Daffodils

Well, it's March. The creative laze is passing. Finally, finally. Now I'm waiting for April.

March's flower is the daffodil--and I don't have any pictures of daffodils, so here are some day lilies from my garden last summer-- they won't bloom again til July, but they're yellow, and they're vaguely suggestive of daffodils. Kind of like jonquilian cognates. . .

Besides promoting cancer awareness, daffodils are symbols of the spring. . .and oddly enough, they are one of Aquarius' flowers--a month late. Not that anything associated with Aquarius is normal. It is the "sign of the future"--so maybe it is appropriate that it's flower be one that will only come into season after the sun has moved along.


Here's William Wordsworth's Daffodils:

I wandered lonely as a cloud
That floats on high o'er vales and hills,
When all at once I saw a crowd,
A host, of golden daffodils;
Beside the lake, beneath the trees,
Fluttering and dancing in the breeze.

Continuous as the stars that shine
And twinkle on the milky way,
They stretched in never-ending line
Along the margin of a bay:
Ten thousand saw I at a glance,
Tossing their heads in sprightly dance.

The waves beside them danced; but they
Out-did the sparkling waves in glee:
A poet could not but be gay,
In such a jocund company:
I gazed--and gazed--but little thought
What wealth the show to me had brought:

For oft, when on my couch I lie
In vacant or in pensive mood,
They flash upon that inward eye
Which is the bliss of solitude;
And then my heart with pleasure fills,
And dances with the daffodils.

Interesting that he likens them to stars. . . the link between stars and flowers is one that still fascinates me. Children doodle star-shapes meaning flowers, and every star sign is associated with certain flowers. Botanical life on earth comes from the stars as surely as we do . . . and many flowers seem possessed of undeniably starry signatures--almost like they're gesturing, twinkling, implying.

Say Never-Never

Was just browsing through Squidoo.com lenses. . . and stumbled upon Seth Godin' lens, with an excerpt from "Small is the New Big", which counselled businesses to "Do the Never". . .whatever's "always" done. . .don't do.

Okay, fair enough. Obviously, don't go mad and, say, "Okay, Seth, well, all airlines fly. My airline will tunnel underground."

Christ, but I've been an uptight human being lately. Always with the extreme scenarios.

It was very serendipitous that I came across this. . . I used to believe this fervently. Yeah, fervently....... a word I've been too uptight to use of late.

Peter Pan.

Never Never Land. . . .

Say Never-Never used to be my motto.

In fact, when I was 19, I even wrote a not-terrible poem about taking "the nevers and the gnarled forevers" and crushing them "like dead leaves" beneath my feet.

Oooooh, the romance of "dead leaves". Every true romantic knows.

What I've been saying a lot lately is "No More" and "Enough".

All the friggin' play has gone out of my life.

But I am making a mental note about Pan here, and I consider myself on warning...

"Do the Never", counsels Seth Godin.

Okay, so I don't have a product to market and I don't know how, exactly, I'm going to apply this, but I am going to remain conscious of all the ways in which I dutifully mimic the status quo, and without attempting to run an underground airline, I am going to shimmy outside of the box as soon as I identify an opportunity to do so.

Might be kind of hard: I've been stuck in my own counter-productive thought process for waaaaaaayyyy too long. The other night, I was asked if I had lost all sense of wonder. Had to seriously think about that. . .I've gotten so cynical.

Well..... fairy-dust, I suppose.

No one can fly unless the fairy dust has been sprinkled upon them. . . . . and, oh hey, off the top of my head-- what happened to The Lost Boys: "It is sad to have to say that the power to fly eventually left them. . . ."

Well, I don't want to lose that ability. But I've gotta lighten up.

I have to start defying my own mental gravity. You'd think someone as anti-authoritarian as myself would rebel against even my own limiting thoughts?

It is kind of funny that the picture I'm using here is a statue of Peter Pan-- that's practically sacrilegous.

No one could ever capture the spirit of Pan in stone.

But, it's a nice shot, and it was available on Creative Commons, and I didn't want to use a cartoon.

So, here's to paradox, and here's to Never-Never.

Starry Signatures: Imagination or Bust

It took me a long time to decide to start this blog. I hemmed and hawed, waited and pondered. I am still not certain what all I will be writing about, but I decided to take the plunge. My reasons are manifold: as I get older, every day, I find myself less and less inclined to use my imagination, and as a result, my intuition recedes to the very depths of my subconscious, emerging in increasingly cryptic dreams and a frustrating restlessness that I can never seem to channel.

It is the nature of my oh-so-prototypical North American existence: my nine-to-five, my happily-shacked-up and essentially sane and solvent life. Don't get me wrong: I'm not knocking stability. I'm a Capricorn with Cancer Moon, and no one with that starry signature has ever knocked stability. But my Sagittarian inner planets ache for adventure and new experiences. (If the language of astrology is unfamiliar to you, stay tuned.... it is this imaginative and highly symbolic language that has inspired me to begin this blog. As a young woman, the stars and the lore assigned to them by nearly every civilization on earth captured my imagination in a way nothing before had, or has since. It is my intention to rekindle my relationship to the celestial alphabet, and hopefully inject a bit of it into the vocabularies (and imaginations) of my readers-- should I be so lucky as to attract any. I really have no idea what I'm doing-- launching a blog on a wing and a wish, with a very, very vague purpose. What I do have is a strong feeling--a strong need to begin the long process of articulating my impressions, insights and questions about the world, its people, and my life.

This is how all great poems begin. A strong feeling. An urge. A need to articulate.

I have always written poetry. What is a poet without her imagination? She is the author of business correspondance. Oh, and I excel at that. I do. Pls adv of your sked. arrival time.

So much of our culture today is "uninspired". We say it all the time. "That was an uninspired piece of crap." We recognize the lack, but how do we counter it in a day and age when crazed marketers have capitalized upon nearly every imaginative symbol humanity has ever. . .well. . . imagined?

What is a society without its imagination? It is a department store, I guess. A discount bin. A heartless marketplace. I've got nothing against the marketplace-- I just often struggle to locate its soul. Perhaps this is a failure of my own imagination?

"No imagination, that's what makes a beast." Who first said this?

In any event, its time for me to proactively tap into my own imaginative stores. No better way for me to do that than to consistently write. Write every day. (Will I live up to this? We'll see...will I stumble upon subject matter rich enough to keep me here, toiling and wondering on the electronic page, rich enough to attract equally curious and imaginately hungry readers? Man, I hope so.)

And so: first entry.


Starry Signatures

When I first began to study astrology (don't knock it til you've studied it) the incredible, seemingly inexhaustible symbolic language of the stars confounded and fascinated me, much the way our great loves fascinate and daunt us. We want to know everything about them, and never tire of exploring their every facet, often suspecting that some vital piece of information may be eluding us.

Astrology first piqued my interest when I was nineteen years old and very lovesick. There were two boys I liked, and I couldn't figure out my own heart. This may sound very childish, but I have never since lived on such high emotional alert, or tried quite so hard to understand myself. I didn't want to hurt anybody, and I didn't want to be hurt, and I spent most of 1997 in a state of extremely productive turmoil: questioning, wondering, second-guessing and analyzing myself, my friends, and my potential lovers.

This actually sounds torturous to me now-- all that agonized emotional questing. But as I get older, and am increasingly likely to go with the flow, hold the course, and just hang in there, waiting for a break, a change, a day off, time to think, or the opportunity to reflect...I actually miss being so deeply engaged with my life, so profoundly aware of myself as a conscious being, moving and changing the course of events in accordance with my own, well-analyzed fears and desires. It was an extremely creative state of existence. Now, I worry that my tendency is to be less creative and more detached from the flow of events. The state of modern society, and media inundation has made me into a rather passive observer, and that sucks.

How can I, as a "grown up" (ick) tap back into the same sort of invested-in-the-outcome passion that drove me to persistently study and try to decipher the coded messages of the stars?

I don't know, but that's okay-- Nobel prize winning poet Wislawa Szymborska once wrote that her poetry was born of a perpetual "I don't know", a state similar to what 19th century, second-wave Romantic poet John Keats described as Negative Capability-- being at peace with the mystery of existence. The lack of absolutism and dogmatic pronouncements. The incessant questing for answers of my youth has given way to an open-mindedness pertaining to the mysteries of existence, even as I get increasingly uptight and control-freakish about my own trajectory.

So, I don't know, but the primary aim of this blog is going to be to attempt to examine everyday events, social issues, random one-off situations and media stories with that same critical, imaginative, and wondering eye. It was passion that enabled me to learn the ins and outs of astrological symbology so profoundly and with such relative speed. Of course, like anyone away from home, I have forgotten the nuances of the language I was once so comfortable with, and it may take me a little while to get them back....

As I prepare to launch this, the Moon is teetering at the tail end of the zodiac, at 29 degrees Pisces, about to move into Aries and make a 90 degree angle with the Sun in early Capricorn.

Interesting that I should begin something new with the Moon at 29 Pisces, a degree of ultimate culmination, as Pisces is the last sign of the zodiac, and 29 its final degree ( the zodiac is divided into twelve 30 degree slices, or signs).

I suppose this moon degree is an apt descriptor, as my decision to begin this project is the result, or culmination, of a long, restless process of consideration, trying to liberate myself from an inspirational quagmire.

So I am going to post this. When I return, I will write a little more about the Pisces Moon. I can think of no better way to get my feet wet.