Flowers of the Moon

moonflower

in the dead of night

i come alive.

Kurt Kanawa

It's that time of year again, when the moon is full, and the amazing Night Blooming Cereus in my "Moon Garden" opens at dusk, and blooms like a flower from the mysterious Heavenly Realms.  You have to get up at dawn to see it in the light, because with the heat of the sun this night blossum closes.

I find this gorgeous flower so extravagant a gift from nature, so miraculous, and something that, if one is not tuned into it's once a year, one night only gift.............people rarely notice.  And yet there it is, opening to the moon, an elfin event, sheer magic and beauty in my own back yard.

Thank you, thank you, is what I always say to the Cereus.

And I'm not alone in my delight..................

The Night Blooming Cereus.........an Encore Performance!

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I've had a bit of  magic happening right in my own back yard this Spring................my Night Blooming Cereus cactus less than a month ago decided to produce a spectacular 6 blooms (I took pictures and wrote about it).  This extraordinarily beautiful, and rare, flower usually blooms only once a year, and that at night (although if you get up early in the morning you can see them still).  The very delicate flowers close up and wilt in the heat of the day.  Normally, after a blooming cycle, the cactus produces a purple fruit, and doesn't do it's spectacular show again until next year.

To show my appreciation for the artistry of this fabulous cactus, I've been thanking it.  And to my amazement, it produced a whole new array of buds.  I've never seen anything like this.......and this morning I awoke to the beautiful blooms below!  I'm amazed, and feel very much like thanking the Devas of the Cereus for their generosity!

Desert Summer ........

The long, hot, introverted summers of Tucson are, like the long winters of the North lands, a time to go inside (quite literally), retreat.  After you get over the rigors and limitations of  The Inferno, and provided you have a good cooling system, you can quite learn to enjoy this time.  The snowbirds are all gone, the students are gone, and Tucson is a much quieter place. Everybody is up by 5:00 when it's cool, and by noon you're inside.  After the sun goes down people go out again, the cafes open, music is hear from bars, people like me are in the yard watering the plants and having a glass of cold wine.  The hot desert moon hangs, intense in the heat, over all, and walks in the surrounding desert can be very magical indeed.  Just bring water, water, water, because one quickly learns here that without water, there is no life.

Hot or not, it is still summer, and the adapted life of the desert is responding.  The giant saguaros produce a  crown of beautiful white flowers which quickly become sweet purple fruits (native people make wine and preserves from them) full of birds tearing at them. The desert doves make their mournful call, but actually it's a mating call.  The veneer of greenery in the desert dies back, waiting for the monsoons to come in July, when suddenly, , the vast storms roll in every afternoon, thunder and lightning, pour down floods that disappear within an hour or two...............and almost overnight the desert greens with seeds that have been dormant all year, waiting for this time.
  

mullein

It's easy to live inside of apartments, cars,  cyberspace and televisions today, immune to the subtle voices of nature, the "great conversation".  I remember when I was living in upstate New York, and suffered from asthma.  Every morning I would walk out into my garden and there would be mullein plants, springing up in very odd places I had certainly not planted them.  A herbalist friend remarked, seeing this phenomenon, that the spirit of the plant was trying to help me out.  Mullein is specifically useful to people with lung problems, both as a tonic and as an herb to smoke and breath.  A true Medicine Plant, a generous plant, responding to my need.   How often do we take the time to thank them?

I had that same experience with "fairy circles", also in New York.  We lived on 40 acres, and I remember, being very involved in Pagan spirituality, I was eager for "signs" in the fields of Devas.    I left offerings, I talked to the trees.  And sure enough, there were a number of times when I would take a walk and see grasses grow up in pretty clear circles.   Fantasy on my part?  Maybe, but other people saw the  "circles".  I like to think the fey folk were saying hello.

Mushroom Fairy Circle (not my picture)

The Desert too has its spirits, its Numina, and if you listen, you can converse with them.  Friendliness has much to do with opening the conversation.  Ever since my Night Blooming Cereus cactus put on such a spectacular show a few weeks ago, I've been patting the cactus in the morning, thanking it for giving me such beauty.  I'm absolutely astounded to see a multitude of new buds on it now, and thrilled with the prospect of a new show of these rare, ephemeral blooms once again.  Coincidence?  Maybe the cactus just likes me, and is responding to my great appreciation for its artistry.  Why not?  As an artist myself, I know I respond to appreciation.

Night Blooming Cereus

I've decided to give myself a "retreat" for a while,  and one of the things I'm going to do in the course of the next few weeks is work on a new book that's called "The Goddess Suite - A Community Portfolio of Excerpts from Performances, Rituals and Writings 1998 - 2014", which will archive the materials I have for communities in the future who may wish to use them.  I still receive emails from people who are interested in working with the Goddess masks, and along with my friends Mana, Annie, and Macha, I believe it's important to archive and share as much as I can the processes we all developed in working with sacred masks, ritual theatre, and telling and inventing new stories about the Divine Feminine through the art of the mask.  What I think is humming underneath this project is the possibility of me returning to working with groups directly myself. 

I think, every single day now, about what happened last summer when I was visited by the spirit of an African Songhai shaman - I think about the call he left me with to "revive Yemeja".  Yemeja has been called   the "Mother of the World"........ as an artist, as I keep saying to myself and to the other artists in my network, we need to take seriously our job, our unique power to "re-myth culture".  As the New Stories Foundation points out, so much of what happens in the life of humanity has to do with the stories we tell about the world and ourselves.  We need stories about the Great Mother, the Goddess with a Thousand Faces.  If I can help in this endeavor, I will.  So, I'll just keep on keeping on, and see what seeds get planted now in the quiet time..................

Found Poetry:"The Barbed Heart Finds Refuge Among the Palos Verde Forest"

The Night Blooming Cereus and other Milagros ....

The world is
not with us enough
O taste and see

grief, mercy, language,
tangerine, weather, to
breathe them, bite,
savor, chew, swallow, transform

into our flesh our
deaths, crossing the street, plum, quince,
living in the orchard and being

hungry, and plucking
the fruit.

Denise Levertov

Here is one of the loveliest secrets of the desert, the mystical Night Blooming Cereus. This cactus only blooms for one night. To encounter a Cereus on a velvet hot night is a magical event...........they were made to bloom in moonlight, to be seen with "night vision", which is very different from day vision.  

Rare, wonderful, how can there be such  "Milagros"?  I remember someone saying to me once "This is it.  It's July 17th, 1996.  This will never come again."  And he was right.......his comment brought that particular day to my attention, both its gift and its loss, over and over.  Even as I remember that day,  I see all the lost  domestic magnificence of a summer day in upstate New York, humid light filtering through red maple leaves, the smell of a barbecue, my ex-husband's voice as he pressed my shoulder and handed me a plate of corn on the cob.  All of that is gone, long gone now, irretrievably gone except within the reservoir of  memory......even "my" husband, who is someone else's husband now.  What, and where,  is the "I" indeed?

Living in this extraordinary time when so much is endangered, and so much is also possible.............I find I have less and less use for abstractions.   The world is too full, and too precious, to waste in abstractions that remove us from the shimmering web of life in the here and now.  I know full well that my own life continues to become shorter, that my sight or smell or hearing will no doubt diminish, that those Goddess given pleasures are, as Denise Levertov wrote, to be "tasted and seen".  Because it will never be July 8th, 2012 again.  "grief, mercy, language, tangerine, weather, to breathe them, bite, savor, chew, swallow, transform into our flesh....." All a privilege, all an exchange, all about reciprocity.

I was reading a book someone gave me by Shirley Maclaine called "The Camino".  I found it  annoying..........I appreciate Ms. Maclaine's bravery, and wanted to know what it was like for her to cross Spain, to walk that road.  But most of the book was about describing her ideas of the meaning of life, sex,  and the origin of species in Lemuria and Atlantis, as well as remembering a past life with Charlemagne.  I rarely felt she was just "there", on the Camino.  She also kept having a constant battle with the paparazzi......I couldn't help but think that she needed to  unconsciously create that distraction as well.  Dying her hair brown, assuming another name, wearing sunglasses, and  saying "yeah, people say I look a lot like Shirley Maclaine" could have nipped that one in the bud.  Oh well.  I didn't like the book, but I did learn something from it. 

I've had a dream of walking the Camino de Santiago in Spain as a  Peregrino for many years.  My pilgrimage would (maybe) end at the great Cathedral in Compostella, or maybe at Finisterre, "the end of the world", and I think I would not be making it to visit the bones of Saint James, but rather, to follow the ancient path of the Black Madonna.   I would go to Compostella to be "composted".   I don't actually think a goal, or a purpose, is all that necessary to the Way anyway, which is why I loved the recent film "The Way" with Martin Sheen.    The Journey is the Reward. 

It seems to me that extraordinary events are going on all around us, miraculous occasions of great beauty, or astounding mystery, and one is often so busy being somewhere else, preoccupied with "abstractions" about life, that we miss the everyday Milagros, given, and given, and given. These are the days of "miracles and wonder, the long distance call".  I think there is great solace in seeing that, even now, even here,  "on the Camino".

I had an experience I called "Angels in Nebraska" back in 2005.......I've shared it before, but would like to share it again.  If anything, the message gets clearer for me all the time........

ANGELS IN NEBRASKA and a Talking World   (2007)

In an article from his webzine "Warrior of the Light", Paolo Coelho wrote:

"I let my life be guided by a strange language that I call “signs”. I know that the world is talking to me, I need to listen to it, and if I do so I shall always be guided towards what is most intense, passionate and beautiful. Of course, it is not always easy."

I have also have found myself engaged in a "Great Conversation" that seems to be going on all around me, and occasionally I’m stunned to realize I wasn’t listening. The conversation seems to become most lively when I'm in movement, whether walking, crossing a trail, or a state line, or an ocean. Like many Americans, I've been blessed and cursed with restlessness and rootlessness. Between destinations lies a mythic land of migration, a free range for the imagination in the "Bardo" of transit, where I occasionally meet Angels of the Flux.

JOURNAL ENTRY, September 3, 2005.

Stopped in Cozad, Nebraska, home of the Robert Henri Museum.

The Museum has some beautiful paintings of the tall grass prairies by a local artist, and a few reproductions of Henri's "Ash Can School" paintings. They don't have any of the originals. Henri's father, it seems, founded Cozad, but had to leave rather suddenly with his sons and wife when he "accidentally" shot a man in a heated argument. He went to New York, changed his name, started the first casino in Atlantic City, and his son went on to study art and become famous. The boy never returned to Nebraska, although he did go on to live and work in Ireland, New York, and Paris. Cozad is proud of him anyway.

I continue to fret about my commitment to art. My life seems like a tapestry, on my good days, the threads finally woven with some skill into a colorful tapestry, I see that I have achieved some small bit of mastery. And then there are days when so much precious life seems wasted, lost, too many disappointments and wrong decisions and wrong turns. Those are days that are about emptying out, discovering things that once seemed so opaque are now, well, transparent. Unimportant. What really matters?

So here I sit, with a very nice cup of coffee and a sandwich at the Busy Bee Diner, where I have a front row center seat for the First Bank & Trust Company of Cozad.

That got my attention.