obliquely perhaps…

Those who know me know that I am in thrall to the magic of my childhood world. Oh! Those days of jugglers and troubadors, of bonfires and street faires, creative colorful humans engaging in playful countercultural experimentation!
When I moved North in 1979, it was into a grey world covered in rain, not a rainbow banner to be found anywhere, I used to lament, lament! my perceived loss, but what I didn’t realize that the times had changed as well as my personal geography, and that the gypsy fortune tellers had packed up their caravans and receded- that the flames had died down to coals carefully packed into beds of moss and tucked into caches to wait out the Reagan years and all those bindles and bindles of cocaine…
My heart was such a cache. I could feel the presence of Wildness within it, but I was waiting all the while for some collective breath to blow those embers back into a living flame.
How wonderful not to be waiting anymore.
How wonderful to contain the story and the means to tell it.
How wonderful to know the Trick of seeing into the grey, and past it to the lightning flashes of color that are not separate from it….

Humans are waking up and that fire is burning again. I’m the proof.

The Faeries are back!

alice's patchy pants

The kids were discussing the behavior of 17 year olds, or high school seniors, or something.
Alice (age 16): “I’m going to rise above all that.”
Opal (age 13): “How are you going to rise above anything when you’re so short?”
Alice: “….mentally!”

my training is progressing nicely. Yoga again today, and some attention paid to diet over the last week.
I spent a wonderful afternoon in the kitchen, allowing my heart to choose ingredients. I made a lovely pot of greens and beef enough to last for three days. And I can wait patiently to try this winter pickle, with onions, yellow beet, and dried nettle. In a hot pepper brine reused from a friend’s pickle that I was saving.

winter pickle

There hasn’t been much stitching going on, but lots of play, lots of dance, and good company this week!