The Systeri of Reflections Mystery School got together to give our labyrinth some TLC after a year of neglect on our part.

Before:

After:

It’s amazing what a few people can do in 4 hours in the 100 degree sun with determination and a lot of water! The energy of the labyrinth definitely picked up as we got everything back in order.

While permanent labyrinths and sacred spaces are needed and good, my aching legs are reminding me why I prefer to draw mine in the sand or in chalk on the sidewalk.

If I had a choice, I would have picked Tim Gunn to be my gay dad. My own gay dad was probably the opposite of Tim Gunn. Somehow I don’t imagine Tim Gunn with a paper napkin snapped into his shirt to stay safe from dripping salsa. Nor do I envision Tim Gunn with a clicker in his hand to count all the “cute boys” he saw that day.

I’ve watched Project Runway intermittently over the past couple of years. Not regularly because there is no TV show I watch “regularly” with my schedule. But I love how Tim Gunn handles the designers, especially in critiquing their in-process work, as he mentions in his Project Runway blog:

As the show’s faithful viewers will know, I don’t tell the designers what to do. Rather, I probe and query to hopefully trigger them to ask themselves whether their direction is appropriate and will lead to success.

Most of the time he gives specific advice to help them rethink their designs and direct their thought processes in more productive ways. I know, however, if he doesn’t say much of anything but “well…make it work…” that person is pretty much doomed. It is his ability to guide and advise without making the designers feel incompetent or worse that I would really have liked in a gay dad. And I love him in this interview with Chicago Tribune’s Maureen Ryan right after Season 4.

I told my husband last night that the only style make-over show I would want to be on was Tim Gunn’s Guide to Style. Somehow I think he would help me look my best without making me feel horrible for the “fashion” decisions I have made haphazardly over the years.

So, if anyone knows how I get on that show, you’ll let me know, right?

“So….how YOU doin’?”, originally uploaded by Carly & Art.

I just feel like spreading the love around….

My BFF and her husband are artists. I’m not sure they use that word to describe themselves, but they are just overflowing with talent.

Art is miracle worker with wood and is making me two beautiful corner shelves for devotional mini-altars,, and he is a great nature photographer. He has this way of noticing all the wildlife that I never see when I’m out in the forest (which I admit is rarely these days). And his photos show the relationship that he has with nature that just wows me.

Carly embroiders like nobody’s business, and creates sacred ritual that will move you to tears and uplift your heart.

Did I mention they also make the best homemade jams, pies, ice cream, and “weird” food?

So, check out their Flickr pages at http://www.flickr.com/photos/artdrauglis/ and http://www.flickr.com/photos/wiredwitch/ for more photos.

I want to share two great post on today’s interwebs.

Anne Johnson over at The Gods Are Bored writes of an event in Navel Filled With Icing that I would nominate as a premier Discordian ritual popping out of Mundania’s unconscious.
James Wells over at Evolutionary Tarot has a great post titled Tarot and the Work with a two-card spread that cuts through the BS and gets down to business.

In other news, I finished the Shrine to Yemaya this afternoon. I will be posting it to my Etsy store tomorrow and will post some pictures here, too.

buttered toast, originally uploaded by billmarrs.

I was just walking up the stairs in my office building, and I swear I just smelled warm buttered toast. Which made me think of my mother because she always eats toast for breakfast.

Lightly crispy buttered toast is truly a comfort food for me — but one I don’t often think of, except when I am sick and trying to keep something, anything, down.

But for just a moment, in the grey office stairway, I was reminded of my childhood and my mother, with the ghost scent of toast.

**ALERT! ESOTERIC GEEK POST BELOW!**

In alchemy, nigredo, or blackness, is the putrefaction or decomposition of the material. It is the first step in the process of transmutation. Carl Jung in Psychology and Alchemy interpreted nigredo as a moment of maximum despair, prerequisite to personal development.

You could say that was my experience Friday as I struggled against feelings of inertia, insignificance, blocked creativity, and rage. I wanted to pull everything out of my house into the back yard and burn it in a magnificent fire.

Instead, I decided to clean my studio. I am not an expert on alchemy. In fact, I have read very little about it. But as I was looking at the above photo, I thought “oh, this looks like nigredo or dissolution,” which took me down this trail of thought.

The next stage is albedo, or whiteness, which is a distillation and further purification. For two days, I went through boxes and piles of paper. Some stuff went into the trash. Other things went into a box to be given away or sold. Here is a view of the effluent — those things washed away down the hall and out of my life!

At this point, I decided to invest in some clear storage bins of various sizes. This allows me to organize my supplies according to material or use: paints, brushes, pens/pencils, fabric, yarn, papers, collage images, boxes, beads and ribbons, etc. Putting those supplies I decided to keep and seeing the cosmos, or order, come together in my studio was a type of citrinitas, or yellowness. In this stage of the alchemical process, silver is turned into gold — everything begins to come together and the light of the sun dawns — metaphorically speaking.

And then, it was done! Clean, organized, and ready for the next creative project. This final stage of rubedo, or redness, is the finding or unveiling of the perfection that always lay hidden within.

Not only is my studio and my temple ready for my future Work, I am inspired to learn more about alchemy. It is my experience that we find spiritual processes of transformation in our everyday lives — but only if we (1) know to look and (2) honor the divine within the everyday.

I finally set up an etsy store where I am offering limited edition prints of my digital collages for sale. Soon I will have some altar boxes and shrine, and a few universal manifestation boxes ready.

Check it out at Nine Ravens Studio.

Katrina Messenger tagged me for the Passion Quilt meme.

The rules of the meme are thus:

• Post a picture or make/take/create your own that captures what YOU are most passionate for students to learn about.
• Give your picture a short title.
• Title your blog post “Meme: Passion Quilt.”
• Link back to this blog entry.
• Include links to 5 (or more) educators.

We are All Connected; Care for One Another

I hadn’t planned on doing anything for Beltane this year. I’m a thousand miles away from the people I celebrate with, and we don’t usually celebrate Beltane. Instead, I went to the beach to walk in the water, feel the breeze and sun on my skin, and listen to the surf and shore birds.
Several years ago, I struggled with why Samhain resonated with my being, while Beltane basically left me cold. At that time, I reframed Beltane from “sex in the woods” (not that there’s anything wrong with that) to a mirrored relationship with Samhain that sung to my soul.

At Samhain, we look to the past (our Ancestors) and bring their wisdom into the present. We look into the face of the certainty of death and the uncertainty of the beyond. At Beltane, we look to the certainty of life and the uncertainty of the future.  We take the risks to move consciously forward into our future.

Last year, I hosted a maypole working that focused on embodying the elements of creation and weaving the magic of manifestation.  What I learned at the Center, holding the pole so it would not topple as it was pulled in different direction, was that we hold in our hands the power of awareness, within our heart the yearning for balance, and within our Will the ability to set and keep to a course of action.

The beach was almost empty; the tide was rising; and the sand was soft beneath my feet.  The Beatles’ song “Strawberry Fields” was looping in my internal radio. I found unbroken shell in the sand. At some point, all the sensations from sea, sand, and sun welled up around me, and I just had to do ritual.

Just beyond the upper reach of the waves, I inscribed a three-circuit labyrinth in the damp sand.  I breathed to ground and center myself before stepping in.  As I walked the labyrinth, I asked myself, “What do you weave into your life?”  When I reached the center, I began to turn to face each direction “Earth Air Fire Water Spirit” became “Yod Heh Shin Vau Heh” as I called in the elements of creation into the center of my soul. I spoke words of creation out to each of the directions and then I settled down in the center to enter a light trance as I sang to and watched the waves.

“What do you weave into your life?”  At Beltane, I am always reminded that I am an agent can act effectively in this world.  It is my birthright and my duty to be who and what I am — a co-creator with the Great Divine, God Herself, the Heart of the Universe. Rather than lie back and let myself be thrown this way and that by life, I can pick myself up and weave together the threads of existence to create opportunities and take advantage of them.  I can help myself and others.  I am not helpless and passive.  While sometimes we need to just “be,” there are other times when we need to “do.”  And at Beltane, I remember that I have the right to be and the power to do — all to take the risk of stepping fully, consciously, and intentionally into my future.

To mark this remembering, I inscribed a pentacle in the sand at the center of the labyrinth and sealed the experience into my body.  Then I walk out and away back into ordinary time and space.

The body of my maternal grandmother, Jane Ellen Overall, died this last week on Wednesday, April 16, 10:03pm, at the age of 82.

I was taught to believe that her spirit lives on and is now reunited with her husband, my grandfather, who passed away over twenty years ago. On some level, I want to believe that. It would have made her happy.

On another level, I have to admit that I don’t know, and may never know, if our spirits continue, shaped by our physical lives and personality, after our bodies die.

I know what I don’t believe — in a heaven of eternal reward and a hell of eternal punishment. They don’t fit with my concept of the Ultimate nor with my experience of life. If life is a combination of a myriad of experiences, then I would expect the afterlife, or future lives, or whatever if there is anything, to be a similar combination. I suspect that anything eternally without change would be numbing after a while. And the universe is too varied for that.

Perhaps when we die, we get what we expect — a kind of mentally constructed reality that lasts as long as we need it to. That might be nice, or not, depending on what one expects consciously and unconsciously.

Perhaps when we die, the part of us that is not physical regains its full non-physical awareness. Perhaps there are things that can only be experienced and perceived within our human form, and things that can only be experienced and perceived in non-physical existence. One is not better than the other — just different.

All of this assumes that there is a non-physical, or spiritual, or energetic, part of us that survives after the physical body dies. For the most part, I do believe that. But there is a niggling uncertainty that I have struggled to live with. Perhaps we all do.

Because really, truthfully, we do not know.

But because it was her truth, and her dream, I wish my grandparents happiness together again in each other’s arms.