Rusty, Lusty and Responsible (More Slipp'n In)

Nene the rare Hawaiian goose.
(In her non-mythic form)

"A melody's calling those lyrics," Nene was rocking on her hinged feet. The ruffly, jazzy mood of a rock made The Woman laugh out loud. It was a deep and mellow near-bass sound.

"You need a melody to go with those lyrics," the man grinned. "We all start out lusty. You think?" The man had set his shovel against the wobbly wire fence and was running one hand through his mostly gray beard.

"When I was nineteen I rolled my car, with two friends in it. Scared the crap out of me. Changed my life!"

"Are your friends, still friends?" The Woman asked without asking the obvious bit of the hinged question.

"They are. One of them was just visiting us. The other still lives back East, but we still ... keep in touch. Surviving something like that can bond people. Leastwise it did for me. I was lucky." The man was nodding now. Reminiscences creating that two directional flow of time, Nene appeared to him as a blurr. The man blinked and adjusted his glasses.

"What is it?" The Woman asked when she recognized the aha of connecting moments.

"I thought I saw something beside you. A big bird?" He shrugged when The Woman asked, "What color bird?"

"I'm not sure. Must be the heat," he suggested, changing the subject to the more mundane and safe. The unusual heat wave was definitely affecting the region. "They say to expect 100 degrees tomorrow. That's why I'm out here today, and won't be tomorrow."

"Good plan," The Woman capped the small jar smiling at the Mullein blossoms. "Thank you for the kind words about missing us when we leave. We aren't very good at good-byes, but being a mirror for Earth, people like me have to get used to processing good-byes."

"Hmm, never thought about it that way." The man was sincerely puzzled by the comment.

"We're responsible for the definitions we tow with us. And if we get old and rusty, but still remain lusty for life moving on is often the option that we must take. Movement keeps our hinges operating. You know what I mean?"

The flow of conversation had lost him. His shovel now in hand and his foot primed to turn another row making room for fall plants. Nene poked her long neck and beck between the wire fence and nudged at a berry still dangling. The warm temperatures suite the creamy feathered goose and berries were her favorite dessert. The Woman felt a tinge of sadness about the dangling conversation. But the yama bells remained silent. That was something.

Transforming the English Language

Robin Wall Kimmerer "Mapping a New Geography of Hope"

I'm awake when I should be finishing a night of restorative sleep. My practice of self-care is changing so among the remedies for maintaining balance I've started taking a small prescriptive remedy three times (instead of twice) in a twenty four hour period. For awhile, my body needs this increase dosage. Twenty-four hours divided by three means I take this small prescriptive medication every eight hours. Any way I do the math this requires waking up at that deliciously deep hour when dreams and rest are working their medicine. There's a conflict going on here.

So rather than fight with myself and the disruption, I left the cozy futon and my bed mate who is also part of this new normal because he is my caregiver who wakes me at that late night hour with the pill and a glass of water. When I can't get back to sleep, and say, "I'm up." He says"Okay, I'll finish reading that book then." "I'll bring it back for you," I told him as I dressed in the dark for the walk across the forest to the Quonset where he'd left the book about a contemporary mythic adventure with seasonal change. Summerlong by Peter S. Beagle. 

My New Moon wishes still wet with the making I long for the company of care, the voice of caring, the presence of reassurance, and find it. Like those phone calls to dear pals, I type in a name and find this video with Robin Wall Kimmerer one of my heroines. Her words string stories that soothe me just right with language that braids no less sweet than the sweet grass of her beloved Sky Woman. I exhale deeply, shoulders drop and my eyes are drooping, I yawn with sleepiness now that I have heard her, seen her.

A safety pin's worth of medicine this one. I inhale the message to remember to remember and laugh from all the best of places within me at the thought of transforming the English Language. Now that's something to look for in a new normal, a new remedy. 

Good Night Moon. Good Night Me.

Spider bite

These are the 'Ole moons, the reflective and reconsidering times (4 of them before the moon comes full, 3 of them when the moon is waning). We have "pulled the plug" on our proposal to move onto the prairie front. Too many risks and too little real support. So yesterday Pete and I spent time here in the woods a bit stunned by the attempt. Talking about what happened helped a little, but mostly what helped was to clean up the dust and cobwebs inside the vardo and the Quonset. As I prepared the vardo for Pete to vacuum I pulled off a length of cloth that warms the underside of our futon. I felt a small sharp sting. Quick bite! A nanosecond of doubt fled. I knew I had been bitten by Spider. I searched for it. There. Circled into a tight ball, 'playing possum' was 'Uku'uku. Using a small cloth I unfurled the spider, very much alive. Looking at my finger I saw the bite already reddening.

"You need to go outside!" It's warm in the vardo and they love to sneak inside. I get that. It's been a few years since my last spider bite. I remember what the Medicine Woman told me, "Have you asked what Spider is trying to tell you?"  I had not thought to ask that question back then. After tossing the cloth and spider outside I walked into the orchard, looked for the green leaves of Laukahi (Plantain) and picked two and chewed them into a poultice for the bite.

I asked Pete for a band-aid to hold the poultice in place and told him what had happened. Through out the day and into the night I asked Spider, "What are you trying to tell me?"

As I write early in the morning, the redness of Spider's bite has been eased. Thank you Laukahi. I listen. Answers seem to be coming, unexpected or perhaps answers that are more and more "Listen more often to things than to beings. Tis the Ancestors breath ..."

With the 'Ole Moons, the answers unfurl. I pray to have ears to listen, and hear what is true, and write the story to express the medicine.

"Why follow astrology if you don't apply it ... - Elsa P."

SCORPIO (Oct 23–Nov 21): The dictionary says that the verb "to schmooze" means to chat with people in order to promote oneself or make a social connection that may prove to be advantageous. But that definition puts a selfish spin on an activity that can, at least sometimes, be carried out with artful integrity. Your assignment in the coming weeks is to perform this noble version of schmoozing. If you are offering a product or service that is beautiful or useful or both, I hope you will boost its presence and influence with the power of your good listening skills and smart conversations. - Rob Brezsny

Captain Jack Sparrow via Wikimedia

Pete and I are just back from an early morning breakfast at Mukilteo Coffee. The cafe is just down the road from our woods' place. We and one of the owners go way back to times when the now-major corporate business was a sidewalk kiosk outside Mukilteo's old bus barn on Front Street. "I'm getting older," Gary said as I gave him a hug and reply that I'm pretty good. "Pretty good ha?" "Yay, we're alive another day. Live to pirate another way," I said. It got a rise out of the guy who is always ready with a comeback or quip to keep momentum up. He's a master schmoozer, who believes everyone knows his secrets. Can't vouch for that one, but he does appear to be an open book with just about everyone.

I woke this morning after a fitful sleep, trying to find a comfortable way to accommodate a pain in the neck. "Where did that come from?" Pete asked when I apologized for the loud sawing of log snoring coming from me because I couldn't sleep on my side. I answered with no hesitation, "Stress." He went no further with words. Went on with his sleep and his dreams. We are without doubt in a major period of transition, birthing something new, as we step out of the woods literally and metaphorically. It's not smart to disclose the details of where or with whom we are collaborating, but it is important to keep walking the walk reinforcing the talk of Spanish poet Antonio Machado:

Caminante, no hay camino. 

Wayfarer, there is no way

El camino se hace por andar.

You make the way by walking it.

I got an email the other day from one of the people I see for health care. She was checking in with me to see how I was getting along, hoping the warm weather was aiding in my recovery from the wet and moldy conditions of late spring. I wrote back and said I had learned a lot this year, and that among other things we were moving out of the woods. My last line in the reply was that I  had learned the limits of health. It's a paradoxical condition to say that to your health care giver; but true. There is a limit to how healthy a person can be. No matter what we do, or don't do we none of us get off the planet alive. 

In my case, and I am not alone, the limits of health include the reality that much of what my health care giver offers does not help. This excerpt from Brian Doyle's novel Mink River, a portrayal of courage, character and mythic reality was a dose of medicine story for me. The town doctor is walking and talking with Billy, Worried Man. They speak of their work, their profession.

"You know, says Worried Man so quietly that the doctor has to strain to hear him over the lap lap lap of the patient ocean, I am tired of pain.

I know the feeling.
I have smelled it all my life and I am tired of it.
Yet we are professionals, Billy.

Mm.
We volunteer for other people's pain.
Mm. 

To carry their pain.
Mm.
To heal their pain.
Mm.
But we don't, do we?
We ... what?
We hardly matter most of the time.
What?
We don't, Billy. We make our holy gestures, we conduct our intricate and complicate rituals, we apply salves and poultices, elixirs and potions, and people remain broken and torn. The best I can do is just witness the pain...Pain comes to me and I wave my arms and conduct my intricate rituals, as ephemeral as the wind, as insubstantial as shadows, as elusive as smoke." 

"I've shredded both your checks," my health care giver wrote. 
"Thank you, what an unexpected gift," I replied.

So ... this way we walk, this one that I walk with a soul that is as surely imbued with the character of pirate in all its cunning and schmooze-glue, I walk knowing, through experience, there are limits to health. Astrology, a practice I follow, a walk I walk consistently, points to my heavily tenanted 8th House; very Pluto/Pele and extreme in most of my expressions. After six years of living a cloistered and protected woods life, Pete and I prepare for a change. Extreme. Back in the day when I was a younger woman, the age when first I met the coffee baron of Mukilteo Coffee fame, I was a master of schmooze and was paid to ply my wares. Life has changed a lot. Those limits of health shorten my stores of energy, but, there is a lifetime of practice that can be edited (it's Virgo Season, Virgo is a master of edit) and applied.

Jack Sparrow may be one of the infamously famous silver screen pirate characters, and a personal favorite. But he is only as good a replicant as the pirate of my our family stories. I am a granddaughter of a pirate, Francisco Calizar. The stories of him are mine, given to me while I listened to my Papa Honey under the shade of puakenikeni and plumeria trees. They are fuel for my pirate's soul feeding my imagination dialogue and conversation to sell "a product or service that is beautiful or useful or both." 

Will we sell on the open market, or via the thriving yet repellent black market? I hope to do so with that Brezsny spin "carried out with artful integrity."

Arrrgh, Francisco, lead the way. 

Myth & Magic on the back of The Year of the Wooden Horse

Gung Hee Fat Choy Happy New Year the Year of The Wooden Horse. The Safety Pin Cafe began the process of weaving the common and ordinary magic of story, place and mythic journeys. The characters found in the story of The Safety Pin Cafe share the whimsy, cultural poetry and timeless connections. But, not everyone can see the cafe, or recognize the doorway that begins on a day a duck could love.

It makes no nevermind is the password. Those who are ready for the medicine find it.

Today with the start of the Lunar New Year, a second medicine story, a work-in-progress is now showing to an intimate audience. Together with this handful of friends I invite audience participation and, The Joy Weed Journal is read for the first time. Over the next month or so my audience and I will talk about what shows up for them. Like the aging border witch Joy Weed, I tread the edges of society and culture and experiment with new ways to bridge time and evolution. I tinker with the limits and discover through experiencing. That's what happens when one is sensitive.

If you would like to read the medicine story, it rides in on the back of the Lunar New Year's Wood Horse. To read it click here.

Bang those pots to clear out the old, eat your long noodles and yummy dumplings, cut a slice of moon cake and share it with those you love. Happy New Year of the Wooden Horse!

Mokihana