Chapter 10: How to Make an 8-Station Mind-Map
I'm gonna teach you 8-station mind-mapping step by step. If I tell you why it will just fucking confuse you. Just trust me. Do what I do.
How to Make an 8-Station Mind-Map
Draw a diamond.
Overlay your diamond with a square.
Beginning at the bottom left corner, add the symbols.
Symbol's Meanings
- Fallen Angel (The Protagonist)
- Cross-hatch Circle (The Theme/Backdrop)
- The Mask (Something is Hidden)
- Crescent Moon (A Cycle)
- Split Rectangle (Change/Transition)
- The World (Equator, Capricorn, Cancer, Ozone = Emotional Climate)
- The Ghost (The Presence of the Past)
- The Sword (The Final Choice/Resolution.) It can stab you to death. Or like Arthur you can pull it from the stone.
I forgot to draw the ozone on 6 the world. Please add it to yours.
Number the stations.
Quickly, don't think about it, select only one discovery from each of your 8 chapters. Giving you 8 discoveries. On a separate piece of paper write these 8 discoveries.
A Reminder: Your Discoveries
· So, you are going to fuse your chapters together.
· You are going to read it through — just read.
· You are going to read it through again and note links in chapters.
· You are going to journal in your hour in your place about these links.
A Reminder: My Discoveries
I am limiting myself to 8. One discovery per chapter. You will see the significance of this when we begin 8-stations next week.
• Chapter 1: Compulsion to be better than others. Links to:
• Chapter 5: Mum telling me I must do better than everyone cos of the colour of my skin.
• Chapter 2: My mum is a doormat for my dad. Using her dead husband’s pension to fund the house he owns. Links to:
• Chapter 6: She may have gone to see her other kids in Limerick cos she genuinely believes her heart will kill her soon.
• Chapter 3: I am already in her tummy coming out of the pictures. Links to:
• Chapter 7: My great nanna, nanna, mum, me, my daughter are Russian doll eggs.
• Chapter 4: Me and Elaine staring at each other through the handle of her navy Silver-cross trolley as the blue and cream jug flies over our heads. Links to:
• Chapter 8: We don't need freedom because of our colour or race. We just need the freedom of peace. Demonstrated in the other photos Elaine has been sending me this week. Of her stylish sideboard, and her graceful drop-leaf table, and their positioning. Building her new, solitary, peaceful, country home. And my comments of encouragement because I am the eldest. Building my solitary, peaceful, country home.
Fallen Angel to Change/Transition
• Chapter 1: Compulsion to be better than others. Links to:
• Chapter 5: Mum telling me I must do better than everyone cos of the colour of my skin.
I am representing these two sentences, at their station, in images. Like accepting the 12-word title, object and 12 associations, you must accept the first image your subconscious tells you to draw. This is mind-mapping.
Then you read it like tarot cards. In line with the meaning of its governing symbol.
- I am the protagonist.
- I'm standing on a trophy.
- Everyone else, my audience — are less than me.
- I'm proud, hence the lion's mane.
- I'm also bleeding into 2, the theme, the backdrop.
- My mum begins in an ordinary dress, which changes into a mistress gown. Cos when all is said and done she has white privilege.
- I know she means well, but there is now a standing mirror, between me and her full of the white audience she sees me through. The mirror and them are now higher then me. She changes how I see the world.
- I am holding a hand mirror, looking at my changed face, now shaded black and white.
I do not know any of this when I am drawing them. I just draw what comes into my head as the best way to depict what the text is saying.
Muscle Memory
Each day, except Saturday, in your sacred hour, in your sacred place, I want you to 8-station mind-map your original 8 discoveries.
Each day, your 8 original discoveries always align with their stations. Chapter one = the protagonist. Chapter 2 = theme/background. Chapter 3's discovery = mask. Etc, Etc.
Each day, your 8 original discoveries will create a different mind-map. New meaning will emerge. The key as always is to let go. Draw what enters your mind first. Do not second guess yourself.
Each day, wax on — wax off. Practise. Acknowledge my practice is 23 years old. Be kind to yourself and know you will get better. You will build your own symbolic alphabet. A direct line between your conscious and your subconscious mind.
My Completed Mind-Map
My Discoveries
• I draw circles around things that are significant to me — they are scenes — stars and galaxies emerging from the universal plasma.
• I hand the trophy in 1 to Elaine in 8: awarded for making her house a home.
• Her house in 8 is orbiting our house in 2 that only belongs to my dad: he holds the key.
• My mum with horns in 6 is looking back through her own mirror at the kids she has lost. She is trying to navigate the Cape of Good Hope to visit them to regain her wings and go to Catholic Heaven now death is knocking on her door. 25 years later I watch her daily scurry to Mass in the Little Gem behind the post office where I work. I never stop her to say hello.
• Both of these stars orbit me and my trophy. My mass is holding them in place.
• My head is obliterated. I don't know if I am coming or going or who I am.
• My dad is a bit player in this galaxy.
• Me and Elaine looking through the handle of the trolley are crushed by it all.
Your Discoveries
Each day, I want you to write 8 discoveries, quickly, when you finish re-mind-mapping your original 8 discoveries. I will do the same.
