The skin, the skein, and the stillpoint.

I'm standing on the deck of my new pad, a dirty martini in my hand as I look over the treetops to the southwest and enjoy the scramblings of the black squirrels amid the gradually baring branches. A gibbous moon is faintly visible in the late dusk, and I can smell a neighbour's fireplace through the faint autumn breeze. The calicos mewl around my legs. The kingsnake tightens her coiling grip around my forearm, her tail slowly fluttering at my wrist as she nuzzles her head under my shirt, under my arm, up my shoulderblade, and around to my warm neck.

Both of us have recently shed.

My schedule is normally very intense, and meditative moments such as this don't always come as often as I'd enjoy. Tasting olive brine and Italian vermouth, it occurs to me how much I'm letting go of, channeling through, reincarnating with. Moving my previous pad has been a struggle, as if shadowy, wraith-like hands did their very best to keep me rooted and captived and burdened. I am convinced, as was the Grrl before me, that Something Amiss had happened in the place. Perhaps the scrawled words STOP StOP stop on some of the exposed brickface was our first clue?

Not long after the move, my beloved iMac finally gave out, and I'm still largely without reliable online access. Certainly, it's affected the momentum for this blog, but it's also true that the resulting stillness has allowed me to go even deeper into my sense of renewal. Without cyberspace, I'm finding more time to enjoy the subtleties, like my martini in the slowly enshrouding autumn darkness as I ponder where, and with whom, I've been and where, and with whom, I intend to go.

It's what the Grrl would have called my stillpoint.

My new bed is one of my futons, and I'm enjoying being closer to the floor on its polished, light wooden frame. Kara was on her taut belly, but her hands were pressed to the floor and she gasped aloud, crying out as I held her deliciously small faerie ass while I fucked her from behind, her voice carrying through the hardwood floor. We broke the new place in.

And, it would seem, inspired my neighbours in the space directly below. A pair of delightfully jovial, zoftig, earthycrunchy, lesbian earth mothers, I could hear their cries of ecstatic bliss not long after Kara and I were gasping and quetly laughing with limbs akimbo.

Things are so good. I'm not used to this much good. I'm still shedding skins, still enjoying the Fates' gifts, and still in elements of stillness, but I also know that all is part of a growing kundalini coil.

The snake burrows further under my shirt, and she's coiling too, wrapping her body around my chest and abs, seeking warmth away from the evening breeze. An olive dances along my tongue as I raise the glass to my lips, looking at the moon and the constellations above and around me. I give thanks to the luminous moon. I face directions and offer blessings to those whom I love, present and not. I pat the serpent under my shirt affectionately and go back inside.