Category Archives: Quickies

it’s been a minute

Oh boy. Almost two years since I’ve posted to this blog. Plenty has happened since then, most of it still too difficult to get my head around. I’ve had some ideas for things to write about, but it’s been too intimidating to hash them out after not posting in so long. A funny thing happened this evening, though, and I thought I’d use it as the momentum to get something started again.

I’ve gotten a little into crystals lately. I’ve gotten a little into a lot of things over the last little while. Yoga teacher training, for one thing. Precognitive dreaming. Chakras. Here’s a funny little anecdote where a few of those come together.

A few weeks ago I visited Angelic Roots in Oak Creek for their customer appreciation weekend sale and bought myself some fancy rocks. Some of them called out to me and others I selected for specific purposes. I’ve been playing around with them, feeling them out, trying to discover what they have to tell me, which ones I should hold onto, which ones I don’t feel any connection to. Sometimes I put a crystal at the top of my yoga mat when I begin my practice. Sometimes I take them in the bath with me. It’s been an interesting exploration and this evening it got a little more interesting.

On my way out the door to yoga class I remembered to pick out some crystals before I left. I stood by my nightstand where I keep them and did a whole chakra thing that I might explain some other time. With my eyes closed, I shuffled my crystals, spread them out, and then felt which one was calling to me at that moment. I chose one and opened my eyes. I had selected amazonite, which I bought specifically to protect me from EMFs and the like. It has other purposes but I haven’t learned them yet. I thought to myself, well I won’t be needing anything like that at a yoga studio, or basically “that’s not the answer I want!” and shuffled the stones again. I ended up selecting a combination of different stones and bringing them with me to the yoga studio.

When I got to the studio, my gut sank immediately. I’m hugely sensitive to LED lighting and the studio had installed new overhead lights. They were offensively bright. The lights weren’t turned on in the yoga studio itself but the window into the studio from the lobby let in enough light that I had to set my mat up in the farthest available corner. I did the yoga practice with my eyes half closed and it was okay, although I wasn’t really able to relax into it. I did have a nice time with the stones I had brought with me and I got to know them a little better.

After the class had ended I spent a couple extra minutes in shavasana, waiting until the studio had emptied to roll up my mat. As I gathered my belongings, it suddenly hit me. That amazonite was calling out to me in order to protect me from the LED lights to which I’m so overly sensitive. I haven’t been drawn to that stone since I purchased it, but tonight, the first night I visited this studio since they changed their lighting, that stone is the one that wanted to join me.

I’ve been working for a while now on developing my intuition. I’ve started to accept that among other things, I’m a little bit of an empath, a little bit of a precog. Part of what I’m trying to suss out is when to listen to that intuition, and when to listen to my reason, or whatever the other thing is. One lesson that seems to keep coming up is learning to know what it feels like to reject an answer because it isn’t the one I want, versus rejecting it because it doesn’t feel right. This is exciting stuff to dive into and I’m happy that my little rocks gave me something to work with tonight. Thanks, rocks! You kind of rock.

Loss Leader

This week I lost a number of seedlings. A tray I had been cold stratifying in the fridge up and germinated before I noticed and half of those babies died. Harvesting weeds for My Bunniness at 4 a.m. the other morning I accidentally uprooted the cilantro I’d been nursing from seed and had just transplanted. Today I came home and found that the neighborhood feral kitties had ransacked the trays I’d been hardening off and had planned to get planted tomorrow.

I’ve been working 60 hour weeks for too long now, and I’m keeping those hours low on account of I refuse to work weekends. Guys I work with are losing fingers and winding up in the hospital on an all too frequent basis. In the grand scheme of things I’m keeping my losses to a minimum, but there’s definitely a cost associated with keeping these hours. It’s heavy on my mind but I still haven’t come up with a better way to pay the bills. I’ll chalk my lost seedlings up to poor timing and note the experience, and I’ll continue to spend whatever spare seconds I can find throughout the week working out a better plan. It’s going to be a rough haul any way it works out. Hopefully I can still get those sunflowers planted this summer.

There are moments in all the chaos where tranquility just happens. On Saturday I got to drive a 1937 Allis Chalmers tractor around the Fischer Farm. I spotted a Monarch butterfly and tried to keep up with it for a while, jerking that big orange machine around the field as my target flitted and then vanished. It was but an instant but I’ll probably still recall that moment decades from now. Space gets bigger in moments like those and there’s room for all the aggravation and heartache to disappear. Almost room enough to lose sixty hours in.

Coyote Beautiful

As I was walking over to the Garfield Park Conservatory the other afternoon, I spotted a furry creature nosing around outside the Monet Garden. It certainly wasn’t a dog, and it was too big and too grey to be a fox. I wondered if it might be a coyote, but it was sleek and beautiful. The last time I spotted a coyote was in the Rockies, where everything is a bit rugged. I was whistling as I walked over, and the creature paused for just a moment to look at me, curiously, before it trotted off. I ran up toward the fence surrounding the Monet Garden and I could have hopped over, but my furry friend had already slipped away.

Instead I made my way through the Conservatory and back out into the Monet Garden, where a few kids were gathered – none of them older than ten years old if I had to guess. I asked them if they had just seen some kind of crazy dog or fox or something, and I was quite excited about it. A young girl, who was probably the oldest of the three, told me “It was a baby coyote.” The tone in her voice was the best part of the whole story. I got the impression that she has seen at least a dozen baby coyotes just this week, and that she was absolutely tired to death of having to explain such things to ridiculous and patronizing grown-ups.

I’ve lived in this general area of the city for most of the time I’ve been in Chicago – close to twenty years now. I’ve heard of coyotes in Lincoln Park, and I once saw one in Winnetka, but I’ve never heard of a coyote in Garfield Park. It’s about time! I know a few folks around here who keep chickens and other livestock, and I’ll have to let them know that there’s reason to keep an eye out, but I’m glad to see some more wildlife around these parts. I’m not sure how much one coyote is going to do to keep the rat population in check, but I’m sure there are other benefits to be had. Begin the trophic cascade!