(or: Okay! I get it! Seven is significant! And your point would be???)

I had a peculiar but interesting experience last month to do w/ the number seven. In July.

Seven crows ‘escorted’ me to work, sort of. For a few blocks down the main street I walk. And there were a bunch of other sevens going on as well.

Well, I woke up humming a song from my 1980s adolescence this morning, and could NOT get why that was.

When you’re on a theme, or jag, and you’re in the middle of a journey or lesson, much of the material being dredged and roto-rootered is already there in your subconscious. Or at least that’s what I’ve always suspected. I am not saying this in that idealistic “we’re born knowing all there is to know” bullshit kind of way, because it’s not true. Rather, I am making the simplistic observation that nothing really goes completely unnoticed, and much of it makes its way beyond your basic sensory data into either long-term memory, or limbic memory, and/or the subconscious. And because everyone’s subconscious is a unique repository the symbolisms might be really out there, or anything but universal. The only symbolism today is numeric, for example.

So what was the song? Don’t laugh, it’s a song from one of the first records I bought right before 7th grade. Duran Duran’s ‘The Seventh Stranger’, off an album titled Seven and the Ragged Tiger. It’s a good song IMHO, but the lyrics don’t really lend themselves to anything related to my current situation. But when I look back at that time when I was buying vinyl records, and decompressing a lot with music, and listening to indie and college radio, it was a real renaissance. It was the birth of all kinds of interests and goals, some of which I’ve actually accomplished, others of which were shelved as they grew irrelevant.

Alternately, there was a lot going on in the world leading up to 1984. The arms race got kicked up several notches by Ronald Raygun (as my mom used to call him), for starters. We were watching made for tv movies like The Day After, and people were of course paranoid about nukes. To my mind, the world was a powder keg back then. Of course it is now, too, and don’t forget that Mother Nature could just wash her hands of us and decide fuck ‘em, humans are just a waste of oxygen and raw materials, and then we have some super volcanoes go kaboom and some tsunamis, and that’s it.

So, I’m going to contemplate 7 for the rest of the day. Saturday, the seventh day, of course. Maybe I should listen to some Sun Ra and His Arkestra and contemplate Saturn as well. He said he was from there. Coming up with a talisman would probably be a useful exercise, too.

While I go looking for Sun Ra tracks, here’s the seventh track (one of my favorites even) off a CD I haven’t listened to in ages:

Edited to add: I found some Sun Ra The guy was incredibly prolific and much of his music was self-recorded to be sold at his shows and/or in limited release, or bootlegged.

And here’s Pharoah Sanders’ ‘The Creator Has a Master Plan’, just because:

This is of several parts, part 2 is here.

Dang… from 80s pop to 90s electronica to innovative jazz in one post. My head is spinning.

We stripped off as many ripe to mostly ripe-ish pomegranates as we could, this morning. This particular unknown cultivar has a tendency to split if it ripens too much in direct sun, so the seriously split ones are earmarked for the hens (they are pomegranate junkies; if the dood so much as reaches up to the tree growing directly over their run and coop, they go nuts) and we’ll be popping the arils out of the other fruits. I filled up two bags, eek. Good thing there are lots of cooking shows on PBS on Saturdays.

Going to use an orange blossom honey I got at The Oak Barrel in Berkeley, and orange blossom is something I haven’t even dared to spring for at the grocery store in ages (it’s always too spendy). They said it’s ‘local to California’, so at least it is not some mystery mix of clover honeys from east of the sun and west of the moon. Last time I bought one of those 10 pounder cans of clover honey at the market, the can which has had the same plain yellow label with red printing on it since I was a kid over 30 yrs ago, I was amazed to see some of the honey comes from as far away as Argentina! Now, I have nothing against the Apis mellifera tribes of Argentina, but the carbon footprint is just unacceptable.

Also on deck, boiling up a couple pots of beans to use up beans bought last year that are getting real tough. One of the pots needed to be soaked for three days, with water changes once a day (the plants love that soaking water), and is getting boiled up with turmeric, whole cloves of garlic, and a bay leaf. The other is being boiled up with just the garlic. So that’ll be beans for a couple weeks. For frying, adding to dishes, maybe making some hummus with, etc.

And then I need to cook up a pot of tomato sauce. We are having insane wind which blew half the jersey devils off their branches in the wee hours, and they’re ripe enough for cooking. The chickens got the smaller ones which displayed blossom end rot, early this morning when I was spot-watering. And it looks like I’ll be cooking up some costoluto genovese as well, because they all ripened at once.

This morning I strung up a bunch of bright yellow ho chi minh peppers (these little suckers are hot!). They’re so cute and innocent looking, but this batch will be ground up and jarred once it has dried sufficiently. The plants are just kicking them up by the bunch. So at least I have ONE reliable hot pepper growing. The padrons are looking like crap. They did so well last year and I was able to toss them into a hot pan with olive oil to make them puff up and blister, but this year? I think I have two that are almost mature between three plants. Dangit. The jalapenos are looking like crap. The pasillas are looking like crap. The santa fe grande is MIA. It’s okay. There’s enough to eat from the yard without sweating the small stuff like temperamental capsicums.

So today I have to put on my Domestic Goddess apron, and get busy. After I fry an egg for Daisy, who has been waiting patiently next to the food dish since noon.

Off to cook that egg and then start splitting up pomegranates.

Here’s some music from one of the many places where pomegranates are cultivated.

Petition your female ancestors, and attract the attention of a chthonic deity.

Of course it all makes sense now.

I never fancied myself a necromancer, nor a -mancer of anything really. But the figurative piano fell out of the sky and landed on my head this morning, walking to work. I was working with the dead* when I was petitioning my various mothers (mom, grandmothers, et al) for assistance awhile back. It never felt like that, mind you. While it is hard losing female relatives with which one has a good relationship, they’re never completely gone, at least that has been my experience. There is that sense of a void, of this gaping hole inside which feels like a deep and cold place within the earth, which waxes and wanes depending on external conditions and whether one is susceptible to depressive episodes. And there is that sense of loneliness. But then one starts living life again.

Mom appeared in my dreams often enough, from when I was 16 to when I was about 30, that I came to feel like she had not actually left me. It was just that I had to sleep to get to see her. What is telling is that in my dreams time was progressing like it did externally in real life. I was growing up, living on my own, working various jobs, and the dreams followed all of those events accordingly. Mom was back at the apartment where we lived, making tea for us, sitting and talking to me, meeting my new friends, giving me advice. She may have visited me at my apartment where I lived for 10 yrs, but it is really hard to remember in detail if that was the case or not. In a nutshell, she was still around, and the void was not so big inside as a result of that.

Still, I feel a mite foolish that I did not put two and two together all this time. Apparently I’ve had such a lack of separation from these women, mentally and emotionally, that it didn’t occur to me I was petitioning spirits of the departed. Sometimes I am just too much of a literalist. Tell me that I’ll keep someone in my heart, and I tend to do that.

Hekate’s part in all this? She guides the dead to and through the Underworld.

*And no, this was not necromancy in the Homeric sense of the concept. No animal’s blood, no fire pit, no burnt offerings. Seven day candles worked quite well with offerings of things the Ladies were fond of when I knew them, goblets of sherry or wine, and fervent prayer. This is something one can reverse-engineer their way towards, or around, or front and back. Just be careful when working with ancestors to keep in mind that you’re calling back their idiosyncrasies, mean streaks, biases, and the like – not just the idealized memories you have of them, so expect some cathartic experiences as a by-product. Or just be really careful about which ancestors you call upon.

Last night was the Green Corn Moon. As it just so happened, a few ears of Hopi Blue were ready to be twisted off their stalks. I made one mistake, which we diced up and ate in salad as baby corn (even flour corn is good raw, if you pick it before the kernels really develop), and then there was one which was not quite blue, which I broke into 6 hunks and tossed to the biddies. Each of them marched around the run with a hunk of corn cob in her beak, before finding a preferred spot to really attack and peck it into oblivion. Unfortunately, the Rojo was not quite mature enough. It’ll be ready for the Harvest Moon next month.

There is no sweeter and more welcoming smell than fresh green corn husks and the base of the cob where it twists off the stalk. I wish I could bottle that. I may well try in coming weeks.

Keeping with the theme, we ate pupusas for dinner, with salad on the side. Diced baby corn in the salad, some traffic signal orange tomatoes accompanying the corn. The cats got quite a few treats. Lucy’s nicknames are Corn Maiden and Tortilla Princess, and Daisy’s also known as the Queen Mother of Maize. They parked their fannies at the table and waited for their dad to set aside bits for their dish, batting their eyelashes, just about.

Then I made an altar piece, which is something I have not done in a really long time. 1 small ear of blue corn, leaves from the blood orange tree, willow, tobacco, coffee, elderberry, anise hyssop, and a sprig of wormwood. And then a huge seed plume from one of the amaranths. These were bound around the cob with strips of corn husk, stacked in a pattern. And I had my usual offering of the day’s egg, a leaf of S. divinorum, chocolate, Solanum nigrum berries, and a wee dram of whiskey.

And, following up on an earlier discussion on making poppets with uprooted amaranth plants, I carefully tugged up a couple tall ones with really full heads of ‘hair’ on them while watering last night, and they are drying on the patio right now. Gotta say, the roots are not much to write home about. They’re on a par with tomato or sunflower roots; a fluffy root ball but nothing that is particularly muscular or evocative of even skinny stringy limbs. Well, I wasn’t exactly expecting such, but heck sakes, I pull up oxalis with meatier roots. (The reason, of course, is these plants are just really resourceful about seeking water in all directions).

We’ll see what comes with drying the amaranths. I need to top some others in the yard in order to make a sacramental cake with them. Maybe during the dark moon. And it is two months away, but I need to think about the marigolds and whether I want to try propagating more of them for the Day of the Dead. They grow pretty fast.

Here’s hoping I am able to grind a heck of a lot of flour from the Hopi Blue as more ears mature. And then from the Rojo, and then from the Anasazi.

It was a sweet and homey image, us eating something made of corn, and the cats partaking as well, but the only corn that is trustworthy is the stuff I’m growing, actually. With fewer and fewer exceptions, every ear of corn grown in the US is genetically fucked with in some way. Heirloom strains are being lost forever in Mexico as farmers are being pressured to be industrial farmers instead of small-scale subsistence farmers. It is easy to lose sight of the fact that corn is a revered crop, the way it has been exploited and spliced and ruined by food ’scientists’.

So, last night I pledged to start corn a helluva lot earlier in the warm corner of the yard, and to finally fill the front yard with it as well, next year.

The bike ride began normal enough. I cut through the parking lot at the station and headed down a residential street. I saw this fellow in tan or khaki turn the corner from the right, and run ahead of me. He was wearing work clothes, not athletic clothes. He was jogging quickly, but not sprinting by any means, nor was he leaping. He was maybe half a block length ahead of me, and disappeared with the curvature of the path. I was zooooming on my bike, and I did not catch up with him. Which was strange. Nor did I pass him, it turns out. Because I saw him twice more, coming out from the right, and turning to run in front of me, like half a block’s length. And he disappeared ahead. I did not catch up or pass him. When I got to the main street he was well and truly gone, and I had a very strange feeling about what I’d just seen several times in the space of five minutes.

I’ve not seen a jogger run that fast since the Bay to Breakers. Not only that, he turned into the path in exactly the same fashion, and ran in the same fashion, each time I saw him. Not sprinting. Just a casual and efficient jog. Where was he retreating to when he wasn’t on the path? It looked like it was just the bushes.

It was that in-between time where it’s not quite night sky, and not quite pre-dawn sky. I wonder if I’ll see him again.

Incidentally, the main street I came to, when it was clear he was gone? It is part of one of the several crossroads I pass on my way to work. Not saying that to posit that the Dark Figure or Man in Black is actually the Man in Tan, but it was peculiar.