​The earth is in perfect balance as well. Day and night, light and dark are in a state of equilibrium at the start of autumn.

That can affect people in different ways. For some, it’s a season to honor the darker aspects of the goddess, calling upon that which is devoid of light. For others, it’s a time of high energy. There may be a feeling of restlessness in the air, a sense that something is just a bit “off”.

If you’re feeling a bit spiritually lopsided, activities that keep you close to the land, or those that help others, can bring you balance and harmony.

Here are some ways you and your family can gear your fall festivities toward traditional, or more earth-based celebrations:

Decorate your home or a rented space like an old barn and host a barn dance! 

At the beginning of the summer, I agreed to write a column for our community newspaper, The Pinewood News.  Every other week I submit columns and book reviews for the residents in Munds Park, our little cabin community.

This obligation has gotten me reading a lot more this summer. I’d been avoiding reading for the last year because I thought it would take away from my novel writing time. Actually, the opposite has been true. I read mostly during lunch and before going to bed at night.

Instead of being a “time suck,” reading seems to rev up my imagination and get me thinking constantly about word choice and phrasing, not to mention how much new information there is to learn from other author’s books.​
I also joined Netgalley, an online service that connects publishers and authors to a community of early influencers who will help their book succeed: librarians and booksellers, who order an recommend books to their patrons; media professionals who interview authors and publish book reviews; and reviewers and bloggers like me who write about books online and leave reviews on retail sites and more. I have already requested a dozen newly-published or not-yet-published books that I’m excited to read. 

On this blog, I’ll give you the “best of the best” as I come across them, starting with Poison Girls, by Cheryl Reed.

I actually discovered Cheryl’s book during a workshop at Left Coast Crime. She was on a panel of authors who have moved from newspaper crime reporting to writing novels. I thought the panel was interesting because, as a past journalist myself, I rarely feel that novelist get the atmosphere of a newsroom exactly right, and even fewer accurately describe the pressures on a crime reporter.

But Poison Girls nails it all—the  political maneuvering of publishers and editors, the back-stabbing competition between co-workers, and especially the daily ethical decisions the reporters are forced to make, with no safety net from prosecution.

The novel ls is set in South Side Chicago in 2008 where teenage girls of prominent and wealthy families are dying from fentanyl-laced heroin called “poison.”

Natalie Delaney, a crime reporter for the struggling Chicago Times, is determined to get to the bottom of the deaths. She navigates the world where thrill-seeking teens and hardened drug dealers coexist, by developing a friendship with Libby and Anna, two cousins who are dabbling in the drug world. 

Natalie senses that these are not ordinary OD’s, but her new friend, Anna, leads her in confusing circles around the truth. Eventually she traces some unlikely links between the South Side drug dealers and the city’s power brokers, but she still doesn’t know why these young, affluent girls are willing to try a drug that will likely kill them.

As the death toll rises, Natalie finds herself chasing one of the biggest stories of her career. We get a sharp sense of the false leads, half-truths and frustrations that are part of reporting a story that no one else seems eager to break open. The paper is happy to run her page one articles when the focus is on the tawdry deaths and gang involvement. But when the reporting leads to politicians and some of Chicago’s most well-connected families, Delaney is hung out to dry.

Although the drug culture is realistically portrayed, it is the reporter’s life that rings true throughout. Delaney is a flawed and sometimes unsympathetic character, struggling with the ethical dilemma she is thrown into.  How does she separate getting the story and becoming personally involved with the people in it? Is it ethical to observe a crime being committed, and not stop it, for the sake of the article? The exploration of her inner life adds layers of depth to the story, and several times I stopped and asked myself what I would do if faced with the same situation.

Cheryl Reed’s Poison Girls is a gripping tale that often reads like creative nonfiction. And for good reason. Reed, a long-time crime reporter, drew the story from her own experiences covering a group of young girls using crack cocaine in Dayton in the 1990s. A former editor and reporter at the Chicago Sun-Times, Cheryl has won many awards for her investigative reporting.

This is Reed’s first fiction novel. Her non-fiction book. Unveiled: the Hidden Lives of Nuns, chronicles her four years living off and on with nuns across the country.

At the time of this writing, Poison Girls has 29 Amazon reviews, all of them 5-Star.

• Paperback: 374 pages. Also available in ebook format.
• Publisher: Diversion Books (September 12, 2017)

This crazy lady calls herself "Witchwood." The photo doesn't do her justice, she is a striking specimen. She is right across the trail from a very shady, fairy-glen type grove of trees that feels highly magical as well. 

I have left painted rocks in "Witchwood" and the adjacent glen three times this season. Every time, the rocks were gone when I went by the next day. Obviously she gets a lot of human attention. When I tried to visit with her, however, she told me to leave her alone. 

​Urban trees, on the other hand, live surrounded by humans, were almost certainly planted by humans, watered by humans, and generally have regular human interaction. 



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Photo credit: Squinert, Melbourne, Australia

​On the downside, some urban trees have experienced higher than necessary levels of trauma, and might be angry at humans.

Trees may have been visciously pruned, or had their branches broken for no reason, and this will make the trees, as a tribe, angry.

​So you may find some angry or sullen trees who feel violated by humans, or who have lost good friends (lots of them) in an urban setting. These trees may not only refuse to speak, but will physically lash out, whacking people with branches, falling onto houses in a storm, tripping you and ripping out the sidewalk with roots.

For these trees, consider doing some land healing activities: Apologize for their bad treatment, witness and honor their pain, give them space but come around often to let them know there are good humans out there. 

Urban trees have to withstand different demands than their forest counterparts.  Pollution can be especially hard on certain species. For example, at one time, sugar maples were planted heavily in cities all over the United States. 

​For the sake of the tree tribe and the living trees, I think it’s good to honor the fallen trees. One of my favorite things to do involves taking charcoals and doing healing drawings and ogham rune work on the freshly cut stumps, and leaving little blessings, such as acorns, tobacco, lavender, dried corn. In fact, I fill my pockets with these little offerings each time I hike out into Nature, just in case I need it. 

​If the fallen tree is in your yard, don’t get rid of the stump—use it for a planter!

​You can even make a rune set from your favorite tree, and keep its spirit near you. 

​I’ve been thinking a lot about trees lately, ever since I got home from camp in Redwood State Park last month. The park is second-growth redwoods, so tall they turn the sunlight dappled in the afternoon. You can’t help but feel their presence. 

​Throughout the park are the gigantic stumps of the original stand. The stumps are big enough you could curl up and sleep in them—and several campers actually hung hammocks from the stump edges and slept there. Many of the stumps also provide the base for the newer, second growth trees, so the forest feels ancient and wise, as if the new trees absorbed the knowledge of their predecessors. There’s a lot of magic in that redwood forest.

We live in a forest at our summer home in Northern Arizona. Our cabin backs up against the Coconino National Forest, so we are immersed in tree life. The vanilla scent of the Ponderosa pines wafts across the back porch in early morning.

Before I moved to Arizona to live full-time, I thought the only serious weather issue was the temperature.
​
The Phoenix area is extremely hot. We average 110 days a year over 100 degrees, and it doesn’t cool off much at night. That heat is relentless.

​Prickly pear fruit ripens at this time, turning a dark shade of pink.

​Every year I watch, amazed, as my trees grow tall and lush in the midst of such heat, and the plants in my landscape bloom in magenta, bright orange and red. 

​Who knew the desert had such vibrant plant colors?

 At the end of the procedure, they also injected a recently-developed  analgesic (numbing agent) called Exparel, which is supposed to keep the area numb and pain free for three days, eliminating the need for a narcotic pain reliever. This is day 3 and so far, so good. We’ll see what tomorrow is like when the Exparel wears off. I filled the prescription for the pain killer just in case.

So, now I’m on a no-chewing, soft food only diet for the next week. Soft food is limiting enough, but I’m also diabetic, so my diet cannot consist of mashed potatoes, yogurt and applesauce. I need to continue to eat low-carb and protein rich meals to regulate my blood sugar and to make sure my bone graft “takes” for the upcoming tooth implant.

Here’s what I’ve found that adhere to the doctor’s guidelines, my personal needs, and still taste good. Note: They don’t all look good, but oh well, for this week, appearance is secondary. The main thing is that all of them are hearty enough to eat before taking antibiotics, ibuprofen and other meds that can cause nausea on an empty stomach.
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·       Mashed avocado and cottage cheese. Add a little balsamic dressing and garlic powder and it’s tasty.
·       Whipped sweet potatoes, summer squash or cauliflower with butter and favorite seasonings. Just not red or black pepper or dill weed, which get caught in the teeth.
·       Green Smoothies with healthy ingredients (any of the above stuff, plus peach, squeezed lime, blended baby spinach, cucumber and carrot juice, plus a favorite seasoning (I prefer celery salt and garlic).
·       Fruit smoothies with a little frozen banana, strained strawberries and blueberries (the rest of the berries are too seedy), silken tofu, squeezed orange or lemon, and vanilla almond milk. If all of the ingredients are frozen before use, the smoothie is nice and creamy. I freeze almond milk and coconut milk in ice cube trays, and then take them out as needed.
·       Creamed soups with some added quinoa for bulk.
·       Sloppy Joe without the bun. A whipped veggie on the side with a little very finely grated cheese.
·       Cold Gazpacho soup, made creamy style, with a dollop of sour cream and lime juice on top. Yummy! This one will definitely stay in my diet when I return to solid food.
In a few months, after the bone graft is complete, I’ll get to go through all of this again.
 
So, let me leave you with this bit of hard-earned advice: First, don’t skip a year with your dentist, no matter what. And, second, if you have any tooth pain, don’t assume it’s gum sensitivity and try to cure it with Sensidyne toothpaste. Get it checked out. Trust me—an extra visit to your dentist for a cleaning and x-rays is so much more pleasant and cheaper than the alternatives!
 
When this adventure in eating is over, next week I’ll share my investigations into “raw eating” with the dogs. And, maybe, cats too.
 
Here’s to your health. And remember—brushing and flossing is not enough. Get those check-ups!

Photo by Annie Leibowitz

Consider, for example, this conversation between Severus Snape and Harry Potter during their first Potions class.  Snape asked Harry a series of questions, including this clue: “Mr. Potter. Tell me, what would I get if I added powered root of asphodel to an infusion of wormwood?” Of course, Harry, being new to the wizarding world, had no idea.

According to the Victorian language of flowers, asphodel is a type of lily meaning “my regrets follow you to the grave” and wormwood means “absence” and symbolizes bitter sorrow. If we combine the meanings of those two plants, we could interpret the truth behind Snape’s question as, “I bitterly regret Lily’s death.”

Cold-hearted as Severus Snape might have been, readers eventually discover that he’s been in love with Lilly Potter for all of his adult life. In fact, this failed love story is the catalyst of Snape’s entire character arc, and it’s the painful seed that grows the complicated relationship between Harry Potter and himself.

Rowling gives us the first clue early on. Of course, deciphering it requires a working knowledge of Victorian flower meanings.
Along that same line…

​First, we have Harry, whose birthday is July 31, which corresponds to Holly, his wand wood.

This evergreen plant is protective and reminds us of the immortality of nature. People born under Holly are natural-born leaders.

Ron’s wand is Ash, which matches his wand and March 1 Birthday
Hermione’s birthday of Sept. 19 corresponds to her vine wood wand.

​For whatever reason, Rowling did not choose to have Voldemort’s Yew wand match his birth date of December 31.

Personally, I think she wanted the Yew associations of death.  Yew is poisonous. Every part of the tree contains alkaloids that are fatal to humans. And Yew remains poisonous after the tree has died. Similarly, Voldemort’s Horcruxes and Death Eaters lingered on after his demise at Godric’s Hollow, poisoning minds and destroying lives.

​Rowling said her favorite beast in the series is the phoenix, a mythical sacred bird who ignites into flames when it reaches 1,000 years old, only to emerge from the flames as a new, young version.

​My favorite is the Thestral, a breed of winged horse with a skeletal body, reptilian face, and wide, leathery wings like a bat. 

​Thestrals got a bad rap in the books, and became known as omens of misfortune and death because they are visible only to those who have witnessed death. What I found most interesting was how Rowling used the Thestrals to distinguish people who have witnessed the process of dying, as opposed to those who have only seen the resulting death. Those who have witnessed life ending will forever see life differently.

Behind the Scenes
Daniel Radcliffe has been very open in the past about his struggles with alcohol. He admitted to Playboy Magazine that he drank heavily between the ages of 18 and 20.  He said his life went off the rails for a while when he turned 18 and was filming Harry Potter and the Half-Blood Prince.

“People with problems like that are very adept at hiding it,” he said. “I can honestly say I never drank at work on Harry Potter. But I went into work still drunk. I can point to many scenes where I’m just gone. Dead behind the eyes.
​
Realizing he had to change his ways, Radcliffe quite drinking a month after filming the final Potter film, and still doesn’t drink.
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