something that lasts forever.

My five-year-old child was having trouble falling asleep recently.  Into the dark studded with glowing star stickers, he whispered: “I’m scared…I’m scared”.  The wind was blowing the wind chimes against the house, and the snow on the roof was cracking as it froze hard.  It did sort of sound like a gigantic wolf was just outside the house, tail smacking into it, paws clawing the rooftops.  I didn’t know what to say to ease his fear, but distraction often works. 

We began to think together about all the animals curled up as the temperature dropped well below zero, and what fears they may be confronting.  He was particularly worried about the snowbirds, the baby animals, the resident skunk.  We said together “may they be safe, may they be cozy (just like us), and may their fear disappear”.  He said it over and over, letting the words run together like a stream.  At what I hoped was just the right moment, I invited him to include himself in these wishes flowing out of him - this river of care.  His voice quieted as he took a deep, slow breath, then said simply “okay, I did”.  I smiled at his frankness. It still took a while to find sleep, but he settled, and finally added that delicious, deep breathing of a young child to the softly howling wind.  I sat nearby, remembering something I often say in classes: fear damages the kidneys, wisdom is the antidote, and pondering the connections between cold and fear, movement and wisdom.

Next day, it’s zero degrees out and the curve of the river is frozen solid and white, like gloved hands draped around an elbow.  I’ve never seen this river broken in motion.  I think it should be unnerving to see a highway of ice where the river should be, but somehow it is a relief to see it suspended.  Breathing with the river, I pause at the top of the inhale, full and brimming, before letting go again.

A glacier made this river valley. I live where it slid off the shelf of granite into the silt below. I wonder, what does the fish see from the bottom of the riverbed right now, what color does light turn through sheets of ice?

In the bath, the same child is humming to himself while pouring water from cup to cup.  He stops suddenly and says with conviction, “Mama!  I really need something that lasts forever!”  I peer around the corner from sorting winter jackets and wet mittens and see him surrounded by water.  We spend the next 15 minutes discovering that every single thing, including our thoughts, has been here forever.  Iron tub, metal spigot, plastic cups, bones, breath, laughter, water; all here since forever.  Where else would it go?

Across the river, the beautiful cascading waterfall has also come to a halt, frozen in time, cleaved against the rock.  Maybe, likely even, frozen water holds more memory then its moving counterpart.  The memory of skipping through the nearby woods, but also the memory of once being a cloud, a body, a steadying breath. This waterfall is water reflecting the river water, the river water is reflecting the atmospheric river of cloud, the cloud river is perhaps reflecting the glacial shelves in the distance.  All of it memory, all of it just trading places, over and over and over.

a tree's soft rescue.

Recently, I was standing alone outside the entrance to an emergency room where I’d just dropped off my partner.  His blood levels needing measuring and monitoring, and we needed to know he wasn’t still losing any internally.  He’d already spent one night here, but tonight - the night after Thanksgiving - the ER was hopping in this small coastal southern town.  We arrived after 10pm, the wait was 3-4 hours.  My kids were still awake and worried back at the condo where we were staying, so I had to whisper to the desk workers, “please keep an eye on him, in case he passes out.” I won’t go into the details of his particular story, but for me, standing in the dark, halfway between my life partner and my kids - I felt as if I were skimming the surface of a wide, dark body of water, unsettled by the waves of emotion that needed to stay under the surface in order to keep us all from drifting apart.  Slowly, Pema Chodron’s words floated to the surface, “groundlessness isn’t something we need to avoid.”  I almost laughed out loud, here in this unfamiliar place, among people I couldn’t emotionally or logistically lean on for support, I was truly inside the meaning of complete groundlessness.  It was unavoidable.

Out in the dark humid night, I slowly willed my legs to traverse this groundless moment.  Instead of walking straight to my car, my legs led me to the base of a massive ancient oak.  This tree somehow survived the hospital’s erection and now stood wedged between the glaring florescent lights of the waiting room and the dark rows of cars where remnants of worry, pain, and the sounds of crying babies lingered.  I lifted my palms to the rough, moss encased bark.  Though I could sense the vast tangle of stories this tree knew – around since at least the early 1700s, when this marshy edge became a town- mostly I felt the endless flow of it’s great capacity for life.  Like a heartbeat, it pulsed under my hands.  I leaned in, forehead to tree, and found myself asking this great old being for a bit of strength to get me through the night, and to watch over my love while I was away. 

Much later, with both kids on either side of me finally breathing deep, I landed in a light dream.  I was all moss, dry in some parts and drinking mist in others.  At first I tried to pick it off – it was a bit itchy – until I looked up to find a little finch on my shoulder.  I realized the thick moss there was protecting me from its sharp little feet, giving us a soft buffer to appreciate each other.  The finch sang a morning song that let me know I was not alone - then another that made the moss grow. 

I made it through that night and the rest of the trip with the image of moss coating my skin.  It helped me carry the luggage and push the wheelchair around the airport and drive my family back to our nest in the north woods.  Here the oaks are tall where the southern ones are wide.  They are soft and big leafed where the ancient marsh dwellers are prickly and round.  Both versions seem set on resilience no matter what the weather brings - on that clear directive we call, simply, to live. 

Everywhere we go, trees are more present, more aware, and more responsive to our mutterings than I think most of us cultured in western thought can even comprehend. They shelter, inspire, nourish, and regulate us, whether we know it or not.  They breathe with us, literally, and even seem to be able to reach through dreams.  They are our true cathedrals, known deep and wide throughout indigenous cultures.  As Malidoma Somé writes, “When there is a grief ritual in my village, it takes place in the open air, among the trees, because that is the sort of thing the trees will echo and the earth will absorb most easily.”  As my own Baltic ancestors knew, like most land-based cultures know, trees shape the words that fall from our mouths, from plea to prayer.

Upon making it home, waking in the early slanting light of this particular longitude, I stepped out to greet the red oak giants I live beneath.  I told them my story, my dream, the whole painful ordeal.  Then I gathered a branch that had come down in the wind while I was away, and placed it on the outside altar, next to a bit of mossy bark from a coastal live oak.   These beings are also honored on the ancestor altar, alongside all the brilliant, bumbling humans I claim no matter their faults.  The trees though, they receive my deepest bow.  They hold the fabric of our grief and praise together in their simple, continuous chant: life. life. life.

the beginning of what comes next.

If you are a pagan, a witch, or a plant, happy new year.

I know, it’s a bit obscure to imagine, but the plants know…and not by temperature - which we all now know can be so finicky - but by the slant of the sun, which gives us all life. For people who aligned their lives with the plants, the new year begins with the end of the harvest and the return to the root. It starts with a quieting down, a blanketing of the fields, a full release of leaf and flower and stalk, and a turn toward the fire. Essentially, the new year begins with a death, and while their is grief out there in the landscape, more clearly there is simply an exhale, a letting go. With death, we welcome the beginning of what comes next, including the liminal dream state that winter brings, if we allow it. You don’t have to be of any particular religion, ethnicity or indigeneity to claim this. You don’t have to be from any particular place, other than this particular planet.

The harvest is complete, the fullness of the earth’s giving over. This year I thank in particular: tulsi pine motherwort, elacampane ashwagandha osher, linden live oak lavender…and vitex, dear little tree that grew from my father’s seeds.

This planetary placement in relation to the sun is known as the middle point between the winter solstice and the fall equinox. This has little to do with any religious thought, but is significant in how we spin around the sun. One of the oldest systems for reading time - the same one that birthed the Iching, Qigong, Chinese medicine, and Daoism - is one that measures shadows. These shadows, when measured and linked together, create the image of the yin/yang symbol, and the fibonacci spiral.

With pine boughs on the altar, surrounding photos, notes, and names of my beloved dead, I begin again. As we in the Northern Hemisphere spiral toward the moment of deepest shadow, we are invited to follow the roots down, deep into the earth, and dream up what we will next become.

Pay attention to the place of composition, not the flower or mushroom that will come from it.

The Linden Tree.

Linden trees have long held my attention. 

Eight years ago, I travelled to the eastern most edge of the Baltic Sea to deliver my father’s ashes (as promised) back to his homeland.  Nothing is as it was when he was born there, not even the name of the country.  It was a disorienting place that left me uncertain about his request, but the lindens leaned in and steadied me for the task.  They’d made it through war and all the changes it brought, and remembered him home with me. 

I didn’t know then that linden is the sacred tree of Laima, Baltic earth goddess whose name means, simply, ‘happiness’.  In Slovenia, There’s one linden who sprouted up around 1300, where politicians still gather annually for a national meeting, joining their voices with the nectar-drunk bees exalting over the sweet blossoms in song.  Old lore says one cannot tell a lie when questioned under the limbs of this tree; it’s heartening to imagine what might be possible if more powerful people met under a linden now and again.

 Now that I live in a place where they are abundant, here in the northeast of Turtle Island, I’ve been on the lookout. I found my first linden at the edge of a cemetery, a small one filled with mossy headstones marking colonizers and settlers, infants and elders, mostly from the 1800s. This tree stood silently at the edge, towering over and extending shoots from the base in every direction, as if extending a hand to each soul lost, with a special reach toward those not represented.  Trees are so friendly, especially these.  Linden’s very leaves inspired the classic heart image, and the blossoms and leaves gathered in a cup of tea welcome our hearts to soften and calm, leaving an inner strength.

 I began visiting other small cemeteries in search for linden, and sure enough, I suddenly see her everywhere, green hearts waving me over in the wind. In fact, linden seems to like to grow at the edge of any canopy, standing at the edge of these once forests, then pastures, now farm or maybe cemetery, linden silently offers softness to the pain this worked land once endured.

 There’s one tree in particular that I like the feel of, and visit often.  This tree I place my back against, these roots I align my feet with.  I look out on the land with linden’s view, hidden in the wild tangle of shoots.  Motherwort and nettle grow here too.  This trio offers safe council to stand inside of as the world spins wild. 

 From here, I listen to wild geese traversing the skies, heading south, but perhaps less far each year.  I look out and see the spindly, sick hemlocks, losing their footing here in their territory.  I smell something not quite like home – not like the California Bay and Redwood I dream about - but similar enough to tug on my heart and encourage a few tears to open my lungs and let the loss in.  I moved here not 5 seasons ago, seeking safety from my fire-y homeland.  I seek linden because I need my heart to stay soft and supple for all the grieving there is to do, all the turning towards suffering and loving this life anyway. When there is numbness, there is restriction – but we can’t afford to be numb right now.  This is a moment of extreme inflammation in our landscape, minds, and collective hearts.  Linden cools, softens, teaches yield. 

Laima is the goddess of fate, but she has no human likeness in the tattered threads of Baltic history, she is simply the ground we walk upon.  Our fate lies with the empty fields, the sinking headstones, the fevering landscape - standing with linden helps me grapple with mine.  Standing with linden, I remember my smallness, and the great possibility that we humans can only know a tiny thread of the vast web that the universe is. 

the clarity of descent.

I was speaking with a client recently, discussing the ways they are aligning with the season, and not.  In five element theory, this season of Autumn is ruled by the metal element, which I’ve always thought was a little obscure.  Earth, fire, air, and water, sure – but metal?  What’s up with metal representing my favorite season of downshifting and softening?  Upon deeper investigation, metal represents the energy of Autumn kindly.  When aligned, it is the energy of clarity, distillation, and cutting through to what’s essential.  This can mean clarifying our thoughts, methods, and ways of walking in the world, but out of balance might look more like a self-critical mind, racing thoughts, or too much stimulation that ends up feeling like anxiety or nervousness.  Metal is the energy of the mind at work, but there are so many ways that can go wrong in our culture built on productivity.  My client spoke of feeling full, exhausted, and wanting to soften the excess tone they are humming with.  But to soften into the energy of darkness, nighttime, and abundant kidney qi (which comes in winter), we can’t skip the sunset.  Fall is the season of just that, a slow-motion descent into rest.  The metal energy that we can wield (think of sword play) adds clarity and tone on a cellular level, making the yield into gravity a graceful one. 

As a dancer in my twenties, I used to get slightly drunk, just enough to alter my equilibrium, and stagger around my live/work studio playing “pathways”.  Pathways was a movement puzzle I made up: how can I make it to the floor from any position without knocking a bone or shaking the floor?  It was so satisfying to use the alcohol to take me off balance and allow my buttered, wise body to engage in a downward flight.  I’m not advocating that anyone get drunk and try this, but there’s something to adjusting to how we find our way to softness that might be useful in this time.  We are all slowly coming down out of a massive amount of cultural anxiety (high tone) from the past pandemic years.  Using the energy of the season to support our integration of what is essential just might bring the clarity we need to avoid getting stuck in a rigidity that only leads to debilitating exhaustion. 

Instead of ‘pathways’, these days I use the breath, inhaling while acknowledging the simple gratitude and joy for life that an in-breath brings, and being with the innate grief that comes with exhaling.  Inhaling joy, exhaling grief.  It’s a physical practice, based in the very tangible experience of the lungs taking in air (life) and letting go (tiny death).  Each breath we take offers us a moment to truly be with all the grief and joy we’ve lived through, allowing these deep emotions to shape us into a smooth blade of grace and clarity.  This Autumn, may you know such clarity from your biggest ideas to your tiniest cell.

mother tree

mother tree.

a two thousand year old tree opens
its palms to the hot smoky air
unfurling needles, sucking in carbon. 
roots spread even now
into the soil made of her own barked body
hundreds of years gone.

below, tiny humans splash water on the bone-like roots.
this tree is worth saving they say, scrambling
to keep the embers from the nearby fire
blooming into flame.
she is old, she knows, older than any small beliefs they’ve held and called
ancient.

they are cutting down the young ones surrounding her
clearing out a ring of isolation to
keep her safe. 
(she notices the vibrations through her grieving roots)
she is tired, perhaps, or indifferent, or sacred.  or all of these things,
like a mother, worn down to the knuckle.
when will she fall
what will be the reason?

imagine the sound, echoing around the planet
creating its own wind.
and the quiet that follows such a huge event
like a breath held, and then
the sunlight filtering to the forest floor where it has not touched
for over two thousand years, moving in with indifference, and loving caress.

this tree, now shrouded in smoke
from her burning kin
is no longer as resilient as
the bowing humans would like
is fragile.  now, with urgency
they agree she should be ‘saved’. 
five days ago, fireworks fizzled
in chaotic paths, lit by their kin.

 two thousand miles away, a woman is on
her back, holding her belly gently.  she has recently
been through an ordeal, a scraping
of her womb from the wanted, yet impossible
beginnings of life growing there.  her children shriek nearby
lighting up the neighborhood with their laughter. 
they are her dearest treasures, a ring of adoration
to shield her from isolation.  this one, this lost one, lingers with
a sadness she can’t quite describe, like a breath held. 
she is quiet these days, naiant in the waves of grief,
indifference, exhaustion. 
to her children, she remains the most sacred thing.
she let go of the sapling growth to make room
for the ones already standing
and yet, the smoke rises around them all. 
the fires are spreading, the chaotic paths branching. 
what, she wonders, is ever worth saving
and saving from what inevitable end? 

sparks erupt between her children’s tempers
she goes to them
with all the patience and compassion she’s capable of
and holds them equally, with fragility. 
these ones, these ones
are worth saving.

On being chosen, woven.

My five year old isn’t afraid of anything, except spiders.  Lately, when he sees even the tiniest one making her way (for ease, all spiders are ‘she’ in our family) from one dusty corner to another, he makes this hilarious sound somewhere between a scream and a moan - corners of his mouth turned down, eyes going wide and rigid (think Peewee Hermann). It inevitably sends the rest of us into stitches, such a surprising sound coming from this brave, both-feet-first kind of kid.

* * *

It’s morning, early summer, on precisely day 4 of my morning ritual, which is this: drink a whole cup of tea sitting in the first sunlight, facing east (with instructions for the kids: absolutely NO interruptions unless someone is dying).

I’ve been watching the catbird to my left, doing the chug back and forth under the hydrangea I’m settled next to.  I turn back to my almost empty teacup and am surprised to find a tiny, thin spider suspended over the rim.  She’s obviously been here for sometime, with several threads winking in the sunlight, her body like a spinning acrobat over the mouth of the cup.  I’ll admit, at first I’m a little miffed, feeling resentful that someone did interrupt this ritual of a whole cup of tea, a rarity for any parent of young children.  But quickly I become curious, where did this spider fly in from, and what will she choose to do with this opening?  She lithely shifts from hanging suspended to making her way over the edge, dancing down the outside of my favorite mug.  Now opening her front legs in a graceful split, now weaving her other legs under her in an invisible geometry, her movement seems too beautiful to only be utilitarian.  I’m not sure if she’s touching the clay cup or hovering just over it; her tiny grace is masterful in the face of gravity.

Long minutes pass watching this tiny detail of her intricate dance when she begins tip-toeing off the edge of the cup.  Somehow, a pathway through open space has appeared, and she uses it effortlessly.  Then, after losing myself completely for these minutes, I see my arm come into view, spider quickly making her way to it.  Now, I’m not afraid of spiders per se, but I’m told I made the exact same sound my son utters upon seeing one, when I was his age.  My skin tenses, my senses zoom every sensation back to the foreground.  Then she stops, mid air, as if giving me time to decide.  Do I want this contact?  I exhale slowly, and she weaves her last few steps to my fuzzy bare arm.  At first, I feel every little foot fall, and resist the urge to stop the tickle.  Then I gaze in wonder as she continues, ever graceful, to simply weave me into her web.  Using the tiniest hairs on my arm she gently lifts her body off mine with her own brilliant invention.  I see my arm start to glimmer in the sun with a patchwork of threads – she seems to like her web woven tight and messy, not at all like the order of a giant garden orb.  Finally, her movements slow, she finds the edge of the old sweatshirt sleeve pushed to my elbow, and rests.  I have the sensation of breathing with all the things she’s threaded together, both known and unknown to me. Then, with such delicacy, this little spider reaches down from the cliff of my cuff to my skin and tastes me, bringing her long graceful forelegs to her mouth.  Again and again, she touches, tastes, returns for more.  It is the most intimate thing to witness, my heart beats between my breasts with awakened tenderness.  Tears swell in my eyes, just for a moment, and a slight smile reshapes my quiet mouth.

When I’m finally called back to my family, I pick up an old root sitting at my feet, leftover from twilight gardening, and she welcomes the new texture with what I could only describe as excitement.  I leave her there, in the shade of the hydrangea as the day is heating up, and walk slowly back into the house, but not before throwing back the last sweet sip of now cold tea, web threads mingling with jasmine green.  It washes into me light sunlight, like a spider’s gentle kiss.

the most consistent medicine for despair.

A dear friend recently told me that one of the names of the plant above is gill-of-the-garden. when I heard it, I took a big, audible sigh and smiled wide at the presence of poetics in my often clunky, utilitarian home language. Quite possibly, the best place to find such lovely expressions is in the soft, quirky common names of plants.

I’ve been following this plant around, watching it wander up and down the rocky garden boundary, pushing through cracks, and nestled beside the plentiful wood violets. Maybe this little ‘garden escapee’ really is the gills of the garden, bringing some space into the tight places, some oxygen into the warming soil.

Going out to the gills-of-the-garden, getting close enough to smell the dirt and slow enough to stay awhile, is getting a dose of what else is possible. The garden is such a place of possibility, a diverse landscape where I understand how humans really can collaborate to create something utterly beautiful. When I’m here, I’m reminded that - though it’s easier to see the fact that our species is a bit of a menace, bent towards battling our way through - we are quite capable of using our hands and heads to benefit many. It’s a self-compassion practice to notice where we humans can add some beauty.

* * *

Living in this time, with so much destruction, fear, and devastation, it is easy to submerge into despair. The threat to black bodies in the U.S. right now is unfathomable. The threat to women’s bodies in the U.S. right now is immeasurable. The threat to whole countries of people under attack is undigestible.

I do not want to be numb to these truths - to be whole, I must stay engaged. But also, to not lose myself in the thick sleepless soup of despair - to stay agile - I step into the garden…

Peonies in the moonlight. Brimming, pregnant with creative possibility. What color will unfold as the moon begins to wane? Next to peony is rose, whom I uprooted from my California home because I couldn’t bare to leave without her. Still no sign of life above ground, but as I touch my hand to the base I can tell it’s there, waiting for safety to re-emerge. Turning toward the moonlight, I see the plot of medicinals newly landed in the soil. Bee balm leans towards chamomile with a secret. Arnica spreads easily towards the shade of motherwort - two priestesses of the blood. And little astragalus, who I thought was certainly a goner, is pushing up into the bright mooned sky, spreading its pinnate leaves like a woven tapestry.

The recovery in my heart is quicker than I expect.
The metaphors are less important than the radical act of balancing the palpable weight of grief with the density of beauty.
The most consistent medicine for despair is the simple practice of stepping into acute awareness.
There is always beauty to be found.

lessons from a bedtime banter.

I was laying in the dark next to my smallest child. This nightly ritual, where he nods off to sleep with my body close, is usually a sweet blessing. This night, it was taking awhile, with lots of flopping around and trying to engage me for a chat.  Suddenly, he cried out in pain.

“Mama mama, my heel is bleeding!” A sure decoy, I was not taking the bait.  I responded curtly with “I don’t feel anything wet”, then back to feigning sleep.   2 breaths later, “I have a blister! It hurts so bad…I need a Band-Aid!”

“But there’s no blood?”

He recalculates. “No, no, I…scratched myself. But it really hurts. I need you to fix it.”

This child has certain privileges with an herbalist as a mom, always at the ready with the helpful plants to soothe and heal.  Essentially, he knows how to get me interested.  After much persisting about his pain I let my curiosity peak, turned on the headlamp, and took a look. The tiniest scratch was indeed present on his heel, so small that I could barely see it. I turned off the light and flopped back down as he huffed and puffed and then announced into the dark with gusto:

“Mama, you are not taking care of me!”  

This statement snapped me to attention, but I kept an even tone and whispered, “That’s because you are a wise body that knows how to take care of yourself.”  He finally warbled off to sleep, and I was left in the thick of this question:

Who’s job is it to take care of whom, and to what degree? 

Upon waking, no mention of the little in-firmed heal. It was only when he was pulling his socks on that I remembered to ask him how it was feeling. 

“Oh that, it’s healed.  My body did it all by itself.”  And then, after a thoughtful pause, “Isn’t that amazing?”

This is a message we rarely hear, and for good reason: our culture relies on our desire to consume in order to be healthy, happy, and safe.  To embody the perspective that we already have everything we need is incredibly threatening to capitalism’s inner workings.  Instead we are taught, right down the subconscious level, that we can’t possibly heal without all the external things constantly being waved in our faces. 

Take a band-aid for example: made out of plastic (hello big oil), usually dyed with synthetic chemicals and made sticky with who knows what, always wrapped in yet more plastic to make it ‘safe’.  Usually, the biggest service band-aids provide is a sense of care offered from another person, a symbol of their love.  Do we know we can heal without one?  If we are old enough, yes, but at that point the commodity might be deeply entangled with receiving another’s love.  This is a light example, but it’s easy to go down the rabbit hole of seeing how consumerism is a parasite on our need for connection and safety.  Where else could our sense of connection and safety come from?

We are living through a time where we center fragility and forget what it’s like to be relaxed and confident that our bodies can hold us.  For too long, we’ve been spoon fed the narrative that we need someone else to fix us, and in doing so have relinquished our most precious power: our own health.  I’m not inviting shame in acknowledging this, or guilt, or even blame on the system that feeds us.  All that is a part of the same feedback loop.

Sometimes I like to imagine what I would do if I didn’t have all the things marketed to be well: no pills, no supplements, no band-aids, no masks, no grocery store paying people to shop for me, no herbs even - just to try on a different perspective.  What I can feel in this game is the subtle shift of my spine, just slightly, the invigoration of my blood, the balanced tone of my viscera.  I think of this as my wei qi, my protective qi, waking up…that stance that we take when we are ready, yet relaxed, for anything.   This stance is so important to know, for each of us to sense, because it is how we practice strength - like the long red oaks that seem to reach taller in the face of the coming storm. 

I often wonder where we would be (physically as well as mentally) if this was an Rx we centered and practiced, an internal precaution deemed as important as all the external ones.

At the root, our bodies are beautiful expressions of the earth, perfectly reflected in the larger body of the planet.  I don’t think we have any idea how intricate, complex, and utterly brilliant this travelling ball of blue-green life truly is.  If we did, we’d trust it, and trust ourselves too.  

How to re-open.

What a long, deep contraction, like a perpetual winter, we’ve been in.  The threat has ebbed between immense, questionable, or laughable, depending on our particular vantage points.  But the collective, on a nearly global level, has been in a fetal position.  So how do we open, literally, our bodies back up to the light? What is the shape of becoming? 

I’m reminded of how western allopathy used to proclaim that birth was an inactive occurrence for the baby coming through, that we come into this world limp and needy on every level.  Traditional wisdom, now verified through technology (please do see the underlying subtext there of feminine wisdom vs. patriarchal verification) has a different understanding of birth: if given the space, babies let their mothers know they are ready to be born by pushing on the cervix, twisting through the bony passage, unfurling their spines and with feet against the fundus, thrusting into the world.  If unimpeded, newborns will also undulate up the mother’s belly to the breast, and latch on without support. 

This simple shift of what agency we all come in with can translate to how capable and trustworthy our bodied selves truly are.  We’ve embraced – or been made to embrace – a narrative that the only agencies we have are outside ourselves in ‘fighting’ this virus: masks, prophylactic drugs, isolation, and ventilators.  I understand the pathway here, but what else is possible? 

We won’t pretend health is equally available in this systemically racist society.  (Black and brown bodies of culture in the U.S. have perished at roughly twice the rate of white-identified folks.  But across Africa, Black bodies have survived well, with over 11 million infections and only 250,000 deaths on the entire continent.)  But going back to the idea that we all come in with an innate physical intelligence, how can we use that moving forward?  What does it look like to engage with this viral intelligence that is in fact a part of who we all are too? 

For me, it looks like unfurling, pushing my feet into the ground (concrete and all), and feeling my head pushing up into the sky.  I see the squirrel gathering moss in her mouth, I see the full face of my small child smiling at a stranger again, I see sweet annie and elderberry and japanese knotweed pushing up to join me here. We are doing this collectively, as the Earth wakes up the plants (where I live). but as an individual I wonder, how strong can I be in this moment, how flexible and vibrant and inspiring?  How can I move towards possibility and away from fear, which always has a diminishing effect?

All of our answers are different - I can almost smell the brilliant diversity of our collective garden as we engage with the challenge to live with health. We are brilliant beings, when we stay in our skin.

There’s one more thread here to weave in, the one about how, according to systems theory and metaphysics, what happens to the earth’s body echoes inside our own.  I do imagine that if we considered the impacts of our health choices on the Earth more fully, we would make different choices.  I know we’ve all found muddy, snowy, trampled masks as we traverse our days.  (I’m at 197 and counting.)  Most are N95s, made out of synthetic plastic fiber made out of fossil fuels, rubber, aluminum, and steel. Historically, us humans tend to respond first with a hefty dose of impetuosity, then we consider the impacts.  A good example is sunscreen, which, while healthful for us, has been devastating for coral reefs, which are even more important to global health. Are the protective options we’ve chosen really the best we can do to protect the vulnerable…whom might we be excluding in that label?

I know another surge may be in store for us soon, complete with fear, inflammation, anxiety, and mandated requirements.  What I wonder is, what would a response look like from an unfurled stance that considers the whole breathing Earth, who right now is inflamed beyond possibility?

The subversive act of living within our physical means, in a healthy orientation, could be a guidepost.  Asking the nearest tree, squirrel, or stone for guidance, might not be out of the question.

“Baby slides into a new world.  A transformation has occurred.  Baby is changing from fetal circulation to neonatal circulation, initiating respirations, smelling the environment, feeling air for the first time, listening, seeing, and experiencing his or her first impressions of this planet. Mother is seeing this planet through new eyes. She will usually sit quietly for a few moments allowing herself to return. She then reaches out to touch her baby. Usually the partner sits by, watching, with tears of awe.” –Wapio, esteemed midwife, homeopath, teacher

landscape/memory.

Out the window: white canvas, tangle of grey trunks exploding out. Austere, cold, the kind of snow great thinkers might have thought on.

Then there’s this little bouncy grey squirrel emerging from the treescape. He (let’s say he) launches off the snow like a skipped stone on water, stopping right under the young forsythia in my view. Behind the glass, I watch as he dives his little paws into the 12 inches of snow, tunneling down. Two seconds max of digging before pausing to check for threats, and then back in: digdigdigdigdigdigdig – look – digdigdigdigdigdig – look. The rhythm is so comical, yet honest. He digs himself down until all I see is the wiry tail, little shoulders and spine all covered in snow. Just when I begin to wonder if he’s in the right spot, jackpot! Two little paws arise out of the back of the fridge with the prize: hickory nut. With pleasure, we both enjoy the nut, right there. It’s cold, snow dusted, perfectly preserved, like pistachio ice cream from the bougie ice cream store. I swear I can taste it too.

After snack, I wonder what’s next. It’s back to digdigdigdigdigdigdig – look – digdigdigdigdigdig –look. More tunneling this time, more effort. But it’s there, he knows, and after a few more minutes of the frantic then careful motions that only squirrels can switch between, he’s got another one. In slow motion, I watch him turn back towards the red oak, consider, then launch his way up to a tiny hole I never noticed before – dull human that I am. In no time at all he’s upside down, 50 ft. up a tree, peering down into the hole below with the treat in his mouth. Two paws emerge from the hole, grab the nut, then disappear. A smile spreads across my face, my heart too. Sharing, something every piece of this breathing earth knows how to do. Empty handed now, he climbs to the highest crook in the tree, orients towards the sun. I sit with him there, satisfied, our faces to the bright morning sun together.

I marvel at what the squirrel must know of the contour and contents of every inch of this territory. It is utter brilliance that we humans are surrounded by, not the other way around. We do though, sometimes align ourselves in just the right way for that brilliance to be reflected back onto us…sometimes.

It’s said that the world is constantly writing our stories, recording everything that’s done and said. This land has a memory longer than our first ancestors, has known every bone discarded with an intimacy we long for. Perhaps some of us - the pesky furred ones - are able to hear the land well up underfoot with story, memory, sustenance. What would that sound like, I wonder?

hearth chant.

Here’s the thing:

Women are the hearth.  We are the blood, the flesh, and the fire of our entire species.  We already hold the center.  We are the center.  In our bodies are the echoes of the earth’s bounty and gifts, the nourishment we need to survive, to breathe, to be.  And yet. Women’s bodies are burning up with ambitions and expectations to provide, provide, provide.  We are to provide the food, the nurturing, the delight, the creative voice, the muse, the intuition, the wealth, the wisdom - endlessly.  Women are wise, magical, beautiful, intuitive, otherworldly, responsible, central. 

We are drowning in this. 

(Just as our earth is drowning in our vast expectations of extraction.) 

I’m so tired of seeing women normalize their traumatic experiences being child bearer, rearer, bread winner, and emotional barometer, all at once.  It is normalized because it is highly productive, which is the center of modernity: production.  We don’t even see that what’s expected of us – what we expect of ourselves – is exactly what we expect of the earth: too much.  Like cows lined up to give all their milk away, we are afforded none for ourselves.  I’m enraged with what modernity – masked as progressive, liberal ideas – is doing to women’s bodies and their experiences in them.  And this is not just what the constructs and ‘others’ are doing to us, it’s what we are doing to ourselves. Women come to me for help, thinking the plants can help them continue extracting.  And perhaps they can, for a time, because plants are nothing but generous.  Like all the female saints and archetypes, they give endlessly, withholding nothing.  But there is no amount of tea or tincture that can be thrown at the machine of modernity to make it stop; we are driving it.  We have to turn the key, get out, and remember that our bodies are as soft as the soil, and cannot be raked against endlessly without depletion.  We women - mothers aunties sisters grandmothers - are the hearth.  The fire will burn us up if we don’t tend it, and insist others take a turn in tending. 

An old, used up hearth has no sense of pride - just as an over-used woman has a deep lack of essence, or self-esteem. Blood has long been linked to self-esteem, and women have been all but bled dry in this age of extraction. Activists and thinkers can talk circles round the extractive way of living off - not on - the land, but few connect the dots between the body of the earth and the bodies that we are. Tending these bodies of ours differently would directly impact our tending of the Earth. Mind you, I’m not implying pampering and delicacy, if women were delicate we would no longer exist.

The imbalances run deep. It’s happening in our bodies right now, just as it’s playing out in the soil and sky. Inflammation, auto-immune disease, cancer.  These are all about too much heat - a fire burning too hot always scorches.  A hearth must be tended by many hands.  Men, women, two-spirits, non-binaries, children, elders, ancestors…we must all tend the center.  Currently, we nearly all adhere to this story that modernity asks of the woman’s basketed body: “carry it all, and make it look easy”.  There is an end to this path, it looks like infertility, chronic illness, chronic depression, cancer, unexplained immune flare, bitterness, and burning to collapse. This path may acknowledge our “hard work”, our “great effort”, and our “incredible contributions”, but it does not see the threadbare woman being crushed with unnecessary ailments under those external accomplishments. To praise only those of us who relinquish our health at any cost is to turn away from any hope of collective health. Noticing how often it happens, from novels to historical figures, is dismaying.

There is another path where it is honorable to do just enough, to let ambition lie fallow at times.  To acknowledge, then share the workload, to never ever leave each other alone to raise our kids in isolation.  And this is not a ‘women’s issue’.  As I keep chanting: we are the hearth.  We are the hearth.  Without our fire – our health – there is no continuation.  No place to stir your ideas around, no place to shelter, no place to be fed from. 

This is crucial to know. 

— * —

Once, in a far off place, there was a central hearth where all our individual embers came from. The story goes that each year, women were given space to replenish the hearth that they tended (and indeed were). They travelled together, from all directions, back to the center. They rekindled their light as part of the sacred duty to the whole. The children were cared for. The home hearth was kept well. They took as long as they needed.

I begin walking barefoot.  The ground is wet, cold, but the direction is clear.  Walk south, towards the hearth, towards the mother.  As I walk, I begin to sink deeper into the duff, and the earth begins to receive my weight with fervor.  She is excited to receive.  Like walking down a shallow set of stairs, I descend, first up to my knees, where ambition leaps.  Releasing into the cool, damp solidity of soil, I continue my descent, up to my belly, where wisdom and possibility seed.  These things give way, as I realize my own exhaustion, deep depletion, need for support.  The ground swallows my breasts, milk releasing slightly as they are stimulated by soil.  Now my neck, my agency - now my mouth, my power.  My eyes are last, but instead of darkness, I see through the black earth a small flame ahead.  No need to walk now, the earth guides me south, takes my weight with ease and allows me full yield.  I arrive at the flame, and it grows to meet me in size.  We stand facing one another, myself and the ember mother, and with gentleness, She consumes me.  My known narratives melt away and I am simply light and warmth, just for a moment.  My senses only know ecstasy, a pure and simple joy, and like an infant’s smile it washes me anew.  Suddenly, I am on my own feet again, and the ground becomes solid, warm stone on bare feet.  I’ve passed through the ember, and continue on, through the clear path of the cave, into the light.  Slowly, I step toward the entrance, or exit, of the cave, and am welcomed back into the falling rain, the wide smooth river, and my sisters, brothers, lovers, children.  In my pocket, close to my belly, is an ember burning soft and warm.

Where the cave meets the moving water, we shake the husk of modernity off and expose our golden, bright selves for all to see. We are exquisite in our imperfections and shortcomings, and bountiful together…like corn, jeweled and resting in the sun. 

finding the quilled cave goddess

This photo really doesn’t do this mountain justice, but I wanted to share it as an invitation to make like a mountain and lie down on the land, let your head sink just as hers does, nose nestled into the evergreens, and settle in for a small story.

I’ve come to call this mountain “the great woman”, a name my 4 year old coined when I showed him the hip, the fleshy arm, the sinking head. Do you see it?Most people call this place Mt. Toby, and although I’ve looked and looked for an older name, one that encompasses more of it’s majesty, I haven’t found one yet. I circle this mountain daily, enamored by how much quiet attention it - or she, or they - demands. In the picture, over on the right, half way down from the hip line, there’s a cave. It’s technically a dark cavern created by two huge slabs of rock that fell together after a glacier slid away, but to me it feels very much like a place where bones meet, the birthing bones of a resting woman.

There was someone else in the cave yesterday.  I sensed a strong presence, and swung the headlamp around.  The dark seemed to devour the light, but I decided there was no bear; perhaps it was the closeness of the wet bone-like rock making it’s presence known.  I stepped deeper into the dark, willing away all the younger versions of myself that would certainly be afraid. I scanned again with my small light and found what my senses had detected.  There in the corner, tucked up as far into the crevice as she could get, was a beautiful, big porcupine.  Don’t ask me how I knew her gender, I just did. Her body faced the wall, but her little soft face turned around to take me in with her eyes.  It was so dark, and yet we could see each other clearly.  With such a formidable defense as a body full of quills, it’s curious how safe I felt.  But knowing she knew how to take care of herself, I knew I didn’t need to be overly cautious or accommodating.  Talk about some protective chi, there’s no need for inflammation here, in body or speech, a porcupine knows they are safe.  What if we humans knew, deep down, that we are safe? How might our reactions soften towards all we encounter? Turning the flashlight off, I sat down on the damp rock and listened as we breathed together. She began a little cooing song, which I added my own soft hum to. The scent of old rock, bathed for millions of years in darkness competed with the smell of earth, full and bright in my nose.  The sound was wholly consumed by the layers of rock. I wondered that there was no shrine here, no homage to some goddess or another, but then turned my attention back to the shared song happening deep inside the mountain, right then.

I remembered that the ones who say the least are often the ones who have the most wisdom to share. This porcupine didn’t let off her stinky protective scent, or quiver her teeth as me.  Instead, the look on her little face seemed to me a look of longing, of uncertainty about what’s to come, and a deep soft grief.  I wanted to protect her, but then remembered how brilliantly protected she already is. She found shelter in the womb of the mountain, her soft vulnerable belly close to the stone. She requires nothing of me, which comes as a small shock to my system - so used to giving, offering, supporting as a woman and mother in this time. I leave the little cave goddess before I’m ready, I could stay here all day truly, but the wisdom of that dark dwelling animal stays with me.  I allow her to be a metaphor for relationship, for non-verbal communication, for standing in my own skin, not reaching beyond my own clear boundaries. Metaphor for me isn’t just a nice way to evoke descriptive writing, it’s a way to weave the connected stories of our existence back into each other, like tucking the ends of the willow in for a finished basket. In this way, she is woven into me.

I drive home and stop to take in the view, snap the picture above these words.  The leaves that have covered the skin of the mountain, like fur, are all gone now.  The trees rise like soft hairs off the curves of rock and soil.  This mountain, this mountain I still barely know, is what I grip to like a holdfast of the wild California coast.  I miss the smell of bay so much my body aches, and the grandeur of oaks, redwoods, dancing bays and madrones is a sight I can only see in the dark now.  Here, the forest is not grand.  The forest is change.  The mountain is teaching me how to shape shift, how to appreciate the cold, the growth, the water pouring down like sheets. There is so much to be connected to, it’s dizzying when it really comes into focus. 

what do we know about unison?

Every year for the past decade, I’ve hauled myself out to the cold, windy, Sonoma Coast on January 1st, with many friends and strangers, to flock.

Flocking? This is one of those terms that we all know with our bodies, no matter how obscure it may sound to our minds. It’s the score we agree to when we walk down the street together in big cities, and what happens when we applaud a great performance. It’s also protesting, and marching. Flocking is simply moving in unison, but that sounds easier than it is.

When I was 22, I spontaneously went with a dear friend to Ocean Beach (SF) on New Year’s Day to watch the sunset. We walked lazily out on the sand, shoes left in the car, and stood facing the light. As the orange sun began melting into the horizon, I noticed many others had turned to stand and watch. There was complete silence in the human realm as the sun slowly descended, and then, suddenly and all at once, we began to clap. All along the beach, hundreds of people were applauding, laughing, and delighting in our collective response, like an infectious tickle. It sparked the ritual I now refer to as ‘murmurations’, always performed on new year’s day (gregorian calendar).

I engage the Cherokee folk dance known to most as ‘the Tslagi Dance of Life’. I was taught it by Shinichi Iova Koga, who learned it from his Butoh teacher, who learned it from a woman in Golden Gate Park. It’s a simple dance of reverence to locate oneself inside the landscape, with gratitude and awe.

Last year, it was just me and my sweet oldest child, bowing and moving with a mirrored grace in front of the cresting waves. It was solemn, given what was happening last January, but full of reverence, and no less aligning. We both felt the importance of doing something just to be beautiful - not productive or useful - to begin the year. In a sense, it’s quite the opposite of a new year’s resolution - it’s a gift to the waves, the passing birds, the shifting sand.

This year, I find myself far from that deep ocean place. I’ve stretched my roots such a long way from that coast, I can almost touch the other side. In these stark Massachusetts woods, I’ve spent the past several weeks inside this question:

what flocks here?

I’m looking for a bird, a bug, anything, to reflect that calming energy of unison in my new home. The birds have all flown south - except the individualistic jays and cardinals, the trees stand naked, seemingly apart from each other, and the deer have strangely disappeared (it’s hunting season). It’s all felt a little fragmented, not unlike the human realm.

Then recently, standing by the Saw Mill river that bends so sensually through the nearby forest I walk through, I found the unison I’ve been looking for. It’s right here, in the congruent, single-minded flow of water as each particle finds the slightest downhill slope and it braids it’s way to the sea. Water is what the trees of California told me to move toward, what I dreamt about before I knew I was moving, what stands as reflector, teacher, muse…not to mention the element all life hinges on.

There’s something truly profound about mirroring the qualities seen in the landscape with our own limbs and breath, and this year more than ever, it feels so important to do so. I read so many words typed into a screen or printed on paper about belonging, accepting, and reckoning during this time of the Great Turning, but find that the body is often left stagnant and uninhabited in that receiving. Words take up space - in our minds, “the cloud”, our attention, but a dance is simple a form of reciprocity…what’s taken is equally given.

This new year, may we take a deep collective bow of gratitude, all together, and align with what is beautiful in the landscape of our living.

unknown territory.

a morning improvisation:

It’s 8am. The hurricane of humans has just left the house, and I am momentarily left to my own devices.

I step out into the cold morning and wander away from the house, into the woods across the road. Three deer flick their young tails at me, a jay swoops in to announce this new player in the scene. I walk softly between houses barely visible through the trees on either side, choosing damp old leaves for my path.  Even though I know I don’t ‘belong’ here, I keep going - I want to know the curve of this place and how it connects to the road below.  There’s something steadying about knowing the terrain, not just the paths carved for travel.  Also, walking in this nameless forest is the right environment to reflect the unknown territory we are collectively travelling.  We are in a no man’s land of viral load, drugs, weather repatterning, and mandated decisions, no matter which vantage point we lookout from.  Standing in unmarked woods offers me an embodied sense of the disorientation.

It’s quiet here. There’s a steady decline where I imagine water will flow. Mushrooms bloom their last brilliance.

Suddenly, I look up to see someone bringing their compost out from the nearby wooden house I hadn’t thought was so close. I freeze, knowing I’m likely on ‘their’ land, and not supposed to be here.  Everything is more vibrant, more scented, more alive. The rush of soft adrenaline is invigorating, and I finally feel awake to this day.

I spend the next 20 minutes playing a game of staying unseen as I make my way down to the road.   Several birds attempt to out me, but the humans refuse to look up from their tasks.   At one point, another person walks straight in my direction and I stop stone still behind the spindly tree that happens to be there.  As they load up a wheelbarrow with debris I stay put, heart racing.  A nearby squirrel pumps their tail at me, cackling: “See? kinda fun isn’t it?”   Yes, it is.  It’s just the right amount of tension that feels invigorating, not depleting…like a tree that’s healthy enough to bend without breaking.  

I make it to the road unseen by several humans, but every single deer, jay, chipmunk, squirrel, and chickadee in a mile radius knows my whereabouts.  It’s a little absurd how much we humans miss, surrounded by such deep, diverse communication.  In practicing being just another animal walking through the woods, I can get a sense of what it must feel like to have so many others know my business, and have my back.  I love this feeling of full body autonomy, yet deeply webbed witnessing.

As I walk up the road toward home, the half moon beams a wide smile above me. Then I spot a chipmunk in mid step on the nearby stump. One eye tracks me inside their full stop. I know now what it feels like to be watched, so I acknowledge briefly, with kindness, then lower my gaze and keep moving.

I know now how empowering it is to be accounted for, yet unthreatened by another. If only us humans could afford each other such diversity, and respect.

in praise of illness.

Last week, after an overly full day of activity, I woke to find my smallest child sick.  This one, who is bright and fast and sometimes so loud I need headphones, was suddenly a limp little flower. 

The compass that locks into place around illness is clear and immediate for me:  slow down, attune to the physical, tend to what’s vital.  Bring out the jar of steam herbs to invigorate the shared air.  Go out to the tree with turkey tails for broth, to the thyme patch for tea.  Let the day be foot baths, warm foods, gua sha, long stories. This is not because I’m afraid of illness, but rather a communicative body deserves a response.  I’m not out to change or ‘fix’, just respond to what is being expressed, and model attunement for these young ones.  We are more body than anything else, and ignoring what it’s saying seems just plain bizarre, if not dangerous. 

To reorganize around someone’s body, not their ambitions (or my own) is quite a shift from the bizarre normalcy of our culture.  Normal these days tends to be organizing around the pings and dings of devices and tightly planned, imposed schedules.  In contrast, we humans once organized around the curve of the moon, the generous language of songbirds, and our bodies.  

. . .

When someone in my family gets sick, I’m secretly almost joyous.  Even during a pandemic.  Even though I’m not immune to the ‘fear of covid’ either.  The real medicine here is the actual illness, not all the herbs and foods and care I respond with.  There is a reorienting to the physical that feels so profound - so human – I am instantly connected to all that is current and happening in real time.  Here, I’m allowed to linger in the present and let simplicity be medicinal.  The medicine is dancing between surrender and response – action and non-action.  Being sick is a healthy response to imbalance, and I’d rather look at imbalance straight in the face than carry on for the sake of normalcy. 

I think I do that most everywhere in my life – it’s why I heaved myself across the country from my deep home and community: to respond to what’s being communicated from the Earth’s broad body.  We are like a billion little worlds orbiting inside the curve of this green blue planet, and the way we each inhabit ourselves really is reflected in how Earth manages our presence.  It makes perfect sense that the imbalance we are calling ‘climate crisis’ or ‘bad weather’ is a healthy response to that deep dysymmetry.  The earth is as overmedicated as we are.

 . . .

Lots of folks these days are writing about how personal choices around ecology don’t matter much in the face of big policy changes that are needed in government after government across the continents.  To be honest, I don’t have any big hope in government.  I do wonder what would happen if we changed the story from the bottom up – re-spun the tiniest to the biggest tales about how we should live, what we need to do so, and why there’s really no way to exist without exploitation/destruction/control.  Just like there’s ‘no way’ to for medicine to exist without harm (the Hippocratic oath is so “out” in allopathic medicine these days).    

How about this:  we are all keepers of bits of starlight that needs the most profound care and tenderness to survive past our bodies so there’s light for the younger humans we love to see by.  And, we are all – even the assholes among us – worthy and deserving of a self-love akin to a mother’s un-afflicted love.  We were all once delicate new bodies, adored and cherished by someone. What if we still are – and acted like it?  What if the medicine to the biggest imbalances is the same as it is for the smallest ones?

 *    *    *

My little one eventually gets better, and seems older.  To physically struggle, especially when we’re little, feels like a ripening, a filling out into our next selves…a shedding of a skin.   I tell my child that being sick isn’t something to fear, it’s something to welcome.  Then I bring tea, and we count golden leaves as they fly - no longer a part of the trees, belonging now to the breeze and soon, to the soil.  I spin some story about the wild journey the leaf takes to become part of the water, the gold in chipmunk’s fir, his own laughter.  It’s a long, complex story, but very believable.

*    *    *

My love letter to California

After living for most of my life in the Bay Area, I have made the difficult (that’s and understatement) decision to move to the Northeast, in light of the ongoing and deepening climate threat of living with fire. This is my love letter to the land we call California.

Dear land, dear jagged mountains and soup bowl of deserts, dear fog shrouded coastline and California bay scent:

Thank you for growing me up. Thank you redwoods for being the first trees I gazed into with two day old eyes. Thank you San Francisco for catching me at 20, lost and looking for a true teacher. Thank you Death Valley for reminding me that inflammation is inhospitable. Thank you tides for enveloping the blood of my unborn ones and delighting the ones who made it all the way through. Thank you countless mountains for your hard lessons in body and heart. Your curves and wild ridges and even wilder coastlines have inspired me to continually widen my lens. You have grown me up like no other. You have emerged in me and through me and woven me into the fabric of belonging.  I know I belong with you.

But you are nebulous, wild, always changing. You have been many things before, and there is so much more you have yet to become. I have left you, mirroring your transformation with my own wide movement.  You are a powerful land demanding all animals heed your attention as you burn.  Move, you said.  Change with me, you said.  My heart breaks to leave my home, my biggest teacher, my land, my love. I’m not leaving you, but I am leaving. I love you, but I am leaving because I love you. I leave to stretch my running roots to find water, to not pull another drop out of your creeks for myself, knowing your depletion. The bear who passed through Sonoma County recently, where bears have always been but never are, she heard you too. I follow her lead now. I make room for her return. It is my great privilege to do so, but also a responsibility I feel in having heard you say go.

Humanity has criss-crossed your skin with highways and neighborhood grids and row after row of grapes and yet you remain wild in your oaks and slopes. So tenacious, so full of growth, despite exhaustion. I love you golden land. I love you mountains of fog. I love you bodies of brackish water. You bring me to my knees with your ferocious beauty. My land. Can I claim you as you have me? Can I take you with me? Aren’t I made out of you? Aren’t you me? Dear wild oak strewn land of the salmon and bear and hobo and hummingbird, are you sure I must go? I know. You’ve been clear. Time for you to transform, time for me to give space.

You are not just California, but the rich fabric of soil and memory that breathes life into my bone marrow. And if this is the case, I take you with me everywhere. I will find you under every rock noticed, every plant discovered, and every curve acknowledged of your great breathing body. I gather my rootlets and imagine them walking east, but my taproot remains forever with you, dear land of my birth, my heart, my love.

witness/be witnessed.

At the sound of a low-flying plane I look up suddenly into the white and grey. Instead of the familiar dead shape of a plane traversing sky, I see the bright white wings of an egret flying low overhead. The sound of the plane continues as the egret flaps its delicate wings, legs splayed in the oncoming wind. The juxtaposition between what I hear and what I see is almost comical, tinged with grief.  The egret works hard to traverse the sky; the humans above it’s head are likely working hard to forget they are thousands of feet from stability, traversing one movie to the next instead of one ridge to another.  We don't often see the bird that's incessantly calling to us until it's already fleeing our presence.  I wonder: what do we humans lose, spending most of our nights indoors?  How much do we miss out on without the night sky as a compass to live by, the smell of earth a constancy of daily tasks?  I know there’s bigger questions out there that need answering (they are probably coursing through your head right now), but really, doesn’t it always come back to engaging the heart enough to be in love with this little life we have? 

Once, recently, I found myself at the coast with a small group of humans, spontaneously singing, dancing, and throwing flowers into the waves and the setting sun.  I was just beginning to feel a bit silly and shy, when an otter bobbed their head up from just beyond the break.  They strained their neck high out the water, staring at the lot of us.  If an otter could drop a jaw, I imagine they would have done so.  The long necked creature bobbed along, floating in front of each of us, and somehow, the witness of that sea otter sealed my conviction: yes, humans know how to bow.  We know how to play, how to give thanks.  Watch me.  I spun around and swam in the sand with an otter’s delight.

A formula for falling in love with our life, moment after moment:  Witness.  Be witnessed. Not by other humans, but the leaning trees, the nodding flower heads, the passing stream with a place to go.  Earth body, human body.  Same body, ancient perspective.

tracking the story of human choice

We were walking close to a snail’s pace down the path, each one of us finding something new to point out to the other.  The tracker found the tiny chipmunk prints from a morning skitter, the birder rattled off names of which woodpecker it could be hammering it’s head into a nearby tree, and I wandered slowly, trying to train my eyes away from the plants and into the world of animal tracks.  We had just finished inspecting a dried up chunk of bird scat (junco, they agreed – somehow), when I glanced over toward a very familiar bay tree, only something vital was missing.

Towards the bottom of the 4 or 5 trunks that peeled out of the ground, there used to be a giant ganoderma, also known as artist’s conk, also known as reishi.  Now, there I see only a long, jagged saw mark.  I used to think of that mushroom as a bracket, helping to support the great weight of the towering bay tree.  While it’s possible some scientist came by and decided this bracket conk needed to go (and the verdict is still out on if these fungi have it out for their host trees, or not), but more likely it was an enthusiastic herbalist, excited to put that mushroom to good use.  The medicine of reishi spans thousands of years and several continents as an invaluable treatment of cancers, inflammation, immune response, the list goes on.  It also treats the heart, support for our own pumping center.

There were several smaller conks around, but this one was the most visible, so close to the trail you barely had to put a foot on the forest floor.  I stood dumbfounded for a moment, shocked that another herbalist would break the rules of the honorable harvest.  This indigenous wisdom, as laid out by Robin Wall Kimmerer, says don’t take the biggest, oldest, wisest beings for yourself.  It says take only what is given, and ask before taking (asking requires deep familiarity and scientific observation).  And perhaps the hardest one: take only what you need.   How much do our wants get entangled with our needs; what part of the heart do we use to interpret this rule? 

This path has a special place in my life, but I don’t live here.  The chipmunk, juncos, woodpeckers surely have much more of a say than I do about whether or not this mushroom that measured almost 2 feet across, was needed here.  The problem is, we barely know that others exist these days, beyond our human-centric experience.  Had I not been with other trained observers, I would have missed the junco poo, stamped out the chipmunk track, and only briefly wondered about the woodpecker.  How can we ask what’s okay to take if we don’t know who to ask?  And truly, what medicine might come our way, in leaving that special find where we spotted it, for all of us to know? 

More and more people are excited and interested in learning about foraging, herbal medicine, wild foods, natural dye plants, etc.  It gives me both hope, and pause.  I think the first question for any of us – myself included – in wanting this deeply connecting wisdom is this: how do I enter, and what gifts do I bring?  Like coming to a dinner party at a new neighbors home, we never arrive empty handed and let ourselves in.   Generosity is our guide, greediness will be our collective demise.  Generosity will lead us in the work of reparations, both with other species and our own. As far as I can tell, reparations are about relationship, and reckoning with what it means to not continue the trajectory of taking something – everything – and making it of use for our own benefit…be it the blood of the mountain, the sanctity of a dark star-filled night, or the support of a great old tree. 

What would it mean to leave what we find behind with a song, a nod of gratitude?  It seems our deeply human work is to stop trying to own everything, finding instead that we feel much more like we belong to something.

The cobwebs of humanity: a birthing basket.

My overgrown toddler and I were driving home the other day, him gazing out the window with the wind blasting his wispy tangled hair, just the way he likes it.  Suddenly he declared in a soft voice, “mama, did you know I love myself?”

All at once, in every cell of my body, I knew that he would be alright here.  That small proclamation set my heart at ease, knowing that kind of love is essential in order to love anything else.  I also know that if I water this child’s ability to feel his own self-love, I’m protecting all that he’ll come in contact with, including the planet.  Looking deeply into the rearview mirror I said with a shaky voice, “puppy, thank you for telling me that.”  

 Shaky, because it’s hard to love our species right now.   It’s pretty dismal out there from all angles.  The pervasive view of us humans is that we simply can’t help ourselves from engaging in destructive behaviors, and will eventually destroy ourselves and everything around us.  You feel it?  We ‘just can’t help’ creating waste, abusing animals for the sake of eating them, mining the depths of the earth to power our screens, pillaging the sea, the list is endless…and so we must just be doomed.  Why else would the richest people in the world be set on finding other inhabitable planets except to grab untapped ‘resources’, or secure an escape route when it all comes crumbling down?  The available story is one of destruction, superiority, and fighting for our place.  But these stories damage our sense of self worth and self love collectively, keeping us rooted in shame.

 The toxicity of what human supremacy has turned us into is not our true nature, but it has eroded our ability to love ourselves as a species, and for many, as individuals.  A dominator has to turn away from their reflection, lest they see the harm they’ve done.  This separation has had a profound impact: we’ve stopped being able to fall in love with the earth in a way that a child does mother, without domination or desire leading our hearts.   Instead, our relationship has turned quite abusive.

A young girl was visiting my home recently, climbing around in the cherry tree that graces the center of the herb garden.  She said something about “your tree”.  I toyed back with her that the tree wasn’t mine, to which she said, “Yes it is!  You grew it didn’t you?!”  I didn’t, the tree has been here much longer than I, but her words rang like an out of tune bell.  I remember saying back to her, “your mama grew you, does that mean she owns you?”  For an independent five year old, that was not a welcoming thought.  

This planet is so much more than the sum of it’s parts—or  resources—than our human supremacy mentality has reduced it to.    This idea may not feel present at first, but it’s deeply lodged in all of us, all the time.  If you had to describe the human relationship with Earth, what would it be?  Honest, selfish, abusive, generous?  Equal?  The truth is painful.

When this burden presses down and grief feels like a brick on my heart, I force myself to come outside and practice laying my mind down on the land.  I do mean come, not go.  Being out is taking a step inward, like stepping onto a compass and suddenly feeling oriented.  Grief is right there, but with the heartbreak is also gratitude.  They spin around each other like

one big disco ball,

lighting up my chest. 

Through breath, they swirl into each other.

So into to the garden I go.  In this practice, I am not learning through a program, for a degree, or with books.  No certification sought.  I am learning with my body.  I Feel the curve of the rock echoed in my own sacrum, see the reach of the branch reflected in my spine.  Looking out and in simultaneously.  Noticing the invasion of certain species and the invasion of certain thoughts and seeing how those two things are not separate.  How does the light change the color of the moss, and my skin?  How does looking closely reveal the hidden stories—through tracks, birdsong, plant growth?  It’s not about knowing all the birds, being able to read all the tracks, or having vast amounts of information stored away in my head (much less a device).  It's about being inside of my own book, and learning to replace the language of thought with the language of sensation.  What does it feel like to be a part of something? 

 Here, with my senses eager to engage, my presence makes sense, is important even.   Hands reach to tend reflexively.  If I didn’t tend this wild land, diversity would collapse into a few aggressive characters (you know who I’m talking to, Crab Grass!).   And native plant diversity, well, that’s what invites the hummingbirds alongside the raptors, the flicker and the oriole pair…the fox in the back field, the deer family and quail family, the incredible gopher network and the occasional bobcat.  Even the wind would pass through differently without me here, holding this parcel of land with two hands.  I am a keystone species, if I choose to be.  Here in the garden, the kind of human I am makes sense…hands are for holding, tending.

And one doesn’t need a garden—or  have the obscure “green thumb”—to  know this.  There are many entry points to the land, because what we call land is simply a great tangle of webs that we are all weaving together.  We know ourselves by knowing the web, knowing the terrain and the weather that we live inside.  Think of the body as a landscape, the landscape as a body, and lean in. 

It’s this work that will remember us to ourselves, and heal the pathways of love between our own species and the earth.  There’s a simple-ness to it that makes it unbelievable, but simple is often where the most profound shows up.  When we are in love, how could we possibly destroy and turn away?  I know, grief is here too, where heartbreak happens.  It’s not an easy emotion to metabolize, but it’s not something to fear.  (remember the disco ball.)  Grief is what lets us know what and who we belong to.  With a strong sense of belonging, what might our grief help us discover about how generative and vital we are here, what new story might emerge?  It could be the story of our present selves - with all the history we've been through - making choices that bring us back into a healthy relationship with the earth, and therefore ourselves.  We have all the tools we need to be well, right here in our bodies.  They include our eyes, our olfactory senses, our porous surface, but the key ingredient is our willingness to drop the power play and return to a listening stance rather than a demanding, domineering one.  Although this message does not have anything to do with policy or politics or machinery, all of those things would transform were we each to do this work of returning language to the land and listening.  To put the book down, to walk out in the rain, and wait until the rhythm of the droplets blooms in our minds. 

Like the hummingbird making use of old threads to weave this year’s nest, we too can turn the cobwebs of humanity into a birthing basket.  And it is a birthing moment.  We’ve all gestated our personal, diverse questions about humanity this past year, had our own physical challenges and spiritual reckonings, just like every pregnancy.  And just like any birth, the presence of love is palpable.  Now, holding new possibility with tenderness—and our own raw hearts with the deepest love possible, what might beat into existence?   

What might be different if we could all simply declare, with innocence, that we love ourselves?

*special thanks to Altair Bay for his continued teachings as a lively human, not 4 years here.