Inside the Funnel

An Equinox activation for the creative process

We say that change exists, that everything changes, that change is the very law of things: yes we say it and we repeat it; but those are only words, and we reason and philosophize as though change did not exist. But ultimately it is change that is real, and change is the essence of sensual and creative experience.”

- Essence and Alchemy: A Natural History of Perfume by Mandy Aftel

Hello friend,

My laptop needed a good dusting when I sat down to write you this letter today. I’m considering that evidence of a summer well-spent. The textures, shapes, voices, and spaces of the past few months are still swirling through me, like the sediment in the last, ice-melted sips of a delicious mocktail. A little lindenberry from Poland. A splash of rosemary from California’s coast and honey from her poppy fields.

It’s taking me awhile to get back into words. Travel has a psychedelic quality. It forces you into a container of dynamic forces. Demands your brain continuously adjust to new stimuli. When you think you’ve learned the pattern, found the right box to put the new information in, the anomaly appears. A mis-translation. Wrong address. Serendipitous encounter. Cancelled flight. Lost item.

After a steady stream of fighting the arising ever-present force of flux, you start to let go. You’re inside the barrel, as surfers say. You gotta hang loose and all that.

I’ve been inside of something similar this summer. An alchemical and fluid vessel - letting the escapades and events of the moment overtake me, lingering in conversation with good company, eating meals on an orange and pink picnic blanket by the ocean, tracking the flight of pelicans, following the sounds of music down hidden alleyways. This year, I embraced summer’s nimble, lightweight, lively spirit, collecting impressions like souvenirs, without too much thought about where they’d live and how they’d go together when I brought them home.

Now I’m starting to decelerate, to land, and beginning the process of gathering inspirations from the surge of all this subject matter. I’m returning to half-finished books, home projects, class ideas and writing and finding less guilt and overwhelm than in years past, having all these loose threads. I suppose there’s a sense of right timing, one that the creators of the natural world seem to move from intuitively.

A tasteful hummingbird nest sourced by a master curator from exotic blue yarn (a female flew up to my face as I wrote this)

This is a poem about the process of shifting into a new awareness offered by the transition from summer to fall. What it’s like to feel the first impulses to gather, refine, distill, and preserve. Sending it to you — kissed with clear dry air, moonless night, a swan flying on the back of the Milky Way, and canyon streams singing with late monsoon rains — on this day of equal light and shadow, from a place called Portal, on the exit ramp of eclipse gateway.

May it be an activation to organize and guide the weavings of your artist hands in the days of ripeness ahead.

Portal

The air is cold now
when the Sun rises.
To step outside in bare feet 
is like testing the waters of an unfamiliar river.

I retrest into the cabin of stone and cedar.
Its warmth and coziness are alluring.
I'm tempting to just stay inside 
and sleep a bit more
because I stayed up late last night
looking at the stars.

But it's too late.
I leave the door wide open
while I make the coffee piping hot,
beckoning inside,
the atmosphere's crisp and snap,
allowing the intoxicating chill of the pale blue sky
in its summery crescendo
to swirl and seep 
and lift
the languor and teetering delirium 
of this long, hot siesta.

I pull on wool socks
and my red toboggan
(even though I know I'll discard them in an hour.)

I take a seat on the porch
at the round table
where I've gathered books and notes,
postcards and a camera full of photos.

My thoughts find a cadence like the grasshopper's thin song  — 
clear and direct.
Like my eyes pointed now toward the red canyon in the west,
my instincts follow the funnel of light  — 
hitched, like everything else
to the swift turning of our planet.
A season's effort,
like the sap of juniper
rising from the ground, flowing in rivulets through outstretched branches
coalescing and condensing
into the sharp, clean aroma
of a single
stunning
bead.

Juniper berries by Yana Gorbunova on Unsplash

Happy turning, happy gathering, dear reader.

And if you are someone who would have been burned at the stake in the 1600’s…

Happy Equinox ∞ ∞ ∞

- Lydia