Virtual Locations and Solstice

Happy Solstice (a few days late).

As I write this, the U.S. is struggling with a just plain evil policy of seperating infants, todlers, and young children from their parent when families attempt to seek assylum or immagrate (sometimes illegally) into this country.  Immagration is a complicated issue, and I'm sure any solution will be equally complicated, but federal government's crackdown and its psychological and physiological damage to over 2000 children is immoral.

For my Solstice pause, I rearranged the statuary in the back yard, placing the Sphinx to the west of of the lawn circle and the Lion to the south.  I need to find a replacement shell for the Sphinx so she can have a reservoir of water between her front paws again.  The Lion looks good in a kind of cave of laurel and vibernum, and the Sphinx is peeking over some plant I haven't indentified astride some goldenrod.    

When I have ritual in the circle, I think I'll place the labyrinth stone in the north.  The eastern flower bed currently features foxglove (thanks, Mark!) and arbor vitea (thanks again!) and other plants that Mark has managed to coax out of the ground (our clay-heavy soil is in dire need of amendment).   If I can get my act together, I would like to build some standing tables with spiked leges so I can level them after they've been set in the ground.  

And in the back of my head, as I arrange things, I wonder about boundaries and boarders, and the chainlink fence running between our house and the houses of our three neighbors.

Wednesday night, as I lay in bed, I watched a live-stream of Stonehenge.  The sky here had just darkened, but at Stonehenge the pre-dawn Summer Solstice sky was casting enough light to see people.  Our house is far enough from Stonehenge to make it awkwardly late to watch the sunrise there.  On one hand, the technology of live-streaming made it very cool to be virtually among the trilithons of Stonehenge. On the other hand, I was in bed watching something happening that for some of the folks there must have been luminous, but that luminous experience wasn't translating across the Internet.  Honestly, it looked like a bunch of (mostly British) people standing around as if they were waiting for a rave to start.  I was very much aware that I was looking at a plastic-and-glass slab rendering of a crowd of strangers holding up their plastic-and-glass slabs to capture a photo of the pre-dawn crowd milling around Stonehenge.  

We have a planetary network that reduces the world's boundaries to palm-sized panes of glass.  

I watched for about twenty minutes, but there didn't appear to be any sort of organized ritual; of course this made me feel like I was in an old Carleton College comic strip, "Tall Corn" (renamed for the purpose of this particular strip "Mystic Corn"), where two undergraduates go out to watch the Carleton Druids have a ritual ("Wait! The Blonde is taking off her mittens!"), are disapointed that it's not a nude ritual ("That's it?!"), and end up asking incredulously, "Don't you people do crazy things?"  ("Well... Jon's a vegitarian....")

A few crazy things went through my mind, but Mark was wiped out from all the pollen and had passed out even before I started the Stonehenge live-feed, so I turned out the light and went to sleep, too.

Pre-Solstice

Summer solstice is just around the corner.

This is a catch-up post.

We're getting our first hot days--above 85F--of the season

I've been going to the gym, although I haven't been posting about it.  At the advice of my masseuse, I'm looking into ways of mixing up my work-outs, because it seems like I'm always pulling something in my arms or shoulders and then I have to dial back the weights. 

Here's a collage of photos of Smokey (center), Cicero (upper-right), and (neighbor cat) Spencer.  They mostly get along.

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Dream: Olaf's Treasure

Dream:

In an earlier dream, I was in Corvallis driving some author friends around, S.D. and C.O. (who is not an author in real life, but a high school friend) or maybe E.P. (who is also not an author in real life, but a friend from St. Olaf College.   We may have been driving from Portland, and I seem to recall highway navigation.  In any case, I was driving, and I realized that I needed to get S.D. to her house in North Corvallis, which meant I needed to take the Hwy 99 exit to Walnut street--which meant going over a small hill (which in real life was probably the back road to Samaritain Hospital.

Suddenly, S.D. was sitting on my lap, and the car stalled, and I couldn't get my feet on the break or gas petals properly because S's feet were there, too.  The car rolled backward, and before we knew it, I was driving the car backward on the highway.

There was something more about being apartment-mates and a meal.

I think the main dream starts here... I was in a house that was my Grandmother Agnes's (only it wasn't).  Everything was dark wood, and chrome grates and enamel tubs and vaguely 1950's decor.  Some cats and kittens (possibly Cicero) were there, and there was a pile of stuff (like a kitty basket) over an air vent near a cast-iron stove to keep the kittens from getting into it.  The room became more cabin-in-the-woods as the dream progressed.

The stuff was cleared away, which revealed a trap door (more like a five-by-five-foot section of the floor flipped up) opening on a kind of vanity counter and bathtub.  The room was darker than above, and there was a sense that it was part of the air circulation system.  I think we were trying to turn on lights, and after fiddling with an old-style breaker-box, we opened up another part of the room, which was dark and musty like a concrete floored garage or tool shed.

There was still a sense that this space was underneath the wood cabin.  This room had a bunch of my Great Great Uncle Olaf's stuff (like a lawnmower) in it.  In the dream we called him Uncle Olaf, but it was really my Great Uncle Conrad.  There were other rooms beyond, and we found ourselves (by this time my writer friends had turned into non-descriptive, generic family members) in a labyrinthine set of museum wings filled with Fertile Crescent Antiquities that Uncle Olaf had excavated and curated by himself (and everyone was surprised, since he was a potato farmer from Astoria in the early half of the 20th century).   

I think the cats followed us around.  Room after room was filled with tiles, and carvings, and figurines.  There was a room of finials which had a special, crescents-and-feather finial in it... it was some kind of rune, I think. 

In a side room, we found a glass-chip vase filled with random rocks and agates.  We decided that it would be OK to take a stone each.  As we were exiting the museum, I passed through the tool shed garage and noticed a figure standing/sitting in a wheel-chair (he was propped up, he was standing, but there was also a wheelchair).  It was Olaf/Conrad; his visage was dark and shadowy (which was kind of odd, since he always had a shock of silver-white hair on the top of his head and I always remember him being pale).  Since Olaf/Conrad died in the 1980's,  I stepped closer, for a better look and became aware of his dead staring eye blazing blue in the dark.  He didn't move; he didn't speak; I don't know if he'd opened his eyes or if they'd already been that way, but his blue eye had a flame in it.

I rushed upstairs.   The cabin was still a cabin, but now it was in a city setting.  My relatives, a married couple, were standing on a concrete overpass. 

"Uh," I said, "I think it wasn't a good idea to take those rocks.  We should put them back."

The husband agreed, and gave me his rock.

The wife wanted to keep hers.  "They're good luck.  Why should we give them back?  All those years, Olaf [did something bad/selfish], so I don't see why I shouldn't take some of that luck now."

I walked up to her, "You're using Olaf's bad decisions in the past to justify _your_ bad choice now.  Stop it." 

There was some frustrated rock-throwing, and I picked up one dark rock from the edge of the overpass before waking up.

June.

June is busting out all over, and everything is happening at once.  The last few days, I've been busy with a decoration project for an event at The Child's school.  At work, folks are gearing up for the end of the academic year and the graduation ceremony.  Some how dentist and vet appointments became scheduled during this time.  The Child's birthdday is coming up, which means getting ready for various festivities.  After that is Father's Day and Pride Events everywhere but Eugene.  Things start to wind down by the Fourth of July.

The grass pollen seems to be pretty bad this year--but Mark has managed to avoid most of the usual symptoms of May and June.  Luckily, I only really feel it in my eyes, which are gummy when I wake up in the morning.