Sparkling Lotus Ink

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

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.