Eyes Open

"As if something out there seemed to take notice"

It's been a year since the Mothwing Collective came into the world, and our explorations of the bright side of the eerie are still going strong. To say more about what the bright eerie is, and what it means, is an ongoing project that will come in time, but for now, here (hopefully, for your pleasure) are more pictures. Never fear, our eyes are open and watching the horizon.

Spectral speculations.

"I dreamt I called you from the past."  

(And I did dream it, via some secret line from 1988 into now, and I told the story of all that happened between the times of your birth and mine, but when I woke up, I couldn't remember a word.)

Rearranging geometries and breaking invisible sightlines.

Fate hums along wires

Eyes Open

Beacon, signal, silent invisible

Lunar lucidity

Hidden turnings. 

Lens flare as Aldebaran, striding across the star map. 

More mothwingy images next post. Count on it. 

The Sopping Tuesday/No Longer, Not Yet/ The Past and Pending

 (With apologies to Edward Gorey...)

It's a dismal anniversary, damp and melancholy, not unlike the day it commemorates. It was the 8th of May, 11 years ago now, when a low rumble of thunder got my attention. The heavy sky outside my window brought on a vague panic; I'd forgotten how dark the hill country could be when it rained. 

I shuddered, a bone-deep sort of spasm. I wanted to wail out loud, because how could I hide from the weather? But there was nothing for it. Instead of wailing, I got in the car and drove to the elementary school where I registered one of my children for classes; the next day at the junior high I would register another. The littlest one, I could still carry on my hip, just barely. I remember pulling into the parking lot and having to sit for a moment to catch my breath, because it had been so long since I'd done anything without my husband that I wondered if I'd forgotten how. I remember seeing the gold-green live oak catkins scattered on the damp asphalt like runes. I was not versed in reading them, but I already knew they said, "you don't want to be here." 

The next day, it was still pouring as I sat at the glassed-in office at the junior high on the hill, filling out paperwork while the pledge of allegiance echoed down the hall. It felt so strange, looking out on the silvery world on the other side of the glass. Vertiginous, like I might fall. Last month, last week, even, we'd been living our old lives somewhere else, and now we were here. 

My black ballet flats were soaked through from the run-off, so after I'd left my teen to his classes, I'd gathered my toddler and gone to Walgreen's for a cheap pair of sandals and a bottle of Excedrin Migraine. I remember our reflections in the doorway glass, the sky behind us, the rainwater rushing down the gutters even as the clouds were beginning to break. I remember how I sought comfort in the drugstore's sameness, how it reminded me of Victoria, soothing my homesickness for moment, even though I knew I was fooling myself. I even remember feeling a little weird about buying the sandals, too, as if by purchasing new shoes, it would mean I was somehow betraying my old self, that it would be the beginning of the end of who I was before I came. But when the sandals were worn out by the end of the summer, I found I hesitated just as much when it came time to throw them away. 

I went to back to Victoria for a visit a couple of months ago. I hadn't been there in a long time. It was equal parts more decrepit and yet also somehow revitalized. My family never had much interest in returning, so it was my friend who drove me south. He wanted to see the place I'd written about, the inspiration for the name at the top of this page. He wanted to know the "infernal geometry of the streets", the unnaturally silent corners, the haunting sense of being in a place that felt like no place much at all.

We sat on a bench downtown and drew sketches in our notebooks and listened to the clicking of the crosswalk lights. We watched the eerie shimmer in the intersection of N. Main and Santa Rosa while the palm fronds rattled in the silence.

We explored the places on the map I'd once made, climbed to the top of an abandoned parking garage where we found mysterious signs and wonders. We rested, hot and tired, as we watched cloud shapes drifting by. 

And all along I had the unnerving sense that I could just go home, as if I'd only gone for a long walk in the sunny afternoon, or just popped out to pick up lunch, like I'd done so often. As if the landscape of my life had not irrevocably changed. As if I could just walk back to the gold house (now painted blue), as if my children would be there, still children, and not nearly all of them grown up now. 

That's when I knew for sure that - in my mind, anyway - I'd never really left. That part of me (my heart, soul, psyche?) had remained there all along. Life on pause, transition incomplete. Those worn-out shoes I didn't want to toss. Unlike the rest of my family, I'd never really made the leap. 

Maybe that was my way of surviving. Perhaps, perhaps. But it's way past time now to collect those parts of myself and go. The life I lived in Victoria and the quasi-suspended-in-transition existence that came after. I'm tired of dismal Tuesdays and dread at the sound of thunder. Finally, at last, I have a new key.

The hex of the past is unwoven. Maybe one day I'll even remember it fondly. For now, though, I must turn my attention to that which is pending, and for the time when not yet is no longer. 

"I am an other, and I always was."

"There is no inside except as a folding of the outside" said Mark Fisher in The Weird and The Eerie, but recently I've come to wonder if that's entirely true. 

It was a February afternoon, when a bird flitting low across the road in the pale light brought, in a sudden flash of wings, an incursion of silence, as if the world (and my consciousness, too, being part of the world) had stopped for a moment to acknowledge this ordinary, extraordinary happening. 

Since then, I've begun to wonder if it's not so much a folding, but more of an alignment, a reminder in that flash of wings that the inside and the outside were always the same - we just forget to notice sometimes.

Be Your Own Ghost

Did you ever think that maybe (just maybe) those moments when you get a little shiver might be your future remembering the present?

Exercise Your Inner Eye

 Always good advice. 

Trees Sway, Walking in the Wind is Difficult

A windstorm swept across the hill country the other night, leading me to prowl the yard listening to each tree. My youngest child tells me he knows all their sounds in the wind; the high whistle made by the desert willows, the low moans from the Texas mulberry. 

When it became too strong, I hid in a dark alcove and made this recording. Faint sounds of wild geese navigating the storm. 

Title is from the Beaufort wind scale, 7. Moderate gale. 

"Sunbursts can appear in photographs when taking a picture of the sun through the diaphragm of a lens set to a narrow aperture due to diffraction; the effect is often called a sunstar."

Sunburst - Wikipedia

February morning, just after sunrise. Steam rising from the night-time drizzle, sun glint between cedar pickets. Astra, the kitten, is chasing a beetle as black and shiny as she is. Existential dread gathers in the sodden wood, but I tell myself to let it rise and disappear like the steam from the rain. It will be alright, I said.

And it was. 

Between Aldebaran and Pleiades

Thursday, 7:30 PM. 68 degrees, winds SSE at 9. The sky is clear, and all is quiet except for the windchimes in the trees. I'm standing under the garden archway, which is a little worse for wear after the recent freeze. I have one hand on the fence, balancing. I am keeping watch. For what? Oh, I don't know. Something I can't see yet, for this is always the way. You don't see it until it arrives. 

Through the branches of the juniper tree, I see a bright light in the northern sky. A plane heading south. It's distant yet, and I can hear no sound, only see the light growing larger as it approaches. Soon I can see that even though the sky looks clear, there must be a layer of mist higher up, as the lights from the plane make a halo as it comes. I lean on the fence and watch it flying, and for a moment everything feels so cozy, just the juniper and the plane and me. 

In a few more seconds I can hear the engine's hum, and the plane flies low overhead, cutting a path between Aldebaran and Pleiades. Soon it is out of sight, and now it's just me and the juniper, and the high layer of mist that I know is there but can no longer see. I wait a moment, and then it is time for me to go, too. 

Nothing has changed, but everything has changed. As ever. As always. 

I suppose the word must have spread on the astral...

Somehow I'd forgotten to post this earlier, but this is the art notebook I kept during 2021-2022. I don't know if it's good at all, but I do know I finished it, and that must count for something.

νέος

Every Leaf Speaks Bliss To Me

A few more mothwingy pieces from a backlog of mothwingy pieces in my files. I'm delighted to be able to say that 2022 has been my most productive year so far, and that collaboration has been a lovely experience. (I mean, since when have I ever really had a backlog of artwork to post before?) I've always been a loner who worked in solitude, so breaking out of that into something new has made me see things in a different light. For all of this, I am very grateful. Here's hoping to turn over more new leaves in 2023. 

Psykick Ohio/Spiral of Fate

The past and the pending, watchful trees, murmurs from beyond the veil. Synchronicities on late autumn nights, a cold grue that I will speak about one day, but not now, not yet. 

I'm back in Texas now but feel the lines of the map drawing me out and away. I see their shimmer at the horizon. It's been a long and patient wait, but finally, times are changing. 

They Must Have Known You Were Coming

Everything that rises must converge. 

The Remnants and Revenants of the Great Black Swamp

"Here, she will be trapped in her own illusion, because everything in the woods is exactly as it seems."

Angela Carter ~ the Erl-King

Haunting the remnants of the Great Black Swamp with my collaborator and compatriot, Mere Pseud.