Lucky Me!

Lucky me! 

Billy bought me a new camera for my birthday and I have been having lots of fun with it. I love nothing more than just taking pictures of the birds and the bees and the butterflies.

Here's a shot of a honey bee in the Olympia veggie garden. We planted a long row of sunflowers. Just the other day Jackson realized we had robber bees trying to steal honey from the hive! Bill and I went over, and sure enough, you could see these ruthless bees from out of the garden trying to drag the guard the bees away from the door. Bill opened the hive and there is no sign they have made their way in to the gold yet. We're doing everything we can to save our bees.

On a hike up to Upper Lena Lake, Bill and I heard little bird sounds and stopped to watch these little babies just learning to fly! What a sweet moment to just get to watch them struggle to land and balance. This one posed for me quite a long time while I practiced with the new camera.

Thank you Billy!

It Was Last Night's Rain

It was last night's rain that made these daffodils fall splat.

and brought the slug that ate into the heart

while the others were turned away.

It was last night's rain that kissed this hellebore's faces

beat on the backs of this hellebore's heads

and left these hellebore leaves cuddled

while these ones huddled.

It was last night's rain that made this trillium lose her pollen

and this trillium keep her hat.


It was last night's rain that made this violet so shy

and this sedum sparkle

though this red currant cried

to see fungi town crumble.

Here's what remains of last night's rain.

In the lap of Mother Nature

Another post so soon? yes. I felt a need. Tomorrow I begin a retreat for 8 days. The retreat last summer was so sweet. I gained so much. I have to do it again.

It is wonderful when you are in a place of nature with no talking, no outside world, all your needs so easy to care for. It frees my mind to wind down its worrying and come to rest. Sad to say, I have been called "The Worrier Princess" quite a bit.

With my mind at rest I am so present. The world around me looks so vibrant and alive, which of course it is, but when my mind is full with thoughts I am so easily distracted.

When I can shift/change my perspective the whole world changes. I have had such beautiful experiences when I remember that my thoughts are directing my experience, and when I can observe my thoughts and their power to create, the shift happens.

Bill and I went for a long walk today. We finally found the eagles nest we knew was nearby. We weren't looking for it, but the sounds were so loud coming out of it, we couldn't miss it. Nearly every day there are two or three eagles circling over our neighborhood.

I also saw a male tanager today in the trees. It's bright orangey red head caught my eye. It is the first one I have seen at our house. I feel so blessed. When Bill and I sit in our living room we are looking directly out a huge picture window into the yard. We call it our TV. I have to say, we get the best reception.

OK, I will post when I return. I have some time left today to get some more work done before I leave, and I best get to it.

Where Velvet Comes From

These are my favorite kind of primroses. These dark purples are the first to bloom, but I have some pale periwinkle ones and some yellow ones that are so sweet looking and highly fragrant. These were the only plants I dug out of the ground when I left Vashon -- gifted to me by garden pal, Mary.

Primrose (An aberration, primroses are usually pentagonal) and fawn lily: hexagonal symmetry in the garden:

S-x In The Garden

Ok, now that I am working on a book called "S-x In The Garden" I have become very aware of my shy side. I am not usually comfortable mentioning the title without a little explanation that it is a plant book. Also, I am not very comfortable with the title. I am sure those of you who know me are saying to yourselves right now "she has a shy side?" So that explains the dilemma. I am an introvert and an extrovert. And while the book was totally about plant reproduction before, I will let you in on something: condoms are now part of the design creation, and this is only the beginning....

I can't write about s-x in the garden without mentioning trilliums.

We are very, very lucky to have so many trilliums in our yard. Because this land was logged so long ago, without earth scraping the entire area, we have many native plants on our property and in our neighborhood. Every spring we count the trilliums. About now some of the flowers are aging, and others have just begun blooming. It's nice long season. Bill counted right around 400 trilliums inside our property line today! It's amazing to us.

Why am I talking about trilliums? Well, this is something I didn't know until I met Bill: trilliums bloom white, and when they are fertilized they turn pink and then red. Though he said it differently. Something about how they are white till they have sex and this makes them blush and they turn red.



I can't say this is true of all trilliums, but it is definitely true of our local native ones.

I think this is a very fun thing to know. And when I first began thinking about S-x in the Garden, I thought it would be full of this kind of thing. But then I wanted to create a different kind of book. I wanted to get away from facts and information and get into something more subtle. So the book is happening, I am making it. I just didn't know I would be so shy to write about it!

The Geometry of Five & The Taste of Love

Looking at sources from art and science, the associations between humans and five are many. Five senses, five extremities, five taste distinctions, five digits on each hand, on and on. So five is symbolic related to human fulfillment. Fruiting flowers have five petals. Flowers, too, are a symbol of fulfillment. To me they also symbolize the human self, abloom in the Garden of Love -- fruiting flowers ourselves. Our favorite flower of love, the rose, has five petals, or multiples of five. Other flowers of love are pentagonal in symmetry as well. Hmmmm. Isn't this interesting?

If you look with soft eyes you can see the pentagram that doesn't quite settle into form in the middle of this echinacea flower.

Five is also related to the golden spiral. The golden spiral is based on the proportions of Phi: 1.618... or phi: .618... . Phi is a ratio found in nature (shells, growth patterns of plants, and more) and also in the human body. The Golden Mean applies Phi to a line, dividing it so that the whole and the parts relate to each other proportionally as in a:b as b:c. One of the easiest places to see phi is in the pentagram (here is one of the ways that five comes in). When you have a perfect pentagram, the segments are in a phi relationship to each other. This is part of what has made the pentagram a powerful symbol throughout history, and thereby responsible for giving it a bad rap at some point, becoming associated with evil spells by witches, the devil, and so on.

Really, the pentagram is a symbol of the beautifully proportioned. There are a million sources on the Internet and in the library for this, but most important to me is understanding that the phi relationship of the part to the whole is geometry's way of expressing the universe creating life in relationship to itself, and perhaps to an even larger whole. Therein lies the pentagram's power and fascination.

Julia Brayshaw, author of Medicine of Place and co-conspirator of all things Venusian.

Thanks to my friend Julia, I've learned a lot about the heart recently. She shared an issue of Lilipoh with an article about Frank Chester and also an interview with Rollin McCraty, PhD.

In Walter Alexander's interview with Rollin McCraty, McCraty describes how the heart is a sense organ. He reports that the heart sends more information to the brain than the brain sends to the heart. Other research shows that it is the heart that modulates brain function and perception. You have to read the article and more if you need convincing. It is not a stretch for most of us to agree that how we feel about things affects how we think about things. So what if we fed our hearts with nectar?

Frank Chester reports that research has shown that the heart is not a pump. Blood courses through an embryo before the heart is formed. Something else is moving the blood. Chester believes the heart is a streaming device. There's too much to report on here, but he goes on to describe how the blood spirals into the left ventricle clockwise, and spirals out the same ventricle counter-clockwise. It reverses direction inside the heart chamber. There is a point where the blood has to pause before reversing. I find this fascinating. And it is a leap of my imagination, I know, to link it back to the golden spiral, but I do. It is that point at which the blood stops, as if time stands still before spiralling out backwards.

"And how does the golden spiral come in?" I bet you are asking. Well, this is my leap. The golden spiral grows from zero, from nothing. If you look at the heart of a daisy, or sunflower, you'll see that the golden spirals keep forming, keeping enlarging from the center. From nothingness they grow. The Fibonacci spiral, a way of approximating the golden spiral, grows from zero as well. It uses a formula where the first whole number added to the next whole number creates the third in the sequence. Then you add your second whole number to the third whole number for the next. 0+1=1, 1+1=2, 1+2=3, 2+3=5, 3+5=8, 5+8=13, and on and on to create a sequence that looks like this: 0,1,1,2,3,5,8,13,21,34,55,89, etc. This is a sequence, or spiral that grows from within, meaning the numbers are self generated. The ratio of each successive pair of numbers in the series approximates phi, 1.618... , getting closer as you move higher along. All that is needed to begin this algorithmic function is nothing, but somehow, that nothingness is full of potential. And this algorithmic golden spiral is how we grow. Five and the pentagram are symbols of human fulfillment, but put phi in the mix, and you see also the potential for growing fulfillment. (By the way, most flowers have petals that correspond to a Fibonacci number.)

The body is full of phi relationships and golden spirals, more than I am aware, I am sure. My favorite is the heart. Muscles wrap the heart with a golden spiral. Within the heart (sense organ, not pump) is a point of stillness, of balance, of pause, perhaps even a point of listening. What do we wish it to receive? The gifts of flowers, the sharing of joy, the flavor of nectar? As the heart expands, energetically spiralling out energy in emotional waves, what do we wish to send?

Invocation to the Water Spirits, a flexagon edition I created.

For me the hummingbird is an elegant symbol of our loving potential. Now I know the hummingbird also eats small insects, but by and large, it is the sugary nectar of flowers that is their food source. What we source from influences our view. The hummingbird sources from the sweet things in life. What if we all knew how to drink from life as the hummingbird does? And what if we grew as the flower does, opening our hearts to the sun and offering our sweetness without judgment?

Salmonberry flower.

It's All Poppy~cock

The poppy has always been one of my favorite flowers. It's showy, comes in many colors and varieties, and carries powerful medicine. The poppy inspires me.

For the 10th Anniversary show for May Day Press I made several little flower books. Poppy was the first.

My idea was to use a strip of paper as long as the press could carry and do only one print run. I didn't want to glue or sew any pages together to make the book longer. The text had to fit in the length of the press bed in one line. I sat with the poppy and drew on all my knowledge of its history and medicine to write a poem. I worked the poem in the press bed so it would fit and the pages would fold in between the words. It was a challenge. I love the result. Four pages for the four petals.



Poppy

Weaver of fantastical journeys.
You are the spice of dreams,
healer of unbearable hurt,
rattle of oblivion.


I ended up with far more to say about the poppy and began working on a second book. This one was more dense with text, and like Hazel Tree Lore & Legend, came in a small box with drawers full of stuff.

Poppy: Seed, Petal, Leaf & Pod. 3" x 3" x 3" What looks like blue is really dark purple.

A selection of pod varieties with paper petals in the big bottom drawer. The top drawer holds the book and seed packet.

Box with book's title page and a paper packet of poppy seeds. The book is letterpress printed with a tiny border of 6pt. poppies in different colors bordering the bottom of the text pages. The text gives various cultural uses of the poppy, both past and present, a recipe, and other facts. One of which is that opium was once used as a spermicide for birth control. This leads me to my current project --

Sex In The Garden. My poppy and other flower shaped books are coming back to mind as I work to develop a flower shaped book for Sex In The Garden, something to hold an essence of the experience without the dryness of a lecture presentation. I was visiting my book artist friend Diane Jacobs last week, and she and her husband gave me some inspiring support for this book. Thank you!

Of course there is so much left to do in the garden, or should I say, left undone. . . ? But walking about and taking pictures of the mess revealed some beauty. This poppy was expressing the other side of life.

In less than a week we will be celebrating Imbolc, an old Gaelic celebration of light and the beginning of spring. Yes, spring. How our calendar and seasonal markings became so odd, I am not sure. But around here, spring is surely happening. The birds are singing again and plants show signs of renewal. The light is returning and it is calling us up out of the compost of the past year and into the possibilities of now.


Poppycock - (from Wikipedia) Anglicized form of the Dutch pappekak, which literally means soft dung or diarrhea (from Dutch pap pap + kak dung) - is an interjection meaning "nonsense" or "balderdash".