Day Number 7 following the instructions in "Manifesting Your Soul Mate":
I love this next preparatory question: Is there someone you’re still in love with?
You mean, besides Filippo Neviani?
Ah. I see this has been met with a collection of blank and bewildered expressions – he’s actually better known by his stage name “Nek”, world renowned (except in the musical wasteland known as the United States) Italian singer & performer, famous in four languages for “Laura non c’e” recorded originally in Italian, but later re-recorded in Spanish (“Laura no esta”), English (“Laura’s Away”) and then a fourth combined Italian and French version with a silly French pop starlette who apparently thought it appropriate to dress for the video of a song about longing and loss dressed like a busty dominatrix, I was never able to figure out why. (Although after watching the video, it occured to me that ‘Laura” might have gone missing in France for reasons we’d rather not examine all that closely.)
Finally, after it was established quite authoritatively that “Laura” wasn’t where she ought to be, the song was actually later made into a movie (!), and goodness knows what else they’ve done with it since he debut’ed it at the San Remo song festival in 1997 and rocked everybody’s world with it. Plus, he and I have the same birthday, so it HAS to be fate, right? Right …? Okay, as I’m sure he himself would be quick to point out, maybe not. But who wouldn’t want to sit and gaze into those eyes for a while? Mmmm!
But back to the question. Now, I don’t know about you, but it seems to me that most people, if they were actually in love with someone, wouldn’t think, “I’m so much in love! How wonderful! I’ve never felt so happy, so alive! Life is perfect! I think I’ll wreck it by searching for an entirely different soul mate!”
What an odd question to be asking! So perhaps the author actually meant, “Are you still stalking that idiot who dumped you three months ago?”
The Art of Stalking
And the answer is: no, I’m a really pitiful stalker. Stalking with any degree of success requires time, planning, efficiency, deviousness, patience and lots of energy to keep the intensity going … I’ve found it’s usually easier to just say, “Oh, [bleep] it, he’s not worth it.” Really, I can’t think of anyone worth the effort to stalk, and nine times out of ten, people who stalk the objects of their obsessive desire tend to get caught doing it. Then you have to quickly explain yourself, usually to various law officials, parole officers and finally to your real soul mate, who shows up and wants to know why you’re wearing an electronic monitoring band around one ankle and can’t leave the house. And have you ever seen the mug shots of celebrity stalkers hauled into jail and photographed to commemorate the moment? Maybe it’s just the camera angle or those cheap police department light bulbs, but everybody looks like either Ma Barker or Ernest Borgnine in those photos, even if they didn’t look that way when they woke up that morning. Generally not a good idea, stalking people, IMHO.
So the answer to that is: no. Except to Nek: if I weren’t so lazy and you weren’t on another continent and I didn’t have a flying phobia … for you, I might make an exception. (Pause for thought). Nah. Still too lazy, sorry.
Tool Collection Summary Update:
Still haven’t received Tool #1, which of course is (pause for voices of an ethereal choir, wafting over the rafters into the heavens) “THE PEN” (another pause for appropriate reverence) … ever and ever amen.
… and I did receive #2: the awesome Italian journal. Which I can’t use until … (see above) THE PEN … arrives.
Tool #3, the so-called ‘Treasure Map’ – sorry, I still call it a collage – is underway. I found some really cheesy Valentine’s Day gift wrapping paper, but with a nice color pattern and some red and white lacy heart paper doilies of different sizes am in the process of messily glueing it all together and laying down the background on the poster board in preparation for the cut-outs of pictures and words – still being collected – and plan to add some words and poetry of my own.
< ---- and here’s Tool #4. National Geographic supports an indigenous artist and artisan collective, “Novica”, and upon reading that I might want to consider utilizing rose quartz and garnet crystals (more on why I should consider such a thing in a moment) … a quick Google search found this: a rose quartz and garnet necklace, named “All Love”. Tucked into a really beautiful tapestry and velvet-lined box decorated with red and gold thread, made by the astonishly gifted Kalyani Gupta of India … who sent me a lovely postcard/thank you note with the necklace, and how often are you going to get that from Tiffany’s or Jared’s? Like, NEVER. In fact, there are some Fifth Avenue jewelry stores in New York so unjustifiably snooty that they expect you to thank them for graciously allowing you in the front door – I’m thinking they could learn a few lessons in graciousness from Kalyani Gupta.
So, why did I need rose quartz and garnet (and a few other) crystals – including moonstone, a search for which had sent me off into the land of flammable moonstone vat perfumes yesterday?
Feng Shui. Ah. Feng Shui. My favorite topic under the general heading of “Huh?” I can’t recall what led me to learn what it was a few years ago – probably general curiosity – but what I remember of the subject was confusion at trying to figure out how the messy task of burying small statues of frogs or turtles in my backyard, getting mud under my fingernails and screaming “Ewww! A worm!” when I saw one would increase the size of my bank account. In retrospect, judging by the direction my bank account has taken since the mighty crash of the stock market last year … perhaps burying that little ceramic frog – or whatever it was – and facing down slimy earthen creatures made more sense than piling up shares of GE. Who knew?
I knew this was going to be a challenge. The brief background: I had an evil ex-relative, still an executive at the Bank of New York, who was a felon, specializing in grand larceny. She had waited until I left for four months to go back to college, and as soon as I was out of sight, had stolen money, credit cards, taken out fraudulent loans in my name, stolen the contents of my home and all of my personal belongings. Now she was trying to steal the house itself. It was in the hands of lawyers at the moment. But I had lived for five years with only four months worth of supplies, and none of my furniture and belongings, except for a few bookcases and a daybed. Later, I’d managed to retrieve my toolbox, a hutch, table and some dishes out of a storage shed I’d kept apart from the home. A co-worker had been kind enough to gift me with her used coffee table and end tables when she bought new ones. But the evil ex-relative had everything else I’d once owned.
I now knew I needed to begin reconstructing the semblance of a home instead of living like a bereft and cash strapped college student, operating out of plastic bins as all of my dressers had gone the way of my house. If there was something to this “law of attraction”, I doubted very much whether this rather pitiful outward appearance of existing in a state of exile and loss was manifesting much of anything good. So it had to change. This was going to be a challenge. I was having to start over again from scratch.
Time to revisit Feng Shui without looking down my nose at it in the condescending way I had the last time. And the first step was to come up with a floor plan of my apartment.
Death by Toolbox
Initially, this entailed crawling around on my hands and knees in the back of my closet and hunting down my “Tool Box”, crammed with things I used once and never expected to use again – for example, that girly pink hammer an ex-boyfriend refused to even consider touching even to hammer a nail into the wall (“[Expletive deleted]! I’m not using that! It’s PINK!!”) (What? Hammers don’t work if they’re pink?), and the matching set of floral screwdrivers he bought me later - his self-entertaining commentary on the pink hammer - and a Black & Decker retractable metal tape measure.
Now, I assume guys raised on using complicated and dangerous tools like retractable tape measures have figured out a way to use them without injuring themselves; as for me, every time that tape suddenly ‘retracted’, it undulated around in the air first with the crackle of flapping aluminum and I narrowly missed losing an eye on its sharp edges when it went reeling back into the case. *SNAP!*
For a short time, neighbors may have been curious about the sound effects emanating from my apartment: (“zzzzzzt!” “Flap, flap, flap!” “*Shriek!*” “SNAP!” “OW!”), but, they weren’t curious for too long: I’m notoriously accident prone, as well as lazy, so naturally I next thought of taking the cheater’s way out of measuring my own apartment: hunting down my apartment complex’s website and seeing if they had any floor plans.
They did! The one I found was not entirely accurate – but it was close enough for my purposes. I now had a working floor plan and all my vulnerable body parts intact. Once I had the floor plan, all I had to do was divide it up into a 9-square, and match up the end result with a Feng Shui overlay – something they called a “bagua”. Each portion of your living space governs one of nine areas of your life – the point is to carefully decorate it with colors and crystals and flowers and bells and whistles and other things, to “strengthen” those areas.
And at present, the area of my living space that represented, “Soul Mate Search Success!” – or more, accurately, “Love and Marriage” – didn’t at all look like “love” was on my mind when I was in the room, according to to the Feng Shui experts. It looked like I was far more obsessed with spending time on my computer, staring at a blank wall and doing a lot of reading and filing of important documents. What? Desks and computers and bookshelves and filing cabinets don’t shout out “Love and Marriage!” to you? You don’t find metal filing cabinets to be very romantic? And computers? Whoa. How little YOU know. Well, it depends upon which site you inadvertently stumbled upon when you were actually looking for “congressional whip”, I suppose.
The Feng Shui people, however, disagreed with me quite emphatically. The computer room had to move. Quickly! Out! Out! Out! Apparently, according to them, I would only attract metal-heads, accountants and possibly space aliens with this set-up, and should consider myself lucky if I could even manage that much with this room.
From this experience I learned a valuable lesson: that ancient Chinese sages had never lived in an apartment wired for cable. According to this, for the Feng Shui to work, the computer room had to be turned into a bedroom, the storage room had to be turned into a combination storage room AND computer room; the living room had to be turned into … well, it already was a living room, but not what you’d call an attractive and welcoming one, more like a stark and barren and dysfunctional one. And even if it took a while to collect the furniture for it, at least I could start Feng Shui’ing the rooms for their intended purposes.
Hence the crystals, to start.
Bernard Wuensh and Why I found Myself Taking Class Notes Again
It will tell you something about my complete lack of preparation for Feng Shui if I tell you that I even got completely distracted from learning about that by instead being absolutely riveted by Bernard Wuensh and his online “Introduction to Crystallography” video course at MIT Engineering. We’d established the principles of translation, rotation and reflection in symmetry before I remembered that I was supposed to be doing something else with crystals (like: finding some and sticking them in my house for reasons I hadn’t quite figured out yet), not embarking upon a new career as a crystallographer and geologist. Note to self: a definite possibility for my next life – it was really interesting.
I already knew that crystals were excellent conductors of electricity and are used throughout the electronic and aerospace industries; I knew that human beings generated a certain level of electrical energy, and I knew that the human brain was wired to interpret waves of energy as “reality” as we knew it, and I had only a layperson’s grasp of quantum mechanics and physics. It still was difficult to make an intellectual leap beyond that knowledge into “crystals help you change reality” – but … this entire experiment was meant to be followed without piling a layer of intellectual judgment on top of it. If I approached it like a scientist, I’d never get anywhere,
So, we'll temporarily wave good-bye to the right side of my brain and start working with the left - the side that was supposed to be creative, intuitive and unsupported by any scientific validation of any kind. Crystals. Time to start looking for crystals.
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