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.