On The Bus:  Spring Comes to Point Leap

 The season when the rain makes the road a silver ribbon, and the water flooding the culverts reflects the burdened sky and you think youre seeing snow. Dusk stretches ductile into the dark of Night, the Breath of the World has given up its honed density for a sensual invitation to Space, and Rising.

 The wee shrubs begin to bud; tight, sweet scales of Spring fish flexing into the birds of Summer, slowly unfolding in the new heat that invokes the blood in everything to rise. Amid the Hickories I pick my way, hooves trodding last years leaves and empty shells. Standing on the fallen catwalk the wind finds me everywhere, and amid this magnificent Presence of the hills beyond and the sky above and the lake below, and the good, sweet air all around, I sense beneath my breastbone, the nest of my belly, some great and silent Conjunction.

 Metal chest hidden under torn pages of bark, cache of the Cartesian Wandering. Left creekbed china potshard for handpoured lead that had its irresistible force met with some immovable object. Left a little of my light behind between the trees, a signal flare to anyone out there beyond the pale that might still remember me. They say this stream runs for miles underground; drop that Porkpie down and find it four counties over. But for now theres the Hawk, the Cairn Grotto, and the sweet-talking Peepers who reserve their Hosannas for the space of three paces, happy, however, to sing witness to this Idyll as it is their own.

  I fly the flag of no Nation that would confine itself to a line in the sand of a war, scratched by a man on a map. Ungovernable. The trees bud and the creek rushes.

 Eve of May and the sky is deep electric blue. Someone kindled a Last Fire with fruitwood and you can smell the burnt sugar of newsprint they used. A series of hot, bright days, our spirits stretch out through our skins, the ache is welcome, and sweet. The blush of blood is on every succulent bud, the hills reborn in their gentle green. The bats are out, as low into the Last Light two geese, bound in tacit contract, fly over my head and I can hear the air hissing in displacement beneath their wings.  I sit outside at night and listen to the peepers in the creek, watch the stars, yet unobscured by leaves. The dark is wide and welcoming.

  There is a promontory at the end of a hogsback path through piney wood, past sacred stones and pools of blue-black water, where the wind blows you clean through at the cleft in the legs of Becoming, incantations of air and water, and a tree brought low at the edge of the descent, taking the weight. There is a hidden, winding stream, deep with rain and snowmelt in the Spring, its goatpath ascensions laughing in Trout Lily and Saxifrage, the Womb Stone around the bow where the light shines on broad, bright green blades and it sounds of the Chord of the Night before the Beginning.  There is a field, split by a tributary, where once there were a People, and their Spirits still circle the Traveller who approaches with reverence, and skin-listening.

 . Into the teeming Machine I go, without the ceremony of cigarettes or the blessing of breakfast or the elixir of tea, and they introduce some strange magick into my veins that rappels me down into senselessness and forgetting and send some ocular apparatus into me, to measure the health of my disease. Afterward, emerged from the unnatural university, we paddle across the lake and into dense capillaries where the Great Blue Heron rises sudden and slow from trees among the tussocks and you gladly follow after, where the fiddleheads congregate in intricate sylph kingdoms, vernix furred, unfurling their feathers of fronds. I am great at getting us forward, but possess no skill to steer.

 Long moments of Light, clouds like new lambs, the sky spring periwinkle blue. Wild mustard butters the fallow fields. A string of pearl days to offset our recent run on citrine, raindrops fat and soft until the Tesla transmissions begin, original electricity, the retort near and immediate.

 Rain rippling on the pond, brief spires of water and the endless concentric reverberations. The aperture of earth opens to accept the Blessing, a baptism for bud and bloom and leaf, with the roots receiving their fresh measure.

  I arrived here in the heart of winter, when all had receded into the least it needed to endure the grief of Demeter. It is something to imprint upon that emptiness, and witness it filled.

Thank You to all my Guides, Guardians, Family, Friends and the Angels.

Thank You to Zuzu, Sister Mother, Brother Amos, Aughty-Aught and my Center of Gravity.

Thank You.

 

 "The quality of mercy is not strained.
It droppeth as the gentle rain from heaven
Upon the place beneath. It is twice blest:
It blesseth him that gives and him that takes.
Tis mightiest in the mightiest; it becomes
The throned monarch better than his crown.
His scepter shows the force of temporal power,
The attribute to awe and majesty,
Wherein doth sit the dread and fear of kings.
But mercy is above this sceptered sway;
It is enthroned in the hearts of kings;
It is an attribute of God himself;
And earthly power doth then show like God's
When mercy seasons justice."

 Notes from Late July and Early August

Saturn steady and strong in the west, late evening, fireflies high in the canopy of the oaks. Golden digitalis VanGogh stubblefields and deep green swords of feedcorn, most just now flirting their pistilled kerchiefs, everything half-size.

Heavy-magick summer evenings with the roar of the wind and the cricket trill and the heat lightning and all the stars. Savored my first Peacevine tomato today from a volunteer growing between the beans and the birdhouse gourds, the sudden, sweet-earth egg-sac sensation in your mouth when you split the skin. The creek on our side still cradles a few wee pools full of frogs and water-walkers; across the street its an arroyo. What little rain came doesnt seem enough, here on the tatted edge of this years drought. Im keeping things alive using what water im willing.

Took a walk down the old farm dirt road, saw Cherry Hill from behind the fenceline, the cool green groves from afar. Tectonic shifts in my life, light rising up, things falling through. But the omens are auspicious and my hope is high.

That protracted relentless living mirage desert of days came to a close with the void-of-course Dark Moon a fortnight ago, and its been a gentler, tempered heat and some rain, evanescent early morning downpours. So things dont seem so harassed anymore, and it shows in the growth, a hydrated green release. And the days and evenings are blessed with hymns of wind, scented with rain, fine weather for sleeping, regardless of this feeling of something having dropped anchor through the core of me, of dragging through the days. Things go unharvested.

Lughnasadh (John Barleycorn is Dead! Long Live John Barleycorn!) Full Moon in Aquarius, bread, butter and spirits for the Faeries, a little fire, even if its just a covey of flames. Something small to signify my conscious participation in the great Turning of the Wheel. The Hoya blooms profusely.

I find my mood reflected in this oscillating weather, a cumulonimbus sky giving way to grey flannel and back to blue over and over through the days, until the last day of july and the sky lowers and the lightning cracks the grim skin of clouds for less than a second before that great sonic report that characterizes deep summer thunder startles in its invisible immanence. It all makes beautiful sense: why wouldnt we be affected by barometric shifts if we are indeed three-quarters water?

August will no doubt begin that stretch of restlessness that cobbles into the month of September and finds itself at the end of a crepuscular road in October, bringing itself in for the long rest of winter behind the creamy yellow light of windows watched from the night outside.

Travelled down to a lake further on where merry bands were playing and I twirled in circles around beautiful Brother Amos and around me, a pale, red-haired, cornflower frocked little girl step-danced in wee black-ribboned slippers with fierce precision, her arms locked by ancient decree, and me inside her orbit, knees bent, hips shifting, old, long arms everywhere like snakes, or the story of water.

It was beautiful there, the little ewok bridges and narrow wooded paths, the light on the water and the clouds all gold and peach marmalade in the maxfield parrish western evening sky, and to the east, the crazy blue of storm weather that only asperged us briefly and passed on by. Everyone was friendly, and happy, and smiling, mothers nursing their babies and a blue heeler and a woman who hooped with fire.

I talked moth pheromones and Mayan temples and at dusk had a real lemonade that was perfect.

the new theme song.

"and if there's something that you want to hear, you can sing it yourself."

"then let's inhabit a universe of love."

lodge fire

so happy to find the latest one after so long.

my heart gets so wide open.

blessed be.

(drat the ads)

Letters from the Outside, #61

Fireflies in the lilac bushes. Seafoam oat fields, shining wheat. Flocked mullein leaves, daisies and wild pea vine along the roadside. Galactic maps of linden buds. The catalpa blooms and the grass is tall in Avalon. No surer sign of summer than day lilies and chicory and knapweed. In september I will have lived here six years.

Butterflies drink from the echinacea, red pollen sacs amassing on the hindlegs of bees. This strong sudden breeze is a blessing, a benediction. Tinfoil pans bang on tomato cages. I plucked calendula petals today, to use in a balm. The pumpkins and the volunteer squash have cross-pollinated and I dont so much mind pulling up the squash as I fear for what its done to my pumpkins.

I sit here and listen to the wind moving through the trees. Everything in the garden except for the chamomile, calendula, crucifers and beans is at least half the size it should be. You drive around the cornfields here, and you see how stunted even the corn grown by People Who Know What Theyre Doing is, some of it barely clearing a foot this late in july. When youve been looking at things from up very close for awhile and then set your gaze on the sky and the clouds you can feel the miraculous clockwork of your eyes moving, your mind expanding to take in so much space.

I spend a great deal of my days pulling weeds with a spade and breaking the earth away from the roots of the weeds with my hands, inch by inch. The straw ive managed to put down helps keep the ground around the slow-growing plants cool and loose. Its impressive how hot the earth can get otherwise, like beach sand. The sky is a vast blue sheep pasture during the day, and a twinkling glimpse into the marvel of the universe at night. I think of the threshold season mornings when topographic alchemy performs her magick on the damp vapor trapped in the valley and ices the open air not very far above the ground, from where it appears this dense, luminous fog and from the high roads and ridges an opaque, undulating coverlet.

I have not been walking as the roadside enjoys a south-easterly exposure for most of the day and the recent heat is prohibitive, even early in the morning. I have not been to see the chestnuts being born, reveled in the smell of the black locusts, been delighted by the scarlet tanagers and indigo buntings, stilled by the coven of crows among the oaks. Instead I pull up weeds and lay down straw and wonder what fruits these dwarved flora will bear, taking breeze-blessed breaks under the maple listening to the wind roll through the far, tall trees which sounds so much like the shore of the ocean. One is made from earth and water, one from earth and air. Fire has a roar of its own.

Ive seen very little at the feeder but finches in their admittedly impressive array, and the hummingbirds, shining messengers of hearts-ease and joy. Not many titmice or juncos. Just a strange summer all around. The lightheat is an imperious forcefield streaming in at your heart center, your own burning core, whereas cool moonlight is curious and fey, dancing gently into the pineal eye. The lawns are turning brown, but its been pouring in georgia and I wouldnt mind a few days of rain to raise the table and slake the earths thirst.

Back across the bridge, thirty-eight geese at the pond along the river and beside the fen to play at gods and hatch and fly away. These river stones across the seasons, always different in their moments and incarnations, but always the same, like a moonrise or a sunset, a spiral of becoming, rising and returning and passing away.

 

I stand facing into the wind and gently shake a corn stalk to bless myself with its pale, scented pollen. The ears are emerging, and I hope the generous falls of visceral pink silks announce cobs of sweet seed larger in proportion to their spires. Will all the fruits and grains and vegetables be runted? The eternal optimist, I think, perhaps these smaller specimens will be concentrated in their flavor, hard won under this unrelenting sun.

The wasps are building a nest in the cow skull on the table where I sit beneath the maple tree, so I move to the shade of the leaning spruce to read a letter (when I opened the mailbox to receive it a butterfly fluttered out. The world is full of such encouraging portents) and watch the garden cope with another days ample portion of summer light and heat. The round bales along the road shine in their plenty.  Whatever else, its been a banner year for hay.

I discover three grand, heady, sweet strawberries waiting to be thoroughly enjoyed in the grassy patch in the corner of the garden. Just the smell of them reaffirms my faith in the world conspiring to make of me a wiser, wilder, happy woman. This letter composed, as always, over many many days, little notes taken along the road. And that road winds along into all the future nows until we find ourselves across the creek from each other, waving neighborly.

We love you.