"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. 

Location, Location, Location

Many thanks to all of you who have adventurously walked under the red awning and stepped across the threshold into The Safety Pin Cafe. In a few short weeks more than 1,000 visitors, and nearly 200 readers have sampled the medicine story of Pale the Border Witch. The cafe located in a town so familiar, yet without an address, might be found in The Dictionary of Imaginary Places? The story of wandering between what passes as reality in the everyday and what could be just as real in the borders has a gift for any of us who has been faceless, homeless, or otherwise without. Tucked in the folds of a cozy yet mythic story of 6,000 words layers of common magic has been planted in the community imagination. The wave that is Drewslist: what a place! Most of the visitors and readers discovered The Safety Pin Cafe because of the ongoing enticements I've posted on Drew Kampion's email list.

Many thanks also to Annie Horton Zeller and Gwen Samelson from WhidbeyAIR for creating the space to share The Safety Pin Cafe and the Hawaiian traditional practice Makua O'o. The air waves, and the comfortable recording studio of WhidbeyAIR in Coopeville is a perfect location for spreading a medicine story. Mahalo nui loa a pau. LISTEN to that program here.

Simple and sometimes silly, the journey between here and there can dwither (I made that up) a person who is set in the way things ought to be. Mythic arts editor, author and blogger Terri Windling has long been a source of courage and inspiration to me. On her blog Myth and Moor Windling wrote this about "Foolishness" 

"While our intellect chases its bright and lofty visions, our  most original, powerful ideas tend to rise from muddy, murky depths below: from the clouded waters of the subconscious; from the baffling landscape of nightmare and dream; from the odd obssessions, weird fixations, and uncanny flashes of intuition that rise up from those strange parts of ourselves that we know and approve of least; from those places most likely to make us feel ridiculous, and exposed. The muse, if we follow her far enough, and honestly enough, demands that we bare it all: our angel wings and our asses' ears. It doesn't matter if we're writing genre fiction and not memoir; it doesn't matter if we're painting fairy tales and not self-portraits. "All art is autobiographical," said Federico Fellini; "the pearl is the oyster's autobiography."

You gotta serve somebody!

"Although the skills aren't hard to learn, finding the happiness and finding the satisfaction and finding fulfillment in continuously serving somebody else something good to eat, is what makes a really good restaurant."

Mario Batali 

Earlier this week I had a chance to meet and get to know Annie Zeller Horton, Co-host of  WhidbeyAIR's all internet public radio's "Isle of Arts". Annie has been reading and tasting the samples from The Safety Pin Cafe via Drewslist. I got an e-mail from her a week ago,"You have me tantalized and made me eager to learn more about The Safety Pin Cafe," she wrote. The menu and the method for serving up the story, the characters and the setting for this imaginary place has been an adventure. I was thrilled to know someone I didn't know (yet) was tantalized. 

The entrance into ... the poetry of language ... the bones of The Safety Pin Cafe

" When your soul awakens, you begin to truly inherit your life. You leave the kingdom of fake surfaces, repetitive talk and weary roles and slip deeper into the true adventure of who you are and who you are called to become. The greatest friend of the soul is the unknown. Yet we are afraid of the unknown because it lies outside our vision and our control. We avoid it or quell it by filtering it through our protective barriers of domestication and control. The normal way never leads home." - John Donohue

For a month now, The Safety Pin Cafe has surfed the cyber waves, catching the reader's eye, perhaps, tantalized your imagination. It tickles me to know that the scents of The Safety Pin Cafe interest you, for I see that more than 100 readers have sampled the story that began in the winter. My ancestors were skilled and powerful water-folk, surfers and voyagers on the wa'a kaulua (canoe) the ride from here to there depended upon a willingness to adapt to the wave, to the water.

 If you have read the medicine story and came to the concluding chapter you might recognize the Granny Smith Apple ... the choice of apples for a pie served around a table upstairs, above the cozy cafe that serves no coffee, but offers instead steamed milk and cinnamon toast. The photos above were taken years ago (before the story of a border witch strung itself), yet it is that apple and that pan which will be the cover to the book. Left unattended the photos rested in the archives and now they have been uncovered ... they have a job to do, a joy to encourage, a story to enliven.

How patient am I to learn the skills of self-publication? Not always very patient, but I persist, teaching myself how to use new software I press on the brain cells and hope for bridges to make sense of LibreOffice Writer.  I thought the pages of the chapbook would be ready by now, 'aue ... alas, no, not yet. Still paddling! Writing this post is a break from that new territory which I wade through like eating a tasty bit of fish filled with bones. Ono (delicious) with some risks.

Under the red yawning: a pin's worth of magic

 "I think that even if illness was suddenly, blessedly removed as a factor in my life, I would still be at this same point in my journey: having reached the years of middle age, and recognizing that time is not infinite, I feel compelled to turn inward and focus my time and attention on truly mastering my craft. - Terri Windling

The Hawaiian Moon Calendar Kaulana Mahina offers me regular emotional and practical tune-ups. Though we can often go without seeing Mahina from my place in the woods, I know there are times to rest, re-view my actions and weed or re-tell the stories I am telling. These re-view times are called the 'Ole Moons, or Quarter Moon Phases four phases before Full Moon and three phases prior to the New Moon. The past four days and nights have been 'Ole. These 'Ole times are not a good time for beginning new projects if given the option. I have been re-viewing, resting and considering the stories I tell. There have been no weekly updates to The Safety Pin Cafe while I attended to the internal clockworks, till now...

Town is busy with visitors and regulars and my thoughts thick and worries weighty. I kept at the business of living and sought out a better feeling thought, and found it. There was a gift to find and wishes to be sent to loved ones. Even with so few spoons, I heed my astrologer's advice and sought the good for someone other than myself. As I crossed that sticky bog where the Worry Wart Clan lay their seductions, my silly-loving fingers found just the bit of magic I needed to pack a moveable feast for two: the gift for the loved ones! A happy orange lightweight and collapsible picnic basket and four checked cotton napkins will fit easily into a parcel bound for a town near Paris. Snacks and tiny star candles will start the moveable feast bound for France.

Keen with the scent of gift-giving the perfect traveling red awning under which I might take moveable feasts from The Safety Pin Cafe called "Here. Here I am." Wrapped in a sheaf of clear plastic at least a yard's length it stuck out of a basket of umbrellas. On a busy day in Salish (which was wearing sunblock instead of rain boots) disguised as a red golf umbrella with a fiberglass stem was the moveable awning for The  Safety Pin Cafe.

A hand stitch, language of birds, a safety pin: common magic, complex nature

"Common" ... western definitions

1. belonging equally to, or shared alike by, two or more or all in question: common property; common interests.

2. pertaining or belonging equally to an entire community, nation, or culture; public: a common language or history; a common water-supply system.

3. joint; united: a common defense.

4. widespread; general; ordinary: common knowledge.

5. of frequent occurrence; usual; familiar: a common event; a common mistake.

"Common" ... Hawaiian definitions
1. hana mau
2. ma'amau,
3. laha, laakea

"Commoner"
1. Maka'ainana
2. noa
3. 'ino
4. hua
5. noa'noa

“I have heard the Amish will place a small mistake or imperfection in a quilt or other handmade item. Why is this done?”
“We’ve heard that many years ago sometimes a scrap of fabric that didn’t quite match was used inconspicuously in a patchwork quilt to give it “identity.” We question whether this is true. We don’t know of any quilters who would do that today. Amish quilts are all band quilted; stitches are very small and uniform. But, no matter how hard one tries, the stitches are not all identical and perfect. A quilt may have an imperfection, but it wasn’t on purpose.” - The Amish People

The door to The Safety Pin Cafe has been open for a week, and oh how thrilled we are to have had so many visitors.  Less costly than investing in the creation of the boards and batten of a store-front and eatery, the cost as a writer and translator of words and history is instead kuleana ... personal responsibility. I am a happy woman sharing the story, the characters and the journey of culture for it is precisely, and imperfectly, that journey of culture evolving that fills the cup of those who walk through the cafe door.

Invite The Possibility

"The Safety Pin Cafe is close, nearer than one could imagine and is open especially to those who straggle borders listening for the comfort of an empty cup needing filling.

 

"This is a stop over place, The Safety Pin Cafe," the chef said as we watched The Faceless Woman empty the mug of warm milk and vanilla. Raven refilled her mug and sprinkled more cinnamon. "Not every one finds this place, it's easily missed among the distractions ... this and that, either or. But, many do find us and we never turn people, mostly woman, away."