Akua Moon: a kapu time to remember to give thanks

The forest was lit with brilliant light late last night and early this morning. If we were down at the muliwai the waters salt with fresh would have blended and breached the artificial boundaries of private property confirming and still the waters rise. Mahina the Moon is fattening and yes the waters rise, all the water within and without rise reminding us how we are so inextricably connected.

Like one Earth meshed net my water is my neighbor's is her neighbor's is their neighbors and there are no boundaries when the water rises no barbed wire high enough nor secret deep enough when the waters rise.

Earlier in the week before the Hillary storm was trumped Pete and I were out at the prairie front, not far from the water's edge the estuary the muliwai. The day was pleasant the sky sharing its blue gown with the movement of clouds and sunshine was making us believe there was still some hope for a bright warm day a future led by progress, and potential for change.

 I walked the beautiful stretch of land that is the South Whidbey Tilth campus the grass wetter than expected my little brown leather shoes were soaked before long. But, it made no never mind the air was fresh, the land seemed content with the feedings absorbed with Sunday Farmers' Markets

 and one lone Dandelion was still courageous in her destiny to propagate. Such strength of heart!

 Put away were the sand box toys now lidded and secured against the surely coming sometime storms of a Salish Winter.

 Mostly naked theResident Tree Nation's limbs were nonetheless or maybe more because they were less sinuous with their arms so pointed and unadorned

 Mostly naked but for the dangling fruit still remembering how great the season has been.

 Mud, and crumbling leaves turn quickly to mold and rot but there is a memory of color and just how systematically Nature withdraws without any help from us and then there is only compost.

 A mound of rocks or stones, the common prairie rocks remind me of their beauty as I stopped for one last look out the driver's side window. Common stones. One more opportunity to remember the nourishment of eating the stones 

ʻAʻole mākou aʻe minamina I ka puʻukālā a ke aupuni Ua lawa mākou i ka pōhaku I ka ʻai kamahaʻo o ka ʻāina

We do not value The government's hills of money We are satisfied with the rocks The wondrous food of the land

- Kaulana Na Pua written by Eleanor Kekoaohiwaikalani Wright Prendergast in 1893 for members of the Royal Hawaiian Band.

Thank you to our friend Terri "Tita Wise' for the beautiful high tide photo from West Beach. All the other photos are mine. 

It began on a day much like today ... a day a duck could love

"It was a day a duck could love. For that matter the week was a duck's paradise. Dressed for the season in my long skirt, paisley wool shawl, and tea cozy hat with the red hibiscus over my left ear my feet splashed in puddles. The sensible shoes--black leather lace-ups-- answered the silly duck talk coming from the edges, "It makes no never-mind to me. For though I have no oily feathers to shed the rain, my sensible shoes are always game." I'm sure the ducks got even sillier as I twirled at the end of every city block. But by then they were out of earshot."

Above me the rain today is splattering fat and abundant. The announcer on our local radio station said, "I could take a moment to tell you about the weather but if you look outside you can see it's RAINING, and will be raining until it doesn't rain anymore. And then it will either start snowing and stay that way for the next many days hear in the Great NorthRain." Aieyah.

When I wrote the medicine story, The Safety Pin Café a tale of remedy born in the imagination, it was the art of writing that turned a soggy attitude and sodden set of lungs into the bridge between. It's that place that accepts some of the reality and blows it into a bigger picture, turning skin and toes into the webbed feet of silly ducks who transport themselves through water and birth their babies on the solidity of earth. They are comfortable with both fluidity and solidity. On the radio behind me I listen to 'Aloha Friday' and the music of Hawaii. It transports, I become more fluent.

"I would love to live like a river flows, carried by the surprise of its own unfolding."

John O'Donohue
"Fluent" from Connemara Blues

 

December draws to conclusion in three days. The Safety Pin Café has unfolded and I continue to be surprised with it. My feet are wrapped in cotton socks, my head is covered with a favorite tea-cozy like hat, and I suspect the ducks, wherever they be, are getting sillier as I twirl weird words onto the cyber-cloud of words.

 

For a taste of more Weird Words check this out.

If you have not yet read the original medicine story The Safety Pin Café, it's only a click away.

 

 

Riding in on the (Year of the) Horse

We finished building our moveable tiny home Vardo For Two in 2009, The Year of the Ox. Pete (born in the Year of the Ox) and our friends Doug and Lois parked in the ferry lane bound for our first landing on the Kitsap Peninsula.

This is not us, but it is a vardo drawn by horses in a ferry lane. It's now 2014, The Year of the Horse. 

I discovered a new website authored by Susan Levitt and find her information and her style to be clear and confident with a strong Pisces-influence. As with most of what I write, I start with a seed idea that has been intuitively informed and begin. The search and discovery phase is one of the most enjoyable stages of creating, it's all about play! and fuels me for the writing itching to be put down. Levitt is Pisces-a-plenty with a website to promotes her intuitive-psychic signature quite beautifully, I think. Here's just a snip from what Susan Levitt writes about the Year of the Wooden Horse, 2014.

"Keep in mind this year that Horse energy is free spirited, wild, willful, and independent. Horse has a refined instinct that acts fast, on the spot, unlike Horse’s opposite the Rat who thinks and plans before acting. The time for pondering and planning was 2013 Snake year. Horse year is time to act fast, buy that home, launch that business, travel the world, make a big purchase, get a promotion at work, have a breakthrough – take a leap and fly. If it’s right, then there’s nothing to think about. Just follow instincts. Even if you miss the mark, you’ll have all of Wood Sheep year 2015 to get cozy and enjoy life’s comforts in all their artistic forms."

My husband and I are an Ox and a Pig. We are different in big ways with our gifts that spread the joy of being fully alive. The Ox is steady and hard-working and being Cancer as well it is his greatest desire to be steadily helpful and nurturing to his kit and kin. Family is at the core for a Cancerian. The wheeled home we live in was built by that Ox-infused energy, it's that same energy that has found ways and means of making known his qualities where we have nested. He volunteers, he helps people move, he anticipates the next step and plods ahead. Born in the Year of Pig I love a cozy, fun place to be. Partying (used to be) such fun for me. Love of a cozy home remains what I cherish, and partying not so much. What happens for a Scorpio-Pig is an interesting thing: feeling all the deep and often dark places of mucking about in the dirt (which is what "Earth" means ... dirt!) I age with the awareness of being honestly at home. My sensitivities to chemical over-use and a highly artificially fragranced world challenges me to find peace (home) with the ordinary. One day, one night at a time the ordinary makes itself known and loved and I learn to hear them because as botanist and inventor born into slavery George Washington Carver knew "If you love it enough, anything will speak to you." Through the experiences of being ill and sensitive to the ordinary, I am learning to listen, hear, and write it down/give it back. It's the exchange of gifts that is the common magic.

The Year of the Horse brings quick changes according to Levitt's description above, for those born in the year of Horse, it's the instinctive wisdom of responding that allows a seasoned jumping horse to fly from one edge of a precipice to the other side as if guided. And, in fact, the horse can do that. I look at the grace and speed of horses and am amazed at them but know them very little. Only once have I ridden a horse, and I was never in sync with it and still wear a worn tailbone from the long ago trail ride. Such is it for a pig. Instead of being one of those creatures who is involved with the quick and free spirited independents of 2014, I will probably make my way into the Year of the Wood Horse content to explore the creativity of common magic that has began to write itself through me. Winter has seasoned The Safety Pin Cafe, tempering the old habits that linger, impatience among them. In place of some of that impatience I am relishing the gifts of being more fully present. Exchanging the carbon dioxide of my breath with the oxygen rich gifts the trees give me. Appreciative and grateful to the waves of the internet world, the first medicine story has been ready more than 300 times. Who you are readers, I know of only a few. But ... it makes no never mind thank you all!

The medicine of story is a consistent gift, and one that I give thanks for because I love to play with it and it loves being played with. The second part of The Safety Pin Cafe is mostly finished, but I postponed opening it up to be read on the 1st of January. It seems that story wants to begin with the Year of the Horse. Look for it to be my gift to readers coming with the second new moon of the Gregorian Calendar, Chinese New Year, very nearly midnight January 30, 2014. The Joy Weed Journal is its name, and those private writings will be available here on January 31, 2014.

The Joy Weed Journal ... medicine story #2 rides in on the Year of the Horse

Mau a mau: The Continuum

I continue. I continue a tradition of navigating and translating. Forty one years ago to the day I gave birth to my son. To create him I needed to travel, leave the home island my birth place. My tradition and practices at the time were young and in so many ways I was ignorant of the protocols ... the treatment of others, creatures, the elements. Or, perhaps to be gentle with myself, I was early in the journey of knowing. I became a mother at twenty-six, wet behind the ears, a Capricorn Moon woman with decades of practice ahead of me. There were inklings of my practice of navigation and translation: I knew I must journey even while I felt the internal tug of leaving. The clue/the inkling remains true now.

I continue and pass along the tradition of navigation and translation and see that the practice continues with my son. Born in the Pacific Northwest forty one years ago, he, like myself, travels ... back and forth, forth and back and then further from his home places he explores more of this planet home. Beyond, yet including those places I have been, my son navigates and adds his mo'olelo ... his story, to the practice. My son is now back on the island of my birth, O'ahu, experiencing the place and the traditions that expand his life. He sent us the photos below and through them he connects me with the past opening a portal through which we step together. Kekuhi Kanahele might call this connection and portal the Haka kaau. In the gesture of sending photos using the metaphoric stream of space and time both space and time become timeless. The longing and the loss I feel is tempered as I live the metaphor and am transported. There is the magic! The magic of a continuing practice.

Later today my husband and three friends and I will gather to practice putting together the tangible form of the imaginary and mythic place called The Safety Pin Cafe. I prepare myself in the early morning hours saying my prayers and meet with my guides and teachers: watch the video of Pua and Kekuhi and get myself into the portal with them, clear all doubt and visualize, connect. The recipe for creating what Kekuhi describes as "alchemy to allow flow into a different time and space" is the one I work with as I prepare the tangible Safety Pin Cafe.

1. Recognize my space
2. With guidance from my kumu (teachers)
3. I consider the poetic text (the medicine story)
4. Prepare the regalia/props that speak to particular entitities and help me petition respectfully
5. Energy of the collective gathers
6. The portal is created
7. I the practitioner step in
8. Then, it is my honor, to invite the audience in with us

No matter how many times I have presented story, I, like my kumu Pua and Kekuhi, get nervous. Humble in my approach to something not yet done. Knowing that humility is different from humiliation, my practice of navigation and translation continues. Mau a mau. Mother to son. Son to mother. Within our family the journey continues. 

Hauoli la hanau keiki kane Kawika.

"Fiction and poetry are doses, medicine"

 "In many shamanic societies, if you came to a medicine person complaining of being disheartened, dispirited, or depressed, they would ask one of four questions: When did you stop dancing? When did you stop singing? When did you stop being enchanted by stories? When did you stop finding comfort in the sweet territory of silence?"  - Gabrielle Roth

"A plate of fine bone china, only slightly chipped but sparkling clean, was arranged with cinnamon toast cut into stars and moons and ducks." - from The Safety Pin Cafe

 “I had lines inside me, a string of guiding lights. I had language. Fiction and poetry are doses, medicines. What they heal is the rupture reality makes on the imagination. I had been damaged, and a very important part of me had been destroyed - that was my reality, the facts of my life. But on the other side of the facts was who I could be, how I could feel. And as long as I had words for that, images for that, stories for that, then I wasn't lost.”  - Jeanette Winterson

" Scorpio Sun is both the puzzle and the puzzler.
Seeing what is beneath the surface is what Scorpio does best. When presented with a situation where the pieces don’t seem to fit, Scorpio moves those pieces around until they do. When Scorpio can’t make those pieces fit they throw the puzzle in the trash and set off to find a new one, amputation.
 - Satori H.

The weeks of late August and September fill with the details and finishing touches for the opening of a mythic and magical place, a place where common magic is the medicine: The Safety Pin Cafe. The story is transforming me as I believe "Fiction and poetry are doses, medicines," as Jeannette Winterson wrote above. The original Safety Pin Cafe is my daily place of medicine making where meals for the belly and the imagination are cooked up simultaneously sometimes; or separately as when I sit to eat oatmeal and am 'dosed' with the flavor of spice: cinnamon the friend-maker.

What continues to thrill and enliven me is the process of becoming. I love digging around, and with a broad Scorpio signature, I am both "the puzzle and the puzzler." Nature all around me in the woods does the work of becoming without as much rumination. To be human with a will that often forks into two (or more) directions at once is perhaps just one more example of quantum reality ... the wind does it all the time! As I shift a gear and compose this JOTS is stretched across my leg trying to ignore my jiggling arm that keeps striking keys. I write during the 'Ole Moons reflecting on the progress made during the months of the magic medicine story begun in November. Many surprises and challenges have made the process time-consuming. I thank my ancestors who speak to me through dreams, and that amazing box of a computer connected to the cyber-web which allows me to see and hear things like these videos.  My husband Pete encourages me as he sees my energy build after a cycle of challenge and isolation. The dreams and the stillness temper and bake my refueling mana and I listen to the quiet, and what is most important rises to the surface. I lap it up like cream to a kitty. I have much to learn to orchestra the opening of The Safety Pin Cafe. Layers of symbolism, storytelling and collaboration with others make for an event that stretches my imagination and my capacity to create.