Warning: Crystal Banging Hippie Post.

The family went down to Canmore this weekend. For the Damsel, the Dude, the Bud, and the dogs, it was a vacation. (Okay, let's be honest: not for the Damsel. For the Damsel, it was dual-wielding the boys, swearing at Pixie when she got into the food, and learning fun and exciting things about how dogs deal with that fake sugar they use in some gums (hint: not well!).) For me, it was a chance to take Advanced Reiki, which is this sort-of-new thing that comes between Reiki 2 (in which we go from just healing people to doing emotional stuff and healing at a distance) and Master Reiki (in which I presume we start throwing fireballs and blowing up boulders with our minds).

I continue to really love the reiki center in Canmore. The teacher is fantastic, at least for me, a perfect mix of spirituality and practicality. Also, given that when you walk into where she holds her lessons, you are struck by the sheer number of Himalayan rock salt lamps, bowls of loose crystal, and ionizer things spraying mist into the air, it's kind of a place built for crystal geeks in general and me in particular. I always feel a bit like I did when driving through Sedona and seeing hippie shop after hippie shop: "Bring unto me your chakra charts, your rose quartz and lavender oil! Immerse me in dreamcatchers and scented candles, Tarot decks and amethyst geodes, incense sticks and semiprecious gemstone jewelry! For I am Patrick, Geek of Geeks, and I need some rutilated smoky phantom quartz, preferably double-terminated, and also ideally with little rainbow bits inside."

We learned more symbols. The symbols are getting much larger. I continue to both agree with the folks who say that the symbols aren't necessary, just a tool to get your mind into the right place, and to note that a lever isn't actually necessary to move a rock, but sometimes tools are useful things.

We also got a new attunement. We did a meditation beforehand, which was new for me -- in the classes I did at other schools, we just sat quietly. It was a guided visualization that ended with us in a cave with glowing crystal walls, which (as one might suspect from me tossing off that many varieties of quartz without hitting Google) was right up my alley. The teacher had us talk with our guides. I hadn't really talked with my guide in awhile, and it was interesting.

In a way, it dovetailed with the class I took back in December, because the conversation was about some of the experiences I'd had since Reiki 2. In Reiki 2, one of the takeaway messages I'd really clicked onto was the notion that we weren't bodies that had souls, we were souls that had bodies. This time, the message boiled down to, "Okay, yes, but also, you're a soul that has a body, and it's still, you know, important, in terms of being the way in which you interact with the damn world."

The feeling I got from the meditation and the attunement was amazing -- I very much didn't feel my third-eye opening or a big magical sense of enlightenment. I actually felt as though I were getting more solid, like it was building my body back up.

After the attunement was over, we all shared our stuff, and wow,  trying to explain something that boiled down to "Uh, I don't know, I think I just took a level in paladin" was fun to do, even to a room full of people who'd just plunked down a fair amount of money to get their chakras done. The teacher then talked about the purpose of the attunement, which was in fact to strengthen the bond between the spiritual and physical selves to allow the physical self to better represent the spiritual self in this world.

At which point I internally went "Woooooo!" for having had an experience that gelled at all with what we were supposed to have. This is why I keep doing reiki. I still can't fricking see auras. I'm never going to see auras. No amount of classes is going to make me see auras. Hell, I can barely recognize the faces of people I know well in still photographs -- the notion that my vision is going to start overperforming is fairly laughable.* But reiki? Reiki I can do. And it works for me.

After that, we went into a wide range of things that were kind of modular, things that I'd seen as part of separate disciplines but now with reiki on top of them. We did psychic surgery, to which my reaction was, in brief, "Okay, this is a bunch of hucksterism, and it also appears to be working, so maybe I need to examine some of my prejudices."** We also did some reiki-flavored meditation, which I really liked, and some crystal stuff, which I also freaking loved (since I was already sneaking crystals in a lot of the time, given my inability to resist anything shiny and theoretically natural).

The thing that I liked most about this class was the teacher's practicality and honesty. She showed us how to use a pendulum and talked about how we could use it, and then said, "This never really worked for me, though. Some people swear by them, but I just never clicked with them, and what I did get took longer to get than just trusting my own intuition would have taken. Same goes for this grid pattern here. I tried it, and I really didn't like the energy. Again, some people love it and think it works really well, so decide for yourself." The lack of defensiveness and the willingness to own that other people liked things she didn't made the entire class a lot more comfortable, because, again, I can't see auras for crap, I can't tell what shape anybody is thinking of, I can't astrally project or lucid dream or, you know, anything like that... but thinking about energy work less as one monolithic entity that you either could or could not do and more as a collection of musical instruments, some of which you might tinker with, some of which you'd lovingly play for years, and some of which sounded like someone trying to gargle a badger every time you used them, that helps me get past a lot of my fun and exciting issues about trying to explain to the world that I use pieces of rock to help cast heals and buffs on my allies. (The WoW analogy is the best one at work, insofar as anything beyond strict silence can be considered the best thing.)

We ended the class with a treatment. I think that all of the treated people fell asleep, myself included.

And then the Damsel picked me up, we utterly failed to find the cool vegetarian restaurant she'd wanted to find, and we ended up going to the Grizzly Paw Bar and Grill ("Kid friendly until 10 PM!") where the hippie-outfitted server who brought us our foccacia club and mushroom swiss garden burger with beer-battered onions turned out to be vegan herself, which caused my wife to say that she was impressed at someone being vegan in Canmore and me, due to my state of enlightenment, to not note that with a freckle-dusted rack like that and the willingness to wear that tank top over so little of it, the server could probably announce that she would consume nothing except cherries and wheatgrass and not get any flack about it. I also picked up a crystal pendant from a shop. I'm fairly certain that the shop owner was putting on the hard sell (having learned that I'd come from the reiki class, she started hitting up the auras and the energy play fairly hard), but I'm also fairly certain that it's a kickass crystal that feels really good in my hand, and I did just come from a reiki class and should probably not be quite so skeptical when somebody starts trying to sell me hippie stuff.

* Conversation with my wife sometime awhile back:

Her: So the actress's face was used as the model for that character?

Me: I don't know.

Her: I thought you saw the actress's face.

Me: Oh, I did. I just can't tell whether it looks anything like the character in the game. I really have trouble recognizing people in pictures.

Her: ...?

Me: I don't know. I just... maybe I look at body language or something more than I look at, uh, what people look like? I mean, I've actually considered the possibility that I'm almost completely blind, and my mind is just reading auras like crazy to fill in the blanks.

Her: ... That would actually explain a lot.

** Psychic Surgery

I saw stuff like this with the shamanic healing things I read about, and it always triggered my "And that is where the guy pulls out a bunch of goop he had in his pocket and explains that he just pulled it out of your body with psychic powers, and now you should pay him" reaction. I know that's unfair, because I know that some people respond really well to psychic surgery, but the few cases where I'd read about people ripping people off under the guise of healing them just soured the whole thing for me.

The reiki version doesn't have all the trappings, but there are still parts that I look at and say, "Okay, that's getting the person into the right emotional state, and that there is sending a trigger, so there's a good chance that some of this is placebo, and that even if you were just standing behind them doing nothing, they might feel some kind of release of pain or pressure."

And then, as my wife said to me on the drive home, so what? I'm so afraid of sounding like a quack that I'm turning into the free amateur version of the doctor who wants to be completely honest and tells you that this stuff he's giving you for your headaches is actually just a placebo. Yeah, he's being honest, but was the goal to be honest, or was the goal to get rid of the headaches?

This is something I've gotta deal with. Because ultimately, it felt really good both to do it and to have it done, and I need to focus more on the healing and less on what I think people might say about how I'm trying to do the healing... especially given that I'm, you know, shooting undetectable energy out of my fingers that magically knows exactly how to heal the person.

As a former Californian now living in Canada, it's really interesting to watch what's happening today. People were ditching meetings to watch the inauguration -- not just exiles like me, but Canadians (and folks here from other countries) who see the U.S. as the large and unruly downstairs neighbor that sometimes gets in loud fights you can hear through the floorboards. There's a sense of celebration.

I've been trying to think about what I can do. It ain't much -- a video-game writer in exile in Canada isn't really on the cutting edge of what happens in the U.S. -- but if everybody does something, something gets done. So with that in mind, here's what I think I can do.

- I will keep donating to pro-gay-marriage, pro-animal-welfare, and pro-children's-welfare organizations (among others). I will remember that in difficult years, it's more important than ever to give to the people who lack equal rights, and to those who lack lobbyists in the halls of Congress.

- I will fight for non-straight romance options in our games. In a game with few romances, I will push for bisexual, knowing that these are more likely to make it in. In a game with more romances, I will push for flat-out gay, knowing that it is riskier but also knowing that people want more than a straight romance that happens to have the gender of one of the love interests switched.

- When I make a small side plot, and I've got it all designed, I will ask myself what gender and race assumptions I've made and what I can change to make it better. I will make polite observations on the plots of my coworkers.

- I will raise my boys without assuming that they will automatically marry a nice girl. (The Damsel's mom and dad have made it pretty clear, I think, that we obviously have no problem with them bringing home somebody with a different skin-tone.)

- I will write letters to toy makers telling them that my older son wants Piper, and has in fact requested her specifically before several other heroes, and that he's going to want Wonder Woman, too, in a few years.

- I will listen in the comments section for things that I haven't thought of that a white male video-game designer in Canada can do to be part of the solution.

Well, heaven willing, it looks like I've made it to Christmas Break. I'm taking a devkit home to play some more. I'm also taking tomorrow and Friday off. I'll be heading down to Canmore (near-ish Calgary) to do an energy workshop. I don't usually take time to do these things, and I especially don't take money to do these things, but I'm feeling a need to put my money where my mouth is. If I'm walking away from what I grew up with, I need to go forward. Reiki seems to have worked well for me so far, and I want to see where that goes.

So I'm off to look at chakras and crystals and stuff, then drive back up in time for the BioWare holiday party. The Damsel wants me in a tux. Given how much of my crap she puts up with, I'm willing to do this, though I fear that all the other employees will think I'm a server and start handing me their empty champagne glasses. Ah, well.

Here's hoping the energy workshop is fun. I'm still having trouble saying it with a straight face, because even though I really enjoy the meditation and the exercises, I was raised with such contempt for this kind of stuff from some of my family that it's hard not to immediately retreat into humorous self-deprecation. I'm trying not to do that here. We'll see how it goes.

Since Prop 8's passing, like so many others on my f-list, I've been trying to figure out what I can do. And in SFGate, I found this:

"In his column this week in Catholic San Francisco, Archbishop George H. Niederauer calls for an end to hate and name calling in the aftermath of Proposition 8, and issues a call for reconciliation based upon trust, respect, and tolerance. The leader of the San Francisco Archdiocese says we must be able to disagree without being disagreeable, and “with God’s grace and much prayer, perhaps we can all move forward together.” The full text of the Archbishop’s column in the Dec. 5 issue of Catholic San Francisco follows.

Proposition 8 on November’s ballot added fourteen words to the Constitution of the State of California: “Only marriage between a man and a woman is valid or recognized in California.” In the weeks since the adoption of this amendment the media have carried many speculations about the role of the Catholic bishops in California, and about my role in particular, in the passage of this proposition. It is my wish to clarify here what was done and why it was done, and offer some thoughts about the way forward amid so many misunderstandings and hard feelings."

Glad to hear it.

(snipped explanation of what the Catholic Church did)

"That is what was done. Why was it done? Some voices in the wider community declare that there could be only one motive: hatred, prejudice and bigotry against gays, along with a determination to discriminate against them and deny them their civil rights. That is not so. The churches that worked in favor of Proposition 8 did so because of their belief that the traditional understanding and definition of marriage is in need of defense and support, and not in need of being re-designed or re-configured."

How do you feel about driver's licenses? Should the church have a stance on those, too? Because, see, no church, not even all churches, get to have a damn say on marriage.

Marriages that get blessed by you guys, sure. Marriages that start with weddings officiated by your peeps, sure.

But I've got a friend who was married in Monterey by a non-religious wedding officiant. Her job is marrying people. It was like the classy non-Elvis version of a Vegas marriage (in terms of being in a small room and not a church, not in terms of it being sleazy or tawdry or anything like that). My uncle was married in a lovely outdoor ceremony for which the officiant was my mother, who was deputized for the day to be allowed to officiate at weddings. Both of these weddings were lovely and loving events. Neither of them had anything to do with religion, any more than a going to the DMV. Getting married may well be a powerful and spiritually uplifting time, like going to church, but it ain't the same damn thing, padre. Just because a 16-year-old in a car-loving family has a spiritual epiphany while standing in line to get his license at the DMV doesn't mean that it's religious, and therefore you don't get to tell that 16-year-old that he doesn't get to have his license because you guys feel really strongly about it.

Marriage is exactly the same. It's got all this civic baggage that cannot just be ignored. Partner health benefits. Visitation rights. Divorce law. Wills. Living wills. If the church gets all up in arms about gay marriage because of the buttsex and regretfully shakes its head about the gay folks losing all that other stuff, it is no better than the jackass libertarian on a messageboard I frequent who voted Yes on 8 because he is against the institution of marriage on account of the tax benefits thereof, and therefore he will vote against anything that helps marriage, even this gay marriage. That jackass got dogpiled. So should you.

"Some of our opponents respond with this question: Even if these churches saw the California State Supreme Court decision in May as damaging to the institution of marriage as they understood and valued it, shouldn’t they have kept quiet and stayed on the sidelines? Some would say that, in light of the separation of church and state, churches should remain silent about any political matter. However, religious leaders in America have the constitutional right to speak out on issues of public policy. Catholic bishops, specifically, also have a responsibility to teach the faith, and our beliefs about marriage and family are part of this faith."

I completely support your right to make your opinions known.

I am disgusted with your decision to support misleading and ugly ads that falsely tied gay marriage to forced gay wedding ceremonies in churches or graphic sex education.

And hey, fun fact of politics: if you share your opinion and encourage people to donate money to a cause, and we find your opinion and your cause reprehensible, we get to yell at you. If your cause rescinds the civil rights of us or our friends, some of us may use language you find unpleasant. Tough shit. You're free to tell the flock to vote for hate. I'm free to call you a bigoted jackass. Don't be the guy who says something stupid, and when we say, "That's stupid," yells that we're trying to censor him. Just don't. Everyone hates that guy.

"Indeed, to insist that citizens be silent about their religious beliefs when they are participating in the public square is to go against the constant American political tradition. Such a gag order would have silenced many abolitionists in the nineteenth century and many civil rights advocates in the twentieth. Quite a number of important political issues regularly touch upon the ethical, moral, and religious convictions of citizens: immigration policy, the death penalty, torture of prisoners, abortion, euthanasia, and the right to health care are some such issues."

Just so we're clear, this is your clever rhetorical ploy to cast the Catholic Church, the religious organization that spawned the Crusades, destroyed indigenous cultures worldwide, and mumbled awkwardly into its vestments during mishandlings of priest abuse of children, as the force of moral righteousness that we should all feel bad about yelling at?

Shut up. You don't get a free pass when you slap a white collar on a black shirt.

"Members of churches who supported Proposition 8 sincerely believe that defining marriage as only between a man and a woman is one such issue. They see marriage and the family as the basic building blocks of human society, existing before government and not created by it. Marriage is for us the ideal relationship between a man and woman, in which, through their unique sexual complementarity, the spouses offer themselves to God as co-creators of new human persons, a father and mother giving them life and enabling them to thrive in the family setting."

You want me to talk about old people, infertile couples, the grand history of marriage throughout the world and even specifically in Europe that doesn't look the way you're describing it now, and all the rest, or should I just stop at how the fact that you believe marriage existed before government is a crappy reason to try to interfere with government process? You don't want buttsex in your unmarried-male-priests-only religion? Best of luck to you. Feel free not to let them get married in your churches.

But the Catholic church is also strongly against divorce, as I can attest when said Catholic church refused to let me marry my non-Catholic wife until she got an annulment (from her non-Catholic marriage, already divorced several years ago), and then lost the paperwork after patting my wife on the head and telling her not to fuss, and then suggested we reschedule our wedding since, with them losing the paperwork, there was no way my wife's annulment would come through on time.

Based on this powerful and morally pure distaste for divorce, can I assume that the church will also be lobbying to outlaw divorce come next election? I mean, divorce is a civil process, but that didn't stop you guys with marriage, so bring it up. Slap that bill up there. Let's see how it goes.

"Are there many instances in which this ideal fails to be realized? Of course there are. Single parents, grandparents, foster parents and others deserve praise and support for their courage, sacrifice and devotion in raising the children for whom they are responsible. Still, the proponents of Proposition 8 subscribe to a definition of marriage that recognizes and protects its potential to create and nurture new human life, not merely a contract for the benefit of a relationship between adults."

Take that, you gay wannabe adopters! There are far too few unwanted children in adoption homes, and the straight couples demand sole access! Screw you, gay couples using surrogates or IVF! My church only recently recognized Galifuckingleo as being right! You think your puny science can stand against it? Bite my pasty Irish-American ass, you folks who lose a spouse through divorce or death after already having children, then recognize your gay nature and wish to show your children that the love you have for your new partner is as valid and real as the love you had for the other parent!

"Whatever others may say, the proponents of Proposition 8 supported it as a defense of the traditional understanding and definition of marriage, not as an attack on any group, or as an attempt to deprive others of their civil rights."

Well, of course they did. We're the PC generation, remember? If you passed a bill saying, "Yep, we're prejudiced," everyone would get antsy, so, like the proud folks who used zoning regulations to make the off-ramps too narrow for the buses to use, and in so doing successfully kept most of the black folks off their nice white beaches without ever using the word "Negro", you used the wonderful love of man and woman as the public face of the fact that you are scared shitless of all the buttsex you heard going on in the bunks at seminary.

"The fact remains that, under California law, after the passage of Proposition 8, same sex couples who register as domestic partners will continue to have “the same rights, protections and benefits” as married couples. Proposition 8 simply recognizes that there is a difference between traditional marriage and a same sex partnership.""

Uh-huh. Tell me that isn't next on your list, like, say, the states that just barred civil unions or gay domestic partnerships.

Also, Plessy versus Ferguson called, and they'd like a word.

"What is the way forward for all of us together? Even though we supporters of Proposition 8 did not intend to hurt or offend our opponents, still many of them, especially in the gay community, feel hurt and offended. What is to be done?

Tolerance, respect, and trust are always two-way streets, and tolerance respect and trust often do not include agreement, or even approval. We need to be able to disagree without being disagreeable. We need to stop talking as if we are experts on the real motives of people with whom we have never even spoken. We need to stop hurling names like “bigot” and “pervert” at each other. And we need to stop it now."

I'm cutting the rest, because I feel I've got a better answer for this question.

First off, how fucking dare you? Throwing the first punch, bloodying the other guy's nose, and then declaring peace and acting aggrieved when the other guy decides to fight back got old in grade school, even Catholic grade school. My dad went to a Jesuit school. You're going to have to try a bit more guilt and wordplay before I stop calling you a bigot. And frankly, your rhetorical bit trying to put up the false "both sides have been wrong" bullshit would hold more weight if you hadn't just maintained that you totally weren't calling anyone a pervert by trying to pass a law making it illegal for those folks to marry.

And second off, there is one other thing we can do.

We, who grew up with in the shadow of a great aunt who led the National Council of Catholic women and knew your pope when he was a bishop, who spent our formative years at St. Augustine's Catholic Chuch in Pleasanton, who were confirmed under the name Michael the Satan-Smiting Archangel, who led religious retreats at our youth groups, who sang in the choir at Christmas mass, who read the gospel at the Youth Service at St. Elizabeth Seton before it was even an official church, who sat at Taize in the Stanford chapel, and who did our damnedest to convince our skeptical beloved fiancee that the church we'd grown up with wasn't the ugly prideful exclusionary throwback she'd heard about right up until that same church asked us to choose between it and her, we can take the strong moral compass you helped instill in us and use it to say, "What you are doing is wrong."

I love God. I love Jesus. I detest the self-serving political organization that lines its pockets in their name. I've spent years apologizing for my church, like a spouse in a bad marriage concerned to stick with it in hopes that the other person will change. I am done. I am done with confession, with baptism, with the holy and oh-so-withholdable-to-your-political-adversaries Eucharist. I am finished. Forever. And everything I've seen says there's no formal way to do this, no form to sign, no book to be stricken from, so this is all I have:

I hereby renounce my Catholic faith.

Sometimes I feel like I find the wrong cults.

Someone on an angry liberal blog posted a message in a thread about our current Republican Vice Presidential candidate. It was a discussion about lack of competence and corruption, and I was reading avidly (although in small doses, because if I read too much of it, I get angry all day for no good reason, and really, I sort of suspect that that's what somebody somewhere wants: us angry, our minds focused on the frustration of how bad things are or could be; one of my friends did a study showing how a perceived lack of control profoundly changes one's worldview, and I think somebody somewhere wants that worldview to be prevalent). And then, in the middle of the dogpile (in absentia), someone noted that the medical care would be overrun by "Christian scientists and reiki nuts", in terms of faith-based practices edging out legitimate medicine.

This is always a fun experience. I imagine it's like being a black conservative in a dogpile about illegal immigrants, which then all of a sudden turns overtly racist, with kind of a, "Yeah, yeah, you tell them, wait that's me, damnit," feel.

There are Reiki nuts? Really? I got a treatment from a center (not a general holistic center, an actual Reiki center), and yeah, it was fantastic and awesome, and wow did they have some awesome crystals for sale. But you know, nobody ever told me to stop taking my asthma meds. Every Reiki teacher I've ever had talked about it as something to do in addition to medicine, not instead of it. Ideally, it helps. At worst, you're getting somebody to sit still for a short time and try to relax, which can't hurt. But I've only had one Reiki session ever where someone suggested not taking my current meds, and that was someone who suggested something that was not Reiki (and was far weirder than Reiki ever will be) as something to try to see whether it might help my allergies. It wasn't like she suggested that I stop taking heart medication, or even the asthma medication.

And ultimately, I don't know what to make of that comment on that blog. Either the liberal guy was being a bigot, or he had legitimately run into someone who took Reiki to an unhealthy place. And either of these options are viable. There is no magic formula that lets you decide which one is the asshole and which one is the legitimately aggrieved party. There is no community, group, spiritual movement, or political party for which membership therein guarantees that you aren't a jackass. There are pinheads everywhere, and there are kind and caring people everywhere, too.

This is part of what the worldview-people, somewhere, seem to want. Get people polarized. Get enough loud religious nuts out there that the atheists and agnostics have to yell back, so that all the people who go to church but support gay marriage and don't want creationism taught in school feel attacked and have to choose a side. Get everyone at each other's throats, because the people who pull the strings think that they'll win, or that it'll distract people from real problems, or (in rare cases) that the you will actually succeed in ending the world, which is what they want.

Don't let them determine what the sides are. Figure out your own sides. Don't let them making you into their opposite numbers. Be better than that, whichever side you find yourself on. Vote, and be upfront about your vote, and be willing to talk openly and defend it, but don't demonize the other side. It may never stop one way or the other, but you don't have to help it.

I got one of those alumni letters a little while back, one of the ubiquitous "We can't do this without your support" letters that I tore up with rather more force than was necessary and a cutting remark, and the Damsel said that it made her sad that I seemed to hate Stanford so much, as it was a really good school, and me getting the Masters and the Bachelors simultaneously meant that I'd never actually gotten to experience a different school to see just how good Stanford was. I replied that I didn't hate the school, and she said, with a fair degree of confidence, that I really seemed to.

It was an interesting talk. I could justify some of my dislike. Back before we arrived in the Great White North, I applied for a PhD program, and when I went back to the old campus to get letters of recommendation, my Masters thesis advisor flat-out refused to write me one (despite me getting a solid A from her) because she was "simply too busy". Things have worked out well, and I am far happier up here making video games than I would be over in Denver working on deeply sensitive short stories... but I still consider the English department's complete failure to support a student the moment they stop getting the tuition check a slap in the face, and they won't be getting any more of my money.

My wife's comment made me think, though, and I had to admit (to, uh, you guys, not her; I'll probably bring this up once the kids are asleep) that it does go deeper than that. Stanford may be a really fantastic school, but it wasn't fantastic for me. It looks really good on my resume, and I suppose that when I write plots about blowing up asteroids with phase-particle cascades, I am on some level using my deep knowledge of Shakespeare's use of metaphors for marking and printing in Henry V. That's all fine.

(And some of my not-love comes from not trying to act like a pretentious dick about it. One of the few serious hurt feelings I've inflicted on a friend up here was in using my Stanford-kid status as a club in a conversation. I meant it ironically, but it still made me feel like an ass and reinforced the fact that it wasn't something to bring up. Unless people ask for specifics, the Damsel and I met "at school in California".)

But when I decided to go to Stanford, it was because I'd come away from the ProFro night feeling like this was finally going to be the place where I met people like me, where I found my crowd. There weren't a whole lot of people at Amador Valley High School who could talk Star Trek and Sondheim simultaneously, who read the Belgariad and Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance and wanted to have earnest and, in retrospect, very embarrassing conversations about both. I thought that Stanford would be the place where I found those people.

And still, in my freshman-year housng at Roble, I was refered to (in those awesome behind-your-back conversations you accidentally hear) as "the weird one". As in, the three-room quad I shared with three other guys had the jock, the party guy, the computer geek, and... "Patrick's the weird one."

That's not a failure on Stanford's part, ultimately, as much as it is a failure of my expectations. I spent a lot of elementary and high school shutting the hell up or regretting not doing so, because as one of my teachers put it to my parents (I later found out), "He's really smart, and he can't hide it, and every time he opens his mouth, everyone in the class knows how different he is." I didn't find a large group where I felt comfortable letting who I was hang out there for everyone to see until I got to Clarion West a few years later, and then again at BioWare. At both of those places, I can talk about Joyce's Ulysses, Knight Rider, various versions of Green Lantern, and time travel as it applies to Catholic dogma. Not everybody gets everything I say (just as I don't get everyone they say), but they don't call you "the weird one" when they fail to get your reference to an old Sifl and Olie sketch. We laugh, we share, we learn from each other. Along with my wife a few friends I've had since forever, the people I've met at Clarion and BioWare are the people around whom I don't have to pretend to be something I'm not.

So it's okay, Stanford. I found my people. Sorry that, with the exception of the Damsel, they weren't you.

So I haven't posted about spiritual stuff for awhile. This is one of those weird ones where I'm not entirely sure how much I feel comfortable putting up online. I'm slapping it behind an LJ cut, so the only people who actually have to read it are the people who care enough to click. It's less work for me to do that than for Dave Bushong to set up Pipes or whatever it was to read everything in my LJ except that one tag.

So consider yourself warned. It's hippie beyond here.

Last week's "what are we doing about religion?" talk dovetailed with a discussion that pops up frequently on Reiki areas, which is the notion of the symbols.

Reiki teaches symbols at the second level (my level), specifically three of them:


When I was taught the symbols, I was also taught to view them as sacred. I was taught that you don't show them or name them to people who aren't at my level or higher. Different Reiki groups, we were taught, believe differently, and have no problem showing it or sharing it, but for us, it's supposed to be private and sacred.

So that's the first source of internal Reiki conflict -- you've got groups that put the symbols on medallions and crystals and tee-shirts and wall hangings, and then you've got the other groups going, "Dude, what the hell? Our sacred spiritual secret should not be available on a Cafepress mug!"

And then there's the second source of internal Reiki conflict: the people who are of the "symbols are a crutch" mentality. Here's how it goes for them:

The Reiki symbols weren't part of the original curriculum, and were in fact only developed by the original master to help struggling students focus their energy more effectively. In fact, since the Reiki symbols channel energy and send it out at a particular frequency, they can eventually hinder students more than help them. It's like you're playing a game in which you're a wizard. At low levels, you can throw a puny spark of fire on your own, or you can use your wand, which reliably throws out a decent blast of fire. Over the years, you're getting more powerful and more experienced, and on your own, you can throw a massive fireball of enormous power... but if you use your wand, you're still only throwing that same decent blast of fire. The early crutch is limiting your potential. And really, the symbols aren't magic. They aren't special. They're symbols. They are illusions that are not necessary to do anything.

This argument always sets my teeth on edge, often because it's used by the same people who use the "How can anyone be offended by words? I'm just saying something. You being offended by it is your choice" argument.

Of course they're just symbols. Of course they aren't real. I concede that wholeheartedly and unreservedly.

But nothing is really real. Everything is just a symbol. Everything is a simplification that the universe and your brain come to an agreement about in order for you to get through the day without your head exploding. Everyone needs symbols and figureheads and synecdoches to represent the things that are too big for everyone to comprehend if taken as one lump sum.

And everyone's symbolic needs -- the point at which their brain says, "Yeah, I can't handle that, just give me an easily identifiable face to empathize with" -- are different. One person can happily live with notions of karma and spirit and treating others with respect, and another person needs to take that spiritual concept and wrap it up in a picture of a big bearded person in the sky who judges them. One person can handle the plight of children in Africa, while another person needs to see a child's face on a poster for the pain and suffering to really hit home. One person can send energy to someone through their own conceptualization, while another person needs to use Reiki symbols to get his mind into the right mode to send that energy.

I don't care if my symbols aren't real to you. I'm not asking them to be real to you. My symbols are real to me. Your personal OS is not the defining view of the universe. The sooner you realize that, the better off we'll all be.

(Which means that, practically, I'm not going to crusade to get Reiki symbols taken down from websites, but I'm not looking at the master-level ones myself, and I'm not showing the ones I know to other people. They're sacred to me, because that's how I was taught. Maybe someday I'll feel differently. Mileage may vary.)

Me: By the way, how's your head today?

Damsel: It's great, actually. After the massage three days ago and the chiropractor two days ago, your Reiki last night was what got the headache to go away.

Me: Well, it could be an athletic thing, too, like how you're more sore the second day after working out, so the massage and the chiropractic care took a couple of days to kick in.

Damsel: Or you could just shut up, stop self-doubting, and say, "Thank you for saying that. I guess it really works."

Me: ...

Damsel: ...

Me: Thank you for saying that. I guess it really works.

Damsel: Glad to hear it.

# # #

Ended up having an interesting talk with the writing team about a story aspect on the unannounced project. We were trying to figure out how to portray religion in the game (and this is the part where I have to become uselessly vague, because I can't tell you whether this is a space opera, a Western, a unicorn fantasy epic, or a Cossack tundra strategy game), and we hit a block-point.

A strongly atheist writer wanted the religious group -- practitioners of a monotheistic faith -- to be utterly deluded, following lies spread by an ancient bad guy. I was fine with the ancient bad guy, but I wanted the group to still be accurate at the core. As not-currently-churchgoing as I am, there was still a major difference between a church that has had an originally good message perverted by a bad guy and a church whose entire religious text is a lie perpetrated by the bad guy. The first one hits the "think for yourself, find the faith beyond the politics" message that I like, while the second sets up the entire religion as a bunch of stupid people.

We ended up deciding to ditch the religious thing altogether, because an hour of talking, plus another hour in which the guy talked less amicably with another writer while I was at lunch, taught the team that no matter how we approach this, any fictional presentation of a religious group that isn't blatantly D&D-esque (ie, quasi-Norse or Greek gods of various spheres) is going to tick somebody off. As soon as it stops being "bearded guys sitting on thrones in the clouds" and becomes something close to what modern people* believe, you've got a recipe for disaster.

* And "people" here means "our basic gamer target audience, which is largely white, largely male, and largely some combination of Christian, Lapsed Christian, Agnostic, or Atheist." I know that Hindu worshippers have multiple deities, but the hot button here was what Timmy Johnson's parents would say when they found out that on Sundays after church, he comes home and plays a game in which a monotheistic faith is presented as a lie or a perversion being unwittingly acted out by well-intentioned people.

Finished "Hypatia" last night. Woooooooo. Now back to fiction.

Damsel: How was it?

Me: Significantly more academic than I had hoped. I don't think I'm really the target audience. I'm not really up to speed on Neoplatonic philosophical movements.

Damsel: Ouch. That's too bad. It sounded like a really interesting story.

Me: Oh, it was, definitely. Just not in this book.

I think I got what I needed to get out of it for the next novel, but the book made me realize how very much I didn't miss academic writing. I have settled comfortably, post-Masters, into my life as a layman, and I have developed a fine appreciation for books written for me and my people.

It would have been so much easier had it simply disappeared -- had the midwife caught our extremely polite and, in retrospect, far too subtle indications that we wanted her to get rid of it for us.

So instead, it sat in a bowl by the microwave for two days, until the midwife came back and put it in a zip-lock bag and then in the freezer.

At which point, there were issues.

See, the thing is, if it had just disappeared, we'd have been fine. It wouldn't have bothered us at all. But now it was there, sitting in the freezer, and it was a thing. We couldn't just throw it into the dumpster. Leaving aside the legality (or lack thereof) of disposing of biological waste in a public trash receptacle, it just felt... wrong. Disrespectful. It had been defined, explained, made real, and throwing it out would have conjured bad sympathetic magic in the minds of all of us, even those of us who don't believe in sympathetic magic.

So off we went to the hiking trail near the river. We had dinner first, to let the bikers and runners filter out. We got out there some time after nine.

There were mosquitoes. We swatted, flailed, formed a conga line to swat the back of the person in front of us. We put on spray. The mosquitoes, grand and mighty in the twilight of Edmonton at nine-thirty in July, laughed at the spray. We covered the baby in blankets, because the spray, nontoxic and friendly and generally useless as it was, was too strong to be used on the baby's skin.

It was in a cooler packed with ice. I carried it. Nobody else particularly wanted to. After a bit, the Dude got tired of riding in the stroller, so we let him run, and it sat in the stroller in his stead.

The Damsel had a spot in mind. We moved toward it slowly, because we were hiking with a two-year-old, a woman who had given birth less than a week ago, and a baby who was passed around to all the grandparents. We passed a spot that I thought was perfectly good -- off the trail, in some grass near a picnic area -- but it was deemed too close to civilization.

We reached the Damsel's spot. It was indeed scenic and beautiful, overlooking the river. On the side that wasn't overlooking the river were houses. The trail got close to the 'burbs at that particular point, and it had never been important to remember until surreptitious religious biological waste disposal became an issue. The Damsel swore mightily.

We pressed on. The trail got darker, hemmed in by trees. Little side trails appeared, and we explored them for likely spots. Grass whipped our legs. The mosquitoes got bigger.

This was, I realized, the birth experience. Moving through a tunnel of trees in the twilight, the shapes unfamiliar, the air strange and sticky with remembered heat, the buzzing of unknown things all around. The way ahead was lost in darkness, through the bends of the trail through the trees. We would recreate the process by which our son came into the world in order to dispose of it properly. It was right. It was just.

I turned. My mother was trying to get the stroller through a rough patch, jiggling the wheels. My father-in-law was trying to shelter the baby from the mosquitoes. My mother-in-law was hugging my wife, who was trying to stomp off into the wilderness to find a good spot and also trying not to break down in frustration at how this all was going.

I realized that we'd already done the birth experience quite recently, and recreating it was sort of belaboring (so to speak) the point.

I walked back and made a suggestion. Everyone agreed.

We walked back to the spot I'd seen before. I took our smuggled spade and dug the world's worst hole between two trees, off away from the picnic site. My father-in-law asked how it was going. I told him that I'd hit a snag, as somebody else had already buried one right there. The laughter was soothing. It didn't scare away the mosquitoes, but it helped.

When the hole was deep enough, I opened the cooler. I said some words about tying my son to the land of his birth, within sight of the water, in the cool air and the fading light of the Alberta sun. I opened the zip-lock bag, emptied it into the hole, and filled the hole up. My father-in-law and I dragged a log over the hole to keep scavengers away. I gave a small Reiki blessing with one of the symbols I know.

After I washed off, my father-in-law did a blessing on our son, burning sweetgrass and using a fan of feathers to move the smoke over all of us while saying a prayer that invoked Jesus and God and Maheo and Escehe'eman. The Damsel held the baby. I held our older son, until, tired and cranky, he squirmed enough that my mother took him out of the way. We finished up, hugged, and made our way back to the car.

My older son was fine, but the baby was crying. I used Reiki to soothe him on the way home, hanging over my older son's car seat to get my hands into the right position to send good energy and calm him until we got home. I thanked my mother as I cleaned out the cooler, using more soap than was probably necessary.

"I was really happy to be there," she said sincerely, and then added, "This will make a fascinating story."

So that's what we did with it.

Your mileage may vary.

So it's probably not great that while reading Making Sense of Paul by Virginia Wiles, my reaction to the concept of apocalyptic eschatology was, "Oh, like me and debt reduction! If I live right and don't spend too much, I should see the debt go away... but then the debt doesn't go away... so I decide that everything will be wonderful once I sell a novel and use the advance to eradicate my debt!"

I had a revelation for the most succinct way to describe my current religio-spiritual beliefs. Stripped of all the pretty language and taken in the simplest possible terms, what I believe about spirituality and faith can be summed up as "Lois McMaster Bujold's Curse of Chalion meets Terry Pratchett's Small Gods meets Wonderfalls."

Not one that I can whip out at the family reunions, alas, but in geek circles, that can at least establish a common ground from which to begin the arguments.

There's an article in my formerly local paper that talks about Reiki, and I found it really interesting. It really seemed to encapsulate all of the good and bad and awkward stuff that has marked my experience with practicing it:

I was supposed to read Beggars in Spain, by Nancy Kress, this weekend, for a book club meeting. I didn't finish it. Instead, I had a revelation.