Sunday, March 31, 2013

Only a Fresh Mistake



There's a race of men that don't fit in,
A race that can't stay still;
So they break the hearts of kith and kin,
And they roam the world at will.
They range the field and they rove the flood,
And they climb the mountain's crest;
Theirs is the curse of the gypsy blood,
And they don't know how to rest.

If they just went straight they might go far;
They are strong and brave and true;
But they're always tired of the things that are,
And they want the strange and new.
They say: "Could I find my proper groove,
What a deep mark I would make!"
So they chop and change, and each fresh move
Is only a fresh mistake.

And each forgets, as he strips and runs
With a brilliant, fitful pace,
It's the steady, quiet, plodding ones
Who win in the lifelong race.
And each forgets that his youth has fled,
Forgets that his prime is past,
Till he stands one day, with a hope that's dead,
In the glare of the truth at last.

He has failed, he has failed; he has missed his chance;
He has just done things by half.
Life's been a jolly good joke on him,
And now is the time to laugh.
Ha, ha! He is one of the Legion Lost;
He was never meant to win;
He's a rolling stone, and it's bred in the bone;
He's a man who won't fit in.

No bucks, no Buck Rogers


"Deer on the Loose" decorative firescreen



"We have lost the hearth where we sat with our grandparents who told the stories. We have replaced the hearth with the television set. No hearth, no heart. No sense of continuity. No sense of the great connectivity. No sense of the great chain of being between generations without which civilization perishes.” ~ Jean Houston, Timewave 2013


Self-Raising Power: The Particular Sadness of Lemon Cake




Maternal deprivation is the absence of care, lack of affection, holding, looking into your child’s eyes giving the message: “I love you so much”, listening intently to your daughter’s messages, verbal and nonverbal. The narcissistic non-mother removes all the joy from her daughter’s life. Narcissistic mothers live for themselves alone. Often they are envious of their daughter’s beauty, talents, intelligence, exuberant personality. They hate their child’s spontaneity and pick away with their nasty criticisms.


Some daughters learn to conceal their true feelings. Others become emotionally numb. Some harbor a deep mother rage inside that they turn on themselves and becomes self loathing.


Daughters of narcissistic mothers have difficult life struggles, learning to fully love their unique selves and celebrating it. 

 
To break the yoke attached to the narcissistic mothers they must recognize that they bear no fault.
 
They are separate from the cold ungiving selfish self absorbed woman who didn’t raise them. These daughters do the hard work of healing themselves and emerging as strong, loving, gifted women. Many benefit from psychotherapy, nurturing relationships with friends who understand them, spiritual practices that create calmness deep within them,creative pursuits that are healing and transformative, giving their care and affection to others who feel unloved and unwanted.


Daughters of narcissistic mothers can and do come fully into the own true identities. They can prevail over the past and live fully in the present, expanding and growing all of their potential.


Linda Martinez-Lewi, Ph.D.

Saturday, March 30, 2013

Ordinary memory. Everyday......Beauty



Everyday Beauty


When I die don’t let them keep the bones
to marvel at the load they bore;
nor the ashes to wonder at the quantity.
 
Don’t offer them the parts that work,
so that others, nearer life, can share the pain.
 
Break the bones, and spread the ashes
under a lemon tree and roses.
 
Let me at last bring scent and savour
to the weary lives of those who loved me.
 
When I die I want to be an ordinary memory.

Doris Leadbetter 1927-2004

Eager Feet: Easter Saturday

 
It's a dangerous business, Frodo, going out your door. You step onto the road, and if
you don't keep  your feet, there's no knowing where you might be swept off to ~ Bilbo Baggins
 
 
 
The Road goes ever on and on
Down from the door where it began.
Now far ahead the Road has gone,
And I must follow, if I can.
Pursuing it with eager feet,
Until it joins some larger way
Where many paths and errands meet.
And whither then?  I cannot say.
 
 

Turning the Corner: Gabo Island

Gabo Island, Mallacoota, Victoria
 
 
Spurred on by the discovery of goldfields, settlements in Victoria and New South Wales were growing rapidly in the 1850s. The American steam ship SS Monumental City, the first steam passenger ship to cross the Pacific, was sent to Australia to provide a transport link for passengers travelling between the burgeoning cities of Melbourne and Sydney.
 
The Monumental City undertook its maiden Australian voyage, leaving Sydney in May 1853, to transport passengers to the Victorian goldfields. But it was the be the ship's only successful Australian Voyage. The return trip, which left Melbourne on May 13, ran aground on Tullaberga Island, between Mallacoota Inlet and Gabo Island, off the coast of East Gippsland.

The weather turned bad and the ship began to break up, claiming the lives of an estimated 37 passengers and crew.

The tragic event caused a public outcry and much pressure was put on the Government of the day to reignite plans to build a lighthouse on Gabo Island.



The island is only 5 kms in circumference and the light tower is in the top left hand corner in this picture. It is practically solid pink granite with a heavy covering of sand and native flora.

"That (the wreck of the Monumental City) really pushed things along. They put a temporary lighthouse up which ran for about six or eight years and while that was running they constructed this new tower that's the existing one we look at today - the iconic Gabo Island granite lighthouse," Mr op den Brouw says.  "It is a stunningly beautiful tower, really graceful curves.  Many consider it to be Australia's most graceful tower.  The pink granite looks great, especially on a sunny, red sunrise or a red sunset; it's just stunning."
 





For almost 150 years, the lighthouse has played a crucial navigational role for vessels travelling Australia's east coast.

"The vision was that the coastline be like a series of streetlights, that any vessels following the coastline could follow the streetlights from one safe shelter to another," says Mr op den Brouw.


"It's quite a critical part of the coastline. Certainly in the early days of sail ships, when there weren't too many lights around, there were quite a lot of wrecks on the coastline here and if were to go back and look at the archives we'd find there would be over 100 various sized vessels that have been lost in this area - some simply due to storms , but others to navigational errors.
 




It's the point on the coastline, if you are travelling from Melbourne to Sydney, it's the corner of the continent where if you are travelling north-east you turn and head north to get to Sydney, quite often boats would turn north a little bit too soon and run into something very hard. It's played a very important role. It's on that juncture of the continent."

 

Petra, Jordan - photo swiped from Dr. Luis Barrera who
has asteroid 19395 named after him.




Friday, March 29, 2013

Terrapsychology & Chaucer

artwork by Mychael Barratt
 


Terrapsychology is a multidisciplinary set of approaches for investigating the deep connections between us and the presence of our animate, sentient, and reactive Earth.

These approaches represent:
1. A call to conscious re-emplacement: coming home to where we live in a deep way by discovering how the places where we live function as facets of our own psychological life and well-being.


2. A methodology (Terrapsychological Inquiry) for demonstrating the mutuality between human wholeness and planetary health. Terrapsychology started as the study of mostly unconscious interactions between the deep human psyche and the psychologically animated presence, or “soul,” of place and the things within it. The orienting root is Story: Story as a weave connecting people to place. The story of a locale includes how its empirical, ecological, cultural, personal, and even folkloric dimensions gather into a meaningful narrative anchored in its unique geography.

 
3. A program of healing the cultural split between self and world that underlies the environmental crisis through education on a variety of perspectives that bring psychology into the environmental crisis discussion, diagnose the crisis, and offer sustainable alternatives.


4. A practice of understanding a place’s sufferings and health from inside its stories while experiencing one’s own story as part of the place’s (“heartsteading”). This includes training and practice in researching the details of particular places—terrain, history, ecology, lore—so that people who live there bond with them strongly and begin cycles of mutual healing. Because these places take on the qualities of the psychological field or “life space” of the inhabitants, heartsteaders treat the land and its features, soils, water, animals, etc. as living things deeply implicated in their psychological life, just as they inhabit the place’s.


5. A genre for writing movingly and even poetically about the living presence of places and things.


6. An invitation to dream up a “new myth” for the kinds of Earth-based communities that match our needs and deepest desires. This myth involves the collective creation of a truly planetary psychology that offers a meaningful vision of where we belong in the world.



The orienting root around which terrapsychological research turns is Story: Story as a weave connecting people to place. Even the body's connection to the land is storied, imagined, fantasied in the depths. The terrapsychological approach seeks to learn the many-sided story of a particular locale by discerning how its empirical, ecological, cultural, personal, and even folkloric dimensions tend to gather into a meaningful narrative framework anchored in its unique geography.

The uncanny aliveness of the locations we inhabit seems to be the rule rather than the exception. It’s as though what the conscious mind sees as dead places and things, the unconscious reacts to as animated presences and metaphors. Borderlines and borderlands, polluted bays and polluted moods, personal complexes and apartment complexes all seem to resonate together. This should not surprise us. Not only can events in the world symbolize aspects of the human self, those aspects in turn point back to the features of the world that evolved our minds.

 
Terrapsychology also takes on the questions which mainstream, empire-era psychology and psychiatry have demonstrated themselves incapable of tackling:

 
 What is Earth asking of me?


Text by Craig Chalquist PhD
 

Thursday, March 28, 2013

To Sir With Love: Full Moon in Libra

Delta Chi fraternity statue of "Vulcan" stolen on June 10 2007


When I was a little kid in primary school, 9 years old, one day the teacher told us about Pompeii and Mt Vesuvius.  I eagerly raised my hand, excited to have something to contribute, excited about having something I could share.  Sir, Sir! my father said he saw Mt Vesuvius erupt.

I can remember Sir barely glancing at me before scoffing his disbelief and how the other kids erupted into raucous laughter and hissed insutls as Sir informed me that my father must be mistaken because Mt Vesuvius erupted a very long long time ago and for my father to have seen that, he must be over 1000 years old!! 

My little cheeks burned with embarrassment and the ridiule was enough to insure that I went through the rest of my schooling, primary and secondary, very reticent when it came to participating in class discussion.  There are five years worth of high school reports in which most of my teachers recorded that I was a quiet student who needed to participate in class discussion. 

You might be able to imagine how I felt as an 9 year old being lectured to by an authority -  Sir - in an educational setting, that my father most likely told a Big Fat Lie about seeing Mt Vesuvius erupt.
My father was a man of few words - very few words.  When he said anything, his words carried more importance because of their rarity and I did not question whether what he told me was accurate or not.  I was a child. It was the task of other adults to cast doubt, to arch an eyebrow in reponse to my father's words and actions.  On that front Sir descended to the occasion.



B-25s from the 447th Squadron of the 321st Bombardment Group passing near erupting Mt Vesuvius on their way to bomb targets, March 1944.

On the matter of Mt Vesuvius: my dad did see that ancient volcano belch and clear its throat. The last time Mt Vesuvius erupted was on 18 March 1944 - during World War II.  My father served with the RAF as a Leading Aircraftsman.  For reasons that have been lost in time, he was in Italy at an RAF airfield in March 1944.  It is probable that with the extent of damage done to the planes of the US 340th Bombardment Group that calls went out for all available LAC to come to Italy to assist with repairing the ash-dusted planes. My father was stationed in Ceylon and probably hitched a ride to Naples. Who knows: these are the little stories that fall between the cracks of the bigger stories.

My father saw Mt Vesuvius erupt in 1944AD not 79AD.  Dad wasn't specific enough: that's all.  If he had said to me, I saw that volcano erupt in 1944, I may have made a different impression and received a more considerate response from Sir on a later occasion.  That is pure speculation on my part of course.  The reality was that my father saw a good deal of the world and the remark about seeing Mt Vesuvius stands out as the only time he made a reference to his life Before Now. Now being 1970.

There is a the yearly class photograph which helps me to remember Sir. He looks an arrogant twenty-something man with pretty-boy looks and a snappy style of dressing which camoflaged, or accessorised, his detached and offhand style of teaching.  I suspect there was probably a Portrait of Sir hidden in his attic in the fashion of Dorian Gray.

The year was 1970, I was 9 years old and had once again been pulled abruptly out of school and shoved off to the country to stay with maternal relatives. In my desk at school, were all my textbooks and belongings and a weeks later, maybe a couple of months, when I returned to class: somebody else was sitting in my desk and all my things were missing. Stolen.

I protested to Sir and he could not have cared less.  Could not have cared less that the belongings of one of his female students had been pilfered on his watch and that his authority and position as teacher obligated him with a duty-of-care to find the culprits, to get to the bottom of the matter.  Il problema ignorato...   It is seared on my memory the shock I felt, followed by a keen sense of Sir not being fair before a yawning sense of desolation settled over me with the thought, Why doesn't Sir  believe me? 

What does a child know about the defence mechanism of adult denial? 

I have no memory of being instructed to go to the Principal's office.  Of being taken to the Principal's office to lodge a report of theft of my belongings, the removal of valuable and necessary textbooks from my desk.  A crime had been committed: did nobody care?




That teacher was the worst of humans in my book: a "shruggie".  One of those individuals who stands by and does nothing.  A bystander.  That subspecies of humanity whose inactions deserve to be neither rationalized, accepted or tolerated. This was a man who had gone through teacher training collage, had a piece of paper that qualified him to teach and he had been given an authority that he was too wet-behind-the-ears, or to ambivalent to know how to wield. 

Then there is the fact that people don't know how to respond when a 'ghost' addresses them.  And I was a ghost.   I can see that now.  I had suddenly disappeared off the face of the daily routine of primary school class.  Nobody knew where I had gone, or how long I would be gone for.  I was dead-in-life and then I came back and I was shunned.

My disappearance from the daily sameness of attending school was a direct result of my mother's latest suicide attempt.  In those days nobody talked and nobody knew that my father and I lived on the slopes of a volcano, and that neither of us knew when it was going to erupt or for how long. 

I remember Sir.  I bet my shift that he was a proper arsehole to the women in his life.  I look at his face from across the distance of four decades and detect the curling sneering upper lip of a man practiced in that most insidious of abuses: of gaslighting, of stonewalling, of turning-the-tables.  That people of his ilk attain positions in which they have access to young minds is one of those banalities of evil. We all have our sticky stories of that icky Teacher.

Niet praten maar doen

"Actions, not words" or "Dont prattle, act"


1970 was a highly tumultuous and brutal year for me and my parents. The loss of my belongings, the talk-to-the-hand response of that Teacher, registered as rape.  A roughshod trampling of my rights on multiple levels.  I was raped by the patriarchal model when I was nine years old.  Held down and serially raped by a culture steeped in values that are invisible to the eyes of children.  What I know is that I did the right thing.  I did what I had been told to do if I had a problem. To talk to the teacher and ask for help in solving my problem. I did that.  I did the right thing and I was told to find somewhere else to sit, to ask one of the kids to share their textbook with me, to be quiet and then Sir  said that I had missed a lot of school and I couldn't expect any special treatment.  Il problema ignorato


1960s classroom

I think we all remember the teacher that throws us under the bus. 

As I work through the passage of perimenopause, on my way to becoming Crone, new insights emerge on a daily basis.  I am within the volcano of my womanhood: I am sifting through the 'burning fields' of my lived experience and the past I lived in the company of a man -  my father-  who was a flawed individual with many faults. 

A flawed individual who did see Mt Vesuvius when it last erupted and that must have been way cool......and scary. 

I will think no more on Mr Warfe-Sir-other than how odd it was for a young man to be a primary school teacher in 1970 when so many other young Australian men had been drafted into National Service and were serving in Viet Nam.


The lava flow of Autumn in Bright, Victoria


Friday, March 30, 1944

"The eruption seems to have abated very slowly during the past few days. Cinders and ashes have been raining down over all the villages in this section, but seem to be slowing up. The smoke from the crater is apparently changing from the intense black to white again. Yesterday, I looked at the Autostrade through my glasses, and it is apparently covered with cinders as is the entire mountainside. Only two weeks ago, I rode up the Autostrade and then walked several hundred yards up toward the crater. Yesterday afternoon, we rode in the ambulance, and, on the way back, we took a shortcut via Pompeii. Bulldozers were plowing the cinders to the side of the road in huge banks. Practically all the gardens and vineyards are covered to a tremendous depth in the area all the way from Vesuvius to Salerno. Many people are homeless and without food, but they seem to take it in stride, just as the Northerners take the snow in winter. After this eruption it’s easy to visualize the destruction of Pompeii - a most amazing and uncanny phenomenon. From my quarters I can still see what appears to be small areas with smoking lava, but the smoke from the crater has abated. Today, the wind is blowing inland, and it appears that cone is much lower than before. Vesuvius is definitely not dead after all these years of inactivity.”
Source text from: The Mount Vesuvius Eruption of March 1944 - Warwings
VolcanoGeek.


Stolen fraternity statue recovered Delta Chi’s bronze Vulcun found after reward offerBy Gwyneth Gibby Gazette-Times reporter

Tuesday, March 26, 2013

Transforming Medusa




“to look at the Medusa straight on to see her. And she’s not deadly. She’s beautiful and she’s laughing.”


Write, let no one hold you back, let nothing stop you: not man; not the imbecilic capitalist machinery, in which publishing houses are the crafty, obsequious relayers of imperatives handed down by an economy that works against us and off our backs; and not yourself.

Now women return from afar, from always: from "without," from the heath where witches are kept alive; from below, from beyond "cul-ture"; from their childhood which men have been trying desperately to make them forget, condemning it to "eternal rest." The little girls and their "ill-mannered" bodies immured, well-preserved, intact unto themselves, in the mirror.

Frigidified.

But are they ever seething underneath! What an effort it takes-there's no end to it-for the sex cops to bar their threatening return. Such a display of forces on both sides that the struggle has for centuries been immobilized in the trembling equilibrium of a deadlock. Here they are, returning, arriving over and again, because the un-conscious is impregnable.
~ Helene Cixous, The Laugh of the Medusa, 1975


Medusa, Audrey Flack, 1991


Medusa's transformations from beautiful maiden to monster and from monster to emblem, are thus both forced on her by males, each of whom is assisted by the masculine goddess [Athene] whose temple Medusa defiles and on whose aegis she will be placed. ~ Charlotte Currie


Elizabeth A. Sackler Centre for Feminist Art, Brooklyn Museum
Healing and Medusa: Shedding the Stigma of the Gorgon Myth - Owlmirror

She Loosened Her Hair and He Kissed its Waves in the Moonlight

textile art "Blonde, lifted" by Inge Stahl


It is written that Loki Laufeyarson, out of sheer malice, once cut off all of Sif's hair, and when Thor heard of it, he grabbed Loki and was about to break every bone in his body until he promised to have the black elves make a head of hair for Sif from gold, one that would grow like real hair.

The emotionally charged triangle of Sif, Loki and Thor is all the more evident in the eddic poem Lokasenna, when Sif tries to placate Loki in the midst of his malicious wrangling: "Then Sif approached, offered Loki mead from a crystal cup and said: 'Hail now, Loki, accept this crystal cup, full of antique mead. Better find one woman, among the AEsir's sons, who is without fault.'

He accepted the horn and drank it down: 'You'd be the one, if only you were wary and cautious with men; but I know someone, it seems to me, who made you unfaithful to Thor, and that one was crafty-wise Loki."
Sif signifies summer Fertility and corn, hence Loki's cutting of her hair is interpreted as a fire destroying a corn field. Sifs name is cognate with the German sippe, meaning "kith and kin." From this we may assume that, like Frigga, Sif is a goddess associated with peace and friendship in a happy family, and with conjugal fidelity.

Don't believe everything you read.

Text sourced from Valkyrie Tower


Runes compatible with sif are Berkana and Inguz.
 
 
Rune of isolation or separation in order to create a space or place where the process of transformation into higher states of being can occur. Rune of gestation and internal growth.  Inguz represents the Great Mother.  She is the sacred power of female sexuality. When she appears in your spread, the counsel is to honour your own sexuality and recognise it as a source of magic.

 
“One is not born, but becomes, a woman.” — Simone de Beauvoir
 

The Journey is Home

textile sculpture "Mute Servant" by Inge Stahl
 
Be an empowered woman, a citizen of planet Earth in a pervasively patriarchal time/space, whose power is emerging full force through the aegis of other women as She moves into and beyond........  Nelle Morton 1905-1987
 


Biography of Nelle Katherine Morton

 
 

Monday, March 25, 2013

A Mythic Life : Gene Tierney

Gene Tierney

On 6 June 1943, a conjunction of Sun with Saturn in Gemini squared Gene Tierney's natal Jupiter in Virgo opposing natal Moon conjunct Uranus in Pisces.

At some stage in June 1943, brushing aside advice to not attend, Gene would make her only appearance at the Hollywood Canteen.  There she would shake hands with a woman serving in the military, who brushing aside the rules of her medical quarantine, would infect her 'favourite actress' with rubella virus.

Gene Tierney was in the first-to-second trimester of pregnancy with her child Antoinette Daria Cassini, who would be born premature on 15 October 1943, weighing less than 4lbs and needing a total blood transfusion. Daria was born partially blind, entirely deaf, severely retarded and spent the majority of her life within institutionalized care. Daria's father, Oleg Cassini, "King of Bridal" would pick up the tab for the most part.  Howard Hughes would prove himself a kind, generous and loyal friend to Gene.

Daria Cassini died just before her 67th birthday on September 11 2010.  She is survived by her youngest sister, Tina; two nieces and two nephews, and six grandnieces and nephews.

The argument continues between the anti-vaccination league of mothers, who fear their children may develop autism, and the Department for Public Health & Safety who are advised by expert microbiologists and immunologists.

Gene Tierney wrote of her anguish over Daria's fate in her autobiography 'Self-Portrait' and her own eventual decline into mental illness, delusions and emotional collapse and the popular treatments of the 1950s.  Treatments that my own mother endured in 1950s Australia.

I recall how as a child I had a prominent vaccination scar on my upper arm that I was self-conscious about because the children at primary school would tease me about it: like it was a witches mark.  I don't know if I had an adverse reaction to my baby/early childhood vaccinations.  I have no idea what medications my mother, who had manic depression, was taking whilst pregnant with me. 

There just wasn't the awareness then of the hazards and risks with pharmaceuticals.  Those were the days when medical science was still figuring things out.  The doctors told Gene Tierney that there was no risk to her child-in-utero from the bout of rubella she had contracted.  Maybe the doctors didn't want to dash Gene's hopes. 

The fact is, if they had told her the truth, had told her there was an 85% chance her child would be born severely disabled, then Gene and Oleg could have considered their options.  Terminating the pregnancy on medical grounds being one of them.

Oleg Cassini called his first wife the "unluckiest lucky woman in the world". 

Gene Tierney filmed 'The Ghost and Mrs Muir" not long after being  encouraged to place her first-born daughter, Daria, into care.  That movie is a perennial favourite of mine.  How hard, and Hollywood-cruel, must it have been for Gene to play the mother of young daughter (Natalie Wood) in a chocolate-box perfect story of female independance in the late 19th century.

Back then it was felt that the best practice in the event of personal crisis was to "keep busy to take your mind off things".  Gene Tierney was kept so busy in the early 50s that she lost her mind completely.

We can only hope that 'best practice' has gotten a whole lot better in the 21st Century.  Now, more than at any other time, is it essential for people and families experiencing extreme personal crises to shield themselves against the inevitable pathologizing of emotional responses that are appropriate to the life circumstances which have altered.

Being touted as one of the most beautiful women of her time and then giving birth to an 'imperfect' child was a solid shattering of any notions Gene had of living the fairy-tale life with Count Cassini.

When the gods come calling, nothing prepares you for the form in which they'll arrive. 

 

Wednesday, March 20, 2013

Sapphire Blue: a sterile hybrid

Thirsty bees and wasps drinking from fountain pond - Norton Conyers, Yorkshire
 
 
 
Norton Conyers is believed to have been the inspiration for Charlotte Bronte’s Jane Eyre. The author came here in 1839 and describes the secret staircase used by Mr Rochester as a short cut to the attic where Mrs Rochester was incarcerated so, when, a blocked staircase was discovered in 2004, it created much excitement. The author is also believed to have based her idea for the mad Mrs Rochester on one of the family's aunts who was ill and confined to a garret.
 
 
 
 
How Stean Gorge, Yorkshire
 
 
One cold winter day a fisherman had gone out to sea. It began to grow stormy when he was about to return and he had trouble enough to clear himself. He then saw, near his boat, and old man with a long gray beard, riding on a wave. The fisherman knew well that it was the merman he saw before him, and he knew also what it meant. 
 
“Uh, then, how cold it is!” said the merman as he sat and shivered, for he had lost one of his hose.
 
The fisherman pulled off one of his, and threw it out to him. The merman disappeared with it, and the fisherman came safe to land. Some time after this, the fisherman was again out at sea, far from land. All at once the merman stuck his head over the gunwale, and shouted out to the man in the boat,

“Hear, you man that gave the hose,
Take your boat and make for shore,
It thunders under Norway.”
The fisherman made all the haste he could to get to land, and there came a storm the like of which has never been known, in which many were drowned at sea.
 
The Fisher and the Merman
From Scandinavian Folklore, ed William Craigie, 1896
 
 
 
Bees working the Sea-Holly
 
 
'Sapphire Blue' is a garden cultivar with the largest flowers of any sea holly. It is not invasive. The wild form of E. planum is capable of being too aggressive in the Northwest, but 'Sapphire Blue' is a sterile hybrid.
 
Latter image and text swiped from Beautiful North Yorkshire
Folklore migrated from Seven Miles of Steel Thistles