popsicle stick wreaths.

You guys, we are sick. All of us. We managed to make it through Thanksgiving with only a few sniffles, which have morphed into full-blown head colds today. This puts a bit of a cramp into my original plans of spending the remainder of fall vacation crafting Christmas-y things while drinking cocoa and listening to old holiday tunes. Thankfully though, there are crafts that can be done while sitting on one's arse, and that can be completed in about 20 minutes or less, depending on your level of commitment.

Enter: popsicle stick wreaths, reminiscent of your first years in school, no doubt.

These are pretty self-explanatory, in my opinion. You'll need a hot glue gun, popsicle sticks, paint or paint pens (optional), and various sundry items to festoon your wreath with. I grabbed buttons, twigs, and pom-poms because that's what I had lying around, but you can use whatever you want.

Paint the sticks, if you've chosen to do so, then glue them end-on-end into a hexagon (a stop sign shape). Pick out your sparkly goodies and glueglueglue until you've reached your desired look. For the little souls creating these, I recommend that they arrange their decorations as they want them, then hand the whole thing over to an adult to glue. If they're hell-bent on gluing it themselves, elmer's glue is an option. although I find that the wreaths don't stay together as long.

Beautious!!! Now loop a ribbon around the top and hang them in your abode. Relax and drink a glass of wine. Or in my case, garlic and honey.

Cough.

at home.

1. a nest my husband surprised me with.
2. banner I made late last night while listening to Billie Holiday.
3. coffee. Always coffee.
4. an old and favorite scarf.
5. sometimes I sit on the floor at a distance and just watch him. My favorite thing.

#47

47.

That field
in the middle
of the trailer-park.
The grass laced around my ankles
when I ran; like hair, I imagined.
The hair of an enormous,
dirt-woman-creature-goddess.

In the middle of the field
was a hump of earth,
a wave of soil and rocks.
You could hide from view
behind it,
myself and the others;
the girl with food-stained clothes,
the noisy boy
who pinched us too hard
and laughed.
That small hill saw
my first draw from
a cigarette, when I finally
learned to french braid, how much
I cried over being so poor.

There was always too much dust there.
Hostility, intolerance, beer cans
rattling in the wind like tumbleweeds.

But there was also this:

The blackest night sky.
Guided by memory out of bed
and into the night.
To stand in the middle of nothing,
privileged to see every star.


*from my poetry journal

my shadow.

I keep coming across the idea--and not at all on purpose--of accepting your "shadow-self", of gaining the knowledge and accepting that the shadow makes up a huge part of who you are. And that it's only after doing this soul-work that we can really love ourselves, radically.

"Everyone carries a shadow," writes Carl Jung, "and the less embodied in the individual's conscious life, the blacker and denser it is."

I read a lot of spiritual and inspirational material when I first wake up. I like to reflect on certain things and/or be thankful over coffee and watch the sun come up. And I've been getting this little itch that needs scratching, this thought:

Is illness itself a form of shadow? Or are physical maladies the manifestation of denial or masking of the shadow-self?

I find myself saying yes! and in the next minute, thinking no, or only sometimes. A very young child, for example, one who has no knowledge of darkness, one who hasn't even learned yet how to fear or the need to hide aspects of themselves that others find undesirable, can still wind up ill, and suffer from a horrible variety of conditions. I think there are exceptions. I think illness robs you of things and makes you feel inadequate, which just may be why a certain shadow aspect forms.

There's really no one, at least, not in my immediate vicinity who can shed some light on these questions for me. But there are books, all those tomes of undiscovered wealth. Though with things like this--hard, spiritual, psychological--I have to be careful not to cram too much in my head at once, which only serves to make me more confused.

Do you have any thoughts or resources for me, my friends? I'm very, very curious about the subconscious/illness connection.

1a.m. soul-art.

Stayed up way too late last night, giving myself free therapy. Can't say I regret it.