Jefferson Airplane -White Rabbit-

My last June (birthday) post is White Rabbit by Jefferson Airplane. I was really too young to understand the "hippie movement" but I wanted to be part of it so some of my core values came out of that movement. I was "Green" before there was a "Green Movement." I was Alice at one time, too. But I guess reading changed me. I ran off with a hippie at 18, (we read Thoreau together and played folk songs) only to leave him later and marry a Renaissance Man who said he married me because "only with me could he be his true self." I was so honored to have his trust and love. But he knew I was a wild child. I've had a lot of wonderful birthdays in my life. I've been incredibly lucky. Here's my favorite hippie song, my brother used to send me Alice in Wonderland pictures. They hang over my bed now. I still play this song almost every day. See you all later.

Doors and Portals

 

@Springborn21

My next to last post of June 2023 for the end of my Birthday month celebration and reflection. I saw this door on Twitter this last week and I knew when I saw it that it would go in the story. Doors are portals, literally, even if they are just portals from one room to the next room in a small house. Metaphorically, doors are passageways to separate spaces that may be metaphysical. Doors are always choices or journeys. Some small. Some grand and wide. They are also, in a very different context, openings in walls which keep separate spaces.

I've always been obsessed with doors. I've always found the architecture fascinating. I often paint my doors, over and over, different colors or even paint flowers on them. This door is from a garden in Suffolk. The aesthetics moved me emotionally. I love flowers and brick walls. The colors are pleasing to me and some of my favorites. The door is very old. What lies behind it?

Doors are essential to my own mythology in The Ambitious Fairy Project which is a tale that pays tribute to portal fantasies but not in the usual ways.

Much of what I have celebrated in June 2023 has been leading me to my work and my novel. There are many stories in the world but some only one person could have written. 

It's too idiosyncratic, too shadowed by personal experience, its edges are not shaped properly, the spaces are off kilter. They feel uncomfortable and at the same time, pleasant and inviting. They are full of contradictions and layers.

Open this door and this is what you will find.

In all Joy, we will find some sorrow.

“To speak of sorrow
works upon it
moves it from its
crouched place barring
the way to and from the soul's hall.”
         

                         ― Denise Levertov

(We must all carry our sorrows as best we can)

Jane in June long, long ago.

This was another summer, another June, so long ago, in a town I loved and still love. It's the setting of my fictional town in the novel. Though we really lived in two towns, Greenville, Mississippi and then a suburb of Memphis, Tennessee, this third town was where we spent a lot of our time when not on other trips. My mother kept us very busy. It was nothing for us to take a long weekend somewhere any time of the year, to pack up and just go somewhere. She had wanderlust. 

We spent lots of winters and yes, summers in St. Francisville, Louisiana, where we rented trailers and houses and little cottages for weeks at a time. St. Francisville was our jumping off point to New Orleans, LaFayette, Morgan City, Baton Rouge, Sulphur, Lake Charles, places where my mother knew people or had had relatives. We would go down on weekends a lot. But when school let out in May, mother took to the road. The two youngest of her children never returned home until after Labor Day. 

When she got into horses, this changed some and our trips were scheduled around horse shows. I did not like horses or horse shows so sometimes I went down with my Daddy to St. Francisville or with my older brother and his wife. This summer that happened. My brother later went to booth camp and then in 1971 he was in Vietnam. We slept on couches and floors that summer. I never wanted to go home. I could have stayed all summer in St. Francisville where I had local friends, some I had known since I was six years old. But mother wanted to go home for some reason. 

I ended up staying a month in Greenville with some friends and then going over to Moorhead to my cousin's where I spent at least two weeks. My grandmother lived nearby. I am not sure how I got home or when, probably by Greyhound, which was my friendly travel service in those days.

I suppose this old faded polaroid made me think of how much I really loved St. Francisville, the Mississippi Delta, and how I never settled into that little suburb of Memphis as a young girl and even struggled with it as a young woman, though I live there now and have for years. I am not sure where I call home, but the house I live in or the proximity of my children and their families. Where is my home?

I suppose the answer to that now is where my books and computers are. My flowers. Outside my children, all the people I truly loved are gone and this girl looks like a ghostly memory of the wildflower. She was lonely and always floating. 

The wildflower now still is and does.

Make meaning or go insane.

“Meaning is primarily a subjective psychological experience. A smart person is more likely than the next person to be aware of its absence and to be affected by its absence. He is more likely to get bored, to experience meaninglessness, to begin to see the extent to which neither his society nor the universe are built to satisfy his meaning needs, and to then hunt for soothing or exciting meaning substitutes that ultimately reduce his freedom. Meaning is a smart person's most difficult challenge.” 

 ― Eric Maisel

P.S. I have posted this previously on the blog, but it fits in June things that are totally necessary. Meaning is a difficult challenge but finding it and maintaining it is always my first objective these days.

Gustave Moreau, “The Peacock Complaining to Juno.”

Juno, from which the month of June takes its name. She was the Roman sky goddess, who married Zeus and while he never resigned himself to a restrained life of any sorts, Juno was a good wife, occasionally indulging in turning Zeus' lovers into other things. Smiling. I never thought I would truly fall in love, the kind of love that would bring a marriage full of delights and even children. I was so self-absorbed. When younger, I did not trust easily and I did not desire steady companionship. I liked my freedom and the fact that I could do as I pleased most days. A lack of commitment allowed me to indulge my own whimseys.

     And then I met Johnny.

     He was different. Odd. Childish. But a Renaissance man.

     It was the wildflower he loved and wanted.

     Smiling.

    And so we married and were lovers and had babies...

    We spent years exploring and understanding each other.

    Happy Days. Sad Days. We shared a life, really.

    Summer was our time.

    Summerland.

    We named our home, "Satis House" which means "It is enough."

Death is at the center of things.

 An important book. Not an easy read. But perhaps, a necessary one. As I wrote in the post previous to this one, Psychology has really helped me get out of the little box that was me and view the world differently. You have to step outside that box to see the world. Perception is not everything. That's the postmodern lie. And we no longer live in a postmodern world. We are shifting into something else even as I write this.

Psychology changed my life for the better.

I began studying Psychology in 2001, too. I'd like to mention these great men and thinkers. Of course Freud! His greatest student Alfred Alder, Jung gets an okay, Laughing. Ernest Becker and his influences, which included many great thinkers, Søren Kierkegaard, Norman O. Brown, Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel, Otto Rank. Others Rollo May, John B Watson who created Behaviorism, Alfred Beck who followed and formed CBT. And Daniel Kahneman. Going to therapy off and on throughout my life, studying Psychology gave me a chance to view the world outside my own little box. And believe me, getting out of our boxes is hard to do. My June celebrations would like to thank all these people, to recognize their brilliance and hard work and how studying them has changed me, make me a better version of myself.

The Big Influences

 

At the Bottom of the Garden by Diane Purkiss

Mortals and Immortals by Jean-Pierre Vernant

From the Beast to the Blonde: On Fairy Tales and Their Tellers by Marina Warner

The Big Influences. A little over 20 years ago, I bought these books. I think I bought all of them around 2001, the same year. These three books led to the buying of other books and helped reform "my thought on everything" really. Laughing. This June I've taken stock of my influences, my luck, and how I have changed as a person, all the little crooked paths that led me to be the person I am. In some ways we are all the same people we were as children. The core foundation and value were there in childhood. But as adults we grow and change and become better versions of ourselves if we are lucky. And I have been lucky.

The Walkabouts - The Light Will Stay On

The other song that gets a spot in June 2023 celebrations is  The Walkabouts' The Light Will Stay On. Even though I had created some of my world in a paracosm as a child, many things came along that made a mark. This video inspired a certain idea that had been floating around in my mind after I read a book titled The Porcelain Dove by Delia Sherman and it really fit into the world of my paracosm and I knew it would always be there. It is on my writing playlist and never rotates out.

Placebo - Come Undone [Rock Am Ring 2009] HD

June 2023, has been a month of the things I love. Birthday month, Midsummer, flowers, gardening, beloved books to read and yes, music that haunts me.

A lot of whimsey and beloved aesthetics. Living with the fairies, learning to Re-enchant my ordinary life. Romanticism. Fairy tales, children's books, the wildflower and child in me. The best things that I am embracing in order to live the best possible life now.

And this performance of Come Undone is one of those beautiful things that I will always cherish. It is on my writing playlist and never rotates out. At one time, it was the Placebo song I played the most year round. Brian Molko never, ever, looked more beautiful than in this 2009 performance at Rock am Ring.

Current Motto.

"Creatives need "imaginative space" to produce art. We have to balance the amount of information we crave with the needs we require to let our imaginations thrive. So we must choose carefully to protect that imaginative space. Too much information destroys our capacity to create." — Jane  Harrington

(This post was inspired by an earlier post/quote by Percy Shelley on creativity.)

“We want the creative faculty to imagine that which we know; we want the generous impulse to act that which we imagine; we want the poetry of life; our calculations have outrun conception; we have eaten more than we can digest.” 

                       — Percy Shelley

Inside the Tim Walker: Wonderful Things exhibition

Sexual Communion.

His skin covers me entirely; we are like two halves of a seed, enclosed in the same integument. I should like to grow enormously small, so that you could swallow me, like those queens in fairy tales who conceive when they swallow a grain of corn or a sesame seed. Then I could lodge inside your body and you could bear me. 

              — Angela Carter. The Erl-King

The biggest influence on my novel is this story by Angela Carter.

 

The biggest influence on my novel and yes, my entire work is Angela Carter, and especially this short story, The Erl-King. While Carter's work is subversive feminist reinvention of fairy tales, my work is something else. Angela Carter was the postmodern. I have deliberately left postmodernism behind and looked to something else.

When the flower blossoms, the bee will come.

 

Swamp Mallow.

Summer love.

Inside this flower a bee buzzes right now.

From The Erl King by Angela Carter...

‘The woods enclose. You step between the first trees and then you are no longer in the open air; the wood swallows you up. There is no way through the wood any more, this wood has reverted to its original privacy. Once you are inside it, you must stay there until it lets you out again for there is no clue to guide you through in perfect safety; grass grew over the track years ago and now the rabbits and the foxes make their own runs in the labyrinth and nobody comes.' 

                                        —     Angela Carter, The Erl King

Midsummer Love.

"I am doomed to overflowing, both in living and in imagination." 

               — Anais Nin

June, June, June

“Green was the silence, wet was the light, the month of June trembled like a butterfly.” 

                                — Pablo Neruda

Lana Del Rey - Summertime Sadness (Official Music Video)

Kiss me hard before you go
Summertime sadness
I just wanted you to know
That baby, you the best

I got that summertime, summertime sadness
Su-su-summertime, summertime sadness
Got that summertime, summertime sadness
Oh, oh-oh, oh-oh

I'm feelin' electric tonight
Cruisin' down the coast, goin' about 99
Got my bad baby by my heavenly side
I know if I go, I'll die happy tonight

Oh, my God, I feel it in the air
Telephone wires above are sizzlin' like a snare
Honey, I'm on fire, I feel it everywhere
Nothin' scares me anymore

Kiss me hard before you go 

Summertime sadness 

I just wanted you to know 

That baby, you the best 

— Lana Del Rey

Victorian Fantasy favorites

 

Favorites.

Climate Choir joins XR at Bristol Cathedral for Luke Jerram’s Oil Founta...

This is a fascinating image. I've been having trouble getting it out of my mind, even in June, which is a month I dedicate to myself and whimsey. But it somehow fits, and how that is happening I am not sure. And I have seen it and cannot unsee it, and I am affected in ways I do not fully understand and they are NOT simple directions that I can easily follow. For now it is puzzle that will surely be a story of some kind. Sighing. 

The Selfish Giant by Oscar Wilde illustrated by Lisbeth Zwerger.

 

“He did not hate the Winter now, for he knew that it was merely the Spring asleep, and that the flowers were resting.” ― Oscar Wilde, The Selfish Giant

What I am Reading Now, June 18th.

 

“None of the things one frets about ever happen. Something one's never thought of does.”                      ― Connie Willis, Doomsday Book

(reading now, June 18th, 2023)

Choose Life. Choose possibility. Choose Joy.

 

"That it will never come again is what makes life sweet. Dwell in possibility. Find ecstasy in life; the mere sense of living is joy enough." — Emily Dickinson

Jane is June, June is Jane.

 Having been born and spent my childhood in Greenville, Mississippi, I learned to cherish summers where I lived outdoors like a free little wild creature. I was born on the first day of June and perhaps because of that birthday, June became part of me and I part of it. A month of magic and play. The official kickoff of summer vacation from a long list of family obligations including my own schooling. This morning, I wrote on Twitter (then deleted it for placement here) that I have a lifelong habit of going around barefoot in the house and garden. I've also developed a lifelong habit of sitting on the side of the tub and washing my feet throughout the day. It seems so easy to think about putting on a pair of shoes or even slide-on sandals, but I never take the time. Today, when I was washing my feet for the first time, before noon, I thought about all those who had lived who had sat in houses with dusty floors and washed their feet in a bowl of water which I am sure was a luxury. It gives new meaning to those people in Biblical stories who washed and anointed feet, doesn't it?

I like the feel of floors beneath my bare feet, the blade of green grass, even the stones that I walk across, the paths I have made in the garden over the years. I love summer, I love June. It's easy to see that I love myself and my life, that I work to slow it down, to feel as much as I can, pay attention to as much as I can, be grateful as much as I can. That I relish the senses, even the thorns and small pebbles that occasionally prick and cause pain.

How do we stay enchanted when we see so much horror throughout our lives, when we experience illness and pain, and great losses? I am beginning to believe that this is about personality and that forms in childhood. The toddler here was never free from trauma, a medical issue, and yet, that little girl, with all her pain, saw great beauty everywhere. I am still that girl. I was flexible and teachable. Curious. Grateful.

Walking around with no shoes, perpetually living in a "summerland" even when winters came, enchanted by living at all.

June is always Yellow.

 

Le petit Dejeuner by Pierre Bonnard. 1936

(I like yellow.)

RIP July 20,1933—June 13,2023

“The way of the world is to bloom and to flower and die but in the affairs of men there is no waning and the noon of his expression signals the onset of night. His spirit is exhausted at the peak of its achievement. His meridian is at once his darkening and the evening of his day.”

― Cormac McCarthy

Metaphors and Storytellers

 

Much to consider on why we read or write tales of enchantment, those magical stories from our childhood and adolescence. Some of us love these tales our entire lives in their original form or ones we create for our adult minds. It is a complex journey to understand why tales of enchantment and magic are so steadfast in a post-postmodern culture built on existentialism, personal identity, and even cognitive science. Perhaps this is really a question about metaphors and history and even psychology. Perhaps it is an enchanted tale about a species who built a world completely out of stories?

Grandmother and Hollyhocks on Summer Vacation.

 

“There was so much time that marvelous summer. Day after day, mist rose from the meadow as the sky lightened and hedges, barns and woods took shape until, at last, the long curving back of the hills lifted away from the Plain. It was a sort of stage-magic.”
                                 ― J.L. Carr

I like Henri Lebasque's work and it's new to me.

 

Young Girl Sewing on a Sofa by Henri Lebasque

Nature is important.

 

“Everything that slows us down and forces patience, everything that sets us back into the slow circles of nature, is a help.”
            ― May Sarton

Art by Angela Barrett

For me, it was both.

“Psychoanalysis was probably more useful to me as a writer than as a neurotic.” 

                 — Philip Roth

Magic is powerful.

"Magic enables man to carry out with confidence his important tasks, to maintain his poise and his mental integrity in fits of anger, in the throes of hate, of unrequited love, of despair and anxiety. The function of magic is to ritualize man's optimism, to enhance his faith in the victory of hope over fear. Magic expresses the greater value for man of confidence over doubt, of steadfastness over vacillation, of optimism over pessimism". 

           — Bronisław Malinowski

Stepping outside yourself

To pray is to pay attention to something or someone other than oneself. Whenever a man so concentrates his attention—on a landscape, a poem, a geometrical problem, an idol, or the True God—that he completely forgets his own ego and desires, he is praying. 

                           — W. H. Auden

Gondal and Emily Bronte - Wuthering Heights Grade 9 GCSE

Diane Purkiss on Wuthering Heights and the paracosm of Gondal. 

Gondal. Gondal. Gondal.

Soulmates are two people who have a deep understanding of one another. Love is easier. Understanding is complicated.

 

“For you
i have saved poems
under my skin.”
― Sanober Khan

Art by Max Švabinský

The Own Service by Alan Garner

 

Going to post every day in June to celebrate beautiful things I love. This is about finding an anchor, doing my art, being enchanted by the beauty of life, and learning to live in the present. Worked in the garden today, planting sun impatiens, Shasta daisies, and new lilies. Soaked everything. Tonight, after supper, I am going to read The Owl Service by Alan Garner, a classic low fantasy novel. I love low fantasy where something extraordinary intrudes on ordinary life. This is a classic story that I never got to read as a child. I've been making up for all the age appropriate fiction that I missed. I'm feeling both confident and good about my own work-in-progress and it's coming along faster now. I still face challenges in my personal life and am working all that out. But I am optimistic.

Modern Restlessness

"Collapse into never."
— Brian Molko.

All reactions:

Come from the fairies

I got drunk on that honey wine🌼

of the lunar cocoon that the fairies

collected in hyacinth glasses:
dormouse, bats and moles
they sleep in the crevices or in the grass,
in the deserted and sad courtyard of the castle;🌿 🏰

when the wine spilled on the summer land🐝 

or amid the dew its vapors rise,

happy their blissful dreams become
and, asleep, they murmur their joy; well, they are few
the fairies that carry those chalices so new. 🌺
— Percy Shelley

June 1, 2023

"And then one fairy night, May became June." — F. Scott Fitzgerald