I have been asked, directly and indirectly through the Old Fart, for progress reports and new pictures of the kittens.  Here they are.
 
I put both litters together on the bed:  Linda’s seven and the five that P.K. birthed since the previous pictorial kitten post.

They moiled and roiled and engaged in brownian motion…

Then the bigger ones started scattering in all directions.  In this shot, you can see on the left a bit of P.K., who got concerned and jumped onto the bed.

This is the runt of the older litter, Linda’s.

…and this is the only one yet named:  Tippy for the white tips on his dark ears.

Sometimes, that opinion is not entirely accurate.  My intentions are generally harmless.  I have not lost my infamous temper in almost sixteen years, and even then nobody was killed, maimed, or scarred for life.  Scared, but not scarred.

Accidental, unintentional harm is what concerns me, now that I have gotten my intentions in line.  It is not enough, I feel, to do no intentional harm.  I intend to do no harm at all, and that’s much more complicated and difficult.

 

Defining, “harm,” is the first difficulty.  Many of my clients, a few friends, and some family members, think they have been harmed by my frank forthrightness, but in that opinion they are usually mistaken.  That old truism that the truth hurts might sometimes be true for some people, but hurting is not the same as harming.  The difference between hurting and harming is similar to the difference between being bruised and being maimed.

Professionally, my ethics dictate that I relate to my clients all that I perceive to be even potentially significant, without regard for their feelings and reactions or my own.  Often, the most repugnant facts are those we most need to understand in order to choose the best course.  I think it is most unfortunate that our culture views “disillusionment” in a negative light.  This one, for me, is a no-brainer:  Tell it like it is, then deal with the feedback, whatever that is, in personal relationships as well as professional.

The issue that strains my brain is a different one:  How do I differentiate between a truth or fact that needs to be revealed, and one that is not only unnecessary to tell, but potentially harmful.  I have spent a lot of time mulling this one over, and failed to come to an acceptable conclusion.  The potential scenarios in which this issue might come up are too numerous to detail here, so I’ll just tell you about one that comes up frequently.

I know someone who is talented, skilled, flawed, vain, insecure and emotionally needy.  Actually, I know several such people, of both sexes, so I’m going to refer to them in the collective.  They tend to crow over their achievements, fishing for compliments, to reassure themselves of their worth.  Being skilled communicators, and experienced manipulators, familiar with and confident of their audiences, they usually get what they want.

In the Cosmic scheme of things, this might be a minor harm, but I’m not working on a Cosmic scale right now.  I am concerned with the personal mental health of my clients and associates, and with the general health of the culture and society in which I live.  Manipulation and reinforcing manipulative behavior are not healthy things to do.  The healthy reaction:  honest confrontation of the manipulative intent and neurotic motivation, is going to go down with these sickos and their sycophants like a turd in the punchbowl, just like that dysphemism for a lead balloon went down with most of you.

Do I do more harm by keeping silent and letting these sick social patterns continue unimpeded, or by confronting them?  I know that the answer to this question depends on variables I cannot predict.  In some situations, if I make my point sufficiently well, some of the participants might have a little AHA! moment, if they are having a personal teachable moment coinciding with my articulate moment.  Equally likely is that they will perceive my confrontation of our mutual issue as a personal attack on themselves and their current idol.  When that happens, they adopt an embattled attitude and become even more adamant in their pathological behavior.

For me, the best thing about the latter scenario above is that such coteries of insecure creatures in their mutual admiration societies are seldom overt or activistic in counterattack.  I’m not likely to be killed or maimed for pulling their covers.  Usually they are content to just tell each other how coarse and mean I am.  There is no direct harm to me in that, but I do end up inadvertently reinforcing the pathological social pattern I wanted to extinguish.  See my dilemma?

 

I wasted an inordinate amount of time trying to think of a title.  If I don’t write this soon, it won’t get done.  I’m sick with something that involves fever and body aches — in other words, my immune system is in high gear, but I have no way of knowing whether I’ve caught an infection or am having an autoimmune flareup.  Anyhow, I’m droopy and dopey today.  Happy and sleepy, too.  You can keep the rest of the dwarves.

Three days ago, I noticed a few aphids at the tips of some of the fireweed plants in my yard.  Yesterday, as I drove out to the highway for a trip up to the Sunshine clinic, I saw the telltale black tops on a lot more fireweed at the roadside.  We stopped at the bake shop on the way home, and Lois told me that a lot of people in the area have said they’re seeing the aphis infestation.  It’s ugly, and it is also unusual to see black aphids.  They are bigger and much showier than our usual little green nasties.

In the early 1970s I worked as a crisis intervention counselor at a free clinic.  My colleagues, some friends, and I hatched a plan to buy some remote land on an Alaskan lake with only fly-in access, and build an intentional community.  The only thing we lacked was the financing.

This was during the economic boom times of construction of the Trans-Alaska Pipeline.  Optimistically, we explored the possibilities and discussed the fine points of our plan.  We wrote grant proposals.  When nothing came of them we talked of investing in real estate, fixing up and trading up.  A few of us put some money down on properties.  Then came the bust after the boom.  Some of us were working two crappy jobs just to make ends meet.  Most of us lost what we had invested in the land when we couldn’t keep up payments.

Our little group disintegrated.  Some died, some moved away, and others became disillusioned with the dream or just too busy trying to survive.  I never gave up on the idea, even while I was dumpster diving for food and fixable things I could sell at flea markets for enough money to keep a roof over my head.  I thought that one way I might make the money to make the wilderness retreat center happen would be to write a book about a community of people running an intentional community in the wilderness.

I knew that the best fiction is character-driven, so I started with a group of people.  The core group lived in a remote Alaskan healing center, and they had connections with other similar communities on other continents.  They became real to me and began to develop a story.  I carried notebooks with me wherever I went, so I’d have the ideas there ready to type up whenever I could afford to buy a typewriter.  I had filled 3 notebooks and started a fourth when my little house trailer was burglarized.  Along with my five marijuana plants, camera, tape recorder, tapes and other items with some value, the thief took the notebooks.

That was a setback, but it didn’t stop me.  I found an old manual portable typewriter in a dumpster, straightened some bent parts so that it worked after a fashion, and started setting down dialogue for the first time.  By then, my characters had lives of their own and one of them went off into a snowstorm and met up with an ET visitor to Earth, who eventually pulled in several other alien races.  The story got even more interesting when a serial killer started stalking the psychic members of our global technomadic community.  I really got into it, to the extent that I started dreaming extended sequences — something I still do. 

I’d work on it in my head a lot of the time, make notes in the ever-present spiral notebook, then in between working for a living, followed by having a baby, being a mother who broke land, built greenhouses, made a garden, tended it, chased a wild little boy around, foraged for food and worked as a psychic at fairs and festivals in summer, kept the wood box filled and a fire going in winter…  sometimes I’d get out the typewriter and fill a few pages with story line and dialogue.  Then I started doing psychic readings by mail and the typewriter had other things to do, earning money for our subsistence.

The boy was between elementary school and middle school, and the Old Fart had moved in with us, when the Kid and I went south for a winter on our Big Field Trip.  When I got home the following spring, I found no sign of my box of manuscript pages.  Either the old drunk destroyed them for spite or they were some of the “papers” he said burned up in a fire that started because he hadn’t properly tightened a propane fitting when he switched tanks.  The manuscript was gone.

The characters still lived on in my dreams and daydreams.  I got a laptop that was compatible with our 12-volt home-generated power, and started reconstructing the early chapters of the story.  It was better than ever, more cohesive.  Rewrites with a word processor were so easy….  The drive crashed.  Some of my backup disks were defective when I tried to put the data onto a new drive.  I started reconstructing once again.

Eventually, we moved onto the electrical grid and obtained a desktop computer, but I kept using the laptop for my writing.  Finally, that old laptop, which I called Schpeedy Trackbawl because it required a steady supply of alcohol swabs to keep the trackball rolling, quit one last time.   It had been obsolete when we bought it and we’d given it every possible memory upgrade.  It’s a doorstop, my set of data disks is incomplete, and they are incompatible with this system I’m using now.

The story goes on in my head, but I’m less interested than ever in trying to bring it to a fitting end, write it all down and submit it for publication.  Most of my writing in the past six or seven years has been on my memoirs.  I have told a few people that I will finish them and turn them into a book, and that is my intention.  However, it is more important to me to get it written than to see it in print.  Posting on the web is publishing, as far as I’m concerned, and I have been serially publishing my memoirs since I started writing them on Xanga six years ago.

It’s quite obvious to me that the story that was to have been the novel exists somewhere on the mental plane.  I dream it occasionally, and at odd moments the characters pop into my mind to tell me what they’ve been up to.  Another thing that is obvious to me is that I don’t want to get it all written down badly enough to keep fighting burglars, accidental or deliberate book-burnings, computer crashes, etc., to make that happen.  The Universe is not cooperating in that effort.

The memoirs may or may not become a book on paper someday.  That has a higher degree of probability than my new age flying saucer serial killer thriller ever being finished and published, or my putting together a real wilderness healing center.  Telling the story of my life is important to me.  That’s why I wrote this story of my unfinished novel:  it’s part of my memoirs.

Greyfox said that to me on his cell a few minutes ago.  When he said it, I cracked up so badly that he had to wait until I caught my breath before he could finish telling the story.  He is at the historical museum in downtown Wasilla today, selling his wares at the weekly farmer’s market.  He’s not a farmer and his wares are forged, not farmed, but this market isn’t discriminatory.  They have crafters and an espresso booth, too.

The source of today’s merriment was Penny, known to many as pain-in-the-ass Penny.  The woman has NPD (narcissistic personality disorder), and hers is a mixed form, including traits from the overt and aggressive NPD practiced generally by males, as well as traits of covert or hypersensitive NPD, which is generally the province of females.  She whines, pouts, kicks, screams, pounds things with her fists, ingratiates, insults, insists and wheedles:  whatever she thinks might get her what she wants.

Booth spaces at the market are first-come-first-served except for the vendors who arrived early at the first market of the season, picked their spaces, and paid in advance for the entire season to reserve those spaces.  Penny pays week by week, but expects to get “her” regular space every week.  Today, one of the Dinkels got there before her and took the space she prefers.

Dinkels are a big family in the Matanuska Valley, many of them farmers, descendants of Harold and Frances who came to Alaska in 1937 as part of a Federal program to replace some of the original agricultural colonists who had given up and gone south.  Any given Wednesday at the market you can probably find at least one Dinkel selling vegies.

When Penny arrived and found a Dinkel in the space she calls hers, she came predictably unglued.  Mr. Dinkel referred her to Leroi, who runs the Historical Society and the Farmer’s Market (as a volunteer).  As Greyfox related to me the exchange between Leroi and Penny, I was already laughing at the characteristic character voices of Penny’s high-pitched, “rrr… wrgh… rmph,” and Leroi’s deep, calm, authoritative declarations of reason and order.

Greyfox, with his own case of NPD and a history of clashes with Penny behind him, enjoys seeing her put in her place, but he habitually tries to maintain civil decorum in public.  It was no surprise that he would be trying to keep a straight face as he listened to Penny rant and Leroi lay down the law.  What got me was the, “ears folded double,” bit.

The dog slipped past me and out the door this morning.  We don’t let him out unleashed because it is dangerous out there and illegal as well, but once in a while he makes a run for it.  When I took off after him to bring him back, I took the camera.

Just down the block, he stopped to check his p-mail…

…and leave a message.

Then he ran ahead and around the corner into the cul de sac, where he found some more p-mail.

He caught the scent of something on the wind…

…and took off into the wind to investigate.

After I took the camera home and got his nobbly pink fluorescent ring toy from the fridge (only place in the house where he won’t smell it and try to get to it), he finally approached close enough for me to grab his collar.  With ring proudly in his mouth, he pulled me all the way home.

I’m exhausted.  I probably should have awakened Doug to chase down the dog.

The mnemonic verse is supposed to go:

It runs through my mind a lot when I’m outside.  I habitually, even compulsively, identify the things growing around me.  The stuff I generally call “swamp grass,” is sedge.  It spreads by stolons underground.  Out in the muskeg it provides perennial green, whether poking up through the water in times of flood or fading to pale near-yellow in dry times.  In my garden, it invades, competes with my strawberries, rhubarb, chives, onions, etc., and makes work for me.

Along my driveway, between the house and the road, now that there are seed heads waving atop the stems, identification is easy.  In addition to the water-loving sedge that thrives much better in the muskeg and my irrigated garden than it does in the driveway, I counted five different species of grass, and one rush with heads like little bottle brushes.

Sometimes whatever happens to be running thorough my mind becomes muddled with something altogether different.  If you are wondering how soft kittens found their way into the mnemonic verse for grass identification, so am I.  The seven new kittens under my bed probably had something to do with it.  This litter is the first for Colander Piebean, AKA, “Linda.”  She was huge and uncomfortable in the latter weeks of pregnancy, with a belly bulge that more than tripled her usual girth.  She stuck out so far on the sides it looked as if she’d swallowed a football sideways.

Her voice is rather rough and raucous at best.  Her frequent complaints about the heat and internal pressure, along with her bulbousness, earned her the temporary nickname, “Bagpipe.”  I suppose she’s happy with her kittens.  We seldom see her now, and the only time we hear from her is when we mess with the kittens.

Yesterday, Doug got his head stuck under my low-slung bed frame while dragging kittens out for routine handling and socialization.  I had to lift it off him, and that was complicated by the fact that he was taking up nearly all of the space where I needed to stand to do the lifting.  I stepped on him a couple of times while getting into position.  When I gripped the frame to lift, I gripped some of his hair, too.  When he started backing out, he had to stop and wait for me to get my foot off his shirt.

Needless to say, all came out well in the end.  The kittens were handled and photographed, then returned to their nest at their mother’s insistence.  Now, Doug has them out again, in a squirmy pile on the bed, with Koji sniffing interestedly and wagging his approval, and Linda strongly suggesting that Doug put the kittens away.

I’ll be back with progress reports, of course.  We have two more pregnant cats, too.  One of them is the one we were taking to the spay clinic about a year and a half ago, when the car broke down and I came down with pneumonia at the same time.  There has not been enough money nor a proper opportunity for any spaying since then.  Fortunately for the kittens, Greyfox is able to find homes for them in Wasilla.

 

I hypothesize about everything, including what might have split the tree in the photo above.  If a cause/effect relationship isn’t obvious, I speculate.  In human behavior, I seek meaning and motivation.  (Greyfox laughs at me for that.)  Almost always, I find more than one explanation for each occurrence.  That’s okay.  The questions matter more to me than any answers.  I’m curious.

I found a few things that piqued my curiosity on Friday’s water run.  As we often do, we bypassed the spring on the way down and went to Camp Caswell for ice cream.  As Doug and I got out of the car, we heard barking sounds coming from a pickup truck parked across the lot beside the propane pump.  I looked, expecting to see a dog.  No dog was there — just a round-headed, button-nosed kid about six years old, barking at us.

The shape of his head was evident through his sparse buzz-cut hair.  There was a definite air of hostility about his bark, his facial expression, tension in his shoulders, and the tight grip he had on the side of the truck bed.  I gave my head a shake and turned to go into the store.  When Doug saw the barking kid, he started laughing.

Since that truck was the only vehicle in the lot and a young couple were the only customers in the store, I supposed the barking kid came with them.  I said, to no one in particular, that it was a funny-looking dog in that truck out there.  Nobody seemed to pay me any attention.  We made our purchases and left.  By the time we were out there, the truck had gone.

As I drove from the lot, I asked Doug if the kid’s barking had struck him as funny.  He said, yes, it was pretty funny.  I said it hadn’t seemed funny to me, that I had sensed fear and hostility.  I paused a beat and said, “I saw no tail wagging.”  That got the laugh I was going for.

I thought off and on about the barking kid and discussed him with both of my guys.  The Kid’s opinion is that he was just goofing around.  I felt that he might have been venting some repressed anger or imitating a vicious dog of his acquaintance.  The Old Fart says he was obviously a feral child raised by wolves.  If he had been howling, I might credit that explanation, but he sounded more like a doberman than a wolf.  A child reared by feral dobermans?  Maybe.

At the spring, someone had moved the big rock from the middle of the little stream.  Now, it is on the ground at the edge of the stream, and a bigger rock is in its old place as stepping stone.  A lot of effort went into that project.  The smaller rock is fairly big, obviously heavy, and had been half-sunken in the bed of the stream.  The bigger one would be more than I could lift.  I’d probably even have a hard time rolling it.

Previously, it had been possible for a long-legged person like me to get from bank to bank of the stream without the stepping stone.  With the original rock there, even a small child could cross the stream without getting wet feet.  Now, crossing the stream is absurdly easy for anyone, and one could perch one’s butt on the flat top of the big rock in the middle, and still have room for one’s feet, or at least the heels.  Maybe a cool place to sit was the motivation.

My other unsolved mystery from yesterday involves something seen at a distance through trees.  In this telephoto shot, the tawny color and rounded “ears” suggested to my imagination a reclining Asiatic lion.  Reason suggests otherwise, but other than a big rock or a bear (but the color’s not quite right for a grizzly), reason suggests no alternative.

Pizarro, AKA “Berzerko” met us when we got home.  The photo below, of a hazy sky over the big muskeg along Sheep Creek, is available in a large enough version for wallpaper, here.  The photo of the split tree at the top of this entry was captured from approximately the same POV as the long shot below, in a slightly different direction.

  

Let me count the ways.

1. My shopping list:  for a couple of weeks I have been noting our needs on the magnetic dry erase list on the refrigerator.  Monday, the day before my projected trip to Wasilla, I transcribed those items onto a page of a spiral notebook and did some serious checking of supplies and discussion with Doug, to fill out the shopping list.  When I left for town noonish on Tuesday, I left the list in the notebook on my bed.

2. My lunch:  Tuesday around noon, all bathed and dressed and ready to go, I made a quesadilla.  Since it was too hot to eat immediately, I set it aside to cool while I enlisted Doug to help me get the potted rhubarb plant into the car.  That 5 gallon bucket of wet dirt is heavy.  When we got the rhubarb buckled into the passenger seat, I got in and drove away, leaving my lunch behind.  Doug had it for breakfast.
3. My rant:  Greyfox told me a couple of weeks ago that he’d bought a hanging basket of nasturtiums and lobelia (he didn’t say “lobelia”, but “little white flowers”) at the farmer’s market.  A few days ago, he started asking me for advice on plant care because the leaves were turning yellow.  I had already advised him to remove the flowers as soon as they faded (deadheading), and to pick off any leaf as soon as it showed any yellow.  I repeated that advice, and said his problem could be root rot since the container had no drain hole.

   I wasn’t even out of my car yet when I saw what was causing his yellowing leaves.  The plants were going to seed.  I took the basket off its hook, sat beside it on the porch, and started picking off dead flowers, seed pods, and yellow leaves.  As I worked, I lectured him.  I ranted about people who neglect plants and said just because he could afford to buy it didn’t mean he deserved to have it.

   I was bitching him out pretty thoroughly when I realized my blood sugar was low and asked him what he had to eat.  He nuked a frozen burrito for me, which was awfully bland, so I started popping the spicy faded nasturtiums and immature seeds into my mouth.  I went around the rest of the day with my breath smelling of some of the sweetest flowers on the planet.  The food sweetened my mood too, but I had to apologize to Greyfox to sweeten his disposition.

4. My hatch:  By the last supermarket stop, I was fatigued and my blood sugar was low again.  A kid helped me out of the store with my bags.  I had to unpack them, sort stuff, put the perishables into the insulated cooler, the fragile things on top of the pile, etc.  Then I got in and drove through the parking lot and across the street to a thrift shop — with the hatch open.  Greyfox asked me if I’d done that deliberately to give us more ventilation (It was a beastly hot day in Wasilla — a roadside time and temperature sign read 91 just after 6 PM.).  Sometimes that man gives me way too much credit for smarts.  Either that, or he was being sarcastic.

   On the positive side, I don’t think anything slid or bounced out while I was driving with the hatch open.  If it did, it must have been something non-essential, because I haven’t noticed anything missing.  Another positive:  I found a camera tripod at the thrift shop, a better one than I have ever used in my life, for $5.00.  I also bought seven VHS tapes of my kinds of movies, an antidote to the recent BAD FILM FESTIVAL of  “so bad they’re good” (not in my opinion) flicks Greyfox had given me.

5. Greyfox’s glasses:  Early in our shopping rounds, the Old Fart put on his prescription sunglasses and put his regular glasses in their case in his shirt pocket.  When we got back to his cabin, he couldn’t find the glasses.  After searching the car, he phoned La Fiesta, where we’d had dinner, but he hadn’t left them there.  Our only stop after the restaurant had been at his storage shed at the far end of the strip of cabins where he lives.  I asked him if it was possible that the glasses case had slid from his shirt pocket while he was pulling things out of the storage shed.  His eyes lit with hope, and I drove back there.

   As we approached, he spotted the case on the ground in the driveway and I hit the brakes.  First thing he noticed when he picked up the glasses case was tire tread marks on it.  He had to straighten a bent frame, but otherwise the glasses were unharmed.  That is a very good thing, because his uncorrected vision is 20/900 — legally blind.  His special thick lenses don’t come cheap and they have to be ordered from afar, so he might have spent weeks with only dark glasses in his current prescription and an old pair that doesn’t let him see as well.

Just as the left-open hatch turned out to be a harmless error and Greyfox’s glasses weren’t irreparably damaged by being run over, my left-behind list wasn’t a big loss in the end.  While Greyfox had been searching for his glasses, Doug called to say he had found the list.  I had him read it to me over the phone, and picked up the rest of my groceries after I dropped Greyfox off at home.  The Old Fart’s hurt feelings will heal.  It’s certainly not the first time I’ve bitched him out, and he has learned through the years to understand, if not appreciate, what happens when my blood sugar is low.

There is a story behind the potted rhubarb I took to town and gave to Greyfox.  Years ago, when Doug was small, his dad, Charley, helped move one of the original cabins from the Matanuska Valley agricultural colony to the museum in Wasilla.  He salvaged a few things from the old homesite, including some rhubarb roots from the abandoned garden.

They grew in my garden at Elvenhurst, my place across the highway from where we live now (have been “house-sitting” for ten years), and continued to survive unattended over there for seven or eight years.  A couple of years ago, I went over and dug up some of the surviving perennials, including several pieces of rhubarb root.   That season, I ran out of stamina (M.E., in case anyone is wondering why I’d run out of stamina) after planting only one of the roots.  The following summer, I got another one planted, and the rest of the root pieces stayed, with a little bit of soil, in the bottom of a blue plastic bucket through two winters, put out a few small leaves each summer, and SURVIVED.  This year, I got a third big piece of root planted, leaving one small piece in the bucket with just 2 little leaves on it.  I filled the bucket with soil, potted the root, and tended it for a few weeks.

After a somewhat brief and very limited immersion in consensus reality, I have decided to get back to subverting the dominant paradigm.  By, “limited,” I mean that I got a toe wet, didn’t even go knee-deep in pop culture.  I didn’t start watching TV, going to first-run movies, or renting videos, for example.  My only two magazine subscriptions are still Archaeology and Smithsonian.  I don’t tweet — don’t even own a wireless device. 

My radio stays tuned to NPR, so I get exposed to a bit of pop culture that way.  Facebook, when I signed on a few months ago, brought me closer to the mainstream.  My first FB friends were old friends from Xanga.  Some of their FB friends became my friends.  One indication of how far I’ve moved into that sidechannel of the mainstream is that I no longer put quotes around, “friends,” in that context.

I got swept along with these people into the culture of Facebook.  It’s similar in a way to my initial enculturation as a child:  I accepted and absorbed what came at me from my environment.  Even so, I maintained some discrimination.  I learned how to hide some people’s posts from my newsfeed, and how to hide or block apps.  But all that was reactive, and I didn’t really start to take back control of my mind until I got proactive in seeking out new facebook friends.

I can’t claim much personal credit for having initiated this.  To start with, I was guided by Spirit.  That unmistakable Voice in my head suggested that I reach out for a different kind of input.  I started searching for names of people with whom I have had enlightening or uplifting contact in the past:  people like Dick Sutphen, Antero Alli, EJ Gold, Claude Needham, and some New Age authors and practitioners that I respect.

I told Greyfox about my encouraging early results and with his concurrence I searched out for him some of the people from the Pagan community with whom he had been associated while he published The Shaman Papers and lived close enough to attend Pagan gatherings.  In this way, each of us acquired a set of Facebook friends more in keeping with our ideas and our intentions for ourselves.  There has been crossover and overlap between our circles of friends.  I spend probably more time with his friends than he does, since he’s still only getting an hour or two on library computers a few times a week, but the change has affected us both.

Every day since I made that move, my Facebook newsfeed has brought me more and more enlightening and uplifting contact with like minds.  I did not drop any of the other friends.  I think it is healthy to be exposed to a variety of views, to get some reality testing from comparing and contrasting them.  There is also the chance that I can serve to do some cross-pollenation of ideas among friends and friends of friends.

Fittingly, this change in my mind and life coincides with a retrograde station of Uranus, which is stationary retrograde in my birth chart.  The station of Uranus at the beginning of this month occurred opposite my natal conjunction of Sun and Chiron, so some spiritual healing and radical change is in order for me.  The current astrological intensity, with Jupiter, Neptune, Uranus and Pluto all retrograde now, and a Full Moon/Lunar Eclipse coming up tomorrow, has me on an incredible high of connecting with other minds, working together in alternate realities, and pulling energy into the mundane world.

Can you tell I’m digging it?  Yes, I am.  I’m also looking forward to spending time with my beloved soulmate, lawful spouse, and partner in crime, the Old Fart (AKA “Greyfox”) in Wasilla tomorrow.  It’s time for the trip:  our fridge is empty and his space is filling up with things he has been picking up for us.  I didn’t plan for the trip to coincide with one of the biggest astrological events of recent days.  It just happened that way, the way so many of the most interesting parts of my life do happen.