April 22nd, 2016

The school year is finally winding down, but it seems I have as much to do as ever. This month has been particularly action-packed, as we finally got into the build phase of the project we began back in February. It took us four and a half days spread over a couple of weeks, but we finished it, and it looks great. It'll be a really functional piece of work for the environmental center's programs

When we first arrived for our last build day on Tuesday, we found this dragonfly nymph exoskeleton on the trim of our deck. In the words of our professor, our project has already started breeding life. Personally, I took it as a good omen, and things continued to go well as we finished things up.

Here we are adding some finishing touches...

Our final product; we built a deck, two tables, and a net rack for a macro-invertebrate dipping station. Originally, there was also meant to be a kiosk for signage, but as we discovered, there are a lot of subterranean rocks on our site, which meant that that piece could not be built at this time. However, the center has our drafted plans and materials, so if they later on feel like relocating that component to a different area and building it, they can do so.

Our deck, from a different angle.

We saw this lovely (and large!) snake on Tuesday, plus a water snake I couldn't get a picture of.

Later that day, I found this little guy sitting on a campus sidewalk - they were only an inch or two across!

An Update

First - an update on those activities which I mentioned in my last post! I did indeed end up doing a crystal spread and meditation. I went with chakra- themed stones, because I was feeling off energetically, and so laid the following crystals over the appropriate energy centers: Black Tourmaline for the Root chakra, Red Jasper for the Sacral chakra, Tiger's Eye for the Solar Plexus chakra, Green Calcite for the Heart chakra, Turquoise for the Throat chakra, Lepidolite for the Third Eye chakra, and Clear Quartz for the Crown chakra. I did this while laying down on my carpet, with a blanket thrown over my legs because it was chilly. There was a bit of stiffness in my lower back, but as I began the meditation, this relaxed and dissipated.

Afterwards, I walked over to the campus lake and rented a kayak. I spent about an hour paddling around, enjoying the weather and the wildlife.

There were a ton of ducks, and the turtles were also out in force, basking in the sunlight. By the time I was through, I'd counted eleven, including one itty bitty softshell turtle that was barely an inch and a half long. Moreover, there were many frogs sitting in the shallows, and I spotted a school of minnows darting just under the surface. All things told, it was a lovely way to spend the afternoon.
That evening, I had had plans to go to a meditation class at the Gaia Center, but when I got there, it looked like the class was in a different location.

I ended up just wandering around town a bit, and besides finding a little Chinese shop which sold delicious bubble tea, I also stumbled upon the Gaia Center's labyrinth, which is painted on an abandoned piece of concrete.

There's also a lot of pretty trees surrounding it, and a little waterfall.
Monday night was Esbat, and also represented my first official ritual since moving onto campus. I had located a really pretty area behind the dining hall near a creek where there was a grove of trees and several stumps. Since it was out of the way, I thought I might use it for my ritual. I don't usually get to do rituals outside, as doing so in our backyard would be more than a trifle obvious, and this seemed like the perfect place to get away from prying eyes.

I grabbed my travel altar and set up camp on one of the flatter stumps. The ritual went really well, I think, albeit a bit short, and even though I was in a pretty secluded area, there were still a few people who walked by. I'll probably do my Mabon ritual there, though, and see how it goes. Because it was a so-called "Supermoon", the moon rise was just beautiful. It was butter-yellow, and huge in the sky as it peeked up over the trees.

My cameraphone cannot begin to do the phenomenon justice, but for the record, that yellow blob in the middle of the picture is the moon (the one on the left is a street lamp).