Midwinter of the spirit

When darkness falls, tend to the candle of your spirit.

On the longest night, sing a song to the sun — that invincible god who burns, yet is not consumed. 

Whisper a blessing to Earth, the Beloved who holds us so close to her, in life and in death. 

Now — at the still point — we remember those who have returned to the earth's womb. 

We wonder what is to come.

We wait — and while we wait, we dream of the blue snow of deep midwinter, lit by the moon's bright chariot and the shine of ice-bound stars.

On the longest night, the fire grows low. 

Hold fast to your evergreen hope. Your red-berried joy. That glowing star that lives deep inside of you, even on the coldest, darkest night. 

And do not let go.  

The Longest Night from Angie Pickman on Vimeo.

Once upon a path

"The land knows you, even when you are lost." — Robin Wall Kimmerer

A curving path — one that I cannot see the end of — is irresistible to me. 

Have you ever noticed how a pathway feels alive? The turns and twists, rise and fall, seem a kind of drawing, a calling-on speech. 

Follow, follow, the path whispers, setting the rhythm. And follow I must. One questing step after the other, a bewitched child in a fairytale.

With our wandering spirits we sense that a pathway is a liminal space...a space of transition from one place to another. A threshold between here and there. 

We walk on, in a state of not-knowing. How far will the path will go? Where will it will take us? When we turn to look back, what will we see?

Again and again, I make images of paths, roads, ways. Why do they call to me, I wonder, what are they asking? I've not considered before the reason why this motif holds power. But what feels true is that they speak to us as messengers, from the imaginal realm, the unconscious — in the wordless soul language of archetype and symbolism. 

A path reminds us that we are both physical and spiritual Travelers, Explorers and Wayfarers on this journey through life; that we are passing through, transient upon this earth. 

Who can delimit the metaphorical path they are following in life? Or whether it will take them where they imagine they want to go? 

Only in looking back can we begin to have even a hope of tracing the larger trajectory of our winding journey. 

I keep thinking of The Fool tarot card. We set out into the unknown, to learn those lessons we need to learn.  

For imprecise navigators such as I, there is something comforting about a clear and unambiguous path laid out before us. How can you go astray, as long as you keep to the path?

But on a deeper level, isn't that clarity an illusion? The reason we want to follow the path in the first place is because the mystery beckons to us...precisely because we do not know where it is heading. Nor is any path you step onto ever clear. Because any worthwhile path changes you, as you walk it. 

We are like rivers, never carrying the same water (or self) twice. 

The path is a spiral. We revisit the same places, emotions, challenges again and again — but changed. On each turn of the spiral, we bring with us subtle or profound shifts in our perceptions, our understanding, our experience. 

We are in changing relationship to this path, and the relationship goes both ways...we also alter the path through our walking of it, in ways we cannot fully know. All is alive.

If I let my intuition speak to me of pathways, she says: "The path knows it is being walked, and it wishes for you to walk it."

The path recognizes you. It invites you on a journey through the inner and outer landscape. This path, this ground that your feet love walking upon, loves you back. 

Walking, I look into the land around me like a mirror, like a book, like a map to myself. Who to be, how to be, where to walk next?

The land knows who you are, writes Robin Wall Kimmerer. Then perhaps also the path creates who we are? Will I recognize myself anew in its voice?

I offer a blessing for the path, and for those who walk it — The Travelers, Wayfinders, Seekers and Wanderers:

May you be lost ... and may you be found. 

Into the cauldron

Down, into the cavern, the psyche, the Underworld; so Samhain, and the dark half of the year, spins us down to our essential selves. 

Asks of us, how will you serve what sleeps now, and will rise again in spring?

Like our plant relatives, like the landscape, like everything that ages, we wither. A part of us sinks down and in, revealing the bones that have lain beneath the long seasons of growing, flowering, fruiting. 

If we have nurtured our gardens, the seeds of another harvest lie scattered over the ground, shaken by the North winds. Waiting in the last, fading light before darkness falls; to be held by the sheltering earth through the long months of ice, snow, killing cold.

Remember this night: There are witches, and there are witches. 

Beware, sisters, which paths you choose to walk. 

Will it be muttered curses, crabbed thoughts, and casting a metaphorical evil eye? 

Humanity can be so very disappointing, after all, and we may be so frustrated with unfolding realities, that this seductive, thorny path may seem to be the one where we hold more power. I speak from experience.

Rather, instead of casting maledictions, will we ask ourselves some version of the questions: How can I serve the Earth? How can I serve life? Using the gifts I have been given, what can I do to heal and help, and imagine the world the way it could be? 

How can I make more of what I love, and less of what I do not?

We all have the other kind within. (A proper cackler, I mean.) Yes, a Crone is meant to be fierce. But, fierce in service of something important, something life-giving, something that matters.

Wisdom whispers, perhaps we want to call up our most fierce powers to serve that which we love most, and to change that which ruins, harms and destroys. ???

Here, let me remind you about the Cailleach — the divine Crone who reigns over winter, beginning as I write, at Samhain. Who shapes mountains with her hammer. A creator and a destroyer, like every crone goddess. A fierce carlin who bestows sovereignty, and, with a fine sense of justice, punishes those who take too many lives of the wild creatures sacred to her.

Know you that a Crone's eye pierces any disguise or intent. 

She sees clearly, judges sternly but fairly, and — like most old women, and winter itself — does not suffer fools gladly. 

The Crone guides the young. Protects the defenseless. Rights the balance. 

Ever, the Crone serves life (as death also serves life) — which is as it must be, as all of us must do, in order for all of life to flourish once again on this Earth. 

Isn't that what we all long for? For life to flourish once again? Inside ourselves, in our spirits, and flowing outward to heal every inch of this planet?

Perhaps this is why witching myself feels like beginning to rewild myself. A profound gift as we head into winter, a seed I can hold in my heart, in the darkness. 

We are nurtured by seeking out wild ways of knowing. Feeling into Earth ways, with their vast power to mend our wounded selves and our wounded planet. 

The way I somehow eased into a softness toward my gardens this year, trusting the plants to find their own way, reseed where they will. Giving the plants time and space to do what they know far more than I how to do: express their intelligence, their ways of being. 

This is an Earth way. 

Because our beloved Earth is the opposite of a minimalist. You must scatter millions of seeds, not only one. You must plant endless forests of trees, continents of prairies, a world of oceans. She is brilliantly, magnificently, endlessly, fecund and creative. 

Let us recognize her always in ourselves...and ourselves, always in her. 

So, on Samhain, there are witches...and there are witches. As we sink down into the mysteries of the Crone's dark womb, here is my spell and blessing...

May we rest deeply in this cauldron of darkness. 

May we dream of possibilities, as seeds do. 

May we trust in what is rich and strange in ourselves and others. 

May we let the wild reclaim even the smallest inch of our fallow ground ... and slowly, slowly, awaken it to flower again. 

 

The speaking places

For me, walking through an oak savanna is like entering another reality. 

A heightened, heart-expanding reality, where every being, gesture, movement or sound seems to carry a significance beyond my power to fully understand or express. 

Come, the oaks call me, before winter is here. 

Always, as I encounter these places that speak so deeply to me, I get a sense that I am walking into an ancient story being told. Witnessing a centuries-old conversation among beings whose sheer presence is so immense it is almost palpable. 

What is it all about, that shift in consciousness? It feels like moving from a reality that feels flat into one with a vast sense of depth and space...as if I am walking into the original template of this world — an archetype, or symbolic landscape, of the unconscious. 

There is a sense of past and present, suspended, existing as one.

A sense of being one small piece of this place's eternal and mysterious unfolding.

A sense of being invited into a way of knowing and being without thought.

A sense of being loved. 

See the diverse ways they gesture and express themselves: each akin, yet unique. 

This is strong magic: the power of a speaking place. 

To sense the sacredness of another, we must carry the sacred within ourselves. Otherwise, how would we recognize it with such certainty? As within, so without.

Here, the fading embers of my spirit rekindle. Circular thoughts unknot, inner monologues cease. 

I rest, my whole being awakening to the beloved Earth above me, below me, around me, encircling me.  

John O'Donohue wrote, "The shape of a landscape is an ancient and silent form of consciousness...The earth is full of soul." 

He also wrote, "The silence of landscape conceals vast presence." 

Yes. And the silence of landscape also reveals vast presence; because the silence itself is a kind of voice. 

One we cannot hear with our ears, but sense with our souls.  

The withered cloak of summer

I walk in wide, prairie stillness. 

Summer's end. Crisping under the August sun, whiff of juniper, a pelting of grasshoppers before me, the tidal buzz of cicadas cresting and dying away.

It was a still day, I was sweating, and the sun pounded down. 

The land whispered its song. 

You know how what you see around you sometimes floods past your skin and your resistance, and you feel larger? Connected. What's out there changes what's in here. 

Other times it feels like you can't get past yourself enough to fully be in another place. 

This was one of those times. The inner disquiet was loud.

Which is exactly when you most need that connection. 

Wild grapes ripening

Indian grass flowering

Bur oaks and clouds

Even when you are sweating and hot and feel cranky, you still speak to the cedars, the butterflies, the oaks, particular cloud formations. You try to encourage everyone. You try to learn things, and be a good guest.

Standing beneath a bur oak tree, I listened to its ripe acorns pelt the ground around me.  

A lovely, clear song I'd never heard before demanded my attention, descending from the hills across the road. A field sparrow, said the Merlin app, only this far north during breeding season. (Now that fledglings have left the nest, tens of millions of birds are migrating south across Minnesota each evening.) 

Goldenrod and pasture thistles

Big bluestem, turning copper-carmine-purple

The point is, the prairie still bloomed. Even in late August. Even in drought. Big bluestem, Indian grass, Rattlesnake master, goldenrod and thistle. Grapevines and gray dogwood branches heavy with fruit, ripening in the sun. 

Prairie plants have taught themselves over millennia how to adapt to adverse conditions, like drought. For instance, they understood it was necessary to grow deep roots, narrow leaves and hairy stems to reduce the evaporation of precious water. 

Even in hard times, the wise plants know how to make medicine, to feed others, to be generous with their gifts. They keep on expressing who they are, however and wherever they can. They devote all their powers to making and remaking this world each day. 

Rattlesnake master, goldenrod, bluestem and Indian grass

Staghorn sumac turning red

Young oak savanna restoration

But how about much-less-wise people? When we are crispy-leaved, crooked-stemmed, discouraged, maybe the best we can do is to just show up. To be an imperfect witness to that beauty which remains, to what is still right with the world. Maybe that is how some withered humans express who we are in a time of drought. 

Maybe — though we seem to walk in solitude on these journeys, alone with our deadened sense of wonder and fractured praise songs and an unease we cannot escape however far we walk — the world is still listening to us, still teaching us, still inviting us in. Still casting blessings upon us each day. 

So may it be. 

Uisce beatha

purple coneflower

I wonder sometimes whether all the stories and words have run out of me for good. Did I use them up? I feel like I keep trying to refill myself, so I can come alive in some way. 

The fact is, people are more complex beings than that, more sensitive and mysterious. I can’t just plug in input “x” to get desired output “y.” Feeling sad or empty or disappointed isn’t wrong, or a pathology of some kind; it’s part of life, isn't it?

blazingstar

The earth's life force unfolds all around each day as I garden, walk, breathe. But somehow, energy reserves are still low. (How like a machine I treat myself. Do I allow myself to be tired? Discouraged? Encouraged?)

I have been revisiting my life like a tourist, trying to make sense of it. Making stops at all the sights of the past decades: Writing. Dancing. Costuming. Travel. Languages. Relationships. Therapy. Voluntarism. Work. Do I still like this or that? Does it feel right, interesting, worth doing? Do I feel excited about any of them?

meadowsweet

I suspect what I am actually in search of is a sense of purpose. We can all find hundreds of ways to distract ourselves, to spend our days — but are they meaningful?

When I quit my job 18 months ago, what I thought I would be doing now is gardening, reading, traveling and writing.

My status report: 

• In our second consecutive summer drought, expanding my garden empire has been a struggle; nevertheless, she persisted.
• Much reading in hope of awakening my imagination with stories and magic, no noticeable effect. 
• Neither the energy or desire to do much writing or traveling at all. And I feel disappointed about not having that energy and enthusiasm. And a little worried. 

Amid the dry-yet-glowing landscapes of high summer, that is the uncomfortable interior landscape I’m inhabiting.

wild bergamot

Blessed be those who thirst in spirit. On quest I go, through the withering forest. O let me find the spring where runs the water of life, and let me drink deeply.

Parable of a fern

I felt like this little fern was greeting me. It makes me smile.

When I look at these tender green fronds rising through the grate of the storm sewer, I see how tenacious and full of hope this young plant is. It grows without any worry about whether it "can" grow, or will somebody run over it, or what will it do in winter. 

It does what it knows how to do, what it must do, without thought for the future, like all beings that are wild. 

I think about how akin we are, all living beings. How we recognize our struggle in that of another species. 

The fern is doing no more and no less than what every being tries to do: live, grow and leave seeds behind — whether they be baby ferns or a highly inconspicuous blog.  

Ferns and writers: struggling to flourish under less than ideal conditions. 

Fern strategy says that, if we are open to it, we will find opportunities we did not expect, at times and in places we would never imagine we would, if we are not too proud or too inflexible to inhabit a small, humble niche. 

And our lives are not any less beautiful or worthy or useful because they are quiet, green, underfoot, largely unnoticed. 

Some of us may tell ourselves we can only thrive, or create, or surprise ourselves at all under narrow or idiosyncratic "ideal conditions." 

But what if we don't even know what our own ideal conditions are? What if they are myriad, far more broad and varied than we think? 

And what if even the whole idea of ideal conditions at all is a false construct, just another way to hold ourselves back and to avoid trying at all?

The parable of the fern encourages me a little bit. It has been a lonely and strange two years. I've been hanging on in my dim niche under the grate. Sometimes a little sunlight peeks in. Sometimes I poke my head out through the bars, and try to remember what it feels like, that green feeling; when life pours through my veins. 

When thought is overtaken by living. 

Calling up our power

Still, the witch stirs her cauldron.

I hear her call, Come to me, daughter. Remember your power; the power of women.

 

She knows this long, old story. Century upon century of women, demonized for exercising their power and autonomy — another chapter in the story of sinful Eve eating the forbidden fruit.

 

After many hard-fought and all-too-recent gains for women in this falling-apart democracy — the so-called bastion of liberty, the so-called leader of the free world — the radical patriarchy is eager to criminalize a woman’s right to bodily autonomy and her own reproductive decisions.

 

Lives lost and options limited because of a radical minority's misogynist, hypocritical, pseudo-religious bullshit.

 

Whatever spin they try to put on it, it is clearly motivated by the same hatred of women that has never stopped rearing its ugly head; one of many systemic efforts to restrict and control women around the world.

Women with fewer rights than men. Women not allowed to drive. Women who must hide their faces in public. Women who can’t choose whom they marry or when. Female genital mutilation. Women raped and honor-killed. Women with no health care, no education, no vote.

 

The old, ongoing story of women, for millennia chattel, controlled, stalked. Harrassed, assaulted, disbelieved. Abused. Terrorized. Murdered.

 

Burned as witches.

 

Chances are, you have experienced one or more of these things. Maybe there have been times (years) when you felt like prey the moment you stepped out of your front door (or even inside of your own home). When vigilance became automatic, when assessing the threat level was engrained behavior from such a young age that you don’t even think about it most of the time.

 

And times when, whatever you did or didn’t do, it wasn’t enough to protect you.

 

They have always wanted us to believe we are lesser-than. Powerless.

 

Now, and in times past, we utterly reject what they want us to believe.

We live our lives, and resist, and persist. We make our voices heard. We join together. We use our power.

We rise: in the divine feminine, in the power of women.

 

Because no law or person or can make us less than we are. No law or person can change our belief in our equality, and our rights as women and human beings.

 

We cannot be constrained by the limits of others, only ourselves.

A pagan woman, I draw power from that quiet voice of the witch inside me. From the sacred earth, of which we are part. From belief in my soul, in all its shadowed beauty. 

I envision Eve walking forth from the garden of Eden; woman, and sinless, and whole unto herself.

Midsummer

In the valley of the white oaks, time is measured by shifting clouds and the zip of blue dragonflies.

The landscape and time itself seem to undulate in unison, as if I have walked into a Van Gogh painting. Isn't Earth the first ecstatic artist? She who expresses her Self through living places and beings? And aren't all of our creations and expressions inspired by this life we are given?

 

When I am here, the present moment seems to stretch into eternity, in the midst of an intensely mortal beauty holding me in its spell — suspended, part of one long, deep, sustained breath. The world breathes. You can see and feel her breathing ... your home.

You can rest now, in the cupped hand of the world. Finally, you are here, in a place you didn't know you were looking for. Here, as you were as a child, when each midsummer day lasted a forever; each day bright and new and full of wonder. You remember, because you are still able to feel that wonder, on such a day and in such a place as this ... a vast garden, a waking dream, a soulscape.

An utterly worldly and Otherworldly beauty, which are one and the same. A heaven and an earth, which are one and the same.

Rest, now, in the eros of gravity holding you close to the beating heart of this world. There is a path to be walked. A sky to expand into. A ground to carry you.

The eternal valley breathes, expressing its being in unfolding, dazzling flight paths, outflung branches, green wind speech, blossoms of blue wild indigo, overflowing gifts, the buzz of bumble bees.

Gather pollen while you may! For you, too, are gathered, into the hands of the Beloved Earth. You, too, love, and are loved in return.

 

You, too, are sacred, and divine, and live forever.

Wildflowers save lives

Eastern cottontails hop down sidewalks. Red-winged blackbirds chase trumpeter swans who float too near the nest. Snapping turtle lays her eggs next to Wood Lake. First-of-year monarchs, Eastern swallowtails, American lady butterflies. So many firsts already past. The wild lupine and blue wild indigo are blooming. A pair of blue herons wings by my window. 

A squirrel chewed through a fascia board and has taken up residence in our attic. If a house is a sort of person (and why not?), then the attic is its head. A squirrel in the attic, looked at as a metaphor, could symbolize circling thoughts? A trapped feeling? Or maybe finding a temporarily safe place to rest? Bats in the belfry....

Ants find a crack in the siding and crawl in ones and twos over the kitchen counter, wondering about this strange new world of white quartz. I pick them up and they anxiously explore my hand or arm as I carry them outside into the garden. Be free, little ant. Be free, squirrel.

One day, a terrible continuous thunder fills the air and almost flattens me to the ground. High overhead, I see four ghostly fighter jets, one after the other. I can barely see them, but still need to cover my ears for minutes after they pass over. Later, I learn they were flying to base after doing a movie promotional event here — calling to mind several objectionable aspects of this American culture I was born to. 

Such a bifurcated experience we live: On the one hand, glorious spring, earth's expression of hope and joy and beauty. On the other, democracy implodes in slow motion; the rise of authoritarianism and white supremacy, mass shootings, and the unrelenting destruction of our earthly home that continues every minute of every day. 

What does one do with all this? How to maintain sanity in the midst of it? I struggle with how to write about any of it. I have no great wisdom to offer or light to shed. I'm no poster child for behavioral health.

What I do: Write to friends. Read stories to escape for a while to Some Other Place. Talk to cats or birds or my husband. Walk, to calm myself, and to seek out beauty with a graced eye (as John O'Donohue wrote, "The graced eye can glimpse beauty anywhere, for beauty does not reserve itself for special elite moments...it does not wait for perfection but is present already secretly in everything.")

Most of all, I work in my native plant (ie, wildflower) gardens for hours nearly every day, as if they could save me. Distract me from the madness of the world, protect me from getting lost. Reward me with joy and meaning, heal mind and heart, comfort me when the world is chaotic and frightening. All those things.

My garden isn't only about me, though. The reason I put so much of my energy into it is because I don't know what else to do that feels important. I don't know any better way to give back for the life I have been given.

Another way to put it is that making this garden feels more important than anything else I can do, or that I am likely to do. 

I've spent a lifetime writing, without knowing if I ever helped or changed one single thing or person, besides myself. Making a native garden, though, gives me a material way to help heal what has been destroyed — a way that I can manage, when everything else feels impossible. 

I love that a garden is something you can touch, and smell, and feel, and see, and taste, and experience — outside of your mind, outside of thought. Outside of the attic in which I at times find my thoughts squirreling. 

I love that a native garden is a space that invites in other creatures — to eat, rest, reproduce and live the lives they were meant to live. I love how generous nature is with her gifts. I can witness for myself the life-giving magic of these little gardens in each flower that offers nectar and pollen...each bee that feeds on these flowers...each butterfly that lays her eggs on a host plant...each leaf eaten by butterfly and moth caterpillars...and each caterpillar fed to nestling birds. 

My native garden was designed and planted to support the most life possible. That is its reason for being, its meaning. Beauty is always present; but planting for beauty alone just isn't good enough when it comes to doing our part for the continuation of life on earth. There is so much at stake in the gardens we plant, the choices we make. Nearly every tree, shrub and flower growing here is native to this place, and was planted to feed the native insects and birds whose very survival depends on their presence in the landscape.* Many of these are keystone species, such as my beloved pair of bur oak trees. 

So, on these still-cool summer days, I labor with all the love, knowledge, care and creativity I can muster. Willingly suffering scrapes, insect bites, bruises, sweat, occasional aching knees, stiff hands and cramping shoulders. With the earth embedded in the whorls of my fingertips. In service. To steward to this small piece of earth with my own two hands. 

Though I work hard, I know I do only some of the work...the soil, the sun, the insects, the rain, and the plants themselves create the garden alongside me, and try to teach me along the way. Maybe they love me as I love them. 

Maybe someday, if I am patient enough, I will hear what the plants want to tell me. 

* Does it seem strange to you that in North America, we think of English and Asian garden plants as "traditional," because our great-grandmothers planted them (hello, turf grass lawns, lily of the valley, box hedges, callery pears and peonies)...while the lovely, critical wildflowers native to our region are scorned as "weeds"? Our colonial past isn't really past. 

In the Land of Waiting-for-Spring

A tulip-in-waiting.

Pasque flowers await Queen bees, yet to emerge.

In this season of waiting, in a time that can feel like the unraveling of the world, what gives life joy and meaning? What are the signs of hope that lift us up?

Wild ones always spark that joy.

Last week, at the base of this oak hill by the river, a flash of soft yellow caught my eye. An inquisitive little goldfinch watched me from her perch with bright eyes. As I spoke to her in my most bird-beguiling tones, she fluttered to a near branch, and then to a nearer to listen for a moment.

Another day, high overhead I saw a migrating kettle of hawks and watched, mesmerized, as they swirled and spiraled on a thermal, a column of warm, ascending air. An ancient, circling dance of black wings against blue sky.

Earlier, on an evening when telescopes were set up to view the stars, I witnessed a breathtaking sight: a flock of night-migrating swans. 

Out of nowhere they swept into view. They wheeled and undulated like a murmuration of starlings, then winged away west, a dazzling oneness of movement and purpose — crossing the continent to a destination only they knew. 

Never before have I witnessed the great movement of spring migration across North America at this scale, as it was happening. I was speechless with wonder, reverence. The swans' surety, their way of knowing what to do, where to go, when to go there...all of the many mysteries swans know of that humans do not; not least of all, how to get from here to there, using senses humans will never know. 

How amazing to see these white-feathered beings flying as one in all their power and striving, and in accord with their internal knowledge — inhabiting their full, embodied, necessary lives — in their rightful place in the great web of being. 

This is magic. This is the spell of the wild. Touched by the ineffable; the swans' sacred nature revealed to me, their utter belonging to the ancient cycles of the wheel of the year, and to the community of earth and sky. 

I felt I had touched the vital source. For one singing moment, I felt part of the vast sweep of life on earth, this beautiful earth I love so much. 

Beltaine blessings as the rain falls from this Land of Waiting-for-Spring.