What once was marshland remembers

I was born under a Water sign, and live in a watery place encircled by lakes, wetlands, a creek and two rivers. 

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. 

Fifty years on, frogs at this same lake sing loudly in the springtime. They chorus from dense stands of young willows, habitat for the frogs that also protect the the shoreline from erosion and help filter pollutants from the water. Turtles nest on the sandy beaches. Great blue herons stalk the shoreline under dangling willow fronds, and bald eagles circle high overhead, fishing. 

Now, the waters are allowed to find the shape they want to become...to flood at will into adjacent marshy pools thick with reeds and frog songs, where red-winged blackbirds can weave their nests amid the deep tangle of cattails and sedges. 

And fifty years later, I am thankful to have gained some understanding of what a living lake is, and how it may be abused or ignored or cared for and treasured by the people and culture that surround it.

When I think about this place, I feel gratitude that these waters and lands that I love were always cared for and honored by the Native peoples. They were still honored and remembered for generations after the people were displaced and robbed of their sacred homelands.

I am also thankful for the wise minds in recent history that are allowing wildness to return, even a small degree, to these public lands. Allowing them to be who they are, to do the work they were created to do.

I want to remember that these waters, and all waters — even in the midst of a city — are living and ancient, and that they remember.

That the land I walk on remembers its ancient past as marshland, savanna, prairie, woodland. 

That the land also remembers the original peoples who listened to hear its voice...the people with whom  it lived in deep, reciprocal relationship for millennia.

I want to believe that if I sing to the waters, speak and listen to them, chant my thanks and feel their liquid touch upon my skin, that they may someday carry a memory of this woman, as well.

I want to believe that my deepest self, like the marshlands, will always remember who I am; always return me to my essential wild shape — to the person I was made to be in this life. 

River of souls

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. 

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. 

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. 

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The journey: I flew across North America, rode on a bus for three hours, up and up into the Sierra Madre Mountains, to the small town of Angangueo. The next day, we took a 20-minute drive in pick-up trucks to the sanctuary entrance, then half-an-hour on horseback up the mountain, followed by a 15-minute hike to the viewing area.

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.  

True song

I woke to the true song of the robin.

All alone he sang, a brave voice in the darkness before dawn, claiming his rightful territory.

He sings of spring, a mate, rain, old berries yet uneaten, insects wakening under dead leaves. Of sunlight flooding through bare tree branches and twiggy nests earthworms wriggling forth from the earth to drink of its cold moisture.

A week ago in Santa Fe, the air smelled of dust, pinon smoke, apricot blossom, and juniper.

I still feel a slight sense of dislocation, a neither-here-nor-there. A ghosting feeling, as if my body arrived but some part of me (my spirit?) is following more slowly, maybe migrating northward and on the wing like the robins, not yet at my destination.

Air travel is especially abrupt when traveling between such dramatically different landscapes, with bare time to transition from Southwestern spring to Northern spring.

There: A high desert clarity. A sea of dry air that steals away all moisture from one's nose, in which skin takes on a map-like texture, an atlas of lizard trails and pebbled riverbeds and beetle-traced tree bark.

We walked through arid gardens of soft sands, yarrow, dusty gold, sage and subtle greens against the backdrop of pine-dark mountains, under vaulting arcs of cloud...

Down streets so quiet one could hear the gentle patter of blossoms hitting the ground...

House finches with rosy throats warbled their songs in the fruit trees, plucking blossoms one by one and drinking their nectar before discarding them to flutter to the stones below, and the adobe walls were painted by soft shadows.

We followed in the footsteps of ancient peoples, through the canyons, cholla, cottonwoods lining the small river (like but unlike their eagle-eyried kin along the Mississippi River), dusty paths, vast walls and fortresses of ember-lit and golden limestone towering overhead, glowing against the blue sky.

We climbed into cool-shadowed cliff dwellings, blew dust from our noses, carried water for the journey, rested in the shade, rested in the quiet, the quiet of an ancient place. All wild places are ancient, and sacred, but some strike one so more than others, like this one.

What would it be like, getting to know even one mountain? To watch such an eternal being through every shift of light, season, weather? Calming, I would imagine, an object of contemplation, meditation, inspiration, like Pedernal Mountain to Georgia O'Keeffe.

Oh how beautiful the paintings, but just as much the life of an artist following her vision, the photographs made of her working in her kitchen and garden, a life all of a piece, making sense.

Maybe that is what lingers most of all, a calling I have heard before and hear again. My true song. Will I listen this time?

A quiet voice like water

Thinking about my last post, I begin to notice how often I write about what is calling me (in this case, I am back in dance class after a long time away).

This is the word spell we wrap around ourselves, all unaware.

Do you do the same?



Outside, it is raining, a soft and secretive pattering of drops on the roof overhead.

The house is quiet, the cats asleep, the candle lit.

The wildflowers I planted in a seed starting tray begin their lives beneath the soil.

A day to turn inward...a watery, daydreaming sort of day.





I see how I evoke that which I want to be more present in my life...or I evoke a direction I feel pulled to follow, in order to call the path to me. Sometimes without even knowing that is what I am doing.

I perform that ritual here. Where else is there a space for dreams, magic and mystery, but in our creations?

A web post (or a person) may on the surface appear simple, but is many-layered with wish, meaning and emotion, like a deep network of roots beneath the prairie soil that anchor the sunlit growth unfolding above the surface.

Putting forth a thought...a wish...a state of being, is a kind of spell casting. This is one of the types of magic we practice, whether or not we consider ourselves witch, shaman, healer or artist.

We define and shape our reality, and ourselves, by how we think about and express them: An evocation.

We call something by naming it...then putting intention behind it then releasing it, within and without.

But the things we struggle to express — the most deep and powerful and shape-shifting things — they seem to resist being named and encapsulated.

This may be a vast longing that we can't translate into words...

Or it may be a suggestion of a thing entwined around something else, in such a tangle that we can't tease it apart and examine it properly...

It may be something of which we see only the barest outline, out of the corner of our eyes.

This unnamed something floats in on the pale silk of a milkweed, and plants itself in the tangle of thorns, thistles, whispering grasses, the under-the-surface beings of our inner landscapes.

Such callings are elusive and wild. What wants to be known sends out tendrils, or rivulets. It surfaces from some nameless place within.

We can listen for its whispers as it flows through our lives. With our attention, we nurture and give home to its voice. Trying to pin down and examine it may wither it to silence.

It is like water, this voice. Its source is sacred, a spring deep underground in darkness. Speaking through the language of image and dream, metaphor and archetype, it finds its way to us by secret channels, nurtures life unseen, ebbs, flows and shapeshifts.




It is Mélusine, a freshwater spirit.

It is a Mystery unleashed in spring.

Like spirit whispers, water rarely follows a direct path...it meanders. So the paths to these callings and destinations are intuitive and winding.

We do not know where we want to end up, or even exactly from where we are beginning...we hear only a whisper on the wind. This way.

We have only this signpost.

If we wish to stay connected with our sacred source, I believe we must follow the whisper, the signpost, over and over again throughout our lives.

The wishes of birds

I follow the wishes of birds.

I hear them calling to me in the morning, to bring out seeds, cracked corn, suet, when the low sun spills its amber across the blue-shadowed snow.

Giving to them is a gift to me. Always, they touch my heart with their joyful presence. I watch their thrilling flights from branch to feeder. Recognize the life in them—their bright eyes, quick flutters, down fluffed against the cold, foraging to survive as does every living thing on this earth.

When you look at any being with eyes of love, you witness its divinity, its personhood.

You recognize the animating sacred spark of life you share. You feel akin. Then you want to help.

So you bring seeds.

It helps each of us to survive winter.

Before dawn, in spring, the lone voice of the cardinal singing out in darkness means everything to me.

How can this one song pierce my heart so with joy and sorrow? I lie awake and listen.

While he sings, the whole of my life feels held within that song, beginning with the most precious gift we are given: the sweetness of being, of life throbbing through us, in oneness with the cardinal and every other being. Because this loneliness, this sense of separation is an illusion, say spiritual masters, philosophers, quantum physicists.

Coming out of my dreams, wakened by by this heartbreaking beauty, every sadness floods through me, every happiness, what feels like the deepest measure of my existence as a living being in this world.

My heart then whispers its own kind of song in return, reminding me how brief is the life of a songbird and a woman, but how beauty remains despite grief and death. The feeling of the beauty and the grief together, its poignance, the sense of timelessness and eternity and oneness: I cannot put that into words at all, only tears.

Sorrow sweeps out your house so that new joy can find space to enter, said Rumi. As they beguile open our sleeping hearts and call forth joy and sorrow, singing to us of how ephemeral yet eternal life is, the birds bring us even more gifts: To weep is a gift. To love, a gift. To sorrow, a gift.

Seeds. Also a gift. But perhaps a small one, considering what wonder has been received.

Reading by lantern light

I read The Hour of Land by Terry Tempest Williams during our late September stay amid the dark, burnished glory of Jay Cooke State Park.

It was drizzling and gray the three days we were there, but we were well tucked away into a snug cabin next to a wall made of jutting faces of dark slate, flanked by pines and quaking aspens.

I read into the dark by the light of the lantern.

The wind shivered the aspen leaves, and their soft, silvery clamor sounded like rain, too...even when it wasn't raining.

While we built a couple of soggy campfires and took a long, damp hike, we spent as many lovely, quiet hours reading.

St. Louis River

I've been reading books by women who are living and creating in dialogue with the landscape. Especially wise, powerful, authentic and flawed women who raise pointed questions, who challenge the status quo, who are willing to speak truth and take action for what they believe in.

I revere women like these. Their path-blazing inspires me in the best way. I am always seeking guru sisters and guru mothers and guru aunts, I think. Not of the same blood (though we are all related, really) but of like spirit and mind.

Which brings me back to The Hour of Land, which I recommend for lovers of wilderness and wildness and wild women. TTW's subject is Americans' relationship with our national parks. But her relationships, knowledge, curiosity and mind range wide as the continent, and The Hour of Land  is about far more than national parks.

It is about love, sacred rage, politics, right action and self knowledge.

It is about grief and beauty (are they always intertwined?). The sensate world. Wonder.

Terry Tempest Williams is a protector and a warrior. She, like many of us, is angry about destruction of the land, of our heritage, of beauty and quietude, of the rights of the people, the animals, the water and the earth itself.

"Our species is committing suicide—that is a choice—and in the process, we are causing others pain. Who cares? Who cares about this wilderness? This glorious indifference?"

"I keep thinking the essential gesture is to act, to respond, to remain true to our core beliefs, and not to be afraid to give voice to our anger. For me, the danger is silence and it multiplies into complacency and consent. My question remains, how do we take our anger and transform it into sacred rage?"

"Our institutions and agencies are no longer working for us. It is time to reimagine our public lands as sanctuaries, refuges, and sacred lands. Time to rethink what is acceptable and what is not."

Toad

"Wilderness is not my leisure or my recreation. It is my sanity." 

 "We believe in more, more possessions, more power, more war. Anywhere, everywhere our advance of aggression continues. My aggression toward myself is the first war...Wilderness is an antidote to the war within ourselves."

"The time has come for acts of reverence and restraint on behalf of the Earth. We have arrived at the Hour of Land." 

This quote from Darnell Davis, a Blackfeet elder, brought tears: "The last best place is our first place."

The land of the first Americans was, and is, their everything. And they have always understood this in a way that far, far too many other Americans do not.

They know this land as a deeply loved and intimately known Home. As the source of nurturing Food. Powerful Medicine. Meaningful Work. Sacred refuge and source of Spirit. As a Place of ritual and worship. A Place of Story and Wonder. A Place of memory, birth, death, ancestors. A Place of Blessing, also Home to All Our Relations: Bison, deer, wolf, moose, salmon, fox, raven, eagle.

A Place to tend to and shape, renew and care for. A Place to love and honor like a father, a mother, a child, a beloved. A Place to hold the People forever in the cup of its hand.

This land is a place worth protecting, worth our love, worth fighting for. Even if who we are fighting are our own institutions, our own agencies, our own police and military, our own government who is not listening to our voices.

There is no one and nothing more important than this planet on which we dwell. We ARE the land, and the land is us. The people are right to say Water Is Life. The Land Is Life. It is that simple, and that enormous.