Opening Fall’s Door: 9/27/13

As the week winds down, I’m ready to play in another round of Cynthia Lee’s Spirit Uncaged invitation The Scattered Life Collective.   

 Here’s a peek into my week.

current time: 7:45 pm

on the menu:

Sweet Cipollini onions were in my CSA delivery this week, and so tonight I whipped up a mushroom onion tart. 

out the window:

All afternoon I was enjoying the bright autumn light and then the lengthening shadows.  At dusk the cicadas were singing, but they stopped when it got dark.  Later tonight there should be a nice sky show with the waning crescent moon and Jupiter sharing the stage around midnight.

reading:

My husband finished reading Stephen King’s new crime novel Joyland and thought I’d enjoy it, so I’m digging in before it has to be returned to the library.  I’m not much of a King fan and I don’t really like horror, but this seems like a pretty light-weight tale of a lovelorn college boy in a haunted amusement park.   Feels like the perfect segue into autumn and a possible tide over until later in October when I break out the one I-must-watch-every-year-before-halloween movie Something Wicked this Way Comes. 

listening:

This week I did my monthly Lectio Divinia practice using a quote from Lenard Cohen, and so it’s only appropriate that I had his Hallelujah cranked on overdrive .

watching:

Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead.  I’m a huge fan of Tim Roth.

making their appearance in my mail box this week:

• I’ve been waiting for Ellen Lorenzi-Prince’s Dark Goddess Tarot to be released and I pre-ordered earlier in the summer.   What a delight to have it show up this week.  I love her art.  Isn’t the death card – as appears on the box – wonderful?

• I won giveaway this week over at Quinn McDonald’s blog Quinn Creative.   She was giving away a copy of Randel Plowman’s The Collage Workbook and now it’s made its way to my house. Do check out her post where she was soliciting suggestions on possible uses for a wonderful set of vintage flash cards she has.

• A number of folks I know have been singing the praises of Teresa Robinson’s monthly Right Brain Planner.  It’s one of those use-however-you’re-inspired kind of things and I thought it would be fun to give it a try myself.   And this week my first issue – the October issue  – arrived.  I’ve got some ideas of how I might use it, but I’m going to give myself a play time this weekend to do some visioning and planning and think this might be a great asset.

good things:

The Equinox.   It felt like a particularly powerful time to me.

Seeing old friends.

Celebrating a long-awaited life change for a friend – a new job and plans for her much anticipated relocation.

BLTs made from tomatoes from my brother’s garden.

All the interesting and wonderful (and sometimes just downright peculiar) ways the opportunities for new perspectives showed up for me this week. 

Around and About:

• I’m a big fan of letterpress work.  And last year I was delighted to hear about the annual Roadworks Steamroller Printing Festival which is being held this weekend in San Francisco.   They use a steamroller to press prints – how cool is that?!

          Dutch Door Press, one of my fave Etsy letterpress finds, participated last year and will be there again this year.  You can    read about the giant lineoleum block they carved for the printing last year.

• Moving from giant prints to giant fireballs…   Yesterday a giant fireball in the Indiana sky was seen by folks in six states.  Wow that’s huge.  I’m really disappointed I didn’t have my eyes to the sky and missed it!   But you can read about it here.

• Speaking of missing things, I don’t know how I’ve managed not to know about Rising Appalachia until now.  But now they’re on my radar they’ll be staying there.  I love this video of their performance art experience from SUNU.

• Found this image I love on Behind the Curtain blog.

• And finally, here’s a peek at the transient art of Jim Denevan.  He works BIG in sand and ice and other medium that allow nature to reclaim his art. 

The transient aspect of his work really appeals to me, and felt particularly apropos as this week was ushered in by celebrating the equinox.  One of the things I like to do on the equinoxes and solstices is create weathergrams that I hang outside so the elements can disintegrate them over time.  It feels appropriate to me to mark the turning of the cyclical whel with something that itself will ebb and dissolve.   For this season’s weathergram I used a bit of paper I had made earlier embedded with the dried leaves from a previous autumn.  I love knowing they’ll eventually return to composting but for a brief while delighted the paper fancier I am.  Traditionally a weathergram contains a haiku.  This year I used a translation of one of Basho’s works and wrote it out on the back:

“all along this road not a single soul—only autumn evening”

in summary:

Here’s my playing-card-as-canvas summary of my week – the practice I’ve adopted from Teresa Robinson of {stargardener’s} right brain planner whose weekly mission is to “document the keywords, colors, and/or lessons. ”  The back side of my card is my favorite selfie of the week.

What about you?  What’s your week been like?  Did you feel like things really shifted with the equinox?  Have a bright point you want to share?  Or a low point you could use a hug around?  Read something interesting this week or discovered something new?   Do tell – you know I love to hear.