When Life Gives You Tornadoes, Make Bouquets!

I’m not sure if last night’s weather made national news, but just wanted to let people know that we are OK here in Goshen after a night of storms and possible tornado touchdown. I did my usual property protection with the THORN Rune, Nature Spirits and visualization, and once again, almost no signs of a storm on our block. What’s strange is that the little “damage” we had, I dreamed on Sunday morning! Poor Ann, of Exopermaculture got an eye-full of an email from me on Sunday, as I had intended to ask her a simple question anyway about watering the Garden Tower, but instead awoke from an extremely vivid dream about what appeared to be the New Madrid earthquake.

In the dream, I watched the ground beneath our Garden Tower heave-ho, to and fro until the Garden Tower actually tipped over. Everything was eerily quiet in the dream, and the only real loss turned out to be that the GT had squashed a ripe watermelon. In sharing the dream with Ann, I mentioned that the watermelon in question was only a few inches now. Well, after last night’s crazy storms — telephone poles cut in half, trees down all over the county, 60K people, including us, without power most of today — the only real “damage” I saw outside today was that the watermelon from my dream had been catapulted off its little cradle when a pot of mint tipped over.

Amidst all the blowing, the exact watermelon from my dream (just a younger version of it) met its demise. Hopefully that means the tornado substituted itself for what would have been a devastating earthquake at the fault line if it rocked the ground so much up here. 😉

I don’t mean to minimize the effects of the tornado. People described trees “all over the place,” broken store windows, and much of downtown Goshen remained closed all day today. My friend Kimber stopped by this morning to see how we fared, sharing that her garden, too, had largely weathered the storm. On her way to our house, she observed many downed trees that had carefully inserted themselves between houses so as to cause the least amount of structural damage possible. We expressed gratitude that the tree right next door to us — about 5 stories high and hollow, according to our mulch guy — made it through yet another storm. It’s unlikely ever to hit our house if it goes, but one direction would mean a 60,000 volt impact on power lines that supply the North end of town (where Kimber lives); the other direction would demolish our neighbors’ house and possibly part of our front yard garden. You can bet that tree received extra protective attention last night!

People around town today shared being awoken by their cell phones blaring tornado warnings, as well as the town’s tornado sirens. Being so used to the train whistles all night, we, of course, heard none of that here. David slept through the whole thing, and I sleep so earplugged, lavendered and with the white noise of the vintage Hassock fan that I’m “lucky” if I hear David’s alarm each morning. I did awake at 1 a.m. with a sudden knowing to unplug the stereo, since we’d already done our laptops before bed. By then, incredible lightning and winds had started, so I began Rune protections and full concentration. Once things settled down, I fell back asleep, awakening two hours later due to the unusual silence of having the power out. It remained out until around 4:45 p.m. today.

All in all, though, this storm seemed yet another example of “being in the world but not of it” or of radically diverging realities — one negative and the other new and celebratory. Kimber arrived to find me gathering bouquets in my nightgown, wellies and a light sweater — zinnias and yarrow in hand. When I went outside to survey the “damage,” I had found only a tipped over geranium pot, the one rogue watermelon, and a couple pots of mint on their sides. Nothing broken, just a wild mass of electrified, happy, brilliant plants! I felt compelled to gather flowers for one new bouquet to replace the older one I’d just composted.

As I continued to look around, I noticed that some of the taller flowers and leeks I’d let flower were spread out and somewhat drooping. They hadn’t detached, but their tall, heavy stems encouraged me to lighten the load with two more bouquets. I ended up finally staking some of the plants that had asked me to stake them earlier this week (oops!), but really, all I got for my negligence was an extra two spots of loveliness:

The first bouquet

Tipsy leeks and echinacea inspired this one.

And, oh, my! These stems were so long, they needed background support. Confession: I have long been a fan of bathroom bouquets. 🙂

As synchronicity would have it, I had very few sessions scheduled today and had just had a dry run wifi outage last Thursday, leading me to have prepared to do any phone sessions via cell “if necessary.” I even got to use a handy dandy cell solar charger from my prepper postal friend, Sean. It’s too funny that I always, always get him whenever I go to the P.O., and we always happen to have just the right info or product that the other of us has been looking to learn or acquire. Anyway, now I can finally tell him that I opened the box!

As with that 6/14/14 date, which seemed another reality splitter, today marked an especially wonderful day in David’s world — and thus, by extension, my own. Without going into private details, we received two additional confirmations of long awaited changes that will dramatically free up his life in very much imagined and intended ways. He had a half day today and picked me up to run errands in a part of town unaffected by power outages. Since cell phone conversations (even with headset, Qlink, and a SARS shield) still zap me with EMF’s, I felt famished and even a little shaky. (The orgone pucks have dramatically helped with our in-home wifi, but, I tell you, those iPhones are toxic! I really do feel like I have radiation sickness whenever I talk on them for any length of time, even with all the protections. That’s not to say the protections don’t work. Without them, I cannot even have my phone turned on, let alone talk on it.)

Anyhoo, I mentioned how hungry I was, so David made a beeline decision to turn into Goshen’s new Thai restaurant we’ve meant to try. We had heard very mixed reviews and didn’t know what to expect. Lo and behold, we had a fabulous lunch! Artistic presentation, delicious vegan food, lovely waiter. Thank you, thank you!

We then continued on our errands and eventually took a short nap at David’s parents’ air conditioned house (I hadn’t slept much last night), since they had power. When we returned to our house, the compost bin I’d recently ordered for our next door neighbors arrived, our power was on, and I just needed to await delivery of a different compost bin for us, which I had scored for very cheap on Craigslist. I’ve been looking for a second compost bin just like our current one for months, and they’re either unavailable or very steeply priced. I got both of today’s bins for about half the cost of what a single one would have cost. Their arrival so close to each other after months of searching on today, the same day David learned his wonderful news … just underscored the contrast between disaster and joyful timelines.

If you’ve felt insane intensity this last little while, you’re not alone at all. I hear from people all over the world each week, sharing statistically improbable successes and bizarre challenges that you just can’t make up if you want to write a believable novel. It continues to become ever more clear that what Starhawk calls El Mundo Bueno and El Mundo Malo live side by side.

In magical realist terms:

“Doña Elena used to say that there was the Good Reality, El Mundo Bueno, literally the Good World, and the Bad Reality, El Mundo Malo, and they were always vying with each other. In the Good Reality you have a mild headache; in the Bad Reality you have a fatal brain disease. In the Good Reality, you catch hold of the rail as your foot slips; in the Bad Reality, you miss, slide down the stairs, and break your neck.

“We walk in the Good Reality as if we were treading the thin skin on warm milk. It’s always possible to break through and drown. …

“There is a hopeful side to Doña Elena’s teaching. … Even in El Mundo Malo, the Good Reality is always just on the other side of the surface of things. If you can learn to reach and pull yourself through, you can make miracles.” (Starhawk, The Fifth Sacred Thing, page 44)

Each person gets to decide, moment by moment voting with attention, intention and vibration — which will it be? I say: “When life gives you tornadoes, make bouquets!”

Cheers, Lovies!