Why MindSpinner?
I like to think about the names of blogs - most are carefully chosen. They may be hip or witty or thoughtful. They aspire.
I chose the name MindSpinner a long time ago, in the late ’90’s, for a different purpose. It was not a word to be found in other contexts on the Web then. I could have the domain mindspinner.com for the asking. It wasn’t associated with rainbow tranquilizers, whatever they are, nor with setting the mind to spinning like a top, which makes me sound dizzy.
It had to do instead with spinning ideas and connections out of the raw material of life, as my foremothers spun wool into thread suitable for weaving cloth, cloth to keep self and loved ones warm.
It had simultaneously to do with the way a spider spins a web upon which she walks and dwells out upon space, connecting things. It had to do with the fact that these webs can be very beautiful, nature’s art.
It did not have to do with the fact that real spiderwebs function as deadly traps, that spiders have eight creepy legs and six or eight creepy eyes, or that they suck the life’s juices out of their helpless victims.
No, it just had to do with the art of weaving. Perhaps I’m safer sticking with my great grandmother’s spinning wheel as the essential metaphor, but I can’t give up the beauty of the web, or of traversing space balanced on silken threads that span circumference, cross dark and catch first light, anchored in everything. I can even risk the notion of a few extra (strictly metaphorical) eyes, but envision no further.
jo(e) wrote:
I like the imagery of weaving. This post is so beautifully written.
Posted on 04-Dec-05 at 8:50 pm | Permalink
ehj2 wrote:
My predominant mode of perception is intuition (not thinking or sensing or feeling) and I intuit mythologically and psychologically …
so the immediate connection for me was Ariadne …
and most of us know of Ariadne as the woman in the labyrinth who, out of love, helped Theseus overcome the Minotaur … and was then abandoned by him on the island of Naxos instead of being taken, as promised, to Athens to be his wife …
She gave Theseus a “clew” … a ball or skein of thread to guide him in the labyrinth … and from this word we take our word “clue” … and follow clues … as tentatively and attentively as one might follow a shimmering almost-insubstantial golden thread in the morning “Venus” light.
Her name, as a variant of Ariagne, means “Very Holy Maid,” from the Greek word àgni, which means “the most holy.” In some of the stories about her, she had sons who were kings.
The threads, of course, are always the golden threads that guide our lives if we would but follow them … they are the “still small voice” within each of us.
The Goddesses and feminine powers are all associated with the Moon and the ocean, and the cycles of nature, and the movements and energies of the cosmos. No small powers here.
In a compelling synchronicity, the Moon was one of the seven planets of the ancients. It was the planet of spiritual intelligence … and thus mythologically the feminine is equated with spiritual intelligence and wisdom (Sophia), as opposed to raw masculine (solar) logic.
The planets were the moving lights in the solar system and the most powerful one was and is the Moon. It is not a coincidence that there are seven lights — as chakras — luminous within us, that the Candelabra in the Temple of Moses had seven lamps (this physical Temple being simply a model and a reminder of the real Temple within us), and that there are seven moving naked-eye lights in the solar system.
The myths of Ariadne, the “Very Holy Maid” are replete with sadness and loss … and we are reminded of Mary, a later Holy Mother who was called “Moon of the Church,” and who also had a son who was King, and who also knew so much wisdom and suffered so much loss. A further connection is reveiled in the dates of festivals in their respective honor — the great festival to the moon goddess was continued by the Catholic Church … and the date of August fifteenth was chosen for celebrating the feast of the Assumption of the Blessed Virgin.
It would be better if we all remembered that Sinn was a Moon God, and Mount Sinai, the holy place visited by Moses, means “Mountain of the Moon.” Mythologically, the Moon was and remains the source of spiritual wisdom, and the natural realm of Sophia.
For me, the term “mindspinner” simply brings all these threads together … the wisdom (and sometimes sorrow) of Ariadne, the “mind” of spiritual intelligence, the powers and wisdom of the Moon, and the faith one has in following the golden threads across the labyrinth of any honest life … threads which, seen at a different angle, are simply a razor’s edge, or the path that is narrow, or even a road that is too often not travelled.
You may not have meant to suggest all these things in your title … and perhaps I read too much into what may have been a casual production … but I’ve lingered in the poetry and prose you offer here, and I suspect I’m not far from the mark.
Respectfully and mythologically,
ehj2
Posted on 05-Dec-05 at 11:11 pm | Permalink