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I like this particular star, because — when oriented to the page — it consists of two overlapping and off-kilter eight-pointed stars. These could represent the Stabile and Mobile dichotomy. Except because not all four Water signs, say, belong to the Stabile group, there's no easy way to represent their orientation to that polarity... unless there's a Celtic/Islamic style knotwork system that can join them across groupings. Worth thinking on.
So, here's a layout for a possible geomantic mandala, using an Islamic-ish knotwork star to reflect the signs round and about the mandala. I haven't compared this against elements or zodiac yet, but there may be something workable here.
D & I spent the morning finishing up making these sets of fish cards - each fish is a piece from the first Suzuki book. They're fun and useful for book review. You use a little fishing rod with a magnet at the end to see what piece you play next.
My sister did the super cute illustrations. They're scanned so we can easily make more copies later. And all the fish are laminated for longevity. We gave two sets to my school's upcoming fundraiser raffle.
134/365.
A colleague came to me with a plan to talk about a debate about World War II in her class — American isolationists vs. interventionists. We talked about her plans, and did some revision of these plans with diagrams and maps and Brainstorming!
Her class has 23 kids in it. We decided that we were going to have Roosevelt deliver a policy speech, and then have two teams under him — one would propose the specific lend-lease legislation; a group of opponents would try to undercut it. The opposition would then propose their own legislation and Roosevelt's team would try to undercut THAT. But then we were left with too many kids sitting on the sidelines. We tried to resolve it by imagining teams on the sidelines producing graphic design materials and propaganda that would support or undercut both sides — or that would serve as "voices from the extremes" which would help make clear what a dangerous time this was in American history.
Some of our planning revolved around having a "graphic design" team produce a newspaper that had all the technical data that each side would need in its newspaper — and to tie those newspaper designs to William Randolph Hurst and other newspaper demagogues of the 1920s and 1930s and 1940s.
These two shapes strike me as the most appropriate for a geomantic mandala. There's still work to be done, sorting out //where// and //how// data is recorded and projected to the observer/meditator. But at least the matter of organizing by stability or element could be settled in the composition of the list.
A colleague came to me with a plan to talk about a debate about World War II in her class — American isolationists vs. interventionists. We talked about her plans, and did some revision of these plans with diagrams and maps and Brainstorming!
Her class has 23 kids in it. We decided that we were going to have Roosevelt deliver a policy speech, and then have two teams under him — one would propose the specific lend-lease legislation; a group of opponents would try to undercut it. The opposition would then propose their own legislation and Roosevelt's team would try to undercut THAT. But then we were left with too many kids sitting on the sidelines. We tried to resolve it by imagining teams on the sidelines producing graphic design materials and propaganda that would support or undercut both sides — or that would serve as "voices from the extremes" which would help make clear what a dangerous time this was in American history.
Or, a pair of eight-pointed stars can be overlapped, resulting in more elegant kite-shapes with more depth. Here, the underlying tension would have to be between the Mobile and Stabile signs.
Regarding a geomantic emblem or mandala... continued...
One possibility is to offset four squares, for the four Elements, and create sixteen kite shapes or cells for the sixteen geomantic signs.
But, each of these "cells" is relatively small, and generates a lot of smaller, awkward frames around itself.
I'm not particularly happy with any of the layouts or lists of the geomantic figures I've found so far. Accordingly, I'm going to have to try out a whole lot of versions of the list to find one that looks good in two overlapping eight pointed stars. And that likely means filling in a lot of photocopied sheets.
Sheets something like this one.
You'll be able to play along when the scanner at school is fixed again. And school is over for summer.