Sparkling Lotus Ink

shake rattles & sing .3

April '07 - rattling the south-facing garden beds awake at our former home.  

eta:  a very different Molly's word tincture: Molly Sheehan of Green Hope Farm Essences.

Yesterday in the later afternoon I got a text from J. who was elsewhere in the house or yard.  He said it was going to start raining in about an hour and a half and was predicted to keep going for four days.  That's how I wound up in the way-back machine of my searching for the specific lede pic today.  Am glad for the rain since we had so little snow.  The more rain inches we can soak into the ground the better it will be once micro-droughts define themselves.   But perpetual low-light will not make for compelling blog documentation.

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Am currently putting together a super concrete - you need these things and then you do these specific steps - type of How to Make a Flower Essence post.  Once it's published this will link back to all the posts that are previously filed under that category.   The pragmatic how-to post is meant to be amplified by all those other posts in both direct content and more deep-reading between the lines.  So far as I can tell, anyone who openly shares something authentic about themselves in relation to this blog has quite an adept feeling for their organic landscape and its specific spirit(s) of place.  Not to mention a special affinity for many of the plants and trees that grow there.

All such affinity is, in effect, an integral part of how-to make/co-create an essence.  This type of high-crisis moment - at a nuts and bolts level - is an awesome time for anyone who wants to participate in healing themselves, their environments, and their own growing spaces to actively do something that crystallizes the spark in their heart's dreams and healing wishes for All That Is on our beautiful and increasingly broken-apart home here on earth.

Above is a blended-flower bowl that yielded a wonderfully comprehensive remedy called Mellow Yellow.   The essence came to life on the hillside where I kept a plot specifically devoted to raising flowers I wished to prepare as flower essence mother stocks.  If you follow the link you'll land on one of the first posts I made here. You'll see a picture of me from '05 looking equally content and determined.  Same pitchfork  but now I wear shoes with hard shells like a sensible person.  Or wait to do whatever until I am wearing them.

for the curious and knowledgeable alike - here's a thumbnail synopsis of the bowl's contents. 

Broccoli - Scours the psyche in a way that allows us to see how/when/why we interpret the actions of others as personalized victimization.  Offers psychic and emotional fortitude to deal with that skew IF we've a mind to.

Marigold - Very supportive of neural circuitry and its vibrancy level.  This essence - in whatever form of flower variety and color - has been indispensable in essence combinations that are geared to supporting integration with the larger/higher/faster frequency that so many of us tend to 'catch' even if we keep our awareness of it deliberately small or convince ourselves it's merely wish fulfillment or Nothing At All.

Nasturtium - boosts the circuitry of the electrical body.  A boon for those who tend to fade somewhere between the 6th and 8th inning stretch of any given day.

Pumpkin -  Helps support our subtle and physical bodies' need to galvanize under duress/situations focused on The Choice of No Choice.  Helps you locate whatever you need energetically to do whatever it takes mentally & physically in order to bring a necessary project to a timely conclusion.

Snapdragon - to smooth the bite in your communicative style if you've normally got one.  To help you keep from developing such bite under duress - especially when thrown into a situation where you personally have little to no control and it angers you.

Vatican Tomato -  Tomato's healing signature addresses situations in which we've actively allowed patterns of self-sabotage to become normalized behavior to you. 

Moon and Stars Watermelon - psychic birthing & midwifery to support life's expansive changes and creative hot streaks.  Times two thanks to the above contributor.

Yellow Wood Sorrel - hydrates physical and emotional burnout associated with hypersensitivity. 

Zucchini - supports kinder & gentler self-care initiation than we generally allow ourselves.

The above packets hold the remainder of the other seeds I've started under lights in the basement - rattling all the way.  Lincoln leeks and basket flowers are regular must-grows for me.  African foxgloves are fairly well known to me in their purple form.  They've grown with a gorgeously prolific branching pattern on various parts of the property but never taller than 3 - 3.5 feet. Am trying the white variety because they reach 5 -6 feet when they're happy.  Was thinking I'd inter-plant with Indigo Spires salvia here and there within the Evolving Sanctuary bed.   I really love gracefully architectural combos that intermix white and blue flowering plants - arranged in a visual chain that stays embedded in the mind's eye most vividly right before dusk.   This I learned from a wonderful garden design book called Color Echoes in the Garden.

  One day about a month ago an early morning dream spirit advised I grow Sweet Thai basil rather than my favored cinnamon variety.  The latter has been indispensable for decades as our family dinner iced beverage of choice during the summer months.  Couldn't find any on offer at any of my preferred seed sources when I finally ordered.  So that turned out to be an on-point lucid swerve from the Beyond.  Never heard of this bergamot variety before.  It's capable of reaching maturity in a single season in this hardiness zone range.  If it doesn't then I won't see what the flowers are like in relation to our bee, butterfly, hawkmoth and hummingbird contingents.  Not unless I can figure out how to successfully winter it over somewhere in the garage ...

skywalker(s)

The scarlet runner beans in this post were sown late and grown specifically for their flowers in my hillside garden.  This was the first opportunity I had to co-create flower essence preparations in a relatively pure setting - the way it's "supposed" to be done.  Previously I'd spent roughly six years preparing essences in my backyard's garden.  We lived on a small and fairly public exurban property.  We shared a driveway with one neighbor. A very active and well-attended church served as the other. 

Against this backdrop I worked late into the night to write and think and continue refining my childhood understanding that flowers had a lot to say that we ought to hear and then apply as best we could.  By my late 30's I'd reached a point where that awareness had focused on a crystallized certainty that anyone who was willing to trust themselves enough to also trust what flowers and their medicine spirits might choose to communicate/set in motion ought to be able to make vibrant and highly effective flower essences from the familiarity and individual beauty of their personal growing space. 

Also (I was and remain especially passionate about this particular bit) if "growing space" boils down to a pot or two on an urban fire escape that, too, ought to be recognized as Sacred potentiality capable of generating ongoing intelligence/energy exchanges and a great deal more. 

 When I first got SL2 fully planted there was a honeymoon week where everything seemed charmed beyond belief.  Three days were crystal clear mornings full of birdsong with gently soaking afternoon and overnight rains.  Then that blessing ran its course. After three additional sunlit days of scanning the weather predictions while not yet needing to rely on the Hillside water pump, it broke at approximately 3 a.m on the morning I was planning to use it.  I received an email shortly thereafter though I didn't read it until 4:15.  That was still plenty of time to rouse J ahead of his work-based routine and get his help filling our two trash barrels with water once he'd braced them inside his van.  We rode in virtual silence that didn't break once we maneuvered the van to the highest edge of the slanted garden space. 

Just before we silently tipped the first barrel on its side I felt rather than saw an enormous sky-walking Being.  It reminded me of super-old [and ethically tainted] drawings and engravings made by interlopers in attendance of Taos traditional dance ceremonies.  These unseen Beings vibed exactly like the dancers in those drawings.  As a child I'd spent hour upon hour studying such artwork and much more that could be found at the Penn Museum's anthropology wing in the early 60's.  My mother would give the avid-reader security guard a pack of cigarettes an hour to watch me while she did her research for the day.  

Fortunately this was always the same person and he couldn't have been less interested in messing with me or anyone else.  Those things were already crucial to me; what I knew about being alive had taught me I could either afford to relax or I couldn't.  At the museum I could definitely exhale and forget everything else.  So I quite willingly gave the guard all he needed in order to do his job - which seemed in large part to consist of sitting in his little box reading paperbacks with an expression of fierce concentration.  I didn't do any of the things other relatively infrequent child visitors did on the regular.  I had zero impulse to run or shout or touch things.  I never attempted to open any doors to the courtyard visible from his booth, let alone rush beyond them to kick at the sculpture displayed in the outside gallery. 

Every once in awhile a museum visitor would complement my behavior but I had my own reasons for running in Model Child mode at these times.  However else she might disappoint or alarm me, I wanted my mother to keep bringing me along to this vast, ever-quiet and incredibly well-ordered place filled with things unlike any others I'd seen. I loved being left alone to wander at will and form my own conclusions. Indeed, those day long treks to Penn remain one of my cornerstone/perceptually unchallenged experiences with personal liberty and intellectual curiosity allowed to follow its own lead.

Being small (5 and 6) nearly everything within the museum seemed huge by comparison.  But the biggest objects of all were three enormous Buddhas that had an entire gallery offshoot to themselves.  The first time I saw them I very nearly did run on my way back to the guard.  We had an unspoken agreement that I wouldn't speak to him or so it seemed to me. But on this day he sensed urgency and readily put his book aside.

I asked him what the Buddhas were.  My only frame for divinity at that point was based on regrettably humorless Lutheran dogma.  His answer left an indelible impression.  He told me the Buddhas were skywalkers.  Instinctively I understood that the masked dancers in the drawings and etchings were also skywalkers.  And so when I felt that same level of a primal energy where land and sky connect in the forms of Soul and Spirit - right there on the hillside, in the gloam of daybreak while drenching my garden for its own good until the pump could be fixed - I recognized that the Beings I perceived had been there a long while. 

Overwhelmed by this awareness and all the points in my past that had effortlessly converged in single droplet of understanding Who I Am, I moved in continued silent unison with my husband.  We pivoted the van in order to release a second volley of water on the waking garden space.  When a wild turkey suddenly shot straight upwards out of a nearby roosting tree we both jumped in surprise.  It was easy to imagine a gigantic Being moving far above the three of us - wearing an enormous head wreath of turkey tails and wing feathers. 

Weeks later I finally spoke of that morning with J.  I asked if he remembered the turkey who shot out of the tree really fast and high.  And how we both jumped.  He said of course he remembered although he thought those enormous landwalkers were the true show stoppers of the day.  Automatically I said they were skywalkers and he said no, they were merely big enough to BE in the sky as they walked.

                 

It made all the sense in the world to me.  But it still felt wrong.  Specifically because I'd had such a strong sense in my bones that I was surrounded by SKYwalkers.  I thought about it the next day at the garden.  One of my special tending chores involved carefully grooming the Scarlet Runner Beans I was growing for the essence of its healing signature vibration: dismantling fear

As I groomed them they offered a message:  WE are also skywalkers as you have noticed but did not recognize.  We meet the sky throughout our life for the benefit of All.  And I began to wonder if perhaps this is how flowering vines more generally might consider themselves; at least when they have clear passage to move straight UP.  Pole Beans, in particular, will travel seemingly forever if they have something sufficiently sturdy to climb against. 

The particular bean flowers above are from an eye-level cluster that later volunteered for the anchor position in a blended bowl of 5 different flower species.  The blended vibration named this healing & illumination offering Joyous.  I looked at the structure of the flower's healing and illumination properties more carefully and added Warrior with an eye toward Angeles Arrien's beautifully apt description of the Warrior archetype: a person of Community who shows up for and with that Community.

what we set in motion

In the Spring, Summer and Fall of 2005 I had the good fortune to keep a garden specifically for essence making purposes.  It was located on the outskirts of a CSA growing space at the top of a hill in the town where I used to live.  I worked in (and passively communed with) this Place at least three times a day - more if I was actively preparing essences. 

Above I stand tall and happy at 45; tending to the stone heart at the center of the garden.  It's filled with gifts of gratitude and love from the original human Friends of Sparkling Lotus Ink - these particular talismans offered specifically to the wild soul of Gaia and the medicine spirits of the landscape as well as flowers growing in that space.

This is the same space a few months earlier, marked-off for me by the CSA's general manager.  I created the stone heart altar space in the center and a few days later made lines of stone to turn the heart into the center of a sacred compass pointing towards the four directions.  With ease of writing the name over and over in mind, I called this space SL2.  Meaning it was the second garden in which I had prepared Sparkling Lotus flower essences.  It was also the first from-scratch garden space where I introduced myself as nothing more than willing hands and feet. 

Of course, as the years roll on it becomes increasingly clear that this was my aspirational goal rather than an ongoing fact.  I had plenty of self-oriented intentions and attachments to outcome.  Many of which I hadn't consciously considered until they bloomed full force. The garden itself scattered potent seeds of fundamental truth about myself/perception in a way I was able to accept and work with in an ongoing manner.  Flowers taught me, virtually every time I looked at them, how to look deep within the BE-ing of all sentient lives just as they're lived. Incorporating this awareness successfully enough to set a strong taproot did not occur over the course of this magical moment of stop-time personal Ascent.  But it did first bloom there in a sustained and ultimately sustainable way.

Above the bed is fully planted and beginning to grow into itself by my birthday at the end of June.  This is the space where Grace's beloved Joyous Warrior was born.  Sometimes, as is evidenced in the picture at the end of this post, I would bring plants in pots from my home garden so they might absorb the hillside's atmosphere a week or so before I gathered their flowers for inclusion in an essence bowl. 

Below shows the signal-sending changes I made to Donna's sign long before there was anything else beyond the patchwork stone heart in the center of the bed.  Note the small collection of stones and feathers (below the sign to the right) offered by other humans who quite early on felt themselves drawn to this work and finding ways of becoming an active part of it.

There's much to share about this very auspicious place and time from the most illuminated aspects of my personal history.  As collective instincts urge us to gather in order to to contemplate and honor Story & Life lines of ongoing meaning to us, this is the part of my own story-life that I'm most compelled to tell.  This is my contribution to the larger gathering of Beginnings we're all beginning to redefine and reconsider.  It's also a very specific visual arc illustrating how a thing quite literally gets set in motion:  Deliberately and by conscious choice.  Perhaps most amazingly to me, this post is also about my learning how my life's dearest wish as a tiny girl became the actual course I've followed with dogged determination; even if it seemed a lurching and perhaps entirely imaginary journey many times over the years.  And yet that's not at all what it's been.  It's been an ongoing act of sentience finding its way to a place where life is lived as just one of many species.