Sparkling Lotus Ink

the persephone gear shift

Weather-wise it's essentially felt like October since the second week in August. Yesterday it was cold in the house upon awakening.  Not chilly or brisk until you move around. cold, period. This morning it was freakin cold which may be a particularly new england sub-category.  For the past 48 hours I've been wearing stuff I generally start pulling together somewhere during the week before Thanksgiving.  It's a little bit nuts.  Cognitive dissonance maxes out further due to the green leaves on all the trees. 

The last day of Summer is always a mixed emotional bag for me. This year it's both more difficult and far easier in that I'm being asked to stay quiet and 'away' from the actual landscape out in the field.  Perhaps because I'm off balance from grieving but then again maybe that's a very human ego-driven perspective to hold.  I think it's most likely the land has stuff it needs and wants to accomplish that doesn't need my involvement.  I sense tremendous summer love flowing towards and through me.  I wasn't needed and in honoring that the gesture of good faith goes very much noticed, is my sense.

Still it's weird in a time where everything is strange.  And that's always the best time for something magical as I promised in my last post.  If you like music with a strong beat and a little bite you can listen to what I was hearing while I wrote.

listen only video:  Making a Noise in This World.  Robbie Robertson.

Ceremonial grief in the time of social distancing is a lot easier to manage and organize than an actual memorial gathering.  I started learning that all the way back on the February-March cusp when I began 'losing' people I loved to Covid but I did not experience such disembodied gathering as being energetically powerful until far recently.  It involved, first, someone who died from brain cancer rather than Covid.  And also someone I've known essentially all my life.  Everyone gathering at an appointed time to make noise in their own version of a sacred place because the person who left his body was a noise maker first and foremost.

It was really something. Especially the way unpredicted very strong and seemingly endless T-storms rolled in a bit later.  and it didn't enter my mind it was anything ordinary so much as I knew without doubt it was my long time incredibly loyal friend making his get outta my way into the hereafter.

and you can bet your ass he did NOT go quietly as he stomped and whirled his own particular sacred patterning into the deeper cosmos that we all assumed according to his spiritual beliefs was leading him to Bardo territory.  A man so wracked with pain and according to his daughter little more than skeletal (he was always scary skinny but still, she said ...) was transformed, by all accounts of those who had similar experiences, into an electrical maelstrom.  And when I went to check a floral offering I'd left the day before I discovered the above scene.

and it felt right to leave it that way for awhile.  he was not an angel person and would literally turn his head or once his entire body to look away from any and all evidence that I am.  I laughed.  how could I not?

On what proved to be the day before RBG's passing I was suddenly called to go back to this place and take pictures for sharing.  It's right in the center of the Evolutionary Sanctuary.  From the 'outside' it looks like this:

I call it the Temple of Trumpets because all those dark green fronds behind the goldenrod are trumpet vines. This year they flowered so prolifically a neighbor asked me what we'd 'done'.  Beneath the vines, from the inside, it is green-world with all that implies.  I went in with just my camera, a sense of holiness, and mindful care. The angel remained upside down.  I fixed that and sat quietly.  I was filling myself up with green energy.  It felt important to stay and let that happen as long as I could stay mindful with it and then to photograph the interior wooden skeleton of the Temple. I didn't know why then.  But now of course I do.

and so I invite all of you to step inside and refill yourself.  This isn't what I had in mind when I took the pictures and planned the post.  That's why I had to wait a little bit to share it in this new context.  It's wrong to say my heart is heavy.  It's condensed in every sense of the word.

Things will start slowing down now energetically at least in the Northern Hemisphere.  But there's counter-energy speeding up in other ways and most of them are entirely unpleasant and the very opposite of life-sustaining.  Nonetheless - tomorrow or maybe today when you read this - is a day of organic balance.  Perfect and inexorable balance between light and darkness.

When I got this far I put on warmer socks and shoes and my winter (no lie) car coat.  Went outside to walk around in the front yard moving west with summer's retreating light.  We spoke together.  I noticed an entire colony of self-seeded cardinal flowers blooming in an inconvenient location.  i smiled.  Smelled a spikey bugbane flower stalk and smiled again.

The all important third smile comes from this:

Namaste

things i like about the day so far

Back in the past tense of last month I still differentiated between "bad" and "good" days.  On one of the last categorically bad days that I had I realized grim times indeed had arrived.  I did what I'd been avoiding since this entire pandemic nightmare began. I bought something over the internet specifically to make myself feel better.  Didn't try to dress it up/rationalize/turn it into some kind of metaphor or any other thing.  I felt crappy.  I bought something in a way that provides a sense of immediate gratification with the extra treat of pleasant anticipatory expectation, and immediately felt better.  There's a term for that about which I have so many thoughts/opinions/feelings I'll just write about it in a more formal way.  Let's just stick with these amazing fabulous socks that I'm currently wearing and they are indeed a thing I like about this day so far.

They were overpriced and so I did some of what the internet calls Shoe Math to make both numbers and justification match up so it squared for me. [editor's note: these aren't the only pair of socks I bought while so absolutely ripshit angry at Jared Kushner (again) that the only remotely constructive/stabilizing thing I could think to do with my logic-brain's impotence in the face of very powerful Cancerian emotional surging was to buy colorful overpriced but ecologically responsible socks.] When they arrived and I put them on my feet they said "worth every penny thank you so much."  So I in turn said thank you to PTB/cosmic grace and my privileged white lady half who said "ENOUGH I am getting those socks I keep looking at!!!"   Oh yeah.  I'm so pissed as hell at this point I'm out there buying things I don't need just because the little girl in me stills wants the kind of stuff she never had.  Reality and previously established personal/structural underpinnings are sufficiently broken down for me to feel treacherously close to bone level Self here in the land that outright refuses to stop sparkling.  So much for prologue in the name of keeping it real.  Please enjoy my MUCH enjoyed 8 a.m. walk around with the DSLR.

gah.   so hard to pick favorite flowers for me.  but morning glories are right up there.  This is the Venice Blue variety.  One of my favorite things about morning glory design is the way color (and in single color flowers, color sheen level) emphasizes the five way axis in an elongated star shape.  I mean I see that up close in real life and I swoon.

Gah again - but maybe exponentially.   Look at that one streak of cobalt and a few paint-drop kinda watered down blue circles in the lower left quadrant.  Don't know if this is a sport of Venice Pink or Venice Blue once again.  Look at the vibrant rain soaked buds and leaves.  But now if you were in the garden with me when I took the pictures, your shoes, socks and feet would have become soaked as well.  I saved the upscale new pair for my return to the house and the rest of the day.  They are tres fab. 

We have not been mowing walking paths in the field (or any of the lawns) because our mower has been out of commission.  So has everyone else's apparently.  The Guy only came to pick up ours for the actual repairs yesterday.  This makes our property a wealth for summer/autumn cusp wildcrafting.

We have been inundated with rain for a few days (it is so frustrating not to be able to send it out to the west coast ... !!!) again and so I'll need to re-hill the leeks.  You can see they're getting more leek-like.  Am going to add a scant layer of the lobster compost before adding more top soil.

lifetime resident of our front door until the glass goes up and Spider-roomie comes in until spring.  Sometimes the spider is waiting for someone to open the door, right at the edge of the screen.  My other cat didn't favor using this door to go in and out - she just liked it open at all times (and in all seasons if she'd had her druthers) so she could sit directly in front of it and Keep Track.  Mama's only interest in/relationship to doors is exiting and entering.  So that's when I first noticed the spider waiting right at the edge.  And thought "Oh maybe it will go out if I wait an extra minute"  and then thought "OH it was probably waiting for something to happen so it would have that opportunity.  The spider understands humans."

happy tulsi in the field.  Didn't get to harvesting before the rain returned and this morning I felt the vibrant colonies in the field thanking me for that.

Seasonal shifts in the field garden!  When I came out to greet the morning glories (see below) I interrupted some goldfinches who were scavenging what remains of the thistle seed.  I silently told them I wouldn't stay long and I didn't.

Finally we have discernible green beans!  They'll do well in today's strong sun phase.

The morning glories started blooming as soon as the last band of rain, and t-storms, hit the pike. I knew it and also knew I wanted the flowers' medicine spirits to be part of the co-creative mix on its own terms before I went out to greet them on mine.  Specifically:  years and years ago in my very early 20's I read a book (and don't remember which book it was where I read this) about magical gardening.  That wasn't quite where I was at but it was the closest thing and so for years I read books about that and Findhorn-related/deva-based gardening experiences of others. That kind of was where I was coming from if we overlook all the all-to-human underpinnings of "findhorn" and it's resulting community and ongoing evolution.  But being me I couldn't do that.  So I just started wingin' it.  The book I recall without remembering its name talked a LOT about inter-flower/inter-plant relationship.  What the individual plants needed from each other in order to ground and center the right kind of environment for magical working(s).   Morning glories are essential for guarding against/banishing/diluting the impact and infiltration of a dark/negative forces.  This seems like a good practical element to embrace for flower alchemy, right?  And growing the highest possible quality herbs and food crops.  So okay.  Morning glories have always been in the field since the garden's second season because GrandPa Otts seeds hitched a ride from the odd place. 

So the basic energetic/vibrational purpose of Morning Glory was fulfilled.  GrandPa Otts flowers are such deeply cosmic sentient beings (and also hardy self-sowers) that there's really no need for anything else.  Last year, I hardly noticed any Grandpa Otts in the garden.  So once we put up the part of the fence that ran north to south with an eastern face, I added a packet of the seeds to my last Kitchen Garden seed order of the season.  I thought.  Until I dreamed I had unsuccessfully repressed my first language-based response to viewing the successfully erected fence. This needs morning glories.  plenty of 'em.  Ordered three more varieties - the ones I'd dreamed of wishing I had a place to grow back in early January.  We all know about being careful with that stuff, right?  And yet still we wish.  So because I suddenly did have a place for them I ordered both the Venice Blue and Pink and also Flying Saucers and a packet of Mixed Japanese series varieties that I will definitely grow under lights in the future.

They all got in the ground super later.  SUPER late - third week of June - because in between my first and second order this seed company was quoted in a Wall St Journal article about the sharp uptick in consumer interest in food crop gardening.  YA THINK?  So they talked to three companies - two of which I had already knee-jerked my way to post haste before a larger group of gardening "everybodies" woke up to what was comin' down - about how this was affecting both their bottom line and production/turnaround schedules.  The Kitchen Seed spokesperson said they were there and responsive but running 2-3 weeks behind.  By the time I was morning glory seed shopping there was a big banner at the top of the site that said a month to five weeks.  I'm right up the road and normally takes 2 posting days tops.  It took the five full weeks this time.  So they all got a late start but are now coming along with strong verve beyond the Japanese series species which are struggling and sulky.  The intentionally planted GrandPa Otts are just now showing bud node growth.  Farther along the fence line there's a few multi-branched self-sown vines blooming beautifully.

In the sunlight and then again in the rain I gave my place here a chance to be and do whatever there is that doesn't require human hands, feet, or perception.  This isn't always easy but I've done it since we came here because it was the next logical and necessary way for me to level-up in terms of my life-long quest/desire to merge with natural intelligence.  I've been so focused on being a cog in a wheel that it's taken everything we're all witnessing and internally experiencing and living through for me to realize it's perfectly okay to go to that garden because you don't know where else to turn and you desperately need all the things a garden gives so freely. 

Gonna close out with a Pisces-driven recurring moment from my past:  When he was very young (and thus I still had years and years of ovulation/menstrual cycles ahead of me and hence was often very hormonally-driven sorts of emotional during the first-bush/first gulf war years) and I was unable to not-be-emotional around him he would unfailingly comfort me with a warm touch and a soft voice.  "Oh Mommy.  It's okay.  Tomorrow will always be tomorrow again until it isn't."

right?

 

and the sun said: we got this

Day before yesterday I hit a wall of sorts.  Some of the most draining signs it was coming were entirely self-induced.  My challenge ever since has been to love myself through the results of my ungrounded/ungrounding efforts rather than beating myself up that here we are again, Ace.  Loving myself through the results of something I should have seen coming or even better yet avoided altogether is no small task for someone like me. So that's kinda what's still the major point of pragmatic and ongoing focus.

I decided to start with the one true thing.  for me yesterday, that involved going outside in the pouring rain (this was very early yesterday morning) and standing at the north eastern edge of the field just beyond the garden fence.  I asked the invisible earthly sun to help.  Also explained what I had done to myself and how also I had known better than to have done it.  And then.  Wow.  I felt the whole surface of the field sort of fold around the edges of itself energetically so it vibed like more of a bowl.  And the earthly sun medicine spirit said to me "we got this."

and I knew somehow that the "we" was me and the earthly sun.  Didn't understand what it meant and saw no trace of the sun from one end of yesterday to the other.  Today I woke just about as early and noticed immediately how/why I woke up.  The sun was in my eyes.  Before that, when it was still yesterday/raining, and I had the sense it was going to take more creativity than I possessed to deal with even a single more day of rain without losing my dwindling supply of goodwill, I tried to push past the negativity, man.  I went out with my good camera and took pictures in the side pocket gardens.  They were hushed, water-logged and dripping with moody secrets destined to remained untold.  Was just starting to find my groove, and lots of previous unnoticed garden seedlings like the cardinal flower above, when the rain drops began to fall again.  I mean they fell again.  again.  and again and again and again.

Usually when people bitch about the rain and how they 'don't like' it (especially once it goes on for longer than an hour or two a time every once in a while) I talk about the ground and all the drought cycles we have that we never used to have, etc.  But in this most recent rain binge?  I, too, am absolutely sick of the rain.   Also lightning.  Totally totally completely and absolutely done with lightning.  Have only experienced this frame of mind three or four times previously in my life.  All the other occasions involved enormous frustration while traveling fairly rough across country and wishing to camp in specific places for equally specific reasons but no dice.  It happened in '82 and again in '03.

But me being sick of rain is immaterial to the deeper concern I hold - The ground will get sick if the rain keeps going.  Or rather not the ground itself so much as everything that's trying to grow in soil rather than watery mud under cloudy skies.  As I had feared while sitting inside imagining what was happening in the field between lightning strikes - much of the formerly gorgeous tomato crop has begun to rot.  The beans aren't rotting but they're still an inch and a half long and no wider than they were when I brought in the shallots.  The squash are fine but I want to keep them that way and so I've been reading how to complete the curing process inside.  Have studied repeatedly the exact way they're supposed to be cut from the vine so the curing process isn't interrupted or short-changed.  I will probably screw it up anyway but I say that with a great deal of love for myself rather than self-castigation.

There are a few plants that don't suffer from so much rain.  One is Cardinal Flower.  I originally had two little plants that I hoped to grow into a super colony before I left earth.  They were devoured entirely by insects.  But not before the few straggly flowers apparently set seed.  All the rain brought all the cardinal flower seedlings to attention.  I could see where many bud heads had previously withered too badly to survive but two did and the others had just enough color to them that I could see where the plants were located.  I drew a little map/chart in the dirt and have since gone out to recreate the guidance system on paper with next spring in mind.

 You can see how rain soaked everything is because the flower above had been sitting in full sun for at least two hours and its was still absolutey saturated. I am absolutely saturated  as well and thus grateful this is the full moon in the water sign of Pisces rather than one of the two others. If it were Cancer I'd still be crying and laughing like a lunatic with poor to no ability to explain why.  With scorpio I'd still be sitting quietly somewhere in a calm and relatively dark place.

Or else, far more realistically, let's face it.  I'd still be dancing around to Mambo Sun just to see if I could take myself all the way to other side of whatever the hell that was.  But it was ever-remarkable Pisces.  Therefore I went into that void.  The no-thing-ness.  It was, as always, incredibly supportive in that the void supports all forms of energy.  To me it's like an enormous cosmic hammock supporting all.  forms.  of.  energy.   Once I got that about Pisces I started to be incrementally less concerned about the way my son spun out emotionally. He was two and three during this time frame.  And he also has a scorp ascendant and a sag moon so he spun out a lot.  Emotionally and otherwise.

What I noticed about his spin outs is that they also had what J called drive-backs.  He'd spin all the way out, then kind of donut-circle-drive around all the way out there for however long it took him to get the whole thing untangled within himself and then he'd drive himself all the way back.  In like an hour, tops.  And then not understand (this part remains the same...) why others are still oscillating about the fact that he was tremendously upset but he's not upset anymore so what's the problem.

Understanding the maternal metrics of likewise understanding my kid's personality helped me understand who I was at the core.  Not as a mother.  Not as a grown up.  Not as a kid myself wandering around inside my adult mind and body wondering what to do next.   At the core.   At the core it's said we're all the same and thus all Heart.  Today's vibe still has the all-heart energy of the Piscean full moon and within that window I'm preparing the essence bowl pictured above from Angel Wing begonia flowers. 

T loves having this one put in a bowl of orange water with some lavender essential oil.  I place a few of my great-grandmother's cut glass finger bowls with the combination near places in our common areas that he frequents and then when he's wilting or lookin' flinty I point out the bowl and he stands watching with a silent glow while I replenish the essence and essential oil drops.  I love that this is one of the ways he enjoys being loved by his mom.  And then afterwards he keeps track of the bowl in that he'll look towards it in the room from time to time along with his survey of the other things he enjoys seeing.

It feels nice.  I think doing it while also steadying the ongoing lo-fi blessing of I'm your mother and I love you very much really does 'nice-ify' the rooms' vibrations. 

Begonia's vibrational and healing signatures are written in the key of Heart.  The flowers themselves as they grow often shape shift and evolve into secondary forms of elaborate beauty that at times seem more than a bit otherworldly.  Sound familiar fish lovers?  I'm making this essence with myself and my son and our described unceremony of meaning in mind.  We are both getting hardened by these times and all the thoroughly toxic and corrupt individuals who are making so much noise.  We share an affinity for dark humor that's currently running on scant fumes.  We're both done.  But we're freakin' water signs.  There's no such thing as "done" we simply become uncontained and uncontainable.

Until all that emotional and mental and psychic chaos of no borders or boundaries finds a way to crash or stumble into Heart territory.  And things get quiet.  And if they aren't going to become quiet by themselves we begin to look around at how we can create other forms of quiet to compensate and rebalance.

Today I'm also preparing something both cardinal flower and jewelweed called me to be prepared-to-prepare.  Today's cloudless sky and full-on sun was something I had to take on faith.  I also took the pictures in case it was sunny and I wanted 'nice' images from my nice camera to include in a post.

The bowl above is a very obvious and much welcomed 'raincheck' from my customary birthday bowl.  It holds cardinal flower - which is equally and simulataneously super-grounding and elevating for the first chakra as well as being a ceremonial vibrational stand-by - and jewelweed which is a very versatile essence several flower alchemists in my modest circle of such have been mentioning as seeming on an evolutionary curve that hasn't come all the way into focus.  All I know is that I've never in my 24 years here in central MA seen jewelweed flowers so large and full and vibrantly expressive of their full Being.  We had a rainy later spring but then drought in between the two rain cycles.  The dry periods were also quite hot.  The combo killed off most of the Jewelweed plants.  We're talking hundreds of plants all told.  Yesterday both of these medcine spirits said to me TOMORROW.  I didn't have much focus or sustained energy or even a clear sense of my physical body.  But I did have faith.  Not saying that part has anything to do with how today's turning out but it is what I had.  Didn't think I "had" much of anything at the time beyond a heaping wealth of personal short-sightedness. 

But I did also have faith and I don't know why but I honestly believe I was born with it. 

Jewelweed is for people who don't know how to slow down. In an unchallenged/unilluminated state they don't know what 'stop' means until their mind or body or both provide a glaringly clear definition.  It's also for people who've confused productivity with gear-stripping.  And whose personal definitions of "uncomplicated" would leave most people with crossed eyes and/or the need to speak up and say something.    does any of that sound familiar??

the bowl also contains a single teeny tiny broadloaf plantain flower.   That's for balance in all ways and all things.  I work with the Plantain medicine spirit and the plant's vibrational energy a lot.  Am loving how it might feel to be aware of the tiny ping of a presence of this beloved energetic signature.  There are three red sage flowers for all the usual sagey-reasons in the key of red/securing and illuminating the first chakra.  And there are innumerable tiny individually cut and loved all the way into the bowl fragrant heliotrope flowers.   This is an essence for folks who don't know how/when/why to stop beating themselves up.  a-hem.  Think I'm gonna re-read yesterday's post on my other blog with Fleetwood Mac's Yesterday's Gone playing in the background.  And maybe just for balance and because I love this man so so much I'll follow it up with mega-pisces George H's Horse To The Water.

Already listening to it so I could find the link to put above and below.  You'd think I'd be out of things to mention loving about George and his music but here's something else.  I LOVE that this song is his final musical word.  It really speaks to those two ever so pointy-points on the tips of the Vesica Piscis.  One goes all the way up and the other absolutely never forgets we are also all-one as on all of us inhabiting the same planet and all it contains. Including our own entirely human human-nature.  What I love about Pisces extrapolation the most is the way the energy entices us with something like  "look. here's the limits of earthly consciousness.  Here's the limit of having limits.  Oh look.  here's the other side of consciousness.  It's all one.  It's all the Same."  And the creative art of all types that comes from that energy all holds that message without even having to look very closely.  But when you do you are always richly rewarded. 

Horse To The Water time is upon us, imo.   It's kind of the way "everybody else" seems to be living. Set it up on You Tube and listen while you do something else.  Sam Brown kills the vocals.  From the Albert Hall memorial concert.

*Partway through the Harrison segue J called up the stairs to tell me I had essence bowls on the verge of shade.  Got out and moved them in time but not before entangling myself in a few dozen burdock seedheeds. They are everywhere.  Always.  In all stages of formation and decay.  After I moved the bowls by the pool I went out and double checked the bowl in the field.  Felt when first setting it out that it would like to moved more to the center of the field beyond the garden once the sun was higher in the sky.  Will talk about that bowl and the experience in my next post.

The seeds and the inside of the seed casing is SUPER itchy.  Had to change my shirt and in a perfect world would have also had a shower then and there.  Any number of dwindling burdock plants are left in inconvenient places to seed because the locations mark bird flyways and the seeds are beloved and extremely beneficial after the black frost - for the chickadees who come in from deeper woods and the finches who stay year round.

During yesterday's earlier morning break from rain I captured the Hydrangea bush.  Subsequently had a dream while napping that I told the bush I really disliked the name of the variety and that I felt saying it out loud (Pinkie Winkie) was both diminishing and disrespectful. Today when I was out in the same place gathering the cardinal flowers, jewelweed, and a single tiny plantain bloom I kept going over to the bush because it was beckoning yet not.  When the bowl was set into the grass while I re-stabilized I was looking directly at the bush.  It definitely looked back at me.  When that was established - my knowing it had a conscious bead on me - the bush communicated its wish to be known as Madame Butterfly.

Much better, no?

how she was

It's a beautiful morning to be outside but I'm waiting another hour or so to let more dew evaporate.  It's going to be a big harvesting day in my efforts to get as much done as I can before the tomatoes rule my days, dreams, and nightmares.  I know it's coming.  Every evening when we go out to see how the day's been for the garden J looks at the wealth of steadily growing and ripening tomatoes and turns his head so I won't see his silent laugh.

In this interim morning off to loaf and laugh in my studio I also searched out a few images of Celeste in the field.  Love the one above.  It's very hard for a calico cat to be truly stealth in this kind of landscape but she let her wild & determined personality carry her along in its place.

This is kind of a weird choice but it's also perfect because J's campchair is in nearly the same spot as her memorial statue.  Also because she's showing her affection while gnawing on the hem of his shorts.  She loved doing this but only with J.

23 years is a long time for a cat.

she loved her place in our family and was determined to keep it.

and she has.

I was conscious of my own determination to hold fast to our bond.  Cutting it was difficult.  But as she left more fully in that moment I felt her telling me a summer would come when I'd find her everywhere.

and I have ...

 

 

 

happy birthday, Pearl

Very early this morning I had a dream that my grandmother was making a slow perambulation of the field garden.  She was wearing a brown and white check dress she favored and vigorously shaking the fence wire all around the perimeter.  When I woke up I was still partially in the dream and then I remembered today was her birthday.  She'd come to check and make sure what I most value remains safe.  Still on her watch of watching over me.  Probably has been through all the years I felt no sense of vibratory connection.  Waiting for that change.  Picking her moment as old women do.

Usually, if I happen to be blogging on her birthday, I prepare a written tribute the day before with just a single image of her at the top.  Today I thought I'd work with image prompts I snapped as I  moved with my thoughts of her on this morning's inspection tour.  Things around the place that remind me of her.  Things I believe she would love and/or strongly approve of.  And, in the case of above, something she gave me on one of my own tween birthdays. 

She would sometimes remind me when I was especially sad (usually about not "having" a father) that we were both born of the summer when everything grows and makes seeds for the years to come.  She would jostle me by the shoulders none too gently but her voice held that lion's purr of persuasion at all times.  She would insist we understood how to live perfectly fine without parents or siblings helping us understand how because we were born in the season of life itself.  And then she'd give me science-y books of successful distraction to read like the one above.

***

  Always - from her to me for all holidays and also just-because gifts that were usually based on sale price windfalls - there were books. Not "a" book (although there was nearly always an extra special book that got saved as the last thing to be opened at her insistence) but books in the plural. 

(I don't have many of the books my grandmother gave me and scarcely any of her (many) other gifts including what was stipulated in her will as mine to inherit.  My mother systematically destroyed or gave away nearly everything important to me and/or my grandmother, generally right in front of me, in the wake of Pearl's death.  So the book above is super-precious to me.)

Having been raised through cycles of somewhat profound deprivation she also survived reversals of fortune borne of the depression, a hound dog of a husband who spent a great deal of his money on other women, and escalating racial tensions she feared would be the absolute death of our democracy.  She could be flinty and harsh when passing judgement on those who did not know how to suck it up and get on with things in an absence of emotional overwhelm.

she raised me, a person who is emotionally overwhelmed on an average of two or three times an hour, to get on with things just as she did.  This part of my background has taught me a lot over the long haul.  Think people who read here would for the most part agree that I do, in fact, get on with things.  And much like this complicated and always passionate woman who showed me what's what about being female and living in the world, I can be undeniably flinty and well past my last nerve when it comes to those who weren't raised to come through come hell or high water.  Although I wonder a lot , and always have, about what life would be like with those kind of options I'm not sure I'd be well suited to living in such a way myself.

Pearl understood I was a creature of volition long before I did.

The first time it occurred to me that Pearl's spirit might travel to visit and explore our place it was during the meditation portion of my morning yoga practice during the late winter of '17.  I suddenly saw her standing in the woods pictured above as they were when I first went outside at quarter of 7.  She was in her brown and white checked dress with her hands on her hips and her head thrown back so she could scan the tree tops.  She whistled a series of flawless bird calls.  And I opened my eyes, pulled out of the meditation and said out loud "Yes that's what she would do first if she came to visit."

If she was alive I can imagine her getting out of the car for the first time and heading directly towards the woods to commune with the bird nations she loved so dearly.  Kind of like I and many I know get out of our cars and don't really say hello to any of the humans happy though we may be to see them so much as we go wandering as if magnetized straight to the nearest garden space.

My grandmother's legacy is multi-plexic but she definitely taught me that whatever's wrong in human life can be healed by something you'll find in the natural kingdoms.  And unlike many holy rollers of those times and since - my grandmother didn't believe in a strong-armed interpretation of man having dominion over all other life forms.  She believed we didn't deserve our brains or our hearts if we didn't act like we knew how to use them.  I can easily see her chaining herself to a nuclear facility's chain-link fence or a redwood tree's trunk.

Pearl raised me to take no shit.  From anybody.  If something was wrong, anywhere for any reason, it was my duty to speak up.  To understand the problem from an overview level and help re-arrange a point of conflict's individual parts if I could.  She raised me to boycott, to actively put my body on the line in protest, to pray on problems I had no idea how to solve under my own steam, and to never forget absolutely everything and every person connects to everything else and every other person.

Something previously inexperienced began to happen after I had the vision of her standing in the woods with her hands on her hips.  It involves a cat.  My grandmother loved cats.  So did I but I was forbidden to have one and eventually given a dog who didn't like me at all and vice versa.  Be that as it may I associate double-leo Pearl with cats.  I once went into somebody's house to discover their most reclusive of four cats, Minerva, sitting expectantly on the counter right by the door I'd entered.  I had the spontaneous idea she was conveying one of those silent cat messages but picking up on any specifics was not my reading forte.  But the special human to the cat aka the friend I was visiting was an animal communicator.  She told me Minerva - who never came out to greet guests let alone wait expectantly for their arrival - wished me to know something:

You're grandmother's waiting for you.  Somewhere.  In the woods.

Since then it's become my habit while woods wandering to sometimes ask tentatively and sometimes with loud exuberance if Pearl is present and would like to account for herself.  To no avail until I started to realize something about the times I've been doing it most recently here at home.  Anytime I talked to Pearl, Mama would come racing to the scene.  Sometimes I'd see her approach or hear the thud of galloping feetsies but usually she was just suddenly there.  And she'd commence scratching like crazy on the trunk of the nearest tree.

This morning when Mama came galloping I actively wondered if there was a connection. 

and then I thought about the fact that even though my grandmother wouldn't recognize a lot about today's world and the ways my family personally lives within it she would undoubtedly recognize the part of my container garden that remains disaffected by my overall efforts to up my Final Effect game by summer's mid-point.

Am referencing the stuff on the pool skirt.  This is how Pearl herself gardened although I didn't make the connection until this moment.  If she were somehow here today I have a good idea of what she'd do.  Stand over me with her hands on her hips until I took the perennial red sage out of the beautiful pot which is clearly too small and get it duly situated in something larger and lackluster in appearance.

Perhaps that's where I'll start delayed-by-heat chores rounds this evening.

(my grandmother quite successfully taught me that the look of a place couldn't hold a candle to its cumulative atmosphere and effective purpose.  In that respect and a good many others she would have approved whole-heartedly in my choice of husband.    She would also find him suitably generous of his cumulative resources in a long haul way with just the right level of big flashes to show proof of a kind she always noticed and highly prized - that what mattered to me also mattered to him if only by default.)

took about six pics in a row while Mama sat there gazing at me and I asked if my grandmother's spirit was afoot within her.  was figuring it might be one of those occasions where one or two pics in the chain showed obvious activity of anOther sort.

nope. 

but then again, knowing Pearl, she keeps her options fluid and body surfs ...

During my first of today's visits to the garden I picked the first ripe tomato.  Cut the Blush baby in half so J and I could share this first homegrown taste.  Our jersey roots kind of mandate we make something of a ceremony of it for each type of tomato grown.  This variety offers a sweet burst of cherry tomato taste coupled with extra meaty full tomato-flavored flesh.  Hoped it would be perfect equally for salads, sandwiches and stir frys.  And it will.  Could probably also handle a barbecue skewer.

thumbs up. 

Will share small packets of seed for anyone who might like to have a go next year.

the caveat:  given enough space, light, and manure these vines are super prolific food bearers that have reached the end of their stake length here at the high summer mark.   That's why I'm offering small amounts of seed.  Even if I grow 2 plants max every year for the next few I will not be able to use up the seed while it's viability level is close to full potency. 

last night I could not sleep - already! - over exactly what I plan to do with all the emergent tomatoes as they ripen.  It was a rousing un-success but then just now as I'm sitting here making this post I realized I can chop them up with some of last year's shallots and create a cooked-down stock base that can be frozen in meal-planning chunks.  Will experiment also with freezing the fruits whole as well.  Even though it brings up immediate flashbacks of a Little Findhorn experience involving several gallon freezer bags full of yellow pear cherry tomatoes that did not unthaw so much as mush themselves into oblivion.

~*~guess it's obvious I have re-thought my level of willing accommodation to the Too Many Words contingent of email consideration points in recent times.

I came back to blogging in order to do it deliberately.  And for me that's impossible without words in sufficient number to the themes.~*~

happy solstice!

~May you travel peacefully yet with a renewed sense of personal capabilities for tremendous growth and fruition during these days of the long sun~

clarity & focus

Unexpected yet incredibly well timed - was called to prepare a flower essence around noon today.  Above shows the bowl shortly after settling it in perfect suspended balance between two of the repurposed field rocks.  It contains three vibrant blooms from the largest surviving Montana Blue Centaurea. This flower essence is all about vision that's both crystalline and comprehensive.  Can think of no quality more relevant to these times. 

***

one of the fleece flower's stalks topped by an exploding baseball-sized sphere of still tightly budded flower panicles.  the Fair Maiden lives!  holding breath a bit waiting to see if she blooms as well.

Took this documentation just prior to 'staking forward' per the plant's suggestion.

Discovered the echinacea that's appeared utterly eclipsed by the foxglove has managed to thrive enough to produce a side-shoot clump of itself.   This was completely concealed and utterly unknown to me before the staking.  Have spent some high octane quality time in this general portion of the evolving sanctuary bed today.   The energetics feel good.   See below the rough facsimile of an isosceles triangle formed by the three vibrant blooms that offered themselves for the essence bowl.

Love the fact that one of the flowers is completely red violet.

light & green

on Sunday I spent an entirely pleasant few hours sitting in a camp chair with a pair of noise-cancelling headphones.  spent a bit of time looking around and breathing deeply.  Snapping pictures from time to time but mostly I was spotting for J while he did this:

and this

and also this

With no prior experience and only a variety of you-tube videos for guidance an early learning mistake was the best of all way-showers.  J had to dig the augur out manually.  That gave me time to take pictures of places I love to document as they flow towards full leafing.

Hickories are the last to leaf.  and also one of the most beautiful unfurling ballets branch-to-branch.

The familiar view expands with fresh life.

earlier in the day (at 7:30 a.m.) I set-out a bowl with three Iris flowers. 

Here's the bowl at its alchemical mid-point.  This is one of the most radiant and light soaked mother stocks I've had the honor of shaking to life.  It's astounding to me what's been unfolding bowl by bowl.  The summer season hasn't started and I've already harvested 11 essences. 

***

On Monday we were meant to finish getting the fence post holes augured.  Instead I spiked a fever and then had a most un-pretty meltdown due to a debilitating fibromyalgia flare-up that refused to let me push through it to the other side is how I think of it.  I've had three flare-ups in the past two weeks.  Feels like an entirely lateral shift from fleeting but mercilessly potent anxiety attacks of the previous few weeks. 

J was okay about the tool going back with having only used it one day of the two he'd planned.  Said using the powerful machine the day before 'took a toll' and as a result he was fine with the zen of digging all the rest of the holes - save one that will be difficult.  There may be more problem-soiving needed between us as a result.

Look how she's growing!   I will try to get a better shot of the branch canes which are hugely attractive to me.  Kind of like bamboo at this stage.  Spent yesterday doing nothing but read The Year of the Flood, plan what I hoped to be able to accomplish today in the outside world (I did), and watering the host of seedlings pictured below.  Fall asleep about 6:30 in the evening.  Slept through until 5:30.  Got up and walked around just to see how my joints felt once in motion.  I felt at 60% capacity and trusted I would renew even more energy and cellular nurturing over the coming days. 

Right now I am accepting that part of what's involved in getting back into physical balance will involve re-setting my weird classic-teenage biorhythms. My physical/mechanical body had an ongoing conversation with both my soul and critical thinking brain.  By day's end I'd replaced grim what if this means that and then that and that and that with a sense of optimism.  Because:

Everything from my basement greenhouse is happy and we are in the throes of planting a little here and there.  This evening J and I transplanted three clumps of red bee balm from the very edge of the transplant bed.  It's being pushed out of the garden by a ground-cover(ing) veronica that ran wild at the old place.  I did not bring any here on purpose!  Took five years to appear and since then everything else is being pushed farther and farther into the grass.  I worried the three bee balm colonies we ultimately relocated would be destroyed or seriously maimed by the fence process. 

Just before twilight J dug troughs roughly a third deeper than necessary.  I added lobster compost and J chopped it in the soil below the trough then remixed after adding the dug-up soil.  We planted the first two with equal measure of care and firmness.    As we worked J made ongoing note of the soil's superb condition.  How free of root pieces and little stones it was.  When we got to the last chosen planting site the soil was so impeccable he said

you weren't fucking around.

allowing myself a shy quiet moment of pride I then felt it was important to provide context.  I pointed down at the soil and said

this was the day we found out T needed a biopsy.

We planted that clump extra tenderly. 

The waxing crescent moon of this evening was fantabulous

yesterday & today

Clearly the biggest news of late is the reappearance of Snappy.   My first sighting occurred on this same date last year.  Recall my grandmother's Way of driving me to contemplate snapping turtles to help myself drop down into a quieter center of personal gravity.   Knew instinctively what I was looking at  there on a rock ringing the frog pond and yet hoped to be wrong about the species.  Snappy was fairly tiny at this time last year and s/he's still pretty small.   Between 5 and 6 inches.   In the interim everything about the creature has grown into its cellular etching, natural form, and patterning.  Like all turtles this is a very well designed creature. Plus, of course, it bites to devastating degree.  J and I were both hoping s/he'd moved on at nature's urging.  But. Realistically that was two people hoping there'd be no need to deal with yet another problematic Thing just now.  Why on earth would s/he move on when s/he has a pond stuffed to its gills with plump tadpoles.  there's a lot to Snappy's story and the amount of time/thought/reluctant turning to heart space I've put into the situation. 

Saw Snappy for the first time yesterday when I was on my way out to the firepit to process two essence bowls.  one joins my flower & stone roster: aquamarine and celandine.  that was planned.  Once I'd set down the bowl I looked at the self-resurrecting (deer systematically eat it down to bare earth later in the season when they take to bedding down in that corner of the field) strawberry patch.  Collecting flowers in the bowl brought open-crown hyper-realism to my awareness of the individual blooms.  I'd never fully noticed the perfect green pentacles formed by the sepals' frame of sparkling white flowers!

Strawberry's flower medicine spirit was an enveloping mantle of good cheer.  Simmering just below the walking-around crust of what the day contained.  I felt it rise and caught a few breaths to comprehend what the experience was teaching me.  Any plant or other form of sentience can do this.  Our particular species is probably the slowest learner to be found - but still.  I was enveloped by Strawberry's healing signature and the organic nature of its medicine spirit.    I have no prior experience with something so spontaneous, complete, and fluid.  Strawberry entered my senses and enveloped every part of me with ease and confident optimism.

I was invited to linger within my collection process - to treat this specific experience like a spiritual cleanse and soulful picnic.    And so I jumped into a whole other way of being.  Instead of monomaniacal focus on The Process and its undeviating Procedure I took off my shoes and socks.   Used a set of the filters from the aqua/celandine bowl to saturate the soles of my feet  until I felt a tingling gratitude for the nourishment.  took the next filter and moved into the urge to swipe it from my forehead to belly.  It was the most relaxed and organically meaningful experience of my week so far. 

Rubbed the strawberry filters on primary and secondary heart chakras front and back.  Then an upward swipe from heart to crown.  

Later in the evening my much anticipated order of Blue Vervain/Verbena hasta arrived via Fed Ex.  The plants were in transit for two days and are still un-kinking themselves on the back deck.  Had originally planned to get nine then dropped back on both expectations and plans in the wake of  T needing the biopsy followed almost immediately by J's layoff.  Will plant in two groups of three or three groups of two.  Probably the first.  Hope for enough seedlings to take hold so I can raise them as the third group I originally envisioned.

Here's a lovely( 4:13 minutes) blue vervain primer from radiant bee loving Deb Soule.

Read through the company's unpacking/further acclimation info.   I've only ordered live plants once before - from this same company in the wake of their annual seasonal clearance sale.  I remember being impressed and grateful for the careful packaging - as I was this time.  But based on the size of the plants I received previously I'd imagined the six above would be roughly half the size and age they are.  These are very well established plants.  I know where I'm planting them but first they need some days to acclimate and harden off.  They're joined on the top deck by the basement seedlings.

The picture above documents my 2020 'nurture babies' having their third day on the deck.  It's their first experience with dappled morning sun.  Am leaving them outside for progressively longer periods of time.  They still need protection from wind and rain in addition to the shock of NE night temps.

This morning I got up early.  Motivated myself in roughly a tenth of the time that's become my hunkered-down slow poke mode-of-choice.  Was determined to get the shallot sets in the ground - plus do some other field-based chores - before the sun lost its cooling slant from the east.  Planted ten rows of 5 sets.  Have a means to safely and effectively share the overage that thrills me in its simplicity and the organic way the opportunity/connection came together. Once I'd hustled myself out I took my mindful-mode time getting things in the ground.  Was deeply appreciative of J's level of care in the removal of thickly matted grass clumps and stones of all shapes.   And the careful way he'd mixed in topsoil so all I had to do was add rows of lobster compost and be equally careful mixing everything together.  Enjoyed rattling over this year's shallot site so much that I walked through the whole garden in various configurations while rattling.  Figuring out where the tramped-down pathways will be once the fence is up.

You are asserting yourself.  We welcome you as one.

Same acknowledgement and encouragement as the other day.

My first layer of clearing effort has now reached a point I wasn't sure I'd be able to achieve. Now I need to put muscle into eradicating some of the wild pea vines that are a story unto themselves.   My plan is to get as much clear soil as I can - in patches here and there if need be - in order to broadcast amaranth with deliberately placed clusters of sunflowers.  A sunflower house is too much fussy work for all the other Things.  But I'll raise just as much joy as possible growing bird food for the many different species who live here ringing the field with their songs and activities.

a shadow-selfie from yesterday's energetic picnic at the fire pit.  love the way my hat's shadow makes me look like a pumpkin head.

underground they waited