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.