New Format: Three Takes on a Spell

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.

I've been struggling to "find my life's purpose," but there is one word that encompasses my two lifelong obsessions--words/language and herbs/medicine/plants, underpinned by a spiritual awareness :

SPELL

Right? What words and herbs have in common aside from my interest in them is that both involve spelling. Both are underpinned by energetic vibration that can transmit beyond their immediate material.  A word can create a marriage or a death sentence; hit the right note with the right vowel, and you can shatter glass. A plant's essence can be extracted into water, alcohol, vinegar, or oil and have effects far from the soil in which it grew.

Put differently, both plants and words, their energies, their vibrations, participate in magic. Most of us use magic, whether we realize it or not. Most of us call it something different. All about how we frame it, right?

How we frame it--the mindfulness--is the third leg of the stool. My words and sounds participate in magic, which can mean many different things. I can talk myself into being strong or weak. The herbs--the food/medicine continuum--participate in magic, which can mean many different things. I believe everything we take in can be food or medicine depending on the dosage and that much of herbalism involves figuring out which inputs in which doses are good medicine for a person (at a place and time) and which are not.

Additionally, my words and the way I use my herbs (how I feed myself and how that affects my body/behavior and also what I make for others) affect other people and the whole Universe. Therefore, the mindfulness practices help me to be intentional about spelling, to ensure that I do what I do for the highest good.

So, my blog for these 100 days and possibly beyond will contain, for each nine-day period, a spell, consisting of three posts--an herb, a word, and a mindfulness reflection (not necessarily in that order) with a common thread between them.

And, since one of the failed Gong failures involved lack of follow through on sharing my blogs on social media, another of my Gong items is three minutes per day on social media. Three minutes! I must be able to do that, right?