Hih-Fes-Tuhs (Old sign: Libra) How will we ever find peace? Oh, Captains of Industry! Before the Season of Darkness descends, please, circumambulate your domains! Leave the helm and leave the forecastle and get up in the rigging! Sit in the crow’s nest a while with a glass and meditate. Then come back down to the deck. Talk to your seamen and seawenches! Inspect the salt tack: is it festering enough? Too much? What of the bilge! What of the hull!?!? What of the pitch and nails holding all the water out? Holding your lives afloat?!?
Ter (Old sign: Scorpio) Tick tock! Maddening little time to finish your briefs? Was there ever a better misnomer? We would all like to see you win! We would all like to see what you might really do with all that money and resources! Will the money be a tool for earthbound causes or might you recognize those who wish you well, and know intuitively what you need to do?
Shang-Te (Old sign: Sagitarius) Walking through the woods of savage conduct has made us all feel smaller than the tail of a proper pointer. Like Hephaestus you may have a limp from that string in your leg, but we will naytheless prescribe circumambulation. Go back through the woods of your shameful behaviors! Can you see the forest for the trees?
Gih-Na-Sha (Old sign: Capricorn) Walking through the bog of indecision has not helped you one jot. Straight ahead, point to point excursions are quite literally for birds. You are a primate with the head of a pachyderm! Find another way!
Hahp-E (Old sign: Aquarius) We can take it or leave it, but we wish that hard horn of stubbornness in your heart would submit to weathering. Only you can create the storm that will finally blow it all away!
Hehk-Eht (Old sign: Pisces) We feel remiss in failing to mention our friends in the Southern Hemisphere and the fact that here in the north we may begin our autumn now! Happy springtime to you, antipodes! We shall soon receive the winter gift from the south, and then they from us and on and on for the next, we wish, five billion years on Earth!
Kah-Le (Old sign: Aries) Epilogue, Part 2 “Thou knowest what thou didst, Gawain!” Donntcha? And yet you ride forth like the ghosts are not watching. They know! We ride forth in ignorance always, but now your ignorance is willful. Inn’t? Smoke your precious herbiage in your porcelain pipes! Just don’t excuse the fact that you know the smoke kicks your dick in the dirt! Upla! Whoa! Your steed spooks before the black gaze of the cave! ADMONITION: Please, gentle souls, turn back or turn the page! Do not read on or do so at your own risk! A mouldering wooden sign before the cave gives you a hint as to the dangers ahead: **WARNING** BRIDGE OUT AHEAD! Spoiler alert: the Green Chapel (viz.: CAPUT hence CAP). Your steed abandons you with all speed the moment your feet touch down. The cave is not initially unpleasant, yet with every step the cave tapers to a snaking tunnel. There is a profusion of life within the cave. At full dark the mosses and insects and frogs become iridescent in the blackness. Your eyes hunger for light and your hands feel living wall of the passage. You know not whether you are walking snakewise, or corkscrewing like a gluttonous vulture. Up or down, left or right doesn’t have meaning anymore. Then finally the unmistakable pinhole of daylight enters your awareness, and your body feels infinitely relaxed. You could be back in your bed in the keep! You feel kept. There is some hope after all! But the tapering increases evermore until you feel the roof of the gallery on your crown. (You lost your helm long ago!) You crouch low and begin your slow crawl, and the pinhole is now almost the size of a Daric or whatever money you brutes use for market exchange. THUNK! “Alas, Gawain, thy shoulders are still too broad.” You can curse your body and wish your shoulders to be womanly, mousy even, but it will not change the fact that you have emerged from the pit. Now like a dumb toadstool only your head, and rather conveniently, your neck is all that made it to the surface. In the space behind the barrow the sound of the grinding axe: sriiiiiiiisriiiiisriiiishriiiiiishriiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiii-ZANG! The blade of the greensteel axe sings in your spine: “The sharpening is complete! This is thy whole life!” Next month: Epilogue Part 3 and A Prologue
Ah-Naht (Old sign: Taurus) Goddesses kissed you last month, and now you need to figure your best path with such auspicious blessings. When you see how reckless you’ve been in the boar chase, in the kitchen, in the laying of the keel of your tiny fishing boat, you feel stupid and small, and yet fortunate those things did not lead to your fall. Those were the blessings given you! Blessings of protection. Now you must fix these things: take another hound or two on the hunt and more skill, take the skill into the kitchen and back to your fishing boat and prepare to move forward.
Eh-Shu.jpg (Old sign: Gemini) “Mother. Mama. Mamma!!!!” She is driving you crazy. Whether your mother is young or old, dead or alive, present or departed, there are times when no gift, not even the gift of your own life, sways your hurtling gorilla nature! This problem is a genuine opportunity to test your own sense of humanity! The self-loathing is a powerful drug and easily has its way with your etherized mind! Remember to give yourself proper food and rest.
Tah-Na (Old sign: Cancer) I remember birds alighting on the rinds of the fruits of mossy boughs. I remember the seeds of children taking root and shooting. I remember growing tall and old. The limbs I lost in winter. The blooms I pushed out in spring. I remember a great creaking and a fatal loss of limb. The fungi, lichens, moss and algae drifting closer to the heart. Helplessness within and without; the hollowing and the incessant work of woodpeckers. And the final fall in a galeless day was loud and terrible; but, I soon became a home for a family of squirrels, then badgers, then squirrels again. Again again again. And I feel the sediments laying down upon me. And I will wait until I have turned to crystal and can be extracted and polished by men!
Marutuk (Old sign: Leo) I would like to find the place of my birth. Here or there? I would like a sign please! Magic me up a sign if you please! Please?
Kah-Noom (Old sign: Virgo) Wishing feels wishy-washy this moon. The wishing is too heavy or too light: some wishes fall down to the center of the earth where our intellectual analysis fails us. Other wishes go straight into the galactic plane and are swallowed up by Sagittarius! Reemitted as X-rays and scatter shot back into the moon. Blunderbuss! Oh Blunderbuss! Close your mouth! Focus your wishes and you will feel the ground.