Sparkling Lotus-land

inevitability

I love terra cotta - as a medium and as a color.  One of my favorite things about the later fall season is the way this color abounds in the natural landscape here in new england.  This year has been unseasonably warm and the dead leaves are lingering on the trees.  I've had plenty of time to relish the final understated spectrum of their color changes.

I don't make a secret of the fact that I have to put some concentrated effort into appreciating the colder seasons of the year.  But, in this particular part of the world, those seasons are inevitable. On today's walk I was thinking about that word; remembering how I learned it from a cousin of mine when he was newly returned from Vietnam.  We sometimes took walks together and I caught myself wishing I'd had a chance to share some of my favorite wandering spots of the here & now.

Although I have a very well developed set of crisis-handling skills, they don't include dealing with personal grief in a timely manner.  It's a particular (recurring) life challenge that tends to put me in deer-in-the-headlights mode and, in that context, I've felt myself slammed to hell and back by many a metaphorical Mack truck.  Frequently I don't know much about what I was feeling and trying to tell myself about my emotions until I've reached the sane, safe distance of retrospect.  Thus it sometimes feels as if I miss my cousin more actively with each passing year - especially when I hear a certain song he liked to sing during unselfconscious moments. It was something he favored as a background for a chore he was doing or an antidote for a boring stretch of road he driven hundreds of times.

This is a homey, intimate detail I noticed about him so vividly that it's become my cornerstone memory of him.  I wrote the previous paragraph with full intention of linking to song lyrics.  But then I hesitated.  It seems better to leave room for whatever song may remind you of someone special from your own life.  Somebody who had immeasurable patience with you.  They went places and did things you could never adequately imagine and you both knew that.  Yet they answered your questions about where they'd been with honesty and steady, compassionate eye contact.

In high school I imagined myself in love with someone who liked to sing the same song.   For them it was an over-the-top performance piece.  Their voice lilted and lingered over different words and sections of the melody than my cousin's low key version of the same tune.  When I think of those differences it's almost like I'm remembering two different songs.   And I've noticed that whenever I sing it myself (usually on walks, when I'm thinking of my cousin) I always stress one particular line that all but recedes when I consider my memories.  Or hear the popularized recording in a movie soundtrack or drifting out of somebody's car radio tuned to an oldies station.  In that version the phrase that means so much to me is hardly noticeable. 

My hands wavered over the keyboard as I considered ending this post before I'd gotten to the bombshell lurking in its uncharted depths.  But why bother to come back to this blog if I'm going to keep things tidy and sanitized.  There was a third person of special significance to me who frequently sang that song.  Today is the anniversary of their suicide.  And, when I woke to the realization that this was one inevitable thing the day meant to me, I felt the same primal shift of unease I feel every year.  My heartbeat was a wild salmon intent to swim upstream to the its source of origin.  And I thought what I always think: I didn't see it coming. 

Later in the morning, when I had talked myself past the sense of frozen disarray, I took my customary walk.  When I looked up at the empty bird's nest I had a powerful moment of helpless recollection. Because I didn't see it coming.  I can't even guess how often I've wished with all my might that I could have known and done something - anything - to keep someone safe when they didn't know the meaning of the word on their own terms.  

It doesn't matter what I know to be true of suicide's mechanics.  Obviously anything I could have known or done would not have prevented an outcome beyond my control.   And so my desire to have known and done something that defied all odds and obstacles is an impossible wish.   Knowing this is crucial but it doesn't make my sadness and regret any less potent.  I took a picture of the nest to remind myself:  we can only do our level best.  Whatever that may mean will shapeshift from moment to moment.  Inevitably.

the beloved

Celeste and I have just enjoyed a lovely lunch hour's tour of the main garden bed.  Haven't taken pictures in the last couple of days because my camera isn't waterproof and it's been raining pretty steadily.  The garden is soaking and joyous in its wild growth.

This year the angelica is flowering much earlier than it usually does.  The plants aren't growing nearly as tall; they're putting their energy into copious flower heads.  I am interpreting this as the plant medicine spirit knowing something as only nature intelligence can know.  This is a powerful confirmation for me.  The plant above was the first one to flower early last week.  I had a few flashing seconds of cognitive dissonance and then a deeper flash of realizing the flowers weren't early but right on time.

The rain has not cut the distinctive spicy-sweet scent of the flower heads.  In essence form this is a remedy that helps us navigate our lives during its most profound crossroads points.  There are a host of traditional usage applications:  the dawning of adolescence, birth and the dawning of motherhood, witnessing or inhabiting the transitional stages of death, and during active dances with shamanic dreamtime.    I think the essence is quite useful for any transition where we're keenly aware of our own fear factor.

Fear is hardwired into our human experience for some very valid survival purposes.  But it also tends to encroach on turf where it doesn't serve a truly useful purpose.  It's just there; like the one oddball dinner guest we're impelled to invite even though we know they will monopolize a central portion of 'out of the way' kitchen space that's actually quite inconvenient from a host's point of view.

The Angelica archangelica healing signature holds lessons about grace and profound acceptance rather than courage.  The latter gets a lot of airplay; this is the hero's signature, after all, and something that dominant culture widely lionizes.  But the former character attributes are often confused with submission or self-defeating acquiescence.  Angelica flower remedies help us develop clarity so we can sort one thing from another while we're also learning how strong & illuminated we're capable of being in the face of important life changes.

I'm sure by now I've made my attachment to this plant abundantly clear.  I love it so much that I also love sharing all that the plant can evoke in a human keeper.  It's a true delight for me to pass on seeds or seedlings of this beauty*.  Angelica is a strong solar plant.  For many people this also gives the herb a masculine correspondence.  For me it is ambi-sexual.  It could be masculine, it could be feminine, it could be a bi-sexual fish that has learned how to grow wings or an asexual bear who no longer needs its specie's patterns of hibernation.

Whatever it might be Angelica is always true to itself.  The flower heads form three at a time; there's a central flower and two side blossoms.  Each head contains a globe-shaped constellation of individual flowers.  These are rich with nectar and most winged creatures love them.  It's my habit to give the feeders plenty of private time with the plants.  In return they normally remain undisturbed when I join them for delighted observation.

The overall growth pattern of a mature plant usually appears visually symmetrical even though the flower stalks and heads form in odd numbers.  The first plant to flower has produced seven stalks and twenty one blooms.  As the flowerheads unfold the stalk gets longer.  The result is a form that looks markedly human especially in the day's earliest and last flares of light.  The "arms" of the plant can be interpreted as a welcoming open embrace or the stance of fully elongated protection and guardianship.

  

I don't think I'll ever forget my wonder and awe during the first season I grew this plant.   In each year since my affection has grown considerably even though I get the consistent feeling it's already so huge there's no way for it to expand.  This growing season is no exception.

*Please note that my favorite plant has something of an Evil Twin in the plant kingdom.  Water Hemlock is extremely toxic; this is the plant that Socrates and many others used to commit suicide.  It's also killed innumerable folks who didn't actually mean to die.  So please don't nibble from any plants you may find by the wayside or try to bring them home with you.  Always make sure you have purchased Angelica from a knowledgable source or otherwise have any seedling you acquire identified by someone with a trustworthy amount of botanical savvy.  Have them do it in person rather than long distance/by photograph

before it gets you

Today's pictures share more art from Greg Robinson.  Above is a Coyote themed drawing for a wooden comb he has carved.   I thought I would feature this piece today because there's been so much awakened sense of C. latrans' presence in life's borderlines. There's the infamous oh so you thought you knew what you were doing and what you wanted - oh really.  Did you really vibe that's been causing significant reverb patterns.  Also I sense myself to be entering Song Dog mode.

What this means (at least for the moment) is that after a number of weeks of feeling stalled-out in terms of verbal eloquence, I am now finding it easier to express myself - especially with those who communicate in a sincere and thoughtful way.  I am very grateful for that shift because my recent bout of verbal ineptitude has been bordering on flat-out incoherence.  Even those who can usually push through the thickets and by-ways of my conversational style had been staring like what the hell are you trying to tell me.

It is a beautiful spring day here today - still "spring" by deeply nuanced New England standards but warming & greening up significantly.  There are tons of plants emerging in the garden and I have just made the day's mail box run without a jacket.  Maybe a more significant point is that I was able to walk there and enjoy the endeavor.

Whenever I have a day of feeling noticeably better and more mobile it can be challenging not to fall into a long established pattern of over-doing.  Or scattering lots of energy in a mis-applied effort to pick a few things and stick with them rather than going in ten or twenty directions at once.   So many choices, so little common sense.  But I am learning not to follow that paradigm because, when you really think about it, who's better served to learn new tricks than a timelessly old dog.

Greg says of the finished comb: It is carved from a piece of storm damaged Big Leaf Maple from near the Columbia River mouth.

You may notice that I am playing around with the blog layout.  Started this at one in the morning and, half an hour later, I was pretty much ready to hit the delete key.   So please bear with me while I figure out the finer points ...

gathering influence

In recent weeks I've been soaking-in the visual power of another batch of Greg Robinson's artwork.  This piece is titled Grandmother; shown here with a photograph of his grandmother Cha' ist.  I've also been revolving in the world evoked by a Molly Peacock poem. 

The Soul House

To the soul house no guests can be asked
though it is calm as a lake, its shore so prepared
anyone who stops by wants to build there.
But no.  Who lives here lives unmasked.
Across the waxed floors slips only a soul
in a soul's bathrobe, tattered of course.
This is what spirits at home wear.  That bowl
receives real plums, the vases real flowers.
Soul breath is quite real, too, its naked powers
insisting it be housed exclusively
for its air alone - pure being.  And no
secrets in the soul house, only privacy.
A place to grow in but not outgrow.
Not emptiness, but emptiedness.  A source.

Can you feel the energies gathering towards this lunar cycle's full moon?  This is a good one for taking the time & thought to step away from our game face and other masks.  Revealing our true selves can be a slippery business although it's something kids frequently try at home - and elsewhere.  Somewhere in the dawn of adolescence we seem to stop thrilling to that kind of risk.  Even the most original among us begin to wear that originality as another sort of mask. 

Any time we live inside of something that we've devised as conscious projection we run the risk of betraying who we really are and what we most need in order to genuinely thrive.  Why should we stock our soul's cabinets with complacency?  It seems this would be a good moon to rectify whatever sorts of creative dislocation cause us the most damage; whatever pieces of denial we've selected to carve ourselves an allegedly safe space that's really no such thing ...

related matter

Yesterday my son and I celebrated spring with a trip to our favorite local greenhouse.  All the plants fairly pulsed with vitality.   I selected two small scented pelargoniums to bring home with us.  Also stocked up on my favorite flowering plant supplement.  We set these things on the checkout counter and then roamed at will for awhile.

The tour of inspection raised my enthusiasm level; it's very cold and windy outside but this is still the start of a new growing season!   I was especially elevated by the long row of herb seedlings.   Tony enjoyed touring the succulents and hanging baskets.  He is tall enough to see their contents at eye level.  During our first visits to this nursery he was considerably shorter.  Am delighted this is still the sort of excursion he enjoys sharing with me.

Some of the back greenhouses were open.  This is where Paul and Barbara tend the hundreds of vegetable and flower plants they raise from seed every spring.   As we peeked inside we saw Barbara working peacefully. 

It won't be long before the tables are bursting with flowering annuals and the hanging baskets are bright with several fuchsia varieties.   The sunny hillside was covered with greening thyme runners that added a crisp lively scent to our walk.   I was so inspired by the visit that I asked Tony to take the long way home, via Snow Pond.

The ice is still rather thick on the pond.  The wind was blowing with force strong enough to swallow our words as we tried to talk to each other.  My jacket wasn't heavy enough for lingering.  We walked to the edge of the pond, surveyed tree damage from last December's biggest storm, and hurried back to the warmth of the car.

The urge to plant had become so powerful that I got this seed packet for the cats' benefit.  After lunch I made a little ceremony of preparing a pot for each cat.  Covered with plastic, these offerings have been placed on high window ledges.  The animals are none the wiser.  But helping the wheatgrass grow to the recommended 3-4 inches without feline interference is going to be challenging!

It was a satisfying and active way to begin the season of fresh life.  Today I need to recharge and prepare for another active day tomorrow.  From there I'm planning a few days' break from blogging.  Will be back Tuesday or Wednesday...

freshly bloomed this morning on the silver leaf rose scented pelargonium settling in here at my desk.

equal parts

It's the vernal equinox a/k/a the first day of spring here in the northern hemisphere.  It's also the start of a new astrological year and my personal favorite New Year's Day marker in the annual cycle.  I do not get myself hung up concerning which particular new years day is the "real" or "best" time marker because, let's face it.  We can all stand to embrace as many fresh beginnings and blank slates as possible.  So I tend to acknowledge all the available choices plus invent a few of my own making.  For me this is tremendous fun rather than muddle-making and disorderly.

That said I've always felt a special affinity for spring; maybe it's got something to do with my aries ascendant.  On this particular day I have a couple of small ceremonies that have come to mean a lot to me.  I always burn a fresh pair of silver and gold candles until they extinguish themselves.  I use a small ocean colored womb-like pottery vase full of sand.  When the flames reach the sand their heat fuses the individual granules.  The fusion creates a relatively solid half-egg shape.

I gently dig these shapes free of the uncooked sand and tap out the final nub of the expired candles.  The nubs leave a small hole.  I fill them with herbs that signify blessing, protection and gratitude.  Sometimes I add tiny chips of stone or a very small feather.  Then I bind the two egg-like halves together with colored thread and leave the bundle as an offering in the center of my garden.

Anytime is a good time to smudge the house - especially in today's interesting and frequently troubled times.   It's particular efficacious to smudge on a universally significant day of the year.  I like to enlist the whole household in this process.  Any large feather can serve the purpose of dispersing smoke.  It's nice to match the bird's symbolic correspondence with the occasion.

For the year's quarter marking points I like to use a wild turkey feather.  These birds are associated with heightened awareness, and sharing, of our personal & collective blessings.   First the feather is moved away from the smoke in order to encourage its cleansing passage into all the nooks and crannies where energy can stagnate.  Then it is moved back towards the smudge bowl; encouraging fresh awareness and blessing-manifestation to enter the home. 

You can 'brighten' a freshly smudged room by dipping a plant branch in fresh water - I like to add some drops of emerald elixir - and shaking the water into the corners and across the center of the floor.  Lemon Verbena or Rosemary are generally accepted as the most efficient and powerful branches to use.  I also like to cut some willow fronds and leave them in a vase situated in a quiet corner where they're not likely to be disturbed.  They will unfurl their leaves; bringing a lovely energy of the natural world into our home and (wo)man-made environment.   The vases can be ringed with shells or stones and other trinkets of personal significance.

I generally switch the cloths and representational items on my household altars at the first new moon after a season changes.  On the day of seasonal change I started shifting the energetic focus by switching-out the candle colors* and a single item.  Some talismans remain constant throughout the years and others change as time passes.

Yesterday I went out in search of some silver and gold tapers.  Couldn't find any but luckily I have the tiny 'emergency backup' candles pictured above. As I was wandering around, picking up a few little things like glow in the dark embroidery floss and a bottle of fray check, I noticed the bright little butterfly in a packet of beads.   For me the springtime isn't just related to new forms of growth; it's also about transformational relationship to all that seeded itself back in the fall's equinox time-frame.  So the butterfly came home with me.

Its accompanying bead assortment will be very nice to include in an anklet I'm planning for a young friend who is about to have her first teenaged birthday.  Am keeping the butterfly for my business & communication altar space.  When it's time for the brilliant creature to fly onwards I'll make something currently unknown for an as yet undesignated person.  Not knowing is fine for me.  Spring is an excellent time for winging it and, also, creating brand new plans out of thin air.

* I favor bright green or sky blue candles for the spring season.  Established belief systems may call for equally established color correspondences.  While I have indeed established a system that embodies my personal beliefs, I do not limit myself to expressing that system within the way I acknowledge life/consciousness at a ceremonial level.  This goes back to my early life experiences with elders who shaped me to make intuitive choices that held the strongest level of personal meaning.

shifting towards spring

Lightness has been entering my general mood flow as well as my daily attitude.   And just in the nick of time - Tuesday was our 25th wedding anniversary and yesterday was Tony's 24th birthday.   The family celebrations were modest and heartfelt; a nice compliment to the full moon's brilliance in the sky.  Today I saw my primary care doc to review my latest bloodwork and also discuss my ongoing spine/leg issues.  Now I have lidoderm patches to add to my cache of pain management tools.  And an acupuncturist referral. 

While waiting to see her I started a new library book - Face to Face: Women Writing on Faith, Mysticism and Awakening.  It's a collection of essays, poems and excerpts from larger pieces from a variety of women edited by Linda Hogan and Brenda Peterson.  Once I was a paragraph or two into the the introduction I found myself blocking out the wailing toddler and mind-numbing easy listening radio station in the waiting room.  Had a chance to read the first offering from new-to-me Mohja Kahf and a second piece by long-time fave Terry Tempest Williams.

From just that much I'm already thinking of this book as a keeper; if it were my own instead of the library's I would be hauling out some highlighters to mark especially evocative or thought-provoking passages.  As it is, I've found a handful of items to copy into my all purpose collection-of-word-related-things notebook.   And when I got back home I was a lot more interested in googling Mohja Kahf, and then reading the WaPo article that I linked, than I cared about reading the informative info that came with the box of lidoderm patches.

This book will now join the one I've nearly finished as bedtime and first-waking up reading.  The latter - Close to the Bone by Jean Shinoda Bolen - has been so satisfying that I need something really strong to follow.  Am a long term admirer of both Bolen's healing work and her writing style.  This particular volume is a thought provoking and emotionally affirming examination of the alterative aspects of chronic and life threatening illnesses.  I've linked to the preface, published on Bolen's website, for those interested in learning more.

This book's impact on my psyche and more mundane attitude has been profoundly positive.   As spring approaches I am ready to develop a new and less frustrating relationship to the assortment of health/physical issues that I'm obliged to embrace.  And I do find myself wanting to authentically embrace the reality of it all rather than simply tolerating that which I can't control as fully or simply as I might wish.  So yay.  Over the past few months I've been working overtime to keep faith that I would reach this point in a way that anchored deep beneath the superficial/lip-servicey level.

My bloodwork was declared perfect beyond a continued thyroid anomaly - right now it's swung in the opposite direction of Graves presentation and is functioning a bit too slowly.  So I'll have to go for another draw in six weeks.  In the meantime I'm likely to re-commence daily work with Lemon Balm.  Although it is most commonly associate with hyperthyroidism I have read and heard a lot of positive things about its use in regulating more moderate cases of hypo-function.  This seems to be an especially helpful herbal ally for those who started out on the hyper end of the functioning spectrum. 

I have plenty left from last year's harvest to drink as tea, and my friend Robin has thoughtfully supplied enough tincture to allow for alternating between the two applications.  I found Robin's support invaluable during the more crisis-oriented aspects of the Graves diagnosis.  Integrative healing can raise hackles on both sides of the choice-making fence so I was very selective about who I picked for sharing details of my decisions at the point where I felt most vulnerable.

Over time Robin and I have both worked diligently to achieve and maintain tenderness and a trans-personal sisterly love and respect for each other.  A variety of life experiences leads me to understand that this is no small accomplishment.  In fact simply holding the ongoing inclination, and consistent willigness to embody it, seems rather exceptional in spite of the fact that my personal life philosophy would suggest that it ought to be an ongoing way of the world.   Thinking of our shared process, and knowing of Robin's strong gift for intentional medicine-making, I felt particularly honored, protected and loved to include her tincture in my wellness-building regime. 

The dried herb that I've been using to brew tea comes from my own garden beds.  Lemon balm is an especially prolific ally there so I'm already anticipating the first harvests of fresh leaves once the new growing season gets underway.    Infusions from the freshly picked leaves have a wonderfully deep yet delicate green color.  The distinctive lemony scent fills the sensory mind and, I believe, opens the body's cellular being to welcome this marvellously effective and gentle healing agent.

Back to the doc visit details - my blood pressure and heart rate are now in the optimum range so, for now, I'll stay with the modest amount of beta block I've been taking.  My hope/healing intention is that I can develop a more even-keeled exercise regime that will allow me to release this maintenance drug.   An absence of ice means an end to corollary fear of falling on it and further damaging my spine.   And, without that fear, I'm a lot more likely to follow through with the kind of practical application cardio exercise that's part of my strongest comfort zone. Am simply not a treadmill or step-class sort of person but I suppose if it comes down to it I will bite the emotional bullet and do what I gotta.

I told the doctor I was struggling a great deal to get my work done and further struggling to deal with the increased spine/leg pain that results when I do actually manage to lose myself in the writing process long enough to effectively dissociate from physical sensation.  Then I professed my lack of understanding for why I was having so much trouble getting a handle on this situation, given my fairly extensive history with pain management.  She just looked at me for a moment and then said very simply it's because you're human.

Obvious and yet revelatory; I have spent the last few months criticizing myself for not finding a successful way of handling either the pain or a re-structured schedule/general lifestyle that allows me to find ways of decompensating the pain's levels of impact and influence.   For too long I have been qualifying my human-ness with the sense I ought to know what I'm doing in re. pain management well enough to do it successfully.  Right?  I mean the basic premise does make a lot of sense to me but I doubt I'd feel nearly as rigorously certain of what the outcome ought to be if I was listening to somebody else's process rather than second-guessing my own.

By the time I got done listing all the things I routinely do to help and heal myself the doctor was looking at me like just how much more do you think you can  sanely expect of yourself , anyway.  So I went the distance and vocalized what she was clearly weighing the value of saying herself:   I'm not being realistic or empathetic enough within the goals I encourage myself to attain.

And that particular insight - as well as the changes it implies I'd be wise to pursue - brings us back to Close to the Bone and how immeasurably nourishing I'm finding it.  This is another book from the library that I'd like to own.   Because it's been so instructive and psychologically helpful to me, I think I will probably purchase it sooner rather than later...

ground lion

In some traditional cultures Chameleon assumes the Coyote role(s) of trickster or savior or divine creator.   They are also associated with visionary Sight and Dreamtime guidance.  In the every day world chameleons are slow moving, territorial and hypersensitive to every nuance of their environment. 

Contrary to a common mis-perception they do not change color as a method of camouflage.   Color is their basic language; a method of communication that can move very swiftly*.   When they sleep their usually vivid skin turns white.  This is how poachers often find them.

Over the years I have learned a great deal about this animal because my son developed an enormous fondness for them when he was young.  To this day we discuss them on a very regular basis.  Years ago Tony remarked that I was a lot like a chameleon.  This took me by surprise.  I was used to thinking of the creature as his animal.  But the longer I thought about their habits and personalities the more sense it made.

The little chameleon statues pictured above live in our kitchen.   I got them several years ago, at a dollar store, as a birthday present for Tony.   When the sun first begins to set the kitchen is flooded with golden light and the statues are illuminated.  Today I am thinking of the animal's ability to focus their eyes independently.  It allows them to study two things at once with equal clarity...

Note:  there are some wonderful chameleon pictures at this site.

* when we lived in Boston we sometimes visited the chameleon at the Franklin Park zoo.  The range of green variations in the animal's skin pigment was both transfixing and mind-boggling.

unfolding

The beauty of a lotus flower speaks in many tongues.   When words fail there is always the stunning illumination of the bloom to light the corners of our mind and its blank spaces.   This morning when I first woke up I was thinking in images of bright color and warm physical sensations.  My body was more relaxed than it's been for a number of weeks.  And I had a sense of something waiting for me to find it.

Indeed there were many things to be found today including an assortment of gifts that kept me spellbound.  First there was the gift of less physical tension than I've felt in several weeks.  And a glowing awareness of blessings that encompass my entire family.  An ability to catching my breath in order to more fully absorb those particular blessings. New flowers budding & blooming on my desk.  An unexpected package in the mail.

Did you know that woodpeckers are harbingers of significant shifts in focus and life force?  They are rhythm keepers; a drummer's ally and auspicious guardian of spiritual & practical clarity.  All week I've been watching the small tribe that lives in our silver maple tree.  Did they know a member of their tribe dropped a feather in another place which has found its way to me?

Lotus medicine is a very powerful keeper of compassion in a world that is trying hard to remember how to walk that talk and work the walk; to let the illusions of intelligence and its boundaries shatter as gracefully as possible.  It isn't a journey to be made lightly or in a spirit of impatient expectation.  Wise people know that the farther you go the less you know.  In not-knowing our mind and senses are free to embrace each moment just as it is without searching through the past or scrambling towards the future.  The very nature of meaning and its memories expands and contracts with each breath.  The lotus spirit waits at the core of our personal and collective psyche .  When we're ready to open ourselves to the realm of anything & everything this most sacred flower may give what we need as if those things had always been with us ...

lunar living #1

Just words today; last week sometime I posted a comment on Jen's blog that prompted her to ask that I say more about my habit - or, okay...just for Jen - ritual - of marking the full moon of each lunar cycle with some form of self-gifting.  I've been doing this for quite awhile.  It started more than a quarter century ago when I made the choice to stop drinking.  In living out the undeniable challenge of staying true to the intention I got in the habit of rewarding myself for every month I stayed a sober alcoholic.

I didn't originally equate these rewards (most usually fabric, a hair ornament or some type of outrageously gorgeous blank book in which to keep my written journal) with the full moon until a friend pointed out that I was synchronized with it even if I hadn't planned things that way.  This particular friend was capable of waxing quite poetically about our silvery grandmother in the sky.  I started wondering what would happen to my habit/ritual if I intentionally hooked it up with the abundant fullness segment of any given organic cycle.

This turned out to be a more elaborate process than I would have imagined in advance.  In order to consciously choose an appropriate way of marking the full expansion of reflected light I needed to have a name/context for each cycle.  Of course I could have done what many people do and adopted some existing system of moon names.  But, in truth, I felt silly about that and not in a good way.  Silly in the context of self-consciousness and not being sufficiently authentic to keep a straight face let alone maintain an ongoing intention of seeing it through.

So I started naming various lunar cycles - not exactly off the top of my head but in a way that was quirky and entirely personal.  I'd like to keep it that way so I'll just express what happened once I started to self-gift in a more conscious fashion.  For one thing, I stopped gifting myself with things.  I started to give myself time instead - to spend a whole day reading poetry and eating precisely what I pleased (eg. green beans and english muffins) or, in a kind of diametric shift, to pick a bogglingly complex recipe and then give myself the time and space to build a meal around it.

The cooking gifts often turned in impromptu dinner parties and allowed me to embody a primary component of abundance e.g. sharing the wealth.  And that is how I got in the habit of gifting myself with the impulsive spirit of generosity and sharing with others just because it was always in my power to do so.  It felt so good that I started to wonder what it would feel like to be equally generous (rather than simply 'feeding the machine' of wanting things and allowing myself to have them) with myself.  From there reading poetry gave way to journeying downtown to Boston's enormous public library and poking around in categories that were beyond my normal reading terrain. Or going to a gallery or museum and then taking a luxuriously long and invigorating walk back home. 

For the evolving years of working crisis intervention and mothering a brilliant genius level child whose mind ran circles around me, I gave myself the gift of doing jackshit for a day.  Abundance in those years was not an additive process; I simply needed to-be and there was honestly no greater gift I could have given myself.  Even the english muffins and green beans were too much of a task for me to consider; I took to getting takeout from a different sort of ethnic restaurant every month.  This was simple since I lived right on the edge of a neighborhood that had a wide range of choices available.

When we moved to the country I gave myself a day to wander in the woods instead of continuing to feed the belief that I didn't properly know how to be in the woods.  I stopped trying to do (or be) whatever I thought Thoreau might have been or done - I was just Alicia learning how to walk and look and remember in whole new way.

Inevitably I started wandering as a matter of course, just to keep my head together, and so I switched to giving myself a day to be UNtogether.  If I felt like venting in my journal non-stop for two hours so be it.  If I didn't feel like getting out of my pajamas, I didn't.  Then I got sick.  Hanging around doing nothing in my pajamas became a way of life rather than a treat.  I started giving myself time to not think about being sick or trying to square the circle of how I might help myself heal.  Having a day or two "off" on a reliable schedule did wonders for my incentive and determination the rest of the time.

Once I began to get well I went back to the gift of what my son calls non-days.   These are slightly more abundant and fulfilling (at least in what I observed in my kid - by now a teenager - who became and remains my inspirational model for kicking down the walls of personality and self expectation long enough to simply float and let the universe do everything else if only for a little while)  in scope than venting into the hyperspace of my own mind or simply refusing to change into street clothes. A non-day for me typically means staring into space for enormous lengths of time without turning it into any kind of active meditation or wondering what my grandmother might say about so much unfettered day dreaming.  And pizza for dinner.  Pizza with artichokes.   And no cheese.

 After a few months I discovered that my personality responded to greater pockets of wellness by trying to make up for all the time I'd "lost" in the interim years.  This led to crash and burn syndrome and also led me to the sense that I didn't really deserve to relax just for the hell of it - I was forced to "relax" so often that I lost track of how nourishing it is to give yourself time off the clock just-because.

Eventually I re-established a sense of entitlement to kick-back without having to make a special ceremonial process out of it.  At some point around that time I crossed a line I never actually drew and started gifting myself with things again.  New pajamas.  Beautiful grown-up versions of oversized picture books. Raw materials to make my own highly eccentric hair ornaments.  Bright and shiny sorts of impulse point-of-sale purchases that held no actual purpose beyond spreading them out on my bed and feeling exceedingly happy just to look at them.

I might add that those bright & shiny things are now forming a certain glittery backbone to the collages I've been making in my efforts to become more visually skilled.  And that brings me happiness all over again.  For a long time - like most of 2007 - I gifted myself with replacing books from my personal library that had "walked" somewhere and never come back home to me.  This process allowed me to release any simmering resentment for specific people - or just the sort of person - who feel no need to return what they've borrowed.  Not to mention (because this in greatest truth is what I really REALLY resented ...) the way their behavior put a once-burnt crimp in my own desire to share relatively freely.

In 2008 I vacillated between giving myself time to embroider (or watch three back-to-back movies or possibly do both of those things at once) - without having any direct notion of what I was embroidering or what I might do with the finished result - and things that suggest I mean what I say about continuing to take myself more seriously in the realm of visual development.

This year it looks like I'm setting a precedent of gifting myself with things I have previously considered silly or senseless or overly acquisitive/self-indulgent.  Perhaps that will lead to gifting myself time to make silly/senseless/indulgent items from the things.  More on that once the full moon actually occurs once or twice...