still here...

Stitching and finally finishing a project gone dormant feels good.

Tacked onto a base of black linen, it became a book cover for my tarot journal -- now I want to make another one, only with a different card for inspiration. 

This year I have set Mondays aside as a day for watery, intuitive rituals. One thing is a constant -- I first light a candle and meditate and then draw tarot and/or oracle cards for the week ahead, using different decks each month. I definitely have my favorite decks to work with but by rotating them, I get to know all of them better. (I also give myself permission to buy new decks now.) Monday/Moonday is just a good day for me to stretch and learn. Some watery mundane things include watering plants, laundry, soup-making, medicine making, taking a bath -- it all depends on the season.

A new colony of honeybees moved into the tree-house a few months ago. 

                                                                                                                                                                  This bee-house is occupied by a colony led by Queen Heidi II who is the daughter of the first Queen Heidi. I love that the women who raised and sold us the colony had a lineage established to pass along.                           

Another cloth close to being finished. For months, I have been trying to decide whether to chop it in half or not. It seems like it would have more options to be useful if it were smaller.

These are the new girls, Liza and Amber. Liza is a French Cuckoo Marans (with feathers on her feet) and Amber is a Dutch Welsummer. I'm learning that having chickens is not for the weak of heart -- Lilith died one morning in my arms, out of the blue. Then another young pullet named Saphie was sick from the start and died after only a few weeks. I have seen and learned so much in such a short time.

The original Moon sisters -- Margaret Wise Moon, Honey Moon and Cinco Moon. True to form, they are very tough on the new girls, pecking order being so important and all.

On the kitchen table, some new-to-me plants -- Marimo moss balls. They aren't really moss balls, they are actually solid algae balls that live in the bottom of fresh water lakes. The movement of water currents makes them round so I try to help by spinning them around by hand when I think of it. Their water needs to be cold and they need to be kept out of direct sunlight. I squeeze them gently and replace their water every Monday. 

A red sun one afternoon with forest fires to the north and the west of Denver.

Nasturtiums soon to be harvested for the kitchen.

Assorted reading and easy knitting, hexipuffs for the beekeeper quilt. 

A project for autumn -- to partially deconstruct and then reconstruct craft-store brooms and then make my own broom from scratch using the lighter, greenish broom corn, Sorghum bicolor, that I grew last summer. The darker broom corn broom was a gift that will serve as a model of one way to do the stitching. I'm reading about broom folklore and magical uses and like the idea of an ancestral broom for the time when the veil thins next month. 

The garden at the beginning. See the kalette plants grow around Buddha.

Mid-to-late summer -- Buddha's mask. I planted kalettes all over the back yard because the chickens loved them last year and it was so fun to watch them jump to reach the leaves at the top. They are beautiful plants.

Last night when it was nearly dark. Buddha wearing a headdress. 

I hope you are happy in the now moment and also looking forward to good things in your life. I love the feeling of reconnecting after such a long time. 

xo

make yourself yours

We each have our own paths, dreams, visions, creations, experiences and lessons as we live our lives. These are the things I journal about here on this web log, sometimes with long pauses in between. Lately I've been listening and dreaming about the coming year. What seeds to sow, projects to begin, commitments to make, books to read...and on and on it goes. And I find great pleasure in figuring out the best way for me to live a happy, authentic existence. It's a job we've all been assigned -- to make ourselves real.

I've begun stitching a little, on paper instead of cloth -- this image was part of a promotional postcard and the frame is just a cardboard box decoupaged with bits of book pages. She's very Brigid-like to me with her fiery hair.

When I looked for signs of life in the snowy garden the other day, I found a few new motherwort leaves that were perfect on my avocado toast. Motherwort isn't exactly a culinary herb but fresh anything has value. Only a month ago, there were still dandelions in the grass, but they've all disappeared now. This coming fall I vow to pot up and shelter a few dandelion and chive plants for winter use. 

Blanket stitching on another old postcard-turned-button-card.

I am intrigued by the Fire Goddess Brigid, forerunner of St. Brigid. Every year on her name-day, also known as Candlemas or Imbolc, I begin setting up a little tabletop Brigid altar. This year I included a Brigid image -- a little corn husk doll -- and instead of using plant material for my Brigid's cross, I wove a torn calendar page and inscribed it with various meditations (idea from here). The blue altar cloths were dyed with home-grown Japanese indigo. I still want to place a few more items on this altar -- some beeswax or a teeny-tiny jar of honey to represent all the activity about to resume in Nature, a little sun image for warmer days, and a lamb figurine for birth/rebirth. I am only touching on the surface of the Imbolc season here -- if you are so inclined to delve into the meaning or to explore the old ways and practices of Imbolc, there is still plenty of time. In the Celtic tradition Imbolc is three months long -- it begins now in late winter, goes through Spring Equinox and ends in late spring.

Homemade elderberry syrup poured over a waffle is possibly the best way I've found to take an immunity-boosting herbal medicine. 

As Imbolc is also the time to bless and potentize our seeds for spring planting, the basket of seeds serves as a symbol of good crops to come.

Pillows taken from other parts of the house over the holidays ended up all together on this bed -- a nice show of homemade and store bought. I have pretty good memories of the song You Are My Sunshine -- my mom sang it to us kids and my dad whistled it as he drove. It may or may not have been "their" song. As I always saw myself as being "the sunshine," the part about being taken away was concerning though -- please don't take my sunshine away. In my mind it was please don't take my Peggy away.

Nothing simpler or more wintry than glass cylinder candle holders slip-covered with white sweater sleeves.

Green.

 

The last of the Echinacea angustifolia tincture has been decanted and more must be made.

Little propagation vases filled with slips of plants brighten up dark spaces around the house -- sweet bay leaf, Laurus nobilis, and pink nerve plant, Fittonia albivenis here. I seem to have lost my knitting mojo, I knit the little candle mat over a year ago just as it was slipping away. I don't know where it has gone.

I'm enjoying walking our dog Talula on snowy days because we usually have the park to ourselves. Looking down, concentrating on being sure-footed on multi-layers of ice and snow -- my entire field of vision is such that I can imagine for just a moment that I live in another time and place. Maybe Finland or Sweden or even a mountaintop.

You need only to claim the events of your life to make yourself yours. When you truly possess all you have been and done, which may take some time, you are fierce with reality.  ~Florida Scott-Maxwell
                                                                                                                       
Wishing you sunny days and blue snow blessings. xo

a little while

It's been a little while.

I put most of my crystals to bed on their very own mossy mattress to rest and rejuvenate. This is sort of what I've been doing too, resting and rejuvenating, after the bustle of the holidays followed by our youngest daughter's wedding.

In January I found my sewing mojo again when three moons and a butterfly started coming together. The paper fans were components for a holiday decoration that never quite made it to the finish line.

My first knitted socks were washed and blocked.

I love the rabbit sock blockers from the Knitting Shed. 

I'm back to sitting at my little altar table to meditate, read or journal. At the beginning of the year I drew The Star as my theme card for 2018 and I've had it on the table every since. Today I wistfully put it back into its deck and shuffled the entire deck thoroughly. After a quiet time, I drew a new card for today's guidance and it was The Star, which made me very happy indeed. Most appropriately, the herb shown on the card is skullcap, a calming relaxant and a good sleep aid. 

 

I pulled out roses and eucalyptus from some of the wedding centerpieces -- then hung and dried the roses in bunches and saved the eucalyptus for the dye-pot some day soon.

I am juicing nearly every day now. I've tried many different combinations of vegetables and we pretty much love them all...the only constants are celery, cucumber and lime, the other ingredients vary. 

Twenty-five moon squares made from plant-dyed cloth are being backed by hand with more plant-dyed cloth. And then assembled into rows of three. As I stitch, I think about all the women before me who sewed everything for their families by hand -- before sewing machines. They made dresses and skirts and pants and shirts. They made jackets and coats and linens and undergarments. I wonder what they think, seeing me sew these squares together...because I know they're watching, I can feel them.

Even though we're well into the month of February, I keep reading (and then reminding myself) that this is still a time of deep rest in Nature where I live and should be for people who live here, too. I very much like not hurrying on to the next thing or even thinking about what comes next. It's a dreamy time for sure. 

Good days to you. xo

a holy day

Today is Winter Solstice, the shortest, darkest day on the wheel of the year. It's the day I had my fourth baby and it's the day he was cremated exactly seven years later. Today is a holy day.

On this cold, snowy Solstice day, I want to savor any sense of wholeness that I can feel. All day long I have been imagining how life would look if I was completely whole -- with no limitations, beyond time and unaffected by current reality. What would a perfect day look like, what would I be doing, where would I live, who would I love. Tonight by candlelight I will write my wholeness into being. I'm thinking that when all is said and done, things may not look much different than how they are now. And that's good.

Toward contentment. xx

a sacred pause

Every so often, I do a writing exercise comparing "now" with the same time one year ago. How things have changed, what has ended and what is new. If I'm in a great place, the words come easy...if not, I have to go deeper.

 

I am sewing less now...but woke up the other day wanting to make a simple star. It might have had something to do with a line that I recently read and loved...."the way to the stars is not outward but rather inward."  

I miss sewing but know it's a cycle and it probably won't be long before things change.

A scrap of blue velvet for one side and a handstitched 9-patch for the other, stuffed with wool and decorated with beads and blue pins.

I am better about labeling things now.

                          

I'm eating more roots now...baking several beets at a time to have on hand for lunches, one a day. I think I'd rather have a beet a day than an apple a day. But that could change at any time.

I'm knitting way more now and I can knit socks now. That's my first pair in the basket waiting for sock blockers to come all the way from England. I know you don't really need sock blockers but I see it as part of the experience.

I know my camera has a painting filter now, turned on by accident on Thanksgiving Day. All my photos from that day are like this. 

My youngest daughter and I are planning her wedding now.

Sometimes I feel that I'm doing less of everything I normally do. Some of that is because of wedding planning but it's also the shorter days and longer nights that gently lull us into rest and restoration. I've heard this time referred to as a sacred pause. And then I remember that trees only appear to be dormant while their roots continue to grow, all the while sinking deeper into the earth. Maybe we too grow deeper as we take our sacred pause. xx