Chiron: Wounded Healer, Wholeness Weaver

A Sneak Peek at My New Book,
Keywords to Unlock Chiron

© 2012 by Joyce Mason
All Rights Reserved

The word collage you see above is called a Wordle. If you’ve never had the joy of playing in this sandbox of making words beautiful, click the link and dig in! I think Wordles are one of the coolest things ever invented.

I decided I wanted to add a Wordle to the PDF version of my upcoming book. This is a picture of the 50 keywords or phrases related to Chiron that I’ll be covering in depth.  I “loaded” the word list to have what I considered the four most important words pop out bigger. Lo and behold, that’s when I discovered a new tagline for Chiron that’s just an expansion of the old: Wounded Healer/ Wholeness Weaver. Even with my passion for words and considering how much I play with them, I never “got” that particular combo. Now it seems so right; I couldn’t wait to share it with you!

I hope the other Chiron aficionados who read this blog will be as excited as I am to have finally found a balanced phrase that describes Chiron. I can’t tell you how many new things I have learned in writing this book. One of the most exciting things about writing: it forces you to sort things out lurking in your mind, sometimes in the deepest recesses, so that they make sense to you. Then maybe they’ll make sense to someone else! Even more exciting is the chance to connect the dots and find that there have been new discoveries floating around in your head all this time.

I have long objected to “wounded healer” as (forgive me) a lame description of somebody who was so much more than a limping teacher, surgeon and herbalist. Yet in writing Keywords, I recognized that this is the description people glom onto. I started thinking about why. I suspect it’s because the world needs healing more than anything, and we are all wounded in some way. In writing this book, I decided that, by popular demand, I should no longer fight that phrase …

… so imagine my joy in finding a complementary add-on that also gives Chiron its rounded due and depth on how it acts in a chart. The fact that it almost rhymes will make it even more memorable. Rhymes and songs are known to “stick” where other streams of words slide right out of memory.

I still love Bill Pratt’s winning One True Alchemist in last year’s Chiron tagline contest! Variety is the spice of life, and you’ll appreciate Bill’s title even more once you read Keywords. Since wholeness is the ultimate Chiron keyword, it won’t be surprising if we discover a whole lot of other good taglines, including those great contest runners-up.

I’m making great progress on the book. I’m 60-70 percent done and still hoping for a fall launch while unwilling to kill myself if it doesn't fall easily into place by then. You’ve seen some of the words covered in the Chiron’s Keyword Corner feature on this blog before, but the book will have so many more words, plus expansions and edits of many of those articles. So far, I’m very happy with how it’s turning out, and considering I’m a classic Virgo about being my own worst critic; what a nice surprise.

Let me know what you think about Chiron’s new tagline! If you’re excited about how the book sounds, I should let you know that my muse runs on enthusiasm. Cheerleading really makes me work faster!