samhain tarot spread

Part of my Samhain resolution for the upcoming year is to embrace the dark parts of myself (something I've been needing to do, but was only recently brought to my attention at my astrology session with astrobarry). to that end I thought I'd do a tarot spread revolving around The High Priestess (aka the Female Pope), who is the dark goddess of the major arcana. I used a spread from the book The New Tarot Handbook which I picked up on my last residency at Goddard (it's written by a faculty member). I absolutely love the book (go get it!!) and I've been reading and re-reading it when I'm away from my cards or unable to read for whatever reason (like on long plane flights between the east & west coasts).

I must admit, I haven't been as dedicated to the cards as I was in the past. It's been a while since I've picked them up. So many exterior emotional drains in my life have made it seem impossible to spare the energy to sort through the deck. I was, however, pleasantly surprised with how my intuition came back when I picked up the deck tonight...

See my reading after the jump.

merry samhain!!

have a happy halloween & a blessed samhain y'all!

don't forget to make a wish at midnight for the new year...

I'll be setting out my tarot cards & making my resolutions... lighting candles for mary & persephone & leaving a special something for hecate on the fire escape.

blessed be,

n

weather

my part of brooklyn seems to have survived sandy pretty much unscathed.
though when the trains will be running again to facilitate our connection with other parts of the world is anyone's guess... the mta is notoriously slow at these kinds of things.

everyone talks about the weather, 

but no one does anything about it. 

-mark twain

oregon squares

My grandmother passed away 12 October, & I've been in Oregon the past few days for the funeral. She was a loving and wonderful woman, & I will never forget our conversations about poetry, or the huge amounts of sugar cookies we made each christmas... slathering frosting on them until the sugar soaked into our bloodstream through our fingertips. 

It is nice to be back in Brooklyn, Portland feels like a strange purgatory place now, I've made more trips there this year than I had in the entire span of time since I moved away. Though there are some bumps in my road right now, I'm glad to be home. 

If you follow me on twitter you're bound to have seen these before. But here's a selection of some photos from my trip west. 

I've updated my myspace for the first time in two years if you're interested in checking it out.
My grandmother's obituary is online, for those interested, there is also a guestbook for comments.

N

three clouds

from my seat in coach. 

page 78

"[...] But she was young and she had never felt the power of the dance so strongly before, and she wanted to keep it; she wanted it with a great ferocity which she mistook for passion for this man. She was certain about him; he could not get enough of her.

[...] She could have accepted it if he had told her that her light brown belly no longer excited him. She would have sensed it herself and told him to go. But he was quitting her because his desire for her has uncovered something which had been hiding inside him, something with wings that could fly, escape the gravity of the Church, the town, his mother, his wife. So he wanted to kill it: to crush the skill into the feathers and snap the bones of the wings."

-Leslie Marmon Silko, Ceremony

journal pages

I like to light pages on fire & use watercolours in my journals. 

may 2012

four photos from new jersey

Yesterday I ventured to a place I had never before encountered.... New Jersey.
My lovely friend Heather Mae was playing a gig in Asbury Park and I decided to tag along. Overall, I don't have anything too terrible to say about the state... except that everything was closed at 6 on a Monday and I wandered through a boardwalk wasteland before finally stumbling upon a kind business owner who agreed to fry me some tofu and fries so I wouldn't starve.

me hanging out in the green room like a roadie, Asbury Park via instagram,
the aforementioned tofu & fries,  another view of the green room (everything was covered in stickers).

western night

"The love I've known is the love of
two people staring

not at each other, but in the same direction."

-Frank Bidart, To the Dead

animals with horns

Went to see Eugene Ionesco's Rhinoceros at BAM last night. Performed in French with English titles by Parisian theatre group Théâtre de la Ville. It was pretty amazing. I'm already a fan of French Avant-Garde Absurdism, and this was just another tick in the "love" column. 

Although, I did realise pretty darn quickly that my French is not what it used to be, and I had to rely on the supertitles pretty heavily. 

I loved the sparse set design, and the multi-functionality of all the set pieces. The sound design was also incredible... evoking the Rhinoceros without seeing them until very late in the production. The play closes tonight at BAM's Howard Gillman Opera House. 

images courtesy of BAM. 

dear sugar

"withholding distorts reality. it makes the people who do the withholding ugly and small-hearted. it makes the people from whom things are withheld crazy and desperate and incapable of knowing what they actually feel."

I got my hands on the book of the Dear Sugar column from The Rumpus by Cheryl Strayed. I'm only a few letters in, but I love it. It's exactly the kind of thing humans need. The process of waking up can be slow, but it seems to me that this will help.

under bridges

Went to the DUMBO Arts Festival last night with the lovely Jason Simone for the final performance of "Codex Dynamic" an awesome 3-D visual extravaganza of digital art. Laying on the ground under the Manhattan Bridge Anchorage was a completely new experience for this Brooklynite, but totally awe-inspiring.

Obviously pictures cannot do it justice, but what kind of iphone using New Yorker would I be if I didn't take a thousand "artsy" shots??