Digital Ambler does something every month which I think is pretty cool.  He analyzes the traffic to his site at the end of every month, and summarizes the answers to the questions that result from the visitors’ search terms.

Alas, the search terms that people use to find this website are not that numerous, nor that interesting.  But I figured I’d try it, and see if some new results got started…

The most frequent term that brought people to this site was “cultural appropriation and fire poi”.  When I search my own blog for those terms, I find these three posts, on cultural appropriation, on a theoretical (or not-so), walk in the woods, and on cultural appropriation and foam core.  I was talking with my friend Craig the other day, and one of the unhappy conclusions that we came to was that a lot of the Western spiritual tradition seems to consist of borrowing elements of other systems. No matter how much we try to make them work within our own system, or try to structure them so that they draw on the Western tradition, it winds up offending or upsetting someone.   Alchemy may be from Taoism; my own tai chi practice comes from China, too.  Goetia may be Chaldean or Near Eastern; Geometry is ancient Egyptian, and so on.  Argh.

“How to Draw the Tree of Life” — This was the second-biggest search term in the last quarter.  If you want to draw the Tree of Life, these are the posts on this website that help you do it: Learning to Draw the Tree of Life and Creativity on the Tree of Life.  This is a geometrical exercise, but if you know your Tree of Life correspondences, it’s a useful set of exercises and trainings.  If you find it useful, though, I’d love it if you left me a comment.

“Memory Palace geography” — A lot of people are trying to memorize geographical facts for the National Geographic Geography Bee, apparently — and they’re looking for help here.  Here’s the post that references memory palaces and maps.  Frankly, I think that this is probably not enough. I think that part of the reason I can use a globe is that I made one when I was a kid — and then I had to make maps of each continent, and then a country on each continent, and then a sub-district in that country (like a départément in France, or a State in the US, like that).  So I learned to think in maps at an early age… and this kind of knowledge bank is lost to kids because they don’t make maps the way I did in sixth grade.

“Memory Palace faq” — I used to write a lot about Memory Palaces because I taught them for three years.  There’s a fair number of articles about them, and they link to this master post. If I have an FAQ on them, it’s here.

“Knitting Poem” — I’ve only written one good poem about knitting, and it’s this one called  the Sestina on Knitting. Curiously enough, it’s not posted on this blog, and I’ll rectify that later today, I think.  But then there’s an improvised poem I did while making a scarf, called What is Work? and that poem is here.

Anyway, those are the four most common search terms on this blog in the last quarter.  That said, there are well over a thousand encrypted or unknown searches that sent people here from Google or Bing or elsewhere, whose origins or searches I don’t know.  And it would be interesting to know why they came… but I’m not going to hold my breath, either, waiting for them to explain what brought them here.

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