last night's psychonavigation was...interesting, but I didn't bring a lot back. that's one disadvantage to trying to get internal insights with, say, lots of THC: you're in such an altered state when the visions come that when you're sober again, the visions seem remote and devoid of meaning. It's not amnesia, exactly, because you can remember more or less what happened, but not why it seemed to make so much sense at the time.

But I do think that now that if any trickster has been messing with me lately, it's not Coyote, even though the fellow's been on my mind lately thanks to Gunnerkrigg Court. Instead, I think it was Anansi. And I wonder about that...honestly it feels presumptuous and appropriative of me to pretend to any sort of spiritual contact with a deity from a culture I know almost nothing about, but then I suppose I could say the same thing about a lot of my supposed dealings with deities. I mean, what can I _really_ claim to know about Loki or Hecate or anyone else?

all I know for certain is that I've had a couple of fairly powerful experiences of the numinous in connection with Anansi, with the Undertale "Spider Dance" and The Cure's "Lullaby" as evocative music. The experiences have lacked the closeness of my interactions with Loki; more strongly do I feel (if you'll pardon the expression) like a spider under a magnifying glass being scrutinized by a power I don't understand. With Loki, and with the Undertale pantheon, I feel like I'm on more even, conversational terms.

So, I've thought and reflected about this some more today, and I think I know the right way to think about it. I can still getting something out of my experience without running to the somewhat dodgy extreme of saying, "OK, I'm working magic with Anansi now," which I think is a somewhat questionable thing for an off-white (my mom's from Chile but I was basically socialized white) and comfortably privileged person to say. But I _can_ say, "I'm working with a deity who seems strongly associated with spiders and who reminds me of Anansi, what little I know about them." There must be other spider gods too, right?

Some of what happened to me yesterday, the curious feeling of trickster activity that nevertheless felt rather different from what I'm used to from Loki, seemed rather in line with the lessons that quasi-Anansi had for me last night. "Step patiently, step patiently, build and traverse webs with care, and you'll be better off than you are now, your mind more on your goal than on your surroundings—and your footing." And I remember how the culminating "trick" of that scrambled trip around Renton was my putting my foot in an unexpected hole and tumbling painfully to the ground, scraping myself rather badly on the way.