Dreams and Skies

The weather has been a rollercoaster this last week.  Earlier, we spent an enjoyable weekend basking in the sunny 50F weather; this last few days we've had snow and this morning it's 22F outside.  I'm not sure what the hummingbirds think about all of this as ruddy sunlight creeps into our backyard and I imagine they're in a torpor right now.  

Weird and vaguely erotic dreams this morning led to a Reed Dream.  There was a sequence in a dorm or similar student housing.  I was changing clothes?  and noticed that water from the leaking roof had made bulging trails behind the ceiling's and wall's paint/plaster.  At one point during the dream, I commented on the oddness of being a practically sixty-year-old college student, but this did not result in the dream becoming lucid, and instead there was a muddled moment wondering how I was paying for my housing if I wasn't exactly enrolled in classes.  

There's a break in my recall.  I was in a large, dark, brick hall, it may have been a library.  At one point there was a Christmas tree in the middle of the room.  Along one wall were a series of arches, stairs, and balconies.  I had an iPad, which I had been using to write.  A renaissance ensemble was singing a Mysterium (I forget the name of the piece, except that it has a boy soprano part that sometimes is sung with helium).  They were singing it straight, and a woman in a blue period dress was singing the super-high part. She was having a theatrical interaction with one or two male choir members, and I'm not recalling the plot.  

During all of this I was going to RollerBlade.  A middle-aged collegiate woman advised me I should put away my iPad, as there had been a rash of iPad thefts.  As I was putting the iPad into my canvas bag, it slipped out, dropped about two feet onto the brick/concrete floor, and cracked.  At first I thought it was just the safety case around the iPad, but it was the glass front, which fractured and offered sharp edges to my fingers.  I put the iPad back into my bag and started to strap on my RollerBlades.  Now that I'm thinking about it, these were my original black-and-neon-yellow RollerBlades.  I had difficulty getting the bindings snapped in place, as they kept crossing and doing phyics defying things only possible in a dream muddle.  I never managed to get both RollerBlades on, and only imagined gliding around the Christmas tree to the sounds of a celestial choir.

On the sky front, we had a break in the clouds and I managed to snap some photos of the Moon and Jupiter (and its moons), as well a Venus

Bone 23

I had a strange dream the other night.  A woman was doing divination from chicken breasts.  She would take a large wooden mallet and smash the breast bone.  The breast bone was a dream construction, a kind of grid of bones over a coin-sized sternum bone.  The woman would smash the grid of bones, which would pop out a kind of bench-shaped or pi-shaped bone.  Where the bone piece landed on the sternum piece was significant.  Somehow the number 23 was involved.  I don't recall if the actual number appeared on the sternum, or if the popped-out bone landed in the 23rd position (or both).  

I spent the day wondering if the number 23 would make a significant appearance, but so far no.

This morning's dream involved traveling by boat and car (I'm thinking ice was involved), and an abandoned art deco tour of a city that might have been New York, or might have been Astoria, Oregon.  Mark and I were touring in a group through structures that had been abandoned, but were simultaneously a hotel.  We started out in a kind of shuttle station which was located underneath the latticed deck of a large cast iron bridge.  Train cars, sort of like what they have at the Old Electric Station restaurant, were on either side of a causeway.  Lots of rusting Art Deco triangles.  

We walked to a five story building.  Instead of stairs, there was a kind of looping metal pipe (maybe it was a pole?) one had to climb.  It involved lots of reaching and swinging; one had to reach out and grab a loop of metal, then hook one's foot in anther loop on the other side.  Mark could climb it, but I was having difficulties.  The building itself was otherwise like a McMineman's Hotel:  vaguely art deco in style, and about a hundred years old.  

I'm going to guess this was inspired by some photos of an Edwardian church and newly released video of the Titanic.

Ides of Winter

It's hard to believe that we're already at the Ides of Winter, half-way between the Winter Solstice and the Spring Equinox.  What convinces me about the change in season is the extra light we're getting in the evenings now that the sun is setting later.  

The sky has been mostly cloudy.  I haven't been able to see the Green Comet, C2022 E3(ZFT) at all.  We did have a few nights clear enough to see Polaris and the Big Dipper, but not dark enough to for the comet to show up.  I tried to take photos in the evening and morning, pointing my camera in the general direction of the sky, but it simply can't be made to take an exposure that's long enough to capture something fainter than a magnitude 5 object.  I did get some photos of Venus and Saturn close to each other, along with the Moon.  About a week later, I managed to get some photos of the conjunction of the Moon and Mars near Aldebaran. 

I've finished attending a Zoom seminar on the ancient Egyptian Books of What Is In the Netherworld.  What I've gotten out of it so far is that ancient Egyptians (which is a loose term considering the source material spans from about 2550 BCE to about 1060 BCE)  really liked their dichotomies (order / chaos, night / day,  living / dead,  manifest / unmanifest), and they use a manifold number of images and symbols to represent setting up a neutral area, timeless and spaceless, wherein the dichotomies are united and cosmic processes rejuvenated.   The ouroboros is one such image, as is an egg.  There's also significance attached to spitting and swallowing in the Netherworld, similar to myths like the one of Ceridwen swallowing Gwion and giving birth to Taliesin later–only with snakes and the sun.

On the writing front, I finally finished the short story, ran it by a reading group, and am editing it.  The ending needs work, as it's really not tying up some loose ends in the way that it should; it couldn't hurt to tighten up the story generally, and I've done that to some extent.  

On the dreams front, I've been having them, but I haven't been writing them down. One or two have been sexy; the majority have been more like soundtracks or me thinking through what-if scenarios.  There was one the other night that involved a cobra near my calves and had an ancient Egypt feel to it, but that's as mythic/magical as they've been.  Otherwise, it been things like Mark and I were going to buy the old rental I lived in when I was at Reed and which was nicknamed "The Motel Six."

Helipad of the East!

I purchased some new solar LED garden lights to use in the outdoor garden.  The ones that I have been using have had some mishaps—one is missing, either stowed away in a lamp somewhere or else blown off of the deck and hidden in the verdant margins, and the other had its crackle-glass casing broken by Mark and The Dog.  

It wasn't until I got home that I discovered the new lights shone with only a blue-white light instead of the possibility of rotating through red-blue-green color.  Mark seems to like the steady LEDs better than the colored one, but it does lend the air of a helipad to the outdoor circle.  

I suppose that I will have to move the gardening shepherd hooks and the LEDs to the edge of the yard instead of leaving them standing in the circle.  Mark, or, more accurately, The Dog bumps into the hooks on a semi-regular basis.  So I guess they're ceremonial hardware that's seldom used for full ceremony and are in the way of other users of the yard.  

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On the writing front, I've still working on one short story that has some plot holes in it.  This is what I get for writing intuitively instead of by outline.  It's possible that I want to add a few more characters and write different characters actions and reactions to the story situation.  

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On the research front, I've recently stumbled across an Egyptian ouroboros while reading an essay by Eric Horhung on Middle Kingdom Egyptian ontology – the tricky part is knowing how much the understanding of said ontology has changed in the nearly fifty years since the essay was written.  Apparently Middle Kingdom Egyptian religion wasn't so interested in connection with local numina, nor in communion with a transcendent diety, but more in maintaining Maat, or order, in a kind of rejuvenating devotion that keeps them and the world from slipping into chaos and unmanifestation.  At least that's my understanding, there's a dynamism to it that I haven't grasped yet.

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On the OMG front, it looks like the public space that I go to to write is also used by a local conspiracy group with the phrase "for the children" in its name that uses words like "plan-demic."  I am going to have to write at a different time or place.

Epiphany

Happy Epiphany!  Some time when Mark is away I'll dig out my frankincense and myrrh, go outside into the soggy yard, and enjoy the rising scent.

The sky has been cloud-filled lately, which has prevented good viewing of a comet (supposedly), and the crescent moon swing by Mercury, Venus, Saturn, Mars, and Jupiter.   I did manage a look at a waxing gibbous moon near Aldebaran the other night when the cats woke me at 3—but it was foggy.

On the story front, I'm wrapping up a short story... and it's resisting.  The story started as a fleeing from an army story, then wanted to turn into a doomed lovers story, and then an ethics of technology story.  At least I haven't thrown Atlantis into the mix.

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.

Visitor of Light

Some nights, not every night, an otherworlder visits the corner at the foot of our bed.  I will wake and discover it silently and inscrutably standing.  Who knows how long it stares down at us as we sleep.  Usually, it is a short thing of shadow that walks backwards and away through the bedroom door and away through the hallway, or it's a manikin smudge with glowing eyes that folds itself into some dimension orthogonal to ours.  But its latest manifestation was filled with light.  

This time, its head was a featureless white globe of light.  It lit up the closet doors and the bedroom door and the bookshelves.  Around its wiry, curving neck and over its head was a frill like a dowdy lampshade or a dusty bonnet filched from Laura Ingalls.  Its body -- or at least its arms, possibly its legs -- were covered in thick grey skin, like an elephant's or a rhino's, with short squat triangular nails at the ends of its hands? Hooves?  

It stood at the corner of the bed by my feet, light streaming from off of its head, with an attitude of curiosity possibly more malign than inscrutable.   Then it stepped backwards, and, as if multiple, overlapping irises of gauze closed it off from the bedroom, it and the light shuttered itself away, leaving me, Mark, and the dog in darkness.

I've gotten used to it. 

Repeating Patterns

It's that pause during the year before it seems like everything happens all at once.  Thanksgiving will hit, I'll need to figure out some sort of holiday craft gift, start production, and mail out items soon.  And set up a Winter Solstice Lights Spiral.  While trying to write, going to work, and other everyday tasks.  Somewhere in all of this we want to send out holiday cards, too.  

We've made some fairly creative holiday cards in the past; I think "Smokey Knew He Could Save Christmas" was my favorite.  A few years ago, there was an abortive attempt to have us riding the notes in a music score for "Jingle Bells," but Mark thought it was "too gay," and we've devolved to generic portraits.   Perhaps this year's card will be "Merry and Tired."  

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The other day I finished "wiggling tiles," as I liked to put it, and came up with a tile pattern using pentagons.  

I was pleased with the effect, but I had a suspicion that I'd done something similar.  Sure enough, as I was going through my photo collection to try to find pictures for a family 2023 calendar, I ran across a design I'd done last spring that was virtually identical.

And looking more closely, this is essentially a variation of interlocking circles within a hexagonal array, which I did a variation of last November.  I suppose there's only so many ways one can have repeating infinite tiles using pentagons, and it involves arranging them around hexagons.  

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I'm trying to decide if Twitter imploding is a good thing or a bad thing.  

On one hand, I have some contacts with writers, Math Art Folks, archeology, Pagan, and folklore specialists that I would hate to lose; on the other hand, having one less social media site to visit might not be a bad thing—Ursula Le Guin famously did not have a Twitter account.  On the first hand, it's kind of fun to see what other folks are doing, especially when I remember to use curated lists; on the other hand, virtual friends are virtual, and none of my family are on Twitter.  And then there's the whole DoomScrolling thing.

I might post more directly to this blog and less directly to other social media sites in an attempt to simplify my life and also to exercise my ability to focus on something longer than 256 characters, which feels like it has atrophied in the last two and a half years.   We'll see how well that works; Twitter (and Instagram) make it easy to fire off a quick post.  The same quick post with Blogger takes a little more effort (fire up a computer, upload photos, write text, import photos...) mostly because there appears to be no mobile app for Blogger.  

I'm sure there's a metaphor in there, somewhere.

Carousel Griffin

Made a quick visit to the Albany Carousel.  The last time I was there, this griffon was a partially carved hunk of wood beneath a cartoon banner of how it would look.

Full Moon Dream

We join the dream in progress.  Mark and I were at a kind of conference or festival, a combination of OryCon, a LGBTQA retreat, and a pagan celebration.  Mark and I were in a small motel room with lots of moonlight  through the window, white sheets, and white curtains [hot sex scene redacted, but I will keep the joke "up periscope!"].

Early in the morning, a man in his late twenties or early thirties knocked on our door.  He was an amalgam of various people I know, clean-shaven, short curly hair, earnest.  He wore a sheet or a toga.  "Oh good," he said when we answered the door.  "I wanted to check in on you to see that you hadn't disappeared and let you know that last night Todd [editor's note, Todd is a random name] and I were walking around last night Todd saw you naked in the window, and I turned and I saw you, too.  You want to be careful."   The implication was that the conference center was in a rural area and we risked harassment at the least.

There was a break in the narrative.  I was sitting at a long formica-top table in a darkish conference center cafeteria.  A group of us might have been sitting in a booth.  There were clumps of people walking by, and my sense is that it was morning... but it might have been evening.  Three generic "townie" guys were at one end of the table (in waking life they remind me of the 19 year old "townie-hood-wanna-bes" who used to hang out in downtown Northfield, Minnesota, only in the dream they were super-generic, bland, middle-Americans), and six or so folks of diverse gender and orientation were at the other.  The two groups were at the same table, but sort of pretended the other wasn't there... or more accurately, the guys were pretending to be part of the gay/pagan conference, and everyone else was pretending to be taken in.  

The leader guy pulled out some hand written notes out of envelopes and started reading the letters.  I wondered how he'd gotten a hold of them.  The letters were things like coming-out stories and poems.  It wasn't exactly a doxxing, because he didn't know exactly who the authors were, but he was reading them to his friends and saying things like, "Can you believe this?" and other judgmental statements.  I worried that he might have something I'd written.  A discussion started between the lead guy and one of the diverse women, and it seemed like one of the generic guys was not as convinced of his moral superiority as he had been.

There was a break in the narrative.

I was in a brightly lit conference room, like a conference center ballroom divided down the middle by a movable partition.  I was waiting by a raised floor or stage, about fifteen feet on a side.  It was a square grid of white squares about two feet wide, either a dance floor or else some kind of Dungeons and Dragons game.  Stairs on the grid led up to a second raised dais with a blocky throne.  I was wearing large black boots, more than motorcycle boots, but less than Glam Rock boots a group like Kiss might wear, and I held a large hammer (it wasn't Thor's Mjölnir, the shaft was like a sledgehammer's, but the head was a large rectangular hunk of metal).  A woman in a white dress, along with everyone else, was waiting for "Steve" (I've forgotten what his name was in the dream) to show up, so the presentation/conference could begin.

Finally, I said, "Well, I've got the boots and I've got the hammer, so I'll just start things until he get here."  I hopped onto the stage, went up the stair, and sat on the throne.  The presentation hadn't been going on long when some townies came in and glared at people.  I shrank back a bit on the throne hoping to remain inconspicuous.   

There's another break in the narrative.

It was dusk.  I was moving along a mostly straight path set along grassy and lightly wooded hills.  In waking life, the motion was similar to RollerBlading, but in the dream I was walking quickly.  The path was made of a dark red marble, with quartz veins and inclusions.  I supposed that either a heavy dew was falling or it had rained because the surface was shiny.  I held a long-handled rake, or squee-gee, or hockey stick in front of me, which I used to clear the surface of the path as I raced along.  I cleared off fallen miniature maple leaves that had fallen from some of the trees that the path sometimes passed through.

There were townies in the hill, but they had changed into fantasy raider armor of a vaguely Nordic type with thick helmets, with down-pointing bull horns on either side.   Sort of like the Knights of Ni, but I am only making that association many hours after waking.  They never got onto the path, but there was a sense that they might pull me off of it as I went speeding by.  I swooshed through miniature maples overgrowing the path, managed to avoid them, and raced before them.

Ahead in a canyon, there was a large group of mostly men having a dance contest.  It was night, but there was enough light from overhanging lights, and possibly a fire, to see bright red costumes of two men spinning around each other in a kind of tango or lindy.  In waking life I'm pretty sure this was inspired by a dance routine I'd seen earlier in the day.  More people came walking in procession along the path.

I was there to announce the end of the dance contest so that the contestants could be chosen and the next festivity could begin.  I rapped the butt of my rake in a four-four rhythm against the marble path, which made a loop around the dancing ground, and began to chant (iambic octameter?) in a language unknown to me: 

Oh-be Bárðarbunga nachtan
Oh-de Bárðarbunga nacht !

[editor's note, the chant is an approximation; the words Bárðarbunga and nachtan were not actually used, but something like that - there was certainly a ð in the mix.]  The crowd joined in and it became a call-and-response.  The energy of the chant grew until a hairy, burly man wearing nothing but a large, brown leather kilt rumbled a sustained and deep tone which ended it.

I woke around here; there was another scene where someone needed a special balloon inflation rig before the dance awards ceremony could start, but mostly I lay in bed and tried to fix the syllables of the chant in my mind.  

I'm trying to figure where this dream is coming from.  I was fatigued from a COVID booster and Cedar Creek Fire smoke, so the Full Moon ritual this time around was harping before moonrise in the backyard circle, scratching Cicero while an orange moon rose over the hills, and smooching Mark (once I got him outside).  This was followed up with various electronic word games with Mark, a small libation of tequila in honor of the moon, and the season one finale of Lucifer.  

The first part of the dream feels like typical privacy anxiety.  In the back of my mind I'm always wondering how well drawn bedroom blinds are and just how sound-proof everything is.  Mark at a convention, let alone a gay paganish one, would have been a sure sign I was dreaming if I had stopped think about it.  I think the convention is a lite version of "back at Reed" motif. 

The second part of the dream I suppose is a continuation of being out anxiety.  Mark dropped out of the dream.  I'm making some plans for traveling to a big city pride, and maybe this is connected somehow.  Though I am not sure where the generic straight rural townies are coming from.  They weren't "townies" per se, more just super-generic middle America dudes.  

The third part of the dream is puzzling.  I don't know what is going on with the boots and hammer.  The dream became more "Norse" as it progressed from this point.  The only thing I can think of is that earlier the previous day I had used a (smallish) hammer to drive some rebar into the ground in order to place gardening crooks for the sun and moon around the back yard ritual circle.  Oh, right... and recently I'd come across a 1902 painting of a "Young Germanic Warrior Looking at a Roman Helmet," by Osmar Schindler

The forth part of the dream is a fairly textbook otherworld transition material -- I'm surprised there wasn't a horse or a river involved, but the motion along the path (which did have a watery sheen) would count as crossing a boundary into an other realm.  Even if the waking world backyard circle of bricks transformed into the dream dancing ground, the hammer transforming into a rake/hockey stick still seems a little odd.  

The dream started in bright moonlight, transitioned to day time interior spaces, and returned to night time light by fires.  I don't know why by the end of the dream everything had become a kind of Heathen-fest.  I would have expected Greco-Roman or Egyptian or something more Arthurian.

Recovery Full Moon

I'm trying to get into the mood for tonight's full moon.

It's a little difficult because around 9 AM Friday morning I got my latest COVID bivalent booster, which meant that around 7 PM I started feeling tired, had the chills and a fever of about 100 F by 9 PM, and by 11 PM my fever had gone up to 102F.  Thankfully, Mark set up an air-mattress nest in our living room for me to shiver in which did not include Aoife draped across my knees or Cicero abusing the Laws of Gravity near my face.  Aside from waking from shivering I managed to get adequate sleep, and by 8 AM Saturday my fever was down to 100F.  

I didn't have the ocean of sweat moment this time around—either hydrating tons during Friday; or the new vaccine prevented the artistic, but gross moment; or else I slept through it.  

Saturday I was fairly tired, and reread A Wizard of Earthsea with an eye for how description and sentences were structured, napped, and watched both the movie Hocus Pocus (1992) and its sequel (2022) for the first time.  The movies were goofy, and I didn't realize they were aimed at middle-school aged children until about ten minutes in.  I enjoyed them, and I would say that I understand how they would be some people's  version of Labyrinth or The Dark Crystal.  

Sunday, I was still slightly tired, and with some other aches and pains and an air quality index of 160 from the still burning Cedar Creek fire, I haven't felt particularly witchy, mystical, or in the spirit of All Hallows' Eve.   Perhaps I will burn some incense sticks, play the harp, and do a tarot reading for myself.  Then again, given how Aoife is tearing around the yard barking at neighbors and passers-by, and how Mark —who dislikes incense— is knitting outside... maybe I'll just play the harp.