The sparkly effect around last night's moon is the result of tree flowers and newly unfurling maple leaves. I stood outside for quite while.
The upcoming Scorpio full moon has been asking for advance preparation on my part. This is a significant switch up from me asking my water-cousin's moon-in-waiting to be gentle with me. I tend to do that as a matter of course and have ever since I was 18 or 18. 'Mixed results' would be a diplomatic way of putting it. I generally feel like I'm trapped in a psycholgical and emotional cement mixer with thousands of boulders tumbling around intent on 'polishing' me in the emotional, subtextual, and depth-charged way of such things. And then other times, it's amazingly healing and feather-gentle. That's how it was last year, for instance.
now this year the Scorpionic medicine spirit is talking to me rather than keeping quiet while I figure it out on my own. Telling me to Prepare to Receive.
This switch feels appropriate in my life's arc as well as where we are in the chakra wheel: Scorpio moving right on in and murmuring hey baby. just get yourself ready, okay? I assume my mind will blown in some way that may or may not be translatable in language-based way. Part of getting ready for that in the physical sense is another part of what I generally experience during the Scorpio lunar fullness. Just as usual, I've had really debilitating head pain for the past few days. It's been intense enough to promote altered consciousness.
People who make a habit out of talking to themselves through their bodies know what I'm talking about. In my case, it's been vividly clear to me since my late teens that my mind and spirit turned out to be my high cards. But I try not to flash that around like physically healthy people like to do it.
We all get gifts, we all get burdens.
and then we either sack up or demand to see the manager.
that's my boiled down sixth chakra/scorpio full moon takeway.
it really never varies at that level
but the particulars are endlessly rearrange-able
and so they have been.
The fire pit area post burning is always a kind of new year because the old growing season's been burnt clear. J's in the background attending to some of his newest tiny white pine transplants. I've been going outside everyday (except the time it snowed) and slowly tottering around with the cat, and my eyes peeled for new signs of life. Sometimes I weed a little, and take a fair amount of pictures during camera days. I dream and envision and listen to all the invisible voices and dreams of the waking plant world.
I'll take the head pain involved
with that level of high frequency reception because I consider it a reasonable price.
Also there's stuff I can do to keep everything at a dull roar so I can maintain some semblance of regular activity on its slowest speed.
add to which:
after I heard the verdict and finally exhaled?
my head pain didn't vanish
but the level is now both livable
and simple to control when it's not.
now i'm going back to not listening to what people have to say
because I'm seeing now, and what I see hasn't yet found a dovetail with word tincturing. Not in myself or an ability to absorb that kind of conscious word use as it's offered from others. This happens a lot. Like the eight year period when I went analog and knew without doubt I wasn't 'missing' a thing. I think the part of my brain that felt it was vital I clock the mainstream level of what's on other people's minds is undergoing major revision. A lot of this head pain that's louise hay-worthy in nature, is all about how much I need to disconnect from what the shadow realms of keeping track of Everybody are up to. I've always considered it a point of honor that I don't disconnect from my species along lines of affinity, time management concerns, or discernible 'point'/purpose. Maybe it still is. But I'm ready to retire from the front lines there, as well as elsewhere.
This years Maple flowering season has been straight-up magical with its primarily sunny days full of warmth and freshly emergent human experience. All the new alchemists were able to achieve their first co-creative success by way of working with the flower medicine spirit of the first flower essence they came to know - through the dive program - Red Maple.
This a profound culmination of shifting awareness.
The sense of satisfaction I feel is deeply nourishing. As is my profound gratitude to the trees spirits who so obviously gave of themselves to these budding healers and light workers. I felt their energy rippling with invitation: come. we are ready to receive your reception.
and they meant me, too.
and so I went to the red maples here and there around the property, simply receiving.
Ladies Mantle is the alchemist's plant totem by long-established principles. I invited the new alchemists to approach the plants on the mornings they were here and drink from the leaves if they were so invited.
they were not. and neither was I.
but we all stood in wonderment
and gave ourselves some points for not going ahead and doing it anyway.
'that would have been so human', one of them texted me.
I considered it a moment
of professional achievement wreathed
in deeply happy sense of personal fulfillment.
I have this plant growing in two parts of the dooryards: the tiny strip gardens by the porch and a far more sizeable colony in the sidepocket gardens. They were the only thing the moles didn't destroy back when I was trying to create "nice" beds that looked like I knew that kind of knowing what I was doing (which I do ...) rather than maintaining a largely feral pollinator corridor, that rings my chimes about a thousand times more.
Another thing I really enjoy is successfully growing a plant from seed to flower - particularly when it's on my holy grail list. Today I am SO INCREDIBLY UP AND HAPPY because yesterday I spied flower buds of the one and only Cowslip I've gotten this far. An old friend has grown dozens of them and once created a simple but effective walkway border of just cowslips and japanese ferns. She's a double Libra. Seeds instinctively know what she wants from them, and take it from there. I'm good with just the buds on this single plant.
it's what my seeds know I want from them:
to shine in their own way and make a meaningful statement in my heart.
Yesterday I didn't care about my head's atrocious hammering neuro-circuitry
because of those buds.
mission accomplished, i say ...
all the plants in this post are neighbors to each other. The way this coral bell's emerging suggests there's a division of parts in her future. I refer to this quietly lovely companion as The Dowager. She reminds me of really old ladies in my earliest formative memories.
Tried for years to grow wild columbines from seed. Finally gave up and got three little plants from Select Seed. I planted them in a row for the hummingbirds to feed during a gap in the flowering cycle. One was summarily dug up by a squirrel intent to replace it with a cache of sunflower seeds. The other two are pictured above. There are also three seedlings growing in the cracks of the bricks. One really wet day in May, when my head stops hurting as much until thunderstorm season, I will transplant the babies in the same small bed with their mothers.
This lunar cycle's new moon in Aries has had me on a mission to complete a single hanging-on task that requires a degree of mindfulness a day. To that end, yesterday's endeavor involved repairing a pomegranate seed rattle I cured and began working with in my early 20's. have posted about it a fair amount over the years but don't remember if any of those words exist in this iteration of an SLI blog.
Above the repairwork is still wet. It has since dried and I've lightly sanded so the matte acrylic gel isn't bumpy enough to announce itself. Underneath the silk ribbon is a hole that developed when the skin of of the pomegranate cracked. I figured out what to do, and then waited until I was in the right head and other cosmological alignments had occurred.
at first I thought I might like to take other portions of the ribbon scrap and apply them randomly.
silk is such a magically conducive organic material.
am going to use something cellulose based though to be more in keeping with the rest of the rattle.
didn't mind using a little of the gel for the repair rather than decoration because it makes that piece of ribbon better supported from the inside of the hole, and little seeds shaking against the silk. Have shaken it a lot this morning.
it brings me into myself.
If you have a chance to make yourself something meaningful & sacred this month
especially between now and the week after the full moon
go for it.