MAGIC In The Air Today...

Happy first day of fall!

The sun enters Libra tonight at 11:09 pm, eastern. This is the autumn equinox, time of light and dark in balance.

It is also the full moon tonight, or early tomorrow, at 5:17am eastern.

The moon is in Aries, initiatory fire sign of impulse, action and change. The sun moves in to Libra, initiatory air sign. Air signs rule consciousness and creative energy.

Aries and Libra are both cardinal, meaning they bring energy of change. That is what the spring and fall are about...changing. Aries in the spring is fire which transforms, Libra in the fall is air which, like breath, creates from the depths of who we are.

The equinox is the time of balance at harvest--so to harness this energy we take time to reflect on the season that has just passed, and with reflection allow what we learned about ourselves to take hold. It is this new knowledge that will now initiate for us, and initiation will really permeate if we take the time to be grateful. The season of gratitude and blessing counting, of going within with knowledge of our light, begins now.

Happy Fall! Blessings to all, amen amen amen...

wait, mercury retro, again?? how did i not know this?

watch out it's about to take us skidding back over the landscape of our past three months. go see risa at nightlightnews.com, four paragraphs down (i haven't been able to get anything to paste to my blog for months now and i am too lazy to type it all out) and read about this mercury retro, starting sept 6th and going for three weeks.

and then let's stop using our heads so much! right now it's all about relaxing, softening the gaze and muscles and stance, deep breath so you can feel a smile emerge in your chest and permeate that rose light within. our bodies want to be sleeping more in preparation for the equinox and if we dont slow down now we'll end up sick. curl in to the burrow of you, and trust in the natural thrumming rythms that are loosening the heat under and just around your skin. let the boundary between you and the air goooooooo.... moon soak time, let those yearnings surface and re-begin...

list: random thoughts and change

1. i'm working A Lot these days it is fall semester re-enrollment time and all i do is get new students registered hola hola bienveindo or how are you welcome i'm going to test you but it's so i can help dont be scared. last week i passed my one year anniversary at this job.
2. bob dylan keeps singing to me i feel a change coming on. in life, this is all there is, change. perenial as the breeze.
3. i haven't written anything all week, except for friday poetry day the day i spent in pjs with books all day because the night before the calling moved in me sudden like it does which is when i so love it the most. so thursday night after i worked late i came home all charged and pumped and just kept moving got tea climbed in to bed, in to soft, cool, happy bed my sweet little nest of me pillows and softness and my precious sheets, my arms full of books my heart with the illustrious light. this little poem that came out of all that meat i come to bed carrying arms full of you and i love you every one, we will make love, arms full of us, all night, in the morning i will prop up and revisit you with a smile And how good that felt to wake up and do just that, and it's only a few days later but i haven't been writing or on the net at all, so i had to come here, and just let some of it download out.
4. it is fall out, how i love to lie still in the quiet air in the morning. i got home tonight and mat and pat or else ruth or the wacky neighbors to my other side were having a fire. o smoke smell that i love...sweet prayers that linger but go eventually above. and the air coming off the river is cool and with no balm. the peepers speak loud to the deep clear night and tomorrow is september's full moon. have you heard it, the first geese calls?
5. i want to blog about this, about passings, the earth walk, the time outside and our connections. i want to blog about my grlfriends and how they save my ass again and again. i want to blog about classism and seeing from the bottom up instead of the established and oft unquestioned view of the elite out, or down. i want to blog about memoirs and starting again and again and writing even though it makes your heart hurt. i want to blog about spiders and flowers and how that is the saddest part of fall when the flowers start to disappear. i want to blog about change and the difference one year can make, about last year this time and all that longing spent staring at the corn, hearing the paper stalks shake, seeing the fall sky spread, driving and driving the yellow backroads in the dry afternoons. how different it all is, how much has, and so of course how little has, changed. i want to blog about how i still cant believe and keep forgetting that i am 32.
6. the desiderata has been showing up again, and again, to me. it is so good, it's own magnificent prayer.
7. i'm taking a lot of new stuff on. creatively. it all lives in me and is always there, like air, even when i dont see it or cant remember it.
8. i'm tired of my job, there is no joy left in the chalky burnt ruin at the wick of me. the people that i work with i am posting pics of them to remember that before we are workers we are mothers, fathers, sisters, brothers, sons, daughters, lovers, friends. they are shining stars.
9. i work hard. i try to do good work. we all do. and like me, we all let people down. we are all unique, and ascending, and all also so very much the same.
   

Baby Steps

So, maybe this'll sound weird unless you know me. I was walking up the front steps of the porch a day or so ago at Ocean Pines and looked down and had this random thought: I need that picture of my foot to put on my blog. Then the part of me watching me is like, whaaaa? First, I barely have been blogging lately and second--my foot?? Well. It's true that feet have been something of the basis of a life metaphor for me lately--Feet dont fail me now, practicing Standing in my truth, as in sit or stand, dont wobble, and also I have been grounding a lot lately, a meditative practice that has to do specifically with the focus on the feet. Sooooo......(....sorry dear reader you know me and how i digress when it comes to serendipity...)

Earlier this eve I was enjoying an impromptu din-din with the neighbors. They have this killer spot of peace in their backyard. We were sitting in a triangle under a great shade tree watching lightening bugs and sharing sorta sad tales when surfergrl Pat heaved in all big and loud then yelled Check out the moon! Which was alive and lovely there over the sea reeds and us with the startled stuck place in our throats which happens when you forget for a second about life going on all around while you're all busy living....

Which reminded me, tomorrow is our full moon. I came home and checked out astrowisdom's moon messages to hear what medicine mama luna has for us all right now. And all I can say is holy serendipity...The past 48 hours have been a crash test for me in humility. All in the love department. That's all I will say about that other than to express once again gratitude to LIFE and LOVE which are GOD to me for affirming through the moonwisdompage that all is just as it is meant to be. Serendipity has a way of saying When....and after two long days of that experience myself, I read her message on there and felt my spirit go ahhhhh. And most of all, the part about baby steps stood out. And self-love being active, not just an idea. It was a good affirmation, a nudge and nod about how loving ones self means owning all of your self, the good and the not so good stuff you dont want to see....

Be well dear friends. Beeee happpyyyyyyyy. Be luna-lushous.

I'm so blessed. So are you. Read about it and see in to your soul. Then go out and get a soak in the moon. And practice your own little footwork towards love and truth.

Full moon

Full moon Sunday around midday, which means tomorrow night (Saturday) she's at her apex:
Learn more:http://astrowisdom.com/thisfullmoon.htm, and more importantly go outside and take a moon soak. The rain's should be gone by morning and it's so, so good for your soul....

Friday Reflections: Truslow Road

There were these tall pines that lined the back end of the land at Truslow. Tall, and with the sweet achy smell of the needles that make you remember a kind of inner quiet you never actually knew but secretly hope for in the woods. Tall pines, like the kind that at night blend in with sky so you are sure they are having a conversation up there in the dark with the clouds that are joking with them with their tender little caresses moving as fast as they do across the sky. Slow down slow down maybe the tall pines are saying to the night clouds, slow down and stay a while here in the dark with our sweet sweet smell.

It was November, the end, when we moved in there, to that 600-square-foot falling down asbestos run deadgreen shingled shack on Truslow Road, back of Truslow Creek edge of Kingstown, Queen Anne's County side of the Chester. A town as I always find them, without a zip code. We furnished that house with third and fourth-hand finds we bought at the local auction for $10, $7, maybe $6 the whole Lot. Once, that $7 bought me a brown banana seat bike from the seventies, a red paint-splattered stool, two brown wood foot stools, a pair of work boots and two quarts of oil. Every Wednesday for months we'd go to auction to see what we could see, neither of us having jobs or any belongings but campgear to speak of, having just ended our travelling days of living on the road. It was an auspicious return home, Full Moon night of Final Harvest, October 2005. Moon so big and pink and white it stuck us where our breath should be as it hung over watching Washington DC. We rolled in from the Mountains charging along Rt. 50 New York Avenue beside the Mall and I secretly sucked in when we got to the city and I felt the energy of the land all around of where I'm from and then, I saw the moon at once too and felt the longing inside give out Home....

Truslow wasn't planned, as so much of the big moves in my life rarely are. One day we just got sick of living with his mom. Ex-stepdad had this shitty little pad going down in the dirt and did we want to upkeep it, fix it up even, and care for the land? The land. It was November so that the land when we moved in was just one big patch of curled brown grass, but a whole-acre full, and with the tall tall trees in the back that never lose their leaves. And it had this dead-zone that vibrated to me: this huge matted mess of vines with prickers and thicket and undergrowth where some time ago some nice hedges or bushes must've been. That's where we will make this home I knew.

And we did: by February first seed we'd set about taking out that thicket just sort of stuck there in the back acre of our land. It covered a good 4 or 5 hundred square feet, almost as big as our house itself, and we worked at it, hard, sweaty in the cold February air but under the early that year sun. I wore work gloves and got tears and lines of red blood anywhere I had exposed skin and at the end of those days I felt for the first time what it feels like to cultivate something with your entire body, something sacred and precious as the eternal land. It was his idea to actually recess the fire pit we were putting in, so that the fire would actually warm from the underside of the ground. And by light/dark time of Equinox that year we had made our mark and called others in to join our Home: a community gathering advertised locally to all to join us for soul warming and music in celebration of grass-roots place-building and being true to as within, so without. I burnt a thick dried twig of sage and set a sacred circle around that fire pit as we completed it, walking three times with the smoke and the song on my breath and my heart open in love and thanksgiving--my friend Turtle Mike was there to help set up with the lights and he followed me round and round and round. It was the first night I ever met Walsh and heard her sing and of course this happened through Josh, and both of them played and stilled our hearts and many people, caught fully by the vibe we meant to capture and release in goodwill that night, had tears of gratefullness rolling down their cheeks. At the very end it rained a light light rain and this was the sign of release and blessing, and at once cleansing, which I was waiting for as omen of great harmony and success.

It was March the following year that those tall pines and that space created in honor and awe and thanksgiving at their feet called out to me again so loudly. Spring herself came quieter that year, waiting to show little peeks of her face til well after first-seed, unlike February the year before. I had been through a long winter. A new position in Adult Ed under a threatening and domineering new boss was challenging me in ways I never before knew. I gave all my energy to it, the job, because I cared about the people and so if there are people involved that is what I always do. But I was dwindling away and miserable inside. In long hours of prayer and mediation I sought to follow the heart of, to transmute with the change, that I knew on my deepest level was attempting to begin. I hated it, though knew begrudgingly that time is time and the process must run its course. And so, in those weeks of March leading to Equinox and New Year for me, I felt called out by the land, by the deep healing energy of Home.

I carried arm loads of books: notebooks and poetry, and a Christian text by Oswald Chambers I was deeply in to, out to the land moist in her pre-spring roots. And sometimes I would read, and if the words started to come I would write and write, but mostly I just laid there, on the ground. With my body feeling the waking of the land. Recognizing a fine softening between my contour and its. And I would breathe, and it was like the first time I ever knew about and tasted air. I still remember quite physically what it was like to take those long healing breaths like that, like, in fact, I was breathing in the whole of that land, of those trees, of all that pulsing of music and light by fire that still I am sure lives right now back there, back of Truslow in the roots of the one time heart of our land.

Yesterday I came home from work and the sun was high enough in the sky to still get to soak in some strong white rays. I ran in to Teena's house, got some books and notebooks, and ran out with my arms full dragging a beach chair awkwardly behind. I didn't read at all, just sat in that deep breathing place of half-eyed slumber.

That last March at Truslow it was as if a great rest had come upon me. And inside that sleep there lived the quiet seedlings of personal truth I wasn't capable yet, and so therefor unready, to be. Indeed, in the time that followed those several weeks it turned out I would need all the energy that I stored during my great and blessed pause with the tall pine trees: by the end of that month we learned that we had to move, and so the adventure continued, and the deep seeds began to unfurl, as we made our way on to Anngar Farm.

Recently my friend Susan told me one of her favorite sayings is But the hallway's hell! As in when we are waiting for the promised window to open after our most recent door has shut, waiting in the hallway sure can suck. But I don't know. Maybe the hallway can be the best part. Maybe it's like the deep reserve of air we never knew we had.

Seed Moon, or Wind Moon

The Full Seed, or Wind, or Pink Moon (after the shimmers of pink buds now spreading over the spring ground.)

A good time for setting new intentions or goals, identifying what is sacred and time to grow in your soul...

Mama mama, wow. I asked her after my still time tongiht to smile for this shot...

Moony Mama's Unite. Papa's too.

So, there's this moony/astrology site I really love. It is simple and helpful and extremely informative as to how to use the symbology of astrological archtypes in a personally applied way. Which I love! And I especially, especially love that tomorow's full moon is in a sector that highlights the spiritual/psychic/emotional messages in current physical illnesses, health concerns or dietary issues. So, if you read my spiel yesterday, than you know I just marked another one down for those blessed unseen magic hands...

For anyone who's counting, that's:
~Serendipity: 1 zillion and why not keep going...Verses
~Mundane Life: too many to count, but on the rapid decrease...

Go check her out, Lisa at astrowisdom.com and learn more about all the little miracles at work each and every day

Sittin still in the prime

La luna mama at imbolc--wow

View out back the shaman shack between the bones of the tipi


front of the shaman shack

Kelly-kel sittin still in the prime

First, before I forget, today was a lunar eclipse. These occur a couple times a year, and like solar eclipses, affect us in a varied bunch of ways. For most it will go unseen, yes...but for those of you walking around today feeling like a pinpoint puncture in your consciousness happened and now for some reason you see clearly, or have "been relieved" suddenly or whatever aha experience of clarity has come, this is eclipse in action. Recall: la luna is our light in the dark, the shining into the unconscious or creative substance of our dream selves, and that light went out, briefly transmuted as it was by the perfect alchemy of the earth and sun in harmony....So this is sudden change on the soul level--the intuitive level. Sudden clarity, or riddance, if you will. Eclipses of the moon may remove something mental--the old detritus of no longer needed ideas (and how cool, too, as it is those very things that create all our reality!) in a quick quick way, or maybe the beginning of some perception come undone...

Remember, all endings are beginnings; as with beginnings an ending is sure to come.

As for me, I am choosing to stick with an old adage some friends of mine taught me once: More will be revealed. Had a chill day next to the Chop River yesterday and then at a singing bowl meditation at the Shaman Shack. Def got me some light in the dark, but I for one am quite content for now to sit still in the prime (allbeit warm!!) winter quiet and continue to witness within....

What I'm enjoying right now:

Teena's sick flippin brownies that somehow taste like toffee, too

&, the blog of this cool chic Kasey from the beach who is a foot reflexologist/massage therapist.

(this is a link not to her blog but to her wellness center in oc)
http://www.coastalwellnesscenter.com/reflexology.php

Here's her digs: Kasey can't deny it any more and ends up voicing several times a wild instinct in her heart space pulling her for some unknown reason to go to Thailand. Her husband finally remind her she's terrified of planes and hasn't travelled by air in close to 30 years. The next day an invitation from a reflexology school in Thailand invites her, expenses paid, to come teach at their institute for a month...Ahhhh serendipity. Read about her trip--she's there now--here

and to thy own self might you be true....

Cuz it's my favorite kind of meditation & it reminds me of Sammy G

First Day of the Hunt

The schools always close,
knowing we're so country
all our boys will skip anyway,

and the valley rises together before dawn—

daughters pulling wool caps
past fathers' ears, reciting the profound
and elemental list:

rifle, rounds, knife, rope,

only to send each heavy man to the woods
where he'll slump the day in drifts
of solitude and prayer

while most deer stay down, evading
the unlucky, the night spent

visiting cousins: stroking curves
of antler, lengths of blood-stiffened fur.

Every year it's the same
soft and deliberate snow prints,
the waiting—

as if mine could emerge from his last hiding
place and walk the evening,
empty-handed, to me.

poem for the day by Paula Bohince

Seriously, if you've never tried:
let's posit that meditation is simply a means of going within
or, let's not posit, let's visit dictionary.com:
meditate
verb, -tat⋅ed, -tat⋅ing.
–verb (used without object)
1.
to engage in thought or contemplation; reflect.
2.
to engage in transcendental meditation, devout religious contemplation, or quiescent spiritual introspection.

okay, so if that's the case, reflecting or contemplating, even devoutly religious or quiescent
(-adjective 1.being at rest; quiet; still; inactive or motionless: a quiescent mind. ) or spiritual introspection that involves the mind. well. i am obsessed with this experience, maybe, naw likely because as a teenager and thus when my identity schisms were being chemically cemented by way of the all mighty hormone, i was early engaged in conscious-changing experiments that always involved substances of some sort. so now, sans-substance of course, i really dig on what can still take me to more open, or heightened, or even Still levels of being from within.

try reading a poem, really connecting the movement of it to your inner state. as means of quiescent introspection. join me in the tribe of the holy yogic creatix: from ecopoetshaman gary snyder "The yogin is an experimenter. He experiments on himself. Yoga, from the root Yuj (related to the English \yoke") means to be at work, engaged." join me in this fabulous dance of self-creating, supplication, sublimation on into beginning and beginning all over again....

p.s. also, if you read this far. the poem above reminds me of my friend sam. who i want to mention bc i dig him so much, too. brandon told me last nite he was headed to sammy's for some of the overflow of venison he's got this season. it made me so full of longing for hard, cold earth days that you walk through gingerly but assured purely by the warmth of your friends. the pond out back of the corn pokes and over the hill at sam and tim's. the goose blinds there that always mildly disturbed me, til the nite same cooked us goose soaked in oj in the black cast iron top of his wood stove. how it chokes me to look back on those times. growing up together: knowing sam as this goofy lanky dude that one time was already up in a tree that i suddenly needed to climb. or the night, last january time of Cold moon and god was it cold, and we walked through the woods at anngar the air with its bluehue that reminds you of the ghosts there in the body and bones of the ancient old land--and we were so cold that all at once bran and sam and me looked at one another and ran, under the full moon with cold cheeks and air that burnt our runny noses, all the way back to the farm house, and scraped together a meal of what sam had brought--oodles of noodles, and what was left of ours--some veggies and a little cheese.

how this time of cold calls for warmth. for friends. or good poems. or surrendering, at rest, quiet, still, to within.

Full Moon Meditation

Last night was the full moon--or early this morning anyhow, round 5.

I caught this shot at about 6:30 am, literally as la luna was setting herself discreetly behind the clouds...

...and this other while driving north on 213 Saturday evening

Autumn Equinox is this weekend...the nights length passing over to grow longer than the day and I love the Autumn, that great triumph of space that gathers itself in a bundle, the long slow sigh of the earth. A breeze is blowing so great on the farm right now--through the windows, moving the curtains way out and making me very aware of the lines of my body. The full moon is past, but that doesn't change the spirit of a Harvest Moon in the fall.

Harvest moons bring to the surface the bounty of your year...

Look lightly on yourself now, do you like what you see? This is a strong, though subtle week. Take time to yourself, give your insides a peek--this truly is the time of year to be especially conscious of what "you're putting out there" right now. So get out there, root, connect to the deep breathing earth and the far-growing sky and try some Wonder...