Kah-Noom (Old sign: Virgo) Those boulders in the white water will knock the bottom out your boat. Unspeakable cold lurks two feet down.
Ah-Naht (Old sign: Libra) Soon you’ll need not make anymore excuses for your absences! Oh, what a glorious feeling for you, Heph! No more BBQ invites to decline (respectfully), no more backyard parties! Finally winter is coming again! Can’t you smell it! The wonderful smells of harvest and the approaching season of death! Season of death for some, however, for the working man, who prefers inside-me-time to ply his craft, winter is a season of life and light! Gives you such a divine sense of what life could be like if we could just have winter all the time! Then we would have in our possession all the excuses we need! (This reading was not intended to make any connection whomsoever to THAT series on premium cable!)
Ter (Old sign: Scorpio) Shake the gavel! Rattle the scimitars! Use your finger to make a point! And for all our sakes, remember that any good device, if overused, ceases to be a good device!
Shang-Te (Old sign: Sagitarius) As you were walking one morning with your retinue, you came across your old general, a mad dog in his youth and loyal throughout—we cannot remember his actual name, can you?—wrapped in a shroud upon a bier, but still alive. You thought it cruel of his family to bind him up before death, but, upon unbinding him the palsy, of which you had been wholly ignorant, began to shake the man apart! “Bind me up, you, you, you, fo-foool!” How dare this servant talk to his sovereign that way? But then you notice your general’s pleading eyes and mercy stirs you: with a snap of your fingers he is bound and comfitted again! Thank him for his service! Now move along more carefully, if you please, your Fanciness!
Gih-Na-Sha (Old sign: Capricorn) Did the message get through? Distance shouldn’t matter much anymore, well not in the Lower 48. There are so many ways of getting in touch now. Do not be overwhelmed by all the options! Remember that reaching out is whole point!
Hahp-E (Old sign: Aquarius) The wheat berries are blood red. Golden bloody wheat will give you a tummy ache just looking at it. You may even experience some…sympathy runs? So too the video of the old rollercoaster you rode in your youth deep in the tidewater mangroves! Poop damn, you! Poop! We suggest you examine these hair triggers, disarm them, and then get back to us!
Hehk-Eht (Old sign: Pisces) March water feels far away. Snuggling with your fellow schoolmarms, you hardly recognize that you have slipped. The wheel can turn that quickly…SNAP! The augenblick! And it’s gone!
Kah-Le (Old sign: Aries) Epilogue Part 1: The hospitality is divine! Inn’t, Gawain? The warmth of the hearth, the rumbling wheels of carts bringing the lord’s goods into his citadel, and the lady of the house have you feeling almost too good; where is the daily pain? Whence springs the dull ache of quotidian toil? Your superficial wounds have healed, but your mind still raves like an idiot. Stop eating monkey brains, dummy! No good for your liver these heavy meats! You contemplate to the point of doubting your own existence and fortune-fate. You have wondered several times genuinely with a brilliant chill of the spine if you in reality had perished out there with the wyrms only to become their diet; now you find yourself in paradise. Do not be deceived, you, you, fool! It is time to meet the Green Knight, so pay attention! The lady arrives to give you a boon. Her body, which of course you immediately and respectfully decline, but she steals a kiss and your heart flutters for a moment like a sad flag of defeat. She begs you on bended knee to take her boon. A scarf of worsted green wool. This gift you accept with the knowledge that it may save your life. Oh, grim, gray-green world! There you must ride now, kind Sir Gawain! Where the canopy brings the sky down low! Your body is healed: the healers have worked their arts since the very minute you arrived! Your armor is shining again: the blacksmith’s knave burnished it this morning! Your sword is sharpened: the blacksmith used his own whetting stone of shocked crystal! Your horse has new shoes: the lord’s ferrier is an artist in alchemy and the captain of the guard! You need not test the keenness of your blade, kind Sir! Just ride out! Ride out to your fate! Next month: Epilogue, Part 2
Ah-Naht (Old sign: Taurus) A note on the “Springhouse, August 2019:” We know you probably thought we might say something like, “golly, it’s bigger on the inside.” But we are simply not ready to go down that road. The road of endless popular references. “More of what we know of what we know.” If someday all of English is bestowed to allegorical popular references, you know, like the tongue of the xenomorph, which Captain Picard encounters in “Martuk,” we will revisit the issue. But we admit that the springhouse is bigger on the inside. Everything always everywhere is bigger on the inside. Take on your stranger form!
Eh-Shu (Old sign: Gemini) Epilogue? “Hahahahahahahahahaackhackahclke” The laughs and vagaries are ceaseless drumfire here on the holographic surface of becoming! The one woman band—I never did catch her name nor her band’s—was in mid-set when the singularity opened up beneath her black-stockinged feet and spaghetti became we all! Vermicelli of the firmament! Fallen angel hairballs all! The whole of everything in our ken is there with us now. I can concentrate and just make out the strains of trumpets and the plunkings of the gamelan of coral and bone. The chattering bones of the roadhouse. The cheer of the crowd when they received their rations of spermaceti blubber. The hecklers and the thieves. The greybeard nurse sharks and their parasitic broods. The beloved bandleader and the groan of the onyx Les Paul. Another strain pierces through the idle chatter: a combination of harmonica, hurdy gurdy, pedal steel and bagpipe and…pan flute? Hard to tell it; but just as quickly as I first perceived the strangeness, like the full moon light peaking through heavy cloud, the sound was instantly unmistakable; ‘though, I could not see the performance, I knew precisely what the sweet noise was and who was making it (remember there are two ways of knowing: knowing facts and knowing or recognizing people and the lived world; English took only CNAWAN, hence KNOW, and never looked back; however, to wit, viz.: Ital.: SAPERE e CONOSCERE; Germ.: WISSEN und KENNEN). And I knew in the center of the singularity, among all of us spaghetti monsters, the man on the accordion and the woman in black upon a simple cot of pirate riggings are making now the beast with two backs.
Tah-Na (Old sign: Cancer) We watered your idols with living tenderness all the moon, but we lost many of your brothers and sisters anyway! How can we ever regain our resolve after this loss? Sad and blue we pick up our seed pouch, put on our sunhat and set to work gathering for Spring.
Marutuk (Old sign: Leo) We have been judged and found wanting! Overreaching and overreaction have laid us low. Arrogance and abuse we have lobbed at our fellows!