In my alchemical wheel of the year, the summer solstice is distillation.  A series of events and activities that began earlier in the year are all now coming to a time of finer planning and attention to detail.  Given that we're still in Mercury retrograde, it means going a bit slower and understanding that things will come together more at the last minute, and that's okay.  Expressing the energies of distillation means more mindfulness in decisions.  My word back at MayFire was "choice."  I have to make more discriminating choices now.  

We've actually had summer-warm weather in the Emerald City lately.  The garden is full of color, but we got enough water to top off all the barrels with the last storms so we've been able to ignore the hose for a bit longer.  It's time to hit the walking-path-edge of the lawn again, to differentiate it from the formal meadow.  Walking to the solstice parade, I took a photo of a fantastic patch of wild sidewalk garden which I felt was a perfect example of what we're trying to grow.  I think I want to give Dad back his weed whacker and get a tiny push mower for our needs instead.  It will wind up being a LOT quieter, and without having to deal with a cord, it might be a lot easier too.

I finally heard myself, as I was telling my friend A at the neighborhood farmers market on Friday about my spring travels.  It was the phrase "I broke wide open," that triggered my Coulson moment.  When I heard myself say the phrase and remembered saying it more than once just like that.  It dawned on me that this is not a "healing from," it's not going to go back to what it was before.  The materia I shifted is just that:  in a different place or arrangement.  It's going to be slow healing, like this guy I knew who had a diverticula burst and they had to let his surgical wound heal open, not sewn shut.  Yay, growth!....uugh...

I found this picture frame with an image of Mercury/Hermes at the Goodwill for $1, as you can see by the tag.  Of course I got it.  The image turned out to be a photograph, dated May 23, 2000 on the back.  A brief bit of sleuthing on the internet and I believe there is a very strong case to be made that the picture now in my possession is the likeness of the Florentine statue of Mercury located in the Butchart Gardens in Victoria, BC, Canada.  I don't know if the frame and image will remain together, but I can say that right off the bat I am just a tad more fond of the image...

from The Secret Book Of Artephius, taken from 'In Pursuit of Gold' by Lapidus

The last few days I've been walking around in my neighborhood via a series of alleyways that I've never walked on or hardly noticed in the eight years I've lived here.  Mostly you see garbage trucks using them.  I can wander most of my immediate area now on a connected set of private pathways which almost no other people or cars is using.  It's surreal.

The OSF production of THE TEMPEST was amazing.  The spellwork in the play is exemplary, and you can see how it's been a huge influence over the centuries on magickal language.  But when you really look at it, Shakespeare crafted some fantastic magick, stuff that was super-powerful and potent, and the language is amazing at the end when Prospero undoes all he's cast, and it's so fucking ethical it's a freaking benchmark when you look at magickal practitioners today, about 400 years after this stuff was written.  And there was this one part where Ariel rose up on wings and I swear to Tumblr the costuming and freaking everything was like Attack on Titan and I nearly lost it, which is to say nothing of K's reaction.  Being in the theatre, versus a dark movie theater, we controlled ourselves.  Just.

It's one of those lull-in-the-action moments of the year, a gap of quiet in the midst of some really busy times and travel.  I alternate between feeling restful and restless.  The constant light is actually now so pronounced it's making me crazy.  I'm up late at night trying to get to bed and then turn right around and wake up very early.  We've been having a dry spring, and so it was nice this past week to actually have some rain.  The garden and the barrels needed it, and you could tell the city residents actually did too.  Cool, clammy, subtle humidity is annoying and it appears to be something we will be seeing manifest more here as the climate changes.

The astrological influences for the month of June are excellent for the first three weeks.  In fact, Wednesday the 12th is aligned with Separation and falls right on the full moon.  After I get home from Ashland I'll need to do a bit of cleaning (de-twigging) of plant material so I can get going on a few things.  I have things ready for filtration and others that need to get bottled with Mercury.  Due to my practice of recycling my containers, I'll be working in that order to make empties for the new projects.  I also have some new tiny bottles that I have to find corks which fit them, or some other means of sealing/closing.

I am headed south this weekend, with stopovers along the route.  We'll be over-nighting in Milwaukie, OR on Thursday.  Friday morning will see us at the Enchanted Forest, about an hour further south in Turner, OR.  I was here once in the 1970s, when the attraction was still quite new and there were no rides.  K was here as a young girl too, but that probably was still in the later 1980s at the latest.  A long time since we visited.  But the memory of the ultra-uber-gigantic witch's head never faded for either of us.  I'm sure you can see where this sort of thing is headed.  Oh yeah, there WILL be pics.

from THE SIX KEYS OF EUDOXUS

One play I am really looking forward to this weekend is THE TEMPEST.  I've not seen the entire thing staged live, and have seen more things inspired by the original than it in its entirety.  No doubt there will be alchemical allegory that will arise in there somewhere.  I just signed up for JSTOR so I could have access to this major paper from a drama journal in the late 90s that specifically details the alchemy metaphors in the play.  One of the big kickers for that one is that an actor with whom I worked way back in the 80s the summer I was employed by Shakespeare Santa Cruz is in the cast!  I was looking up the actors online last night out of curiosity and there was Bruce A Young, still best referenced to other people as the big black transvestite hooker that Tom Cruise calls in RISKY BUSINESS.    INTO THE WOODS I've only seen as the filmed stage play, and they're working on a movie adaptation now, so this should be good to see in that context.  I'll be curious to see if they make the Wolf in this version as anatomically correct as they did on Broadway.  Given the casting, I think not.  In fact, the Wolf is going to be portrayed by the deaf actor from STTNG that we saw last season in CYMBELINE and THE HEART OF ROBIN HOOD.  Several bit parts in ITW are going to be portrayed by Catherine Coulson, who was the Log Lady on the tv show TWIN PEAKS back in the 90s.  Add to all that some daytime temps in the 80s, our penchant for shenanigans and we're looking at a majorly awesome weekend.

On the home front, I have my garden projects stabilized at the moment.  Saffron is weeded, covered with compost and essentially "asleep" until the first of September when those bulbs will want to be fed.  The roses I hacked back in February are gorgeous now, and clearly they like the big chop in the very earliest of spring.  There has been some talk of adding back in a sage plant, but maybe in the front yard.  Apple tree just keeps getting watered and watched.  I think it's not going to set much fruit this year due to be moved in-ground, but that's for the best in the long run.  White strawberries are just starting to come in, and having been moved to the front, they are getting a lot more sun and seem quite happy.  Fruit yields on those are looking to be up this summer.  I guess that means eating a half palmful at a time instead of three berries.  Only catch garden-wise is the absence of rain.  We normally don't have barrels running dry right at the start of June but, despite many predictions of various showers, the last two weeks in May were pretty dry.  We just hooked up the hose to handle bigger stuff like the raspberry bed while we still water by hand on the rest.

Jeebuz, but I am glutted on movies and it's a wonderful thing.  It was X-Men last weekend (finally, it didn't suck!) and this weekend we have Maleficient.  (memo to self: find horns) And I'm ready to keep hitting it weekend after weekend all summer.  When I'm not busy with other stuff.  Suddenly there's this path that's cleared up in the fog and it extends out into October.  I got an email laying out dates and events for Fall Fest/Bonedance, and it's been split to be more of a two weekend thing.  Looks like Jeff's previous schedule of total overlap just isn't flying anymore.  And really that's probably for the best.

Next up travel-wise is southern Oregon in early June and an extended weekend in Ashland.  We FINALLY are going to stop at the Enchanted Forest on the way down.  The gigantic witch's head is reason-enough alone.  We get The Tempest and Into The Woods in one long, ass-busting day.  I think we're one inside and one outside theater-wise.  I'm bringing that amazing purple blanket that I got from Tara at Illumination last year just to be safe.   

We've had this threat of rain virtually every day, just like you'd imagine for Seattle, and yet it never quite kicks in.  I'm trying to gauge influences and warmer temps to find a good day to get some spagyrics started.  I think it might be convenient for me to do them in tiny craft batches as I have plant material and containers available.  If I do them in pairs-ish fashion it will work out a lot more easily than if I do seven singly.  I also have to decide if I want to get my Mercury for that here in WA or wait until I hit OR in two weekends.

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.