Sparkling Lotus Ink

currently reading etc.

Am greatly enjoying my current Morning Reading book.  The narrative is both compelling and evocative but for me the biggest pleasure is the slow rolling tone of the book.  It's a wonderful ballast for the various topics that inherently hold a strong charge: race, history both personal and collective, unconventional upbringing and, well, science.   Additionally Dr. Lantham has a love of birds so strong that I've begun to feel a persuasively described yearning connection to them I've not otherwise engaged - to know flight as a physical experience under no volition but one's own body.

Am roughly halfway through this memoir of roots and rootedness to both Place and Family.   Requested his poetry through the library loan system.

and

THIS:

The Turkish Fig usually doesn't unfurl any leaves until April.  Am crediting my new plant mister which I got at Dick Blick after reading a comment INSISTING everybody get one for their painting practice and another for their houseplants.  I got one for painting.  I mainly use it for the plants.  Over the holidays I got a second for the house/plants.   Still using the stubby little Holbein sprayer with my paints.

Have never had such happy plants at this time of year in my entire adult life. 

Look how beautiful.

viriditas

Feed What Feeds You .1

Thought this might be a nice post to get manifested at a point in the year when there are plenty of gathering options irrespective of hemisphere and general temperature ranges.  Am aware that many who read here actively engage in a variety of ceremonial rituals, including caring for the sacred objects they like to work with and Keep.  More than likely that means everyone also has their own existing care and feeding rituals related to nourishing those things that nourish us tenfold more.   Years ago I developed the habit of making my own consecration oils for nourishing purposes.   I use them to dress candles just prior to lighting.  I also like to warm the oil on the stove, add just a bit of beeswax, and pour it to cool within recycled hand or face cream jars.   This becomes a nourishing and revitalizing butter for all wooden objects of ceremony as well as skin-headed drums and rattles.

~*~ you need a scrupulously clean wide-mouthed glass jar to successfully manifest this project.  As a guide - I use a half pint canning jar for my personal use and in this case I also impulsively grabbed a full pint jar to infuse for wider distribution.  Mainly because I inadvertently over-gathered inclusive materials.  I've found a half pint of oil will meet my personal needs, plus maybe six or seven half ounce bottles to be given as gifts, for 2 or 3 years ~*~

I put the above jar remarks first because there's really no way around their importance at a practical level. Now to the single most vibrationally important aspect of creating a ceremonial oil that is in complete tune with your uniquely impeccable intentions:

when working with fresh/windfall materials:  isolate your focus on your home landscape's most inherently sacred plants that are also at least a bit fragrant and safe enough to be handled over time.  As with any other sacred and ceremonial endeavor there may be one or two that call to you there in the spontaneous moment of scanning what's available to be gathered.

  If you're strictly urban or unable to roam around outdoors:  Take stock of what you've gathered through shops, precious gathering expeditions in a loved one's garden or wild-crafting adventures, and as gifts from friends.  Plan to spend a long slow dreary Saturday or Sunday puttering about your home while a small pan of infusing oil wafts its magic throughout your brain chemistry and home environment.  Be assured that most dried herbs re-hydrate with slow deliciousness especially when they're warmed in a gentle and slow manner.

Note: You'll create a far more phytochemically potent oil by going the warm infusion route.  Or if you get a little science-y from time to time, as I do, you might relish putting up two half pints - one as a warm infusion and the other left in place over slowed-down time as a cold infusion.  That's how I concluded I preferred the latter method - because it felt a lot more vibrationally unique and gorgeously subtle to me.  Among many other things I particularly loved how grounding and centering it became simply to see the infusion bottle sitting there quietly holding space in alchemical process day after week after month.  Every time I picked it up and gently shook it I imbued the container's energy with my own love and gratitude for this tiny little way of slowing time enough to hold it there in my hand.

Perhaps your own emergent recipe will incorporate sacred purification elements of a long-standing historical nature such as the juniper and white pine in the first image.  Or it might revolve around a plant or two with an established spiritual/ceremonial history that led to its inclusion in your garden space.  My interest in Angelica archangelica (seedheads pictured above at my former home) began in my early twenties so when I first felt drawn to making ceremonial oils about a dozen years later it was a no-brainer to base nearly all of them, for years and years, upon the elevating properties of this illustrious herb's distinctive angelically antiseptic scent.

[Note the commonality of cleansing & purification properties held between the two evergreen sprigs and the angelica seed heads.  Somebody working from dried/cached supplies might fill this quadrant by selecting some preciously hoarded copal, amber, or myrrh resin.  If that somebody is you, pound what you've got into smaller pieces or at least scarify your resin in order to release more of its scent's healing and illuminating properties.]

pro tip:  pounding dried tree resin is 'way easier and far less fiddly but if you're used to scarifying tough seeds here's another way to put that highly specific skill set to practical use.

Over the years I've been drawn to create nearly all the infusions I've made with olive oil as their carrier.  For the vibrational/ceremonial oils I generally go with three months of cool infusion on a dark shelf in my dining room.  This makes the coalescence of energetic and phytochemical properties nicely subtle and more about co-creation than 'maximum extraction' as when preparing medicinal tinctures and therapeutic oils.  Matters of scent are easily fine-tuned once the base oil is prepared - most commonly via essential oils and/or strongly fragrant flower petals such as tea roses, their fresh wild cousins, or highly scented lilies such as the ever-popular Stargazer. 

Am repeating a more complete look at the first image so you don't have to scroll up as you think more closely about your own options.  Remember my chosen/illustrated quartet is just an example based on what was immediately on offering at the time I was spontaneously moved to prepare this oil as a ceremonial activity during the current season's mid-point energetic cresting. 

Perhaps your ideal base/grounding formulation is a trio or even a duet.  Focus on what it FEELS like you should work with not What Acey Did.  That having been said - my oil's four-square base is firmly grounded in Place by the two evergreens inclusions.  White pine is a naturally occurring tree ally and the juniper bush by the frog pond is the botanical anchor of the original landscaping plantings. 

If you're reading along thinking I'd really like to do this but where would I even start try this:

Consider, as quietly as possible, what would ground your oil in the most personally meaningful corners of your daily landscape?  Just keep asking yourself that until your automatic answer stops reflecting your lack of certainty.  Go with your instincts.  You have them or you wouldn't still be reading along with any inclination to try it for yourself.  Gather what makes sense amount-wise plus just a little more. Not too much.  Just enough so you aren't cut short if the proportional amounts need to be 'adjusted for taste' as you move into the prep work and your gathered materials begin to look and feel a bit different.

With strong grounding comes the ceremonial need for equally strong elevation. Lavender is an excellent and widely available choice in dried bud form that's often vibrant enough to include in projects like this one for two or even three years after harvesting.  The dried buds in this post's images were given to me (an entire pound. YIKES.) two years ago in fully dried and husked form.  But these treasures from a summer gone by shyly murmured in a steady way within my heart while I was figuring out my recipe - forgotten as they were in the farthest recess of my herbal pantry.  I'd received so much lavender I simply didn't know how to deal beyond shoving the final overwhelming last-straw quart jar of it far out of sight.  Stay tuned for how I'll employ the rest of this retrieved cache - most likely in celebration of the winter solstice.

To round out the quartet/power-square base, I was drawn to pluck the remaining sprigs of Tulsi that had not yet succumbed to our plummeting night temperatures.   As you read my explanation below, think about any plant that YOU'VE actively brought into your garden/life specifically because it elevates your mood, soul and spirit.  The vibrational goal in making a four-square base is to balance the organic landscape energy with intentional humanly-introduced plant energy of equal significance to the person making the oil.  For that reason this is a great activity for Going Within in a unique way that may well reverberate, at least a little, every time you work with the oil or share it with somebody else.

~*~*~

Every year I grow about a hundred Tulsi plants from seed.  Some day I'll explain the whole story but for now:  the plants live as hardened off seedlings ever-eager to become full blooming plants within a variety of containers on our deck and the paved area below it.   In the beginning of the crop's outdoor growing season I pinch off the tops when the flower heads are plump with purple-tinged budding energy.  These are carefully dried for my family's winter tea inclusions.  As the plants begin to branch I continue to harvest for drying purposes, but only here and there.  At this point many of the tea herbs in the field are in bud, bloom or swollen with sought-after leaves so I focus on preparing our daily restorative teas from freshly gathered materials.  In this dual manner I harvest what I pre-determine to be my fair share of the Tulsi over the next few months.  The scant leavings pictured above, on the eve of Samhain, held a deep reservoir of this beautiful plant's juicily scented healing signature:  abundant illumination, spiritual protection and elevation.

Let's review how to recreate my power-square on your own terms:  think about the scents and plant energies that draw you in and hold you steady in both practical and elevated aspects of your life.  

As a very different example from what's on the screen - one year pretty far back in the past I made a square infusion from chopped angelica leaf stems, a few pristine acorns gathered from a particularly meaningful tree, a small white shell of enormous personal significance, and a recently broken aqua aura point.  Later, when the oil felt ready for its final touches, I decanted and strained, placed the clear oil in a fresh glass storage jar, and then added a few drops of frankincense and sweet orange essential oils, plus the precious last remaining segment of a dried vanilla pod.   I shook vigorously for about a week before commencing work with the oil, with the vanilla pod fragment left in the jar. 

While you're finalizing your choices make sure you have a sufficient amount of carrier oil on hand.  Olive oil is often the cheapest and easiest choice especially since most people already have it on hand in their cabinet.  It's easy to find in the market in a variety of quantities/prices.  Of even more value for vibrational considerations, olive oil has a number of established connotations in both healing and ceremonial work.  It weight and viscosity adds a nice little sizzle to a burning candle and hugs the beeswax close when making a butter-cream to feed your sacred objects.

Gather your chosen infusion elements.  Work quietly and mindfully to chop or hand-tear the various elements.  Remember that the more you cut or tear the fresh material, the more surface area will be exposed for infusing the oil with its physical/phytochemical properties.

pro tip:  set aside any stems or woody branches to dry a bit.   When your homespace feels in need of a special cleansing and brightening perk, break everything into pieces that will fit in a simmering pan of water.  The scent will be subtle at first and then (as the dried wood chemistry releases itself into the heated water) miraculously full and rejuvenating.

I'm not sure how long it took me to prepare my pint and half pint jars.  I do know it was long enough to drop down deep into my quiet inner center.  And to relish how healing it felt and how grateful I was to have taken the time and space for the process.

Once you have your materials bruised or chopped place them gently in their jar and slowly fill it with olive oil.  Note:  since oil's so heavy it takes a while for all the air bubbles to rise to the surface.  You can help this along with a clean chop stick or wooden barbecue skewer,  Sometimes for smaller bottles I've used an extra long darning or doll-making needle.  Try stirring the bottle's contents gently then doing something else for twenty minutes before stirring again.  Once all the air bubbles seem to be released cap the bottle tightly.  Turn it upside down on a saucer or in a shallow bowl.  Leave it alone overnight or even a bit longer.  By then any remaining air will have formed a gigantic bubble at the bottom of the jar.

note: I like isolating the air bubble this way even though it means you have to turn the bottle over to get it all the way filled.  But this way you'll have a visual idea of how much oil you have to add due to the curvature at the base of most glass bottles.  Upright, it's easy to get visually distracted by both the lid bands and the congregated infusion materials due to somewhat less curvature at the top of a typical wide-mouthed jar.

Once you've adjusted the oil amount in the jar, it will become very apparent why you're sequestering this project within a saucer or bowl.  Keeping the project as clean and free of seeping oil as possible is a bit fiddly but easy enough to manage quickly and effectively. I like the way this low-key jar tending adds another layering act of careful manifestion.  I usually keep the oil infusion going for a full season.  This would make a lovely family/inter-generational project to begin now and complete in late winter or early spring.

If you have any questions, leave comments or send me an email.

LOVE

Above: my beloved familiar kitty-girl Celeste who died, at 23, two years ago tomorrow.   Here she is as a young lass in one of her favorite resting places at our former home - nestled deep within an expansive colony of Sweet Cicely.  She also loved resting amongst Angelica plants which is what I thought this image showed until I loaded it into this post.  Have decided I like closing-out with this peekaboo glimpse of her all the same.  For she is an enormously big part of the story I'm telling here ...

healing light(s) .1

Wasn't sure what image to choose for this one but finally settled on this fragment from a long ago Business & Communication altar in a place I no longer live. I chose it because the topic of this post first made itself known in my bubbling consciousness during that linear time frame.  Gazing at the image it's not that hard to send myself back to Then during this same time of year in 2002.  I'd been distributing homemade flower essence preparations for just a few years.  Hardly a week went by when I didn't spend meditation time actively seeking a sense of connection to others who were pro-active and committed in our patterns of inter-species communication.  People absolutely called - beyond a shade of doubt - CALLED to prepare and distribute flower essences.  Not (ever) as a business.  But just because.  What else would one do if so called?

In the larger human world of daily context I was still learning what it meant to live in xurbia rather than a thriving metropolis.  I cultivated social ties with other Gaia lovers (and more specialized plant geeks) in a local radius that, over time, proved nothing short of transformational.  I also treasured a circle of more far-flung friends with similar interests.  What gave me a sense of being set apart from those connections was a lack of knowing anyone else who was making their own essences.  That specific form of circumstantial loneliness guided me to seek psychic contact with whoever these unknown people might be.  I formed the habit of moon gazing  while asking if anyone else was Out There doing and thinking and learning the same kinds of things.

yes 

Sometimes I would have the sense I'd managed to connect somehow and in response the connection was reinforced with that single word.  It didn't take long to begin wondering about matters that no longer seem strange to me - not even when I hear myself saying them aloud to somebody else.  I wondered if these affirmations were an actual reception and transmission process in the classic psychic sense OR if they might spring from the collected energy within whatever groves we claimed as part of our particular sacred space(s) - whatever rocks we might have collected and carefully configured - whatever dreams we might share, person-to-person, without even properly remembering a single one of them.  Surely our most potently sacred and personally true self releases particles of itself in such ways.  Within those places where we danced unself-consciously and at times without clothes.  Within the places where we saw - just for a split second of linear time - another sort of Being caught offguard by our presence.  Moving swiftly through something seamless and fluid that separates their time in shared spaces from ours.

yes.    yes.  yes.

One long summer evening back then I sprawled on my bed staring lovingly into the wide flung bough of a silver maple that became deeply meaningful to the point of feeling like a member of the family during the 14 years we lived there.  I was looking at the tree and then all of a sudden I was looking at a kind of holographic map of the country, seen only in shadow form but yet quite clearly that's what I saw.  I don't mean in the hallucinatory sense, I just mean my inner visual screen superimposed itself in a way that was far more compelling.  Because I was seeing beautiful leaf green, electric blue and buttery yellow lights twinkling and gleaming here and there all over the country.  I saw rose and turquoise and a deep jade-like green so exquisite that I wept in gratitude the first time I realized I might be able to replicate it with just the right mixing of watercolor pigments.

we are here.

It was such a perfect summer evening that magical abilities such as these seemed as natural and ongoing as the presence of whatever favorite cooling beverage you sip as you gaze long and deep into the sky.  I had no trouble believing there was cumulative value in what we do at the earth loving and healing level that moves far beyond whatever our specific reasons are for following our inner and outer guidance systems.  I understood this sort of thing was moving and transforming just as it always has on this continent.  Throughout the planet, come to that: the universal power of Word transferred to other forms of universally understood language.  Fragrant smoke from a sacred fire wafting beyond time and space.  The earth's heartbeat mirrored in a drum's steady rhythm.  When-and where-ever we set our messages of love and commitment to each other in place through the way we dance along with the flickering elements of sacred flames or add pop and sizzle to a heart drumbeat's foundation with rattles of all kinds and spontaneous wild-timbred vocalizations. 

we are here.  we are doing what we've learned it's important to do. 

[This post serves as a prologue to something long and more layered concerning how and when I received confirmation of another person having an empowered and empowering moment quite similar to my own vis a vis a sudden beauteous awareness of other human souls projecting themselves as colored lights - here, there and everywhere.]

wood talk .1

So much has already been written about the masterpiece above (especially by those who love mixing up word tinctures of their own) that I don't feel any need to directly address the book I finished reading earlier today.  Instead I want to share a snippet of its impact on my thoughts and behavior.   Above I've paired The Overstory with a carved teakwood table that's held space in five generations of my family's living rooms.  On my watch generation number five, at age six, one day discovered stickers via an unknown-to-me girl on his school bus. She was evidently on a mission to Convert Some Boys to the joys of this microcosmic universe of late 80's merchandising excess and ready availability.  Thus she  sent T. home with a thick handful of vividly hued high heeled shoes, elaborate sunglasses and improbably colored insects with human faces.  He told me nothing about them at the time and it took me awhile to see his first experimental forays into guerrilla collage art.

Since he stuck at first to the inside of his closet walls and an obscure shelf in our little used full-on Victorian butler's pantry, I didn't actually notice until three substantial colonies of lurid strawberries and cartoonish hats filled with puppies peppered the top of this table.  I had just enough mom-time under my belt to understand that dealing successfully with the situation wasn't going to be a matter of stop doing that so much as do this instead.   Despite my awareness of the implicit trivial tree usage (not to mention the plastic) I had my own stash of stickers. Anytime I added to the collection I was aware I was only going to hoard them and then I'd purchase the modest selection all the same.  Later I was glad I had them on hand.  I still held on much too tightly to these personally gratifying treasures but by then it was purposeful.  I kept this collection so I had something visually interesting and thus endorphin releasing to shuffle through when I couldn't sleep because of the first terrible awful no-good very bad gulf war.

 Back in mom-land:  I didn't reprimand so much as I abruptly changed the ongoing narrative.  I produced my cache and silently fanned out the barest taste of what my hands contained: three dimensional and highly realistic amphibians; not just the obvious Big Cats but also much smaller intricately patterned wild felines; holographic and highly realistic photographs of the sun flaring every which way. His eyes glistened.  And despite the way it had always hit me dead-wrong as a kid, I moved in strong to place us both in non-negotiable 'bargaining' mode by stating my opinion as ultimate fact:  These stickers are much more beautiful.    He gave me his young boy's version of today's patented why not state the obvious expression.  Then he reached towards my pile while, in a surprise move that floored me with his innate sense of reciprocity, simultaneously passing me the eye-stabbing bubblegum images some other mother was going to have to remove from family heirlooms.

That day my son and I spent our after school time together creating strips of drafting vellum to fit along the painted-over-for-generations oak molding that separated the living room from the dining room.  Then we spent laughing, silly and undeniably quite high quality time together until it was nearly the dinner hour.  We stuck chamelons and different species of maple leaves and supernovas and Saturn plus Jupiter encircled by all its moons and several somewhat grotesque stone statues from throughout Europe all along the vellum strips.  When he went to sleep that night I moved the teak table into the adjacent room and piled it high with fabric on both levels.  Was in such a hurry to spare it further harm that I didn't pause long enough to remove the stickers first.  By the time I discovered the oversight we'd moved to the mid-state wilds and the table had, for the first few years of abruptly shifted daily reality, lived in our cedar closet with fabric still piled high upon it.  By then the stickers were fused in place. I had to saturate several parts of the table in lemon oil-soaked rags.   Nowadays I prefer to use Lemon Verbena wood conditioning cream but somehow this table's remained neglected for five or six years now.

The day after I began reading The Overstory I spent a number of impromptu hours attending to my lapse in care for this beloved friend of a lifetime.  First I removed all the books from the lower shelves and then I moved two large bowl shaped planters. They had to be moved separately because of their heaviness.  I put my hand on the bare dried wood and said in a clear soft voice Thank You.  I meant that as in:  for surviving despite the years of burden placed upon you simply because you are a table and they are made to put things on.  Then I apologized for my lapse in restorative care and set to work.  It took me a few hours to thoroughly rub the conditioner into the many grooves and sharp lines of the carved wood's continuous pattern.  Sometimes I told the wooden table how beautiful it was.  Sometimes I tried as best I could to imagine what a teak forest might have been like once long ago.  Sometimes I cried for any number of reasons. In the evening I buffed the table.  Its glow suggested it would be even happier if I buffed it again in the morning.

Through all of my human perambulations of the two days it took to thoroughly love up this piece of my entire memory soaked life, I kept my basic sensory awareness on what it was like while I sat in a girl-like puddle of legs and baggy clothes slowly caressing the conditioner into the wood. I went back early in the first day's afternoon to give a second much thinner application of nourishment to the most abraded spots.  And thought to speak aloud - directly to the wood I was feeding - of asking just this one last winter's responsibility of holding the heavy plants in place  I worked in a way that was happy and entirely present.  The next day I buffed the wood slowly and with close attention to the wood's emerging life force telling its own lifetime's worth of experience in the human world.  By the time I felt satisfied the table looked like itself again - as I remembered it from my childhood..  I thought longingly of those faraway teak forests none of us (including teak trees) will ever be able to know first-hand.  I also thought about the book I had just started reading.  Seventy pages in, it was already clear to me that I wasn't going to forget any of it in a hurry.  But I didn't yet realize how mind and heart opening an experience it was going to be to read this book all the way through and then quietly sit with the first levels of its meaning for me just starting to form sentences.  So often in situations like this I just go all the way back to my jersey girl roots of ultimate personal expression: whoa.

how would we have any way of knowing how long wood retains an intelligence memory of its former life as LIFE itself?  how would a member of our species have the first genuine knowledge or right to put terms and conditions on what is or isn't possible within the vast parameters of inter-species communication?

ripening seeds

I have no idea what plant this is and haven't yet prodded myself into an organized attempt to change that.  A few years back I came upon an arresting group of them while day-tripping at The Fells.   For a minute or so I didn't even register my hands moving automatically to ready my camera for a number of shots similar to this one.  Was utterly gobsmacked by the glowing Indigo color of the seeds.

Autumn gardening season is in full swing.  On this end there's a lot to do and yet the overall landscape spirits are asking for privacy.  This seems to happen a lot within space that's intentionally co-creative in nature.   So of course there are occasions when the request feels like an inconvenience (or perhaps even the wrong call) by human standards.   To move myself through those cycles as quickly and peacefully as possible I envision how nourishing it must be for the landscape to dial all the way into itself without distraction or interruption.  To listen - as a congregation of sentience,  to the sound of seeds large and small dropping absolutely everywhere.

I feel like this happens in human consciousness as well.  Here we are - moving into the slow rhythms to follow a season of irrepressible growth.   Something moving that fast cannot sustain its pace indefinitely.  Summer's a lot like a cheetah in that respect.  Autumn, by comparison, seems quite low-gear and self-sufficient.  But it's a time of great activity all the same.  Particularly for seeds who need to get where they're going in time to settle in for the season of dormancy to come.

What grows in your own internalized autumn garden?  Is it offering you seeds for scattering in your dream and waking landscapes?  Where in your life can you find a place to sow a modest pot's worth of space with those seeds?  Can you imagine yourself being patient for the types of seeds that are organically slower to germinate than others? What additional real life metaphors for seeds can you broadcast joyfully, and where?