It is supposed to rain over the weekend so we spent today trying to get more of the outside work for Bel-Summer done. We moved the children's old swing set and jungle gym. The swing set went out to the orchard. I am sure it will work well as a trellis for the seedless grapes I am hoping to plant one day. They were in the area that we are using for ritual now and with a larger group we needed to prepare more room. They have been there so long that the wild roses have grown up over and through them so before we could move them we had to do something with the bushes. I didn't want to just mow them down so we dug up four of them and moved them to our front yard. But first they had to be trimmed back quite a bit to be able to handle the thorny waving canes. And during the time that it takes for the roots to recover and grow out into the new area they won't be able to support much foliage. I hope they will survive the transplanting at this point in their growth. They were covered with an incredible number of buds most of which had to get cut off with the trimming. If they make it though, it will be nice to look out from the house and take pleasure in their beauty.
In the afternoon we went down into the woods to repair the Sacred Cauldron for the bulb-planting rite. A number of years ago our group built a stone cauldron with stone from our land and cement a friend gave us. It was a fun project and we danced to charge it up. I am particularly fond of "Atlantean Crystal Gadgets" though I won't make a lot of claims for them as psychic machines, like some books do. In any case, I dreamed a kind of satellite dish gadget that was supposed to be part of a cauldron. So I built it with a crystal in the center, 9 copper leads going out to make the dish, and 9 copper leads going down to be buried in the Earth. In my dream I knew that this would draw up energy from the Earth and collect energy from the Sun and sky and concentrate it in the crystal. With the device built into the cauldron the crystal would focus the energy into the bowl of the cauldron. So things but into the cauldron would be charged up just by being in there. Tom was surprised to have a definite sensation of the energy when he passed his hand over the crystal. He was pretty skeptical about it all.
So we replaced one of the stones that had fallen off and opened up Artemis Trail, which had begun to close up. I called it Artemis Trail because I always seemed to flush deer coming out of that spot when I took walks in that area. And I found myself thinking of Her when it happened. Small trees had fallen over to block the trail and Prickly Ash, a very thorny bush was growing up to prevent passage. We cleared them out at the entrance and back a little ways then left the rest to twindle back into a deer trail, a wild path for a wild Goddess.
There is still mowing to do and myriad of smaller errands to do, probably more than we have time to finish. I guess whatever gets done, gets done and that will have to be good enough.
Copyright © 2000 Kyril Oakwind