Sparkling Lotus Ink

equinox: blue-balanced light & dark

Giving myself this day of immersive relationship to the energy, yet also sharing the experience.   Usually I go all-in or just kind of dabble here and there throughout the day.  Now I'm considering everything that happens part of the medicine walk.   "sacred time isn't separate time"  Am considering making a painting to resemble a cross-stitch motto.  for substrate, use a piece of salvaged wood and hang it in the mud room.

J will remove another layer of leaves from the pond today.  We will rattle and sing.  Others have been by per loosely arranged schedule. 

At sunset we'll stand facing west and absorb the shifting light of this new season on its first day of life.

As is my way I am going all in with The Healing Garden class material.  There are many altar spaces in and around our home but I wanted something especially dedicated to the energy work for this course - and in a place where I could see it alot - that was grounded in our home's energetic structure rather than my studio space.   Set up a wooden folding tray just by the door of the living room leading to the kitchen and downstairs hallways.  Built the altar slowly over an hour's worth of time and gentle contemplation of my inclusion options.

building an altar is always rewarding, elevating, and above all else intentional BLUE in living action.  Deb's exemplar featured a backdrop.  Haven't worked altar space that way in decades.   So, yeah.  Let's re-ignite the horizontal axis.  This is SO BEAUTIFUL and smoothing for the entire house.  Planning to smudge with all the doors open.

Included on the wall:  my layered red square from 'way back at the beginning of the Dive.  The other three are literal as well as more spiritual guardians and guides in the field.  J's fox tribe.  My song dog howlers.  the bluebirds that travel with goldfinches during the winter from their thickets in a nearby overgrown orchard.  During the summer both birds nest and roost in the field. A goldfinch peeps around the edges of special stone and crystal friends. Raven spirit led me directly to the eye-portal stone at the Quabbin Reservoir about 30 years ago. Also included with what's to come in mind: citrine, danburite, larimar, amethyst, chrysoprase, lemurian seed crystal, ruby matrix, chrysocholla, obsidian, and a tiny bit of emerald matrix.  And of course an aventurine egg gifted quite long ago - in another century/millenium, in fact.

My grandmother's beloved snowdrops teacup.  Later I'll fill it with beach sand and just as the sun has settled out of sight we'll light the silver and gold candles.  Also my grandmother's spring rabbits.  I wound up switching-out the basket for my mother's willow basket with a grapevine handle.  that way there are three generations of my bloodline to tie me to my personal mother-line as well as Gaia.  A small Tree of Life talisman that was original gifted to me by the piscean dive captain's mother on the day she learned she was pregnant with his younger sister.  It just felt right to her, as a memorial of that shared moment in our Time.   And the talisman has found a special protected home in every summer's garden since.

go outside and breathe as deeply as you can.

we've made it this far.

and now find ourselves surrounded by Blue.

(hopefully this post is helpful for the few who have written asking what to do, how one might arrange, etc. for an altar space that's organically developed in a manner that's equally Spirit-and-self directed.)  Below, Gaia waits to be recognized through this working.

pro-tip:  if you're sharing on social media and whatnot - post pics that don't show all of your building & intention work.

it's an energetic and magical boundary thing.

and it makes a great deal of difference what frequency vibrates and how.

running every place screaming excitedly

an anniversary gift of sorts.

one that will play an important part in whatever the garden becomes within and without.

wow.

this is beyond 'beyond' even.

 

 

true blue heart

37 years ago, Jim and I were married in our dining room with 73 of our closest family and friends joining us - family with us in the dining room and all others in the living room and foyer.  It was super-cold that day and we had friends/relatives coming up from the Delaware Valley.  So I'd cranked the heat.  Because I'm a non-scientist, I did not consider the heat generated by 76 people (adding in Us and the JP who said he'd never been to a 'far out' wedding before but now he hoped there'd more ...)on top of cranking everything up to 72 degrees.  We were married directly in front of the old fashioned steam heater in the dining room.  The JP's face was bright pink.  I got dizzy.  started getting heart palpitations.  may or may not have been having an anxiety attack.  I rushed out amongst the family members, into the bathroom where I splashed-away my wedding makeup in an effort to calm down.  Ice cold water.  Laughing nervously from embarrassment. 

Later - Lordy Lou!  I heard from Aunt Grace's grandson (he was a wild 'un at the downstairs 'VIP lounge' section of the reception festivities.  that's all I'm saying) that after i rushed out a whisper chain flew through the living room contingent that I might be a runaway bride.

the mortification.  and Joey really enjoyed telling me about it, too.

be that as it may, three different people gave us copies of the book above. 

also?  people - throughout the ceremony and reception and up until the last time we had a gathering during The Before Times - have insisted, now and then, on referring to us as John & Yoko.

we don't like it.  at all.

for oh so many reasons.

5 years, to the day, prior to our wedding, we moved to our first apartment on the Allston/Brighton line in Boston. 

we decided to get married on Valentine's Day.

J suggested we 'home brew' things and have the ceremony on our anniversary of coming to town, three and a half weeks later.

there are stories.  but we pulled it off.

 

My mother's wedding gift was the above book which I kept borrowing from her.  She wrote a really lovely invocation on the fly leaf.

I sense a constancy in who we were, are, and shall yet  become when I look at these books.  41 years - years of all sorts, including a few that were undeniably out of sorts.

welcome to voice/hearing projection/reception truth-telling month.   I'll be back with the flower image/shift meditation in a couple of days.

LOVE

...here we go...

Here are all the new seeds I didn't plan to purchase this year.  But then I remembered a fence means peas are possible and things just went from there.  J apparently realized this would happen but in all our budget discussions I kept saying it wouldn't. 

tis a wise man who knows his wife better than she knows herself.  I've no control in this arena and he does indeed know that.

Lettuce for the guy who makes my world spin.  I don't eat it any more due to how enthusiastically my body makes calcium-oxalate kidney stones. 

I have other sunflower seeds in waiting as well

J's down below me in the garage right now cutting the new table-top board he purchased yesterday.  I'm psyched.  Will provide bulletins as they emerge concerning additional food plant crops to be sown from last year's seeds.  

I made the heart chakra cloth used as a backdrop for these pics for my very first chakra intensive workshop series at a local apothecary.  I included a rose colored Japanese wishing bell and a grouse feather to promote new rhymthms and intentional heart-centered wishes for the group created altar space.    Am planning to put it atop my studio coffee table work space for the final week of heart-work.

found this badly abused photo earlier today and thought to share it.  That's J taking in the vibe at North Beach at the end of the day on which we met Ferlinghetti at City Lights.  The photo's set aside in case I ever again go out in the world for a frivolous reason such as loading up on fresh laser copies of photos, artwork, etc for collage purposes. 

I really love how the damage done to the physical photo lends the strong flavor of Dharma Bumming it in '82. 

NoCali.  In the early 80's.  Staying, at times, with folks who lived deep in the canyons with all that implies.

hell yeah we inhaled. 

a lot.

The companion photo of me looking like I'm in direct contact with the Starman waiting in the sky makes that abundantly clear.

not sure where it is.  if i find it, i'll share.

I wouldn't do it now but I sure did have fun living out of a van on Market Street in San Francisco for the brief moment in time in which we did it.  You haven't lived until you've peed in a bucket while watching a nun eat deep dish pizza at the Numero Uno's just next to where you've parked.

she demolished everything but the plate.

 

 

unstruck

I really love the translation of the Sanskrit name (Anahata - which is also a very beautiful word) for the Heart Chakra. 

Unstruck.

not unbroken/unbreakable or unbeaten/unbeatable.  Not resilient, determined, brave, good or any of the more negative descriptors we all commonly hear, speak, or simply associate with the word "heart".

Unstruck.

I've always found that beautiful.  In more cynical moments, or pure despair that I never seem able to be quite strong enough to be strong, period, with no downtime (I know.  I'm dealing with this as lovingly as I can as we take this journey ...) - I have also found it purely aspirational.

but recently.

I was thinking about four or five particular people I know who've lived life, as long as I've known them for a minimum of 30 years, through and from the heart center.  It's nothing special they do or how they do special things.  It's how they do every-thing.  And see every-thing and every-One.  I feel lucky indeed.  We can be inspired, motivated, and dare I say herded, through a great deal of what we as individuals and as a collective 'need to learn' and then move on to actually achieve.  But any time someone's leading from the the heart - and we're sharp enough to realize how much we can learn from noticing even just that little bit of heart-based reality shapeshift - then we're elevated at a cellular and experiential level.

Unstruck.

All the people I know who are heart-leaders have had their actual, metaphorical, and energetic heart struck quite tangibly, any number of times. 

it's their energy that's refined and maintained and just naturally percolating in an Unstruck state.

that's how everyone's Heart wants to filter and radiate.  On an Unstruck frequency.

re-considering self/identity

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...

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 ...