Today, I went to a meeting of the Garden Club on the virtual campus of Grey School of Wizardry to talk with friends from across the country about our latest projects. We discussed planning and building an herb garden for the school on that 3D simulated, 2D reality. Okay, that sounds a little silly until you look at the landscaping options available in the marketplace “in-world.” Specific flowers, fields of them. And not just vague flower-like approximations, but narcissus and forget-me-nots a botanist would recognize.
Would you like an ancient oak tree that changes leaves with each season? How about a hive of honeybees that never sting? Roses absolutely anywhere, with wisteria and morning glories, too. Spending hours in-world, I built a house beside the ocean, with a beach and waterfall and horses – Oh yeah… It was easy to go wild constructing my own landscape. Equally easy to return time and again to enjoy the fruits of my virtual labor. My aims, entirely altruistic (of course). The idea is to take this construction knowledge and build something the whole student body can enjoy and be proud of.
The challenge is to construct an educational Physic Garden in the simulated reality. Physic is an arcane word for healing or healer. The goal is to build a magickal garden that will be useful to the students of Grey School no matter which department of study they specialize in. Of course students of Wortcunning will want to visit and study the plants and their uses. Then too, I expect we shall see students of Healing, Beast Mastery, Defense Against Dark Arts, Wizardry, Lore, Alchemy, Natural Philosophy… alright, just about everyone.
As we visualize it now, a circular garden is laid out like an astrological chart, with large planting areas at each of the signs & natural houses, set according to the virtual North of a simulated compass. Each plant, carefully selected for utility and versatility, is placed in the bed according to its proper location in astrological correspondence. With the flip of a virtual wrist you can take a cutting (copy) and descriptive note card to explain the herb and its various uses, according to interest. A virtual garden to teach constructive life skills.
It never occurred to me that I would enjoy spending time in a simulation. I like living in my 3D world + time = life. I prefer hanging out with food and flowers, books and art, to test tubes, microscopes and equations with more letters than numbers in them. My husband is entirely the other way, finding magick at the heart of every scientific discovery.
Each morning I am in awe as he describes in detail the amazing nuances of each new breakthrough, retrieved from the bowels of the internet using his version of Solomon’s Key-words. Quantum is soooooo last century, we’re talking Low Energy Nuclear Reaction, intelligent radio signals from space, and M-Theory. I think he has a different internet.
We know that there are vast amounts of space between the particles that make up each atom of anything. They are charged with electric energy in one way or another and either connect, or don’t with the particles nearby. When all the energy holds hands, it is a solid thing. And when the energies maintain their boundaries, solid things remain separate. For instance, your hand hits a table (ouch) but it goes through water or air.
In the virtual world, this is not always the case. There are times my avatar gets stuck in a wall, or enjoys wingless flight. Just like in a dream. In fact, the simulated reality is so very like a dream world that it is easy to translate magickal concepts to the students there.
For me, it is easy to believe in the power of little things. The butterfly who spreads her wings and thereby causes a whirlwind on the other side of the globe. Like any big project broken to its smallest components, it’s one thing at a time and keep moving forward. I’ve been able to conceive of creating big change on a quantum (very tiny) level. This is how my magick works, beginning with a thought and expanding into action.
As evidence to my faith, I know my computer responds to moods by the consistent way it merrily retrieves data when I am contented, or alternately freezes with threatened data loss when I am in a last minute panic. But that is Quantum Theory, and being played about with until the late 1920’s, is positively last century in scientific thought.
Apparently, it is a digital universe we live in, and a very convincing simulation, too. The all-inclusive Big-Bang was just the [ON] switch for this evolving universal reality. He’s been listening to physicist Tom Campbell on YouTube watching the 16 hours of lecture associated with the idea and encapsulating it for me during 15 minutes between coffee and the commute. Mind = Blown and I am out the door, on my way to work. It doesn’t take much to set my brain spinning as I drive through the country lanes to the suburban roads that turn into city streets and thoroughfares.
At work, I turn on my computer to build an e-shop for the Academy of Arcana gift shop. I take every product we have, and convert it into its digital semblance through photos and descriptions. People from anywhere will find these and with desire peaked, place orders, wherein, (as if by magick from another realm) their desires appear in the mailbox. Did I say “magick?” Oh, my…
Because it is for “Magic” that the M in M-Theory stands. And perhaps the forward thinking men of science have come ’round to believing in it once again.
Patheos Pagan on Facebook.
the Agora on Facebook
Adventures in Wortcunning is published bimonthly on alternate Fridays. Subscribe via RSS or e-mail.
Please use the links to the right to keep on top of activities here on the Agora as well as across the entire Patheos Pagan channel.
Ad-Free & Subscriber Log-In