A Week Ending A Season Beginning

It’s been a curious week.  Anyone else feeling that?  We’re on the final sprint of this eclipse season now awaiting the total lunar eclipse, which happens with the upcoming full moon.  We’ve just welcomed an equinox ushering in a new season; and Mercury is retrograde and offering us the opportunity to reflect.

I like to take the time at the end of cycles to reflect on what happened as a way of closing out the old, and then opening the way to the new.  It is of course one of the reasons I enjoy doing these most-week’s-Friday-review on my blog.  But I do it for lots of other cycles as well – such as closing out summer and opening the way to autumn.

We are always spinning, always cycling through spirals and rhythms, some large, some small.  We can choose how we want to focus our attention – on single cycles or multiple ones; focusing on the micro or expanding ourselves a bit to try to understand and leverage how the micros are always nested in the macros.  We each have to decide at what level we want to look and play, knowing of course we can always change our view.  That’s the fun of it all.

So for example, I like working with days – each having an energetic quality to tap into.  And then there is the cycle of the week, and I often try to give you a glimpse of what that means for me in these weekly peeks of what’s captured my attention.  I work with the slightly longer lunar cycles; the seasonal cycles; and often layered over that the cycle seen as a whole year; as well as particular cycles that are longer than a year.  It all feels rich and magical to me, like I have my hands deep into fertile loam of my life.

Bees and Spider

I’ve written about my connection to Bee and Spider here, and I was delighted both made special appearances on the Equinox.  I take that as an auspicious sign.

The Bees have gone delightfully crazy over a couple of Goldenrod plants I have in my yard.  Dozens and dozens of bumblebees and dozens of smaller honey bees have been feasting.  It makes my heart so happy to watch them.  And a Wolf spider (the first I’ve seen) stopped by for a visit – what an amazing looking creature that had me thinking about stylish wardrobes.

Reminding me of spider webs, artist Annie Vought produces amazing work with cut paper.

Doing What We Can & Supporting What We Love

Each month we start at a dark moon, just as a total eclipse offers us an opportunity to remember that sometimes the only way to begin something is in the dark.  I’ve been reflecting on that a lot this week.  Sometimes things feel so complex.  I appreciated what Rebecca of Cauldrons and Crockpots has to say, and you can read her full post here:

“It doesn’t seem like much. Sometimes it seems like we should be doing a whole lot more than we are.

But sometimes all we can do when faced with the complexities of existence is to offer what we are to the world, and hope that it is enough, that it makes a little impact on someone, somewhere. And then, in the end it will all have been worth it.”

The Syrian refugee crisis has been on my mind a lot, leading me to think about how we individually respond to crisis and those in need; but also how we do it collectively.  I think this particular crisis has a lot to tell us about the stripes of our various countries and those in charge of policy making.  I appreciated this article by Public Radio International outlining some lesser-known organizations providing assistance.

One of the things I’m endlessly fascinated by is our individual choices about the things we wish to support.  I have a rather elaborate system where each month is dedicated to a particular “cause” or issue that I’m interested in, and then I spend some time finding a charity or group within that framework that I wish to contribute to.  It’s what I imagine a philanthropic organization is like only on a micro micro scale.  In addition to these more fixed focus things, each month I also try to support some crowd-funding project(s).  These are a couple that make my heart happy:

Katherine Dunn of Apifera Farm’s Magical Misfit Book Mobile:

Moowon book – artisans, vanishing arts, hidden places

Magic Always Shows Up

One of the wonders of this week is how easy it has been for me to release things. Not just physical things, although I’m patting myself on the back for making great progress with that in my office.  But emotional things, as well as beliefs.  Big stuff that.  There’s such spaciousness in that.  I think releasing is always available to us, but there are also certain times and circumstances that make it easier – and this feels like one of those times to me.

This week I also started looking at the energy behind some choices I’ve been making, and found I was surprised by them.  There’s magic in discovering new things about yourself.

And then there’s this:  contact juggling.  Yep, that’s magical too.

What about the magic that is a child’s heart?  Annie Flavin shows us a peek into her daughter’s heart.

This is pretty cool as well – a visualization of global weather conditions forecast by supercomputers updated every three hours.  Be sure to click on the static image that appears on the page, to be taken to the moving image.

Other Entertainments

I’ve had a week of wonderful and sometimes quite strange dreams.  But I was even more delighted by this video Behind the Trees.  I’m a huge fan of both Neil Gaiman and his wife Amanda Palmer, and she did an animated video of a conversation she had with sleeping Neil.

This week I read The Dirty Streets of Heaven by Tad Wiliams, an amusing urban fantasy about a detective angel and his adventures with the “other side” – namely those pesky demon types.  Definitely thumbs up – or should that be wings?

And there you have it – a peek into my week.  What showed up for you this week?  Anything hiding behind the trees?  What magic have you spotted?  Been finding it easy to release things lately?  Do tell – you know I love to hear.