Bow to the Wow

We are bags of bone, blood, and bacteria.
Propelled and compelled by passions, programs, and periphera.
Guided and misguided by dogma, karma, and criteria.
Are We Not Men?!

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

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Return to Forever

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…

Return to O-where

Some images from our recent pilgrimage to O-where, May 2010.

The quietest moments often echo the longest.

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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…

Magic Chariot Ride

Continuing the exploration of Chariot cards from the decks in my collection, the following cards depict the transformative vehicles that the Charioteers harness as they challenge and transcend the boundaries of being.

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

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

Apps to Weave the Web

In a departure from the typical posts here on O-where, I wanted to heap praise on some excellent free applications and utilities that make my navigation and weaving of the wild world of the web more efficient and fun.

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.

Chariots of the Cards

The imagery of the Chariot cards in Tarot decks can be among the most creative and dynamic in a deck.  The Chariot card can represent the emergence of the will through controlled mastery and direction of the physical.  This can be depicted as a cosmic vehicle in which the material self and the spiritual self converge to journey on new pathways of expression and discovery.

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

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

Close Encounters of the Tarot Kind

One of the most wonderful aspects of Tarot is the range of visions that utilize the Tarot as a framework for creative, spiritual, and multidimensional encounters.  A fascinating example is the Tarot Trascendental deck by Juan Albiol, published in Spain in 2009.

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!?

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