I'm Getting In My Own Way Again...

Changeling Child

I thought jewelweed pods were fairy peas and I picked them carefully so they would not pop and spoil my gift. I laid them carefully on leaf platters, along with berries my mother told me not to eat and colorful flower petals. A perfect feast.  I had a stone circle built, a fairy circle, a castle, an altar, and there I left my offerings. Sometimes I wanted a wish in return. Sometimes I needed the fae to remember that I knew how to take care of my own kind. 

16th century flower illustration PNGs.

(source: Book of Flower Studies, ca. 1510–1515)

Much of what happens to us in life is nameless because our vocabulary is too poor. Most stories get told out loud because the storyteller hopes that the telling of the story can transform a nameless event into a familiar or intimate one. We tend to associate intimacy with closeness and closeness with a certain sum of shared experiences. Yet in reality total strangers, who will never say a single word to each other, can share an intimacy — an intimacy contained in the exchange of a glance, a nod of the head, a smile, a shrug of a shoulder. A closeness that lasts for minutes or for the duration of a song that is being listened to together. An agreement about life. An agreement without clauses. A conclusion spontaneously shared between the untold stories gathered around the song.

John Berger, "Some Notes on Song (for Yasmine Hamdan)"

'First, it means that you will be happy if you are doing your thing -- not necessarily achieving excellence, simply reaching for it -- in a life that allows you to do so. But, it also means that happiness is something we all deliver to ourselves.'

open.substack.com

Only Lisa can make Lisa happy

Norman Lear offers some words of advice to a stranger

Black foggy mountains

bow beneath the legacy

of a golden sun

George Seferis, tr. by Edmund Keeley and Philip Sherrard, from The Collected Poems 1924-1955; “And if the soul”

Thursday, 8th July 2021

There is freedom in the shadowed storm as the veil-wrapped sky billows in a climbing release. I lay here on the rough strewn ground, a wilderness of rain-kissed grass, tumbled yarn, and loose cut threads. Find me in the running lake carving eyes into the overgrown path, lost to the planted sky now curling into a silver smile.

Freedom is more than just running through the rain on Thursday afternoons.

0903, O.L. / Tumblr: @3lsahart / Peggy Toney Horton / September Days, In New England Fields and Woods, Rowland E. Robinson / Unknown / Alexander Theroux / Memory of Water, Reina María Rodríguez / September, Helen Hunt Jackson / Wallace Stegner / Instagram: @kjp / H. Stuart / Unknown / Unknown / Henry Rollins / Margaret Atwood / Diario Cuatro, DC de Oliveira / Virginia Woolf / Unknown / September 1st, D. E. / Beginning and ending with my death, Zeina Hashem Beck / The Whole Word and Other Stories, Ali Smith / Turquoise Silence, Sanober Khan / Victoria Erickson

let me stay,

dancing like fae among flowers

lost to the breeze

and summer sun-showers

When the people you are closest to, who may even know you more than you know yourself, call you fearless and strong when you start doubting yourself, it makes you realise that there is a whole part of yourself that only others see and believe in. And maybe you could start believing in that too.