New Moon – Flower Moon Begins

Today, the new moon shifts from Taurus into Gemini.
The folks at Hoodwitch – who point out that this one is a Super Moon? – mention that this is a time when people may find themselves feeling a little overwhelmed, or else feeling like they can take on more than they actually can. (Guilty. My wife totally sat me down and told me not to reinvent the wheel on a particular project). They suggest that this is a good time, energetically, for rituals around goal-setting (new moons in general) but particularly for creative writing, communication, and social boundaries: Gemini is chatty and social, but is also an Air sign so, tarot-wise, Gemini exists in Sword Time, in terms of things you may want to focus on. Want to Work yourself to be better at Using Your Words? Now’s the time to do it. Want to get your actions more in line with your actual values? This – especially with Venus squaring Pluto right now – is a prime opportunity get that stuff sorted out, make a plan and implement it (for longer-term project, which this might be, I recommend Miss Sugar’s New Year New You magical-action project prompts – I’ve found them really helpful on a number of occasions). Want to focus and get clear about some Stuff you’ve got that’s keeping you confused and spiraling, dig down and sort out what you really, really want (as Ariel, at Siobhan’s Mirror, suggests I do in her Scorpio Tarotscope for this New Moon), or maybe let go of some Old Baggage? This is a good time to work on that (and, handily, Hoodwitch has you covered with a Meditation suggestion).
 
Liz Worth talks about Gemini New Moon as a time of social choices. She offers a handy tarot spread (bottom of the linked post) and asks us to consider who is choosing us, and where we’re putting our social energy. Are we deepening connections with people who matter to us? Are we reaching out to people who reach back to us? Or are we tossing our social energy “juggling balls” at people who aren’t tossing them back, and aren’t showing up? Are we expressing ourselves to the best of our abilities? She points out that Gemini Time has a shadow side that looks like indecision and lack of commitment, and a certain amount of abdication when it comes to owning our choices (and our ability to make them). <– This is absolutely something that I have a LOT of problems with and am only very recently starting to get the hang of. I've been faced with a series of crap options on the personal front and, not liking any of them, have chosen to stick with the status quo while telling myself (and firmly believing) that someone else had all the power in those situations… even though, really, I was making a choice to stick with something that wasn’t going well. This Gemini New Moon is a good reminder for me to watch myself, and my (in)actions, in those situations. As Hoodwitch points out: “Practice acceptance this week, even about the things you want to change. Acceptance isn’t consent; it’s self-awareness.”
 
Questions to Ask Yourself during Gemini New Moon and its Waxing Period:
What can I cultivate, nurture, and allow to take root within myself as this moon waxes? You’ve got all that composted energy from the recent Balsamic Moon to work with so, set goals, yes. But then act on them. A goal is just a wish, if you don’t put some action into it. For each goal you set, come up with one internal and one external action you can take to further it. (E.G.: I want to use my words better. Internal Actions: I can do a face–up tarot spread to help me sort out what I want to say, or I can bless and drink a tea made from nettles and thyme, to bolster my courage and my way with words. External Actions: I can push myself to Use My Words to ask for what I want or need – attention, respect for a boundary, choose your own adventure – clearly and specifically, once a day, for a week… and see how I feel).
What I can I breathe through and/or air out during this period of clarity? Gemini Time means connections, but Air Time more generally means boundaries and sometimes cutting ties, whether with people or with old habits. Get clear on what are deal breakers (and who or what need to be offered less of your time, energy, and attention as a result) versus what are things you can accept as a “price of admission” in your social interactions (and therefore work to stop spending your energy stewing about them)?
 
Ariel’s tarotscope for Scorpio suggests that good things (and some much-needed financial/material stability) come for those who stand their ground. Which is a relief to hear. Gods know I have a hell of a time talking about Money Stuff, and don’t have a really solid grasp of what “normal” or “healthy” look like when there’s cash on the table (or not on the table, as the case may be). I hope her predictions hold true, but I suspect I’ll need to Use My Words and have some scary/stressful discussions in the near future to make sure of that. O.O
 
As far as good things coming to me go… I’ve landed another part-time contract: One day per week (or a little less – more like 4 hours, with the option of a few more as needed) at a very respectable rate of pay, working From Home for a friend who needed, essentially, a research assistant. I’ve also received a wodge of seeds and starts from friends of mine (an aubergine and a jalapeno pepper; a couple of ground cherries; a whole bag of seed packets that I can use in the front and back gardens). I’m really enjoying showing off my garden, and trading rhubarb (stewed or cooked up like lemon curd) for plant starts or giving it as thank-yous. I’m also enjoying harvesting from it! Rhubarb Bars, stewed rhubarb for desserts; baby mustard greens, dandelion greens, and garlic chives for dinner veggies with pasta and cheese sauce; sage (which is about to flower – it’s gorgeous in flower!) used to flavour dips and roasts.
The garden doesn’t quite have its legs yet, so to speak, but it’s getting closer every day. I spaced out my radishes this morning, and we’ll have them to eat in another week or so. The chard is starting (slowly) to take off, and so is the kale. I’ve (re)-sewn sorrel, and I hope it will germinate this time ’round. I may be able to get some lovage (a heavy perennial “herb” that works more like a vegetable. You use the stalks and leaves in place of celery and I think it would be good for “transition periods” – right when it’s available – for soups, stews, and as a pot veggie to cook up with a roast) from a friend of a friend.
I planted (well, seed-scattered) larkspur, forget-me-not, and field poppies in the front yard, and I now have lupin and nasturtium seeds to add as well. I’ll be getting some Lily-of-the-Valley and, maybe, some Dame’s Rocket (“Wild Phlox”) seeds later in the summer, after they’ve had a chance to seed. My goal is to hit up one of the markets (Byward or Parkdale) in the next week or so and see if I can’t get my hands of a few more herb, flower, and veggie starts to top things off but, for the moment, I’m waiting for my seeds to germinate… so that I can remember where they were planted. Adding more transplants has to wait until then! 😉
 
 
~*~
 
Movement: Not a whole heck of a lot. I spent most of last week sick, and I’m still recovering. I’m finding I need more sleep than usual (or at least “usual” during long-daylight time) and I get tired faster. I’m still walking a lot, and working in my garden (which involves lots of bending and squatting and digging), but I’m also taking a lot of rest breaks.
 
Attention: Paying a LOT of attention to boundaries and how much energy I have available to throw at any given project. Some of this means checking, and double-checking my schedule to make sure I know how much of my time is devoted to Other People (whether that’s social time OR paid-work time) versus how much I have available for writing, tending the garden, home-keeping, and other stuff that’s more solitary and self-recovering. Also working to be more actively attentive-to/engaged-with my wife, making time for date excursions and conversations, trying to make a little LESS space in my life for “screen time” (says the lady who has been on her computer for four hours at this point…)
 
Gratitude: Friends & family who give me things – Plant starts, seeds, a covered hotel room (!!!), a car to borrow (!!!), knife-throwing lessons, a recently-replaced washer and dryer (!!!!!) – to help me out. (Seriously, I can’t tell you how excited I am about all of the above, but in particular about the fact that we are going to have an in-house washing machine and drying machine as soon as early June! To be able to make the week’s bread, work my new from-home job, do the dishes, AND do the laundry all at the same time? SO AMAZING!) Grateful, too, for a long walk with my wife, dinner and conversation (and compassionate advice) with a friend, garden chats and catching up with other friends. The ability (thanks to the above-mentioned car and hotel room) to attend my family reunion in mid-June. Grateful for warm weather and long, sunny days. Grateful that my neighbour lets me use her garden hose to water my plants.
 
Inspiration: Dane Edidi’s poetry book, Remains: A Gathering of Bones JUST arrived in the mail, and I’m looking forward to digging into it. I’m also told that one of my library holds has come in, and I’m excited to dig into the work of one of Urban Fantasy’s grandmothers. I’m also getting inspired by the garden- and kitchen-craft of other folks – whether they’re friends and neighbours, or long-distance folks whose blogs I read. It’s great to geek about gardening and fermenting with other people who do what I do, to trade plants (or SCOBYs), and get ideas for what to try next.
 
Creation: Lots of kitchen creativity. Lots of garden nurture, though that’s not exactly “creative” on my part. Coming up with new recipes. Writing poems. Made jewelry for a friend (who was wearing them when she won her Big Award – I’m so chuffed about that tiny, rather insignificant, but special for me detail). Hoping I can push next week for a writing date or two. I read the work of people who come up with, like THIRTY, GOOD poems in the space of seven days, and I’m just like… How do you do that?? But I want to try, too, so I shall. (Remember what I said, above, about Internal and External things I can do to forward my goals? External: Schedule writing dates and put them in the calendar, then follow-through and attend them. Internal: Refill my creative well by reading lots of poetry by other femmes (which will then be glossed in my poetry writing, so…)

May Long Weekend in the Garden – A “Productive Home” Post

So! Erica, over at NWedible, is doing a Productive Home Weekly Report thing, and has invited people to chime in with their own productivity reports.
I’m… not totally fussed about tracking productivity. It feels a bit like giving myself a performance review. BUT, if I think of it as an opportunity to brag about the awesome-fun-cool stuff I’ve been doing/planting/harvesting/cooking/baking/canning/fermenting/etc chez moi that I’m really excited about… it gets a whole lot easier.
So here we go.
 
IN THE GARDEN there has been sprouting and there has been planting! Of both seeds and starts! And there has also been (a tiny bit of) harvesting! Because perennial food crops are fantastic!
 
PLANTED:
I picked up some starts from the local Home Hardware (I’m not choosy). Purple basil, peppermint (I seriously managed to kill my peppermint last year – possibly due to drought, or possibly due to poor management – so I’m trying again), Lebanese cucumber, yellow bell pepper, and yellow cherry tomato. I got them in the ground early this afternoon, along with planting some golden zucchini seeds. We’ll see if they come up.
 
I’ve got scarlet runner beans and butternut squash, along with a “perimeter fence” of daikon radish (I’m hoping the long, thick tap-roots that develop will help keep water in, and invasive runner roots out, of the in-ground bed where I grow my cucurbitas and all my nightshades) planted as seeds, and have some probably-butternut squash coming up from compost-seeds already, which is nice. My rainbow chard is popping up all over, and I spent part of this afternoon transplanting it into more orderly rows (yeah, I’m doing rows… ish. I want my chard to have lots of room to get big and gorgeous and start thriving). My kale – which is, in theory, the Tuscan Black variety (Cavalo Nero) – seems to have sprouted, too, which is nice. I’ve been thinning out the self-seeded mustard greens a LOT in order to give the chard and kale some room to grow. Mustard, I’ve decided, makes a lovely “baby green” for salads, but isn’t something I love as a cooking green, partly because it bolts so darned quickly. It makes for decent sprouting broccoli when it bolts, though, so I’ll have to leave some to mature. 😉
 
The as’kebwan’ (sunchokes) are starting to sprout (again – I dug up a bunch earlier, as I needed to get the last of last year’s harvest out of the ground, once it had thawed – they’re great, by the way, and finding their way into a lot of stew and “potato” salad).
I have no idea if my (new to me) raspberry bush is going to flower this year. Or any year. But fingers crossed?
 
READY TO HARVEST / HARVESTED:
I have tonnes of rhubarb (and sage, and winter savoury) ready to harvest. Along with some frozen rhubarb left over from last year. Uhm. So, as I’ve previously mentioned, I need to make some pies. Or at least a Rhubarb Cafloutis or a crumble or shortcake or something. It makes a great coffee cake (I use the recipe in Company’s Coming “Muffins and More” for cranberry coffee cake, and just use diced rhubarb in lieu of cranberries) and, now that I have eggs in the fridge again, I may just go that route as it packs easily for lunches.
 
The sage has been getting picked and chucked into braises, fairly frequently, but I haven’t been doing a whole lot with the savoury. The dandelion greens and Vietnamese garlic (the tops, not the roots) have been getting added to pastas every so often, but (weirdly?) I’m concerned about using them up too quickly (or at least before the garlic starts to scape).
 
OTHER:
I turned the compost (first time!) and edged the in-ground beds (front and back). I’m happy with how the compost is doing. I put stuff like pizza boxes and newspapers in the compost heap in order to add carbon to a pretty “green stuff” heavy heap (at least I think it’s heavy on the green stuff, as it’s mostly spent coffee grounds, old tea bags, egg shells, and veggie ends) and its rotting into oblivion along with everything else, which I assume is a good sign.
Also, there are wriggly worms in the compost (and even in the raised beds!) and the soil in the back yard’s in-ground bed (which, until Wednesday, the compost heap was sitting directly on top of) is dark a relatively easy to turn – unlike the dirt in the rest of the yard, which is pretty compacted and mostly supports stuff with deep tap-roots, like dandelions.
 
 
IN THE KITCHEN there has been baking and fermenting!
 
FERMENTS:
I’m drinking a LOT of kombucha lately. Partly because I’ve been home, sick, this past week, and drinking Lots Of Fluids has been a significant part of the bill, and partly just because it’s hot out now, or reasonably so, and I’m wanting cool bevvies, rather than hot ones (at least when I’m not hacking up a lung. Appetizing, I know). So I’ve been topping up my kombucha bottle a lot more frequently. NOTE: This makes for a less sharp kombucha which, with my love of the sour stuff, isn’t really what I’m going for. It’s still good, it’s just “lighter” than I like. I continue to cut it with a cup or two of lightly sweetened, long-steeped hibiscus (raspberry/pomegranate/etc) tea, as I like how that works out.
 
I’m continuing to make dairy kefir. My wife won’t touch it in terms of using it as a yoghurt substitute, but she likes it fine in baked goods, so I’m using it a lot in pancakes and coffee cake and similar. Even in bread (see below). I’m making Very Small Batches, and hoping I can get back to the stuff I was making in winter, where it would separate really evenly into curds and whey, and I could get super-thick “kefir cheese” (more like yoghurt or sour cream) that way, while using the whey in things like bechemel sauce or briases. Today, I made chocolate popsicles using (1) chocolate chips, (2) coconut milk, and (3) kefir. They probably won’t be solid until tomorrow, but they should be VERY delicious (and not overly sweet, which is a help when you want something refreshing on a hot day) if the liquid mixture is anything to go on.
 
I (finally) drained my sour kraut crock and packed the fermented cabbage (which is crunchy and done, but also salty AF, holy moly…) into some big mason jars and put it in the fridge. Time to start using this stuff on sandwiches. (Conveniently, I have some beet-and-bean spread sitting in the fridge that will work really nicely with this).
 
Speaking of sandwiches… I tried making a sour dough starter. It.. was not that? successful?
I separated out into Kinda Brown Water on top, and sludge on the bottom. Except, when I drained off the water, it was actually pretty bubbly and fermented-looking. So… It sort of worked? Maybe?
Basically, I poured the entire ferment into my most recent batch of bread, along with 2tsp of dry yeast, so while it was doing its thing, I don’t actually know if it was lively enough to lift a whole new batch of dough.
Yeah.
I’m learning to make sour dough from books like Michael Pollan’s Cooked, and I’m not too quick on the uptake. I don’t usually (yet) start making my bread dough the night before I actually want to bake it, and I’m realizing that if I want to do sour dough, that’s how it’s going to go. Or else I’m going to be starting the chef – like maybe making a chef from equal parts kefir and flour and water, which I’ve done, but am not entirely sure about (my wife liked it. I wasn’t too keen on the texture, which was a lot denser than I’m used to, but it was flavourful and made an acceptable sandwich, so it did the job) – at breakfast, and baking the bread after dinner. This is, by the looks of things, a bit of a slower process than the “only takes 2 hours” version using dry yeast woken up in sweetened warm water. So we’ll see. I’d like to keep this up, just because it would be nice to not need the dry yeast, eventually. But, for now, I’m really glad I have some on hand.
 
BAKING:
The entirety of this week’s baking has been the above-mentioned bread and rhubarb coffee cake. There are a couple of chicken legs baking in the oven right now – although that’s more like a “confit de poulet” than a “baked goods” kind of thing. It’ll be dinner along with some left-over potato salad (not made with sunchokes, or even at home, but left over from a catered lunch at a place where I was temping) and some wilted greens (as in: dandelions and garlic greens. I want that sorrel to successfully germinate even more now… Hm… a little lovage wouldn’t hurt, either…). Big Plans for this weekend include a new batch of bread (made with dry yeast, I have zero doubt), a further rhubarb Thing (maybe muffins), and cookies or cornbread. Probably not both.
 
 
GENERAL HOUSEHOLD STUFF:
Put together a care-package for someone who helped do the C-16 rally on Parliament Hill the other day. (Pasta, crushed tomatoes, salsa, tinned tuna, tinned soup, and 2L of pumpkin-coconut-lentil stew that I made with the stuff I had lying around).
I haven’t been gleaning a lot yet this year. I’ve got dandelions growing in my raised beds, so we’re just harvesting them like any other intentional crop. The the local fruit trees (my favourite cherry, plus tonnes of serviceberries) will be fruiting in about six weeks, and so will the red currants, and I’ve been watching their progress with GREAT interest. (The alley raspberries are about to flower, though they’ll take a little bit longer to fruit). I’m hoping the garden will keep us happily in greens all summer (and fall, and into the early winter…) with lots to spare for the freezer, so I’m not worrying too much about foraging for wild greens right now.
Went grocery shopping! I’ve been on “milk and eggs only” for 3-4 weeks, after a fairly lean winter. We’ve run out of a few things that I’ve been putting off replacing. It’s really nice to have cooking oil, mustard, mayonnaise, chocolate chips, and a bunch of other “not 100% necessary” things again. Plus I bought chicken. 7 chicken legs for $10. I have no idea if that’s a good price or not, but I’m really happy to have 3 meals for two + a chicken leg for some evening when I’m on my own over here, sorted as the greens start to come in. There’s still a lot of dry-goods to replace (particularly flour, but also honey and some basic baking things), and I want to re-stock on chicken and fish in one big go, though I suspect that will happen at Costco or similar, rather than ordering another half a pig. (Yet. We’re still finishing our first one). We’ve got a gallon of maple syrup due to arrive some time this coming week, which I’m looking forward to. I want to try using it more frequently in my baking.
As per usual, I’ve been offering the first slice of every new batch of bread to my gods and ancestors + Anybody local who wants to partake. Now that I’ve got the compost turned (and regularly watered – thanks to the neighbours who are okay with me using their hose), I can use it as an offering place for more stuff, should I happen to have it. The compost heap makes a great offering altar, just because it’s got All The Things in it – heat and wetness, earth and air, and movement, and change, all going on at once. If I manage to successfully make mead (hello, summer fermenting project), some of it will be going in there.
We turned the heat off. (Technically this happened a week ago, but close enough). It’s been wonderful to sleep with the windows open again!
I moved the fig tree outside. My landlord’s husband and I stood outside, drinking coffee and chatting about gardening. He said the fig tree needs a bigger pot (again), and that going around the edges with a big knife will help keep it from becoming root-bound. Which, admittedly, it might already be. But… we’ll see. It’s not technically ours, we’ve just been babysitting it for two years.
 
ANYWAY. That’s the state of the garden and the rest of the household for the moment.
 
 
TTFN,
Meliad the Birch Maiden.

Full Moon – Leaf Moon Crests

I planted Motherwort in my garden this morning. 😀 A friend of mine gave me three dug-up plants from her garden, and I gave her some culinary sage from mine. It’s been gentle-raining, off and on, all day, which should do it some good. My hyacinths bloomed this year, and my tulips are looking like they might manage a bloom or two as well. My Crane’s Bill (Wild Geranium) and Violas are about to flower, maybe the Lamia, too. The Lungwort, of course, has been going great gangbusters for weeks.
Things I would like to add to the front yard: mugwort, lily of the valley (the friend who gave me the motherwort has some she’s willing to part with, once the blooms are done), blood root, Siberian scilla/squills, grape hiacinths, blue crocuses, dark purple tulips (think Queen of the Night), sweet william, bee balm, Russian sage, more bergamot, and more columbines.
In the back, my peas are (just barely) coming up, and the self-seeded cilantro is too. I have self-seeded mustard greens coming up all over the place – which is a mixed blessing. On the one hand: Greens! On the other hand: No root space for my rainbow chard to take over, and I want LOTS of rainbow chard this year! I have a new raspberry plant – a gift from another friend, who contributed roughly half of my front yard garden plants last year – in the perennial bed, too, and need to start harvesting my rhubarb. Time to make some pies!
What would I like to add to my perennial bed? Sorrel (which I’ve seeded, but which may or may not come up this year), chives, and maybe a red currant bush.
In the neighbourhood, the service berries have started blooming, and the apples, pears, cherries and, y’know, lilacs aren’t too far behind (give it another week, probably). The maple and birch trees are in flower. The leaves are bursting forth all over the place.
 
Hilariously, or not, I’m back to sewing dog harnesses. All that job and money stuff that the recent New Moon touched upon? Well, I got an easy-out in terms of dealing with them – at least for the time being.
I needed to find a part-time job to make sure I had some reliable income, and the gal who runs the dog harness company lost 2/3 of her brand new staff inside of the first week, so I said I could go in and do what I’d been doing before, and we worked out a deal. As of the Full Moon, I’ve been getting paid to sew dog harnesses (YAY!) plus, while I’m still going to need to take the bus into work, at least some – probably most – of the time, I’ve worked out with a co-worker that she’ll give me a lift home on the days that I’m in. I’ve offered her preserves and/or garden produce as a thank-you for this because food? I always have enough food to share. ❤
 
Anyway, with regards to the actual moon phase… Ha. Unsurprisingly, I'm writing this about three days late, and the full moon in Scorpio is actually waning through Sagittarius and into Capricorn. Still, I'm working from the perspective that the astrological house that the Moon is in at Full and at New have a certain amount of sway over, well, things I might want to be paying attention to at the time, if you will. (A bit like writing prompts for you brain/life?)
So here we are:
 
The Hoodwitch (who also offers some suggestions for herbs & stones to work with at this time) tells us that: one can use the energy of a Scoprio Full Moon to get to the heart of, and excise (hello, waning moon!), intense stuff around guilt, lust, and obsession.
 
Chani Nicholas reminds us that “Power must be claimed” and suggests that the current full moon energy can be used to tap into the intense, transformative power that comes from actually checking in with your feelings and sorting them out.
 
Mystic Mama points out that Scorpio Full Moon is a time when we can get a good, long look at what we really want, and who we really are – both the stuff we like, and could be proud of if we’d only let it out, and the stuff we don’t like and try to pretend isn’t really there. She asks us to check in with ourselves about whether our goals are really OUR goals, or if we’re wanting things that we think we’re supposed to want due to what we were taught to value in our families of origin, what we think we need to “want” (or present as wanting) in order to get our (secret, unspoken – Scorpio Time is the time to take a look at those) needs met, or just due to swimming in the societal kool-ade our whole lives.
 
Sarah Gottesdiener over at Little Red Tarot offers wisdom from Liz Migliorelli, saying that “noticing is not enough”, not only are we called to tune into our deepest, most intense emotions and intuitions, not only are we called to step up and do the hard mental, emotional, and physical work of transformation, we’re also called to release and let go, to “let the old dreams die, let the wrong ones go” so that we can let the right ones in. She asks “How can we ease our physical tension around true embodiment of our full range of emotion?”
 
Tarot-wise, Scorpio Full Moon is a High Priestess kind of time, but also a Moon kind of time. A diving deep and surfacing kind of time. A feeling ALL the feelings time. A hard-look-in-the-mirror time. It’s a time to heal ourselves. A time to rise from the ashes of whatever Tower needed to be burned.
It’s a good time to do rituals and/or exercises to help heal your sexual/reproductive organs and – Scorpio being the sign of Go Deep or Go Home – to heal your emotional Stuff around same. So, Scorpio Full Moon energy is good to harness around things like getting over the ex who broke your heart, easing the heartache of infertility or the hurt, rage, and confusion of sexual trauma, as well as for untangling the internal knots that keep you shame-spiraling around wanting, needing, or feeling things in a big way. It’s good energy, too, to harness if you want to get your second chakra (Pluto) AND/OR your third chakra (Mars) spinning on good bearings.
 
This is a time to get to the roots of what needs to re-balance, within yourself, in terms of:
– Money Feels
– Sex Feels
– Guilt or Shame around the concept/accusation of “selfishness”;
– Where (and why, and how much) you’re offering your energy versus what’s coming back to refill that well;
– Creativity Feels;
– Sorting out where you are really being victimized or taken advantage of, versus where you are martyring yourself, or shooting yourself in the foot, by hiding your desires, down-playing your needs and waiting for others to guess and provide
– Guilt or Shame around taking time for art, pleasure, beauty, and other stuff that gets dismissed as “frivolous”;
– Blocks around your sense of Self;
– Blocks around creating change in your habits and behaviours
– Feelings around your Personal power (Do you give it away in order to secure something you fear being without? Do you practice building the courage to be direct about asking for what you want?)
 
Questions you can ask yourself during Scorpio Full Moon and its waning period:
What can I let go of and allow to pass on as the moon wanes through determined Capricorn, stubborn but open-minded Aquarius, and sensitive, cathartic Pisces?
What can I compost into something new and fertile in the roiling cauldron of the coming dark/balsamic moon (one that will be characterized by a bold and sensual energy that matches Scorpio’s own intensity)?
 
 
What am I working to let go of? Scarcity-Thinking. Resentment. Anxiety around my ex (ha, see above…) who will be moving back to town in less than two months. The assumptions I make about what I surely must want in terms of personal interactions and expectations. The heaviness of my metaphorical foot on the brakes when it comes to opening up to pleasure and desire (yes, even still, even after all the progress I’ve already made, this continues to be A Journey).
What about you?
 
~*~
 
Movement: Tonnes of walking. A lot of time on my feet, too, which is less great. Modeling work. Digging (and squatting, and bending) in the garden!
 
Attention: I am trying to Science my way through decoding my own Relationship Assumptions, and notice (but it’s not enough to just notice) the points where I’m defaulting to a rote reaction (the irritation I feel when I think I’m being ignored or punished; the frisson of fear that shows up when a crush talks about relationship developments with other folks) rather than checking in with how I actually feel (See both Chani’s and Hoodwitch’s Scorpio horoscopes for this week – linked above) and/or where that feeling might be coming from. I am also paying a TONNE of attention to my garden right now. It’s so exciting to watch things sprouting, greening, growing, and coming back to life! Ditto the numerous (more have been planted since last year!) neighbourhood service berries and my favourite alley-way cherry tree as they bloom and – hopefully, eventually, fruit!
 
Gratitude: Thankful for fresh greens in the garden (they are dandelions, but I am A-Okay with that!) and for my seeds germinating and pushing up through the ground. Thankful for a gentle walk with my wife this morning, and also for the guts to ask a cafe-worker if they ever have tarot readers working at their shop (I now have an email address to ask about coming in and doing for-pay readings once a month. Fingers crossed!) Grateful for friends who bring me plants and food. Grateful for a part-time job with co-workers who are game for ride-sharing. Grateful for plant trades and fermentation-supply trades and a broad community of people who share what we have.
 
Inspiration: Lots of Femme Poetry coming in the mail, and in through the library, too. All the green and growing things giving me hope.
 
Creation: Planting in the garden, but also thinning and weeding, putting a little more effort into “curating” the garden and making those spaces grow what I want to grow. Still working on the stocking extensions, but I’m on the last push and will, with any luck, have a finished pair of stockings by this time net week! Taking myself on writing dates (sometimes with other people, sometimes solo) and working on my Lip Gloss manuscript. Pushing for a focus on femme inter-reliance and also on magic and witchcraft, as there are SO MANY witchy femmes out there, and I want to touch on what we do and how we do it.
 
 
TTFN,
Meliad the Birch Maiden.

Full Moon – Melt-Water Moon Crests

Wrote this last Monday, when the moon was full in Libra. As of this posting, Venus has juuuuust stationed direct again. Onwards we go!
 
~*~
 
It’s going to be 22C today! 😀 😀 😀
I wore my monster-fur coat to my temp job (I’m working close to home all week, and have a tonne of social things planned for the evenings!) and didn’t even have to do it up. I probably would have been fine with no coat at all!
 
My weekend is – weather permitting – going to involve a lot of raking and shoveling, turning the compost and getting the garden beds ready for planting! (And, possibly, doing some actual planting of things like kale and radishes and rainbow chard, since they can handle the cold weather and chilly-damp soil just fine). I’ve got a heap of sunchokes that I need to dig up so that the rhubarb has some breathing room, and I’ve also got a bunch of different peppers to seed-start indoors, courtesy of my wife’s dad. Jalapeno, Jimmy Nardella, and one other red bell that sounds like it would be good for salads.
 
Planting list for this weekend:
Tuscan Kale
Red Russian Kale(?)
Rainbow Chard
Snow Peas
French Breakfast Radishes
Daikon Radishes? (I’m thinking of doing these more as a “perimeter fence” around my in-ground bed in the interests of having fewer weeds get through and into my squash and eggplants bed.
 
I’ll plant peppers, eggplants, cherry tomatoes (if I don’t get a bunch of “volunteers”… unlikely), zucchini, fairy tale pumpkin, butternut winter squash, hopefully some “Baby Boo” (or other tiny “pumpkin”), and maybe some collards later on, but it’s cold-weather crops that are going in right now.
 
My other task this week, is putting together a care-package for someone who needs life to be just a little bit easier right now, and will probably make a point of doing a few freezer-meals for us, at the same time. As such, tonight is going to involve a certain amount of re-organizing the fridge and freezers (yes, both of them) so that I have adequate space to host a few lunch-sized and meals-for-two containers of various vegetarian delights. Menu List is: Pumpkin curry, macaroni and cheese, and some kind of harvest stew involving lots of root veggies. Even though I’m not “really” doing the Eat From the Larder Challenge this year – I will be buying coconut milk for this extravaganza, and have already bought two dozen eggs and a bag of coffee since the beginning of April – I’m pleased to say that I have enough salsa, crushed tomatoes, frozen pumpkin, frozen other veggies, fresh (well, in the fridge…) root veggies, and even CHEESE, that I only need to get in coconut milk to make my ingredients list for a few large-batch meals for someone else complete. And I’ll still have lots of frozen summer & winter squash, broccoli, and other goodies (beets, leafy greens, carrots, sunchokes (as’kebwan’), onions, cabbage…) to cook with for the rest of the month. Hurrah!
 
I feel like I’ve had a break-through. All that blogging about relationship juggling acts, and life coaching around boundaries, and magical-working around healing and nurturing my own (whale) heart[1], a year and a half of pushing and digging and swimming in all the Feeeeelings and… now I’m trying something very, very new. I feel like I’m having a Two of Cups experience, in the Kalil Jibran sense of “do not grow in each other’s shadows”, but also in the sense of “new connections” and sparks of recognition. Putting that boundary work into practice.
 
I’ve spent years asking myself “What do I want”, and frequently what I’ve wanted has been – to some, or all, extent – a thing beyond my control. I want this person or that person or those people to respond to me in XYZ ways. I still want those things. But I’m aware that hinging my potential happiness (or lack-there-of) on them… isn’t very effective, and will mostly just make me crazy[2]. So something I’ve started asking (myself) (the gods) for is that I be able to be happy with interpersonal circumstances as they are right now.
 
I admit I feel kind of sanctimonious saying that out loud. Like: If, a year ago, I’d read someone else writing what I just wrote? I would have thought “Well, that must be really nice for you, then, hm? Some of us aren’t totally dissociated from our emotions, fyi!”
 
But that’s part of the whole Whale Heart situation. My Whale Heart knows what it wants. But she doesn’t fling herself off the cliff of desire (I’m mixing metaphors, just… go with it) and blindly hope that someone else will catch her before she smashes on the rocks. There’s a whole lot of careful negation of “what is so-and-so able to give at this time?” + “What do I need to do and NOT do in order to enjoy receiving what they’re making available, rather than feeling used or taken advantage of when they aren’t able/willing to meet me at the more intense level at-which I’m generally operating?”
 
And… look, it’s not like this is a fool-proof method to “be brave without getting hurt” or something. People lie – or variations on the theme of “lie”, if you want to go with something a little less harsh – when they’re afraid they won’t get what they want/need if they don’t tell people what they think those people want to hear. People have crap self-knowledge and think they’re ready to offer way more than they actually are, and then get overwhelmed when someone takes them at their word. People make active decisions to cross their own boundaries (because they’re lonely or because they think X Experience is going to be sweet enough that they’ll just deal with the repercussions afterwards) and underestimate the damage they’ll do to themselves in the process[3]. People are bad at communicating and cross wires with each other all the time. So it’s not like this can’t go completely pear-shaped. But it helps. I can ask myself what I need to do, and not do, in order to:
 
– Enjoy the kind of sex-life that’s available with a grey-A spouse
 
– Avoid over-investing in a friendship-with-benefits that may or may not grow into something else over time
 
– Maintain a friendship with someone who is consistently terrible at making, and following-through on, plans
 
– Have a hook-up with a long-time friend and still be “just friends” (rather than love-sick) the next day
 
…Because the answer isn’t, and can’t be “want less”. But it might be “offer less” or “offer differently”. If my (technically still on-going) Queen of Cups Project has taught me anything, it’s that wanting less – having fewer or lighter appetites, teaching myself to believe that crumbs are a feast – is a sure-fire way to mess with my head and starve my heart to pieces.
 
So. I pace myself. I go slowly. I tidy my garden and start my seeds and cook good, “real” food in my kitchen that I try to keep functional. I say Thank You to my gods and ancestors. I scribble. I reflect. I take careful risks which, small miracle, are so far having surprisingly lovely results.
 
Spring has sprung.
What do I want to plant for myself?
How do I want to grow?
 
 
~*~
 
 
Movement: Ha! I hurt my hip pretty badly about a week ago. The bruise is spectacular. But it means I’ve been going reeeeally easy on the “movement” part of my life. Even with a fair bit of walking, I’ve been calculating just how much walking it’s wise for me to do on a given day. I spent a lot of the last few days sitting down (in cars, in a curling “lounge” during a friend’s game, at my desk in between half-hour spurts of Getting Things Done on my feet). I’m lucky, my injury is all in the muscle and healing up nicely.
 
Attention: Watching for scilla, crocuses, and other early flowers opening up in sunny, south-facing spots. Makes me want to plant a heap of super-early bulbs along the north fence in my back yard… but that will have to wait until October. For now? I watch and I thrill every time I see buds opening and flowers blooming! 😀
 
Gratitude: Grateful for my lovely wife who gives me lots of snuggles and kisses, the exciting new person in my life, flowers(!), hang-outs & conversations with friends, being able to wear sandals today(!), my casis-coloured faux-fur coat that I only get to wear for about two weeks a year, and this is one of those weeks, lazy mornings that let me catch up on sleep, enough food that I can share with other people, rainy days that soak the thawed-out soil and help it get ready for news seeds, sunny days that bring me tonnes of hope and joy, the rhubarb making it through another winter (all of it, by the looks of things!), pepper seeds from my FiL, other people interested in tarot, free time to spend on knitting, the small blue bird who plays games with me on the living room floor, music, a pay-cheque for this week’s work, the chance to watch the moon set through the guestroom window.
 
Inspiration: Tarot’s suite of earth. Venus in retrograde (yes, really). Compost. My writer-friends who are always doing so much. ❤
 
Creation: Two knitting projects on the go – still working on the (cobalt blue) extensions for a pair of (beige, fishnet) stockings, sorting out how to do the toe. Heel up next… or maybe I’ll start the second stocking and go from there. Also working on a “sample” of a sock pattern. Next steps there are (a) finish the sock (taper off the heel gusset + knit in the round, then decrease to make the toe), then (b) knit an actual PAIR of socks for the lovely wife. 🙂 Have promised myself an hour of creative writing on Wednesday evening, plus further scribbling over the course of this week. I want to re-prioritize my writing, so that I can actually get a manuscript (maybe even two?) finished. Rawr!
 
~*~
 
 
TTFN,
Meliad the Birch Maiden.
 
 
[1] I am absolutely getting those earrings – or a smaller version there-of – btw. Can’t wait! 😀
 
[2] Like actual crazy. Panic attacks and exacerbated mental health crap. That kind of crazy.
 
[3] Not that I’ve been considering anything like that at all… >.>

Warming Herbs for Winter

Hey there!
So Snow Moon began not too long ago (not that I’ve done my blog post about it or anything, but… bear with me), and the snows have come in force, bringing a lot of ice and a lot of quite cold (-23C, so seasonal, but not horrific if you’ve got somewhere warm to be) temperatures.
When I think of “warming herbs” – meaning herbs (and spices) that will produce heat in the body to help you sweat out illness and similar – I tend to think of things like ginger and cinnamon. These days, I also think of garlic and mustard (Woohoo!), but I was wondering – thanks to this post over at Little Red Tarot – what else I might be able to draw on, in terms of locally grow-able flowers, leaves, and roots, that will help someone (like, say, ME – I got a bad bronchial+sinus infection, quite a few years ago now, and it’s left me pretty susceptible to getting more of them) deal with Winter illnesses at home, without having to book an appointment with my over-stretched GP.
 
Labador Tea (Ledum glandulous) – good for calming coughs. Also good – when the dried roots & leaves are ground and added to an ointment – for helping to relieve chapped lips and hands.
 
Lavender – I use the essential oil to help heal badly chapped lips and knuckles when the cold, dry air makes them split. NOTE: Lavender is a common allergen, so be careful with this one. Topically, it’s good for helping to heal burns. It’s a powerful antibacterial and anti-fungal (so, for example, good to use on your feet if they are getting gross after weeks of heavy socks).
 
German Chamomile (Roman Chamomile works too, but German is hardier for the garden) – Steep the flowers into a tea to help gently warm you up. If it’s anything like Ox-Eye Daisies, it will help to increase circulation, but… meh?
 
Burdock Root – Like chamomile. Make a tea of the roots (you can also tincture them)
 
Mullein (Verbascum thrapsis) – One of the primary herbs for any lung problem, including whooping cough, asthma, bronchitis and chest colds. Allegedly, the leaves were smoked to relieve lung problems. I wonder if you could use them in a hot water inhalation (the way we use eucalyptus essential oil).
 
Angelica ROOT – including (hard to find, apparently) Ontario native species Purple Angelica (Angelica atropurpurea) – will help “cut through obstruction” and make you sweat. This one is easy to grow from seed and needs lots of space in the garden. It’s a carrot-family plant, and should be harvested in the fall (late October, early November) of its first growing season. Use the leaves to make a chest compress to relieve inflamation.
In TCM, this root is called Dong Quai, and is used for menstrual stuff like relieving PMS symptoms & menstrual cramps, or helping to encourage a late period to get started. It’s also good for upset stomachs (think gas, bloating, digestive difficulties… but also (apparently?) IBS and colitis?)
As a Winter Herb, though, it’s particularly good – steeped as a tea, or made into a tincture – for helping to increase your circulation, reduce mild fevers (don’t use it for bad fevers), and help you to loosen up thick, gummy phlegm that’s making it hard to breathe.
NOTE: If you are a pasty, white person like me? This can make you more sensitive to sunlight. Also it’s not wise to take this one while you’re pregnant or lactating (it’s bad for fetuses and kids under three).
Allegedly, the taste is somewhere between celery and… juniper? I have no idea how that works, but people candy it and say that angelica root tea tastes good rather than, like, barely tolerable, so… maybe it’s one to look into?
 
Peppermint – The leaves make a good tea for coughs. Essential oil is cooling (topically) and anti-microbial (see: “mint”) so, when accessed through the leaves, can help get rid of coughs and colds that way.
 
Basil, Thyme, and Rosemary – Like mint, these herbs make a tea (or an addition to savory dishes) that acts as a digestive aid and can help push through light-weight phlegm. Good for when you have a frog in your throat, not so useful for something heavy like walking pneumonia.
 
Fennel – Simmer the seeds to make a tea – which you can drink as-is, or else thicken into a syrup for use in calming coughs and shortness of breath as well as loosening up congestion. Apparently you can’t use this stuff in high doses as it can cause spasms and hallucinations (I don’t know what constitutes “high doses”, though, so that’s not very helpful).
 
Yarrow – Use the leaves and flowers to make a tea, or add them to a bath, to help you sweat out a fever. (Drink lots of water with this stuff. Also, avoid this one if you’re pregnant or trying to get pregnant). The tea encourages circulation and combines well with peppermint to help one conquer a cold or fever. (Also lowers blood pressure? Maybe, if you have low-enough-to-worry-about blood pressure, this is one to avoid?)
 
Anise Hyssop – Use the leaves to make a tea to help with colds and with chest pain brought on by coughing. You can use them in a hot bath or inhalation to help you sweat.
 
Garlic – This is a fairly powerful antibacterial and antiviral (eating whole cloves of it raw will also make you – or at least ME – throw it right back up, though, so make sure to mix it with something easier to swallow). It’s also improves circulation, which will help warm you up.
 
Cedar (leaves/fronds) – Cedar has antifungal, antiviral, antibacterial, and antioxidant properties. A tea – or a hot bath – made with the tips of the leaves, is good for coughs and colds. The essential oil can be used, topically, in an ointment like vix to help relieve congestion (don’t take cedar essential oil internally, generally speaking). I think (I think) you can use this, much the same way you’d use eucalyptus essential oil in a steam inhalation.
 
Mustard – Use the seeds of the mustard plant (like: the one you would use as cooking greens) to make a VERY HOT poultice. From what I hear, this is super uncomfortable and shouldn’t be put directly on skin BUT if you spread it on a scrap of cloth, and put the cloth on the chest of someone with pneumonia or otherwise really bad chest congestion,it will have an effect similar to a eucalyptus rub (but NOT soothing – this stuff can cause blisters if you put it directly on your skin).

Green Tomato Chutney 2016 Recipe

So, I’m about to run out of the house to do laundry, but I wanted to get this down. I finally got around to making my green tomato chutney (after, what, a month of saying I was going to get to it?), and put it in the slow-cooker to do it’s thing while I’m out this afternoon.
The recipe is a little different from last year’s, because I have slightly fewer tomatoes (my mistake – I waited too long, due to having run out of canning jars, and the first batch I harvested went moldy), and slightly different ingredients on hand, and also because my garlic basically dried to the hardness of cashews in the fridge, but here’s what I did:
 
 
Green Tomato Chutney 2016
 
~10 C green cherry tomatoes (halved, if they’re bigger than your thumb-nail)
8 garlic cloves, rough-chopped (very rough… um…)
1 yellow onion, diced
5 apples, diced
 
1 C cider vinegar
1 C kombucha vinegar (yep, I totally trying this out)
3 C white sugar
 
¼ C prepared mustard
2 tbsp salt
1 tbsp nutmeg
1 tbsp ginger
1 tsp ground cumin
20 grinds of black pepper
 
 
DIRECTIONS
Put everything in the slow-cooker and set it on “low”. Let it do it’s thing for 24 hours and see where everything is at. If it smells tangy and zippy and tastes good, turn up the heat ’til it’s bubbling. Sterilize some 1C jars, can and process in a boiling water-bath for 10 minutes. Allow to cool (listen for the “plunk” that tells you the jars have sealed properly). Let sit for at least a month before opening to allow everything to get even more flavourfully mixed.
Enjoy!
 
I have no idea how many jars of chutney this will make, but I’m guessing about 6-8. Fingers crossed!
 
I’m glad I got around to doing this. Green-tomato chutney is a really great way to get tasty, edible veggies into your system over winter, it adds a lovely tangy flavour to pork, turkey, cheese, and even tuna sandwiches,and it lets me get a second harvest from my cherry tomatoes (some of which are sitting in a bowl, with an apple, ripening indoors) after the season is well and truly done.
Green tomatoes from the garden + onions & apples (both pretty inexpensive, if you buy them, and apples can often be found on urban trees either growing wild, or planted so long ago that the current owners don’t know what to do with all the food that’s suddenly available) make for an inexpensive preserve that let’s you use free bounty and “hard luck harvests” to make something delicious.
 
 
TTFN,
Meliad the Birch Maiden.

New Moon – Harvest / Squash Moon Begins

It’s been an Eight of Disks kind of day. Grey clouds scudding across the sky, sun warm when it’s out, but mostly it’s chilly enough to remind me that it’s autumn, nearly October.
I’m running that canning workshop the day after tomorrow, and one of today’s tasks was getting the last of the ingredients together. I’m so relieved that Ontario blue plums are still available, because I’d have been in some trouble otherwise. (I promised I’d bring enough to make 3 litres of the recipe I’m teaching – about 1 pint each, basically, since it’s a small class – and I was worried I’d have to add rhubarb or apples or something to get the full amount).
Other tasks have included vacuuming, dishes, laundry… all the things that are required to keep a house going, day to day. It’s been really good to just dig into it and do it without feeling like I “should” be doing something else.
 
I’m feeling the spiral of time particularly thickly right now – mostly because, this time last year (and every year before last year for the past six years), I was prepping to go to an event that isn’t (exactly) happening this year. I keep going over “this time last year…” in my head, and part of me really wants to stop. I’m trying to focus on food, and the very beginnings of our local Festive Season (which basically runs from the full moon closest to the Autumn Equinox, all the way through the winter to almost Beltane – although, yes, things quiet down a little bit after Mother’s Nigth and New Year’s Day). I’ll be cooking a couple of turkeys, this time next week, bringing one – along with a wild rice pilaf ft butternut squash, McIntosh apples, dried cranberries, pumpkin seeds, onion, garlic, and sage – to a potluck thanksgiving gathering, and the other will be pulled apart and frozen in meal-sized portions to be added to pasta dishes and similar on nights when I’m too tired/busy/lazy to cook anything with a lot of forethought.
 
i’m glad that the temperature has dropped, though also glad that there hasn’t been a frost just yet. My forest of cherry-tomato and roma tomato plants (most of them a re volunteers, if you can believe it) are heavy-heavy with green fruit, and I’m looking forward to stewing it all into a chutney again, but it will be nice to gather in at least a little bit more of the ripe stuff before the season ends for good.
 
I picked all of my eggplants yesterday. Small, glossy, and dark purple – one of them has a “nose”, of all things, this random purple spike sticking out of the side. I’m going to peel them and cook them up with chick peas, coconut milk, and some of last year’s tomato sauce for dinner tonight. I’m down to only a few jars of 2015 preserves at this point (phew!) and I’m kind of hoping we’ll all be slightly sick of prserved tomatoes by the time the frost hits. That way, I can easily put off opening this year’s preserves until January or February, when the root veggies start getting scarce and I need to start leaning on what I’ve put up in jars.
 
That’s the way I’ve been cycling things, so far. Trying to rely only on jarred and frozen veggies for as little time as possible (which, let’s be honest, is still something like five months, but still), and have a few solid blocks where I’m serving fresh stuff (even raw stuff!) without anything I’ve put up. Otherwise, it can get to be too much vinegar in everything. Tonight we’re having jarred tomato sauce, yes, but this morning was eggs with garden tomatoes. Chicken and pasta with sage pesto fresh mashed from the garden and never having seen a freezer, or jerusalem artichokes (a solid month or more away from being dug up) sthen boiled like buttery potatoes or else sliced thin and stir-fried for a crunch like water chestnuts.
 
Next New Moon is the weekend of Samhain. I’ll have the squash in by then, and the garden will have mostly gone to bed. Between now and then, who knows what will happen.
 
~*~
 
Motion: Lots of walking, lots of lifting. A friend told me I was strong and that my muscles are in good conversation with each other, which was not what I was expecting at all, but which is wonderful to hear. The weather’s getting chilly, but I’m still trying to get out dancing now and again. Some of that’ll happen tomorrow evening, I think. 😉
 
Attention: Watching the way my hope and my cynicism fight it out against each other. It’s not a great thing to watch, but there it is. Also keeping an eye on screen time (I say, typing this on a computer, having spent the last two hours reading The Internet…) – my lovely wife has suggested that we do a regular No Tech Night together – the kind of thing where we stick to tarot cards, accoustic instruments, conversation, reading aloud to each other, and that sort of thing for the evening’s entertainment rather than zoning out behind our electronics. I fully support this plan (and so want to get this finished in the next 10 minutes).
 
Gratitude: Running into a friend while out doing errands today (she said “I had no idea why I came in here, and then there you were”). Grateful, too, for the above-mentioned No Tech Nights. Grateful for house guests. For suggestions on how to approach house-hold cleaning and organizing as a series of short, contained “blitzes” rather than as this endless battle against entropy (hopefully this method will help us get our house in order for what, with a little luck and some encouragement, will be a winter full of guests and gentle entertaining). Grateful for friends who get in touch to tell me that they miss me. ❤ Grateful, even, for the taurus (they had it tattoo'd on their arm) working their second shift at the McDonalds counter (yeah, you heard me) who made me change to get the laundry done with. Grateful for local-ish blue plums and on-sale Quebec McIntosh apples at the grocery store. Grateful for witchy fam and people to talk shop with.
 
Inspiration: Other artists (always), though not necessarily the way they usually are. The poetry of other femmes (always – this week, it’s Leah Horlick’s For Your Own Good), geeking out about how we’re a narrative species that loves fitting life’s intricacies into patterns that make sense to us. Talking tarot and witchcraft with masc-of-centre folks who, until this year, I never expected to be such a part of my woo-munity.
 
Creation: I wrote two poems this week, and submitted them to an anthology of femme writing! 😀 Heaven and Earth only know i either (or both? A gal can dream) will be accepted, but I’m so glad that I did this!

Full Moon – Apple Moon Crests (and Wains) PLUS Autumn Equinox

There’s a nip in the air that wasn’t there a week ago. The sun is still warm, even hot, when it hits you directly, but the mornings are chilly and, while we haven’t needed to turn the heat on yet, I know it’s not going to be long before that becomes a necessity again.
People with gardens are harvesting hardcore, bringing in the green tomatoes before they get hit by the frost that’s threatening to arrive any day, putting up the last of the rhubarb jam. I did a second round of tomato-canning last weekend, while that big, gorgeous harvest moon rose in the sky, and my wife spent the weekend with her GF.
I’m teaching a water-bath canning workshop next weekend. (It’s a go! Woot!) We’ll be using neighbourhood-harvested chokecherries + farmers’ market plums and a slew of other goodies to make Chokecherry Chutney (which, technically, is a relish given how I’ve done the seasonings. I’m keeping the “chutney” for the aliteration of it all. 😉 )
The chokecherries have been sitting in my freezer, already strained into a purree, for over a month. Even though there’s at least one tree in the neighbourhood that’s still got berries on it, I didn’t want to risk not having any available for this workshop, so into the freezer they all went. I suspect my October is going to be full of canning – a nicer time to do it, since the weather will be cooler and a hot, steamy kitchen will hold more appeal than it does in August. Chokecherry curd, GoblinFruit jam (chokecherries, black currants, raspberries, vanilla, and whatever else I can throw in there), rhubarbicue sauce, and lots of pumpkin butter. I tried harvesting apples from a local tree, but most of them were out of reach, so… we’ll see what we can add to my three apples + a couple of crab apples. They may end up in a green-tomato chutney (ft mustard and black pepper for heat), or else just baked into some kind of freezer-friendly cake recipe.
 
I’m feeling the need to rush, right now. Like I should be harvesting bouquets of grape leaves and dandelion greens and chard (my chard is finally starting to take off, can you believe it. Autumn plantings for the win, I guess?) and putting them up in the freezer so that we’ll have plenty of greens frozen for over winter when the imported stuff is soooo expensive. Like I should be buying as much yellow zucchini as I can get my hands on and putting it up in pucks so that we have something other than root veggies to draw on in January and February. Like I should be making (more) vegan sage pesto for the freezer and drying basil and Greek oregano in the dehydrator. And I should. I should be outside with a bowl, right now, cutting rhubarb stalks and yellow chard fronds and ripe, skinny eggplants off the gorgeous plant that finally started heavy-producing when the drought broke (I have a blowl of ripe baby-tomatoes and purple beans sitting on the counter already). I could do a nightshade heavy meal with added white beans and some of last year’s salsa on top of the left-over beefheart and quinoa slow-cooked dinner I made on Thursday,and it would feed the four (we have guests this weekend) of us quite nicely.
 
My wife, her GF, and our two guests are off canoing this afternoon. I begged off because I’m down with a head-cold and the idea of spending a windy, chilly autumn day on the water seemed like a less-than-wise way to go. So I’m home, writing about seasonal changes and plotting what to do with my garden’s bounty before the frost knocks it all down for another year.
 
The cross-over into Root Time is only a few weeks away at this point. The days are noticeably shorter than they were not that long ago and, now that the Equinox has (just barely) come and gone, they are shorter (only just) than the days are. I’m aware of all the Personal Growth I’ve been doing over the past six months, wondering how much of it would stick if I found myself trying to open my heart again to another unknown quantity.
I read a blog post the other day that asked “What are you afraid of being”, and the answer is: I’m afraid of being crazy.
I’m afraid of being in that space of spiraling anxiety and hyper-arousal and constant doubt where self-soothing, for all that I do it as hard as I can, also feels like I’m gas-lighting myself, telling myself pretty lies that only make it easier for someone else to be careless with me.
 
I’ve spent most of 2016 trying to tease out the strands of what I can manage and control in terms of anxiety and boundaries versus what I can’t (other people’s feelings and behaviour) and how to tell when to pull the plug on something that isn’t feeding me. There is still so much I don’t understand, and I am afraid of being crazy if I try this again.
Miss Sugar recently talked about “the dark part of the forest“, the dark side of one’s own Glamour, and how her Glam is equal parts Glenda and Elphaba. Equal parts the charming femme escort who works the tropes of femininity so hard they break (to paraphrase Kathryn Payne) and the fierce, terrifying, single-minded “belle dame sans merci” – the femme who is written off as mad/insane because she’s sick of playing by the rules that say “want less and you will always have enough“.
Carrie’s post for this moonth’s Scorpio tarotscope, over at Siobhan’s Mirror, says “The door of your transformation has been cracked open, and it cannot be closed again“.
Has it? How do I trust that what my gut is telling me is true? That it’s neither wishful thinking & relentless hope nor the awful stories my anxiety, fear of abandonment, and generalized self-loathing want me to believe are true?
 
The Autumn wreath is on my door. I have a couple of butternut squashes (hallelujah!) ripening in the garden, more rhubarb than I know what to do with (no, actually, I totally know what to do with it), and some shorter-than-expected but hopefully proliffic jerusalem artichokes that I won’t need to harvest until my birthday roles around, shortly after Hallowe’en.
From now until the snow flies and the killing cold comes on the heels of the longest night, we’re in the season of the witch.
Time to tincture, time to brew.
What’s brewing for me?
Time (and my intuition) will tell.

~*~

Motion: Not nearly enough, but Plank every day is still happening, which is something.
 
Attention: Paying attention to the way I watch people’s body language, check-in a LOT when they look stressed/uncomfortable/distant, noticing how often this happens with masc folks in particular, and wondering how much of my over-performance of emotional labour relates to the genderedness of emotional labour (which is heavily fem(me)inized) and whether or not my fretful/soothing (freeze & please, mend & tend) reaction to someone else effectively Doing “Resting Bitch Face” While Masc is entirely a case of hyper-awareness around other people Being Displeased (which is, of course, my responsibility to manage…) or if it’s actually a reaction to someone “failing” to smiiiiiiiile or otherwise perform “everything’s great, and I’m engaged in the proceedings”… It’s a weird thought-process to follow, but at least I’m noticing it now.
 
Gratitude: Grateful for ripening squash. For a new-found urban fruit tree near my wife’s workplace (ish) that is ready for harvest (it miiiiight be plums?). For the chance to see Against Me perform in Montreal. For old acquaintances blossoming into friends who want to come for weekend visits, and for new friends making the time to get to know me. For the chance to share knowledge and canning techniques and recipes with people who want to learn. Grateful for the slow return of body responsiveness, too.
 
Inspiration: Necessity, in many cases. What do I do with a dozen ripe and over-ripe pears? What do I do with four stale cherry-chocolate-chip muffins? How do I stretch this grocery budget farther than I did last month? (Answer: Make a lot of cheap eggs-flour-milk desserts like pear upside-down cake and chocolate-custard bread pudding with pears, plus Add Beans to Everything). Beyond that? I’m reading Bill Pfeiffer’s Wild Earth, Wild Soul which… has some good stuff, I think, but which is also getting my White Hippie Side-Eye going pretty hard in a couple of places. His “Wild Earth Intensives” are a neat idea, but I’d like to see what I can do to rejig some of the techniques for a decidely urban landscape.
 
Creation: I’ve mostly been creating in the kitchen these days, cobling together recipes for sage pesto, pickled pie cherries, and a slasa that involves more dried fruit than last year’s did. Today, I’m finishing off a sweater (minus the trim, which I’ll get done over the next few weeks). Poetry Critique Group is approaching again, so I need to get on that with some new pieces.

Full Moon – Tomato Moon Crests

Thunder Moon was the wrong name. I said, a mo(o)nth and a half ago, that the minor drought conditions seemed to be lifting.
I was wrong.
It’s been weeks and weeks of oppresive, heat and almost zero rain. Things have been so dry that one of my tomato plants tastes like… the tomatoes taste like salt and bananas, if you can believe it.
I’m pretty sure part of why I’m writing this today, after weeks of no updates, is because (yes, it’s Full Moon today[1], BUT) the heat broke, just a little bit. It rained over night, and I don’t feel nearly so exhausted.
 
I cut down most of my mustard greens today. They’re a cold weather crop that bolts much faster than I expected. Between the tiny leaves on the bolted stalks and the general heat-wilt, we just haven’t been eating them. Late August is coming, and I am hoping to plant out some rainbow chard (again – I have about two rainbow chard plants, and they are struggling. The rest never even jerminated, that I can tell) for an autumn harvest. Considering using a totally-threadbare tank top, stretched over a dollar-store trellis, as a sun-shade so that the seeds will jerminate, instead of cook, this time ’round. (I have a LOT to learn, folks. You should see my neighbour’s crops. They’re all doing just dandy!)
I have bought zucchini and curly (Scotch?) kale at the market. My plan is to process that stuff for frozen veggies over winter today. That and, hopefully, drag my ass out to harvest choke cherries.
 
I feel like “nothing is getting done”, even though that’s not really true.
I started my Life Coaching sessions (just barely), about 10 days ago, and did a lot of soul-searching / psyche-digging (more psyche-digging) to answer my coach’s initial questions (more on that in another post).
I went to Queer in the Kitchen and learned how to make sour kraut (which is now sitting, doing its Fermentation Thing, and should (in theory) be ready to eat around Labour Day Weekend) and offered to do a water-bath-canning class for them (we’ll see if that actually happens, but I’m excited at the possibility)
I’ve gone dancing a bunch of times, and started chatting about tarot cards with someone who DJ’d one of those dances and then went to the sour kraut workshop.
I’ve written more poetry for “How to Cook a Heart” and (finally) did a little bit more work on The Novel (yesterday).
 
And yet… I feel like all I do is make dog harnesses and eat ice cream while wilting in the heat. The thought of turning the oven on is enough to make me want to Never Cook Again (or at least not until we get our usual cold snap in early September). I feel like buying vegetables from the market, when they are the same kind of vegetables I planted (zucchini, cooking greens, eggplants), is cheating. Like we should just live off of grocery store root veggies + the roma tomatoes I was planning to buy and can anyway this winter, rather than giving us some minor variety in our diet by paying for things I was expecting to successfully grow myself. The house is a constant mess, and I don’t even know where to start with it.
 
When I look at where I was, this time last year, I was so hopeful. And what I feel now is tired. Like a waste. Like “why do I bother” and “why am I here”. When did I stop being hopeful and start feeling like I needed to justify my continued existence?
…And yet, when I cut the cards on my new tarot deck (the Mary El one), the card I pulled is the Queen of Cups, cancer’s crab – all feelings, all the time – climbing from her heart to her throat.
The questions my life coach asked me, two weeks ago, were to get a handle on what I want to accomplish through the coaching. Unsurprisingly, the single word we boiled things down to is Receptivity. Maybe I could have gone with “worthiness”, but – like my coach’s preliminary suggestion of “self-sufficiency”, it’s too easy to turn that into something that will hurt me rather than help me. Too easy to turn that into the “shame dance” of trying to prove to someone else that I’m worthy (of love, of care, of anything other than a kick or a curse), rather than teaching myself not to brush off kindness like it’s something I shouldn’t need.
 
I read – or tried to read – my most recent tarotscope (via Siobhan’s Mirror, ‘scope itself done by Marianne at Two Sides Tarot), which said… I don’t actually know what it said. Because I read this bit:

Before we get into that, though, can you take a moment to recognize just how capable and skilled and creative and worthy you are?

 
…And just stopped. Like: Nope. Can’t do that right now. Can’t do that at all. Why are you lying to me, horoscope-person? I can’t deal with this crap.
 
Like, if I say that I’m worthy, and mean it; if I say that I’m capable and skilled and creative… then why have I not done more than this? Why am I not pumping out poetry – good, well-crafted poetry that only needs some polishing to make it worth publishing – every day? Why am I just sad and tired all the damn, stupid time? Why is my novel still languishing in it’s half-finished state? Why is my house so filthy and over-stuffed? Why is my larder so full of things I bought, instead of things I made?
 
I’ve been reading Rupi Kaur’s Milk and Honey (a book of very short poems and lots of doodles), and she has one that says “How you love yourself is // how you teach others // to love you”.
And I don’t love myself.
If I did, I would probably treat myself better, not brush off someone’s “how are you” as a formality, not beat myself up so much.
I don’t have a clue were my self-inflicted nastiness came from. I guess… some part of me thinks that being worth caring for is entirely bound up with how much abuse I’m willing to take?
I don’t know. It’s dumb, and I need to cut it out.
I don’t love myself, and I need to learn how.
Life Coach is showing me The Plan for this on Wednesday.
I hope I can make it work.
I am so sick of feeling like this.
 
 
~*~
 
 
Motion: A lot of walking. A lot of dancing. One really, really long bike ride (2 weeks ago, 27 km round trip – with 7 hours of harness-making in the middle) followed by barely being able to take a single (long, fairly big, but still) hill on my normal bike the next day. Getting back on the bike on Wednesday, but I don’t think I’ll be riding to work again any time soon.
 
Attention: Paying attention to ripe tomatoes, chokecherries ready for harvest. The water levels in my garden. The sky, praying for more rain.
 
Gratitude: Thankful for multiple modeling jobs this week and into the next; for the way my wife smiles at me in the morning (adn the fact that she wears crop tops…); for hanging on a corner in the Market, watching fireworks, with a bunch of random strangers (and being able to tell them why they were happening, because I am apparently a know-it-all…); for getting some work done on my novel; for the half-cracked pear tree branch that has falling over our yard, sitting on top of my neghbour’s trellis, and the tree-owner telling me to harvest as many as I could reach… just to wait until early September so that they’ll actually be ripe. (So, guess who’s making pear butter this year!). There are good things in my life, and I need to rmeember that.
 
Inspiration: Read Juliet Takes a Breath the other day. Between that and watching queer kids (ages 12-15) get excited about drawing at Manga Camp (I was their model. They thought I looked like Harley Quinn. I’ll take it. 😉 ) I am chock full of “Yay, Adorable Babies!” which feels pretty great.
 
Creation: Was able to dive into my own novel (finally, again) to do some re-structuring. That felt really good. I still have to finish the damn thing, but it’s something.
 
 
Cheers,
Meliad the Birch Maiden.
 
 
[1] Actually, it’s totally not for another week. Woops. >.>

New Moon – Thunder(?) Moon Begins

Well, I’m writing this something like 10 days after the new moon actually turned up, but let’s go with it.
The minor drought we’ve been having in these parts seems to be on the mend, as we’ve ben having big rains (and little rains) and, ah… gentler temperatures the past few days.
 
My lovely wife and I went to Toronto Pride, for reasons that had nothing to do with Pride and everything to do with seeing my ex / her sweetie off to Alberta and their first Real Job In Their Field (I am a weird – or maybe not-so-weird – mix of proud-fam, missing/sadness, and relief (of various types) on this front), but we stuck around for Festivities and visiting our various friends in the area. It was a good time, and it gave us a chance to reconnect with each other, which was much-needed. 🙂
 
Came home, however, to the results of the back x-ray I’d had a few days before leaving. A scary-sounding set of results that included words like “disease” and “obliteration”, followed with an “emergency” appointment with a back surgeon a week later (that was three days ago, as of this writing).
 
That was a scary week.
BUT all is well. Or as well as it can be. Basically, I have to do a lot of core-strengthening exercises so that I can rely on muscle (rather than bone and somewhat-non-existant discs) to hold up my torso. More reasons to ride my bike, do non-push-ups, sit up straight, and bounce on a yoga ball. 😉
My wife jokes about how she now has “a prescription for a ripped wife”. I’ll take it. 😉
 
In other news: My (yellow!) cherry tomatoes are starting to ripen, and they are delicious. I have (so far) one golden zucchini and one eggplant, but may get one or two more… here’s hoping. Still not much luck with the rainbow chard, but I remain hopeful. My cucumbers and butternut squash vines are starting to take off (thank you mamas!), so we’ll see if I get any fruits from them as time goes on. I’m just glad they’re growing and getting bigger!
I’ve been harvesting mustard greens (and dandelions, and lamb’s quarters) for pastas, sandwiches, and putting up in the freezer, too. Not a lot yet, but I’ve made a start.
The nieghbour gave us a bag of some of her spinach-like succulant greens (most of which I put up, but we’ve also had some in a stew and some on our sandwiches) and I got to participate in a “fruit recovery” harvest of a local cherry tree, which was nice. I need to pit and freeze the cherries today, though. It’s time. In theory, they’ll wind up jarred into pie filling or else turned into a cherry salsa (pie cherries, onions, basil, cilantro if my garden’s still got some, coriander, garlic scapes, black pepper, ground cloves, a little salt, some wine-vinegar, a pinch of sugar, and maaaaaybe some candied ginger), though I don’t have very many, so we’ll see if I just kep them frozen. 😉
It’s time, too, to pick raspberries in the alley and freeze them for later – I want to make more goblin fruit jam again this year, since last year’s batch was soooooo good, using choke cherry purree and some of these raspberries, plus whatever other odds and sods I can come up with.
 
We are Summer Cleaning the house in an effort to get rid of the mice (unlikely, since the walls are audibly full of them and we live in a row-house which shares walls with other homes) or at least the smell of them. Between the mopped floors and the re-arranged furniture (and bird cages!), our living room is feeling a lot more open, and I’m really liking it!
 
Did a tarot-interpretation for someone the other day – a reader who I respect quite a lot, who did an all-call for help making sense of a reading she did for herself – and just got a note back saying that my interpretation helped a lot and was in line with messages she’d been getting from Elsewhere, too. So I’m feeling (a) moderately amazed, but also (b) kinda chuffed abou tit. Go me? 😀
 
My thre singing lessons have come and gone, and I’m feeling more confident about my singing (and that I’ve Still Got It, basically), plus I’ve made a good start at learning Casta Diva. It’s still very-much “on the page”, but it’s somewhat “off the notes” at this point, which is nice.

~*~
 
Motion: Due to the whole Back Diagnosis thing, I’m doing (reallly basic) core-building exercises and making a much bigger point of engaging my core muscles when I’m out walking around town, sitting at a sewing machine, and what-not. Not exactly “motion”, but related and neccessary.
 
Attention: Trying to lavish attention on my wife, and to attend to my duties as a domme in terms of holding her reins as well. Additionally trying to peel back further layers of my emotional onion so that I can be more cognizant of it when I’m playing into my own meta-narratives and that sort of thing.
 
Gratitude: Greateful for the chance to reconnect with my wife. Grateful for back problems that are NOT a disaster and that I can fix (or mitigate significantly) just by getting stronger. (Thank you all the gods!) Grateful for a (small, but legally acquired) harvest of sour cherries from a tree in the next neighbourhood over. Grateful for friends who trust me with their hearts and their fears. Wow. ❤
 
Inspiration: Reading More Than Two (a Poly-101 book with lots of useful questions for the readers to ask themselves), partly to ask myself those questions, but also to get a feel for what gaps there are in this kind of literature. I’ve got PLANS, kittens. Let’s see if I can follow through with them.
 
Creation: Continuing to work on my “How to Cook A Heart” manuscript (a poetry collection looking at queer, polyamourous relationships & family-building through the lens of seasonal eating & local food), specifically – and maybe this bit belongs under “inspiration” – by using the Tarot’s suit of Earth (2-10, maybe some others if I’m inclined) as a skeleton upon-which to hang some of the abundance/security/cultivation stories I want to tell. Pleased with how it’s going so far. This suit isn’t the Feelings Suit, I realize, but I find that its material-security and home-life themes twine very well with discussions of compersion, fears around being a third wheel, metamourships & constelationships, and the making of chosen-family from scratch. Tarot being a symbol system (and thus Made Of Metaphor to being with), using it to structure one’s poetry is a tried-and-true method for a reason. 🙂

Onwards!

– TTFN,
– Meliad the Birch Maiden.