present calling

Maxfield Parrish. Rene Magritte. They painted the sky I'm watching this evening.

There's a particular glow that comes about when the sky has a certain percentage of cloud cover--and tonight i find myself beckoned to the back porch by such a light. To the east, the Twin Buttes catch that glow and hold it golden in their sandstone cliffs while purple-soled pink clouds slowly move westward, morphing into discarded insect exoskeletons, backflipping mermaids, and pinwheeling stars. Meanwhile, a silouette of a tatter-winged bird darts across the blue, and the sound of wind tickles the pine trees (i can see it, though i cannot feel the wind on my own skin). To the west, the sun sinks slowly--it is only the first of july--and sends sundogs in its wake, rainbow clouds skirting the horizon like prisms. a hummingbird flies directly into my view of this kalidescoping scene and hovers still as death, with paradoxical wings moving nearly as fast as light. whatever came before this moment doesn't matter, for now...for now.

for emily

kale is a cool weather vegetable that thrives at coastal farms in northern california, where the temperatures rarely exceed 75 degrees, but the soil temperature is maintained around 55 for a good 8 months of the year. it is a brassica/crucifer (the flowers look like yellow crosses) and is therefore related to broccoli, cauliflower, mustard greens, bok choy, cabbage, raab, collards, kohlrabi, arugula and radish. it has numerous varieties: red russian, blue vates, lacinato or dinosaur, and curly, to name a few. generally, it is found in cuisine as a side dish, sauteed with garlic, perhaps, or as a "green" contribution in soups, stir-fries, or salads.

i have a special relationship with kale. i am roughly 40% comprised of kale. i can eat it a bunch at a time, as a main dish with a miso-lemon-tahini dressing, or at breakfast alongside eggs with garlic and red pepper flakes. my friends know they will be served kale if they are eating dinner with me. the only bumpersticker on my truck for quite sometime stated my philosophy for the betterment of life: "eat more kale".

kale, once established, survives the coldest conditions of most growing places. in fact, it often tastes more rich and sweet after the frost that brutally kills off the rest of the garden. i desire that stamina. i want to make good of the dark and the cold. so, i eat kale. lots of it. as if, somehow, i will be what i eat.

my will has been tested. after 4 years in colorado, i suffered a winter that was the closest thing to depression i'd felt, um, since i discovered kale. but kale has a hard time here, too. it told me so, late last summer in the garden i planted at the smiley building. after several months of production, it grew weak. the aphids moved in on it. "we'll keep growing," it told me. "but we'd rather you take our lives now, when we can still be of use to you, nutritionally speaking...". it said little else, except to mention its joy of having grown under the shade of the sunflowers for so long. i smiled with sadness in my heart, and deep respect for the generosity of this plant. for underneath its leaves had grown several lettuce plants, who generally stress severely in the dry, sun scorched days of the high mountain desert. i did my best to ward off the aphids, but the kale told the truth. i harvested it all. we ate it, my friends and i, in great gratitude. the kale let its energy go where it could be best utilized. i aspire to do so much. if i have to slow down in the winter, so be it. let me live again in the summer, and let my rest give me energy to send in the best direction.

i planted an entire bed of kale today. happy solstice.

waste

it is March, and apples still hang from the tree on the corner. they are shriveled and lumpy, dull and lifeless. it is not my tree, but i wonder if it were, would i have picked them all?

driving under the influence

i came home tonight from town, fully coated in the radiance of the cancer full moon at perigree. the mountains shouted at me from each of their 7 dimensions: depth, width, height, shimmer, refection, aura, and spirit, and i nearly drove off the road. how often is your shadow brighter than your physical presence?

the quality of dreams

i woke this morning to the blinding white of snow reflecting sun. i reflexively closed my eyes, and saw back momentarily into the dream state i'd just been. i don't know if i would have recalled my dreams otherwise...there's something about waking into bright light that immediately stimulates the mind to focus on the present reality. but what about the reality of dreams?

dreams are real. what we do in dreams affects our minds and influences our experiences arguably just as much as our memories, both consciously and subconsciously. i remember waking once after a dream where i was engaged in a sweet, sensual kiss...my whole body was aroused, i was holding my breath, and my mouth still tingled from the cool, wet touch of the lips i'd been kissing. i experienced a moment of confusion--i was suddenly alone in my bed when i'd just a millisecond before been alive in another's embrace--but i laughed aloud with excitement--the experience was just as real and just as present in my mind and body as if it had happened in my waking life. and it could very likely impact me the next time i saw the person i'd been kissing: i might feel embarrassed, or attracted, avoidant or giddy. it might change the way i would speak to her or about her; it could influence my perception and memory of past interactions with her. even though i might condition it all with the qualifier "it was only a dream,".

what if we collectively became more accountable for the creative power of our dreams? What if we gave up our dismissive attitudes towards our subconscious sensibilities and consciously included them amongst the variables that make up our days? what kind of would we live in if dreams didn't come true because they already are true, as least as true as everything else?

me in the old west

written on the stars, written in the body

i've been reflecting lately on autumn, and the relevancy of its energy in our collective experience of life. (if you haven't noticed already, most of my blog tends to illuminate the parallels--or at least the mirrors and poignant reminders--displayed by the natural world in accordance with human emotionality and suffering...somehow it becomes a little more tolerable when i notice that no being really escapes what life has to offer). obviously, fall is a time of transition--the days rapidly lose light, the temperatures sink towards frosty and snow bearing, and our expulsion of energy, like the sun, wanes. the two astrological signs that dominate this season are libra (the balancer, the emblem of justice) and scorpio (the sign of birth and death--or, in other words, the ultimate in transformation). autumn gives us the opportunity to balance out, to breathe more, to notice the light...and then scorpio moves in, and leads us--sometimes painfully, especially when we resist--into the darker sides of ourselves and our world. because of this, scorpio gets a bad rap. but what she's doing is a great service to all of us. she's providing us with ample tools to analyze and explore the mysterious elements of our self-created depths, and she gives us the freedom to destroy what limits us, and to open to new possibilities, even if those possibilities over-winter and don't sprout until spring.

i've noticed that i tend to be drawn towards transition and the times where people make themselves vulnerable to change. i find that i want to witness when people give an aspect of their identity to death, and when they create space for something new to come to life, even if that something new is unknown, and perhaps even scary.

this fall we're entering a huge unknown transition as a collective. I have a sneaking suspicion that we're even on the edge of a deep, radical social and cultural transformation. not just because of the political scene, but also due to a rising desire for a spiritual climate change--something that unifies us while simultaneously divinizing our own personal truths.

in the stars (since we've been talking astrology), we're moving into a 2 year phase during which saturn (the planet of structure, form, and order) is in opposition to Uranus (the planet of instigation, transformation, and Waking Up). opposition means only that we will feel some friction--it need not mean that there can be no common ground. in fact, there is great opportunity with these two ideologies sitting across from each other. what kind of new conversations can we have? how can we create and transform our common structures--homes, schools, workplaces, communities, etc-- to allow us to wake up, be present, and allow the inevitable transformation of our selves, our identities, our needs,and our lives?

Despite what astrology predicts, i feel this shift happening in my heart. in fact, it seems that our hearts are the actual container for this kind of change to take place. regardless of culture, regardless of experience or family genetics, education or economics, we all have a muscle in our center that pumps the same lifegiving fluids through a structure composed of the same basic DNA. and the vital nutrients pumped by that heart and through that blood are found in the air that we all breathe and the soil we all walk on. simply enough, our depth of connection comes with our breath and our mindless ability to assimilate and transform our environment into what makes up our being. Then, when you add the mind to it all, the details (and perhaps the diversity) are mostly given by choice and perception.