Dancing Stones Solstice Dawn

                               Solstice Dawn
             At 4.30 am the air is cool and so still that you can hear the waves breaking on the rocks half a mile away.  Cuckoos call, loud and long and the moorland gorse is alive with larks who sing but never rise before the Sun. Stonechats chip and chink and cockerels in distant valley farms below proclaim the dawn..

      "Great Spirit, at this time when so much seems dark in our changing world, open our hearts to the long light that sustains us and reveals to us the wonders of creation that our Mothers and Fathers have known for time out of mind, and as the spinning orbs weave our web of life let us be humble in the face of the endless love that holds and heals us all" 
                                                                                                                                                   

Samhain

  While Samhain has most sensible folk curling up with a pumpkin and a horror movie or doing dark magicks,  we who 'grub around in the mud' - as our appalled Virgo city boy neighbour would have it - have a special mission. For the end of October is the time to prepare next year's potato ground and as everyone knows, potatoes are Pluto ruled, as are leeks which follow potatoes into that still warm, unmade bed as soon as they're harvested.  So, having a freshly dug plot our thoughts turn to compost. Later there will be trips to the farmyard for the other Pluto ruled stuff but the 'fertiliser du jour' is seaweed which usually rolls in on a south easterly swell around now. 

         There's a stiff breeze off the Bay and it's spitting with rain. Against a deep pewter sky, feeling the pressure drop in their barometric bones, three rooks burst skyward from the thicket of dark pines behind the railway lines as if thrown up by an invisible juggler, over and over.  Luminous pale gold reed beds almost conceal the grey heron and dabchicks break the silver surface of  marsh pools. The spring tide is flowing and frisky and yes, rolling dark with weed.  Along the strand line goodly little heaps of seafresh weed,  like a fabric market for rockpools,  rusty wracks and  leathery kelps, sea lettuce, delicate, emerald goodness and little red coral weed, thong weed, wireweed, bladdered and forked and iodine, wet weed .
   Bending our backs to the task, we fill sack after sack, dragging heavy bags up the beach as the racing tide swirls foaming around them.  In days gone by horses and carts dragged tons of weed up to the surrounding fields..hard, hard work but as sustainable, natural and seasonal as the rooks dancing against the steely sky.

    The tide turns, the waves now lifting the floating weed back out to sea.. The Gods give, and the Gods take away... 
     Bags of weed hoisted dripping and heavy into the back of the car, we walk for a bit, stretching aching muscles and breathing deeply.  It's beautiful, a thin, thin line of diamond brightness defines the horizon as the clouds build and as the wind strengthens, little skittering flocks of dunlin swirl, reeling into the spray. We have the beach almost to ourselves and it's beginning to rain.
         Later, the seaweed deeply spread on next years' potato patch and leek and potato soup simmering on the stove, we reflect on the fittingness of some things..
         Wishing you all the fittingness of the end of one year and the beginning of another.

Squirreling

A succession of nasty cold showers is keeping me indoors today and not before time as the housework has deferred to the call of the garden in these dry spring days and more importantly I owe myself some creative time.  One Christmas several years ago my daughter gave me a beautiful notebook ~ you know the sort, gorgeous turquoise and gold silk padded cover with a folding catch and button, hand made paper with flowers incorporated and tissue between the leaves. It came in a silk bag, fragile as a butterfly's wing, of mossy green, ochre and ivory. 'I thought you could use it for your recipes and remedies..' she said... Of course it has been far too good to use. Does anyone else suffer from this stupid affliction? Anything I really like ~ clothes, fabrics, good watercolour paper, jewellery, gets squirreled away unused in case it gets spoiled. Admittedly this is a very real possibility with me but I do have a 'zone' where I can be careful and gentle and this zone is also squirreled away like heavenly treasure, too good for me, too good for this ordinary day with all its muddy demands and noisy opinions.
    Lately I've been noticing that a great deal of the stuff in charity shops and market stalls bears an uncanny resemblance to some of my hoardings.. Nothing looks so precious when it's piled up on a trestle table on the street or shoved in a box in a saleroom...No, I have to bite the bullet, admit that I'm not going to live forever and start using this stuff and leave heaven for some properly worthwhile treasures.
  In the light of this, my lovely notebook is out of its bag, dripping with rose quartz and whatever magics I can muster, waiting for me to commit my charms and potions to its pristine pages..perhaps when I've cleaned the bathroom...

  The garden can look after itself today but it's a pretty good leaf day if the the weather's good where you are. .I'll be sowing some herbs later on this sidereal Scorpio Moon day, things I can leave outside without worrying about the cold; Parsley,Dill and Coriander and some Salad Bowl lettuce and Corn Salad. Late afternoon is best for this both today and tomorrow.

perplexity and peace

I'm grateful for dentists ~ honestly! I know that without them life would be a lot more painful and horrible...can you tell I'm trying ever so hard not to complain about the challenges of impressions and extractions...and having to eat cold cauliflower cheese very, very slowly. I'm also grateful for anaesthesia, but I don't much enjoy that either... As a matter of fact, in this respect,my usual blatant disregard for injury deserts me totally - well it's self inflicted normally so that's ok!
    I remember my friend Dan who was trollied off for cancer surgery laughing, saying that the dentist still reduced him to a nervous wreck and so it is with me, nothing else comes close...Still, I'm grateful for dentists, honestly!
             Gradually the world outside is beginning to dry up, the sweet peas are spending the daylight hours outside now, the tomatoes are up and I'm hoping for a dry spell over the weekend to get a patch dug for shallots and garlic and to get some salads started. It's a flower day tomorrow Moon gardeners (sidereal Libra/air sign astro peeps) so I'll be sowing some aquilegia and gypsophila  in the propagator.     

 

 

Today I'm grateful for peace. Our country is being run by a bunch of crazies and I don't expect that to be changing in a hurry, but so far,thank heavens, my life and that of most of us alive in Britain today has been lived without the daily horrors and deprivations of war. As a child in the early sixties I used to hear heavy planes droning overhead as I lay in the huge iron bedstead of my Grandmother's  spare room and quake with terror waiting for the dreaded 'atom bomb' to explode. I'd heard my Nan and Fred the Baker discussing this phenomenon in some detail when I should have been elsewhere ~ invisibility was one of my several talents ~ I never told them that I was scared but I still remember the terror, night after night as the planes came in low to a wartime RAF station nearby.  Last year, I was following Harry Fear's late night broadcasts from Gaza as Operation Pillar of Cloud took place a world away. Drones endlessly circled the city all the long, dog barking night and I got just a whiff of the same feeling. With today's atrocities reeling across the TV screen, I'm feeling more grateful and privileged than I can say that I have lived my life in relative peace.

Aromatics

Thanks to the person whose vehicle number plate 666 RRR made me smile.
    Today I had every intention to go to the allotment and make a start on cutting up the pittosporum tree which blew down last week and is seriously in the way of progress. A combination of drizzle and lethargy weakened my resolve however and so I turned my hand to making tummy salve.
         Butters, oils and beeswax combine to make an aromatherapy treatment for nervous tummies. You know, it's when you're worried, angry and generally emotionally overwrought, the digestive system is often the first way your body responds. You're 'gutted', 'sick of it', running to the loo and worse.  This pleasantly fragrant salve is massaged gently over the solar plexus chakra in a clockwise direction ( that's the way the digestive system works) to soothe and relax the jittering and churning which are so uncomfortable. Soon you're breathing more slowly and deeply and feeling calmer and
back in control. This salve doesn't react badly with sunlight on the skin and it's safe during pregnancy ~ it will even help to prevent stretch marks.

  
 There's a good strong one for adults and a milder version for the under 12s. A baby salve is on the way too just made with pure camomile.  I'm grateful that we can almost always find something in our environment to comfort and heal . Do you have a particular wild plant that flourishes in your garden? Before you complain too much, just check on the medicinal properties of that plant - does the answer ring any bells?

Buskers

Snowdrops, as you probably know, are best planted 'in the green' - meaning in full growth, and here in the far west that's about now. So I was delighted that after a few whopping hints, the Beloved arrived home at lunchtime today with a couple of nice clumps of snowdrops ~ thankyou, you're a Goody!

 

I love street music; In town this afternoon it was really good to hear the first buskers of the year, Flats and Sharps ~ a young Penzance bluegrass band ~   (you can tell if they're good because they have a guitar case instead of a hat) doing rather well too, deservedly so, thanks to them and all musicians,

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7Y0Z81t9hfo

 

catch them here.

 

For myself and many of us who work alone, one of the best of modern innovations is the podcast ~ hours of cold and tedious work now fly by in thrall to a multitude of  fascinations. I learned more stuff about the Iron Age today than I realised there was to know and if I listen to it a few more times I might even remember some of it. Gratitude then to experts of all sorts and to the BBC which in spite of some glaring shortcomings is still, in my opinion, worth the licence fee.

And although in principle I'd rather supermarkets didn't exist, I have to shamedfacedly admit to being rather infatuated with the brand new Sainsbury's store which opened here a month or two ago, I'm captivated by the little solar panels on its carpark lamps, its recycled rainwater in the toilets and its lovely lighting and air conditioning that you actually don't notice - it's just clean, tidy and lush and though I may well fall out of love with it and its GM Desiree potatoes quite soon, like all infatuations, it's pleasant while it lasts..

 

Smelly Henry

Monday is housework day chez Morvah so today I'm grateful for my little vacuum cleaner whose  smiley face belies its true nature and purpose which is to fill the house with the fragrance of 'Old damp dog, lately cavorting in foul marsh' while it does its job of sucking up our filth. So I'm thankful for nice smells again; the room spray of fresh roses that I made before Christmas comes into its own on Mondays.  Thankfully, open windows are at last an option again, and it's possible - if a tad ambitious - to hang washing outside, it seems so long....
     I'm grateful for little snippets of interest and amusement from my friends on facebook. I like that it's possible to  'chat' in real time sometimes or to take hours or days over a conversation, or just send a smile or blow a kiss if there's no time, so thankyou all of you - you make my day better by being there.  Of course it's also a source of learning and I'm grateful also to those of you who teach me so much about so many things ~ we're all learning together perhaps, even we old'uns! My long love of astrology, studied alone for the best part of thirty years has been enhanced  so much by finding the astrology community online ~ thank you all.
  

                                                                                                                                                                                  

We've lived in this street, with a couple of short breaks, for seventeen years. In that time we have lived in three of its eleven houses and made gardens in all of them. Sadly two of them have been cleared away for the purpose of displaying rank weeds and rubbish. The first is next door to where we now live and has been stripped repeatedly of any sign of survivors of my planting and left to long grass and mud - until this winter a new tenant has arrived and started to dig over the garden. She has struggled through  water and mud to get it done and planted up. She's very young and keen and we can't wait to see flowers over the garden wall again so I'm grateful for my lovely young neighbour and to all those who make gardens everywhere, Spring is on its way!