What is Casual Alchemy?
Most simply, it's a making and object-based approach to Psyche:
Learning to Let Psyche Lead.
Zen Bulls Eye Story Find It!
Draw YOUR BullsEyes!
Tell yourself new stories: “Life is Flow,
a river bed. The Self is fluid, No Single Self,
It (We) depends and changes
“I’m not a man, but a mob.”
Time is Kairos, not Chronos. Circular.
We are in several dimensions at once.
Learn to flow -with grace- between them.
“Time is not a line but adimension. You don’t look back along time, but down through it, like water. Sometimes this comes to the surface. Sometimes that. Sometimes nothing. Nothing
goes away.” Margaret Atwood, Cats Eye (1988)
Autobiography in Five Chapters
By Portia Nelson Find It!
Find your other Streets, your Other Ways of going, of expressing/refreshing old truths
on hats, in jars, mobiles, toy boats
Find CLAN PlayDate Model
There are Others, new and old, for this part of your life
LEARN James Hillman, Thomas Moore, Rachel Remen, Marion Woodman, Lewis Hyde, John Holloway, Rumi, Mary Oliver, Basho,
Marcel Duchamp, Celia Rabinovitch, Ed Yong
WANDER Notice what parts of the natural 
world keep appearing
MAKE a Cord Cutter. For What, for Whom?
Use EMPTY containers, jars, blank cards, CVS bks
Keep It Casual, Playful. Avoid the Useful.
Host some chancy FLOW event.
SHARE Skills, Earned, Learned insights, Service,
Potlatching, Potlucking, Gifting
ELDERING is the time to “Dwell in Timelessness,
Give yourself away and Be with Children” Andy Fisher
“WALKING IN THREE WORLDS”
Photo by David Horton
It's a collection of ideas and self-guided prompts to get more access to your Creative Unconscious,
to Access the Intuitive Mind and bypass too much thinking and talking.
Finding ways into a light trance. You are likely already skilled in how to do this:
Look around your living and work spaces. Notice the number of Altars - spaces filled with special objects--you have already made. What are they about? Who are they to and for?
Just Make Something. Let It Reveal: What it is, Why it was made, Who responds and comes for it.
Liminal Thinking and especially SHADOW
and the cosmic fact that Everything is Connected
Go find that Emily Dickinson poem about
"Ourself, behind ourself concealed..."
About the stuff we ALL carry around.
It's the way we were born
In these last 20 years,
I have not been able to tidy this material into A ONE SINGLE BOOK. It seemed so didactic and
the very opposite of the undulating nature of
Casual Alchemy. So all this has become more a heaving biome of thoughts, images, observations, suggestions, mutterings, memories and references.
A short booklet form seems promising. It allows for a re-telling of the same material but with important different inflections or variations.
The size and brevity, at 3-28 pages, is kind to all learning styles and attention spans. It invites the Intuitive Mind to have a presence in the experience by choosing where to begin:
"What am I in the mood for today?"
I recently made a couple of such "books", 4"x6" softcover, using the services of online CVS. They cost about $10 each. The great benefit is the chance to sift through all the random thoughts and images that collect around you and try to make a 20-page experience.
I really like the exercise of it; the practice of collecting and editing and balancing words and images.
Casual Alchemy explores five areas:
Casual (play, awe, surprise),
Alchemy (balancing head, hand, heart; the Need to transform: ourselves Are Hornet's Nests a good metaphor?
Making (a rich viable route to identity),
The Spiral (key image, experience) and
Vegetable Thinking (rooting in our organic, not
technical nature. After all, we are 70% water!)
Yours as a Gift!
Core Narrative on Casual Alchemy (11/21)
Making your Book of Mirrors (11/21)
Curious Trails, Scents, References always updated
Materials from Casual Alchemy Workshops
Befriending the Creative Unconscious
(27p., Omega 2018)
Comes with Creative Aging (22p 2/21)
Notes on Alchemy (6p. 2009/2021)
As a Game! (6/21)
Meeting Your Ersions (8p.) (6/20)
