DragonFeathers
From Wikipedia:
The Persians believed that the baby of a dragon will be the same color as the mother’s eyes.
According to an ancient creation myth, the Vietnamese people are descended from a dragon and a fairy.
They can take on human form and are usually seen as benevolent.
Dragon feathers are the thickest kinds of feathers. They can be made into dusters or quills & when woven together, they can be used as a protective covering.
I would like to know a dragon.
One flew by my window.
For those of you who don’t know, I live in Brooklyn, NY, on th’ 6th floor of a loft building overlooking the Williamsburg Bridge, the East River & the Manhattan Skyline.
I was home alone. I heard a swoosh, the sun was blocked out, darkening the house, & a big gust of wind blew in thru’ the open window. I heard helicopters & sirens. I looked out the window as a jet flew over way lower than the airplanes landing at JFK usually do. A dragon. It landed on the bridge.
It was huge, a wingspan of 50 feet would be my guess. 5 stories wide. I didn’t see it’s full length. It was shades of red & rose & gold & brown, with flecks of white. Sparkling in the sun. Helicopters swooping by it. A dragon. On the bridge.
Instead of scales, it appeared to have feathers. Scale like in shape & some strange amber, red & yellow growths between it’s shoulders & at the nape of it’s neck. They glowed like jewels.
It left as soon as it came, flying north, up the East River. The helicopters followed & the sirens faded.
I googled it. There was nothing to be found. As if it never happened. I suppose it’s in Canada by now.
I went back to the window & looked out. But everything seemed normal again.
Thru’ my open window drifted a single, luminescent feather, & upon it a tiny, golden colored beetle.
It fell slowly past my face & onto the floor, back & forth, looking almost as if it were slowing it’s own fall on purpose. I figured, dragons, faeries, talking spiders, why not a self motivated feather? I think Tom Robbins wrote something like that.
I reached down to pick it up & as I did the golden beetle skittered off into the garden (I have a garden in my house) & disappeared, or hid.
Luckily I had a small brass beetle which looked similar to the one now residing here.
And since I’d been asked to make other things of late, by magickal creatures no less, I decided that perhaps it was implied, in this case, that I should make something special & specific from this experience as well.
& so I give you:
DragonFeathers.
It was suggested to me, by another faery friend who sometimes seeks Sanctuary here at th’ HoC, that I work in 3 dimensions with my pieces more often. So, per this friend’s intsruction, came this piece.
I leave the description of this piece to your imagination, and the pictures.
A dragon. On the bridge.
I’d like to meet one.
P.S. -It’s feather is inside.
P.S.S. I’ll blog about other things too. Storytelling has many forms. Roll with me.
A Special Missive to You, the Reader
Village’s in the Sky Need Your Help!
So, this passed summer I became involved with a very special & inspiring project. I’d like to tell You about it & more importantly ask You to help. A few clicks & You can contribute to the creation & replication of a fabulous new meme.
Work was slim here in the Candied Apple & I became of the mind to travel down south to Virginia, there to find project work or temp jobs. The day before I left Brooklyn, my friend Paxus contacted me. “You want to build treehouses?” he asked “See VillagesintheSky.org“.
Upon visiting the site & seeing what their evolving mission is, I was sold. Or hooked by the tale as is the parlance.
The rest of the story is an adventure best left for another post. I helped build treehouses, platforms high in the air, as a”testival” (read “festival test) for the upcoming project in Missouri at Eastwind Comunity. Visited Eastwind itself & brought the project to Burning Man, with the intention of spreading the idea, collecting ideas & people & skills & resources.
Which brings me to my Missive to You, the Faithfull Reader (all two of You?).
Villiages in the Sky (or VIS) is planning what I’ve come to think of as an Ecovillage Festival, or Permaculture Skillshare. The short version is that they are building a treehouse village with rope bridges & ziplines & apparently now pirate ships in the trees, running it on wind power & conglomerating as many folx as they can to come & have a permaculture skillshare festival, which then leaves an ecovillage in it’s wake.
The goal here is to go beyond the “leave no trace” meme of many current gatherings & festivals & to create a positive trace, a model of festival & sharing of vision that will recreate itself elsewhere & eventually have a huge impact on how many choose to live their lives.
To do this, especially on a volunteer basis, we seriously need Your help.
Here is a link to Brighter Planet, an organization from which we are looking to get funding so that this project can go on without a hitch.
What I need from You is to go to the site, decide You like VIS, sign up & then vote 3 times before the 15th. This date is coming up quickly so I ask You to do this ASAP. Signing up won’t get You spammed, is short & painless & will make Your desire to encourage this kind of project into a tangible impact. Also I ask that You forward this to other folx.
I am planning on being in MO for a bit of time this coming spring to help on site with the prep & the festival itself (not sure about dates & other travel plans yet). If this is something that really sparks an inspiration in You, or speaks to a passion You have that You think the permaculture, sustainability or communities movements need more of, I’d ask You to consider offering Your ideas & if possible, time & effort, resources & experience, to this project. Get involved. You won’t regret it.
Come to Eastwind sometime between now & the festival itself, cited for late May/ early June I believe. There is an amazing think tank of folx on this, but many hands (or many minds) make lite work. We would like Yours.
I will write more on my experiences with this project, as well as my hopes for it, soonly. I needed to get this Missive out right away so as to get as many folx voting as possible. Again, please Vote 3 times before the 15th & get anyone else who can spare a minute or two to do the same. This project is so valuable to the cultural revolution that Western Society so desperately needs. I think we’re ready. Let’s make it happen.
Love, Rhythm & Light to all of You.
In Community,
Ahnika D
‘Aught Ten, Day One.
So, technically it’s the second day of ‘Aught Ten, but I’m gonna call it the first since I’m still up.
I’ve never really periodically blogged before, so this is new to me. What do I share? How do I order it? Since the name is “Amalgam Nouveau” I suppose my intention here is to connect together many different, and perhaps at first glance disparate, ideas, happenings, plans, stories, et al, & connect them, amalgamate them, in an elegant new way. How does it all relate, from my point of perspective anyway.
So the Holidays have been a series of guests & projects here at the House of Collection. The rain & snow & a week of work have kept me from doing much of anything to fullfill my role as Garden Manager in the new garden we are creating (slowly but surely) in the side lot of our building. There’re only about 15 folks from the building in on this project & I think ts likely that, when spring comes, we’ll be locked in at that number. So far we’ve dug up the entire yard, gotten rid of several small mountains of dirt & debris, flattened it all out, and I’ve managed a couple times now to procure truckloads of free bricks with which I’ve started making a brick path ’round where the plots are cited to be. Me & my neighbor Steve are hopefully building raised-bed frames for all of the plots sometime in January & we still need to double dig all of the plots before spring in order to sulfur them to adjust the Ph of the soil. Once that’s done our landlord has agreed to pay for a large truckload of organic topsoil to fill the frames with & then we’ll be thoroughly on our way to having a real garden. I can’t wait to be composting & even more I look forward to eating what we’ve grown ourselves. While living in NYC no less!! F*ck Yes!!
Also in the works has been the project to re-do the floor in our bathroom with oil shale river stones we procured awhile back from as seriously magickal place in TN very close to an amazing queer artists commune called Ida. We’ve cleared out the bathroom, swept & scrubbed & scraped & patched the floor, laid out the stones & our wonderfully brilliant friend Iris has been doing the dirty work of laying all of the stones in thinset mortar on the floor in the patterns we’ve laid & we’re now about halfway finished. I’ll post pictures hither & thither soonly. After that it’s a copper & barnboard buildout to the clawfoot bathtub & touch up to the paint on the walls & then we’ll move everything back into the room & be done!
So that’s a smidge. Gardening=more Sustainable!! Less money spent on food, more meaning & connection with the whole process of it, from composting to planting to de-bugging to harvesting to eating to composting again Self renewing cycles are the only ones that work long term. SO glad to be moving into one. And salvage in the city is great! Why should all of the gorgeous stamped perfectly useable bricks go to the landfill (& someone have to pay for them to go there) when we can use them to beautify our lives in a practical way? And collecting the river stones was a magickal day in a magickal place, immersed in our presence in Nature & our imaginations of what could be. Why buy slate @ some chain store when that is an option?!
So ya. Hire friends, work for friends, grow yer own food, salvage, re-use, repourpose, imagine, immerse, rinse repeat.
More soon…
Rhythm & Light,
Ahnika Delirium
Amalgam Nouveau 