Merry meets everyone! It would seem we have made it through another winter. It is often believed that this Moon is called the Worm Moon because the soil is soft and warming and the worms start to pop from the earth and birds get their tasty little treat and life comes springing back! 

I drew a card with all of you in mind and found the Queen of Swords. She advises us to begin fostering practical wisdom and bring our winter fancies to life. So, wake up those muscles and rub the dream dust from your eyes. It's a brand new day. ​

​Dear ones,

This is the time of year when I start looking for magic. The time when I start digging into drawers or boxes. During the long winter it is easy to forget about the light, forget that things can bloom vibrant. It is easy to forget the feeling of finding a small flower growing alone at the base of a tree trunk, or a small treasure finding its way into your palm.  The smell of solid perfume trapped inside my great grandma’s locket lost to me inside a jewelry box. The fuzzy buds of apple trees. I think this is the reason Spring cleaning makes sense. Not just as a clearing out, making space for new growth. In garden beds as well as in your garage shelves or nightstand drawers.

There are tiny sprouts in the front bed of my house underneath the low windows. This will be my first spring in a new home. All of the sprouts hold the magic of the unknown. What will they become? What has grown here, ready to come again. How will we inhabit this space together, the sprouts and I? 

One of the ways I find magic in the restlessness of this shifting season, has become a ritual. Every year around this time, I watch 리틀 포레스트 (Little Forest). This movie is full of small magic. The joy of small sprouts and slow cooked food eaten with company. Every year this movie reminds me to look for the small remnants left in the cupboards, to remember my ability to create from scant stores and deep hunger. 


“If I stay till the spring’s spirits break through the winter, will I find my answers?”

긴 겨울을 뚫고 봄에 작은 정령들이 올라오는 그때까지 있으면 해답을 찾을 수 있을까

—Hye-won (리틀 포레스트)

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The Worm moon marks the true stirring of spring, the little critters deep under the earth beginning to shimmy their way up toward the light again, feeding birds and tilling the earth from within. There is an energy humming within us, a waking and a shimmying outwards after a season of deep work. As your internal thawing and stretching begins, how can you bring your attention to the small joys, awaken to delight and life again as if wiggling your fingers at the end of a long meditation? The following is a bibliomancy offering from Catalog of Unabashed Gratitude. Ross Gay’s work is a space where I can always find the power of small joys, and I hope this helps activate your delight muscles.

excerpt from “Patience”

and yes, it is spring, if you can’t tell
from the words my mind makes
of the world, and everything
makes me mildly or more
hungry— the worm turning
in the leaf mold; the pear blooms
howling forth their pungency
like a choir of wet-dreamed boys
hiking up their skirts; even
the neighbor cat’s shimmy
through the grin in the fence,
and the way this bee
before me after whispering
in my ear dips her head
into those dainty lips
not exactly like entering a chapel
and friends
as if that wasn’t enough
blooms forth with her forehead dusted pink
like she has been licked
and so blessed
by the kind of God
to whom this poem is prayer.


As the moon ripens to its full silver glow on the 18th, on the precipice of the Spring Equinox, I want to draw you back to ritual, to small joy and its ability to sustain. What fills you up when you feel emptied out in the pursuit of answers?

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To welcome you into the collective shifting of warmth and energy in our world, I give you another bibliomantic offering. This one from Monty Don’s Down to Earth, which has become another ritual space for me in this season. 

“I don’t think that anything makes me happier than an April evening spent preparing the ground and sowing veg seeds for a summer harvest while the garden settles gradually around me. All winter, the ground lies cold and wet, but when that clammy chill in the hand is replaced by warmth, and as the soil responds to the caress of a rake preparing a tilth, it is as though I am returned to the rightful earth.”

How can you build small patterns into your day to fill yourself up? What generosity is already in front of you, waiting to be accepted? What seeds can you plant now, under the light of the full moon that will allow you to feed yourself and others? 

These seeds and rituals are small things, repetitive and vivid. How can you keep your hands dug into their soil to feel their warmth on your skin? How do you wait for them to germinate, to sprout? 


“Potatoes are planted first in the spring. 
봄에 처음 심는 것 중에 감자가 있다

Though it is cold, the ground’s warmth pushes the potato sprouts out. 
아직 춥지만 땅 속 옮기는 감자 싹을 품어 밖으로 튀어 낸다

The sprouts, the flowers, and bearing crop… 
싹이 나오고 꽃이 피고 열매를 맺는

it all takes time. 
타이밍이다

You have to wait. 
기다린다

You must wait. 
기다린다

Wait. 
기다려

You have to wait to taste the best food. 
기다릴 줄 알아야 최고로 맛있는 음식 맛 볼 수 있어

You can get spring greens for free, but potatoes take hard work.”
봄나물은 빵이나 나무에서 공을 얻지만 잠자는 노동과 땀이 필요하다

​—Hye-won (리틀 포레스트)

I feed the lies, dismantled feud of underworld. A rooster and its constellation consume the faults and a promise of wants in our sacraments. An open symphony unknowing in its
seam. We have no sound and the structure is boxed in winter split/spit. Old, Dividing, Bow, Door. Create, Open, Guard, Threshold. We keep the ones we love in the walls. Our homes, a jail — so we return to be yielding at the hearth: white bread and mayonnaise offered. Winter's door, thumbprint on a windeye's light, cage bearers. Bird's wings, a sheath not through the world. Embodied in the snore of family conjoined — the bone: clavicle, holds us with a bent iron pin, as if to say: I have and you have not. The unowned edges of a number; some wheel of the year bent into an origami of I have not and you have. When my eyes are closed, a virus bellows, the pink sponge squeezes vinegar over christ. Some wagon of doom rattles the frame of this house, our mystery recedes, it makes less sense, this mimicry mouth. Render. I give back.I have not, and you have not. Let this misgiving be named. Make jam and hang it on Christmas amber. Thy genome does without borders. Different, make different. We eat of cod memory, red fatty fish, the eggs shed will not hover high. Iron weights our bones. The open heart, a cabinet without. Schemes endured for provision. They feed me still and still me.


wi
sh
95.







"That's an uncertain smile.” its a wince I think, but pull back the curtain mid sentence, there is change of channels --
foliage spills from your mouth, an owl takes a snake ancestor in the sickbed wishes.
there's a something— static decades scratched from the skull in yellow: the pupils saw color.
A dust worm — locust, swell the night class lights illuminate deer eyes;
Roses on horn tip by nightstand on this corridor of junctures
it's there.
I rode Red bike through lace, closing gates.
that's not a tree for
I know there is a biting cruel, it ripens
a lark— being your song is always gesture
I thread a corolla between this stranger, their gut fiends for a homing beacon. Every single buttermilk shrunk between ten this morning and close at your local grocery store is waiting for you to open the door. It resists: spell; I page for grocery to release the bone mouse to run free along the sky shelves in fecund curving streams. Saturn circles the moon — a road beyond Santragachi is marking you home--
winds stutter, fatigued beyond autonomy
conceding to a glory hole hospitality state
I was told, explicitly, not to leave this booth. You say
don't follow me
from here follow me
from here
I rode Red bike through
lace,
seven refugees, guards at half doors, shipping bots, groomed seniors--
it's there.
in caves and paddocks and soil, by ten or now, an opening named something like “it's not there.” maybe like bones until new plan can advert, prism and grain concuss — sludge, them; I in riding hollow steer something rougher.
I is voice with roll base murmur “Da”, passed through mine, stay in mouth for some to get or eject.
I am granted line authority, receive burn victims at dusk on strobe ribbon of road— a reclamation project.

Matt Wedlock is father to Shae River, partner to Kristen Wedlock, adjunct professor, grocery store clerk, astrologer, and is a graduate of Naropa's Jack Kerouac School of (Dis)embodied Poetics 2012. M. can be found @honeyandseaweed on Instagram & honeysucklesea.squarespace.com.

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