New Moon in Scorpio and Solar Eclipse ~ October 25, 2022

My October 2022 Forecast shares:

October 25 New Moon in Scorpio and Solar Eclipse, 6:49 a.m. Eastern US time. This New Moon Solar Eclipse occurs at exactly 2°00′ Scorpio. This degree emphasizes sacrifice of something old and cherished, the surrender of which allows us to move forward. Venus sits in the same degree, bringing love and beauty to the process of transmutation. Memories remain but new life beckons.

Dane Rudhyar’s Sabian Symbol for this New Moon in Scorpio Solar Eclipse is:

PHASE 212 (SCORPIO 2°): A DELICATE BOTTLE OF PERFUME LIES BROKEN, RELEASING ITS FRAGRANCE.

KEYNOTE: The accidental nature of opportunities that impel one to break away from a past, the remembrance of which is still poignant and cherished.

A new and greater realization usually demands the sacrifice of something which has brought loveliness and fragrance to a lesser form of living and feeling. Old feelings are poignantly remembered, even as one moves into a new and wider sphere of experience. Old relationships may be left behind, but the memory of their essential moments lingers on, perhaps strong and nostalgic.

This is the second stage of the forty-third sequence. It contrasts with the first in that it reveals the difficulty of dealing with the past as one enters into a new realm of feelings. To the excitement of novelty answers the memory of the graciousness of the past one has SURRENDERED.

Our sense of smell often triggers far off memories. Our primal connection to the past wafts across consciousness in surprising ways. The addition of a Solar Eclipse adds to already intense and bittersweet feelings. It’s OK to mourn the past even while celebrating a new, much longed for present.

Venus closely conjuncts the New Moon Solar Eclipse, so we will feel love to its Scorpio depths. In addition to the Goddess of Love, asteroid Amor sits less than two degrees behind this meeting. Amor rules romance and affection. Three degrees ahead of the New Moon Solar Eclipse sits Aphrodite, the Greek equivalent of Venus. Love, love, and more love. Asteroid Cupido — as in Cupid! — also joins in a supportive sextile from Capricorn.

Adding to that Sabian Symbol’s sense of a surrendered old love, we have another supportive sextile from asteroid Atropos in Capricorn. According to Dark Astrology:

[Atropos] is the third dark aspect of the three fates. Atropos is the cutter of the cord of life and her Roman equivalent is Morta, Italian for death. So very final then! According to Demetra George “Her position in the birth chart shows how and where we bring our fate to [its] inevitable conclusion and how we cut the life thread when we experience endings, loss, closure and death.”[1]

… The meaning of the word is “the inevitable”, and what is impossible to put aside. [Its] namesakes include the poison Atropo Belladonna or “Deadly Nightshade” and an ominous looking yellow and black moth called Acherontia Atropos or “Deaths Head Hawkmoth” There is even a skull motif on its thorax. It was regarded as an evil omen.

This moth is a thief and opportunist, it steals nectar from the honeybee. So Atropos is a scavenger, like the raven, and associated with both death and magic. Scavengers are looked down upon, but they are essential as natures recyclers and rubbish collectors. Maybe Atropos in the chart burns off once [and] for all any left over festering karma.

From the other side, Asteroid Isis in Virgo closely sextiles the Scorpio New Moon Solar Eclipse. In mythology, Isis connects with the idea of death and regeneration, because when her husband Osiris died, she reassembled him from his scattered body parts. This reassembled Osiris only materialized long enough to impregnate Isis with their son Horus — a reminder that even with rebirth and regeneration comes irrevocable change.

This is also a South Node eclipse, which emphasizes the past — releasing that which no longer serves. All these aspects amplify Scorpio themes of death and rebirth. Sometimes the beautiful and cherished needs to die in order for something even sweeter to be born. Death can be metaphorical or literal. Eclipses set the tone for the next six months, so some of these endings, deaths and inevitable changes will unfold over time.

This is a heavy, tender New Moon and Solar Eclipse. Be gentle with yourself and others in these times of “Sudden Adult Death Syndrome,” with additional threats of nuclear war, famine, financial crash, and you name the looming disaster. To me, it feels like we’re approaching the end of Lord of the Rings. Not everyone and everything we love will continue on our same journey. Yes, we will grieve, but life promises regeneration and renewal.

As we approach Samhain/All Hallow’s Eve/Halloween, Jupiter retrograde reenters Pisces on the 28th, and Mars — the planet of Action and War — stations retrograde in Gemini on October 30th. The battle becomes an internal one. Allow yourself to feel the full depth of emotions. Love abounds — sometimes almost too much love to contain. If it spills out in tears of gratitude, grief and grace, so be it. We are blessed, and our Ancestors have walked some of these same roads before us. This, too, shall pass, but for now, let yourself feel all the feels.

I’ll leave you with Kahlil Gibran’s poem:

On Joy and Sorrow

Then a woman said, Speak to us of Joy and Sorrow.
And he answered:
Your joy is your sorrow unmasked.
And the selfsame well from which your laughter rises was oftentimes filled with your tears.
And how else can it be?
The deeper that sorrow carves into your being, the more joy you can contain.
Is not the cup that holds your wine the very cup that was burned in the potter’s oven?
And is not the lute that soothes your spirit, the very wood that was hollowed with knives?
When you are joyous, look deep into your heart and you shall find it is only that which has given you sorrow that is giving you joy.
When you are sorrowful look again in your heart, and you shall see that in truth you are weeping for that which has been your delight.

Some of you say, “Joy is greater than sorrow,” and others say, “Nay, sorrow is the greater.”
But I say unto you, they are inseparable.
Together they come, and when one sits alone with you at your board, remember that the other is asleep upon your bed.

Verily you are suspended like scales between your sorrow and your joy.
Only when you are empty are you at standstill and balanced.
When the treasure-keeper lifts you to weigh his gold and his silver, needs must your joy or your sorrow rise or fall.

First Day at the Beach and Dunes

It feels like Spring 2022 has finally begun. Today we had a taste of Summer with a high of 84 degrees, but we’ll be back to snow flurries and rain later this week. We took the opportunity to head to Van Buren State Park on Lake Michigan. This place has lots of erosion and downed trees, but we love the changing scenery and stretch of beach for walking.

When we got there, David said, “Is it just me or are there a lot more downed trees than the last time? I suspect there have been MANY things in motion all this time of which we’re only just now seeing the signs.” That seems true on several levels! In any case, I thought I’d share some of our day:

I always find abstract art on this beach:

I also got to test my new Solbari SPF 50+ arm sleeves. These are bamboo fabric tubes that gently grip your upper arms. Thumb holes allow the sleeves to cover your hands, too. I got these for gardening, as they allow you to turn short sleeve shirts into sun protective gear. We walked along the water during peak sun hours, and I’m happy to report, these sleeves work well. So did the SPF 50+ hat. When we finished our walk, I put the sleeves in my purse. Easy, peasy. Sometimes I like having options that go beyond sunscreen. My fair Celtic skin needs all the help it can get!

For some reason, the stark contrasts of sky, sand, roots, rocks and driftwood make us both feel so alive. Another lovely day!

The Next Phase and a Collective Dream

From a couple emails I sent this morning:

We have entered the next phase. Our birch tree confirms it. The top of it fell over in last night’s storm. The little wren keeps hopping around on the fallen branches, trying to make sense of it all. I have had several external markers this morning indicate a huge shift into the next phase.

I decided to share most of yesterday morning’s dream here, because — while personal — it also seemed collective, even at the time I had it.

6/17/2021
“The Cliff and Bag of Bread Epic”

This was a long, four-part dream. I recall almost nothing from the first three parts, but the last part is clear.

I was in some kind of resort, and Stuart (from Artists and Aliens) was the bartender. He was very busy, just working efficiently, but nonstop. At some point he handed me a large, square bag of bread and asked me to donate it to the delivery truck for recycling. It seemed like if the bar didn’t go through enough bread, then they could donate it to the delivery place and possibly get some sort of credit.

I don’t know the arrangement. Stuart just tasked me with donating the bread. I looked out the window and saw the truck below, turning onto a side street.

I ran fast down the hill with the bread but suddenly found I had overshot a cliff. By a lot. I looked down and realized I was nowhere near the side street and about four stories higher, looking for somewhere soft to land, but there was nothing but asphalt far below.

The cliff had rock face you could maybe climb, but I wasn’t on ropes. Everything was also a little wet and mossy, like it had recently rained. The cliff, even if I could reach it, would be slick. Even if I managed to somehow swing myself to the cliff, I would probably smash my head open. I looked down again and calculated that a normal person would die, but realized I would not.

I knew that fall would hurt. Bad. It would take years to recover, very painful years. No options seemed good, yet here I was kind of floating in suspended animation, four stories above the asphalt, holding a 3×3’ bag of bread.

The delivery truck was long gone, and I continued to scan for somewhere soft to land. I could not believe this would happen to me, that I trusted Stuart about delivering the bag of bread, and it led me to this impossible situation.

After awhile, I realized I should have hit the ground by now. I became curious how I had not fallen anymore. I just floated by the cliff in suspended animation. I kept scanning and scanning for somewhere to land, but there was nowhere. I realized I was powerless to control the situation at all.

After a very long while, I realized I was slowly moving backwards. When I turned around, I saw that the street so far below had raised in a gradual hill as I was moved backwards. I saw a fence with very pointy pickets and thought, “Oh, no, that is NOT a soft place to land. I had this miraculous recovery only to land on very sharp points?! I don’t believe it.”

Whatever force moved me did set me down on top of the fence, but so gently it didn’t hurt. There was a boxwood hedge almost as high as the fence, right next to it, and I managed to climb down quite easily. I still had the bag of bread.

I walked for what seemed like years — a very long time anyway — back to the low spot in the road and figured out how to get back to the resort at the top of the cliff. I think I walked on a road, not climbed the cliff. I only recall my arrival. I briefly debated finding the delivery truck since I had not completed my assignment, then realized I couldn’t find the delivery truck even if one still existed.

Stuart seemed slower now and maybe more of higher management, not the bartender. Tania and Courtney Geyer were there. Courtney asked if I wanted her to complete a painting we talked about a long time ago. I realized I was ready now and said, “Yes, that would be perfect.”

…

There was an earlier part of running a t-shirt through a color photocopier, along with a check, like a bank check. All the sides of everything managed to print at once, and this t-shirt was colorful in its designs. That’s from one of the earlier parts I don’t recall, but it had something to do with the recent event of my running off the cliff and then floating to safety, then journeying back.

I was a new person when I returned from the journey. Not everyone understood that, but it was true. This dream felt epic in scope and also like it tracked with COVID lockdown and disruption of normal life — like we are getting towards the end — not there yet but pretty close. Nothing will be the same [and some people will be angry. That’s their issue; nothing can be done about it.]

Bible flip calendar today: “We can rejoice, too, when we run into problems and trials, for we know that they are good for us — they help us learn to be patient. And patience develops strength of character in us and helps us trust God more each time we use it until finally our hope and faith are strong and steady.” ~ Romans 5:3-4

END of dream journal.

…

I’m just posting the photo and dream here in case either speaks to anyone on a personal or collective level. I omitted some of the more personal parts of the dream, as well as my interpretation. Just sharing because when I awoke yesterday, I thought, “This is also a collective dream.” As so often happens with me, parts of the dream then appeared in waking life later that day.

It feels like lots of tiny gears all moving together like clockwork. This, in turn, reminds me of two dreams I posted on 2/06/2020, before COVID lockdowns began:

Synchronously, before listening to this, two dreams this morning featured “Time” as a topic, including a wall of dozens of circular clocks, all synchronized, all being kept warm by a “hot plate wall” behind them. The message was one I keep getting, “high vibe and filled with life force energy,” a theme that keeps showing up in dreams about death, mud or dusty wreaths filled with seeds. This particular dream implied that we could “eat Time” and that this time banquet was being prepared and kept warm by amazing cosmic time chefs who knew exactly when and how to serve the right moments as a feast.

In the prior dream, I was in a clothing store, second story, somewhere in Idaho. The female clerk told me that in order to find what I wanted, I needed to cross the street. I went downstairs and began to cross the street, which turned into an intimidatingly wide street.

I crossed at a crosswalk, but the light went through several cycles as I made my way across the street. I was wearing high heeled, intricately carved wooden shoes, which I realized I could not continue to walk in. I took them off, and my bare feet couldn’t continue walking on this road, either. I was already in the middle of the road with cars on both sides. I dropped to my knees, kneeling, and “walking” on my knees across the street.

I worried that no one could see me so low to the ground, that I would get run over. Then I realized that none of the drivers of the cars seemed to notice the lights had changed. Time had either slowed down or stopped for them while I made my way — safely — across the street. When I arrived at the other store, traffic resumed. The store had exactly what I wanted, even though I didn’t know I was looking for it. I left wearing the new clothes.

Wishing everyone peace and love as we undergo another collective shift.

Scenes from Sunday and Signs of a New Earth

I haven’t mentioned them in awhile, but my longstanding “life in death” dreams continue, with lots of waking life bleedthrough. I described some of these dreams in the Precognitive Blues series, and also mentioned them in a post called “Ringing in a New Decade and a New Earth,” alluding to my powerful experience in The Womb exhibit at Meijer Sculpture Gardens, which began a spontaneous ritual initiation for me on the Eve of Winter Solstice 2019.

On Sunday, David and I went to Lake Michigan for our fourth time out of the past five weekends — a welcome recharge of walking along the edge of and in the water, as well as sitting on an eroding sand dune of eerily upturned trees. The exposed roots form a kind of Otherworldly forest of open tunnels and hilly sand passages to get there. We like this area, because it’s quiet and somewhat secluded, with shade for fair skinned me. Here was our view to the left this past Sunday:

On the way there, we stopped at Geoscape Rock Shop in Paw Paw, MI. David had seen a sign for it while out there for work one day. The outside of the shop features huge chunks of unusual landscaping rocks like sodalite, lepidolite, Mookaite (aka Australian jasper), lavender rose quartz, and more standard selections. Inside, they offered a large and varied collection of unusual items, including the Zebra Onyx Crystal Skull, pictured below.

This jumped out at me because of the zebra and owl dream I described in the post Owls, Dragons and Zebra Elephants: when dreams spill into “real” life. To the right of these skulls, was a statue of two owls, which again echoed the two owls I was drawing at the end of that same dream:

Time Dreams and a Podcast

I wanted to bring attention to Ann Kreilkamp’s ARKCroneCast Updates, her new podcast available to Patreon subscribers. The subscription levels are only $5, $10 or $20 per month, well worth it, imho. Ann brings over 40 years as an astrologer, plus 77 years of extraordinary living. I especially enjoyed her latest, Number 11, called “Trust.” She discusses this theme in context of Saturn and Pluto types of trust, and I found it perfectly synchronized with this morning’s dreams.

I left those dreams as a comment on her site, but I’ll share them here, too. I highly recommend this podcast to anyone feeling a huge disparity between right and left brain messages. I know many people keep receiving vivid dreams and visions that seem so real, yet so unrelated to current life circumstances. Ann’s podcast shares different levels of trust, and why this theme seems so “up” right now for so many. (Hint: Saturn and Pluto, though not exactly conjunct, remain super close in Capricorn.)

Anyway, here’s my comment, and here’s the link to CroneCast 11:

Great podcast!

Synchronously, before listening to this, two dreams this morning featured “Time” as a topic, including a wall of dozens of circular clocks, all synchronized, all being kept warm by a “hot plate wall” behind them. The message was one I keep getting, “high vibe and filled with life force energy,” a theme that keeps showing up in dreams about death, mud or dusty wreaths filled with seeds. This particular dream implied that we could “eat Time” and that this time banquet was being prepared and kept warm by amazing cosmic time chefs who knew exactly when and how to serve the right moments as a feast.

In the prior dream, I was in a clothing store, second story, somewhere in Idaho. The female clerk told me that in order to find what I wanted, I needed to cross the street. I went downstairs and began to cross the street, which turned into an intimidatingly wide street.

I crossed at a crosswalk, but the light went through several cycles as I made my way across the street. I was wearing high heeled, intricately carved wooden shoes, which I realized I could not continue to walk in. I took them off, and my bare feet couldn’t continue walking on this road, either. I was already in the middle of the road with cars on both sides. I dropped to my knees, kneeling, and “walking” on my knees across the street.

I worried that no one could see me so low to the ground, that I would get run over. Then I realized that none of the drivers of the cars seemed to notice the lights had changed. Time had either slowed down or stopped for them while I made my way — safely — across the street. When I arrived at the other store, traffic resumed. The store had exactly what I wanted, even though I didn’t know I was looking for it. I left wearing the new clothes.

I love your mantra at the end: “Let the tide carry me, whether it goes in or out.” I think I’ll adopt that one, too. So many Plutonian dreams this past few months! My goodness, it’s Pluto central … with Saturn thrown in trying to stop the tide. 🙂 Thank you.

Dreams, Signs and Syncs, Plus … Astrobutterfly ~ The Astrology of 2020: A New Order

For those interested in a breakdown of the biggest astrological events of 2020, have a look at Astrobutterfly’s latest post, which you can find here.

On a personal note, I have to laugh, because yet again, these major events — especially the planets changing direction and the shift from Earth to Air energy — are hitting exact spots in both my natal and 9th Harmonic Charts. It’s getting uncanny, but at least it may explain why I’ve had such vivid dreams and why my waking life seems like a dream. In an email to my astrology mentor and friend Ann Krielkamp, today I wrote:

Ringing in a New Decade and a New Earth

I’ve had so many potent dreams — even more so than usual. A recent one, I called “Nurture Tenderness,” involved “six agreements” whose enactment would bring in the New Earth frequencies. The first of those agreements was “Nurture Tenderness.” I decided to share a little more here as we close out 2019 and enter 2020, because Tania mentioned how my dream reminded her of Lee Harris’ 2020 Energy Forecast, recorded 12/12/19, but which she just posted today. He, too, lists six themes, which coincide with so many of my recent dreams. From Lee’s YouTube channel:

Themes discussed in the 2020 Energy Forecast include:

BLINDING CLARITY (Intuition/Truths + Truth-Telling/Mental Re-arrangement)

RISE OF LOVE THROUGH DEATH AWARENESS (The death of people/relationships/animals/nature/systems)

COLLABORATION AND TEAMS (The Upswing of people coming together to collaborate and work with each other)

GROUNDING VIA NATURE (The technology take-off/distraction of attention being leveled through Nature but also Natural Disasters/Loss and local events)

CREATIVITY AT HIGH SPEED (Faster than ever creative endeavors – with less internal resistance and more need/embrace in the outside world)

HEART HEALING (Conflict Energy showing up as a trigger for heart healing/the rise of emotional awareness and the need for more people to lead in the realms of heart healing, mindfulness and emotional intelligence)

His video clocks in at 1 hour 11 minutes, and you can watch it here:

Lee’s list summarizes my past four months of extremely intense and often quickly validated, precognitive dreams. I’ve also experienced what I can only describe as “spontaneous rituals,” where life creates such elaborate synchronicities that they feel like planned rituals, dripping in lush symbolism, with a beginning, middle and end. I am not the same person I was before encountering these journeys, most of which feature over-the-top womb, birth, and death symbolism. Here’s a photo from an exhibit called “The Womb,” by artist Rebecca Louise Law, at Meijer Sculpture Gardens:

My experience inside this corridor and womb (made of nearly one million dried flowers) was so personal that I don’t feel led to share it here. Entering the floral womb in the center, with a loud heartbeat over just imperceptible music, and all that fragrance triggered an inner rebirth that then continued to spill forth throughout the day, in synchronicities with my exact birth time, first breath and finding a perfectly hidden, (yet intuitively revealed to me and then validated) dead coyote in half-frozen sand sculptures on the edge of Lake Michigan’s waves. Just before sunset. On the Eve of Winter Solstice. I’m still unpacking the entire day’s events. Too personal and interwoven with synchronicity overloads to share more here.

In my same dream that featured the party/class sharing the six agreements to facilitate living on the New Earth, there was another part of the dream that involved sniffing a “really stinky navel.” It was actually my own navel, but the stinky navel brought a big grin and was “OK, because it can give birth.” The really stinky navel had something to do with Cosmic Rebirth. It smelled of deep Earth and ozone — extremely pungent, green moss and fertile soil.

Another dream featured special boxes that could “rejuvenate very old people” if delivered to the correct address, which was “20 Virgo.” Besides a personal meaning to me, I find it fascinating that the Dane Rudhyar Sabian Symbol for 20 Virgo invokes a New World collective journey:

PHASE 170 (VIRGO 20°): A CARAVAN OF CARS HEADED TO THE WEST COAST.

KEYNOTE: The need of cooperative effort in reaching any “New World” of experience.

It is difficult to know, from the original formulation of the clairvoyant’s vision, the type of caravan of cars that was visualized; what seems to be clearly implied is a process in which a group of persons are journeying together — thus linking their consciousnesses and energies (the “car” symbol) — in order to safely reach the goal of destiny. Here there is no longer any sense of competition, but an ordered and structured endeavor.

At this last stage of the five-fold sequence the past is entirely left behind; men cooperate in the great “adventure in consciousness” in a TOTALIZATION OF PURPOSE AND EFFORT.

In order to deliver the rejuvenating boxes to 20 Virgo, “I had to crawl out of this dirt floor passageway with the boxes intact, then down another ladder and try to find the right location where the people were, who needed reviving.” (I’m quoting from today’s dream journal entry.)

“On the way, there was a display with all sorts of stories made out of tiny seeds. People kept asking me if this was the story they heard in their youth, but how would I know that? I just guessed sometimes yes, sometimes no. The colored seeds in transparent vertical boxes were like the book covers.” (Everything was arranged like a library, and each seed contained an entire story, each vertical glass holder appeared as a book with thousands of seeds making up the images of the book covers.) “Time was running a little short, and I needed to get to the 20 Virgo, which was now an address.”

I don’t have exact interpretations of these dreams, but the symbols seem over the top and not just relevant to me.

On a recent walk, I silently asked if I could and should trust what I’ve been shown as the new coming in. I immediately noticed a feather on the ground. I walked past the feather, then heard, “Turn around. Pick it up. That was for you.” Before turning around, I felt/knew “It’s an owl feather.” Sure enough, it appears to be so. Its edges have the special fringe that allows for silent flight. As I continued my walk, a solitary stag with medium sized antlers walked slowly across the road in front of me.

This morning’s sunrise came between very low and very high, dark thick clouds, initiating between these layers a long, horizontal rainbow. I wasn’t sure what, if anything, to share as we close out this decade, but this seems just right.

Love, Blessings and Happy New Year!

Laura

Monday, April 16, 2018 Live Radio Links

Towards the end of my “Loose Ends, Astrology and my NDE” post, I mentioned this upcoming 8-minute live radio segment opportunity that appeared the morning after I committed to staying here. I have no idea what to expect from this interview, but here are the links to the live broadcast. It will occur on Monday, April 16th at 11:52 a.m. Eastern Daylight Time (US, same as New York City).  Below you can find links to get you to the live broadcast on the day/time of my show:

 http://www.allbusinessmediafm.com/studio2 and
https://tunein.com/radio/All-Business-Media-Nationwide-s281640/ and your broadcast can be heard live the day of your show. 

At some point, this broadcast may be archived, but I don’t know details about that yet. I just agreed to the 8-minute segment due to the uncanny synchronicity of me becoming aware of a relatively insistent opportunity right after my NDE in which I committed to finishing my books and allowing whatever visibility wanted to come my way. I hope you can join us on Monday.

 

Fly Free, T-Bird! We love you.

David and I just learned that our dear friend, Tim Martin, passed away yesterday. He was and is a beautiful soul and will be deeply missed. I mentioned him after the first of our moves to Kalamazoo: “Thanks again to our superhero friend Tim, aka T-Bird, for all the above and beyond help this weekend.” “Above and beyond” was right.

Tim was not afraid of Death. We spoke of it often, not in a morbid way, but in a natural cycles, Faery Realm, and depth psychology way. On Wednesday he texted me: “Interesting that my first memory is of my brother and I looking for snakes in a brush pile considering how my whole life can be seen as a chthonic journey; realized this this morning on the drive in”

I usually get a heads up when someone close to me is about to pass — sometimes months ahead of time with a 24- to 48-hour window of time when they’ll pass. I’ve had heads up about clients’ relatives I’ve never met, my grandparents’ deaths, my father’s death, death date of a friend’s husband and then sensed her own death. I don’t share this information, because you never truly know, and also I don’t want to give anyone any self-fulfilling prophecies.

But Tim’s passing came as a shock. As his best friends, we are deeply grieving the loss.

We knew he was going through a massive shift, and he sensed it would occur before Winter Solstice. Looking through texts and emails, there were many signs that his liberation might be a bit more dramatic than anyone, including Tim, anticipated.

Tim was a very, very good friend. A huge orb of love in an aching world. He wrote gorgeous poetry and was a voracious reader, always learning, always seeking truth. I used to call him Tim Bombadil after Tolkien’s character, Tom, my favorite from Lord of the Rings. He’s the only Cancer male I’ve ever managed to stay friends with, a 7/7 baby, magical to the core. He loved the Earth as his Mother, made beautiful altars and photographs, offered whiskey to faeries, and his daily communing with Nature surpassed most people’s once-in-a-lifetime peak mystical experience. We texted so often I needed to delete the text streams every six weeks to free up memory on my phone. Now I wish I’d kept them all.

His daughter Eimhear (“ever”) was the light of his life, and we send so much love to her and her family right now.

In a recent text, Tim told me he wanted to be reincarnated as a Nac Mac Feegle. He had nagged me into reading “The Wee Free Men” and then got me hooked on Terry Pratchett’s Tiffany Aching series. In gathering some poems and recent words for his ex-wife and daughter, I felt led to look up this quote about Granny Weatherwax, which, if you knew Tim as we do, you’d find so clearly applies to him, too, in his sacred grove.

And yes, Tim had a truly sacred grove, which we were blessed to enter with him on more than one occasion:

“Tiffany thought of the little spot in the woods where Granny Weatherwax lay. Remembered.

And knew that You had been right. Granny Weatherwax was indeed here. And there. She was, in fact, and always would be, everywhere.”
― Terry Pratchett, The Shepherd’s Crown

As David said in a 3-way text stream with Tim on Friday, “Fly, T-Bird, fly!”

We love you, Tim. Nice to have such a brilliant ally on the Otherside, but we will miss your laugh, your constantly changing ideas, and your bear hugs. We’ll miss your great big heart that overworked itself all these years. Now you can love and be loved with no limitations.

Blessed Be, my friend. You were and are such a blessing in our lives.

Death of the Old: Let it Go and Embrace the New!

Just a very quick note today between sessions. I’ll start with an email reply I made to someone today:

This must be the time of many deaths. I think every session this week has been about people processing someone’s death or needing to deal with their own mortality. That is not to minimize your own losses, for which I’m sorry. It’s just bordering bizarre how many clients have had death as their session topic this week.

Life is good here, but I’m also having a kind of death of a version of myself in that we have so much wildlife here — very cool, but also such an abundance of it — that gardening will be extremely different for me. There’s not much point in planting most of the things I had planned to put in, as even with fences, there are tunnels, there are climbers, flyers, it’s kind of a free for all. I wanted a more manageable garden, so this transition is forcing that upon me. I can either fight all the critters full time and still lose or plan accordingly and not even build things up too big to begin with. Choose plants they notoriously don’t eat.