Autumn's Bounty

Acorn, butternut, and spaghetti squash line the farm stands in our neighborhood. Yellow spade-shaped leaves seem to be the first to dash across the roads like little airplanes. Clumps of brown oak dot the trees. Night falls in the evening again. The blueberries and tart beach plums have been harvested. The apples in people's yards fall from the tree with wormholes, and you wonder why they do not harvest them. The cranberry bogs are turning red. The bike paths are empty.

This morning Raven and I harvested the last wild grapes in our yard. This was not the simplest of tasks. We have no ladder or fruit picker. What city slickers! A pub chair, a long rope and some sticks did the trick. These are the sweetest grapes of the season. (Speaking of being a city girl, I seem to be the only mom who wears black dropping my kid off at school, but I'm just really not feeling the call of the jeans. Historically, this area has seen a lot of black mourning gowns, so I am all for the change.)

Berries like lychees hang low on branches in front of the library and down along main street. People assume they are inedible. But why would people keep them around so long if they aren't edible? They form huge clumps of mushy red and bright orange fruit on the personalized bricks and fill the holes of workman's soles in one step. They also taste delicious.

Here's my pumpkin pie recipe for fall.


Pandora’s Pumpkin Pie
October 26, 2010

Filling:
15 oz. canned organic pumpkin puree
14 oz. organic tofu
2 organic eggs
1/2 maple syrup
3 tablespoons whole milk/ricemilk/coconut milk
2 tablespoons cornstarch
1 teaspoon vanilla
1 teaspoon cinnamon
1/4 teaspoon nutmeg
1/8 teaspoon ginger
1/8 teaspoon clove

Put pumpkin puree, ricemilk and tofu in a blender. In a bowl whip eggs, vanilla, cornstarch, maple syrup, and spices together. Add blended mixture to wet ingredients and whip together before placing into pre-cooked crust.

Crust (option number 1):
½ cup rice flour
½ cup potato flour
½ tsp. cinnamon powder
Small pinch of clove
Small pinch of nutmeg
1 egg beaten
4 tbsp. rice milk
2 tbsp. oil
2 tbsp. cold water
4 tbsp. maple syrup
½ tsp. vanilla extract

Crust (option number 2):
1 1/2 c. rice flour
1/2 c. organic whole milk/organic rice milk/coconut milk
2 tablespoons maple syrup
2 tablespoons oil
1 tsp. cinnamon
pinch of clove
pinch of nutmeg


In a bowl, add dry ingredients. Make a hole in the center. Add egg and beat. Next, add all wet ingredients. Mix well. Make a ball out of the dough. Place in the center of a greased tin. Press, until evenly distributed. Preheat at 350 and cook for 5-7 minutes, before adding pumpkin filling.

Bake at 350 for 45-50 minutes. Cool on kitchen counter top. Refrigerate until completely firm in the center. Let stand ten minutes at room temperature before serving.

"As The Wheel Turns"
Once I placed the Fall Equinox 'sticker', my five year old son knew the Spring Equinox was on the other side of the wheel. He also knew where the Solstices fall in relation to the equinoxes. I am so impressed!

Spirit World

In a region where people historically have feared death, reckoning, and believed that consciousness ends with leaving the physical body, there are plenty of haunted houses to prove that death doesn't mean the end of personality essence. We are living on the energetic foundations of nearly four hundred years of American culture and walking in the footprints of the Native Americans who inhabited these lands for hundreds of years prior to that.

Photo by Pandora Peoples with Annalee Peoples

Ghosts seem to have a wide range of emotions. I come to this conclusion based on my personal experiences, those of my clients and friends, and what I have gleaned from the local legends. Content, angry, waiting for an apology, wanting to be heard, feeling lost, feeling playful, or lustful, from tricksters to spirit helpers they reflect the whole spectrum of human experience. Some are faint energy fragments and some can make conscious choices. Their presence is a variable here we can't ignore, and can affect our lives in positive, negative or neutral ways.

Perhaps if we had a deep respect for death, and saw it in terms of a transition into a new phase of life/existence, it would amplify our ability to find serenity when we cross over. If our culture gave reverence to the elderly years in general, it might bestow more feelings of purpose and accomplishment in the later years of our life. Perhaps our wise elders would die knowing they had passed the torch and that their mission in life was accomplished, and that their legacy would be carried on.

The New Age philosophy that everything happens for a reason and that there is a divine and positive benefit to every tragic event, is appealing but not easy to relate to in the face of tragedy. In the work I do, I have seen many young people who have crossed over who have found purpose and meaning to there lives on the other side. It was part of their soul's evolution to experience death when they did. It also taught their friends and families valuable lessons. At times, it expands the relationship between family members and validates the unseen world. There are often more limitations in the physical world, than in the invisible one.

Happy Equinox

Yes, it is the harvest time in the wheel of the year, when my family gets a little giddy. The spiderwebs hang like silver crystaline thread in the morning dew, the mist is heavy over the lake, and rambles over the surface like a drunk old man leaving an empty tavern at day break. The mice are back in the attic, and scraping away in walls, and what was a poison in summer is a nice midnight snack in the fall. Shadows creep in the darkness, and snapping turtles find their way to your lawn looking for sun. Time to rejoice in the gradual thinning of the veil.

Lit pumpkins deck the hallway, fluttering with garish smiles. There's rapping on the ceiling, grandma's reading bedtime stories while ghosts disguised are creaking. Staircases thump at two, and later still at three, while the screen door moans in the moonlight, a raspy voice etches a sorrowful tale in your wine-weakened head. Growls in your ear of an enigmatic "He", punctuate a dinner with your grinning family. No howling dogs you will find here, they are mute like cats and deer. Watching the gate as it slams shut, with quiet inquisitive fear. Something escapes from a mirror, like clockwork every year, and it rides through the streets before retiring to your mug of flat old beer. Queer is the mellow morning, as it revels and relaxes in hues, like the twilight sleep of angels, illuminated like Sunday pews.

"Widow" by Pandora Peoples with Annalee Peoples

Southern roots go deep...I made bacon, corn muffins, black bean soup, eggs, and fresh hash brown potatoes this morning. Ah, loving the cool weather.

Enjoy The Growlers!

Finding Hormonal Balance Naturally: combating the effects of pollution

Hormones are complex. In Natalie Angier's in depth book on female health entitled, Woman: An Intimate Geography, she states that women naturally have over three hundred types of estrogen. That's a lot of femininity! Studies are finding that many species of animals are exhibiting characteristics of both sexes*, due in part to exposure to herbicides, flame retardants, and chemicals found in cosmetics.

SCROLL TO THE BOTTOM FOR A HORMONE BALANCING RECIPE

Hormone imbalance is par for the course in a world that has introduced on average 500 new man-made chemicals to the human body since the 1950s. (How many of these are from direct injection via vaccines?) These effect the systems of the body, suppressing our immune function, creating toxicity in the body, disrupting our hormones and metabolism via our endocrine system and lead to low-grade inflammation (which is a foundation for serious illness). The presence of endocrine disruptors in medications which are processed and released at waste water disposal plants into rivers and oceans may be responsible for some fish displaying intersex features**. There is some concern that in populations where hermaphrodite amphibians and fish are being studied, chronic illness in local human populations are significantly higher and on the rise.

Cancer and diabetes are being linked with exposure to heavy metals. "Medical science has discovered how sensitive the insulin receptor sites are to chemical poisoning. Metals such as cadmium, mercury, arsenic, lead, fluoride, 51 and possibly aluminum may play a role in the actual destruction of beta cells through stimulating an auto-immune reaction to them after they have bonded to these cells in the pancreas." (There is a Cure for Diabetes by Gabriel Cousens) And what of the growth hormones given to animals. You may say, well you eat hormone-free, antibiotic-free meat, but really, do you do this all of the time? What about restaurants, parties, events, frozen and pre-packaged foods?

In 2000, Norwegian polar bears were 20 percent more likely to exhibit characteristics of both sexes than Alaskan polar bears, do to an increase in PCBs by industrial centers***. Plankton that the bears eat are contaminated with the chemicals. All Arctic bears in general are displaying signs of depressed immune systems.

A study in 2004, profiled by Harper's Magazine January 28, 2004, found that dolphins, whales, and seals are turning into hermaphrodites because of pollution. According to the U.s. Geological Survey and the EPA, the sludge water leaving sewage treatment plants after processing is a significant source of pharmaceuticals. In ten facilities they have discovered 28-50 compounds in sludge including "antimicrobial disinfectants (triclosan), antibiotics (sulfamethoxazole), musk fragrances (tonalide), antihistamines (diphenhydramine), and antiepileptic drugs (carbamazepine)."****

In light of what we know about hormonal imbalance being reflected in the species with whom we shared habitats and in light of the fact that these polluted rivers effect our water supplies and the agriculture we consume, it is probably best to do what we can to maintain balance through supplements. I've been quite smitten with Rosemary Gladstar's Women's Root Tea, to which I add cooked rehmannia rhizome. I have found it to be mood lifting, and I can feel how happy my reproductive organs are when I drink it.


Rosemary Gladstar's Women's Root Tea

Ingredients:
3 parts sassafras bark
2 parts dandelion root
1 part licorice
1 part pau d'arco
1 part vitex berry
1 part wild yam root
1 part ginger root
1/2 part cinnamon (I use 1 tsp. helps with circulation and digestion)
1/4 orange peel (I use 1/2 helps immune system)
1/4 don quai (I use 1/2 helps tonify uterus and reproductive organs)
2 parts cooked rehmannia rhizome (my addition...full of iron, delicious blood tonic) Optional: pinch of stevia


Break up pieces of rehmannia. Mix ingredients well with a wooden spoon. I use two tablespoons of the mixture to a medium sized pot. Bring to a boil. Simmer 20 minutes covered. This makes the perfect amount for my traditional Chinese tea pot.

Sources: * http://www.nytimes.com/2008/04/08/science/08frog.html?_r=0

**http://georgetownvoice.com/2006/09/07/hermaphrodite-fish-provoke-concern-about-pollution/

***http://www.edie.net/news/news_story.asp?id=3221&title=Pollutants+blamed+for+huge+increase+in+hermaphrodite+polar+bears

****http://list.web.net/archives/sludgewatch-l/2006-September/001791.html

Goddess Cerridwen

Cerridwen is the Welsh goddess of transformation, rebirth, inspiration, and poetry. Below, my mother Anna, astrologer, artist, gardener and Reiki practitioner, becomes Cerridwen. At sixty she's never dyed her hair, had any surgeries of any kind, and she has only love and good will in her heart. She has the purest heart of any witchy woman in the land.

Translating Multiple Verbal & Nonverbal Languages Simultaneously

Pandora's Garden will be accepting credit cards as soon as she finds a gateway and shopping cart that are compatible that she likes...

Love all the readings I have been doing, it makes my life quite dream-like. I feel like I walk to work barefoot in the rain, mud and snow, always trying to catch a train on the uphill side of the morning, as dawn puts on its emergency brakes, trying not to run me over.

The metaphysical work that I do is like swimming through green mermaid waters, inside a pitch black cave scattered with electric eels, boating upstream into a fiery crater, and out through the flooded servants' door of a large Southern Greek Revival into a backyard with row upon row of drooping ripe crops in the scorching heat, suddenly sliding into a still swamp with dead fish, getting tugged by a sobbing grandmother playing gypsy music with a phonograph into the ear of a def cat, drenched with muddy microbiology I climb up through the Amazonian fig trees into the tops of the green canopy with the buzzing, humming and howling of insects and birds which transports me to from midnight moment to midnight moment, from gleaming tomb to dank castle, from high noon moments in a cliff dwellers' temple....all from a cozy blanket with black waters sparkling in the starlight below me.

Thanks to all of the eager underemployed invisible helpers, for making these journeys into the realms of psyche purposeful and cathartic. Photo: "Lovelorn" by Pandora Peoples with model Abbie Stafford copyright 2012