Hello friends,
Today’s flag, “Fun Factory,” is based on California poppies, small orange flowers that cover hills and dot roadsides in my region in early spring.
One Saturday morning in 2021, I sent my mother a picture of the graph paper design of a poppy-colored flag and 81 squares of cut fabric laid out by color. When I sent her a picture of the finished flag that afternoon, she typed back, “How did you do that so fast?”
“I put on music and pretended I was in a factory,” I wrote. It was a fun factory!
The prolific printmaker Andy Warhol called his studio The Factory. Jonathan Adler, a potter and creative mastermind behind his eponymous housewares brand, calls his studio The Fantasy Factory. In our machine age, it’s wonderful when someone puts their heart into making bright, colorful things and bringing them to the world with the help of many extra hands.
Drawing a card with Fun Factory on it is an attunement to the joy that occurs when we feel most certain about our purpose, so certain that others can participate and perhaps even carry out our plans for us.
Let’s look at today’s reading.
This photo was taken five days before my Papa’s passing after three months in hospice. White lilies are the favored flora at funerals, and these Calla lilies are a non-native species that hail from South Africa. Like the lilies, I have become part of a thriving cohort of non-native East Coast transplants living in California—perhaps because Papa took me here when I was thirteen.
It can be impossible to know all the effects an important person or event has on our lives. White lilies, as symbols of purity and innocence, encourage us to remove blame and restore the soul to its inherent perfection. The journey we share with another is uniquely ours, and it lives on in us even as we begin a new phase of life without them in physical form.
Any type of passing—a project, a season, or a living being—marks the beginning of a new stage.
The placement of Fun Factory with the white lilies reminds us to celebrate the joy in something that has passed, and to allow for all the beauty that’s possible in the rebirth.
What phase has passed? What’s being reborn? It might just be the earth you walk upon; winter officially passes when we reach the spring equinox on March 19!
The water in Cataract Creek never stops flowing. Riparian zones such as this one contain the inherent wisdom of the land, the continually evolving organic processes that cannot be averted or overlooked. Whether you live near a stream or not, Earth is always in the flow across seasons and centuries.
A tree fell years ago so that I could enjoy the sight of the It Takes All Kinds flag hanging from it while listening to a soundtrack of pounding water. As I stepped back and forth across the rocky stream to get the best photo, I was in a conversation across time with the original artist: Earth herself. The flag and I were literally in the flow.
In the Night position following the Rebirth card, Get in the Flow invites us to go with what’s new. When you’re in the flow, you’re not thinking about what has passed; instead, you intuitively incorporate the lessons from all kinds of things that happened and transform them into fresh actions.
These two cards give us the perfect Spring Equinox invocation.
Fresh actions and making waves
There’s a time for consistency, and there’s a time for fresh action. On Saturday I attended an all-day writing workshop at Point Reyes National Seashore. The nature talk about bears (an estimated five wild bears live in Marin County) prompted a memoiristic essay about my high school summers working at Clark’s Trading Post, which features a trained bear show. I was likely the only person in the room who spent hundreds of days working a hundred yards from live bears. One winter I slept in the bear trainer’s cabin, about 50 feet from hibernating bears.
The talk and the afternoon’s instruction on a new journaling technique made me aware of how differently I interact with nature than others.
The overall effect of the day was to remind me of the purity of my inclinations. Seeing how others view the world inspired me to take fresh actions on things I’m already doing. I can consistently be myself, the person who writes memoir, takes sunset hikes, and captures the waves in the sky. Fresh actions are not wholly new things; they involve sharing my work in different ways—like the three versions of waves in this email: sea, Photoshop, and sky.
May you be inspired to take fresh actions this week! Happy Spring!
Love, Lee Ann
P.S. Thanks to those of you who ordered custom Flag Oracle readings. I’m about to send them out; first I worked out the package by sending myself a sample. It looks like the image below. I’d love to batch the work by preparing one for you. Here’s a link to purchase.
Happy spring! I can't wait to give my sister-in-law her two card Oracle Flag readings on March 30th. Unique and precious.