I stood there beside myself, thinking hard about the weather.

That lyric was stuck in my head all the way home from training. I did at least eventually remember it was a New Order line.

This was a hard, intense weekend for me. (And for several of my classmates, for that matter.)

We did some energy work around the yes-meets-no polarity, which is frequently an eroticism thing for me when I'm working it; what I got when I was holding that was black and silver and blue and dark and deep and soft, an intense, demanding urge to cocoon. When I drew cards around that -- the five of Thorn's Black Heart reading, and then three followup of an 'okay, now what?' nature, I got the tower reversed, the ten of wands (can't recall if it was upright or inverted), three threes -- swords, and pents and wands reversed .... The only actually cheerful bit was in the three-card followup, which indicated that my relationships are fine and good for me.

General message: you need to pull back, stop overcommitting, withdraw, and fucking well take care of yourself, or you're going to explode. And I kept getting repeats and variations on that the entire weekend. With other things -- like how to unbind my energy from relationships where things are too tangled up for me to feel able to forgive. With my tendency to put energy at things that I can't get to right now rather than the steps I need to get there. With a bunch of other things.

When I drew the five-card for the Black Heart, and was trying to interpret it, what I got was:

Quick now, here, now, always—
A condition of complete simplicity
(Costing not less than everything)

We made meditational mandalas as spellwork, and mine was:

And all shall be well and
All manner of thing shall be well
When the tongues of flame are in-folded
Into the crowned knot of fire
And the fire and the rose are one.

I'm going to poke and refine that design and then talk to splurby about how much it would cost to get in her queue ....

When I resolved to pull back, call in my energy, not expend -- something that wound up meaning that I had a clear sense that I shouldn't try to render the images in my head in the Centre Guardian meditation/artwork -- I drew another three-card and got the Two of Swords, the High Priestess, and the Ace of Cups. Okay then.

It'll be interesting to see what that follow-up reading on the question of my enlightened self-interest turns up, in the context of all this.

(The poetry is the end of T. S. Eliot's "Little Gidding".)

Gardening Preparation Notes

Links from whispercricket:

http://100milediet.org/home/
http://www.fhwa.dot.gov/environment/rdsduse/ma.htm
http://www.earthworksboston.org/urbanwilds/UWinvasive_alt.htm
http://www.massforests.org/ma-forests/common-species.htm
http://www.umass.edu/plsoils/soiltest/soilbrochdec2003.pdf
http://www.enscseeds.org/diversity/index.htm
http://www.newfs.org/nursery.htm

Books:

Carrots Love Tomatoes: Secrets of Companion Planting for Successful Gardening, Louise Riotte
Square Foot Gardening: A New Way to Garden In Less Space with Less Work, Mel Bartholomew

Cursing the Basil: And Other Folklore of the Garden, Vivian A. Rich