Category: emptying the hands

Cross-town

MKAster

I’m cleaning out drafts, and this has been sitting for a couple of years. I scroll past it, but I’m not sure why. I think that I dislike talking about Chicago for a pile of reasons. Chicago is directly on my Pluto line, which fits because I had several severe, near-death experiences there and decades of trauma. But mostly, now it is truly somebody else’s life. It’s so far from me and who I am, it feels more like speaking about a character I studied. It’s something I lived through and something I survived. It’s a city full of traps, ghosts, and bruises.

________

I met an older woman from Chicago. It doesn’t happen that often out here. I don’t know how it quite came up. She was talking about her struggles to see all Cubs games via Roku, so I knew our soft rift was coming—a forked divergence. I didn’t break it to her right away. It’s a specific dialect in split hairs based on the prejudices and proclivities of symbolic geography. 

She went into her history, of her Grandfather at WGN in the 30’s, Bozo, her Dad’s work with the McCaskeys, where she was on September 11. It’s a thing. She wanted what I have too, but mine’s just meager: the registrar at the Art Institute in the 20’s, being a sommelier at Jordan’s starred, fine dining space, some service staff at the Armour mansion, and 86ing a drunk, young Pritzker on Michigan Avenue.

I don’t share much. My people just survived. Some with airs and aspirations, a fading knowledge of old world stability, some without any at all except hunger and harm.

I got in mild trouble for 86ing that Pritzker, from the kind, but inauthentic boss who asked me out so gently and respectfully once and even though he was handsome, tall, and perceptive, I could tell he spent time binge drinking to try and ignore those deeper parts of him, and betraying his authenticity to fit in with groups that I doubt he actually wanted to fit in with. He surely sat in the bleachers at Cubs games with college friends who made women feel unsafe, his pressed khakis and button-ups to mask whatever he was really feeling inside. 

I didn’t want to be somebody’s way they figured themselves out. I was already too far working on the inside and dissecting my wounds for wisdom to spend time helping someone skirt around theirs. I was already the sharp knives version of me, all starving and edges to parse through what had happened with maximum perseveration and zero safe connection to my body. A smear of ether, defense, and sparks everywhere I went to make some sense of it. All reactivity and survival.

That was the same place the other manager cornered me in the back of the house, asking me why I wouldn’t go out with him while getting closer and closer until I couldn’t move except to shove past his arm hard with my left hip. I told that other nice, tall manager, who actually got it, and it never happened again. 

It was a funny place, in the heart of Gold Coast, where all sorts of notables would stay when they flew in for their appearances and talks. Lots of politicians and newscasters, and niche celebs. Beautiful high-end sex workers and jazz musicians between sets at nearby hotel lounges.

In that same place, the third manager (who was depressed, but real) and I talked about music, and he loaned me his Silver Mt Zion albums. He asked me out, too, but my policy was always the same – I don’t date people I work with, so that was that. And anyway, I was already getting ready to be done with being sad. It’s telling how many were drawn to me when I was all wounds, and the frenzy of alchemical and visceral work to fix them, the place where pain is distilled into the fuel for transformation.

There was a server named Christian who had eyes that showed he was pieces inside from having been raised in a cult that wasn’t kind to children. He spoke about it freely, and there was a peace I had when working with him because we could feel the reality of the other. He was at an age where he was processing—far enough away from the events, but not so far that he had found a way to live with it yet. By saying it, he was hearing his story hit air, and making sense of it based on reactions from others. I don’t know if he knew it, but we were all protective of him.

And I worked with a middle-aged man, a functioning drug user who managed his use well and always called me ‘fine-ass’ plus my first name, with a smile, which from him wasn’t gross but hilarious and somehow managed to be a genuine compliment. And his cousin, who was so nice, but managed his drug use far less well, so we all helped him out to make it through each night smoothly. The first one taught me that you can say anything you want as long as you smile while you’re saying it. 

That’s where I was working when the WTC was bombed. I had to go to work that day before planes were grounded because nobody could fly out, and the tall manager thought it would be busy. I went into the city, the only vehicle on Lake Shore going in, while every car was streaming out. That day, Stan Lee was dining because his flight was canceled, and one of the servers was thrilled, but it was hard to be excited because the news was of things actively collapsing. A server named Julia was in the bathroom, throwing up, waiting to hear from her family. Later when she moved away, I moved into her Pilsen apartment.

Once, when I was buying wine for another restaurant, I left for lunch and went to The Drake to meet my other manager, a man who looked like a comic book hero and used to be a pro volleyball player. We were buying wine at auction for the high-end MJ restaurant. MJ drinks extremely good left-bank Bordeaux. In those days, the manager drove out to MJ’s house to drop off cases of Bordeaux from the 60s, and in 90-degree weather, he’d be drinking glasses of 1st growths while he hit golf balls out on his driveway.

Once I hit his shoulder with a Billecart-Salmon Rosé cork, and he was really nice about it. Once, I accidentally poisoned his lawyer with shellfish during an anxiety attack. I was always starving then.

That day at the auction we sampled bottles from the 30s and 40s and then I ran back and delivered salads dotted with dates and cornbread croutons, rolled up some silverware in napkins, and walked out into the night for the long, unsafe walk up the beach past small parties and up-to-no-goods and solos contemplating things, to the maddening concrete apartment where there was nowhere to go but on to the page. 

In the conversation with the older lady, we get to the part where she’s asking where my people are from. It’s hard to explain quickly. I say my dad’s family is from the South Side, which isn’t true, but it’s a shorthand for Irish that she’ll understand, and easier than explaining the North Side Irish, and Dean O’Banion, and then the family’s eventual settling in the suburbs. It’s enough to differentiate us. It’s enough to let her know: Catholic and White Sox. And then I add: My Mom was born on the North Side and then grew up in Wheaton. That’s enough for her to know: Protestant, and to them, sports don’t matter much. Not in the same way.

The White Sox predictably shift her. But I judge her for the same thing she judges me. I don’t tell her I lived right by Wrigley for a while, and what a damn mess, and the menace those fans are. Most of those game attendees are drunk tourists and frat boys in bad sandals with toenail fungus and no shirts, puking and pissing on the streets all around the park. Not there for the baseball, but for publicly drinking around their glaring insecurities. 

Everybody is a Cubs fan; it’s work to be a Sox fan, which feels way more Chicago. Way more along the lines of: the Lager Beer Riot, Pullman Strike, and Haymarket Affair. You have to want it, and you have to be willing to pay for it. Way less: Out for a beer with a pack of blatantly undiagnosed menaces. But ultimately, what does it matter? It’s just a coded language waving in the air.

All of this is packed into a conversation I have in my head around her because there’s no way to make the discussion real, past geographic, verbal, symbolic stenotype. I could say: My grandma worked at the Maurice Lenell factory making Pinwheels and Jelly Stars. Her kitchen smelled like stale bread and cigarettes. All of my Great Aunts had dark shag basements with wood bars and pool tables, Catholic whiskey, and custom clay ashtrays made to fit their palms. In their living rooms, Wedgewood bric-a-brac. On Easter, orchids for the girls and mothers.

My mom’s dad was a printer making ads from lithography stones and retreating to the garage due to so much leftover shell shock and a wicked, undiagnosed wife behaving wickedly inside. His way to still love her was to let her be harmful. I come from many men who were dead cowards in relationships, afraid of their own emotional shadows. I come from women who had to be the men because of that. 

My grandfather hid and made stools, turned beautiful pedestals, and made a bird’s-eye maple dresser. He used melted toothbrush handles to make hinges, and airplane windows to make photo albums, all instead of rising in his life and self; a fear of discomfort, a fear of his own growth. Nearly everybody in that family was or is a frustrated maker and artist. Everybody was always hiding from whatever was harder to do—overdeveloped in one area, stunted and quaking in the other, and making those around them pay for it.

The older lady had a different experience from mine. She talks about spending time on their boat on the lake, their WGN box at Wrigley, and how she still gets a card from the McCaskeys at Christmas. I’m sure she never fainted in a cold drop outside the Music Box from a movie that made repressed and surfacing memories flood back into her body, and her first memories are not of sitting on laps of varying safety watching people play penny Pinochle in smoky kitchens well past bedtime, or cracking out the fine china and silver only twice a year dressed in velvet for an uncomfortable, ceremonial holiday skirting around brutal truths and watching permitted, simmering abuses unfold.

I don’t think she’s conscious of it all as we converse. She hasn’t had to be. She has never found herself at a random gala a friend had an extra ticket to, and then later changing her clothes under the clothes she was already wearing while on the El to go to her friend’s new band’s show with a midnight start at the filthy punk bar. She hasn’t lived high/low enough to know how to seamlessly be both, and when, and where.

retrospect/uncircumspect

MKAster

I had this sitting in drafts for more than a year, from when I was mentally measuring how far I had to get from myself, from certain parts of myself, and how the parts of myself I moved into were about a different dialect of survival than I had previously known. I also had a risky curiosity about defamiliarizing the self, elected a brand of punishment for what I perceived as a failure, and a wonder about what remains of the self in elected abandonment and alienation.

______

The mutability I conduct necessitates an identified frame that provides a measure for how far I can recede or expand myself, otherwise, the expansion or contraction will simply continue to unspool. And even when it exceeds or shrinks, I was previously too often taken by the movement itself to stop or cease. The momentum became a curiosity, and the effect it had on others was a way to try and please, achieve, and stretch myself, but often meant self abandoning for the interest in witnessing another’s subsequent movement or action, or an outcome I was simply interested in seeing if I could create. A sort of energetic Stretch Armstrong for the sake of it. Again, a curiosity. And probably an excess of creativity.

And, being this mutable, this Sagittarian and Piscean, while the editions of myself that have unfolded over decades have differed somewhat, I know why ages 32-40 were such a stark shock to this life. Why I elected as much. And I knew even then, why I abandoned most of the core of me, occupying my own perimeter, filling in the radius, and abandoning the center aside from a thin, exposed shimmer of the soul; like a cat clinging to the walls of its own room. I know exactly why but it doesn’t make the image or experience any less of a shock to measure from this distance and time. Or, the toll upon my body any less extreme. You can abandon your body for your mind, or your mind for your body, but you will still be charged either way.

I’d occupy the center in potent, technicolor iterations for short times to find out if I was still there. I remember showing up for my dissertation in work coveralls and MAC Ruby Woo lips, pale as a candle and fine fissures throughout from the work. Leni asked me what it meant to write it and I answered incandescent, crying, but in an exhausted cry. Weak, thin tears that made no difference to the state I was in. Like waking up a moment from sleep during a recent grief and realizing you were crying in your dream anyway. But I left there and shut the door. Returned to my own perimeter, stepping over much of myself on the way. A way to live around the mess of wounded, abandoned, and writhing sentience and only access the creative force. Extract the marrow but ignore the meal, unable to occupy my own body in a way that could allow the pain to quarter for a moment.

Between the ages of (I argue) 37-50ish we undergo tremendous Plutonian destruction and then resurrection. Some will get through this period still needing to cling to the fabricated identity of themselves they had hewn in the Saturn return in the late 20s to early 30s. And while that’s the first blush of our adult selves, it isn’t made to carry us through a whole maturation. That’s where Pluto, Uranus, and Neptune go to work in the mid ages. We’re meant to mature by aligning back to our soul and this incarnation’s goals, and then making new choices from that point — in partnership, friendship, work, values, vision, and faith — that better fit our primary self that was born into this life, and that many of us had to fight to keep sight of.

If the mid-life transits (or, the mid-life crisis), which everybody must pass through and is arguably the hardest point of any life lived as long, is the appearance of urge for the unlived life, or, we are led to the door of our unlived life. We can watch as some surrender to it, some choose to fight it and fail, and some are cataclysm-ed and then transformed by it. It tries to reset us to where we’re supposed to be, a jolting realignment, breaking all the ways built on false soil, and where we had ‘notions’ about ourselves or moved too far from our truth.

When I was younger I sometimes took far greater risks than I could afford, and getting as away from my core self as I could was one such way. Generally it turned out fine, resulting in remarkable or rare experiences that made good stories, shaped me for the better, or became important self-secrets, but when it did not, it really did not. And it’s this mutability, coupled with the most sensitive of nervous systems, which should have been protected and sheltered at first by family, and then later by myself. But I didn’t come to that realization until a decade ago and then hurried to push everything away to methodically and deliberately titrate — in a way that’s inherent to me but was not previously allowed — what would be allowed to come in.

If we are individuals who didn’t have families that at least partly fostered and honored our individuality and singular needs and curiosities, we had to steal glimpses of ourselves in far smaller ways, lifting reflections from where we found ourselves most illuminated, even when it was only a spark, suspicion, or resonance.

There are mundane moments in life from when I was young that have stuck with me. Non-remarkable, quickly passing moments where I could feel my soul stretch and breathe before needing to take cover again. One was at a zoo field trip. It was a bright day and warm late spring weather and I had finished eating lunch on the grass outside. My friends had gone in to rejoin the group but we still had time. I realized that nobody who knew me was around. And my family had no idea where I was. And I felt elated to just be out in the world, unknown, and free and alone. It was a tremendous feeling of liberation. Of just being a living breathing thing in the world, energy connecting with other energy. I thought of leaving to experience more of that feeling but couldn’t figure out where I would go.

And another, ice skating on a frozen pond in the winter among tilting, dead, soft yellow prairie grass in winter. I was with my best friend and we were off the side of a pretty busy road. Her mom had just dropped us off and we trotted through the collapsing grasses to the pond and laced on our skates. Two young girls just skating on a frozen pond alone with no sound but some distant cars and wind and a time on a watch we should be ready to leave by.

I knew who I was in museums, in the city, in nature. I knew who I was alone, in rooms, with music, on the floor, at the movies, and especially on paper. But all of those moments were extremely fleeting, mocked, judged, or prevented. Life was in service to the fabricated identities and the terminal fragility and immature violences of others.

It’s impossible when living in a war zone of abuse to figure out who you are. Who you are will not get you fed or seen. Who you are must become a survivalist specializing in the ways that will hopefully generate the least pain on any given day.

When life opens up and becomes more or less your own, it takes years if not decades (and some are never able) to stop magnetizing the same landscape that was lived in. If you are a boxer, you find people to box and situations you have to fight. But if you want to love somebody, especially the self, you have to unlearn that fight. You have to know when you need or want the gloves, and when to keep your hands in ice. And if you are growing in that way, you will need the gloves very infrequently if at all.

I don’t know when I was farthest from myself and pressed into all of the strange secondary aspects of myself, living around my own light. I know I wore a lot of colors, I ate food. There was less blood, and blades. I oriented myself to an osprey nest. I befriended the snakes in my yard, I otherwise let almost my whole life out on contract to others. But I found this piece of writing and I think this was pretty close. By age 38 I knew I had gone too far past myself, and simultaneously, had collapsed in on myself. I knew I was the negative space of myself, hesitant pencil marks and clear surface making my shape. I knew by that age I was going to have to die or resurrect. Eventually, I’d do both, in both literal and spiritual ways.

“And it always felt like I have this unknown deal that’s hard for me to keep.” That’s it. Some part of me knew what I was doing, the cost, and that I was going to keep doing it a while more. It was a costly exile. And a permeating, shocking, fathomless, saturated birth and return after.

More of it

MKAster

In the red clay, I scoop a low grave, roll into it, rust across white cloth. The lion pawing, howls to get back out. It drags me by the dress-neck, summons fire and a circle of ancestors to minister a liquid. Nothing takes.

A teacher explains I’m just in a bad etheric neighborhood, no need to stay. The lion manages me across its back, walks us out of the landscape. It drags me to a fountain chiseled from quartz, leaves me there, licks at my limbs.

At which point the water matters, at which point the garden matters, who knows?

I beg my own root open, melt past fear with gold light.

In the waking, my dog declines, loses her weight, fur over bones and skin gone wonky. Jupiter squares my Moon, Neptune chokes it. I steadily leave myself. At the oil, spike, and rock shop, a reverend says he can see, shoves bloodroot at me, golden calcite, says why wait.

Every dream is me

standing over my body

breathing

get up, get up, get up.

part company

MKAster

then the ground

was shatter and smooth

over something harder.

the same as my chest

filled up tar molasses;

before that, heavy cream,

sand, ornaments.

 

I pointed up, slow,

second place fireflies–

my body strobing

memory drum and limp nails

on floorboards, the ceiling

hit between tasks,

time measured off.

 

a heat register’s cloud

and fall from standing–

speaking glued shut.

synapse panicked syllables

a metronome’s tick

repeating at the tremor

 

 

(2004. 4 of 28 drafts I’ve never done anything with, being resolved into notes and outlines.)

eclipse season

MKAster

Sun in Cancer season is always a lot, if different than other emotional, water sign seasons, like Pisces and Scorpio. Things we consider permanent or safely sunken parts of our emotional landscapes loosen with the emotional tide, and are deposited on the shores of our consciousness.

If Pisces is our subconscious, intuition, and dreaming, and Scorpio is pain and passion lurking in the shadows -secrets made painfully known, stinging truth – Cancer is our own emotional way of being in the world, what we hold in, the crying we do alone. Cancer is our vulnerability we try constantly to protect. With water seasons, I find it feels similar to being thrown out of a boat in turbulent water — don’t fight it, imagine your body as driftwood, go limp, go with it, and you will rise right up. Just ride it out. Fight it and at best the waters will fill your lungs, distended your chest – expanded with the weight of salt water.

Think first of Cancer, the crab. Its hard outer shell holding and hiding tender insides, able to scuttle in all directions, perceiving, darting up and down – peering out and descending, and the pincers that grasp and do not let go. Apply that to the emotional functioning of Cancer as a sign and you can see how all of theses things (as with all signs and their pros and cons) can be gifts and detriments.

Cancer is the only sign ruled by the moon – by the divine feminine, by constant flux and cycle – usually partially shrouded, and briefly, fully illuminated, then changing again. And, because the moon moves so quickly, and of course visits the sign every month (*every month*, no other sign has to go through that kind of activity as regularly), Cancer can be considered moody. Changing. And, Cancer is the sign and behavior of mothering. Family is vital to the sign of Cancer. What the crab cares for, it goes *all in* on, sometimes to the point of smothering. Cancer is, an emotional fish, er, decapod. It’s fiercely protective of itself and of its own.

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Mary beating the devil. Fair depiction of one aspect of Cancer… the devil correctly fears one thing, a fierce mom.

Those of us who know or love someone with strong or aspect-vexed Cancer energy instinctively seek to find stable land in those relationships, but sand shifts and moves. Even if Cancer trusts you the once, that was just that one time. The next time is its own experience: to be determined. You are in with a Cancer or you are out. And, at the same time that doesn’t mean you aren’t still caught in a pincer without even knowing… if a Cancer decides you are their family, that won’t waver. Even if you are continually tested. Cancer doesn’t let go unless it can see a good reason or something forces it.

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The beauty of Cancer is the truth of the emotions. When Cancer isn’t bound by a calcifying rising or moon sign like Cap or making a hard aspect to something like Saturn (which would try to convince Cancer that overt emotion is a detriment), the pure emotional expression is generally gorgeous, or with a strong aspect to Mars sometimes scary, but usually at the least, remarkable, often an honor to witness.

So Cancer season has us all feeling what Sun, Moon, and Rising Cancers feel regularly, to some degree. Much like when the Sun is in Pisces and everyone is crying, others have to live here in this place of shift and armor and chronic awareness of underlying vulnerability, the rest of us only visit. All of this and I haven’t even addressed the Cancer new moon partial solar eclipse a few weeks ago – energy that will resonate and play out for months, especially for Cancer sun, rising, and moon folk.

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processing pie cherries and the last of the 2013 honey

Personally, that Cancer eclipse on the 12th was much stronger than I thought it would be, in ways I didn’t expect. So. Much. Cooking., and, during incredible heat outside… illogical, but satisfying. I go in cycles with cooking, but I suppose since Cancer is my 4th house of home, there’s nesting to be expected. And, extra focus on mothering of course. I went to see Won’t You Be My Neighbor with a friend, which severely cramped my crying. But still, I was and am wrecked, accessing those memories and emotions raised by it.

A thing I could see during the film was that while every viewer loves Mr. Rogers, his relationship to everyone varies, of course. As with the example in the film of Jeff Erlanger – someone to whom Mr Rogers probably meant the world – the rest of us fall along a spectrum. So confronting how much he meant to me, and why, (probably very similar to what he meant to my sister and brother) cuts to the quick, does not let up. We’ve been talking to each other about who has seen it, who hasn’t. It’s a sacred subject for us, something we each hold in our depths.

In this season it’s natural too that other, deepest, nerve-close narratives should arise now for emotional processing. Cancer is the season of the wounds that haunt us – the rusty, corroded aches we can’t quite name, asking to be pulled from the depths, cleansed, transformed. Things lost at sea rediscovered, brought up, and cataloged, understood, demystified.

A friend linked me to the CRIMINAL episodes about Evelyn Nesbit. And then Tuesday, Karina Longworth, posted the episode I’ve been so long dreading/waiting for: Virginia Rappe and Roscoe Arbuckle. I’m anxious thinking about listening to it, heart my throat. I’m so worried she is going to overlook or not expound upon a key angle.

I’ve studied these stories and women and women like them so much, and their narratives resonate so strongly, both scholastically and personally, especially Virginia’s. Sarah Marshall pressed me to explain it once and I couldn’t. I thought for sure she would have something she felt that way about, a topic she has to leave the room for should it arise, unable to hear so many get it so wrong and for it to be partly personal to her. But she didn’t.

I’m going to go see the Mr. Rogers movie again, alone. And properly, though characteristically silently, express everything that should be left there, in the dark, with only his constantly accepting face flickering back at me.

After Cancer season of course, is Leo. In Leo we can have genuine, well merited pride over what we worked through, use our new wisdom in a wonderful display of saturated individuality, or we can fall to pridefulness, having not worked through what arose, with a self-deceptive shrug of: ‘I’m fine the way I am. Humph’… all very, The Emperor’s New Clothes. In a few months, Scorpio will have something to say about that.

Current recurring visual themes of my season: keys, wasps, spiders, and the feathers are back. I asked for signs to keep me bolstered and steady, and so the feathers are back. And, people leaving things on my doorstep. Which is curious, and unsettling.

Ready yourselves for the next Full Moon partial Solar Eclipse in Aquarius on the 27th, and then one in August in Leo – a sort of next chapter in the book of last summer’s big eclipse in August. I like to think I’m sitting these eclipses these out, with little activity in these signs in my chart, but as I’ve learned, how these eclipses impact others ends up impacting how their relationships and communities change, grow, or morph in turn. The ripples made by others create whole tides elsewhere.

 

social studies

MKAster

Rest well, dear friend and mentor, N. Eugene Tester. It’s immeasurable how much better I am for having known you. I fear anything else I could or should convey now will only feel trite and thin, but I feel a need to try…

There is much to say about his work as an educator, as well as his positive impact on me, my life, and helping me to honor, sharpen, and utilize my inherent gifts and abilities. He taught me to dismantle the destructive behavior of anyone who tried to minimize or harm me or a community, via informed intelligence and truth. Rest well, good man. Thank you for reinforcing in me to always keep seeking knowledge and to never cease learning. Thank you for seeing everything everyone was trying to crush out of me and frame as wrong, for the intrinsic gifts they were. I wouldn’t be half the truth teller and perpetual student I am had I not met, been respected by, and learned from you.

What a full, and well-lived life.

Though you never believed it, we will met again.

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crystalline green

MKAster
A few friends recently asked how I’m using stones, so here you go, lovelies…


I’m not a pro over here. I don’t know how other people work with stones; I just follow my instincts. So here’s my system: each morning after I’m dressed and before I leave the house, I stand in the dark next to the china bowl in which they reside and hold up one at a time to my solar plexus. If my body leans forward (felt in the hips), I place it in a line to the right. If my body leans away, it goes into another line to the left, and if my body doesn’t move, the stone gets placed in a third line in the middle. (This process has gotten so there are also lines with more or less energies — body slightly leans away versus strongly away, hence the other two lines. Pardon wrinkly sheets.)


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For this one (above and below on 2/9), when I had completed the process, I felt a little unclear so went back through the first two lines on the right to identify which were the very strongest and which wanted to be in combination with others. It turned out that the kunzite (light lilac shard) was the strongest. That went into my hand first. Then I went back through the other stones until I had a handful. This allows for combinations to meld and decide themselves.


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Interpretations for each stone and how they conduct energy or what they can be used for can be found in books or online. I find these to be more or less useful, but I think it’s more important for a relationship to develop between stone and user. Some stones I can sense and feel really strongly, like aragonite, azurite, celestite, and moldavite (which I struggle to be in the same room with and it turns out this is fairly common) and others that feel muted and sort of blank to me.


But this one was a group that’s so much about softness, loving support, and grounding, with a bit of protection and bolstering faith. Emerald, morganite, kunzite, and carnelian (2 of them), along with rhodochrosite and amethyst. It’s one of the most love-oriented groupings I can see from my stones, sort of a love bomb. And that made sense. The 8th and 9th were good, but intense days of a lot of emotionally demarcating and moving forward. It was also the day after the anniversary of my cousin’s death; a perpetually tender spot on the calendar.


At the end of the identifying process, I turn on the light and gather all of the stones that my body leaned towards into a small fabric bag and into my pocket they go. This method allows the stones to choose themselves as energy to be of use that day, or what can aid or help; what I’m in need of. If a lot of the same stones popping up for days or weeks on end or the same color groups, that tells me that the corresponding energy center  or theme needs significant attention or work (green = heart, blue = communication, etc.).


How woo is all of this? Partly to mid woo. Do I think stones are going to heal diseases? No. But I’ve always been more or less attuned to that which is numinous, especially when I was small. I find using stones sort of like: “Is a barometer going to change a weather pattern?” No. But it’s a useful tool. Ancestors have regularly appeared in my dreams, and my earliest memories in this life are my last ones from my most recent prior life. This was met in my family with eyerolls and minimization so I naturally learned to never speak of it. Then, giving birth heightened all of my senses. It overhauled my attunement, sorta like a low burner that was suddenly turned full up.


I think it stands to reason that as mothers gain heightened senses to protect and monitor their children — the heightened ability to smell, to detect illness or imbalance, and more sensitive hearing in order to hear your individual child’s cry and its meaning, all of the senses might become heightened.


This is about the extent of what I do with my stones. Sometimes I feel compelled to move one to a certain part of the house or I hold certain ones when I meditate, or sleep with some under my pillow. A lot of people program their stones, using specific intent to infuse each one, or grid them by using really elaborate patterns to concentrate one specific energy or intention. Perhaps at some point I will be drawn to that, but for now I’m content to skulk around gem shows, read, clean them under the full moon, and carry a pocketful each day. And, rocks and their formation are just pretty rad and fascinating.


Here is a stone pull from 2/4 that was a surprise. The night before I pulled these, in the place between awake and asleep, I was shown a roll of wide canary yellow satin ribbon, its spool encircling my spine. As I breathed in, the ribbon retracted, spooling back like it was coming back from far away. Only, it stopped at one point, caught on something far off. I tried to energetically yank it. I found a knot in it and untied it, but still it didn’t retract. I pulled these the next morning.


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With the exception of the aragonite (sputniky one which H- picked out for me), smoky quartz heart, and the golden topaz (bright yellow one on left) these are rarely occurring for me. Because I pull these less and encounter them less, this one was harder to understand. In light of the yellow ribbon, what I gleaned from these is the renewed need for defined autonomy — I don’t take happily to my energy being caught elsewhere, especially when I haven’t mindfully given it. As autonomy and independence are generally strengths of mine, I realized it makes good sense that I rarely see yellow stones appearing, especially in any numbers. It’s not an area that generally needs bolstering.


The white (scolecite) and clear (apophyllite and silver topaz) suggest a self-sharpening; realigning intrinsic values and self integrity… sort of refocusing as well as redefining faith and connection (meditation, prayer, etc.). And also, reconstituting the fundamental, primary self. (I did a little meditation later to retrive the caught up ribbon.)


The bloodstone (green) was lending clarity – mental, emotional, and divine. It’s a stone that leaves me feeling not so alone in the world. It also lends balance and legibility to matters of the heart.


I hope this helps! xo