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.

Lee Harris ~ March 2014 Energy Forecast

Lee’s back, sharing many observations I’ve also noticed of late, especially about these intense times. His comments on Facebook and the speed of life are quite synchronous to today’s earlier post. I also just yesterday felt led to learn about facial acupressure, which focuses on the energy points of the head, face, shoulders and neck. Lee, too, expresses the importance of physical touch bringing our neurological systems back into alignment.

I always enjoy Lee’s calm, centered and grounded videos. He gives some comfort for people whose intuitive and psychic abilities allow them to catch glimpses of future timelines, reminding us that whenever we do arrive even in “the worst case scenario” that we will have had all that linear time in between to prepare for it. We have more strength than we realize when we continue to return to the present moment. Lee reminds us to envision peace in places like the Ukraine and other areas challenged by war. By keeping our own center and then radiating that peace outwards, we can influence things far beyond our own understanding. Please do take some time for yourself in these turbulent times!

Published on Mar 5, 2014

Lee’s March 2014 Energy Forecast – Finding the Present in Every Moment….

Full transcription found at http://leeharrisenergy.com/blog

More from Lee please visit http://leeharrisenergy.com

For more information about The Portal
http://leeharrisenergy.com/portal

Spooky Stuff in the Garden

Anytime you engage Nature, you’re confronted not only with Life but also with Death. The Cycle of Life includes birth, growth, death, decomposition and rebirth from the enriched matter. Decaying mulch, worms, discarded plant parts — all contribute to a rich compost that builds the soil and strengthens the ecosystem.

But sometimes ya just gotta laugh! I don’t know if I’m having extra, over-the-top spooky stuff this week because some faeries are having a giggle fest, or if it’s all part of the Goshen gardening package. Some of this stuff is so odd and macabre that I just had to share.

Death Card from the highly recommended Robin Wood Tarot: http://www.robinwood.com/Catalog/Books/BookPages/RWTDeck.html

As regular blog readers know, I’ve been wood mulching the heck out of our yard. Inspired by the film “Back to Eden,” as well as other farms that experience incredibly rich soil and eventually no need to water, I looked at our 10% grass, 90% weeds and tree stumps yard and thought, “Build up!” I made arrangements with a local arborist to have truckloads of wood mulch dumped into our yard and driveway (for free), and I’ve been mulching pretty much since Easter. We also had David’s parents save five huge garbage bags of leaves for us last Fall in anticipation of this year’s garden.

We’ve had good success with leaf mulch in the past, and I’ve recently learned even more about the benefits of mulching. Not only does the mulch save on watering efforts and costs, but it also enhances the mycelium in the soil. Mycelium is the branching, threadlike, vegetative part of fungus, and it has all sorts of amazing properties. Some researchers even claim that mycelium can save the world.

Well, let me tell you, mold and fungus can also creep you out! Off and on for the past couple weeks, we’ve had this funky looking foamy stuff that’s rock hard show up in little spots around the yard, usually around stray wood mulch. The other day, I saw a sadly dead nasturtium that I’d been meaning to pull out surrounded by what looked like sprayed on foam. It was pink and white with flecks of red. It hadn’t killed the nasturtium sprout. That would be the leaf hoppers, but despite its fluffy appearance, this foamy substance was just as hard as the stuff on the wood mulch. Later in the week, I noticed some of it on top of the pile of pine needles awaiting compost and blueberry bushes. I watched through the window as it shifted from white to pink to bright yellow. Then, this morning, I found the same foamy strangler around my very happy chives. What the?!

I should have taken a photo before I broke the strangling foam up with a stick, but I wanted to poke it to see whether it felt the same as the earlier stuff. Yep, except this was kind of sticky, gooey, like caulk before it dries. It concentrated itself at the base of the chives, which actually appear to be growing even better than before. The photo shows a little dish of slug beer, as well as leaves of the very happy watercress making its way around the bed.

I came inside and begged David to come out to the garden to look at this alarming stuff. He did but didn’t have any words of wisdom other than his usual “the internet is a powerful tool.” I came inside and searched “slime fungus strangling plants in the garden.” Well, it turns out we have “Dog Vomit Fungus.”

Dog Vomit Fungus

I kid you not, there are threads and threads of people completely freaked out by this apparently harmless mold. Someone claims it is one of the oldest life forms on our planet — the first mold to move towards decaying matter. It usually occurs near mulch or on lawns after saturating rains — both of which we’ve had.

The thing is, this Dog Vomit Fungus makes me giggle (now that I know what it is), especially after I had just decided to let a devoured zinnia put forth a flower anyway. I call it “Skeletor Zinnia,” and god/dess bless the little one, it’s got almost no leaves but seems to be bursting a bud:

Skeletor Zinnia

And then, there’s the highly informative, but certainly odd phone conversation I had with the friendly neighborhood Lowe’s Garden Center guy yesterday afternoon. I was calling for Bonnie (non-GMO) chard and kale starts, since my sprouts appear to be irresistible to something. They appear and disappear within hours of each other. He didn’t have anymore starts for me, but he shared some helpful garden pest tips.

I asked about rabbits (ours are ginormous, possibly hares!) and he said that if I didn’t want to fence in the garden, I could “collect the urine of a wild fox and circle that around the perimeter.” Ummmm, yeah. While I’m conjuring a wild fox to pee in a jar for me, should I add eye of newt and toe of frog? I asked if we could just use human pee, but he said “only urine from a natural predator will work.” I told him I thought fencing the garden would be easier than catching a wild fox and forcing it to pee at my discretion. He seemed surprised but eventually said that I was “probably right.”

He then informed me that I could also spread human hair around my plants. “If those rabbits get a whiff of human hair, they’ll run away from your plants.” “So, I can either catch a wild fox and make him pee on demand, or I can just trim my hair and put the ends out there?” “Yep. That’ll work just fine.”

For years I have cut my own hair with pinking sheers, because my hair grows as fast as our dandelions. I’ve been using the pinking sheers, but also intensely looking for some layering scissors I’d misplaced last December. (Like, looking for them several times per week, because I have a lot of hair that gets heavy at the ends.) No matter where I looked, those scissors would never turn up. Last night, I decided to test Mr. Lowe’s Garden Guy’s theory, so I went into the bathroom, mindlessly picked up a bag I’ve looked in several times before, and “lo” and behold: the missing scissors, and only the missing scissors.

I thinned out my hair and then sprinkled the layering leftovers around my lower level plants last night, thinking about voodoo and wondering if the bunnies would run in terror or if they’d gather my hair, cast a spell and ban me from my own garden.

Mr. Lowe’s Garden Guy also advised me not to let David mow down any of our clover, but there’s nothing particularly spooky about that. Clover offers more nutrition than most garden plants, so the rabbits will eat that instead. Nonetheless, in addition to a growing clover patch, we’ve now got witchy red hair thinnings, decaying leaves, rotting wood, Dog Vomit Fungus and Skeletor Zinnia, all in fairly close proximity.

If only it was Halloween, I could probably charge admission. 😉