For Your Birthday AND Christmas

Whew.  My vacation is about half-way over.  I feel lucky to be able to take a larger swath of time away from The Day Jobbe, and at the same time I'm wishing for a few more days just to write and research.  

An ice storm came in just before my birthday and coated most of the Willamette Valley with about a quarter inch, which made this year's celebration with friends an insurmountable challenge.  I am grateful that the storm happened after the Solstice Spiral Walk, because it would have been to dangerous for folks to drive to the UU church.

I am not sure what was the most irksome:  the annual necessity of having to schedule birthday events around holiday availability and weather (which is good for developing a martyr complex), sitting in an empty reserved room at a large cafe table (which is good for spreading out reference books and practicing translation of photos of Egyptian Antiquities), or having the wait staff forget that I'd already paid for the space and double-booking a drop-in group (which is good for self-righteous savoir faire). The brunch was good, and I drank a lot of tea.

Afterward, Mark and I wound up taking a slippery walk through the local Pioneer Cemetery.  There's something about visiting a cemetery on or just before one's birthday that is good for perspective.  We ended up at the Egyptian revival mausoleum, Hope Abbey.   By this time, the air temperature had gone up enough to make ice slide off of leaves, and I was able to capture some interesting images.

The next day was in the 50's, Mark planned a yummy family lunch out at a local winery, and he made a lovely chocolate cake.  His cake was much better than deconstructed chocolate thing I got at the winery (which we laughed at because it looked like an undersea tableau of a marine life-form reproductive setting),  and better than the free birthday slice I got from the great bakery around the corner (which was chocolatey and serviceable).

Christmas Day we visited my Corvallis family and had a pleasant ham lunch, put together mostly by my Dad. This year there was much telling of old family stories.  One thing Mark learned is that the little town that my dad puts together for the outside train is based on Colm St. Aldwyn, England, which is a kind of Burridge ancestral home. I managed to both use my camera to take some photographs of relatives and play some music on my harp—this was a win because I usually only manage to bring them to Corvallis and then not use them.

On the Second Day of Christmas, I ate some caramel pop-corn and pulled a crown off of the top of one of my lower molars.  It doesn't hurt, and I managed to visit my dentist for an emergency re-glueing, but now I get to have a root canal just before New Years.

On the writing front, I'm working on a short story that has taken some unforeseen twists.  I've also gone through into Scrivener and updated the formatting to "Modern Shunn Format" from "Classic Shunn Format."  Probably the most difficult thing for me to get used to is using a single space after a period. And Smart Quotes.

Happy Winter 2022 Solstice!

Solstice morning (12/21), I went to write at a cafe and managed to snag a tarot reading.  The gist of the first half of the reading was, focus on one thing, prep for writing and be ready for the muse, but loosen up and try not to force things.  Also, cleaning up a work space is like unblocking congested feng shui.  The second half was set down the things you're doing, take stock, and choose the direction you want to take (and have fun on your Summer trip).  

I came away with a reminder that wands can symbolize fiery inspiration, which is different from the inspiration from the airy heights or the intuition of the suit of cups.  Also, when I attend Eugene Pride events, I'm re-telling myself the fifteen-year-old story of being the only gay dad at a Eugene community meeting of about two hundred.  

Mark was kind enough to purchase a Solstice Gift for me—a pierced gnomon pocket sundial. I had told him about it a couple of weeks ago with the caveat that it was "totally frivolous."  It has a latitude ring,  a horizon ring, and a calendar bridge that has a sliding pierced gnomon.  I'm waiting for a clear enough day to use it; right now it's leading a double-life as a Christmas Tree ornament.  It's very cool, and I need to find an effective hook near a window for it.

The day was mostly cloudy, but there was enough of a break in the clouds to allow me to focus sunlight onto a candle (okay, I cheat a little and hold a match next to the wick) and light it.  I honestly believed that it would be too cloudy to perform this feat this year.  I spread the flame to candles in the fireplace, and then to to the Solstice Spiral Lights event at the local UU Church.  

Last year it rained buckets and doused all the candles we put out for the Solstice Spiral.  This year was drier, but also windier, so keeping candles lit was sometimes a challenge.  It would be fair to say that this year the Solstice Spiral Walk was more of a folk practice and less a Wicca-lite ritual.  I think most people enjoyed walking the spiral.  Of course, after drawing a spiral and laying down fir boughs and sounding a tone drum for over an hour, I'm a little sore.  

Pre Winter Solstice Musings

It's the eve of the Winter Solstice.  In about sixteen hours the Sun will be the farthest south that it gets, and it will begin climbing more northerly.  The day afterward we'll have a new moon.    I'll be glad for the extra sunlight.  

Tomorrow I'll be laying out a spiral and holding ritual space for a Solstice Lights Spiral Walk.  The forecast is calling for more clement weather this year.  With any luck, I'll be able to ignite a candle with the light of the solstice sun.  Last year it rained and rained and rained, which made having an outside spiral walk with candles challenging.  This year we're a little more prepared for uncooperative weather with LED backups and more covered lights.  Also, we have an indoor Plan B if it looks like a Second Flood is going to happen.  At least a horrific cold snap, which I'd seen in a long-term forecast last week, doesn't appear to be happening.  

What the Winter Solstice means to me is that this is a time to examine the structures that sustain and renew us for the rest of the year.  That there's a New Moon about twenty-four hours later means that both the conscious, primary processing, and the unconscious, secondary processing modes are focused on the same inventory of systems of maintenance.  At the risk of sounding like Dion Fortune raving her herself, the deity that I associate with this time of year is the Castellan, who sits on the Inward Deosil Spiral between the Grid of Systems and the Tree of History. 

I believe this calls for a Tree of Life tarot reading with a yearly-planner and scones.

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Today I spent the morning in a Zoom conference writing with other writers.  I managed to polish and write a bit on a short story that I've been toying with for the last few months.  I've been discovering the plot as I go along, and the next step is to focus on what the main character's emotional stakes are—I've got all of the visual eye-candy and cool magical McGuffins in, so right now the story is functioning on a wonder-story level, but it needs more work to function on a "character dissatisfied with their situation" level.   

Holiday Break

The winter holiday is upon me!  I've taken a large swathe of time off with the vague notion that I will write and do various projects.  The first thing that I've discovered is that I'm going to be writing in the morning, I really need to wake up about two hours beforehand to get things like exercising, showering, eating, and generally waking up out of the way.  I also need to maintain a list of tasks to do besides writing.

Aoife has figured out what Postal, FedEx and UPS trucks sound like—apparently, it's pure evil.  Whenever one pulls up anywhere on our street, she goes into high alert, determined to kill whomever it is out there who is obviously a homicidal fiend in human form bent on deeds of depravity and trespass.  She's pulled the brass hood off of our door's mail slot twice since the holiday delivery season began, prompting Mark to replace it with a tasteful wood cover.  

Saturday was the last day of clear skies, and the grey overcast has returned.  I was able to take some photographs of Mars near Aldebaran and the Pleiades, and later the next morning the waning moon.  To my surprise, as I was crunching around on the frosty deck, one of the local hummingbirds came and visited the fountain.  Mark had been raking, and when he realized I was photographing them, he thoughtfully froze.  All I can say is that I am glad I'm not a little hummingbird sticking my bare bird feet into running water on a 30F morning. I don't know how the little things stay warm. 

The first weekend of vacation was taken up with holiday preparations.  We attended an in-person gathering of the cousins on the Burridge side of the family—out-of-state family stayed out of state, and various folks with children cancelled with child ailments; so while it was sad not being able to see everyone, the gathering was less boisterously overwhelming.   The Zoom Gathering was stereotypically Zoom, with a little bit of lag, odd camera angles, muting issues, thrown in to keep things hilarious.  We will have to host a outdoor gathering some time in the spring or summer when more folks can attend in person.

Sunday I went shopping at the local Holiday Market.  I enjoy shopping, much more so than Mark or The Child, and when I go alone, I'm able to do the reconnoiter-commando-raid style of shopping.   In addition to visiting with some of my vendor friends, I made several new best friends by wrapping myself up in a storybook glamour of the green and grey wool cloak, the Assassin's Creed hooded vest (with green shimmery paisley), a pewter Green Man pendent, extra rings, black KN95 mask, and my unbound hair.   Everyone seemed more interactive than I recall from previous years; I'm going to guess that the last two years of COVID has the extroverts overcompensating, myself included.  

The only downside of shopping at the Holiday Market is that I have to remind myself that I'm shopping for others and not myself.  And that I'm a solitary practitioner and not someone in a jewelry coven.  And I'm sure that I have enough ritual jewelry.   

Full Moon Conjunct Mars in Opposition

Happy Full Moon Before Yule in Conjunction with Opposition Mars.

We thought the sky would be too overcast and cloudy to see anything, but around 8 PM, there was a large enough hole in the clouds to take a few pictures.  

Of course I was fiddling around with the tripod and the camera focus to get too many photos before new clouds swarmed overhead, but I did manage to get some shots that weren't too artsy.

The moon was already a little to the east of Mars when we saw it, so I think we missed the actual occultation of Mars.  Still the two were about a fingers-width apart, and while the clouds may have blurred Mars a little, they also cut down on the Moon's glare.