Sparkling Lotus-land

present & accounted for

For the past ten days Celeste has been a little heartbroken and super-watchful.  It's because Jim was road-tripping it to Florida for a long overdue visit with his mom.  This morning he arrived back home.  Naturally the cat is now acting as if she couldn't care less and didn't pine for him intensely while he was gone.  This might not make emotional sense from a human point of view but it's absolutely classic feline psychology.

When he first got in I was still three quarters of the way asleep but I still caught the jubilation in his voice as he announced himself.   I am very glad he took this particular vacation, and fully delighted that he enjoyed the trip, but I'm even happier he's back home.  Life in the household just doesn't seem like it's fully itself without his swingin' bass laying the groove of our ongoing soundtrack.

The seasonal shifts that have been transpiring are making a vivid impression on him.  I am a gold-lit summer girl and so I don't always enjoy peoples' variety of fixations for pushing summer away and focusing on autumn's arrival. It doesn't make sense to take this sort of differing preference personally - any more than it makes sense for the cat to ignore someone she missed so dreadfully.   Yet at times I do find it a personal trial. 

From my perspective it seems no sooner has the sun peaked on the summer solstice than various people start bringing up 'the return to darkness'.   This year I was determined not to have that kind of discourse bother me and equally determined not to feel disturbed once summer reached a point of putting itself to sleep.  I thought I didn't need to keep making it my business if anyone else fancied the choice to leapfrog ahead.  They could do that without a scrim of my barely controlled disapproval.  And I could root myself in the now-ness of each passing moment during my favorite season of the year.  For the most part this intentional live-and-live endeavor has worked quite well. 

I am not sad this year so much as wistful.  Several plans or the simple ideas for plans needed to be tweaked or outright canceled due to my assortment of physical concerns.   For two days before Jim left our main topics of conversation revolved around his itinerary planning and how sorry for myself I felt about the fact that it would be a solo mission for him.  He kept trying to help me feel better about it all.  I kept insisting it was good for me to let myself express the sorrow rather than keeping my distance from such a significant part of the overall recuperative process.

While he was gone I spent a fair amount of time somewhat lost in the process of emotional recalibration.  Once I got rid of my accumulated sorrow and frustration it was time to take a more pleasant inventory of what has happened for & through me during this passing season.   Sifting through the details of that inventory has felt like an authentic blessing.

Plus even I, with my unabashed fantasies of living in an Endless Summer, find something undeniably powerful and appealing about the burnished quality of light as it fades a bit earlier each day.  As we ate dinner this evening Jim mentioned his acute awareness that the light's pattern across the daily timeframe has changed during his brief absence.  It won't be too long before leaf peepers start appearing and the landscape is punctuated by the distinctive gold-green color that's the very heartbeat of autumn's arrival in new england.

I adore that color.  It's part of the natural kingdom's seasonal statement that I authentically relish.  But in stoking my anticipation I'm getting a few weeks ahead of the organic order of things. For now it's still summer at least at the technical level.  This is a time of preparation:  a mini-season of making one last enormous batch of pesto sauce, picking some final sumptuous flower bouquets and assembling the culinary incidentals that lend themselves to pumpkin risotto and slow roasted root vegetable medleys...

the midnight hour & beyond

Have mentioned before that my son shares my insomniac tendencies...for the past few nights he's been out & about taking photographs and then editing them as the clock creeps into the early morning hours.  Although we're both often frustrated to find ourselves unable to sleep, his current project is a lot of vicarious fun for me.  For the past two nights I've been up when he's come home.  The creative energy buzzing around him is quite potent and I really enjoy the snippets of experience he chooses to share.  Also like looking at the pictures once he's reviewed them and started editing.  It's fun to hear details of the experimentation involved and feel the energy looping back through me.

Last night I really liked the picture he took of our yard and adjacent house.  He highlighted the birdbath with a flashlight during the long exposure.  I like the implication that the birds' energy is so vibrant that the area stays illuminated even at night.  It's also fun (and instructive) to see the daily landscape from someone else's eyes.  While he was working on his photography project, I completed a couple of samples for my studio journal.  This was a very satisfying way of focusing my mind.  Then I read for awhile. Finally there was sleep and now a whole new day

This is the center of a Tropicana rose that's living on my desk.  The first flower on the plant bloomed very low to the ground in a shaded, secret location.  This is the third rosebush to begin its flowering in a sort of stealth mode.  Seems like a theme and so I'll be doing some automatic writing on the subject over the next week or so.

Trysomic stocks are a big favorite of mine for their delicate appearance, soft pink-to-violet-to-magenta color range, and lovely spicy-clove scent.  They also make beautiful cut flowers, especially for a bedside bouquet.  This is the first time I've grown these quiet beauties in a number of years.  I planted them in the northernmost bed and a container along the front walkway so that we could enjoy the scent while relaxing on the screen porch.

Clusterhead pinks are also blooming.  The colonies were started from seed during the second year of the garden's life.  They are a nice choice for an "easy" garden because they are care free and not at all prone to disease.   The little (half inch) flowers open on 1.5 to 2 foot stems; as their name suggests, they bloom in little groups two or three at a time.  The length of the stems gives the flowers a bit of a disembodied look.  They appear to be zooming all over the place under their own steam - tiny hot pink constellations showering blessings on other nearby plants.  Their scent is sweet with a hint of spice.

Valerian is also in bloom although not quite as prolifically as usual.  I suspect this has a lot to do with the fact that I didn't have an opportunity to thin the patch where they grow.  Valerian is often considered an undesirable plant because it self-seeds so prolifically.  And, of course, if the plants are too densely packed they will not produce as many flowers.  On the upside, this means there will be fewer seedlings to thin.  The cats "help" with this project in the fall because they love to dig up the roots.  While the pretty white valerian flowers have a sweet cherry pie-like scent the roots smell fairly rank to the human nose.  Cats, however, really enjoy it.  So the roots can be placed in pillows that are intended as kitty dreaming thrones.  Put them in an out of the spot where your cats enjoy lurking so the smell is not as overpowering to human family members.

Since we have not yet gotten the predicted rain I was able to start harvesting calendula flowers.  These two were so pretty that I propped them up with some thread spools and took their picture.  Jim's running errands right now and I asked him to bring me a gallon of olive oil.  It's arrival will give me a chance to harvest some lemon balm for a cold oil infusion.  Am also harvesting spearmint to dry for teas; maybe if I get super ambitious I can harvest enough to start a hot infusion of comfrey and spearmint leaves in the crock pot...

from yesterday

Yesterday Jim and Tony accompanied me to Old Sturbridge Village where I documented changes in the beautiful herb garden.  Have added 11 new pictures to the OSV set on my Flickr page.  Jim took a quick tour of the garden and then retreated to the cool quiet of the bookstore.  Tony stuck close to me; asking lots of questions which I really enjoyed answering.  At the end of the documentation tour I couldn't help taking another look at the heirloom plants for sale.  Came home with some healthy Love Lie's Bleeding seedlings.  I know just where I'll plant them; hopefully it will rain today as predicted and the little lovelies can enjoy a smooth transition.



In the evening we had a family meal that acknowledged the holiday as well as  Tony's return.  Jim played guitar on the back steps while he tended the grill.  He also made an awesome vegetable stir fry.



After Tony mowed the lawn I took a tour of the garden beds - documenting changes here and there.  The advent of digital cameras has really condensed the number of field notes I take but I think it's true what they say about pictures versus thousands of words.


In addition to the spicy aroma of the sweet cicely colony by the side of the house, the air now carries the mesmerizing scent of sourwood flowers.  I love these trees and consider them a must for any well-dressed scented garden space.

 

This afternoon I go to see the neurosurgeon.  Jim's coming with me.  On the way home from Worcester we need to stop at garden center for DRY potting soil.  The bags I bought last week were so wet that the things I transplanted last Thursday and Friday have become mudbound.  I need to rescue them and amend the container contents before it becomes a disaster zone ...

mother's day

It seems appropriate that today marks Tony's official return to Amherst after five plus weeks of helping me cope with life's daily details.  I don't think I'll ever forget how I felt (way beyond "wonderful" and completely ovewhelmed in the most positive and loving of ways...) when he first called to offer himself in this way.  Now I feel even more happy and loving to ceremoniously release him back to his life's regularly scheduled program(s).  He went back yesterday to take an inventory of what remains here that needs to be there.   Later this afternoon he'll be back to get what he needs and return my car.  But first, the guy who made me a mother is taking me to a favorite nursery to see what might need to come home with us.  It's a mother's day tradition for us so I'm delighted to feel strong enough to sit for the drive there and back.

Karen's blog entry for today mentions birth-giving in a wider context than offspring - in that frame and its spirit I wish a very happy day to all the creative women I know who do indeed give birth to many wonderful things and provide such wonderfully fertile inspiration for me.  And of course I send special hugs, kisses and kudos to all readers who are literal mothers as well.  We do this thing (whatever it is) for our children (whoever they are) day after year and perhaps that's as big a miracle & proof positive of bone-level magic as I can imagine.   In the image above, Tony takes care of a few gardening chores earlier this week...

spring colors

Happy Easter to those who celebrate the occasion in whatever context!  It's quite chilly but also beautifully sunny.  Am delighted to report that my mood is corresponding with the weather.  In the past few days I've been feeling much more authentically sunny; much more like my usual self than I've been since the beginning of The Leg issue.    There are a number of reasons for this which relate to the healing efforts I've been making in a consistent way, even when the individual strands of effort didn't seem to have the desired result.  In this kind of situation it seems to me that no single aspect of pro-activity is more or less significant than any other.  All the same it can take a while to form a graceful landscape from disparate bits of circumstance and response/reactions to a crisis point.

This is an undeniable healing truth (at least in my experience & observation) that I've repeatedly told myself to keep in mind.  But it's been a difficult and taxing month when mind and what it 'keeps' can be problematic at best.   Nonetheless, during my most recent Unplugged phase, I finally began to feel the merits and a positive cumulative effect of my healing choices.  There is still quite obviously a problem but I've turned an important corner in terms of coping ability and overall perspective.  Have started to see and feel more of a whole-cloth that's both healing and life affirming.  This helps to cope with issues that are still at least partially overwhelming.   Friends and family also help.  Have really appreciated the concern and care I've been receiving.  I hope that's clear for those blog readers to whom it applies even though I haven't had a lot of extra energy for detailed individual response.

Tony visited yesterday and the small but mighty family had a lovely afternoon and evening together.  I asked him if he'd be willing to drive me to Michaels while Jim finished making dinner.  Tony was really pleased that I had a concrete request and so off we went.  I was on a quest for something that wasn't actually there.  Couldn't resist the consolation prize of the gorgeous variegated DMC floss.  And the ultra cheap "craft thread" which may or may not be colorfast.  I will be testing it before I work these threads into something that requires washing.

The trip to the craft store was an impulsive idea on my part - borne as much from cabin fever as a legitimate need to run the errand.  The ride back and forth to the mall, plus walking around the store, is the most 'performance' I've asked of my leg so far.   Fortunately I didn't push myself too much.  Maybe I'm actually learning how not to do that.  This afternoon I hope to sit in the sunlight at the edges of the main garden bed and do a little sketching.  It's quite chilly and also fairly windy so I'm not sure if this plan will come to comfortable fruition.  At the very least I'll just take a tour of the beds, camera in hand.

Have been concerned that the crocus patches have yet to emerge.  I need to look under various sections of the straw mulch and see what's happening there.  Yesterday it occurred to me that, in my worried nosey-ness, I was actually thinking of "trespassing" within a powerful form of botanical liminality.    This caused me to think a little more deeply about the 'gray area' between the ground and the top of the mulch.  I wonder if plants dream and experience visionary journeys within that realm?  Maybe something will reveal itself to me while I'm outside.



Last night I stitched this small sampler (6 inch diameter) by following the circle created by the embroidery hoop.  I used the variegated threads in the second picture of this post.   I intend this as the centerpiece of a book cover so wasn't overly concerned about whether or not the colors will run when wet.  I just HAD TO stitch something right then and there because the burst of colors made me very happy.  It was a nice change from working within the Gray Areas of my March BJP page.  Am now fairly confident I'll have that page completed by the end of the month.  This helps to chip away at my ongoing angst related to Falling Behind.   There is really no time (or place) for angst of any kind on such a beautiful day ...

it's over there ...

 Recently I watched Lawrence of Arabia.   It was impossible not to think about my mother as the plot unfolded; this was one of her favorite movies and she was unabashedly smitten with Peter O'Toole.  I was struck by the fact that I have very clear memories of her raving on at length concerning his piercing blue eyes yet, in the movie, his eyes often appeared to be colorless.  It was intensely creepy to me but in a riveting kind of way that meant I couldn't look elsewhere.   

Another creepy factor relates to the fact that so many locations in the movie hold names I've come to know all too well via war-related news bulletins.  There's nothing remotely girly about the movie.  There isn't a single female in the film - a fact that isn't personally creepy but it did lead me to ponder afresh the longstanding awareness that my mother was mortified by her female nature and did everything she could to repress and deny its inherent place in her personal identity. 



Thankfully enough I don't suffer from that particular issue. But I do have other sorts of baggage that relates to being female and not necessarily wishing to self-define in ways that are considered normal and/or typical but nonetheless strike me as bizarre or downright pointless.  I thought about these things as I watched the movie.  I also thought about how much significance my mother placed on the arduous journey to Aqaba.  It held such deep personal meaning to her that she kept a 3 x 5 card taped to the wall above her writing desk.  It contained what, for her, was a pivotal line from the movie:  Aqaba is over there.  It's only a matter of going.

As a young girl I was prone to pestering her about that card on the wall.  What did it mean?  She played so close to the vest that it probably never occurred to her that I wanted - nay NEEDED - to know what it meant to her, specifically.  And so she would take my question at face value.  It was a line from a movie.  Someday I'd be old enough to see the film for myself and then I'd understand.

I finally did see this particular film when it played at an art house in Philadelphia.  I was 20 at the time and virtually crippled with mother issues.  Her inner workings didn't fascinate me in the slightest so I didn't think about her attachment to the film or the card that was still taped above her desk.  I don't think I even noticed when the line was spoken.  Half the people in the theater were smoking weed and some couples were having sex right there in theater.  I still recall the details of a comically inept drug deal that transpired in the row ahead of me, but remember next to nothing about the film other than the fact that it was quite long and very very butch.  Also I couldn't help but notice that Peter O'Toole's character appeared so insane that it just figured my mother had found him immeasurably attractive.



When my mother died it was very unexpected.  We had to hustle to pack up her belongings from the rented house where she spent her final years; grief had no choice but to wait on a back burner because no sooner did we get everything boxed and moved than it was my son's first holiday season.  I didn't want to cry my way through it, even if he probably wouldn't hold a conscious memory of my distress.

Grief to have lost my primary life's connection proved to be as convoluted and complex as the relationship I had with my mother.  I wasn't sad so much as I was furious; suicide really does mess with the hearts and minds of those who are left behind to make sense of it somehow.  It took me a long time to sort through the mish-mash of cartons containing her most personal belongings.  So it was a few years after her death before I unearthed a 3 x 5 card with the quote that meant so much to her.  I held the card in both hands and wept for all the things she'd never told me - about herself, life in general, being female and the compulsion to go one's own way even if it involved a harsh road full of death-defying peril.  And in the end the vast expanse of unrelenting desert got the better of her.  I feel I have no choice but to live with that since she couldn't.

I founding myself thinking about allllll of this while I watching Lawrence of Arabia for the second time.  When I sensed the pivotal line was imminent I literally held my breath until I heard the familiar words spoken in their original context.  I also thought about the art house where I first saw it.  The things I'd witnessed there during LOA were NOTHING compared to the sights and happenstances of a New Year's Eve marathon of rock-n-roll movies I attended the following year.  And then, inevitably, I thought of myself weeping as a young mother while I held the talisman my mother's 3 x 5 card had become.  I keep it in a very special place.

When my son was seven or eight I took down my own favorite inspirational quote once I realized how much it was disturbing my child.  It was from Jack Kerouac:  Oh the pain of telling these stories but why else write or live?  My tender-hearted fiercely devoted son couldn't bear the idea of me being in any sort of pain and he certainly couldn't fathom willingly accessing pain in order to tell a story or live in an authentic fashion.  I refrained from telling him that someday he'd be old enough to understand - primarily because, as unrealistic as the desire might have been, I didn't want him to be able to understand.  Ever.  For any kind of reason.

I kept all of that to myself as I attempted to soothe his distress.  It didn't take me long to realize that the quote had to banished before I could hope to do the same with his disquietude.  So I took down the quote and together we solemnly watched it burn to a shred of ash in the bathroom sink.  It occurred to me that my child was giving me an opportunity to re-think my relationship to words and what I was most compelled to do with them.

Of course, life being what it is, Tony is now "old enough" to know about profound pain on his own terms.  He has his own corollary understanding of how it can be converted to creative fuel.   He writes as constantly and wholeheartedly as I did at a similar age.  And he would probably get the Aqaba quote even more fully than I grasp it myself but I'm not sure he'd be willing to sit through Lawrence of Arabia in order to also grasp the original context.  I could be wrong about that but it's a very strong hunch.



It turns out that I never replaced my personal Inspirational Quote with something that was comparable in terms of personal meaning so profound that it's timeless in its applicability.   For the past dozen years I've written surrounded by flowering plants during winter and precarious disorganized Piles of Things while the plants are summering outside in the garden. Quotes seem beside the point but I still occasionally think of the Jack Kerouac line.  Sometimes it strikes me like a bolt of lightning that I no longer consider pain to be my primary creative motivation.  It's simply there along with a lot of other emotions and abstracted states-of-being.

My son's ongoing inspirational quote of choice is  All You Need Is Love.  When I look at the generational progression from mother-to-daughter-to-son I do indeed see progress of a very beautiful kind.  Every time I have a low or non existent sense of personal achievement I remind myself that I've managed to raise a son who believes in the moral imperative of love rather than war.   I'd like to think my mother would be happy about her grandson's chosen priorities and motivational cues.  I'd also like to think that, where-ever her soul and spirit may have traveled, she's managed to make it to Aqaba.  Whatever that means ...

P.S.  Jim brought me tulips last night and sang about them in a quavering Tiny Tim voice as he stepped over the thresh-hold.   The buds were very tightly closed but by this morning they were ready for their close-up.

silently turning

The holiday season is cycling-through to completion - here in sparkling lotus-land we tend to mark that cycle's end at Twelfth Night.  By then I usually feel like this tortoise on a favorite batik sample.  This year is no exception what with multiple snowstorms and several trips to Amherst.  And that ill-fated chocolate overdose.  ::::shudder::::  In any event, this morning was the first time since Christmas Eve when I woke without an incapacitating amount of pain in the very early morning hours.  The shift was welcome, indeed!



Physical pain makes you perceive differently - inter-action with the mundane and linear landscape can look the same and as banal as ever but it's usually more like a mythic quest that we must endlessly decided if we mean to pass or fail.  Where a certain level of pain and neural interference is concerned, "intention" holds very little concrete place in a viable coping equation.  I know this without always living in the house of its larger truth and for that I'm very grateful.  When I think back on the past two weeks I don't think about how generally crappy I've felt in the physical sense.  I think about all I've discovered or pushed into a place of better balance - all the people I love who have done something to make the holiday season memorable and in many cases show-stopping.



All things are grist for the mill's internal landscape.  I make note of my sense of growing panic:  the new calendar year hasn't yet begun and I am already feeling pressurized and "too slow" to make the optimum use of my time and energy.  It's really annoying to feel that way and so I'm hoping to set the baggage aside before 2008 finds us ready-or-not.

Am used to viewing this passing year in terms of failure on various levels.  All these funnel into the primary truth that my body hasn't necessarily cooperated with my force of will.  Am truly so accustomed to that restrictive overview that I was caught by surprise when I started counting-up all the positives and illuminating new sensations that were also a significant part of 2007.  That fact has cleaned up really well upon my closer inspection; an additional blessing that I don't take lightly.  For every complaint that I might be inclined to make there is also a prayer of authentic gratitude and some form of personal liberation.  Somewhere along the way a fulcrum does define itself although we often can't see that until we've reached a point of retrospect and perceptual shifts.  So yes.  The anxiety I feel could be seen as a type A-minus personality defect but I think it's also got a lot to do with taking stock and being honest in terms of vunerability - it has to do with gazing at forgotten or deliberately misplaced dreams until what you see makes more sense than anything else you can imagine.  Yes.  It is that time for all of us ...

Yesterday Tony came home for his official showing-up-at-the-rents holiday visit.  I thought he would want to stay overnight but Jim felt strongly he would not.  All-knowing Dad called it.  Not that Tony wasn't enjoying himself, he told me while I laughed, - not that he didn't want to stay, but chosen-home was calling to him very strongly.  I take such delight in watching this particular flower unfold within my son.  I know everybody is probably tired of hearing about it but I remember that developmental point so well - a kind of impassioned infatuation for the domicile that roots itself far beyond DIY heaven or currently popularized trends of domestic elation. 

While Tony was here we laughed a lot.  We gorged on pizza, talked about all sorts of things, and enjoyed a beautiful applewood fire.  The wood was very "vocal"; echoed above in the wildly flickering flame of a violet taper in the center of the universal altar.  This is a purely enjoyable memory, like a similar fire on Christmas Eve with ass-kicking blues christmas songs on the radio.  Jim drove Tony home and I stared into the dwindling flames - thinking of what I most want & need to accomplish during the rest of this lunar cycle...It is incurable, right?  This overachieving demon?

Leila's Contribution

One evening last week Tony called to say he'd be his household's holiday dog-sitter.  We quickly abandoned the idea of bringing the dog here for Christmas dinner.   Jim decided we'd bring the cooked food to the farmhouse.  Leila wouldn't have additional stress, we'd get to spice up our routine, and Tony could come home for a holiday visit once other housemates returned.  Within these plans I was thrilled to realize the changes would give me some fresh visiting time with the Beech Tree I've come to love.   Plus (obviously! this part's hard to beat as the parent of a young adult...) spend a little time with my kid in his first fully chosen environment.  This seemed like an auspicious shift in the celebratory dynamics and one that I can remember meaning quite a lot at a similar age and life station.  Tony was good natured about the picture taking, which was a nice little plus from my perspective.  Have been wanting to document some details of the kitchen since I first saw this room in late August!

Leila truly seemed to understand her place of importance in the basic "unusual" configuration of the day.  She pretty much did everything that's possible to show canine companionship in its most appealing light.  By the end of our visit she'd adopted Jim into the pack.  Throughout the afternoon I tried several times to take a clear photo of her beautiful markings but she is a young lady in serious motion more often than not. 



When we first arrived Leila was kept in the front part of the house until the turkey could be unpacked and whisked to the oven for re-heating.  The next few hours were spent visiting in the kids' kitchen and eating at the dining room table.  I was working on a second helping of Jim's amazing vegan lasagna before the guys sat down with their first plate of traditional fare!  Couldn't help it.  Food was much too good to stand on any kind of ceremony. Plus now I know that a secret of successful christmas travel involves a bit of pre-meal noshing before you hit the road.


On the 23rd we visited Tony while there was still someone else in the house to keep the dog company. That gave us a chance to shift some of the favorite activities we've built, over time, as family traditions for Christmas Eve.  We enjoyed a delicious Dinner Out together and indulged in our yearly bookstore buying binge on each other's behalf.   We also shopped for the holiday feast.  It all occurred at a very natural and fairly relaxed pace but I was still overwhelmed with sensory input.  Christmas Eve was a quiet day and evening in terms of physical activities but it was also QUITE active in terms of loving connections re-affirmed in all sorts of surprising and hugely pleasant ways.   And I ate too much chocolate.  Seriously too much.   Sleep was difficult and then ...


...Jim started cooking at 5:30 in the morning.  A big home cooked Christmas dinner is the one filament of secular/collective celebration that we've maintained.  It was so much fun to feel the family's energy slip into the skin of the farmhouse.  Jim really outdid himself with his cooking efforts.  The visit was a bit of powerful stop-time:  Leila pranced every which way and we talked & ate ourselves silly.



I love this wooden grinding table as well as the view through the windows.  It was indeed relaxing and pleasant in the house but I kept looking out towards the Beech Tree.  Finally Tony announced himself ready for the vigorous challenge of walking Leila.  She pulled him right along and Jim joined them for a brisk trot through the woods.  I headed towards the Beech by way of the winter garden.  Isn't it lovely in its solitude & slumber!



I brought a mixture of offering tobacco and yellow cornmeal to feed the Beech. Had dreamed of doing this for a few weeks before our holiday plans embraced this specific change.  On Christmas morning while Jim packed the food for travel I mixed the two offering elements.   The tree appeared to be poised in anticipation of the feeding.



On the walk to the tree I noticed that many fallen beech leaves remained pliable with snow and general humidity.  I rubbed the offering into the trunk as I searched for its returning gift.  On the far side of the trunk I saw a modest cache of leaves.  This would be more than enough to learn and print from...I also collected a small branch that had fallen from the tree.  All in all it amazed me how much the trunk's form looked and acted like a self-sufficient shrine space.



In dreams before this visit, I had imagined the trunk formed a living elephant's foot that suddenly mobilized.  The rest of the elephant was not visible.  I have collected the modest branch with awareness that the Beech's medicine spirit has long been associated with the birth of Word and its power.  I will incorporate parts of the branch for some art/stitching projects and perhaps an official writing talisman.  So many possibilities!



Leila's centrifugal influence has been a blessing of expansion for our family legends and tradition.  I wish she had stood still long enough for me to properly photograph her beauty and luminous spirit.  Maybe next time.  For now my favorite image of the day is this picture in which NOTHING IS BROKEN.  Loved the detail too much to let it go undocumented...

kiss the cook

ETA:   sometimes cheetahs prosper ...

First of all, my husband okay'd the posting of these pictures - I'd fused them in my mind as a single image but the basic point is that he said yeahokaysure and laughed about it.  So number one on my lucky-number eleven gratitude list for this season of Thanks is having these kind of images squirreled away in the first place.

Secondly?  Way back in his early 20's Jim developed the spontaneous theory that The Guy(s) were supposed to cook all major holiday meals.  I know that wouldn't be every woman's dream but, me?  I'm all about Jim's spontaneous theory.   I like to watch and arm chair quarterback his precise movements and, wow, this year we'll probably talk about baseball, too.

Third?  Baseball.  Who the fuck knew.   Nuff Sed. 

Fourth?  I have family & friends who deal with my more extreme forms of self-discovery and co-creative practice.  More often than not they have similar life passions.   And peculiar little character traits.  Heh.

Fifth?  Is trite and overused but still quite true.  Each one of us is entirely blessed to be living our particular lives.   You know.  In being clothed and sheltered and properly fed.  And then building from there in any number of individual ways.  Et cetera.

Sixth?  I love my garden and all it continues to teach me.  Am grateful also for each sunrise that I watch peaking into the northeastern edges of this space.

Seventh?   I'm really grateful for the BJP project.  This has been such a great structure for refining visual "voice".

Eighth?  Connecting more dots on behalf of shrinking my stress level and living mainly by a code of quality time.

Ninth?   On days when it's necessary, pain meds and muscle relaxers.

Tenth?  Reconnecting a lot more firmly with my childhood love of embroidery.

Eleventh!  Friendly Ghosts.   You?

   

slaughter at the Yards

Please stay tuned for pictures of water lilies and orchids and other beautiful things  from Longwood Gardens.   The weekend was a whirlwind road trip that has left us slightly sunburned and quite tired!  Nonetheless I've made up the giveaway drawing slips and will have Jim do the actual blind selection.  Results will be posted tomorrow!

note this post has been eta'd to include a couple of the few pics I allowed myself at the ballpark.

Saturday night my baseball education continued. I learned about gopher balls which, um, pitchers really aren't supposed to throw.  Bad news for Dice-K but it was an exceptionally good night to be an Orioles fan because grand slams are cool to be sure.  To my mind, nobody deserves the glow of  victory more than the O's but all the same I had hoped for a Sox win since it was Jim's birthday and all.

The ride to Baltimore was a lot of fun.  Once we had the van situated in a sports arena parking lot, we ate a supper we'd picked earlier from the grazing bars of a Whole Foods off the Jersey Turnpike.  The parking lot was FULL of Sox fans.  I could have easily taken tons of pics but only had one memory card along and I was saving most of it for Sunday's trip to the botanical gardens.   

At the quirky personal experience level  I was in the stadium less than five minutes before I was nearly trampled alive and/or beaned by a ball sailing up from warm-up practice on the field.  It would be way cool and far less of a BAM! traumatic memory if I was exaggerating the happenstance even slightly.  I'd been temporarily separated from Jim as I wandered around gaping at oriole imagery.  Then I looked on the field and saw all these people I recognized.  For real as opposed to on television!  I started drifting closer for a better look and all these other people were charging directly at me screaming "Look up at the scoreboard"!  And then a ball came flying out of nowhere WOW from an incredibly high arc and started down and it was directly over my head.  And I just kind of tucked up in a ball and turned instinctively to the cement railing hoping it wouldn't bruise too much of me.   

When I reconnected with Jim he insisted on hearing the details several times throughout the game.  Below is the image my camera spontaneously took when I first realized I was being engulfed by a mass of screaming people - most of them grasping aggressively in the air because they wanted to be the one to catch the ball.  I had mere nano seconds to form a plan and so I curled myself around the camera and tucked my head low enough to prevent getting beaned if the ball somehow made it through the insistent web of everybody's catching arm.

Within fifteen minutes of finding our seats I thoroughly grasped why some people call that stadium Fenway South.  Somewhere in the second inning I remembered why I had steadily pointblank refused to spend time with my husband in this particular way.  When I'm sitting on the couch at home with one finger always poised on the mute button, I consider it quite unfair that so many sportscasters huff and puff about Red Sox fans and how obnoxious they are.  They don't seem to realize every ballpark isn't Fenway.  I hear stuff like that and I hit mute just on general principle.  And then one fine evening I go to a game - again/finally.  And there's no mute button whatsoever.

Consequently by the seventh inning I had a serious case of the STFUs for the man sitting directly across from us.  Later, Jim thanked me for keeping my mouth shut.   Aside from that, and The Nation in general, there were many things I  outright enjoyed about the event and if I could have had a mute button for that REALLY loud guy across the aisle then I think  I would give the night eight of ten stars.  As it is, I'll have to give it a seven out of ten star rating.  A nine, by the way, would have been the grand slam as a Sox coup via Papi who did crack out a fine homer in the first inning.  A ten would have been Ellsbury or Lowell making the slam and Jim catching the ball.

I took scads of pictures in the Longwood Gardens conservatory and a few dozen more outside.   So definitely stay tuned for some glimpses as well as the giveaway results!