Graveyard Dirt: Two Worlds and In-between

Toadstool Woods

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Hunting in the Scottish gloam for scarlet-capped fairy tale mushrooms.

August 27th, 2010 II

The August 27th, 2010 story doesn't actually end with the discovery of #01. (What, you were expecting an easy fucking read? Honey, I'm Ms. Dirty - every-motherfucking-thing I do is overly complicated and supremely fucking epic.) After a week of non-stop Harvest work - i.e., from dawn till dusk foraging, late night (and early fucking morning) wild mushroom processing, fleshing roadkill, bone cleaning, graveyard garden hooching and preparing my container garden (aka Gothel's Garden) for the inevitability of winter - I had to throw my towel in early last night due to some low energy levels.

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I mean, what kind've weak ass initiatory experience would have me running down a Scottish country road at six in the fucking morning with Chippy strapped to my back - all, like, papoose-style - as the mummified remains of a roadkill deer ecstatically swing in a plastic bag hanging off my arm for all the early commuters to see only once? To ensure that I'd forever be emblazoned as the crowned queen of fucking weirdos to the very local people of this community the Universe decided I needed to repeat the performance, stat.

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Within an hour of cramming #01's dehydrated body into a grocery bag and running breathlessly to my car with a muffin-top of bones'n'fur (much to the confusion, disgust and wonder of passing drivers; which, hey, is to be expected, but if you ask me - I'll just pretend you did (you're welcome, btw!) - the real confusion, disgust and wonder comes from the crazy fucking idea of spending 6-10 hours in a cage thinly disguised as a semi-personal office cubicle), I was, once again, running breathlessly to my car with another plastic bag bulging with the dried remains of a second roadkill deer (#02; a juvenile).

My motherfucking trunk? Packed. (<- Just FYI: I'm still talkin' about the car, although that statement's totally applicable to other areas of my life...ahem.) Despite the severe lack of trunk space - it's not like my ass wasn't warned, right? - August 27th, 2010's day of initiatory experiences wasn't over just yet.

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I didn't know at the time, but I had one more significant find to make because I had one last niggling curiosity to sate.

It was curiosity that pulled on my fucking reigns as I began passing the familiar skank ass carpet, so I slowed the fuck down until the rolled up offcut transformed into the motherfucking deer I had been waiting for. It was curiosity that lured my adrenaline-buzzing body out of the effing car and into a coniferous hedge with hopes of locating a basket worth of pine-lovin' boletes that lead to #02's discovery (and subsequent rescue), and it was that same siren song of curiosity that drew me out of my car one last fucking time because I had to know just one more goddamn thing before going home that day: what the fuck did the Black Laird's loch look like?

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It wasn't growing on the banks of the Devil-ridden loch, but along the moss-covered footpath leading up to the manmade reservoir. Nestled snuggly between the fairy tale dimples of a shadow-filled forest was one perfect toadstool (Amanita muscaria) swaddled in woodland down. It was the first fly agaric I had ever seen, ever touched, and ever held, and when my deer-scented fingers sank into the damp cool of the earth to accept the chthonic (psychoactive) gift I suddenly understood the intrinsic connection between me, the deer, the Old Woman, our land and the ancient, conscious entity living beneath our collective feet.

This is how I became the Old Woman's resurrectionist butcher, and its story of initiation, death and rebirth? Has finally been told.

From Dawn Till Dusk

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One Goddamn Picture

Two days ago I: made an edible anointing oil from herbs growing out of the garden container with #01's remains, used one of my in-laws' crystal vases to macerate some pheasant bones (if you don't tell them they'll never notice), finally pulled out all the motherfucking fireweed and ragwort that's been driving Italics's allergies in-fucking-sane, made an executive decision to prune all the effing patio shrubs Mr. Awesome's been ignoring, tackled five years worth of invasive ivy that's slowly destroyed our fucking fence, seriously contemplated the possibility of pulling Mr. Awesome's non-hedge hedge out and planting something actually useful (i.e., elder), recklessly bounced way too enthusiastically for far too long on an epic mountain of garden debris (to compact the shit into a bag...well, mostly to compact the shit into a bag), freed one of the plum trees from being completely swallowed by a neighbor's tall line of monster fucking cedars and then watched the setting sun illuminate portions of the backyard for the first time in fucking years.

And I didn't take one goddamn picture.

Yesterday I: dragged my sore fucking ass outside to examine and flesh the heads of #08, #09 and #10, shallowly buried the decomposing remains I removed from their skulls so our fox(es) have access to a quick meal, packed the three flayed deer heads into my upgraded roadkill altar to begin the process of rot, checked on the assorted pieces of #01, #02, #03, #04 and #05 macerating in one of the outside rooms, potted on some home-fucking-grown comfrey seedlings, excavated the skeletal remains of Love & Sorrow's mature rabbit from one of my gardening pots, transplanted one of my container lavenders using some of the decayed rabbit dirt, dressed my sage, bay tree and tiny little gooseberry plant with leftover rabbit dirt, paid a visit to the roadkill graveyard situated beneath our office window (where fleshy remains are buried until they become bone), clipped small coniferous tufts from huge motherfucking juniper branches (pruning casualty; why let good magic shit go to waste?) and spent the next eight motherfucking hours in the fucking kitchen rubbing my hands raw by squeezing juice out of seven motherfucking pounds of wild necro-gooseberries - by fucking hand - to make four different motherfucking types of Hedgerow Hooch.

And I didn't take one goddamn picture.

Today I: swore my supremely sore fucking ass that I'd take the day off until I remembered the last time I performed any sort of mushroom sweep was last Friday (work is work, Internet), cackled madly - and even paused to call Italics mid-picking - at the completely unexpected porcini harvest, stumbled across a new bolete-tastic hot spot situated between two other bolete-tastic hot spots, indulgently savored the first mothereffin' brambles of the season, paused to admire the late evening sun reflecting across the ripe blackberries' latex shine, briefly returned home for Italics so we could toadstool hunt together near the banks of the Black Laird's loch, crawled through low-hanging boughs of birch and pine, and scrambled over crumbling, lichen-encrusted walls filling a second magic wooden basket with cherry-red agarics, a birch bolete explosion of massive fucking proportions and the incomplete remains of a carrion crow, single-handledly cleaned - and processed! - 1085 grams of porcini, 1194 grams of mixed boletes and 8 effing toadstools for dehydration, stirred every fucking 2011 Hedgerow Hooch (all (lucky) 13 of them), made a helluva meal which included homemade holubsti (Ukrainian stuffed cabbage) inexcusably smothered with leftover Poulet Marengo sauce and a quick chorizo-smoked pancetta-homegrown sage chicken thing, prepped #11's body for its future funeral and watery interment, and preened vainly in the mirror all evil sorceress-style when I caught the secondhand stains of midnight sex smeared garishly across my lower face.

And I didn't take one goddamn picture.

Lost'n'Found

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How do you locate a lost cairn? Take a loaf of bread, a pomegranate and a bottle of water to the projected location and walk around until you trip over absolutely nothing. Lost cairn? Found.

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Other things found on this adventure: more porcini and fly agarics, an unseasonal badger roadkill (too far gone to take, although I did manage to rescue a piece of jaw with some teeth), nearly ripe currants, crazily ripe raspberries, almost ripe gooseberries, blooming comfrey and two new mushroom hot spots.

Aug. 31st, 2010

Two days ago my oldest friend in the world got married (oh, we go back to the first fucking day of 3rd grade), and my fat, psychopomp-attractin' ass wasn't there. (<- Long story involving lumps (of the worrying HOLY SHIT, ONE'S IN YOUR FUCKING TESTICLE?! kind), broken cars, the lack of a valid driver's license and a certain injured crow (who, incidentally, has begun perfecting its trepanning technique).)

And the worst fucking part? I mean, other than not being there in some sort of vampire-goth-witch designer dress (she made a special request that harkened way back to my teenage years) to exercise all the liberties that only the oldest fucking friend in the world can get away with? She admitted that she was going to force me - in my vampire-goth-witch glory - to read from the good fucking book during the marriage ceremony.

(Cue a never-fucking-ending string of Cartmanesque GODDAMMIT, GODAMMIT!, with each repetition being more fucking ridiculous than the one before. <- But, like, ~forever~.)

Why the fuck am I even mentioning this? Because without her there would be no Ms. Dirty. Or, at least, the dirty wouldn't be the grimy-nasty-algae-scented-sloppy-mud-splattered-nude-body-running-through-the-motherfucking-hedges-and-feral-fields-with-a-recently-found-detached-deer-leg dirty y'all love (and/or hate) today. She might've not created the spark, but she definitely cultivated it, nurtured it and encouraged it to flourish.

Too young to be self-conscious we tore through Midwest thickets around her small farm with wild, half-naked abandon decimating quiet, peaceful patches in irrigation streams (until the clear water ran brown with disturbed silt), scaling deformed, toppled willows bare-footed (much to the chagrin of buzzed deer hunters who had a slightly harder time clambering up to their tree house hunting lofts) and always returning home muddy, bleeding, and tired, but full of anecdotal tales which, to this fucking day, we still reminisce over as if they happened last effing week.

(Our parents, in particular, loved our WE ALMOST GOT EATEN BY WILD FUCKING HOGS! story. <- For fuck's sake! THERE WERE MOTHERFUCKING PIGS IN THE MOTHERFUCKING WOODS! How the fuck were we supposed to know they weren't fucking Cujo hogs? Jesus.)

So, for soppy, sentimental reasons this entry - in which I introduce you lot to my little secret hedge - is dedicated to my first, oldest and most beloved hedge sister: Nicole (even though she has no idea this site exists*, and that I finally found a way to profit off my eagerness to get naked, get dirty and get as goddamn wild as Nature will let me).

* She's just married into the FBI; the less they know about my amphetamine-fueled gardening sessions the better.

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This hella expired bolete mushroom's a lot more fucking useful than it seems. In the cutthroat world of mushroom hunting (you think I'm fucking joking?) it's known as a flag; a large specimen that alerts would-be pickers that they're in prime mushroom country. Normally flags are too deteriorated to consume (although there are occasional exceptions), but they do provide valuable information about the different sorts of mycelia underfoot. When you find one of these fuckers - and it's of an edible variety - take note, that's a spot you'll want to return to next year for a fresher crop. The bolete season in this hedgerow had already past by August 31st, which means it'll be one of the first stretches of local land to provide the very first fungal fruits of 2011.

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While trying to sniff out younger boletes (which I found, but they were also too far gone for a pleasant eating experience) amongst old beech trees and grass-encrusted rock formations I spied something excitingly old and fabulously rusty nestled amongst moss, lichen and stone.

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Internet, I give you Thor's motherfucking hammer. (<- Actually, it's an ancient-as-fuck piece of bicycle that somehow miraculously draped itself across a small boulder for Christ knows how fucking long until I found it (TRANSLATION: not Mjöllnir), but you get the point.) Leaving it would've been a waste of a perfectly good symbolic omen, so it got tucked into one of my magic wooden baskets and hauled back home for future witchcrafting.

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One of the many spectacular views from my secret little hedge. In the distance you can see the purple bloom of wild heather hugging the exposed cap of a nearby hill, and the all-to-familiar ragged line of pine trees that farmers use to separate forested wilderness from open agricultural fields.

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Amethyst Deceivers (Laccaria amethystea); they might look poisonous, but they're not. I was so goddamn focused on BIG EFFING GAME (i.e., porcini and toadstools) last year that I never allotted myself any other edible wild mushroom harvest time. Hopefully this year I'll remember to bag myself a couple of baskets of deceivers when out foraging in the woods. (These fuckers? Love beech trees. Find a row of beeches and you'll almost always find amethyst deceivers, toadstools and a variety of boletes.)

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What's good about a single fucking bilberry (also known round these parts as blaeberry and whortleberry)? One's all you need to help you realize you're standing in a patch of wild motherfucking blueberry bushes. You can see I JUST missed out on 2010's crop, but now that I know where I can locally source wild blueberries (they are slightly different from blueberries, but they're close enough for me to be fucking lazy about it) we're planning multiple trips this year to ensure a bottle of homemade liqueur, a batch of hedgerow jam and enough dried reserves for multiple installments of my new favorite Ukrainian dish: dried fruit compote.

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If my ass goes into the wild you can be sure of two fucking things: I will come out with an assortment of bones, and I will desperately have to take a motherfucking piss within two seconds of entering any sort of woodland. (That last curse? Has dogged me all of my goddamn life. I'm so naturally fucking pushy that I can't help but mark my territory wherever the fuck I go.)

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While crawling through the hedgerow - just after being knee-deep in bilberry bushes - I stumbled across the whitewashed remains of a long dead deer. I scoured the area for other whiter-than-fucking-white pieces, but only found a single rib bone and part of the spinal column. This wasn't the only encounter I had with deer on the 31st; after my hedgerow expedition I rescued my first skinnable roadkill doe (#4; my lactating doe), so in addition to everything I found, foraged and ferreted out in my secret little hedge I also had an adult roe deer to wrestle with once I got home.

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The sun - partially obscured by towering pines - eased through branches and crevices, leaving marks of dappled light along my shadowy, fern-filled path.

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A miniature forest of infant beeches bursting out of their protective braces.

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Too afraid that the forest would steal me away I stuck to the darkened, shrub-choked hedge and gingerly tip-toed around the illuminated paths (<- sometimes shit's overly inviting for a reason) as I made my way back to the car.

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Something managed to enjoy this fly agaric (Amanita muscaria) before I could, so I left the partially eaten toadstool behind. When I returned for my second dose of hedge exploration the local rabbits were kind enough to leave a little magic out for me.

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Chippy; my foraging companion. When Italics can't join me in my rural adventures I take Chippy to keep my ass company (laugh if you want, but he's got a sharp fucking nose for roadkill - he's successfully nailed several outcomes before I managed to start the goddamn car). For obvious reasons he spends the majority of the time strapped to my back like a motherfucking papoose, but he gets his 15 minutes of freedom when it's time for lunch. (<- I try and keep him leashed; cattle and sheep react badly to my presence when I'm out "walking" him, so to spare us from a stampede he's not allowed free reign outdoors unless it's in the yard.)

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As if the first exploration of my secret little hedge wasn't successful enough, I found the chthonic nesting site of stinging, parasitic insects. (<- It takes a true witch to see potential in all things, and it takes a really fucking hacked-the-fuck-off witch to flex that potential.)(<- Consider that one of the few warnings I ever publicly make, Internet.)

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I'm an equal opportunity forager to the point that scavenging has become more of a lifestyle than hobby. It doesn't matter what the fuck it is - i.e., dropped jewelry, rusting farm equipment, dead animals, reduced-to-clear-food and, in this case, the remains of a pheasant egg - if it's in my path then it was most certainly meant to be. In addition to being a bone magnet (snort), I have a weird ass talent for finding discarded wild bird eggs. (Psst! If you're looking for eggshell fragments from carrion crows or game birds I'm totally your dealer.)

May 10th, 2011

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I'll be completely fucking honest with y'all - I love every effing aspect of my roadkill work (from building altars, exercising funerary rites, to carefully fishing out still-warm organs with my bare fucking hands - which, BTW, isn't recommended, but it does give you a better entrails reading) except for having to tackle pictorial logs of our rescue expeditions. Because, really, what the fuck do I have to cleverly offer other than "OH, HEY, CHECK IT OUT - ANOTHER DEAD ANIMAL WE FOUND" with each passing picture? So it goes without saying that I deliberately leave the tres undesirable work* for as long as fucking possible in the hopes that somehow it'll miraculous write itself up (hey, it could happen).

* When you designate evisceration, flaying and psychoactive-fueled butchery as "FUN AND AWESOME WORK OMG" there's only one direction for the coma-inducing boredom of record keeping to go - it becomes the dirty work you try to avoid with almost every motherfucking inch of your life.

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Even though I've had my eye on it for years, May 10th was the first time we managed to explore this particular carrion crow rookery. It's very local - by car, anyway - although it's set back in agricultural fields and scrub woodland so the nesting sites (there seem to be several very large clusters) are a safe distance from the hustle and bustle of human life. (<- I've seen way too many fledglings flattened by cars due to rookeries being built over areas of heavy fucking traffic.)

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I haven't had a chance to sort, edit and upload the funeral pictures - so I can't check my Flickr photostream for verification, and I'm too goddamn lazy to hunt down my physical roadkill journal/log - but I think we left the rookery that day with the remains of 10 carrion crow fledglings that died a natural death. (Not necessarily a painless, comfortable or easy death; just a death that wasn't at the hands - whether intentional or not - of humans.) My roadkill crows tend to be unlucky adults or inexperienced juveniles, but my fledglings are almost always found at the base of their nests. (As you may have already guessed, birds have a devastating infant mortality rate - something like 1 out of every 3 or 4 actually make it past a certain stage of life - so the body count isn't abnormal, even if it is heartbreaking.)

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OH, HEY, CHECK IT OUT - ANOTHER DEAD ANIMAL WE FOUND! (Snort.)

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Even though we pass by this field every effing time we perform any sort've roadkill round-up we've never, ever noticed this so-suave-it's-super-fucking-natural stallion. The second it caught sight of us walking back to the car it immediately began posing for pictures, and we couldn't help but stop for a few minutes to immortalize the uber ridiculous vogue-like flaunting (oh, that motherfucker was workin' it).

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The majority of our rookery excursion was beneath a heavily overcast sky, but - and I kid you not - the second we became aware of the suave stallion's presence the rolling clouds parted and a single ray of sunlight broke through the crevice and fell like a heavenly beacon RIGHT ON THE MOTHERFUCKING HORSE. We stood mesmerized as that solitary beam expanded, engulfing the entire field with warm, radiant light while Euan Garlogie, wonder horse extraordinaire, effortlessly stole the moment by striking many a pose.

Gone to Flowers

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Where have all the graveyards gone? Gone to flowers, everyone.

June 3rd, 2011

Today's going to be a helluva push. It's Chippy's birthday - which we've expanded to "Animal Appreciation Day" this year - so a cake's got to be baked (a middle eastern pound cake using goat-based milk, butter and yogurt), this year's homemade strawberry vodka needs to be made (strawberries are one of his favorite foods) and we've got to haul our collective asses into town to run errands and pick up super special offerings (Burger King; don't ask me why, but spirits, animals and almost anything with a cock goes in-fucking-sane for flame-broiled burgers), party hats and mealworms for a certain injured crow.

Because I'm running on a tight schedule this morning I'm going to (mostly) skip the word count thing and sweetly serenade you guys with photos of an old Scottish kirkyard (churchyard) I discovered on the 3rd, along with one or two quick shots of a local castle I passed (Craigievar) when returning home. (Yeah, you nailed it: this is a pic dump journal entry, but isn't it a glorious fucking pic dump journal entry?) I haven't hammered out any commentary to go with the photos, but everything'll get explained away later since Italics is really fucking keen to explore the new graveyard - and I'm equally as keen to take him there for early morning cemetery sex - so you can expect a better set of pictures in the near future.

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5:30 AM

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At 5:30 in the morning there was only me, the dead and the early summer sun.

August 26th, 2010

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The woods of a broken crow, wild, edible mushrooms, forgotten feathers, misplaced bones and, once upon a time, seven lousy rabbits.

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Scotland Sunset

Another Scotland sunset...

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Jan. 13th Drive

It's been a busy fucking day, so I never got a chance to write a proper journal entry. In lieu of your daily dose of Ms. Dirty swearing here's 13 photos Italics took during our first foray out of the house since late October. (How good is it to be back in the wild? Words cannae even describe.)

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Between Two Worlds

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In Scotland there are worlds within worlds. They're parallel to ours, but separate, occasionally merging for the briefest of moments when the hard outlines of our realities get smudged. Before we had a car we'd creep down to the new cemetery at dawn and watch the otherworldly spectacle unfold, envelope the green countryside and gently evaporate beneath the warm glow of the rising sun.

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It was a supernatural procession that, up until this year, I was forced to watch from the sidelines; always aware that something intensely special was happening, but never close enough to take part. "We're here," it'd say, and every fucking year I'd pace the dew-soaked grass, following the unearthly veil of white that was just out of my reach stretch across dimpled hills and pint-sized mountains and think "I see".

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All I ever did, though, was see...at least until this year. This year I stood in that same dew-soaked cemetery where the row of beeches were nothing but dark shadows cutting into ephemeral mist, where the crows rose up into the bruised belly of the sky, shrieking, crying and cackling as the day began to materialize, where the hilltops - distant but tantalizingly close - blazed purple and magenta in the early morning light.

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This year I stood before everything that was familiar, loved and only just out of reach, but I stood there, in quiet ceremony, holding car keys. This year I was the procession, and the car a slow moving bullet piercing a passage through one world into another. This year we rode through the heart of the bleeding tear, music sinking into the dense white mist, the sounds of a wild hunt - our wild, human hunt with joyous laughter and new age synthesizers (Enya's "The Celts" album) - disappearing into fog-obscured fields, meadows and woods.

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This year I said to that world - to that brief, but annual, rip in the fabric of reality that allows us and them to intermingle for the briefest of moments - "I'm here", and it replied "we see". And for a short time, for a few months, we both existed harmoniously between two worlds.

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PS: For obvious reasons these pictures are best viewed in their original size in the dark.

Dunnottar Walk, March 4th

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So, it's the first of December. (I KNOW, I KNOW - RIGHT?) And while northeast Scotland sleeps beneath feet of unblemished snow (I swear to fuck that the Cailleach washed EVERYONE'S GODDAMN PLAID in the whirlpool recently; if She asks, you don't have any dirty fucking laundry, understand?) I found myself fondly reminiscing over the first flowers of spring I encountered (a clump of yellow crocuses growing along the gravel walkway leading to Dunnottar Castle) all the way back in March.

Then I realized I never managed to share those images - with an exception of the ass one (yeah, that joke doesn't get old in this house...sorry) - and figured that the first day of the last month of this year was as good as any to introduce you to the majestic ruins of one of Scotland's most famous castles.

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I still remember this day vividly. This was our first excursion out to Stonehaven - a small town famous for it's Hogmanay fire festival - on a bright, but cold, spring day. It was the first time I drove to the sea, and when we trailed up and over the last hill crest that obscured the coastal view and caught the rippling blue water expanding out to the horizon I began crying.

After nearly ten fucking years of waiting, longing and isolation I was finally able to drive myself to a large body of water, dip my hands into the freezing liquid and wash my body clean. After nearly a fucking decade my Pisces moon was reunited with something larger, something grander and more profound than a fucking bathtub filled with sea-scented bubble bath. My ten year "dry" stint was over, and as someone who swam before she walked going dry was a hard fucking sacrifice to make.

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The castle itself is situated on a tiny island-like peninsula jutting out into the ocean attached to the rest of the countryside by a thin slope of land. A deep ass gorge gouges its way to the shore, and an otherwise unspectacular burn becomes a cascading waterfall the moment it rolls off the flat fields and over a rocky craig.

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The walkway leading to the castle isn't as precarious as it seems. The main trail's graveled and shoots straight to the ruins, but there are tinier, thread-like capillaries that've been created by countless tourists who want a better picture (or a riskier path to explore).

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The fresh water burn that transforms into a waterfall before the turbulent flow's channeled through the gorge and into the sea. I've visited Dunnottar several times since moving here, but I've never bothered exploring the countryside across the land break - I'm always way too fucking eager to pass all of my time at the ocean's shore.

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Only one room in the entire complex is complete, everything else is in glorious, hollowed out ruins. That single room, though, is a furnished hall fitted with modern conveniences so it's often booked by couples for weddings and wedding receptions. The only other castle that I feel rivals Dunnottar for it's awe-inspiring scenery is Drum, which has its own medieval chapel, pet cemetery and untouched ancient woodland that once was used as royal hunting grounds.

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I fucking hate seagulls. I know I'm running a spiritual MISTRESS OF THE BEASTS scheme, but the one fucking animal I can't abide by is motherfucking seagulls. They're noisy, aggressive and travel in decimating posses. If I put a plate of food out for our birds that fucking plate will last all day long and feed a variety of locals (everything from tiny little house sparrows to boisterous magpies and intimidatingly large crows), but if the seagulls find it? They crash the party, eat all of the goddamn food and break the plate - all in the matter of five fucking minutes.

When we visited Dunnottar in March we could see something was up, and after several long minutes of staring and wondering it became stupidly obvious - it was courtship season. All along the rocky face of the gorge pairs of seagulls were intimately involved, dancing, cuddling, cooing and displaying. I've never seen anything like it, at least not in real life. And, fine, I admit it - my heart soften just a little bit witnessing the tender affection between the birds, but it only lasted for the season of seagull foreplay.

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Italics' postcard perfect photo. (<- I keep insisting we should print these off as postcards, but he doesn't seem to think that the image is good enough.)

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Here's that narrow slope of land that connects the island-like peninsula to the mainland. To the right - just over the rocky shoulder fading into the lower corner of the picture - you can make out the pebble shoreline.

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Getting to the castle is the easy part, getting back to the fucking car park, though, is a monumental task. After spending a long day investigating ruins and exploring the wild shoreline you have climb up a concrete staircase cutting into the side of a hill (which is just as tall as Dunnottar's "island"). "Feel the burn" is something you experience instantly rather than waking up to it the morning after.

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I know it isn't obvious in any of the previous pictures, but a drawbridge shaped tunnel was carved through the base of the rocky outcropping to give the castle inhabitants quick access to the otherwise inaccessible beach at the foot of Dunnottar.

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...and here's me and my fat ass making that beach inaccessible to others. (It's true; you really can't take me anywhere.)

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Dunnottar has two beaches: one to the right (which is open, long and requires no effort to get to), and one to the left (which is private, small and requires you to cut through the tunnel and then crawl along a perilous dirt track that winds down the steepest motherfucking nettle-covered hill I've ever seen). The left shoreline is only accessible via the tunnel and Suicide Hill so its tiny, secluded cove with towering rocky cliffs and grottos carved out of ancient stone walls aren't normally crawling with tourists.

I would've very much liked to show you guys what those towering cliffs and damp grottos look(ed) like, but in our excitement we kind've sort've forgot to take pictures while playing on the shore. With an exception of a tiny rock pool, this is the only picture of the beach that was taken. (Sorry, I'll try harder next time. If it's any consolation, we had a super amazing awesome time and came home with a trunk full of tide-related treasure.)

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Here's a picture from the shoreline, but not OF the shoreline. I've been up to the ruined castle once or twice, but I can't remember what those two gigantic towers housed. I do know, though, that you get to climb up within them, and those are some small ass steps.

PS: This photo? Gives absolutely no fucking indication how massive those rocky cliffs really are. Cause, dude, from the beach they seem to fucking soar.

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And while I'm on the topic of ruins I should probably explain why there aren't any close-up shots of the castle: it costs money. Visiting castle grounds is free (which is pretty standard throughout Scotland), but to explore the remnants of Dunnottar (or the internal workings of any castle) you have to pay a fee. We're planning on getting ourselves a National Trust card for 2011 (it's like a season's pass to most of the historical monuments of the country), so next year - hopefully! - you'll be seeing a lot more of the castles, houses and walled gardens we visit.

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I resent the deceptive perspective of this picture; it's called Suicide Hill for a reason, goddammit. (<- And that shit's coming from someone who spiritually identifies herself with a motherfucking sure-footed goat.)

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The secluded beach isn't really a rock pooling beach, but it does have a few slabs of jutting stone that peek out of the water during low tide. Within those rough, jagged plateaus are small pockets of water where loose stones have ground into hard rock and formed smooth basins filled with tiny treasures.

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The tumultuous fresh water from the burn turned waterfall eventually gives way to a meandering creek which gently cuts into the belly of the gully before snaking its way through the heavily pebbled shore to the North Sea.

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What was nine months ago, will be again in three. And then, a year from now, I'll sit where I am today reminiscing about spring's first flowers on a cold winter's morning.

Oct. 2nd, 2010

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It blows my fucking mind that I've been doing the same things since late July (picking wild mushrooms, working with roadkill, harvesting wild food and preserving everything that comes into the house) and I haven't had the time to recap one day worth of "work". I've posted solitary pictures of what I've been up to, but I've never fulfilled the numerous "I HAVE AN ENTIRE FOLDER OF PHOTOS, SO EXPECT A MUCH MORE IN-DEPTH JOURNAL ENTRY SOON" promises made. (Uh...sorry?)

This particular foray started a 9AM in an old Scottish cemetery, and ended, at home, around 5PM when I brushed clean the very last porcini mushroom picked on the grounds of a local castle. (I was absolutely shattered. This was my first full 24 hour day in a long ass time and we hit a cemetery, visited/made an offering to my wild rabbits, did some grocery shopping, visited #6 (and discovered she was gone), did some garden center shopping, picked mushrooms at a castle, took clippings from the castle's woods and stopped at the standing stone circle/cairn to leave an offering.)

October 2nd had tremendous ups and downs, but it finished on a familiar note - a basket full of mushrooms, the remains of dead animals and a fistful of chlorophyll-powered flora.

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Currants and cemeteries seem to go hand in hand here, but I haven't figured out the connection. Usually you find them bordering the old, old cemeteries, and those are the graveyards that typically have yew and beech. Because they haven't been pruned or kept for fruit, the bushes have grown into towering shrubs that produce very little berries. (When you do see them they're egg-shaped and hairy; a little bit more primitive looking than the cultivated currants we know today.)

To propagate currants all you have to do is take an appropriately sized clipping (about a foot, but it needs to be new growth), and plant the motherfucker. Even though I'm not a fan of black currants (too menthol) I can appreciate how special these fruiting bushes are, so I've begun taking clippings to grow my own graveyard currants at home.

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Back in August we visited this particular graveyard and I came across the remains of two rabbits. (One on the wall leading into the cemetery, another tucked behind a pair of headstones.) Because we spent the visit picking wild raspberries I didn't want to handle the decomposing bodies. So both were left, although I did offer a thank you and explanation (the graveyard was so freakishly welcoming that day that I felt it would've been rude if I hadn't acknowledged what was given).

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The remains of the rabbit within the graveyard, just behind the two headstones, was hard to leave behind. I had just learned that the feet of a cemetery rabbit was some serious ju-ju. (Which makes sense since I've always associated rabbits and hares with two things: death and sex. Why? Because fucking and dying are the two things they excel at. So to find a pair of back feet within an old Scottish graveyard? Holy shit, magic.) Having tumbled down the rabbit hole once (it was an entire month of gastric agony) I wasn't keen on revisiting that particular journey.

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When I returned, two months later, the same remains were sitting in the same position in the same fucking place. Unthwarted by my first polite refusal the graveyard kept the rabbit tucked away for me, and on my next visit - on October 2nd - I thanked the cemetery for a second time and took the gift of what was left of the dead rabbit. (If you click on the image to view larger sizes you can perfectly see its long, grey nails.)

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Strange gifts from strange places for a strange witch. This particular graveyard brought toads into my life, gave me wild raspberries growing out of open mausoleum, dropped a rusty nail (which look HELLA old) in my pocket, provided currant clippings for my patio garden and kept half a rabbit for me until I was ready to take it home. (I think this means we're going steady?)

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My graveyard goods: three currant clippings, my foraging basket (which serves as our Easter basket when I take Easter Sunday's brunch into town on Holy Saturday to have the contents blessed by a priest) and the sodden remains of the cemetery rabbit. Everything's sitting on a mortsafe - a protective guard that kept the bodies of the deceased safe during the Burke and Hare era of body snatching. This particular graveyard has three or four mortsafes in front of crazily large (and crazily impressive) mausoleum.

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After our cemetery jaunt we were back in the car working our way across the country to check on #6 beneath her oak tree. We stopped at a wild rabbit colony I discovered when exploring an out-of-the-way beech hedge back in August.

When I first stumbled across the warren I found two rabbit skulls while poking around a creepy dead zone beneath gigantic pines. After being nervously ushered to leave by Chippy (that's a whole story within itself; he kept insisting that the spirits of the place found me "shiny" and I shouldn't stay long for that very reason) I found two perfect fly agarics, joined at the base, growing out of the cliff face that marks the beginning of the colony. (Rabbit magic, remember?)

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Whenever I take the roadkill route (I have various routes I take depending on the weather, season and time of day) that passes the beech hedge and cliff-dwelling warren I always stop and leave an offering for the rabbits. (They're my messengers, so I try and stay on their sweet side.)

Since the skull/mushroom day I haven't returned to the dead zone area of the colony, but that'll change once I manage to locate a pair of old ass rhinestone earrings that once belonged to one of my grandmothers. (The spirits want shiny-sparkly? I'll give them something shiny-sparkly that has significant value.)

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By this point in the day we had already visited the graveyard, stopped to make a rabbit offering, picked up a few groceries at a farmer's shop, checked on #6 (only to discover that she was gone), sullenly made purchases at a garden center (organic manure, rooting powder and buffalo wing-flavored pretzel bites) and made our way into the ancient oak hunting grounds of a local castle to take more currant clippings.

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Earlier in the year we discovered currant bushes inexplicably growing just off the beaten path beneath an oak tree. The patch was much more obvious pre-bracken; I actually walked right past it a few months ago because the shrubs had been swallowed whole by pre-historic looking ferns. (If you look closely you can see the grape leaf-like leaves of the currants growing beneath the canopy of bracken.) Next year I'll make a point of clearing the ferns to give the bushes a chance to breathe to see if they'll produce any fruit.

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My second round of currant clippings (another three), the foraging basket you're already acquainted with and my "out in the country" leather backpack that has everything I need when I'm doing my thing in the wild. (i.e., hand sanitizer, baby wipes, plastic bags, Tupperware boxes, a knife, scissors, paper towels, foil-wrapped candies (offerings), my camera, a bottle of water and a ball of string.)

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While Italics was having a slash it occurred to me that I've never really posted pictures of Drum Castle before. Next year, when we get a National Trust* card, I'll focus some of my attention to local landmarks and heritage sites since we'll have a pass that'll allow us indoors to take guided tours. (Visiting the grounds is free, but going within castles and houses costs money.)

* The National Trust of Scotland manages historic sites that have either been donated to the organization or "loaned" (in some cases families still maintain ownership but can't afford with the upkeep, so they move off the property during tourist season to allow NToS to do it's thing and then move back in once the site closes down for the season).

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The oldest part of Drum Castle is the tower (it's supposed to be one of three oldest unaltered tower houses in Scotland, built in the 13th century), everything around it was tacked on later. When you walk around the perimeter of the castle it's insanely easy to spot the Jacobean and Victorian additions. Despite visiting the castle numerous times (it's one of my personal favorites) I've only been indoors once.

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I think that's the castle's well in the corner of the building. Drum - no longer seasonally inhabited by the family - shuts down for the year in October, along with most other historic/heritage sites owned by the National Trust. You can see that the windows' wooden shutters have been drawn for winter.

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I think MAYBE these were stables once, but they're public bathrooms now. (I don't know about the men's bathroom, but the women's bathroom always has a bouquet of fresh flowers cut from the castle's walled garden during tourist season.)

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This is the Victorian addition to Drum Castle. To left is the tower (obviously not pictured), and "behind" the Victorian addition is the Jacobean mansion (also obviously not pictured). I totally forgot to snap a photo of the south-facing Jacobean addition. Once Italics was out of the bathroom my attention turned to mushroom picking (there were comically large fly agarics growing along the driveway leading into the castle that I wanted to snatch up) and I forgot to lazily document the rest of the castle's structure.

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The various buildings that make Drum Castle create this perfect little courtyard enclosed by mortar and stone. That's passionflower trailing up and over the side of the wall and arc.

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I love the turrets and old stone decorative work that dot and accentuate the historical houses here in Scotland.

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One last picture of the castle while migrating towards the toadstools we passed when driving into the grounds.

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Visually, the gigantically domed fly agarics are awe-inspiring, but they're a pain in the fucking ass to dry (I try and maintain the shape as much as possible, which is super easy for small mushrooms but requires constant care and pampering if the toadstool's larger than your palm). The much smaller ones are less fairy tale looking, but they retain their shape perfectly and, unlike the larger ones, never seem to get infested by larvae.

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These were some robust motherfuckers that immediately caught our attention as we drove along the castle's driveway to the parking lot. I was torn between picking them immediately (I lost an entire cropping of fly agarics about a month back when someone decapitated every single toadstool I had been nurturing) and hiking out to the currant bushes. Eventually we decided to deal with the cuttings first, and I bit my nails the entire fucking time worried to hell that some retard would come along and stomp/kick/squash the two prime specimens while I was busy in the oak woodlands.

We actually ended up startling someone by racing down the driveway shouting "NO! NO! THOSE ARE OURS!" when another castle visitor stopped his car in the middle of the driveway and got out to inspect the pair of fly agarics. As it turned out he only wanted to take a picture ("I WAS TELLING MY GIRLFRIEND HOW MUCH LIKE TOAD FROM MARIO BROTHERS THE MUSHROOMS LOOKED AND I WANTED TO GET A PHOTO.") and I had to sheepishly explain why I was so protective over those particular fungi.

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Unearthing potatoes along the castle's driveway? Not quite, but close.

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It's the second most beautiful fruit of the earth in Scotland; porcini (also known as "ceps"). Porcini are considered the king of the mushrooms; an extremely prized fungi whose only real competition is the elusive truffle. The thing about ceps, though - as with the entire family they belong to (the boletes) - is they can't be cultivated. If you've ever enjoyed a porcini risotto, or a cep-spiked autumn casserole you're eating wild mushrooms picked by someone. (Some people have a fear of eating things from the wild, not knowing that some of the food they enjoy is actually from the wild. Porcini is one of those things.)

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There's a strange delight when it comes to picking fly agarics, I think it has to do with the modern's world perception of toadstools. When I see the unmistakable white-specked orange-red caps I see treasure lying out in the open, and an entire world completely oblivious to the brightly-colored gifts dotting the countryside.

I hear "poison" whispered behind my back when people pass as I'm carefully unearthing agarics (I try to keep as much of the mushroom intact as possible; there's something special about the bulbous end of the stalk and I try and retain the toadstool's shape in entirety), and I can't help but feel sadly disappointed. In under two thousand years Man's already forgotten his link to the divine, and what was once sacred and the highest form of communion is now fearfully kicked aside like garbage.

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Porcini are a joy in every respect - finding, picking, cleaning (as with any mushroom you never wash them, to clean them you simply dust debris off with a brush), slicing and drying (I have to use the oven right now - on a super low setting with the door open - but I'm hoping to make enough money from my mushroom sales this year to buy a dehydrator for next year). Boletes are sturdy motherfuckers, and ceps in particular - even the large ones - remain rigidly firm when you cut into them.

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When I performed a Passover ritual a few days earlier I used lambs' bloods from three hearts bought at the grocery store. I wasn't sure how to dispose of the organs - especially since they sat on the sheepskin altar with the blood, blessed herbs and holy water - so I decided to take all three to a local stone circle/cairn as an offering. The ancient, sacred site? Ecstatic with the gifts. (Why else would it have immediately reciprocated the favor by giving me a tiny field of fly agarics growing within its boundaries?)

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While I was carefully digging the motherfuckers out of the ground Italics wandered around the short pine alley leading to the circle snapping photos of the toadstools on my behalf.

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Toadstools past their prime. I took the fresher looking of the two hoping that maybe it wasn't as old as it seemed, but once under the oven's slightly warm fan it quickly disintegrated into a orange-red puddle of larvae mush. Sigh.

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Nature's blazing Eucharist.

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Fresh lambs' hearts situated in the center most ring within the standing stone circle. (There's something like 8 clusters of small, roundish cairns within the larger stone circle.) In all my years of visiting this particular sacred site I've never seen offerings left by anyone else. (If you ever visit this Bronze Age monument and find powder sugar-dusted almond croissants or internal organs you know who the guilty culprit is.)

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There's a farm that's gently envelopes the sacred site, so the stone circle's flanked by pasture fields and a homestead. Almost every time we visit we're eventually greeted by a dog - usually a friendly Jack Russell, last time, though, it was an exceptionally energetic (and enthusiastic) border collie - that has to be coyly distracted from the stones with playful engagement, although I know it's only a momentary fix. The second we're gone the dog probably trots back and enjoys the "people food" I've left on a cairn. (That is, if the crows who roost above in the pines don't get it first.)

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As we were leaving I realized I've never actually posted a picture of the stone circle before here in Graveyard Dirt, so I had Italics turn around and take a quick shot. To the left there's a rowan tree growing (the birds always get the damn berries before I do), and to the right's the homestead (unseen). The long shadow stretching across half the photo is being cast by the small alley of large pine trees leading up to the circle.

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All that remains of my lost #6. When we discovered she was gone we spent part of the morning scouring the entire woodland hedge, but all that was found was this leg. I carried it by her toes as the scent of burning tires trailed behind us (OH, THE BIZARRE SCENTS OF DECOMPOSITION!), crying, while trying not to touch/wipe my wet face with rotting flesh hands.

I know how to guide her spirit back to my herd (so she isn't completely lost), but because I don't have her skull - or anything else - I've decided to keep her permanently and not sell any part of the remains I did manage to find.

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I think this fall under "cosmic compensation", but my personal preference would've been getting my goddamn deer back rather than receiving two baskets of mushrooms. I thanked the Universe anyway, and underlined the fact that deer will ALWAYS have priority over mushrooms; just in case there was any doubt or ambiguity.

In addition to the two baskets of mushrooms (one batch picked from castle grounds, the other from the pine alley leading to the standing stone circle) we also came home with six currant cuttings (three from the graveyard, three from the ancient oak hunting grounds) and the remains of the cemetery rabbit.

We were out of the house by 9 AM and finally back by 4 PM; a long fucking day of work, especially since I had gotten up between 1-3 PM the previous day which meant I was rocking a 24+ hour day.

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The fly agarics in this smaller basket are/were the ones picked at the stone circle/cairn.

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The largest of the toadstools that were picked at Cullerlie (the circle/cairn). I was hoping that I might've just caught it before it got old, but that wasn't the case. (You can already see how "soft" it looks in the center.) Like I mentioned earlier, this particular fly agaric disintegrated once I began drying it out. The other ones, though, were in good condition and dried without a hitch.

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The smaller "button" toadstools. It's tempting leaving these guys behind to bloom fully, but it's a risky gamble. The older/larger mushrooms are more likely to be infested with larvae, they're harder to dry and people are way too fucking tempted to decapitate, smash or kick the fly agarics into oblivion. I harvest them in various stages of growth, but for purely aesthetic reasons the smaller ones are preferred.

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Something's already enjoyed some of this toadstool. I found it growing where the crows nest, which is sort've fitting since the first thing I "saw" when examining the nibbled top was the head of a baby bird. (Can you see it? With the pointed beak and the bulging eyes?)

This particular mushroom has a lot of strong animal attachment - from the critter who previous dined on the fleshy cap (rabbit? mouse? those look like tiny, precise incisors chipping away), to it's location of growth (beneath a crow rookery at a sacred Bronze Age site) and the pattern gouged into the mushroom's dome.

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We actually weighed our bounty (almost all of them are porcini/ceps, but there's three that aren't - they're all from the same family, though, which is "bolete") and then I lost the fucking paper I wrote the total on. Suffice to say, this is enough to make any mushroom picker a little green with envy. (If you buy those packs of dry porcini from your grocery store you already know they're EXPENSIVE motherfuckers.)

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Processing the basket of porcini was a fucking nightmare. By the time we returned home I had already passed the 24 hour mark and then I ended up spending over an hour bent over the kitchen sink deliriously cleaning/brushing everything we picked. (I felt insanely deranged at the very end. Italics had to herd me to bed. In fact, I don't even have any fucking recollection of GETTING to bed. Oi vey.)

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I won't deny it; this is flat out, disgustingly gratuitous porcini porn.

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These were the biggest of the bunch, but they've recently been dwarfed by a mammoth of a cep I discovered growing at the side of the road that ended up weighing 503g (that's half a fucking kilogram/just over 1lb!). We ended up enjoying some of these mushrooms in a homemade (gluten-free) bread stuffing and red wine-braised roadkill pheasant casserole when celebrating Harvest, but more on that later.

Graveyard Work

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One of my various "offices" spread out through the Scottish countryside. (I need to get a coffee mug that says "YOU DON'T NEED TO BE DEAD TO WORK HERE, BUT IT HELPS".)

This past Saturday Italics and I spent 5-6 hours foraging in old graveyards, ancient oak woodlands and stunning castle grounds collecting bones, taking plant clippings and harvesting wild mushrooms. I have a stupid amount of pictures to share with you guys, but I haven't finished sorting through all of them. This photo's just a teaser of what's to come.

Pictured: my foraging/wildharvesting basket that also serves as our Easter basket for Holy Saturday (Ukrainians traditionally take their Easter Sunday brunch to church on Holy Saturday to have it blessed by a priest in a special ceremony), the remains of a rabbit (graveyard rabbit feet are supposed to be hella magic) and clippings of currant bushes that grow around the cemetery (to plant at home in my container garden).

Everything's sitting on a mortsafe, which was once used to guard the bodies of the dead as they decomposed during the infamous Burke and Hare epidemic. (How morbidly appropriate that I eventually settled in the body snatching capital of the world.)

Rookery Fairy Ring

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How to deal with all of the magic of northeast Scotland: get blasé about it. ("OH LOOK, ANOTHER STANDING STONE, JUST LIKE THE ONE WE JUST PASSED A FEW MINUTES AGO...AWESOME, I GUESS" and "OH LOOK, ANOTHER FAIRY RING THAT LOOKS LIKE ALL OF THE OTHER GODDAMN FAIRY RINGS WE'VE SEEN AROUND HERE...FASCINATING".)

Trust me on this, you either learn to take your default excitement of living amongst the remnants of a very ancient past down a notch or you're liable to meet your maker Scanners-style with just one 15 minute country drive.

(You don't even want to know how many neolithic monuments, stone circles, old graveyards, cairns, ruined castles, imposing churches, blessed wells and standing stones there are in this area. The region of Scotland Italics and I live in? Seems to have been the spiritual epicenter (of the northeast Scotland, I mean) thousands and thousands of years ago. The amount of shit that still survives - even though most has been lost (it was common practice for farmers to clear their fields of standing stones) - is legitimately obscene.)

Pictured above: A fairy ring growing just outside the drystane dyke of the "most active corvid rookery I know about". (<- Like I needed a fake horn on a real unicorn to be told the place was fucking special.) The photo's all blurry because I was still shaking from finding a roadkill fox earlier in the drive. (<- A long story over a year in the making.)

The Witch and the Dead

There were bones on the wall, toads behind headstones and the remains of a rabbit and pheasant beneath a towering currant bush. We balanced on drystane dykes, ran our hands along weather beaten monuments and picked wild raspberries from a plant growing within a wall of an open roof mausoleum. And when we were caught out by rain we hid, side by side, in the door frame of a fairytale stone tower, fogging up ancient panes of glass with our living breath until a pair of rainbows signaled the all clear.

Goddamn Lucky

Walked down to the cemetery. Ate wild cherries. Watched a raptor hunt. Passed between barbed wire fences. Waded through overgrown pastureland. Had sex in the ruined church. Freed the wild gooseberry bush. Wandered down a shady lane to the local kirkyard. Knocked on A.S.'s "grave". Sat with the graveyard rabbits. Watched Italics take pictures of graveyard rabbits. Watched families of swallows dip above overgrown pastureland. Straightened the nun's grave. Left an offering on Muriel's grave. Left offerings at the cemetery cairn. Poured Didi's ("grandfather") bottle of Heineken over his Midwinter bread at Papa's grave. Left a chocolate cigar for Papa behind his headstone. Left the Leprechaun in the cairn tree. Drank water from the kirkyard's faucet. Waved good-bye to graveyard rabbits and swallows. Walked back home, admiring shimmering wheat fields of green-gold while appreciating how goddamn lucky I am.

My "Office"

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Ladies and gentlemen, my "office". (Well, one of several...)

Corse Castle

I seriously promise, for really reals, that this is the last entry of its kind (at least for awhile). I originally meant to do a second write-up of our (unplanned) Hieros Gamos day out using the pictures we took (of the souterrain, Cairngorms and Corse Castle), but we've been crazy busy so I've had to split the photos up by landmark and deal with them individually. This one, featuring the ruins of Corse Castle, is the last of the Hieros Gamos day out pictures.

Excerpt from Lost and Found: Ventured forth to find 2000 year old souterrain to see if suitable for magic sex. (Executing hieros gamos / sacred marriage Underground in ancient grain storage passage? A+ IDEA!) Accidentally mistook Torphins for Tarland; extra 15 minutes (approx.) added to journey. Road closed 6 miles from Tarland, not awesome. Ms. Graveyard Dirt? NOT amused.

"OH LOOK! A TANNERY! THEY SELL SHEEP SKINS, RUGS AND COATS! OH MY GOD!"

Bump down small country lane towards tannery. Stumble over ruined castle. Recognize walled up windows and doorway. "OH MY GOD, OH MY GOD THESE ARE THOSE RUINS I FOUND ON THAT ALFORD PHOTO ALBUM SITE!"

Preen after accidentally finding local site of personal interest. (Grudging feelings towards closed road lessened.) Decide against tannery visit, decide for finding alternative route to Tarland (and 2000 year old earthen passage). See familiar mound. (<- ANOTHER LOCAL SITE OF PERSONAL INTEREST.) See headstone way in distance. Can't believe luck; self-congratulatory preening overload.

Instead of rehashing hastily learned information I'm going to be even more fucking lazy - I'm simply going to copy and paste shit from various sources about this particular roadside ruin. When confronted with the prospect of narrowing photos down I gave up without even starting; too much concentration, too much effort. You'll see duplicates, but at least you won't see the blurred images that got tossed into the recycle bin.

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Spring Leftovers

Holy fucking shit, I blinked and May was fucking gone! (It's not just me, right?) Everything feels a little rushed, a little quickened. Projects that've been stagnant for years-months-days are finishing one by one, but instead of feeling satisfied I feel edgy and flighty; too many appointments, too much "out of the house" busy, too much interaction with strangers, too much unsettled sleep, too much junk food (Italics is blaming my popcorn addiction) and not enough time to regulate our activities into a new routine of life.

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Grief seeds. I spent the first half of May 23rd visiting with a close friend who came up to see me (all the way from Glasgow which is something like three fucking hours by bus, no joke) and spent the remainder of the day sitting on a bag of seedling compost in the backroom planting tray after tray of vegetables, flowers, herbs and other witchcraft-themed plants.

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Making friends with my new "GOOD LUCK SCARAB BEETLE" that I won off Ebay. I'm slowly but surely acquiring pieces for a proposed Khepri and Anubis taxidermy altar.

(Technically, dermestid beetles are used to clean fleshy remains off bones and
not dung beetles. I've always been a bit of a heretic in the sense that I usually ditch the accepted ideas behind a concept and create a new definition that fits into what I'm doing. Even though Khepri is a dung beetle I still feel the connection is close enough, especially since he's associated with rebirth, renewal, and resurrection - things I'm magically attempting to achieve by preserving bodies, bones, pelts and organs.)

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The vegetable garden that never was. There's a few tomatoes, a few (baby) sweet corn, some squash, a courgette and a pepper. I think I planted 93 individual seeds and what you see is what germinated; disastrous with a fucking capital "D".

If it wasn't for the fact that everything I planted outside is doing amazingly well (my white nightshade just popped up! and my motherwort!) I'd be paranoid someone hexed my green thumbs. I haven't had this sort of gardening-based devastation in motherfucking years. I'm disappointed, but I'm trying really fucking hard to file this year's weak vegetable results under "it wasn't meant to be".

This'll be the first year we've had a car in summer, so I don't expect us to be home like previous summers (a complete 180; last year and all of the years before it? we couldn't leave the house so we just sat a home). I think 2010's agricultural year will be spent learning and identifying indigenous flora, locating wild fruits to harvest, exploring land further afield (to find more elusive plants and trees) and starting various perennial container gardens (herb and witch/flying ointment) instead of tending a container vegetable garden.

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Starting from the left: a fawn leg found immediately after offering The Secret Valley's giant some homemade cake (it's a huge, long story - I've been dying to return to a forest walk my in-laws took us on a few years back where I had an encounter with my first Scottish giant (<- this was BEFORE I started smoking pot and taking mushrooms) who wasn't pleased in the least that the four of us were stomping around his grounds. I took cake and bottled water to sweeten him, but it wasn't enough - part of the footpath got wiped out making the track to the waterfalls inaccessible. Frustrated, we had no choice but to turn back. During a brief rest I left the giant his offering and within several steps a broken fawn's leg laid in my path. I know it might seem like I'm reaching, but my entire experience with the place has involved feet - from walking through his grounds to the footpath being washed away. I gave him cake attempting to show my respect for his property, and he gave me a foot in return. We're even, now, and I expect we'll make it to the waterfalls the next time we go.), two mascerating jars of oil made from sycamore tips (one was gently heated for several hours in a water bath before it was bottled up, the other was left to infuse without a water bath so I could compare the differences), the glass vase found in the cemetery's morthouse on the day we went to the souterrain and a bouquet of artificial graveyard flowers I found discarded in the cemetery's hedge when we were picking beech leaves.

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Starting from the left: wild heather we harvested last August, an antique rabbit's foot brooch (a project), my ritual scissors, the fawn's leg and my jars of oils. You can see my one pepper plant just in front of the white box the rabbit foot's sitting on.

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The ruins of an old homestead situated between wheat fields and grazing pastures.

As we walked towards the remains I noticed a lamb frantically pacing near a metal gate in an adjacent field. "HOLY SHIT, THAT LAMB ISN'T OUTSIDE OF THE FIELD, IS IT?" I asked Italics. We both squinted simultaneously and found that the lamb had, in fact, squeezed itself through the gate and was trying desperately to get back in to its mother.

Scotland doesn't have any trespassing laws (which is why I named the category that documents all of our walks and explorations as "Trespassing"), but I'm sure it has some ancient, archaic sheep rustling laws that a panicked farmer would employ when seeing two strangers lifting one of his lambs for no apparent reason. (Well, no apparent reason from a crazy long distance.)

After a few minutes of reciprocal "GAH, WHAT SHOULD WE DO?" we finally decided to nimbly tip toe through the wheat field (the seeds had just begun sprouting; I didn't want us to be branded as sheep stealers AND wheat killers) to see if we could pass the lamb over the gate to set it back into its field.

LOL @ US FOR THINKING IT WAS GOING TO BE AS EASY AS PASSING A SMALL BALE OF HAY OVER A FUCKING FENCE. LOL @ US FOR EVEN THINKING THE LAMB WOULD INSTINCTIVELY CALM THE FUCK DOWN, SETTLE INTO A SUBMISSIVE STATE AND ALLOW US TO VOLLEY IT OVER THE METAL GATE.

The closer we got to the panicked lamb the more demented it appeared until it finally shot off like a bullet, jetting down the wheat field like the devil was after its fucking soul (ASSUMING, OF COURSE, THE LAMB HAD ANY NOTIONS OF MORTALITY AND WAS COMPLETELY SELF-AWARE) straight to the road. I gasped, slapped both hands over my gaping mouth and watched in horror as the white animal became a white speck running further and further away from the field it belonged.

It felt like I had accidentally killed a defenseless animal with my bare hands. As the lamb galloped away I immediately attempted to string some sort of coherent explanation to the farmer who I was SO SURE was going to turn up any second demanding to know why we were fucking with his livestock.

("NO, NO, NO! IT WASN'T LIKE THAT! THE LAMB WAS OUT! AND IT WANTED BACK IN! WE WERE ONLY TRYING TO HELP! I LOVE YOUR SHEEP; WE DRIVE BY EVERY FEW DAYS TO WATCH THEM!" On second thought, it was probably better to NOT mention the multiple trips made just to visit the farmer's birthing sheep so I mentally edited that damning confession out.)

Just as it was reaching the road it took a sharp turn, scrambled up the stone wall separating its field from the wheat field and leapt back in with such fucking ease IT MADE ME FRUSTRATED. ("EFFING LAMB! IT COULD'VE JUST BOUNCED OVER THE FUCKING WALL WHENEVER THE FUCK IT WANTED!") Relieved - even if slightly irritated by the roller coaster of emotions - we left the lamb and explored what remained of the old stone buildings that once stood between farming fields.

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Despite all my searching I've found jack shit about this particular stone ("stane" if you want to be all Scottish). It looks too small to be a cattle rubbing stone, and it didn't appear to have any neighbors. (Although, if you look closely you can see the homestead ruins and how they align PERFECTLY with the stone.)

I don't know if it's the very last remnant of a stone circle (this area of Scotland is supposed to have the highest number of stone-based Neolithic monuments, but a HUGE percentage has been lost - some farmers left the stones in place, others dismantled circles completely and tossed the stones away), or if it's an ancient marker.

Before I forget again: we managed to catch a boxing match between two rabbits (hares?) in the grassy field with the ruined building(s). It's the first time we saw two rabbits have a go at one another in real life (up until that point all territorial/mating disputes we'd seen had been on nature programs). We also caught two pheasants in the act; we tried to give them privacy, but it was practically over before it began. (<- LESSON LEARNED: DON'T EXPECT A MARATHON SESSION WITH A MALE PHEASANT.)

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Another angle of the stone in the hopes that I can eventually identify this motherfucker.

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Third (and final) angle of the stone in the hopes that I can eventually identify this motherfucker.

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One of two ripe Apache chilli peppers that got added to a homemade duck and beef stew I made last week (or the week before?). Normally I lay to rest all of my pepper plants at the end of the growing season, but this particular one was a birthday gift from a friend a few years back so it's become a year round house plant.

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The morning after the seasonal changing of the guard. I was so fucking busy/lazy (YOU CAN BE BOTH; I'M LIVING PROOF) this year that I didn't have a chance to perform my welcoming ritual on the vernal equinox. (<- In Spring Chile Bird migrates back to us, and in Fall he's replaced by Cobweb Spider.)

#1 problem when engaging in weather witchery: if you establish a tit for tat system you better fucking follow through with your end of the bargain. I've learned a valuable lesson this year* - the Universe isn't obligated to honor its contribution to your agreement if you fail to bring your end to the fucking table.

(* This past Winter was "THE WORST WINTER IN 30 YEARS!" which refused to let us go from its (Her, more appropriately) icy grip. For the first time in years Spring was severely belated, and we were still getting snow in fucking May. Once I got up off my fucking ass and performed the seasonal ritual Winter settled down and finally allowed Spring to take the reigns.)

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Step #3 of my four step equinox ritual. I first remove everything from/on the window (#1), deep clean everything (#2), burn incense on the vacant space (#3) and then return everything, making sure to swap to the seasonally appropriate "guardian". (See CHANGING OF THE GUARD (SPRING 2010) for video footage.)

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Without the statues, plants and stone jars the windowsill looks eerily empty. I think I took this picture around three or four PM (on May 10th); it's so damn dark because it had begun snowing-sleeting-hailing which was the last straw that broke this camel's TOO LAZY TO ENGAGE IN WEATHER MAGIC back. (SNOW AND SLEET ON MAY FUCKING 10TH? NO FUCKING THANK YOU.)

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Once in a while I catch Anubis loitering around the premises.

A few years back shadows cast from a plastic chair and backyard shrub created a silhouette of the jackal-headed God - complete with a pitchfork-like weapon with three sharp prongs; not exactly a trident, but sort've close - on the concrete slabs that make the patio.

This year he appeared on my dinky 600x800 computer monitor (I KNOW, I KNOW, IT'S LIKE I'M STILL LIVING IN THE LATE 90s OR SOMETHING) during sunrise. For a few days the sun's (early morning) position aligned with part of our windowsill altar and some of the statues (Anubis and Thoth) created shadows which tracked across my screen.

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Me and my 420 gift from Italics. (It's a pot leaf necklace. Even though it's a little tighter than what I'm use to it sits PERFECTLY around my lower neck. I wore it throughout our belated 420 celebrations. <- CODE FOR "DRUG-FUELED MARATHON SEX".)

I gave Italics the UFO Tarot (ALIENS, TAROT DECKS AND POT CLEARLY GO HAND-IN-HAND), a yew treen marriage chalice with a pair of rings circling the stem and one helluva anniversary blowjob. (Because we've been so goddamn busy for the past few months we couldn't observe 420 on 4/20 so we opted to save the festivities and combine them with our "THIS IS THE DAY WE OFFICIALLY GOT TOGETHER" celebrations. <- May 9th, 1997; we were both 17 at the time. 13 motherfucking years, world! We're practically an institution by this point.)

There are pictures of the tarot deck and yew chalice, but since you guys already silently suffer by being force fed gratuitous pictures of my fat, naked ass sitting on various neolithic monuments I won't further torture you with frontal nudity involving an unshorn Ms. Graveyard Dirt. (<- I only get to shave mine off when the sheep get theirs off and that only happens when the elderflowers go into bloom.)

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I didn't think that Garlogie's cattle rubbing stone was THAT phallic, but opinions obviously differ.

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Garlogie's cattle rubbing stone from a different angle.

We found this one by pure chance (which is how we normally find them); I was set on exploring a small country lane that hugged a powerful brook, when the lane ended I pulled into the opening of a field to turn around and then saw the rubbing stone only several yards away.

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"...AND MAKE SURE YOU GET PICTURES OF THE AFTERBIRTH AND UMBILICAL CORD STILL HANGING OUT OF HER!"

One of many versions of shit Italics needs to put up with on an almost daily basis. (<- He seriously deserves to win some sort of HUSBAND OF THE YEAR award.) It might not be EASY living with an autistic Aries witch, but at least it's not boring.

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The ewe actually gave birth to a pair of lambs. In the previous picture you can see one - still slightly bloody - but the second's hiding behind her back. In this photo you can see the siblings together.

This is the first Spring we've had a car so the majority of the season was spent behind the wheel exploring all of the tiny roads, lanes and tracks close to home. One of our very favorite activities - I mean, OTHER than outside sex on monuments and in the woods - was simply parking in the middle of nowhere to watch the new lambs of the season frolic, play and take their first few wobbly steps.

In fact, this Spring I came to a conclusion that I should've come to a lot fucking earlier - being a vet doesn't automatically obligate you to work with hamsters and dogs in a clinic. I've always wanted to work with animals, but I didn't think I could handle the emotions that went with treating family pets. It never once occurred to me that I could've gone into providing veterinary care for livestock and farm animals.

(And the WORST-BEST part of THAT? There's such a deficit in that specific type of veterinary medicine that both the UK and USA have begun waiving fees and tuition for prospective students going into that particular field. The thing is, I'm 30 fucking years old and already have a career I need to get back to. There's no way I can dedicate a decade of my life to become a qualified sheep midwife and do what I'm actually supposed to be doing.)

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"OH, HEY, LOOK AT THAT SWAN BEING ALL RETARDED IN THAT FIELD NOT EVEN CLOSE TO WATER. HEY, RETARD, WHAT DID YOU DO, DROP YOUR FUCKING KEYS OR SOMETHING?"

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"OH, SHIT, IT HEARD US! DON'T MAKE EYE CONTACT! I'M JUST GOING TO SLOWLY DRIVE AWAY..."

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A quilted pillowcase I picked up at a resale shop on Good Saturday for Chippy. (It's a long story involving a dog bed that Chippy doesn't sleep in because he'd rather sleep on the floor next to me than at the foot of the bed in his goddamn bed, a pillow covered with a pillowcase I cross-stitched Italics a few years back that he accidentally bombed with ash ("YOU BETTER TAKE IT AWAY AND PUT IT SOMEPLACE SAFE") and my worry that a plush Shar Pei dog toy that houses an ancient Sumerian demon might be cold sleeping on a cross-stitched pillow next to my side of the bed on the floor.)

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A partial closeup of our office windowsill altar, pre-Spring ritual/cleaning. Wadjet - and her axe - act as the centerpiece in front of a pair of stone carved jars. To the left of her is the female side (Tawaret isn't pictured, neither is Hathor or Serket), to the right is the male side (you can see Sobek, but only slivers of Anubis and Thoth).

Everyone got a peanut M&M offering a few months back, all of which were removed, bagged and tagged for later witchcraft. (Initial idea? Grow one or two plants sacred to the ancient Egyptian gods and add the M&Ms to the potting compost.)

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By early May spiders began weaving their webs around the statues. Combine random gossamer strings with a thick layer of dust, spotty glass and dull wood and you got yourself an altar that desperately needs cleaning.

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In Spring and Fall we're joined by a wave of spiders who live along side of us for the season. Since they're are a non-venomous variety they get two giant thumbs up from me, and the occasional escort to the backroom where there's a better supply of insects.

Cairngorms

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Excerpt from Lost and Found: Reconnect with main road to Tarland. Cost of unexpected diversion? Found: babbling brook, old castle, tannery, ruined church, miniature graveyard. Acceptable price to pay for detour. Road? Quiet. Scenery? Breathtaking. Never felt as connected with land. America? Too new. Scotland? Steeped in "ancient". Hills call, water beckons, forests tempt. Scotland speaks; USA still needs to find voice. (<- Treasonous talk? Always good at being black sheep.)

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Excerpt from Lost and Found: See summit of snow capped mountain optically wedged between two hills. "HOLY FUCKING SHIT, LOOK AT ALL OF THE SNOW!" Balk at distance - V. distant - blanket of white. Can't believe visible amounts of snow. Follow road to Tarland. Burst over hill crest, slam on brakes despite acceptable speed. Hill drops to green, fertile valley backing into famous mountain range.

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Excerpt from Lost and Found: Can't find words, can't find thoughts. Park in road shoulder. Cry. Sit, quietly, staring out over majestic landscape. Think "MY HOME; THIS IS MY HOME", know Old Woman is talking; Old Woman is feeling. Entrance to another world - to another land - through purple and white barrier cradling rich farm fields and forests. Few days ago asked Italics "HOW CLOSE ARE THE CAIRNGORMS TO US?". Yesterday Universe answered. (<- Approximately 30 minutes.)

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Excerpt from Lost and Found: Go home? Why? Just married! Celebrate sacred union exploring countryside? OH, WHY NOT! Stopped at "Queen's View" scenic overlook. Heard bumblebee. Studied tourist plaque. Crossed road, marveled at Alp-like landscape unfolding on other side of valley. Poked commemorative sundial. Crossed road, studied tourist plaque again. Made executive decision - find local kirkyard (V. close, tourist plaque map said). Heard bumblebee.

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Excerpt from Lost and Found: New country lane, new adventure. Down tree studded hill into fertile, greening valley. Stupid number of pheasants. (Count? Lost count after 10. <- "Stupid number of pheasants" 100% accurate.) "OH MY GOD, OH MY GOD! JUST LOOK AT THOSE WEE BABY LAMBS! IS THERE ANYTHING ELSE ON EARTH AS CUTE AS JUST BORN LAMBS?" New baby lambs? Never get old. Ms. Graveyard Dirt and Italics testament to bold claim.

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Bennachie, May 8th

Holy fucking shit am I fucking shattered. (<- Who would've thought changing the fucking guard was the spiritual equivalent of running a motherfucking marathon?) I'm not even going to fake an attempt at being cerebral today, so if you have any expectations of being intellectually stimulated today by yours truly prepare yourself for spectacular disappointment.

One of my major goals this Spring was to locate mature pussy willows (known as "goat willow" here) so I knew where to head next year to gather branches of catkins for our Hieros Gamos / Easter celebrations. (Because palms aren't indigenous to Ukraine the Eastern Orthodox church uses switch-like branches of pussy willow on Palm Sunday. But the use of catkins goes back further than my ancestors' conversion to Christianity. The pussy willow has been venerated for thousands of years in folk art and traditional designs because it was one of the first trees to produce growth after Winter. Pussy Willows heralded Spring, and even Christ and the saints above couldn't untangle the countless generations of association so it was appropriated, adopted and accepted by the Catholic church as a suitable substitution.)

Bennachie was my first choice of location for a few reasons:

1.) It's the highest point in this region, which made it religiously significant to the ancient people who lived here (it's littered with neolithic monuments, markers and stones). Bennachie's revealed archeological evidence of goddess worship, and the female association with the area's held on to the point that the profile of the hill - which resembles a woman's breast - is called "Mither Tap" (Mother Tap, Mother Pap).

Even though I haven't found any indication that the Veiled One - the Cailleach - was specifically worshiped/observed t/here, one commonality I've found with a lot of Cailleach stories is that She's almost always attributed to the highest point of a region. I know it isn't documented, but the Old Woman definitely resides up there making it Winter central. (If the goddess worship, tit-shaped (and named) appearance and neolithic reverence isn't convincing, then maybe the fact that macaulayite - the mineral that makes Mars red - is only found at the foot of Bennachie. <- We're talking about the whole motherfucking world.)

2.) At the Bennachie visitor center the children's "discovery" area clearly stated that pussy/goat willow grew at the base of the hill. (ROCK'N'FUCKING'ROLL, BABY.)

May 8th marked our inaugural Bennachie expedition (which was V. successful, by the way) and in proper Graveyard Dirt-style Italics and I snapped some pictures along the way so I could identify some plants, remember where the fuck the pussy willows grew, document any blossoming trees (I'm still on the hunt for a source of wild crabapples and soles) and record my very first Bennachie blowjob.

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An epiphyte! I really, really wanted this motherfucker but I didn't have the necessary tools to lift it from its home. (Normally I'd leave that sort've shit and just make frequent pilgrimages to visit it, but this tiny sapling is growing on a tree that's obviously being climbed, sat on and swung on so it's only a matter of time before someone accidentally - or deliberately - kills it.)

Next time we go walking around Bennachie I'm going to have to discreetly add a ziploc bag and spade to my usual "out for a walk!" repertoire. (Whenever we go "out" I sling my mother's black leather book bag - always filled with bottled water (for offerings), baby wipes, paper towels, string, a branch cutter, a box knife, candy (for offerings), sanitizing hand spray, plastic bags and my ritual scissors - into the car with us because when you're a witch you never know what sort've gifts the Universe is going to leave out for you.)

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Rather than wander up the hill we ambled along the base, following the babbling stream as it wound around the damp foothills. (I knew if there was any chance of catching a pussy willow, it'd be around water.) You don't even want to know the restraint I needed to exercise around this stream. My cardinal fire ass is a water lovin' fool; any flimsy excuse is a justification for getting wet.

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Looking up towards Mither Tap which, for part of the morning, was discreetly draped by low hanging mist.

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"Holy shit, there's a stone here?"

We wandered off the "discovery trail" (the shortest trail at 1km that partially loops around the base of the hill) in search of the Gouk Stone, something Italics didn't even remember despite countless trips to Bennachie as a child.

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The Gouk Stone! (Or, the Gouk Stane, if you want to be all, you know, old and traditional and Scottish.) Gouk means 'fool' or 'cuckoo', the later of which has rich representation in Celtic mythology (everything from heralding spring, much like pussy willows, the ability to prophesize and the uncanny talent of easily traveling back and forth between the world of the living and the world of the dead).

This particular stone has its own unique stories attached to it. Legend has it that the stane's visited by the very first cuckoo migrating back from Africa (thus announcing the arrival of Spring) and that a giant - Jock O' Bennachie - hurdled the boulder down from the hilltop above.

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If you look hella closely you'll see that words have been carved into some of the stones that make up the small dyke behind the Gouk Stane (you have to look a little less closely if you pop open the image and click through to the much larger original size). The words read "THE CALLING OF THE CUCKOO IS THE OTHER SIDE OF SPRING".

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Equisetum (commonly known as horsetail)! Holy shit, a blast from my childhood past! (<- There's a fair amount of indigenous flora I'm not familiar with, but there's an almost equal share of shit I can identify thanks to my wild days spent in Midwest America's version of hedgerows, forests and wetlands.)

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WHOOMP, THERE IT IS! Past their prime, but definitely catkins. We celebrated their discovery with baked potato chips, Rice Krispie treats and a blowjob.

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So we don't forget where we spotted the pussy willows (or the first place I gave Italics a blowjob on/near Bennachie).

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These beautiful lantern-shaped flowers will eventually grow into bilberries, which will eventually wind up in bottles of vodka and whiskey come Fall (Lammas). (<- Italics isn't much of a fruit eater, and I'm really into preserving and creating shit from scratch so homemade hooch is almost always on the top of our priority list when it comes to harvesting wild berries.)

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I couldn't get the EXACT image I was after (I think I probably should've been a LEETLE closer to the unfurling ferns), but my soggy jeans (from kneeling on the damp ground) said it was close enough.

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Bracken, How frond are we?: "Gold under bracken, Silver under gorse, Starvation under heather".

Bracken, positively primeval, right? In Slavic folklore the plant produces the legendary fern flower, which only blossoms one day of the year - the eve of (Ivan) Kupala Day. If you were lucky enough to find the mythic bloom you're supposed to be granted a motherfucking boatload of boons spanning from good health to luxurious riches.

I've also read that burning bracken heads is supposed to induce rain, but that's fairly new information (to me, anyway) which requires further investigation to better understand the fern/rain connection. (<- I'm relatively new to this "IDENTIFY AND LEARN THE LOCAL FOLKLORE OF INDIGENOUS PLANTS" game so you'll have to excuse my botanical enthusiasm.)

Lost and Found

Yesterday, in fragmented notes, thoughts, sentences and LOLs:

Ventured forth to find 2000 year old souterrain to see if suitable for magic sex. (Executing hieros gamos / sacred marriage Underground in ancient grain storage passage? A+ IDEA!) Accidentally mistook Torphins for Tarland; extra 15 minutes (approx.) added to journey. Road closed 6 miles from Tarland, not awesome. Ms. Graveyard Dirt? NOT amused.

"OH LOOK! A TANNERY! THEY SELL SHEEP SKINS, RUGS AND COATS! OH MY GOD!"

Bump down small country lane towards tannery. Stumble over ruined castle. Recognize walled up windows and doorway. "OH MY GOD, OH MY GOD THESE ARE THOSE RUINS I FOUND ON THAT ALFORD PHOTO ALBUM SITE!"

Preen after accidentally finding local site of personal interest. (Grudging feelings towards closed road lessened.) Decide against tannery visit, decide for finding alternative route to Tarland (and 2000 year old earthen passage). See familiar mound. (<- ANOTHER LOCAL SITE OF PERSONAL INTEREST.) See headstone way in distance. Can't believe luck; self-congratulatory preening overload.

Alternative route found via microscopic rural roads. Frequent "OH MY GOD, OH MY GOD! JUST LOOK AT THOSE WEE BABY LAMBS! IS THERE ANYTHING ELSE ON EARTH AS CUTE AS JUST BORN LAMBS?" cries made. Red sports car not as impressed with new life; allowed misplaced vehicle to pass. Roll eyes at unnecessarily fast car, continue to enjoy scenery at own pace.

Reconnect with main road to Tarland. Cost of unexpected diversion? Found: babbling brook, old castle, tannery, ruined church, miniature graveyard. Acceptable price to pay for detour. Road? Quiet. Scenery? Breathtaking. Never felt as connected with land. America? Too new. Scotland? Steeped in "ancient". Hills call, water beckons, forests tempt. Scotland speaks; USA still needs to find voice. (<- Treasonous talk? Always good at being black sheep.)

See summit of snow capped mountain optically wedged between two hills. "HOLY FUCKING SHIT, LOOK AT ALL OF THE SNOW!" Balk at distance - V. distant - blanket of white. Can't believe visible amounts of snow. Follow road to Tarland. Burst over hill crest, slam on brakes despite acceptable speed. Hill drops to green, fertile valley backing into famous mountain range.

Can't find words, can't find thoughts. Park in road shoulder. Cry. Sit, quietly, staring out over majestic landscape. Think "MY HOME; THIS IS MY HOME", know Old Woman is talking; Old Woman is feeling. Entrance to another world - to another land - through purple and white barrier cradling rich farm fields and forests. Few days ago asked Italics "HOW CLOSE ARE THE CAIRNGORMS TO US?". Yesterday Universe answered. (<- Approximately 30 minutes.)

V. near Tarland. Mighty internet: "EARTHEN HOUSE JUST ONE MILE OUT OF TARLAND!" No obvious indication, squint at anything resembling sign. Try to ignore commanding scenery (mostly fail). "A FEW SITES DID MAKE OUT THAT THERE'S A SIGN POINTING TO THE-" didn't finish sentence, tiny - almost non-existent - street sign to souterrain on left side of road. (Eureka!)

No obvious passage Underground. No obvious parking lot. Obvious "PRIVATE FUCKING PROPERTY, MOTHERFUCKERS, DON'T PARK ON OUR FUCKING LAND" sign. (Farm directly on other side of grassy knoll.) Sigh. Roll eyes. Reverse, drive, reverse. Tuck into dirt track leading to wheat field. Not on private property, n'yah.

Pretend to be interested in tourist signpost explaining earthen house. Still no obvious passage Underground. See nothing except small patch of green lawn. Land slightly mounded, follow gentle slope down. Suddenly, tiny black crack in hill. A tear, a rip, a hidden gash. Wild pheasant shrieks when discovery is made. Startled, we laugh. Silently wonder if mother goddess hips will fit through minuscule threshold to Underground.

Mighty internet: "...AND DON'T FORGET TO BRING A FLASHLIGHT!" Torch? Remembered. Check torch to make sure working properly? Not remembered. (<- Oops!) Congratulations on almost dead flashlight, Ms. Graveyard Dirt. Prepared to Helen Keller dark tunnel (came too far to turn back). Faint illuminated glow from flashlight, battery weak - almost spent - but good enough.

Entrance to souterrain tight. Crossed threshold on hands and knees. Crawled like child, like petitioning supplicant. Humble, stripped of grandeur. Began descent into earth like animal, belly touching dusty ground. Further, deeper, darker. Hands outstretched to either side. Can't see stone walls, but can feel assuringly solid structure. Colder, darker, damper. Wooden beams lift up. Crawling becomes crouching, crouching becomes slouching, slouching becomes standing.

Abrupt end of passage. Facing end? Blackness. Facing opening? White pinprick of light. Earth breathing. Air smells like wet graveyard dirt. Water trickles down sides of walls. Silence engulfs hollowed out space. We stand, side by side, as woman and man, as to-be husband and to-be wife in ancient, man-made chamber. We stand in a prison, a womb, an unexpected bridal bedchamber. We stand in a 2000 year old stone and wood lined tunnel where the fruits of Harvest were stored. We stand Underground; our home, our domain, our sacred ground.

Flashlight reveals tealights dotting unseen ground. (Ritually used? Practically used?) Candles won't burn, not enough wax and/or cheap make. Amused, nonetheless. Touch Italics' cock through pants in enveloping darkness. Span fingers over bump and knead flesh and material encouragingly. Joking grope leads to kissing, kissing leads to serious groping, serious groping leads to blowjob, blowjob leads to unplanned martial sex against wet walls of earthen house.

Had planned for overtly ceremonial rite at home, settled for on-the-fly passion in underground passage two millennia old. (Can't ritualize everything.) Marriage, finally. Sex, finally. (57 days of celibacy? OVER.) Physical and spiritual union of man and woman, god and goddess, groom and bride, king and sovereignty personified.

(Unwittingly swallowed live bug during first penetration; tried not to ruin moment by choking. Pretended accidental consumption of living thing during sacred marriage part of never ending life/death cycle. (Hah fucking hah.) Still would have preferred NOT inhaling insect, thnx.)

Painful. (Amazing.) Uncomfortable. (Wonderful.) Tight. (Perfect fit.) Bride. (Wife.) One orgasm, together, almost two. Stone walls, lengths of wood and earth's darkness beared witness. Sealed union by pressing messy cunt against precipitation covered dead end wall. Married, for one year. Exited Underground with husband-prize in tow. (<- UNINTENTIONAL, BUT FITTING.)

Mutant buff-tailed bumblebee welcomed newlyweds emerging from Underground marital chamber. Air? Fresher, lighter. Sun? Warmer, brighter. Entered earthen passage one season, departed earthen passage to another. Exchanged "HAPPY MARRIAGE!" in front of quivering daffodils. Kissed, cleaned up remnants of sacred marriage still coating inner thighs.

Go home? Why? Just married! Celebrate sacred union exploring countryside? OH, WHY NOT! Stopped at "Queen's View" scenic overlook. Heard bumblebee. Studied tourist plaque. Crossed road, marveled at Alp-like landscape unfolding on other side of valley. Poked commemorative sundial. Crossed road, studied tourist plaque again. Made executive decision - find local kirkyard (V. close, tourist plaque map said). Heard bumblebee.

New country lane, new adventure. Down tree studded hill into fertile, greening valley. Stupid number of pheasants. (Count? Lost count after 10. <- "Stupid number of pheasants" 100% accurate.) "OH MY GOD, OH MY GOD! JUST LOOK AT THOSE WEE BABY LAMBS! IS THERE ANYTHING ELSE ON EARTH AS CUTE AS JUST BORN LAMBS?" New baby lambs? Never get old. Ms. Graveyard Dirt and Italics testament to bold claim.

Found old church. Found old graveyard. Found old morthouse. Found handy tourist signpost with old church, old graveyard and old morthouse information. Learned morthouse = corpse safe in olden times (to deter would-be body snatchers). Suddenly more interested in morthouse (surprise, surprise).

Return to dank interior of antique morthouse. "THIS TOTALLY FEELS LIKE AN ORDINARY SHED." (Ordinary shed partially buried underground, anyway.) Had to piss. Saw headstone fragments casually tossed into shadowy corners. Wanted them. (Still had to piss.) Saw small wooden ladder resting against stone wall. Wanted it. (Really had to piss.) Saw discarded dusty vase filled with rocks. Wanted it. (Really for real serious had to piss.)

Had piss at base of ladder. (Ladder? Super big Ukrainian ju-ju, FYI.) Groped ladder. Caressed ladder. Fantasized about abducting rickety old morthouse ladder for personal/ritual use. Considered leaving monetary note beneath rock where ladder stood. Too risky, left it. Took vase, though (not entirely stupid, mkay?).

"WAIT FOR ME, I'LL COME BACK FOR YOU!" Ladder seemed to understand.

Found (in total): babbling brook, old castle, tannery, ruined church, miniature graveyard, Cairngorms, 2000 year old souterrain, husband (and king), commemorative sundial, old church, older morthouse, super old cemetery, unloved glass vase & unrequited love for one ladder

Lost (in total): "virginity" & 1/3 of Blessed Virgin trio

Crathes Walk, Feb. 10th

Desperate for some fresh air and a change of scenery Italics and I hit a local castle (Crathes) for a short walk a couple of days ago. I had originally intended to engage in some V. SRS PHOTOGRAPHY, but it turned out to be way too fucking cold to wander around with exposed skin. For the moment the tripod's been shelved, but the second it begins warming up we'll wake it up from its winter hibernation.

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Standing on a stone balcony that overlooks the walled gardens.

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How gorgeous is that winter blue sky?

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Within Crathes' famous walled gardens.

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Technically out of the walled garden (it's the "Woodland Garden", I think), but the area's enclosed by fencing. Also, SNOWDROPS!

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Back within the walled gardens. I can't remember what's the deal with the large stone bowls; I'll have to see if there's any information provided by the feature the next time we visit.

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We're standing in the garden that the stone balcony overlooked.

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Another perspective of the castle.

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Italics took this picture in a parking lot in Banchory. It SEEMS like there's a monument topping the hill, but the distance made it difficult to judge.

January, 2009

I usually manage to upload and write about 70% of the photos I take, but occasionally an adventure or two manages to slip through my fingers. To give the forgotten images and stories their chance to shine I decided I'd gather all of the loose ends and consolidate them in a monthly entry.

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Smooth, creamy and melt-in-your mouth golden.

(Pssst! It's goose fat, you know.)

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First full moon of the new year (Cold Moon) welcomed by THE NOTHING. (I love the tiny star way above the expanding darkness.)

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I appropriated an otherwise abandoned plum tree in the backyard and named it THE SHANGO TREE. To freak out the natives (aka MY IN-LAWS) I've begun wedging oversized bones in the branches so they'll get white and weather beaten. (WE'LL SEE HOW LONG IT LASTS UNTIL MY FATHER-IN-LAW DECIDES TO UNDECORATE MY BONE TREE.)

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When Beh was alive she's sit and stare blankly for hours at a time and neither Italics nor I knew what the fuck she was up to. It wasn't until recently - very, very recently - that Italics discovered that "fixed staring" was a symptom of a brain tumor. (Beh was diagnosed with "a brain thing" around May and passed quite suddenly in early June.)

We found this incense burning frog in the local health food store when Christmas shopping on Winter Solstice and couldn't resist its Bok Chek stare.

(BEH WAS ALWAYS CHEWING UP THE FUCKING CARPET, HENCE ALL OF THE CHEWED UP FUCKING CARPET.)

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Chark Park eating part of a buttermilk oatmeal muffin.

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How I spent sick day number three. (I MEAN, SERIOUSLY, HOW DOES THIS SHIT HAPPEN IN A HOUSEHOLD OF FOUR ADULTS AND GO TOTALLY UNNOTICED AND UNCLEANED UNTIL I DO SOMETHING ABOUT IT?)

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Shakey Bear testing every pea to ensure they're all top quality.

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Shakey and Shoney looking like pea gremlins.

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It's an hour of back and forth, and constantly changing positions.

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Sun rising through the trees leading to the disturbed children's home.

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Hezbollah contemplates the garden.

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Graffiti on the door of the disturbed children's home. (I'M GOING BACK WITH A RED MARKER AND TEACHING THOSE ASBO KIDS A LESSON. <- LOL, IN GRAMMAR AND SPELLING, ANYWAY.)

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It was originally used as a home for disturbed children, but also had a stint of being an orphanage, I'm told.

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"Wank" has been scribbled on the lower left window, and "wanker" on the lower right.

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Through the trees you can see how the windows and doors have been boarded up.

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When we amble down to the semi-local cemetery (it's about a miles walk, or so) we pass a now abandoned (but still kept) home for disturbed children.

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Pac-Burger at T.G.I. Friday's (in Scotland).

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A piece of streusel topped summer fruits buttermilk coffeecake (with orange flower water!) discreetly drizzled with a Cointreau & summer fruits happy ending (LOLOLOLOL) made for my mother-in-law's birthday.

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A piece of streusel topped summer fruits buttermilk coffeecake (with orange flower water!) made for my mother-in-law's birthday.

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An impromptu dinner:

A thick cut, boneless pork chop stuffed with a feta cheese, cream cheese, sundried tomato, fresh basil and black pepper filling. Flavored with generic Italian seasoning before wrapping up in three slices of Oscar Meyer bacon. Pan fried, and then quickly roasted in the oven with a bit of white wine, mushrooms and vine-ripe tomatoes.

Verdict? Worth remembering.

(Picture snapped after dinner. (No time for arty photographs!))

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We started off the weekend on the right foot.

(And he even rolled up his Oscar Meyer bacon in a pancake.) (Maybe in another 10 years I'll be able to convince him to drench it all with maple syrup.)

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...even classier? I went to the movies the day after wearing a ripped Punisher t-shirt and a wrench necklace. (SO...DAMN...CLASSY.)

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A cock to ride in T.G.I. Friday's (in Scotland).

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Fuck, what a nightmare. This is a photo of the manometry monitor that I had to carry around last year for twenty-four hours when I was undergoing a battery of medical tests to figure out what was wrong with my stomach. (The short version? Hiatal hernia, weak stomach muscles, GERD, acid reflux and a broken stomach valve. They don't know how it happened, or how to fix it.)

It's not pictured in this photo, but a spaghetti-sized tube/wire had been fed up my nose, down my throat and into my stomach so the monitor could record my gut's activity. (I had to eat, sleep, bathe and live with the chord for an entire day - every fucking time I swallowed the wire yanked like a motherfucker causing the tube to jerk, jump and tighten in my body.)

LOL SIDE NOTE: They had to postpone this particular test because I admitted to the doctor that I was partially stoned. (She claimed the data would be "inconclusive" since I was under the influence of a relaxing drug. Pfft.) Thankfully, she thought I was cute and/or funny and simply rescheduled the monitor insertion without any sort of lecture. (Thank fucking God I didn't mention I was high to the medical stuff who performed my endoscopy because that's SERIOUSLY an experience I can totally live without undergoing again.)

Winter Drive, Feb. 4th

A winter drive in Scotland:

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The ORIGINAL plan was to hit a very rural village, but I became willfully distracted the second we stumbled across Scottish explorers' crack - a brown sign (the color of SITE OF INTEREST) with the word "CHURCH" in all capital letters. After a brief private castle, church, graveyard, graveyard and graveyard (YES, THREE SEPARATE GRAVEYARDS) diversion we eventually found our way to our original destination.

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A local kirkyard, complete with an impressively rotund mausoleum. (I'm absolutely desperate to see this graveyard in Spring, so expect more pictures of this cemetery in the distant future.)

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The kirk, opposite the kirkyard. I read that it was either built in 1798 or 1804 (two different sources quote two different dates), but it's been "greatly altered" since construction. The church's site mentioned that the kirk above was built over a much older church that serviced the countryside.

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I don't know if this over-the-top stable/farm building is still in the possession of the local castle, but it was definitely part of the spread at one point.

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Finally, the very rural village (with Mither Tap's (<- where this region's Old Woman/Cailleach lives) imposing figure above the treeline).

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Pitfichie Castle. If I remember right they tore off the roof in the late 1700s which caused it to fall into ruin. Someone intervened when they wanted to bulldoze the castle, although I don't know how long it sat before they began rebuilding. Construction ended in the mid-1990s which means a huge chunk of the castle you now see is relatively new.

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Italics having a slash while I wait in the car (while inconspicuously taking pictures).

After the Windstorm

I have an awful memory for everything except landmarks. (Me? I don't get lost. At least not when I can identify buildings, landscapes or architectural focal points. My mother joked it was my Indian genes that gave me a good sense of direction, but I blame the "talent" on two things: autistically visualizing my environment as a giant Tetris grid, and my compulsive need to constantly check my surroundings thanks to my ZOMBIE ESCAPE PLAN paranoia. <- I SLEEP WITH A MACHETE NEXT TO THE BED. SERIOUSLY.)

Sometimes when we go walking we'll discover a new spot or a new tree or a new woodland feature that we've never seen before. And while I'm busy dancing around naked (<- WELL, SORT'VE NAKED. IT'S MID-OCTOBER AND I HAVE POOR CIRCULATION IN MY FEET; I REFUSE TO REMOVE MY SHOES AND KNEE HIGH SOCKS, DAMMIT!) or foraging (while my jeans comically inch down my ass exposing WILDCRAFTER'S CRACK) or giving head Italics is busy taking pictures for me (AND - IT GOES WITHOUT SAYING - OF ME) so the spot isn't forgotten.

Taking pictures of these spots creates pictorial bookmarks for me. By committing a tree or valley or monument to a photograph I'm making a deliberate point to MEMORIZE IT so it doesn't become just another notable feature used for navigation. (<- WHICH IS BECOMING HELLA USEFUL FOR WILDCRAFTING SINCE EVERYTHING I NEED OR COULD POSSIBLY WANT DOESN'T CONVENIENTLY GROW NEXT TO ONE ANOTHER, DISAPPOINTINGLY ENOUGH.)

Occasionally we'll stumble across a new tree or mushroom or berry or plant we've never seen before, and instead of picking it and bringing it home to ID Italics takes a picture instead. Other times I just want to capture the moment, and while I know other people won't necessary GET IT by looking at the photograph, the picture has everything I need to DEAD ZONE that frozen second in time.

I suppose you could blanket all of the above under "LEARNING EXPERIENCE" - I'm intentionally attempting to learn and memorize local landscapes and ecosystems, I'm intentionally attempting to familiarize myself with my local environment and indigenous wildlife and vegetation and I'm intentionally attempting to memorize all the factors that went into that outing (i.e., the mood, the weather, what was harvested, where it was harvested, under what conditions it was harvested, any and all sexual escapes and where they took place).

((I guess what I'm saying is YES, I KNOW IT'S A PICTURE OF AN ARGUABLY UNREMARKABLE TREE THAT YOU'LL NEVER ACTUALLY SEE IRL, BUT IT'S A SEX/WILDCRAFTING/SPECIAL TREE TO ME AND I DON'T WANT TO FORGET ABOUT IT.))

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There are several ancient yew trees dotted along this particular walk; this is the first one encountered. Despite toppling over ages ago it's still growing happily (if you look REALLY closely you can see the poisonous red berries dotted amongst the evergreen). By this point in the day the light wasn't fantastic so you can't see the intricate, almost sculpted twists winding the tree's trunk into a forked narwhal horn.

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My foraging basket and ass. (<- Which isn't nearly as nice as it was in summer: HERE and HERE. I MISS MY SUMMER TAN AND I MISS RUNNING AROUND NAKED. EFF HAVING TO WEAR FRUMPY CLOTHING, AND EFF AUTUMN'S SHITTY LIGHT MAKING MY BEAUTIFUL ASS ALL DISCOLORED AND SHADOWY.)

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When we go for one of our patented walks I have everything I need in a black leather book bag - camera, baby wipes, antibacterial gel, paper towels, ziploc bags, empty tupperware containers, ritual scissors, a ball of string, a craft knife, a branch cutter, jolly ranchers, a granola bar, a bottle of water and a small book on edible plants.

What I DON'T have is a pen and paper, and that's the ONLY reason why I haven't had sex in the fort above and left a "PS: I HAD SEX IN YOUR FORT" note for the current tenants.

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Two people can comfortably fit in the space between the oak pillars. (<- MY ALL NATURAL B & J/#2 PILLARS!) And that moss encrusted indentation at the base of tree(s)? An organic hassock (<- THE PILLOW YOU KNEEL ON IN CHURCH OR IN PRAYER), perfectly fitting one knee while you're kneeling and giving head.

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The oaks in my youth were fantastic cathedrals with majestic limbs starting beyond the reach of any ladder. It wasn't until discovering this castle walk that I finally achieved one of my lifetime goals - TO GET ON A GODDAMN OAK TREE.

But these weren't the serene oaks from my youth, these were wild and violent trees erupting from the earth like molten lava with sculpted deformities partially hidden beneath a disguise of green moss. And while I miss the silent austere of the ancient oaks of southern Wisconsin, I can't help but feel somewhat enchanted by the feral trees of Scotland - untouched, unkept and free from the bonsai vision of man.

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"I'M TIRED OF WEARING EFFING BOXERS WITH THESE EFFING JEANS. MAYBE I'VE FINALLY GAINED ENOUGH WEIGHT TO KEEP THESE FUCKING JEANS ON WITHOUT ANY SORT OF UNDERWEAR."

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A rowan tree growing directly beneath an oak. (<- I HARVESTED SOME BERRIES FROM THIS TREE FIGURING THE ROWAN AND OAK'S ROOTS WERE TANGLED TOGETHER. I MEAN IT SOUNDS PRETTY MAGIC, RIGHT?)

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Just behind the two oak trees and clump of ferns is a tiny stone wall dam, damming up nothing but mud, fallen leaves and some cattails. I'm hoping that the small water feature is seasonal and it'll be fuller - and more photogenic - in spring. (Fingers crossed?)

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Unidentified berries now identified! When trampling through the forest we encountered a vine snaking up whatever tree it could get its tendrils on, which produced these beautiful, currant-like berries. My first stab in the dark was "WILD HONEYSUCKLE!", and, as it turns out, it is, in fact, wild honeysuckle.

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This thing? MASSIVE. Unfortunately, there wasn't anything to give a sense of scale, so it's hard to appreciate how large the nest really is. (TRY "A HOBO SHACK IN A FUCKING TREE", SRSLY.) We circled the base hoping for some feathers but didn't find anything - not even streaked droppings - so we figured the family must've moved out a while ago.

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I'm going to be boring and rip a page out of Wikipedia and glue it here:

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So far I've been frustratingly unsuccessful in getting Italics to "STICK YOUR DICK IN IT!", although - ALTHOUGH! - I've recently heard "NOT WITHOUT SANITIZER!" which gives me hope. (<- THERE'S NOTHING THAT NAGGING CAN'T ACCOMPLISH, //NOTHING//.)

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You know that windstorm that took down my sweet corn? My corn weren't the only things lying on their sides the morning after. Walking through the oaky clearing was like walking through a battlefield - trees split down to the roots, huge limbs and branches lying haphazardly on the ground, whole trees actually uprooted exposing giant pits of unsettled dirt and rocks.

While scouting for a place to have OUTSIDE FOREST SEX we stumbled across this split tree behind a fallen oak. Growing out of an exposed tuft of decomposed leaves and dead bark was a slender seedling standing at half-mast like a little yellow flag. "OOO! OOO! MAGIC!" I said - more so now that I realize that the tiny tree wasn't growing from the roots, it actually had situated itself INSIDE THE TREE making it an epiphyte - and got Italics to remove it for me.

I'm not sure if mid-October is an ideal time for transplanting trees, but it's not like I had a choice. The slender, leafless pole's outside wedged between my peach tree and sunflowers, and I hope with A LOT of coaxing it might actually survive winter and properly take root in spring. Fingers crossed, anyway.

PS: Holy shit, dude, writing this entry? IT WAS LIKE PULLING FUCKING TEETH. I've spent almost two weeks chipping away at it - AND ONLY BECAUSE I LIKE TO HAVE A RECORD OF OUTINGS WHERE WE HARVEST STUFF (and this time around it was a huge oak limb, a seedling tree, a mushroom and some rowan berries) - so if it sounds disjointed and below par YOU KNOW WHY.

Harvest Home Offering

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Is it criminal that we haven't been back to the semi-local standing stones since walking to them for the first time earlier in June? (YES, PROBABLY.) In June it was effort - it was a fucking EXPEDITION - that had us cutting through sopping wet cow fields, hugging the linear trail of dashes along the sides of country lanes, receiving shocks from electrified fences and cutting through fields of growing wheat as summer's morning sun beat down on us with a crazy amount of ferocity for six in the fucking morning.

But now? But now we have a car - A CAR! AFTER NEARLY TEN YEARS! A FOR REAL CAR WITH FOR REAL WHEELS AND A FOR REAL ENGINE AND A FOR REAL GAS TANK - and the Scottish countryside is my oyster. (<- Hence the lack of quality posting recently. First we were sick, then we were having country sex in historical settings (OH, NEOLITHIC MONUMENTS AND ANCIENT CEMETERIES AND IMPOSING SCOTTISH CASTLES) and THEN Harvest Home hit and I've been scrambling madly to try and retain a quickened pace of urgency to ensure all of my proposed activities, celebrations and rituals come to fruition.)

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When I picked up the fox roadkill on Lammas (I haven't yet written an entry about it, but there are pictures of me processing the body nearly step by step in LAMMAS 2009) I didn't waste ANYTHING. The majority of its vital organs were gone (the stomach cavity must've exploded on impact leaving nothing noteworthy except a friction burned heart) so what remained was carefully extracted and frozen - the hide was gently peeled from the mangled carcass, the feet cut and bundled together, the windpipe, eyes, tongue and teeth meticulously removed and muscles from the mostly undisturbed haunches were stripped off and frozen into little fox steaks.

What I couldn't salvage and use I carefully wrapped in plastic and froze as well, packing it alongside the rabbit, crow and female blackbird in the outside freezer. (LOL @ THAT GODDAMN FREEZER TURNING INTO MY CREEPY GIRL ROADKILL MORGUE. IF ONLY MY IN-LAWS KNEW THEY WERE PAYING EXTRA FOR ME TO RUN AN EFFING FREEZER FOR WILD ANIMALS AND THEIR BUTCHERED PARTS.) I wanted to give those remains as an offering, but I couldn't make up my mind WHERE I wanted to leave them. (The standing stones were the first place I thought of, but I was afraid if people found the pile of gruesome leftovers there'd be some SATANIC PANIC in the air. <- POOR LITTLE MISUNDERSTOOD DEVIL-WORSHIPING WITCH!)

In the end, though, the idea came full circle and the fox remnants were left at the foot of the original standing stone (the other two in the background were later added - they seem to be proper standing stones, although probably not part of the original circle). And to combat any SATANIC PANIC I naturally went overboard making the offering look EVEN MORE SUSPICIOUSLY LIKE DELIBERATE WITCHCRAFT. (Although how BLACK MAGIC can it be if I'm also leaving plums, rowan berries and a small loaf of bread? <- CLEARLY, I AM IN LEAGUE WITH SATAN HIMSELF.)

This is my offering to the Old Woman, the Cailleach, my "darker" self (as opposed to the Virginal Spring Bride, my "lighter" self). With this offering I'm effectively giving thanks for what I received during my reign as the Bride and passing on a portion of my gifts and bounty to my other self. I've sowed, I've nurtured, I've reaped, harvested and learned, and by giving a portion to myself I'm also accepting the experience, wisdom and riches that comes from work. (LOOK, I NEVER SAID IT WAS GOING TO MAKE PERFECT SENSE, DID I? Although it makes PERFECT sense to me...)

The magenta pile of raw meat are the remains of my beloved fox (I DID EVERYTHING BUT STRIP NAKED AND FLING THE BLOODIED AND FLAYED PELT ON MY BARE BODY) and behind it is a huge ass soup bone that I picked up for Chippy, our live-in demon who's been house trained like a dog. (<- WHAT DOES AN AUTISTIC GIRL DO WHEN AN ANCIENT SUMERIAN DEMON COMES KNOCKING? SHE PUTS A DOG COLLAR ON IT, GIVES IT LOVES AND HUGS AND FLIES KITES WITH IT.)(HE HAPPENS TO LOVE FLYING KITES V. MUCH, THANK YOU.)

The round loaf of bread is a traditional Ukrainian bread called babka (it's sort've like a cake bread; rich, sweet and fragrant like brioche) that I normally bake during our Easter/Hieros Gamos celebrations. Normally I only bake babka (or paska) in Spring, but I found a recipe for a pumpkin version and after THAT I wouldn't consider anything else. Thanks to me being me the bread wasn't gloriously orange-gold like it was supposed to since I opted to substitute sweet potatoes for pumpkin (I think they have a better, more rounded flavor) and the tres swish potatoes I used were more corn silk gold than pumpkin orange. (SIGH.)

The babka is sitting on a jellied stack of bones from the three different birds consumed during our Harvest Home celebrations. (Long story short? Because I identify the Cailleach as my MONSTER HAG BABA YAGA SELF I offer Her/Me/Us primitive witch food - booze, bread and bones. <- THREE THINGS, LOLTASTICALLY ENOUGH, UKRAINIANS ARE VERY FOND OF.) I made a stock using the frozen bones and gizzards of last year's Christmas goose (I always offer the carcass of the body to the Woman, but keep the shit trimmed away prior to roasting for stock making) and then added leftover roast duck to the soup. The last set of bones comes from our ROADKILL PHEASANT which I butchered, tidied up and then casseroled with venison.

The plums are windfall fruits from the two plum trees that I've been babying for the past couple of years. (It's taken A LOT of effing work to get those fuckers to flower and bear fruit. Like NEARLY THREE YEARS WORTH OF EFFORT AND WORK AND CAJOLING, PLEADING, DEMANDING AND THREATENING.) I promised any fruit, vegetable or herb that touched the ground to the Old Woman which made plum picking V. interesting when Italics was forced to shake branches way above me because he couldn't reach the ones at the very top. (OH, BUT IF ONLY YOU ALL COULD'VE SEEN ME HALF-NAKED AND RUNNING BACK AND FORTH WITH A HUGE ASS BASKET OVER MY HEAD TRYING TO CATCH EVERY PLUM PLUMMETING TO THE GREEDY GROUND BELOW.)

Last are a huge handful of fresh rowan berries from our overloaded tree in the dirtyard which sits at one of the perpendicular angles of the crossroad we're situated on. (I've been meaning to sit down and string the fuckers up into necklaces and garlands and shit BUT I JUST HAVEN'T HAD THE TIME. Currently I have bunches of rowan berries liberally scattered throughout our altar and in various ceramic bowls throughout the house.) Italics said that it was the berries that finally pushed the Harvest Home offering into OBVIOUS WITCHCRAFT TERRITORY. (BECAUSE, LIKE, PILES OF ROTTING MEAT, PLUMS AND A LOAF OF BREAD ARE CLEARLY AMBIGUOUS UNTIL YOU ADD ROWAN BERRIES.)

OH WAIT ALSO! I also offered water at the stone, pouring it over the very tip of the stone and letting it race down to the earth below. (You can kind've sort've see the streaks in the first picture, especially if you view it in a larger size.) As we departed I managed to unearth an oddly shaped stone - really reminiscent of the one we were just at - from the soil and I took it home with us in the hopes I can create a miniature recumbent circle at the base of the Shango (Bone) Tree's altar next year.

(I'm just going to let the next few pictures speak for themselves. ME? RUIN THE THE PERVASIVE ATMOSPHERE? SURELY NOT!)

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The nipple peak tentatively emerging from the dense morning mist is Bennachie, also know as "Mither Tap" ("Mother Tap" due to the breast shape of the hill). In ancient times it had a significant religious role in the indigenous people's lives. (The Old Woman, the Cailleach, usually inhabited the largest hills and peaks in the area.) While I can't see Mither Tap from any of our windows, the second we're on the road that winds down to the cemetery it (She?) comes into view.

For a year or two now I've been desperate to get to the summit to collect materials to create my own neolithic/stone age hammer. (In stories the Old Woman brings Winter down by striking the ground with Her hammer.) I have no idea how to fashion a hammer out of stone, sinew, leather and wood BUT THAT ISN'T GOING TO STOP ME. (FEAR ME, SCOTLAND, FOR ONE DAY I WILL CONTROL WINTER AND YOU WILL TREMBLE IN THE RIPPLING WAKE OF MY AWESOME POWER! (<- Actually, LOLOLOLOL, I just want to ensure A WHITE FUCKING CHRISTMAS EVERY YEAR, THANK YOU VERY MUCH.))

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After collecting a mostly perfect roadkill rabbit (THAT'S ANOTHER STORY I'M SAVING FOR LATER, BUT THE CONDENSED VERSION IS: FOUND A DEAD RABBIT - RATHER BLOATED BUT 100% IMMACULATE FUR - ON THE WAY TO THE STANDING STONES AND SKINNED ITS PELT TO BEGIN THE LONG ROADKILL FORAGING PROCESS OF CREATING A HOMEMADE RABBIT BLANKET; YAY FOR STANDING STONES PAYING IT FORWARD!) and offering this year's bounty at the stones we casually drove around the country as the sun rose, admiring the mist riddled landscape, gawking at the sheer number of pheasants and carefully looking for even more roadkill.

This is mist rising from the local loch (a man made feature created hundreds of years ago) during sunrise. If you have a super great memory you might remember me mentioning "THE LOCH" when pointing out the glimmer of water in the distance in pictures taken at the new cemetery (as opposed to the old cemetery where we go to leave offerings and gifts and help tend the graves of complete strangers since I'm unable to care for the resting place of my family and ancestors).

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The loch and village containing both cemeteries are named after an infamous magician that lived and practiced the black arts just a mile away (the "Wizard Laird"). He spent part of his youth in Italy, supposedly studying magic, and upon returning home continued his "satanic" practices here. He's buried in the very graveyard we visit - the same cemetery where he allegedly stole corpses of unbaptized babies for his nefarious deeds - although the exact location of his burial site has been "lost" and a modern marker in the shape of a headstone was created to commemorate him and his family.

(I have a kind've sort've maybe idea of where he is. Occasionally I leave a treat for him when we visit the graveyard, knocking on the totally nondescript monument to "wake" him up. The first time I did that I requested that he send me his magic birds - crows, rooks, magpies and jackdaws (I already had the crows and magpies, I eventually got the rooks but I'm still waiting for the jackdaws) - and that very night I had an unsettling dream where I found myself standing in a very specific location in the cemetery, practically choking on the overwhelming, blinding presence of something with big heap ju-ju.)

August 29th Walk

Instead of SEARCHING WITHIN MYSELF FOR ANSWERS (see V SRS THINKING) I'm going to crack open one of the billion image folders sitting on my desktop and tackle a recent walk we took to the (semi-)local cemetery. (YEAH, IT'S GOING TO BE ANOTHER SLIDE SHOW OF SCOTTISH COUNTRYSIDE YOU'RE PAINFULLY FAMILIAR WITH TO THE POINT OF BEING TEDIOUSLY BORING, SORRY.)

For weeks I've been cooped up with no outlet for release. I spent a significant portion of the past two weeks with a mysterious case of "stomach flu" (see DOWN THE RABBIT HOLE) after the rabbit incident (see AUGUST 16TH WALK) making migrating away from the bathroom a dangerous game to play. (Not that I really could have if you took the fever and chills and cramps and fatigue and light-headedness into account.)

Once the bug cleared we found ourselves up at night, which usually isn't THAT much of a problem since we're more than happy to track on over to the cemetery in the middle of the night, but thanks to this being the wettest August, ever, the weather hasn't been conducive to midnight walking so, up until two days ago, I spent a huge portion of the month IMPRISONED INDOORS BEHIND THESE SCOTTISH "BUNGALOW" WALLS. (<- Can't drive; I don't have a car, hence relying on walking everywhere for any sort of escape.)

When dawn finally broke and I saw the sun tentatively peeking behind a veil of partially translucent clouds lighting up the baby blue sky I knew I had my chance. ("OHMYGODTHESUN'SOUTLET'SGOFORAWALK!") Delicate stomach be damned, I wanted to see how the elderberries and blackberries were getting on, and how the lavender at the Nun's grave was doing and feel, taste and see the season shift from late summer to early fall. (SEPTEMBER, YOU BETTER BE GOOD TO ME SINCE AUGUST TURNED OUT TO BE A CRACKWHORE.)

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Early morning sun lighting up the fall-kissed Scottish landscape. (Further along the left is the small ruined church we occasionally visit (in winter, in late summer) and the hedge of beeches that frames the remainder of our walk to the cemetery.) Soon this'll be our only natural looking bit of country; they've begun digging up the fields on the other side of the road to build acres and acres of new houses.

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Cattle sunning themselves in front of the (now unoccupied) disturbed children's home. (BETTER ENJOY THAT SUN, COWS, SINCE WE HAVEN'T SEEN MUCH OF IT THIS SUMMER, ESPECIALLY IN AUGUST. <- It's September fucking 2nd and none - ABSOLUTELY NONE - of my tomatoes are even close to being ripe. NO, THANK //YOU// SCOTTISH WEATHER!)

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We had a short movie clip of a mother and calf nuzzling noses (AWWW!) but it was way, way too pixelated to post. (It was crazy windy that day, which was a bittersweet reminder that soon I'll need to break out my rabbit earmuffs and head scarves to keep my ears properly warm when walking down to the cemetery.)

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An epiphyte! (ZOMG! ZOMG!) Around here mistletoe is probably the best known "PLANT THAT GROWS IN ANOTHER PLANT" (other than rowan), but, in this case, it's a fern way, way up in a beech. (So "way, way up in a beech" that I have NO EFFING IDEA HOW TO GET TO IT because I DESPERATELY WANT TO COLLECT SOME ON ST. JOHN'S EVE NEXT YEAR. Sigh.)

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Hedgerow litter. (We later found a Smirnoff bottle, but both were a little too nasty to bring home and clean for tinctures and witchy plant concoctions.) The more we explore the narrow strip of trees (normally we either cut through it to access the pasture field behind it to get to the ruined church, or we stay on the sidewalk on the other side of the street that leads into the tiny village where the cemetery's located) the more affection I feel for the jagged wall of trees and shrubs. (A litter day pick-up is now inevitable.)

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Every once in awhile we go off processed junk food. (Are we awful stoners, or what?) When that happens it usually coincides with an energetic burst of cooking and baking that inevitably fills the store bought sugary void. Tired with oreos and chocolate mousse pumped full of preservatives, I made a batch of Italian cornmeal cookies flavored with marsala after our hoard of peanut butter oatmeal cookies disappeared.

Later in the day (later in OUR day, more correctly, since I was baking in the kitchen around three in the morning) we were off to the cemetery which meant a round of offerings for everyone. (One for the Nun, one for Muriel, one for "Wizard Laird" and two for us. Guess which one I absently picked for Papa (Ghede), not realizing WHY I did until we got to the graveyard? Sometimes the most obvious things are the things you don't see, even when they're right under your effing nose.)

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A crumbling, lichen and moss encrusted stone wall separates the country road from the asphalted footpath that stretches from where we live to the tiny village on the outskirts of the (ever growing) town. Indigenous plants pop up halfway to the graveyard, first starting with red raspberries, then apricot raspberries, then even more red raspberries until they give way to the long tentacle arms of blackberries. These guys still have a way to go, but I'll be back in a week or two to harvest them for jams, vinegars and syrups.

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I read in a foraging book that the biggest, sweetest, most desirable blackberry is the one growing at the very tip of the branch, and it's always the first to ripen while the others behind it are a week or so behind. And the further up (down?) you go along the branch the more bitter and less desirable the berries become. (Less desirable in the sense of raw eating, the ones in the way back are still tres excellent for baking, jamming and preserving.)

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It's too depressing to even talk about. Seriously. (I spent my childhood running away from housing developments that swallowed rural communities, and at age 29 I'm back at square one feeling helpless and heartsick.)

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After we consummated our marriage (we practice Hieros Gamos; the Great Rite, Scared Marriage, whatever you'd like to call it) in a local wheat field on Midsummer we sat together, newlywed and high, watching the sun rise over the rolling Scottish hills as cocks crowed in the distance. That was the last time we saw dawn unfettered, unencumbered by bulldozers, metal gates and giant pits gutting the earth open. We'll never see that sunrise ever again.

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It's not mine anymore. It's not anyone's; not the foxes or rabbits or hares or pheasants or grouse or deer or mice or badgers or hedgehogs. They put up a gate to keep us out as we watch the destruction of our beloved countryside (and home). Up until a few months ago I felt blessed living in this area, that I managed to relocate in a pocket of perfect balanced living. Within the matter of weeks everything 180ed and I'm desperate to break free, get away, hide deeper in the country where I can live in peace, far from colonies of modern homes that clutter up the once free and wild landscape.

Aug. 16th Walk

When all four of us are in the house I'm a ghost - unseen, unheard, quietly slipping from one closed room to another, hiding and waiting for the time I can become a person instead of a shadow. When my father-in-law leaves for the weekend the anti-social creature of darkness costume gets slipped off and the three of us (Italics, his mother and I) fall into a happy communal harmony where there isn't any real stress or anxiety because the one person who causes the bulk of both isn't in the house.

On those glorious weekends I can sometimes be found sitting with my mother-in-law at the kitchen table having long talks (this past weekend the hot topic was comparing the textures of various body hair over a pot of tea), and I'm almost definitely found in the kitchen, at some point, concocting a cliched Sunday meal from scratch for the three of us to enjoy with a glass or two of wine (I'm not much of a drinker but a half glass of red wine after several hours in the kitchen does sort've hit the spot in a satisfying, social drinker sort've way).

When there's four of us Italics and I primarily exist in the office (or computer room) and skulk around, waiting for people to exit a room so we can slip in just after to avoid contact and/or conversation. When there's three of us an unseen switch gets flipped and suddenly, as if by magic, this segregated house becomes a proper home. We eat together, we talk to one another, we don't avoid rooms (or eating) because the space is occupied by someone else; we just spend time together which isn't done AT ALL when Mr. Awesome is home. (I wonder if there's still a split personality view to the change, or if by this point my mother-in-law finally understands that we deliberately remove ourselves from socializing with them to limit the possibility of an "incident" which is bound to happen after prolonged exposure.)

When my mother-in-law mentioned she wanted some fresh air on Sunday evening I dropped the non-work I was engaged in because, DUDE, "fresh air" equals "walk in the country" and since SHE HAS A CAR AND CAN DRIVE that meant new scenery for me. (Don't get me wrong - I love the long, rambling walks Italics and I take to the cemetery, but that route is out of necessity and it never changes. We've grown accustomed to that view, to that "country". And now that they've bulldozed most of the wild fields leading to the cemetery - FOR FUCKING HOUSES, FOR MORE FUCKING HOUSES, GODDAMMIT - I'm heartbroken since it was the only piece of "country" we could access by foot.)

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With wild heather still in flower I suggested a local piece of wooded area, near a castle we frequent and just a short distance from one of my favorite cairns. So with my Easter basket in hand (and a bottle of water, my ritual scissors, my camera and a plastic bag "JUST IN CASE") we set out across the country passing crumbling stone walls, standing stones and quaint half-modern and half-ancient cottages. Setting out for the walk I expected a bundle of heather, maybe locating a few edible mushrooms and finding unripened patches of wild blackberry. What I DIDN'T expect was a hawk to drop a freshly killed rabbit (practically) at my feet.

The woods are divided into a quartered circle. You can walk the entire circumference or you can cut through the woods using one of four shortcuts. Just as we started our walk we caught sight of a doe, graceful and still, poised cautiously in the middle of the path leading into the center of the woods. She looked over her shoulder at us before bounding away, and we watched, captivated, as the beautiful creature slipped into a sea of green, disappearing almost instantly.

I paused for a second, wondering if the encounter was some sort of nudge. (I work with the indigenous - and very local - winter/storm/death/magic hag and goddess, the Cailleach. Deer are HELLA sacred to her and there's evidence to suggest that long, long ago She and Her deer were revered and venerated by the people here through deer cults headed by deer priestesses.) In my experience when I see a deer - WHICH ISN'T AS COMMON AS YOU'D THINK IN SCOTLAND, OKAY? I GREW UP IN THE MID-FUCKING-WEST WHERE WHITE TAILED DEER WERE ALL LIKE "WHAT THE FUCK EVER, DUDE" AND GRAZED ON ABANDONED GRASSY LOTS NEXT TO O'HARE AIRPORT - some serious shit is about to go down.

Sometimes animals lead, and sometimes they're there to give you a jolt so you're paying better attention. (Crows are good for leading, in a pinch I've asked them for directions and they've pointed me straight every effing time.) When you have one of those moments, though, it takes a second to get your bearings, and if you think too long - or too hard - you find yourself faffing around in the same spot, not doing anything. ("SHOULD I FOLLOW? SHOULD I STAY ON COURSE?")

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We stayed on course, and after that hushed moment of communion my wooden Easter basket was swinging again as we veered around rocks and roots, gently prodding moist mushroom caps as we passed hoping that every fungi poked would have sponge instead of gills. (You can't misidentify boletus, baby!) Within minutes there was a wild explosion of air, feathers and fur as a predator bird - a hawk - took flight, its giant wings slicing through the air as it cut across our path before settling on a nearby pine tree.

Not having my glasses (I need them for distance, but they're so fucking cumbersome thanks to the fucking frames being bent out of shape that I usually just leave them at home if I'm going to be bending over a lot when out) I used the camera's zoom function - as far as it'd go - and managed one picture of the bird before it took off with a single, sharp cry. (In the picture you can see that it's looking over its shoulder at us, and I didn't completely understand why it was so interested in our presence until a few minutes later.)

A freshly killed rabbit surrounded by a tufted halo of fur lay strewn across our path. It was a fresh kill; an immediate kill. It was nearly decapitated, sprawled over uneven mounds of thick, dense moss and red cap mushrooms. When I stroked its body it was HOT (not "warm" but "HOT"; THE ALL CAPS IS V. IMPORTANT TO ACCURATELY DESCRIBE THE LEVEL OF BODY HEAT STILL EMANATING FROM THE BODY) and I suddenly understood the dirty look the hawk had given both of us in the one picture I got of it.

What's harder than deciding whether to follow one of your spiritually significant animals or stay on course despite the unexpected run-in? DECIDING WHETHER TO TAKE AN ANIMAL'S MEAL. (On one hand She was there, as a deer, signaling for me to PAY ATTENTION, STUPID. And both the rabbit and hawk are significant to me (the rabbit is another one of my personal animals, and the hawk was my mother's). On the OTHER hand if I took the rabbit then I'd be depriving an animal of sustenance, maybe even a nest filled with fledglings.)

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In the end I felt like it was a test. Not, you know, about stealing food out of the mouth of wildlife, but a personal test to see if I had what it takes to continue my interest in preserving animals. (I have HUGE interest in becoming a taxidermist, but also harvesting fur, organs, bones and other body parts of roadkill for witchcraft purposes. OH HONEY, YES, I'M //THAT// SORT'VE OF WITCH!)

I had it easy with the Lammas fox I found and scooped up from the roadside; its stomach cavity exploded on impact and everything - AND I MEAN EVERYTHING - was gone except for the heart (which I was most interested in, along with tongue and eyes). There was no gutting involved whatsoever since all of the internal organs weren't present, which totally wasn't the case with the rabbit. The fox was all about skinning and scraping liquefied brains and skull from the pelt, the rabbit? The rabbit was ALL THE WAY, BABY.

I apologized to the hawk, but it wasn't there to accept (or revoke) my attempt at making amends for the appropriation. So I talked to her (or him; I didn't find any nuts but I also couldn't find a uterus or ovaries - practice makes perfect, eventually?) and stroked its downy coat, lifting the hot-blooded animal into my arms like a pet as its nearly separated head rolled and gurgled, emitting familiar clicking noises from its torn throat.

(We euthanize our own rats and we know that there's no turning back when they begin "clicking"; it's the sound of their lungs shutting down as they slowly begin to suffocate. When we hear that we know it's time to use nitrous - laughing gas - to gently and painless put them to sleep.)

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At first I carried the rabbit like a burping baby, a third of its body over my shoulder, its bleeding neck thumping against my shoulder leaving a swatch of fresh blood on my white t-shirt. I ran my free hand down its back, stroking, whispering, petting; loving it like it was my own, loving it like I knew it from the second of birth. When the lactic burn began eating away at my arm I cradled it against my chest like a sleeping infant, its head nestled into the crook of my elbow, its legs, soft and pliable, extending against my forearms as it seemed to sink into a peaceful sleep, the position perfectly hiding the neck trauma and giving an illusion of contented life.

All the while my mother-in-law interjected with "ARE YOU SURE YOU WOULDN'T JUST RATHER PUT IT IN THE BASKET?" and "OH, BUT YOU'RE GETTING BLOOD ALL OVER YOUR SHIRT!" not understanding that the residual discomfort that came from holding the rabbit as we walked on was a necessary part of the game. I tried to explain to her that I was establishing a link - a connection - with it, but I think even my dumbed down explanation went over her head and my reluctance to part with my find was written off as another one of my weird quirks.

(By treating it like a beloved pet I was creating a bond so it knew me. I was creating an emotional resonance with it so, later on, when I needed it it would work with me because what animal, especially wild, would do anything for you if it wasn't acquainted with you somehow? I know ultimately it's a very simple way of thinking, but that's my magic - almost stupidly simple to the point of ridiculousness. (WHY DOES IT HAVE TO BE COMPLEX, ANYWAY? ISN'T MAGIC AT ITS VERY HEART NATURAL, PRIMITIVE AND INTUITIVE?))

The rest of the walk was terrifically unremarkable. As we pottered along my mother-in-law found a weather beaten bone (deer, due to the size, probably from the pelvic/haunch region due to the sockets and shape) hanging from a branch (something I should've easily see myself but without my glasses I had given up looking up and over my surroundings and simply focused concentration on the rabbit and the occasional outcropping of mushrooms along the beaten path).

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At the very last leg of our walk we passed a lane of towering rowans where wild bee balm grew, the purple hassocks covered with wild bumblebees drunkenly ambling from one nectar filled stem to another, none of them particularly bothered with the fact that I was shoving a camera directly in their face as they gathered food. (The BEST picture I got has my mother-in-law in the corner ("I'LL MOVE OUT OF THE WAY SO I DON'T RUIN THE PICTURE BY BEING IN IT!", prophetic or what?), so much for submitting it to the bumblebee conservation newsletter (SIGH).)

PS: Rabbit butchery tomorrow; way, way too tired to talk through another 17 pictures. (<- CONSIDER YOURSELF WARNED, FAINT OF HEART!)

I, Being Myself

So, like, yesterday Italics and I went on a sort've date. (SORT'VE DATE = CASTLE/FOREST WALK COMPLETE WITH A HOMEMADE MEZE PICNIC IN OUR SPECIAL LITTLE SECRET SPOT AMONGST THE OAKS.) I wore my best pair of ASS JEANS (<- SHOWS OFF MY HIP TO WAIST RATIO AND SNUGLY FITS IN A PERFECT DIPPING SORT'VE WAY TO REVEAL MY LOWER BACK AND SHIT) because I knew there'd be many-a ASS PICTURE OPPORTUNITY.

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(It's a relationship/in-joke thing - he likes my ass, I like putting my ass on stuff and letting him take pictures. "OKAY! NOW TAKE A PICTURE OF ME SITTING NAKED ON THIS ROCK! OKAY! NOW TAKE A PICTURE OF ME SQUATTING OVER THIS RUSTY OLD BUCKET WE JUST FOUND IN THE WOODS SO IT LOOKS LIKE A BUCKET'O'ASS! OKAY! NOW TAKE A PICTURE OF...")

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Less than 10 minutes into our afternoon foray I slid - belly first - down a huge ass moss-encrusted rock overlooking a babbling brook, and when I fished around to button my jeans THERE WAS NO BUTTON TO BE FOUND. (LOL!) I, being myself, wasn't wearing any underwear. (LOL!) I, being myself yet again, wasn't wearing any sort of belt. (LOL!) I, being myself but 10-15 pounds heavier since my stomach valve fucking broken two years ago, was completely relying on said button to keep my pants zipped. (LOL!) I, being my stubborn Aries self, refused to end our date on grounds of indecency and simply threaded the sleeves of my zip-up hoodie through the front belt loops of my jeans and clumsily tied them together until my pants weren't falling off.

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And then? And then I commenced in LOLOLOLOLing for the rest of the day, artfully dodging suspicious glances from parents and children with my version of censorship (i.e., pulling my t-shirt down over my stomach, pulling my jeans up over it and then tying the sleeves of my hoodie together to hide bare flesh behind several layers of clothing, hands and a bottle of large water held just in front of my pubic mound) and lamenting all of the wonderful, atmospheric scenes that would've benefited from the addition of a bare ass.
Ah, well, next time.

(These are the whole three pictures we actually manged to get, minus one blurred photo of an out of focus European robin.)

June 26th Walk

So, like, yesterday was an incredibly misty morning over here in bonnie ole Scotland and I couldn't resist the opportunity to bust out and christen our tripod by catching the sunrise over mist-riddled hills. (<- ONLY EVER USED INDOORS TO TAKE PICTURES OF ALTARS AND THINGS.) But when the ethereal mist transformed into choking fog we gave up any hope to get pictures like THIS and settled for the Silent Hill atmosphere instead.

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Walking on the main road that leads into the rural country towards the cemetery.

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Main road, getting close to "city" limits. (<- Where the new asphalt turns into a country lane no longer flanked by streetlights.)

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Suspended Silent Hill wires that go nowhere.

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Looking back towards the subdivisions while walking to the cemetery.

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Our REAPING and HIEROS GAMOS wheat field. (When we consummated our marriage on Midsummer (in this field) the wheat heads weren't up yet; they appeared immediately after we SEALED THE DEAL.)

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Our REAPING and HIEROS GAMOS wheat field. (When we consummated our marriage on Midsummer (in this field) the wheat heads weren't up yet; they appeared immediately after we SEALED THE DEAL.)

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Our REAPING and HIEROS GAMOS wheat field. (When we consummated our marriage on Midsummer (in this field) the wheat heads weren't up yet; they appeared immediately after we SEALED THE DEAL.)

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Indigenous flora obscuring the stone wall that separates the country lane from the sidewalk.

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Looking back while walking forward. The row of trees to the left marks the road leading up to the disturbed children's home (no longer in use).

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The beech hedgerow to the left (where the stone stove is and the cow pasture that connects the hedge, ruined church, walled garden and cemetery) and our wheat field to the right.

N2S: Found nurses blouse (blue w/white trimming) neatly hanging on fence post when walking to cemetery. Gathered grass and flowers from Muriel's grave to make Muriel specific incense. Found wheel-like object on Nun's grave, and broken piece of statue (looks like pointing finger). Found single, large crow feather in cemetery.

June 20th Walk

Midsummer activities have worn me the fuck out. So while I recoup and ponder MY MIDSUMMER SPREAD, THE RETURN OF ZOMBIES, TAILOR MADE HOLES and THE LAUGHING HIGH PRIESTESS I'll leave you with pictures from a recent walk. (This adventure includes an honest to God MONSTER STORY!)

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This is what northeast Scotland looks like around 11 PM the day before Midsummer. (And THIS is what it looks like around 3:30 AM around Midsummer.) The long, dark winters eventually give way to long, light summers which makes being semi-nocturnal a lot easier to handle. (I think we've patented LONG COUNTRY RAMBLES AT 4 AM. While the rest of the world sleeps we're outside climbing ancient, crumbling walls and crossing oceans of dewy fields finding new places to build SEX FORTS. <- WHAT YOU PLAY WHEN YOU'RE 29 YEARS OLD AND MARRIED!)

In this particular picture you're overlooking the boundaries of the "new" section of the cemetery across the cow pasture towards the (obscured) walled garden. (If you click on the image above I've noted where the wall is, but it's much easier to see if you click on "ALL SIZES" and view the original 912 x 684 image.) Behind the line of trees and the walled garden is the ruined church (which you can't see), and to the very left of the image - where a clump of trees jut out just above the cobbled wall - is the beginning of the beech hedge where the stone "stove" is located.

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Do you see the two pinpricks of orange/amber lights in the distance? That's where we live. (ROUGHLY, APPROXIMATELY, I MEAN.) The lights indicate the start of housing developments; where the street lamps end partially tamed country begins. We live close to the outskirts of country (at one time this part of the subdivision was the outpost, but the town's grown since then and we've watched local, wild fields succumb to compact family homes) so it takes about twenty minutes to walk from home to the cemetery.

In this picture you can sort've see how the one cow field stretches between the beech hedge and the walled garden/ruined church and touches the very back of the cemetery. Contractors want to bulldoze the pasture and build high income homes. So far, they've met with pretty hefty opposition by villagers. Due to the recession plans were axed and withdrawn, but I've read that they're trying to push it again...

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Sometimes when it's just us and the weather's nice and we're pleasantly stoned we'll wander around the cemetery like it's our backyard. We visit familiar graves (Papa's grave, Muriel, the Nun and Bill - BILL, WHEN THE FUCK ARE YOU GOING TO GET A HEADSTONE, DUDE? IT'S BEEN, WHAT, OVER A YEAR NOW?), knock on the headstones politely to wake up the occupant and leave them offerings of food and drink. (I always carry a bottle of water and a plastic bag full of individually wrapped chocolate in my walking book bag, just in case we're in a hurry to leave and I forget to take something.)

We tidy up graves, pick up litter and remember those who are forgotten. (<- SOMETIMES IT'S NOT CLEAR WHERE THE WEATHER, SUN-STRIPED PLASTIC FLOWERS ARE SUPPOSED TO GO. WHEN THAT HAPPENS WE LEAVE THE ARTIFICIAL BOUQUETS ON GRAVES WHO OBVIOUSLY AREN'T VISITED ANY LONGER.) It's less "caretaker" and more...I don't know..."ensuring everyone is happily tucked in for eternity", I guess. (<- WOW, IS THAT MATERNAL OR WHAT? Death's the only thing that brings out the nearly non-existent maternal nurturer in me. Maybe that's Santa Muerte's influence?)

That's Chippy my Sumerian house trained demon dog sitting in my leather bag behind the flower arrangements. (LONG STORY. VERY LONG STORY, IN FACT. SHORT STORY? I TRAINED A NON-CORPOREAL ENTITY TO REACT TO A PLUSH TOY. CHIPPY'S - MORE COMMONLY KNOWN TO PEOPLE AS "PAZUZU" - CHOSEN FORM WAS A SHAR PEI SO YOU'LL SOMETIMES SEE ME WALKING AROUND THE COUNTRY (OR THE MOVIES) WITH CHIPPY STRAPPED TO MY BACK LIKE A PAPOOSE.)

(DUDE, EVEN DEMONS TRAINED TO ACT LIKE DOGS NEED TO GET OUT OF THE HOUSE SOMETIMES, YOU KNOW?)

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A simultaneously garish and eerie sight are the solar powered lights that glow an icy blue/white against shadowed headstones at night. We first encountered them on our February full moon walk after receiving a staggering amount of snow. (<- NOT STAGGERING ENOUGH TO STOP US FROM OUR 4 AM WALK, ALTHOUGH I DID GET THROWN A SERIOUS "WTF?" LOOK FROM A WOMAN AS SHE PASSED BY. JESUS, WIFEY, "WTF?" YOURSELF. WHY ARE //YOU// OUT WALKING IN THE SNOW AT 4 FUCKING AM? I'VE GOT AN EXCUSE - I'M A SEMI-NOCTURNAL WITCH.)

(ALSO, YES, IT IS REAL FUR; IF YOU CAN'T WEAR YOUR KNEE-LENGTH FUR COAT IN THE SNOW ON A 4 AM WALK TO THE LOCAL CEMETERY WHEN CAN YOU?)

The blur of festive looking Halloween light in the center of this picture? That's me, naked from the waist up (ITALICS TOTALLY NEEDED TO BLOW HIS NOSE AND I WAS TOTALLY LOOKING FOR A REASON TO GET NAKED SO, CLEARLY, I HAD NO CHOICE BUT TO TAKE OFF MY FUR COAT, MY LONG-SLEEVE SHIRT AND MY BRA SO HE COULD BLOW HIS NOSE IN THE ONE ARTICLE I DIDN'T NEED - MY BRA; BUT ONLY BECAUSE I WASN'T WEARING UNDERWEAR, AS USUAL), pausing for just a second to wave around a solar powered snowman that was flickering on someone's grave.

(That makes me a full fledged witch, right? Running half-naked in a cemetery on a full moon just after receiving the most snow Scotland's seen in almost a generation? <- THAT'S //MY// SNOW, BTW. YOU DON'T CHOKE DOWN SHOTS OF WHISKEY WITH THE INDIGENOUS WINTER HAG FOR NOTHING.)

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I wanted to capture the 60s artificial yellow/green of the miniature ferns growing out of the stone wall "containing" the beech hedge, but by the time we passed the row of gnarled trees it was too dark to capture the inorganic, plastic quality of the plants. Although it wasn't too dark to see how the light behind the ruined church filtered through one of the empty, arched windows making the inhabitable spookily habituated on the night before Midsummer.

"It's something out of a fairytale," I whispered to Italics, although in this story Gretal was also the Witch. (Poor, poor Hansel...)

(Some of these images have notes, so be sure to click on the thumbnails above to see what I've added. ALSO, ALSO, ALSO! Also, these picture's are one billion percent best viewed in the dark and at their original 912 x 684 size (just click on "ALL SIZES"); you'll be surprised how much more you see if you turn off all the lights and let your eyes adjust. See? SEE? AND SEE?)

(If you look hard enough/let your eyes adjust you can see how the ruined church has no roof and even see the empty frame of one of the windows in the last picture.)

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THIS PICTURE COMES WITH A LOLOLOLOL! STORY! (A story? WHAT? You mean there might be a reason why the Midsummer stove* offering was ALL OVER THE FUCKING PLACE instead of neatly arranged within?)

(* An outside stone stove with offerings? DOUBLE WHAT? MS. GRAVEYARD DIRT, WHAT CRACK ARE YOU SMOKING NOW? An older journal entry, ARCTIC RIVER, should explain away some of the confusion.)

RIGHT! SO!

Because darkness grants a wee bit more privacy than light and I have the extraordinary ability to DRAW THINGS OUT FOR AS LONG AS I EFFING CAN I decided that we'd leave our Midsummer stove offering - water, homemade flat bread, dried dates and a banana - AFTER we visited the cemetery so there was no chance that nosy country folk could interrupt the ritual.

("OI, YOU TWO! FET YE DOOIN'?" <- Italics laughs at my Doric but I think that's pretty close. WAIT, NOT CLOSE ENOUGH! Apparently it's "FIT YE DEEIN?" - close enough? Probably, at least I can intuitively understand most of it even if I can't speak it. <- YOU DON'T WANT TO HEAR ME READING ROBERT BURNS OUT LOUD. IT'S AN AWKWARD AND DEMORALIZING EXPERIENCE FOR ANYONE WHO'S SCOTTISH.)

I pride myself on being stupidly fearless. (STUPID IN THE SENSE THAT I SHOULD PROBABLY KNOW BETTER, BUT DON'T GIVE A FUCK.) The only thing that really terrifies me is DEATH (LOL, I KNOW, I'M GOING TO NEED TO GET OVER THAT ONE, RIGHT? I MEAN, IT'S NOT LIKE IT'S NOT GOING TO HAPPEN, OR I'M GOING TO BE ABLE TO BULLSHIT MY WAY OUT OF IT) with a close second being HUMIDITY AND/OR RAIN. (<- WEATHER, DON'T YOU BE RUININ' MY HAIR AND MAKE-UP, GODDAMMIT. ALSO, I ONLY LIKE TO GET WET ON TWO VERY SPECIFIC OCCASIONS: WHEN I'M BATHING, AND WHEN I'M SWIMMING. THE END.)

Monsters? Ghosts? Demons? Hell? Jesus H. effing Christ, I live with a fucking SUMERIAN DEMON and A RANDY FUCKING BLACK MAN (Papa Ghede, also known as Baron Samedi), there's a broken car parked in the fucking driveway, there's a trash heap in the backyard and there's no lawn in the front, only exposed dirt and piles of rocks heaped beneath cast aside pieces of driftwood. LADIES AND GENTLEMEN, WHEN YOU LIVE IN HELL HOUSE MONSTERS, GHOSTS AND DEMONS DON'T ENTER YOUR RADAR AT //ALL//.

Fearless and proud we entered the dark expanse beneath the beeches, having just enough light to maneuver around fallen limbs and ditch-like grassy pits. It was almost midnight when I dropped the black leather book bag (<- DEAR DECEASED MOM, YOU WILL NEVER APPRECIATE HOW MUCH I LOVE THE BLACK LEATHER WHIRLPOOL (<- HOLY FUCKING SHIT, I ONLY JUST REALIZED THAT! WHIRLPOOL! FUCK! STAMPED RIGHT ON MY FUCKING BOOK BAG! FUCK! HOW DID I NOT "SEE" THAT BEFORE? FUCK!) BAG I "INHERITED" WHEN NEEDING EXTRA LUGGAGE TO TAKE BACK SOME OF YOUR THINGS) next to the foot of a tree, Chippy and his yellow and orange t-shirt were the only things easily visible to the naked eye in an otherwise sea of shadowy ground.

Methodically I loosened the leather straps securing the bag around his neck (I tuck the book bag's "flap" into the bag itself so when I draw the strings closed the bag tightens around his neck for a cosy fit) and pulled him out for a moment of freedom (the last time I did that he took off and upset a whole herd of cattle who, honest to fucking God, tried to scale A STONE FUCKING WALL WITH BARBED WIRE just to get away from the unseen phantom terrorizing them; we've since discussed what is - and isn't - appropriate "out for a walk" behavior) so I could get to the offerings.

In the dark everything was still and quiet, even the crows overhead were silent in their nests as the sound of a crunching plastic bag intruded on the otherwise deep and heavy summer solemn. The bottle of water and bag of food were removed from the book bag and, to ensure our getaway was quick, Chippy was instantly return to his snug carrier despite protests of disappointment. (OH, HE TALKS. HE SOUNDS LIKE ANIMAL, FROM THE MUPPETS, AND SPEAKS IN SIMPLE THREE TO FIVE WORD SENTENCES WITH ONE OF THOSE WORDS USUALLY BEING "WOMAN". <- That's me, if that wasn't, you know, entirely obvious.)

It was all going to plan until I squatted at the base of a beech for my ritual "piss in the woods, ruins, cemetery or other places of great importance". (<- LET'S DISCUSS THE ENTIRE EMPTYING OF THE BLADDER RITUAL LATER, OKAY?) As my jeans dropped to the ground there was a sudden rustle in the overgrown grasses to our right. JUST AN ANIMAL OUT AND ABOUT, I assured myself, but my muscles tensed and my eyes flitted from patch of grass to patch of grass because I knew, deep down in my totally not afraid stomach, that the horror movie had started.

JUST A BADGER, JUST A HEDGEHOG, JUST AN ANIMAL OUT FOR A WALK SINCE IT'S ANIMAL TIME HERE IN SCOTLAND, but I was still unsure. I gathered folds of denim into a tight fist so I wouldn't accidentally piss on my clothing, but, really, I just wanted something to unapologetically cling to for moral support. I couldn't see ANYTHING; not even with my glasses on. What natural light remained was reflected off the tips of meadow grass - the downy kind that stretches up to your knees - but past the tapered blades there was nothing, an entire ecological kingdom of "nothing" that was 100% obscured (and leering at me and my naked ass hovering a few inches from the twig-riddled ground).

But the entire "piss in the woods, ruins, cemetery or other places of great importance" is sort've our THING (one of many, anyway), and I didn't want to rush the job because it'd be like rushing foreplay or sex or, you know, that special stuff that couples do that's serious but really a weird, evolved in-joke that can't be explained. So, for reasons imagined and stated above, I didn't want to do a piss'n'run (it's more piss'n'shake the ass, slap the ass, point to the ass, pole dance around the tree trunk/ruins as sexily as one can with pants still shackling ankles and then...well, and then CENSORED MARRIED STUFF).

Performance anxiety hit, but it wasn't //MY// fault. Amidst the darkness, the gnarled grey trees and their trunks, the tall meadow grasses and sunken pits blanketed with rotting leaves there was movement. Unmistakable, undeniable clumsy, heavy movement that was zeroed in on me and steadily moved closer and closer. My heart, healthily hammering away in my chest, leapt into my throat with the first hissing, spitting, huffing sound. (HOLY FUCKING SHIT SOMETHING WAS FUCKING HISSING IN THE FUCKING GRASS AND IT WAS HISSING AS IT WAS MOVING IN MY FUCKING DIRECTION.)

I swear to all that's holy and divine I TRIED MY BEST TO BE COURAGEOUS, I TRIED MY BEST TO BE BOLD AND UNAFRAID, I TRIED MY BEST TO REMEMBER THAT MONSTERS DON'T EXIST but, in the end, I got swept into a story that ended with A RABID FUCKING BADGER BURSTING OUT OF SHUDDERING GRASSES - JAW AGAPE AND RAZOR SHARP TEETH GLEAMING IN THE NIGHT - AND SINKING ITS BACTERIA INFESTED MUTATED TUSKS INTO MY WHITE EXPOSED ASS GORGING PAPA'S (AND ITALIC'S) PRIDE AND JOY.

(Monsters aren't real but mutant, rabid badgers with mastodon tusks who hunt the naked asses of unsuspecting nubile young women having a piss in Scottish hedgerows are, okay?)

If you saw how quick I hauled ass to get the fuck out of there you'd think I was competing against the Devil himself in a supermarket sweep stake. Jeans were unsexily yanked up, Chippy and the tote wildly thrown over a shoulder and the offerings unceremoniously dumped at an APPROXIMATION of the stove's opening (ritual? what ritual? THERE'S A CRAZED BADGER AFTER ME!) all in one whirling movement before I was off like a rocket, charging through grass and brush and over the toppled stone wall not stopping until I crossed the street to the safety of the modern world - asphalt.

For a day or two we speculated what the fuck it could've been, and we always wound up with "badger" due to the sheer size (when it moved it displaced A LOT of fucking grass) and sound. And "badger" we stuck with until the evening of the 21st when THE SAME EXACT NOISE WAS SUDDENLY IN THE BACK FUCKING YARD. ("OH MY GOD IT KNOWS WHERE I LIVE!") I tore through the house like a fucking maniac to find a flashlight hoping, praying and wishing that whatever IT was that IT wouldn't leave until I had a chance to uncover this potentially ass biting mystery.

The noise - MY GOD, THE NOISE! - that hissing, huffing, wheezing sound! Barefooted I carefully crept closer to the unsuspecting visitor, my naked toes curled into the wet grass as I inched closer to the bristled sound, the beam of light from the torch jumping from left to right as my hand shook with uncertainty. I almost didn't want to look. Seriously. There was a second where I thought of several reasons why INSIDE was better than OUTSIDE. (i.e., "MAYBE YOU SHOULD JUST, YOU KNOW, LEAVE IT ALONE. MAYBE IT'S NOT A GOOD IDEA TO BE OUT HUNTING MONSTERS WITHOUT SHOES. MAYBE...")

With an utterly brave flick of a wrist I caught the soft glow of an luminsecent eye. And there IT was; there THEY were. My Scottish hedgerow monster(s) who fiendishly hunted down my scent turned out to be THIS. (VICIOUS! HORRIBLE! LOOK AT THOSE ASS THIRSTY EYES! LOOK AT THOSE AWFUL, SOULLESS FEATURES MADE POSSIBLE ONLY BY THE POWER AND WILL OF SATAN!)

Like a pair of retarded turkeys the two male hedgehogs puffed and huffed at each other, taking turns to circle one another as they competed for dominance. (How can something so fucking small make such a loud fucking sound? HEDGEHOGS, CEASE WITH YOUR ASTHMA-LIKE MONSTER NOISES! But DON'T cease with your asthma-like eating noises because it's pretty goddamn cute to hear you guys happily wheeze while eating homemade sweet potato pancakes. Awwww!)

And that, dear and gentle readers, is how you spook a witch who isn't afraid of monsters, ghost, demons or hell - you throw her in an overgrown hedgerow where she can't see a fucking thing and set loose the hedgehogs.

Midsummer Spread

So, like, I drew *7* pentacle cards for my 10 card Celtic Cross spread on Midsummer. (The other three were THE DEVIL (beneath me), TEMPERANCE (before me) and 7 OF WANDS (final result); ENDING ON A HIGH, YO.)

I'm not ashamed to admit - AT ALL, UNIVERSE, AT ALL - that I have absolutely no knowledge or innate understanding of the entire tarot thang (I do better reading coffee foam or tea sediment or broken egg yolks or blood clots OR ANYTHING ELSE THAT ISN'T A DECK OF CARDS WITH VERY SPECIFIC MEANINGS CREATED BY SOMEONE ELSE) but the fact that I pulled SEVEN FUCKING PENTACLE CARDS is enough for me to go "OH, HEY, WAIT! I THINK SOMEONE OR SOMETHING (OR ME, MYSELF, ALL SUBCONSCIOUS-LIKE) IS TRYING TO TELL ME SOMETHING..." without a worry that I might be reading into things a little too deeply.

#1 (This card covers you / Represents the present situation)

8 of Pentacles:
The future indicates that an opportunity will arise for you to use your strong powers of imagination. You will be able to use your dedicated ability of method and order.

* * *

#2 (This card crosses you / Obstacles that are now, or will confront you)

7 of Pentacles (R):
This is going to be a period of many problems due to your inability to make your mind up. Worrying over money will not make things easier. Trust in your own abilities.

* * *

#3 (This card crowns you / This card casts a strong influence over the present circumstances. It also reflects the best one can achieve under the present conditions.)

6 of Pentacles:
This is going to be a time when you will posses great power over your own fate and also over the destiny of others. With effort you will achieve prosperity and respect.

* * *

#4 (This card is beneath you / An event or matter in the past relevant to the present situation)

The Devil:
You have a selfish desire for money and all it can achieve. You are determined and ruthless in your craving for power and status. The future shows your wildest dreams could come true but you will then have to choose between good and evil.

* * *

#5 (This card is behind you / This reveals an influence in the past which could affect the future)

4 of pentacles (R):
You may find obstacles in your path with regard to finances in the near future. You should listen to good advice offered to you in a spirit of friendship.

* * *

#6 (This card is before you / This unveils the influence which is coming into action and which could operate in approximately six months time.)

Temperance:
You should now begin to work within a budget. The future indicates a long journey for which you will need extra finances. You have a good brain and you are usually right over the outcome of a situation.

* * *

#7 (This is yourself / This card affects you personally.)

Queen of Pentacles:
You will be influenced by a dark skinned mature lady. She has a clear insight into the true character of others. She is domineering but tries to disguise it.

* * *

#8 (This is your home / This affects your family life.)

Knight of Pentacles:
A dark skinned young man who is quick witted and hard working and honorable in his outlook, intent on his pursuit of wealth, features strong in your future. He will be capable of altering your destiny.

* * *

#9 (Hopes and fears / This could reveal your subconscious hopes and fears.)

3 of Pentacles:
Now is the time for you to think about business, as constructive and favorable forces are at work. Money will be gained through speculation or partnership.

* * *

#10 (Final result / Shows the culmination and results which will be brought about from all of the influences as revealed by the other cards in the divination, provided events and influences continue as indicated.)

7 of Wands:
You will overcome delays and obstacles. You can be too casual in love affairs. The future indicates a great victory over a rival.

ALSO, I HAVE FINALLY HAD "NORMAL" SEX.

(We haven't had it NORMAL since Mardi Gras because we said we'd break SEX FAST 2009 in the "doorway" that's in the middle of the wheat field where we Reaped together last year. We kept pushing back the date - FROM FUCKING EASTER SUNDAY - because THE TIME'S JUST NOT GOOD or THE WEATHER IS SHIT or WE DON'T HAVE ANYTHING TO SMOKE. But within a few minutes of JUMPING OVER A CAST IRON PAN FILLED WITH FIRE (<- FERTILITY HOP SCOTCH!) I was all "OH HEY LET'S GO TO THE FIELD //RIGHT NOW// AND HAVE SEX".)

(And we did. And it was good. And I got stung by nettles. And we were up before the crows. And the police didn't catch us stumbling out of the field. And the two young girls traveling home around 4 AM (WTF ARE YOU DOING OUT AT FOUR FUCKING AM YOUNG LADIES?!) didn't even bother giving me wide berth despite my purple and black African dress, ritual jewelry (not as ostentatious as my dress), white Scottish apron (aka LAST YEAR'S WEDDING DRESS) and baggy flannel jacket/shirt. <- IT'S A PROGRESSIVE, HOT WITCH LOOK.)

ON A FINAL NON-SEQUITUR NOTE: I can totally dig almost every aspect of periods except - EXCEPT! - the 3-4 days of continuous upset stomach-ed-ness. (SRSLY, UNIVERSE, I DON'T EVEN COMPLAIN ABOUT MY CRAMPS. HOW ABOUT CUTTING ME SOME SLACK HERE? JESUS.)

May 27th Walk

It seems criminal to be sitting here, hammering out an entry when there's a perfect (bordering near FLAW-FUCKING-LESS) Friday evening outside with a robin egg colored sky and a warm-but-still breeze that breathes across the hairs of your arm.

(Soon - SOON! - will be the time for sunglasses and amphetamines, the bottom half of string bikinis (<- NO SHOULDER STRAP TAN LINES, THANKS, I'LL FORGO THE TOP AND BARE MY TITS TO THE NEIGHBORS) and Dire Strait LPs, hammocks, inflatable pools, barbecues, bonfires and sex beneath the The Shango (Bone) Tree - provided, of course, my father-in-law doesn't manage to kill ALL OF THE FUCKING GRASS again this year.)

I meant to keep the momentum of writing going, but then I got hit by my period and all of those wonderful intentions wrapped up in satiny bows got misplaced (or stolen and sold on the black market). I'm probably the last girl you'll ever hear complaining about her period (NO "I WISH I WAS A GUY" OR "STUPID FUCKING UTERUS, WHAT ARE YOU GOOD FOR, ANYWAY?"; LONG STORY SHORT? I DIG BEING FEMALE, I DIG HAVING MY SEXUAL REPRODUCTION ORGANS SHAPED LIKE A RAM'S HEAD, I DIG THE POWER, THE HORMONES, THE ENERGY, THE BLOOD - I TOTALLY DIG BEING FEMALE, PERIOD, THE END, THANK YOU) but this one - thanks to two previously light ones - was like being hit by a steam powered STRIPPING UTERINE LINING TRAIN.

I bled for five days non-stop, changing menstrual rags twice a day. I bled and cramped while curled up next to Catfish sleeping (our giant six foot Wal-Mart catfish pillow brought home to Scotland during our last trip to the States), I bled and cramped while standing in the shower washing my hair, I bled and cramped while cooking dinner, marching while standing still, lifting each foot just enough to trick my body into thinking I was actually walking. (<- WALKING = BEST THING TO DO WHILE WAITING FOR PAIN MEDICATION TO KICK IN TO COMBAT CRAMPS.)

INTERNETS, I AM WIPED OUT (AND, HOPEFULLY, SO IS MY WOMB). Physically and...well, actually, only physically, because everything else is pretty awesome-okay (or, at least, somewhere in between "awesome" and "okay"). For instance - FRESH, HOMEMADE RHUBARB PIE WITH SUMMER FRUITS (BLUEBERRIES, RASPBERRIES, BLACKBERRIES, RED AND BLACK CURRANTS) AND ORANGE FLOWER WATER? AWESOME! Having to share said FRESH, HOMEMADE RHUBARB PIE WITH SUMMER FRUITS (BLUEBERRIES, RASPBERRIES, BLACKBERRIES, RED AND BLACK CURRANTS) AND ORANGE FLOWER WATER with my in-laws? Just "okay".

Yesterday I spent three hours hard core gardening (hard core = continuing work in the first trench in the dirtyard; I've got permission to plant vegetables there this year, but I have to physically sift all debris, stones, pebbles and boulders from the dirt by hand and cut-break-snap tree roots in my way, otherwise my chthonic vegetables don't stand a chance). Just as I was about to retire - all dirted up and sun-kissed across the bridge of my nose and cheeks (A FACE TAN TO FINALLY MATCH MY CRESCENT MOON ASS TAN) - I figured I better check all of my seedlings and plants to make sure nothing needed to get watered.

And, OH SNAP, shit needed to get watered so the garlic was dowsed and the lilies of the valley were drenched and I offered water ("BEAR ME FRUIT, BEAR ME FRUIT, BEAR ME FRUIT") to The Shango (Bone) Tree and the two other fruit trees (an apple and another plum, I think). The peach tree and tobacco was checked, the peas prodded, and everything inside the bonsai house and outside on the patio was loved, touched and watered. (YOU NEED TO BE V. HANDS ON WITH PLANTS; THEY NEED TO KNOW THEY'RE LOVED!)

While watering my witch's garlic I noticed how overgrown the narrow stretch of dirt had become (we toss rat food leftovers out the office/computer room window so the birds are fed; unfortunately, since a lot of the leftovers are in seed form they happily root themselves below the window giving us a lush patch of rat food seed grass - LOL, THE ONLY HEALTHY GRASS IN THE ENTIRE YARD, SRSLY) so, fuck, since I was ALREADY muddy and sore and tired and damp it didn't matter if I got anymore muddy and sore and tired and damp and went to work on weeding the garlic bed.

(And it was still and cool and beautiful. Hidden in the shade of nearing twilight I knelt on damp earth and turned it up with my bare hands, the only sounds accompanying the tearing sound of plants-from-soil were the metallic pings from the freshly filled bird feeders as the cheep-cheeps came back for one last meal, and the bumbling, stumbling sound of a fattened bumblebee (BEH!) investigating everything but me as the heavy load of its body hugged the ground.)

That moment - with the pinging and the buzzing and the overwhelming smell of saturated, living earth - was Church, the sycamore's growing umbrella of green a breathing Byzantine cathedral. I prayed and didn't even know it, but there was something about that steady, contented silence that felt simultaneously like thanksgiving and hope. (And I wasn't even high! NOT EVEN, DEAR AND GENTLE READERS!)

"AGAIN!" tends to be my motto; experience taking precedent over thinking. (Thinking's for later, in winter, when I'm locked up indoors and have nothing better to do than be intro and retrospective.) But, SIGH, no, not again, because Saturday morning (tomorrow) is the farmer's market and I'm waking up in the evening (today was around 7:30 PM) which means I need to reserve energy to be able to spring out of the house in roughly twelve hours.

So, instead of gardening, instead of thinking (LOL, THINKING? BUT IT'S NEARLY SUMMER!), instead of writing I give you...

...

...

...

...another one of our patented early morning walks. (OKAY, OKAY, CALM DOWN, DON'T GET OVEREXCITED.) After being awake at night for about a week you begin getting itchy and the super awesome thing about living here in Scotland (at least where we're located) is that dawn begins to break around 2:30 AM in summer. So, by 3 AM - especially near the solstice - there's more than enough light to let you explore the countryside while the rest of the (local Scottish) world sleeps.

Italics celebrated his 29th birthday on Sunday (HE'S CAUGHT UP, I'M NO LONGER A CRADLE ROBBER! <- WE'RE BOTH MONKEYS, BUT I WAS BORN A MONTH EARLIER) and due to a retarded mix-up ("retarded mix-up" = I forgot to include the portions in the care packages of home baked goods I recently sent) there were five defrosted chunks of Ukrainian angel food cake (vanilla almond) that needed to be used and a 40oz bottle of cider that neither of us could bare to drink (way too acidic and carbonated; it set off both of our acid reflux issues just after one swig).

Unwanted cake and cider? Sounds like a perfect excuse to go leave celebratory offerings...

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Something was DIFFERENT, but I couldn't put my finger on what it was. And then, right in mid-sentence, it hit me - LOL, WAIT, I DIDN'T PUT THAT MOTH ON MY ANTIQUE CRESCENT NECKLACE! (SAVE THE SILK!)

My mom's Elizabeth Arden "Treasures of the Pharaohs" hippo figure was the seed that sparked SEX PIG 2K; I worshiped the glossy white porcelain figure from afar as a kid (translation: IN THE CHINA CABINET, BUT NEVER TOUCHED OR HELD IN FEAR OF BREAKING IT). It was one of several things I managed to "inherit" when my mother died unexpectedly a few years ago.

Not only does it spiritually resonate with me (the entire hippo thang; which perfectly compliments Italics's crocodile thang), but, in a weird way, it makes me love my mother even more when I see it. (It's hard to remember the crazy, the angry, the everything when you're looking at something so simple, white and pure - it's like seeing the best of my mom.)

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I couldn't find any indigenous folklore about Brimstone moths, but they apparently love rowan and we have a single rowan tree that marks our side of the crossroads we live on. (I've been hacking either rowan or sycamore roots; all of the pieces have been kept since I figure you can do something MAGIC with roots the width of bean poles - CHTHONIC ROWAN BROOM, ANYONE?)

I've only worn the crescent necklace once; it was one of those split second, spontaneous decisions. It was worn with the rest of my ritual jewelry, my favorite ass-hugging jeans, my magic grey long sleeve shirt, my wedding dress (a Scottish apron that I wore when we performed last years GREAT RITE / SACRED MARRIAGE / HIEROS GAMOS ritual) and my black leather jacket when we went reaping last year during Harvest's lunar eclipse. (MORE ON THAT LATER!)

"LET'S GO FOR A WALK," I suggested, out of no where, staring at the Brimstone moth. It was still dark - inky black with a faint crack of cerulean blue where the sun would rise in a few hours - perfect for catching some wildlife still out and about before early commuters began their weekly cycle of wake-work-sleep.

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When the rural town we live in began seriously encroaching on the countryside the occupants of the new houses began using abandoned fields to walk their dogs. After several years walkers have beaten in a path that loops around a cairn and several fields passing hillsides that were once filled with endless gorse bushes and giant foxgloves.

Sections of old stone walls have been removed and two corners of the field - the two split by a gravel road leading up to a farm - have been disturbed. There are piles of gravel and stacks of plastic irrigation pipes and the beaten path has been flanked with flags on wooden stakes; looks like the council has finally decided to make a permanent path for walkers and their dogs and create two small parking lots to discourage people from parking on the side of the road.

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My father-in-law, Mr. Awesome, believes himself to be an expert bullshit artist. We feign ignorance and play along, only because it's easier to go "YEAH, RIGHT, UH HUH" absently while periodically nodding your head in faux agreement. (NO, SERIOUSLY. I'VE WITNESSED A "CONVERSATION" BETWEEN ITALICS AND HIS FATHER THAT LASTED TEN MINUTES AND THE ONLY THING ITALICS EVER SAID - THROUGHOUT THE ENTIRE DURATION OF THE ONE-SIDED INTERACTION - WAS A DISMISSIVE "UH HUH".)

Mr. Awesome alerted us to the fact that a new building scheme was going up, that they were going to put houses where people walk their dogs. You know, the place where the council's outlined the beaten track with flags - like they do with every other path they create and pave in the shire - and carved out two small parking lot sized plots right next to the street. The same two fields were rocks have been deliberately removed from the stone wall to provide access into the carved out plots of land, where piles of gravel are sitting (to use instead of asphalt or concrete) next to a handful of pipes to irrigate the to-be flattened, graveled patch of land.

"Uh huh," we said, in unison, his father speaking to both of our backs as we pretended to be inordinately interested in the dinner we were preparing. "Uh huh," we said, a day earlier having seen an official posting at the community hall saying that the building scheme that had been planned - something I was personally angsting about - was withdrawn and not to be pushed forward (thank you, recession, thank you!).

"Uh huh," we said, thinking "what a fucking oblivious retard."

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Just as we began passing the disturbed children's home (boarded up and no longer in use, but still being maintained in the hopes that one day it can be reopened for the benefit of children) I caught a flash of white bobbing in our wheat field ("our wheat field" = the wheat field where we performed the Reaping ritual last year).

It was, honest to all that's fucking holy, the first deer I've seen locally since first moving here in 2001. (I now LOLOLOL! at my memories of white tailed deer eating so non-chalantly next to O'hare airport when driving in to pick Italics up from the airport or drop him off.)(OH, THE OLD DAYS WHERE EVERY FEW MONTHS THERE'D BE A TEARFUL DEPARTING, WAITING AND DREAMING ABOUT THE DAY WE'D FINALLY BE TOGETHER WITH NO ATLANTIC OCEAN BETWEEN US.)

Deer are sacred to The Old Woman (the Cailleach), and I think I've read that the ancient, primitive deer priestess cults were somehow connected to Her. (WORKS FOR ME, YO. GIVE ME SOME DRUGS, A WEAPON, AND I'LL HAPPILY GO RITUALLY HUNTING SO I CAN KILL, WEEP, SKIN AND THROW A FLAYED, STILL WARM HIDE OVER MY NAKED BODY WHILE ROLLING ON THE GROUND ALL EXORCIST-STYLE. <- Oh honey, yes, I'm THAT sort've witch.)

"I wonder if it'll run through the threshold," I mused, the "threshold" being a cleared section of a stone wall running through the middle of the wheat field - the place where, a few months ago, I declared we should finish our WEDDING RITE. (I mean, JESUS, what could be MORE MAGIC than having ritual fertility sex IN THE THRESHOLD OF A "DOOR"? PRETTY DAMN MAGIC.)

A minute or two later - just long enough to be comical - it darted through the gap, racing up the incline of the field towards Rabbit Hill. (YEAH, YEAH, I GET IT, I GET IT. NIGHTTIME MOTH ON MY CRESCENT REAPING NECKLACE, A DEER RACING THROUGH OUR PROPOSED MARTIAL BED - "FOR FUCK'S SAKE! GET IT ON, GET IT OVER WITH!" DEMANDS THE UNIVERSE. <- We still haven't had "proper" sex; we've been saving that for SEX IN THE FIELD, so Hieros Gamos / the Great Rite has been only half finished since Easter Sunday - ASS FINISHED!)

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The local cemetery at dawn. The new section's contained behind the wall; everything in front is much, much older. The row of trees in the background - the super huge ones in the distance - are the ancient beech trees that create the hedgerow where the stone "stove" is. Just behind the trees is our wheat field.

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The flat, risen grave is our makeshift bench and cemetery sex bed. Unfortunately, it's too dark to see, but there's a weathered skull and crossbones carved into the stone beneath the top. (IF YOU CLICK ON THE IMAGE ABOVE I'VE HIGHLIGHTED WHERE IT IS; YOU CAN JUST MAKE OUT SOME OF THE CROSSBONES.)

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Sister Mary Cabrini's still holding on to her resurrection egg. (For the full story hit up my previous journal entry 2009 PYSANKY which explains the entire egg thing a lot better.) I wonder what visiting relatives or fellow sisters must've thought the first time they saw the hard boiled egg sitting at the foot of the cross. (Which reminds me - I've still got a wee lavender that I've been meaning to plant at her grave for the past two years, BETTER GET THAT SHIT DONE, DUDE.)

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No one there except for us, birds, rabbits and the recently (and not so recently) deceased. It's a beautiful, still quiet that's shared between us and the wildlife - Scotland at dawn, twenty-two days before the summer solstice.

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Wild rabbits in the cemetery. (REINCARNATION, RESURRECTION AND THE LIFE DEATH CYCLE, ANYONE?) If the birds don't get to our graveyard offerings first, the rabbits have a picnic. (The shot's so blurred because Italics had to zoom in super crazy to be able to get a picture of the rabbit cutting through the rows of graves.)

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OH HEY, AS IF YOU HAVEN'T ALREADY GOTTEN YOUR FILL OF BLURRED RABBIT IMAGES! This one was taken on the way back as we passed the beech hedge. Next time we go out for one of our morning walks I'll staple my detached rabbit tail so I can blend in with the locals. ("I AM YOUR RABBIT MESSIAH, THROUGH ME I WILL BRING YOU AND YOUR LAGOMORPHA BRETHREN EVERLASTING LIFE!")

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While Italics was having a slash behind the disturbed children's home I made friendly with the neighboring cows until I was scolded for arousing suspicion.

(Some people aren't as respectful as we are of the home; recently it's been broken into several times by kids who get drunk (OH LOOK, ANOTHER BROKEN BOOZE BOTTLE, AWESOME!), wrench the boards off windows and smash whatever they can get their hands on. For obvious reasons we don't want people thinking that we're the vandalism culprits so we try to keep our presence under the radar.)

(IF WE DIDN'T LEAVE CANDY AT HALLOWEEN AND PRESENTS AT CHRISTMAS FOR THE KIDS, WHO WOULD?)

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I don't have kids and don't have any experience with them, but if they're anything like wildlife then I know they can be bribed with food. (WHO WOULDN'T WANT A DEAD ARMY OF DISTURBED CHILDREN TO DO THEIR BIDDING?) Every once in a while we visit the home to leave offerings of food and water for the girls and boys.

Pictured above is a piece of Ukrainian angel food cake moistened with flat alcoholic cider. (RIGHT, OKAY, I KNOW THAT MAYBE GIVING DISTURBED CHILDREN ALCOHOL ISN'T EXACTLY KOSHER, BUT, FUCK, IT'S NOT LIKE I GAVE THEM A PACK OF MATCHES, OR SOMETHING.) Papa's bird (blackbirds), the ever ready opportunist, has already found the cake sitting on the door step. (I'VE SAID IT ONCE, AND I'LL SAY IT AGAIN - WHERE THERE'S FOOD, THERE'S PAPA.)

Clearer images of the whole house can be found on my Flickr photostream here, here and here.

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Why waste words on something that doesn't need any? EXACTLY. (All photos within this entry were taken by Italics; if it isn't at a weird, close-up artsy angle than you know it's him behind the camera.)

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NOTES TO SELF: Carried back two recently cut logs from children's home for solstice bonfire. Italics found a denim kid's hat near the dog walking fields with a crocodile on the label. (<- OOO, MAGIC SPECIAL!)