Glorious Staycation

Our Beltane ritual went a little...off. My wife took a tumble down our back stairs and sprained her ankle, so our ritual was set aside for something a lot more simplistic.

After Beltane, the weather was largely chilly, wet, constant rain, and I've been a bit blah.

But this past week was hot (HOT!), sunny, and a wonderful time to get out and work in the garden.

Over the long weekend in May, I got out and built the first of our raised vegetable beds.

Finally working the earth in our yard - not just cleaning, raking and fixing, but actually getting in there and adding, building, planting - is such a wonderful feeling. 

I'll be the first to admit my spiritual life has been pretty slack, aside from the spiritual feelings of working the land and being a steward to our space.

This was meant to be a longer update - but I've got some pretty cool projects on the go and the starts of some plans to get this blog off the ground again. 

Merry meet again! 

Dirt. Worship.

It feels weird to be stuck at a desk again.

I took a week vacation, the first since December (which has been waaayyy too fucking long), and spent nearly all of the week toiling in our yard.

With my mother's help, we got most of the leaf litter cleared away, and my wife and I were able to get beds rebuild, cleaned, dug, and are slowly refilling them with soil.

We were left with a decrepit old metal and wood bench - I acquired fresh wood, metal primer and rust paint, new bolts, and outdoor urethane, and am slowly getting everything ready to rebuild it good as new in a lovely deep red colour.

During one of our hardware store trips, we got some herbs (3 types of lavender and one of garden sage) to plant, as well as a foxglove. We have dahlias, fairy lilies, and marigolds to put out.  I have 5 happy plum tomato plants in pots on the deck.

So many nights over the past week, I've stumbled in the house and straight to the shower, exhausted and aching and filthy. Head to toe dirt. Smeared on my arms and legs, inside my gloves, smudged on my face, under my fingernails, on my glasses. Soil and old muck and rust and dust.  From digging out rocks from garden beds, from pulling weeds, from carrying bucket after bucket of fresh garden soil, from slipping and falling trying to disconnect the hose from the tap again. Grass stains on my knees. My neck hurts, my legs are covered in bruises, I have hedge thorn scratches on my arms. I have the start of a swell farmer tan. Sweaty. Hair at the back of my neck is wet, between my breasts is dripping, my glasses keep sliding down my nose.

And I fucking love it.

This is building a relationship with our land - this is paying in blood and sweat and labour, in hopes of love in return. Beautiful flowers, the shade of massive trees, some day soon, sweet fresh veg; hopefully cherries one day from our cherry tree. There are some random blackberry canes here and there that I refuse to remove - others sprouting up that may be wild raspberry. And so much wonderful green.

We had a small barbecue for Canada Day, and for the first time I walked barefoot in the grass. My grass. Our grass. I was always a bit shy to, before, not knowing what rocks or sticks or broken glass were back there. But no more. I walked barefoot, sat in it, laid back and looked up at the sky.

I had to pull some roots out of a flower bed - I suspect they belonged to one of our big trees. I wove them into two little wreathes - one I hung, in offering, on the tree - one I brought in for my altar. It needs a re-do, some freshening up, and then I will show you.

<3

Dirt is wonderful.

Death and Rebirth

My new tarot deck makes mention of how uncomfortable with are with death, how we just don't like to know about what happens to things after they die -- and speaks of Death as "the energy of endings", but always then the cycle of renewal that follows.

I took the Death card from all three of my tarot decks tonight and was amused to discover that all three are birds - a condor, a skeletal bird, and a phoenix.

From left to right - Animal Totem Tarot, Wild Unknown Tarot, and Shadowscapes Tarot

I've been thinking of death in the literal, physical sense a fair bit lately. My grandmother's illness has brought me to the stark realization that her passing quietly and unexpectedly in her sleep would be an incredible kindness versus the possible drawn-out spiral of losing herself to Alzheimer's disease. A coworker's mother also has terminal cancer, and was recently given 24 to 48 hours left, so we were comforting her as best we could while she was at work.

In the metaphorical sense, I'm learning that the death-renewal cycle need not always be painful. We come to expect that when there is an ending, there will be a rebirth, but it will be a bloody, painful, messy process, one that needs to be followed with gentle healing, picking up the pieces.

But what if Death is the healing? What if the tearing down, the cutting apart, the burning and walking away, is the recovery?

I spoke before of severing some facets of my life that were making me unhealthy, that were sickly and stagnant. So much anxiety, so much tension and stress and malaise bound up in so much, so many hours of my life spent on these things. Death brought me relief. The mighty end, that freed me of so much weight. We so often fear death, fear endings, and I think I was clinging, too, to things that no longer served - and that is what we say, isn't it? Those of us who perhaps got a Wiccan-ish flavour to our practice early on? "I release all that does not serve." We cling to our own ball and chain, afraid to drift away if we shed that weight.

I've been mentally healthier, calmer and happier, than I've been in years. My rebirth came as glorious renewal, cleared vision, new purpose and drive. Perhaps it was the timing, the needfulness of this cycle in my life, or perhaps it is all in how I chose to look at it?

Are there any facets of your life where Death and Renewal may restore your vigor and soul?

Stuck sideways between the metaphysical and the physical is our back yard. We saw it as full of potential when we bought this place. Why, put up a privacy fence, plant some flowers, and tada! Our own little paradise. The other thing Death is good at, is stripping us of our delusions.

Our back garden wall is home to a massive rat nest - so there went money, and effort, and no doubt more still - we will never likely be 100% free of them (we live next to a grocery store), but we're hoping to reduce their numbers to a point where the health risks of having so many so near are mitigated. And our beautiful gardens we had romantically planned to fill with flowers, are so soil-barren that I managed to put my foot through one to the near top of a rubber boot. I was afraid at first that I'd fallen into a rat warren, but after a lot of digging, shifting rock and stomping, we realized that the previous owner had tried to compensate for too little soil by piling up rocks in shoddy walls, and the soil has sunk and settled and eroded around these until chunks of the yard are actually hollow. He also left years worth of leaves to rot, so huge patches of the yard are so overgrown with dead grass and rotting leaves that the grass beneath choked and died. But several evenings of hard work, and we've bagged up piles of leaves and dead grass, dismantled shoddy rock walls and rebuilt some, and once the weather is consistent enough to set concrete, we'll be out with mortar taking all those stones (my gods this yard has so many damn rocks) and building proper walls and a fire pit, filling beds with top soil and bark mulch.

We've found an endless number of salamanders under all those leaves. We've been careful to relocate them to dark damp corners near the rocks we're not going to be disturbing. I adore them. (they are eastern red backs, if anyone wants to google)

Even after the work we've done, we have so much ahead of us - but each time we finish, the yard looks a little cleaner, a little greener, and it's a wonderful feeling.

Death in the end, is change. We can be subject to it, but we can create it, too. Choices I have made, with circumstances brought to me, have brought a great cycle around in my life. And now we are agents of renewal in our space, our bit of land, that we are working with love and commitment - like the condor in my tarot deck, we are clearing up the dead so the land can breathe.

It's a wonderful feeling.

(I'll be posting a video tomorrow night, of a tour of our yard Amy did a week ago - and me tracing her steps tonight to show how much we've accomplished.)

For the Birds

Spring has finally sprung, perhaps a little bit.

I belong to a birdwatching group/organization on facebook. A few weeks past, a large number of people started commenting on a funny little bird everybody was seeing that is normally a rare sight in the province.

It's called the American Woodcock.

Woodcocks are native to Nova Scotia but normally shy, nocturnal, and live in deeper wooded areas away from common sight. They use their long bills to probe for worms in the ground.

When they got back this year, the ground was still frozen solid and snow-covered. They were showing up in unlikely places, desperate for food, starving, dying.

Somehow, the tale of their plight became a widely known thing, and the plight of all the other migratory birds arriving back after a long journey to find the landscape looking nothing like spring.

The response was amazing.

I've never heard local and national news talk about the plight of migratory birds. I've never heard so many mass calls for people to put out a little something, anything, to help.

My walk to work in the morning takes me through a pretty sketchy, very urban neighborhood. I saw piles of cracked corn and bird seed out in piles on the lawns of apartment buildings. Someone was back in our spot in the woods leaving piles of seed and chopped fruit. (We did as well.) People bought up nightcrawlers and fishing worms at stores to put out in dishes in their lawns. A local store owner bought massive bags of bird feed--and gave them away for free.

It was inspiring to see so many people doing what they could.

Spring is coming slowly now--weeks later--there is a lot more bare ground, green growth, but still so much snow. Things are not as dire, but they are still not great for mid April.

I had placed a handful of peanuts out on the deck one morning, just after (yet another) several inches of snow. I thought perhaps some crows would find them. They went uneaten, until several days later, when the snow had melted away. A pair of Blue Jays came and grabbed them up. I gave them more, they came back.

They're starting to trust me now, and they have me trained--in the morning, I hear a scream or a squawk, around 8am, of a blue jay on the deck wanting his breakfast.

We also keep a feeder out in our spot in the woods. We were there yesterday and saw it was empty. This afternoon I went out with my wife, and my dedicant (who was visiting) and filled the feeder. It took five minutes at most for the woods to come alive around us. Goldfinches, chickadees, juncos, song sparrows, fox sparrows. They were obviously needing the food. It made me beyond happy to see them all, so suddenly, and know that this is helping them even a little. If one more bird survives a miserable winter and this slow awful spring, it's worth all the money on birdseed and the wet feet and traipsing through melting slushy deep snow in April to fill that feeder even once in awhile.

And now it feels and smells and looks like spring is coming.

We'll be all right.

Illness, Books, Mead and Horn

I've been a bit under the weather as of late--almost literally. The climate this year is fubar, and it's not uncommon for us to swing from temperatures in the positives--as high as plus 6 or 7 (Celsius) to minus 20 or more with windchill. This has been screwing with a lot of people health wise, since nobody can get adjusted to the climate. We're also finally entering the stormy weather part of winter. This has never really been an issue before the last few months, but I've been getting headaches, which my wife and my doctor both think are migraines, sometimes lasting DAYS before a weather event. I'm not sure if it's age, or stress, or what brought this new thing on, but man. The pain isn't debilitating alone, but after that long, it drags on me. I've also been having bad breathing the last few weeks, despite taking my puffers pretty steadily. I now have a script for an oral steroid to help my breathing, and for migraine abortives to help the headaches, and I'm going to be sent for a CT scan to make sure the headaches have no worrisome underlying cause. Prednisone spent most of the day fucking up my guts and making me feel like general poop. Bleh.

I just wanted to share that, since I'm actually kinda proud of how much I've accomplished in the last few weeks despite feeling like shite so often.

I ordered four new books with giftcards I got at Christmas (we jokingly coined in Bookmas). The Prose Edda, the Poetic Edda (translated) a book called "Elves, Wights and Trolls", and "By Land, Sky and Sea" by Gede Parma. I finished the Prose Edda and moved on to Gede Parma as a change of pace before I tackle the Poetic Edda. I'm enjoying Gede Parma's book enough that at some point when I get all of this sorted, I want to read Penczak's Shamanic Temple.

Once I'm done all four of these books, I'll have 4 of my 6 required "further learning experiences" needed for the year, to maintain my IDGAF Initiate status. I need to catch up on my Land Stewardship--with the weather so up-and-down, it's been hard. I have a suet cake to put out for the local birds, but whenever we're due for cold temperatures and snow, we're scheduled to get pouring rain within a day or so, which will melt the suet. I've been trying to wait for a bit of consistently cold weather, and it just ain't happenin'. I want to get it out there, too, because the mild temperatures at the start of winter meant that a lot of birds who would normally migrate stuck around late, and are now struggling in the colder weather. (Birdwatcher. I know these things.)

We bottled our sweet mead batch this Tuesday, as I was home from work due to severe weather. It's been sitting for months while I waited to make sure it was ready--and it's actually drinkable now, not needing to be aged longer in bottle. It has a sweet honey finish that is somewhat floral. I like it.

Last, but not least, I finally finished the cleaning and fancying of my drinking horn. It took a lot of work to get it clean, and for awhile I despaired actually getting it clean enough to drink from--it had a horrible smell that wouldn't go away. I finally soaked it with rubbing alcohol, and then scrubbed it before curing it twice with Guiness. Now it smells like nothing when dry, and a bit like CowBeer when wet. To make it more "mine", I dressed it up with some leather (which I cut, stamped/carved, and dyed myself) and a small carving.


A shot of the carving and stitch work in the back...  The carving was "darkened" slightly with plain old brown colored pencil (Prismacolour, which are wax based) to help it stand out since I couldn't really get it deep enough with the tools I had to make it "pop" on it's own.

 And the leather work on the front! The dragon is (in case it wasn't obvious) a pretty important personal symbol for me, hence why I added one.

I have been "informed" that to consecrate the horn, I need to use it in a blot to Odin when we do our Imbolc rite, (which we are waiting on for the weather to be more "end of winter in sight" than it is now;) using our own home made mead. 

I will mention a little bit about my decision to engrave the horn with the Valknut. I have seen a million and a half explanations of what that symbol supposedly means, the only historically accepted one is "knot of the slain" and "something something Odin" (It's seriously really vague and not seen much.) I've seen some modern heathen takes on the symbol, ranging from "Odin can take you (ie. get you killed) whenever he wants to be Einherjar--and you're cool with that" (I haven't been able to find any source for where this came from though) to "sworn to/works with Odin". My take is more the latter - I associate the symbol with Odin, he has given me things in meditations bearing that symbol, and I accepted the challenge of taking and keeping these gifts. He was willing to allow me to put the symbol on this horn, provided I consecrate it in the manner described above.

(In case anybody who stumbles on this needs it clarified--the Valknut is not a racist symbol. Some skinhead groups have appropriated it, along with other Norse imagery, but nothing about the symbol itself or it's Pagan/Heathen uses is inherently racist. Just wanted to clear that up.)

Man guys, I used a lot of parentheses tonight.