The Big Fat "Before"

For now it's all and dreaming and drill bits.

The days aren't long enough to accomplish what I want in my desired time-line. There just aren't enough days of the week - and I am impatient. Just ask my roommates how nuts I go on my days off. I only have two days a week to get everything done that should take me an entire week. But, sigh, the rest of the week I work to realize the dream of someone else. So many projects bubbling in this dome, scratched across three calendars, rattling around in my head and nagging me in my sleep. Oh, the woes of a passionate woman! Don't feel bad, I wouldn't have it any other way. Stagnancy makes me ache for crunch time.

THIS weekend, I've committed myself to starting and finishing all of the preparations that need to be mailed (and with any luck they will be mailed tomorrow!)- priority to the Valentine's day package "commissioned" from me by Angelena Vargas. She gave me total freedom and so far as the time of this blog being written, this is what I imagine it will consist of (who knows what it will morph into by the time the day is done, these projects have a tendency to shape themselves).

- Damiana infused, warming massage oil.
- Lovers Tea
- Love Spell Herb and mineral bath

Angelena also has a long-time-coming "gypsy box" as she refers to it, that will be full of magical items and personal herbal confections such as feathers, talismans, desert dream salve (mugwort and chaparral infused oil, with essential oils of sage and rose, to encourage lucid dreaming), a hand bound book for keeping track of her own magical practices (and she is a very powerful witch indeed, whether or not she affords herself the title), and a solid perfumed cheek rouge, naturally tinted with beet - I call this one "Beetnick." Oh, the cleverness of me!


Photos of the finished projects will follow - maybe tomorrow? Along with "before" photos of the trailer. It will be in a state of "before" for quite a while. Check back soon!

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.