Thank you to the readers who followed my writings on Wildspell. Blogger has been my writing home for many years, but I have finally moved on. My new writing home is A dryad's tale on Substack. Subscriptions to that publication are free, so please do check it out, if you feel moved to do so.
Thank you again for your lovely comments and support. It meant a lot to me.
Blessings of the wild,
Carmine
Stealing from the chickadees and catbirds, I swallow a handful of velvet-blue June berries. I eat tiny, ripe rubies of strawberries, where they hang in clusters amid leaves curling up under the rays of the mighty midsummer sun. A star god fully visible in the northern sky.
As I eat this warm fruit I imagine swallowing the sun, and the rain, and the seeds of life shaped to grow more June berries, more strawberries.
In the midsummer, finches and robins, sparrows and cowbirds unite in scolding roaming cats, and cicadas buzz in chorus for the first time under the sun.
A marauding, spotted cat with a pink collar has chewed down the catnip I grow for Juniper and Murphy. A judicious application of chicken wire later, we'll see who wins this battle.
Blooming in my native plant garden: blanket flower, purple prairie clover, hoary vervain, swamp milkweed. Butterfly weed, harebells, anise hyssop, pale purple coneflower. Purple poppy mallow, New Jersey Tea, wild petunia, and Canada anemone.
Purple coneflower and summertime are just beginning to unfurl their tossing petals.
I dispense water to their roots, tend to their drooping and injuries.
I pluck out roaming seedlings, murmur greetings to the plants in their happy, green growth and flowering in the cool of the mornings.
I took a weeklong naturalist course on the ecoregion where I live, which is called the Big Woods, or alternately, Eastern Broadleaf Forest.
How would you define a naturalist, I wonder? I think of this as someone who habitually pays attention to the natural world. My textbook on natural history says a naturalist "studies" the natural world, which is more rigorous.
I like learning my share of "facts." But even more interesting are the facts-as-metaphors.
For example. Did you know that it is the nature of rock to be cyclic? Not fixed? Rock forms are dynamic, always in process and transition; similar to every other being and landform — but with their own ways of being, of course.
They are never done changing, as long as the Earth itself is alive. Like us.
Learning this sort of "fact as truth" makes me feel a kinship with rocks. It is another strand in the web of meaning and mystery that connects us all. It gets at truth in a rather meandering, sideways process; one that creates meaning from the perspective of the whole.
This is different from one philosophy of science that I hope does not exist anymore — one that destroys or pulls something apart in order to understand how it works.
One of the instructors in our course joked that their students tend to be either "plant people" or "bird people." I know more about plants than birds, but refuse to be sorted into one category. Birds and other animals, oceans, mountains, deserts, volcanoes, glaciers, stars...all fascinating (though difficult to experience in my own backyard, unlike plants).
Though an elder woman, I am yet a young naturalist.*
With new binoculars and the help of the Merlin birding app, I now have a (admittedly slim) chance of seeing woodland or grassland birds when I hear them singing their songs.
Spotting an Eastern meadowlark or an Ovenbird makes me feel like part of a rarified club, somehow. Though humans have lived with these species for thousands of years, a relatively small percentage of people go out seeking bird sightings.
It takes patience. With my untrained eye I need to search a while before I find the bird that I hear, so the bird needs to stay in one area so I can zero in. When I do find a bird, I am enchanted to see how they sing with their whole bodies — throats vibrating, beaks open wide. It is somehow relaxing, as if I relax into their wildness, their vibrant, singing presence.
Today, on the solstice, it is still early summer here. Yet it feels like July. There is an air quality alert due to ozone and wildfire smoke. We are feeling moderate drought once again. 90-degree temperatures again, with more to follow. Is this summer from now on? Earth is "quite sick" now, reports say.
They also say it is not too late to heal her. We know what to do. Now, "we" just need the will to do what needs to be done.
Anyway, as I look at the burgeoning green beings around me on midsummer day, how I wish I could shoot up as they do in the strong sunlight, and make the most of my growing in the short season of sun, blossoming and fruiting.
This short season we are given on Earth.
For better or worse, I am a spring-blooming flower. I wither, and always have, in hot weather. How sad though, to only feel I can flourish in the coolness of spring and autumn—two brief seasons.
I remember too when it was different — not very long ago at all — in this climatescape where I have lived for all my life, and which I struggle to recognize anymore.
In May, and well into June, the days here were cooler, rainier — so that when midsummer burst upon us, in a dazzle of sun and warm greenness, it felt like the dancing times, the singing times at last were here.
I miss that time.
Once, someone told me her one-line poem that she had never told anyone else, and it was, "I feel lonely for when the Earth was okay."
Then we felt lonely together, and that made it a little less lonely.
Sadness silences me. Anger silences me. Grief and loss silence me. Loneliness silences me. Fear of sounding ungrateful, whiny, privileged, sorry for myself, negative — all combine into the perfect silencing potion.
I am writing anyway. I need to do things anyway. Because it is always the right time to be here, and to be who you are, even when it doesn't conform to societal expectations.
In my effort to acknowledge the positive...yes, it is hot, but not humid.
There is a breeze.
It is "date night."
I am getting together with friends on Friday.
There is pudding in the refrigerator.
And, despite all of my laments, it is green and flourishing still, on the summer solstice, here in this tiny, blooming patch of former oak savanna, in the Mississippi River watershed, of the land called Where the Waters Reflect the Clouds.
*"Though an old man, I am but a young gardener." —Thomas Jefferson
Earth, my body.
Water, my blood.
Do the tides of our blood surge when the moon is full, and calm at its ebb? My own feels in need of stirring, a tonic of nettle and rainwater blessed by starlight.
Floods of river water have overtaken the low-lying trails I walk. The cold water at last unlocked from snow and ice, to trickle, wash, rush through the veins of the Earth.
Kingly trumpeter swans, glowing white pelicans, red-eyed loons, snowy egrets, great blue herons float, stalk, swim and fish where they please, their watery world wide, nearly boundless.
I watch them, from the landing places.
Submerge me in the cold water, let me become boundaryless, shapeless, thoughtless; clear as quartz.
I long with an ancient part of me to drink of wild water, as the animals do, without harm.
Drink at the holy wells, quench my thirst at any stream, river or lake, replenishing my body and blood with that water.
How much we have lost, we humans. Quietness. Water we can drink. Wilderness. The abundance of wild creatures. The dark sky and its shimmering constellations of stars. The stories of the land. Traditions, rituals, and even a sense of our place in the universe.
In the wildscapes, and in the garden outside my windows, I hear spring's first white-throated sparrow, a yellow-rumped warbler, a bluebird.
Chorus frogs in the marsh sing loudly to each other, quickly falling silent at a footfall.
A robin sits upon her precious eggs, in the nest she built under the eaves, next to the back door. From my point of view it is not the ideal spot, as she is startled off her nest every time we go in or out, but it is the place she chose, so we bow to her wisdom.
Rain falls softly but steadily today. Colder here than in Quebec, but three degrees warmer than in Reykjavik. I am both restless and listless in the March-like grayness.
I sipped a cup of nettle tea, downed a spoonful of elderberry syrup. Where is my wild elixir, my Drink Me potion? Within a handful of rain?
Sign of Spring: Finding what was lost.
The snow that fell ten days ago was wet and heavy, and I worked up a sweat as I shoveled it. Each shovelful had to be lifted to the very top of our four-foot snowbanks — high enough that the shoveled snow would not slide back down onto the sidewalk.
The temperature hovered around freezing and I was becoming uncomfortably warm. I took off my hat to cool down. Five minutes later, off came my knit mittens. I unzipped my coat and kept shoveling.
Still too hot, so I peeled off the jacket, and threw that on our front steps with everything else.
After shoveling, I gathered up my sweaty outwear and took it inside.
Only, I was a kitten missing a mitten, as I found out the next morning.
I went outside and scanned the sidewalk and snowbanks. Hmm, a fine job of shoveling, but not a mitten did I glimpse.
I looked the next day, and the next day, too. How frustrating. I liked those mittens. They are blue-gray and match my jacket.
I admit, I like certain things to match.
"Where is it? Who would take one mitten?" I complained to my husband. "One mitten is no use."
Was it someone who had also lost a right-hand mitten, and had been just waiting to find one to replace it?
Maybe some Golden Retriever had picked it up, and merrily carried it away as a prize? (You know how they are.)
Why hadn't I checked that I had everything before I went inside? How could I lose a mitten in my own front yard? I was filled with self-recriminations. Yes, over a mitten.
After a week of this, I gave up on my dreams of recovering my lost mitten, and ordered a new pair.
I should have known. Today, Spring pulled back the edges of Winter's icy pantaloons to reveal a very sodden and icy mitten, on the front steps. Where it had sunk into the snowy edges.
Surprise! Winter trickster strikes again.
It is only March 21. Winter is not yet done with his surprises.
People often talk about "balance" on the equinox because for one day, we have equal times of light and dark. Then somehow that all gets mixed up with spring, which is not a balance at all but a transitioning between the season of not-growing and the season of growing. When it comes to seasonal transitions, or life transitions, there is no balance; more of a balancing.
By no means does spring (or any other season) "begin" at any specific time, much less one day. This is important to note; because if your region is not springlike on the first day of spring, you know it is best not to be literal about these things.
And also there are clearly more than four seasons. Let's look at the meme lore regarding springtime. The seasons following upon winter that we call "spring" actually progress something like this: "Late first winter." "Fool's spring." "Second winter." "Spring of deception." "Third winter." "Mud season." "Actual spring."
Fool's spring, the time I suspect we are in right now, is also known as early spring. Plenty of snow on the ground, melting around the edges. See-sawing between fresh, blue days and cold, gray ones.
The robins, cardinals and red-winged blackbirds, however, are convinced that it is a good-enough spring for them.
The birds do not wait for a better, springier spring to come along, they get on with it. As always, they know there is no time to waste. Sing now! Mate now! Live now!
CHERT! CHERT! proclaims the red-winged blackbird beside the marsh. We are alive, and the time is now.
Needless to say (but I will say it anyway), animals don't have time for bewailing what can't be helped. Instead, they get on with living, regardless of snow, gray skies or less than ideal circumstances.
What if you thought of any circumstance as ideal? All the circumstances in which you are alive.
Now, for instance.
That feels like a winged thought, a way of living fit for birds and humans. Even now, hundreds of miles away, the warblers and monarch butterflies are taking wing, migrating north over this vast continent.
They're coming, it's happening, just hold on.
As a young girl I learned how to swim in the waters of this lake. I did not know then that this was, and still is, a sacred place, where wild rice once grew freely, as a gift to all who would gather it. Where wild, shallow marshlands offered a home for herons and a gathering ground for humans who were here long before my ancestors came to this continent.
When I was young, mowed turf grass ran down to the lake's barren shores. Once a marsh, with liminal margins, the lake then had an artificially neat edge. It was intended entirely for the use of people, not any wild inhabitants. The plants that had for centuries lived in relationship with the marshy shores were mostly gone. Wildness didn't belong at an urban lake of that era. It was at best an inconvenience, and at worst a threat. |
| Day 3: Monarchs nectaring at El Rosario Sanctuary |
I went on pilgrimage to a sacred site. In search of the winter home of my beloved Monarch butterflies.
Monarchs fill me with wonder and delight. They carry happiness on their wings. In summer, whenever I glimpse the flash of orange wings through a window, I rush out into the garden, like a child, to greet them.
Entranced, I watch them circle and float on radiant wings. I pay close attention to which plants they prefer, how long they stay to sip nectar, whether or not they visit the milkweeds. When they leave, if they return.
Like everything we open our hearts to, the Monarchs speak to us, and teach us.
Monarchs and their epic journey south speak to the wild, abundant, mysterious presence of life on this being we call Earth.
Some see Monarchs as a symbol of transformation, and of the soul. Mexican peoples have believed for centuries that Monarch butterflies represent the souls of their ancestors who are returning to visit them, when they arrive around November 2, on Dia de Muertos. Children of the sun, they call them.
A caterpillar miraculously dissolving, then reassembling itself inside the chrysalis to emerge as a butterfly: this is one mystery.
The billion Monarchs who fly for two months to arrive in the fir forests of Michoacán have never been there before. Yet, somehow, each migrating generation knows where to fly — how to find this precise place in this wide Earth — where the guardian fir trees protect them from intense heat of the sun, rare snow storms, and cold winds that would otherwise kill them, and end their ancestral migration.
Another mystery. Monarch upon Monarch, mystery upon mystery.
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| Day 1: El Rosario Sanctuary |
When the sun came out, then we witnessed the most spectacular sight: thousands upon thousands of Monarchs left their trees and took to the air. I no longer had to look at them through binoculars. They were here, zooming just above our heads as we walked down the mountain.
I walked silently, in a dream, amid the surreal magic of tens of thousands of Monarch butterflies winging around me, pouring down the mountain like a river of joy.
A river of souls, speaking truths to us.
Whispering that our souls are alight.
That our souls co-exist among millions of souls — all striving, all invisibly connected past present and future by a great web of life that flows from and around this planet into the universe.
That our souls understand mysteries that our minds do not.
That our lives are ephemeral, yet beautiful beyond words.
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| Day 2: Sierra Chincua Monarch Sanctuary |
See now through my eyes...
Here, resting inside these many mysteries, millions and millions of Monarchs crowd thickly over the fir needles.
Large clusters of butterflies cling to branches, literally bending them downward with their collective weight. They roost on trunks among the lichens and mosses like dense ruffles of stiff taffeta. Like rust-colored leaves that never fall to the ground.
I saw this. This, I saw with my own eyes.
The sight was so vast, so strange, and beautiful, and astounding, and overwhelming, that it was difficult to encompass the reality, even as I stood looking at it.
I looked, and looked, and looked, at the millions of Monarchs roosting in the silent, enchanted trees, or flying very high, black against the bright sky, and it still did not seem completely real.
On the third day, when the temperature rose, and the sun came out, that was the day the Monarchs came to greet us, their relatives. Then they began to fly in great numbers, accompanying us along the path, flying just above and alongside us as we walked down the mountain.
Are you my soul guide? I whispered as they flew past. Are you the psychopomp on my journey through the Underworld?
Then, at last we came to a place where there was an opening, a corridor among the fir trees. And that is where I experienced the wonder, of a river of monarchs, a river of souls: the loveliest sight I have ever seen.
Imbolg is coming, they say. And that reminder is a bit encouraging (though in the north, Imbolg is usually months away from spring).
And yes, it is true that the light rises each day now, minute by quiet minute.
A sense of day, though, can be buried under an entombing sense of frozenness and coldness. Deep snow. Stillness. Days of white-gray sky that hold us pinned to the ice, as we try to find our footing.
Waiting.
I've had enough of resting, now I'm waiting.
In dim January, and February, and well into March, I must wait for the return of my main source of joy.
Joy for me is: The wheel of the year, as it turns toward spring, summer, autumn and the winter solstice.
Feeling the earth stirring around me. Breathing in air laden with precious moisture. Walking the land, hearing wind in the treetops.
Listening to the liquid language of snowmelt, lapping lakes and trickling rivers. Finding names for wild plants and bird calls as I walk. Smelling the fragrance of sweet prairie grasses. Sun and shadows, mare's tail clouds.
Though winter scours my spirit every year, it can gift me moments of stunning beauty...like the night I glanced out to find a diamond snow fallen on the roof, silently sparkling with starry flashes of green, silver and blue under the light of a full moon.
Other days, a quiet beauty flies on black crows' wings as they curve their elegant paths across the sky.
Or the beautiful way a shadow-black oak catches the low-riding sun in its branches and holds it there, like a glowing orb of ice-pearl.
Somewhere, in the wilder-lands, I know that the Great Horned Owl already has begun to nest. And the bald eagles by the great river will soon claim their territory and lay their eggs.
The great movement toward the vernal equinox has begun; as always, so quietly that it is easy to imagine that nothing is changing at all out there, in the snow; or here, in my longing for what is not.
I may tell myself nothing is changing, but it is. Already, I know what I would like to go toward (sometimes it takes months to figure that out).
I wrote this list without needing to think: Warblers. Owls. Migration. Hawk Ridge Observatory. Dawn chorus. Dark sky. Milky Way. Writing in new forms. Tent camping. National wildlife refuges.
More of what brings me joy — for our time is short, and what we love is vast.
I wish you the same.
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.
"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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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| Wild grapes ripening |
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| Indian grass flowering |
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| 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.)
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| Goldenrod and pasture thistles |
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| 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.
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| Rattlesnake master, goldenrod, bluestem and Indian grass |
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| Staghorn sumac turning red |
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| 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.
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?
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| 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:
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.
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.
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.
