First of all: This particular lunation with so much of its energy containing reflection of the Scorpio sun. It has been AMAZING. Last night a fat-bowled crescent lit the corner of my pillow just as I was coming to bed. I kept my eyes open and stared at it for a good long while. Then I went to peaceful sleep. Feel like maybe ... until the shenanigans come to terms with themselves...it's extra important to absorb this Super moon's light
given one thing and another I bumped this book 'way up to the top of my morning reading list. I first read it a month or so after it was published in '87. Loved it instantly and the physical book has come to embody far more than its words. This was one of those books that passed around to all my word-loving 'soft' feminist girlfriends. We were inclined to trade books and then call each other to read aloud the passages we were most enjoying. Listening to the words spoken aloud and with somebody else's meanings-of-emphasis took me deeper into my own enjoyment. I think it deepened sisterly connections as well.
Be that as it may the book starts with a single word sentence: Rape.
You can't get from here to there in Persephone's story without it and the book begins from her mother's point of view. Mother and Daughter exchange letters that gradually spiral with their disintegrated relevance to humans. They speak to the self-rape of humanity as well as their own dwindling/retracted life force: In the losing of meaning and what is therefore lost. Demeter mourns humans forsaking the sacred tree spirits and so forth.
I'm re-reading it now (started two mornings ago as a self-care form of buckling-up because I feel we've all been [seemingly endlessly] suffering abuse from a rapist that just won't stop. A rapist with so many willing and capable accomplices it's really been far more like a metaphorical gangbang. I've thought of it this way all along although in the beginning getting traction from anyone but other rape/incest survivors was a tough to impossible goal. You know it when you know it and you see it when you see it. I thought about re-reading this book as soon as my brain was well enough to fully immerse enjoyably in the experience but then there were so many un-read books.
I don't know what this is - above. I uploaded it from my camera last night and it doesn't bear resemblance to the photos on either side - all taken at the same time/place. But it looks like the sky and clouds. The day in question was very overcast and there wasn't any break in the clouds. I was wandering around outside looking at the landscape at eye and tree canopy levels in search of a larger reality that could ground me in an equally real under-world of combined multi-species life force. I stood near the frog pond until I didn't even remember I was standing there. Just be-ing. My consciousness was absorbed by the still-green spirit of Place. I told the landscape I didn't want to be a human who 'tried' to be attuned to their larger reality. I talked of other things and then went on my silent wandering way.
All the pictures around this one were taken there in that space.
I have nothing to 'regale' anyone with about this particular image - it's simply something that doesn't match anything else of a pragmatic nature. And it happened yesterday while I was basically asking for a subway map that might eventually lead Beyond 3-d
In sharing both the picture and my experience in the yard I'm also sharing my ongoing re-rooting process on the other side of a collective madness I can't recognize on any level. Another far more sanitized and visually manageable analogy for our collective experience might be: somebody coming along in the night and smashing a particularly significant pot containing a beloved green friend - leaving the broken shards, damaged plant, and exposed roots as they fell.
When you get up and are sufficiently awake, one of your first acts of 'a new day' will be to contain the damage/trauma to the plant and get its roots resettled in new digs and fresh soil as needed.
THIS IS WHAT WE ALL NEED TO BE DOING FOR OURSELVES AS WELL AS FOR OUR SENSE OF COMMUNITY IN WHATEVER FORMS. IT'S VERY RELEVANT TO THE FIRST/ROOT ENERGY CENTER.
I'm returning to a favorite novel about the human-driven archetype most meaningful to me because it takes me to a time in my life that I want to connect with. In my 20's I was aware of politics only sporadically. I mean something like what we all have no choice but to be living through I would have tracked fairly diligently but I didn't track much about D.C. and the globe because I was going through an extended phase of believing power only exists where you acknowledge it to be. Mainly I was into local socio-political issues and forms of community organizing at a one on one level that gradually produced more widespread local resource/contact networks. My theory was - and remains - that two interconnecting energies eventually create all else in terms of human dynamics and effectiveness.
Love is the root of all else.
let's consider our individualized Loving Root
What does it look like?
Where does it grow?
Do you keep the plant it grows outdoors, does it meet you on its own terms in a wilder place, or has it always resided in a literal or more magical way in your home?
These questions apply to one of 3 RED personifications I'm making and discussing on my creativity blog this month.
I mention it here so those so inclined can consider their answers. Think of the supplies you're drawn to work with as well as imagined presentation. Something else I've been meaning to do for myself but only just nudged into action - do an image search on 'plant root systems'
alternatively you could consider the root of a plant that well known and loved. Something that roots you within yourself or speaks of your family/tribe rootbed. You could always sketch spontaneously without looking at references in life or on the internet. Sketch from memory what you know of an appealing root system. Start as you mean to continue: by making all of these suggestions something of your own.
Fire Lilies are blooming copiously in the studio. Garlic planting still in progress. Talked to somebody who's experimenting with putting half of his in on the final edge of this lunation, like I'm doing, or digging trenches so he can put them in during January thaw. He says there's loss but it scratches an itch as well as the larder's need. I like forms of making do that are very forgiving of space shots who never remember not to fill their plate too full...