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.

*

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.

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!

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...

seasonal shifting

I'm officially committing to spending more time with my DSLR.   I want to get good at it!

Yesterday was our fourth day of sunshine in a row.  Love the way the volunteer white pine windrow by the driveway has started to hold and reflect light in a way that almost looks like dew or rainfall.

When we transplanted red bee balm from the field to the evolving sanctuary garden a self-seeded radicchio plant hitched a ride.  Now we'll have this lovely blue self-seeding here and there throughout a second garden space.  Really thrilled about that.

Today is J's birthday.  He shares the date with Mary - a detail that's always been very significant to his mother.  We really like our statue  in her replacement position.  It will be major dollars to "fix" the tree situation in a total way but J has a plan for getting the rest of the fallen trunk removed from her stone pedestal.  Might not get to it until spring though.  I may decide She needs to live on the porch for the winter to prevent a snowblowing catastrophe.

love this moody shot of the Maple by the front door.
before I brought out the camera I rescued a drone from the birdbath.  The creature was super waterlogged and inert but I had a sense of life presence so I carried the bee to a large burdock leaf nearby.  The wet spot is where I put him to expell and groom away water.  When I first put him down he moved just two legs very feebly.  This pic was taken about 20 minutes later.  You can see his wings are still plastered to his body.  Also, at the time I took this pic I was dismayed to think he was missing his front left leg.
This pic was taken about a half an hour later.  The bee is very nearly completely dry, his left front leg is fine, and he'd traveled about three and a half feet to the very tip of the leaf.  Seemed as if he was waiting for his wings to dry a little more before taking off.  When I came back from putting my camera in the house he'd gone ...

picture perfect Saturday

It took two 32 ounce spray bottles full of diluted neem oil and part of a third but I appear to have prevailed over the odious squadrons of cucumber beetles that were devouring this impulse purchase Datura.  This plant and many others featured in these posts (such as the fuchsia at the top of this post) are in the mix via Select Seeds' annual plant sale in early May.  Thought the Datura would be lovely to grow right next to the only accessible remaining A. angelica.  You know - that contemplative sun and moon thing again plus other contemplations based on Datura's lateral growth structure that I'll save for another time. 

Am glad I have a large bottle of neem oil for many reasons but in this particular case that stuff's been quite essential.  Felt terrible that I had ushered a lovely and lively seedling into a life of hell.  Made some baffles as I was taught during that Hilltop Orchard summer and also instinctively placed a chunk of black tourmaline at the base of her stem.  Now thanks to so many consecutive rain storms washing everything away - she is coming into strength and a wealth of lateral branchlets.  The beetles appear to be in a lulling phase. I keep the spray bottle in my tool caddy during morning chore rounds all the same.

Mama's orange streaks are going blonde.  We assume because she's spending at least half of her days out in the field and that benefits from the blending-in power of a lighter coloration

Yesterday I finally set up my scavenged silvery shallow bird bath in the field garden.  It's diagonally opposite where I planned to put it but that's because I noticed the blue and golden warblers and carolina wrens are always in this quadrant of the enclosure when I come out for evening watering time.   This corner is at the edge of the tomato patch.  The plants are very tall and loaded with fruit.  The blush oblong shaped cherry tomatoes will be on the table by this time next week.

grace's Queen bowl is now a basket of seeds. 

now the garden feels like home. This Italian protest flag was everywhere the year we visited T during his h.s. junior year winter break in the run-up to g.w.'s declaration of war.  I was very sorry I'd never tracked one down to purchase while we were there but T. brought one as a gift when he returned that May.  Yesterday I ran steel wire through the rod pocket and twisted it firmly in place with the wire fence.  This stability allows the flag to billow and swoop with every little breeze.   It's a much better spot than it's former home on the back edges of the dog run attached to our garage.

fruit of the earth:  in addition to the volunteer delicata vines we also have a vigorous zucchini and a cucumber vine.  Beans coming up - quite late from how I learned but one of our CSA friends swears by going for a heavy yield from a later crop for the best keepers especially if you combine with other ingredients in canning and freezing.   Guess we'll see how that goes for us.    Got a variety pack and sorted them to plant in blocks so I can evaluate what we like best, etc.  They are bush beans so I could save the fence in that quadrant for morning glorious vines.   Whatever variety has pale mint green seeds has emerged without exception.  Quite strong and deep rich green color to the leaves.  Without the fence they wouldn't exist by now.  J did a beautiful job turning and amending the soil in this bean patch as well as the three smaller patches he prepared so I could at long last get all of the Tulsi in the ground.  Am done with that just as the herbal harvest picks up speed and volume.

now micro harvesting:  anise hyssop flower buds, calendula flowers, prunella flowers, various mints. 

Morning fresh-picked tea usually contains a borage flower, small sprig of dill, pinched-back tulsi flower head mostly in bloom.  Sometimes I add a prunella flowerhead if my kidneys feel undernourished and/or energetically murky.

unpleasant reality check:  last night there were a LOT of helicopters. 8 at least coming in two groups of three and later in the wee hours five more just in these seemingly endless line of noise and motion.  Loud with military silhouette and flying far lower than they needed to be.  Nothing like anything in the past.  Ever.

flowers and some unsolicited advice

the first of the crocosmia flower stems came into flower today.  This was the first thing my eyes caught through the mudroom window.

first red echinacea flower from the volunteer foxglove's co-creative partnership.  The latter is gracefully going to seed.  I hope to collect plenty to share!

I think of this variety as the Quinacridone version.  She will definitely be divided in the fall.

the Meadowsweet colony on Sunday afternoon.

The lower deck's container garden is coming along nicely.  I love tending to the strip of pots in the foreground because the deck is just the right height from the ground for standing/back comfort.  Picnic table was left behind by previous owners who said it was part of the original sale from first owner who built, enlarged, and landscaped the home.   Love this particular bit of casual history of the human place.  Continuity.  We all - of the clan who have been at home here - have sat at this table.  Dined, talked, thought and daydreamed.  This year J. had to re-work one of the end caps on the back bench.
First Monarda Fistulosa flower in the first fully mature self-seeded stand from one of the original plants I grew from seed.

my unglamorous and not yet dealt-with pool-skirt addition to the deck containers.  Mainly note many volunteer anise hyssop plants.  I grow them for their flowers which I collect less fairly than most other flower harvests.  I inter-plant tulsi pots which gives the bees another high-grade food source.  In the background is my potting table - our former picnic table from the old place.  In addition to work space the table houses two large asparagus ferns and an allamanda plant that winter in my studio.

These are thriving rescue self-seeded volunteers that I transplanted from a whiskey barrel in the field on a miserable rainy day in later April.  They've required a bit of extra nurturing and encouragement but are now fully ready to be moved to permanent homes in some pots on the skirt addition.

This is the barrel which I allowed to be consumed by red clover.  It gave me an extra harvest source and I appreciated that because clover is a flower where I am scrupulously fair about how much I take from the other species that thrive on her nectar.  The first flowering is largely kaput.  The biggest reason I allowed the clover to have its way is because of what that will give to the soil in the barrel.  Have set aside some conditioner and amendments.  Did not get the finnocchio seeds started in time so I'll sow the barrel with beets. 

Un-pictured:  a pair of swallowtails who swooped to nectar from my fledgling lantana.  To give this beautiful easy-care friend as much sun as she needs I shift the pot's location at noon and in the evening.  Most of the flowering plants I choose for the container garden can handle light shade for part of the day.   Not Ms. Lantana.  Was called to attain the plant and prepare a remedy for the new series that's emerging this summer.  Didn't know that at the time.  Just felt an insistence that had nothing to do with my personal wish-list.

This is a classic New World remedy in many commercial repertories.  Its unique gift is supporting a desire for release and change in those who cannot or will not cry.

I used to be Ms. Clint Eastwood and flat out refused to consider taking this remedy.  My rationale was pretty air tight, I thought at the time ... Well lookit, I never have sinus infections.  Ever.  and Chinese medicine says that's what happens when you don't cry as you should.  Ergo if I never got sinus infections there was nothing ultimately out of balance about the fact that I refused to cry.

not so any more.  children - and specifically Other children - in cages brought that wall down for good and all. 

but I know plenty of folks who are still not-crying while also talking about it 'way too much for the not-crying to be authentically organic and just how they're wired.  A few have written me to ask if I think it's something they should pay attention to and perhaps alter.  I usually reply with just two words:   I did.

really enjoying the fact that the first African Foxglove to bloom is the smallest decidedly runt-like of my basement seedlings.

This is the tree where the Mama catbird comes to sing a special greeting to me when I head for the field on my morning inspection tours.

Trees heavy and lush from a third night of rain fall in a row.  Three of the five overflow tomato plants have set multiple clusters of fruit.  The other two have fruit-cap forms.  If I ever knew the proper name for that phase of fruit development I don't remember.   The towering burdocks are there right in the middle of everything and thriving as they are, unchecked, because they are the King of this place as mugwort is the Queen.  After snapping this I walked over to the plants which I've been too preoccupied to track in close detail.  The flower stalks are a solid 7.5 maybe 8 feet tall.  There is a trio there.  They form a clearly defined boundary line/protective hedge.  Beneath and behind them a quantity of small leopard frogs live to jump another day.

won't this make an awesome Hungry Ghost palace?   Another left-behind item.  May have always lived in this yard.  For years now it has lived in the tiny pool cabana because J realized it was too heavy for him to manually lug into the woods where I envisioned placing it.   Now I'm glad to have a place to work on developing it and also working with it as a shrine.  This whole topic of racism, black/white relations, the emotional fever chart its evoked in me both philosophically and very personally have brought from deeper shadows any number of hungry ghosts.  Right now as you read the words I've chosen with care and love, sure, but far more than that - in order to be respectful to myself and to you in equal measure.  Right now as you read this I am showing you as gently and mindfully as I can who I am in my own white aspects.  I'm one of those unabashedly impatient foot-tapping oh come ON type of raised-to-be-white girls inside an aging half white lady's born-to-racial equality-activism-via-Pearl body.

What I'll begin reading sometime later today. 

would give quite a lot (and I do realize I've said this before) to have Howard here to explainify - if only through historical contextualization - these painfully awful and increasingly strange days.   Have had some kinda almighty struggle of late figuring out where (or even what) my personal sense of life processing via my ingrained sense of racial context is truly centered.  What is my racial consciousness actually about and how do I upgrade it from all the overwhelming options.   Things didn't really start turning around for me with that until yesterday.  In the aftermath of the initial shift in focus and...I guess you'd call it more directly and personally calibrated racial triage and its solution.

From my point of view - if you're a white person - screw any further consideration/explication of your fragility for the moment.  Just ... for right now ...  Look on that part of yourself as, I dunno.  Hillary's emails from a democratic/critical thinking point of view  Read/play/think/engage through your strength and get back to self-examination of what was previously un-tapped info/general life awareness after the fact of moving through your strength first.  You will truly (I promise) gain and learn a lot more from circling back to that other point later when you can also apply the direct retrospect of having engaged through your strength in the meantime. 

Also:  Read Zinn next.  as in n-e-x-t.  There's plenty of stuff to find here online to read for free.  You might find relevant You-Tubes or Vimeos of him reading his words or speaking to the subjects they contain.  Do this with great conviction if you balk or bristle at the idea and/or immediately think oh no that's not who I am.  Who cares.   About any of that.  At a moment like this?  Not relevant.  You shouldn't even care.  Not at the vastly needful moment of THIS moment.

  Read Zinn specifically in relation to his work as an educator and activist during the Spelman years.

You're welcome.  At some point this is going to click in a way where you WILL want to thank me.  Instead pass the fire to somebody else who needs both the light and the warmth that only comes from collectively joined and collectively focused human energy.

p.s. notice how I'm not spoon feeding you from my wealth of collected  Howard links?

that's on purpose.

what are you going to do with your strength. 

Aim to push yourself all the way beyond your personal feelings.  Especially those concerning your own self-relationship. 

thank YOU

eta:  definitely check out the article Mo offered in the second comment - under my name - below.  This is where we, collectively, are. 

sunshine after rain

Am 63 years old now.  It rained a great deal on my Tuesday birthday as it often does.  The ground was in need of massive soaking and it's our combined gift to have it so.  Hope you enjoyed some glimpses of my exuberant (and lengthy) morning inspection tour.  It began around 7:30 and everything looked sensational.  Despite the amount of wind and rather violent rain there were no casualties beyond a few stalks of the Great Fleece Flower.    And a daunting amount of windblown debris.  We had roughly 3 inches of rain.

(we also on/for my birthday had our first take out pizza since before the winter holidays.  T eats takeout roughly half the time from a small constellation of trusted places but this was a major adventure into former normalcy for the two oldsters.  We liked it but I wouldn't want to get back in the habit.  This is the kind of thing that only truly made sense when J had to drive past the places in order to get home.)

It's an ongoing practice for me to take the first couple of days in July as extra time to rest and reflect.   A revolution around the sun has finished and another is beginning.  I like to be still and undistracted enough to soak up that liminality here in the green hearted season.  More generally I also like to consider the dreamy restful needs of the newly born.  What if our birthdays offer us a chance to unfold anew - just as an infant does.  Feeling and breathing air with increased understanding and acceptance.  Coming to understand form and light.  wind and water on the skin. 

I thought about that a lot this year.  And as the rain poured down and I made a point to think about myself and the past year rather than fictional characters I also thought about how hard it was raining the night T was born and how I hadn't a clue of that until he was taken away, with J, for his second apgar test.  And the two midwives said to me enjoy these moments alone.  You won't see anything like them for a long time.  And they laughed amidst shared looks as women do.

***

In tonight's early evening I broke a pair of reading glasses.  Third pair in a week.  A single pair remaining.  Jim suggested a CVS run to re-stock.  Why not?  We'll jump in the truck right now.  Both of us suddenly ready  - both at the same time -  to go out and do this thing.  We went to the one with the self-serve checkout that never has more than two or three other people in it.  Ever.   

We had masks, gloves and a list.  In both directions we enjoyed beautiful rides through the woods and fields right on the cusp of twilight.   Once in the town with the CVS we made note of people socially distancing in line at the barbecue place.  Across the road a group of 7 squeezed maskless around a picnic table all seeming to talk and laugh at once.    People have been going around to places of service work to decorate with handmade banners of appreciation.  Knew that was a thing but it was nice to see it locally with my own eyes.  We came home on a different road that was quite leafy and wild.  Then we took a slight but compelling detour before coming home. 

A road at the edge of a secondary hill on the next ridge over from our own.   We looked at a place there.  One year on J's birthday we stopped, spur of the moment, to pick raspberries at a farm a bit further along the road that's since become a lot more high profile and considerably spiffed up around the edges.   We gawked like people taking in Manhattan for the first time.