Awesome. Maternity.

July 19th, 2007

Dear Jazzy,

I still check your site, sometimes daily, for news, yet am,
somehow, still happy to see the Apricot Moon hovering there.

But in case you want to have more recent reflections, here are more:

Able Mind
Almost Mended
Approaching Mystery
Ancient Miracle
Albert’s Missed

all these things pop to mind, in the Apricot Moon mind,
and with vast appreciation for you, and your mysterious and ably
approached and faced journey,
with love,

xoxox

P

Dear Peggy,  How can I blog when I’m Anticipating Motherhood for Molly? Thanks for these sweet notes.  Can I post them to my blog?  I haven’t abandoned my blog, but the spirit hasn’t moved me.  Something about being in closer proximity to my readers makes me shy? Is this it?  Not sure.

Having an important time of immense quiet and silence and stillness and presence.

Always Margaret’s,

Jazzy

The Apricot Moon

June 28th, 2007

I’ll be back in the States in less than a week, and I feel compelled to post at least once more to my blog before I travel.  We’ve been having a great amount of rain over here.  Other parts of England have been flooding.  The rain ceased long enough yesterday to give us the chance to walk into two crop circles and keep our upper halves dry.  Our feet and legs got soaked by the wet wheat leaning into the tram lines.  We drove down early and met our friends at the Crop Circle Cafe.  Pop told me I should sit in front in the car so as not to get ill - another of my strange new symptoms, car sickness.  I insisted I’d be fine, but after ten minutes thought I might wretch and so we had to pull over and my poor Pop with his long legs and broad shoulders squeezed in the back so I could sit up front.  This helped me not feel the need to be sick, but being a passenger in a car seems an unpleasant role at present.

Lots of talk at the cafe about what circles to visit — our friends had spent the whole weekend in Wiltshire and already visited several.  I wasn’t participating in this talk because I didn’t feel up to it. I’d go where they took me.  An older American couple had glommed onto our friends.  They’d been looking for crop circles all weekend but hadn’t found any yet and didn’t have a car and so they were with us for the day.  I decided early on they were aliens and that I didn’t have the energy to get to know them, and so I ignored them.  I did overhear the alien American woman say to Popsy, “What do you think makes the crop circles?”  This is the question everyone asks, and it is absolutely an understandable question, and yet, only a few months into my interest in crop circles, I’m bored of it.  If I’d had the energy, which I didn’t, I would have asked, “What made you? What made the birds and the bees? How did you come to have the capacity to ask this question?”  I’m glad I didn’t bother with this line of inquiry because it turned out she already KNEW what made the crop circles.  It turns out, according to her (and she is an alien so she should know), they are made by beings called Arcturians from the planet Arcturus. Whew…I’m glad that riddle is solved, for a moment there I thought I might have to spend another day faced with the unknown mystery of the crop circles.

I just did a little Internet research into Arcturians (I love the Internet at moments like this) according to one website Arcturians are little green beings with three fingers on each hand and deep spiritual understanding who live for three to four hundred years and are given careers based on the color of their auras.

But back to the crop circles.  Here is what I know about crop circles: 1) They exist.  I’ve stood in one myself!
2) They are beautiful.  This is of course my own evaluation, but I stand by it.  The way the crop is layered and spun and rests in swirls and tufts, and how they are set into the hillside quietly and in relationship to other sacred sites.  The way the swirls often form around a single stone or wild flower in the field, and how the crop keeps growing after it has been laid down. 
3) They effect me energetically: I only have been in a few crop circles now and so my experience is still limited, but I can say with confidence that upon entering a circle something shifts inside of me.  It is true I can say the same about music, poetry, dance, yoga and many other things.  Still the effect is powerful.
4) They are imbued with mystery from their creation, to their meaning, to their purpose.

It is the mystery I love the most, because I struggle so endlessly with living with the unknown, the crop circle phenomena gives me practice. I always want to tie everything up, predict the future, pretend I knew what was going to happen when it happens, act like I know what has happened and why, and can see where we are all going.  But in truth I don’t know who I am, where I came from, or where I am going - as much as I might bang my head against a wall trying to figure it out.  And clearly the banging is never going to get me any closer to understanding.  In my current state of health I’ve been forced (kicking and screaming) to new degrees of acceptance, that not only do I not know what this afternoon is going to look like for me, I don’t know what any of the days months to come will bring.  This is always true for everyone and I’m in no way special here.  But I can feel it in my bones at the moment.

Soon (if all goes as planned!) I’ll be in New England.  Peggy writes to me from New Hampshire of what I have to look forward to, “It has been hot and steamy here, in the 90s, but with great night skies, moon glowing apricot even through the haze in the west.”

Signing off from Old England.

Summer Solstice

June 21st, 2007

Today is the longest day of the year in this hemisphere.  Which reminds me of the following poem by the great Joseph Brodsky (1940 - 1996), published in his book, A Part of Speech:

A Song

I wish you were here, dear,
I wish you were here.
I wish you sat on the sofa
and I sat near.
The handkerchief could be yours,
the tear could be mine, chin-bound.
Though it could be, of course,
the other way around.

I wish you were here, dear,
I wish you were here.
I wish we were in my car,
and you’d shift the gear.
We’d find ourselves elsewhere,
on an unknown shore.
Or else we’d repair
to where we’ve been before.

I wish you were here, dear,
I wish you were here.
I wish I knew no astronomy
when stars appear,
when the moon skims the water
that signs and shifts in its slumber.
I wish it were still a quarter
to dial your number.

I wish you were here, dear,
in this hemisphere,
as I sit on the porch
sipping a beer.
It’s evening, the sun is setting;
boys shout and gulls are crying.
What’s the point of forgetting
if it’s followed by dying?