New Moon. Sleeplessness.

After crawling around the city of my bed rolling over its soft hills getting stuck in its hard concrete and pausing in the quiet sweet creeks of rest I kept almost starting to find, each time thinking this is it I can feel sleep right on the other side...I am up.  It is pointless for me to try to go to bed at 9 or even 10 even on nights before I have to get up at 4:45.  What good did it do me?  Three hours of sleep tonight and upupup by 1:45.  Here I am.

I got my phone to use the light to make it to the kitchen thinking water would be the trick and there facebook was all lit up with its little red star notifications on the plastic electronic face of my friend blackberry.  I hate you blackberry you are not my friend.  Sam posted the funniest awful picture of me from what I guess is back in the day.  2005 doesn't seem far away enough to say that about yet.  It made me realize: all things move on.

It is a new moon tonight--I mean now that it is Wednesday that were talking about.  She peaks at her void by 6 this eve so that is what the sleeplessness was all about.  It is Brigid's moon, the new moon of first seed or first  light--when the sap quickens and the seeds are sown or first start to yawn and awake.  All that river of life waking up from deep deep inside.  And all the things you want out of your life buzzing you humming you aching you awake.   So the tide flat there flat as the dark moon sitting there her dark eye on you rises after tonight rises a little bit a little bit more a little bit more at a time each passing day from tonight on and winter will take its last rotten lunge at the sky--sorry winter after tonight moves on nothing you can do to beat the changing tide...and spring shall come...

In the meantime it is raining here as if it never rained before as if all the years of all  Time that time was ever Time was kept on a great check board bulletin of life and decorated in country gingham and purple sparkles and timeless gold on a great big polka-dotted wall and suddenly Time itself said no! No more high-falutin fanciness for me lets get back to the basics pleaaase and so translated itself in to rainwater--all that time passed all that water and yesterday it began to fall, same as it fell last week, it falls and falls while all around the rest of the midatlantic they get snow and ice.  Our ground here is moist and muddy.  My heels sink three inches in.

On Friday I grabbed Sam girl Sam at Java Bay not boy Sam with the history of me and funny awful old pictures that aren't really too too old and I said come on I will show you the third sign of spring.  I led her to the front door where across the parking lot you could see all the many blackbirds making feasts of the lawn.  There had to be hundreds of them.  The day before that when I was sitting in my longjohns and sweatshirt and cords and gloves and hat on the back porch in my beach chair under my blanket and snuggie getting late day sun and lusting over the pics in Vogue, I wrote a poem it was a short quick one and came from all the sun confirming what I already know, what Brigid's moon by the wise woman ways used to be used to tell--how close spring is, how soon it truly is on its way.

there are, & have been:
squirrels chasing each other thru the woods
over fallen branches and across canals
filled with water
swelling preparing readying almost
to move~

Beltane in the Air

O Pals.

What an exciting, deepbeating time this is. Last new moon--which would have been last Friday, from around about that time until next Friday/Saturday when we peak with the full moon--well this is the pagan season of Beltane or first-bud. I have been spending so, so much time out and about with my barefeet on the ground that there simply is no denying this alluring and delighting energy that is literally growing and ready to spill over from the inside out....

Naturally, we are part of the ecosystem wherever we live. If you are eastcoast US right now, well then you know life is literally bursting all around you in the form of wiley lawns, new buds, vibrating flowers and sparkling green leaves, open CSA's. This past Friday was the traditional celebration of MayDay, or Beltane. The old agricultural myths mark this as the fecund time of the Gods and Goddesses--and the folklore is that the old myths were celebrated by all night celebrations of first love, sex, dancing, bright ribbons decorating the Maypole and more. Allowing and affirming and enjoying all the pleasure of life! Vibrant, full, alive as it is!

Try this. When you get home from work tonight, or go out to get the paper this morning, pause a moment. Breathe deep. Breathe again. Allow your skin to become aware of the air. Ground your feet, imagine long deep colors of whatever you first see in your mind's eye to be pulling you down down in to the ground like you had your own precious root system. Maybe even envision roots instead of colors. Allow all the quickness in you to flow out in to the earth. Now pull the energy from the earth up in to you. Breathe together, in and out. See if you too cant connect easily to and sense and feel what I am talking about. We move with the energy of the everchanging earth much as it moves us.

So wear a ribbon ladies, fellas sport a dash of red or some other bright color. Get outside and play. This is well the time for your own spirits seeds to begin coming in to bloom. And check out Lisa's info on next week's full moon, eastcoast time 11pm Friday http://www.astrowisdom.com/thisfullmoon.htm. This is the lunar celebration of Beltane, peak power of creation for the harvest year to come.

I plan on celebrating by going back to my roots. There is a festival, a Fairy Festival!! at Spoutwood Farm in the PA hills this weekend and since I'll be up visiting with my recovering pap(see Friday's post), it will be the perfect opportunity to go. This is in Glen Rock. Mom told me this week that I have a great grandmother on either side of mom's folks that come from the Glen Rock area. Mom, who has often side-remarked over the years little passing comments about the 6th sense on her side that her sisters, her mom, my cousin Chels and me, that intuitive sense we all seem to have, well she said this week that this must come from the Glen Rock people. So, woo hoo par-teeee!!

Mom's friend's Liz and Mel, energy workers and massage therapists

at Ancient Arts in Ocean City. These gals do wonders for me!

Anyhow, lineage or not we all are of the same soul stuff, all us people, all the animals, all those clouds, those loving flowers and that gorgeous loving stream--it's all the same subtance-stuff. Us humans were just blessed, all us humans, with the powerfull gift of Consciousness. Which merely is choice. Or as Wordsworth said, the capacity to become

"one in whom persuasion and belief
Had ripened into faith, and faith become
A passionate intuition"

Holy passion, now's the time. So try it! Get outside. Breathe deep. Feel life coursing up from within. Acknowledge, give thanks, and emPower your self!

Celebrate, with me...

No Better Way

…This is actually a commitment to joy. When you feel momentary happiness, or you want to burst out laughing, or you smile for no apparent reason, you are glimpsing eternal reality. For a fleeting moment the curtain has parted so you can experience something beyond the illusion. In time these moments of joy will begin to knit together. Instead of the exception, they will become the norm. There is no better way to know that you are growing…
~Deepak Chopra

Spring, O "Ancient Tongue"

It is so sunny and yellow-delicious and blue out, it is so Spring out.... And today is the slotted day to finally go through the spareroom here at Chop and organize and get rid of or somehow repack and hide somewhere the overflow excess of "stuff" from Anngar. Poor gracious Teena allowing her house to become the cyclone that hit it since I started cleaning out/moving stuff out of the farm.

But it's so nice out.

In honor of a day like today that makes my feet ache to be mud-deep in turned-over soil, go visit Kiva-Rose over at The Medicine Women's Roots. Her wisdom and MotherGnowledge it what I aspire deeply for in myself. Back in Sept 07 when I first was reeling in my own discontent, I contacted her about wanting to go stay a while at her Anima Center in New Mexico. It fell through, I opted for a trip to see my girl Mandy's infant son in Texas instead. Either way it was a time of re-claiming me. But anyhow, read this article, and let the sun, the ancient language of the land and its roots, the poetry of the air out there move you today.

Message in my bottle

There are common concerns I've heard, and usually shared, about moving up the time change and thereby forcing the start of spring. Screwing up our Circadian Cycles and what not. I am born one day after the equinox, and I mean to write it that way: I Am Born, recognizing this time of year always as a time of great rebirth for me. I am one day in to the start of spring, and my whole life, or long as I can consciously remember being aware of "within", I have cycled with the seasons. I am a sunhead, drawn to the light, but born under a Taurus moon, so ruled inwardly by the night. So I flow gently as I can allowing the seasons, and my own deep and personal experiences of them, to inform my soul. I'm born at the Equinox, a baby of perfect union of dark and light. I think these are the marks I came in to this world with, and I seek the balance of allowing them to inform me but only insomuch as trying recognize the "intuitive"-born pathways in to my soul. Last year at the timechange I remember feeling like Milly the Mole: someone turned the lights on too quick!! I was surrendered to my burrow, in deep hibernation doing an awful lot of resting. I wasn't ready to come out yet from my hole. But this year. Woah. I. Am. So. Ready.

This sickness I am just coming through--and by the way, thank you so much all my well-wishers who commented on this blog or facebook or via email, it meant a ton, truly--it was so much more than just a physical thing. I believe in the oneness of the body: the physical and the chemical and hormonal body, effected fully by the mental or emotional body, the subconscious body and the intuitive, the subtle energy body and the spirit. I believe in the full picture of all of these, and I can tell you for sure that my illness was symptomatic of far deeper imbalances than merely fluid in my ears. I was forced during that time of sickness (and time of snow-hostage!) (oh, and during all that, in case the message WASN'T LOUD ENOUGH, my phone got wet and stopped working!) to surrender and to fully hear me. And what I was saying was what I, my deep quiet voice within, has been saying for so, so long. I moved on to Anngar Farm with Brandon over a year and half ago, in fact in June it will be two years. And strangely, the moment we got all our stuff in to that castillo--or castle--which is what my Mexican friend Santiago called the six-bedroom farmhouse that Brandon and I were literally given in exchange for caretaking the several acres of landscaped lawn that came along with it, I began to experience a deep and nagging discontent. I had no words for it, but it kept me up late, woke me up in the dark with blank stares, and caused me endless bouts of un-named melancholy worsened by my own refusal to just listen to what was Within. I kept telling my self just to shut-it, and be grateful for all the gifts you have why don't you?! By October of that year, some four or so months after we'd finally settled in, I had at least allowed myself to hear my inner message: I just want some time to be alone.It made no sense to me. But intensified monthly. Now, here's the thing you need to know about me. I believe in our own deep Authenticity. That we each are alit with gifts specific to our own souls, unique to our own form of song. And it is our duties to listen and align with them and draw them out, and indeed this is how to evolve in to our best selves and serve this world. I believe in constant change, the power of intention, positive thinking and the law of attraction. And most of all I believe that we all are engaged by the same unifying energy, and that that energy exists in vibrations, and that everything, from a thought or intention to the rising-tide, the full moon the equinox a winter's snow or bad news from your best friend, vibrates at a certain level. And at any given moment my being, my holistic whole-bodied being vibrates according to all these many factors of Oneness. And my job is to stay the Conscious Witness so I can align and offer up those vibrations that are unique to me...I believe that in this way Harmony is possible...if even at times it looks like and feels like Divine Chaos. So in this Oneness of things, all movement has it seasons. And finally it came time for me to surrender to that deep yearning: it was all I could do to not scream it at the top of my lungs I just need to be Alone! It logically made no sense but I couldn't fight it anymore, and in fact, I often wonder if fighting that instinct for as long as I did instead of exploring the message of it contributed to the pain that it has greatly caused between me and Brandon. I literally was beginning to fracture inside, to feel depressed and more. And by the time I could take it no more what was left was letting down the person I loved most in the world. And frankly, I had no real reason to give to him.... But there is absolutely no denying that when I surrendered to the deep inner calling and said Yes to it--doors opened immediately. First a new job that afforded me enough money to live on my own, then a home in the vicinity of the new job. The first night I was here at Chop I was busybusy moving all my packed bags off my bed when something suddenly shook me and I stilled inside, and in the utter quiet of those surroundings the inner voice said: Do you hear it? This, this deep silence is what you wanted. And my friends, it is so, so quiet here.

So, I'd love to tell you that I've just honored that quiet since then. And certainly in my own little regular ways I have. But I've also quietly been trying to plot and plan my next move, and then getting frustrated when I can't seem to force those changes. Ping-pong, ping-pong. The more time passes, the more frustrated and full of plans I get. Only to feel exhausted and more confused that ever. I like Louise Hay's term for this--Divine Discontent--and here-in lay the message of my illness: to slow down and just do what I came here, what I quite literally was led here, to do. Be Quiet. Take time to be quiet, in silence, and alone. And trust what will come from within will come in its right time. As all things come as and when they should... Like a foot of snow after you've been home sick for four days. Or the vibrant buds of purple crocus' who so needed some snow melt to grow grow grow... Ahhh, what balance to continually learn and relearn how to strike: balance of the light of knowledge versus faith that in what you can't always see ahead of you in the dark...So it goes so it goes and so it goes..So might it be....

Inside Great MaMa Magnolia, Who Breathes Silence, late-night witching hour with Laura Walsh, Chestertown