Graveyard Dirt: Two Worlds and In-between

Hook, Line and Sinker

I'm god-fucking-awful with endings. They're my creative blight; the constant reminder that I typically blow my wad with an irresistible hook, line and sinker. I have supernova beginnings and low battery endings because I have an ongoing problem with pacing myself: I wail on the gas like a motherfucking valkyrie going to war, and the only fucking thing that can stop the unholy momentum behind my fat, martial-ruled ass is an empty fucking tank completely devoid of juice.

I mean, I'm so goddamned tunnel visioned that I'll continue running if there's vaporized fumes to consume. And then - out of nowhere - the ride'll suddenly stop, and I'll come to a jarring, what the flying motherfuck? halt miles away from the finish line. (You'd think I'd get wise to the route I've floored so many times before, but the scenery doesn't look familiar until the last fucking second, and by that point it's already too fucking late to ease off the gas.)

In other words, I'm so fucking exhausted that I'm ready to slip into an indica induced post-Harvest coma. (Last year Harvest began on September 1st, and it took me three shell shocked weeks to recover. This year? Harvest began mid-July.) In addition to catching up on lost sleep, I also need to mentally decompress. For approximately four months I lived, fucked and worked exclusively outside, and now I've got to get my head around the new indoor-themed set I'll be tyrannically ruling over for the next six months of life.

As you'd imagine I'm woefully behind on shit. Emails, trades, thank yous, private messages, packages, mentions, promises, direct messages, reviewing, birthdays - you name it, and I'm knee-fucking-deep (and sinking). In fact, I was several years behind with some shit BEFORE Harvest began this year. A quarter of a year later I'm even worse off than I was before: my desktop containing my entire life might be fried (not to mention all of the homemade porn I made for "Santa Claus" this year), and this dinky laptop Italics got me requires some mighty repairs to get it working properly.

I know it probably sounds corny, but I really want to thank everyone for giving me such a wide fucking berth these past few months. You guys have been hella patient with me as I got my Harvest on, and I appreciate that everyone respected the distance I needed in order to perform all of my crazy-ass duties, obligations and responsibilities. Now that my feral, non-hibernating ass is indoors for winter I can refocus my attention to Graveyard Dirt, catch up with all forms of communication and finalize the all-important details of future sales and giveaways.

Winter

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With one mighty blow of Her world-shaping hammer the Old Woman strikes my chains of servitude*, freeing me from the demanding bonds of Harvest at the cost of my once green and fertile kingdom.

* Sovereignty, unsurprisingly, comes at a price: to be ruled by what you rule, and to serve those that sustain you.

Harvest Nights

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Saturday night: Secondhand Sundays inventory check.

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Sunday night: organization of 2011's wild mushrooms (boletes, chanterelles & toadstools) while Papa enjoys a piece of chilli chocolate espresso cake, a homemade chocolate chip cookie, a cup of coffee, a pair of used panties and a bottle of pain medication.

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Monday night: necro-hooch straining, sweetening and bottling.

One Down

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One down, twenty more fuckers to go. (<- Doesn't include Halloween, Fet Ghede or post-Harvest menus and duties.)

Blood Moon Rising

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October's full moon rising over an ancient Scottish cairn (burial mounds where cremated human remains were once interred), a threadbare rowan tree and a single toadstool (Amanita muscaria).

Another Effin' Toadstool

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Trade-Off

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This year my Lammas fox didn't arrive until Harvest Home. The trade-off? An unshattered skull instead of a shattered body.

A Mid-Harvest Offering

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I'm currently piecing together a mother of an effin' entry explaining where my feral ass has been, but until that shit gets posted I'll leave you with a not-so-tiny pre-history taster: a mid-Harvest offering of welfare-assured guineafowl, fresh cherries and homemade Kentucky Butter Cake to a "lost" standing stone.

All Effin' Fronts

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The angelic hosts would weep in divine despair if they had an inkling of how motherfucking behind my earthly ass is right now. We're talking on all effin' fronts: journal writing, photo editing, replying to emails, responding to comments, answering direct messages, sending snail mail, fulfilling promises, working on trades, finishing projects, decorating gifts, bone working, gardening, performing funerary rites, baking homemade offerings and observing my personal Harvest festivities'n'rites.

Fuck, I'm even behind on foraging despite putting in full-time hours every effin' day of every effin' week since mid-July. It's not that shit isn't getting done, because I've never been so goddamn productive in all my motherlovin' life. It's that I'm attempting to give a billion things my undivided attention, and anyone with a rudimentary understanding of mathematics will see that my attempts to force division and fractions to ignore basic Universal rules just isn't working. (Ah, well, back to my areas of expertise: sex, death and perfectly boiled rice.)

Usually when one aspect of work slips I throw more fuel on the fire to help raise an extra dose of energy. It's a panic move, but it shocks my ass to the next level and I find I can close the distance between myself and the belated deadlines that are tormenting me. There's a cost for that expedition, though. Dipping into emergency reserves usually means I experience a burnout period that lasts anywhere from two or three days to two or three weeks. It's a tradeoff I'm more than willing to make (and often do), but one I can't afford to exercise during Harvest since my priorities are solely focused on my sovereign duties.

Normally I don't labor this shit, but recently quite a few folks have dropped my ass a friendly email and most haven't gotten a reply (yet). And because I'm of the pessimistic persuasion I've convinced myself that every-effin'-one of them has come to the very wrong conclusion that I'm deliberately ignoring them. (I'm not. Honest to all that is motherfucking holy, I'm not.) So I'm taking a quick second - er, eight paragraphs - to assure anyone who's still waiting for a reply that 1.) I'm totally not avoiding you, 2.) I'm really sorry I haven't been able to find time to respond to your email and 3.) I really fucking appreciate that you took the time to contact me because receiving a friendly email is like getting a giant fucking internet hug whenever I feel down and unmotivated.

I knew that 2011 was going to be a challenging year because it was the year that we decided to finally go pro. ("We" because I couldn't do this shit entirely by myself. Italics has funded all of my projects, kept me company during foraging sessions/roadkill sweeps, helped pick, process and prepare the majority of the non-gross shit I do, acted like a 24/7 springboard for all of my half-baked ideas and, most importantly, kept me going with regular offerings of support, serenity-inducing shots of sativa and cup after motherfucking cup of freshly prepared calming tea.) What I didn't know, though, was how those challenges would manifest because neither of us have any experience with opening a business.

We're aiming for our first post-Harvest/pre-Midwinter sale in November (save those pennies, guys, and be sure to join the announcement-only mailing list so you don't miss the event!), and I'm on the verge of being able to provide private roadkill services for people interested in adopting one of my resurrected animals. I try to promptly answer any questions regarding my work (i.e., rescued roadkill, Hedgerow Hooch, wild Scottish mushrooms and/or any items featured in Second Hand Sundays), but, right now, I can't afford investing time into journal entry-sized responses, so don't take it personally if my reply lacks its usual epicness.

So, in conclusion: it's totally cool to email my ass and say hi, I absolutely love getting email and I'm sincerely fucking sorry I'm so work-focused right now that I can't find the time to reply to personal correspondence (I'm working on that, though).

Pictured above: fresh toadstools (Amanita muscaria), a partially eaten pomegranate surrounded by more fresh toadstools, dried toadstools just out of the dehydrator, a homemade oil made from edible plants (chives and a single dandelion) growing out of #01's buried remains, two bottles containing the recently strained Simple Strawberry Wine and, lurking to the very right of the picture, the dehydrator that's dried more than 100 toadstools just this year alone (and that's only the agarics; I'm still weighing all of our dried boletes and chanterelles to get an idea of how much we've managed to find and preserve.)

A Blessing? A Curse?

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A sudden shock of early morning light blasted through tumultuous clouds and briefly illuminated the dubious contents of my magic wooden basket when I presented my homemade toadstool oil to the local stone-circled bronze age cairn this morning. (<- A blessing? A curse? Fuck if I know, but at least my ass got noticed.)

Patiently Waiting

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A critter-nibbled birch bolete (Leccinum scabrum) patiently waiting for one of my magic wooden baskets.

Waiting to Be Cleaned

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Naturally shed corvid feathers waiting to be cleaned.

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.

Crowhawk

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Crowhawk; it's what all the stylish carrion crows are wearing this season while decomposing at triple cemetery crossroads.

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.

#11

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Today my toadstool hot spot revealed one of its partially buried secrets: #11, a juvenile roe deer. (How my ass managed to miss a skeleton worth of bones beneath the long line of firs I've been foraging at for two fucking years is beyond me.)

Finding Perspective

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What the fuck do you do when your computer's so fucking screwed that it won't even start up? You hand your baby - and years of unsaved mothereffin' work (look, I always MEANT to back the shit up, okay?) - over to very capable hands, and force yourself to get lost in the woods for an hour (or three) to find some fucking perspective.

By the time I returned home with a basket full of birch boletes, chanterelles, penny buns and toadstools? Italics had worked his Mercury-ruled magic. When I heard the good effin' news I swore with a hand on my magic motherfucking basket that I'd make that savior-king of mine something truly fucking special for his trouble: a recreation of the first dinner I ever made him* using homegrown garlic, humanely reared and slaughtered guinea fowl, two types of fancy pants booze and a huge selection of wild mushrooms found when my ass was lost in the woods looking for some perspective.

* Poulet Marengo; we were both just 17, and it was my first attempt at right-proper cooking.

A Growing Collection

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2011's collection of Hedgerow Hooch continues growing as new fruits come into season.

Starting with the largest Kilner jar while moving counterclockwise: strawberry & geranium vodka, wild necro-raspberry gin, a different batch of wild necro-raspberry gin, wild necro-raspberry vodka, cherry vodka, wild necro-raspberry liqueur (vodka-based with vanilla bean and spices), two jars of Simple Strawberry Wine and a wild necro-raspberry ratafia (brandy-based with vanilla bean and spices).

Mercury-Ruled

What happens when your partner's Mercury-ruled? You get to fight fire air with motherfucking fire air. Three cheers for Italics and the two sleepless nights he spent working on my computer to make it virus-free, and to anyone who felt momentarily bad for me. (<- Pity TOTALLY counts as prayers in my book!)

Now that this week's retrograde crisis is over Graveyard Dirt can return to it's Harvest-driven schedule. Normally I don't hint about future content, but since this is a Site Shit post it gives me a rare chance to step out of journal entry mode.

With that being said, I'm: prepping for Bolete Lesson #3 (how to preserve), getting ready to announce GD's first ever giveaway (hint: it involves homework; have you been doing yours?), selecting a few more wild edible recipes to share (mushrooms, raspberries and maybe even gooseberries) and clearing space in my crazy fucking week to finally sit the fuck down and finish up a parade of delayed promises and projects (i.e., dressing up jam jars and hooch bottles, decanting and decorating some of last year's toadstool oil, sending away packages and a stupid amount bone cleaning).

Good Trade?

Today's hedgerow hooch haul total: 1 ½ lbs of wild necro-raspberries, 7 lbs of wild necro-gooseberries and 1 mother-of-a-fucker retrograde virus. My personal computer? Toast. But, hey, at least the car started first thing instead of taking its usual 20 minutes. (<- Good trade?)

Pray for me, Internet; my beloved desktop could really use the fucking help.

Cracklin' Rosie

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Nothing but me, 4 ½ lbs of necromantic wild raspberries*, a bottle of brandy, a bottle of gin, a bottle of vodka, the blessings of Papa's hard fucking cock and Neil Diamond's greatest motherfucking hits. (Oh, we gonna ride till there ain't no more to go...)

* These fuckers? Were picked at an old Scottish graveyard situated near a pair of effin' cairns. Necrotastic, or what?

Bolete Lesson #2

Now that your ass knows what the fuck a bolete is - and where to find those spongy motherfuckers - you're totally ready for lesson #2: how to clean and store your bolete bounty*.

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You'll need your mushrooms (I'm using a youngish Boletus edulis specimen; aka penny bun, cep & porcino), a slightly stiff paintbrush (fan brushes are better for cleaning gilled fungi; mine's out because I was also cleaning some chanterelles), a small knife (preferably geared for mushroom and/or vegetable work; those have a curved blade reminiscent of a sickle), a larger knife (if you'll be slicing and using your mushrooms immediately) and, not pictured, a clean piece of paper towel or cloth (to be complete fucking honest? I just use my effing shirt).

The number one rule of cleaning mushrooms is that you never fucking wash them. Water should never be introduced at any point in the cleaning process. If your mushrooms are dirty - and with that being said, please remember these are wild edibles you'll be consuming; your ass probably won't be the first thing that's enjoyed them (translation: get use to worm holes and critter love bites, quick) - you'll want to dust debris off with either your cloth (shirt, or paper towel), and/or your brush.

I always start at the top and work my way to the bottom. With the dirty base facing downward I hold the bolete mid-stem with one hand while brushing/wiping away any dirt or debris with the other. I begin with the cap, and then clean the sponge beneath the cap. Once the upper half's been tidied I then move to the lower half focusing on the mushroom's stem (always pointing the soiled end down so forest shit doesn't fall back on any recently cleaned parts).

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To cut, or to pick? I've read arguments from both sides of the camp, and I've read enough to convince me that I'm not doing any harm in picking. (In fact, I've read in a few places the practice of cutting boletes actually leads to a serious case of rot that negatively impacts the mycelium.)

I pick because nature knows what the fuck it's doing, and I've seen evidence of that my entire fucking life: anything that bears fruit also releases fruit. Fruiting-bodies are created to be taken and consumed easily, that's their job. When I gently unearth toadstools and boletes it feels right; the bases eagerly lift from the soil with just a little twist. Having haunted the same hot spots for nearly three years I've experienced no adverse effects; "picking", in my book, is a-okay.

With that being said, you wouldn't rip an apple off a branch using extreme force, or wrench an onion bulb out of the fucking ground just by its stem, so don't fucking tear mushrooms out of the motherfucking ground like they're free money no one's noticed. Respect the fucking organism beneath your feet that you're harvesting from. Treat mushroom hunting like any other foraging practice; pick gently, harvest carefully and always keep in mind that the "fruit" you're collecting is attached to a living, conscious thing.

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When your bolete's been brushed clean you only have the soiled bottom to work with. I peel the base like any vegetable, taking superficial layers off to expose the creamier flesh within. A quick once-over usually leaves me with a vampire stake of a mushroom stalk that reveals the internal condition of the stem.

See those tiny indentations? Worm holes. (I know what you're probably thinking, and you're so wrong: this penny bun? Is still a super badass specimen one billion percent safe for human consumption, worm holes'n'all.) By peeling the bottom you're simultaneously cleaning your fungal treasure while exposing any worm-eaten sections for closer inspection.

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Once the debris-ridden bottom's been peeled you're left with one last cleaning job: heading those goddamn worms off at the pass. (<- Unless stopped those mushroom-eating motherfuckers will continue to burrow up through the stalk and into the meaty flesh of the cap.) Remove any part of the base and/or stem that'd make a piece of Swiss cheese cry; several holes is cool, but don't bother with anything that remotely resembles your grandma's crocheted doilies.

Don't aim for perfect, aim for reasonable.

A note on wild mushroom "garbage": in this house offcuts, peelings and whatever's been deemed inedible is returned to nature. Trimmings are left outside at offering spots to either be eaten by visiting wildlife or decompose naturally back into the earth. We leave spore-ripe caps beneath trees that have a symbiotic relationship with the mushrooms since it helps spread the mushroom-producing mycelium. (Heard of flowerbombing? This is its fungal equivalent: mushroombombing.)

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...and that's it! No water, and minimal - biodegradable! - mess.

As you can see this clean motherfucking bolete is ready for immediate use (or immediate storage; see below). You can use your bounty how you'd use any mushroom (boletes in particular are known for their autumnal warm-dry-fur-and-smoked-leaves flavor; perfect for carnivores trying to up their vegetarian game), or you could be a very good Tweezle the mouse and preserve them for later.

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If you're planning on drying your boletes, get that shit started as soon as fucking possible.

If you're planning on using your boletes fresh - but just not that day - I've found that disconnecting every effing cap from every effing stem is the best line of defense against stowaway worms. I store the sorted pieces in the fridge, but in their own separate Tupperware containers. That way, if you still have a worm or two present in your stalks they have no fucking way to get to the real prize of your bounty: the mothereffin' caps. (<- This is a crucial fucking step in storing your mushrooms; one I had to learn the hard fucking way, so just trust me on this, okay?)

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Whoa, whoa, whoa! Where the fuck are you going? Class ain't done; sit the fuck back down. Your ass is dismissed when I say it's dis-fucking-missed (unless you're looking for a hardcore dose of corporeal punishment all Victorian schoolhouse-style).

One more thing: remember how I said The most prolific of the bunch [boletes] can usually be found beneath pines. A whole host of boletes love long-needled conifers, but you got to get those fuckers young because they tend to be the ones that get slimy quickly. in Bolete Lesson #1? Those motherfuckers are a family called Suillus in the larger order Boletales.

They're still boletes, they're still edible but their distinguishing feature - the weirdly sticky-but-not-sticky and slimy-but-not-slimy textured cap - should be peeled off during the cleaning process. While not poisonous the cap does contain a mild purgative that can affect people with super sensitive stomachs. Don't let that put you off harvesting these fuckers - especially Suillus luteus (aka slippery Jack & sticky bun); picture above - they're beautifully fruity with a teasing hint of earthy sweetness.

* All this mushroom bullshit news to you? You must've missed lesson #1, which means you've got extra homework today - congratu-fucking-lations! You're only one assignment behind, though, so you'll have no fucking trouble catching up with the rest of us.

Same Old Magic

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New (used) wooden basket; same old magic.

Pictured above: chanterelles (Cantharellus cibarius), fly agarics (Amanita muscaria), birch boletes (Leccinum scabrum), penny buns (Boletus edulis), miscellaneous bones found in my toadstool hot spot and two halves of discarded wild bird eggs (wood pigeon, I think).

The Devil's Hat

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The Ring

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Before you die, you see…the ring.

Rabbits Out of Fat Air

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Excerpt from Rabbits Out of Thin Air:

There were dark, shadow filled clusters of spiraling pine trees reaching towards the ceiling of the sky. There were slivers of meadows with tufted grass and dry heather, fluff and insects lazily floating through the air, all illuminated by shafts of bright autumn sun. There were great living mounds; the remnants of ancient trees now gone, tucked in by a a thick blanket of all-consuming damp moss. There were small granite boulders, paths partially blocked by swinging branches and partings so tight that all you could do was close your eyes and push forward into the darkness towards the warmth of light as you felt dead and broken twigs snap beneath the driving force of your blind body.

There was all of that, but none of it caught on camera. (ACTUALLY, THAT'S A KIND'VE SORT'VE LIE. THERE ARE //A LOT// OF PICTURES, IN FACT, OF A NEARLY THIRTY YEAR OLD WOMAN WITH WAIST LENGTH HAIR AND A HUGE ASS RUNNING AROUND A MEADOWY CLEARING WEARING NOTHING BUT HER SHOES AND A PAIR OF KNEE LENGTH STRIPED (BLACK AND RAINBOW, BABY!) SOCKS IN THE OCTOBER SUNSHINE.) But you know how it is - those special moments, those special places and special images never like getting photographed, anyway.

It was arched against a moss padded rock at the foot of a natural heather and pine altar where I fucked the horned god of the forest*. With hair spilling into dying grass and body bridged up to meet his I watched the pointed tips of coniferous trees tremble in the unfelt breeze. Between thrusts and long seconds of eyes-closed-and-face-turned-to-the-sun there was a moment when everything froze and the only certainty in the world was that the sky was endlessly blue and the towering, cathedral pines would always be as they were then - fierce and beautiful, a protective fortress forever separating modern man from nature.

A new picture from an old story.

Your Homework's Late

Not one goddamn person handed in their effing homework (re: Bolete Lesson #1), and I'm about to release Bolete Lesson #2. It's time to fess up, Internet - did you find your bolete? Answers (and/or pictures) can be emailed (graveyarddirt{AT}gmail{DOT}com), sent through Tumbr's ask me anything feature (for a very short time I've turned on anonymous commenting for non-Tumblr users) or pinged across Twitter either as a reply or direct message (@graveyarddirt).

July 14th & 15th

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July 14th saw us racing out the fucking door to make a mucho belated offering at the Stone Throne as storm clouds loomed ominously over the heather-covered hills in the not-so-distant distance. Most of the oblations? Stretched all the way back to Easter (when we perform the Great Rite/Hieros Gamos), and had spent the past several months occupying the lower vegetable shelf without paying rent (what can I say? it's just been that sort've year). With Harvest quickly approaching I knew I needed to get the belated offerings to my seat'o'sovereignty, and I had to do it quick.

Pictured above: a bottle of menstrual blood-infused water (to "wash" my throne; the blood's significant because it came from my first REAL period in over two years), a bottle of beer, a loaf of Ukrainian ritual bread traditionally baked at Easter (paska), a row of motherfucking Peeps (how can you celebrate the blessed union without chick-shaped marshmallows covered in granulated sugar?), half of a homemade Peking duck (an offering to the local kites and raptors who suspiciously watch us when we're outdoors) and some microwave popcorn (popped before being offered, obviously) and organic beef mince for the crows at the Pine Hedge Rookery (where TC's from).

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Despite taking a beer it never occurred to me to take a fucking bottle opener, so I convinced Italics to use the side of a rock. The bottle promptly exploded, embedding tiny bits of fucking glass in his hand while soaking the one person who absolutely can't eat gluten with a wheat-based beer. (Sorry about that, baby.) There was no mojo in the air, just a teeth-grinding sense of utter failure and frustration. I blamed myself for not getting shit done on time, but accommodating the Universe's every whim and tangent makes it hard to keep a schedule.

It was a fucking depressing experience. Hot and sweaty for all the wrong reasons, sticky and wet because of a stupid idea, itchy and drainage-y thanks to rolling around in clover (to make a flat space for the crow offerings). I felt so fucking demoralized as we drove home; it was the first time my magic wooden basket was going to come home empty (well, almost empty: there were two naturally shed feathers and one tiny little pine bolete). I'm not ashamed to admit that I was taking it all as a not-so-subtle portent of unpleasant things to come.

Just as I was about to officially lodge a complaint with the Universe about the piss poor results of every-motherfucking-thing that day I jammed the fucking brakes to the motherlovin' ground because, holy fuck, there was a roadkill pheasant at the side of the fucking road. And not just ANY roadkill pheasant, but a beautifully plump hen that was hella safe for human consumption. My magic wooden basket? Didn't fail me after all.

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Having finally fulfilled all of our spring obligations we were ready to turn our attention to the season at hand: mothereffin' Harvest. The day after our Stone Throne pilgrimage we were free to begin poking around our favorite hotspots, so we decided to officially open mushroom picking season at a local castle (a terrific place for birch boletes, penny buns and fly agarics).

Pictured above is a young and particularly phallic Boletus edulis (aka penny bun, cep and porcino) growing amongst forest debris.

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Older Boletus edulis specimens (aka penny bun, cep and porcino); they look a bit ragged and past their best, but their spongy undersides were still unblemished.

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More Boletus edulis specimens (aka penny bun, cep and porcino) partially hidden by long grass.

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The very first Amanita muscaria (aka fly agaric, fly Amanita & toadstool) of 2011. Some critter enjoyed the psychoactive properties before we could, so we left the mostly pockmarked toadstool behind for the agaric lovin' inhabitants of the beech hedge.

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Past the field of clover and line of trees you can hazily make out the bared breast of Bennachie (appropriately named Mither ("Mother") Tap). It's the the highest point in this area and, unsurprisingly, contains evidence of very local, very ancient goddess worship. Whenever I'm outdoors working, playing or fucking Mither Tap is always just once glance away.

Willing to Shed

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It's only when my ass got in the car that I half-wondered if I should've been taking some sort of offering with me, but since the clouds were threatening and I didn't have anything appropriate to give (translation: homemade) I hastily vowed an IOU to the bolete'n'toadstool hotspot as I started the engine. Within an hour my magic wooden basket, brand new mushroom knife, a trimmed variety of wild edibles and a whole host of trees, shrubs and mosses were accidentally anointed by a motherfucking cut that would not clot the fuck up. So I bled as I harvested, knowing that every cut I inflicted drew a drop of blood I was willing to shed.

One Last Treat

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On the menu today: cream of cep soup made from recently picked wild mushrooms, homegrown garlic and local produce. Normally I dry every goddamn penny bun that comes into the house, but I figured one last treat was in order since the in-laws return home tomorrow afternoon. (<- Summer vacation? Officially over. Not that we had much of a vacation...)

Bolete Lesson #1

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I cut my mushroom picking teeth on boletes; they were the first wild mushrooms I learned to identify from my Ukrainian grandmother as I followed behind her foraging footsteps as a child in southeast Wisconsin, and they were the first wild mushrooms that welcomed me back to the ancestral practice when I gained independence in 2010. They're family, in a bizarre way, and their familiar presence makes any hedge, forest or woodland feel instantly like home.

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Boletes are in a very special class of wild edibles - they help you become braver and more confident in your identifying abilities (they're one of the easiest types of mushrooms to recognize) while also being one of the safest groups to eat from provided you follow two simple rules: don't eat what you can't identify, and leave the red motherfucking boletes alone. (<- All the "toxic" ones? Have very obvious red.) Misidentifying a bolete won't land you in an early deathbed. In fact, no one's ever died from eating a bolete, because even the poisonous ones are non-fatal (although I hear they pack a helluva gastric punch).

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The bolete's distinguishing trademark is its lack of gills. Instead of papery ridges beneath the mushroom's cap (left) you'll find sponge (right). All boletes carry this unmistakable characteristic. Some people use "honeycomb" to describe the appearance and texture of the underside, but I feel that the definition's only applicable to the very porous seeming boletes that grow beneath pines. The sponge beneath something like porcini (aka ceps, penny buns & Boletus edulis) is smooth and creamy - a lot like firm cauliflower - as opposed to the larch bolete (pictured above) which is softer and more velour-like.

Now that you know the two bolete rules, how to identify a bolete and have been assured that they're one of the safest groups of mushroom to pick'n'eat you only need to know one more thing before I handover your weekend homework: how to find these fungal fuckers. The most prolific of the bunch can usually be found beneath pines. A whole host of boletes love long-needled conifers, but you got to get those fuckers young because they tend to be the ones that get slimy quickly (see Suillus). Firmer boletes can be found around birches, beeches, pines and oaks, and tend to be the ones that have larger blurbs written about them in mushroom guides.

...and that? Is all you need to know to get started on this edible wild mushroom thing. Your homework, provided you're in the northern hemisphere, is to haul ass outdoors and find yourself your first motherfucking bolete. Get to work, amateur mushroom hunters to-be.

July 21, 2011

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July 21st saw us running into the country to leave offerings of homemade cardamom, coconut and pistachio banana bread, pomegranate juice and water at our local cairn/stone circle. As if anticipating our visit the sacred site generously reciprocated the spirit of giving before I could even present our homebaked oblation: the first two dryable toadstools of the year (plucked from a motherfucking neolithic ritual site, no less!), and a huge fistful of shed carrion crow feathers.

Excited by the auspicious find I gently excavated the pair of fly agarics (Amanita muscaria; also known as "toadstools" and "fly Amanita") - carefully and delicately so the swollen bases cleanly separated from the earth in one immaculate piece - and shouted an enthusiastic THANK YOU! down the mushroom holes to the conscious mycelium beneath our feet. While these toadstools won't win any beauty prizes, they will offer a very potent magic for anyone brave enough to crawl down one of the Underground doors left open by these psychoactive mushrooms.

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A porcini mushroom (Boletus edulis; the motherfucking king of boletes!), known here in the UK as a "penny bun". Ceps are the most desirable of boletes: their flesh is firm, their character robustly satisfying (they provide a rich - almost meaty - taste; perfect for carnivores who need to sink their teeth into something deceptively complex when eating vegetarian) and their warm-fur-and-smoky-dry-leaves Indian Summer flavour actually improves with drying.

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A clown's nose of a young toadstool (Amanita muscaria) pushing past forest floor debris.

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Another young fly agaric specimen (Amanita muscaria) being drawn back Underground by a possessive tree root.

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A gem of a baby porcini (Boletus edulis) buried beneath layers of sphagnum moss.

Harvest 2011

I've got some good news and some bad news, Internet, and I'm so not going to bother dressing either up on this groggy Sunday evening: Harvest 2011, for this effing witch, has officially started. From now until early November our asses will be out in hedges, fields, woodlands, graveyards and ancient monuments (i.e., standing stones, stone circles and other neolithic markers) fucking our way through the countryside while foraging for the wild bounty northeast Scotland provides.

Harvest is when I traditionally have more time to take pictures, but less time to write about them since I'm usually knee-deep in roadkill, mushrooms and a whole fucking fruit salad worth of indigenous berries. (<- Picking, finding and harvesting? Is the easy part. The REAL work begins when my magic wooden basket - and all the contents within - enters the fucking house.) In the past I've actually held off from updating Graveyard Dirt consistently from late summer to late fall because I really fucking hate posting entries without a gag-inducing amount of substance (with my One A Day photos/videos being the sole exception), and I didn't want to misrepresent myself, my practices or the real content (i.e., the off-season shit) of this journal to new visitors.

Most photos from previous Harvests? Never got written about or posted here. I had sincere intentions, but motivation for "substance" is a hard fucking thing to find after spending weeks carting around a stupid amount of roadkill deer and processing never-fucking-ending baskets of toadstools hunched over a motherfucking sink. The sad fact is that I'm STILL trying to play fucking catch-up with last year even though I'm pathetically falling behind with this one. If I continue to treat every goddamn picture I upload as unquestionably sacrosanct and that it can't be fucking touched unless I write a mother of a fucking novel about it then 70% of my shit will never get published on this fucking journal.

So here's the bad news I promised you: Harvest's begun. (<- I think I might've cushioned that blow by this point.) Graveyard Dirt will inevitably take a hit due to all of the discovering, finding, foraging, fucking, harvesting, picking and wildcrafting (and then the cleaning, skinning, gutting, drying and preserving) I'll be doing over the next several months. (I'm not joking in the fucking slightest when I say that this is the busiest time in my year.) I won't have the luxury of time to pick over the tiny details of my practices and projects so you may notice that my entries are a bit light, and that they aren't published as consistently as they are from November to July.

And the good news? I've decided to be radical this Harvest and give posting-shit-without-worrying-about-a-motherfucking-word-count a try. I highly fucking doubt I'll be able to post daily (as I do now), but at least Graveyard Dirt won't grind to a complete effing halt. The content might not be intellectually exhilarating, but it'll be mostly fresh and - if you live in the northern hemisphere - you'll unavoidably learn a thing or two about wild edibles possibly growing in your local hedges, fields and woods when I tackle what shit you should be looking for, how to find it, how to prepare it and, most importantly, how to enjoy the fuck out of it.

10 Ms. Dirty Harvest Stories (& a link**):
* 2009 Harvest
* 2010's Harvest Meals
* Cereal Mariticide
* Harvest Altar, 2009
* Harvest Festivities & Rites
* Harvest Home Altar (Dark)
* Harvest Home Offering
* Harvest Home Pheasant
* Harvest Moon Foraging
* The Widow is Born

** Psst! There's more Harvest stories here!

The Forest Provides

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Giving Thanks

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Giving thanks for yesterday's hedgerow bounty.

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July 13th, 2011

Today's dirty - Ms. Dirty! - adventure? A quick visit to my secret little hedge to leave an offering of homemade sweet potato gingerbread, pomegranate juice and water to my spectral rabbits and pine ghosts. Our original intent was to come home with a basketful of bilberries (to hooch), but not a single fucking berry was to be found. Despite the slight letdown I still managed to fill my basket with foraging surprises and fungi treasures.

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A bitter beech bolete (Boletus calopus) amongst hedgerow moss.

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After a few minutes of poking around old ass beech trees I noticed egg-like mushrooms squeezing out of the hedge's leaf-cluttered ground.

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Chanterelles (Cantharellus cibarius), motherfuckers! You can tell that this one's a true specimen because it doesn't have gills (like the button mushrooms you get at the grocery store), it has wrinkled looking ridges.

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The hedge's floor was abundantly studded with tufts of scrambled egg, but they were still too small to harvest, so we left the little fuckers - for the time being - to mature amongst brittle leaves and broken beech masts.

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To ensure I didn't go home empty handed my secret little hedgerow filled my magic wooden basket with the hollow remains of wild pheasant eggs.

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A pair of poisonous Devil's boletes (Boletus satanas) pushing their way out of hedgerow moss.

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The broken skull of a wild rabbit whitewashed by nature.

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A more mature specimen of the poisonous Devil's bolete (Boletus satanas).

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A sudden clearing of foxgloves (Digitalis purpurea) which tempted me to stay, but since I didn't have any latex gloves I opted out of harvesting the magenta blossoms'n'fuzzy leaf tops and took a picture of the wild flowers basking in sunlight instead.

Three Moments

Three moments worth celebration:

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01. Unexpectedly finding the very first boletes of the year.

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02. Discovering a mother of a fucking strainer for maceration work.

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03. Italics's new favorite henna color - on me - finally arriving.

Winter Treats

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A wild harvest for the body and soul.

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A winter treat for the red-blooded.

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A wish fulfilled for the witch in the woods.

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.)

A Year Since

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Has it really almost been a year? A year since I last wove a trail through the long grasses that grow between the mottled birches and brittle shrubs with my magic wooden baskets in hand? A year since I last crawled on my belly beneath majestic boughs of larch and fir in the search for gold (fungi gold), a year since a multitude of tequila sunrises were seen blazing Tropicana orange-yellow against Scotland's purple-tinged heather, a year since we rolled over musty leaves, arched against crumbling bark and lost ourselves in that seemingly eternal September?

Here's to replacing really fucking good memories with even greater ones, two-party entheogen-blessed mushroom hunting expeditions and the endless bitching that inevitably comes with pulling ticks out of my motherfucking ass after woodland fucking.

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.

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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Amanita Muscaria

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The Day of 7

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Here's a sterling example of my recent streak of bad fucking luck: within days of passing its mothereffing MOT - which took longer than fucking usual, so we were without access to a vehicle for something like 1/2 a week instead of the usual overnight - my car broke. I mean, like, within 48 effing hours of being returned home. On our first foray out after a long nocturnal period I lowered all four car windows to clear them of condensation and only three came back up. And then the door of the non-working window began whining, even AFTER I turned the fucking engine off. My ass? Never even left the effing driveway that day.

We sealed the open window with a trash bag (a sight I haven't fucking seen in something like 15 or 20 years; Scottish people are notoriously car-vain, so you don't see dirty ass beaters chugging down the highway with homemade plastic windows like you do in the States) and I braced myself for the inevitable: the frustrating disbelief of how much fucking time would be necessary to fix what was, essentially, a small fucking problem. Because that's what happens with this car. (Last summer? It was out of commission for nearly a fucking month because the speedometer stopped working. Not a complicated problem, but, LOL!, the repair guys ordered the wrong part, couldn't fit the used one they found and...)

I'd totally agree with you about needing to be more laidback and zen about this shit, but with our fucked up sleeping schedule - which has been in place for over ten fucking years, so it ain't gonna change anytime soon - there are month long periods where we're up exclusively at night. And being up at night, in Scotland, during the depths of winter means I have to abandon my roadkill duties entirely until our bizarre way of living finally falls in synch with the normal world for a few long weeks. In reality, I actually have a very small window of opportunity to engage in those duties (at least during the darker months of the year), so I begin biting my nails when the car suddenly goes down just as our schedules align with the ability to go out.

Within a half a fucking hour Italics had already pegged what had gone wrong. Apparently, my make of car is notoriously fussy about moisture. Water got into where it shouldn't have been when I lowered the windows, and a fuse freaked. But we aren't mechanics, so the car had to be turned over to professionals who wouldn't listen to Italics, and therefore spent over a motherfucking week taking shit apart going "WOW, WE REALLY DON'T KNOW WHAT'S WRONG WITH THIS THING".

After 8-9 days of nail biting we finally get a "LOL! HE WAS RIGHT ALL ALONG! LOL!" call from them, and I tried really, really fucking hard not to see red, but it was hella hard, internet, when I finally got my fucking car back only to find that the repair guys busted our radio and internal clock. Which means it needs to go back to the shop. Again. So something else can break within a week of bringing it back home.

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(The serious fucking kicker? My father did all of the mechanical upkeep of our cars, but when I asked to be taught those skills he laughed the idea off. Neither of my parents took the time to talk to me about drugs, alcohol or sex, so you'd think they'd try to strike a balance by teaching me something useful like simple auto repair, but...no.)

Anyway, this entry isn't solely about me bitching about my car, I just sort've wanted to give you an idea of how life can get royally fucked when I don't have one when we're up during the day. (I suppose I could've been succinct and said something like: no car = no roadkill work, nocturnal mode = no roadkill work.) And this time of the year is a crazy special time because all of the hibernating animals are sluggishly coming to, which means certain species are getting hit as they groggily stumble around.

(Roadkill definitely has its "seasons", and right now we're knee-deep in badger season. It's not that badgers don't get hit off-peak, it's just that during this time of the year they're slowly waking up, emerging from their dens and diving headfirst into mating season. In badger world it's a crazy motherfucking time, although it's an unfortunate time that often sees a high body count and leaves many badgers windowed (they mate for life). 2011 is my second year of scavenging, and in that time - at least until yesterday - I've only come across two roadkill badgers and both of those were found in early March of last year.)

So, like, that's why the car's broken window had me biting my motherfucking nails: badgers (the dead ones, anyway). Because, fuck, we love badgers. Seriously. Out of all of the indigenous wildlife here in northeast Scotland they secured the biggest chunk out of our collective hearts. They're amazing, wonderful creatures burdened by medieval beliefs. They're maligned animals - much like foxes - and seem to have become the farmer's scapegoat. For all of those reasons and more we place badgers pretty fucking high on our roadkill pedestal; to be given one is a tremendously huge gift, and one we don't take for granted.

But badgers aren't the only animal of this story, (roe) deer play a pretty significant role, too. During this past Yuletide season we created an altar beneath the Christmas tree (an altar beneath another altar? talk about motherfucking talent!) around our Yule log, and we used apples, oranges, pears, plums and foil-wrapped candy to decorate the space. After the holidays we split the food into three lots: one was offered to the kids at the boarded up orphanage and home for disturbed children, the other went to the cemetery cairn for Papa, our ancestors and the locally buried dead and the last and final lot - comprised of 6 plums and 1 pear - were set aside for the roadkill deer I found, and, subsequently, took home in 2010.

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So, yeah, okay, it took my fucking ass three motherfucking months to finally execute the ritual (I ended up freezing the fruit to preserve it), and you'd think there might be some residual hard feelings about the delay, but even before we began leaving each deer its offering (at its death site; we left a whole plum - a significant choice because my roadkill altar is beneath a fruiting plum tree which means my spectral herd got a-fucking-lot of fresh, homegrown plums as offerings during last year's Harvest season - wherever we found the body of one of my deer) we stumbled across the ruffled - but unruptured - body of a male pheasant. (I mean, that find in itself makes a successful roadkill haul.)

Within minutes of dropping the first plum and ringing the deer bell for the first of 6 times (I spent 21 fucking days last October "herding" these motherfuckers with Chippy to get them to associate the sound of the goddamn bell with food) we came across the near perfect body of a wild rabbit. Unless you get them early on, roadkill rabbits tend to get mangled within an hour of death. Miraculously, this one - who wasn't warm to the touch in the slightest - somehow managed to remain unscathed, which meant I found my first intact rabbit of 2011. (Two usable roadkill animals in one day? That's a hella successful roadkill haul.)

After approximately placing #2's offering down (it was a drive-thru operation; I drove, and Italics rang the bell and tossed the plums out the window in the general direction of where the body had been found) I caught the dingy, yellowed belly fur of a large animal. "BADGER! BADGER! OH MY GOD, OH MY GOD! BADGER!" I started screaming - almost swerving - because all I needed to see was that dusty, ivory stomach hair to know what animal was lying at the side of the road for me.

I cried. Just a little. It was a weird mix of grateful, happy and sad. I would never, ever choose anything but life for any creature, but when death happens in my little kingdom-territory I want to be there for the animal. When I use the word "happy" to describe how I feel when it comes to roadkill, it's only because I'm relieved that the animal isn't lost and wasn't deprived of a funeral with mourners. I'm "happy" because I made sure that the animal wasn't forgotten, and that its death wouldn't have been in vain. I'm "happy" because I know how much love it'll get once it gets home (I admit it; I'm autistic and hug things, especially roadkill animals), and how much love it'll receive when it's time for me to transfer responsibilities to a new caretaker.

But, fuck, yeah. A badger. Pristine. Huge. A mother of a mother, in fact. (Teats; she's got them.) She had a somewhat shitty ass that needs to be babywiped, but otherwise she was in perfect condition. I moved the roadkill pheasant and rabbit aside and gently laid her giant corpse in trunk of the car, stopping to caress the depth of her winter coat. (Three usable roadkill animals in one day and one of them's a motherfucking badger? That's a crazy hella successful roadkill haul, even if she did unceremoniously fart in my fucking face as I loaded her into the car.)

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Before I could make my third offering - literally, just around the road's bend from the badger - I caught the battered remains of a deer in a ditch. So Italics, for the fourth time, had to patiently wait in the driveway of someone's house as I assessed the new animal. The buck (#9!) was too old, too broken and too gutted (his stomach had been hollowed out, but was filled with bloodied water) to be carted home, so I dragged his mangled-shattered-eaten remains far from the side of the road to give me - and fellow scavengers - a safe place to do our business. Despite being somewhat bruised his head seemed otherwise undamaged, so I decapitated him, took his head, released his spirit back into the wild and left the rest of his body tucked under some budding gorse for Nature.

I just barely pulled out of that motherfucking driveway when my eyes caught the all-too-familiar tuft of yellowed belly hair. Another badger, within seeing distance of the other roadkill badger and deer. Perfect. Amazing. Soul-crushingly teddy bear cute. And when I lifted it up into my arms, spying his little package, my heart almost broke. We found a male and female badger within less of a 1/4 of a mile of one another; it's very likely they were a mated pair.

On one hand you think "well, fuck, at least they're together, you know?", but on the other hand you think "fuck, what must've it been like to experience your mate for life get killed? and then to be killed the same way as you stumbled around confused and grieving?" and that second thought still causes everything in my chest to ache. So it was a little downbeat in the car as we inched closer to home, because finds like that really make you appreciate the serious prices that need to be paid for a "crazy hella successful roadkill haul" and that an animal's death doesn't just impact that specific animal, it potentially spells disaster, death and loneliness for offspring and mates as well.

Within a few miles of offering #3 (we've found two deer and one badger in that spot; I'm going to do my goddamn hardest to get some sort of animal crossing sign put up at that deadly bend to see if I can lower the wildlife body count) I caught the bristly hair of another deer (#10!). For a second I thought I hallucinated the crumpled body because, fuck, who finds 6 motherfucking usable roadkill animals within a 15 mile radius of their fucking house in one fucking drive?

#10 remained a questionable hallucination for about a half an hour; with no more room in the trunk (2 badgers, 1 pheasant, 1 rabbit and 1 decapitated deer head) we had to make a quick pit stop at home to unload our haul just in case the phantom deer turned out to be a reality (a tangible reality that was complete enough to take the entire body).

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Plum offering #4 was made on our way home, and then plum offering #5 was made on our way back to the maybe-for-real-but-who-knows? roadkill deer. She - #10 - was a rare fucking find; a treasure. Only 3 of the 10 deer I've found have been female, most of my herd's made up of young males. While Italics became acquainted with another driveway (just so I'm not giving the wrong impression: Italics is crazy active and helps me with most of my physical work, but yesterday his bad back was acting up so I benched his ass) I got out to inspect the very real deer.

Her state was near identical to #9's, which we found less than 10 minutes away. My guess is that both had been dead between 2-4 days; long enough for the eyes to turn milky white, to give scavengers a chance to empty the abdomen (but not make a huge dent in any other area of the body) and to be a little too far gone to take home and process in our little Scottish kitchen. (My mother-in-law? Just LOVES sharing her white kitchen with my roadkill.)

Her head, like most hit'n'run deer, felt solidly intact, so I dragged her partially eaten remains up a hill - jamming my fucking wrist against the ground when we both started sliding down the steep dirt mound - where I performed my decapitation/release ritual away from speeding cars and prying eyes. (Cause, like, the last thing people want to see is my fat fucking ass hanging out of my fucking jeans while beheading a dead animal at the side of the fucking road.)

A secondary surprise came in the form of detached wings, which I found on the way back to the car. Not even full, proper wings, but the very tips made up of a handful of bashed feathers on either side. But it was only the tips, plus a few nature-cleaned bones still attached to the structures, that I found. With no other feathers or scattered remains it seemed like something had carried those remnants from the original site of death. From the looks of them, they came from a rather large bird. (I have my suspicions, but I haven't had a chance to actually ID them yet.)

No offense to the trunk full of dead animals we were carting around, but fuck were we shattered after finding #10 and the tattered wings. That particular roadkill route usually takes me about 30-40 minutes to perform. Yesterday? It took three fucking hours. You would not fucking believe how thankful we were when it became clear that the roadkill slot machine was finally empty.

The last deer offering (#6) was made on the way home, and shortly after - just down the road where I pick the majority of my fly agarics/toadstools - a seventh offering was made (a large pear), because, as we all know, "7" is way, way more magic than "6". And it wasn't until later that night I realized that I had arbitrarily chosen March 7th to make my 7 offerings, which, in turn, rewarded me with 7 animals. 7 usable roadkill animals in one day? That's not just a crazy hella successful roadkill haul, that's a seriously magic roadkill haul from a Universe that evidently doesn't hold grudges.

PS: I realize that the entire roadkill thing is a niche interest, and that not every visitor to Graveyard Dirt is going to understand or accept my practices. That's cool, I totally get that. But if you ARE interested in learning about how I incorporate roadkill into my feral version of witchcraft (what I do, why I do it, etc.) two good places to start are my roadkill Flickr set and my Asphalt & Entrails journal category. Happy scavenging!

Witchcraft

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What's Ms. Graveyard Dirt's witchcraft made of? The lost, the found, the harvested and foraged. The chipped, the dusty, the once buried and rusty. The splintered, the broken, the discarded and forgotten. That's what Ms. Graveyard Dirt's witchcraft is made of.

Bones, Twine & Feathers

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Right before the flu benched my fucking ass I was running on some crazy effing energy and actually managed to complete several long-promised packages to friends and fellow witches. The one damn thing I DIDN'T accomplish before being swept out to Influenza Sea? Taking pictures of the finished products. That event finally happened a few days ago in the backroom, which means I can officially box everything up and ship it all out in the next day or two.

Normally I loathe ruining surprises, but I wanted to familiarize folks with my bizarre decorating style before anyone buys anything from me so they at least have a general idea of what to expect. As beautiful as new bottles, lace and fancy charms are, they're expensive, so almost everything in my embellishment repertoire is second hand. I've used, saved and sterilized all the bottles'n'jars, and a lot of the ribbons, trinkets and organic paraphernalia I use I've either found, made or grown.

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I know that this picture is shockingly similar to the one above, and the only reason why I'm double posting the same(ish) image is because I was a complete and utter retard who forgot to take a proper fucking close-up of my hooch twins. (In my defense? I was totally rushing because natural light was fading fast.)

Both mini-bottles of booze are homemade; the dark one is a coffee-vanilla bean vodka, and the transparent yellow one is a raspberry vodka made from wild apricot-colored raspberries that grow near the boarded up disturbed children's home and orphanage. Both were created in 2009, so they've had more than a year to flavorfully mature in my magic closet.

I've decorated the repurposed fruit juice bottles with twine, feathers from roadkill pheasants and some of my nature-bleached outside bones*.

* The weathered, whitened remains of offerings I made from previous years. The bones get kicked around by visiting wildlife until it's time for a YARD CLEANUP. When a yard cleanup happens I round up all the bones I can find and add them to my growing collection. Eventually I clean them and use them for divination, decoration and projects; they were offered to the spirits and ancestors as gifts, consecrated by nature and the weather, stirred, moved and chewed on by wildlife and, after all of that, still managed to return to the hand that gave them away.

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A large handful of dried, wild mushrooms (my "Wild Woodland Mix" that combines at least several types of boletes, including porcini) and a pair of preserved pheasant feet for a friend, carefully wrapped up with an outside bone, pheasant feather, twine and wooden rabbit ornament (a clearance bin purchase) to celebrate the new Chinese year.

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More of my Wild Woodland Mix tucked in brown paper, and secured closed with twine, another outside bone and one of Papa's homegrown Ring of Fire chillies. (Note: If you're (un)lucky enough to receive one or more of my dried chillies, you can totally grow plants from the seeds within. In fact, I've found that indoor chilli plants make the easiest houseplants, and they provide several rich harvests. Just be sure to tickle your flowers with a brush or finger to ensure they're probably pollinated and you'll be rewarded with an avalanche of peppers.)

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Partially wrapped in brown paper and twine is one of my last jars of rose hip, apple and cinnamon jelly made from wild rose hips that I personally harvested back in mid-September of last year. The consistency is just a touch too thick - it was my first attempt at making homemade jelly and I overboiled the mix - but the flavor makes up for the lack of looseness. (The cinnamon lends a hint of fragrant, smoky wood to the candied apple sweetness of the fruits.)

I huffed second life into an old vanilla extract bottle by filling it with some of my chlorophylltastic sycamore oil. (<- What happens when you let several giant handfuls of tightly closed leaf buds infuse in organic grape seed oil for almost a full fucking year.) And then I decorated the emerald elixir with twine, a copper goddess charm (it just seemed more Ms. Graveyard Dirt to hang the charm ass-first), yet another outside bone and a found feather.

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Can I confess something? I was genuinely apprehensive about taking pictures of my bizarre creations. I'm insufferably in-your-fucking-face Aries confident about everything I do, with an exception to anything that falls under the "creative output" header. A lot of my projects and hobbies sit in stagnant limbo for an inexcusable amount of time because I allow my supernaturally perfectionist tendencies to get the better of me.

In short? I'm terrified of producing something shit, and even MORE terrified of the prospect of not realizing that I produced something shit. As lame as it sounds, forcing myself to take and post pictures of my decorated creations has been a tre-fucking-mendous exercise in letting go and getting on with life. Hopefully the recipients of my feral witch gifts will look past the use of dusty bones and ragged feathers and feel all the love I put into those poorly tied bows and recycled glass bottles.

Today, We Didn't

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Yesterday we came home empty-handed. Today, we didn’t.

Beech Hedgerow Crow

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"Do you wanna park?" I asked Italics as we loaded the car with our grocery shopping. It was just after 10PM in early July, which meant the natural lighting had dimmed, but it wouldn't truly be dark for another hour or so.

(We live far enough north to experience dawn breaking around 2:30AM during summer; night doesn't properly fall until around midnight, and even then - especially around Midsummer - there's this luminous blue ribbon that hugs the tiny space between the horizon and sky that doesn't disappear during the 2-3 hours of darkness.)

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So I drove to the small country lane that begins with crossroads and ends in a 3-way junction, where my wild roses grow, where I ritually reap wheat, where we pick up roadkill pheasant for dinner, wave to the familiar cattle, get followed by the local raptors and occasionally pilgrimage over to the trio of standing stones that've seen countless generations live, die and work the sacred land that the ancient stone monuments inhabit.

We pulled into the beginning of a blocked off, feral road (nature's reclaimed the unused stretch of asphalt, and now it's covered with grass and wild flowers providing the local rabbits a lush playing field) and parked, but hot'n'heavy car action didn't come into play because I was dying for a piss. (I'm a woman of many curses, one of them being the inexplicable need to fucking urinate the second I'm in the fucking country.)

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In that dimming July night we broke through the tricky hedge separating open country and forest, and spilled into the twilight hushed woods. Silent and eerie we maneuvered around pockets of pooled water, broken pine boughs and the dilapidated remains of a pheasant coup as we explored new, uncharted territory.

(One of the reasons why I find so many goddamn pheasants is because we live a few miles off an estate that provides hunting, so the gamekeepers artificially inflate the number of birds by introducing human-reared pheasants into the wild.)

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And then we did what we always do when it's just us and nature: we fucked. This time against a tree as I simultaneously tried to keep the position (the second I lost the perfect angle his cock would pop out) AND not slip off the two different dirt mounds I was standing on. We both laughed, we both climaxed and we both ended up having to pick bits of broken bark from our hair once we finished our amorous encounter.

As I scooped the combined sexual fluids trickling out of my cunt to offer it to the ground - to the woods, nature and earth - we found the remains of a solitary wild rabbit skull, perfectly cleaned and white washed by the elements. (Which is usually standard for us. For whatever reason the wild likes to repay favors, and it repays them pretty fucking quickly. The year before we ended up having ritual sex in another pine forest, and as we left a hunter gave me seven shot rabbits for free.)

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We did manage to park despite our unintended foray in the woods, and we sat - side by side - in the front of the car passing a bottle of chocolate milk back and forth while I enjoyed a reduced-to-clear apple turnover. (<- Post-sex munchies!) And when it was time to leave, we came home via the tiny, old village that we often walk to in order to visit the local graveyard (and abandoned wall garden, the ruins of an antique chapel, the beech hedgerow, the field where I first ritually reaped wheat several years ago and the disturbed children's home and orphanage).

Even though it was much darker than when we originally set out "to park" I instantly identified the black anomaly resting against the low stone wall separating the beech hedgerow from the road: a youngish carrion crow. I quickly pulled into a partially barred field opening leaving Italics (and the running car) to quickly jog down the length of the stone wall to pick up the roadkill bird to take home.

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(Corvids nest in that particular hedgerow, but I'm not sure of the actual type. The bird I picked up was definitely a carrion crow - it's kind've easy to misidentify/mix up juvenile rooks and crows because rooks don't develop their garish, gray-colored beaks until adulthood - due to the beak beard it sported. (<- Carrion crows, regardless of age, will always have a smattering of bristly feathers growing along the top of the beak.) I can't say for certain that this crow lived in those beeches, but it was a lot smaller than the other crows I handled later in the year so the assumption that it was a youngin' from that group of nests isn't exactly unfeasible.)

Once home I promptly ignored all the fucking groceries that needed to be unpacked and sat my ass down on the kitchen floor to release and ritually deconstruct the dead crow. First the two sets of gravel-crusted wings were clipped from the body, then its tail feathers (they're still attached to a dried bit of skin so instead of being reduced to loose feathers they form a tiny fan), and once the major appendages had been removed I carefully skinned the bird's head with a model craft scalpel to save the feathered hood to dry.

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Having never actually seen the internal anatomy of a crow - or any wild bird, for that matter - I gently opened Beech Hedgerow Crow to take a respectful peek inside, although its small body sustained massive trauma which reduced the majority of the internal organs to a pulpy mess.

(When you get hold of a larger roadkill animal it's always obvious where it got hit. Internally, I mean. The smaller the animal, the more damage it takes throughout its whole body, so instead of having one isolated area that's bruised and battered the entire fucking body can get beaten up and liquefied.)

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The youngin's clipped feathers and hood were pinned against cardboard, salted and dried. I bagged the more perishable remains - the body, feet and head - and immediately froze them, leaving the eyes and tongue in tact for later extraction. (Waste not, want not.)

And in the outside freezer Beech Hedgerow Crow still sits with the other corvids, waiting for the day when a witch comes along and knows in his/her heart'o'hearts that this lovingly prepared roadkill crow was meant to come home to them.

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Just incase this entry grabbed your interest:

I'm selling both the wild rabbit skull and all of Beech Hedgerow Crow's parts. Currently both of its wings, its tail feathers and hood are dried and ready to be shipped, although they do require a little TLC to remove gravely bits. The skull, bones, few internal organs and feet aren't ready, though, so they require some processing time before they can be mailed. (I know, I know, I hate waiting too, but at least the tradeoff is knowing I'll be working on those parts especially for you.)

I have video footage of me ritually cleansing the wings and feathers that I need to post (not to mention an entire fucking folder of still photos), but if you already feel strongly about any part of this carrion crow (or the rabbit skull) you're more than welcome to contact me (graveyarddirt@gmail.com) about reserving or purchasing your desired piece(s).

Pine Hedge Rookery

The pine hedge rookery, where a lot of our local crows live. This is where I often get the ones that die a natural death, where I pick up pristine feathers from, and where I leave special offerings. (Which is really sort've pointless since all the damn crows hang out in our yard thanks to all the fucking food I put out for them on a daily basis. <- I even got the motherfuckers eating borsht out of a bowl. Seriously.)

Last year - when this was taken - grain was grown next to the rookery, and I spent a very early morning ritually reaping a large bundle to take back home to work with. (You don't want to know how many effing feathers I had to untangle from the sheaves.) Halloween, Fet Ghede, Thanksgiving, Sviata Vechera, Christmas and New Year celebrations sort've overwhelmed me, and I haven't had a chance to sit down and finish that particular project yet.

In 2010 I collected between 5-7 complete crows (a mix of natural death and roadkill), so there's a good chance that some of my freezer crows are actually present in this video. (If you're planning on buying one of my frozen corvids it's totally cool to wave hello to the birds because there's a good chance you'll be waving to your crow.)

Universe Whispers

Dogs don't bite, bees don't sting and strange neighborhood cats brush their unfamiliar faces against my legs. "Witch!" the Universe whispers, but only nature hears.

Ache in My Heart

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It's been three motherfucking months since I last filled my magic wooden basket with nature's bounty. I don't want to seem all melodramatic and shit, but there's this ache in my heart, and it's been there since the killing frost laid its icy blanket of pre-winter across the land.

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There are days when the loneliness gets so fucking overwhelming that all I can do is sit down and cry, and I wonder if the sleeping land feels stirred by my tears, if it's sluggishly aware and pines for me the way I fucking pine for it on a daily fucking basis.

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I haven't been outdoors - where it counts, where I belong - since October. Winter's kept me busy, and my festive indoor schedule has been running me fucking ragged since Halloween. I haven't had a chance, not one single fucking opportunity, to cast off responsibilities and get in my motherfucking car and just drive until my heart no longer aches.

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I feel like a queen haunted by ghosts. I mourn phantoms and vivid memories, and the pictures that remind me of that time only rub salt in the fucking wounds. My eyes trace over familiar shapes and I can feel them beneath my fingertips; the loose, gritty dirt clinging to bulbous stems, the cobweb-sticky remains of tattered veils, the flawlessness of the waxy caps which burned like tequila sunrises beneath wild birches and heather.

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Maybe Winter is the mutual longing between a queen and her land, the collective ache that throbs and bleeds throughout the long, dark months keeping things alive, keeping things warm. And maybe for every hot tear that runs down my fucking cheek a silent promise is made that Spring must oblige.

2010 Altar

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2010; a year of bones, a year of death, a year of green and wheat, a year of animals, a year of roadkill, a year of wild mushrooms and berries, a year of hedges, a year of forests, and a year of graveyards and standing stones. 2010 was the year my land reached out to me, initiating an intense period of acceptance which I clutched in my tight-fisted hands as if it was the only meaningful thing in the entire motherfucking world.

So how the fuck do you gratefully wave good-bye to a year that's given you so goddamn much? You deconstruct it, piece by piece, gift by gift, until you're left with the raw basics that built it. With bones and seeds and leaves and musty, fall-scented fungi I created and layered an altar of thanksgiving, working on the tangible hymn up until the last few minutes of the 31st. (<- Something better've duly noted that I worked to the very fucking end, OR ELSE.)

"2010," my voice cracked, overcome with emotion. Italics didn't say anything, but he draped an arm across my body in comforting agreement. And we silently stood, side-by-side, before our altar of adventures, trials, victories, failures and achievements as husband and wife, king and queen, god and goddess and - my personal favorite - devoted shepherd and loving (even if somewhat willful) goat.

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I first started with the kitchen's stark fucking naked altar. Traditionally evergreen is brought indoors during Holy Supper to decorate the table (I use a mix of ivy, yew and cedar - all from bushes growing on our property), but because we were buried under an insane amount of snow around the Winter Solstice I couldn't get out to our shrubs to take cuttings. (<- That's why the window's Sviata Vechera altar looked so fucking bare on the 21st.)

On the 30th of December the snow had receded enough to let me take clippings from outside, so on New Year's fucking Eve I finally got to tangle a variety of evergreen up and around my Khokhloma pieces, candleholders, skulls and candy. (Better late than never?) With the layer of greenery set, I embellished the curtain of foliage with homegrown wheat, the first set of deer bones we ever found (I, uh, still need to write this particular story AND upload the pictures), two homegrown chili peppers, the conjoined bolete triplets we found in October, my jar of "uniquely special" toadstool (fly agaric) oil created on Halloween and one of the miniature kolaches baked for Sviata Vechera.

Farewell Sendoff

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A monu-fucking-mental year deserves a farewell sendoff in style: homemade vodka* created earlier this year with locally foraged wild berries and backyard-grown fruits, a dab (or two) of my fly agaric oil that's been infusing since Halloween, a bag of imported pot with a hallucinatory slant and sweaty, friction burn sex on a sheepskin rug that Italics once lay on as a baby.

Pictured Above: plum liqueur, wild blackberry brandy, wild blackberry vodka, gooseberry & cinnamon vodka, wild raspberry vodka and strawberry & geranium vodka.

Good Fucking Indication

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You know how I said "this picture gives ZERO indication how fucking massive these mushrooms really were" in this morning's journal entry, Harvest Moon Foraging? Here's a good fucking indication how fucking massive those mushrooms actually were.

Depressingly Symbolic

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This is the sort've shit you find lying next to one of nature's most sacred entheogens which helped establish the very foundations of our religious and spiritual beliefs. How depressingly symbolic, right?

Harvest Moon Foraging

I woke up this morning with a Yuletastic list of things to do (bring the decoration boxes down from the attic, make the templates for this year's gingerbread house and start on the motherfucking Christmas cards), but all that's really on my mind - other than FOR FUCK'S SAKE, WHY DID -OUR- GODDAMN SHOWER HAVE TO BREAK?! - is red and orange dotted with delicate flecks of white. (Fly agarics, if my description of the "white-specked motherfuckers" doesn't sound familiar.)

Two nights ago I finally filled my digital camera to capacity, and when exporting shit over into my archive folder I caught myself sentimentally flipping through photos that were taken as far back as September, and goddamn if nostalgia didn't rise up and bite my motherfucking ankles like a PMS-inflicted viper. With just a few green-tinged images ("HOLY FUCKING SHIT, LOOK HOW FUCKING GREEN EVERYTHING STILL IS IN SEPTEMBER AND OCTOBER!") I found myself sighing longingly for a time as recent as two months ago, when the land stood on a precarious cusp of neither summer or fall and it wasn't buried beneath four feet of motherfucking snow.

Even though everything's sleeping beneath a layer of white and we've already played the first festive song of the season (Run With the Fox, by Yes) I find myself looking back to Harvest, and the one thing I consistently find myself missing is the thrilling sight - it IS thrilling; it never got fucking old or boring, and I doubt it ever will (ladies and gentlemen, I give you the passion of mushroom collecting) - of partially hidden toadstools burning like tequila sunrises beneath mottled birches, purple-blooming heather and sphagnum moss.

So I thought FUCK IT, I'M GONNA INDULGE THAT FEELING OF BABY PICTURE SENTIMENTALITY and earmarked the set of pictures I took of Harvest Moon's foraging expedition (which, by the way, fell on the autumn equinox this year, so these magic mushrooms are totally SUPER magic) near the banks of the Black Laird's loch for today's Graveyard Dirt entry.

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You wouldn't believe how many "HEY, ASSHOLE..." speeches I wrote ~in my mind~ to the fucktard who decapitated my fly agaric patch in mid-September. I was particularly excited by this crop; I had been nurturing them for almost a week, but then I came down with a cold and couldn't check on them daily. By the time I was well enough to crawl out of the house someone had gotten to every fucking toadstool growing along this stretch of land leaving me nothing but broken, bulbous stems.

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The toadstool genocide has a happy ending, though. When I pitched a fit at the Universe for fucking with my wild crop the local land intervened and placated my tantrum by providing me with one of my largest mushroom hauls of the season. So I lost one patch of fly agarics, but I gained one Harvest meal of lamb shanks braised in herbs, tomatoes, red wine and fresh, wild mushrooms.

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There are three toadstools hiding in this picture, can you see them all? (Give yourself an extra point if you find the sacred beer can which was ritually offered by a spiritual pilgrim through their SUV window as they drove (and drank) pass this stretch of nature-blessed land.)

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All of these guys grow along a thin, but long, strip of land right next to a small country road. Because it's off the beaten path I never found beheaded fly agarics, but I did often find them popping up next to discarded junk thrown out of car windows. One of the super fantastic fairy tale toadstools Italics and I found together actually had cellophane from a cigarette box - complete with gold "ribbon" for easy opening - plastered to the fucking cap.

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Alice has already had a bite.

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The fly agarics growing in moss - or the sandy, loose soil beneath firs - are the easiest to ease out of the earth. The swollen base of the stem can sometimes get firmly lodged within the ground, so it takes a little finger digging to encourage the mushroom out in one full piece, but no excavating was ever necessary for the toadstools growing in moss or loose soil.

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How can something so naturally beautiful be so fucking reviled and vilified in our modern society?

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My foraging basket (with a not-to-fucking-shabby amount of "edible" wild mushrooms) and four more hidden toadstools, can you spot them all?

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Parent and child. (They look fused together, but they weren't. The bond between them seemed pretty apparent, though.)

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This picture gives ZERO indication how fucking massive these mushrooms really were. (Try BABY, WILL YOU TAKE A PICTURE OF ME SITTING ON THESE FIBERGLASS TOADSTOOLS TO COMMEMORATE OUR VISIT TO SANTA'S VILLAGE? big.) If I remember correctly, the one on the right - the larger, orange one - was a son of a fucking bitch to dig out of the goddamn ground.

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The largest, most impressive fly agaric specimens seemed to grow beneath ragged heather bushes. Since they were always partially buried beneath musty old leaves, brittle twigs and layers of scrubby heather the ground would release this rich, moist scent of earth, mildew and organic decay when the soil around the mushroom was disturbed.

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A witch is never really alone in the woods. (I love the daddy long legs poised beneath the rim of my basket all Little Critter-style. <- If you aren't familiar with the Little Critter series every page had a spider - and I think a mouse and a cricket (or was it a grasshopper?) - tucked away within the illustration for you to find.)

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This isn't an abnormal sight from August to October in my neck of the woods. You can get an idea of how fucking huge those two mushrooms really were when you compare them to the other fly agarics in the photo. I mean, Christ, just look at the fucking girth of the orange toadstool's stalk!

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Some are fire engine red, some burst into orange-yellow flames and others are golden egg yolks served sunnyside up. What they never are, though, is "boring".

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There's an unwritten rule about mushroom collecting: if they're easy to pick/unearth, then they're going to be a fucking bitch to get to. You don't even want to know how many times Chippy got slapped in the face with a bough of fresh fir (when I'm out foraging I tuck him into my leather book bag that I wear on my back all papoose-style) as I forcefully pushed past natural barriers made of pine branches.

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I won't lie, if you were born with a sharp eye you're fucking miles ahead in this mushroom collecting game. Throughout the season your eyes need to filter and sort through a huge variety of neutral, natural shades, and the only thing between you and a sore fucking back is your eyes eventually adjusting to the spectrum of fall colors lying at your feet.

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Because the grass was goddamn green where I was collecting I never even thought of crossing asphalt to see what was growing on the other side of the road. On the autumn equinox I finally tip-toed over and found yet another stretch of land ripe with fly agarics and various boletes. If it hasn't already been made abundantly clear from my previous journal entries and pictures: my little sovereignty kingdom is wild mushroom fertile like whoa.

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September's full moon (Harvest Moon!) foraging expedition ended on an even more bountiful note when I came across the first edible roadkill pheasant of the year. (I follow two strict rules with small roadkill: if scavengers have already had a chance to put a serious dent in the carcass I won't eat it, and if the body's ruptured open revealing internal organs I also won't eat it. If the animal doesn't fall into either of those categories it's fair, culinary game in this house.)

This hen had just the tiniest scratch in her skin which immediately destined her for the kitchen. In fact, you guys are already acquainted. This is the Mabon roadkill pheasant hen that became one of our Harvest Home celebratory meals. You've already witnessed her funeral, and followed along as I explained how I ritually broke down her body into usable parts without allowing any of it go to waste.

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Her head and asphalt-scuffed beak (now currently drying in a box of fine cornmeal and salt).

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One of her unearthly, scaly feet (which are also drying in a box of fine cornmeal and salt).

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One of her car-tousled wings (which, along with the other wing and her flayed skin, is pinned onto a piece of cardboard in the garage beneath a layer of cornmeal).

Uniquely Special

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I've been holding off on writing about certain projects because I felt like I had to introduce you to my situation (see journal entry 2010, which is a V. abridged version of the past 10 years) so you could really appreciate where the fuck I'm coming from. To better understand what I'm doing you have to be semi-familiar with my history, because it's in my past where these foundations were laid, and it's in my past where my desperate longing to do this shit originally germinated. Without that decade of Universe-imposed isolation and solitude I wouldn't be the person I am today, let alone the witch you see reeking revolutionary havoc in various social networking sites.

Working with toadstools (fly agarics; the white-speckled red-orange "poisonous" fairy tale mushrooms) is something I always wanted to do, but I never had the opportunity until this year thanks to not having a motherfucking car. When the stars finally aligned and a car dropped into my lap I didn't take the good fortune for granted; I was out, every day, in rain, wind or shine picking and harvesting what I could from ancient woodlands, hedges, castle grounds, roadsides and sacred sites (i.e., standing stones, stone circles and cairns).

After a day of foraging - which wasn't limited to mushrooms, I picked and took home anything that seemed left out for me which included wild berries, roadkill, feathers, bones, wild bird egg shell fragments and whatever manmade "junk" I stumbled across that seemed suspiciously significant despite its rusted mundanity - I'd drag my magic basket home, take pictures to document the day's haul (I want people to feel connected with the products they buy from me, whether it's mushrooms, animal remains or organic plant material and the best way to do that is to provide pictures of said products in their natural environment and to share their stories of how I acquired them through journal entries), perform any required rite or ritual, sort through the treasures, clean them, label them, store them and, in the cases of mushrooms, dry them.

In roughly three months I picked over a hundred mushrooms, and that number doesn't even count the "edible" specimens harvested, cleaned and dried for winter eating. Because this is my first fucking year doing this I don't know if that number's normal, abnormal or amazingly phenomenal. What I do know, though, was that northeast Scotland's countryside was exceptionally welcoming to the point that it verged on being cosmically creepy. (How do you know when the Universe is enthusiastically encouraging you on? When you find yourself engaged in a one person game of dodgeball where your ass gets repeatedly pelted with the shit you're looking for.)

Despite the love and care I put into every fly agaric picked, some of them were beyond my help. When a toadstool wasn't suitable for drying a spore print was taken and all of the remains were committed to the earth (one of my "roadkill buckets"; a container filled with dirt and the unusable parts of one of my animals, I'm PRETTY sure the vessel'o'soil used is either crow or deer based), because, fuck, you just don't go throwing one of the oldest, most powerful tools of communion with the divine into the fucking trash.

Other problem agarics were hard to identify until after I began drying them. The two worst offenders? Infestations of larvae (they travel up from the bulbous base of the stem, through the stalk and into the mushroom cap) that rendered the toadstool unusable (I'm TOTALLY about accepting the nature of Nature; if you pick and consume wild shit, you need to deal with the fact you may be picking and consuming MORE wild shit than you intended - but in these cases? the worms ate EVERYTHING leaving hollowed out, brittle shells of fragile emptiness), and mold.

The mold thing seemed to be dirt related - it only appeared on the bases (speckled, funnily enough, like the white dots on the caps, so the mushrooms weren't blanketed in fuzzy mold, only spackled very gently with tiny Styrofoam pinpricks) of the most soil-encrusted mushrooms. (I tried removing as much earth as I could with a pair of brushes - because you aren't meant to wash mushrooms to clean them, you just dust debris and unwanted junk them off - but in some cases it just wasn't enough.)

I don't think I would've experienced the problem if I had a dehydrator at my disposal, but I didn't. (I'm actually hoping I sell enough of what I harvested this year to afford one for NEXT year's season.) I only had an oven, and even on the lowest temperature setting (with the door open) some of the larger agarics wouldn't dry completely leaving me with a toadstool-themed Sophie's Choice: stick with the oven until they were hardcore dehydrated (which ran the risk of a slightly toasted appearance), or hope that they were dry enough to store them in a brown paper bag with a sachet of silica. In most cases the mushrooms continued to dry without incident, but a small handful developed itty bitty spheres of white where dirt remained transfixed to the base.

I've sort've been pussyfooting around the subject, all NUDGE, NUDGE, WINK, WINK, COUGH, COUGH, AHEM but we all know the score - the majority of people who'll end up buying these mushrooms from me are interested in experiencing the psychoactive reaction from this natural entheogen. With that in mind, it's then my job - as your black market, witchcraft-flavored drug lord - to:

1.) ensure everyone understands that the toadstools being sold are for novelty purposes; you shouldn't eat (or drink) them, and I can't be held responsible for whatever happens if you decide to ingest them

2.) join everyone else who's ignoring #1 and do my very best to provide the cleanest, safest specimens for consumption

Knowing that people will be buying mushrooms for ritual/ceremonial work I've begun the process of grading my stock. The absolute best fly agarics will be left whole (perfect for adding to your curiosity collection!), the second best will be reduced to "chips" (perfect for adding to your magic waters, incense blends and whatever else strikes your fancy) and the deviants of the bunch - the ones that were just a touch too wormy, or developed flecks of mold - were separated from the pack to ensure everything sold is 100% suitable for all uses.

If you've been following my adventures you'll know that I abhor waste, and I'll beat something to proverbial death to wring every last use out of it. One of the things I always wanted to do with fly agaric was create an anointing oil, but I didn't want to dip into stock that I could sell least it took money away from a dehydrator. So instead of using the beautiful and the best to make myself that oil, I used the rejected outcasts which were unfit for human consumption.

Just a few minutes after 11 PM on Halloween night I sat down with an empty pickle jar, my ritual scissors, my bean nighe bowl, rapeseed oil and bags upon fucking bags of dried fly agarics and got to work checking every single fucking mushroom. Whatever fell into the most desirable grades were filed away for sale use, and whatever appeared remotely iffy was reduced to confetti and added to the glass jar.

By the stroke of midnight - and only JUST - the devious deed was done; I had myself a respectable jar of locally picked fly agarics chips infusing in locally grown organic, cold-pressed rapeseed oil. Everything in that glass container - the oil, bits of mushrooms, the dirt, the tiny fragments of pieces of twigs and organic debris - was grown, picked and processed within 15-20 miles of our house. As if the "magic" in the magic mushrooms wasn't enough, every single fucking ingredient that went into this particular oil grew, lived, died and was harvested in my personal jurisdiction.

And now? It'll sit and macerate. For an entire year. And by next Halloween it'll probably reek to fucking hell of preserved pickles, but smelling like a Slavic appetizer is a small fucking price to pay for something so uniquely special.

2010

2010 has been a year of so many fucking firsts I don't even know where the fuck to begin. I dreaded stepping over the threshold of 29 to 30 earlier in April, but graduating into full-fledged adulthood has been one of the most amazing goddamn rides I've ever fucking experienced. For twenty-nine fucking years I existed; on my thirtieth year I finally began living.

This year's seen the culmination of a huge fucking chunk of my most treasured dreams and aspirations metamorphosize from "unfulfilled longing" to "motherfucking reality", and without hesitation I sunk my teeth deep into the proverbial flesh of time and space and clamped onto this way of fairy tale life because there's way in fucking hell I'm ever letting go of it.

Toadstools (also known as amanita muscaria, but more commonly as "fly agarics") are something I've wanted to work with for a helluva long time. If you've been following Graveyard Dirt throughout the Harvest season you probably know that they're prolific in my neck of the woods (northeast Scotland), but, until this year, they've been out of reach (as were all of the other "edible" mushrooms I collected, the berries I've harvested and the roadkill I've taken home) because I didn't have a goddamn car.

For ten fucking years I had very limited access to the countryside of Scotland, even though it begins just a few blocks out of our rural subdivision. Nothing - except the beech hedge, boarded up disturbed children's home and orphanage, ruined chapel, abandoned wall garden and local graveyard - was within walking distance, and none of those places (as special as they were/are to us) were suitable environments for the sort of activities I wanted to engage in (i.e., wildcrafting, harvesting and living off the land).

Suitable environments were always just over the next hill...literally. The crow rookery and woods, the closest standing stones, old wells, the stone throne, the Black Laird's loch and my High Priestess B & J columns are all places I habitually frequent - my "offices", I've joked - but are just a little too far to regularly visit on foot. In the car? Three, sometimes five minutes and then several more of walking. By foot? Hours, in some cases.

Without a mode of transportation those places - as close as they were/are - were inaccessible to me. As my relationship with my father-in-law deteriorated, so did my connection with the outside world. Because I couldn't drive (I only know how to operate an automatic, and both family cars were stick shifts) we had to rely on Mr. Awesome to get around, but he had (and still has) a bad habit of turning off his phone or just leaving it at home if he doesn't want to be bothered, so when he'd forget to pick us up we had no method of contacting him.

After a few years it wasn't worth the frustration, especially when my stomach first broke; there's nothing worse than being sick as a fucking dog in public with no idea when or how the fuck you're going to get back home. I became a living ghost. I haunted windows and patio doors, blankly staring out transparent portals to an increasingly distant world while watching the seasons fluctuate and change. Days would pass, weeks would pass, months would pass. Years, eventually, would pass, and as they faded away the time between outings became more and more drawn until I realized in moments of sharp lucidity that sometimes those times would last 4-5 months.

Four to five fucking months of not leaving your house. Ever. No movies, no shopping, no post office, no grocery store, no real human contact. Nothing. Just the familiar box I lived in that became a prison without bars. I tried to escape; we wore down the path to the local graveyard and explored whatever countryside there was within reasonable walking distance, but then I got sick. Twice.

I cut my left tonsil on a piece of hard skin from a pork roast I had ritually made. Within 24 hours the cut went septic, and in under 48 hours my ass was hospitalized. I didn't leave the sickbed for another year and a fucking half. It took something like six effing months for my tonsils to finally clear (I was given two weeks worth of penicillin, but the second I went off the medication the infection would return and that game played continuously for a half a fucking year until I was prescribed THREE WEEKS worth of penicillin which finally killed the fucking infestation), but when it did the most hardcore and fucking violent symptoms of my stomach breaking began surfacing.

It's hard to leave the house when you feel exhausted, lethargic and your stomach's constantly unsettled because you've been on some serious antibiotics for an infection that won't go away for a significant part of the year. It's even harder to leave the house when you suddenly begin experiencing gut-wrenching burps 200+ times a day, throwing up everything you eat and finding yourself unable to breathe or exert yourself.

I went from being tested to being initiated. I knew the first part was the Universe getting up to something, but I never expected that the hospital/tonsil thing was just the tip of the fucking iceberg. I never expected that I'd have to spend nearly a year bedridden, unable to eat, drink, breathe, sleep, fuck or live because something was happening in my body that I had no fucking control over. I lost myself, I lost my life and I lost my physical connection to the outside world.

Initiation is hard. Initiation breaks you. Initiation doesn't provide rubber cement or a fucking helping hand to glue your pieces of you back together. I asked for big things; I got a big thing. My wish had been granted, but it came at a price. I had to be reborn, and, as if birth wasn't already painful enough, I had to relearn how to live with a problem that couldn't be medically fixed. At the darkest times it was a blight, a good ole biblical old testament pox, but even in the despair I had a tiny grain of truth embedded under a nail - to be resurrected you have to be torn asunder.

To play God is a dangerous, tricky thing if you're just a human being. You're asking for shit that normally isn't issued with this finite, mortal gig. As a fearless, impetuous twenty-something I stood in the face of what I believed in and demanded an ability that has no root in logic, reasoning or science. It cost me nearly two years of my life, and drove me to desperate hopelessness that had me questioning everything, including the foundation of my beliefs and my very purpose for being. Retrospectively, it's not an unfair price to pay when you've asked for the breath of God, but to say that there wasn't a period of intense adjustment as I learned to carry the gift would be the understatement of the fucking millennia.

Anyway...

2010 has been a fucking monumental year for me. In addition to having access to all of those "suitable environments" that were always just a hill or two away I've been well enough to retain a worrying frenzied pace of life. Nearly two years ago I couldn't breathe without some form of difficulty (it's my stomach valve; because it's broken it allows air, food and liquid to come and go as it pleases without involuntary regulation). Two months ago? I was lifting adult roadkill deer into the trunk of my fucking car all by my fucking self.

If I seem unusually hyperactive or enthusiastic about the things I've done this year - or the projects I've finally been able to begin - it's because I've waited a decade for this sort of freedom, not to mention thirty fucking years to live a meaningful existence that I've spent an entire lifetime dreaming about. My fantasies are becoming a reality, and the prison that's kept me walled up behind a barrier of stone and glass has finally been relocated from the biography section of my library of life to fiction.

Fairy Tale Friends

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I already miss my fairy tale friends.

Harvest Bites

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Five fucking pounds of wild, Scottish blackberries that were eventually turned into vodka, brandy, syrup, vinegar and a gluten-free, homemade pie. These motherfuckers were so goddamn big that it only took Italics and I an hour of picking - IN THE SAME FUCKING SPOT - to fill half my foraging basket. (I have a feeling that the giant free-range/organic egg does a poor job in belaying the sheer quantity of berries.)

Thanks to "THE WORST WINTER IN 30 YEARS!" everything's late this year. (My patio container garden? Still fragrant with sweet peas, lupins, borage and sunflowers and we're rapidly approaching November.) The blackberries weren't ready this year until AFTER Michaelmas, so to exercise folklore-ish precaution I fought fire with fire.

(The long short? They say Old Scratch claims blackberry ownership by pissing on them after Michaelmas. That might've been the perfect solution when dealing with everyone else, but when a feral, urine-marking witch is involved all bets are off. I called SUPER shotgun by pissing into a spray bottle before gently "misting" the berries with watered-down urine. But I was a good sport and gave the Devil a generous piece of apple, plum and blackberry pie.)

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"In ancient Scottish woodlands no one can hear you scream." (Ridley Scott, I'll be waiting for your call; I've got ideas.)

Someone decapitated this particular porcini and its stalk split into three creating the Alien-like egg.

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This is that monster of a porcini that I mentioned in my previous journal entry (Oct. 2nd, 2010). It was a flag - an older, larger specimen that signals you're in prime mushroom-huntin' grounds - but unlike most flags this particular mushroom was in prime condition.

I noticed the Goliath of a cep growing along a semi-busy country road while castle hopping, but we couldn't stop the first time around due to traffic and road works. On the way home we pulled into a hidden lane et voila, cep heaven. (This wasn't the only one we found; the entire area was COVERED with them. We evidently stumbled across a porcini site no one else knows about.)

This fucker alone weighed 503g (that's a half a fucking kilo, just over an effing pound!) and had practically zero blemishes. I can't remember the super grand weight total - in addition to this large one we managed to find a respectable handful of others (which can be seen in the background) - but suffice to say, it was impressive.

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Every year in September a local castle holds a produce sale over the course of several weekends hocking the fruits and vegetables grown within the castle's walled garden. We've dubbed the event "Castle Pie Day" (Italics buys me apples and plums so I can bake a homemade pie, and in return he gets a piece of - ahem - "pie" beneath a specific tree whose branches are just long enough to keep his pie-eating privately decent) and incorporated the sale into our Harvest festivities.

This year we missed all three dates due to being sick. (Sometimes I think I'm better off getting whacked with the fucking flu. Several days of intense bed lounging and I'm quickly on the mend; the same can't be said of a low-key seasonal cold that annoyingly clings to your ankles for fucking weeks.) Needless to say, I wasn't thrilled. But - BUT! - I still managed to create "Castle Pie" using special ingredients - plums from our backyard, apples from another walled garden sale and the Devil's blackberries.

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Lessons learned, porcini edition #1: if you've going to spend over a fucking hour carefully picking and brushing off debris, for fuck's sake, trim the motherfuckers before you "forget" about them for two days.

In the course of 48 hours the few worms that were in the base of the mushrooms managed to eat their way through all of the stems rendering them useless. If I had circumcised - heh! - the ceps before leaving them for a few days (which I've done before without any problem) the larvae would've never had a chance to work up towards the caps.

Porcini lesson #1 learned.

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Bolete triplets fused together at the stalks, but seamlessly slipping into one another via caps. These guys were past their best, but we picked them anyway to dry out for this year's Yule Log. (We decorate our log with things found throughout the year and that includes mushrooms, berries, foliage and - to the mundane eye - rusty junk.)

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Backyard plums, wild blackberries and apples grown in a walled garden tucked into homemade gluten-free pastry and then liberally covered with a spicy-sweet blanket of brown sugar streusel. I was initially worried about using gluten-free flour - it HATES being overhandled; the more runny your batter/dough is the more likely it'll bake to perfection - but the vegetable fat (I've used all of my "neutral" lard; the only thing left is a sacrosanct jar of lard rendered from a piece of smoked pork fat) rubbed into the mix beautifully and with the addition of xanthan gum everything came together smoothly and softly.

To ensure no one got their slice of "pie" (ahem) before the other I had my first bite while barebacking Italics' cock, masturbating myself with my right hand while holding the ceramic dish up with the left. Some work was required to keep everything balanced ("BITE, MASTURBATE, CHEW, MASTURBATE, BOUNCE, MASTURBATE, SWALLOW, MASTURBATE, BITE..."), but the effort was totally worth the orgasm. (<- I had one of my trademark screaming climaxes, although this time with a mouthful of homemade pie.)

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Agarics and boletes go hand in hand, where you'll find one, you'll always find a variant of the other. (They both share favorite trees: birch, fir and larch.) Once you get an idea of the sort of woodland they like (toadstools don't seem to mind much longer grass and heather, but boletes can sometimes be a bit fussy and like shorter, grassy terrain - especially if moss is involved) it's possible to come home with several baskets worth of fly agarics and bolete-based mushrooms.

Pictured: bay boletes (orange-y stalk and brown caps), birch boletes (large mushrooms), Slippery Jacks (peeled mushrooms; the slimy coating which makes them "slippery" should be peeled back since it causes gastric upset in some people) and itty bitty little larch boletes (I really fell in love with these tiny motherfuckers this year).

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Up until this point of wild mushroom harvesting (I think this was around the autumnal equinox) I had been excruciatingly good about not dipping into my stock for personal use. (My original intent for all of this foraging was to create homemade Christmas gifts for friends - flavored oils, vinegars, booze and jams made with local fruits and herbs from my container garden, and dried wild Scottish mushrooms picked by yours truly.)

When it became increasingly clear that the majority of my friends didn't share my insane love for feral fungi I got, uh, frustrated. ("HOLY SHIT, NOW WHAT THE FUCK AM I GOING TO DO WITH THESE SEVERAL POUNDS OF FUCKING MUSHROOMS?!") Actually, I got militantly frustrated and decided that the entire world needed to be educated about why you don't need to breathe into a paper bag when offered a stash of wild mushrooms (from me, anyway - you know, the girl who is petrified with the very thought of death and would never put herself in a position where that outcome could be a likely possibility).

Even though we're now out of mushroom season - hard frost kills signals the end of foraging, and this landscape's been iced over several times this week - I have folders worth of pictures I'll be posting to help readers familiarize themselves with the bolete family. (<- One of the safest wild mushrooms to pick, even if you're a super novice. And probably one of the easiest families of wild mushrooms to identify.)

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Sugary wild blackberries being funneled into an old wine bottle to make gluten-free blackberry vodka. (<- Smirnoff uses corn instead of grain to make their spirit, so it's one of the only vodkas that's considered "gluten-free".)

Something tells me that my friends won't suffer the same fear of the wild when offered a bottle of this homemade hooch. (Although these berries DID get "gently misted" with diluted urine before being picked. My friends? Damned either way.)

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I spent all of August, September and October picking wild fungi. Day after fucking day I'd return home with the same goddamn mushrooms, and day after fucking day my mother-in-law would ask the same questions ("ARE THEY SAFE? CAN YOU EAT THEM? ARE THEY OKAY?") even though they were THE SAME FUCKING SPECIES SHE SAW ME PICKING EVERY FUCKING DAY.

Did it help that I knew the names of the boletes I was picking? No. Did it help that she heard the same effing names over and over again, revealing that I ONLY PICK WHAT I CAN ONE BILLION PERCENT IDENTIFY? No. Did it help when I explained to her - again and again - that my family and I have eaten these mushrooms all our fucking lives and no one's ever gotten sick or died? No.

Fed up with the constant second guessing - and frustrated with the overly cautious attitude towards wild foods - I finally set aside a handful of fresh woodland mushrooms (bay boletes, birch boletes, larch boletes and Slippery Jacks) for a special meal. (Lamb shanks braised in fresh herbs, wild mushrooms, plum tomatoes and red wine.)

That was about a month ago. Both Italics and I are still living (as is his mother), and no one got sick. In fact, my mother-in-law said it was one of the best goddamn lamb dinners she had ever had. (Not exactly verbatim, but close...sort've.)

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Lessons learned, porcini edition #2: never kiss a motherfucking porcini when a goddamn European's around.

Some Swiss asshole trailed Italics and I when he saw my foraging basket and IMMEDIATELY BEGAN PICKING THE SAME FUCKING MUSHROOMS WHEN HE SAW WHAT WAS GETTING PLACED IN MY EFFING BASKET. Since that fateful afternoon we've visited that particular spot several times, but someone's beaten us every single fucking time only leaving whole chunks of cut porcini bases scattered around the mushroom site.

(Which, by the way, were completely a-okay to eat.)(Apparently, plundering a mushroom site and not leaving anything for anyone else isn't bad enough, some people have to leave evidence of their retardation and inability to share all over the fucking ground.)

Porcini lesson #2 learned.

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.

Giving Thanks

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...for all that grows, for all that lives, for all that gives.

Pictured: a roadkill pheasant I personally butchered and cleaned, organic celery and carrots grown in Scotland, porcini mushrooms Italics and I gathered from local castle grounds, fresh herbs from my container garden and garlic that I grew this year in the front yard.

Harvest Festivities & Rites

itmoons asked: Hello! I've emailed you before and I am a great admirer of what you do. My boyfriend and I have been discussing the old ways and pagan holidays and such things and decided we'd like to celebrate them correctly (we did an informal ritual for mabon). With samhain coming, i was wondering what you did for mabon and what you will do for samhain. also, any sources you can direct me too would be helpful. apologies if these questions are too forward/personal/presumptuous. just two lil pagan boys lookin to give the goddess her due.

Ever since I received this question I've been hella excited by the prospect of answering it, but I've been so knee-fucking-deep in various observances and celebrations (and work - will the mushroom season EVER FUCKING END?) that I haven't had a chance to address it. (I'm actually pushing this question to the top of my list because 1.) it's seasonal and 2.) it provides an explanation as to where my AWOL ass has been for the past few months.)

At this point in my life my Gregorian year is split into halves. In the first half, the Light Year (spring and summer), I'm the virginal Bride who marries the divine king and throughout the growing months we reign together ensuring fertility and new life. The second half, the Dark Year (fall and winter), I'm the great Whore who sacrifices her husband, consort and king (wheat, vine and bull) and harvests his blood, flesh and seed for consumption and resurrection.

(This is a really quick, basic breakdown to give you an idea of where I'm coming from. I've addressed the Virgin/Whore dynamic and perpetual tug-of-war far better in previous diary entries. If you hit up the categories BRIDE and CAILLEACH you'll find more thorough explanations that I'm much happier with.)

Because we live in a mostly rural setting and I work with the idea of female-based sovereignty the majority of my Harvest (from Lammas to Mabon to Samhain to Fet Ghede) is agriculturally themed. Rather than just focusing on our little patch of property I've incorporated this entire area that we live in as my land, and I routinely drag Italics across the local landscape to perform various rites and rituals in the Scottish countryside we see every day out our windows.

The following is a list of activities, rituals, celebrations, observances and traditions that we try and nail every year. Some, it goes without saying, are more important than others, so we prioritize things and keep our schedules flexible for unplanned disasters (i.e., bad weather, catching a cold, family drama) to ensure that the most important shit is executed. (<- Like Italics/the divine king, har har.)

* Reap wheat; Every year I ritually reap wheat from local fields and from containers in my backyard patio garden that I've personally grown. The wheat is then gathered into a bundle and decorated with a blessed cloth embroidered with traditional Ukrainian designs. The venerated bundle - also known as didukh in Ukrainian (pictured here) - represents my ancestors, this land, my sacrificed king, consort, and husband. Throughout the Dark Year the bundle's featured in every major ritual and altar until spring, when I dismantle it and plant the king's seed I've been protecting and holding since Harvest. (See Cereal Mariticide and The Widow is Born.)

* Change the guard; Our companion for the Light Year is Chile Bird, but when it flies the coop for winter it's replaced by Cobweb Spider. Around the time of the equinoxes I remove everything from our office/computer room windowsill altar, wash everything (the objects sitting on the space, the window (inside and out), the frame (inside and out), the ledge (inside and out) and even the hinges, handles, blinds and areas of the wall touching the window), return the permanent altar shit and swap to the appropriate "guard". (See Changing of the Guard.)

* Clean bedroom; Before I drag out our vintage coffin cover to keep our asses warm throughout winter I have to thoroughly clean our bedroom to remove traces of the Bride. I've jokingly referred to the ritualized act as "cleaning up after the Bride" since I have a tendency to leave incomplete projects scattered across any flat surface. But this is serious, crazy magic cleaning that involves blood, sweat, urine and protective washes. (See Cleaning Up After the Bride, Cleaning Day I and Cleaning Day II.)

* Plant garlic; I use a lot of garlic in my cooking and magic work (not that cooking isn't magic), so I've started to grow my own which allows me to add "special" ingredients to the soil for themed bulbs. Garlic's the only thing I plant as the Whore that the Bride harvests.

* Turn down the yard for winter; During the Dark Year my major altars are located within the house, but during the Light Year my major altars are located outside of the house. When it's time to begin moving indoors I "turn down" the yard for winter which involves planting garlic, cutting the grass (for the final time), raking leaves, collecting seeds, emptying pots, straightening up sacred spaces (i.e., the Shango Tree roadkill altar and the patio altar) and covering vulnerable plants from extreme weather.

* Move Stone Cock; At first snowfall Stone Cock (and his black pebble balls) is brought indoors (this year He sat at the base of my peach tree as my patio altar's centerpiece), where he'll stay until the first day of summer. On May Day (Beltane), He'll be paraded out with blessed ribbons (that decorated the "maypole"; nudge, nudge, wink, wink) which will then be hung on branches of fruiting trees.

* Cut the grass; Which, understandably, doesn't sound hella magic, but I then rake up the grass and dry it so I can offer homegrown green (albeit dried green) to local lactating ewes on Bride's Day (Imbolc).

* Harvest from the backyard; I usually choose a single day to complete the majority of my backyard harvesting. Half-naked and high I burn incense on my patio offering pillar as Italics helps me pick plums, cut herbs and gather other backyard food we've managed to grow during the year. Everything is then washed, processed and divided into what we keep, and what we give as tribute. (See 2009 Harvest.)

* Create a Harvest altar; I created a Harvest altar for the very first time last year (pictured here) and it kicked so much fucking ass that I really regretted the fact that I was too busy this year with roadkill, mushrooms and berries to raise it for 2010. Fingers crossed that next year I'll manage my time better to give myself a chance to recreate the place of thanksgiving.

* Create a Halloween altar; The only time I've ever missed constructing a Halloween altar was several years ago when both of us came down with a serious case of influenza that lasted the entire Halloween vacation (and then some). (<- Because we cohabit with my in-laws I'm only able to have a spacious altar four times a year when they're away on holiday: Easter, summer, Halloween and Christmas. Creating altars is a huge fucking deal for me because I normally don't have the ability to dedicate spaces to elaborate setups for any real length of time.) Oops! I just realized I never uploaded any pictures of last year's altar. I have one photo, but the job's only been partially done: 2009 Halloween altar construction.

* Perform the Whore's Black Mass; At some point in our Halloween vacation we celebrate the Whore's Black Mass which involves various intoxicants (pot, MDMA, mushrooms, nitrous and alcohol) and ritualized marathon sex in front of the Halloween altar. When we celebrate Hieros Gamos (the sacred marriage), the drugs'n'sex rite is a ceremony of union, which I've always found to be gentle, loving and tender. Black Mass, though, is all about out-of-your-fucking-head screwing for the pure sake of pleasure. (Reproduction be fucking damned, let's see how far you can force your fist into my cunt!)

* Observe Fet Ghede; My Harvest ends with Papa's feast, Fet Ghede, which I celebrate on November 1st and 2nd. We bake Pan de Muerto for the occasion, using the dough to fashion offering cakes to those who've died since last Fet Ghede. (We then take the bread to the local graveyard and leave it on a cairn.) I also whip up a special meal specifically geared for Papa. Sometimes it's homemade gumbo, sometimes it's baked ham, but there's always cornbread, rum and Hoppin' John. (Not to mention pot, cigars and sexy lingerie.)(See Fet Ghede, 2008.)

* Pay tribute; It's important for me to give back what I've taken or have been given throughout the Light Year as the Bride. It's a thank you, a tribute and a celebration of everything I've done and achieved. With baskets and bags I take a fraction of the roadkill I've found, food I've grown (and gathered) and bread I've ritually baked to the nearest standing stone and leave my tribute at the base to give back to the land that's fed me, and to show my gratitude for all that I've been given. (See Harvest Home Offering.)

* Steal potatoes; The local farmers don't know it, but they pay tribute to me. When the wheat turns gold I reap from their fields, and when the potato plants shrivel up I unearth potatoes. It's a teeny, tiny price to pay to have a witch personally looking after your crops (and the land they're growing on), especially when all of the agricultural land here is either grain or potato. "Stealing potatoes" is more of a LOLOLOL tradition, though, and nothing more than a bit of fun to fluff up our celebratory Harvest meals.

* Bake Castle Pie; One of the local castles has an annual sale of produce grown within its walled gardens. Every year we go to buy plums and apples, walk the castle grounds, visit the bees still hard at work, have sex beneath the same tree and return home to bake Castle Pie together. (The yearly event must be magic because Italics isn't really into fruit, but I often find him picking at the pie when no one's looking.)

* Visit the apple and pear sale; Once a year, on one day only, a pay-to-enter heritage site holds an apple and pear sale selling fruit grown within its gardens. This is the one chance to get a hold of really old varieties I've never heard before ("cat's head" and "bloody ploughman" come to mind). We normally buy three bags of fruit and then take a long walk along a path that circles and winds around old stone walls, farming fields, hedges and beech woodlands (usually pausing to pick blackberries because, holy shit, dude, you would not believe the size of the motherfuckers that grow there).

* Bake Baba's Ukrainian apple cake; Using some of the apples purchased from the heritage site sale I bake a traditional Ukrainian apple cake for my (now deceased) Ukrainian grandmother. My grandparents fashioned themselves a slice of "the old country" in southeast Wisconsin which meant I spent my growing years running around barefoot in a fruit (pear, plum, cherry and apple) orchard, so I have a strong, sentimental attachment to autumn fruits and how they're incorporated into festive cooking and I've tried to keep that tradition alive in my own way. (See Dreading Mortality.)

* Bake bread; Wheat is enormously significant to me; it's the face of my God, my husband, lover, consort and king. With one hand I kill Him, and with another I resurrect Him. I drink His blood, I crush His bones and I eat His flesh. When He's alive and living (Light Year) I refrain from baking bread, but once I perform the reaping ritual I'm allowed to use His body until resurrection. My baking season begins with a traditional Ukrainian bread (paska or babka; babka's like paska plus, using more butter and egg yolks) during Harvest, and ends on Easter (with the same bread, although this particular loaf gets toted off to church on Holy Saturday to be blessed by a priest) when I bake my last and final loaf for the year.

* Prepare celebratory meals; The only thing more celebrated than sex in this house is food. We try to eat seasonally, and as locally as possible. (Pretty goddamn "local" when you're digging up your own potatoes, plucking berries off bushes just yards away from your house and picking mushrooms only a few miles from your rural subdivision.) We have several Harvest related feasts (not including Fet Ghede), and when preparing those I focus on incorporating as much wild or homegrown food as possible. This year, for example, we're roasting a roadkill pheasant with the "stolen" potatoes, and we'll also be making homemade wild mushroom and pheasant risotto using boletes I've picked throughout fall and a roadkill pheasant I picked up on the autumnal equinox.

* Transition from Bride to Whore; Because my hair takes for-fucking-ever to grow I only cut it two times a year: spring and fall (the same goes for Italics, although I usually cut his hair for him while my hair is trimmed by a professional). In addition to getting my hair lopped off I also get my eyebrows done (threading all the way, baby!), and thoroughly rub my ass down with a homemade purifying scrub out of salt, olive oil, honey and rosemary essential oil. (In spring I give my physical appearance a boost because I'm a bride getting ready to be married, but in fall I become a mistress, so my preparations are less wedding based and lean more towards "super extended night on the town".) During the Dark Year I use henna to dye my hair darker (Whore), but during the Light Year I use henna to dye it red (Bride).

This year's Harvest has been crazy mental, but insanely rewarding. I've never experienced anything quite like it because, up until recently, I didn't have a car. I spent nearly a decade fantasizing about a way of life I was desperate to live, repeatedly telling myself "IT'S OKAY, YOU'LL GET TO DO IT ~NEXT YEAR~, IT WON'T ALWAYS BE LIKE THIS" to keep it together. 2010 has been a breakthrough year for me; it's been the year I officially began to live and everything I've done and experienced has been a complete and utter joy and revelation.

My boyfriend and I have been discussing the old ways and pagan holidays and such things and decided we'd like to celebrate them correctly (we did an informal ritual for mabon).

If you're exercising a Choose Your Own Adventure-style spiritual journey there isn't a right or wrong way to celebrate and observe special days; it's an experimental process that evolves yearly. If you're involved in a religion with a hardcore set of beliefs I'm sure there is a "correct" way of doing things, but if you haven't committed yourself to a one specific path you aren't obligated to follow anyone else's instruction manual.

The beautiful thing about going solo and doing what makes sense (to you) is that sometimes it'll work spectacularly, and sometimes it'll end disastrously funny. But - BUT! - no matter what the outcome, it's always a learning experience that ultimately shapes the rest of the game.

My suggestion? Do shit. Do a lot of shit. Do stupid shit, do funny shit, do crazy shit, do serious shit. Just do shit, and keep the shit that makes you laugh, cry, and feel alive and work on that shit so next time around you'll laugh even harder, cry more meaningfully and feel so fucking alive that the very core of your being is on celestial fire.

also, any sources you can direct me too would be helpful. apologies if these questions are too forward/personal/presumptuous.

Man, I'm the worst person to come to when resources are involved. I've written my own mythology, created my own gods and crowned myself a divine queen in my world. And the worst part? The Universe is playing along. (I guess that means my "script" has been optioned?) I can tell you what I believe, what I do and the meaning behind everything, but I'm not a quotable resource.

What I can do, though, is direct you to the blogs, diaries and journals of witches, pagans, spiritualists and rootworkers that I follow who are a LEETLE less out there that might be able to provide different views and approaches to celebrate this time of year. (Hit up the index page of Graveyard Dirt; you'll find those links on the left under the "READING" category.)

I'll also point you towards my Amazon wishlist so you can get an idea of the reading material that most interests me. (I always feel weird providing the link, but I've had a lot of people ask for it to discover new material to add to their own personal wishlist.)

Right! I hope I've been slightly helpful (or at least moderately interesting). Whatever you guys do, just make sure it's coming from the heart (and/or gut), because that's the shit that sculpts your beliefs and transforms your life. Good luck with Halloween/Samhain, and thank you for prompting me to finally sit my ass down and write about our Harvest festivities and rites. (I actually began drafting an entry along those lines to explain my absence, but with all of these new activities, all of the old traditions and taking care of our tumor-ridden pet rat, Choney, I just haven't had a chance.)

PS: Just FYI; when you're the type of person who posts a picture of yourself barebacking the New Year roast, naked, there's no question that's "too forward/personal/presumptuous", *winks*.

Fighting Fire with Fire

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If I told you, you'd regret asking.

All Over Again

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Just when I think the season's over, I find a new patch and the magic starts all over again.

Mabon's Mushrooms

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While I was sick people stole the caps off the fly agarics I had been babying for almost a week. I was mad. I was upset. I cried FOREST, HAVE YOU SEEN WHAT THOSE MOTHERFUCKERS DID? and seethed over the loss of my harvest (oh, you get attached; you get attached really fucking quick when you watch them grow day by day).

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NEVER MIND, FUCK THEM, I GOT THIS SHIT SORTED the Forest said, and threw out a damp, moss-covered carpet dotted with orange and red white-flecked fruits just for me. (Me and Forest? We're like ~this~. Forest makes sure that I never leave with an empty basket, I make sure I never leave Forest without peeing once (or twice, or three, four, five, six times if it's one of those days).)

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Just before leaving Forest said, HEY, BABY, THIS IS A LITTLE SOMETHING-SOMETHING JUST FOR YOU and tucked several fistfuls of young boletes into my existing-in-some-reality garter belt to make sure I had something super special for the autumnal equinox. (OH, FOREST, YOU SHOULDN'T HAVE. (NO, REALLY, YOU SHOULDN'T HAVE, BECAUSE IT STARTS, INNOCENTLY ENOUGH, WITH BOLETES AND WILL INEVITABLY END IN TRUFFLES.))

Magic Mushroom

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Just between you and me? They're all magic mushrooms, but some are just a teensy tiny touch more magic.

A Witch's Harvest

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A witch's harvest: ripe grain ritually reaped from an ancient Scottish field (the one that grows next to the local crow rookery where I get my feathers and the occasional dead bird), and fly agaric mushrooms picked near the banks of a loch named after a black arts practicing Laird who met his death over the not-so-frozen waters while in the company of the Devil himself one Hogmanay night.

Phallic Agaric

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Mushrooms don't have a gender? Bull-fucking-shit.

Wild American Roses

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At 12 I picked pale pink petals from wild shrubs growing where the fox roamed, took the flowers home and made a dog rose sugar syrup (which I ate with frozen waffles).

At 17 I took a 17-year-old Scottish boy to the wild roses, showed him how they towered beneath rustling cottonwood trees and told him, after zippering up my pants, how, at age 12, I had made a pancake syrup out of the delicate petals.

At 30 I stood, just yesterday, at the mouth of a golden grain field, a roadkill pheasant in one hand, a basket of ripe wild rose hips in another, remembering the 12-year-old girl and 17-year-old girl that eventually made this 30-year-old woman (now married to that Scottish boy who was especially interested in wild American roses 13 years ago).

White-Specked Motherfuckers

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I don't know how many individual fly agaric mushrooms I have, but I DO know that I'm officially out of silica sachets that were bought just last week (a bag of 50).

If you work with reindeer, spectral deer, want an old skool magic addition to your curiosity cabinet or are friendly with the Sámi please keep me in mind for all of your toadstool needs. (<- Handpicked on the banks of a Scottish loch steeped in black magic history by a modern day, feral witch.)

Because, dude, my amanita muscaria cup? Runneth the fuck over, and these white-specked motherfuckers aren't paying rent. If you'd like to lighten my fungal burden (I'm just taking names and numbers right now to gauge interest) my contact information can be found on the index of my personal journal/diary, Graveyard Dirt.

DISCLAIMER: It goes without saying, these mushrooms are not for human consumption, and my ass ain't liable for ANYTHING if you find yourself flying with Santa's reindeer, capeche?