Seeing as how I’m not crazy about the very hot days of summer and basically tolerate them inside with my A/C on when it’s over 78, I’m happy to say that this is the coolest and wettest August in my memory.  Which is a wonderful thing. I get my garden watered for free.  My blackberries came to fruition this year.  I can wear the clothes that I am most comfortable in. I can work with the wool textiles that are the hardest to stand in the heat.  Fall is coming on in leaps and bounds and I’m The Happy.

The leaves are changing on the trees, just a little but it’s there. My cat’s shedding has decreased noticeably. The cooler evenings where I can actually sleep with the quilt on the bed. And the longing for making, and eating, pumpkin bread has begun.  I’m dying to use my cast iron corn bread pan with little corn cobs for the mini breads.  Mabon and then Samhain cometh.

I had a lovely quiet weekend with The Ex. We laid low after being so busy of late and watched videos and got all creative. We took two naps, ate comfort food, and didn’t leave the house, not once.  Unless you count taking out the garbage and feeding the strays.  I managed to get all kinds of puttering done.  Puttering is my favorite thing to do.  Even more than my embroidery and artwork, puttering and just letting myself live completely in the moment feels so darned good.  And I always manage to get things done that I didn’t even know needed doing.

I cleaned my main altar and made a new altar cloth.  I’ve been meaning to make this one for a couple years at least.  Got out the Autumn decor and candles and incense.  The directional altars also got an upgrade.  Dianne Sylvan’s post last Thursday inspired me to get a move on and I will be posting pictures soon so that she can check it out. Per her request to her readers.  I’m game.

I also began to draft up the slices for the remaining four wheel pieces from my wheel of the year project.  Perhaps I will take pictures of where the project stands right now and post them too.  I’m having a lot of fun with it as it just organically flows from my spirit.

Last week was really a doozy.  I got clobbered by some miscommunication, that wasn’t on my radar and should have been, in a volunteer group I participate in. It was unexpected and suffice it to say, I decided I would rather be happy than right and pulled out of the project. Another project that a friend had asked me to participate in and that I wasn’t eager to do got angry with me because I pulled out of that completely too.  And she had the nerve to take my partner aside and actually criticize me for doing it.  To him!  Not to me. Whoa. As if he wouldn’t tell me, bless his heart. 

Did I tell you all that I have fibromyalgia?  A chronic pain and fatigue syndrome?  While I consider it to be mostly in remission if I am not careful with my schedule I can put myself into a full blown pain cycle that can take weeks or months to recover from.  Not to mention the accompanying depression, fatigue, IBS, and other various fun symptoms of the FMS beast. So I must really make sure to take care of myself.  Get enough sleep, eat right, make my 12 step meetings so I don’t die, and make sure that I have time to create because that will kill my soul to not do that. 

Drama, I just hate drama, and there has been far too much drama of late.  Should I chalk it all up to Venus Retrograde right after Mercury Retrograde? Perhaps.  I think though that the universe has given me enough thumps on the head lately in this area of my life (including the broken friendship which stemmed from that group) to let me know that I just don’t belong there.  And I’m okay with it because I don’t think I want to belong there.  Must follow my bliss.  Whee!

Here is my MUST do list:

• Donations for the annual Samhain Spiraldance Fundraiser for Gaia’s Temple: 3 pouches, 3 checkbook covers, 2 hats, 1 eyepillow all embroidered and sewn by hand by October 10th  (Bliss)
• Embroidered felt Wheel of the Year for myself (Bliss)
• Yule presents all to be hand made for my family and friends: several pairs of knit socks, one wall hanging, several pieces of jewelry, homemade soaps and candles, shortbread and a myriad of other things (Bliss)
• 5 permanent commitments every month: Oloteas 4th Saturday, Gaia’s Temple 2nd Sunday, Jeshua 1st Saturday, 12th step phones 2nd Saturday, SCA Business Meeting 3rd Monday, 12 step meetings every Monday and Friday evening (all but one is Bliss)
• I am responsible for the Arts and Sciences display and competition and getting the prizes in order, three of which I am providing myself, one of which still has to be made for an SCA event in September (not so much Bliss)
• Organize classes through the end of the year for said SCA group (not so much Bliss)

Here is my WANNA do list:

• Ritual clothing that consists of sabbat short tunics I can wear with jeans.  I’m a jeans and clogs/boots kind of gal.  And while I love dresses I can only wear them in weather that allows me to wear tights.  So I really want some tunics I can wear that are festive and spiritually symbolic and yet feel like my regular clothes (Bliss)
• More altar and ritual items (Bliss)
• Finish up the other wall hangings that are in queue (Bliss)
• Make some slipcovers for my old chair (Bliss)
• Some other house and ritual decorations (Bliss)

Overall I think I’m coming out on top in the Bliss area and that is verra nice.

So, when my stint with the SCA group mentioned several times above is over, that part of my life is going to fade away.  I’ll still go to the random event and when motivated I’ll do a new demo on the Medieval Tailor website, but for now at least, I want to get those classes organized, that last prize made, and be done until after Yule.

I’m really looking forward to the rituals that are coming up and all the festivities and activities that go with them.  The baking for the potlucks, the making of garlands and other bits, the rain, the quiet project season…

Aside from all I said above, I feel very good, am quite happy, and love life. Yes indeed I do.  Blessings to all who are having difficulties at this time, may your road level off.

My personal web page is reborn.  This is where the galleries of my work in textiles, photos, and paint reside. 

It has a new design, I finally organized and discarded some things, and I’m very pleased.  To learn more about me, that is the place to go. Well sort of, I don’t open my heart there but the mundane aspects of my life are there in a nutshell.

Enjoy!

I thought you would like to know about this urgent campaign to free the remaining South Korean aid workers who have been taken hostage by Taliban fighters in Afghanistan. The Taliban have already executed 2 hostages, and are threatening to execute the rest this week–an action that could trigger a mass evacuation of life-giving humanitarian aid from all of Afghanistan.
 
The situation is desperate, but there is hope. The Taliban are from the Pashtun ethnic group, and observe a strict code called ‘Pashtunwali.’ This code demands “hospitality to all, especially guests and strangers”. There are rumours of infighting among the Taliban over these kidnappings, because they clearly violate the code.

This week, Avaaz members are running a petition as a full page ad in a major newspaper in Afghanistan, the Killid Weekly–and directly contacting the official Taliban spokesperson, Qari Yusef Ahmadi, to deliver the message to the Taliban leadership.

The Killid Weekly ad, and the phone call to Ahmadi, will be more effective the greater our numbers. We need to get well over 100,000 signers in the next 24 hours, and massively grow the petition this week. Please forward this email to as many friends as possible and ask them to sign the petition at the link below:

http://www.avaaz.org/en/honour_the_afghan_code/tf.php?CLICK_TF_TRACK

Thanks!

What an awesome name for a website or anything else. My absolutely favorite artist is Stephanie Pui-Mun Law. Her delicate, colorful, and evocative paintings just send me. So, naturally when she announced that her 2008 calendar was out, I fell all over myself to buy it. It arrived a couple of days ago and I’m still just smitten. It is a really large calendar and the print quality is really some of the best I’ve ever seen on a calendar. I can see every pencil mark she made before she painted, which, as a fellow artist, really knocks my socks off. I love that these pictures are full sized and true to life size or bigger.

One of the other things I am waiting on tenterhooks for (do you know what a tenter is?? not to mention it’s hook? )  is her cards. Yes, stretched tight and can’t wait for release, that is I. Because in 2009 her Tarot deck will be published. Oh yes, indeedy, I look forward to that day.

Anyway, I thought, with the shadows lengthening I would tell you about that a bit. I noticed the cool moisture on the air Monday night as I left for an 8pm meeting. The shadows were long and I thought for just a moment that I was late… Ahhhhhh, Autumn cometh. This morning my toothbrush was still partly purple from the brushing last night. Why? Because of all the delicious blackberries I ate in the dark while watering the garden.

Those berries are precious to me. The first year in thisplace, I rent, my landlord came one day when I wasn’t home and had his minions cut all the blackberries to the ground. We had an agreement that he would do no maintenance beside mow the lawn and storm clean up. This wasn’t the first or last time he was to break that agreement. But those vines were cut a week before harvest.  What about fresh, organic, free, fruit do you not understand? What about the bounty of Gaia?

His wife won’t let him cut them any more but the last few years we’ve had a bit of a drought here in the Pacific Northwest and my berries have, wait for it…. withered on the vine. Before ever being edible. *sigh*

One other year I was able to get some berries and the night that I planned on harvesting them I found that same landlord outside in my garden eating the berries that until I came along never existed. Oh. My. God. I was beside myself.  “It’s my property, I can do what I like.”  Does that mean I get a reduction on my rent?

So this year when I noticed that I was really going to have a harvest I was just ecstatic. I began wearing my gold grape vine earrings in honor of the fruit harvest. And last night, my tongue was so dark purple it was black. And it stained my toothbrush.  Which was a very smiley thing to find first thing this morning.

Tonight is a full harvest.

I? Am eating blackberry cobbler this weekend.  Happy Purple Tongue

If you cooperate with the cosmic rhythms in the coming weeks, they will stimulate some interesting changes in the way your brain works. Here are a few of the developments you can expect: a five-point rise in your IQ; a boost in your ability to solve puzzles; a growing knack for heading off bad moods before they even erupt; a sixth sense for distinguishing between what people say they’re doing and what they’re actually doing; and a dramatic improvement in your ability to know what you don’t want.

Well then. I think I’m a bit ahead in the game if that is the case. Don’t know that I’m too concerned about the boost in my IQ or puzzle solving ability in general but I think that the latter skill might have something to do with my ability to know what I don’t want and to distinguish that pickle of other people and their actions.

Recently I ended a friendship of over 7 years.  It was a shock to her.  But not to me.  Not really.  For me I had known it was just a matter of time before I cried “Uncle.”  I know it looked good to her on the surface but I really didn’t feel that what she thought was our friendship was what I consider a true friendship at all.  It felt like a dictatorship to me.  If I didn’t like anything that was going on between us, tough shit and too bad.  And I just couldn’t participate any longer in a relationship where one person was allowed boundaries and the other just had to suck it up.

That is not to say that it doesn’t hurt. I love(d) her. It hurt like hell and damnation. Like a bandaid ripped off and the hair and skin all gone hurt. A shock and then a rubbing and rubbing and patting of the skin to take the sting away. But nothing works except time.  Some of my friends are probably sick and tired of listening to me while I process the feelings surrounding that event.  I’ve felt very badly that I hurt her.  I never wanted that.  I felt badly that the suddenness of the event was so explosive. And I felt bad because I know she doesn’t really know why or what I couldn’t take any more.  She thinks it was one incident and that I was being silly and a bitch.  But that incident was just the straw that broke the camel’s back.  And, last but not least, I’ve been pretty darned angry.

She was and still is an amazing human being.  There are things I miss so much.  But there are others I don’t miss at all.  I heard recently that she is glowing because of some good things that have happened in her life and I’m so very happy for her.  And truth be told, when I’m not thinking about this I’m very darned happy as well.

At the Fires of Lughnasadh the thing that I offered Lugh on his funeral pyre was my grief over this split.  That the grieving would end.  And as usual, this request is taking a while to come to pass. But little by little, I’m hearing good things through the grapevine, that her life is progessing, quite well in fact, and I know mine is as well. 

Then this as I read the blog At the end of desire this morning. 

Whatever is past
and has come to an end
cannot be brought back by sorrow

Well shiver me timbers and ahoy.  Thank you Lugh!!  Thank you thank you thank you!