Just a reminder that “GraniteRocks” is the name for today in the EcoLogical Calendar: A New Way To Experience Time for 2009.
Lots stirred up in this chapter of 12 Secrets Of Highly Creative Women by Gail McMeekin. I recognized “where I am” in these words about the void–that fallow season in one’s creative cycle–or, what I see as the place of Unknowing, Uncertainty, and Mystery in our broader life (Change!):
While we long to restore the old, its time has passed, even if we wish otherwise. Such passages force us to redesign our internal selves and often produce surprising results. But they also involve loss, grief, despair, as well as communion with our darker side. Change thrusts us into chaos, and it takes time to reorder things and find a new route. Courage is mandatory.
My home, community life, and relationship with the nature of a place is fundamental to my creative nature. So uprooting from Vashon Island to a new terrain also places me in the void. Realizing two years ago that it was time for us to leave Vashon (when I’d been fairly sure we’d never move again!), to almost moving back to our former home in California (my grandparents’ house) to ending up here has been quite a journey! I also realize that my next creative cycle has everything to do with where we end up homesteading.
So, this morning I woke accompanied by the familiar weather system of loss and grief. Often I enjoy starting the morning by dreamtending, or just reflecting, before getting up and outside to my sit spot. Today, though, with that sadness just drooping through me, I thought to myself: What can I do to be really excited to start the day? Just reflecting wasn’t going to do it. So I grabbed my iPod, found an HerbMentor interview with herbalist Lesley Tierra, and soon I found myself excited by what I was hearing and what I was learning about.
Then it was outside to my sit spot–a so-called “core routine” for nature awareness as offered by Wilderness Awareness School and the Kamana Naturalist Training Program, which I pursue. The Sit Spot routine is simply sitting in one place outside, and absorbing what’s happening around you. Other practices become bundled into this routine–sense meditation and offering Thanksgiving. The twin practice of Sit Spot and offering Thanksgiving is a profound spiritual practice, and one I find essential to cultivating an “upright mind” — clarity, inner peace, spaciousness.
When I’m feeling pretty miserable, like this morning, I make sure to get out there and, yes, offer gratitude (and, oh boy, it’s a challenge to do this, much less to truly mean it, when I’m down!). At one point, that depression just hovered in my lap, truly that lump of something (as in: “Yuck!!! What are those hens eating this time????” “Just another lump of something.”). At that point, I leaped to my feet, ran across the neighbors’ yard and up the hill.
From the top of that hill, the mountains just revealed themselves in a ring, and I truly felt myself in the presence of ancient beings. As I watched a low fog waft through town below, those mountains remained present and clear. Eventually, I wandered about (scaring some mule deer resting under some spruce and Ponderosa pines), and listened to the myriad birdsong beginning: the cheery-up of the American robin, the long liquid song of a song sparrow, the chick-a-dee-dee-dee of the (you guessed it) mountain chickadee, and the beep-beeps of the nuthatch. I entered our home, perhaps not totally cheerful, but comforted by the round of the morning beginning, the beauty of the world around me. Homesick, I thought. No place feels like home. So the challenge and opportunity is to discover how I am always at home. My Sit Spot and Thanksgiving practice, cleaning the house, loving my family, hanging out with the chickens, loving the nature around me, and being mindful of my food–creating a nourishing nettle infusion to sip for the day–all help me to return to myself.
And trusting in what I love right now. I love learning about herbs, and imagining how our bodies are singular ecologies, just as the area of my Sit Spot, and this town, and this valley, and this part of Oregon and so on are concentric rings of singular ecologies, each telling their own story which is also my story. I love asking myself questions, and bumping around in Mystery, glimpsing a paradigm shift in my inner being, and attempting to operate from that new alignment (my Medicine Tree). I love to write (this blog, my children’s magical nature novel), I love to imagine a rewoven culture, with all of us living from the heart of our nature, connected with the unique nature of of our place, and really understanding its language, speaking it, singing it, dancing it, living it. I love to imagine that our ancestors and the mountains can speak to us, and then actually hear those words and songs. Really. I’m imagining our forest-and-farm home on Vashon Island, WA and my village, and my grandparents’ house in San Mateo, CA–that place of grace and heritage–and this beautiful, kind, wild home that is our new nature in Joseph, Oregon–all of these amazing places as one place.
How does that change everything? If the sisters of my women’s circle on Vashon are, say, visiting in those empty-for-the winter guest cottages across the street? Or if my friend Kara and her husband Hawk are hanging out at Mad Mary’s four blocks away in downtown? I might create a forest-and-garden infusion for these my friends, and some fresh baked kamut-amaranth-quinoa bread, and just hang out with them. Okay. So they aren’t here. What are the small things I can do instead? Deliver a dozen eggs to one of our new friends who owns and operates Wild Flour Bakery, and enjoy some coffee, a lunch roll or pecan roll, and conversation with him in his shop. Email or phone a circling sister and imagine (with her) that we are sharing tea as we converse. Maybe even light a candle as we talk. Groove out on Kara and Hawks’ blogs and websites and sprinkle comments here and there.
I realize that I’ve always reimagined my reality, but have always grounded it exactly where I am (so the huge palm tree in my suburban backyard when I was growing up, became the gateway to the Magic Queen’s realm for myself, and whoever would come along with me). Why stop now?
I am visiting a friend at a well known wilderness awareness program. A gathering of students of all ages is taking place, and the founder of the program is present. Spontaneous groups of children and adults go up to this naturalist and he intuits an animal name for each person. I decide to join one of these groups and see what name emerges at this time. I’ve had several different nature names over the years from participating and assisting in these nature awareness programs–Northern Flicker, Raccoon, Great Blue Heron …. Each name was like making a new bird or animal friend. And of course I have my own true name, one that the forest gave me. What name will emerge now?
