Sparkling Lotus Ink

Orange Summation

    
This is a post of reflection woven with my final week's sacral themes: Synchronicity & Co-creation.

On a personal level that synchs-in well with the end-of-water-cycle song I've always intended to post as a listen only '20 remaster of Uncle John's Band.  What else could I possibly pick?  A song that gives me shivers of happiness and knew-so-many-people--from-before glad tidings each and every time I hear it.

***

We're currently abiding in the energy of a Cancerian full moon with its peak expression most likely happening today or early tomorrow depending where you live and how vibe-sensitive you are.  My feelings about water-sign full moons are mixed.   For one thing they bring up so much intensity of feeling, memory, and intuition that my various fire aspects more or less leave the building in order to the preserve their essence.  I never enjoy those times.  Without my fire/solar energy I'm never quite sure who I am.

example:  I once went into a local apothecary on a nothing-but-water day.  It was near the end of the third (solar) month of my first self-guided chakra intensive experience.  One of my biggest illuminations from that experience occurred when I realized I had no idea who I was on the inside.  I knew what I did.  I knew what I was good (and for that matter bad) at.  I knew where I'd been and where I wanted to go but I didn't know who I was at the most pivotal and entirely solar center of my own self-awareness.  I didn't have any sense of that energetic wheel at all.

[blue is the sacral center's cool-down color.  This can be hard for people who don't really "do" deep water energy work very comfortably or at all IF they happen to associate blue with Water rather than Sky.  I had that problem for a while with a strong glowing red sense of connection to my root chakra.  Red to me was fire and hence I could never seem to get 'grounded' vibes from it so much as rapaciousness.

Three different people have asked me about this blue/water /how-can-that-possibly-help-me-dry-out conundrum.  And much as I've chafed over hearing this answer myself it's the truest truth.  Just in case there are others:  You have to concentrate.  You have to be willing to accept that in the beginning your concentration might not seem to be produce anything you can recognize - or anything at all.  You have to be okay with that and remain open to nothing happening.  This "failure" is quite likely to re-assert itself as an out of the blue insight or inspiration that seems to present itself in an immediate and wholecloth way.   Be open to the appearance of  BLUE color ray energy appearing of its own accord to cool excess orangeness and/or to emphasize something that seems to emerge spontaneously at the speech and/or vision energy centers.  This may happen in synch with the Dive or at a future point - most likely when you least expect it.]

***

Montana Blue Centaurea, pictured above, makes a wonderful flower essence most usually associated with the head chakras.  But look at the feathery petals.  Imagine gently dropping the womb-center's energy into a bed of such magnificence.  I find it's really invaluable for stabilizing and clarifying the sacral energetics of intuition.  The more powerful it feels the more I seek to counterbalance that with some ongoing degree of head-based Vision clarity.  Montana Blue and Italian Alkanet are equally amazing for this kind of crystalline back-up. 

***

 At the time of my first (self and book guided) chakra intensive experience back in my late 30's I 'thought I'd done something wrong' or otherwise misguided.  So I went into the store seeking advice on how to gain a sense of who I was.  This upset the store owner who refused to accept the reality of me on a no-fire day.  (she was an aries and we related to each other in a distinctly aries kinda way...)  Just would not accept it and so there were tears profound enough to convince her - okay, this person I in no way perceive as having this type of problem is having it nonetheless.  

She went to her healer's strengths as well as her pendulum while I told her I needed something to help me know how I to get all the links in my energy chain lit and linked up as an ongoing thing.  We settled on a specific tarot deck and Sweetgrass flower essence.  Taking it led me to "suddenly" think or imagine four different ways I already was connected to my entire column as well as my full self but had simply/not-so-simply forgotten how to utilize the power/personal responsibility of turning the lights from bright to dim.  The problem had been my hyper-specific notions of how I was "supposed" to be doing and feeling things. 

[California Poppy holds so much healing for our species.  The entire plant containing all its phases of seed pods, flowers and buds, and roots can be tinctured for a very effective pain relieving agent.  I like adding three parts California Poppy to one part dried lavender buds previously whizzed through a blender.  Although I usually chop and grind to maximize surface area - the first time I work with a plant for tincturing purposes, I always ask the plant's primary/largest plant colony ahead of gathering - which would you prefer in order to help me and together help others? CaliPop always wants to remain intact for me.  At least so far.

I work with California Poppy flower essence a lot and for many reasons.  Primarily I take it in combination Green Bells of Ireland.  Year before (almost) last I was guided by both flower medicine spirits in a series of dreams and meditations.  They wanted - as in REALLY wanted - a small plot in the field garden where they could grow and commune together specifically to combine in an essence.  I promptly ordered the necessary seeds and buzzed with anticipation.  will tell the whole story - picking up at this point when we're deeper into the Solar region of Everything.

P.S.  the two flowers pictured above were part of the essence bowl's contents.]

***

A few days ago we had prodigious rainfall.  This caused several types of shifted consciousness.  For one thing the precipitation and 8 inches of snow melt runoff caused a true watershed's worth of water to barrel through the edge of our property more or less within the stream bed.  In some places it broached the bed and spring run-off grooves long established.  I stood at the glass doors in J's office and quite suddenly understood why this specific perspective leaves him at times preoccupied with flooding potential.  Always thought it was a dimensional skew based on what I see from the much higher back window in the studio.  And it is, but on my end. 

As I stood watching from the studio stairs I opened the window so I could also hear the water running while the rain pounded in the stream and everywhere else. It sounded without exaggeration as loud as the spontaneous waterfalls that formed following flash-flooding just above the tree-line in Yosemite on an afternoon in late August when my son and I were there.  Also, as I stood listening from the safety of Inside, I felt in my body the way I've felt on a trail ride when the horses go all horse-like one right after the other with a ripple of Horse Expression that could mean nothing or everything.  It was exhilarating and I took it in as a fitting end to this month of sacral challenge, deliverance, and ongoing illumination. 

J took a short film from the center of the bridge just past noon when everything was at its peak level of water-based mayhem and chaos.  I waited two more days and didn't go out to the same spot until yesterday morning.  By then the water had receded and slowed itself a good bit.  Took some pictures of the ice and water.  Walked in the woods just a little to see portions of what J describes based on his daily repetitive loop.  The path out to the field is deep muck.  I need to coordinate mental incentive with physical willingness to leave the sacral womb-feeling of my studio space because the field will be even deeper muck. 

as we get ready to move towards the yellow/solar center I'm thinking alot about cauldrons.  Fire forging a cauldron of some kind from earth-metals or very thick clay.   the cauldron holding whatever water/sacral energy we may need for continuing.

Namaste

birth/day stories

blossom crystals with iron inclusions lending an orange tinge to the individual points.  Given to my mother, while in labor, the day before I was born.  My grandmother kept it in her pocketbook while I was being born.  Family legend says but only in whispers:  she left her bible behind in order to have enough room.  So for the event of my birth Pearl went just a little feral and pagan.

***

It isn't hard to see how/why this particular gift was selected.  My mother turned over ownership of this beauty when I was eight years old and given my first small personal garden space.  In the summer the blossom rock lived there.  In the winter it lived on the little chest of drawers next to my bed.

In my adult life the rock continued to summer outside within garden spaces close to the house where I could keep track of it.  This tradition was curtailed when yellow jackets began to build egg chambers on the rounded inside dome of the mother blossom.  Even after scrubbing the rock the pheromones remained beacon-like.  Last summer I tried an experiment.  I put the blossom rock in an open (but screened) window sill here in the studio.   I wasn't sure if anything would happen but a few days later I noticed wasps clustered on the screen adjacent to the rock.  When I took the rock away the wasps stopped congregating.  put it back and they reappeared.

not what we call strong science by any means.  but ...

***

My son was born a month early and yet right on time.  He didn't feel like an Aries (at all ...) while he was growing inside of me - he felt like a pair of fish tumbling around every which way in amniotic fluid. 

Sometimes he communicated with me.  Once, quite memorably, he communicated with J. as well - announcing his name to be Anthony.  He communicated the same thing to me.  We discovered as much when, after the fact, I tentatively asked if J had any name preferences and he replied just as tentatively:

"I really don't but maybe ... the baby believes his name is Anthony?"

and then the story tumbled out of both of us.  We looked at each other.  Odd happenstances that couldn't be proven logically were a hallmark of our relationship even then.

***

The day before he was born we didn't yet suspect he was on his way.  We went to an Italian restaurant we loved primarily because it served good food we could actually afford if we skimped a bit on other types of 'extras'.  On this occasion we had their Sunday buffet brunch and when we got home I took a nap.  While I was asleep I dreamed we went back to the restaurant and I ate another serving of every single thing I'd eaten while we were there. 

When it was time for night-sleeping we still didn't suspect the imminent arrival.  Dreamtime changed that. 

It began with my arrival on the bank of an enormous lake.  I could hear the water sloshing against the support beams driven into the lake bank sand.  I could feel myself wearing a very heavy cumbersome set of metal and leather clothing.  With the magic of dream logic, once I stepped into the moonlight I could see myself as from an overhead distance.  I was dressed like a Samurai  because that's what I was.

And the moonlight was very holy although I couldn't see the moon.  It was so high in the sky that no matter how I bent my neck and stooped I couldn't see it.  So I got down, flat on the long floating deck that went on for quite awhile with the water all around. 

And lying flat with the whole sky above me I still couldn't see the moon.  But I could feel the undulating deck and hear the water sloshing beneath it. 

A monk joined me.  Arriving without fanfare and strictly in the terms of dream logic.  The monk knelt down and took my arms to pull me into a similar upright position.  We touched foreheads.  Then the monk laughed.  He flew up into the sky like a balloon that had suddenly lost all it's air.  And in the process he turned into a cloud, still laughing.  And the cloud passed across an enormous rust-red moon.  Despite the dullness of the color the moon glowed just as it always does when full.  And it pulsed like a heartbeat.

I wanted nothing more than to be part of that moon and so I ran to the end of the endless deck and climbed down the ladder at the end.  And within the dream my conscious mind woke up enough to feel the lake water rising to embrace and then all but consume me.

my waters were breaking.  I woke up with an electric certainty and strong recollection of one of the few dreams in my life that I recall with perfect clarity year after year.

***

For comparative purposes, it's necessary to take on faith that I'm only marginally interested in astrology at this point in my life.  But back then?  I was 'of the cloth' all the way.  Hence the second call (obvi the first was to J just settling into what he imagined would be a sensible and measured morning at the drafting table) was to a sunbrother with an ephemeris. 

Once he confirmed what I felt I most needed to know (I also thought I needed to go out and buy sandalwood incense to burn during labor.  I still laugh about that.) I started talking to my son.

I don't know if I can handle raising somebody with a Scorpio moon.  Do you think it will be okay to wait until that's no longer the situation?

and this voice but from inside so you hear it through your bones.  this voice that is my son's voice to this day said to me "sure mom.  no problem."

He was most definitely a pisces and entirely ready to be born.  textbook in that end but I was an assiduously empowered woman who intended to labor from that place so that's what I did.  There are stories about those six hours in which nobody but nobody got in my way for even five seconds.

Since he was a month early there were some things.  It was two weeks before my sunbrother was able to supply everything but the Sag moon sign (which I thought was MOST EXCELLENT without also realizing, as I had about Scorpio energy, 'but wait you will be the Mom of this person') I'd been able to work out on my own.  Before he began I told him the story of both the dream and then the communication in which I achieved cooperative contact with my kid before he was all the way breathing.

and because my friend is a brit's brit he replied with the single word quite.  I went on for awhile.  and then he said I might want to put a thought or two towards The Ascendant.

and just the way he said it I knew.

oh yeah.

The monk came back as an unbelievably intense firebrand very much living in today's mashed-apart world.  No problem at all to have a Sag moon for that kind of ride, right?  Especially when the whole other Thing With Purpose could thus be shifted to what was undoubtedly the master plan all along.

this is my Telling story in women's circles of a maternal nature.  If it isn't an astro crowd I just tell the dream part.  If there are a few people who can get the whole THUNK of the other part I tell it as well

Once I told it to Jeannine Parvati - she being the whole reason I became a mother.

she laughed with the thinnest trace of nervous mental energy weaving amongst her trademark melodics.  She then opined there were any number of inferences and references to be made just off the top of her head.  She declared it made her dizzy and she couldn't think about it any further - she had to imagine and fantasize instead.

and that's my water story about mother stories and sacral sisters.

namaste

Orange Flower Essences

The Sparkling Lotus repertory is very strongly rooted in various rose essences.  Tropicana Rose essence has the distinction of being the most popular of the bunch at a feedback level. All rose essences interact, at an electrical level, with our central and sympathetic nervous systems in some combination of ways.  There used to be a prolific and detailed Rose alchemy component to online flower essence information banks but nearly all the links I tested-out ahead of time have gone dead.  So these background notes really only reflect my own experiences, feedback such as the link posted below, and my awareness that literal rose flowers soothe so much for so many that I can't imagine their electrical essences would do any less in the more subtle registers. The more hypersensitive/emotionally hyper-active you are the more likely you are to respond to rose's many-petal'd invitation to slow and soothe and savor your own unique creative and psychic flow.

Here's a link from bygone days in which a gifted flower alchemist shared her experiences with the essence.

My favorite orange rose is a deep coral glow of a beauty.  The flowers smell like freshly cut apples sprinkled with bee pollen.  She beckoned from a sales rack outside the next town's hardware store.  At the time we had 'driven into the country' from our former home.  This is probably one of my top dozen most cherished essences.  Probably in the top five of that list. 

This flower medicine spirit soothes neuro-circuitry in a way that's equally nourishing, revitalizing, and protective.  Absolutely lovely especially when wading in deep-orange waters...

the California Poppy medicine spirit is very adept at soaking up hyper-emotional or overcharged sexual compulsion.  It's protective and illuminating to all the chakras but the chalice shape of these flowers opened to a fresh day's light always puts me in mind of the sacral center's bowl-like moon blooming from the six sacred lotus petals.

I also associate my own creative flow with this flower.  All I have to do is see a picture of a blooming field or a single chalice spangled with morning dew and its light and I feel my mind and hands itching to make something and/or a growing need to elevate whatever I'm already making.

The flower medicine spirit vibrates at a vacillating but always-very high frequency.  In the FES repertory guidebook this one's designated as a shield against luceferic light.   Also false reflections of equally false psychic or spiritual light sources.  Can work very well as a stabilizing ally for complex-PTSD. 

Calendula essence holds a long established relationship to smooth and inclusive manners of spoken communication.  the Calendula flower medicine spirit holds and generates a great capacity for holding and reflecting light.   This is also a great ally for effectively levelling-up the game of whatever forms of truth telling you employ in you work and larger life.

Siberian Wallflowers are so vividly orange they need their share of cooling down by garden design standards.  I grew them the year they were meant to be popular but weren't ('02 or '03) and consequently a number of the small upstart greenhouses I visited were selling them cheap by the time I went on a mission of mercy prowl.  

There's a lot of high vibrational range in this essence - perhaps most of all for people who want to open to spirit at a specifically creative level.   This happens to be one of the three flower essences that taught me the most about opening to my own inner channels of intuition.  It helped me make the jump from reading plants with confidence and accuracy but assuming everything else I picked up was either wishful imagination or a test of some undefined Nature to see if I'd have the humility and grace to stay in my lane - to integrating more layered forms of awareness that may or may not relate directly to flowers' healing capacities to help humans.

Roadside Orange Day Lilies that I lovingly cultivated from a scant dried corm back at the old place.  I made this essence on what then felt like an odd hunch it would be helpful in clearing the atmosphere during emotional meltdowns related to one of a kind events such as weddings, a child's christening, and so forth.

In a more distanced world of the commonsense present I wonder if this might be good for personal collaborations that are designed to be unusually brief or centered around a specific once-in-a-lifetime theme/form of inter-laced workmanship.   

Long ago a friend and I noticed how the flowers swoop out on both sides of the Honeysuckle bud cluster.  She pointed out that the fattened buds remided her of ovaries and the long flowers' throats reminded her of fallopian tubes.   When I co-created an essence in my old garden I read the flowers in the established way: so that the flower's trumpet shape served as an ability to receive far-off spiritual and psychic messages.  But I also thought of my friend's earlier life read.  I asked the flowers if their medicine spirit had the ability to plant especially sweet sacral center healing seeds of long term beauty.  And so it would seem that Spirit does have such abilities as well as a sweetening attribute that's frequency rather than scent based.

Red-Orange Passionflower from an enormous plant living in the main greenhouse at Logee's.  It used to be a very straight zip south from the old place so J and I were prone to go sometime between Valentine's Day and our Anniversary in early March.  Just the right time of year to wander agog at the many flowering wonders of this place.

the Passionflower healing signature relates to cleansing and healing from our deepest wounds in ways that facilitate turning that wounding and its healing into some type of Service work.  Two different people have asked me about orange passionflower - calling to them for alchemy and not knowing WHAT.   

This is a path of Service essence irrespective of what it facilitates to get you in alignment for such a thing.

Marigold essences always inter-relate with our CNS/electrical circuitry.  This makes them a very nice mixing-companion for roses.

In the summer of 2005 a few pagan-centric alchemists began working with my flower essence handbook and their own druthers of what they were inclined to make of their deepening earth/light/human triangulations.  Several were strongly guided through meditation or automatic writing to prepare an essence bowl for this fire-flower while the sun was in Leo.

They grew obsessed with it.  And the skies kept raining pretty much alla time but often most frustratingly after two hours of vivid sunlight.  Eventually it all worked out but it was a time of receiving multiple emotionalized emails concerning 'weather on the 8's' and how heartbreaking it all was. there will be a third installment mixing what's left of the red and orange flower considerations and suggestions.

let's pretend this is twitter

If only so I can say:  enjoy this emotional timeline cleanse.  The noise here in the States is getting intrusive right along with the rising Covid numbers here in the town where I live and elsewhere in MA. 

Above is a part of the front yard's side pocket area that I took to calling The Indigenous Tribute Garden.  It could also be called the result of the gate in the background being stuck shut during a time when J was putting in 70 hour weeks so it took a while to fix.  I just directed him where to stop mowing and then I had a nearby place to commune with many of the plants I wildcraft from the field much farther from human dwellings and roads. 

Think I've found the fulcrum I'll need to have a better sense of how to proceed blogging about chakras in a long haul way. My mind's been an ongoing roadblock of no consequence to anyone but me.  At the same time on that whirling mind level the consequence feels endless if entirely self-perpetuated. 

the good news is if it's something I'm doing it's something I can stop doing.  And have already begun.

this pic or something similar will show up in the next post mixing red and orange flower images with short descriptions of their essences.  The photo above was taken during the summer I kept this garden in the summer of '05.  As described in that early post, I approached a local CSA manager to see if I might have 'a bit of earth' specifically to co-create flower essences.  She didn't know what they were but she knew about Bach Rescue Remedy.  I told her were I lived (densely populated by any standards not just ex-urbs) and she immediately brought me in.

It was a magical summer that culminated with hurricane Katrina.   Thus it was a pivotal personal development summer as well.  This was borne-out in astrology, my local teaching efforts, and just time spent on the edge of a wonderful old orchard right at the summit of an equally wonderful New England hill.   As I was writing these words it seemed as if it was also a summer that - within my own mind - asked me to grow all the way up and get truly creative in terms of how I put my energy into the world as a healer. 

J takes afternoon walks around our neighborhood's roads.  Yesterday he brought in the garden bell that we both overlooked until I suddenly remembered in the middle of the night.  Knew the beautiful knotted tibetan cord probably wouldn't withstand more than another year if that so am glad to have it re-hung in its new and greatly improved winter location.

Today temps rose to the high 30's.  local road traffic has thinned considerably.  T's various electronic and building projects are kudzu-ing basement real estate.  J and I have agreed to investigate standing light garden units.  Something modest and just the equivalent of what I have now or even a bit less.  If the service bureau's work slows down for him he's likely as not to figure out how to make it - or at least the frame - himself. 

Tomorrow I'm putting on muck-boots and walking around the field for awhile...

 

what I'm working on to post

Today there is also a new ORANGE post at Nichobella

[just found this orange-centric pic in my files while looking for something else]

I'm fixin' to build two posts about flower essences - for the first and second chakra respectively. This takes thought-time and also searching my photo archives time.  But I'm definitely on it now that I've been told the interest is firmly there. 

Am also providing co-creative how-to links from previously posted entries

essence preparation - nuts & bolts .1

essence coalescence - nuts & bolts .2

Want to add that I've super-enjoyed receiving the playlists a few folks have created by interspersing my selections with some of their own. I plan to pull together something that expresses itself more towards the Up aspects of second chakra work somewhere near the end of next week.

There was a truly magnificent light orange Opium Poppy plant in my garden at the old place.

I worked with her to co-create one of my first flower essences.  P. somniferum flowers - of any color - hold a soothing vibe of slowing down, coming to center, and resting the mind and body with assurance it's safe/possible to fully relax.

Water Music for Turning a Shadow's Tide

If the sheer magnitude of the second chakra's already wiping you out (raises hand) here are ten songs to move to before all the water freezes solid.  Originally there were 11 but I sensed a particular song might not cut it for most or potentially all of my usual readers if I drew attention to that song in addition to Bad Romance. I like to post music only links but for a few of these I had to accept settling for video links. 

Under The Bridge -  The cool thing about making a mix tape is the way I like to start with something that almost makes the expectations of others presume I don't know what I'm doing. I was asked to start with this one 'for personal reasons' directly after I was asked if I'd mind spending part of my Sunday afternoon compiling this post.  Hopefully I'll make it up to those who expected things to lead off with Prince just cuz it's me.  Instead he's where he belongs on the momentum's trajectory curve instead.

I Wanna Be Sedated Remember when I copped to being a former wicked accomplished drinkah?  This was my absolute favorite song back then.  I still can't sit down for it.  "oh no oh oh oh - oh ho!"

Bad Romance   As soon as I heard this song for the first time I embraced it as retroactive 'celebration' of something that happened with a deeply scorpionic individual who inspired me, at 22, to write an entire group of poems entitled The Ides of Lust.   There's nobody like Stephanie for breaking this stuff down.  I love her.  This is a great dance-able reload.

Premonition - one of my favorite songs of its day.  I used to walk around singing to my various work friends "I must be crazy/I must seein' thangs"

The Chain -  'i can still hear you sayin'  elevated(?) break-up music vibe.  And that album cover!  total sacral shadow.  Dance it out of yourself.

[the one I took out but I'll tell you what it is - Side to Side.  Feel free to add it back if you like. Especially since Ariana was my Cancerian artist to complete the water trilogy.]

When Doves Cry - I mean when you want to get serious about either this chakra or dancing your way through it you go to the master, right?

Blood Sugar Sex Majik -   shadow-Scorpio's theme song. Also that's Anthony's sun sign.  Even I who categorically sucks at guessing such things correctly found this one impossible to get wrong.  This was the only RHCP I'd planned to include because how can I not. And still could not even once the person I'm supporting in all of this specifically asked for "the addiction song" to top the list. I like the way it mixes with the song on either end so I've broken my rule about only one song from one artist per mix.

I'll Be Missing You  I'm sure we all have somebody unique and special to think about while this one grooves its way along.

 I've Got My Mind Set On You.  Because Pisces always closes out the wheel.  Definitely a bit of yellow/third chakra bleed to the vibe but I didn't want to give this spot to any old Pisces  so ...