Sparkling Lotus Ink

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!

how she was

It's a beautiful morning to be outside but I'm waiting another hour or so to let more dew evaporate.  It's going to be a big harvesting day in my efforts to get as much done as I can before the tomatoes rule my days, dreams, and nightmares.  I know it's coming.  Every evening when we go out to see how the day's been for the garden J looks at the wealth of steadily growing and ripening tomatoes and turns his head so I won't see his silent laugh.

In this interim morning off to loaf and laugh in my studio I also searched out a few images of Celeste in the field.  Love the one above.  It's very hard for a calico cat to be truly stealth in this kind of landscape but she let her wild & determined personality carry her along in its place.

This is kind of a weird choice but it's also perfect because J's campchair is in nearly the same spot as her memorial statue.  Also because she's showing her affection while gnawing on the hem of his shorts.  She loved doing this but only with J.

23 years is a long time for a cat.

she loved her place in our family and was determined to keep it.

and she has.

I was conscious of my own determination to hold fast to our bond.  Cutting it was difficult.  But as she left more fully in that moment I felt her telling me a summer would come when I'd find her everywhere.

and I have ...

 

 

 

happy birthday, Pearl

Very early this morning I had a dream that my grandmother was making a slow perambulation of the field garden.  She was wearing a brown and white check dress she favored and vigorously shaking the fence wire all around the perimeter.  When I woke up I was still partially in the dream and then I remembered today was her birthday.  She'd come to check and make sure what I most value remains safe.  Still on her watch of watching over me.  Probably has been through all the years I felt no sense of vibratory connection.  Waiting for that change.  Picking her moment as old women do.

Usually, if I happen to be blogging on her birthday, I prepare a written tribute the day before with just a single image of her at the top.  Today I thought I'd work with image prompts I snapped as I  moved with my thoughts of her on this morning's inspection tour.  Things around the place that remind me of her.  Things I believe she would love and/or strongly approve of.  And, in the case of above, something she gave me on one of my own tween birthdays. 

She would sometimes remind me when I was especially sad (usually about not "having" a father) that we were both born of the summer when everything grows and makes seeds for the years to come.  She would jostle me by the shoulders none too gently but her voice held that lion's purr of persuasion at all times.  She would insist we understood how to live perfectly fine without parents or siblings helping us understand how because we were born in the season of life itself.  And then she'd give me science-y books of successful distraction to read like the one above.

***

  Always - from her to me for all holidays and also just-because gifts that were usually based on sale price windfalls - there were books. Not "a" book (although there was nearly always an extra special book that got saved as the last thing to be opened at her insistence) but books in the plural. 

(I don't have many of the books my grandmother gave me and scarcely any of her (many) other gifts including what was stipulated in her will as mine to inherit.  My mother systematically destroyed or gave away nearly everything important to me and/or my grandmother, generally right in front of me, in the wake of Pearl's death.  So the book above is super-precious to me.)

Having been raised through cycles of somewhat profound deprivation she also survived reversals of fortune borne of the depression, a hound dog of a husband who spent a great deal of his money on other women, and escalating racial tensions she feared would be the absolute death of our democracy.  She could be flinty and harsh when passing judgement on those who did not know how to suck it up and get on with things in an absence of emotional overwhelm.

she raised me, a person who is emotionally overwhelmed on an average of two or three times an hour, to get on with things just as she did.  This part of my background has taught me a lot over the long haul.  Think people who read here would for the most part agree that I do, in fact, get on with things.  And much like this complicated and always passionate woman who showed me what's what about being female and living in the world, I can be undeniably flinty and well past my last nerve when it comes to those who weren't raised to come through come hell or high water.  Although I wonder a lot , and always have, about what life would be like with those kind of options I'm not sure I'd be well suited to living in such a way myself.

Pearl understood I was a creature of volition long before I did.

The first time it occurred to me that Pearl's spirit might travel to visit and explore our place it was during the meditation portion of my morning yoga practice during the late winter of '17.  I suddenly saw her standing in the woods pictured above as they were when I first went outside at quarter of 7.  She was in her brown and white checked dress with her hands on her hips and her head thrown back so she could scan the tree tops.  She whistled a series of flawless bird calls.  And I opened my eyes, pulled out of the meditation and said out loud "Yes that's what she would do first if she came to visit."

If she was alive I can imagine her getting out of the car for the first time and heading directly towards the woods to commune with the bird nations she loved so dearly.  Kind of like I and many I know get out of our cars and don't really say hello to any of the humans happy though we may be to see them so much as we go wandering as if magnetized straight to the nearest garden space.

My grandmother's legacy is multi-plexic but she definitely taught me that whatever's wrong in human life can be healed by something you'll find in the natural kingdoms.  And unlike many holy rollers of those times and since - my grandmother didn't believe in a strong-armed interpretation of man having dominion over all other life forms.  She believed we didn't deserve our brains or our hearts if we didn't act like we knew how to use them.  I can easily see her chaining herself to a nuclear facility's chain-link fence or a redwood tree's trunk.

Pearl raised me to take no shit.  From anybody.  If something was wrong, anywhere for any reason, it was my duty to speak up.  To understand the problem from an overview level and help re-arrange a point of conflict's individual parts if I could.  She raised me to boycott, to actively put my body on the line in protest, to pray on problems I had no idea how to solve under my own steam, and to never forget absolutely everything and every person connects to everything else and every other person.

Something previously inexperienced began to happen after I had the vision of her standing in the woods with her hands on her hips.  It involves a cat.  My grandmother loved cats.  So did I but I was forbidden to have one and eventually given a dog who didn't like me at all and vice versa.  Be that as it may I associate double-leo Pearl with cats.  I once went into somebody's house to discover their most reclusive of four cats, Minerva, sitting expectantly on the counter right by the door I'd entered.  I had the spontaneous idea she was conveying one of those silent cat messages but picking up on any specifics was not my reading forte.  But the special human to the cat aka the friend I was visiting was an animal communicator.  She told me Minerva - who never came out to greet guests let alone wait expectantly for their arrival - wished me to know something:

You're grandmother's waiting for you.  Somewhere.  In the woods.

Since then it's become my habit while woods wandering to sometimes ask tentatively and sometimes with loud exuberance if Pearl is present and would like to account for herself.  To no avail until I started to realize something about the times I've been doing it most recently here at home.  Anytime I talked to Pearl, Mama would come racing to the scene.  Sometimes I'd see her approach or hear the thud of galloping feetsies but usually she was just suddenly there.  And she'd commence scratching like crazy on the trunk of the nearest tree.

This morning when Mama came galloping I actively wondered if there was a connection. 

and then I thought about the fact that even though my grandmother wouldn't recognize a lot about today's world and the ways my family personally lives within it she would undoubtedly recognize the part of my container garden that remains disaffected by my overall efforts to up my Final Effect game by summer's mid-point.

Am referencing the stuff on the pool skirt.  This is how Pearl herself gardened although I didn't make the connection until this moment.  If she were somehow here today I have a good idea of what she'd do.  Stand over me with her hands on her hips until I took the perennial red sage out of the beautiful pot which is clearly too small and get it duly situated in something larger and lackluster in appearance.

Perhaps that's where I'll start delayed-by-heat chores rounds this evening.

(my grandmother quite successfully taught me that the look of a place couldn't hold a candle to its cumulative atmosphere and effective purpose.  In that respect and a good many others she would have approved whole-heartedly in my choice of husband.    She would also find him suitably generous of his cumulative resources in a long haul way with just the right level of big flashes to show proof of a kind she always noticed and highly prized - that what mattered to me also mattered to him if only by default.)

took about six pics in a row while Mama sat there gazing at me and I asked if my grandmother's spirit was afoot within her.  was figuring it might be one of those occasions where one or two pics in the chain showed obvious activity of anOther sort.

nope. 

but then again, knowing Pearl, she keeps her options fluid and body surfs ...

During my first of today's visits to the garden I picked the first ripe tomato.  Cut the Blush baby in half so J and I could share this first homegrown taste.  Our jersey roots kind of mandate we make something of a ceremony of it for each type of tomato grown.  This variety offers a sweet burst of cherry tomato taste coupled with extra meaty full tomato-flavored flesh.  Hoped it would be perfect equally for salads, sandwiches and stir frys.  And it will.  Could probably also handle a barbecue skewer.

thumbs up. 

Will share small packets of seed for anyone who might like to have a go next year.

the caveat:  given enough space, light, and manure these vines are super prolific food bearers that have reached the end of their stake length here at the high summer mark.   That's why I'm offering small amounts of seed.  Even if I grow 2 plants max every year for the next few I will not be able to use up the seed while it's viability level is close to full potency. 

last night I could not sleep - already! - over exactly what I plan to do with all the emergent tomatoes as they ripen.  It was a rousing un-success but then just now as I'm sitting here making this post I realized I can chop them up with some of last year's shallots and create a cooked-down stock base that can be frozen in meal-planning chunks.  Will experiment also with freezing the fruits whole as well.  Even though it brings up immediate flashbacks of a Little Findhorn experience involving several gallon freezer bags full of yellow pear cherry tomatoes that did not unthaw so much as mush themselves into oblivion.

~*~guess it's obvious I have re-thought my level of willing accommodation to the Too Many Words contingent of email consideration points in recent times.

I came back to blogging in order to do it deliberately.  And for me that's impossible without words in sufficient number to the themes.~*~

shake rattles & sing .3

April '07 - rattling the south-facing garden beds awake at our former home.  

eta:  a very different Molly's word tincture: Molly Sheehan of Green Hope Farm Essences.

Yesterday in the later afternoon I got a text from J. who was elsewhere in the house or yard.  He said it was going to start raining in about an hour and a half and was predicted to keep going for four days.  That's how I wound up in the way-back machine of my searching for the specific lede pic today.  Am glad for the rain since we had so little snow.  The more rain inches we can soak into the ground the better it will be once micro-droughts define themselves.   But perpetual low-light will not make for compelling blog documentation.

***

Am currently putting together a super concrete - you need these things and then you do these specific steps - type of How to Make a Flower Essence post.  Once it's published this will link back to all the posts that are previously filed under that category.   The pragmatic how-to post is meant to be amplified by all those other posts in both direct content and more deep-reading between the lines.  So far as I can tell, anyone who openly shares something authentic about themselves in relation to this blog has quite an adept feeling for their organic landscape and its specific spirit(s) of place.  Not to mention a special affinity for many of the plants and trees that grow there.

All such affinity is, in effect, an integral part of how-to make/co-create an essence.  This type of high-crisis moment - at a nuts and bolts level - is an awesome time for anyone who wants to participate in healing themselves, their environments, and their own growing spaces to actively do something that crystallizes the spark in their heart's dreams and healing wishes for All That Is on our beautiful and increasingly broken-apart home here on earth.

Above is a blended-flower bowl that yielded a wonderfully comprehensive remedy called Mellow Yellow.   The essence came to life on the hillside where I kept a plot specifically devoted to raising flowers I wished to prepare as flower essence mother stocks.  If you follow the link you'll land on one of the first posts I made here. You'll see a picture of me from '05 looking equally content and determined.  Same pitchfork  but now I wear shoes with hard shells like a sensible person.  Or wait to do whatever until I am wearing them.

for the curious and knowledgeable alike - here's a thumbnail synopsis of the bowl's contents. 

Broccoli - Scours the psyche in a way that allows us to see how/when/why we interpret the actions of others as personalized victimization.  Offers psychic and emotional fortitude to deal with that skew IF we've a mind to.

Marigold - Very supportive of neural circuitry and its vibrancy level.  This essence - in whatever form of flower variety and color - has been indispensable in essence combinations that are geared to supporting integration with the larger/higher/faster frequency that so many of us tend to 'catch' even if we keep our awareness of it deliberately small or convince ourselves it's merely wish fulfillment or Nothing At All.

Nasturtium - boosts the circuitry of the electrical body.  A boon for those who tend to fade somewhere between the 6th and 8th inning stretch of any given day.

Pumpkin -  Helps support our subtle and physical bodies' need to galvanize under duress/situations focused on The Choice of No Choice.  Helps you locate whatever you need energetically to do whatever it takes mentally & physically in order to bring a necessary project to a timely conclusion.

Snapdragon - to smooth the bite in your communicative style if you've normally got one.  To help you keep from developing such bite under duress - especially when thrown into a situation where you personally have little to no control and it angers you.

Vatican Tomato -  Tomato's healing signature addresses situations in which we've actively allowed patterns of self-sabotage to become normalized behavior to you. 

Moon and Stars Watermelon - psychic birthing & midwifery to support life's expansive changes and creative hot streaks.  Times two thanks to the above contributor.

Yellow Wood Sorrel - hydrates physical and emotional burnout associated with hypersensitivity. 

Zucchini - supports kinder & gentler self-care initiation than we generally allow ourselves.

The above packets hold the remainder of the other seeds I've started under lights in the basement - rattling all the way.  Lincoln leeks and basket flowers are regular must-grows for me.  African foxgloves are fairly well known to me in their purple form.  They've grown with a gorgeously prolific branching pattern on various parts of the property but never taller than 3 - 3.5 feet. Am trying the white variety because they reach 5 -6 feet when they're happy.  Was thinking I'd inter-plant with Indigo Spires salvia here and there within the Evolving Sanctuary bed.   I really love gracefully architectural combos that intermix white and blue flowering plants - arranged in a visual chain that stays embedded in the mind's eye most vividly right before dusk.   This I learned from a wonderful garden design book called Color Echoes in the Garden.

  One day about a month ago an early morning dream spirit advised I grow Sweet Thai basil rather than my favored cinnamon variety.  The latter has been indispensable for decades as our family dinner iced beverage of choice during the summer months.  Couldn't find any on offer at any of my preferred seed sources when I finally ordered.  So that turned out to be an on-point lucid swerve from the Beyond.  Never heard of this bergamot variety before.  It's capable of reaching maturity in a single season in this hardiness zone range.  If it doesn't then I won't see what the flowers are like in relation to our bee, butterfly, hawkmoth and hummingbird contingents.  Not unless I can figure out how to successfully winter it over somewhere in the garage ...

shake rattles & sing .2

Yesterday my body felt too sore and stiff to push any yoga-related edges.  I took the day off and further took my time getting to the point of taking time outdoors.  When I did get as far as planting columbine seeds I worked with Mama's close attendance.  She startled some when I produced the rattle and commenced shaking it but ultimately held her ground there on the ledge where the rattle rests in this picture.  I pressed seeds of the two columbine varieties featured as a visual lede in yesterday's post into the chilly soil.  The predicted n'oreaster is being successively downgraded.  Had hoped for 3-4 inches of snow but now they're saying just a dusting.  That's why I reserved half the seeds in each packet.  Have strong and seemingly good ideas of where I might plant those in another three and a half weeks.  I have viable delphiunium seeds in a box in the dining room closet. I'm thinking of starting them in a whiskey barrel in the field.  See what might emerge successfully enough to transplant into pots until they're sturdy enough to plant-out with next year's garden in mind.

wellness check of the day:  Make sure you aren't adopting habits of shallow breathing patterns.  Take slow steady breaths in.  Hold for release and then exhale slowly.  Shut your eyes and breathe for five minutes - preferably standing in soft morning sunlight and just before twilight descends in the evening.

J. fixed-up a hybrid wheelbarrow from various parts of two useless versions.  We now have two that function just at the time of year we need wheelbarrows most.  It was the first day I successfully nudged myself to get back to reading something I'm glad to be absorbing first thing in the morning.  Am beginning with a re-read of a book I loved the first time through:

It should be said that I met and briefly knew Jay Leutze in the mid-90's by way of a writing class at the Boston adult education center.  He was head and shoulders talented above and beyond anyone else in the room including the instructor.  We sat next to each other and at a certain point after he'd revealed he was working on a fictional trilogy I could not control the NEED to ask if I might read the fair copy (such things still existed then ...) of the first volume.

It was brilliant and as recently as last year I recalled a particular running theme without being able to place the book it came from for upwards of a week.  Shortly after I read that novel he moved Back Home to the mountain that features as a main character in the book above.  In addition to about a dozen books that are new to me I'd also set aside a small pile of re-reads last fall for my 2020 reading goals.  For a small window of time back in January I felt this particular book might not be a good fit since there really aren't any more safety nets left to allow environmental Davids to trounce industrial Goliaths.

but this is an excellent record of the time Before.  In time people will need to study this kind of thing as a way of figuring out how to bring more balance back to the land/people dichotomy.

(also I have never forgotten the way Jay could read a sentence or two of somebody else's draft aloud and if it was yours you'd sit there thinking.  "Wow.  My words can SOUND like that.")

shake rattles & sing .1

It's a sunny new england day but still quite chilly.   I'll add long johns under my gardening trousers and then head out, pomegranate rattle in hand,  to wake up the soil a bit.  Tomorrow morning I'll press the tiny poppy-like seeds into the soil and wish them good fortune.  Word of a nor'easter coming our way with six inches of snow expected is actually perfect for columbines.  I may scatter some larkspur and poppy seeds as well.

Columbines really like it here especially in and around the evolving sanctuary garden.  These two choices have been calling to me since the 2020 Select Seeds offerings went live back in January.  Once I finally did order I dickered for awhile over the "necessity" of them but then ultimately decided new columbine varieties for my garden are definitely in the hyacinths for our souls category.

Just below the trumpet vines you can see the earth I turned and rattled-over.  The seed bed extends several feet and I'll sow two islands with plenty of room inbetween.  Aside from cutting space to stand and tend to the seedlings we needed to cut down two secondary vines that were much too close to an enormous tree-like poison ivy entity.  It never went dormant so we didn't risk cutting it down.

You can see above, the two cut vine stems still entwined in the fence wire.   There's also a stripling elm to be cut on the other side of the ivy.   Just one of the many things that got out of hand the year Jim got Lyme and I was clobbered with an eruption of Graves Disease.   Seems we are still catching up from two critical 'gap years' for both of us.  But we are glad and grateful to have a place to be outside and moving .

There's a lot I'd love to clean up right here but the retaining wall and subsequent ground above isn't very stable.  Upon reflection I'm glad there will be plenty of roosting places available for the dozens of tiny birds who live here.  I want them to stay on general principle but also because they eat the poison ivy berries and also those of a nearby poison sumac.

While we were working two neighbors walked by.  They appeared to be together yet practicing extreme distancing.  J. saw them yesterday and concluded they walk at significantly different paces.   The woman complained to me of an eyesore across the road.  She asked if I had ever complained about it or asked that it be removed.  I said uh-huh same as I'd said when she asked if I wished it wasn't there in place of how beautiful it used to be.

it's taken a decade but I've learned how to fit in. 

My pomegranate rattle is very elderly and every year the seeds inside speak more loudly....

 

today's outside time

Today on J.'s lunch hour we came out to the field to consider the garlic and ... something else not quite gelled yet... bed that he created yesterday afternoon - one pitchfork at a time.  HA!!  I have convinced the usually-has-a-better-idea sorta virgo man in my life that pitchforking rocks everything else if you're truly serious about healthy soil.  He said he saw worms everywhere as he was working.  We stood and considered his accomplishment in silence for awhile.  Silent - or nearly so - brains as well.  Studying soil we played an active part in creating.

We looked around without speaking much and eventually mulched the new bed with a generous layer of straw.   Yesterday while Jim made that bed I eradicated all the sumac trees that have begun to block light on the garden's eastern edge.  Marked places where the sumac runners should be pulled ASAP and also pulled as many as far and wide as I could.  Usually I do that for three hours and then do nothing for another two days.  But I did that for about two hours and then pulled up/cut down dead remnants of last years garden. I needed to do that in order to mentally divide it into a nine patch grid.  That will make it easier to keep track of what needs doing - where and when.

Everything in the natural landscape feels vibrant and fully perked to keep the waking process going.  In the image above the garden bench has been moved farther from the bed.  There will  be a strip of grass path there into the original square growing space.  In my head I see the whole thing dug, tilled and dug, mulched and replanted.  In my heart it blooms to sustain us. 

Later in the afternoon J. wheeled around a corner of our house quite suddenly when/where I didn't expect him but that's how he rolls so I've learned to do the same.  He told me to stay away from the news if I was already upset and so of course I asked why and he told me and then I needed another vigorous eradication sort of project in search of calm or at least some clear space.

I have plans for the space beneath the Japanese Dogwood that's part of the original landscaping and her two self-sown daughters.  I also have plans to get as much of this small corner of pachysandra outta here before everything's too grown around the plant to get to it effectively.  The soil here is SUPER rich and perfect for my intended purpose.

[thought I posted this last night.  today it's snowing but very lightly.  Was expected...]

Plant Geek Eyes: the tarot edition

Not so long ago I acquired the tarot deck pictured above by winning a runner-up lottery prize from a regional herbal collective.  Quite a bit more recently an old ethnobotany buddy who off-and-on reads here SOS'd me on the subject of the same deck.  Was asked if I'd do a visual breakdown explaining how I approach a new deck in order to become more familiar with it.  Although I'd normally be inclined to post this on my secondary blog the gorgeous plant-elevating artwork feels like it's ultimately a better fit for this space. 

 go here if you want to see a thorough (and thoroughly lovely) PROPER review of this particular deck.

 Hope my process/approach sparks ideas of how you might personalize and enhance the experience of familiarizing yourself with a previously unexplored deck or perhaps your very first.

My first move once the deck is out of the box is to liberate it from its paper ribbon.  I hold it gently in my left/receiving hand while using my right to open the deck's accompanying guidebook to a random page.  I then retrieve the card (this will be easy even if you've never done it before because a virgin deck is arranged in perfect numerical/suit order)  corresponding with the page I opened in the booklet.  In this case is was a very short search-and-find walk to The High Priestess.

I don't initially focus on the left brain/info part of this introductory gesture.  I simply look at the card.  Noticing what it feels like vibrationally and what I admire most about its visual presentation.  Making note of what ultimately resonates - or fails to. 

* If you've got a frame of reference for other decks notice how this card differs from and/or fulfills your expectations in terms of vibe, specific illustration, and color palette.

*If this is your first deck try looking at the card's imagery as if it had been created for your specific scrutiny.  Solidify some type of personal response to what you see:  note your feelings, intellectual connections swiftly made, emotional surges that defy linear definition and so forth.

The purpose of this opening gesture is to also get a feel for what the deck's guidebook has to offer.  It was a lovely surprise to see the inclusion of (wild)crafting ideas. Interactive prompts are very compatible with the hands-on world of herbcrafting. That adds a lovely layer of automatic resonance and accessibility.

*~*~*~*~*~*~*~*~*~*~

My next exploration nearly always involves XVIII and XIX - the Moon and Sun cards.  The reason doesn't relate to the tarot-based meaning of these cards - it's astrological.  My natal sun sign is ruled by the moon.  My moon sign is likewise ruled the sun.  That makes the cards' natural pairing - as well as their energetic polarity - especially potent when one or both cards appear in reading.

 Unless you have a specific pairing of strong established meaning to you - I suggest you begin by doing this:

Separate the 22 (0-21) Major Arcana from the rest of the deck.   Shuffle very lightly - not so much to mix them up as to give them your touch until the cards start to hold some of your warmth.  Am aware many people interject assertive energy at this point by rapping the Majors sharply on the edge of a table or a specific sacred object sturdy enough to absorb the blows. I just like to touch them via shuffling until they hold warmth.  Tarot cards are pragmatically composed of paper which holds vestiges of sentience.  Simple warming touch seems like a much more rewarding way to wake up together, doesn't it?

Spread the cards out like I did  - a bit messily and with a great deal of overlapping among the cards.  Soften your gaze rather than studying whatever shows a focused way.  As you gaze rub your palms together briskly for a moment.  Then begin rubbing them more gently - about twice as long as you were brisk. These motions will enliven your secondary palm chakras as well as pinging your Crown and Heart chakras to begin their opening process .

Hold your hands, palms down, 4 to 6 inches above the cards.  Don't mentally watch what you're doing just allow your palms to hover until you feel a gravitational dip/pull to pick something up.  Repeat in order to select a second card. 

NOTE:  if you don't feel any kind of physical or energetic nudge simply shuffle the major arcana well.  Cut the deck twice using your non-dominant hand.  Re-stack and then use your dominant hand to deal yourself the top two cards.

Study the cards' colors, images and symbols.  Make note of what these elements already mean to your visual brain - in or out of a tarot frame.  Quiet yourself enough to notice anything the image whispers to (or from within) your soul.  When you look carefully - what does this card feel like at a purely personal level?  Is the resonation strong enough to focus on what's been evoked rather than concern over what the card is 'supposed' to mean?

If you're the type to document grab a fresh notebook and write down the cards you select.  If they resonate strongly for you at the blink/image level pay special attention to their designated meaning.   Documenting your card draws will yield a fascinating grasp of patterns to the draws you might not notice if you rely solely on your temporal memory. After the trends are noted I transform the otherwise dull/repetitive entries into art journal pages or use them for collage substrates.

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Next I pull my soul and personality card from the deck.*  This is a numerological thing often attributed to Mary K. Greer.  In research prep for this entry I learned the technique actually pre-dates her.  Here's an online source for all the relevant info needed to make your own calculations. 

[Note if you follow the link:  I don't know what is up with the third mentioned card of Shadow.  What's been included doesn't make sense to me.  When I consulted my copy of Tarot for Yourself I saw nothing similar but it's a very early edition.  The new re-release may have that shadow information included.  If anyone reading has that edition and the info makes the slightest bit of workable sense could you verfiy in comments, please?]

*alternatively you can simply look at the remaining major arcana and pick two more cards that appeal to you - whether you know why or not.  Sometimes it's a lot more juicy and ultimately revelatory when you don't know why but you go with it anyway.

By now I trust the imagery clarifies why I decided to publish this post here.   This morning I found a comment to a post in which grace mentioned a review she'd read of Herbcrafter's comparing artist Joanna Powell Colbert to Pliny.  It doesn't seem at all hyperbolic the longer I look at her gorgeous work.   Each card is comparably compelling and brimming with life-force as well as flawless and beautifully varied composition.

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I have one more habitual step before moving on to study the deck's imagery systematically.  Will begin posting the full visual review in the next post.   Hope everyone will agree this was a good choice to kick off a new blog element of sentient exploration. I want to more cohesively feature art that's inspired by ever-deepening appreciation for the green nations.  Thought to name the category Plant Geek Eyes.

As a final gesture in this portion of a Hello examination I pull a three card reading from just the Majors:  above/below/within.

Always good to see such a personally significant card riding high above.  Dandelion is an interesting choice as a Fool significator plant.  In comparison Michael Tierra's classic Herbal Tarot assigns Ginseng.   Dandelion feels a lot more on the money.    Have some intuitive opinions concerning alternative allies for 0 but they are of zero relevance to anyone but me. 

[If you have feelings or thoughts about specific cards you pull - write them down within the day's card list.]

  Was gladdened to see Strength in the below position.  Garlic is an excellent choice for a Below totem.  And an equally excellent health-full ally to cherish. 

within reflection: Garlic is pretty much everything to a faltering immune system.  Or surviving practical and situational emergency.  If you have water and some garlic you have a healing restorative broth that can help keep you lucid, aid recuperation, or promote sufficient resilience to avoid getting sick in the first place.  If those two ingredients are all you have for a little while you'll keep up enough strength to forage for additional nourishment. 

[It's good to keep a fresh vibrant head of garlic with your emergency bug-out supplies if you can - for these very reasons.]

Tower energy signifying my current within status is right on the money.  BOOM.  pluto.  BOOM.  pluto again, over and over again.  Over the last couple of weeks I've found that pretty much anything involved with my internal structure that's remotely false or outdated has been crumbling or lighting itself on fire with colossal speed and great finality.  I think it's a thing that's happening for people intent to marshal inner resilience in the face of whatever lies ahead.  We're organically shedding what we can't use no matter how inviolate such internalized structures have seemed in the past.

In some moments it also feels like the ceremony of burning a few inner temples to the ground while they hold their peak beauty.

  The thing to remember about Tower energy is it's not something you or anyone else can stop or even forestall for any successful length of time.   Tower-generated change is inevitable in nature.  As is, within literal nature, the decay on which flourishing mushrooms feed.

Usually I let my first Hello end with such quick and largely visual assessment. But this time I went back to the accompanying guidebook to read about Mushroom's relationship to the The Tower as perceived by the deck's creator.  What I read put me much in mind of what happens from a naturalist's perspective once the Tower's archetypal role is reconfigured in neopagan decks as The Blasted Oak. 

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When drawing your own three cards keep things loose and intuitive if the meanings aren't known to you.  really LOOK at the cards before reaching for the guidebook.  What does the featured imagery already mean to you?  If you don't hold personal associations what can you infer about the focal points from the way they're presented on the card?

light and LOVEly dreams to all!

The back of our field in later April 2012.

Valentine's Day has always been my favorite holiday. 

Beltane's second ...

and the sun said: yeah baby .13

Today I woke with sun in my eyes.  It was an extra wonderful thing after countless grey days made dismal and bleak with the ongoing roaring wind effect.   When the sun shines after a pronounced absence I especially love those times when I have an opportunity to free-float through the day on - not so much a whim as a very strong intuitive nudge.

One nudge after another I made my way to the back dooryard by mid-morning.  Paused on the deck to do a bit of intent staring at the ice-filled 'replacement' planters that were too shallow to grow truly thriving flowers.  But a few day's back I realized how they could be used quite productively. And also add new experience to my container growing repertoire: using each one as a separate container garden 'seed bed' for various biennials.  Am finalizing my seed list at the moment but need to integrate my shopping list with what's viable and on hand in my seed collection box.  Should have done it last night but was too tired from the day's activities far out-pacing my organic energy level.

I need to come down to this spot with my better camera to properly showcase the small cluster of river bushes and striplings that I love.  I don't visit them much because they need to keep their wildness there amidst the mossy rocks.  But I do move upstream a few times during no-ice phases of our brown months.  just to make sure that particular congregation isn't burdened by windfall branches.  Later I'll have to go out in clothes better suited to yard work.  Fleece isn't very compatible at all I have found.

Today I spotted my first land-based skunk cabbage of the year.  It's worrisome how early I started seeing new growth pushing out of the stream bed. Usually I don't see anything in the water for another month's time.  It's often the beginning of April before the plant's leaves unfurl in the land-based colonies.  Seeing the new life above so much sooner into the year evoked mixed feelings.  As a human who is finely tuned to green forms of life it's an automatically exuberant moment.   It's also a life-long habit.  I grew up near any number of streams and was lucky to have guided tours of a few on an ongoing basis over the years.  Heralding fresh signs of a new year's life force by searching out the earliest growths of skunk cabbage plants holds a deep experiential taproot in my soul.

One very kind and extremely good humored (yet perpetually poker faced) elder-man my family knew used to call me Little Miss Sharp Eyes.  We'd walk along that property's stream and he'd announce something he could see.  I'd locate the same thing.  But it wasn't always in the same place he'd seen it.  In which case he'd smile and tell me I'd won.

For quite awhile (seemed forever in young child terms ...) I'd accept this without a clue of what I'd won.  So I finally asked and he told me I'd won my sharp eyes a little more fully.   And he certainly did his part to show me innumerable ways eyes could See and search-out detail when outside walking.  He also taught me to address the sun as Grandfather and the moon as Grandmother.   I once asked him what he liked most in the world - expecting a wonderful nature story.  He grinned wide and spoke around it.  

"airplanes"

Years later he and his wife were on a plane that was held hostage on the runway.  It was somewhere in Europe during that window of time when such things appeared in alarming news breaks as the very worst form of terrorism.  Their involvement made it personal - a local story of great scope and ongoing conversation.  They were trapped on a plane at gunpoint in a foreign country for a significant number of hours.  When they arrived safely in NYC the press was waiting.  Local papers posted pictures of them that were taken as they left their initial government debriefing.   She looked shaken for sure but far more she looked hell bent and determined to have QUITE a word with any number of someone's Manager(s) before all was fully said and done.  He merely looked like he'd seen new things.   Undoubtedly with poker faced aplomb.   To this day I wonder if that experience dampened his enthusiastic love of planes.

The (very) gentle-man who taught me how to walk along a little stream so as to find innumerable tiny universes along the way also taught me a concept he called Power Station Bingo.  Upon reflection (and I mean in terms of the level of reflection I held around the time they'd been trapped on the runway during my early high school years) I don't think what he was talking about  ever had that name.  I think it was something he may have made up on the spot when some insatiably curious kid he was trying to teach to love the woods bedeviled him with questions he did not want to answer Just Then - for whatever combination of reasons. 

I could have been that kid because the questions I felt pressing enough to insist on immediate (and complete!!) answers never stopped at that phase of my life.  But I was just one of many who did not have a paternal presence in their life but were also lucky enough to move within his circles of community awareness. 

here's what he taught me about earth energy and how it moves:

Sometimes you go into a quiet little corner of a place and find four rocks.  Right in the center of the rocks you'll find an evergreen.   Sometimes you find the evergreen first but you'll also find rocks beneath its lowest boughs. 

All evergreens and rocks enjoy this arrangement but it becomes important to recognize with respect any time you're passing when the rocks are directly aligned with the compass points.  When they are both tree and rocks can sing but our ears don't remember how to hear them.  Other creatures do.  They are Everywhere.