Mood Indigo

What if I am an indigo child?  If you are not familiar with that term, it's cool because I had never heard of it until yesterday either. I Googled the word 'indigo' as well as a few other search terms like 'color theory' and 'spiritual dark blue' until I was satisfied that I had the full story.

Towards the end of my search, just about to the point where I was about to call it done because my answers regarding the vision board did not seem to be about any of the stuff I was reading, I stumbled onto the indigo children.  A woman, allegedly a psychic, named Nancy Ann Tappe noticed a large number of children born during the 60's that all had indigo auras.  These indigo children are claimed to have unusual spiritual gifts, possibly even super natural gifts, of empathy, creativity and telepathy.

Since I am not one to board the nearest band wagon with a free seat, I am still letting this idea ferment inside myself.  But there are some interesting points to ponder here, this is how Wikipedia describes potential indigo children.

• the belief that they are empathetic, curious, strong willed, independent, and often perceived by friends and family as being strange
• possesses a clear sense of self definition and purpose
• exhibit a strong subconscious spirituality from early childhood (which, however, does not imply a direct interest in spiritual or religious areas)
• a strong feeling of entitlement or deserving to be here
• a high intelligence quotient and an inherent intuitive ability
• a resistance to rigid, control-based paradigms of authority

Sound like anyone we know?  I have to admit that all the above things resonate quite truthfully for me but there is a sound argument to be made that most people fit the above criteria.  I disagree with that, quite a bit actually, but I am not here to debate the validity of indigo children.  At least not yet.

While I do like the idea of having a fall guy (exasperated person, "What is your problem NOW Cairn?", me, "I'm an indigo child" shrugs shoulders and moves blithely on) and am more than willing to be obnoxious about the whole situation, I'm glad my mom never found out about this.

I can't even imagine the course my life would have taken if Jean had latched on to the indigo child movement.  It's a bullet well dodged for truly.

As it happens, my vision board was not about any such thing.  It came to me last night in the shower, not too long after I posted about useless blogs.  Which, by the way, I do not regret, feel sorry about or have any desire to back pedal away from.  As usual with my fits of temper, I'm glad it happened.

It cleared the decks for a revelation and that revelation is right in front of you if you are reading this blog in its original form.  Take a close look at this page - not the words because this one time, the words are NOT important - what do you see?

I see a field of varying shades of dark blue with a white lacy script at the top.  Oh my!

That Nelly, she never steers me wrong and she is telling me that we are on the right track, that the road to publishing success is through this blog and that we are ready to fly.  So, so ready.

The thing is that I can't fly alone, I need you to help make my dream come true.  Americans love an underdog story and I am that dog, a shaggy mutt from Sacramento, California with a sweet story and a big desire to share it with the world.

So, if you like this blog, please share it with someone, please visit Prospector's facebook page and give him a like or add some words of encouragement to this page.  Your support means the world to me, literally.

Blahg, Blahg, Blahg

Oh I know this is going to earn me some haters, but I'm an opinionated gal - you may have noticed.  So I've been doing a blog challenge this month and therefore reading a lot of blogs, most of them I would never go near under different circumstances.

And with good reason, many of them are completely worthless.

Far too many of them deal with the *struggle* to take control of their own lives, to fight the evil media barons that allegedly rob them of something important or to just walk away from that job/relationship/social media that is bringing them down.

Oh boo hoo, if you don't have something meaningful to contribute, then shut the hell up.  Just because a blog is available, it doesn't mean you should regurgitate every pithy saying that crosses your path.  You are accountable for YOUR own life and only YOU can control how outside forces affect YOU.

Blaming the outside forces is not only a waste of time and energy, but also a fantastic way to skip out on your obligation to your own self.

Quit whining and start doing, there is a brilliant blog down that road.

Hyp-Know-Therapy

Vision boards look like the new big thing lately, but it is only the phrasing that is new.  When I was in my teens they were called treasure maps and even earlier when I was in grammar school they were simply called collages.  Treasure map resonates much more for me than vision board because I'm writing an entire series of books about a man seeking treasure.  But, whatever the phraseology, it is all good because the end result is the same.

So what is a vision board and what is its purpose?  Simple, it is a method of allowing your subconscious mind to guide you in choosing words and images so that you can see what it is you truly want as well as the road to manifesting your dreams.  You don't need any fancy materials, just a collection of magazines and other printed material, some glue and a canvas of decent size.

I have made many treasure maps in my life, in fact my big board is just a larger and more functional version of a treasure map.  But it was my conscious mind that put the big board together, so when my good friend Maude Schellhous sent me an invite to Hypno Studio for guided vision boarding, I was anxious to attend.

Maude and I go back a while, well over 10 years now starting when Clyde suggested we get hypnosis to help get us through a rough patch in our relationship.  At the time, Maude was in business with another therapist who took on Clyde, and I - thanking all my well aligned lucky stars - was given over to Maude.  My sessions with her changed my life in ways both subtle and broad, because of her, I easily let go of a lifetime of old, useless hurts that I had been clinging to desperately.

The most important treasure that I ever uncovered during my sessions with Maude is Nelly.  Other people would call Nelly my spirit guide or my angel, but neither of those terms is the truth.  I am a trinity, we are all a trinity of Me, Myself and I, and Nelly is I.  Me is the who I am right now, Cairn from California; Myself is all those other people I have been before this life and I is the eternal me, the essential me and the culmination of my journey.

Nelly has always been with me of course, but I never saw her before Maude.  Nelly is a very old woman with a stern visage and long steel gray hair, she lives on a sunlit prairie with a tall chain of bluish mountains on the west side and a huge fig tree on the east.  Nelly always wears a yellow gingham dress that sets off her pale blue eyes and she is frequently not alone on her prairie.  Until last night when everything changed.

There were about 15 of us last night, all stretched out on yoga mats and blankets on the floor as Maude's practiced tones put us into a relaxed state of being.  Once you've been hypnotized, it doesn't take much to go back under - at least for me - and my inner wisdom perks right up as soon as it hears her words.  It was no different than a solo session in a comfy chair and my mind went where it always goes when I'm under, out to the prairie.

At first I thought there was something wrong because it was dark on the prairie, everything was saturated in a deep, dark indigo blue including Nelly.  She was not garbed in her faded yellow gingham anymore, last night she was wearing a long indigo dress with a strip of pure white lace around the throat.  And she was not standing on the prairie, Nelly was floating above it with a sea of twinkling stars sparkling around her and a copy of The Last Prospector tucked in her arms.

There was only one other time that Nelly was not dressed in yellow gingham, she wore a shiny pink dress the day that Maude regressed me.  It was Nelly's way of acknowledging the help that Maude had given us because pink holds a special meaning to Maude that I found out about afterwords.

When Maude brought us all back out, I was a woman on a mission.  I cut out all the vivid dark blue images that I saw and was especially drawn to round things like a pristine white bowl and rings encrusted with blue and white gems.  Pictures of people leaping with abandon, a random paragraph about creation stories, a school of tiny blue fish and a photograph of a mason jar filled with small white Christmas lights on a dark blue background are the images my mind keeps seeing today.

My treasure maps are not works of art, I've seen many that are but that is not my style.  The minute that I try to prettify my collages is the exact same minute that my conscious mind has usurped control, so my treasure maps are a visual hot mess.  To other people.  I see those seemingly random bursts of images and I see my own thought process, I never claimed to have an ordered mind and my treasure maps are ample evidence of that.

I'm still not exactly sure what message Nelly is trying to send me, there's the obvious one that I am doing the right (write) thing with my life.  Which is good to know, btw, Nelly doesn't always approve of how I go about things.  But there is something more, it's all that indigo that keeps making my inner dog bark.  In my book series, the Yndigon tier is one of the most influential in Solstice and the Yndigons prefer to worship the dark twin Ynoirya.

Ynoirya is chaos and destruction, she almost destroyed the indigo tier once but the people who survived the 'great uplift' did not curse or blame her.  Instead they built a cultural tradition that embraces the blessings of Ynoirya and go on to create one of the strongest communities in Solstice.  The Yndigons are an interesting group, inspiring awe and revulsion often at the same time, but there must be something else there that Nelly wants me to see.

But I don't see it yet and that's the thing with vision boards, the meanings aren't always immediately clear.  Often it takes years before a person sees the connection between an image and how it affected their life. It will come, my inner wisdom will bubble up with something good when I'm thinking about something else.  Or not, maybe it's just the question that is the thing itself, seeing as how my engine runs on queries that would not be impossible at all.

You don't need hypnosis or a special class to make your own vision board, but I recommend it if you get the chance.  Is the now the time for you to see what your inner wisdom is trying to tell you?  Absolutely yes!  Do it for fun if nothing else because you just might be surprised at what pops out.

And, if you are feeling especially treat-worthy, give Maude a call and set up a session.  If you tell her Cairn sent you, I get candy :)  Just kidding, I don't get kick backs.

Wanted: Half a Clue Seeks Same

I realized with an ugly start yesterday that I have a life outside of The Last Prospector that's being neglected. It started when I sent an update email to one of my closest friends and then suddenly remembered that I had left another good friend hanging about something important.

Omigosh, I felt so guilty as I dashed off a message to The Point (that will be good friend's code name from here, I named a significant geographic feature in Solstice after her).  The Point was trying to find homes for two cats whose elderly owners were moving to a care facility and knew that I was looking for an older cat to take in.  I'm adamantly against taking in a kitten or small dog if Sweetback the hawk considers our back yard to be part of his hunting territory.

Well, all this happened in the days leading up to the blog challenge and the challenge opened up many opportunities for me and Prospector, so I'm ashamed to say that I forgot all about the cats.  The Point was more than gracious about my lapse, but she's a very gracious and kind lady and even asked about my happenings with the book.  I briefed her and my closing line was this, "I still only have half a clue about what I'm doing, but that ain't stopping me."

Such true words that could describe easily half of the things that I've thrown myself into over the years.  Perhaps even three quarters.  Life is an adventure and I am a thrill seeker of sorts, I have yet to bungee jump and am not opposed to it, but my thrills are more offbeat.  I almost never fully look into something before throwing myself headlong into the unknown and publishing is no different.

Here's exactly how it went:  I threw down the book that catalyzed this in disgust and told Clyde that I was writing my own story, I went on to say that I would also self publish and that I would figure it all out on the job.  End of saga.  No research, no planning, no strategizing -- I'm coming to this new world, so make room.

From what I've read, I'm doing this all wrong.  I should have tested the market, built up a strong online presence before the book was released and be much more aggressive about selling The Last Prospector through this blog.

This is for the permanent record folks:  this blog was never intended to be a vehicle for sales (blasphemy, I know).  My sole intention for creating The Light Stealers Song was to prove to the world that I could write coherently and entertainingly so that people would have enough faith in me to go out and buy the book.  I want everyone to have the exact same confidence in my words that they have in my food, it's just that I've spent a whole lifetime proving that I can cook.

The only people who ever knew I could write were my English teachers, so I hope they are all happy now! And if any of you out there know Bill Karns from Cosumnes River College, tell him Cairn says hey :)

So I keep making moves, right and wrong moves, but at least it is motion.  And I learn more every day, but the most important thing that I already know is that there are as many roads to success as there are feet walking.

That's all my bleating for today, I'm looking forward to tonight's uber-super-duper-cool fun that I will breathlessly report on tomorrow.  Pleasant day Travellers!

Granny Panties

Well we got it together yesterday and took some photos.  It wasn't horribly traumatic at all, in fact Clyde and I kept breaking out into laughter during the photo session, I'll tell you why in a moment.

We spent most of Saturday setting it up, Clyde enjoys photography but our past portrait attempts were kind of sad so he cruised the net for some tips.  He set and reset the lights with me stepping in whenever testing was required, rearranged all the furniture to set up a 'studio' and tried various things to diffuse the light.

Clyde asked me for my cheesecloth. "Mmmmm, no, that's mine", I said, "that's a kitchen necessity and you can't have it."  Let me just say here that cheesecloth can be both expensive and difficult to find; when a cook needs cheesecloth, it's an immediate need for which there is no easy substitute.

So, I was off to Wal-Mart Saturday night in search of diffusing material.  Somewhere during that brief drive over, my mind changed the material from white to colors.  I got it into my head that he wanted color filters for the lights, even though Clyde had said no such thing.

I did not look for white anything, instead I went to the slut section at Wal-Mart (it's the section where they sell padded bras to preteen girls, don't get me started on that one) and started flipping through clearance bits. Oddly, they only had flannel and fleece items, sure it's January, but this is Central California.  I stood there in the slut section thinking furiously until it came to me.

Oh yeah, granny panties.  It's a fair bet that the good people at Fruit of the Loom did not see me coming, but they were ready for me anyway.  I snatched up the last five-pack of colored nylon panties; blue, green, yellow, pink and one wild paisley pair.

I love this picture, I'm going to frame it and hang it in the kitchen.  The back drop is a chenille bedspread draped over the vitrine (which is a china cabinet of sorts that we pried out of Clyde's grandparent's wall before the house was demolished) and covered with some sheer sparkling fabric we had around.  Clyde rigged up the lights and I held a piece of white poster board on my lap to reflect light back up.

Those colored panties turned out to just what we needed, and many thank yous to the Universal Order for the course correction.  It wasn't the harshness of the lights that we needed to address, it was the color, and we noticed the vast improvement with the first test shot.

It took a lot of experimenting with combinations of colors and panty placement on the lights, but by the end of Saturday night we had a good set up.  Yellow and purple were the best colors for me, which is odd because those are the colors I am going to paint my office (Shortening's former bedroom, she doesn't need it anymore.  My kids aren't wild about the idea of being named in my blog so they are code named Shortening and Cracker).

On Sunday, Clyde took a couple hundred shots that I have culled down to about 20 that I can live with.  So what do you think, does my photo look good enough to share with the innocent citizens of planet Earth?  Wait!  Before you answer, consider this:

Happy Monday Travellers!

Mo-Mo-Momentum

Something fabulous happened yesterday, it wasn't anything big or life altering, but it made me ridiculously happy and I'm taking it as a sign.

It's been mentioned in this blog before that I enjoy back yard bird watching, I've always enjoyed it but stopped putting out food and feeders when Charles Howard came to live with us.  I felt so guilty luring those poor birds to their certain death and CH was not a cat to let a bird just fly away unharmed.  (For the full CH story, please see the earlier blog posts The CH Thing, St. Valentines Day Massacre and Impact Craters.)

So I did not resume my bird feeding until this last summer, I knew CH wasn't coming back this time and there were no new pets on my horizon.  It started with the hummingbirds - my family will understand my new obsession with hummingbirds once Travellers & Tramps comes out - and they still come in droves.  Doves, sparrows of all types, finches, mockingbirds, and, the valley standards, scrub jays can all be found daily on my back patio.

The gold finches started coming a couple of months ago, but not for the food, they want the hummingbird nectar and aren't afraid to beat the living crap out of the feeder to get it.  I set them up with a regular bird watering tube in the climbing roses, so there is less finch-on-hummingbird action now.  William across the street gave me a feeding sock full of nyjer to attract different birds, but I guess my feng shui was all wrong, because the birdies didn't touch it until yesterday.

I asked Clyde to get out the ladder and put the sock up in the tree branches, he did and 20 minutes later the cute little gold finches were singing right outside my bedroom window.  Success!

Then it got better, dark eyed juncos!  That is a first for my backyard, but all travellers are welcome, and the patio was filled all afternoon with birdsong and feathered antics.  Clyde even mentioned how crazy full the back yard was and I said they are harbingers of fortune.

I can feel it, feel the tide coming in, and I am ready.  There is a (good) tightness in my chest that gets stronger every day, I see the energies gathering to my summons and practically percolate with excitement.  It's either going to be very wonderful or very annoying to live with me in the near future!

So now is the time Travellers, now is the time to get in on the leading edge of that wave.  There are only a couple weeks left to submit an entry for The Name Game and win a copy of The Last Prospector.  Just make up a name, any proper name for a person, place or thing, and send it on via the comment section on this page, sending me an email or posting on Prospector's facebook page.  Prospector is a warm and wonderful guy, so if you 'like' him, he'll like you right back.

It's that easy, there will be three winners plus one grand prize winner who gets a book and will see their submission used in a future book in the series.  So get those entries in now, before I take over the world.

Picture Day

I was blessed with many gifts in this life like a warm smile and a ready wit, very many blessings that I try to acknowledge with gratitude whenever possible.  We all have gifts but life always finds a balance, so each blessing comes with a dark side.  That ready wit doesn't always find welcoming ears and it gets me into a bit of trouble from time to time.

That smile has a dark side too, one that I have to face today.  But this is part of my journey and the time has come for me to walk down that road.  This all sounds really ominous, doesn't it?

WELL, IT IS!

I need photos of myself in order to promote The Last Prospector and it's illustrious author properly.  The problem is that I am not photogenic, not in the least.  My expressive features do not lend themselves well to still photography and that beaming smile takes over so all most people see is teeth.

I have a round face with two big apple cheeks and a head full of thick curly hair, photos of me look like cartoon characters.  Especially if I'm wearing my Mr. Magoo glasses that block my small eyes that get even tinier when I smile and my fat cheeks swallow up my tiny eyes.

Now, please don't think I'm getting down on myself.  I don't think that I am unsightly, but I know my weaknesses.  Tyra Banks would say it has something to do with the geometry of my face that doesn't work for still photography and I can live with that, we all know higher math isn't for Cairn.

My husband's niece is the exact opposite, she can't take a bad picture.  Even blurry pictures of her are very pretty, she could have been a model if she was a foot taller, maybe foot and a half.

But my many years of watching and re-watching cycles of America's Next Top Model has taught me there are ways to combat bad photos.  Mr. Jay says to get in front of that mirror to find your angles, and I have, there aren't many good ones though.  Actually there are only three, but three is a good number and I only need one picture, so I like those odds.

Lighting is important too, Clyde is on that detail since he's the photographer and it will probably take all day just to get that right.  We'll get it done though, so that leaves make-up, ugh.  Mr. Jay isn't here to help me with that, so it will be minimal - I have tried a few make-up tutorials on line, not a pretty picture.

I guess it's a really good thing that modeling was never one of my life's goals.