Full disclosure of personal superstitions

About fortune cookies:
Everyone at the table has to choose their own cookie.
Don't ever read your fortune until you've eaten the whole cookie.
Positive messages are clichés from the universe.
Negative messages are curses.

On the tarot:
The tarot should only be read at certain times, such as:
in conjunction with either a full or new moon
on important days like birthdays, solstices, and New Years Eve

Random magical beliefs:
Synchronicity is more likely than coincidence
To witness a celestial event harmonizes you with the universe
Karma exists in the way that everything is deserved, especially bad things
It's good luck to be chosen, bad luck to choose
Dreams are meaningful and can foretell the future
To express desire openly brings misfortune and disgust
Frequent roadblocks indicate something will not work
Bad moods interfere with technology, rendering cell phones and email accounts incapable of receiving messages.
Wishing might be enough
That the universe has design or logic, but there might be no god.

(Seriously, what a sap)

Provisions for survival in a world less fantastick. (TP)

A brief catalogue of collected superstitions, part 2

Interesting superstitions and sayings:

In Iceland the first snows are "Winter Calves."
If you itch in the mouth, you will receive a mouth-full of knuckles.
The flower "Love Lies Bleeding" is symbolic of "Hopeless, but not heartless."

Misogynistic beliefs;
Women are associated with the negative, passive principle:
Humble
Ignoble
Low
Mean
Tranquil
Dependent
Capable of creating life, and destroying the life she creates.

Interesting Greek superstition:
If you bury a woman who died without marrying, your fields will be plagued with drought from her unquenched thirst for love. The only remedy is to place a bottomless jar atop her grave.

Interesting island superstition:
Those that are buried at sea repay the ocean and the fish for the sustenance they provide.

Comets appear when the devil lights his pipe and throws away the match.

A brief catalogue of collected superstitions

As such:

The color black has these cultural connotations:
Grim determination
Despair
Night
Evil
"The personality traits of those who lean towards black are:
Female-Mystery
Male-Accepting of the challenge of mystery.
Black Angels are fallen angels
Black Mountains: The Northern Mountains that cover the Earth in darkness (Navajo)

The color blue has these connotations:
Discouragement
Capable of destroying the enemies of faith
Constancy
Deity
Justice
Sky
Truth
Doubt
The personality traits of those who lean towards blue are:
Conservativeness
Introversion
Sober-mindedness
Opinionated
Old-terms associated with the color blue:
Blue Woman:
A woman whose presence dismays men.
Blue Stocking:
A woman of too bookish taste.

Wolves have the connotation of:
Astuteness
Bloodthirsty
Corrupt
Covetous
Cowardly
Cruel
Cunning
Dark
And the plant "Wolf's Bane" is symbolic of misanthropy.

Thinking today

And yesterday about reflection.
I'm thinking about looking at a sailboat on a lake. When the boat is anchored and the sails are furled and the water is calm.
It's an image of symmetry.
Thinking some about Elaine Scarry's ideas about symmetry being instrumental to both beauty and justice.

There's something in that reflection, and the resulting symmetry that suggests wholeness, as if the whole world is seen at half until seen in full through reflection.
The sailboat sitting on the surface of the water sits on a horizontal plane of separation. But we know as we look at it:
that there is more boat under the surface of the water
that there is a volume and quantity of water providing the bouyancy upon which the boat balances
that in that water are living creatures
that under that water is more ground, softer and darker than what lies on the shore.

Our awareness that there is more than what we see. How far should that awareness go? How much is speculation, how much is reasonable expectation? There are so many directions to go with this boat and this lake...

I'm thinking though, about how perfect the boat is on the calm lake. The water surface is a mirror of the sky, and the shape of the boat is twinned. The mast of the boat reaches both into the air sky, and into the water sky. Each mast creates a line in my mind between air and water. Not just reflected, but capable of reaching into the volumetric area of each: air and water.

Anyone could tell you that I am distinctly interested in the idea of lines in the air and water, traceable paths of trajectory, like wakes and contrails.
But that mode of thinking is changing focus, now.
I was watching Lake Hiawatha over the summer and there were, like at all lakes, birds skimming over the surface of the water. When there was no wind, it looked like the bird in the air was pulling a twin through the water. But I was also thinking that the bird was pulling its past along with it, the past being captured, reflected light of its own body, moving through the air.
Potentially thinking about the speed of light, and the idea that all living things live removed from actual time, brains having a lag time for processing...
Is the bird more whole for its reflection? Does it exist then, in concert with its past?

I'm not sure what all this is about, its been on my mind for a while.
I have to think more...

I was infected with Pynchon's ideas in Against The Day.
So I borrow from it, now.

we risk being divided in two . . . Atonement, in any case comes much later