What Kind of Spell Is This?

Planting Our Future

As It Is Today

A little over a year ago Jon started relandscaping the front yard. It’s really our only yard as our backyard area is very small and fenced off from the rest of the backyard which is where our landlord resides in his unit.

The relandscaping started due to rats. Hmmm, rats are a theme.

The greenery directly in front of the house was primarily our Magnolia Tree and an invasive vine with pretty periwinkle flowers that began to take over and created a home for the rats. This then created conflict between Sookie and our other two dogs, Zoey and Teddy, as Sookie became overly excited by the rats and would resource guard the area from the other two who were, of course, also interested in the rats. It got so I had to take them out in shifts to avoid the doggie drama

As It Was - Overgrown Periwinkle with a Cameo from The Smurf/Ursula

“What are you doing?” Jon asked me as he came out to find me in the early evening light late last summer hacking away.

The vines had gotten so overgrown that I noticed the Magnolia was suffering. Before I knew it, I was standing knee-deep in a pile of pruned periwinkle. Jon and I decided to remove it completely to prevent it from once again inviting unwanted beings and sucking the life out of the tree. We also dug out some other weeds and the starts of some small trees that had been returning year after year.

We then borrowed our new neighbor’s tree trimmer and with some love and a lot of trimming coaxed the Magnolia back into full health and then went to work on the pomegranate and the oleanders hanging over our fence from the next-door neighbor’s yard. We also removed a plum tree that had died. Before dying it had sprouted another tree and once we sheared the dead tree away, the living being began to flourish.

We let it all sit for a bit, clear and open, feeling the opportunities and envisioning potentials while applying patience to not fill in the empty spaces too quickly and to allow for an organic evolution of the space.

“Yellow Bells!” our new neighbors Bruce and Barry suggested when we asked them what they thought a good flowering bush would be for shade in front of our house which faces west and gets blasted with full sun and heat all day and into the evening long during the hottest months of the year here. Bruce is a landscape architect, and we get to enjoy his artistry from across the street.

The yellow bells came first, then the privets and the hopseeds, all of them small and in pots, positioned in front of the house. Jon dug holes and filled them with magical compost he’s created here in the bins he built along with other organic fertilizers. We used to make fertilizer from fish bones that we’d get from a local fish place in Encinitas. Jon’s love of gardening and farming came to fruition once we moved to California.

Mid-Way Through - Bushes Out of the Pots and Into the Ground

The bushes and shrubs were in the ground and then he planted mulberry bushes, fig trees, an apricot tree, and blueberry bushes along with the annual pots of tomatoes and herbs and cucumbers and melons. The mulberry bore delicious fruit this summer. The fig only sprouted one fig and a visitor to our yard must have nabbed it because it disappeared. We even had a plum tree volunteer itself next to the one we saved. The volunteer plums are of a completely different variety and we assume it came through some faerie portal to keep the other plum tree company (or someone threw a plum pit on the ground there and during the rains it planted itself and began to grow). You can decide which version of events are true. Perhaps, it’s a “yes, and…” situation

As it is Today - Apricot, Plum, Fig, Mulberry, Blueberry, Pomegranate, Yellow Bells

Jon planted flowers in pots and scattered them throughout and at some point painted our front door a beautiful shade of red.

Newly Painted Red Door

The rains came and came and came and suddenly we had full-shade bushes growing in front of the house along with an abundance of plums and mulberries and tomatoes and herbs and a Meyer lemon tree that after a decade has finally given us full-sized lemons instead of the tiny offerings we were receiving.

Then I got obsessed with needing a rose geranium plant like the ones so easily found all over Northern California. They flower once a year or so, little pretty pink flowers, but the rose geranium scent is prominent throughout the entirety of the plant all year long, and it is one of my favorite fragrances. I always have it on hand in essential oil form.

Jon asked around locally and none of the nurseries had it. That Sunday at the Farmers’ Market I picked up a bunch of flowers from Night Heron Farm as I often do, and there embedded in the bouquet were a couple of strands of rose geranium. Alena and Danny gifted me with a few stalks of it the next week and told me to just plant them in the ground, no need to root them in water first. So we put them in the ground, surrounded by a wire cage to not get trampled by our pack.

A few months later I am now greeted by this sight and its gorgeous scent. I love to run my hands over it and walk away perfumed by its beauty. The rose quartz that sits beneath it is one of the remaining ones that we brought with us to California nineteen years ago. Most of them have been gifted to others over the years.

As It Is Today - Rose Geranium Grown from Just Three Small Stalks

One night this summer as Jon and I were sitting out with the dogs as we do every night during the spring, summer, and fall, Jon said, “I wonder what kind of spell this is?” as he looked around at his work referencing a piece of magic that had become clear to us years earlier.

When we moved into Theresa and Vasken’s apartment building in 2003 we turned the room intended to be the dining room into an atrium-like space. We got some wicker furniture and created a fountain with a giant blue pot filled with crystals and surrounded it all with palm plants picked up at the local garden store.

“Come on, I’ll take you,” Vasken said to Jon when we mentioned we wanted to buy some bigger plants our second week there. Vasken had a truck. Before I knew it they were out the door together on this errand even though Vasken had just gotten home from work. His kindness and generosity were once again fully on display.

We thought we’d live there for a long time, but about nine months after moving in I took a little spa trip on my own to Wisconsin. Jon and I would often flee the city and head to favorite places in either Wisconsin or Michigan. I was reading an Anne Lamott book which was set in Marin County in Northern California, which was where Jon and I had vacationed together just a couple of years earlier. The book put me there and suddenly I realized that California was where I/we wanted to be.

When I returned home from my trip I announced to Jon, “We’re moving”

“What??? Where???” he asked, a bit panicked.

“California. If we don’t go now, I am not sure we ever will.”

“Okay then,” he said. It was always where he truly wanted to be.

We left seven months later in the fall of 2004 for the Redwoods and the Russian River in Western Sonoma County. It would be two and a half years later that I got the nudge to move south.

Encinitas is where we landed. After a few tenuous months of having trouble finding suitable housing, with our kitty Sneaky Le Boo in tow, we moved to a house on Third and B streets just three blocks from Moonlight Beach. You can read the full story of our move to Encinitas and all about Sneaky here:

Sneaky, Izzy, and The Smurf — A Tale of Three Kitties

One night, a few months after moving into the house on Third Street while sitting outside on the deck on our wicker furniture with our fountain set up there, surrounded by palm trees and listening to the sound of the ocean, I suddenly shouted, “OMG! It’s our dining room from Teresa and Vasken’s!”

Inadvertently we had created a spell in that space intended to be a dining room in that apartment we loved. While there we put ourselves in Southern California surrounded by palm plants. It took us four years to bring it to fruition in Encinitas.

We don’t yet know the outcome of the spell Jon has cast here for us with his landscaping, the magic is still working and probably will for some time now, but we are more and more excited to find out.

I’ve been wearing my dragonfly pendant daily as a reminder to be open to the flow, be flexible, and operate from joy during this time of transformation. This gorgeous hummingbird was feasting on our yellow bells today sharing that we can travel great distances without tiring and to ask our faerie helpers for support along the way.

Join me at 5:00pm Pacific Time tonight, November 30th on Beyond the Ordinary Show with host and good friend, John Burgos. It’s a free program and will be so much fun. If you can not make it live, registering will get you the replay as soon as it’s available.

Edited to add:
You can now catch the replay here

P.S. I attended the Ojai City Council meeting Tuesday night and am still processing it. While the agenda was light, with only three items, the content was heavy. I need a bit more time before I can find the words to effectively communicate my perspective.

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