Signs, signs, everywhere are signs...

A week or two ago, I took advantage of the lovely weather to take a walk with a friend and shoot the breeze, just to share what was going on in our lives. Lately I've been quite worried about several of my friends, and I was letting my walking partner know all of my concerns, as they have been in the forefront of my thoughts. I looked down at the sidewalk and saw a playing card at my feet - the Queen of Hearts. A bell rang in the back of my mind that this meant something, but I couldn't remember just what, so I picked up the card and put it in my wallet, planning on deciphering it later. When we were retracing our steps to end the walk, I noticed another card on the ground near where I'd found the first one. Wondering if this might be the second half to whatever message I was supposed to be getting, I picked it up as well, even though it was soaked through...although it had barely been sprinkling. It was another Queen of Hearts.

Now I could have overlooked finding the first card alone as an obvious coincidence - it was a neighborhood with plenty of kids, who could have been playing with a deck of cards and forgotten to clean them up. But the second card being exactly the same as the first, as well as both cards being directly in my path, gives me a bit more pause about the whole situation and makes me more inclined to believe that this really is the universe trying to let me know something.

The Queen of Hearts corresponds to the Queen of Cups in tarot, and every source I saw during my research mentioned the word "compassion." This card denotes someone who cares a lot about others, which is of course a good thing, unless it's taken too far. There's the possibility of this card showing up in a situation when someone is putting their cares about others above their own cares, sometimes even to a dangerous level. I don't think I'm in any danger of completely forgetting myself for others, but there is the fact that, when my friend and I started talking and she asked me what had been going on in my life, the first thing I thought of was my worries about my friends, NOT what had been happening to me.

I know I'm being told something. I think it's something along the lines of "lighten up a little bit!" or "don't worry so much about what you can't change!" or even "remember yourself!" I'd welcome any other views on the matter, especially the bit about the second card being all wet. Totally can't get that part.

In other news, I'm making yogurt at least once a week and it is better every time :D

BODY/MIND/BRAIN: Treehugging, Pushing the Limits and Being a Geek

Well, tis the season, once again. It's been a bit of a strange one, overall - the first time in years that I'm actually living with my folks, getting to them and my sisters again after years of being the cool absentee sister who swooped in for the holidays and then was gone again. There's been a fair amount of familial strife in there, but for the most part it's been fairly painless. It's also the first time I've observed the winter solstice as a holiday, not just an interesting astronomical event. I've been poking around for some small thing I can do by my currently solitary self, haven't found anything yet but I'm sure I'll be able to figure something out in time.

Usually the tradition is that on the evening of my mother's birthday (Nov 30), we all go out as a family and pick out a Christmas tree to take home. This year, however, my dad had helped with a Christmas service as a nursing home on that day and was just "too Christmassed out" to do anything else dealing with the season. So we left it for the time being and went on about normal daily matters until just the other day, when my mom went out by herself and came back with literally the biggest tree we've ever had. To get it into the stand alone took quite a bit of finagling, with my sister and I both lifting it into the thing, then me holding it up while she tightened the base. Yep, that "treehugging" in the post title is quite literal. And this is going to sound either impossibly dorky or hippyish or both, but it's really something of a zen experience - your senses are completely taken up by the tree: the feel of the needles on your arms and face, the heady scent of pine all arond you. It sounds silly, but that was probably the first time I'd felt really in the spirit of the season. It probably speaks to my pagany soul in a way - that of all the many and varied traditions in my family about this time of year, the one that sticks the most is the tree itself.

I also made what I consider a pretty damn huge breakthrough this past week. I've been following a running program lately that has me running for a few minutes, walking a bit and then repeating the process for 30 minutes 5 times a week, and on Wednesday evening I decided that I'd had enough with the stopwatch for then and that I'd just run and walk as the mood struck me. After running for a little while it occurred to me to just see how long I could go on running -to test the limits of my endurance, if you will. Now, keep in mind that I had NEVER run over about 5 minutes straight before that I remember, but I'd been keeping up with the program and thought I could maybe manage between 5 and 10 if I paced myself right. Well, that night I ran for 20 minutes straight, without stopping once. This may seem small to some, but to me it was like finishing a marathon. I felt like a goddess.

Lastl and briefly: I got a laptop! It's a brand that no one knows about yet, which is why I could get a machine with such great specs for such a great price. Hopefully the novelty of it will be slow to wear off, helping me get back into the habit of posting more often. But for now I'll bid goodnight - or rather, good morning, on this very new Solstice Day!

-N

MIND/BRAIN/SPIRIT: Knitting, Entrepreneurship and Awareness

I have been knitting like a fiend these past several days. I'm making a sweater (my first!) for my sister out of this absolutely luscious yarn - soft, fine alpaca, in a deep jewel-toned watercolory mix of blues and greens - and have already finished most of it in just a few days. My mother is astounded with how fast I can knit, and truth be told I'm surprising myself a little - I actually knit so much that I broke the skin on my thumb yesterday (but it's since healed over and is getting nicely calloused). It got me thinking, however - the main drawback towards making an attempt to sell my creations, online or in local boutiques, has been the fact that it wouldn't be worth the time it would take - I always assumed that if I charged no more than the price of the yarn plus the cost of making it in minimum-wage hours, it would add up to far too much for anything larger than a hat, pretty much. Lately, however, I seem to have become a faster knitter even than I used to be, and so it just might be worthwhile (as well as an interesting experiment).

The experimental part would be tied into the fact that I'm going to start taking classes in business with a concentration in e-commerce in the spring. It might be interesting to see how much natural aptitude I've got at this before I officially learn anything about it, and how much better I can get once I am actually schooled in the subject. The first thing to do, at any rate, is to collect a number of patterns and designs that are mine enough (that is, altered enough from the patterns on which I base my creations) to sell without being a plagiarist. I also need to get everything that's been floating around in my head for years and actually put it down on paper. I think the hardest part will be pricing the stuff - I was looking on etsy.com the other day for pricing information and saw stuff that I could make in a couple days tops (read: a lot closer to the beginner's level than I am) priced for $120, $150, upwards of $200! If we go by a scale based on fineness and complexity of the garment, the sweater I'm making now would be at the upper end of that range, simple based on the gauge (number of stitches per inch, which translates as fineness of the knitted fabric)!

So yes, that's my newest project thus far. I've had the bug before and slowly get closer to actually doing something with it every time the cold season rolls around. I'm pledging now to have sold at least 10 large pieces (sweaters, shawls, etc) by winter solstice in 2009 - how that will be accomplished remains to be seen.

Awareness is next on the list of graces, and it's a toughie. On the one hand, I think it's absolutely essential - as children of the earth, one of our responsibilities is to know what's going on with our mother and all the rest of our siblings, and to do less would be to deny our connection to every other being on this planet, and to the planet herself. On the other hand, sometimes it can be just too painful. There was a time when I simply stopped reading the newspaper (apart from the crossword) because the glut of bad news - wars and rumors of wars, brother killing brother, and all the rest - was too much for me to handle along with the stresses of my own life. Too many horrible things over which I had absolutely no control; it was a choice between continuing to be aware of what was going on in the world and not crying every morning when I read the news.

I am older now, though, and somewhat stronger. I've come to the conclusion that anyone who can take the emotional pain of knowing about tragedy without being able to do anything about it simply must make themselves aware of the goings-on of the world - for the simple fact that the more people ignore something bad or wrong, the more leeway it has to continue. The world turned a blind eye towards Hitler and his rise to power and terror in his own country, and only took notice when he started to seriously threaten the rest of the world. We as a planet cannot afford to make anything close to the same mistake again.

So awareness is definitely on my list. Next up is caring, which should be up soonish, as I'm on break now. W00t!

-N

MIND/SPIRIT: The Lake Isle of Innisfree

Well, this was going to be a post about awareness, the next grace on Sylvan's list, as well as some general updates and such. However, I've been somewhat distracted from that - as I was reading through the day's postings, I noticed that the article on pomanders linked to through JPC's blog was entitled "Golden Apples of the Sun." Being something of a lit. nerd, I remembered that this was a line from a poem by W. B. Yeats, but couldn't remember the rest, so I looked it up - the poem is called "The Song of Wandering Aengus" and is a beautiful, complete story in only three stanzas that I won't spoil, so click on the link and read it now.

However, as lovely as that poem is, it's not my favorite of Yeats'. My favorite is much more popular and over-anthologized, but even the glare of too much popularity can't obscure the gentle evocativeness of "The Lake Isle of Innisfree," which is as follows:

I will arise and go now, and go to Innisfree,
And a small cabin build there, of clay and wattles made:
Nine bean-rows will I have there, a hive for the honey-bee,
And live alone in the bee-loud glade

And I shall have some peace there, for peace comes dropping slow
Dropping from the veils of the morning to where the cricket sings;
There midnight's all a-glimmer, and noon a purple glow,
And evening full of linnet's wings

I will arise and go now, for always night and day
I hear lake water lapping with low sounds by the shore
While I stand on the roadway, or on the pavements grey
I hear it in the deep heart's core.

Yeats wrote this when he was a young man of about my own age (23, I think) living in London. At the time the Irish were still quite looked down upon by the English, and Yeats, with his Sligo accent (in the West of Ireland - somewhat equivalent in American terms to that of the Deep South or mountain areas) must have been especially marginalized. Also, the island he based his dreams on was not viewed as such a picturesque place by the locals, who gave it the unseemly name of "Rat Island" before he rechristened it, and the last I knew, they were still calling it that, unaware of the dreams of a tiny, peaceful Avalon drawn for the world by one of their countrymen. Whatever his neighbors called it, it could still be the focus of Waldenesque daydreams for a lonely young man living among strangers in the middle of a cold, dark, grey city.

I won't go into deep detail about the imagery of the poem or wax on much longer about how it is the perfect escape. I'll only say that this tiny, perfect picture of a peaceful life spent in the midst of nature is, essentially, what I want my life to be. It is what I have longed for through all the long hours of work and study in the past several years, the dream I barely dare to wish for because it doesn't fit in with the plan of what other people want for me. It is nothing like the streamlined, modern daydreams of my father and sisters, full of nice cars and big houses and power in the form of too much money - but it is my dream, and I know that I am not alone in wishing for it - there must be others who, too, "hear it in the deep heart's core."

-N

MIND/SPIRIT/something like that

So I might have to makeup a new topic heading for these posts that are not quite worldly enough to be MIND but not quite SPIRIT material, just random musings. MUSE, perhaps? Anyways...

I was talking to T the other day, and he brought up what I think is a very interesting thought. Basically it goes this: pretty much every task or project, large or small, that you takes on reflects somehow on your entire life, or rather how you want your life to be. Specifically, in my case, T wondered if all the work I'm doing on the garden is a metaphor for what I'm trying to do with my life in general.

When I started, the place was not quite a mess and had a decent basic setup, but it was a mix of boring bare dirt that was heavy and compacted from being ignored for too long and ugly invasive overgrown old foundation plantings. The first thing to do was to uproot and throw out everything I didn't want and dig up the soil, throwing everything in to an ugly, albeit temporary, chaos. This part is the most backbreaking and the least immediately satisfying - especially discovering bucketfuls of gravel in the soil that make it impossible to do quick work with the big shovel and force me to crouch down and pick each one out with a trowel - but even more so overall, as each day of work just reveals more of what still needs to be done. Deturfing the new flowerbed means I need to dig up all the newly-exposed soil there. Digging up and loosening the soil means I need to amend it and plant before the frost, as well as moving a good volume of soil somewhere else, as decompacting it means there seems like about twice as much as there used to be. And at the end of the day, it still looks far worse than I want it to, with mounds of bare soil everywhere - very unfinished.

Making all the plans for the future is a bit more fun, but still just as hard work. All the pretty plans and drawn-out diagrams, while certainly fun to put together, have to work with the existing space and criteria using plants that will work in the area, considering all colors and textures of each plant (flowering, fall color and any winter interest). I want the garden to be lovely and useful in all seasons, flowing gracefully through the year without any "down time," as well as being low-maintenance (taking care of itself, basically) and pleasing not only to those people who see and use it most often but everyone else who might come across it. It's going to take some years to get it to that point, and I realise that no one else is going to want to work on it, as least not as much as I'm willing to do, so I need to commit to this now.

I'm sure I could go on with this and find many more metaphors and probably some interesting revelations, but right now I need to go finish packing, as I'm leaving for a visit to Ohio early tomorrow morning. Yay!

-N

BODY/MIND/a little SPIRIT: Just some loony musings

This morning I began to have a strange feeling. If I had to place it in my body I'd be torn between putting it in the pit of my stomach and at the nape of my neck, just at that place where if someone grabs you there, your shoulders automatically hunch up. A couple of times I felt physically ill. I shrugged it off on the fact that I'd just eaten egg salad one time and found dozens of nasty white grubs in the turf I was digging the other time - but these things do not usually affect me, especially the grubs - I've been digging and de-turfing for a while now and come across hundreds of the little buggers in the past few weeks, and this is the first time that the bile has actually risen in my throat at the sight of them. I even got rather weepy a couple of times - I was thinking about W, it's true, but I thought I'd gotten to a point where I can think about him without instantly breaking into tears. But most of the time it's just a sort of eerie quiet nagging - or, as a song that just played on my Pandora station puts it, "a vague feeling of dread." Very apt.

While poking around on the intarwubs today I noticed on the nifty little gadget that my friend now has on her blog that it is, in fact, a full moon tonight. Now, let me say that I have not been keeping track of this at all, but it does seem to me that I've noticed before, at times when I felt undefinably uneasy, that it turned out to be a full moon. I've definitely had many times when I just felt "off" for some reason, even way back when I was a young'un - I verbalised it then as a feeling that "something's going to happen" but nothing ever really did, that I recall.

Noticing this possible correlation today, I did some more poking of the wubs and, while I can't find any definitive scientific studies or that kind of thing, there are a lot of comments on public forums from people saying that they feel different around the full moon, particularly mothers saying that they can track their children's behavior by the full moon, or rather that they can guess when the moon is full by how their kid is acting (it makes a difference - if you look at the calendar and expect your child to act up around a certain time, I assume that you will be more likely to notice instances of acting up around this time). Other people say that they can never sleep the night of a full moon, and wake up with the night sweats in a cool room.

There's also the thought in the back of my mind that I am feeling this way because there is something I should be doing right now, something thatI am neglecting or forgetting, and this unease is just a reminder to do it. As soon as I sign off here and drink my warm milk, I think I'll go light some candles and ponder a bit, maybe figure out what that something is. I definitely want to keep tracking the mood and matching it up to the seasons and moon phases, if there is a match. I probably won't do it entirely here, but instead write it down in a notebook and summarise my findings. Goodnight for now.

-N

BODY/MIND: Digging is hella good for you!

Apologies for the nonexistent post yesterday - I have been working like a dog for the past couple of days, and LOVING it. My parents asked me when I first came back down here if I could do anything for "the grounds" - they're thinking about selling the house in a few years, and the lawns and gardens and various other areas around it leave quite a bit to be desired. We live pretty much in the woods, which means grass does not grow well even in the areas that we do bother to rake, and the rest is ankle-deep in oak leaves year-round. Way back in the woods there's nice stretches of moss and wild ginger and such, but the area nearest the house needs to look much more cared-for, both for our enjoyment now and also for when the house goes on the market.

Right in front of the house there's a little bed with some established boxwoods and an azalea, and a roughly semicircular area that used to be split into three "slices" when my sisters and I all lived here, and we'd each have free rein with our section. That's long been overgrown with some boring, uber-invasive liriope and all the other flowers had died except for a huge spindly Brazilian blue sage, which I tried to salvage by dividing the huge-ass clump of roots and putting it in several pots, but we'll see next spring if that did any good. Then there's the sidewalk, some sickly lawn and the "natural area," which started as a place we were too lazy to mow and is now a kind of rocky leaf-covered desert with a few trees here and there and the ugly concrete well cover.

First thing to physically do was rip out the liriope and all its roots (and lemme tell you, it did NOT want to go) and dig up the entire front garden area, avoiding the bushes, to loosen up the soil. Still working on that, but right now there's about a 4x8 space that's dug up and loosened to a depth of a foot, pretty tough going as our soil is heavy red Carolina clay and full of stones. I also convinced my parents (well, I convinced my mom, and now my dad just has to put up with it XD) to cut out some of the lawn and put in another bed across the sidewalk from the existing one. I laid the edge I wanted out on the lawn with stones and cut about half the turf off that area today - OMG! Grass is evil, not only because it's a monoculture that sucks the soil dry but because it personally hates me. I worked for at least a couple hours basically just scraping the grass off this area, not even started on digging it yet. I think I might need one of these for that.

Digging is fantastically good exercise. I have to use my legs to shove the spade into the ground, my arms to pry the soil up and lift it onto my pile, and my abs and torso constantly to stabilize the whole process. As a result, I hurt like a mofo, especially my back, since I'm constantly bending, twisting and straightening again, and my forearms, from prying the stones stuck in the soil loose with my hands and then throwing them to the side. But it's definitely the good kind of hurt - I can feel myself getting stronger, can actually feel my muscles getting harder. Just a little bit, but it's there. So I don't feel quite so bad for skipping my runs for the past couple of days, especially as I'm starting work in the garden at 8 or 9 in the morning and working for several hours straight at a time.

Besides all the physical labor that has to be done, the main real work is actually planning what all is going to go in the nice new beds once they're done being loosened and mixed with fertilizer and such. This is not a small project. I've got to take into account the fact that my mom doesn't like to do work in the garden, and my dad usually doesn't but on occasion will do far too much. They both like foliage and fragrant plants, especially as my dad is colorblind and can't tell the difference between red and green, but can certainly appreciate nice shapes and contrast. On the other hand, the garden needs to look physically appealing and inviting to everyone who views it. So basically my job is to figure out, of the certain plants that will even grow under these conditions, what is the perfect mix of architecturally interesting plants, fragrant plants and regular flowering plants, and how do I arrange it in such a way that it needs the least amount of care? Added to that, I need to make the garden interesting all year long, and any one plant blooming at any particular time needs to fit in with everything else - the color scheme will change from season to season but everything needs to flow together seamlessly, with one plant coming into its prime just as another in the same space fades for the year. Now, don't get me wrong, it's a fascinating project, and exactly what I've been studying on my own for years and years, but it's SO HARD. After thinking and drawing and researching for about a month, I'm just starting to get a set idea of what I want where for spring alone.

My mind has been so busy - trying to get to sleep last night I kept thinking of all the different plant combinations I have in mind for a particular area. Nettle tea has definitely helped - I've got tons of energy and the mental stamina to research plants for hours on end while I'm not working outside. I'm now drinking 3 or 4 cups a day; still not using the full cup of herb as suggested by Susun Weed, though, about 1/3c per 3c water and it seems to be working just fine. If it's worked this well with this little (relatively), however, I'm wondering it I won't be something of a hummingbird once I try it full-strength. Whatever happens, I'll be sure to document it all here! And I'll post pictures of the work in progress and the rough plans I have as soon as I can take them.

Goodnight, all

-N