays host to an international gem show. I knew this before I moved here, but more as a fairytale, almost, than with any real sense of cognition around it. After five years in extremely white-and-homogeneous Homer I appreciate how international Tucson is in and of herself. And she's definitely rich in gems, metaphorical and literal--petrified wood, wonderful quartzites and schists.

But for this two-week period a whole separate reality plays out in the convention centers and hotels, the motels that line the Interstate 10 frontage.

I imagined I could easily miss the whole thing by simply sticking to my routine, such as it is. But over the weekend I had the opportunity to be a fly on the wall at one of the convention centers.

It was as if the Silk Road had been transported to the Southwest.