candles & resolutions & wood shavings all over my floor

12th Apr, 2025

this post brought to you by Ghosting Since Birth; The Celi Dayrope Playlist
(Sorry bout my 2022 music taste-)

🐝🐝🐝

tonight I did something I have been meaning to do for a long long time.

about 6 years ago I conceptualised an OC¹ who would become one of the most lasting out of the many I've made since. Her name is Celi, which is not short for anything she wants you to know about.

I briefly gave Celi so much attention; included her in so many pieces of fiction, roleplay, and idle characterisation that she occasionally flirted with becoming something akin to an alter.^2,3 To this day, she still lives rent free in the back of subconscious, despite several half-hearted attempts to dislodge her with a broom.⁴

Here's some more fun trivia about the gal (some if it even relevant to the post):

1. Her full name is Celi Dayrope.
2. She's a psychic, or perhaps a medium if you prefer.
3. She has wildly curly strawberry-blonde hair, a trait I inflict on all of my dearest characters out of envy.
4. She suffers headaches and entirely useless visions of the future.
5. Her entire family is technically deceased; but its cool, cause they're all ghosts and get up to hjinks such as stealing her bathtowels.
6. She unfortunately started life as a Homestuck character, for which she will likely never forgive me but has thankfully almost outgrown.
7. She really enjoys cooking but is TERRIFICALLY bad at it, especially pancakes. The girl lives off instant noodles and canned apricots and its a wonder she doesn't have scurvy.
8. In addition to the visions and the mediumness, she's occasionally prone to lumokinesis⁵: the technique of interacting with the divide between shadows and light as if it were a malleable object.⁶
9. Her hobbies include candlemaking, what passes for urban exploring when you live within the few functional floors of a massive semi-medieval stone tower, and occasionally following up on puported alien sightings.⁷
10. Oh, and woodcarving.

And here, I finally get to the point.

For a long time, I held it as a resolution that if I was going to host an entity in my head who was dubiously independant from myself, I should really engage in at least a few of her hobbies,⁸ just to be safe. Some of them we already shared, such as being bad at cooking. But the two closest to her heart were always candlemaking and woodcarving. And yet, despite repeated intentions... I never really got around to it.

Until at last tonight, I finally changed that. At least half of it, anyway.

🐝🐝🐝

To change the subject for just a moment, I've been having some hjinks and shenanigans occur recently. You can read about that elsewhere, and honestly I'd suggest you don't.

Tonight, I attempted to do something about this that I probably should have thought of a while ago; rather than sit alone and think myself into circles, I went and asked some friends how they dealt with problems such as Envy.

In order, the responses were more or less:
"Find a distraction and some relevant emotional music till you feel better,"
"Throw yourself wholeheartedly into acts of love and kindness to alleviate it,"
and finally, "Go touch grass, idiot."

I firmly and genuinely found all three of these responses helpful despite their seeming simplicity, and I'm incredibly grateful that people took the time to provide them.

And of course, overachiever that I am... I did all three. In a manner of speaking.

🐝🐝🐝

Tonight, I at long last assembled the various materials I had been collating over the last two weeks, and I finally told all the excuses to fuck off. I lay a sheet down on the floor to catch the shavings and the dust.⁹

And I sat down and gave woodcarving a shot.

Not anything impressive, mind you. Just taking a small circle of grey gum I'd cut from a branch, and carving it roughly into another shape. At one point I girlbossed too close to my paws and grazed the back of my knuckles. I didn't really prepare a stencil or anything sensible, just worked from the heart.

The result is not anything awe-inspiring, or polished, or symmetrical in any of the places it should be. It would make a rather mediocre gift.

But god was it satisfying to create. It soothed the first rough edges of an itch I've been carrying a long time; to create, to contribute, to perceiveably exist. It made the child in me clap her hands and watch with wonder through the membrane of my soul.

I do believe we'll continue doing it.

🐝🐝🐝

This feels like something of a weak conclusion, but I've said what I set out to: Woodcarving is cool, irrespective of my personal reasons for attempting it.

Some time soon I'm gonna go buy some paints, and challenge my paws to crochet something reasonable.

Creativity is its own reward. Existence is the goal and the journey and the outcome.

Thats all. Go forth and create scuffed art. 💚