This post is the text version of an exercise now available in PDF format at thoughty.itch.io/arnmountain for your use under a Creative Commons 4.0 Attribution International license.
All art and text by Beau Jágr Sheldon, 2023-2024.
Arn Mountain & The Glass Globes
Containment and Categorization of Emotions & Memories
by Beau Jágr Sheldon, 2023
In the green and overgrown hills and valleys, there are a series of caverns beneath the ground. Many years ago, these caverns were carved out and made into a secure storage location. Inside, there are full size locations with marble stairwells and arches, document archives, even some legendary vaults with highly desired media within. In this ritual, you are now the owner of this colloquially-called Arn Mountain and within it, you can store all of your memories, emotions, and experiences in whatever form you deem appropriate.
You can traverse it in your golf cart, stopping at each location as you need, and take things out or put things inside the various safes, secure locations, or display shelves. When you’re done inside, you can exit the facility, locking the door behind you physically and electronically. The facility is huge, and even if you recorded every moment of your life, you would never run out of space for each record, and it is almost as if the space expands as you need it to hold what you must.
This location is one of the most seismically and natural-disaster secure locations in the entirety of North America. No outside force will interfere with what you put inside the mountain. It will not be shaken, broken, burned, or invaded, and is truly a safe place. No one else can enter it without your permission, and you can revoke access to it for anyone, at any time. Because of this, you have complete power over the mountain, and can go into it whenever you wish, or keep it locked and protected when you prefer.
For this ritual, you will either describe or conceptualize Arn Mountain, identify how you will store some of your memories and emotions within the mountain, and you will also identify some key items you keep in the Glass Globes protected inside the mountain.
The lines after each prompt can be used as pacing, with a breath in or out for each line, when read aloud. The headers are guidance for completing this as a written, nonverbal prompt, and do not need to be read aloud.
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