The Year of Artemis

I'm writing a book! It takes up most of my writing time. It's an idea I've had for probably ten years, to cover the utterly fascinating period of Classical Greece during the Persian and Peloponnesian wars. This is amazing stuff. Impossibly complicated and intertwined families and connections. Intrigue and drama. Kings and tyrants and overthrown governments. Betrayals and manipulations. Incest and adultery. An imprisoned king who goes mad and commits suicide by stripping off his own skin. How is possible that the name of Kleisthenes is more or less unknown in our culture when he's literally the man who implemented the first democracy? 

So, yeah. I am super excited about this. I've wanted to write one portion of this for years, but it occurred to me that the entire story, the pre-and post-, has a whole cast of characters and stories that I want to tell. It's outlined and I have the first three chapters in the works. 

Anyway. It was just Halloween, a holiday I like a lot even though I'm indifferent about wearing costumes. There's something about this time of year that has always evoked something strong in me. The chill in the air, the smell of wood smoke, the leaves crunching underfoot. It's a magical time. 

In some pagan traditions, Halloween marks the end of the year. It's the end of the growing season, the harvest is in, the nights are dark and full of terrors. Well, not until we turn the clocks back and extend the evenings even longer. But it's the time to honor those who have gone before, and also to recognize our own mortality, laughing in its face as we dress up as the things that frighten us. 

There's a tradition that calls for a dedication of a year and a day before pledging oneself to the old ways. Probably dates from the '50s like most Wiccan traditions. I think the concept is valid, though. Take a year to think about what you believe and how you want to practice that belief. 

Two years ago I started a journal to document my year-and-a-day. I've always liked to write down my thoughts, even if I don't often read through it afterward; the act of writing just helps me sort out my beliefs. As Joan Didion put it, I don't know what I think until I write it down.

Turns out I have a lot of thoughts and a year later, this was a 400 page document that was taking a while to open. I started a new year-and-a-day and decided that if I kept doing it, moving the date one additional day each year, it would begin on my birthday the year I turn 80, which I'm thinking is my probable lifespan. Then I realized that I'd done the math wrong and leap years are a thing, so it wouldn't work out like I'd thought. Oh well. I aspire to 100 anyway. 

In any case, it's time to start a new year. Instead of the uncreative name "Year and a Day (3)" I've decided to take a page from the ancient Greeks, who named their year after the eponymous archon, the top man elected to the office (there were several archons). The Romans did this too, naming their years after the two consuls elected to office that year. 

Diana of Versailles, Roman copy of a Greek original
 by Leochades of Athens 

(A one-year term only, not to be repeated. Let's take a moment to appreciate some of the better ideas of our democratic forebears.)

I've decided this will be the year of Artemis. Being a single woman without children, I've always been drawn to the solitary goddesses. Artemis is the sister of Apollo and the daughter of Zeus. She's a virgin goddess who is oddly also a goddess of childbirth. The huntress of the forest. She had a cult in Sparta whose yearly festival involved a flogging game/ritual that became such a huge spectacle, the Romans eventually erected a theater to hold the massive crowds that would come to watch the event. 

History is so interesting. It's my dream to write something where this resonates to everyone. 

Slowing Down

I'm surprised the blog still had me signed in, it's been so long since I posted anything!

In reality, though, it's only been six weeks. And in the scheme of things, that is a fairly short time. This is not just an excuse (though it doubles nicely as one), it's my theme today.

I'm taking a sick day. And writing a blog post, you say? Shouldn't you be curled up in bed sleeping, or at least moaning in misery, since you had the audacity to take a day away from your duties in the workplace?

Maybe you're not saying that at all, but I am. I'm not sure why I feel such tremendous guilt whenever I take a sick day. Probably because I am very seldom too ill to function, and that's always been my guideline about taking off - if I'm too sick to work, I should be too sick to do anything but lie around and groan about how awful I feel.

That does happen to me, but not often. Maybe once a year, not even always once. I had a cold last week that has lingered through the weekend, culminating in an upset stomach and a night without sleep, and when I found myself wide awake at 2:30 am after two hours of fruitlessly counting sheep, I decided to just take the day off. I have well over a hundred hours saved up and nothing pressing on my calendar today. So why am I so reluctant to just give in and take a day to rest?

Well, for one thing, it's appearances. One does not call off on Monday without raising a "yeah, sure" eyebrow or two. Plus I was off on Friday for my scheduled flex day. Surely I could have willed myself into feeling better by now. And the thing is, I am not incapacitated. I could work. When I woke up around 7 (after finally drifting off around 3;30), I thought, "just go in late, you're all right."

See the guilt? I can't decide if this is my Catholic upbringing, my German ancestry work ethic, some combination of the two, or just my personal psychosis.

I stopped to visit with a friend on my way home Thursday. After yawning approximately 42 times in the course of an hour, she advised me to go home and completely relax - Netflix and the couch. It'll be good for you, she said.

Did I do this? No. Instead, I was spectacularly productive over the weekend. I wrote up a to-do list with about three dozen items on it and did them all. I thrive on that feeling of accomplishment that comes with ticking off a bunch of things that needed to be done.

And yet, here I am. Tired. Still needing to slow down. 

Green Acres is the place to be. 

This is the time of year to remember to do that. Maybe it's part of the reason we all tend to get sick in the fall. (Yeah, I'm pretty sure it has more to do with people being inside more and the kids going back to school spreading germs everywhere, but bear with me here.) This is the time that the brightly-living part of the year fades away. The heat and growth of summer come to a gradual, beautiful end, over the course of just twelve weeks. This is autumn, the slow decline to that part of the year where everything will come to rest.

Winter is unequivocal. It's cold, there's only a few hours of daylight, pretty much everything about it says "Go inside and sit by the fire with a book." Autumn is the promise of that, with its changing colors and chilly mornings, all the while allowing summer to linger on with its clear blue skies and continuing wealth of hot sunny days. It's my favorite time of the year in part because it feels so fleeting. Technically all the seasons last three months, but in Colorado there are really only about six weeks to take a drive through the mountains to see the gorgeous colors before a wind storm or early snow rips all the leaves down. By mid-October, the window is closed.

The message is slow down. Look around. Everything is coming to an end. Enjoy it while it lasts. Take a moment.

Take a day.

The world will not miss you for one day.

Second Harvest

Around the first of August we celebrate the second harvest. Wiccans call it Lammas or Lughnasadh (pronounced 'Lu-ness-a'), in honor of the Irish god Lugh. It's the height of summer, the crops are coming in, and it's time to celebrate the bounty of the growing season. 

My tomatoes started ripening a couple of weeks ago. From here until first frost, I'll have some nearly every day. I grew almost all bite-sized tomatoes this year - grape, tiny orange, yellow pear, and cherry. I think I like the orange cherries the best; they have such a delicious sweetness. But I especially love how colorful it all is in the basket. 

And a single, minuscule green pepper. Peppers don't seem to love my garden.

I have three pepper plants this year: jalapeno, banana pepper, and green. The green pepper has given me only the one sad little specimen you see in the photo. I've tried to grow them three years straight and this is, sadly, the best I've done. 

However, the jalapenos are doing well, and I've already picked a number of banana peppers. I've never grown them before and I rarely even eat them outside of Subway sandwiches, so the first time I chopped some raw into a salad I was dismayed at how weird and bitter they tasted. Then I found a recipe for pickled banana peppers, and all has been right with the world. 

I grow zucchini every year. This year and last, I mixed it up with a yellow crookneck squash plant as well. A couple of years ago a friend asked, "How do you grow zucchini?" and I could only reply in amazement, "You plant it in the ground." I am inundated with squash every year. Zucchini omelettes, zucchini brownies, zucchini cake, zucchini quiche, zucchini casserole, a gajillion versions of zucchini bread both savory and sweet. Zucchini shredded and frozen for the indeterminate point in mid-winter when I'm ready to eat something with it again. 

This year, though, I haven't seen much from my famously prolific squash plants. Hopefully they'll start to give me more as the month wears on. It is definitely still summer: a couple of beautifully cooler days over the weekend gave way today to the sunny 90s. 

I'm glad of it, really. I am not a fan of the summer heat and autumn has always been my favorite season, in large part because of the relief it brings with crispy nights and cooler days. But in the last couple of years, the crushing drought and heat seems to have tempered back into the summers I remember from my youth: hot, yes, but not the oppressive Arizona-desert, get-thyself-indoors hot we had for what seems like fifteen or twenty years running.  And because it's been warm but not horrible, I find myself sad to realize that summer is coming to an end. 

Not yet, though! For now, the veggies are bursting and the sun is shining and the grass is...well... dead. But it's quite obvious, now, that the days are shortening and the seasons are turning. Autumn is coming. 

(Fair warning: I started watching Game of Thrones. I'll try not to quote it excessively.)

And now, this picture of kittens. 

Cuteness overload!

New Beginnings

In recent weeks I started thinking about adopting a new kitty. I feel guilty for even wanting to, as we have two still in the house - the sister and father of my Peanut. Two cats is really enough, in terms of space and upkeep required. But I miss the special relationship I had with Peanut. Gordon and Snuggins have Jesse as their human. They like and tolerate me, but it's not the same.

I'm not sure how I got to thinking about a pair instead of one. I guess if two is already enough, why not double it? Makes perfect sense, really. But once the idea was planted I couldn't get it out. A pair from the same litter, built-in friends.

As it happens, the Dumb Friends League is on the way home from work. Literally I drive right past it. So I stopped in last Thursday just to see the adoptable kitties, and there they were! A pair of brothers, five months old, captured from a feral colony in Denver.

They are so beautiful! A tiny panther and a mini ocelot.

Verdict's still out on their names. They came as Brad and Chad, but they're not attached to them, and they don't seem particularly suited. So far, Felix and Oscar are front runners. Oscar the ocelot, and Felix the panther. I love giving a black cat, subject of so many superstitions of bad luck, a name that means Lucky.

Also up for consideration: Toothless.

I'm not committing to it yet. We'll see if it sticks. So far, the names seem fitting.

I adore them already, and yet I'm kind of terrified. Four cats in the house! What have I done? I listened to them tearing around in my room last night and realized it's been fifteen years since I had a kitten. They're going to destroy everything! It's what they do!

His markings! He looks like an ocelot.

Totally worth it. I mean, look at those faces.

Coexist

I've been on vacation the past week, a much-needed respite from daily life. Man Friend has made an abrupt exit, so I sold our tickets to the music festival and bought a ticket to see my oldest, closest friend in New York instead. Turns out she needed it as much as I did, so it was a happy impulse.

Friends make everything better, don't they? Nothing like a few nights of wine, conversation, and belly laughs to put the vagaries of life back into perspective.

Coming back yesterday was an adventure. Flight delays make traveling exhausting - I've always found it both amusing and puzzling that waiting, then sitting on a plane doing literally nothing but reading, can be so tiring.

Anyway. The first flight was delayed over an hour and we all had a tight connection in Charlotte. I hope that beautiful girl next to me made her flight to Atlanta but I doubt it, we didn’t get to the gate until it was set to take off. I was luckier: we arrived just in time for me to run down to the gate, only to see this flight was delayed too. Good thing or my bag probably would be in Miami or something right now.

In any case, on this second flight, I have an aisle seat near the front, which is my favorite place to be. Not only did I make the flight but I got a good seat! I have good luck this way.

Someone pulled the wrong lever and there's only emergency lighting and no air circulating as we board. Nevertheless, it's freezing. The girl across the aisle in a sleeveless dress asks the flight attendant for a blanket. "We don't have one," she's told.

I wish I had a sweater to offer her. I usually do, but it's summer, and I'm traveling very light.

In my row, there's a youngish man at the window and a big fiftyish woman in the middle. I sit down and immediately bury my face in my tablet (Wolf Hall; great book) as the two of them are chatting up a storm and I, the introvert, want no part of small talk today. He's coming to Denver to see his mother who is going to have heart surgery at St Anthony, and she is peppering him with questions - where are you from, how old are you, how old is she, what's the issue, how long since you've seen her, on and on. He’s from Boston but lives in Charlotte and has a total Southern accent now. Much is made of the change in his accent. 

It’s all very ordinary chitchat and then she asks him, “Do you know the Lord?”

I freeze.

“I do,” he says.

“But do you really know the Lord?” she persists.

“Yes ma’am,” he replies.

“That’s good,” she nods. And asks the name of his mother and says she’ll be praying for him.

I’m waiting for her to turn to me and ask me the same question just because it seems like she’s going to, but lucky me, my “please do not speak to me” cues are accepted for what they are and she does not.

But what would I have said? I was preparing an answer, and I was uncomfortable at the prospect of explaining myself. “I’m a pagan.” “I am not a Christian.”  “I have been previously acquainted with the one you call Lord, but we are no longer on speaking terms.”

I have no desire to be an ass about my non-belief in the Christian faith. I am fully aware that the stories I consider another mythology, others regard as literal truth. I believe there is truth in all mythologies; not necessarily in the details of the stories themselves, but in the lessons they teach us.

My 10^th grade English teacher once began a lesson with the statement, “Myth is Truth.”

We all stared at him.

Myth is Truth, he explained, because it is believed.

I can’t remember exactly how he broke it down, but here’s what I took away from it: Myth is more than “legend,” more than “fiction.” It is more, even, than an attempt to explain natural phenomena. Myth seeks to expose the deeper truths of nature, both of the Earth and of humans and of our place in the world. 

Most stories do this on some level, really.

I'm grateful that she didn't ask me my faith, because I have a feeling my reply (which likely would have been the shortest one, 'I'm a pagan') would have been met with disapproval at best and hostility at worst.

Ultimately it doesn't matter what we believe. It's what we do that matters. This woman prayed for the man's mother: this is a kind and generous thing to do, whether or not you believe prayer has any value.

The woman is offered a seat in the exit row a few rows back with more leg room. Apparently she had a first class ticket and was bumped, and this is their only recourse to offer her something better than this least-desirable middle seat. She accepts and heads to the back.

The man smiles at me. "Looks like we'll have more room!" I smile and agree, it's nice - I can't remember the last time I didn't have anyone next to me on a plane.

He hauls his backpack up onto the seat, rummages around for a minute, and pulls out a hoodie. Reaches across to the woman on the other side of the aisle. "Are you cold?"

She accepts it with a smile of pure gratitude as he jokes that "it's clean," and drapes it over her goosebumped arms.

Kindness. This is what life is about.

As we are leaving the plane I can't help noticing that several of the first-class seats do in fact have blankets, and several of them are still in plastic, unused. 

Lessons from the Earth

Things I've learned from my strawberry patch:

- Patience. The six spindly plants I planted last year that barely survived the summer came back lush, fruitful and vibrant after the rains of spring.

- Optimism. I've amended the soil and planted six more along that stretch of fence where several plants died last year.

- Enjoying the Moment. I've been harvesting berries for several weeks now. With only this small patch, this means every couple of days, five to ten tiny little berries are ripe for the picking. Just enough for a single serving, sweet and delicious and best eaten the same day.

- Steady Hands. It's delicate work, cutting the berries loose without bruising them.

- Observation. Berries ripen overnight; I have to check the patch every day to catch them when they're ripe for me but not yet noticed by the critters.

- Calm. Working in the earth, in any capacity, brings me calm. The worst of moods, the heaviest of worries, even the grip of sorrow can be dispelled after a few minutes of digging up the earth. The monotony of weed-pulling offers a rhythm all its own - and the occasional joy of actually getting the whole root of the dandelion.

I've been thinking a lot about the Strawberry Moon, of how to better live by the cycles of the seasons. I'm a very early-morning person, up before dawn every day, but I've been pondering a shift to a later schedule to better enjoy the long protracted days of summer. I haven't done it yet, and I may not - the sunrise, after all, is still my favorite time of day - but it's a natural inclination, I think, to feel a shift in the body along with the season. Just as we tend to get to bed earlier in winter, when the nights are long and dark, it only seems right to stay up late past the long sunset, and watch the first stars dot the sky.

Long long days, that's summer. Live by the sun, feel by the moon, as they say.

(don't ask me who they is, I saw it on Pinterest)

Strawberry Solstice

The summer solstice was yesterday, coinciding with the full moon. This hasn't happened since 1967, and won't happen again until 2062. I had no idea they were so rare.

http://yourtake.9news.com/media/20911710

So today marks the first full day of summer, though it's felt like it for the last week or so with temperatures in the nineties. I have a love/hate relationship with summer. Love the long days, green growth everywhere, lingering dawns and sunsets, Hate the oppressive heat, the blistering sun, the sad shift in the landscape from green growth to dry yellow straw.

Though I do have to admit it's a glorious moment when I walk out of my meat locker of an office into the heat of the day.

June is the Strawberry Moon, as now is the month that strawberries are producing. My patch is doing really well! I've taken a few every day for the last week or so, along with a few handfuls of spinach from the veggie patch for an awesome little salad. I love getting meals out of my garden.

Strawberry Moon is also known as Rose Moon, Honey Moon, Lotus Moon, Green Corn Moon, Planting Moon, Horse Moon. Following the moon's cycles is probably the oldest means of marking the passage of time we know, and a lunar calendar is still used in many places.

It's remarkable how accurately we've managed to break down the turning of the year by just watching the moon and the sun. They are gods and goddesses in most ancient traditions: Sol, Apollo, Sunni, Mani, Selene, Artemis.

Why not? Without them, we wouldn't exist.