I used to make magic. Well, magical symbols. Headological symbols. Usually filled with feathers and beads and runic rhymes. But not always. Sometimes they were virtual cut and paste. Hey, whatever works. (Some links on that 2003 post no longer work.)
It has been said that the difference between headology and psychiatry is that, were you to approach either with a belief that you were being chased by a monster, a psychiatrist will convince you that there are no monsters coming after you, whereas a headologist will hand you a bat and a chair to stand on.
It’s been a long time between synchronistic symbolisms. And now it’s spring. And now it’s time, says my Granny Weatherwax self.
This for b!X: to bring good fortune, help dreams come true. As real as headology. It will be mailed tomorrow.
A circle fashioned of the flexible willow in our front yard and the ornamental tree planted in the back yard in memory of his father, covered in the colors of Scopio (black) and Luck (red). Two feathers from his nephew’s collection. A ring threaded with amber and coral brought back from Poland by his grandmother. And in the center, a jade carving that belonged to his dad connected to an “old woman” milagro.
Because, you never know.
My son-in-law says it’s his lucky number, so he and my daughter were married on May 24th, fourteen years ago. I hope that they had a Happy Anniversary today. I made dinner — spicy glazed shrimp over pasta with a double chocolate mouse pie for dessert. I even did the dishes (that’s usually my son-in-law’s job). And my grandson dressed like a waiter in a fancy restaurant and poured the champagne, served the dinner and dessert, and cleaned the table after.
It was a nice day all-around, even though it was muggy and the mosquitoes were out having a great time.
I’ve always wanted to grow calla lilies, and today my daughter planted the pot of them I bought last weekend. I couldn’t resist buying them because it was the first time I had ever come across a whole blooming pot of them for sale. I might have liked a different color, but those were the only ones available. They won’t last through the winter in our planting zone, but I’m going to try to remember to dig up the bulbs and bring them inside during the fall. I really do like calla lilies. (duh)
All the rain we’ve been having has really stirred up the growing green.
When they bought this house, I sent them an odd tree I had seen somewhere called a “Harry Lauder’s Walking Stick.” From here: This shrub reaches a height of 8′-10′, with a similar spread. The flowers of Harry Lauder’s walking stick are yellowish-brown “catkins,” as on pussy willows. The blooms appear in early to middle spring. However, this shrub is not grown primarily for its blooms but for its unusual branching pattern, which is indicated by its other common names: corkscrew filbert and contorted hazelnut. For as you can see from the picture, its branches contort themselves in every which way, resembing corkscrews.
Right now, ours is only a couple of feet tall and is covered with spring leaves. But in the fall you can see the screwy branches. In a few years, it’s going to be a real eye-catcher around here.
Our gardens around the house are fun and funky, evolving as the spirit moves one or the other of us. I’m rather partial to the little troll house that sits in the middle of a section of flourishing green at the end of a little path. 
No one seems to be living there yet, but, certainly, any on of our resident chipmunks would be welcome to move in.
Meanwhile, over where I put a bird feeder so my cat can sit on her perch and watch the activity out her window, a male grackle visits several times a day. I’ve never had a grackle feed at a feeder; they usually just eat what falls on the ground.
Although the grackle is often considered part of the blackbird family, along with crows and starlings, it actually is not. It is part of the meadowlark and oriole family of birds. It is a large black bird with an extra-long tail. About its head and shoulders are iridescent feathers that change from blue to green to purple or bronze, depending on the light.
This coloring often reflects a need for those to whom the grackle comes to look at what is going on in their life differently. It says that situations are not what they appear to be and you may not be looking at them correctly–particularly anything dealing with the emotions.
Keep in mind that black is the color of the inner and the feminine. The purple and bronze coloring about the head especially usually indicates that emotions are coloring our thinking process. The grackle can help us to correct this.
Spring. Newness. Hope. Magic.
(for lack of anything else to say, I’m posting here a poem a day….)
That first winter
(our strange shrimp-shaped child),
locked into the old railroad apartment
(our brassy new marriage keys) —
with the snow seeping through
the chipped bathroom bricks,
I nursed that child
before the open oven,
and we each took showers
with bathroom door hopefully open
to the kitchen’s meager warmth.
Our imaginative landlord
(poet-pretender,
great making of Christmas plum pudding)
attached an infra-red lamp
to the toilet,
mistakenly assuming
that plumbing, like flesh,
would succumb to its magic.
We could afford to laugh,
then, shivering
behind the radiant lie
that lined the loose edges
of the closed bathroom door.
I still feel the cold
of that first winter,
the cold of that closed door.
Cold as hell.
c elf 1960s
((For lack of anything else to say, I’m posting here a poem a day….)
Her Daughter’s Destiny
If she mirrored me
she refused to know it,
choosing, instead,
the finer lines
of her father’s reflection.
There were times
I wished her gone,
her and her herd
of fragile unicorns –
or cornered where
I couldn’t watch
their golden dances
filling the space in my mirror.
When she left that spring,
the corners grew shadows.
She set free the unicorns
and took all of my mirrors
with her.
……….
Her Son Leaving Home
Young Dionysus,
a faded blue bandana
circling his head like a halo,
layers himself with choices
forgotten by the gods.
He smells of earth, of dreams,
of rain that flows with ease
along acres of hilly woodland,
filing some final need
in the deep hollows of stones.
He releases himself to the magic of motley,
to the wind, alive in his unbound hair,
to sweet pickings, scattered
like ripening berries
along miles of roadside vines.
As he leaves, the hearthfire
crackles softly.
Blackbirds loose feathers
from the heights of sky-borne oaks,
and honey bees sing to the sun.
c elf (1970s and 1980s)
Since there is no urgency for me to get up mornings, I tend to lie abed for hours, drifting in and out of sleep. During that time in the morning is when I dream — complex narratives always set in the same dream universe, consisting of the same winding urban streets that rise up from a river and move out into an area that is reminiscent of the neighborhood where I grew up. Somewhere in the mix is a school/college campus and a hotel on a lake where there is always some kind of social dancing going on.
It is as though when I dream I move into a life in some parallel dimension where the topography reflects a mixture of places I have known in this life. They are recognizable places, but they are enough off-kilter to become problematic. I am often unsure or lost in this dreamscape, which is populated both with people I know and don’t know, and always fraught with distressing situations.
I dream these dreams almost every morning and wake up tired and disoriented.
Of course, the answer is to get up early and avoid the dreams. Somehow I can’t. I’m always curious to find out what is going on in this other life of mine.
This morning I dreamed of my cousins who are in Florida — two couples whom I haven’t seen in several years. In real life, one of their sons and my son were born a month apart. In my dream they were both the age of my grandson, now — around 9 years old. And my son was also my grandson. And there was a frisky puppy — a long-haired reddish puppy whose fur I could feel — soft and silky — as I held onto its collar to keep it from jumping on my son/grandson.
In the dream, one cousin was showing me around her opulent apartment. There was really no point to the story. (Even as in this life, there seems to often be no point.)
Nothing was resolved before I woke up with one of my favorite Mary Travers’ songs from the 1970s — “Morning Glory” — running through my mind. I spent some time today doing an internet search for the lyrics, but couldn’t dig them up anywhere. I remember them as something like
I’ve got to figure out how to make myself go to bed earlier and get up earlier. I wonder if it’s just how my biorhythms are?
It’s March 11, 2011.
There was a terrible earthquake in Pacific Ocean today, and Japan is being hit with 30 foot waves. Tsunamis of various sizes are headed toward both North and South America. Untold lives are being destroyed even as I write this.
Rebellion and unrest in the Middle East and Africa continues to escalate, as untold lives are being destroyed even as I write this.
The state of Wisconsin is leading the way toward an America I’m not going to want to live in, and untold lives are being destroyed even as I write this.
It is my 71st birthday today, and, as I watch and listen to the devastating events going on all around me, I am grateful for the life I have right now, uneventful ‘tho it often is.
And that’s why today, on my 71st birthday, I am filling out forms to be a hospice volunteer — because I am used to doing useful things and need to do something useful with the time I have left.
When I moved here to be with my daughter and family two years ago — after almost a decade of care-giving and 40 years of various other “useful” jobs — I thought that I would be happy hanging-out, relaxing, reading, doing my crafts, gabbing with my daughter, playing with my grandson.
Well, I’ve been doing that for two years, and now I’m ready to get on with some kind of more useful life.
There are about five nursing homes in my immediate area, all of which have hospice units. I’ve been on the receiving end of hospice services as a family member through both my dad’s and mom’s illnesses. I know, from experience, what kind of support people in that situation need. And, since I was an undertaker’s daughter, death has been a part of my life since I was born. It is as though I am coming full circle.
I’m not doing this for altruistic reasons. My reasons are rather selfish. I need to interact with and meet other people (and I discovered that the gym and senior citizen center are just not my style); I need to do something useful.
And that “usefulness” might even spill over to my creative crafting, since I would be interested in making the kind of “memory pillow” that I made for my mother for others who might find them comforting.
So, at 71 I’m shifting gears yet another time so that my time here has meaning for me. My mother lived until she was 94. I don’t know if I’ll last that long, but, while I’m here, I want to be engaged with the world in a more meaningful way.
For my birthday dinner, my daughter is making my favorites: shrimp scampi and key lime cheesecake.
It’s my 71st birthday, and, even as I write this, my life is good. But as I watch the news on CNN, I wonder — for how long?
Your eight-year old can’t go to sleep because he’s crying so hard. He’s crying so hard because, he says, he doesn’t want to ever die and he doesn’t want anyone he knows to ever die because he doesn’t want to be alone.
You don’t really believe in “God,” and don’t believe in heaven. You’re not religious, and the Golden Rule is about the closest you come to embracing any doctrine, although you try to pass along a moral and ethical code that you hope he understands and continues to live by.
But what about “after?” What about after this life? What do you tell your eight-year old that will calm his fears without outright lying?
What you do is write a book that explains who and what we are in a way that will address his fears yet still be in the realm of what might actually and scientifically happen. ( After all, Carl Sagan thought so.)
And you call this book Spark.
Go over online and read through Spark — and see if it’s the answer you’re looking for.
This is the kind of day for skiing or snowshoeing or snow-fort building. But I don’t do any of them. I can’t seem to even walk very far these days.
But today, with the sky a clear blue and a sun that has finally left the falling snow behind, I bundle up and get myself outside for the first time in weeks. I take a short walk around a few blocks — just about as much as my joints can take today.
When I come back to the house, I haul out a stool and sit on the small porch. I close my eyes. For a moment I am back in my babyhood carriage — the old kind from the 40s, with an oil cloth cover that rolls up to my chin, so that I am warm and snuggly inside, even though my nose is cold. The sun is warm and bright on my closed eyelids. I want to be a child again.
I think of my mother — how young and happy she was when she pushed me in that carriage — how disappointment and dementia drained from her spirit what was the best of her. I think of her because her 95th birthday would have been this month; she would have made it had she lived for three more months. But it’s just as well that she didn’t; those months would have only extended her hell on earth.
I could sit here all day, pretending. But I have a math challenge to confront — figuring out how to use a sweater pattern I like but using a different weight yarn and different size needles. It’s all algebra, but math-challenged that I am, I have to work myself up to grappling with setting up the equations. I can’t seem to keep my body in shape, but I try to do so with my brain.
I do have to deal with my body, though, despite the back problems. I’m hoping I can try the “chair yoga” this week at the senior center in town — that is if it’s not canceled again because of a another snow storm. And I’ve begun firing up my wii around 4 p.m. every day just to do some balance and aerobic exercises, which I seem to sorely need.
We are all waiting for spring. But for today, I’ll take the sun on snow.
snow up to his 8-year-old waist; he dives in and swims