Saille (Willow) - April 15 to May 12
The Willow in the Tree alphabet stands for the female and lunar rhythms of life. She is water-seeking, thriving from preference on the damp margins of lakes and streams or across the low-lying water meadows. Water and the tidal movements of the sea are governed by the pull of the moon. The moon in its monthly rhythms is female, contrasting with the male sun's daily and yearly turnings. In several ways, the Celts held women in higher regard than we do today. On the material level, women were property owners, and whoever controlled the property controlled the marriage. Women of all types and ages appeared in the Celtic pantheon, the spiritual strength and life-giving qualities given by both female and male recognized equally. There were may colleges of Druidesses - learned women and teachers - respected equally for their gifts of see-ship, often expressed through dreams, or night visions. Magical Associations: Romantic love, healing, protection, fertility, magic for women.
~ The Celtic Tree Calendar

I can't remember now how I landed on that page yesterday . . . oh, I know, it ("Willow") was noted on the calendar I have hanging beside my desk at home.

I like it a lot--"water-seeking," the pull of the moon, dreams and night visions.

I haven't been recording my dreams here very often, but I've been recording them almost every day on my Visor. I have a program called, not surprisingly, Dreams--just a simple program for recording a title and dream details, but I like having a special place for them. You can also record a quality (deep, medium or light), whether or not the dream was lucid, and a category (it comes set up with "Fantasy" and "Reality," but this is configurable, so conceivably you could set up categories for tracking how often you dream about work, for instance). I don't use any of these elements right now, I just use it to keep my dreams, so I don't forget them.

They haven't been particularly interesting, but even when they aren't, I'm always thrilled when I remember enough of one to have something to write down, and I've been doing pretty well lately.

One day last week I dreamed I found a bunch of money under my car. Well, "a bunch" being relative, meaning five or six pennies, two Mexican centavos and a couple of what I believe were Thai coins. Even in the dream, I realized that wasn't a lot of money, but I was trying to find enough to buy something from a vending machine, and I thought it might be enough, especially after I found a little, folded up bill that I thought might be worth as much as five dollars.

One of my beliefs/superstitions is that you should always pick up money you find on the street. I don't care if it's heads up or heads down, I just have this feeling that you don't turn down money that's freely given. A penny's a penny, not worth a whole lot on its own, but it always feels like good luck.

And just for the record, the old saying isn't "Find a penny, pick it up, and all the day you'll have good luck," it's "Find a pin." Which reminds me of the time I saw Doña sitting close to my sewing machine, and saw the glint of what I thought was probably a needle or pin in the carpet near her, and by the time I got over there, there wasn't anything like that.

Still, I hadn't had her very long, and like any new mom, I was panic stricken that something might happen to her, so I called the vet (not the vet we have now, but a different one), and asked, and he said if I would bring her in, he'd x-ray her.

So I took her in, then went to work, and worried until he called me. But what he told me when he called worried me even more--he said something like, "She's full of pins, there's all kinds of stuff in there," and while it didn't seem likely that she had eaten a whole pincushion full of pins, I didn't know what to think.

He said they would have to keep her overnight and feed her special food to facilitate the pins' passing out of her digestive tract, and they would monitor her closely.

I can't even remember now how, or who, realized that they weren't pins at all, but surgical staples that had been used when she had been spayed. By a different vet, or I would have been even more aggravated. As it was, I still had to pay for the special food.