Beginings and endings... they are often the same.

Well, here we are again, a new blog and a new beginning.

We are hoping to continue the blogger tradition that we started on our LiveJournal so long ago. We will offer musings on art and culture. Explorations on the Mythic Arts movement we are so delighted to be part of. Festival and event reports from the decorative fringes of society, and perhaps just some inspiration and enthusiasm, two of our favorite words.

Our lives are cyclical and seasonal. Ruled by weather and storms due to the nature of our work, selling our art at outdoor entertainment events, as well as the cycle of the events themselves. We are often caught up in the business of the festival seasons, much the way farmers are in the harvest. Such is the state of our Autumnal lives. A favorite season of many artist, filled with lovely colors, and quiet afternoons, but overflowed by our participation in the Maryland Renaissance Festival. A nine weekend event, located in lovely woodlands along the Chesapeake Bay, near Annapolis, MD.

So, we thought to offer some of the old, here on the new. We were drawn away from writing on LiveJournal by the cultural transition to Facebook. Yet, still the urge to write and muse extensively was with us. Coming here to Blogger, we will post some of our favorites from the older journal.

So here is a an entry from our Journal in the Autumn of 2006. At the time, we were living in Crownsville, MD, very near the Renfest. There, we lived in a somewhat idyllic setting for a pair of young artists founding their business and family. A studio apartment located above a quirky florist business, and remarkable little cafe, owned by friends. However, the best of that, was our gardens. The Green Rose Labyrinth Gardens were located in the back of the building. Two meditation Labyrinths were our delight there. One a "brick in ditch" variation on the Baltic Wheel Pattern.

Baltic Wheel Labyrinth in Brick in Ditch style.

The other, The Green Rose itself. A 900 foot nature trail labyrinth, cut into a wooded lot. Based on a variation of the inner pattern of the Chartres. Winding trails to the center, and there, a fire pit, surrounded by benches, and wrapped in memories of community and joy.

The entrance to the Green Rose Nature Trail Labyrinth.

I shall write more about our time there later and my exploration into the winding paths of the labyrinths, but for now, I have set the scene and then, paint the picture. Finding this entry, was like a lost friend's soul, and still I am enraptured by Autumn....

Originally posted November 6, 2006:

Glorious autumns reaps her tithe in reverence. An exchange for her golden display in which we, dear friends are far the better for it.

I am enthralled by Autumn. I find myself frozen, unable to think. A particular maple drowns me. There is this small one in my labyrinth which over hangs the pathway, that moves me to tears. In the afternoon sun it fairly caresses the light. I must spend time in care of my golden chapel. To give her what is due, taken out in the joyful labor of raking. A massive chore of moving and shifting this epic carbon mass. The stored minerals and riches of a season, drawn upwards throughout the tree. Every molecule pulled through the rings and flesh and laid in courses, and in turn laying courses of humus black upon the forest floor.

The Hugging Tree. A large Tulip Poplar that split the trail.

Piled too thick, the rich burden smothers that beneath it. Laid up in drifts and you watch in become once again. I remember the feeling of rich loam in my hands, that gives me a tangible feeling for, a smell, for my utter unimportance to the teeming cycle. And the thought of this knowledge, so utterly bound up in my own mortality, offers me comfort. An understanding that I matter only up to the point of my carbon load, my nitrogen input.

"Such a long long time to be gone, and a short time to be there."
-Box of Rain, The Grateful Dead

The Skull of Memory. A concrete skull, placed to remind us of our fragility. The sign reads, "All Things Must Pass"

And yet again the minerals that make us up have already passed this way.
Iron taken up, each molecule in it's place, and laid upon fields, a thousand times, richness passed through, by food, and water, each bit of us has once been ...a leaf... whose yearning was ever for the light.

Born of distant suns, cracking down building blocks to create more. The light of one nitrogen molecule's being brought into existence shines forth to nurture the incarnation of another. If that other's brief existence lies in a human or tree matters not to the light. They are each giving up its energy in a like fashion.

I take a piece of tree limb from my grove, place it in the central labyrinth hearth, and release the minerals. The heat there is really of no greater importance than that I nurture deep in a compost pile.
Or that of a far star. Each are composting, converting, energy, into heat, me, the star, the pile.

"We are stardust, we are golden, We are billion year old carbon,"
-Stardust, Joni Mitchell
She also said that there is "a comfort in melancholy"

The Tea Fire on the morning afterwards.

So tomorrow I will spend some time in my woodland path. I will try to caress the sunbeams like the leaves. I'll use my camera to catch mere memories of the color.

I wish to do honor to what the stars have sown. I hope to preserve my own memory and the memory of me! To touch these moments and try in useless futility, to share the reverence with others, through a talent for art. Futile in that only with the breath of the moment within your nostrils, that fleeting moment, can you find light that makes you small. I transpose only what I see. Craft is so easy when nature provides such desperate challenge.

My winding path, The Green Rose Labyrinth, is a brief moment, a long walk in a short space. My attempt to share how I experience wilderness. The largest expression of what I wish to convey as an artist. To touch people and live through their memories of the emotions I provoked. Life is short, art is long.

Even the simplest patch of trees is a lonely scrap in the midst of a galactic forest. I will bow my head in raking contemplation, chanting the Heart Sutra towards the earth.

OM GATE GATE PARAGATE PARASAMGATE BODHI SVAHA-
"Om, gone, gone, All Gone Beyound, Enlightenment, Svha!"

Remembering that only each is gone, and each can only hope to last as long as ...a leaf...

See ya in the labyrinth...

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