Find Spirituality in Nature

and this one reminds me of New Mexico

......I really like the castle in this one : )

I looked up these images while trying to treat my mother-in-law´s bitchy implication that not only am I not a Buddhist (since I am removed from that cultural context), I am probably practicing “witchcraft/brujeria” because I am likely to be “praying for bad things” rather than “for good things,” with a seriousness and gravity it did not deserve, to wit, showing her the tradition in which I´d hung a string of small paper Buddhist prayer flags on “our” (guest room) mirror (said flags actually received in the mail along with a solicitation for donations signed by – wait for it – both Richard Gere and the Dalai Lama. LOL

I can´t imagine what she imagines I ought to be praying for. I do know that she must not really think I´m a witch: otherwise she´d have to know she´s at the top of the list for those BAD PRAYERS hahahahah ! Whichever, she´s providing me some awfully good satire material….although she´s kind of already her own walking satire….

In the moment, I just imagine Arnold Schwarzenegger strangling her and then forget about it. I also don´t answer her phone for her, or go around closing bedroom doors to keep the cat out for her. (the cat issue is a whole other long story) For this, she speaks to me with a truly unique, pricelessly absurd contemptuous and condescending tone made funnier by the fact that after nearly four decades in the U.S. she still can´t manage to string together a single complete English sentence. So it´s really hard to keep a straight face while she´s imperiously reprimanding/instructing/commanding me. Got to admire her spirit, though – she doesn´t let that prevent her from both acting like a queen AND regally handing her son and me free tickets to every low-budget A Day Without a Mexican movie that comes along…not that SHE´s worked a day since she and wayward husband hopped over the border inherited savings and Mexican-rental-properties income in hand.

Ha !

ok, so…maybe I´m not being that Zen about it…

:P I know.

Living Tree necklace. Isn’t it lovely!

There is something extremely powerful about planting in the dark of the moon.

I had a very specific ritual in mind: repotting back into one of my own favorite pots a cherished little plant my mother-in-law took off of my porch without my knowledge on a day she´d stopped by, before we moved, “just to dig up some of the baby palms from the back yard.” That same day I had to rescue my small bag of potting soil from her car…only to discover later that she already had two huge economy sized bags of soil in her own yard that have sat there now for weeks unused…typical….sigh I have to stop striving to make her flaky malevolent selfishness make sense. :P Fiance suggests feebly that she was just trying to help us move, in spite of how she took things from and planted things in our garden all the years we lived in this first shared home of ours. I suppose there is only so much spine a man can have when it comes to his own mother….?? especially when she lives only 150 miles away and has a personality like C’s. The little round blue ceramic pot my plant was originally in has vanished, although The Red Queen doesn´t appear to have watered the little plant at all since she repotted it into her own plastic pot and shoved it into a hidden nook of her labyrinthine, jungle-like backyard. I found the plant a couple of days ago, but even after inquiring after the whereabouts of my own flowerpot, haven´t been able to locate it “in the planting area,” hahaha. Admittedly I have not excavated her entire storage shed. It is nowhere apparent.

But as I considered this ritual, my instinct was to become lighter, not darker and more intention-filled, where The Red Queen is concerned. My old martial arts teacher would have observed that we are in victim mind about each other. The only thing I can do is not dance with her. That in itself is difficult enough to resist…she has nothing else in life but her imaginary entanglements with people. And her every act toward me seems to be intended to remind me that I LIVE IN HER HOUSE now. Hahahaha. She forgets that I know all the stories about how many times my fiance busted his ass to come up with the money so his parents wouldn´t lose their house, how many times he has given them money to pay their bills….she is insane if she thinks I have an ounce of respect for her or her precious hearth-goddess self-image. I must not be there when she tries to grab on to me for her own emotional needs…hehe I think this is a move in The Book of Five Rings. Simply not being there. This is not a situation I can deal with by giving the other person what they want.

So I had a really strong feeling that I shouldn´t use a dark ritual like that with regards to her. I feel like she is really kind of evil

[to be plain, it´s my opinion that she is mentally ill…I think and others agree that she is showing signs of early Alzheimer´s with the accompanying intensified random rage and dementia, and there is something so eerie about the similarity between her personality and my mother’s when my mother was at this stage…I have spoken to my fiance and to C’s husband about how necessary it is to force her to see a doctor…it is heartbreaking that, just as with my own parents, her domineering personality is making it more difficult for those who love her to get her to the doctor before it´s too late…it´s now been almost five months since my fiance first confronted her about her memory problems and the possibility that she could benefit from Alzheimer´s meds…at least, that´s what he SAID he did…..her husband´s response when I spoke with him last week was, “Oh, yes, our trip to Cabo has been the priority, she will go to the doctor after that.” Hah. Yeah. Hard to argue with THAT logic….yeah.]

and that if I created that kind of powerful energy around this issue, it might help me, but it might not. Never play with dark energy in the devil´s playground, hehehehe.

So what I sense with this new moon is the poise of the ebbing tides about to return, and my own ability to be light and uninvolved…almost not there in this sense, like the new moon.

Heh…and I am very fortunate with all the advantages I have been given right now to help me embody my other intentions. Walking on the beach really is a good enough ritual for me. ; )

Of course I am repotting my little plant as soon as I get off the computer today…in the sunlight !!!

It´s going into a bigger blue ceramic pot liberated from another plant that didn´t survive my own negligence. :P Lots of room to grow…if I don´t forget to water this one….. : )))

And, in other gardening news, the orchid that hadn´t bloomed in 3 years still has its bevy of blooms: tens of white blossoms, more than ever before, for over a month now! amazing!

:D

and found nine.

As a kid I´d have concluded this meant the Ocean was welcoming me. : ) Now of course I try to work out whether it´s the season and the relatively small number of seagulls, the extremely low tide leaving all sorts of smaller shells and flotsam higher up the beach and the sand dollars out of the way on the long smooth shoulder lower down below the humped strands of kelp where the gulls seemed to prefer to pick. The dense humidity and the early twilight created the kind of autumn hush that also reminds me of being a kid and racing my bike through a suburban dusk where everyone else seemed to be sequestered inside some box glowing with yellow light. This kind of soft air and expectant quiet only exists in regions where there is enough humidity to trap cacophany in the air and disperse it like steam. Even the ocean seemed calmer although there were still a handful of surfers bobbing around. The sky was muted as well, so hazy that only a long feathery lip of cloud cordoning off the horizon hinted at its hoarded pink glow.

Then I saw the most mournful bulldog ever and had the best cappucino in a long time brewed up by a Bretagnan with the most perfectly stereotypical French accent I think I almost grew a beret listening to him.

Gosh I like San Diego.

:D

and also well I love my ocean sound machine sunrise clock thingy and I am thrilled to pieces that the November Fool Moon is approaching just one day off my birthday. The official nomadic total upheaval is actually ON my birthday, yes, and that was so mate and I could enjoy one last weekend day together in the old digs before all hell breaks loose and carries us off to new lands of adventure. :D

The sleep deprivation may explain the uncharacteristic verbal tics like “Yarr” and “thrilled to pieces.” heh

by attending the Del Mar Airshow. Well, only made it to part of it. Arguably, the best part: the Blue Angels ! Actually arrived just in time to see one of my top two favorite planes, the Harrier, landing. Man! that thing is cool !!! Tons and tons of metal hovering almost motionless above the ground, rotating this way and that like a girl posing for a picture. Ridiculous! incredible!

You may say, “Kali, what do planes, and military planes at that, have to do with nature or spirituality?”

But you would only say that if you have never been to an airshow and noticed the way every moving thing in the air catches your attention when you have been standing openmouthed at the sheer awesome power and grace of human invention. We are part of nature after all, and so are our mistakes…. I caught myself wondering much against my will whether these warbirds would be as beautiful without their terrible capacity for destruction and, yes, defense…I think not. Beauty is not a moral thing. That is one thing you confront as an artist (or maybe as a thinking human). Maybe these things could not be flown by people who are not on some level willing to die for an earthly cause. They are certainly adrenaline-junkie daredevils!! :D It’s like playing the violin with an airplane. Ha…well…I try to think of them coming to the rescue and destroying evil madmen, not bombing innocent villages…we all know there are two sides to this coin.

Actually, we don’t all know that. :P The thing about skill is it also requires singlemindedness. Just like stupidity. Funny.

Another thing you notice at the airshow is how you notice every bird: every motion in the sky catches your attention. How the simplest birds surpass our disgustingly expensive technology, hahaha.

Couldn’t get a pic of the Blue Angels. They just wouldn’t stand still. XD Here’s me by a random military copter.

I was so dreading the end of summer and it is such a BEAUTIFUL Fall day today !!

cool air!

Wooooooooooooooooooo! I am going to go run around in circles like a cat now.

Whilst doing laundry. And paying bills. And catching up online.

Let’s hope the bills don’t end up in the washer and the laptop in the mailbox.

and more Sunset Cliffs