the Ritual is to have crab legs.  Drenched in butter.  Then the Calendars.

Just as i was timing those long legs,

 

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it came FAST and as you can see, Out of the Blue.  Thunder,  lightning 

 

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a torrent of Rain and then,  hail.    I'd fed early and good thing,  they'd gotten a few mouthfulls before Running for Cover.  And it seemed that it got Dark,  almost instantly.

so now the long slow pleasure of the Calendars.  Going through each month,  noting things to remember from the year gone by at the top of the page of the months to come.  the Re View.  remembering.  awareness of time passing.  I love this a Lot.

 

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going through.  Month to month.  transposing some things that are on going.  Mostly looking at so much mundane but some,  not at all.  a sense of continuity.  of small things that matter.  I'll need to add some things to December…like this storm.  Like it was the time i made the collage matchboxes for the kids.  a few more things.

 

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here it is.  I'll go back,  maybe a word at a time and fill in the threads.  but it's done.  And i became aware while finishing that it was this,  most likely,  that caused all that stress in the spinal cord.  The tension.  I could feel it today and try as i would,  could not find a way to do it without that tension.  I sat on the futon couch this time.  Breathed.  changed position.  but still….the physical focus of it.  

the ARNICA proved miraculous.  Today there was only a very vague sense of something.  so i would gladly give a thousand percent Testimony for Boron Arnica Montana.  I'll continue it for one more day.

so here we are.  the eve of 2017.  ok.  

 

 

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22 responses to “the Eve of Begin Again”

  1. joanne Avatar
    joanne

    Happy New Year. I found your tradition of the calendars a very good idea. I hope you do not mind my taking it up. I have also copied your Metta to write in my new calendar. I think I will change the last line to may you move through life with ease.
    I wish I had known of the crab legs drenched in butter. I love them just that way. I will add that to my 2017 calendar–for December. Thank you for being you.

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  2. Acey Avatar
    Acey

    i too have calendar rituals that are long standing and deeply meaningful to me. this is another map fragment,i think: building-in time and space to immerse in whatever brings pleasurable meaning and depth. To build resiliency as well as strength is what i imagine. This year i have a really high class calendar selected when somebody unexpected gave me an equally unexpected gift card: paintings by Wolf Khan. There are many trees of strong vibration with wonderful smears and streaks of unexpected colors. many of the paintings from the calendar are in his online gallery here: http://www.wolfkahn.com/artworks/item/paintings
    anyway – while i wait to make actual contact w/. robin i did think of something that is really my own story to tell concerning her particular brand of insight. And it contains a literal map fragment! While i was still adjusting to living here and feeling a bit tentative about how to grow closer to the land in ways that didn’t really impose too much of my ideas and ambitions upon it, I sought greater intimacy by embarking on something I’d done at my former home during the first full year we lived there. In a largely silent and non-thinking way I set to work on something that quickly named itself: ghost mapping.
    can’t remember if you were reading at my blog then or just following more generally my comments at jude’s? But i had taken pieces of very fine italian linen. silk gauze, raw silk, silk habotai and some silk chiffon and charmeuse. all just plain white or natural cream color. These pieces were wrapped or buried within different trees, in the ground or otherwise secured within other places throughout the landscape.
    Really it was one of those channeled esp sort of experiences like preparing a flower essence or searching for butterfly chrysalids. In terms of what was “supposed” to happen with the fabric, it was/is really nothing whatsoever like the popularized eco dying. It’s just about soaking up the vibrations and in that process, yes, plants and trees do leave their imprint. It is a process I first explored through creative direction from a fiber artist named christine teasley. don’t think she has an online presence with art to view or writing. The project i reference evolved in the late 90’s within shared work for a collaborative fiber arts project she devised and named Pieces of Place. That methodology was ‘edited’ in my mind for the purpose of ghost mapping but it didn’t feel like i was thinking it out. i was just aware of what should or shouldn’t happen even if i didn’t know why. or what might follow.
    i imagined i’d leave the cloth markers outside for a full year but some of the pieces started calling for me to collect them after just a couple of months. the first one that called – and did so really loudly – was a piece of very stiff gauze that was originally a napkin made by my great grandmother. this piece was partially decomposed and much softer. There were dirt stains on the remains of the cloth. Once I had studied and held it for awhile inside the house i was drawn to gently meld the tattered gauze to a modest rectangle of leftover linen. I stitched the former napkin in place in a kind of slow-moving trance. my hands just seemed to know what to do and at the end of it i was shocked to find I had fashioned the silhouette of a louisa may alcott sort of massachusetts lady. i was greatly suprised she was so anglo and clearly not the sort of female i might have imagined i’d “find” as a ghost. But she was herself. And she wanted to go back outside! I took old fashioned clothes pins and hung her in the snowball viburnum bush by our little frog pond for a couple of months. Now she resides with a few other less discernible stitched ghosts and the flower rooster you sent me.
    They are waiting for me to get my act together and buckle down to bring about the articulation they seek.
    Back when i first brought the stitched piece in from the fog pond, i told robin all of this over the telephone and then expressed some doubt about the form that had been hiding (i assumed) within the old well where the napkin had been buried under a few rocks. She asked how i could possibly doubt such a powerful experience and i said well, this lady. she’s pretty obviously anglo and very lady-of-the-house looking and that surprises me.
    but robin felt very strongly (this is pretty much our dynamic. we both feel things very VERY strongly and then speak of it to each other) it was NOT a surprise. for starters she encouraged me to talk about where i live specifically long enough to ascertain that this place was once part of a larger place – a 600 acre river settlement/plantation that existed long before this town and neighboring villages were incorporated. but i was still doubtful. i told her i had expected a wild haired curvy half naked goddess with maybe some horns and a long turtle shell necklace or something.
    well robin said, in a kind or oracular tone, that i already knew that sort of goddess really well. of course there would always be more to learn but, really, wasn’t this lady with the big bustled dress more of a new thing for me? A ghost that could easily reside within myself just as easily as i found it in the ground, underneath a rock? Could we imagine the patience involved with how long she had waited to be seen and known?
    Robin suggested that perhaps this woman was a ‘spirit fragment’ of an actual person who was never listened to very carefully in life, and so forth. She would just have done her work and cared for her people and thought her thoughts and felt her feelings very very privately and possibly in total silence where such matters are concerned. and I realized, well okay. I am half anglo, right? and I don’t, actually, listen to that part of myself all that often since the general voice and ongoing influence is so obviously all around me. So I don’t tend to give it much focused attention.
    I have since vowed to change that and do now try to more consciously and compassionately straddle two canoes, as the saying goes. Over time i have come to appreciate how these particular sort of soul and spirit fragments from anglo ladies who once lived where i live now might flock towards my project. Perhaps they loved it here ever bit as much as i do. perhaps they are part of what creates the long undulating rainbow ribbons that sometimes appear in pictures i take of the field gardens, etc.
    In terms of more generalized potential map fragments – one of the things i like best about robin is that she is so passionately intuitive and lovingly encourages the same kind of self-belief system in others. she gave my project a frame that i have felt having an ongoing impact on how i relate to actual people in this landscape – people who live here right now while i’m living here, too. i have become active in the community because of this MAP FRAGMENT – i have been following the path it charts and didn’t even think of it that way. Didn’t even when you started writing of map fragments right after That Thing took a form and purpose so difficult to accept.
    although i’ve explained what it all means to me specifically, i think anyone can form their own “point” to this anecdote. When i started to think about this the night after you asked if i’d share anything further related, i realized how timely the remembered incident actually was. it’s almost shocking i hadn’t made the connection sooner given how many of us have been saying we have to learn to become open to experiences and points of view different from our innate affinity groups etc. etc. And to accept difference as a soul-level embellishment woth of study and perhaps even eventual admiration of some kind rather than seeing/feeling a barbed wire fence it would be dangerous to embrace.
    When i remembered robin’s part in the process i also reminded myself: i have helped others locally to begin and in a few cases even complete landscape-driven ghost maps of their own but mine lies unattended and largely un-materialized. the ritual of turning from one calendar time-marker to another inspires me to change that. This story reminds me to keep the vibration high and clear rather than getting lost in the turmoil and confusion that will surely continue to abound.
    don’t know for sure but even despite the way too many TOO MANY words, i hoped you might embrace this story as part of a shared Eve.

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  3. vicky aka stichr Avatar

    i laughed and laughed the last time you mentioned the lack of butterfly calendars….because that is EXACTLY what my MIL sent me….but dear sweetie got me the freebie from the gas station, of Washington State things.
    and then i laughed again, just now….because i totally forgot to get out the calendar to work on today! totally. forgot. must be what happens when you suddenly become 60, but are determined to be 30.
    it’s ok. i wouldn’t be able to finish it til tomorrow anyway because i can’t change the calendar page until the first is really here. fate. karma. murphy’s law.
    i will look over both calendars…maybe cut them up and make one from 2. send you a butterfly.

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  4. Michelle in NYC Avatar

    Oh my that sudden storm.
    Oh my my the stitching wish more like an intention.
    Grateful for Arnica too and all the homeopathics I’ve come to know.
    I change calendars but not that ritual and I forget whats to be remembered having already three dates penciled in to the new one…including New Years day at Tibet house with 108 Hanuman Chalisas and rotating musicians, and the start of a new round of writing group on the 9th and the beginning of another ninety day ‘Commit to Sit’ on the 12th, and the Womens Protest March in NYC on the 21st day after my 74th birthday. Before I exhale it will be February!

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  5. Deb G Avatar

    Thinking of one of my grandmothers who has always wrote a little bit on her calendar each day. This year things have changed for her and I don’t think she has been.

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  6. jude Avatar

    I ordered a calendar from Valerianna. I like your tradition. It might work well for these new forgetful years.

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  7. Mo Crow Avatar

    what a storm to let go of the Old Year & bring in the New!

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  8. beth Avatar

    okay…………

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  9. cynthia Avatar
    cynthia

    so some humor to start this new year..imagine me me going out to check the water trough and get the snow off of the solar battery that keeps the fence charged..i noticed that the snow …which has been piling up since the Sunday before Thanksgiving…had lowered the fence way way down..and even though alan was so tired last night i ran in to get him up and out for an opinion check..so we were trying to fix the fence in the snow when alan turned and said..oh there is a cow in the garden….
    a note…cows leaping over fences look exactly like old nursery book pictures of cows jumping over the moon….
    so thee we were..me in my flannel nightgown and a sweatshirt and slippers..alan in sandals and jeans and a sweater..and large loose cows…steers so not as frightening but still very large and not so nimble on the icy snow..and neither were we..and they are eons younger….i ran in to get my cow pole that i keep by the door…seriously..alan got a bucket and some feed..mainly we were just trying to contain them and get them away from the hilly icy road…alan had them sort of cornered so i ran in and called josh ..i hate that cell phones do not work here…and went back out..after a while .that seemed forever..alan was herding with the grain bucket in front and i had the cow pole…and a shovel to prod them from the back..ok yes i wish i had a video..we must have looked so ludicrous..but mainly we were so scared..adrenaline charged..and trying to remember everything we have ever been told about herding cows…we have done this in the summer..but never on snow and ice..and the cows would slip as much as we did..it was… uhm … intense…who knew that i would ever hit a cow..much less hard enough to make him jump back over the fence…
    alan got back over the fence and it was really scary then..the cows were so hungry..we had not gotten hay out…in fact we had no hay…we were in the rain part of the forecast and there was still lots of hay down…..so who knew snow would come so unexpectedly and cover it all and the cows were so close to him..he couldn’t toss the grain..like that kind of close..finally he got it away from himself..tossing grain through the air..the cows ran after the grain and he scattered the rest and we made it out…alan went in and i stood guard until josh arrived..oh i was so happy to see him… he walked the long slippery boundaries of the meadow..pulling up the fencing..
    we are not usually scared of /frightened of the cows….but cows in the snow are a whole new experience..it was more a fear of slipping and falling..and subsequently being accidentally trampled ..these are the cows whose noses i scratch all summer after all..but now we are sitting here..we were laughingly calling our state post bovine syndrome..meadow said no ..we were adrenaline depleted..and sounded so very grown up.. so we totally lost it laughing..
    anyway ..hopefully the cows will go back to the farm this week..where they will have more shelter..lots of hay..and our meadow will be a quieter place..
    now with a new vision of ourselves…wranglers ????????
    so my plans of ritual and custom seem to have faded..and i imagine..some interesting aches later..i do not usually run through snow and slip slide on ice..but really imagine this with humor and join me in laughter..what an unexpected start to a new time..i was so happy with the thought of ease..now i am simply full of gratitude..and when i move again..for i am suddenly depleted of energy..although still smiling..so grateful for cows who decided to pillage the garden and the wildflower hill and not run down the road…the calendars may wait for tomorrow..i am also smiling over the small post at the top of this screen that tell me ..quite officially that ” New Year’s Day will be observed tomorrow ” i am assuming bowl games and parades… not to intere with the NFl..but for whatever reason..that small announcement alone could push me over some edge..i think i will join you in arnica smearing..
    in any case ..your storm was amazing and your goats..like the ones here make me smile with their own true selves emerging to us through your pictures….a very happy new year’s day..being observed here..right now..gentle day grace

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  10. dee Avatar

    the storm feels so right. big enough for the crack between years. signalling a collective disrupt. i love the sweatshirt. it must have been metta to stitch? I might have to make me one!

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  11. grace Avatar

    oh….hello, joanne…and yes…take anything, everything….
    you can find so many variations of Metta on Utube, it’s
    wonderful that you chose the sense of it that suits you…
    Thank YOU for coming here and being yourself. Please come more.

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  12. grace Avatar

    i remember, Acey…the Ghost Mapping…i loved reading it as you went. I love this and am reading and re reading again, again

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  13. grace Avatar

    i am really really GOOD with my Astrology Calendar…am just so
    ok without butterflies…

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  14. grace Avatar

    your calendar becomes mine

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  15. grace Avatar

    maybe someone can help her

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  16. grace Avatar

    all my years have been and are a blur

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  17. grace Avatar

    it was a GRAND and Surprising storm

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  18. grace Avatar

    yes, that’s it, isn’t it…just ok

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  19. grace Avatar

    i was holding my breath….couldn’t find the smile till the
    END and then, because both of you are so Grand in the middle
    of the night….our True Selves….oh, bless you and your
    best and fine Man

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  20. grace Avatar

    i am looking foward to what comes of it

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  21. Ali Avatar
    Ali

    Oh yes, and many times you will not know

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