Indi's Journal

So, I talked about the Conflux a little in my last post, and I guess that got Dad thinking I should share more. I’ve actually written a basic info post about it before, but that was a while ago, and there’s definitely more to say there. This week, Dad suggested that it might be good to talk about history.

It’s hard to point to a specific origin for the traditions and beliefs that go together under the word Conflux, since they really are that, a sort of grouping of ways of thinking and acting that have roots that are older than writing. It’s not the sort of religion that has a specific founder or central figure. Instead it came out of the habits and experiences of groups of people who spanned a pretty large part of the world. Specifically, there’s a lot of roots of it what we see of the pre-writing cultures who lived along the Whiteshell and Cottonwood rivers of Western Stonespine. This isn’t too surprising, since Confluence, the historical center of Conflux belief, is where those two rivers join together. It looks like there was lots of migration along the rivers, and the folk who gathered together at that big junction began practicing together.

This of course sounds a lot like the mythic origin story of the Conflux, where the Wanderers built that city as a place to live and provide shelter for other folks who, like them, were looking for a place to be accepted in the world. Most folks don’t hold that as literally true, and Confluence itself predates any stories or rituals that are recognizably Conflux, but the story certainly reflects the land it came from and has served as a template for how the city, and the religion, have developed.

The first written Conflux myths date back a little over three thousand years, found on clay tablets from right around the same time that writing itself arrived in that area of the world. However, archaeologists have found cave inscriptions and paintings which seem to relate to them that are centuries older, suggesting that they were using writing to record stories that already existed. These stories seemed to be passed around and collected in different ways throughout the centuries, in a really similar way to how people craft and share codexes today.

Starting about twenty five hundred years ago, we have a bit better records, starting with the temples constructed by the Braidtail clan, apparently after previous smaller temples were washed away in a flood. These were taller and sturdier, made of stone blocks and set on high ground overlooking the river junction. Those were a different construction than how we do temples now, with a large central area and alcoves for specific Wanderers. There were a lot more alcoves than the Wanderers we most commonly talk about now, so no one’s sure if they focused on a larger group of gods, had them divided up in different ways, or something else. As usually happens in the Conflux, the specifics of traditions are always being rethought and places being repurposed, so it’s hard to know specifics. But that temple still exists, preserved as both a historical site and a place of worship, now allowing people to temporarily set up whatever shrines they want in those alcoves.

Moving ahead nearly a couple thousand years, I can talk a little about how Conflux beliefs spread in the Modern Migration Period. This is when books (mostly hand-bound and hand-written) were really starting to spread across the three continents, and an inventor called Cayra Duskrain popularized the practice of printing small sets of pages (all from hand-carved printing plates) and then gathering them together into reconfigurable books. These were easy to distribute, collect, and create at home, leading to a lot of spread of Conflux ideas, and eventually the traditions that came with them. The themes of belonging and hope for the outcast, as well as the flexibility of how they meshed with other belief systems, helped the ideas catch on far and wide throughout the world, which is a big part of why the Conflux is so widespread today.

Those are the big things I can think of that count as “history” without getting into big boring lists of who wrote what when, so it seems like a good place to wrap up. But if there’s any more detail that anyone wants to know about, please tell me, because gathering this all up together is really helping me learn it better myself, and I’m finding this sort of historical context really helpful as I keep trying to figure out my own place in these traditions.

Arranger is a delightful puzzle game that I played on my iPad, which was a perfect way to play such a tactile where the main controls is moving up down left and right, which I could do on the touch-screen with swipes. The basic mechanic is very puzzle-game-y, you play a character on a tile grid who moves by shifting the ground under herself, meaning most other things in the same row or column with her will move when she does. Adding in some things like wrapping around the edge of the map, certain objects that don't move with you, and lots of other clever elements for different puzzles made it a really fun and inventive game whose core mechanic never wore out its welcome. But that's not what's really special about the game.( Read more... )

This week Dad gave me an assignment to write about a more recent shift in relationship between Rheos and the people on it, one that started kinda badly, could have gone worse, and yet still managed to end up with us ending up in the best harmony we've ever been in with our world.( Read more... )

Kraken Academy (The two exclamation points are in the name but I'm not gonna type them every time, sorry dad!) was an unexpected game in a few ways. Unexpected genre, unexpected vibe, unexpectedly short. None of these are a bad thing at all, I really enjoyed playing it, but talking about those unexpectednesses is probably the best way for me to talk about the game in general. ( Read more... )

FixFox is a cute little game that's hard to describe. The word I keep coming back to is "adventure", but in the Zelda sense, instead of the Monkey Island sense. Except that there's no fighting, and a lot of inventory puzzles, so maybe there's more Monkey Island in it than I first thought. It's a game that's stuck with me a lot, and I'm really happy to have played it, even if I think there are some things it could've done better.

( Fun with foxes! )

A while ago, I talked about the altars around our home that we use to honor our gods and the other spirits of our tradition. I said then that the altars are important because they help remind us that those gods and spirits are all around, so I guess it makes sense that for this entry, Dad suggested I start talking about those spirits more directly, starting with the spirits of the land.

This is a huge topic, just as the land itself is huge, so I'm going to talk about my understanding of experience based on our traditions and the folktales of the place we live. If I am going to get philosophical about it for a sec, I think that's kinda the only way to do it; I think the way we experience the spiritual world around us is really affected by that sort of context. Talking about it in a more general way never seems to get further than "yeah everything is alive, everything is in relationship," and that's important, but doesn't get you very far on its own. So other folks may experience or express all this differently, but this is what the spirits of the land are to me, based on the stories I've heard, and the things I've experienced.

The most well-knoown land-spirits are the 'riversnakes'. There's lots of stories about them, but they're also a big oart of my own experience of the spirits around where I live. To give a general idea, I'll talk about the legends first, then how we think about them in practice.

There's a riversnake for every place that flowing water shapes the land, from the smallest creeks to the rivers that run halfway across the continent. People say that you can see them filling the banks of their river if you look very closely on the night of the first sliver of moon. If you see a riversnake before the riversnake see you, it's supposed to be good luck (I think originally it was supposed to be "a good harvest", lots of water I guess?), but if you catch one staring at you first, then the story is you better watch out, especially around the water.

For me, when I go out and experience the spirits of the land, the riversnakes, or something like them, feel like the most basic spirits they are, making up different sort of 'domains' based on all the water that flows into one river. Like one riverspirit could be found, in some ways, in the whole watershed that leads to that river. To me those are really some of the few actual 'boundaries' in nature. Some people talk about the spirit of a particular lot, or park, but to me the landspirits aren't really ever confined by the boundaries we draw, but by what the land (and the spirits) do on their own. When I try to connect to the land around the Lodge, the riversnake is the first spirit I experience, rising up out of the land, all made of river rocks and local plants, big even considering our creek is pretty small, and barely noticing me except as just a small part of whatever helps keep its domain in or out of balance. Still, that makes it an important spirit to be on good terms with, to remember when I'm thinking about my connection to the land, and trying to offer to what matters to me.

I wonder sometimes about the spirit of the mountain we live on. It's covered by more than one riversnake (since there's a few creeks running down it) but the mountain of course has its own presence apart from them. People used to think about mountain spirits a lot when they would mine deep into mountains. That could be dangerous work, and you could see how you might think that mining into the mountain would make the spirit angry. That's why people would lay offerings as part of mine work. Sometimes this was food, but more often it would be paintings and carvings on the mine supports themselves. The idea was, they were taking something beautiful or valuable out of the mine, so they'd leave something behind that had its own beauty and value. Me and dad took a tour once of an old mine, and we saw some of the wood along the tunnels. Some was carved with animal shapes, and there were others that were repainted with all the bright colors (which faded over time of course). There was even a place where someone had carved a poem into a beam, about the family they had waiting at home, and how they were thankful to the mountain for helping feed them. These days, when they do mining, I think they focus more on repairing the shafts when they're done and leaving no trace, but I remember reading something about how the mineworkers will still leave small pretty things as they work, just to keep the mountain happy while the mine is still there.

The last thing that comes to mind right now is the spirits of trees. I'm not exactly sure if they're "land spirits" in the same way as the spirits of rivers and mountains, or if they're more like the spirits of individual animals. I think it's sort of a mistake to just see trees as part of the landscape rather than as individual beings. But still, they're always in one place, so it's understandable to interact with them sorta like they're locations. I don't know a lot of folklore about the spirits of trees specifically. There's those old stories about spirits of the dead getting tangled in trees and becoming wood-wights, but that's more about spirits in trees, not spirits of trees. I do know that when we first moved to the lodge though there was an old birch tree that I liked a lot, and used to leave offerings for. Nice food around the roots, sparkly things in the branches. Unfortunalely, unknown to us the tree was already sick when we moved here, and a few years later it had to be cut down. We took it pretty hard, and did our best to honor what was left of the tree, using the stumps to decorate the yard and that kind of thing, and I actually still have a piece of that tree (and some of the beads that we hung in it) on my ancestor altar, because it really feels like an ancestor of this place, in a way.

I think that feels like about all I have to say about land spirits right now. I could probably talk more about other spirits-of-place too, like the ones of houses and cities and other built places, but that feels like a pretty different topic that I'll save for another time. If you have any questions about any of this though, please ask them! I love to talk and think about this stuff.

Dad reminded me that I should talk here about sorta a big change in my life that actually happened a while ago but I guess is still worth mentioning: I go to regular school now! For a while I was home-schooled, partly because of how far we live from the city, and partly because me and my dad were both worried that the regular schools wouldn't do a good job with what I need.

Home-schooling was actually really great for me in a lot of ways, but it also got kinda lonely and isolating, and things got to a point where the stuff I was wanting to learn wasn't stuff that Dad was confident teaching. Fortunately, in the time that I wasn't going to school, we found out about a really good place that I could go, that dealt with a lot of the problems.

Kirreteuro Academy is sort of on the outskirts of the city, and it's not at all a normal school. There's only about 20 kids, for starters, and they're in all different age groups. That means that things are really personalized for everyone. There are four regular teachers, and it's run out of what used to be someone's house. So basically, it ends up being a lot like home-schooling, but with more folks around and people who are more experienced in teaching all sorts of things. I really like it, it's such a huge difference from any other school I've been to that I hardly know where to start talking about it.

I guess the teachers are a good place to start. Jack and Alex are probably the right ones to talk about first. They sort of started the school, because they also have a kid who they thought wouldn't be covered very well by regular school systems. Jack is really cool, my dad calls him an "old hippie", he's super-laid-back and knows a lot of stuff about music and art and culture. He's lived in a lot of different places in the world, and likes to share stories. He even has a local radio show where he plays all sorts of music I've never heard before. His wife Alex seems a bit more like a typical teacher, she mostly does administrative stuff for the school but she also teaches history, in a way that I actually find interesting rather than boring!

The two other regular teachers are Mal and Eve. Mal is probably my favorite, because he teaches math and science, he does it in a kinda goofy way that involves lots of analogies and chalkboard drawings, which helps me a lot; I'm realizing I'm definitely what the folks there call a 'visual learner'. It's kinda cool how math class works since everyone's in a different place. We have books, and we work from books and go to the teachers if we need help thinking through something. It's really impressive how much Mal knows, and it's exciting how much I'm learning. I think I got through a whole year of pre-algebra before Glowtide!

Eve teaches language and literature, which in this cases means I'm reading and discussing books with kids who are a lot older than me. It was kind of intimidating at first, both because of the reading and because Eve is kind of strict, but it turns out she's strict in a way that's really helpful, like she makes sure everyone gets a chance in discussions, which is good because sometimes the big kids really want to talk over me and talk down to me. I also saw a really cool other side to her a couple weeks ago. We were taking a field trip to the local newspaper and we stopped off where she lives, which is sort of a loft apartment thing except the whole bottom part was racks of movie posters and other collectibles like that. It turns out her and her boyfriend also have a business selling those. We saw some original posters from some of my favorite movies, even ones that are older than me. Did you know movie posters are printed on both sides so that they look good when they're lit from behind?

The other thing I really want to talk about is the school area itself. It was originally a house, but it's really big and has a whole bunch of other buildings around it too. There's a little greenhouse, some chicken and pigeon coops (we learned how to help take care of them our first week here, and it'e easier than I thought it would be) and even a two-story treehouse in a huge tree in the back yard. But my favorite place is the music room. I guess it was originally sort of like some sort of cellar or basement or something because it's basically below the house but you go into it from a separate door. And it's absolutely filled with music stuff. The walls are covered in crates of records, and there's a drum set and a fancy keyboard and all kinds of weird instruments from around the world. It's obviously one of Jack's favorite places, and he has shared a lot of music with us, and showed us how to use the instruments a bit too. Of course I tried out the drum set first. Jack says I have pretty good rhythm, but I think I like melodies better, because what I've really been having fun with is the keyboard, playing with all the different sounds it can make, or setting it up to do its own rhythm and improvising things on top of that. I'm not sure if I'll ever make something I want to share with other people, but I'm having a ton of fun trying things out.

There's so much more I could say about it (and I probably will) but I think that gives a good idea for now. It's so weird and cool to actually be looking forward to going to school. I mean I always loved learning, but it feels really special to have such a supportive place to do it that's acutally still called 'school'

For a journal entry this week, dad asked me to write about the altars in and around our home, Alpenglow Lodge. That totally makes sense. They're an important part of our hose and even our daily life. Altars are important because they help remind us that the gods are with us and spirits are all around. They're a place where we can gather and put things that are important to us and them.

Probably the most "important" altar in the house is the one in the Channel room, where we go for indoor circle gatherings and rituals. That one is set up be what my dad calls "ecumenical". It has icons for the Wanderers of course, but they're spread out and among other representations of other traditions, like carved stone wolves for the Everpack, fiber-woven designs for the Rhythm-callers, and quite a few more that I don't even recognize. Lots of those were added by people who come visit; it's meant to be an open place for them to make their connections too. It also has a lot of candles and places for incense; it gets bright and pretty smoky when it's all lit up for rituals. At the center, of course, is a colorful glazed bowl for offerings. Rvery altar I've ever seen has a bowl almost all of them also have some sort of fire. Those are sort of the point of an altar; the fire to mark the space, and the bowl to offer to whoever you're connecting to.

That bowl gets offerings at rituals and gatherings, but the one that gets most of the house offerings is the hearth altar. It's in the kitchen, and it's much simpler. It doesn't have candles, because it's literally built into a nook in the fireplace there that we sometimes use for cooking. So it's mainly a just a bowl, with some firebricks with Wanderers symbols engraved in them. I remember helping my dad carve them when the house was under construction. Into that bowl goes a little bit of everything we cook in the house, as well as a splash of whatever spirits (the alcohol kind) get opened here. It's also my job to clean it out every few days.

Cleaning it out means going to the outside altar, which is likewise pretty simple; it's at the north end of the stone circle, a small bowl with shiny stones inside and plants set around it. That one honors the spirits of the land, and I guess it's an example of one that doesn't have fire nearby, though when we're doing ritual outside, the firepit itself becomes the altar that gets our offerings.

Me and dad both over personal altars in our rooms too. His is on part of his dresser, and it's neat and clean. There's a cloth, with two engraved glasses for offerings and a big candle between them. Around those are pictures of ancestors, most of whom I never really met, but I'm glad they're there. On his altar he also keeps his bag of runes, and a little plastic puzzle of a wolf, for the Everpack.

Mine is maybe a bit more elaborate, but I like getting fancy. It's on some small stacked tables in the corner of my room. The top has a cloth, framed with shed antlers (represeting the Dancer and Singer) and different rocks and carvings and tools arranged in a triangle representing Spark, Stone, and Smoke. (I could go into a lot more detail about what those all are, but maybe I shouldn't make this too long!) In the center I have a candle too, and in front there's space for my ritual tools (a "talking stick" and my drum beater, mainly) and I also have some special necklaces that I hang there when I'm not using it.

But that's not all! That's just the top layer. After all, I haven't mentioned the offering bowl yet! That's on a lower level, right in front of an incense burner, and there's space on each side for a candle. I change around those candles a bit with the season and other things; there are certain ones that certain spirits like better, so it's good to have the ones there for who I'm focussing on. There's also a little more space to the sides there to hold other things that are special to me, mostly bits of rocks and wood from special places I've been. I just realized I don't have anything for the Everpack there! I should probably fix that, it's been pretty important to me too lately. Finally, below all that, beneath the legs of the table, is my drum (which is also a whole other other topic I guess)

If mine sounds more elaborate than my Dad's, I guess that's partly because it's my style, and partly because it's the only one that's mine; there's a lot of Dad in the other house altars too. I guess it also has to do with my style; I really like patterns and symbolism and reminders, and my Dad tends to focus on simple straightfoward things. I think how someone sets this up is a reflection of themselves and their relationships, so it's only natural that ours are different. I'm really happy that we're in a place and a tradition (well, more than one tradition!) that makes it easy to do that sort of thing.

The first time I played this game, I played it for a few hours before bed. I dreamed about it all night.

( That could be the review right there, but I can definitely go on... (SPOILERS) )