Sparkling Lotus Ink

sometimes it isn't raining

I wrote a post with this same title and image that I thought out in advance as an ongoing mid-day activity.  It was careful to be: careful, mindful, and neutral-gear neutral.  Maybe that was the problem.  Or maybe it was just retro merc shadow type stuff  or one of those lazy thumbed keystrokes you don't intentionally make.

Gonna take that as a hint and stay in real-life-while-on-the-internet mode which is how I've been for the past couple of days.  Just say what's true for me.  If the sheer certainty of my voice's willingness to speak at that level is either off-putting or offensive that's a very unfortunate point of unintentional impact on my part. 

I've shuttered my creativity blog for reasons I'll be blunt enough to label underbelly bullying of an eye-rollingly tenacious nature.  And that's all I'll be saying on the subject barring uniquely extenuating one on one circumstances.

As far as this primary blog space I'm going to get back to where I left off within my planned blog posts somewhere right around the time Covid came along.  Somebody I taught to be the kind of person who could facilitate such a thing sat with me yesterday after carefully but firmly suggesting I allow myself to at least make a full and complete list of people central to my life who've died since the beginning of the year.  The phrase "pragmatic grasp" was applied and I had to ask for a pen so I could write it on my hand lest I forget. 

I taught him very well.  And that's all that really needs to be said.

so I said it to him directly there in the moment and his eyes lit up above his mask.  And his mouth was already moving to ask well what did I simply want to say to him?  And I smiled under my mask.  I said I wanted to tell him a story he's tired of hearing but I wanted him to stay with me all the way as if he never heard it before - right up until the end of my trademark rim shot interrogative that's a major part of my storytelling-for-a-purpose shtick.  And he shut his eyes and threw his head back and groaned because he knew what was coming.

When this person was three I met him for the first time.  His mother was a friend of mine I'd met in the UK and that's where they lived.  Until they came here for the first time and I met him as a three year old who marched directly in front of me and pointed just as directly at my third eye with bold certainty. 

he said "I know you.  I know you from BEFORE."

So I said that but with a lot more embellishment about their home when they first arrived and his mom and also stuff his father said about it all later on in the evening.  And he was nodding with his eyes shut trying to push himself past his resistance to yet again hearing this story he's heard way too many times.  But never from me.  Because let's face it. I have my own son to annoy with comparably off-told stories that prove some or another hippie-dippy point of mine.  This other guy's father?  Is relentless with this particular tale.

And I saw him make the pivot in his 'memory' of everyone under the sun telling him this story which he doesn't remember because HIS big takeaway of that day was apparently this person arrives with chocolate bars.  His eyes shot open and he looked at me.  He was nodding his head okay.  I never heard YOU tell me this story before about what I said.  I was getting this all from his eyes and that's because of masks.  And, obvi, people who are willing to wear them.  Eye language flourishes when there's nothing else to scan that speaks to collective humanity as we instinctively best recognize through our own and each other's faces.

And I watched his eyes think (another favorite thing of mine to notice about people important to me) and then he said "what is the interrogative?"

"What if," I asked him.  " 'Before' was Now?"

Whoa.

the return of RED

Most of the maples here turn bright yellow or deep plum.  Scattered here and there we have a few scarlet leaved trees. For the past several years they haven't turned color but simply browned, shriveled, and fell in a few days' time.  I presumed it had something to do with lessened rainfall and virtually no snow cover for a few years in a row.  So now I'm drawing the highly unscientific conclusion that my intuition held a degree of merit.  Nobody can say we had insufficient rain this year.  We also managed, at least here, to maintain a thin layer of snow and snow-packed ice. 

The picture above looks like one enormous tree but that's a skew in perspective.   The elm stripling seemingly divides the tree in half visually.  But it's actually two trees on either side of the narrow shady path that leads to the field.

The picture above was taken on the same day I took the images in the previous post.  The others were taken during a break in the rain afternoon before last.  Today it's sunny but everything's kind of or outright swampy for my waterproof shoes.  Have been dealing with neurological pain for several days running somewhere between 5 and 7 on the pain scale.  Even with effective healing options that kind of thing becomes physically draining the longer it's in play.  Today needs to be a gentle recuperation day rather than a get out there and ... get! out there!! wall-to-wall productive experience. 

When it was merely drizzling J raked leaves from the side dooryard and the driveway.  I took these pics during what we thought was a return to sunlight but then right after dark a fresh deluge began.  Glad he bumped that task to the head of the list.  We would have had flooding problems for sure if the leaves had been there causing major and secondary dams in the driveway.

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Am thinking a lot about the color red as it relates to rootedness, grounding, and the first/primary chakra.  I feel a strong connection between that mental activity and seeing the red splashes in the landscape.  Even yesterday, when the rain intensity was authentically biblical, I could see through the watery blur those same red beacons of years past.  I'm glad they're back.  Everything peaked on the holiday weekend - same as what used to be normal.

Another highly unscientific conclusion I've reached is that the Turkey Buzzards are actively altering their hunting flight circles as more leaves fall.   Their return to a former roosting spot in the big oak tree just over our property line is another sign of previous normalcy laying new claim to the landscape.   Also when I first saw their hulking forms sunning near the top of that tree through our bedroom window I immediately thought purification.  Also thought of sky burials.

Still reading Lab Girl 30-40 pages at a time first thing in the morning.  It's a very worthwhile book This habit of maintaining ongoing slow reads of pleasantly rewarding books rather than incarnating via doomscrolling (or 'necessary' fiction/non-fiction) has proven invaluable.  I actually enjoy waking up in the morning. That makes it a lot easier to evaluate/understand the way I feel moving forward with my day. 

stability takes many forms at the internalized level.

...a sense of personal rootedness...

in sunnier daze

It is once again cold and rainy.  The images are three days old when it was warm enough to lie flat on the cement pool skirt with Mama.  Took about a dozen pics from that angle.  Above there's a pair of circling Turkey Buzzards.  Was a little bit uhhhhh over the one on the left coming out as a kind of reverse aquamarine colored negative.

The flaming red maple is the tree that beckoned me to prepare an essence in the early spring.  The towering honey locust on the far right was a stripling volunteer most inconveniently located.  I discovered it in very late fall.  I saw the leafless branching pattern and hoped it was an Elderberry.  Now there is a second offspring honey locust growing in a less inconvenient spot.

quite the libra, he was ...

remastered version of my favorite John Lennon song. 

Also reading Alan Light on the subject of JL's complex legacy.

Autumn Views

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!

many overlapping interests .1

"Emily always has the last word"  Lynn Margulis

yesterday I received a gift of what can only be called liminal proportions.  It's the re-issue printing of the Emily Dickinson tarot deck from Factory Hollow Press.  The deck is amazing in so many ways before it's even considered as a divination tool.

The deck is a collaborative effort of five women artists. 

The rest of this post will focus on Halie Theoharides' interpretation of the major arcana.  She worked from an insect palette.

   the Emily quote below the card from a different deck* is a perfect match, imo, for the card backing artwork and the very dreamy way it feels to shuffle this deck. (*correlating to the traditional High Priestess card - the above is from the Greenwood Tarot deck).  The Dickinson deck includes a card with just those words, as glimpsed above.  Am considering putting it in the deck as a kind of wild card but maybe not until I see how I'm nudged to concretely relate to and with this deck. 

On my creativity blog I mentioned writing fathers and also my sense of an entire tribe of writing mothers.  I would see Emily as the reigning matriarch of that tribe although I never thought of it concretely until just now.  I certainly think about her when I'm out wandering in our little field, the front lawn and house dooryards because it's the same landscape, essentially, that she knew.  The same species of plants I love, nurture, and gather are framed on the wall of her house in the form of exemplar reconstructions of her original herbarium. 

rabbits rabbits

I love Chesca Potter's artwork and every single card of the Greenwood Tarot.  Although the card above is from the earth suite, I think it's a marvelous illustration for the full moon in Aries.  Also a good tie-in for the first day of the month.

Mama's been recuperating from a leg strain.  Yesterday she went out for the first time in many days.  She had tight supervision for about 40 minutes or so.  Then the wind kicked up enough for her to voluntarily scamper inside.  Today it was far milder.  She was out for about two and a half hours.  And then this happened up in the studio:

It's a period of gear shifting.  A deeper level of internalization that's burnished by introspection as organic as outer radiations were just weeks in the past tense.  One of the nine delicata squash didn't cure properly but the other eight look wonderful.  Our meager shallot harvest will be enough.  We still have many from last year's harvest that are firm and juicy to supplement. 

While I was looking for the red Challenger rabbits the two of Cups kept flipping out of the pile asking for contemplation.  The entire deck is this beautiful and deep.  Have been thinking a lot about the sacred inner union of male and female polarity contained in each of us.  It feels very important right now to focus on forms of polarity that are sacred and organic to the natural kingdoms/natural law.  To literally raise the tone of our inner landscape.  To understand how attraction works not just for but within us.  I've thought about this process a lot during this particular calendar year.  Lived various aspects of the process in ways that feel divinely enhanced and others that felt far more like a collection of broken watch gears, coffee sludge, and yesterday's papers.   Now it seems I need some time to wander most quietly and with these shorter visual post card sort of posts.

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stuff's weird right now in terms of commenting but I still hope if people visit they feel they have gained some measure of what they enjoy about visiting here.

windfall & re-alignment

The autumn season has begun to settle in. Am starting to sift through the layers of learning and question marks involved with the two dozen flower essences, essence blends and essence/elixir combos that were successfully co-created during the spring and summer seasons.  Some of that will be reflected on this blog but it seems like I'm pulling something together in my mind that's not yet clear.   I have an Aries ascendant so am hoping the coming full moon in that sign will be clarifying as it usually is for me.   The past week or so (ever since I pulled the Tower as a final outcome in a tarot reading) has been something of a metaphorical obstacle course to parse beyond the broad strokes of what's true enough to stand and what isn't.

Today/last night I started to feel as if the psychic debris and rubble-dust of the energetic tower's collapse began to clear a bit.  Above is a living collage reflecting my eventual answer to a question a friend asked me yesterday once I reframed it in relation to my sense of personal agency.  Am making a small topic specific art/collage journal out of the vote by mail mailer.  Just something that feels both contained and containable.  The astrology of the moment suggests it will be challenging to find and maintain a cool head and steady heart.  But so important vibrationally and energetically in terms of what we manifest as individuals and at a collective level.

Am helping somebody with a very ambitious long term project.  In the interim I've decided this is an excellent time to do some work on my own energetic operating system.  Am super aware of the eroding and in places threadbare collective first chakra energy all around and thus am strongly motivated to work on that at a personal and small-scale collective level.

J. scavenged this narrow shelved bookcase a few days back.   Once it's cleaned up it'll be used for overflow mother stock storage.   Am very psyched to get the collection better organized and easier to access.  Have two other found-object painting projects.  Grounding pragmatic stuff.  Spent all day today puttering in such a realm.

A favorite marker in my yearly preparation for a new cycle of time-keeping - the arrival of next year's calendar from Lunar Press.   Loved what the artist, Jamie Hogan said about this cover art.  It's a very joyous design. 

Love the mysterious encircling of the energetic center of the mailing envelope's postage stamp.  a spot where all four elements combine.

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Watched a Pam Gregory you-tube video about the full moon.  Love what she had to say about the next little while's massive opportunity to receive and process an increased amount of light as an individual and collective evolutionary tool ...

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

communion and solace

 

 

 

Super in love with this variety of anise hyssop.  Got it at Select Seeds' plant sale in the spring and the sweet lady had a rough start due to many insect invasions that were somewhat biblical in the area. But in the end she made five strong stalks and they've flowered prolificly.  Next year I'll stalk with bamboo.  Flower heads are 4-5 inches tall and about two and a half inches wide.  Hummingbirds love them.

All but one of the white African Foxlove plants has performed super well.  It was the drought portion of the summer in its center that sustained them.  The continuous water saturation has slowed them down somewhat but they're definitely reached five if not 6 feet.  I'm 5'6" and I'm looking the flower stalk in the eye as it were.

All these pictures are from yesterday afternoon.  I took the time to disconnect from the rest of my day and just hang around outside in the driveway area with Mama and all the 'enclosed' kindred spirits.  Every time someone mentions that phrase in relation to other humans my brain and heart automatically think on this level instead.

In the next post things get a bit magical...