Myth For My Tale Bone

"It was a day a duck could love. For that matter the week was a duck's paradise. Dressed for the season in my long skirt, paisley wool shawl, and tea cozy hat with the red hibiscus over my left ear my feet splashed in puddles... The wind began to dance with me as I lifted my nose and sniffed from beneath the felt hat now much soaked through with rain. No fairies. But, a large copper pin about the size of a butterfly dropped from the cherry red awning above me and landed on my right shoe. A pin. A safety pin. "My Ma, "I said to myself. Besides being famous for carrying a flashlight my mother always wore at least one but more often a couple safety pins. Just in case. Long before it was punk fashion, safety pins are a talisman of security hard-wired in my DNA like knowing how to make something out of nothing. I fondled the pin and felt the distance of time between us compress... The Safety Pin Cafe Years ago, and not far away, we lived in the woods at t...

There was no ease to following sleep, the drowsiness escaped me, replaced with rewinding every fleeting worry from the day, the week, the month. My Worry Warts grew and nothing would calm them. When I finally tired of not being tired I feel asleep and into a nightmare that rattled me to the precipice of crazy. I needed to dissolve the boundaries of crazy, and called to Pete. "Gotta turn the light on, honey." Counting a few beats, I waited long enough for him to shield his eyes. Looking down at my tray of small brown bottles filled with tinctures, I hunted for the one that would cut through the cosmic nuttiness. Stellaria Media . Chickweed. More often than not, I fill the dropper full, squeeze the tincture into my thin-skinned ceramic sake cup, pour filtered water to the top and sip. But this time I asked for a count. "How many drops?" I really needed to get as close to 'right' as possible. The Wise Woman Tradition says, there are no rules and no r...