> get lamp

OH HAY I just noticed. Since Daylight Saving Time now ends on the first Sunday of November, that means that it's November 1st this year. In other words, that magical extra hour you get at 2 AM when the clocks jump backwards to 1 AM will be late on Halloween night. Talk about your liminal times...

aaaauuuughhh yum it totally smells like the misty night-and-morning-in-the-redwoods smell from MythiCalia out there tonight.

I wish I could smell this All The Time without having to deal with the humidity and associated hair-poofing that goes with it.

tree-mist, earth-breath,
clouds below the moon--
so far below; so far below
they touch upon the tendrils
that spiral upwards, reaching,
aroused within the earth,
the speech of Great Ones,
the silver vapour rising
as the soul within the planet
exhales a single word.

So. That earthquake. Doods, I felt that. Not the shaking (duh, at 400 miles away?), but the "*ping* Huh? WTF? Something totally just happened in the last ten minutes..." as I was sitting in the waiting room at the eye doctor's while enotsola was having his eyes poked at.

Weird.

P.S. Squiggly mass of red dots on top of the big blue one (looks different now than at 12:30 because fewer of them are "past hour"): ( screencap )

I was like "hee hee! Lookit allem aftashocks!" enotsola, er, didn't share my amusement.

This kind of celestial arrangement is usually something I associate with the power of the West. Apparently it is possible to see it in the east as well at the right times of the year. (You won't catch me up at the time of day necessary to see this, unless I've for some reason stayed up that late.)

from a comment I made in a locked post:

I've made the mistake of trying to achieve some kind of nebulous spiritual thing by Buying Shit before. I spend a lot of my life turning my energy (time) into money, so hey, maybe I can work the conversion back the other way: the more of _____ I buy, the more thought I am directing towards it.

Unfortunately that doesn't exactly work, especially when we are talking about initially opening up a current, whether that's to a line of practice or to a specific being. You have to spend the time directly first. You cannot lead off with material gifts. Think how you would feel if someone just randomly approached you and gave you something, even if they had done research to find out what you liked. You'd probably wonder what their motive was, wouldn't you? It would seem a little creepy. You would not be all that inclined to just say hey, sure, we're buds now. After you've spent some time and exchanged some thought and energy, then you can start buying gifts if you like, and it will seem much more sincere.

I've tripped over this multiple times in the past *mumble* years and I think it's only sunk in very recently. I've tried buying "stuff" for various spirit contacts, sometimes as gifts, sometimes as anchors. Doesn't work. Has that same hollow feeling. Gotta sit and have a bunch of rap sessions first, pal. Or in the case of a body of practice, work with its techniques.

It's a funny cycle -- you should start out without too much stuff. Then you can start accumulating stuff as useful tools. Then eventually you start dropping a lot of the stuff again, maybe even all of it, because hey, you and your spirit buddy (/god/tradition/whatever) have spent all this time together now, you no longer need the accoutrements, the venue; you have each other.

RJ Stewart "Advanced Magical Arts" (book)

Caitlín Matthews and RJ Stewart "The Deep Well in the Wild Wood" (music CD)

A jet egg like ones I was fondling last year, but didn't feel right getting because I had no matching piece. In the meantime I had acquired a selenite egg (well, kind of a bulged oval), which now immediately became "the other side". Now that it can be two poles and a connector, though, means the selenite wand that I had been using with it is no longer part of the set, or has some different role.

A plate and cup set with a design of two corvids, painted in black, blue, and purple. ( Read more... )

One of these. The picture there gives no sense of scale (ha! snake? scale? geddit?), so let me unpack that for you: ( Read more... )

I can't really get the whole thing in the picture very well taking it myself, because my other arm doesn't go far enough away. The lady at the table handed me a pair and told me to stand in that Cretan snake-goddess position, which might have had some effect if I had twigged to the fact that was what she was trying to get me to do, but as it was, that didn't make me feel anything. I just knew that I wanted one to sit on my altar. It's big and heavy enough that I can't comfortably wave it like a wand; I have to cradle it like a living being.

That it turned out to actually be part silver in the alloy (unusual for pewter) was eeeenteresting in light of, um, some other things about silver serpents.

And then, this Siberian jade blade (not sharp, duh): ( Read more... )

(Oops, no scale there. Erm, about six inches?)

The silver spiral on it caught my eye while Aidan was fondling some other engraved stones the booth had. I picked it up and totally failed to be able to put it down. It wanted to be held in a certain way (like the snake had), which was in my upturned palm, in front of me, pointing back down my wrist and arm towards my belly (and under the sleeve, so it contacted the skin). If I pointed it up or down, awareness rapidly turned that direction, so if I wanted to actually pay attention to what was going on around me, keeping it level was the way to go. (The land under that hotel is... not thrilled.) The Ogham on it spells "Leir", which is the blade's name and was claimed to be a Gaelic (which Gaelic, I don't know) word for "true seeing". And I dunno about that, but it sure makes my head fuzzy when I handle it. It needs a special sheath or at least wrapping; I can't just leave it exposed, and it didn't come with one.

someone said:

To be able to hear the speech of the trees is a gift I've always treasured.

I said:

You mean the Murmur, the Leafwhisper, the Song of Amber Blood, the Grumbling Grandfather Bark, the way the wind is a free and gleeful messenger?

I realize, saying this, that I can sketch my neighbourhood in trees. ( Read more... )

Birch, Willow, Apple, and Elder. Birch, Willow, Apple, and Elder. Birch, Willow, Apple, and Elder. This particular combination is "ringing" for some reason...

walking softly on the earth
awake and green now
leaves brush gently through my sight