I keep beginning this post in frivolous ways. In other words I keep 'writing'. Working through ideas that aren't what I intended to write about. And yet I know if I segue to writing rather than blogging I will be distracted about making this blog post when I don't seem to know what it's meant to contain in detail. This time I'm going with what I know involves whatever it's about.
A short while back I posted on my creativity blog about a particular quilt I made years ago. It was a life changing experience to make it and it brought me into my full skin as a cardinal sign. Before that I liked to consider myself an Idea Person. I'd throw stuff out. People would say to me, you should do that. I'd say, I'm already doing stuff. You should do it.
To this day nothing bothers me more than people telling me what I should be doing when I'm already clearly doing something very different instead. That's cardinality. We need a lot of that because we need a lot of very dedicated and effective self-leadership. We have to be ready to build reliable gps systems within ourselves.
nothing is real otherwise. And it's all very much something to get hung about.
What this has to do with the quilt I made for a very special person is pretty direct: I went out into my garden yesterday afternoon and after a time I felt her spirit there with me. It seemed I was just on the edge of smelling her perfume and hearing her melodic arpeggios of laughter. Just right on the edge. And then I realized that was my own capability of conjouring. Her spirit watches over me and many others. And perhaps for all of us when we need it most she seems to be right there or almost so.
I crouched to pull leeks. As I did so I thought about JP. I also thought about how my life's been something of a largely enjoyable tiltawhirl ride since a coyote pup sang to me during the wee hours of sleeplessness some weeks back. Enjoyable daily reality or not, I definitely live in the moment we collectively share. Yesterday and the day before I wasn't grounded at all. I couldn't sort the things left on my desk let alone the overflowing stack of assorted Acey-centric supplies beside it. I could not sort out of my thoughts let alone stuff I've chosen to collect.
In the afternoon I went out to the field. It was warm and sunny and my cranky jointed body felt relief rather than recoil. I kept telling myself I couldn't do anything about the everything. I could only choose my feelings and how I focused them. As soon as I allowed myself agency over the jumbled and highly unattractive collection of emotions richocheting all over my inner stratosphere I started to feel calm enough to decide I wasn't obligated to rush through my emotions. It was okay to let them sit quietly - to perhaps let them figure themselves out.
Then I performed an impromptu ceremony at the fire pit. I went into the garden and pulled all the leeks. They filled three quarters of a large paper grocery bag. Today I'll make potato leek soup with a friends' carrots and the very last of the dill I grew on the deck this summer. These are good things to do; my family will benefit for a few days and I'll enjoy remembering what it was like in the garden yesterday while I'm prepping the soup and sauteing the rest of the leeks for freezing in ice cubes made from vegetable broth.
I also picked slews of culinary herbs. It's a first for me to collect anything past the season's mid-point. But I had dreams and did some automatic writing, meditated out in the garden itself. Before Samhain it rained almost continuously for three weeks. There is a great abundance. I was given the impression that long unchanged human rules might be considered arbitrary and in these current times perhaps downright capricious.
So I harvested and was grateful. There's now authentically plenty of everything rather than strict rations to ensure enough until it's a new growing season. Was able to collect fresh lemon balm shoots, tender kentucky mint tips, and marvelous sprigs of german thyme for adding to the coming weeks' blending-up a new batch of abundance of care tea.
The soil is still warm. Nonetheless the upcoming weekend is when the garlic and shallots go in the ground because it's the only time J will be available before the ground freezes. We've decided to do the planting together as part of our joined effort to build a mutual foundation, from scratch, in these amazingly goofball level of messed-up times. Planting our favorite anti-everything bad food and also our most agreed-upon mandatory culinary staple is our living version of a red square.
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I decided yesterday morning that irrespective of politics and piercing head pain I had to stop procrastinating a return to daily yoga practice. I was waiting, ostensibly, for my head to stop hurting. Then I realized between the weather and an obstreperous collection of the most appalling people on the planet that wasn't going to happen. Yesterday morning I couldn't settle down after the poses to meditate. Today I could do it even if the blank slate was occasionally overlayed with a kind of mental sky-writing - an unbidden glimpse of the son in law's mannequin-blank face. Barr-none laughing inappropriately. golden child's hands placed just so over Times Square. Tom freakin' Cotton. And then different skywriting: these are PTSD symptoms. You know that. Just keep re-focusing.
It was seamless at least for the amount of time it took me to lie on a familiar carpet in the early morning sun and drop out of my mind for twenty minutes. I went deep into the night sky then. This particular lunar cycle has been outrageously compelling to me. On nearly every clear night I've gone out and crashed around in search of the perfect viewing location. I just had to be near it. I felt the light itself was singing. I thanked the moon for the power to reflect its cyclical journeys by reflecting various arcs of sunlight. As I was doing so I had the sense of an incoming message but maybe it was more of a very slowly to sprout insight. These moments in which I stayed present in what I personally knew to be true and meaningful were an incredibly potent form of resistance.
let's all wake up some extra light in ourselves. See if we can move it around amongst those we love and help it grow ...