"I SET FIRE TO THE RAIN" - Besieged, A State of Grace, Pushing Daisies & Seven Streams

"I set fire to the RAIN,  and I threw us into the flames
  where I felt somethin' die..."  Adele

I Set Fire to the Rain - Nik Helbig

Set Fire to the Rain & Assassin Creed Jump - Secr3TDesign

THUNDERBOLTS & BIRD SONG--

For weeks, Zeus & Thor have been hurling thunderbolts and creating massive downpours. The wettest year in France in 40 years--they keep telling us.  Zeus, the God of Sky & Thunder, won all his battles with the help of the thunderbolts forged for him by his uncles, the Cyclopes and his son the smith-God Hephaistos. The mighty Thor, Norse God of Thunder, used his Giant-slaying magic hammer to win his battles. Thor even created the tides by drinking down part of the sea.

The biblical rains keep coming and the birds keep singing.  It seemed to me that they were singing louder & more sweetly the harder it rained. Turns out some of the volume is related to mate selection as the little fellows have to go to greater lengths to show their worth in uncertain climates. But another thing that happens to bird song in the rain is similar to the effect raindrops have on light waves. Like the rainbow effect, as rain drops take light and twist the spectrum into components, so do the rain drops take the sound waves of the bird song and distort them. And, as a drop of water will magnify an image, the rain drop will amplify the sound of the bird’s notes.  The result is that what we think we hear really isn’t what it is. 

Wren singing his heart out in the Rain - Kreations by Kerri

 So if people sing in the rain, do our voices & songs sound distorted?
 What we think we hear really isn't what it is?

Clockwork Orange - Singin' in the rain

Sometimes I wish my life were a Musical - Nabigator

But no one was singing anyway...

Everyone around me felt soggy, out of sorts & BESIEGED

The SEVEN of CUPS kept showing up

 

The Seven of Cups can stand for the waters of delusion, the clouds of intoxication, the emotional waters rotting in the depths of destiny.  They have fallen from the grace of Tiphareth, the center of The Tree of Life.  Seven of Cups talks of the human desire to experience the unknown, the subconscious & the wish to escape the plain old reality to find a better world somewhere in fantasy.  Promises unfulfilled, drunkenness, violence, selfish dissipation, deception in love and friendship, success often gained, but not followed up.  The emotions are out of balance; some deep disappointment has not been resolved.  Oh, doom & gloom.  Recognize and accept your own shadow.

Brocante - Chateau de Charras

My Shadow - Long in the Orchard

" Besieged is how most people feel most of the time: by events, by people, by all the necessities of providing, parenting or participating and even by the creative possibilities they have set in motion themselves, including, especially, a success they may have fought for over long years...As creatures we define ourselves through belonging or not belonging, we cannot help but make commitments to people, places and things, which then come looking for us. Conscious or unconscious, we are surrounded not only by the vicissitudes of a difficult world but even more by those of our own making...Little wonder that men and women alternate between the dream of a place apart, untouched by the world and then wanting to be wanted. But we live best at the crossroad between irretrievable aloneness and irretrievable belonging, and even better, as a conversation between the two where no choice is available...Nel mezzo, in the midst of everything, as Dante said, to be besieged - but beautifully, because we have made a place to stand - by the people and the places and the perplexities we have grown to love, seeing them not now as enemies or a force laying siege, but as if for the first time, participants in the drama, well known friends, familiar and surprising, privileged to knock on our door so that we may see them and sit down with them again, perhaps for a very last time."

Begun in a tiny Paris hotel room - but gifted with a balcony for coffee, and an undeserved and glorious view of the Eiffel tower - after waking and starting to think about Buddha’s mythical and miraculous declaration, supposedly said at the moment of his birth.
Heaven above; earth below,
I alone and sacred

Excerpted from essay, Besieged-- David Whyte's  Reader's Circle Essays 2011-2012

 Under the Lime Tree, Cellefrouin, Fr.

But then it rained some more and the grass kept GROWING

Back of the Chateau

Lime trees next to the Orchard

On Thursday, Ascension Day, it was whispery still--the house in blue shadow; we lit candles and reveled in all the shades of blue in the room, in the sky, shifting from Cerulean to Azure, Midnight Blue, Alice Blue, Prussian Blue, Persian Blue, Egyptian Blue, Maya Blue and best of all, Indigo, the  color of "seeing".  I felt like having a "Seance on a Wet Afternoon", with Kim Stanley and Richard
Attenborough--remember that spooky movie? 

Indigo Sky

the erratic light, the willful clouds, scarlet poppies, a lazy bumblebee
at the edge of a lavender just planted, & the ubiquitous CUCKOO
announcing Spring's courtship made me feel dizzy, ditzy and alive.

Now the clouds look like grey butterscotch rolling along

 Here comes the "Grace" part: Quelle beauté, & I couldn't trap it on paper.

My words leaped like spring lambs, but not onto the page!  Days were filled with half started emails and scraps of notes flitting through the elementary air...hopscotching between via positiva & negativa while the soppy spring offered its tender blossoms festooned on every fruit tree...it will be a good year for the bees.  Fat bees on lilacs spotted on evening walk.

Lilacs in the Mist

Apple Tree - Verger

This year's blossom, last year's fruit

I fell into GRACE:  Had some amazing Tarot events,
transcendent readings at La Charrue & Le Marquisat.  I am grateful to be a small piece of the puzzle for change to take place in someone's life.  One woman said she woke up from a dream that told her to go to Les Gardes Ponteroux (the hamlet where I was reading) on her way to Paris, she had never heard of the place and showed up at my table with a bewildered look on her face. The cards revealed a key to resolve a massive decision for her and she left with tears of gratitude.  It was very intense and wonderful to see that kind of transformation.  At La Charrue I read for a whole family, mother, father, son.  Amazing to see the trinity of their cards & destinies intertwined.  Ça m'a plu - That pleased me!

grace (v.)

c.1200, "to thank," from Old French gracier, from grace (see grace (n.)). Meaning "to show favor" (mid-15c.) led to that of "to lend or add grace to something" (1580s, e.g. grace us with your presence), which is the root of the musical sense in grace notes (1650s). Related: Graced; gracing.

grace (n.)

late 12c., "God's favor or help," from Old French grace "pardon, divine grace, mercy; favor, thanks; elegance, virtue" (12c.), from Latin gratia "favor, esteem, regard; pleasing quality, good will, gratitude" (source of Italian grazia, Spanish gracia), from gratus "pleasing, agreeable," from PIE root *gwere- "to favor" (cf. Sanskrit grnati "sings, praises, announces," Lithuanian giriu "to praise, celebrate," Avestan gar- "to praise").

Today is "Whit Monday"  - Lundi de Pentecote - Pentacost Monday - It's still raining.

Pushing Daisies - Via Positiva

"Pushing Daisies" Season 1, Episode 7 Quote:

Vivian - "I think it is brave to try to be happy"

THE SEVEN STREAMS

Come down drenched, at the end of May

with the cold rain so far into your bones

that nothing will warm you

except your own walking.

And let the sun come out at the day's end

by Slievenaglasha with the rainbow's doubling

over Mullock Mor and see your clothes

steaming in the bright air.

BE A PROVENANCE OF SOMETHING GATHERED,
a summation of previous intuitions, 

let your vulnerabilities walking on the cracked sliding limestone

be this time, not a weakness, but a faculty

for understanding what's about to happen.

STAND ABOVE THE SEVEN STREAMS

letting the deep down current surface

around you,

then branch and branch as they do,

back into the mountain

and as if you were able for that flow,

say the few necessary words

and walk on, broader and cleansed

for having imagined.

David Whyte

from "River Flow" 

Pushing Daisies - Via Negativa

The Seven Streams - The Burren, County Clare