Up: [[Creating a Body of Work]] Created: 2026-03-01 An astrologer, who trained as a psychotherapist, said to me that > [!Orbit] Joe Landwehr > This life, for me, is ultimately about completion, about winding down, about bringing all the various creative threads that have wound through my life and made it what it was to some sense of closure and finally arriving at a place of stillness and peace. That idea of bringing all of the threads together has been a major theme throughout my life. When I was teaching, it manifested as huge multi-month inquiries with multi-disciplinary connections. Since my retirement eleven years ago, the focus has been on the connections, the creative threads, in my own life and also on the connections between my life and the big ideas of: depth psychology; symbols and symbol systems such as Tarot, and the questions, explorations and issues of life’s third act. I’ve always believed that connections need to be tracked so that patterns can be observed. Hence my decades-long fascination with [['Year Of' Books]]. I started documenting my life at age 10 and, while there have certainly been gaps, as well as plenty of journaling that is boring in the extreme, I’ve continued to document for the 56 years since then. In the last few years, I’ve also begun exploring [[Expressive Art]] and narrative art, especially [[Illustrated Journals]], all of which speaks to a desire I’ve always had but never thought I could achieve — to bring the creative threads of my life together in a combination of text and visual image. I’m a “project person,” always have been. I love sustained effort towards some kind of huge creative goal, but those efforts during my work life, while enormously satisfying and successful, took me to life-threatening burnout. I’ve been afraid of travelling that road again… until recently. ### This is Lasair Lasair is a Scottish word (my ancestry) meaning a blaze of sunlight or fire. It is pronounced Lass + Air and is the name I’m giving to a comprehensive collection of resources including: —> my personal Obsidian vault ‘FireWork’ which houses all of my dreams and dream interpretations; decades of journal entries, art and photos, as well as thousands of notes from books, courses and experiences. —> my public Obsidian vault ‘Profound Journey’ which contains as much of ‘FireWork’ as possible that isn’t too personal. I’m hoping to eventually recast many journal entries as short personal essays, perhaps [[Beams]] —> Potentially a publicly available Obsidian vault that doesn’t have the restrictions currently true of Obsidian Publish, such as not being able to take advantage of Bases, Properties, or most plugins. I want to employ a “Choose your own adventure” series of paths through my vault, but this may not be fully possible in Profound Journey. Time will tell. —> a blue box, an actual custom made box painted Prussian Blue and decorated with a spiral, stars, the moon, Hestia’s flame, and a female hermit with lantern, which is my birth card in Tarot. The box will include small sculptures and meaningful objects from my life, but it is most especially for a set of notebooks I will be making which will be a combination of creative notebooks and illustrated journals on a variety of themes. More on those themes and on an explanation of the difference between creative notebooks and illustrated journals at another time. I’d come up with the Blue Box idea years ago, but recently thought I’d have to forego it because of the challenge of making connections between analog and digital resources. But I think I can do it by taking photos of pages and putting them in the vault, and by indexing the notebooks to include what’s also available in the vault.