From the moist Northwest to the crucible of the Nevada desert.  I deserved an ordeal and I got one.  Three weeks.  My first 10 days or so out at the Temple cleared the head space so that once I got into Vegas and started connecting with the community my Lead started to shift and I spent the second 10 days of the trip on an emotional roller coaster of personal work.  Once I was out in the desert, I was either fully engaged in something volunteer/support-related, or sitting in a niche in the rocks weeping, or trying to take care of some sort of maintenance of myself.  If I dropped the ball, it was in that last department.  

My nest was a pile of gear bags heaped behind the chairs of the older couple I took on as Homecomers.  I was almost never in my tent, and only managed to day sleep by curling up in the rocks.  It was a windy, sandy year and actually not showering for most of the event was part of how I survived.  My skin went insane and the cessation of the use of soap was what allowed me to get my itching and dry patches under control.  I de-gritted my head under a faucet once a day and just brushed off everything else as well as I could.  I shared stove and cooler space with Fred and Touina.  There were only two other tents at site 1, every other tenter went to site 3, which wound up packed.  Other than F&T, the other guys at site 1 were a new guy and his Army-PTSD nephew.  It took ten years, but now I can say that I've heard a man say "Don't bother Daddy, he's been up drinking and dancing," as he went into his tent to crash for the day.  Hilarious.

Seriously though, I wouldn't be surprised if my aura kept nearly everyone away from site 1.  I had the hardest event ever in terms of the Lead inside my head.  I've been cracked ever since spending the day with E, and will weep at the drop of a hat or the glimpse of an angsty oblique muscle, really at anything.  A lot of extremely intense shit that's been kicking around in my head over the last year deliquesced in the desert air.  Painful but insightful.  I said a lot of shit to people that has not been being said.  Got some surprised looks, and some support too.  And then there were all the insane things that happened that weren't coming from inside my head. 

From The Magistry, Hoc opus exigium nobis fert ire per altum. December, 1633.

This last year of near constant Nigredo finally seems to have popped and I shifted through a Peacock's Tail phase into Albedo.  Hence my eye-moistened present experience.  I am staring down some of my worst teenage damage, and I'm not sure exactly how this is all going to go.  My sister said one of the most interesting things she's ever said to me just last night, as she was running around and freaking out as she prepared to leave today for a week of retreat, for which she is the main organizer.  She said to me that she realized that it was hard for me to be in the regular world in some ways, but when you put me into an event/community situation, I was absolutely the most normal person there.  Then she said that normal wasn't the word she wanted to use, but she wasn't sure what else to call it.  I got she was implying not just how I am as a person, but how I function in that setting.  That's some serious shit to ponder for this next week as I have the place to myself.

The three week relocation threw me in a way I hadn't had before, on the sunnier side of the seasonal change for once.  I was gone so long the lateness of light in the evening shifted far enough that I've been completely thrown off since I got back a week ago.  I can't tell how late it is at all at night, and it stays light until past 9pm at this point.  That's kept a bit of the waking trance feeling from MayFire going.  I have been sleeping up a storm.  I actually had about 60 hours at MayFire where I got 3 hours of sleep out of 24 instead of my usual 6 hours.  That was one huge altered experience that went on for days, with so much wind, and being up all night fire tending actively and all that napping in the rocks.  I got to serve Rattlesnake Fred tea in his own tea house, after covering service so he could go see Ariel lead the Moon affinity group's transition ritual.  That was serious gold.  Emergency secret burger delivery to outside the afterglow:  priceless.  I worked the texting magic of the travel phone for that one.  Bought UV sleeves on a whim in mid-trip.  How have I never owned these until now?  I will be packing for Illumination differently based on a few things I tried this outing. 

As I begin this blog entry in an only-hours-old wake of my first Emerald City Comicon, I have the clear sense of having been inside an energetic crucible, but one which is of a different form than my other communities/peoples.  Having chosen to volunteer part-time to qualify for a full-weekend badge made for things being busy but good.  It took as much daytime energy as a night fire circle, except my circles are about 150 tops and this was over 70,000.

Apparently one thing I did successfully that hardly anyone else (if at all) managed was to get my non-legal/magickal name on my badge.  I don't know what made another Minion ask me if Rae du Soleil was my legal name, but when I said no, they were envious.  At no point in the volunteer process did anyone ask me to show them legal ID, so... I used the name I always use at events and festivals.

~ from a 1747 oil-on-wood painting signed by a Johann Winckler

I was running a bath Monday morning, as much of my body felt like I took a beating instead of giving out hundreds of stickers to children, and I was struck with a visualization of all my names.  Relache, the first "other" name, is Albedo.  When I took it on and where I used it I was exploring and experimenting and dissolving.  I stretched out, I explored little bits, I softened a lot of things.  Rae du Soleil, the name I was given by someone who is an Elder and mentor to me, is Rubedo.  When I get into her space and hold it just right, RdS is gold.  This last year has been a grind, being in my own head a lot, bumping and crashing about in the Nigredo.  But what came out of the dark eventually was a gender presence and maybe a name.  I don't think this part of myself is the Nigredo, I think that's the me that's connected to my birth name.  I'm pretty sure what I've found is the Peacock's Tail inside me.  My own blue spark.  I think.  I have that sense of a lack of perspective from knowing you can't really see what's happening to you from your own viewpoint.  I think I got my work for out at the Temple this year framed out for me.   

And from there, we have to do a complete reversal from deep inside my own navel to out where all is just ephemera and oh so shiny.... CAPTAIN AMERICA: THE WINTER SOLDIER OPENS ON THURSDAY AND WE HAVE TICKETS FOR AN 8PM SHOWING.  (wipes down keyboard and screen...sorry)  I've un-tracked more tags in the last two weeks than I can count.  I think a home showing of Cap 1 and Avengers that day is required.  We've nearly got Stasi and Zella in order, so any coherence that K and I have after our cinematic climax this weekend will go towards those two.  VMB in Portland on the 12th.  Holy crap, how did THAT get here so fast?  There will also be an H.P. Lovecraft Film Festival and CthulhuCon that same weekend.  I learned that from a t-shirt being worn by a guy I met for three minutes in round two of Sci-Fi Speed Dating.  I should get some boxes and see what books need to go to Powell's this round.  Let the distillation continue on that front. 

I've spent a lot of mental time revisiting Glastonbury lately.  There were so many layers of magickal history laid down there, I can see why some people go there for a visit and then never leave.  You could spend your lifetime peeling them back like so many layers of onion skin.  Here's one of the smaller chunks of the Abbey found on the grounds of the historic site and modern church.  There is a specific spot marked as being the graves of King Arthur and Queen Geneviere too.

When King Henry VIII took the throne, Glastonbury was still the seat of religion in England, and the Abbey in Glastonbury was rich as shit, and Hank wasn't down with that at all.  He sent some guys to take care of the Abbot, which resulted in the Abbot being hanged, drawn and quartered.  After that, London became the seat of English religious practice and the Church of England was free to dominate the playing field.  I found a website ahead of my trip to Glastonbury where a woman recounts how she conversed spiritually with the last Abbot of Glastonbury and he supposedly communicated to her that part of why he got offed was due to his practice of alchemy.  That's probably worth another look-see.

"Silver is less bounded by aqueous immaturity than the rest of the metals, though it may indeed be regarded as to a certain extent impure, still its water is already covered with the congealing vesture of its earth, and it thus tends to perfection."

~ from "The Stone of the Philosophers" by Edward Kelly, published in Tractatus duo egregii, de Lapide Philosophorum, una cum Theatro astronomiæ terrestri, cum Figuris, in gratiam filiorum Hermetis nunc primum in lucem editi, curante J. L.M.C. [Johanne Lange Medicin Candidato]., Hamburg, 1676.

Legend has it that Edward Kelly (magickal compatriot of John Dee) found some philosopher's stone while wandering the ruins at Glastonbury Abbey one day.  I can't help but imagine it like finding someone's dropped part of their stash on the ground.  "Dude, check it out, I found some Philosopher's Stone just lying on the ground at the Abbey..."  "Whoa, man, that's like so red....let's fire it up and transmute!"  However, that account was published by Elias Ashmole, and John Dee's own diaries give a different account.  I'm now going to remember this as one of those quasi-fictional moments in history, where there's the history and then the fictional romantic account and then my own pop-culture imaginings. 

One of my fairly recent fictional explorations of alchemy was a book called The Alchemist's Door by Lisa Goldstein.  While many fictions like to cast John Dee as a villain, this book had him as a somewhat befuddled magician, caught up in a web of intrigue due to the actions of Kelly.  He winds up fleeing to Bohemia (Poland) where a Rabbi and some alchemists help him stop Kelly's nefarious plans.  In the end, I found the book to have done a good job of riffing off actual history of the period and the mythology of the golem, but it was lighter in actual alchemical content than I hoped.  Alchemy is treated more like a character who the story rather hopes doesn't appear but inevitably peeks in a time or two. 

When I was first introduced to the alchemical process, the mysterious Peacock's Tail phase was described as falling at the end of the Albedo, right before Rubedo starts.  The more I've read and worked my own process, and learned more about laboratory alchemy, I've come to feel that it's more suited to falling at the end of Nigredo, before one begins to move into Albedo.  In my transposing of alchemical phases onto the Wheel of the Year, the Peacock's Tail happens after Yule (Calcination) and before Imbolc (Dissolution).  This year the flash of color(s) that signaled the event had to be the photo recovery.  Normally at this time of year it feels very wet and Solutio, but we've only just had our first whole week of rain this winter this past week and already that's stopped, so it's been more of an inner process this year.  But the feeling of things dissolving, thinning and separating gently is still lurking in there.

I've been doing a lot of bottle washing lately, hoping to get some cordial flavors finalized and portioned out soon.  I have to sit down and do labels.  I repeated a couple of fruits this year so those should just need typographical updating.  I have to start thinking where I want to plant the apple tree in the ground next month.  Time to start watching overnight temps.