And now, a few words about writing, a meander about naming, and a bit with a trout.
Despite my intentions to the contrary, it would appear that I am, indeed, writing a sequel to The Circle Within.
It started out as the Graces book, but has evolved into something that I find much more interesting and potentially a lot more useful. In the absence of a title, the best way I can describe it is something along the lines of "nine essential practices for living a joyful Pagan life." Or something like that. It includes the Graces, but as a part of a vibrant evolving path rather than as an end in themselves.
Granted, I've barely started work on the project, so chances are it will have transformed into an entirely new beast by the time it's done.
Now, the reason I mention this is not to garner oohs and aahs (or mehs and blahs), but to say a small something about the power of naming, and how detrimental it can be both to the creative process and to our relationships with pretty much everything.
Ancient magical wisdom stated that if you knew something's true name, you then had power over that something--there is for example the story of Isis learning the true name of the Sun God in order to master his powers.
In a more real-world sense, this holds true when you think of all the labels we apply to each other, labels which usually serve to divide and conquer as much as they create solidarity: gay/straight, white/black, liberal/idiot. Even in the smallest circles, like children on the playground, a name like Susie Underpants or Shamu can turn a well-liked kid into a social pariah all the way through high school if it's reinforced enough.
Human beings are fond of naming. How else do you communicate? When it comes to spirituality, however, or any real sense of understanding a person or thing, a name can get in the way, as it creates expectations and preconceived notions of what you're dealing with.
When I call a tree a tree, I am both helping and hindering myself: on the one hand I mentally connect the tree with all other trees, with the positive associations I have with trees, and any sort of associations that particular sort of tree has in whatever mystical system I take part in; I am able to navigate my reality with confidence, as I know a tree is a tree. On the other hand, I have just assigned a set of characteristics to the entity in front of me and have now denied the possibility that it might be anything more than, or other than, a tree. If I am unwilling to see past my definition of "tree," I am potentially missing out on many wonderful aspects of tree-ness that I have never experienced before.
Starhawk, I believe, has some good exercises on un-naming in her books, if you're intrigued by the idea of relating to Nature without the burden of labels. It's a particularly difficult practice for a person like myself whose job is to describe the indescribable using the English language. When it comes to un-describing the already-described, my head tends to explode.
I usually give my writing projects unofficial names the second they are conceived. I have an entire folder full of notes on various possibilities: the God Book, the Rune Book, the Graces Book, and others. I have noticed an interesting tendency in myself, however: part of me can’t feel serious about a project unless it has a formal title, but at the same time, once I've come up with a title, all the energy seems to bleed out of the project almost immediately.
Is it that, like Isis, having named the book, I have "mastered" it? Or does turning an unknown quantity into a known render it impotent in my creative imagination? Being a Scorpio, I enjoy ferreting out the hidden motivations and inner workings of people and concepts. By giving a potential book a title, suddenly it goes from the unreal to the real, and perhaps on some level I feel it is no longer a challenge.
Or it might be something much less interesting: commitment-phobia.
Regardless, I have decided that this new book will not have an official name until it is finished. My first two books both had titles by the time I was done with the introduction, but both were altered by the time they hit the shelves--The Body Sacred was originally called Altars of the Goddess: Wiccan Spirituality and the Body Sacred, and I made peace with that eventually even though the whole time I was working on it it had another identity to me. (It helps that the final title was originally the subtitle, so it's not like I took The Body Sacred and renamed it Horton Hires a Ho. In the end I agreed with the change, both for the sake of simplicity and because paragraph-long subtitles are a bit unwieldly.)
It is my decision, then, that my new book-in-progress will not be referred to as the Joyful Pagan Book, the Nine Essential Practices book, or anything of the kind. But as I need to be able to call it something for the sake of communication, I've decided to give it a temporary appellation that has nothing whatsoever to do with its subject matter and therefore, I hope, will not limit my perception of it.
Henceforth, it shall be known as Trout.
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