Sacred Seeds

Pushing at the walls of my cage

Since I got past just surviving and moved into figuring out how to live this new life with MCS, I’ve taken to naming the years of my life since I got sick. Year one was “Sleeping on the couch”, year two was “Defining Boundaries”, and year three was “Anger. Now that we’re half way through year four I think I know what this one’s name is: “Pushing at the walls”.

Living with MCS I often feel trapped in a box or a cage, very much like the Canary we get called. The restrictions on where I can go or what I can do, so that I don’t get sick through exposure, leaving me feeling like a hermit on a good day and a prisoner on a bad day. Recently the walls of my cage have been feeling very restricting and in need of some remolding.

The first push at my walls seems to have come with my writing. After a long dry spell I am back to crafting both short stories and rituals and loving every minute of the process.

The second push came with the glitter clogs of doom ™ . These were followed by the realization that I’ve been basically been living in nothing by sweats and t-shirts for the last three years. That so needs to stop. I have some really lovely clothes, things I used to wear to conventions, performances, even occasionally for my day job. While I may not be able to do the same things now that I used to do, I am heartily tired of letting that dictate my clothing choices! So, the scummy clothes have officially been relegated to use only when I am working now (I tend to paint on my clothes), and the fun and shiny stuff is now out front. I still have my worn out and bad days, but I figure that’s what denim is for.

The third and biggest push against my walls began at the end of last month when I started taking a ceramics class. It has been years since I have been in an art class of any kind, and the last continuing ed class I tried taking was right as I was learning just how sick I was, more than four years ago.

Two friends of mine had been taking a ceramics class at a local city college and we started talking about the conditions of the class room, how much dust or chemicals there were in air (turns out there is an amazing air filter system and super high ceilings), class compliment and the styles of the different teachers. Taking my heart, and my lungs in my hands, I leapt, and haven’t looked back.

Class hasn’t been perfect. Like with any location outside of my house, I have to wear my mask and be careful. And with forty students in the class, I have to be very careful about where I actually do my work. The one day I goofed and sat up front for a lecture I was sick for days afterwards because it left me hemmed in by people coated in chemicals. I’ve had to make some adjustments to make sure I can get through the day. One of the friends who is also taking the class does the driving because by the time class is over, I have very little brain left, and I bring meds along with snacks and lots of water to class to boost my bodies ability to cope with what it’s being exposed to during the four hours in the studio. Even with all of that, I still end up crashing hard every day once I am home, which means I have been effectively losing three days a week to ceramics.

On the other hand, class has been amazing and worth every two hour post-class nap, extra pack of vitamins or antihistamine, and whiff of chemicals I have to put up with. I’ve been watching a lifetime of knowledge and experience pour out of my fingers, into a new medium, to form amazingly wonderful pieces of art. I feel like I have found the natural next step in my artistic process. Even more importantly I am getting to talk with other artists about art and process and life for the first time in years. Each conversation inspires me to try new things and look at my own work in new ways. Every day in the studio my heart, mind, and soul are filled with new ideas and an expanding level of hope and passion.

My main project for this semester has been to build part of the base for a Freyr doll that I am doing as a commission piece. The clay portion is a representation of the lower half of the World Tree of Norse from mythology with its three main roots reaching down into the lower realms and its trunk stretching up into the sky.

I think I am completely in love with doing ceramic sculpture, so much so that I haven’t even touch the wheel yet. And I already have half a dozen projects in mind for next semester, several of which are plans for dolls that I am redesigning to do in clay.

I still have walls around my life, but I think the box I have to live in to be safe finally has some breathing room inside.

Living with MCS, a day in my life

MCS is one of a set of illnesses that are known as “invisible illnesses” because those of us who have them don’t look like we’re sick. They are hard to diagnose and difficult to live with day in and day out in part because there is this lingering feeling that we might just be faking it, since we look normal. If you can’t see what’s wrong with us, then maybe nothing is, right? Unfortunately, the things that make people with MCS ill are also invisible and sometimes hard to identify. We are called “the Canaries in the Coal Mine” because like those birds who warn miners of gas leaks and oxygen deficiencies, we warn of the toxins in our environment. At least for most of us with MCS we only get sick, the real canaries die.

As part of my ongoing effort to help myself, and in turn help others, I spent one day keep track of what I did, how I felt and what I experienced – health wise. It was amazingly helpful to see the reality of my life in black and white. I am so very good a pushing what I go through under an imaginary rug and trying to convince myself that half the things I think I’m feeling are not real, that whole “If you can’t see it, I can’t really be sick” routine.  Honestly look at what my days look and feel like was a powerful reminder of both how far I have come since I was first diagnoses (yes, there has been some improvement I am happy to say) and how much MCS is still dictates the boundaries of my life.

I was also thinking that it might be helpful for other people to see what living with MCS is like because just saying “I’m allergic to half the planet” (my usual answer to strangers) doesn’t really explain what we Canaries go through on a daily basis. Of course each one of us is different. What we are allergic and /or sensitive to is different, what we need to do to cope with our triggers is different and how we recover and care for ourselves is different. This is what things look like for me.

A “normal” day with MCS

My day usually starts around 10:30 am. I know, neat that I get to sleep in, right? The problem is, too often I get a terrible night sleep. Something is off in my sleep cycle which means I can’t fall asleep until sometime after 2 am and depending on how my day has gone, I may or may not be able to sleep once I get to sleep. It will also depend on my sinuses, which right now are a mess with the most current round of a sinus infection (my first official one of the year, my eighth or so since MCS walked into my life).  By this point I’ve had one medication (at 7 am) and need to take another one before breakfast.

On the morning I started writing this, because of how badly I had slept, I woke up feeling rather pummeled and wanting nothing more than to crawl back under the covers. I did mange to get up, stretch grab a scone for breakfast and head out for a walk.

The day was beautiful, clear skies, and spring-like temperatures as opposed to the heat we have had the last couple of day. I had a mask on my face (I always wear a mask whenever I leave the house), music in my ears and pain in my chest. Ah well. With my asthma, particularly of late, I have what I call this “warm up” period for my lungs. It feels like I have to push through something very thick and heavy to get each breath, except I am clearly breathing, which is bloody confusing. It takes a couple of blocks for my lungs to get into the swing of working without trying to kill me. On this morning they never quite warmed up. I finally decided that I needed to be done with my walk and made my swing towards our local Whole Foods grocery store. Going to the store gives my lungs a chance to rest since wandering around a store takes much less energy than even a mild walk, and I can pick up lunch or whatever else I need for the day.

Normally after my stop at the store my lungs are pretty happy. Even if they were still achy when I got to the store, the rest helps them mellow enough to make the walk home easily. Not this day. The walk home was more of the same, thick lungs and slow going. I did make it home, tired but invigorated even with the ache in my chest. It’s this feeling after the walk that makes it worth the effort, and part of why I keep making myself get out of the house and walk.

Next up was more med (well one med and a bunch of supplements), resting and catching up with the rest of the world – hello internet! I got to chat with some friends on line, read some news, and help my youngest son with a last minute clothing crisis before his presentation at school.

Oh, right, school. So the youngest son does these presentations four times a year, a requirement of his particular high school. I can’t attend any of them. All of them are held on campus in a large room with his whole class, his teachers, and a whole lot of parents. This means at minimum 20- 30 chemical fragrances on the people in addition to the cleaning, office and school supplies for the school. Even if no one is wearing cologne or perfume, I would still be in trouble. I did try going to the school the first day my son started freshman year. I managed twenty minutes with two doses of antihistamine and I was sick for days afterward. The administrators and teachers have been wonderful in helping us find work-a-rounds ever since. Now the school sends the yearly registration packet home with my son for me to fill out because they know about my illness. I fill everything in and my son returns things to the school. His teachers and I communicate a great deal through email and phone, and my husband covers all the in person meetings. What this does not change however, is the fact that I have never seen, and am unlikely to ever see, my son’s presentations. I will also not be able to attend my youngest son’s graduation. Having had to miss my eldest son’s graduation from High School two years ago, I already know how emotionally hard that will be for me. My kids are amazing and having been taking all of this in stride. I just have to hope that they continue to be strong. Thankfully they have lots of help and lots of extended family to fill in the gaps.

On this particular day, instead of going to the presentation, I dealt with a getting a chest x-ray done at the request of my allergist. Since a. it was a lovely day, b. the place was not far from my house, and c. there was a safe route I could take off the main drag, I walked. A second walk in one day should make my cluster of doctors happy, and it certainly felt lovely to be out moving my body and feeling the sun on my face again. My lungs were better than in the morning, so that was nice.

At the imaging center there were no obvious scents. This is one nice thing that has been happening with a lot of doctor’s offices of late, there are lots of signs asking people to refrain from wearing perfumes and scented products. It does help. Of course with MCS this only addresses the tip of the iceberg. By the time I was called to get my x-ray the tiny room was filled, which meant there were seven people with me on the patient’s side of the room and two people on the staff side. I had a headache and was coughing after only fifteen minutes in the room.

The x-ray itself was a piece of cake, though I was glad I got to keep my mask on, as the chin plate had been wiped down with alcohol, which while not one of my triggers generally, is a strong enough chemical that on top of the other things my body was already dealing with, that it was not a great thing to add to the mix.

Leaving the x-ray room I had to walk past a cloud of perfume. I have no idea who it was attached to, only that it kicked my headache and cough up another level.

Outside the building, just past the state mandated “no smoking” zone, was a guy smoking. He was of course right in the path of where I had to walk to get to my safe route home.

The walk home was uneventful in the sense that nothing else happened, but my chest ached the whole way and my head refused to stop hurting. I also needed a nap so bad I could taste it. Now imagine if I hadn’t been wearing my mask this whole time…

One of the things I always find odd is how the symptoms of an MCS exposure event / attack / episode – there isn’t any ideal language around this – creeps up on me. I can feel the cough and the headache but think that’s all there will be. I have lost track of the number of times I have assumed that I had “missed” a full on attack, only to get smacked upside the head by the rest of the symptoms half an hour later. And sure enough this day was like the rest in this way. More symptoms kicked in a short time later. Along with the need for a nap, which always shows up as a bone deep exhaustion, comes the “brain fog” – this blurring of cognition and mental capacity. I start to lose access to words. Its not that I cant speak, I can, it just becomes slower, the connections are harder to make – like when you have a thought on the tip of your tongue but you cant quite get it to form and come out through your mouth. I know I have a thought, the answer to a question, a person’s name or whatever, but it takes so much longer to make all the bits work together to relay the information. It gets very frustrating. Of course since I’m also so damn tired, it becomes nearly impossible to care because all I want to do is sleep until I don’t hurt and can think again.

The hurting comes from the headache and the ache in my lungs, but also from the pain in my joints that now get into the act. It seems almost as though the toxins I have been exposed to are pooling in my knees and my elbows, and any other point of connection between bones and ligaments in my body. My joints feel tender and bloated and just plain awful.  There’s also this taste on the tip of my tongue or at the back of my throat – a metallic-y, chemically, tang that tastes like nothing I’ve had to eat or drink recently. At this point, if I haven’t figured it out already, there is no way to miss that I have been exposed to enough chemicals that I am in full on exposure mode. At this point I know I need to take medication (antihistamine to start – the epi pen is on stand by if that and the rest are not enough), drink a whole lot of water, down some activated charcoal and 1000 mgs of vitamin C, and stop fighting the need for sleep.

Post exposure naps can last between two and three hours. After the nap I almost always need to eat and have both more water and more charcoal and vitamin C. If the exposure was mild, like with the imaging center, then that should be all I have to deal with for the day.

The nap, or the meds, or the exposure itself adds something to the way my sleep cycle is out of whack, so it’s a good bet I’ll be up until way past 2 am with my brain making up for all the time it lost time during the day. If the exposure was worse than that, then I will be on the couch for the next several days recovering. Recovery days are a lot like most other people’s days at the end of a case of the flue, one the first day you feel like a wrung out dish rag that can only hit buttons on the remote control, eat chicken soup, drink fluids, take meds and nap. By day two you feel “almost” well enough to get into trouble if you are not careful, that whole cabin fever feeling where you are tired of being sick, but not quite well enough to do anything. I say two days, because of late that’s been the most common length of my recovery time, but it has been everything from two days to four weeks depending on the degree of the exposure.

Granted I don’t have to get an x-ray done every day. But I do have groceries to get, laundry to do, and other peoples weed whacking to avoid. I have learned the hard way that I cannot ride mass transit, fill my own car with gas, go to the movies or see a play, go to a museum, take my kids to buy clothes or shoes, go out to dinner with my husband, or attend a public ritual. In short, I live life inside a bubble, relatively safe because I don’t do the things that I used to be able to do, things that I enjoyed and that we all, myself included take for granted on a daily basis. I have had to transform how I live my life in order to live my life. Now a date with my husband is a walk in the woods or a drive in my car with its air purifier, shopping for clothes is all done over the internet, and my housemates gas my car for me. I am happy to say I have finally seen a play again for the first time in four years because I have wonderful friends at a local theater company and they got me into a dress-tech rehearsal. It was Amazing!

Not all of the changes in my life are terrible, in fact some of the changes in my life are lovely. I have an amazing garden, do lots of on line shopping, and my friends tend to come to my house when I need or want company. What is difficult in all of this is having the choice of what to do or not do taken away from me. It would feel so different to say “I choose not to go to the movies” or “I choose not to go to the mall”, but when that choice was taken away from me with this illness, it shifted a million things in my life, my head and my heart.

Never once did I think while growing up that I would have this illness or be struggling with the fact that I am disabled, but then nothing about my adult life is exactly what I expected. I never saw the Pagan thing coming, or the work as a ritualist or doll maker, and I always assumed I would give birth to my children, not acquire them with my marriage. There are plenty of bad days when I fall into despair and grieve for what I have lost, but there are so many more days now when I can appreciate what I have right now.

Dreaming with MCS as my co-pilot

“Dreamweaver” by Brian Froud

I’ve been thinking about dreaming and dreams a lot lately. In particular I’ve been trying to sort out what the heck my dreams are on the other side of life with MCS.

I used to be the kid who dreamed all the time. And by dreaming I mean DREAMING in big Broadway lights with glitter and follow-spots. There were Tonys and Oscars, huge houses, dress and shoes and horses, unicorns and fairies – you name it, I dreamed it. I even dreamed a few normal things like being a Marine Biologist or a Veterinarian, and I even went through the doctor-president-empress of the universe phase. But mostly my dreams, like my life, stayed rooted in the arts and entertainment world.

As I grew into my spirituality, that passion for entertaining blended with my love of ritual and lead to the creation of Magical Acts Ritual Theater. For eight years I spearheaded a crazy band of volunteers in exploring the line between ritual and theater. It was amazing, insane, back- and heart-breaking work, but it was wonderful. I stepped down as the companies Artistic Director at the end of 2002, just in time to rest up to get sick. There was some odd hand of fate in that I’m certain… I’m just not sure where or why.

After I got sick and then got diagnosed with Multiple Chemical Sensitivity I shut down pretty much everything in my life that wasn’t about healing. The dolls came out of my need to focus the residual creative energy somewhere and because really they were a heck of a lot of fun. But over the course of the next few years I closed off more and more of myself as the grind of chronic illness ate away at my heart until one day I realized that I had stopped dreaming.

Both realizing that I had stopped dreaming and finding my way back to dreaming came about through the gift of a smile and the infectious enthusiasm of a guiding spirit who wandered into my life just at the right time. With that spirit’s smile egging me on, I found a way to challenge my own assumptions that MCS had to own my life and dictate what I could and could not do from here on in. I took a chance and whispered a dream to the Universe.

Of course, in true Aries fasion I figured that would be it. Dream stated, I’m done. All I need was to do the work and I’d good. What the heck was I thinking? NOTHING in my life is ever that simple. For one thing my dream was a little too specific and needed reformatting. So for the last six months or more I have been wandering around with this thought bubble over my head with this jumble of notes about dreaming. And in the meantime, life happens.

Today though, I think I have a clue, or at least a better clue of what I want. Something broader, more “meta” if you will, that allows for more of who I am to come through. It’s incredibly simple really- I want to get the stories out of my head.

So what the heck does that mean? It means telling stories however they show up, as novels, short stories, rituals, stageplays, screenplays, and yes even dolls, because I realized today that the dolls I create are a form of story telling. Each doll tells one part of the story of the Deity/power they are embodying, one part of their myth, one part of their life; they are a story in three dimensions.

Some parts of this dream are going to be easier to do with MCS in my life than others, and that’s where dreaming is going to have to become faith. For each modality there is a point when I will have to step out of my safe haven and risk getting sick out in the world and/or find ways to work with and around my disability to get the job done and stay safe. The stepping outside of my box scares me silly. It is so easy for me to get sick in the world outside my air purified and non-toxic home, there are so many chemicals out there that I can’t see or smell that will knock me on my ass without warning. And yet, staying hidden in my house isn’t the answer either. Like I’m always telling my kids, there has to be a balance. So part of my dream is to find a safe balance between the haven I have created at home the toxicity of the world beyond my doorstep.

I am learning that dreams may present me with new challenges, but that they are only impossible challenges if I let them be impossible. MCS can only run my life if I let it run my life. I have to respect the limits it places on my health and well being, but within those limits, I intend to find the room to fly as high as I possibly can.

Of MCS and Taking Back

As I explained to someone recently, my life since getting sick seems to have yearly themes. Maybe it always has and I am only now aware of the themes because the MCS makes so many things so much more obvious. Either way, I have themes and I have been thinking about them of late.

The year before I was diagnosed was the year of the “almost-flue” because I would get flue-like symptoms on a near monthly basis, cycle through feeling miserable, feel better for a bit, never get quite sick enough to merit an intervention or make any sense to my doctor, and then the whole thing would start over again.

The first year after I was diagnosed I spent sleeping, watching dvds of my favorite sci-fi shows and sleeping, pretty much in that order. I did start working on the dolls, though to tell you the truth, I have no idea in hind sight how the heck I managed that. I had no energy, no mental capacity and nothing resembling health. I still managed to produce the first five Oshun dolls and the first nine Oya dolls. The human mind and body are very odd.

Year two was all about learning new boundaries. This was the year I really got it that I couldn’t go places. The year before I had been doing a lot of dumb stuff like going to museums and movies and the Home Depot and getting sick. Dumb. Year two I owned up to the fact that all of those places were toxic to me and if I wanted to ever feel even remotely healthy again, I had to stop going to them. I had to accept – and not very gracefully at first I can tell you – that I couldn’t be around a lot of people. Movie theaters are deadly places when you have MCS and I am a huge fan of movies. That was a terrible blow. But realizing I couldn’t go to a museum or see a show again – that hurt like nothing I had ever felt before. I discovered the boundaries of my world and they were a whole lot tighter than I ever imagined.

Discovering those boundaries lead to the anger that was year three and coming face to face with the word “disability” and the reality of being disabled. I spent a lot of time that year wanting my old life back, even though there were plenty of things about it I didn’t like. I had been looking for a change – this just wasn’t the change I had wanted. Mmm… something about be careful what you wish for – you will get it? I had asked the Gods and the Universe for change, and I thought I had been careful in how I had asked and what I had asked for. Getting sick instead meant that I was feeling a whole lot of betrayal as well as anger. That was a really tough year.

So now here I am at year four (with apologies to the person I was talking to recently to whom I said I hadn’t named year four…oops…looks like I missed some time in there, sorry) and its looking like this year may well turn out to be about reclaiming my life.

When I first got sick it felt as though my life was over. There was this crushing weight of both “how could this happen?” and “This will never end”. Over time I’ve become more accustom to the weight of both of those feelings. Now I can ask “will this end?” rather than assume it won’t. Medical technology being what it is, anything is possible. And really, human nature being what it is, anything is possible.

I am in a better place today than I was four years ago. I still live inside a tightly restricted set of boundaries and I still react to the most insane things, but I am better. I can feel the difference, and I have to hold on to that. So, “end” can be a question now instead of an absolute. At the same time, I have been feeling very limited, very trapped by my illness and the restrictions it puts on my life. It had come to seem like options were something other people got to explore. So when people asked me what I wanted for my birthday, or Yule or my husband asked me what I wanted for an anniversary present, I generally shrugged and said “whatever” or pointed them at something cute and shiny that was easy and safe. I didn’t dare ask for anything real.  All that changed this April when my husband asked what I wanted for my birthday and I answered, almost without hesitation that I wanted to go see a particular singer in concert. Now on the one hand, this means nothing – it can’t happen. The concerts are an ocean away, which means getting on an airplane – with a crowd of people and their toxic chemicals and are being held in large halls with more people than any doctor is going to allow me to even look at, let alone be near. So no, I’m not going to get to go. But even a month prior it would never have occurred to me to ask. It would never have occurred to me that I should consider the possibility of trying to go, as far fetched as the whole scheme would be. In that one moment I took a part of my life back from my illness.

I can tell you, a month later, I still have NO idea what to do with this information. It rattles around in my head and amazes me. My friends and I have joked about getting me a shiny pink hazmat suit so I can go to concerts and back to Disneyland and do lots of the other things I want to do. It’s totally absurd, and yet… not.

Somehow, someway, in all of this, I have to find ways to live my life.

Back at the start of the year, a friend of mine said to me that “the MCS can’t take much more away from you at this point. So, what do you choose for yourself now?” Those simple words blew me away. Because they are true. This illness has taken the bulk of what it can take from me. What do I choose for myself now? What do I take back? What do I take forward? That I think is the question I will be chewing on all year long.

Sping Color!

While still a bit rainy here in N. Ca, the weather over all has been gloriously sunny and oh so very lovely. Because of this I have finally been able to get out of the house more and walk around the neighborhood. That is lovely in its own right as the flowers are blooming EVERYWHERE! (of course so are the trees and grasses – mmmm pollen – not so much fun, ah well!) There is so much color and beauty all around us, it truly is a feast for the senses.

It seems I have taken this burst of color and growth a little personally as well I have made several new masks and decorated a set of my clogs – all bright and cheerful as befits the season!

The Masks

Since I have to wear charcoal filter masks (from Icanbreathe.com) when I am not at home (and sometimes when things are bad at home) and I am who I am… I like to decorate my masks. After  Jamie found this rockin fringe that looked kind of Steampunk-y  I started looking for more fringe along that line. Well I succeeded and have now manifested three more delicious masks! So I now have six total – cause this is me

The three on the bottom are the new ones. The one in the top row – left corner with the brown ribbon – is the one that inspired the new ones.

The Clogs

I got a bunch of clogs rehealed recently which means I had an excuse (yeah, like I realllllly needed one) to paint a few pairs up the way I wanted them. Since they are done, its time to show them off

(I might have used a bit of glitter on the last two… maybe)

In  website news

I have added more dolls to the gallery! I think I have all but one doll left to put up now! So go take a look. All the dolls that are still available for sale are also linked to the store over on Artfire.com for easy purchase (don’t forget to take a look at Jamie’s jewelery and photography while you’re there!) Let me know if there is a doll you’d like to see or one you would be interested in commissioning, we can always work up a plan!

I have also added a bunch of articles, invocations and rituals to the “writing” page, information to the “healing” page, and finally made a start on the “spirituality” page!

I think I love spring

Blessings,

Kate

A red letter day for this mask wearing ritual lady!

Maybe it’s the holidays and people just being festive and cheerful, but today was a red letter day for me and my mask.

Me and My Mask – Setting up dolls for the Eleusinian Mysteries Altar 2007

Because of my Multiple Chemical Sensitivity (MCS) I have to wear a carbon filter mask (I buy mine from I can breathe and then decorate them ) when I leave the house. This keeps my level of exposure to toxins like perfume, car exhaust, plastics, fabrics and the like, to a mostly tolerable level if I am careful about where I go. No department stores, new car showrooms, or all you can buy malls for me!

Now normally when I am out and about in my mask I get one or two smiles or nods or nothing at all. Mind you, I live in Liberal-ville , right on the borderline between Berkeley and Oakland, really, of all the towns to live and be seen as normal, this is the place! Every now and then someone will stop me, usually on the Berkeley side of the line, and ask where I got the mask or if it came with the beaded fringe (nope, I added that myself – has to be shiny!) and I pass on cards for the company.

Today it was like everyone SAW me and my mask. The security guard at the pharmacy, the guys in the art supply store, people in line, people in the parking lot, a guy even watched me walk past him and smiled saying “Beautiful”! What the heck?!

Don’t get me wrong, I don’t mind any of this, its just… odd. It felt… inclusive. Not that people steer away from me, well except once a guy did while asking me if I had Tuberculosis, oy. But normally I live in a little bubble of isolation created by my mask and my need to not breath in the chemicals that most people don’t even notice.

Sometimes I let the whole thing get to me. I choose not to leave the house, almost don’t get out of bed, and think that people forget that I even exist. It’s hard to be the hermit crab when I am used to being the show girl. The hermit crab almost won today. After my allergy shots I was worn out and fell into an hour and a half nap. I almost let that be the rest of my day, but I push through and made it out of the house. If I hadn’t left home, I would never have been blessed with an afternoon of cheerful people connecting with me and my mask.

Sadly the mask only keeps some of the toxins away from me, so I still came home drained and aching, but with a smile on my face from all the sweet comments people sent my way. That aught to keep me getting out of bed for a few more days at least.

Blessed Holidays everyone!

A Demeter Priestess and her garden

So remember how I said I wasn’t going to plant anything this year? (No, well I did somewhere, so bear with me). Apparently I spoke to soon. I walked into my local WholeFoods about three weeks ago and did the sapy eyed thing over a bunch of plants. Me! over plants! What the heck? Agricultural Goddesses, I tell yay!

So I yeah, I bought some plants and some potting soil. Then I rant out of soil. And pots. So I *just* had to the local plant nursery to get more supplies. And of course, since I was there, I just happened to see a few plants I liked… er… yeah… and so I filled up the back of my van with stuff.

Mind you all this was After my husband got his garden on by working on our front yard! *sigh* The House Kaleidicopia (yep, that’s what we call our home) yard project of 2009 is well and truly under way and I and up to my neck in dirt and plants and loving every minute of it all! Who’da thunk?

To begin at the beginning…

We have been needing to redo our front yard forever. About a month or so ago my hubby asks me if I would like a labyrinth in the front yard. Would I like??? He knows me far too well! Thus began the plotting of the front yard. We don’t really don’t have enough space to do a full size labyrinth, but we should be able to squeeze in a mini five circuit beastie similar to this kind:

The “Classical” Pattern. Original graphic © Shane Odom.

To do that we first have to move all the roses that are (were) where we want the labyrinth to go. That, and offering to buy my hubby a few more roses got him rolling. Over two weekends he, our youngest son and two friends moved first our ailing pear tree from what we now call the Rose side of the front yard to the back yard, where it will get much more sun and be waaaaay happier, transplant all but one of the Labyrinth side roses to the Rose side of the yard, and plant not one but nine more roses all told in the front yard! When they all the grow in we will have two hedges of yummy lavender and white simplicity roses (one on either side of the front yard). The Rose side is now a mini Rose Garden with only one rose still in shock from the transplant process.

The Labyrinth side still needs to denuded of its top layer of weed infested soil, but once that is done, I have a friend who is a wiz at building labyrinths and she has agreed to help me experiment with layouts till we find the right design for our yard. Then we can start laying down the ground cover (probably Irish moss) and pebbles to make up the pattern!

Ugh… lots of work, but it is amazing to see it all coming together!

In the back yard, my adventures in container gardening feel like they are going better this year. I have been reading up on the plants I potted, so I might actually be able to have produce by the end of the season this time!

I now have cantaloupe, watermelon, cucumbers, tomatoes, sunflowers, digitalis, mint (two kinds), sage, rosemary, Echinacea, hollyhock, California poppies, aloe, and Aeonium canariensis growing in my garden. Oh, and I have seeds sprouting for the Lupines and poppies that I am going to add to the front yard, and the cilantro that I will be growing in the back. And just today I planted my summer crop of barley. I’m keeping it in back with the rest of my produce, and hoping that without the massive rains from the winter, I might actually produce some barley plants this time. We shall see.

And last, but never least I have achieved Pomegranate! Yup. I am the proud owner of a pomegranate shrub. It now lives in an enormous faux terracotta pot a former housemate left us, and sits beside my external Demeter altar.

So somehow, in all of odd Chemically Sensitive, exhausting life, I have managed to garden. I don’t feel like I can be called a Gardener yet, maybe if I pull off an actually harvest this year, but I do feel like I am making a better connection to the earth and myself. And behind all of this has been Demeter, puttering around behind, inside and with me all the while I have doing working on myself and my plants. It’s a new sense of spirit and spirituality for me, to just be in the moment with no expectations and no requirements. I’m finding I rather like it.

Sacred Seed and Mirth & Reverence at Baycon 2009

My stuff is on display at Baycon come see!!

For those of you who dont know, I have joinned forces with Jamie Morgan of the Silver Kitsune Jewelery, to create a company called Mirth & Reverence.  We have slowly be blending our work and our wares to the point where we are selling our stuff on line together at Artfire in our combined shop here: MirthReverence This weekend we are doing our first big convention as dealers!! woohoo!!

Jamie, the Wonder Partner , has taken all of our stock and a whole lot of new stuff away to Baycon 2009 in San Jose CA. (Because of my Chemical Intolerances / MCS I cant do public stuff – so she gets the brunt of that work).  If you are in the area stop by the dealer’s/vendor’s room.  The Mirth & Reverence booth is near the back door in the corner and VERY hard to miss – here I can show you… Jamie kindly sent me a photo right after set up!

On site we have a host of new Jewelery from Jamie – lovely necklaces with Venetian Glass, Steampunk stuff with gears and bits, more of her famous twisted rope necklaces, and new cell phone charms and earrings!

From me you get a new batch of horses all lower cost and yet amazingly still filled with attitude (funny that) Some even have wings! And I finally got around to making some of the nifty staves I have been promising!

New from both of us and ONLY for the convention, these are not going to be in our shop – Hair falls in a range of colors and sizes: Earth, Fire, Air, Water, Night, Day, – come on its’s us, of course they were going to be pagan related!

And for those of you looking for my high end dolls, those are at the convention as well – in the Art show on their own table. I sent down ten dolls in total including the two new steampunk dolls Lady Elizabeth and Steampunk Gaia. With them are JB the Technicolor Dream Horse, Don Colorado, Sir EJ, Wiccan Star Goddess, Wiccan Horn God, Warrior Oy, Witch Queen Oya and on loan from her new home: Hekate.

So there is lots to see and buy so come take a look.

Blessings,

Kate

Wiccan God and Goddess Altar Dolls

For the ritual my buisness partner Jamie and I wrote for PantheaCon 2009 I set myself the challenge of crafting the main god figures for the center altar. It took a while, but i managed to get them done just in time for the convention and the ritual!

Now that ritual is over they are for sale in our Artfire shop and I can show them off here! The awesome photos are by Jamie (of course) who now has a whole bunch of her photography up in the shop by the way!

I’ve also been doing a little bit of writing for Artfire.com’s Art Daily. So far they have posted two of my pieces. One is a short article about how to create your own beaded doll head. The other is about how to be friends with people with allergies and chemical sensitivities (like me!) I hope you’ll swing by Artfire and take a look!

Blessings,

Kate

Demeter work, learning about her lovers Part I Poseidon

Ahh the joys of having a chronic illness… it throws all your well laid plans for a loop! December was supposed to be the month that spent continuing my Demeter work by learning about Poseidon. I had Tonsilitis instead. This, mind you, was on top of the strep throat from November and the flue from October, you begin to see what I mean about well lain plans?

Thankfully, the gods of my life seem to be cutting me some slack. I “woke up” meaning I got enough energy and spoons and life back this month that I have been able to do the research I needed to do on Poseidon AND write up my notes! (This on top of working on a new doll – I am definitely feeling better). Since my notes are ten pages long, I think I will stick to a few excerpts for this blog post, and some really great links where you can get more information about the Lord of Water and Earthquakes if you are interested.

Homeric Hymn 22 – To Poseidon

“I begin to sing of Poseidon, the great god,
Mover of the earth and of the barren sea,
The sea-god who is lord of Helikon and broad Aigai.
O Earth-shaker, two-fold is your god-given prerogative,
To be tamer of horses and saver of ships.
Hail, Poseidon, black-maned holder of the earth!
Have a kindly heart, O blessed one, and come to the aid of sailors!”

Poseidon is the brother of Zeus and Hades. In some stories he is the older brother of Zeus, in others the younger. All three are the sons of the Titans’ Kronos and Rhea whom they over throw early in their lives. Once the younger gods and their siblings (Demeter and a few other nice ladies) have control of the world, the boys divide up the realms. Zeus gets all of the sky, Poseidon all of the Sea and Hades all of the underworld. Theoretically they are all equal portions but in all the stories Hades and Poseidon seem to feel that Zeus managed to get the better part of the deal some how.

Poseidon is generally depicted as a man of mature stature, usually with a full beard, holding a trident and interacting with waves in some way. He is often seen with a fish or dolphin in his hand(s). while the descriptions do not come out and say it, he was also quite the ladies man and managed to produce more offspring than even Zeus. There is a very nice description of Poseidon in the Iliad Book 13 lines 17-31.

Poseidon was a busy busy boy… He had a whooole lota lovers goddess and otherwise. For a great list of his lovers you can visit theoi.com at this link: http://www.theoi.com/Olympios/PoseidonLoves.html

He also had a whooooole lota children human, god and otherwise. Probably the best known of his children is Athena. For more on the kids see this link: http://www.theoi.com/Olympios/PoseidonFamily.html

There is some debate as to what Poseidon’s name means. Many references state that he is Lord of Earth or Husband of Earth. Walter Burkert disagrees. In “Greek Religion” he states that “the first component of the name is obviously the vocative potei-, Lord, but the second element da- remains hopelessly ambiguous; that it means earth and that Poseidon is therefore Husband of Earth is quite impossible to prove.” [136] However, Poseidon’s two main aspects of water and earth mover make his title of Lord of Earth fairly reasonable. He is first and foremost seen as a god of the oceans and therefore as a protector of fisherman. His less well known secondary aspect is that of ‘Earth Shaker’ He is known to bring earth quakes and hurl rocks into the sea [Burkert 137]. There is also a key story between Poseidon and Demeter in which they both changed into horse form and mated. Through their union the child/horse Areion was born, and later given to the hero Adrastus. Here again a case could be made for Poseiden being Lord of Earth or Consort of Earth because of his relationship with the De-Mater herself.

Poseidon was honored with sacrifices, festivals and games. His most common sacrifices were bulls, first fruits from the sea and less often horses. “The Isthmian Games were held at Korinthos in honour of Poseidon. It was one of the four great Athletic Festivals of Ancient Greece–the others being those of Zeus at Olympia and Nemea, and those of Apollon at Delphoi.” [theoi.com] In addition the month of Poseideon was dedicated to Poseidon and the eighth day, called Posdidea, was especially sacred to him.

Correspondences

Please Note – Unlike with some gods and pantheon’s Poseidon at least does not have a specific day of the week that he was worshiped, perhaps because fisherman went to sea when the oceans’ allowed, no matter what day of the week it was. Likewise, there is no specific number associated with him beyond the reference to the eight day of his fest month being particularly important. The Greeks did not assign colors or flowers and such in the way that we do now, there fore the data that follows is a list of recommendations only and is based on my experience working with Poseidon personally. As they say on the Net, “your mileage may vary”.

Number: 8

Day of the week: N/A, try Wednesday or Saturday

Month: December

Element(s): water and earth

Colors: all the shades of watery blue from phototrophic (the bright stuff at the top) to benthic (the dark stuff at the bottom), storm colors, with a dash of rocky earth – browns and grays more than life based green

Symbols: three pronged trident, fish, dolphins in particular, Tuna fish and tuna fishing, horses

Offerings: fresh fish, tuna, beef, wine, incense / smoke of some kind but NOT tobacco

Bibliography

Print
Athanassakis, Apostolos Translator The Homeric Hymns. Baltimore, NY: Johns Hopkins University Press 1976, 2004

Burkert, Walter Greek Religion. Malden, MA: Blackwell Publishing, 1985

Parke, H. W. Festivals of the Athenians. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1977

Robertson, Noel. “Poseidon’s Festival at the Winter Solstice.” The Classical Quarterly (New Series), 34.1 (1984). pp. 1-16.

Web
Ancient History.about.com
Gill, N.S., “Greek Winter Solstice Celebrations, Solstice Celebrations Honoring Poseidon”

http://ancienthistory.about.com/od/sexualit1/a/GreekSolstice.htm

The Iliad of Homer on line at Internet Sacred Text Archive as of January 6, 2009

http://www.sacred-texts.com/cla/homer/ili/index.htm

Theoi Greek Mythology, Poseidon main page as of January 6, 2009

http://www.theoi.com/Olympios/Poseidon.html