In many tariqa's all over the world there is a story about a master who always carried a staff with him.
One day one of his students asked why this staff, the master gave him a story and the student went on his way. When the student returned the master asked what he learned. The student told him about his travels and all the things he learned about himself along the road, but that he never found an answer to why the staff.
The master frowned, asked a few questions and told the student to go to another town and tell the master there that he sent him and bring back an answer.
The student went on is way, returned even wiser, but still no answer to why the staff. And he got a bit angry. So annoyed he directly told the master that he wanted an answer not a queste.
The master laughed and said finally you are ready. I will tell you the story about the staff.
One day when the master was still young, he met a master who carried a staff and he asked the master why the staff? The same thing happened to him and eventually the master told him. When he was a youngster, he met a master who carried a staff and he asked him why do you carry a staff?
Proverbs are all well and fine but the fact is, I don't carry the staff because a master did before me. I carry the staff
because I must. It is something in me, of the self I pulled straight out of chaos in youth and shoved into my head right up against the DNA of a species that apparently has a trigger to really like carrying a stick.
I didn't ask the story of why you carry one. I asked you the story of how you carry the exact one you do.
I recognize this is in some ways unimportant!
I carry a staff because I am compelled to, no more, no less.
I carry the exact staff I carry because an entity asked me to, and I obliged. Now I seem to be seen under it's glamour. It likes being seen, needs to be what it is. In academic terms, "some insane ape shoved a bunch of chaos and nonsense into their network graph, and now they carry a fancy stick."
My most recent staff started existence in a garden box.
There was a geometry to the garden box, insofar as it had a slightly raised bed, but the most important geometry through time and space is that "it was untended, left to go back to nature for a time", and it had a defined border with an easily defined "center" or "middle".
This was not a good choice by the owners of the garden: over the years which this garden lay untended, left to nature, a lone tree sprouted from the middle of it.
Of course years later when the owners decided it was time to use that garden again, they saw this tree and decided it needed to go, this lone tree in the middle of the garden/field/place.
So they decided to chop off all the branches and leave the pole of the trunk sticking straight out of the garden.
Enter Wizard, a few days after the tree lost it's branches, as it stands there dying, dead, in fact.
I ask the owner what they intend to do with this thing "oh, we're cutting it down".
I look at it again and ask "do you mind if I dig it up instead?" And I did exactly that.
Now, this didn't come without a cost, and thankfully it's not one I had to pay. There's a geometry behind trees that grow lone from the middle of a place. The geometry of that thing takes the form of a story: a narrative entity.
One of those tropes is "don't doom such things as trees which grow from the center of the field or garden, lest ill fate befall ye"
So I did the only thing I could do: I could not go back to move the garden post before they doomed it, and I could not make it's doom any less inevitable. I spent the next three visits to the property spending no less than an hour each day carefully digging up the taproot.
It came up, eventually, with long sticks of running root rudely broken off and sometimes cut. Some of the deepest of the tap remained, but it's heart came free still living, if slightly scarred, to be put in a place of respect and safety and love while it died and was reborn.
I did a lot more work on it but that is also not germane to this specific lounge topic.
