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