🏁creation shrines 🌸 spring shines🏁
"It is no secret. All power is one in source and end, I think. Years and distances, stars and candles, water and wind and wizardry, the craft in a man's hand and the wisdom in a tree's root : they all arise together. My name, and yours, and the true name of the sun or a spring of water, or an unborn child, all are syllables of the great word that is very slowly spoken by the shining of the stars. There is no other power, no other name." ~ Ursula K. Le Guin, A Wizard of Earthsea
pomegranate blossoms, its been a minute, xo. i write to you from my desk, as i look out to an ever greening landscape, where i can see the orioles bopping around the garden beds pecking for food and where from inside, i sit, with princess nokia’s ‘lo siento’ playing from the speakers. it's cloudy but warm and each day feels a bit more alive than the last. it's easy for me to blush for spring, to accept the invite to swirl and spin towards sun filled days. from as early as i can remember, spring has always been my favorite season. i mean, in my utopic fantasy world, spring is eternal. the unique smell and funk of the earth thawing, the sweet melodies of the song birds returning, the visual but also visceral feeling of the sap and plants rising forth, the deep exhale to say we've made it to another season of blackberry stained fingers and sun invoked pleasure ~ it all brings me shivers and goosebumps and it feels so damn good to be here after a long and dark winter's slumber. hoping you too are arriving to spring with a growing peace and excitement for what’s to come. entering into this season of birth and emergence, i am holding the themes of ebb~creation~flow~grief as my seasonal guiding inquiry & personal passion project. for me that has looked like reflecting on my relationship to creation, how my creativity flows have adapted in relationship to my identity as a parent, caregiver, and human living through pandemic times, and examining the ways i have pigeonholed my creativity practices based on what i *think* i should be creating. though it might seem so obvious, i was overwhelmed by the ways i hold myself back from exploring new ways to be in touch with creation, whether because of shame or embarrassment or telling myself i can’t afford it (both monetarily and spiritually.) i've also been exploring how grief both fuels and dries up my creative well spring. how my grief is entwined with my deeper personal patterns of trauma, and how the dissociation strategies i've picked up along the way as a form of protection have also kept me from feeling in deeper, more embodied ways and how that ultimately shapes how i relate to my creation practice. this is just one tiny dew drop from my seasonal mountainous guiding inquiry, but that dew drop is the inspiration for this love note. a dedication to creation in all of their forms. below you’ll find a compost making recipe, a guiding ritual, a plant crush to help nourish and fertilize your creative fires and a playlist for you to enjoy. p.s. it’s tick season! scoop up a copy of tick magic to enter spring fortified and with your best don’t fuck with my energy vibe <3 with sap and mud, mandana
CREATION SHRINES
CREATE DIRT ~ COMPOST RECIPE
What is compost?
In simple terms, compost is the act of taking organic materials, and adding them into controlled conditions so that the raw materials can be transformed into beautiful, fertile humus. But compost is also an act of creation. It’s a way we can drop deeper into our place in the web of life, by being one small part in a very important act. Creating earth is pretty much as sexy as it gets. I think it can feel intimidating tending compost, and that overwhelm can deter folks from making compost, but compost like most things are very easy to do once you demystify the process. Where I live the ground is clay and full of rocks, and not arable, so in order to grow and tend healthy gardens, I need to create and tend my compost pile, so that practice in turn can provide the gift of delicious dirt. The cool thing is you don't need a lot of space to compost successfully. You can create and enclose a simple 3' circle of wired fencing for your pile in your yard or by cutting out the bottom of a trash can and setting it firmly on the ground to prevent tipping. Nowadays, you can even purchase small compost tumblers for folks who don't have access to a lot of land.
What are the keys to making good compost?
In my personal experience the carbon/nitrogen ratio is a central factor to good compost making. The carbon/nitrogen ratio for stimulating compost organisms should be around 25:1-30:1.
What is carbon material?
Carbon material is typically dry, bulky material like sawdust, wood branches, mulch, bark, paper, wood chips, cornhusks, leaf litter.
What is nitrogen material?
Nitrogen material is typically wet, dense and moist, like grass clippings, manure, green weeds, food scraps, coffee grounds.
How do you make compost?
The idea is to layer your compost ingredients alternatively with high carbon materials first, and then nitrogen materials. Composting organisms need carbon for energy and nitrogen for growth. If your compost is turned regularly, it will be hot and decompose fast, and provide an environment for aerobic organisms (organisms that live only in the presence of oxygen.) If your compost is not turned regularly, and is more a cold, slow, passive pile, then you would have anaerobic (organism that live without oxygen )decomposing occurring.
How to use compost?
The main thing is to make sure your compost is finished, meaning that the compost has aged and is no longer in active decomposition. You can use your finished compost by incorporating your humus into your garden beds, potting mixes, potted plants, for vegetables, trees, shrubs, and annuals. You can also use your compost to make compost tea.
CREATE PRACTICE ~ DIVINATION RITUAL
Choose a divination tool from one of your ancestral lineages to explore, research and practice. Try to choose a tool that you can re-create in your own life. Before engaging in the practice of divination, be clear about your expectations and desires. Offer gratitude to your ancestors for carrying and passing down these technologies for you to steward and inherit.
To start, practice on yourself only. It takes many moons to begin to truly channel and interpret the signs. While it may feel exciting to share what you’re learning with friends, it can be harmful to decipher/practice on others what you don’t fully understand yet. Reflect on your experience with your divination practice. What comes up for you? What challenges do you face? What stories do you see casted?
For those who already have a connection and practice with one of your ancestral divination tools, how did you come to learn this tool? How do you work with divination? How do you use it in your personal life as a way to foretell a story?
The way you shape your experience around your divination practice is up to you. Maybe your actulizations stem from the discovery of your divination practice, or the experience and journey of researching your divination culture. Maybe your breakthrough stems from a memory from childhood, maybe an experience that occurred while divining or having your divination read? Maybe your creation is birthed from what you saw through your divination practice. Whatever way your story takes shape, enjoy the space and tool you have created for yourself to utilize and explore.
PLANT SIPS FOR CREATION TENDING
Because I come to my practice within the love and appreciation of plant wisdom and medicine, I’ve chosen to a plant medicine for you to connect with, as a way to inspire and support your all of your creation explorations. It isn’t a requirement to engage with this plant in your process, but they are here if you’d like an extra layer of support and guidance. You can engage with moss in a multitude of ways, my favorite is through essence but you can also delve into spending time with moss without consuming their medicine, by simply sitting with them and spending time building relationship. If you don’t have access to moss, you can also sit with a picture or google image of them.
moss essence ~ moss are flowerless plants that do not produce seeds, have no roots, yet are some of the first plants to evolve from the ancestral green algae, still thriving 400 million years later. moss, being a non-vascular plant, needs water in order to survive, yet can go dormant and live for many years without it. moss, our elder, who watched life be born again and again in flower, in animal, in human. moss, the keeper of the stories of time and creation. moss, in which patience was seeded, in which resilience was founded. moss, ancient and earthly, tenderly showing us our place in the web of life. take a drop of moss essence to cradle you when you can’t hold yourself, to hum to you the song of the world being born, to string together the creation stories we carry in our bones, but sometimes forget.
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