Bare wires touching
makes for unpredictable
(hot) consequences.
There are workarounds:
insulation breaks down flow
blown out of control.
Magnetism’s nice;
I’d rather it not blow out.
My heart’s inside this.
The perfect circuit
may be one that’s incomplete -
more like a spiral.
—NS
Objects of desire does not cut it, what this red rock of time can buy
the one blessed to bear it, momentarily sun-king for love and forever
held in the flame of reclaiming that burns away all but divine knights.
— NS
Heavy elemental magic; bone on rock. A poem:
…
The poetry of my body is written in the metre of space between.
It follows not the clean or ragged rhythms of outward extension
but erupts from a volcanic groan always churning in deep matter,
placing new threads that link points in secret knots,
finely worked on the loom of many hidden miracles.
The captive pulse of desire is my seat of being;
the emergency of that, a masterclass in my craft.
Patterns appear with the photonic cry of an Icelandic winter
- raw material, deep mater
on a rock polarised like Earth’s wet mind when they I say,
offhand, that I learned to come by listening to Homogenic.
-NS
No edit; no filter. Just the perfection held effortlessly within the chaos.
Alan Watts, in The Wisdom of Insecurity: A Message for an Age of Anxiety —
“Where do I begin and end in space? I have relations to the sun and air which are just as vital parts of my existence as my heart. The movement in which I am a pattern or convolution began incalculably ages before the (conventionally isolated) event called birth, and will continue long after the event called death. Only words and conventions can isolate us from the entirely undefinable something which is everything.”
Destruction lies within creation, and creation within destruction: a key lesson of garden stewardship, and one of the many wisdoms of Hecate/Hekate. These violet flowers will become a nourishing breast oil, the bodies of the plants a contribution to the compost heap, and their former position a new spring bed. There is both sweetness and brutality in the act of uprooting, a dance of life and death and life again.
Integrate Rather Than Segregate
“Our cultural bias toward focus on the complexity of details tends to ignore the complexity of relationships. We tend to opt for segregation of elements as a default design strategy for reducing relationship complexity.” —David Holmgren, Permaculture: Principles and Pathways Beyond Sustainability
“Art ought to be a basic daily undertaking carried out by everyone for passing from nature to culture, from the satisfaction of instincts to the sharing of desire, that is, for preserving and cultivating the between-us.” — Luce Irigaray, In the Beginning She Was
It’s midwinter and the hellebores are flowering, deep and sly, sensuous and underworldly, face to the earth and not out of modesty.
“In addressing the global question of how to continue to live together in our earthly habitat, it’s essential that we reflect on our condition not only as discrete units of biological matter, but also as beings collectively driven to push the boundaries of those units. We will then be in a position to ask ourselves, with genuine, open-minded curiosity, what this drive is about, and perhaps arrive at a clearer understanding of our greater collaborative project.”
— from an essay I’ve been working on.
Winter solstice in the ever-turning rainforest: may we take in lessons of how to embody community and be in material systems from these miniature festivals of diverse gathering and timely regeneration.
I respectfully acknowledge the traditional custodians of the land I practice my art on, the Wurundjeri people of the Kulin Nation.
Kitchen
Polarity’s hands
stretch out time like pasta dough
not yet for the pot.
—- NS
A word on astrology
My personal understanding of astrology is as a complex, naturally derived system for the imaginative interpretation of patterns — specifically, those that occur within the spatial and temporal arrangement of astral bodies. This arrangement is dynamic, continually moving in spirallic cycles. By this, I mean that while no two temporal moments ever contain precisely the same spatial configuration of bodies, we can nonetheless discern patterns of repetition across time. The rotation of Earth around its sun and our moon around Earth, for instance, produce reliable rhythms that are readily perceptible, so much so that they are widely taken for granted. Yet, the state of the rhythmic system’s contents is not quite identical in each successive rotation – everything is forever changing, building on what came before but differentiating itself from its predecessors. It is continually developing through a rhythmic process.
The practice of astrological enquiry can be a means of observing the layout of our wider, extra-terrestrial environment – finding the patterns of repetition that keep the continual flux of things on a coherent track. It might be said that, as far as this point goes, we might as well practice astronomy (as clearly distinct from astrology). If we seek the teachings of science, then that’s no doubt the case. If, however, we want to pursue the arcane art of receiving guidance from our surroundings — guidance that goes beyond the purely practical meeting of physical needs, that helps us in crafting meaningful answers to certain philosophic questions that have no fixed answers — then we may choose to move into the realm of symbolic interpretation.
I believe that astrology continues to enjoy mainstream popularity because it provides a framework for self-reflection with a long and irrepressible history. Its established nature means that very little interpretive skill is demanded on the part of the casual inquirer. Yet it remains, for those who desire to penetrate deeper, an avenue for exercising archetypal, imaginative and interpretive artistry. No rule book can definitively state that there is one true way of understanding astral symbols, just as none can definitively state that there is one true way of reading words (these, too, being a type of symbol). This is the case despite the fact that, in general, we do use symbols in communally acknowledged ways to convey meanings that are at least roughly agreed upon. A dictionary is a guide only, not a binding force.
—-NS
Elf home, crouching gnome, fleshy bauble of woodland lore.
Spotted dome; footprints of my forebears on the forest floor.
Red means poison. Do not eat. Walk with soft fall of feet.
Come near. If you dare, lie close, for Amanita speaks.
—-NS
Self portrait under the Full Moon in Capricorn, 2018.
Time manifests in repeating patterns of movement. This is most clear to me in the garden - microcosm of seasonal change, sex, death and rebirth, of orderly and chaotic activity springing from one impulse to perpetuate life - and under the changing face of the moon.
Time is moving strangely at the moment. As a collective, we are loosening our deference to the authority of the clock, permitting our imaginal senses to float open.
Sensitivity to organic time may be dulled when we don’t attend to it, yet we never leave its presence. It’s woven into our soft animal bodies, underlying the warm patterns of mammalian blood. Technologies like calendars and clocks arise and extend from the drum of our many hearts, as well as flowing inward, earthward, from the celestial polyrhythms.
Organic time has a fractal geometry that is majestic, mysterious and worthy of reverence. Cultivating relationship to it is a doorway to the kinetic temple of embodiment.
—-NS
'Fruiting body' - what a sweet phrase.
Copulating with your mental content
Impregnating’s how I’m like the forest
in the words I speak; they fall upon the floor
They die and decompose and still there’s ever more
Microbes emanating through the words I say
Contaminants and habitats are all in sacred play
Red in tooth and claw; this solar system’s kinda rough
Who knows where this chaos leads but we can’t get enough
—— NS (bridge lyrics, Hall of Mirrors by Ungus Ungus Ungus)
From the scholarly article ‘Nonsense, Magic, Religion, and Superstition’ by Kevin Shortsleeve in Bookbird: A Journal of International Children’s Literature, Vol 53 Iss 3, 2015. He’s referring to nonsense as a literary mode such as in the writing of Lewis Carroll, along with many traditional folk tales and nursery rhymes.
While nonsense […] often enough has its feet planted firmly on the ground - manifesting an overt mistrust of all that is spiritual, magical, or divine - a deeper look reveals that nonsense has been consciously or unconsciously cribbing from occult traditions for ages and, more specifically, that in the impossible spaces that nonsense occupies and promotes, there are profound echoes of an intimate ancestral connection to the spiritual and supernatural.
Curcubita pepo (spaghetti squash) flower
Strong, soft, seeking. Adaptable, pragmatical. Clear, vital, focused, cultivated.
Sensing. Grounding. Ascending. No ego. No drama.
- NS
A quick poem (sometimes it’s best not to overthink)
Pierce my heart with holy arrows
Flying from your lips like winged honey.
Tie me up in words I’ve never heard before.
Spellbind me; be my dearest muse.
- NS
Foxglove medicine
Foxglove feels like cheerful cherubs. It promotes appreciation of living, celebration and sweet merriment by pointing to the finality of crossing the threshold - charmingly, innocently, heart-openingly. - NS
