Resting Weekend

I need to start writing my dreams down, lately I've been remembering more of them, at least in the mornings, and some of them feel like they could be stories, or at least like my dreaming brain is trying to come up with stories.

This weekend was a resting weekend.  I met with a critique group via Zoom, but I had not submitted a story for critique, so I only gave critique.  It was pleasant to visit with folks afterwards.  The closest piece I have in my inventory that is critique-ready (sort of) reads more like a first chapter than a complete story, and I spent some time earlier in the week writing the beginning of the next chapter.  

Mark and I worked on a birthday present for my dad--I have to say that Mark has done the lion's share of the work.  We'll see how well the gift goes over when we present it.  COVID has made celebrating with my folks a bit more awkward--we don't want to give them the omicron variant, which is currently being actively spread in the community, so we'll have to mask up in their house and not take a meal together.  It feels like a step backward after the easing of masking requirements in December.  Luckily, most of us are still within about two months of our boosters.  

We took Aiofe to Zumwalt Park, near Fern Ridge Reservoir.  It's a very large area, and dogs can be off-leash there.  Aiofe chased a ball for almost two solid hours.   

In the past, I've managed to photograph a bald eagle and other birds.  This time, the reservoir was drained so much we could walk to the places where ducks and geese had swum among water grasses.  (Some folks were in the news the previous day when they were detecting in the reservoir bed, got stuck in mud up to their hips, and had to be rescued by emergency services.)  Mark did spot a bald eagle, but it was too far away, even for my camera's zoom lens, to get a good photo of it.  

Back home, I trimmed away the sod and grass that had grown over the bricks in the back yard's ceremonial circle.  I think maybe the bricks might be set into the ground too deeply; it seems like I have to trim back overgrowth about every three months.  I guess maintaining the brick cirlce is like getting one's teeth cleaned.  Clearing them is easier when our ground, which is mostly clay, hasn't dried out with the summer's heat.  Working on the circle, my thoughts kept returning to The Day Jobbe, and I had to keep singing We Three's "Center of the Sun" and make an effort to stay focused on finding the brick's edges with my shovel.  

The Day Jobbe has been taking extra amounts of my concentration and vitality lately, and it I have to make an effort if I want to get any writing in in the evenings or weekends.  Or sleep.   One of the drawbacks of working remotely--which I otherwise appreciate in a COVID era--is that location ceases to be as great a cue to transition between work and not-work; when working from home becomes the routine, it becomes more difficult to put down the mental threads of work.

Once the bricks were cleared, I was pleased at how the circle was more prominent.  I didn't feel like holding a ritual right there and then, but I did get a stick of patchouli incense to burn, and after perambulating the circle three times with it, stuck it into the east, and sat down facing east to play my tongue drum.  I've been re-reading Dion Fortune before bed and have been reminded that two skills I should revisit are the ability to concentrate and the talent of imagination.  Bringing the music forth, I was struck with how playing an instrument improves both.

By now it was late afternoon; the setting sun was painting the clouds and eastern hills crimson, and the temperature was dropping.  I took the remains of the incense stick and discovered that I could use it to make smoke rings.

Solitary Wolf Moon Ritual

Monday night was clear enough for me to hold a solitary Full Moon Ritual.  I lit a patchouli incense stick, turned off the lights in the house, and slipped outside.  The moon was in the northeast, but high enough and bright enough that the cherry tree cast shadows onto the back yard circle.  The darkness and overgrown grass made it difficult to see all of the bricks in the circle, but I managed to do conduct a simple 101 ritual.  

I met Mark on a Full Moon; we got married on a Full Moon.  I've harped at lunar eclipses; I've swam naked, the silver light of a desert moon casting its wavy net through the water -- but somehow I went back to the Full Moons of Three Hundred and Sixy-Nine Moons ago and imagined I heard the chanting and laughter of ritual circles of the Carleton College Druids, and fancied I felt the rush of many bodies dancing, hands linked, in a deosil ring.  

Then the moment passed, and it was only me, the circle, and rising grey strands of incense weaving between cherry branches and the Moon.  

Raptor Saturday

The last few days have been foggy in the Willamette Valley, which makes the distant tree lines and hills look mysterious (or disappear).  I confess I do appreciate it when the sun breaks through and makes everything brighter.  

Mostly overcast skies graced the Cascades Raptor Center when I arrived at the 10 opening, so I had diffuse lighting for photos. The best photos of the resident birds happen when they are outside of their aviaries, and I was lucky enough to get photos of Ravi, a Wester  Screech Owl, and Maple, a newly arrived Northern Saw-whet Owl.

Ravi was not very hungry, and was not very interested in the chopped up mouse offered to her.  Maple, on the other had, was obviously ravenous.  

What I learned during this visit is that the resident birds don't hunt live rodents released into their aviaries, that many of the residents either can't or don't know how to hunt, and that it would be dangerous for them to hunt within the confines of the aviaries because they might smack into a wall.  

I stayed until "The Hour of the Snackening," which is heralded by two-to-three-year-olds having a melt-down around 11:40 because their blood-sugar levels have tanked and they need their after-lunch nap.  

At home, I found Mark working on an art project on our (then) sunny deck.  A murder of crows flew overhead, raising an alarum of mobbing-caws, and our neighbor's chickens, which had been released for free-range foraging, raced to the sanctuary of their pen.  

"They're mobbing a raptor," I said, and raced inside for my camera.

Outside out front, what looked like the hawk from last month perched over the street on a power line.  I fiddled with manual settings, but only got a blurry photo of a the power line and some tail feathers as the hawk launched itself for an escape.  

Then the fog rolled back in.  

Dream: Cheesy Villains' Society

Dreams Jan-13-2022

We join the dream in progress.

I was mostly me, but I was also an investigative reporter.  I was transitioning from one dream segment--something about a jungle or canyon--and walking along a hillside road.

There was a tallish man behind me, wearing a black silk hat and a black demicape of some heavy material.  I want to say that he started out with a Snidely Whiplash moustache, but later on in the dream I think he was clean-shaven.

"Say," I said, "Are you a member of The Cheesy Villains' Society?"

It turned out he was.  

There's a break in my recall.

I interviewed him.  At some point, The Cheesy Villain darted me with a tranquilizer, and I woke up in his lair.  This didn't seem to bother anyone, and the interview continued.

The dream recall is very uneven; somehow TCV disappeared, his lair was in the middle of a local branch of the CIA or FBI or some police organization, and there was a secret passage built into the very heavy and large armchair in the room (the seat and the lower half of the back hinged forward).  

---

In another dream segment, I woke up in our house, but it was an odd dream amalgam of our current house, our old rental, and some other houses I've lived in.  Our backyard was mostly lawn, and it was surrounded by a five or six foot high wood plank fence.  It was an early spring day, the sun was just up, and it was something like five in the morning.  I was practicing pulling a bow back, I might have even shot an arrow.  What struck me was that I would hold the bow in my left hand, pull the string back with my right hand, and site the string against the bow with my right eye.  The bow and the string lining up was significant.

I didn't want to wake Mark and The Child, so I went next door into a building that was simultaneously the old Corvallis High School building an University of Oregon building.  There was nobody in it.  I might have been in my bathrobe.  I remember walking by the old English Resource Center (a library in CHS filled with multiple copies of scripts and standard English literature volumes--this is where I read "Lord of the Flies," "Dante's Inferno," and "Happy Birthday, Wanda June" for fun in high school).  

I heard voices, and three women walked by on the way to or from an early-morning meeting.  They were somehow connected to the university, but the only one I can recall is my old boss, M.R.  We had a short discussion. Then the three ladies departed for another building.  

---

Later dreams were fairly obvious sexual wish fulfillment dreams.  With my husband (well, at first...).  

Dog Park Moon

Late December and early January nights were supposed to be good for watching the waxing crescent moon pass by Venus, Jupiter, and Saturn.  Since it's just after the Winter Solstice, the evenings and mornings have been cloudy and overcast, so I hadn't really seen much of the moon (or the planets, for that matter) for about a week and a half.

When we took Aoife to the dog park a few evenings ago, just before sunset, the sky cleared up enough to show a waxing half moon.  I surprised myself by managing to take an in-focus picture of the moon bracketed by tree branches.  

I think Mark thought I was particularly daring to bring the camera into the Very Muddy Dog Park (we'd had two inches of rain a few days earlier, on top of the previous week's eight inches of snow).   I was more worried that Somebody Else's Dog might jump on me with their muddy paws than I was of slipping or dropping the camera into a puddle.   I managed to get a few photos of Aoife, but the majority of them were blurry action shots of her chasing things.  

The fog, which had rolled back around noon, reasserted its dominion over the landscape as the sun set.   By the time we got home, the sky was a dark grey blanket, unspangled by stars, and the night was moonless.

January and Octagons

We've taken down the Christmas trees at our house and at my folks' house.  Our tree this year was one of the smallest ones we've had, and once we took all of the paper doves, ornaments, and lights off of it, I carried it outside.  I enjoyed the tree, but while it was up it underscored how frat-house-cluttered our living room is.  I suppose whenever we decorate for a holiday, we cross over a saturation point.  

My folks' tree is a monster artificial tree that practically requires a blowtorch to take apart, and winches to cinch back into its boxes.  But we did it.  This may be the year I come up with some kind of origami collapsable tree contraption that my dad can manage (I'm seeing a rack-and-pinion mechanism that expands like a car jack, only tree-shaped).

The snow from December has melted and we're back to our regular upper-thirties rain and overcast (with occasional sun).  Since the hummingbirds were peering down the hole in the fountain's stone pillar looking for water, I braved the frigid water and reinstalled the pump.  Within an hour-and-a-half, they'd come back to splash in the fountain's flow, which made me surprisingly happy.

On the art front, I've been playing with octagonal symmetry.  The results tend to look like quilt patterns.  Whereas pentagons and Penrose tiles have to deal with the golden mean and the odd gap where things don't quite line up, octagons have to deal with issues around the square root of two.  What's interesting is that triangles repeating around an octagon almost will make a perfect five-point star (one can almost, but not quite, make eight pentagons fit around an octagon).  I stuck to squares, right-triangles, and isosceles triangles mostly.  It occurs to me that I didn't try using alternating half-circles set on a square's corners--but that might end up looking like jigsaw puzzle pieces.  Hmm.

The latest dream involved going on an archeological visit to an ancient stone tower, built by vaguely South Americans in some unspecified past.  The tower was more like a giant mesa, eroded volcanic plug, or stone pueblo.  I got caught in a shaft that was being used as an elevator and got mashed a little by the plastic gondola as it descended.  

When I got to the top of the tower, there were a bunch of other tourists there.  A strong wind picked up, and the tower began listing to one side.  We were directed to walk down hitherto unnoticed stairs before the whole thing could blow over.  

I can only conclude that the symbolism of the tarot card, "The Tower," has been added to my typical elevator anxiety dream, which, I'm  just now realizing, had the beginnings of the "lost in a constricting maze" elements in it.  Sigh.

New Moon Cleaning

Sunday was a new moon.  Sunday was a cleaning day.  

One of the drawbacks of not having a craft room or a library is that my side of the bedroom gets cluttered with books, artistic projects, and stray papers.  At one point in the past, I purchased some project boxes, and that helps a little, except that the boxes tend to end up underneath our bed along with stray summer shoes, and collect dust-bunnies and hairballs.  

The tchotchkes and pocket detritus, I'm sorry to say, even winds up on the top of my dresser, which is supposed to be my altar.  The dresser was also doubling as my vanity table and necklace display.  

Mark worked on another project and walked the dog while I reshelved books.  Then I reviewed a few old textbooks.  It was very hard, but I threw away a thirty-five year old S Statistics Package manual from 1986.  I haven't analyzed data with S (on a PDP-11 VAX) since I wrote my undergraduate Psychology thesis.   I think even S+ is old and this was just plain old S --  they've moved onto calling it R -- and my old Statistics Instructor, Albyn Jones, retired just the other year.   It was very weird getting rid of it -- I felt like I had betrayed the Spirit of the Library of Alexandria, or tossed out a children's tattered magic kit, or burnt an old lover's letters -- and I had to sit down with Cicero afterward.  

But I soon carried on, vacuuming, cleaning out old receipts, storing some items in the garage, and even tossing a few periodicals from the late 1900's, which allowed me to actually shelve a few more books instead of stacking them.   And yes, some things were shook out, wiped off, and returned to newly dust-free nooks.  

I figured out a better way to store and display my necklaces:  only one is a proper talisman,  two I'd call amulets, about half are charms, and the rest are merely theatrical -- so moving them off of my altar area made sense.  I do like wearing them, but over the last year with COVID and not going out as much, I've fallen off of choosing one in the morning.

With more space, I moved the Portable Stonehenge to be more central.  Continuing with the "less is more" theme, I cleared away most of the junk jewelry and all but a few of my elemental emblems and ritual tools.  The end result feels calmer and less frenetic, and I'll have to see if I can continue to just take 30 seconds in the morning to ground, center, and move the day, moon and sun pegs around their courses.