At that time I severely needed to return to grounding in my soul, to recover and discover a strong, guiding story — to find my own Medicine Tree.

In this past year and a half I have indeed found new ground and restored or re-story-ed myself to my own nature. I am still very much guided by Mystery and grace and surrender, but find the journey (mostly!) to be one of joy, wonder, surprise. When the darkness and questions and pain and griefs resurface — as they always will — I know that gifts in the loss will reveal themselves, in their right timing. I know how to restore myself to the much larger reality around me — or perhaps it’s more precise to say: I know that I can find harmony within myself and with the larger creation — in time. I can trust in the process and gifts of struggle, though of course I’d prefer to live mostly in the joys!

Jane’s Medicine Tree was a wandering into my landscape of story and dreams to uncover the gold nuggets of truth that have been before me all my life. Before me all my life, but ultimately a far different more resonant expression than I’d ever dreamed. It is as if with each layer of learning and discovery we uncover ever-more potent truths about what the nature of the world really is. Or it might be more precise to say that I experience an ever more alive music, ever-richer in overtones and harmony. My questions remain and continue in cascade. The universe is a deeper mystery than ever, but I’m guided by a music, an image, a scrap of many-colored tapestry, an illuminated landscape that is the Otherworld of my heart.

It is time for me to step out of this story, and to step more resolutely, trustingly into another. A vista has opened that compels my wild heart to no longer just dip my toes in the water, but to dash and leap and plunge across to discover the voices of the land, the plants, the trees, the ancestors, and village, and the music of the world soul and the magic of tale that lives on the other side.

Please join me there if you’d like at:
Singing Deer Healing
and at
Moms Create Culture
… whichever path(s) call to you. Ultimately they are two expressions of the same pathway over the golden hill and into the bright country beyond.

Thank you for joining my story here. Gracias and many blessings as you walk your own story and experience its sweep of wondrous magic!

I’ve been pretty quiet on my blogs.  But lots of hammering, and tussling, and designing has been going on.  Let me just say that I’m going to have a couple of things to announce at the end of the week.

In a way, I find myself exasperated (though happy).  I’ve mentioned in other posts how crazy I feel sometimes with the many things I love to do, and can’t figure out how to do them all in forms that make sense to me (and anyone else?), and then I went and created even more websites and blogs …!  How was I ever going to tend to all these creations?

What’s happened is that I’ve surrendered–finally–to my nature.  And in the process a few insights have dropped like gold nuggets into my hand, and I just understand how to move forward.  Finally.  On many fronts.

It’s like the entire village in me has finally stopped fussing and nay-saying and offering suggestions and criticisms (which did indeed need to be evaluated!), and they’ve unexpectedly reached consensus.  A hush fills my mind, and all the parts of me are looking at each other, shrugging and saying silently — okay, let’s just get on with it.

More exists to the story than that.  Or maybe not.  Maybe my story is just a simple one really of just trying to find the right form, the most authentic expression, the most rooted, strong, resiliant place from which to step.  Maybe we just have to tussle with our demons and have endless meetings with our clever selves, and scribble ideas and revise them, and then discover that we’re writing down the same things again and again.

Maybe at some place we (hopefully) all realize we’re doing that, writing down the same things over and over, and then something shifts, or we shift, just step into another place in the room–or maybe out the front door and into the open air.  We just breathe and know things from a different place of knowing.  A shake of our shoulders and we know it’s time to set thinking — of that kind — aside and start doing what we knew all along we were going to do.

The feel is different though.  And maybe we really couldn’t have done it back then.  Certainly not in this way.

We finally believe in our lives.  In the particular sweep or flourish of our story.

Anyway, it’s time to have fun.

Are you in a place where you can have fun?   Is there a place you’ve been spinning in your life, that has felt stuck, stuck, stuck?  Maybe it’s time.  Maybe there’s a way open right now, to just stepping out that door and doing/being what you knew all along you are meant to do and be.

What pops into your mind as you read those words?  Quick, catch that thought, no matter how bemusing and strange or absurd it may seem!  Cup it in your hands and take a good, kind look at it.  What do you see?  What do you feel?  What do you know?

I do invite your musings, your observations.  I invite … You.  Please scriven boldly below!

Beasties

In cultural mentoring–a method of design for enlivening healthy, sustainable culture wherever we are–we speak of “Inner Tracking”, the questions, explorations, and awareness someone might have when tracking animals in forest and field, or in your own neighborhood, but applied to your own inner landscape. Your own inner wilderness.

In Tracking in outer nature (you know, the everyday world) we look for signs of animals and then attempt to discover the story, to discern the story vividly enough that we can actually “see” the animal moving in the landscape and sense what it was doing, when it was doing it, and why. Animal signs can be the tracks themselves, with how they have “aged” (worn down, been smeared by rain, etc.) by time and weather. A sign can be the grasses munched off in a particular way. Or the scat at the base of a tree. It can be the walnut shell appearing on your foot path (when no walnut tree is even in your yard). It can be the certain agitated bok-bok-begack! of the chickens that lets you know that a cat has entered the backyard.

Tracking animals involves those detective questions: Who, What, When, Where, Why, How? It involves gathering information, feeling into the questions and possibilities and not committing to any potential conclusion. It involves looking from the narrow-before-you (tracks on the ground), to the wide-vision around you (what are the trees, shrubs here and how might they shelter or assist these animals? What is and was the weather and how did it and does it affect the story here?)

Tracking is about looking and feeling into story. Expanding your perception. Holding past experiences and what you think you know gently because invariably what you think is a raccoon print before you will reveal itself to belong to a cat if you follow and work it long enough. Initial impressions and appearances can be deceiving!

Sound familiar? I have no doubt that you are an Inner Tracker, exploring the realms of self and purpose–who you really are, and what you’d be most authentic in doing in this world. Divining where your passion and purpose meet with the outer landscapes needs and wishes–the passions and purpose of others in your shared wilderness–the challenge and opportunity, isn’t it?

Right now I’m deep in my own inner wilderness, mapping and tracking within it. I have been wandering about pursuing a particular story. The story is the not just the guiding vision in my life, but the outer expression as it meets up with yours. I’ve long held this notion that it was a shining gold lion, proud and magnificent, ready to tear me up if I didn’t step and act with care and perfection. Today the creature feels like a mischievous kitten scampering and leaping and playing under a watchful mama cat’s eye.

And my guide and mentor through this exotic savanna that turns out to be the patchy, weedy back lawn (beautifully weedy, with flax and sunflowers growing up from the chicken feed scattered everywhere)–my guide and mentor today is my younger child.

This young girl is magnificent in her vigorous energy right now–urging me to play tag with her in the backyard, or hide-and-seek, or follow-the-leader in games of intricate rules that I struggle to hold in my head. She has me play jump-rope with her in the living room, and she designs mazes for me on paper with beautiful rooms and landscapes and magic items strewn about. Her eyes sparkle with mischief, and she tests my awareness with games where she sets up her Polly Pockets and all sorts of miniature items, then shifts just one or two things. Which ones? How much did she move them?

Her energy is incredible. At 9:30PM she starts dancing and wants me to dance too. She plays an invisible violin, singing the melody, and has me sing a drum accompaniment (my music teacher self is so delighted …). I absolutely know that she is a key to my universe right now, and yet my mind yanks with old stuff–self-created commitments, a warped sense of duty to household rhythms and routines. What has happened to my endlessly creative self? My passionate 8-year-old inner child who could/be anything, anywhere, any time? Who had so much physical and sassy energy? Somehow endlessly creative has come to mean endlessly creating to-do’s for myself–even if they are creative projects. Gah!

Inner Tracking tells me to just hold these observations lightly–they likely do not mean what I think they do. The animal nature of myself that I track is all these revelations and none of them. What I can do–and be–is to feel into this animal self that is me, lean into the direction of purpose and play, allow myself the grace of tasks and the fire hidden in the moment, and anything else that unfolds as I move through the landscape of my day.

And remember the animals. That they conserve energy — resting between times of hunting or foraging. They may pursue something to great lengths when especially hungry, but will usually strive for something simple, easy for them–while also being watchful, scanning the landscape, listening for bird alarms or strange noises, something off. In the natural world animals, plants, and beyond are their own selves, moving according to their nature and style, and responding to outer pressures and events according to their nature. We do this too. And as animals change their behavior when it becomes clear (usually through outer pressure) that it no longer serves them to be how and where they are, so too is it with us humans.

How are you alert in your own life? How do you move back and forth between moving through the tasks before you and scanning for new ways of being, new information coming in from elsewhere (the outer world, Spirit, ….)? How can you–and me!–just relax into what’s before us (if our lives aren’t in danger–and if it feels you are in danger, are you really?).

Words from my child: “Mommy! If you didn’t make your posts so long they wouldn’t be so boring!” (she jabs at the computer screen). She wants me off the computer so she can go joust. I’ll let you imagine what that means!

In the meantime, I hold her words lightly, and head on out. I’m off to adventure in the landscape of my day. How about you?

On the prowl for mischief and magic!

Feb. 24 Early Morning Weave

My mind is tantalized by a sprinkling of notions from an HerbMentor.com interview with wisewoman herbalist Susun Weed.  In particular this  idea spoke loud and clear:

All our cells are replaced in our bodies every seven years, but our atoms are replaced every four days.  When an herb chooses you as an ally (or you choose it), breathe with the plant for ten minutes a day for four days.  Get on your belly or back if you need to.  The herb is exhaling and you’re  inhaling that exhale.  As simply as that you will be breathing in the plant, and it will begin being part of you biologically, and in all ways.  It will begin communicating with you in its language, and you’ll begin uncovering how it might work with you.

With this concept in mind I trail out to the garden this morning, and instead of settling at my Sit Spot, I cross to the shady part of the yard where Periwinkle (Vinca major) is a mass tangle of vines punctuated by purple star flowers, and covers a long expanse along the fence.  A moment’s hesitation–the ground is very wet, and I’m just wearing indoor, thin cotton pants–I lay on my belly and plunge  my face into a cluster of Periwinkle vines, glossy leaves, and sleepy, droopy star flowers.

So I’m taking in this presence and moisture and breath of this plant.  At the same time I’m listening to the changing song of the Singer — that gray bird I just can’t definitively figure out what it is — and know that it’s at the top of the huge birch two houses down.  Mow-and-blow gardeners start up in full, very loud force in the yard behind our backyard–way too close.  I consider a question that John Gallagher of HerbMentor.com mentioned that he posed each day to computer programming students for 5 points extra credit: name five plants in bloom today.  I can answer that:  in my yard its Plum, Quince, Mizuna (a mustard green), Arugula, California Poppy, Pea, Sour Grass/Bermuda Sorrel, Periwinkle …  How about five trees right now?  That would be plum, cherry, acacia (with those clusters of tiny yellow pom-poms that still cause my body to tighten when I see them because I suffered terrible hay-fever from acacia as a teen and young adult, living here in the Bay Area).  Two more, hmm: California Bay with its miniscule creamy flowers, and a tree that I think is Madrone, with its lovely pink flowers.

Face buried in Periwinkle I note that even though the flower is drooped, I know that it has five petals with a white flair in the center, and a pentagram opening  in the center of that (probably the reason this plant was used to ward off sorcery).  I’m relearning plant parts, so I’ll attempt to name that pentagram opening as that of the pistil, the female reproductive part of the flower.  And that opening is the stigma.  (am I right?  I’ll doublecheck later).  The plant grows to about a foot high, with the ovoid leaves in pairs (need to doublecheck how to botanically describe those leaves), and I observe the pattern of the veins.   Vines snake along the damp, limp leaf-littered ground — honestly there has never been anything inviting for me in this part of the garden except for the lovely bright red camellia to the left that is currently in beautiful bloom (given as a gift and planted when my grandmother died.  My grandparents had this house built and lived til the end of their lives),  and the Hawthorn tree, what I think of as the Grandmother tree, to my right.  This tangle has always been repulsive to me, strangling ground cover, dank and invasive.

And yet–I’ve found myself reluctantly fascinated by Periwinkle in the past year, since I first saw mention of it as an herbal medicine plant (a “vasoconstrictor for migraines and passive hemorrhage/bleeding”) on Kiva Rose’s Anima Healing Arts blog.    Overpowering my disdain for this plant is my fascination and commitment to working with the plants that are–literally–in my own back yard.   My working philosophy is that whatever is abundant (herbally — probably in other ways too) right where you are is just what you need to work with.

So I worked with Periwinkle some for my Herbalist 101 course with Angie Goodloe.  And now I’m deepening my relationship by just breathing the herb (nibbling it too).    So much to say about Periwinkle, and so much more I’ll no doubt realize as I deepen my relationship, but I’ll say this.  Periwinkle can ease migraines, so I’ve read.    I’ve only had a migraine once (and at that time is the kind where I didn’t feel pain, but saw lots of flashing lights — kinda reminds me of these Periwinkle star flowers, now that I think of it).  But my mind does tend to tangle with too many thoughts, too many “I can’t figure it outs!”   Currently, too, my mind and emotions have brooded on things of a dark nature, due to something that happened recently.  I reflect now that “warding off sorcery” could be also mean banishing this cloak filled with sick-feeling and unpleasantness.  The situation has passed and been dealt with — I no longer need to walk with this dark energy.  It’s no longer useful to do so.  Can Periwinkle help me to dispel this particular “sorcery”?

I hear a mourning dove cooing in the neighborhood landscape, and the cheery-up, cheerilu‘s of the Robin even further away, but there.  I get up, nibble a leaf, thank the plant, circle the garden to gaze at the Mizuna that with its four-petaled yellow flowers, and seed pods spiraling up its long stalk, and move to my Sit Spot.

I engage in my routines there (though I had practiced Thanksgiving while at the Periwinkle.  Fascinating to offer thanks to the people in my life, the earth, the water, and so on through the lens and focus of this plant!)

Thoughts and questions thread into my being.  Thoughts from that interview with Susun Weed.  Something is nourishing if you experience it and receive good things from it, and even just by recalling it you receive the blessings of it.  Something is tonifying if you do it in a rhythm and good things result.  But the rhythm — even if its a yearly rhythm or some other kind–five days on, two off, for example is essential to the key.   From a whole different conversation–one about preparing an herbal formula as a kind of Celtic Triad (you take the condition you want to treat, then choose one herb for the specific condition, one as a nourishing and buffering, and one for the major body system associated with that condition — I’m not sure if I’m totally recalling correctly but this concept was presented by Heather Nic an Fhleisdeir and her “Think Like An Herbalist” course on HerbMentor.com) — I consider which plants, which practices might support me in rooting me firmly in the soil of myself and effectively offering my medicine to my people (who are they?  Family, friends, communities ….), and making a difference for the planet now and for the future generations (perhaps this is a Systems concept!).  What will help me in growing the rhythm and direction to resume my book, which involves being decisive and insightful and practical about telling a good story?

How might Periwinkle help me in this, since I’m so drawn to it (despite myself!)?   On the one hand it seems not much good for anything, tangling and crawling everywhere, and with pretty star flowers, but it’s hard for me to appreciate them in the midst of that tangle?

Uhhhh …. Just who am I talking about here?

So now I come to the place where I put all this wandering and musing into practical action.  I do notice that my mind and spirit feel … clear!  Can Periwinkle (and the surrounding ecology) have worked its magic already?  That cloak of dread is gone.  I’m feeling amused and nourished and potentially decisive, but in a laid back–”let’s discover what happens” way.

Let’s take the book as the specific condition.

Condition: Help!  I’ve got this entire book with lots of characters and situations and part of it was dreamed up with my kids and some of it is just my playground (but boring to even my kids)–how do I shape it into a story that is fun for the readers too, and that works?  How do I decide what belongs in the story and what doesn’t, which characters are necessary and which aren’t? ….?

So: it’s a tangle right now, like all those Periwinkle vines, overwhelming even the complex, bright stars that are its own flowers.

I might ask a different kind of question at this point.  How might I work with the Periwinkle and the land on that S/E length of fence (hm, it’s in the Southeast — energy of child’s passions, mischief and magic — I hadn’t realized that!) become more inviting to me, to my kids, my husband, anyone visiting the garden?

Yes, I might actually pull out some of the Periwinkle (perhaps I can sit with the plant again and allow it to guide m this?  Is there some way this might actually nourish the Periwinkle community there?).  Okay, a whole trail of thought is opening, in which I jot down questions I have about my book, plot, and characters, and then I go to the Periwinkle, breathe it, lay on the ground and then begin to work: playing with that Periwinkle plot with my hands and senses while also going back and forth with my book questions, just going decisively down the list.  Work with plants and plot, answer a book question (with ut reflecting much).  Back and forth.

Seems like a good whole nature experiment–working on multiple levels and on two different projects that have in common that they totally bug me right now!

How will I know if I’ve achieved my goal(s)?  If not only myself–but my family–becomes engaged with the Periwinkle area (and eventually if it’s immediately engaging to others who enter the garden).

If I can describe my book with animation and clarity to others — in a paragraph, and in one “page”, and how about “three pages”.  If I can do those three things–both vocally and in writing–I’m certain I can move forward decisively with completing this second draft of my book.

I’ll report on the results of this experiment!

Become a Sherlock Holmes to your inner and outer life. These days I follow this practice:

I’ll take a question that’s just nagging at me. Then I’ll let it go. Now I head out to my Sit Spot–the place in my backyard that is sort of my anchor point for emptying my mind and engaging my senses, and just drinking in the rich nature and activity that is my backyard. If I think of it, I’ll attempt to vary my path to my Sit Spot, taking some wandering circuit, or coming in from another direction, rather than the usual backdoor-straight-to-rock direct path.

I engage in sense meditation and Thanksgiving, or engage in some spontaneous ceremony (the other day I created a “green fire” on my sitting stone — a ring of incense-cedar leaves with a pale pink camellia as the “flame”). I may greet the Four Directions and the Center. I may just listen to the birds, the crackling song of the hummingbird, the golden throated song of the Singer (a medium-small gray bird with pale breast who sings high in a birch or on the phone lines — I still don’t know what what it is). I’ll watch the squirrels, and I’ll note that one of the plum trees has begun to bloom. And that the sprouted potato I planted a few weeks ago has sprouted leaves.

Lately I’ve taken to lying on the ground (yes, even when it’s raining) as a way to ground myself (read about this practice in my article A Little Bird Told Me on my Singing Deer Healing site) … and get a very different perspective on things. Supported and nourished by the earth I gaze into the many branches of the incense cedar, and remember why I was moved to take a client of mine who’d been suffering from severe depression on a playful climb up a red cedar tree. These towering conifers with their tall trunks and inviting limbs having everything to teach us about reacquainting us with our own “upright mind” and sureness of spirit, and about reminding us to engage in our child’s passion to play in the trees.

Back in the house I’ll jot down what I observed outside.  It’s amazing how many details of texture, scent, sound you can remember if you really engage your senses, and then make the time to recall what you experienced through writing or storytelling. Telling the story in some form is where you really begin to integrate an experience and understand just what it was!

Then I’ll start tossing in my questions. And I’ll toss in some insights from audios I’ve been listening to, or books I’ve been reading, or something someone has said.

It’s like I’m cooking something, adding this and that into a pot that simmers with the mind that was opened by the natural world, just being in that place and noting this or that in it. Now as I prod at my persistent question I consider how something I know or something I’ve noticed might just be the answer … or lead to the answer. I wonder how some experience out in this backyard might nourish a particular resolution. What springs to mind? Images of slopping bare feet through mud, of grazing around the yard on any edible — the tips of the incense-cedar leaves, the new rose leaves, the new Periwinkle leaves, the flowering mustards, the plum petals, the spearmint and peppermint, the lavender, the “sour flower” (Bermuda sorrel or Sour Grass–Oxalis pes-capre). I wander with questions and wander with possibilities. And in the end I discover, if not the answer, a very different understanding of my question. And a kind of poetic road map that I never would have dreamed up.

I don’t know if any of the above makes sense. But the more I lose myself to my senses in my own backyard, and the more I weave those perceptions and discoveries in with the questions and yearnings that tug in my heart, the more I discover I have answers I can rely upon. That in some form they’ve been there all along. The thing is, when I take them up after my inner and outer wandering, they feel entirely different — more of an enticing ecology than a jangling, won’t leave me alone thought. Feeling the wholeness, the expansiveness, and the tossing in of specific details of that question-ecology, I can lean into the answers that have been around me all along.

But, boy, do they feel exciting and enlivening now! And truly an expression of me in some very different way, whole spirit, holographic way.

So that’s me these days, and my particular style.

You, no doubt, have your own.  How do you connect with the expansiveness and precious detail of the Ecology of You? What realm and pathways guide you to discovering your own unique sense of this blue world we live in, this singular you that you are, the divinity of those persistent questions that you hold?

At times I feel absolutely aligned and on fire, either in an exhilarated, ‘wow, look — I really can fly’ way, or in that deeply satisfied, the fire is burning, healthy, in rhythm way where I barely need to tend the flame, and I can just sit at it and enjoy and be expansive, myself, right where I am.

I think when I am most myself, most delighted with my life, is when I can tell a good, fun story about it. And not just tell the story, but know that someone is hearing the words, experiencing some possibility or truth for themselves. And then I experience their story, their lively reality, and this great mingling of minds, hearts, possibility for a more resonant life, a better world, for living more deeply truly springs forth.

The big challenge in my life is “focus”. In the past year I’ve been teaching myself Hand Analysis. This is the contemporary expression of the old art known as Palmistry. The modern-day idea is that the lines and markings on our hands offer a mirror of our soul-and-psyche ecology. We have so many nerve ends in our palms that there is an intimate connection with our brains, the way we think. The lines and markings may change on our palms, as we change internally, reflecting our change in wiring, so to speak.

Hand Analysis goes further than that though. It speaks of our fingerprints — which never change — as being an actual map of the Soul, revealing both our Life Purpose and our Life Lesson.

What a cool and fun idea, to think that we might be able to read our Soul’s Purpose, and discover our psychic geography, just by exploring the “terrain” of our hands!

In the context of my universe this makes a good “why not?” sense. After all I believe we can read our stories, anything we need to know, anywhere we are. Nature reflects our story back to us. The decor in our house does (and where the clutter collects, and where it is shining with good energy and emotion).

So, stories can be great. They can provide that context, that perfect picture frame that allows the picture within to reveal itself in all its personality. Storymaking is something we humans do all the time.

Sometimes (all the time?) stories run us, and then we sometimes have to dissect how they are affecting how we are experiencing our reality, what we think about “reality”, and make decisions about whether it really works for our lives, for the people we love and want to be with, and the larger world that we are operating according to those stories.

I love the magic of story. The fun part where I create one, or choose one, and then hold it lightly, allowing it to add sparkle and purpose to my life. I’ll run with it for awhile, or stop-and-go with it, picking it up and carrying it around and feeling it like an intriguing and companionable lodestone. Then I may lay it down on my desk or at the base of a tree, and leave it for awhile or for good.

So Hand Analysis is one story that I’m carrying around and poking at and with which I’m playing “what if”. For instance I have a lot of what are called Gift Markings on my hands. These are stars or lines and other markings that are in particular regions of the hand (and the regions all mean something). The Gift Markings point to certain kinds of gifts that you must live in some way in order to feel satisfied with your life. If you don’t live them in a healthy way you feel depressed, discouraged, frustrated.

Other folks may have those gifts, but if they don’t have the Gift Markings, they don’t have to live them. There isn’t that drive and compulsion (and desperation!) to do so.

Hand Art?

So looking at my Gift Markings and (what feels to me) my difficulty in focusing, and here’s a story that makes sense. Yeah, no wonder I struggle with focusing, and can’t choose one or two things to do with my life. I’ve got a whole mess of things saying ‘Live me, live me!’

So what can I do with this bit of revelation? Well, the story of Hand Analysis and Gift Markings, and Life Purpose and Life Lesson all point to specific expressions that I might consciously tend in my life. Let me say, that what I’ve ‘read’ in my hands and prints makes total sense to me. Does this speak to our human ability to find meaningful story in anything? Sure! Would I have felt the ‘stories’ in my prints were ‘right on’ if they were totally different. Possibly — it’s hard to say! But certainly the stories I read here have a lot to say about where and who I am right now, plenty of fodder for exploring self and one’s blind spots, and that in the end is what is most important.

Hand Analysis says that once you fully integrate your gifts, or the ones expressed in the Gift Markings, the Gift Markings may disappear. You won’t have that sense of struggle and frustration in your life related to that gift because you will be using it on all levels. Your particular gifts will be just running along. So you don’t have those Gift Markings announcing on some level “do this! do this! You’ll be happier if you’re including this part of yourself in your life!”.

So with this story in the back of my mind, this particular context, I can look at the many things I love to do, or long to do, and make sure that I have expressions in my life where I actually live them. What has worked best for me is to “bundle them up”, make a little weave of them. And when I do this, live these weaves, and express them as some sort of little mixed-media artistry of life, I am really, really happy. My world springs alive and is filled with that Otherworld sparkle and shine.

Right now my A Harper’s Garden blog feels really good this way, a mini-magical bundle of rainbow threads in my life. With this post I’m deciding to look at my other expressions of self, and seeing where I might twist and tighten the medicine weaves, and jazz them up a bit so that they spring alive and eventually begin tending themselves. Not all of it will be inscribed in my blogs, but a fair chunk will be, because writing is how I make story, and storytelling is how we discover, uncover, create context for the crazy treasure that is our inner and outer life.

Where do you create story in your life? Okay, that’s maybe a dumb question :-). Perhaps I might say: In the art gallery of your life, what are the frames around the art? Or how does the lighting reveal their qualities, their expressive selves (or is it good lighting at all)? How might you change a frame, or move a sculpture so that its artistry is more fully highlighted and revealed? How might you further show off (in some fashion!) that quirky perfect expression or gift that is you, part of you, is you?

Imagine that the Comment box below is one space in your Art Gallery Of Self. I invite you to describe one of the artistic expressions of your self and soul that either is in just a great location in your gallery (lots of folks come through and delight in this artistry of you!) or which you might consider changing its frame, location, the angle or cast of light, or ….

Have fun!

Another expression of self: In her tree house studio Dahlia Rose offers Reiki and healing song to Gypsy Belle

The Dolls and Tree house are by my friends Lisa and Jeff at Journey School!

With the Chinese New Year and the Year Of The Tiger beginning tomorrow, I dust off those images and see if they make any more sense.

In the dream I am in the basement of our house at the time, and facing a dark cloth with a pattern of trees woven into that is actually a landscape I can enter. As I look into the landscape the trees shift into figures of Ogham, the Celtic Tree alphabet, and I have the sense of 52 musical measures. I enter the Tree language, the tree song, and the world changes.

Scenes shift around me, rapid-fire until I find myself in a glowing green energy, flying, with a tiger filled with power lunging into me. Terrifying! But as it passes through me, the scene shifts, and I’m with my family in a control room (with computers and other high-tech gadgets) at the top of an enormous ancient redwood, gazing at a beach where a Stormtrooper (!), is just in easy companionship with a seal and a land turtle.

Here on the eve of The Year Of The Tiger, I wonder what Tiger is saying to me, and what language is written in those Trees. And what is coming together on the shore, how am I peaceful in my ‘control tower’ (my very busy mind!)? I might suggest that the seal is a Selkie (the Selkie was a huge personal metaphor for me back then, and is still resonant), and the Turtle is Mother Earth. I might suggest that the Stormtrooper represents the elements of Fire and Air, and that it is about wielding personal power in some way, past patterns coming into new relationship with other aspects of my being.

I can wonder about the Tiger who lunges through me in the midst of that greenfire expanse, and about the Mystery that governs our inner lives and powers our outer expressions.

I am aware of some change taking place tomorrow. I choose for that to be my reality.

What dreams speak to you today? How might they shift your whole world tomorrow? How can that be an embrace into personal power for you, a place of easy relationship with very different aspects of yourself?

I invite you to muse and dream here …!

"Ic eom legbysig lace mid winde" - Old English for "I am Fire-Fretted and I flirt with wind". These words and this image are from another dream I had

“Ic eom legbysig lace mid winde” – Old English for “I am Fire-Fretted and I flirt with wind”. These words and this image are from another dream I had. You can read about that dream in my post Full Moon Root – The Nature Of Dream from my old blog, The Tree Letter.

Last year I recorded a video of me offering “shan” – Mountain Essence. I finally set up a YouTube account and all that, so here we are! In this video you can see one way I offer these ‘nature essences’. Refer back to my Invoking Mountain Essence post to see what the symbol looks like and how I use it.

Oh, just for the record, when I use symbols I usually just think the word three times, rather than speak it aloud.

Enjoy!

Leaf Wind

“Ask and you shall receive”!

Once again I discover that when I face how confused I am on many levels–and voice it–things slide into place.

My last post was written on the Balsamic Moon, the day before the New Moon, and I might have taken my cue that something was ready to be composted!  Sure enough, on the New Moon I found myself getting up at dawn (which isn’t so very early at this time of year!) and sitting out on the earth in my garden–resuming a particular Sit Spot practice of greeting the new day with which I ebb and flow  in my life.

I’m now in flow with it, getting up every morning (okay it’s only the third day!) to press my hands against the earth, open my senses, express a silent Thanksgiving Address, and look and listen as the various birds and squirrels wake up, offer their songs and chatter, and get about the business of their day.  Meanwhile I tune into the feel of the air against my skin, the moisture (a delightful amount since it has rained) and the smell of it, the clouds thick overhead, the position of the Moon and the Sun–both unseen–today along the bowl of the sky, and the invisible stars.

I’m energetically aided to resume this practice by the Winter Feast For The Soul, a 40-day spiritual practice for peace that (I discovered) also started on the New Moon.  Aligning myself with this intention that is held by so many individuals right now, and which I participated in last year, seals in my commitment to open my senses, slow down, commit to my Sit Spot routine (which is a spiritual practice of silence and peace), empty myself, and be.   At least for 40-days!

Practicing something for 40-days, they say, serves to rewire you to a new way of being.  From past 40-day practices I’d say this is so, though I don’t know that I’ve ever fully embraced the new habit (be it sitting in nature at dawn, or writing my book everyday) for all time.  Usually the practice trickles off.  What does remain is the experience of having done it–having committed and fulfilled my commitment.  No, that didn’t mean that I faithfully practiced whatever-it-was for 40 days, fully and completely.  Just that I strove to do so, and most days did.   The 40-days is “sand bagged” time: a span of time removed from ordinary time, and made special in some way.  Rooting it to the New Moon and placing it in the Northeast (energetically speaking) time of the year–that quiet empty waiting time, serves to deepen us into Mystery, open us to possibility and transformation, to some intercellular change within our spirit.

Illumination

What Might You Commit To For 40 Days?

Do you have a spiritual practice or practice-of-the-heart (same thing) that a 40-day commitment might nourish?  Or would you like to start one?  If so, I encourage you to jump right in and align your energy with the Winter Feast For The Soul–or just with me :-) — and jump into a practice for 40-days.  It could start today, or you could name the starting point for two days ago, at the New Moon.  If you think back on the past couple of days, you might find that you have already started your practice in some way–such is the magic and power of intention, which moves beyond time and space!

If  you decide on a 40-day practice, I invite you to record it in the comment box below, where I will shine a little Reiki blessing on it.  We will witness and celebrate it, and have a little virtual world dance in your honor :-).

The Answer To The Question

To Medicine Tree or Not To Medicine Tree … the answer is, as you may have guessed, that I’ve committed to continuing this blog, with renewed purpose.     I’m no longer “finding my voice” through it–I know what my voice is :-).  The answer to my madness of so-many-expressions of self  is to give each expression a specific purpose (overlap, of course, is allowed).

Jane’s Medicine Tree, then, is devoted to plunging into the depths of soul, dream, myth, emotion.  I might call it Jane’s magical weirdness blog, or even just Jane’s Wyrd (play on words intended).

Thank you for continuing on the journey with me.  And feel free to share your own Wyrd-ness, your own special deep self magic, whenever you feel nudged to do so :-).

But a year ago I didn’t know that we weren’t just going to stay there. That we weren’t just going to go through with our plan of buying land and building our passive solar home in this remote, beautiful, but very different (for me) land. For me, it was a huge struggle to be there. In many ways I loved the area and the life, in other ways, it just wasn’t for me. I knew that if I had to I could root well enough there, and our family could weave into the community in some way, and I knew that it was important to understand that we as a family could make our home wherever we were. And it was important for me to know in my bones that I can express my full wild self in some form no matter where I am.

In the end we decided that we weren’t finding the configuration of land we really wanted. Certain events came to pass, and we decided we’d move on, this time to live back in my grandparents’ house in the San Francisco Bay Area, for business and family reasons. We knew that we didn’t want this to be our final destination, so intended to keep looking for the land. But after a drive through possible places I realized I didn’t want to be looking anymore. Wandering has its time and place, but I wanted it to be done. I wanted that fundamental question of “where is home?” to be answered.

When I told my husband that if a certain property we’d looked at the year before on the island was still available, I wanted us to make an offer on it, he (surprisingly to me) agreed. He now had his own (practical) reasons for that, which he wouldn’t have had half a year before. Sure enough, when I did a little research, I discovered that though the land was off the market, it had not been sold. I wrote a letter to the owner and we made our offer.

… And with a little negotiation (one of the parcels was left off the sale in order for the owner to say ok to the price) our offer was accepted. The magic of right timing. And our lives have proceeded from there.

Interwoven with the question of “home” was my own internal questioning. We had shed so much in our lives in the whole long transition process of moving from our old island home–a transition that included living six months in a 24′ diameter yurt, winnowing lots and lots of possessions, and putting what was left into storage, closing sale on the property and leaving the island not knowing where we’d end up. And that had included shedding my own identity in many ways, giving away or boxing up so much of what I thought I’d been about and then leaving the way open and empty to discover what threads I really wanted to restore to my live, what I really wanted to live from this point forward, what I really wanted to weave.

So Jane’s Medicine Tree was really started as a way to sound my voice again. When I had nothing to prove, nothing I had to do, anything I wished to speak–what story might spill out of through my fingers? And where might it lead me? How might it lead me to discover/rediscover, reground and root into my life, and offer up the next chapter?

Here, a year later, I have answers to many of those questions, but I’m still fussing over the details, especially regarding the internet form of these things. I have a tremendous sense of purpose right now — one project to see to completion (my children’s novel) and another to start mapping (a book project of a different kind). Both those projects could use some blogging around them, to nourish them–to help me deepen my voice with them, flesh out my ideas, to propel me forward. But I certainly can’t write four blogs!

As usual, I’m spending too much time trying to figure things out. In my life the big message has always been about right timing. When the time is ripe I know what to do–or at least know that it’s time to take some kind of action. Here in balmy California, where I barely understand that it’s winter, I know deep down that it is that time of “wait-and-see”. Rest, hibernate, allow space, be quiet. Dream. Vision. The time of quickening approaches, but now is not that time. Roses may be blooming in our front yard, but this is not the time to be throwing forth the flowers of my efforts as finished forms–”Here they are, take them!”. The winter is here, and the rain will come (sometime) and the wind.

It’s time to be open, listening.

Soon I will know where to send those first tendrils of new and renewed purpose.

For now I keep them inside.