Esoterica | Coyote Too

Speciality of the House (Apple Cheesecake)

Sun, 25 Apr 2010 22:40:19 -0400

My mother invented this recipe. Credit it to P.S.H.
Serves 12 (hah!)

	Crust	Topping
1 cup	W. Wheat Pastry Flour	½ cup	Buttermilk
¾ cup	Flaked Oats	6 oz.	Cream Cheese
½ cup	Butter, Melted	2	Eggs (or 1 Duck Egg!)
1 tsp	Cinnamon	2 tbsp	Honey
½ cup	Maple Syrup	2 tbsp	Maple Syrup
4 med	Apples	½ tsp	Vanilla
some	Nutmeg	1 pinch	Sea Salt

Directions:

Crust: Mix well and squish into pie plate. Peel and thinly slice 4 medium apples into crust. Sprinkle lightly with cinnamon and more lightly with nutmeg.

Topping: Mix well with egg beater and pour over apple filling. Sprinkle pinch of sea salt over the top and pop in a wood stove betwixt hot and very hot for approximately 1 hour.

High Energy Music

Wed, 23 Dec 2009 11:11:09 -0500

Today's completely random post. This is my "high-energy" playlist. The one I play when I want a boost in energy. This may jump from Rock to Classical to Celtic to Nerdcore, but they are all upbeat. Links will open a new window on Lala.com with a search for the song. Lala has a pretty good selection and will usually let you play the entire song once if it has it. If it can't find the song, try the artist, sometimes song title searches don't match exactly. Enjoy!

The table headers should be sortable once the page loads completely, your mileage may vary.

Playlist: High Energy 1647 songs, 4.5 days total time, 7.7 GB

Title	Artist	Album	Genre	Rating
Take on Me	A-HA	The Best of '80s Pop: Party Songs	Pop	✭✭✭✭✭
Super Trouper	A*Teens	The Abba Generation	Pop	✭✭✭✭
One of Us	A*Teens	The Abba Generation	Pop	✭✭✭✭
Voulez-Vous	A*Teens	The Abba Generation	Pop	✭✭✭✭
Take a Chance on Me	A*Teens	The Abba Generation	Pop	✭✭✭
The Name of the Game	A*Teens	The Abba Generation	Pop	✭✭✭
Bouncing off the Ceiling (Upside…

Timeskip

Thu, 10 Dec 2009 23:11:28 -0500

I'd promised @badbadgirlx that I'd record a bedtime story for her. I'm not certain if this is what she expected, but it was fun to do. It's one of my favorite short stories by Charles de Lint. It's sad, but very sweet. Like most of his stories, there is magic it in, both traditional and emotional, and music weaves through the story (de Lint himself is a fiddle player). So after I recorded it, I felt it needed a soundtrack of sorts. I was in a hurry and didn't do the best job I could have (I usually use SoundTrack Pro, and I couldn't seem to find how to fade individual pieces in GarageBand, but hopefully it captured some of the mood I was looking for).

The story is called Timeskip. It's from a wonderful collection of stories called Dreams Underfoot. If you haven't read de Lint, I highly recommend this book as a starting point. Purchase links to all the books and music referenced here are provided on the right.

Timeskip.mp3 (40MB, 27min)

The background songs, in order, are:

Evergreen,…

Drawing Happiness from Within

Wed, 10 Jun 2009 22:39:19 -0400

This is a reply, of sorts, to @SingleGal's post called "The Struggle." Like much in Charles de Lint's books, this describes a way to look things which has made me much more comfortable with myself and the world around me. I'm glad her article led me to this again. I should come back to it more often.

“I don't envy the music others hear anymore; I'm too filled with my own now, the strains that connect me to [the] people I love in my life. I'm not saying my world's suddenly become perfect. I've still got my ups and downs.…But whenever things get bad, all I do is slow down. I stop and listen to the music and then I can't help but appreciate what I do have.
It's funny what a difference a positive attitude can have. When you go out of your way to be nice to people, or do something positive for those who can't always help themselves…it comes back to you. I don't mean you gain something personally. It's just that the world becomes a little bit of a better place, the music becomes a little…

Artist Thought for the Day—Vision and Beauty

Mon, 04 May 2009 16:45:40 -0400

“Having a vision [cultural perspective] is a powereful thing. Creating art is imitating the gods. In that respect, everything you do has to be done in great reverence. You don’t do it casually. It’s not to be flagrantly marketed. I sometimes have a ceremony to acknowledge that vision. It’s like having your resume checked by the gods.

"For me, beauty is anything that stirs the soul, the emotion, whether it be grief, anger, joy, or melancholia. In Navajo, we say iina’ya’ hool zhho’. It means ‘an easing of the vision.’ Anything you see, your eyes ease into that, and your mind arranges it. We say nizhonigoo bil iina, the beauty that you live with, the beauty that you live by, the beauty upon which you base your life.

Shonto Begay (Navajo)

Modern Coyote

Mon, 26 Jan 2009 00:20:57 -0500

When we think of myths, we tend to think of things that are old (or primitive). But we still carry myths with us, and we create new ones all the time. We tell each other "urban myths", we pass on stories that we think have moral value, or that we just think are humorous. Some become part of our cultural lexicon, others disappear. Sometimes we think they are true, sometimes we think they are not, but often it doesn't matter. It's the story that matters, and the emotions that it engenders.

There's a tendency to think that this ability to identify our stories as "fact" or "fiction" is an attribute of modern culture; something that sets us apart from our superstitious ancestors. They didn't realize that these were "just" stories. But the fact is, they were just as aware of it as we are. Myths arise as readily from sudden inspiration as they do from the primordial ooze of creation. We have always known this.

What follows is a story from the forward (written by Barre Toelken) to "Giving…

Notes

Sun, 25 Jan 2009 22:23:23 -0500

Jan 25, 2009
On the off chance that you want to subscribe to all of the sections of this site, you're probably feeling a bit annoyed right now. I share your annoyance, but it was a question of starting to write, or waiting until I had the site perfect, so for now, this is how things are. When they change, I'll update the notes. Thanks for your patience.