The new Owhere site is at:
http://owhere.oppenhuis.com

We now have our own domain, so this venerable site that was hosted on WordPress.com will eventually be retired.  No complaints at all about WordPress.com, as they are an excellent hosting platform, and indeed we are still using WordPress blog technology for the new site.

I’ll probably transition some of the content from the old site to the new site, particularly the Tarot related pages which seemed to be the most popular.  I intend to vary the content on the new Owhere site a bit more, as my interests and explorations may wander due to will or circumstance.

So the theme will be:  Explore > Wonder < Repeat!

Kind of feels like a Dr. Who moment, regenerating his body and revamping his Tardis!

Thanks to all the visitors to this version of the Owhere site, and I hope you’ll take a peak from time-to-time on the new Owhere site.

In the immortal words of Groucho Marx:

Hello, I must be going.
I cannot stay, 
I came to say
I must be going.
I’m glad I came
but just the same
I must be going.

Good God. Mad God.
Good dog.  Bad dog.
Bow to the Wow!
What’s all this, then?!

= = = = = =

Went for a bicycle ride through my childhood neighborhood.
Time and place merge with each rotation of the wheels.
Wheels of fortune and misfortune, of discovery and passage.

Fingers stained purple from the old mulberry tree by the graveyard.
Still fruitful after all these years.
Some berries sweet and juicy, some bitter, like memories.

So I return and reach for more.
Through the barbed wire, through the graveyard.
Return to Forever…

The quietest moments often echo the longest.

= = = = =

At dusk each day, scores of ravens would glide over O-where (in groups of 2 to 6), to gather for the evening in a nearby roost.

Cholla cactus with fruit.  The desert flora are gratefully responding from the heavy snows of the previous winter.

Curious lizard

Wolf spider on side of tent (we think it may be a Carolina Wolf Spider, Hogna carolinensis)

Ah… the magical glow of O-where…

Masonic Tarot	Tarot Magów	El Tarot del Arco Iris
Rumi Tarot	Elemental Tarot	Holmsen Tarot
Crowley/Harris Thoth Tarot	Zigeuner Tarot	Tarot of the Sephiroth
Maroon Tarot	Diary of a Broken Soul	Basque Mythical Tarot
Rock Art Tarot	Tarot of the Four Elements	Yeager Tarot of Meditation

Let the sounds of Steppenwolf’s “Magic Carpet Ride” take you away as you go for a ride on these magical Chariots!

(Words and music by John Kay and Rushton Moreve)

I like to dream, right between my sound machine
On a cloud of sound I drift in the night
Any place it goes is right
Goes far, flies near, to the stars away from here

Well, you don’t know what we can find
Why don’t you come with me little girl
On a magic carpet ride
You don’t know what we can see
Why don’t you tell your dreams to me
Fantasy will set you free
Close your eyes girl
Look inside girl
Let the sound take you away

= = = = = =
Art and images are copyright by the respective artists who created them, and may not be reproduced without permission from the artists

Delicious: bookmarking service (by Yahoo) that allows you to save and manage bookmarks on a central site, which are then accessible from most any internet device using any browser via a secured login. You can tag, comment, and group your bookmarks, which are fully searchable.  You can make each bookmark public for sharing, or private.  Simple, quick, indispensible.  Delicious has become my home page, whether at home, at work, or mobile.

Evernote:  A site for creating and organizing notes, storing snippets from web pages, images, documents, scans, handwriting, you name it. Great for research, to-do lists, brainstorming,journaling, work-in-progress, etc.  I use it to store scans of Tarot cards that I can then access and meditate on or journal on.  Accessible from the internet, computer, or mobile. Another simple, quick, flexible tool.

Feedly: a companion to the Google Reader feed reader, in the form of an extension for Google Chrome or Firefox browsers.  Provides a modern inviting alternative to the spartan Google Reader interface, with a customizable magazine-like graphic presentation.  Feedly makes reading blog feeds fun, not a chore.

Lazyfeed:  Lazyfeed scans the blogoverse for the topics you specify, and presents a real-time “conveyor belt” of blog entries for those topics, in an inviting click-me tiled interface. Great for researching new topics and products, and discovering interesting blogs.

Readability: a browser bookmarklet that reformats web pages by stripping out graphics and leaving only the essential text, similar to the “Print this page” feature of many sites.  You can specify font style, size, and margins. Great for sites with small fonts and lots of graphics and ads.  Also check out their TBuzz bookmarklet for sending web pages to Twitter.

Sobees: a social networking aggregator, providing a consolidated interface for reading and sending updates in Twitter, FaceBook, LinkedIn, and/or MySpace. Allows you to add filters to include or exclude specific words from the social streams, handy for filtering out those pesky Facebook app update messages.  There is a Sobees Lite desktop client, and a similar Sobees Web interface.

I hope you find one or more those apps useful in the webs you weave.

The Chariot is the vehicle where man becomes superman, where the material expresses the spiritual (and vice versa), and the terrestrial meets the extraterrestrial.

Here are some of my favorite cosmically inspired Chariot cards:

bifrost Tarot	Trascendental Tarot	Cosmo Meditations Tarot
Fractal Firebird Tarot	Strange Tarot	Langustl Tarot
El Gran Tarot de los Tattwas	Wheel of Change Tarot	Tarot of Cosmic Consciousness

The images on this deck feature strange hybrid creatures amidst Bosch-like alien landscapes.  A kaleidoscopic mix of humanoid/extraterrestrial, organic/inorganic, and esoteric/scientific imagery keep you entranced (and perplexed) as you explore the deck.

The major arcana depict somewhat traditional scenes, but from an otherworldy perspective:

The minors really take you on a trip to strange worlds and even stranger beings:

The more you gaze on these cards, the odd landscapes and composite creatures become strangely familiar, as if you had encountered them from fleeting dreams, or perhaps from your past or your future!?

Background story:  For our remote O-where location, we had arranged for the delivery of a storage unit (a 20×8 foot ocean container) so we would have a secure onsite storage for our camping gear and other essentials.  Prior to this, we had rented a small storage unit in a town about 45 minutes away (each way), so we were very excited at the prospects of having onsite storage.

I awoke at dawn on the day we were to receive the storage container, to hear the sound of rain.  At first I was disheartened, as the rain might make the dirt roads to our location difficult to travel.  As I emerged from our tent, I beheld a wondrous sight, a brilliant rainbow arching over O-where!

I then followed the arc of the rainbow to the north, and the end of the rainbow was illuminating in all its ROYGBIV glory the rocky Knob in the center of O-where.

Looking up, I then was blown away by the arc of the rainbow, with the moon in the center!

Every time I am privleged to see a rainbow, I am uplifted to be alive in a universe of such amazing beauty, and this is surely a sign of a creator sharing the joy of creation.

“Somewhere, over the rainbow, skies are blue.
And the dreams that you dare to dream
Really do come true.”

= = = = = = =

Oh yeah, the delivery of the ocean container was a success.  The skies cleared, the delivery truck slowly but surely navigated it’s way over the rough roads, and we now have onsite storage.  Huzzah!

It’s time to emerge from the viral infusion, the cellular confusion, the dimensional diffusion.

- – - – - – -

I recently obtained an amazing Oracle deck, the Devas of Creation, self-published by Cilla Conway.  (Cilla is also the artist of the Intuitive Tarot, one of my favorite Tarot decks.)  The Devas of Creation is a 72 card deck depicting the emanation of the Divine in its infinite expression and expanson, from the Void to the Cosmos, from the Big Bang to the Fundamental Elements to the Microcosm, and back again.

This deck best speaks to me through one-card selections and meditation.  Near the end of my viral bout, I performed a reading on the topic of “Recover”, and the card that surfaced was the Deva of Emergence.

Deva of Emergence

The Deva of Emergence rises from the tempering fires, shining with incandescent expression.  This is a flare of creative release, the  joy of being and doing and Now!

Cilla Conway provides a wonderful query and challenge from the Devas of Creation booklet:

“What do you love doing more than anything else?
How often do you allow yourself to experience this activity, and the joy that accompanies it?  If you have not experienced that joy recently, you are preventing it.  So what underlying messages do you have that stop you?”

It’s time to emerge from the limbo of excuses and someday.  It is time to be, Now!