Somehow, once upon a time, my housemate and I agreed to take another friend's treadmill which wasn't doing anything at their house. And for a while, it did something in our garage, and then it took became just another thing to put things on. Last week my sister found someone who was willing to be the next residence for the treadmill, so a huge space just opened up in our garage. Behind where the treadmill was is a fairly comprehensive pile of boxes, most of which belong to me and many of which haven't done much since I moved to the Emerald City (on the winter Solstice 2005).
I'm slowly making my way through the boxes. I have a box that is now the "to be shredded box," and I'll probably borrow my dad's very sturdy home shredder to take care of that pile as I can feed more stuff into it compared to the teeny one I have. Stuff that is garbage, goes right into the garbage can in the garage. Same for stuff that can go right to recycling. I have a box started that is for items to go to the thrift store. So far, lots of what I've gotten into is paperish, but I know it'll get more thrifty when I get down to heavier boxes at the bottom of the stacks. Some of it's funny, some of it is bizarre (as in why do I still have this junk?) and it's very much Nigredo work.
Take good heed for this your fire
The fire with water bright shall be burnt
And water with fire washed shall be
The earth on fire shall be put
And water with air shall be knit
Thus ye shall go to purification
And bring the serpent to redemption
~ David Beuther, Universal und Particularia... Hamburg, 1718
More Ripley Scroll energy. I had the extreme good fortune to see one in person in London in the summer of 2012. The British Museum had just discovered they had something like only the 23rd one to exist, and it had been sitting uncatalogued in their basement for several hundred years or something like that. My meditations on Yule about finding a new formula upon which to possibly base an alchemical fire circle ritual led me to delve into Ripley's Twelve Gates.
This blog then did something I've been trying to do for about a year and a half, and that's recover the lost originals from the early portion of the European trip. My iPad crashed during the download and, for reasons that are still unclear, various other photo software programs never could access or find the originals. However, the media function here can access that hidden folder, and I stumbled across them while looking through my photo files for images for this blog! There's no coincidence in alchemy. I get it. There's a lot of work to be done to actually recover and organize them, but I have my missing larger file size photos from Glastonbury and London. My GSW pics from that trip were all fine, but the really personal magickal stuff (totaling just over a thousand images) from early in the trip were cloaked until now.