As I've continued to process last week's thefts, the feeling of violation, I've been resisting the temptation to blame myself for manifesting the woes and at the same time attempting to ask, without self pity, what I can do/could have done differently. What is it that needs my attention and is not getting it?

Again with the questions. Perhaps there's a beautiful symmetry in the fact that I find questions so useful everywhere and always and in the fact that the one quality on which I pride myself and which I hope never to lose is that of listening/being a good listener.  But am I listening enough right now? I feel, rather, that I'm grasping desperately...

Until not too long ago, this blog comprised weekly "spells" formed of three posts showcasing a concept from my three angles of obsession and fascination. Of course, this wasn't saving the world or necessarily accomplishing anything important--or was it? At least it was some sort of momentum and shape.

Sometimes what looks like a finger-twirling dance is actually a planetary fecundation. I've witnessed conversations where the conversants were actually engaged in a jedi light-saber battle, which you'd only notice if you knew how to look. What looks like a plummet into oblivion might in fact be one erect wing of a beautiful bird, the low point its back, sending your eye running up the other wing. Sometimes the tail does wag the dog, or rather, sometimes if you smile and engage the smile muscles, the parts of your neurochemistry associated with things smileable start to kindle.

This post is my tail attempting to wag my dog.

High heat is here. High, dry heat.

Elsewhere, gardeners favor raised beds. Here, contrariwise, we sink them. Cooler, shadier, hold moisture better. I take sacks with me into the river wash and bring home plant debris, horse poop, bat poop, as mulch that is also shade. 

What's alive so easily parches to death; what's already dead doesn't compost because it's just too dry. I love heat, but when it's so high above my body temperature, it makes me wonder if there is after all a "too hot."

In this spell so far, "it is what it is" is not the whole story, and a chiasmus, like that phrase, is an arrangement in the shape of the Greek letter chi χ, or of the cross.

Nice timing, yes? We're looking at the shape of the cross on Easter. Easter which coincides with Pesach this year, unusually but perhaps unsurprisingly in a year already so replete with astrological coincidences and cooccurrences.

We love our cliches and jingles, but there's something really satisfying about words and phrases that step out and step back, are mirror images of themselves--"level"--"radar"--"madam I'm Adam." These are palindromes, which means (in Greek) that they "run backward." In Latin the word would be "retrocourse."

But "it is what it is" isn't quite a palindrome, and so "palindrome" is not the word for this spell.
The word is "chiasmus"--a word named after a letter.

Equinox is like twilight: midway point on the way to solstice, or to midday/midnight, point at which momentum has built so the energy is solidly toward more light, more heat, more day (or, in September, more dark, more cold, more night).

If you're paying attention, you can feel the energy change over. But, as I said in the equinox post, it doesn't all happen right in the key moment. Momentum builds to that point and continues for some time afterward.

And so this spell's "word" post is dedicated to moment/momentum.

It seems appropriate that this spell's word should be

apprentice

since we're talking about undertaking an herbal apprenticeship, and about apprenticing to the plants. There's a nice parallelism, word-wise, event-wise, life-wise, with my recent initiation into the Sufi order--both are part of my "spell" nexus, and both involve setting aside my own judgments, preconceptions, and stories, and opening my ears and heart to guidance.

The "surrender" piece is so important, but let's take a look at the etymology of "apprentice" and see how there's another side to the story.