trail of footprints

awesomealtart: This elaborate, breathtaking painting by Anna Christenson portrays Jack, a character from Charles de Lint’s otherworldly novel Someplace to be Flying.

One of my favourite books, by one of my favourite authors.  The story of how Raven made the world, but he’s always losing the Very Important World-Making Pot, & Coyote is trying to find the pot so he can stir it & change the world & fix it from the last time he stirred it & messed it up.  & everyone is caught in the middle, & the Crow Girls feature heavily. 

At the beginning of Someplace to be Flying, is this bit of poetry:

So I asked the raven as he passed by,
I said, “Tell me, raven, why’d you make the sky?”
“The moon and stars, I threw them high,
I needed someplace to be flying.”

—Kiya Heartwood, from “Wyoming Wind”

Charles de Lint was in town doing a book signing recently, & this is one of the books I took to have signed (I videoed bits of the talk here).  He told me he was happy to see my beat up copies of his books :)

Um. Boat + giant nest + abandoned house + giant horned skull + twinkle lights + a bunch of twigs. It’s like, the recipe for a magic ritual to sail away to the moon. (take me with you!)

Photo by Mike Bailey Gates, more here. (beware, there’s fashion photos & models & similar crap)

(via likeshesg0ld)

ecritureacreature:

It’s been really, really cold & wet & windy & altogether miserable & very un-May-like for the past… month? Two months? Six months? Year minus that one week in March where it was inexplicably eighteen degrees & no one could believe it?

I’m banking on the fact that karma owes me a hot summer. And in the meantime, lest the above happen to me again, I am hibernating in my bedroom with a small mountain of notes & the taste of The Book Thief still on my lips from last night. (Maybe I’ve tasted love before & haven’t brushed my teeth in a while.)

May where I am is the rainy month, & it’s so amazing.  Thunderstorms & everything getting so green and lush. 

We should switch places, because later the summer here will be scorching hot & sunny & I’ll miss the rain. 

Filmed early April, 2012 in the Elora Gorge, Ontario, where I grew up, & a place that I’ve come to consider as something like Canada’s Glastonbury, but where the myth has yet to be made. The day I filmed this, I hiked between Fergus & Elora along the Catarct Trail, and all along the Gorge in Elora, about seven hours of hiking in the end. I laid down near where I filmed this, on the edge of the water, across from a small cave, and just felt the wind & sun & the earth buzzing beneath me. The music is Otterly, by Cocteau Twins: www.cocteautwins.org.

(a blog post I wrote for work today. Last night was a huge thunderstorm, and I’ve been buzzing all day from it.)

Thunderstorms & the “Supermoon”

This Saturday, May 5 will be the largest moon of the year, and it happens to be a full moon.

The moon passes through cycles of “perigee” and “apogee”, in which it moves closer (perigee) and further (apogee) from the earth, because the moon’s orbit isn’t completely circular. This full moon will be only 221,802 miles from earth, making it appear 16% brighter than average. Notably, this perigee moon will affect the earth’s oceans more than usual, creating much stronger tides for a few weeks.

Interestingly, this year’s largest moon coincides with the onset of the thunderstorm season here in Southern Ontario. Thursday evening (May 3) saw the first major storm of spring, with sheet and forked lightning spreading across the sky and booming thunder. The humidity still in the air suggests more storms to come.

So, what do we take away from all this? Well, it’s an excellent time to charge crystals and divinatory tools with the energy of the full moon. It’s also a good time to think about the celestial bodies that rotate above us, largely unseen, and our own place in the larger cosmos. Some ancient peoples believed that lightning came to us from the other planets, and in modern times we’ve witnessed lightning on both Jupiter and Venus, two very stormy neighbouring planets. In Roman mythology, the god Jupiter was said to be responsible for throwing lightning bolts into the sky (Zeus, in Greek mythology).

Thunderstorms themselves, for many of us, can be contradictory: the smashing of the thunder, the heavy rainfall, the danger of lightning and the potential for tornadoes all suggest a violence coming down on us from the heavens, disrupting our lives in ways we can’t control. Many of us even grew up believing that thunder was caused by divine anger. But at the same time, thunderstorms can evoke a sense of comfort and home: we light candles (even when the power hasn’t gone out), we curl up with a loved one and watch the lightening and listen to the sound of rain hitting the windows or the roof. The eerie quiet and slanted light before the onset of the storm; the immense power of the storm itself; and the smell of the earth after the storm combine to create an ethereal, unearthly, magical experience that, if we allow it, can leave us feeling refreshed, spiritually charged, and more in touch with divinity.

Use this magical time of year, and Saturday night especially, to charge both your spiritual tools and yourself. Take time to look upward; at the moon, at the stars, at the planets, at the lightning if another storm comes. Though we can no longer see the night sky the way our ancestors could because of light pollution, the moon and lightning are still there for us, visible to us just as they were to our ancestors.

Click through to the Wonderworks blog for some fun facts about lightning »

(via witchywonderworks)

by the acid dream spaceship

I would add to #6: & also get up at the same time every day.

(via four-sided-triangle)

I do this too, mostly with historical characters. 

(Source: fantasyconfessions)

I had the same thought when I first had sex.  “Oh, now I’ll never see a unicorn!”

(Source: fantasyconfessions)

I went to a book talk & signing with Charles de Lint last week.  He’s been among my favourite authors for about fifteen years, and this is the first chance I’ve had to see him in person.  I was nervous talking to him when he was signing my books, but he was super nice and friendly and made conversation with me, even though he’d already signed a million books before me, and must have been exhausted.

Also in the video are Jay Asher and Leslie Livingston.  I’m sorry I only focused on Charles de Lint; he was the one I was there to see, and I didn’t have enough battery or patience to film the entire thing.