all images from yesterday morning. Harvested lemon balm tips, thyme, comfrey leaves, chickweed flowers and leaf stems, broadleaf plantain, and violet leaves. Blotted all the leaves for 5 or 6 hours and then commenced chopping the stems and leaves. Added dried red clover, calendula, tulsi and more lemon balm leaves from the spring & summer micro-harvests. Also last year's dried prunella heads. Prepared a warm infusion on my stove's warming burner. Love that burner for this purpose! I now have a fine stock of therapeutic oil for making the coming season's healing skin balm.
Night before last I prepared a half gallon of spearmint-calendula skin oil. I don't use it enough for somebody my age and nor does J. So I doubled the amount I generally prepare and created two batches; one in spring when the leaf shoots were lush and another in autumn when fresh shoots have begun to push aside the spent flower stalks.
My sinuses etc. are currently paying for so much time spent outside but sometimes you just gotta. The landscape was ready to welcome me again and I was not about to wait around any longer. J's been walking the woods trail and I sense the glistening somewhat otherworldly activities of the past few weeks have begun to recede.
It's easier to get down to the bridge now. It's been a number of days - maybe a week - since I stood there with J for a few minutes but in truth I'm not sure. Time has become what I always wished it could be - stretchy to the point of ongoing low level disorientation. It occurred to me that this is indeed something I've sought for most of my life - freedom from 'time' as a human construct. So it further occurred to me that when we all got shoved down the rabbit hole of ongoing reality distortion fields piling one on top of the other, that I might have intuitively leaned into the time-altering aspects as a way of learning what the reality of a personal wish might look like?
For two weeks in a row I didn't know what day it was pretty much for the entire 14 days. In my younger adult years that would have thrilled me. I would have called and written to people about it as a Mission Accomplished interlude. In the present tense it scared me. Because I'm old enough to realize it's important to keep sharp and act sharper.
As soon as I went into the field I could feel why I'd been asked to stay away for a time. Not so much at a concrete level as the way the landscape's obviously settled more into itself. I stood for a long while right here where I took the picture. I took note of what flowered. Said a first goodbye to hardwood green ringing our property lines. Left the flag windblown for this official portrait of my co-creative return.
volunteer polk and mugwort stepping in to help with the vinca/periwinkle situation. The plants are guiding me in how to break this daunting task into viable pieces. It's hard to explain. I go out there and they just somehow convey when and where to pull. And so far it's working...
Mama - still stiff legged but determined - led us to her favorite basking and sentry position: the center of the gaia-breasted fire pit.
I joined her for a good long while. The experience seemed like the lunar equivalent of this highly solar experience. It still feels odd to my thinking mind to sit on such a powerful expression of sacred land energy. But on both occasions of spending more than an hour simply being - the last time with emptied essence bowls and this time with the cat - I returned to my normal routine with a strong sense of personal grounding. Need all of that we can get these days!
