Stupid Cupid

Here's my somewhat silly blurb from the Wheatsville Weekly email for the week of January 26th. Its a little cheesy (just the way they like it) and pretty innocent. In my own practice, I'm in the midst of concocting a true lust potion that packs enough of a punch to enamor the dead - or at least raise its pulse. I'll be sure to post the final recipe and, if your lucky, you might just get an attractive vile in the mail, tied with a ribbon and a note that reads, "drink me" for V-day. Do you feel lucky?


Damiana and Rose Petals s for Valentine's Day!

While Rose's delicate and intoxicating fragrance needs no introduction, you may not know that Cleopatra used this famous flower to seduce Mark Antony. Passion-inducing Damiana, while lesser known, has been used traditionally to help sweethearts spice up their love life and contains antidepressive and mood elevating properties. Both are great in an after dinner tea, sprinkled in a bath, or infused in your favorite wine! Here's a simple formula that's sure to impress your special someone this Valentine's day:

1) Start with your favorite red wine (a higher alcohol content is better for extraction, especially when using fresh herbs).
2) Choose you favorite aromatic herbs: Ginger, mints, licorice or cinnamon for a stimulating effect. Oatstraw, lavender, sage, and catnip for a calming blend. Rose or damiana for love - or choose your own favorites!
3) Combine herbs and wine either in a mason jar or the bottle itself if it has a screw-top, and let it sit for two weeks (shaking occasionally).
4) Separate out herbs with a cheesecloth or a mesh strainer before serving.

Serve with chocolates and a romantic string quartet!

Views from a car on a hill (or) Small goats and gardens and windows wide open.

Her dreams were so fantastical and impermanent that who in their right mind would dare to go along with her for the shorthaul - the complete insecurity in one perfect moment or brief brilliant scenario that might very well end or morph into something completely new at the drop of a copper leaf. But why not live it while the fantasy burns, and say in the end that we'd lived out our dream? One always wakes up in the end anyway and tomorrow will dream anew. But no one is sorry for waking up when promises of the next slumber hold so many more mysteries. So why be sad when one thing ends and another is allowed to begin? Why not hold hands and jump? Certain Native American tribes say that when you dream of falling, and you finally reach the bottom, that you make a wish for yourself and your people and it will come true. Let's leap many times, and realize many wishes.

On her knucles read, Holy Holy.

This week has been exceptional. Drew some tattoos on friends that other friends made permanent, wrestled a huge hackberry tree into kindling, saved a persimmon tree from an overly passionate passionflower vine, found autumn (it's been hiding for ages).

All day today off to add further to this list of pleasures...including but not limited to, art, dying lace curtains with turmeric root, making prickly pear jelly, contact papering my bedroom wall, and assembling my growing insect collection. Holy holy is the day!

Ammending the Soil

I'm startleable and excited all the time. It's good and I will not be disappointed if the startler is just a leaf vine or a ghost - or the wind in the trees. Because I embrace my time and opportunity for solitude and self education.

I feel wild like Tigerlily, and I want to un-tame myself now. I want to leave my hair a mess, run around half undressed and half dressed like a man - I want to kick things over with my boots and call like a warrior and howl at the moon.

I AM the person I want to be- though sometimes behind closed lips. I don't need to feel that I am understood, but I shouldn't either shy away for the fear of confusing or putting people off all the more.

Middle of the road, detached, fluid, existing in the pure light of all I am and nothing more but certainly nothing less. Romantic? Not I, perhaps only here.

I ENJOY! And I REVEL! and I REBEL! And I swoon and allure and consume! CHA!!!!!

The train doesn't sound the same. Even the hisssss. The thick air must muffle it. But does it still know me? Though I clearly remember it. I CAN still tame it. Rather, it will still take me wherever I should like to go. Just like a past lover, who loves unchanging but unpossessingly - and I may call on it when it pleases me because no matter the distance and time apart we. are. devoted.

In the areas where I am otherwise distracted, I need to fill in the spaces between - as precious and savory as the distractions might be. I continue to build my own foundation with the expectation that eventually it will be all I have, and in anticipation that one day, maybe even soon, this that I consider so savory will be no more.

...and when it is, I will find something new, and I will become excited again.

There is so much we can learn from eachother without speaking.

I want to communicate telepathically. I don't want to manipulate, I want to connect. And I want us to do this together - like two star siblings who fell to earth in the same place and in the same time.

Luna Sings the Blues

"Where do you go - when you close your eyes and sigh, or else they're far off and vacant?"

"No where. I am here. Inside this body. Inside this mind. This earth. This universe. I never left nor am I inclined towards any desire to leave. For when I go inward I am also projected in all directions outward. I am here and have always been here simply because there really is nowhere else to go."

Did she love him, or did she feel nothing at all for him or for any other man, being, as she had said that afternoon, free, like the wind or the sea?

I don't know many things but I know a few. I know that I am an artist, I know who my real friends are, I know that I don't give myself enough credit, and that my intuition, if I'm really honest about listening to what it's saying, always takes me to the right place at the appropriate time.

I first moved to Austin accompanied by my dear compadre, Clay. I remember him sprawled out on my bed as he returned gradually from a magical day trip. Oh, Clay, the charismatic drifter who befriended everybody and nobody on his gallivants around the world, his routine hitching around the country - no one, of course, was surprised when he ran off to join the circus. So you know, he's laying there all blissed out, with big child eyeballs (like cartoons ones shaped like big raindrops) thinking to us about his approaching 26th birthday and he says, "I always figured that I'd be done wandering like this by now. I'm closer to thirty than twenty and I just thought that I'd be settling down, you know, maybe thinking about getting married and starting a family or a job or something." (Clay, by the way - if you're reading - you actually did say this though you might deny it or forgot about it by now).

So now here I am two years later on my porch, across the street from a seedy college apartment complex and an elderly daycare center - and I'm exactly the same age as he was in my room that day. I'm still in a dead end service industry job that's completely unrelated to any of my passions by a long shot, doing art in my tiny roach infested bedroom, and I haven't come close to doing a crumb of what Clay had done by the time he was 25 (not to mention loads of other people I know and envy at least in the way of travel and spontaneous living).

I went to California recently and had dinner with another friend from back home who owned house, completed his doctorate, and had been sober for a year after returning from Detroit, Michigan which had landed him in a rehab center. He was stable, set up, worked something like 14 hours a day, had a cat, a girlfriend, a surfboard, a condo so close to the ocean you could nearly spit on it from his window. He told me that other friends had jobs at museums, or traveled the country with art exhibitions, were married or getting married, whatever, and I thought; I make sandwiches with no tip jar for a living, have an art degree, just broke up with another boyfriend, live paycheck to paycheck.

But he also told me that for some reason, he felt that twenty-five seems to have some combustible effect, "that things all of a sudden start to happen" at twenty-five. Maybe it's because we realize we're sick of living in roach infested houses, working menial jobs for just enough pay to pay the rent and bills and buy six packs of beer and cheap wine. Maybe at twenty-five we become honest about our potential and our mortality and our resentment or desire for our solitude. Or maybe we're just bored.

So. Twenty-five. I know in five years I'll look back at you, if I'm still around, and say, "oh how you were so young and beautiful and free of responsibility!" But here at twenty-five, I look to thirty, and beyond - tomorrow, ten minutes from now and say, "it's now or fucking never."