originally i posted this one, then changed my mind.

i had forgotten about michael stipe as a little boy with the beautiful mouth, the way his voice trembles inspires me to be more gentle with myself.

"When I was young and full of grace
And spirited - a rattlesnake
When I was young and fever fell
My spirit, I will not tell
You're on your honor not to tell

I believe in coyotes and time as an abstract
Explain the change, the difference between
What you want and what you need, there's the key,
Your adventure for today, what do you do
Between the horns of the day?
 

 I believe my shirt is wearing thin
And change is what I believe in

When I was young and give and take
And foolish said my fool awake
When I was young and fever fell
My spirit, I will not tell
You're on your honor, on your honor
Trust in your calling, make sure your calling's true
Think of others, the others think of you
Silly rule golden words make, practice, practice makes perfect,
Perfect is a fault, and fault lines change...
 

I believe in example
I believe my throat hurts
Example is the checker to the key

I believe my humor's wearing thin
And I believe the poles are shifting

Letters from the Outside, #12

Joy #2: “Finding Money You Didn't Know You Had.” Money is a voucher for various forms of Energy. Food, Shelter, Little Sparkly Things. And the clever devils have built this Babylon System where cash is king. We seek it out, we serve it, people think its freedom but its just a chain. But happening upon a little extra energy can be like walking into the light of a sunbeam. For me, I try to spread my energy around in other ways, maybe a plate of cookies or a mason jar of flowers, a little something I knit, a letter. Moneys not an energy ive ever been good at dancing with, theres weird first-world guilt attached to it, and deeper down the simple inability to grok the stuff at all. I never got convinced all the way, the programming didnt stick. Moneys great, I can trade it for coffee and donuts, organic cotton sheets, a massage. Its what I need to keep the car going, to keep the refrigerator running, to keep from joining the swelling ranks of the forsaken dispossessed. So. Serendipity.

I went back for a blue feather and my Favorite Mason Jar broke in the road. The blue feather was gone. Went back on the bike to clean up the mess and thought that maybe this was my liberation from the doldrums and dismay. I believe this is called magical thinking. My enlightenment rationed out in fits and starts, a crazy quilt, a hopechest dowry for whoever comes after me (more magical thinking).

You can smell the sun on the tall grass. the cattle graze in parade along the widening margin of shade in the pasture by the road. Nursing calves, the peaceful presence of herbivores, little ones gone up ahead to nap while their mothers catch up with the nursery rear-guard who I notice emerge from the windbreak in the van. And ive stepped in to a sentient diorama of the food chain revealing the sun as source of all life. Were waking up to first wave indian summer, hot bright days framed with mist and chill. I begin to gather tomatoes in earnest, and make decisions about the gate, this years rather mad affair of wire gridding and bamboo poles held together entirely by gravity (and one rather stout staff after it fell once the tomatoes growing on it came) but there are days its just too much to consider, the effort and architecture, and think ill just grow moonflower on it next year. If im out there with the hatchet separating maple branch from chaff and it starts to come together, ill dance with it. More rudbeckia for the front, maybe even another rhododendron to crowd out the wild violets that spread in corms that screw themselves into the earth. The lemon balm is taking over, and my ivy slowly twines. I should resist buying these perennials that require staking, or care enough to stake them. They bend inevitably from the weight of their blooming, and their flowers fall outside the little wall necks up bending, all the color and show seeming to come up from the grass. All the perennial beds need a weeding to make room for new seeds to set down.

Like the fool I am I walk out into the noonday and lo, it is glorious the birdsfoot burnished and the goldenrod bloomed. Neighbor broke her pelvis in two different places and their energy was all in my head so I walk halfway and turn around, standing a long while in the sweet shade of honeylocust listening to the wind. Later on, after a trip into town for white sugar and tobacco, I go back out on my bike. Chanticleer, blue with bells on.

Picked tomatoes, got some painting done. Hung laundry, watered the plants, hauled more maple. You think its going to be cool out there, but its humid, nothing moves. Things are breaking; the pump, the tree, the jar, another bit of crockery just this morning taking the compost out. I should be grateful, but im still hungry, still an easily distracted temple tender to that one secret ember holding all the pretty pictures of what my heart longs for, the only part of me closely guarded. Maybe I should give it some light and air, so it can grow.

If it werent for the quiet sky and the creatures and the trees id go absolutely mad. This is probably obvious. The sunflowers are thick with bees, and the tomatoes shine dense red in the morning. Pumpkins on pallets at the side of the road, halloween candy on the shelves. I pick calendula for salve.

Finally spurred into action by the destruction of the Favorite Mason Jar I start knitting a sling, and continue to slog away in seed stitch on Another Pointy Hat.

Tomorrow is September.

for Golden Boy.

 its the birthday of robert crumb.

 “My current wife Aline calls me a sexist, racist misogynist misanthrope. I
guess all that stuff is in me, sure. But it is not as simple as that. We all
grew up in this culture and we all have those tensions. I try to deal with
them in a humorous way and poke at the spot people are most
uncomfortable with.”

i have discovered stornoway.  this ones for my beautiful Zuzu, and her Bill. 

Letters from the Outside, #11

Autumn coming through the windows; you feel the same stirring the geese and butterflies must, some magnetic equatorial pull. A sense of fermenting sets in -- that blooming winesap smell that makes you think of apples and fire. I walk, and break the silence that way, a work up to birth. Dogs divine invisible deer trails, trickles of musk and pelt and meadows elsewhere, deep in the dappled waning wood. Hauling and stacking the maple seems entirely apropos.

Tortoiseshell congregation of cattle, outer tatting of calves, communal industry of tails. They are the picture of late summer, finishing off in the wildflowers and the tall grass with the sweetwater creek running through. Red apples in the valley and green walnuts on the ground. I watch a hawk circle from between glossy green branches of a chestnut stand where I stop and turn around. I look away and then theres two, describing the sensual curves of a thermal, seeking with extraordinary eyes for blood and flesh in the open fields below. The raptors are always with us here, and we watch the story that is the story of the friction of energy generating the arc of each star, the brightness and longevity of every spark, we watch the story tell itself generations over, in the sky or in our small wild spaces, those of us called to witness those sacred places that offer up to us their solace. We observe the work of instinct, the struggle to live long enough to be born again. Listen to your body, your senses, your seasons. These creatures dont have the perilous luxury of self-consciousness. We are the only animals who seem able to entertain the possibility of there being some unspanable canyon between our flesh and the world and all else in it, the only thread that questions the shuttle, or the loom.

Last sunday high creek water through to the root cellar and the Golden Boy returns, bearing marshall amps and leopard heads and a neil postman paperback, for me. there are shallow ponds in the garden, i put together a bouquet that doesnt turn out as well as the ones i give and I suppose thats fitting and how it should be. beans and tomatoes, beans and tomatoes. i bake a cake, and theres folk in the house, they fill the house with some feeling of family, continuity of generations, and out of nerves cook up a platter of squash fritters that no one is prepared to eat. i talk too much, gabbling over the voices, driven forward by a force like an insistent fist behind the bones of your head, like that silver serpentine breastbone expression in donnie darko. I must practice my stillness, my settling breath.

The sky goes cozy, and faces return to the clouds. Excellent walking weather, weather I dont feel I need to get away from, and that quality of light, of fire transmuted to gold and everything begins to separate itself into earth, and sweetness. After awhile I fall into that effortless human stride, my thread unquestioning, and watch myself wondering over waterfalls, apple trees and elephants.

The house and grounds dry out. Walking in the world is a pleasure, that wonderful saturation of the senses that autumn is. Your birthday is coming; as one born into the season, Im sure you understand.

My sign today is a woman underwater, rising. I read an article describing “30 Joys of Living.” And I tried to name the joy revealed through each activity, like naming colors. The article was thoughtful and well-written and often offered the answer in its own text. To wit: #1, “Sleeping In On a Rainy Day,” contains the very word Sanctuary, and thats the essence of that particular joy, that singular sense of safety that allows even the central twist of ourselves to unwind, breathe deep into the belly, and return the hawk to the sky, the whale to the water, the self to the one.

Theres no other way I could say these things I feel, the way my spirit is reflected on the surface of the world. These are my days, their impact upon my awareness of my life as a “patient, willing descent into the grass,” a nearly effortless tumble of words, what I get down here is only an excerpt of the running commentary ive lived with all my life. I apologize if things get too purple around here, but its the voice of my heart, all I have to share, the voice ive sabotaged with abuse and neglect for decades, a shadow of the light I was gifted with upon arrival, and in this late hour I tend what embers left. I appreciate your forbearance. I only attempt to offer some small sliver of my natural experience to you, to make an offering to your wild, beautiful heart while it works, and waits, while we all work and wait for your return. 

 

 

Letters from the Outside, #10

Praying mantis. Nightmares. Christmas lights. Jewelweed in profusion, but the pods wont be ready to pop until september. The tomatoes are awesome, these red, decadent fruits heavy in the palm as flesh.

A humid day, the sky lowers. I pick up litter along my walk; cigarette butts, beer cans, chip bags and nappies. I pass a parked car of mormons who neither wave at nor approach me in my pentacle and b'nai b'rith tshirt. They avert their eyes, reciting silent prayers to Space Jesus.

Black tea cut with lemonade in a pint ball jar. The mail comes;  a tapestry, a puzzle, a cup.

Ill admit. Im in a blank spot. Neap tide.  Knitting in Purgatory, waiting for a sign. 

Mercury goes into retrograde, the basement floods with a foot of water and the enormous and ancient maple in the front yard cracks in half, some benevolent hand guiding it away from our sleeping heads. It continues to rain. My fragile homeostasis knocked out of the saddle by relentless weather of any kind; the heat, humidity, the rain. Snow and cold dont bother me quite as much, for reasons ive previously addressed

Good to have the Home Valence filled, the classroom schedules arrive, the mornings are thick with mist and thin with cold. The earth, the rise of earth we belong to here beside you, is saturated, spongy. Up higher, to the garden, the water collects in little pools, without roots or grass to draw it, hold it. The tomato stakes lose their purchase. Im muttering like an old lonesome woman when I see the mint is blooming, and there are bright red maple leaves in the yard, the hummingbirds still rest their gemstone feathers at the feeder and when they fly away with the warmth, the little finches will come. I bought two rhododendron; hope springs eternal.

I painted last night, its been a year maybe since the last. While I was painting, Cowboy came in and said, “I have seen these transformations before, and I trust them.” and it was like an oracle, a message from some Higher Frequency that I really needed to hear. Because the last few weeks have been a struggle, all the doubt, dread, discouragement, and disgust with myself that I quietly (and sometimes not so quietly) drag behind me through my days and that for some reason I cannot cleave from me rises in my throat, behind my eyes, im immobilized.  August. And doesnt it make sense that we all have our seasons, our tides, inasmuch as we are stars and earth and the Ocean? (Cleave is the word I always want to use because it means opposite things simultaneously. To cling with strong affection and to split with a cutting blow. My intention was the latter).

Maybe its as mundane an explanation as the school year not affording me as much uninterrupted time in which to navel gaze. To look, and see. And because of this clinging veil, its through a glass darkly. Its like the true nature of things is a name ive forgotten, and im lying awake, wracking my brains. Love and Freedom and Compassion and Forgiveness. All these ideals I paper my world with make me feel like a phony, or “significantly delayed” as they like to say these days. Man. Something in August pulls the tendons tight through the iron fist that closes around my throat. Getting the words strung together is like threading macrame beads with yarn after a stroke. Even my muscles dry out, denied some essential solution waning with the Sun. To speak plain, I am well schooled in the talk, and my heart longs to live the walk. But theres a master switch somewhere, a glass ceiling. Twenty years ago I called it Running In Circles at a Dead End. And im still there. How can that possibly be? Is it really laziness? Obdurate Self-sabotage? A lifetime of mulligans, and all that lost play. And here I am Now, today, and I could at least fake it til I make it, right? My latest mulligan, my thirty-seventh strike. So.

We know the cigarette is bad for us. That we should smile with our hearts into the faces of those who have wronged us. Sit up straight. Breathe. But we forget, were these soft fleeting creatures, given hardly the time to realize weve been born before its over. And we expect enlightenment.

So, here it is, a remarkably still, grey late August afternoon. A wednesday. And again I pledge my Light and my Blood to Love. I will try to surrender, and be brave.

Shekinah, Shakti, Shanti. Cloud in the Desert, Inseparable From the One Who Beholds Her, The Peace which Passeth Understanding.

 Love, and Guava Jelly.

its the birthday of my friend, Ben.

love, the viking teacozy.

ive hit the august doldrums, folks.  but lo, september is nigh.

its the birthday of e. annie proulx, dorothy parker, and the man who gave us krazy kat.

(miss parker and members of the Vicious Circle, including harpo marx, in pale suit behind her)

August

When my eyes are weeds,
And my lips are petals, spinning
Down the wind that has beginning
Where the crumpled beeches start
In a fringe of salty reeds;
When my arms are elder-bushes,
And the rangy lilac pushes
Upward, upward through my heart;

Summer, do your worst!
Light your tinsel moon, and call on
Your performing stars to fall on
Headlong through your paper sky;
Nevermore shall I be cursed
By a flushed and amorous slattern,
With her dusty laces' pattern
Trailing, as she straggles by.

its the birthday of my most excellent friend, Zuzu.

my life is a far better place to be because of you.  among a million other things, you help me remember who i am, when my whole life ive ignored it, or tried to forget.  thank you.

"living eulogy.

she danced.

she sang. she took.

she gave.

she loved.

she created.

she dissented. she enlivened.

she saw. she grew. she sweated.

she changed.

she learned. she laughed.

she shed her skin.

she bled on the pages of her days,

she walked through walls,

she lived with intention." 

- Mary Ann Radmacher

for dovie.

on this day in 1936, Federico Garcia Lorca was executed.

(salvador dali, jose moreno villa, luis bunuel, federico garcia lorca, jose antonio rubio sacristan;  madrid 1926)

"Ladies and Gentlemen, I have raised three arches and with clumsy hands placed within them the Muse, the angel and the duende.

The Muse remains motionless: she can have a finely pleated tunic or cow eyes like those which gaze out in Pompeii, at the four-sided nose her great friend Picasso has painted her with. The angel can disturb Antonello da Messina’s heads of hair, Lippi’s tunics, or the violins of Masolino or Rousseau.

The duende….Where is the duende? Through the empty archway a wind of the spirit enters, blowing insistently over the heads of the dead, in search of new landscapes and unknown accents: a wind with the odour of a child’s saliva, crushed grass, and medusa’s veil, announcing the endless baptism of freshly created things"

 

for Cowboy, for a number of reasons.



and another, for me.

Letters from the Outside, #9

Excrescence. Fricative. Pixie. Saturday evening french-press and a book in the big chair. My first hundred had me a little worried, but right after that I fell into it and ill be sorry to see it end. They even mention “a very dry Finger Lakes Riesling he'd apparently been saving for just such an emergency.” the breaking of the third wall that the book does, maybe this is a stand-by of postmodern literature that im just not party to because im not much for postmodern literature, but it unnerves me, making direct references to the Harry Potter books, and texting. I specifically investigated postmodern literature recently and discovered its not my thing. If The Magicians is postmodern, its soft-core. I share peanut butter M&Ms with the poodle whos birthday it is today. Extra treats all around and a share of a coconut donut to celebrate, an evening ride through town ears flying, nose in the wind. Earlier we drove awhile looking for the mama dog but it turned out she was under the outhouse all along, citing a personal day.

I listen to James McMurtry play guitar like Richard Thompson. Your fruit trees miss you, neighbor.

The one dutch belted heifer and her spotted calf by the creek along the pasture, the segregated angus together in a pool of shade out of town. The swell of butterflies, standing at the kitchen sink and several different species play zipless fuck with the coneflowers, the buddleia, the asclepias. I realize that the old womans gazing ball comes and goes with the sun, every morning early she replaces in onto the wooden paws of the performing bear, bearing the reflection of the world and she worries it might get stolen overnight. Across from the widows house under the lovely old apple tree a harem of does and fawn raise their cross-piece heads and bolt back toward the swamp theres one older fawn still spotted on the other side of the road and you can tell its a young buck and before he cuts my right into the hill hes running toward us, his blood already knowing the difference. The sumac are just starting to turn that extraordinary turning and walking into this dark and breezy evening the wind sounds just like rain.

I start picking tomatoes, like collecting eggs hung in panniers across their mothers. I have yet to second-sow but I imagine it will happen soon. Today that dark ray shining through an aperture in the cloud arrow of some bad energy drawn down or rising but the shadow of whatever channel the curse tracks on and later on taking the night quickly into me from the passenger side I think a beautiful woman is a curse; she is a holiness, this idea complete and fleeting like a photo of something written in the sand. The cards said The Empress, Shekinah.

The cats got a rabbit, tore its head off, and Cowboy buried it early sunday morning. They left us both parts, they were so proud. I, of course, was horrified. I have a long-standing magickal association with rabbits. I tried not to read too much into the offering of a decapitated totem animal, but it brought my gorge up like chipmunks and voles dont while I shovel away their gel and entrails. I got him out of bed and into his boots to bury a bunny. He did this with the absolute necessary minimum of vitriol. A Good Man.

Torrential on sunday then it opened up into this beautiful late summer afternoon with birds and sun and a sense of resting. Monday rises one of those brilliant mornings after rain and either the old woman wept loudly or some new puppy cried lonesome, and I noticed the gazing ball hadnt been set out for the day. Rain in the culverts in august where i walk. I do my best thinking when Im walking. And recently realized the egregious amount of headspace storing temporary memory files takes. So I write it down. After that I can let it go, hands open and listening. After that though, theres no craft. No nursery bed for it to grow bigger in, just pinned and mounted onto the ether like a beautiful, inert butterfly. I refuse it the time it requires to live, and grow. Walking through premenstrual density and at the top of the rise a prayer came to me, invoking and encompassing, a gesture toward the belly, the breastbone and the sky. Thats when the old woman wept, I prayed to an acorn, and the wind carried my scent toward the water.

happy birthday, charles bukowski.

"The nine-to-five is one of the greatest atrocities sprung upon mankind. You give your life away to a function that doesn't interest you. This situation so repelled me that I was driven to drink, starvation, and mad females, simply as an alternative."

Fighting for Safe Passage on Indian Streets

“Whatever we’ve gone through, we are relatively privileged because we can speak about it,” she said. “There are so many who don’t have the confidence, or the ability, to even register protest or speak out.”

For Ms. Patheja, the artist behind Blank Noise, breaking the silence has been healing, even empowering.

“Today I think I am far less angry, or aggressive towards the issue, yet am unapologetic about my presence on the street,” she said.

In India, thousands of women like her are becoming Action Heroes. We may not yet be ready to take back the night. But we are making a start on taking back the street.

from Aerial Circus

for whatever comes.  

Letters from the Outside, #8

Carrots, corn, beets and beans. Ate strawberries and broccoli out in the garden, waiting for that one really red slicing tomato to be ripe, the yellow pear tomatoes getting yellow. My lavender plants are getting old, and I dont have the personality to tend them toward their best each season, so I may replace them next spring. The humidity gets to everything. Lavender and sage love a dry heat. Humidity (like extreme cold or altitude) is an environmental state that requires specific traits developed and inherited over time to endure successfully, and thrive. This is not a tropical region. Any equator in my blood would be found in the first few sentences of my genetic story. My grandfather was born in Siberia. I see how even the stalwart iris swords are rusting, I worry for my pumpkin patch, the white death that carried off my cucumbers. My echinacea always look shabby, and I think its japanese beetles. The rudbeckia is a profusion of health and happiness, and with the mexican marigold, tulsi, tithonia, a few select and extraordinary tomato plants and the chard, gives off the desired sense of wholeness, wellness, Life.

Went up the waterfall off the county road, had a little fire in the backyard watching bats and the big dipper, today it rains. I wash the sheets and cook a peach in butter til its pie without the frame. My friend sent me a letter and it was like a lifesaver buoy thing thrown from a coastguard helicopter to me in the middle of the atlantic at four a.m.

I have been putting off looking for my Don Juans Reckless Daughter joni mitchell cd but I think todays the day, since I cant get it off grooveshark. In the meantime I listen to early live recordings of Townes van Zandt.

The gully was so beautiful it was hard to see. And I was on way too high alert to absorb it. There was something guarding something there. Ill take Cowboy and the boys there and it will be wonderful. Well all get to the waterfall, in that small high-walled space, and it will be a beginning. These last seven months or so have been evolutionary for me. Granted, its two forward and one back, but I definitely have the feeling of bustin' out of trenchtown. Cowboys been amazing, patient and loving, and he has space now for me.  Folks in general are weirded out, but if they cant access their own compassion and fragility it would be hard to relate to them anyway. And I have a harder time these days being superficial, and a deeper desire to be real. Ive discovered a few people I can be real with. And the more real I get, the harder it becomes for me to deny my worth, my right to dream. And maybe letting myself really want something will inspire me to work for it. To accept that I have effort of worth to put forward. Since I made that one choice when I was a very little girl ive never put much effort into anything. No dreams, no disappointments. Never living in accordance with my true soul, my honest heart. When something came close to being true I chased it with vengeance. If it was toxic, I drew it to me. And I cant get a second chance on past choices, but I can reclaim my time here for whats true and beautiful and in accordance with this Quest of Clarity and Liberation.

These are the ideals, at least. And stretching toward these ideals will only make me stronger.

I may not get to where im going, this time around, but I can start getting there.

Had my first tomato sandwich yesterday. With black coffee. Outstanding. Weird garden year this year everybody says, and I certainly agree. Everything small and two weeks early. I cant keep up with the beans. Today is the first day in a long time theres been any real rain. All the dogs are a little bonkers today and I cant figure out why. Squirrely and intensely smelling the air. 

I consult the Oracle, get Precious. To me it is a house, a temple, crowned with the moon. It is the Wheels of the World and we are honed into empty space. My Home. Next Resistance, The Rusted Chain. Everything thats kept me bound to stones thrown this lifetime ago. Power Source. A wheat field, and in that wheat field a woman who finds the Very Central Sun within her and breaks those rusted chains. These are my resonances, as the Oracle says. Naïve exaggeration of self importance restricting the flow; surrender to the living earth and be transformed the Oracle says. The Oracle says, dont be afraid.

a prayer for erich martin, sara allison, and me.

Watch more AOL Music videos on AOL Video

for my most excellent friend and fellow therian, Zuzu.    Thank you.

Joy comes from seeing the beautiful.

A scarf, sweeping from the neck. A puffedout skirt with mysterious

draping. A wallpaper with an intricate pattern. Hats and furniture,

statues and inscriptions, graceful figures and dainty shoes.

Joy also comes from seeing the demonic, the ugly.

A man whose body looks like a fly. A fearsome witch. A ghost

holding his head in his hands. A black spectre, Mr. Knife and

Mrs. Fork, with blade and prong growing out of their heads. A

dancing camel. A boy climbing into a picture. A fish flying through

the air.

Joy comes from the humorous. 

A mouse wearing a woolen cover around its long, thin tail. A little

man with a pillow on his head. A donkey and some scholars

wearing the same spectacles. Maids lifting their skirts to hide

their kissing princess.

Joy with the eyes emerges from stories.

---Lisbeth Zwerger, from The Art of Lisbeth Zwerger

today is the birthday of Wendell Berry, the man who wrote what i have taken on to be My Poem, the end there written into my skin:

The Wish to be Generous

All that I serve will die, all my delights

the flesh kindled from my flesh, garden and field,

the silent lilies standing in the woods

the woods, the hill, the whole earth, all

will burn in man's evil, or dwindle 

in it's own age.  Let the world bring on me 

the sleep of darkness without stars, so I may know 

my little light taken from me into the seed

of the beginning and the end, so I may bow 

to mystery, and take my stand on the earth

like a tree in a field, passing without haste

or regret toward what will be, my life,

a patient willing descent into the grass.

fitting then that on this day 98 years ago the term "grassroots" was coined by indiana senator albert beveridge at the Progressive Party Convention:

"This party has come from the grass roots. It has grown from the soil of people's hard necessities."

(wendell's the one in the hat)

Ida: Willow Tree from Foglight Films on Vimeo.

how it is, really.

to the 25th anniversary of the Big Adventure, and life at my house. 

the latest.

 Letters from the Outside, #7

 

I try to time my sunday constitutionals so I hit the road during the third act at the baptist church down the street. That gives me reasonable time to walk in the lull of traffic, to and fro. Sometimes if im running late I cut the walk short (heresy!) for lo, the cars vex me. And im thinking I need a new route for now because walking past The Farm breaks my heart every time. Affects me in an entirely unreasonable way. But otherwise theres not much good walking here unless youre into steep climbs or the county road with no shoulder. The place doesnt seem happy at all. Its a real mystery about those folks. I pray on acorns to resolve this heavy empty ache and then I putter around out back and if I shift the angle of observation inside me I can make the circumference of my world very small and hardly notice the windows of the neighbors houses, or the road. Being in the garden helps with that, too. Its this little space enclosed from passerby, me crouching by a tomato, or under the sunflowers or between the corn, the hummingbirds and the goldfinches and the butterflies and sometimes a hawk or the random spook of a few doe running from rise to rise across the valley and the dogs mad with longing but somehow still obeying the invisible dictum of the fence.

We discuss the connection between corn syrup and petrochemicals, fossil fuels, hieroglyph vs. petroglyph, herd mentality and the galactic/genetic bulge, Cain, iconic outsider, forest dweller, do we jump, or are we pushed? To sit at a table with a cookie and a cup of coffee and say things like “anomaly is crucial to evolution” and “infinite permutations of the genetic code” and not met with blank silence, to be in fact engaged and conversed with and make the air dense with thinking and I diagram the whole process out in chalk, is a true blessing and a gift. To not walk away oppressed with doubt and second guessing, to have exposed someone to the interior and to have not been rejected. This is a great consolation afforded me by life with Cowboy and the boys.

Impromptu stop at the Gurdjieff commune, havent been there since last september and the woman says, “oh, hey! the book rooms open.” I had taken The Docent and the boys to the open house and bought a lot of books. She remembered. I thanked her for recalling me fondly.

Picked some calendula flowers for oil (I know what youre thinking...harvesting calendula on the Dark Moon? What a waste!), collected and broadcast delphinium seed and am sending some to Zuzu.

Am I avoiding picking beans by pruning the tomatoes or am I avoiding pruning tomatoes by picking the beans? 

Rare pull through the perennial bed during which I discover the monarda I started this spring and had completely forgotten about. Looks enough like mountain mint that my first thought was oh dear, is that mountain mint in the perennial bed? and my second thought is Blessed Be im finally becoming Vita Sackville-West.  Sat under the tree in the brewing weather and considered next years perennials. How many can I get away with starting from seed? The bees are in love with the sunflowers, theres so much corn were canning it, and im seeing these tomato plants for the first time this year, all the varieties of fruit and leaf and flower, the rubbery foliage of one and the dragon vernix of another, this blight moves from the center out cell by cell and im grateful its not galloping but I sold Cowboy on the espalier idea and we decided to eat more of the lawn.

Grateful that im satisfied with the events of this summer -- social, emotional, practical and occult. Extraordinary events in the last six months, some kind of pressure still there behind my breastbone, some days it drags me forward some days it blocks my way. Reading up on learning to dance with it, out there on the road to wherever it is im going, The Illusion of Separation is what initiates all this suffering, all over the world. Those of us willing are fighting a lifetimes worth of neurological programming to exhume the Light of our divinity, our souls. I catch myself wishing and wanting and remember that with a true and peaceful heart from now on in, everything will be as it should so I can learn what I need to know. Theres no starting over, but theres Now.