I spent 2.5 hours yesterday going through the attendees’ feedback from Inspiring the Muse. While I was happy to see everyone got a lot out of it, I believe there’s a lot of room for improvement, both in the content and as I learn to develop my speaking style. Mainly, I think I’m going to break apart the journalling and the creative storytelling parts so that they are featured as their own separate classes. Putting them together, while a good compliment, is just something that overwhelms beginning students in an hour or 90 minute time limit. Breaking up the two parts also gives me the flexibility to give attendees more time to spend doing the work, which consists of writing down their thoughts.

Usually when I teach this class, I have a whole morning (2 hours or more), or a whole day (up to 8 hours), to carefully go through the material. My students are given ample time to dive deep into each exercise and properly share and provide feedback on each other’s ideas. Going into PantheaCon, I thought that if I went over both parts of this course, and gave them less time to write, that it would also give them less time to putter around or feel “stuck” in their heads. I like quick brainstorm ideas because the inner editor does not have time to pipe up and spew the negative vitriol that tells us we can’t do something. This quick-fire brainstorm technique primes the pump and shows students how creative they can be in short amounts of time.

I hope that students of this course went home to experiment with what I gave them in longer spurts. If you’re an alumni of Inspiring the Muse and have done the exercises in your own time, please share. I’m always interested in hearing feedback.

I own over a dozen different decks and a bazillion books on various tarot subjects. I have even started making my own tarot deck. My bookshelves are bursting at the seams with tarot and tarot-related items that it’s easy for me to quickly overwhelm myself with tarot-formation. And there’s NO WAY I’m carrying all my books and decks with me whenever I want to study or give a reading. I’d never be able to leave my home. I needed something more compact. I decided to create my own book.

So I grabbed a large 9 by 11 journal bought on the cheep from Borders, and started counting the pages. The thickest journal, I believe it’s 2 inches, can hold a lot of information on the tarot. I worked on the inside of my journal, getting what I wanted in each section down on the pages before I went back to spiffy up the cover and alter some of the pages with my art. This way I didn’t have to worry about getting the cover all bumped up or immediately breaking the spine.
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Originally published at D*I*Y Planner.

Candlelight flickers and dances across the walls of the room. Wispy, light sounds of Japanese pipes drift through the incense smoke into your ears. A tiny woman, her head wrapped in a bright red and gold turban sits at a intimate wrought-iron table covered with a purple, silk table cloth. A white candle, its flame flickering; a palm sized crystal ball; and a pack of cards, the top card displaying the picture of a giant wheel; lay carefully positioned on the table’s top. The woman beckons you to take a seat directly across from her. You take a seat as the woman waves her hand over the deck of cards and begins to shuffle them. As you stare at her, gauging her true intentions, the woman begins to position the cards onto the table in a careful layout. Then she begins to tell you your future as she describes how the cards and what each position relate to your life.

Tarot cards. One of the oldest means of exploring symbolism and your spot in the universe. A simple pack of 78 cards with a myriad assortment of images and cross-culture symbols painted on them, used as divination device by people all over the world. It contains a major arcana of 22 cards that seek to explain higher powers at work as well as a minor arcana composed of 4 suites corresponding to the 4 elements (wands, swords, cups and coins). Of course, there’s a lot of tarot history I’m glossing over here but I just wanted to give you a small background on the cards. If you’re curious about the tarot and want to learn more about its history, check out aeclectic.net and wikipedia’s tarot page for more information about the tarot and variety of decks out there. Read the rest of this entry