thunder moon

an update featuring more questions than answers

I’m moving to Pennsylvania on Wednesday to camp for the rest of the summer at the Hartley farm and work on repairing the cabin and the orchard, and feeling pretty scattered and chaotic, so instead of a longer-form essay this time around, here’s a list of things I’m wondering about:

• how old does a cat need to be in order to be safely neutered? (I could google this)

• what do I think about past lives? The idea certainly stands directly in conflict with what I was taught about the afterlife, but I do think the concept of reincarnation is sort of lovely in its own way. Do we come back as different beings after we die? Alternatively, but adjacently, are we extensions of our ancestors’ lives? I like that notion - that our family lineage literally lives on through us, that my great great great grandmother is alive in the gifts, genetic and otherwise, that she passed down to me. When I stand picking gooseberries in my parents’ garden and feel an inimitable joy and delight, feel mysteriously grounded and at home in the task, am I merely experiencing the blessed simplicity of an ancient, elemental human activity, or is there something more to it? Am I experiencing some kind of little resurrection of a friend who came before?

• am I capable of repairing a really broken truck?

• when I ask ‘am I capable,’ am I really asking, ‘am I willing to get my shit together and do this’?

• on the other hand, maybe I should just pay someone.

• does anyone want to pay me to make their website look nice for them?

• does anyone want to pay me to make art for them?

• why am I so bad at making money?

• will I ever get my shit together and get over being a scaredy cat and make my own actual art again?

• what am I so afraid of?

• any nice carpenters want to come hang for the summer and be my friend?

• when am I gonna get a dog?

• suddenly got super curious about the medieval conception of a geocentric universe the other day (I could google this). Somebody described the whole thing as ‘concentric circles of universal existence,’ and I couldn’t get that out of my head. I think we write off the entire idea super quickly, because, yeah, the earth isn’t the center of the universe. But I’m curious about the spiritual side of that - I love that idea of concentric circles of being - things we can’t see encompassing us and connecting us because they’re bigger than us, on a physical level as well as spiritual. Did we throw the spiritual baby out with the physics bathwater on that one?

• what do my dreams mean? I had a weird one with a white rooster the other night where the tide came in in Ipswich and almost washed out my old van and it left me thinking about the fleeting nature of possessions and the fact that my friends do actually love me. Lots to consider.

• I find myself right at the moment that I’ve been waiting for. and I’m wondering - do I have what it takes? Can I meet the moment as it comes? That all sounds so dramatic. Wherever you go, there you are. I’m never worried about the right things.

In sum, I’ve got a lot of questions, and not a lot of answers. What are you wondering about this full moon?

bonus picture of kittens (Sister and Chef Marlo Stanfield):

until the next full moon i love you guys

xoxo dh