There are no leaves on these trees.

The Patient First next door to the Panera had Mandy's car in the parking lot, and when I texted her that I was creeping on her she answered how small our home town is.

It's not a town, where she and I are from, it's a county.  Due south of Baltimore. But in 2011 with chain stores and strip malls up and down Route 2, that doesn't make what she said any less true.  It's good to be home, there are few things more real and heartening to me than my family and friends.  But I am tired and don't feel too well.  Everyone here is sick, everyone.  Mandy was feeling ill and thought she might be catching what her kids and man had, I'm feeling it because of five days without my morning practice: meditation and writing.  And because there are no leaves on these trees which feels so potently voyeuristic to me, and it's so damn cold.

How quick to fall off the beam, I thought, and called Brooks to make an artist's date.  Erika told me about Zelda's paintings at a gallery at Hopkins, so hopefully that will remedy my soul.  The first week of December on the mountain in NorCal I was walking outside in the sunshine along the ridge of a hill. It was winter and I felt vital still and knew it, I was charged and alive. I remembered what Justin said to me in July, jogging by my side from the inlet rocks along the beach in Ocean City, down by the Pier.

You're elemental, Kel.  You need the elements to be well.  He's so energetic, Justin, and I remember us happy and diving in the water either on or just after our run.  He was right, and I knew it that day months later and a coast away, in the 50 degree mountain air.  My cure for seasonal affective is no more than regular contact with the air, the earth, the sunshine, the trees, the sea.  So it's not just the cold and lac of light that bothers me, it's the absence of a lifestyle.  It's an outdoor wellness regimen that I need.

That, and my regular quiet routine.

I cancelled on Mandy, we cancelled on each other.  I am going to Tim and Mary's tonight to do what I know to do this time of year back east.  It's time to hibernate.  I need sleep.

Goodnight Chop....Goodnight me...

What a fulfilling day. The weather was warm enough for a hike at Adkins Arboreatum and the air, the trees, the breath of all the decaying leaves--it said spring, spring. Lunar Imbolc starts tonight, through the next 24 hours aaaaahhhhhh. And being outside under sky feet on earth, hard and frozen as it all still was, it was so clear to me in an inside way all the little wakefull bursts of life that could be felt. But ahhh, to be in February.....time to sleep, most important time of all for sleep in fact. Feb is like that last hour before waking when your dreams are most electric--this is crucial time for incubation. Everyone's sick right now, too--all your energy is hauling together towards jestation time. So if your all caught up in the temporal day to day chances are you're probably ill or with cold right now. Cuz your soul needs its time....

So sleep, sleep,it's sleeptime to finalize the dreams within....

Cycles & Wisdom & Sometimes Getting to Know

In my wyld and at times crazed round about head there is lately an almost daily flash of new thought or insight that I am noticing floating on by.

It's always a wonder to me the way that my thought process, thus my growth goes: how I'll spiral along with these little randoms of new passing thoughts, fresh and clean as a classroom at the start of September. How they delight by my mind's eye dancing from all different slanted and quik-passing directions, til BAM, along comes one of those days when the fluid is so flow, when everything is so right that it all falls together in a tapestry of perception and oneness-of-living that it so brand new and fresh that it is clear that my soul, big and bright, and my subconscious have been busy at it making sense of things for me all the while. How on those BAM days I can be moved to tears in joy over the simple serendipity and obvious blessed harmony of things.

How I want that, all the time. What a sucker I am, you know, for feeling good...

And so what's on my mind today: how I am aware of being in one of those upturns of my own cycle right now. New growth and taking things in. And since I can see it, little flashes of original thought here and there, and have seen this before--I know that it will eventually culminate in a whole new understanding of things. Which increases my amped-ness to know what is on the way....

But then at once such anticipation also births the awareness in me of what it is to be dull: in the lax period, the time of quiet or void that feels like to me nothing but mud, to be with confusion and no dreams...and how this always pre-empts a period of great wonder and new lease, and also always follows a new level of heightened perception and increase.

This sounds manic-depressive, yes? I know I know. But the truth is I believe this to be quite naturally the cycle of the Creative. And I am heartened at how this triumph, this great seizure and breath of life itself, then the inevitable exhale and release so naturally and rythmically follows the world. The earth itself, the flux and flow of the seasons, the living and dying of every breathing detail, of even the moon. My god even the economy, the stock market, it all goes up, and, what the market-eyes will tell you: so too will what goes up come down.

It is Anicha time right now. Time of Great Changing. The time the earth dreams long of what she soon will grow. In this dreamtime is the unmanifest energy of all that you shall be in the year to come. Feel it, magic and subtle as breath passing by your hair. All artists can feel it right now. Unless they're drugged or drunk-numb...(it's hard at times to trust all that sizzle of magic! hell this I know for sure)...You're sure you feel just behind the air--it's almost like a tingle on your skin. The Dreamtime in your subconscious...the slight rush deep within.

Mercury retro will pass at the end of the month and then Imbolc will come. And then, all us earthly people so consumed with our daily lives will, if we are in a place with Winter, forget that Spring shall come. February will hit us hard with the hurt and we will forget: that our daily acts of living indeed are our only form of prayer. Trust this friends and trust yourselves, trust the natural ebb of quiet and rest for what it is--the downtime before the great release. And it follows naturally this spellbound rush then gone, rush then gone, sometimes electric sometimes Still, time of January when your soul-stuff is letting off little glimmers of all that it deeply dares you to Dream.

Season of change

The corn is down--as of Sunday--and the first frost came today.

And the farm's for sale. The agent was showing around an out-of-towner this morning.

With all this cold and early darkness I am falling to sleep at like 9 at night.

Lately I've been thinking about that old saying, how there is a season for everything.

And how when a season is upon you, you simply can't stop the change it brings.

The way you cant stop the river from flowing, or the dry earth from having cracks.

ahhh, so the season of quiet

and change

quiet change?

is here....