Sparkling Lotus Ink

inner-continental drift yo

This piece of yellow flourite contains some violet flourite crystals as well.  They are babies compared to the old etched, classically geometric layers of yellow.  I've spent a lot of time with this stone since I last posted.  Or answered emails.  Or, really, seriously considered doing either one of those things. 

My head has not been in my game.  They have been separate.  It's taken this long to be in the proper mind and spirit to post a link to what I knew from the jump I wanted as my Solar musical contribution:  Angelique Kidjo absolutely killing the daylights out of Voodoo Child accompanied by Buddy Guy.  Highly watchable.  You'll feel better.  She can dance!

I associate Flourite's healing & illumination properties with Clarity.  Usually I work on that via Italian Alkanet flower essence.  Once the insurrection happened I found almost immediately that I didn't need anymore IA level of intense clarity.  It was too much by far.  I needed something deeply rooted and strictly personal as I tried to make sense of things.

[every day I do healthy stuff, spiritual work, and any number of creative/protective/YELLOW-based things in the house, outside, and/or in the studio. I mean this in terms of micro-actions at the level I've relied on during times of recuperating from long illness.  One way to look at the past toxic chunk out of our lives, eh?  

I love this almost entirely yellow Flora portrait by an artist many of us bow down to and learn from on all sorts of levels: Susan Seddon Boulet.  A lovely picture of her as well as some fine repros of her stunning work at the link.

 At a certain point - who knows how many light years' worth of days ago - I realized I finally had an answer to the question of what might break my brain entirely.  For years people have asked me:  how do you do it.  I think: fuck if I know and then I generally say something a lot less ... coyote.  Sometimes when I'm having a really hard time dealing with fill-in-the-blank I wonder what it would take for me to just opt out of whatever remains of 'mainstream' anything within my mind.

and now I know:

the so-called leader of the free world actively calling out his rabid followers to, you know, bring the boogaloo all the way home.  And then they did it.  And built gallows.  And so forth.

the thing in it all that broke my personal brain was so shallow and entirely american in its nature: Bison horn hat guy who successfully got his freakin' organic dinner in jail and then asked for a pardon.  I said okay fine.  Me and my brain are not playing anymore and I am not watching asshat supreme actually go for the gold and do it.  I took my mental marbles and everything they contain and I  - didn't go home because frankly I'm by now entirely convinced this is not my natural galaxy let alone planet.

One day - I'm not really sure when - I sat in the sun on my dreaming couch and held the flourite up to the light, this way and that.  It's been cold and unpleasant outside but today the sun came out for more than two or three spare minutes at a time.  The cat and I went for a walk  and I took many pictures even though we didn't go far.  There were MANY MANY fox tracks in the muddy path to the field.  She froze with her ears back.  We came inside amidst commotion when she suddenly started running like crazy and jumping up at me in a frenzy (crazed cat yellow eyes and all) until it came close to interrupting J in the  middle of a business meetings and our sudden eruption through the door.  Foxes once again perceived at the brink of, and presumably then running through, the dooryard!  J's declared them out of control given all the tracks on the path.   He's going to do what gets done and urinate around.

[that made me remember a really funny remark jude made in comments along a similar theme and The Man that caught me off guard and i couldn't stop laughing.  she was quite pleased with herself ...]

Took some pictures of the tracks and other things.  Now I can't find the usb cable for either my DSLR or the phone.  If I can't locate either by tomorrow I'll revert to the yellow flowers and then tear stuff apart looking.

Something I didn't post earlier in the month in response to one of the initial prompts from the main Dive material.  Participants were asked to find a picture of themselves that 'captures a moment of centered and indisputable personal power'.  I dickered between three possibilities at different stages of my life.  Finally decided to go with my summer of '75 passport pic.  Seventeen and ready to blow the country, baby!    Here's a varied-shades-of-yellow story about why I have such an outdated passport when you're meant to turn them in.

When I went to get a new one, in my early forties, I said to the guy at the post office - "do you think I could keep this even though I know I'm not supposed to?"  He kept looking at the picture through all of this and before I even started talking.  A guy in his late fifties.  So I pushed it further and said to him

"Nobody will ever believe I looked like that unless I can show them."  He smiled down at the picture, told me it was a really good one, and flipped the passport back at me. 

the coyote-yellow part of the story was the whole time this went on I was laughing inside because of the clear concurrence I'd need visual proof.  I'm laughing a great deal just typing this story into place.

to my community friends:  do you have a picture of yourself that makes you smile and say "yes - that's who I was.  It's who I still am."

?

(volition-wise, i just want it to be summer ...)

this Sunsprite rosebush is pictured at the old place but it still exists out in the field.  It's the only pedigreed rosarian level rose that's survived as long as it has.  Every year it puts up a few blooms around my birthday.  I don't collect them anymore.  I leave them for the energy field and feed the plant but it's only ever those blooms at that time...

what is special to you?  In your home or among the things you've made with your hands?

What small yellow-hopeful thing could you make with your hands on this day?

birth/day stories

blossom crystals with iron inclusions lending an orange tinge to the individual points.  Given to my mother, while in labor, the day before I was born.  My grandmother kept it in her pocketbook while I was being born.  Family legend says but only in whispers:  she left her bible behind in order to have enough room.  So for the event of my birth Pearl went just a little feral and pagan.

***

It isn't hard to see how/why this particular gift was selected.  My mother turned over ownership of this beauty when I was eight years old and given my first small personal garden space.  In the summer the blossom rock lived there.  In the winter it lived on the little chest of drawers next to my bed.

In my adult life the rock continued to summer outside within garden spaces close to the house where I could keep track of it.  This tradition was curtailed when yellow jackets began to build egg chambers on the rounded inside dome of the mother blossom.  Even after scrubbing the rock the pheromones remained beacon-like.  Last summer I tried an experiment.  I put the blossom rock in an open (but screened) window sill here in the studio.   I wasn't sure if anything would happen but a few days later I noticed wasps clustered on the screen adjacent to the rock.  When I took the rock away the wasps stopped congregating.  put it back and they reappeared.

not what we call strong science by any means.  but ...

***

My son was born a month early and yet right on time.  He didn't feel like an Aries (at all ...) while he was growing inside of me - he felt like a pair of fish tumbling around every which way in amniotic fluid. 

Sometimes he communicated with me.  Once, quite memorably, he communicated with J. as well - announcing his name to be Anthony.  He communicated the same thing to me.  We discovered as much when, after the fact, I tentatively asked if J had any name preferences and he replied just as tentatively:

"I really don't but maybe ... the baby believes his name is Anthony?"

and then the story tumbled out of both of us.  We looked at each other.  Odd happenstances that couldn't be proven logically were a hallmark of our relationship even then.

***

The day before he was born we didn't yet suspect he was on his way.  We went to an Italian restaurant we loved primarily because it served good food we could actually afford if we skimped a bit on other types of 'extras'.  On this occasion we had their Sunday buffet brunch and when we got home I took a nap.  While I was asleep I dreamed we went back to the restaurant and I ate another serving of every single thing I'd eaten while we were there. 

When it was time for night-sleeping we still didn't suspect the imminent arrival.  Dreamtime changed that. 

It began with my arrival on the bank of an enormous lake.  I could hear the water sloshing against the support beams driven into the lake bank sand.  I could feel myself wearing a very heavy cumbersome set of metal and leather clothing.  With the magic of dream logic, once I stepped into the moonlight I could see myself as from an overhead distance.  I was dressed like a Samurai  because that's what I was.

And the moonlight was very holy although I couldn't see the moon.  It was so high in the sky that no matter how I bent my neck and stooped I couldn't see it.  So I got down, flat on the long floating deck that went on for quite awhile with the water all around. 

And lying flat with the whole sky above me I still couldn't see the moon.  But I could feel the undulating deck and hear the water sloshing beneath it. 

A monk joined me.  Arriving without fanfare and strictly in the terms of dream logic.  The monk knelt down and took my arms to pull me into a similar upright position.  We touched foreheads.  Then the monk laughed.  He flew up into the sky like a balloon that had suddenly lost all it's air.  And in the process he turned into a cloud, still laughing.  And the cloud passed across an enormous rust-red moon.  Despite the dullness of the color the moon glowed just as it always does when full.  And it pulsed like a heartbeat.

I wanted nothing more than to be part of that moon and so I ran to the end of the endless deck and climbed down the ladder at the end.  And within the dream my conscious mind woke up enough to feel the lake water rising to embrace and then all but consume me.

my waters were breaking.  I woke up with an electric certainty and strong recollection of one of the few dreams in my life that I recall with perfect clarity year after year.

***

For comparative purposes, it's necessary to take on faith that I'm only marginally interested in astrology at this point in my life.  But back then?  I was 'of the cloth' all the way.  Hence the second call (obvi the first was to J just settling into what he imagined would be a sensible and measured morning at the drafting table) was to a sunbrother with an ephemeris. 

Once he confirmed what I felt I most needed to know (I also thought I needed to go out and buy sandalwood incense to burn during labor.  I still laugh about that.) I started talking to my son.

I don't know if I can handle raising somebody with a Scorpio moon.  Do you think it will be okay to wait until that's no longer the situation?

and this voice but from inside so you hear it through your bones.  this voice that is my son's voice to this day said to me "sure mom.  no problem."

He was most definitely a pisces and entirely ready to be born.  textbook in that end but I was an assiduously empowered woman who intended to labor from that place so that's what I did.  There are stories about those six hours in which nobody but nobody got in my way for even five seconds.

Since he was a month early there were some things.  It was two weeks before my sunbrother was able to supply everything but the Sag moon sign (which I thought was MOST EXCELLENT without also realizing, as I had about Scorpio energy, 'but wait you will be the Mom of this person') I'd been able to work out on my own.  Before he began I told him the story of both the dream and then the communication in which I achieved cooperative contact with my kid before he was all the way breathing.

and because my friend is a brit's brit he replied with the single word quite.  I went on for awhile.  and then he said I might want to put a thought or two towards The Ascendant.

and just the way he said it I knew.

oh yeah.

The monk came back as an unbelievably intense firebrand very much living in today's mashed-apart world.  No problem at all to have a Sag moon for that kind of ride, right?  Especially when the whole other Thing With Purpose could thus be shifted to what was undoubtedly the master plan all along.

this is my Telling story in women's circles of a maternal nature.  If it isn't an astro crowd I just tell the dream part.  If there are a few people who can get the whole THUNK of the other part I tell it as well

Once I told it to Jeannine Parvati - she being the whole reason I became a mother.

she laughed with the thinnest trace of nervous mental energy weaving amongst her trademark melodics.  She then opined there were any number of inferences and references to be made just off the top of her head.  She declared it made her dizzy and she couldn't think about it any further - she had to imagine and fantasize instead.

and that's my water story about mother stories and sacral sisters.

namaste

how to rebalance and streamline RED energy

First of all - the color that helps the first chakra's red energy stabilize & re-balance from too much of itself is BROWN.  

I started thinking about Brown last weekend while we were planting garlic and shallots.  This morning I stood in front of a special place in the house and asked out loud:  where's my brown stone.   This piece of raw botswana agate that somebody chiseled open with a few false starts is part of a small collection I inherited years ago.   Have always thought of this stone as Nessie.  See how she rises with hills on the other side of Loch Ness bearing witness.

Botswana Agate is one of my favorite stone friends.  All from the same inherited collection.  To other stone people.

This stone is very waxy and it feels extremely nice in my hand.  Like all Chalcedony this is the kind of energy you bond with in a long term way.  That property got me to thinking about the fact that nearly everyone has an important stone of some kind; a stone that feels kindred and friendly somehow. 

I've been thinking about this particular stone with a small lilt of yearning since grace reconnected with her carnelian as part of the red-rooting process.  In the posts and all the others about the stone I sat here on the other side of the country flabbergasted by the immediacy of her discovery and woven elements of overlapping connection.

I would still like to find a more fully brown stone.  I know exactly which one.  Problem is it could be anywhere.  I have a lot of stones.  My mother was an extremely avid rockhound who loved socializing with others who had a similar passion. As a young child I spent a lot of the time when she 'had' me sitting in a cardboard box somewhere vacant and rock-strewn.  I don't remember any of this but I've certainly seen the pictures.  What I remember quite tangibly is far more multi-dimensional concerning a bouquet of truly nice, kind-hearted and generous people gathered in order to search for rocks worth taking home by the steep cliff banks of the Delaware River.

When my mother died I inherited 2 dozen rolling rock beer cases full of very carefully wrapped rocks and crystals.  To my knowledge she had no interest in the more vibrational wooo end of her treasures' capacity to communicate.  But on the other hand she was a double Aquarius.  I'm gonna go with the idea she connected/communicated with them and they with her whether or not she had conscious awareness of it.

Once I became interested in stones vibrationally people started giving me particular Friends they felt I ought to have.  Sometimes it was a matter of me holding them for awhile and then passing the stone along to a person the original holder would never have met.  Sometimes I give away a stone I was meant to keep but once I realize that another far more obviously appropriate stone either resurfaces or comes to me for the first time.  and so forth.

***

For two days our temps were in the low teens but today it's quite pleasant.  Sat outside to eat lunch on the porch in gentle sunlight.  Last night I watched the setting crescent moon while sitting on the dreaming couch in my studio.  Today I moved various sprucing-up of summer trash picking projects through to completion or at least the painting stage.  The fig tree now has a well-cleaned mustard yellow wooden chair as a stand rather than the foot stool I need to reach my two highest shelves everywhere throughout the space.   We haven't yet moved the mother stock storage unit from the garage to the second floor of the house.  Stuff like that.

J saw bear scat in the field yesterday.  Am glad the garden's fenced or our weekend's labor of love might be swiftly undone.  again.  Have spent all morning and the lunch hour with errands, crossing tasks off my mental list, and hanging around outside with the cat.  Need to get in 4 or 5 hours of writing time to feel more fully balanced in the wake of so much mental, emotional, and psychic crunching over the course of the last week.  Did a card reading asking where I needed to go next creatively.  Much was confirmed of where I felt myself going instinctively and what I 'believed' about the character's next move and how they ought to be woven together.

kinda sorry I didn't ask 'how' though.  or maybe I needed card-confirmation in order to continue figuring it out for myself as amplified by muse-light energy.  Have heard some extraordinary stories of people 'choosing their reality' in terms of how they're spending greater and greater amounts of time focused on what they love.  Things that are slower, quieter, and perhaps more privately meaningful.  Allowing ourselves to enjoy our own company.  Quietly.  Or perhaps dancing to music that's peaceful and calming.  Reading something of an analog nature in a random rather than purposeful way.  Taking one good idea or spark of inspiration from one's inner cache of such things and seeing how it can be simple or small - or both - and grounded in something personally meaningful.

Find a stone.  Maybe you need to take a walk outside to do that.  Maybe you know the stone and where it is or maybe you have to search for it.  By some manner find a stone that feels like a friend who is grounding and stabilizing to be near.  Remember the wisdom and nature of all stones.  They are in the evolutionary sense much closer to their 'pure' stardust form.

Image from ROCK ON traveling art exhibit.  We saw the collection while it was installed at the Garden in the Woods. Think it was '05.  This was the first installation we spied walking through the site's entryway.  Seems so strange not to have gone this year.  It's a favorite outing. On the other hand I didn't want for time spent in my own garden at the very edge of some woods. 

Am going out soon to commune with the garden.  Give straw mulch to the area where we buried Celeste's ashes.  Shelter the young sages.  Dress the young lavenders less liberally but still provided shelter between branches and the ground.  Blanket the rosemary plants thoroughly.  They have suggested in dreams at least one might make it if I do as they ask ... 

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!

seasonal shifting

I'm officially committing to spending more time with my DSLR.   I want to get good at it!

Yesterday was our fourth day of sunshine in a row.  Love the way the volunteer white pine windrow by the driveway has started to hold and reflect light in a way that almost looks like dew or rainfall.

When we transplanted red bee balm from the field to the evolving sanctuary garden a self-seeded radicchio plant hitched a ride.  Now we'll have this lovely blue self-seeding here and there throughout a second garden space.  Really thrilled about that.

Today is J's birthday.  He shares the date with Mary - a detail that's always been very significant to his mother.  We really like our statue  in her replacement position.  It will be major dollars to "fix" the tree situation in a total way but J has a plan for getting the rest of the fallen trunk removed from her stone pedestal.  Might not get to it until spring though.  I may decide She needs to live on the porch for the winter to prevent a snowblowing catastrophe.

love this moody shot of the Maple by the front door.
before I brought out the camera I rescued a drone from the birdbath.  The creature was super waterlogged and inert but I had a sense of life presence so I carried the bee to a large burdock leaf nearby.  The wet spot is where I put him to expell and groom away water.  When I first put him down he moved just two legs very feebly.  This pic was taken about 20 minutes later.  You can see his wings are still plastered to his body.  Also, at the time I took this pic I was dismayed to think he was missing his front left leg.
This pic was taken about a half an hour later.  The bee is very nearly completely dry, his left front leg is fine, and he'd traveled about three and a half feet to the very tip of the leaf.  Seemed as if he was waiting for his wings to dry a little more before taking off.  When I came back from putting my camera in the house he'd gone ...

underground they waited

a second day of unexpected sunshine

When I first got up this morning I couldn't wait to get out in the field.  Really wanted to see how the energy had changed for the volunteer windrow now that J's successfully removed all the Russian Olive trees that were a serious nuisance.  Below is a picture from mid-afternoon yesterday.

The big pile of brush between J and the fire pit seems far less invasive in this form. 

This looks so much better and far more to the point the white pines feel so much happier. The invaders from next door were really cramping their collective style.  but not anymore!

The picture above is a close view of the group's Speaker.    I know this because about a week ago one particular tree sitting slightly apart from the rest began drawing attention to itself.  I am the speaker for my group.  Usually I'd get this repetitive impression while I was deeply engaged in a garden task that couldn't be stopped mid-stream.  Finally we got on the same wavelength. 

I am the speaker!  The tree's exuberance reminded me of Nancy Pelosi doing that slow smiling turn with the gavel in her hand just after the mid-terms.

There was a slight breeze as you can see above.  I had my rattle with me. Moved directly in front of the tree without further fanfare.

"Hello.  I, too, am the speaker for my group."  I shook the rattle very quietly and then a bit louder.  Its tiny white stones moved in a percussive slurry that quickly found its rhythm.

  "Out here, where our groups meet their energies and purpose, this rattle is the speaker for your land's dreams and our combined heartbeat."

(to be continued)

how you would meet and greet the windrow - Speaker first - if you approached them from the woods path rather than entering the field from the front or back dooryards.

and these would be the last two of the group to meet and greet if you followed the curve of their colony from one end to the other.

stay at home day 1/wood language .2

The otherwise unexplained fourth wooden item of this post is the rolling pin directly above these words.  It's from Pearl's kitchen in the house I was raised.  Am not a baker, never will be, and so I use this talisman of my crafty roots as a brayer kinda thing for art journal smoothing and layering plus the occasional spontaneous monoprint that might chew-into the rubber brayers I keep around and misplace on the regular.  But it's pretty hard to misplace my grandmother's rolling pin for more than a moment or two.  Here this treasured bit of family memorabilia is serving as a scale model.  The rattle is roughly the same size.  The inner dimensions of the lid & box is 5. x7.  My plan is to display it sideways as seen later in the post

Since this is the third phase of US pandemic response here in MA talking about "day one" isn't feeling very first-ish anymore.  From the perspective of my adaptability quotient it's been 5 days since I last crossed property lines and ran one drop-off and two pick-up errands in my car.  The things I purchased then are still cooling their heels in my car.  Tomorrow will be a full 5 days worth of 24 hours since I came home and spoke truth to the concrete walls of my garage:  No more.  Not until there's no other choice.  

Keeping track of the days is vital to also keeping track of when it's safe to bring newer items into the house.  Tomorrow it will be safe to wipe down and store the enormous bottles of brandy and 100 proof vodka I bought on that very last run into the headlights of crumbling normalcy.  The brandy's for stabilizing and preserving flower essence mother stocks and also tincturing certain flowers - e.g. ladies mantle.  The Vodka will back-up the fifth I already had to hand for the rest of my medicinal tincturing needs.  It's also what we'll use when there's no more rubbing alcohol.

In case you're not yet as far down the rabbit hole of radically changed awareness/priorities/general life flow as I've become -  Per established universal viral contamination guidelines --  Glass containers need 5 days isolation time before handling.  Plastic needs nine and so the other package in my car must wait 4 days beyond the glass bottles' removal.  But I don't care.  I'm not planning to go anywhere beyond a ride in J.'s truck tomorrow to pick- up our bread share in the next town heading northeast.   All I can say when I catch myself thinking in endless lists of contamination safety data is that I'm ever-grateful I got back as much brain function as I did before all this hit the fan!

This is how I'll hang it now.  When it was the lid of a box it had the orientation shown in the next image.

Last night I asked my dreaming self to set me a path for early morning grounding.   Prior to that I'd gathered three of the four very well loved wooden possessions pictured above.  I also gathered a soft scrap of cotton quilt batting and the lemon verbena wood conditioner I've grown to love.  Had planned to get ginormous amounts shipped here so I could clean and condition as much of the wood finishing over-load in this house as ultimately possible but then I thought to check the location of the product's manufacturer and shipper.  Canton OH.  I checked the pandemic map and decided I'd work with what I have with much smaller refurbishing ambitions setting the course.  This will maximize the number of wood items I'm able to nourish if not in much scope.  Makes sense to start with a few extra special personal keepsakes, right?

(while writing this post I came up with a spontaneous DIY solution for my urge to condition ALL THE WOOD.  I will use the pine/juniper/tulsi oil I just strained clear the night after the full equinox day here.  I'll simply add about a quarter or third more melted beeswax - not sure yet which essential oil - and that will make my own place-based conditioner.  The wood in the house will be fed by the wood living as trees just beyond.  It makes me smile just typing that.)

In the summer of '80 I bought a beautifully constructed wooden box topped by the parquet lid directly above these words.  I bought it directly from the wood wizard who made it.  He was stationed with a wide table full of beautiful boxes and jars and intricate oversized parquet coasters just by the center entrance to Central Park (south).   It was a warm t-shirts only mid-Spring weekend that proved to be incredibly switched-on and seemingly charmed.  Right up there with this experience. in terms of my personal memory highlights.  The creator of this lovely piece and ever so many more was a little arrogant and presuming but the box has remained a beautiful thing that I love.  The best part of 'having' keepsakes is the recollections that move far beyond the thing itself.  This is why I love boxes as memory keepers on multiple levels.

  Somewhere along the line the impeccably constructed box separated from the box.  My goal now is to use tacks in the wall placed to mount the lid in a place where I'll see it often and use it as an ongoing lunar-driven touchstone.  This is so important as sunlight lasts longer each day and I move into a stronger solar mode myself.  I continue to use the dis-joined box as an altar space container for a shifting arrangement of stones, shells, and tiny mementos.

Note the pictures show my treasures before full wax absorption and buffing.  With that slow and steadying process now complete, the objects' combined presence is now a glowing line of energy as I've set them side-by side for contemplation here in the studio. 

Above is an inkwell that was always kept carelessly in a desk I sold in '88 for enough to get us through an entire winter, spring and summer as a young family in Boston.  First by my grandmother and then my mother.  I know the story behind their grim attachment to it but it's a sad discouraging story about my grandfather so we'll leave it at that.  I took it to heart and have kept it because as a [failed] ethnobotanist I'm really fond of this piece.  Inside the carved seed pod is a tiny inkwell I use with my dip pens on somewhat regular basis.

This rattle has lived a very hands-on life over the 19 years we've been together.   It's taken me probably 15 of those years to grow into my inner spirit voice enough to shake the rattle in ways that speak to her voice's scope and power.  I have her because when I heard her in full voice I understood the person who'd known how to hold and shake her like it's an easy thing to merge with a rattle's spirit would not be able to take her home.

I heard her in full glorious voice as a perpetual flurry of the small white stones lovingly described on her authentication certificate.  The shaker was a tall sturdy-legged teenage bear of a boy.  He stood very straight with a rapt expression on his face as he shook and shook and shook.  Everyone in the gallery turned towards him - surprised and smiling.  Everyone but his father who was annoyed and intent to cut the experience short.  Words were exchanged between father and son - protestations and refusals and a final plea with a backwards glance.

If you think I'm putting up with THAT any time you take it in your head ...

And the rest of us either turned away briskly or sought-out each other's eyes.  Small little head shakes and shoulder shrugs.  I'd been planning to buy a colorful wooden Mexican candelabra of carved hummingbirds circling in clusters.  But I asked the owner if he had any sense that boy might come back.  What if I bought the rattle and he kept it under the counter just in case?  Owner shook his head as he looked me over - suggesting I'd be better off buying it for myself.  I thought how much easier it would be to keep a rattle too big for me close at hand than to haul around an elaborate candelabra that felt just right.  And was undoubtedly a beast to clean after use.

That's how the rattle came home with me.  And we have taken a thorough good long while to get to know each other.  When I shook her briskly over the newly pressed-into-earth columbine seeds I heard what I'd heard in the art gallery so long ago.  Not sure how and when it happened but I've got the touch for her now - and she for me.

today's outside time .2

This morning at 8:30 a.m. there was frost all over the field's surface.  The garden's surface had a crusty layer of iced-together topsoil.  The cat and I prowled around quite happily all the same.  I wanted to visit the new root-crop bed and see how the energy felt now that it's had a chance to settle into itself.

Next time I come into the field I'm going to bring a rattle with me.  Like to walk around out here near the equinox with a pomegranate rattle.  Letting the dried seeds call to Persephone Spirit - seeking her blessings as she rises into her aboveworld guise as Queen of the Flowers.

I really love this time of morning in the field.  Maybe an hour or two earlier if it's very hot.  Got the sense the main bed and everything else needed time without me.  Everything that normally lives out there has been making adjustments to our regular highly focused presence.  I'm there regularly but not in this kind of immersive way.  Feels good to be acting and visioning through this specific lens again.  I grew our food the first three and half full years we lived here before growing too sick to manage.  Felt like such a failure at the time but now I have a lot of admiration for what I accomplished even while ill. 

Had trouble settling in the studio after this morning inspection tour and then again after lunch.  J. was evidently having the same trouble and we met as if planned out in the evolving sanctuary bed.  This is how it looked when Mama and I went out while J. was working in his office:

and this is how it looks now. I asked if J. could create this grouping.  He subsequently moved the other rock to join the rest as is evident in the larger view above.  While he was completing the wall I worked in my own personal circle of pachysandra hell to double the amount of cleared space. 

It occurs to me there has been no dormant season this year.  The ground cover area where their roots live never froze after the January thaw.  There are a number of places where the size of the colonies have nearly trebled.  It would be the most disturbing thing in my brain if we weren't immersed in a global pandemic.  It doesn't take much thought at all to foresee we're going to resort to bringing out the industrial weed wacker and massive amounts of plywood and cardboard.  There is no other way to begin to dream of bringing it to heel in the slightest.

Okay Cheryl and all others - feast your eyes.  It has tumbled merrily out of its laughably tiny intended space and pulled the whole damn wall with it.  And this is but one of five out of control pachy nightmares on our property.  But on the tiny daily hands level - I've cleared a good bit of it just there at the very edge.  Am now into gnarled well established groupings that are tough enough to successfully pry them out with a pitchfork.  That makes the work marginally quicker and the runners pull up in long ropes instead of small pieces. 

Also back there - living and perhaps hatching in the dogwood bark - many tiny ticks.  I have picked one from the hollow of my throat and now of course imagine they are everywhere.  Once J.'s clocked out of work for the day we're going to have to check thoroughly and have equally thorough showers.

Meanwhile, earlier this afternoon I sat on that little bench with my back to the nightmare and ate a honeycrisp apple surrounded by numerous songbird mating calls and a small falcon flying round and round amidst many cries almost as if talking to itself.  Not sure what was going on but I could see the bird quite well just across the road in our neighbor's woods.  Beautiful control of the air as well as its body and binocular vision.

Everything involved had a ring of normalcy.  I felt both healed and energized from grounding in this garden that holds so much life and meaning; grounding more firmly my intentions to clear as much of my projected goal's worth of reclaimed garden space as I possibly can.  It's good to have engrossing physical tasks I know how to accomplish.  Especially with J. around needing physical outside engagement on a very similar schedule.

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.