All of my letters are unfinished
So when they say the writing's on the wall
No secret of mine can be read
My hopes mostly left un-wished
In this ragtag collection I scrawl
on the inside of seashells I thread
into strings of un-pearls,
these dreams float
not on currents but inside my head.

Making my way through a book of poetry and a bowl of palatable oatmeal, and it keeps occurring to me, one flash of insight hard on the heels of the previous one, that I am quick to read the book of someone else's existence. Quick to witness someone else's dash into the unknown with a torch. I courageously brave only the night, my reading lamp my only torch, illuminating no other path but the one laid out for a strong female lead.
I remember a man, once an uncle, who built his career on making structures outlive their inhabitants, preserved past the content of living memory. So keen in detecting structural flaws, he left his own house til too late, the moldings crumbling til my aunt brought the roof down around his ears. He made life safe for ages of long-dead residents, and she outgrew his living for someone else.
Fortune cookie says: Stay, and be unremarkable, leave and break hearts.

the Meaning of FLOW

Forgive my soapbox speech, my pulpit pounding. I've a lot to say.
Flowtoys hosted a recent video challenge to members of the spinning arts community to describe the meaning of 'flow.' Flow describes a state when the basic skills of a craft have been mastered and can be applied with some fluency to express the artist's whim. After a run, spinners might say "Nice flow" and mean nothing more than the smooth linkage of basic concepts to form words, sentences, paragraphs in a language that laps the air with tongues of flame. A superficial connection, but a necessary precursor to the real deal. For fire spinners and performers, the term flow can also be used to reference a state of synchronistic performance, when rote drills and muscle memory meet inspiration. In the state where the well-honed artist wields himself as the tool, the lag time between thought and deed disappears, and the resulting cosmic dance within a human vessel leaves sizzling trails burned into the back wall of the audiences' skulls. This may happen never, once in a lifetime, or, for some people, every other week; but if you ask even years later they will recall the sensation of everything clicking into place and streaming through them as if from somewhere else, from divine inspiration, one could argue. Elizabeth Gilbert describes the relationship of the psychologically healthy artist with a creative muse in similar terms in her TED talk. And in general, artists have taken this experience of creative flow and run with it, pushing all the limits of human expression past known horizons.

I privately approach fire twirling not so differently from the religious ceremonies of Sufi mysticism, especially those of the people colloquially referred to as the whirling dervishes. The Sufi mystic poet Rumi began the practice of turning in circles to attempt to reach a state of divine ecstasy. To be more precise, Rumi turned in circles to attempt to return to a state of divine ecstasy, to echo his previous, direct experience of a very intense, transpersonal and ecstatic nature that occurred in the presence of Shams of Tabriz, whom he referred to as Friend in many of his poems. Sometimes you can believe that the Friend is God, and sometimes the Friend seems to be Rumi himself, perfectly mirrored in the eyes of another, but the underlying friendship, loyalty, and love within the poetry are almost tangible. For Rumi, being with that man, talking with him, was like looking into the heart of a fire. Really magnetic, and with no chance to turn away. This experience was so important that Rumi ceased teaching his followers, and only conversed with Shams. His students, angered and jealous, had Shams murdered. And in Rumi's ensuing grief, he began to walk in circles around the pole in his garden, speaking free form poetry for dictation. He began turning and turning and turning to try to recapture the original state of that experience, and he left blazing poetry to trail behind him, about love and infinity and experiencing windows into the divine. Not so different from the aim of the fire spinner: turning on an axis can become a prayer. In motion, there is stillness, a stilling of the will, and in that silent space there is room for conversation with something greater. And that conversation might be about the human condition, what it's like to be a human, to rise to meet challenges, to feel, to suffer, to be inspired, to triumph.

Poi spinning (to me) describes the same experience, it's an inward journey of reflection when you work things out and put ideas into practice, but the art is also about how you bring your revelations to the world, and how you express the fruits of your inner journey. It's one thing to experience the meaning of life, it's another to convey that experience to another so that it lives inside them too, making them want to leap to join the dance.

"Those cursed/blessed with a Psychedelic view of the world have some condition or have some extraordinary experience in their history that changed their basic perceptions of the world. Which is why a lot of them gravitate towards the arts, it's the only way they can express the ineffable," said Christopher Knowles, posting on The Secret Sun blogspot early this month. To paraphrase, experiences may be classified as psychedelic, as opposed to rational or scientific, moments when the mind acknowledges the incomplete and faulty nature of the sensory input upon which 'reality' is based.

It is my privately held theory that object manipulators (like artists and magicians of every stripe (and I do love stripes)) are prone to 'extraordinary experiences' of what the human body and mind are capable of . Those who strive to reach beyond the everyday become artists to express the unquantifiable living wonder they find there, and like Prometheus, they emerge from the mountain of the gods bearing fire to spread among humankind. The success of this quest depends on the ability to enter into mystery, to swim in waters where others might drown, and equally important, to return intact and to form a bridge between the transcendent and the ordinary, to chart those waters for a daring few, further explorers. It may be an act of grief at separation, a longing to return to transcendent bliss, as in the case of Rumi, but it is vitally important for the world, for the advancement of human potential, that these highly gifted beings return to a reality that leaves a bitter taste in the mouth, and bring back a little of that warmth and illumination with them. They make the world habitable for everyone who seeks out the extraordinary.

frozen tracks

Write what you know, people say, as if they know what they mean. I'm waiting, nothing under my bathrobe, I'm waiting to write, barefoot in the chill of a winter morning, until I know something worth writing. I clip my toenails as I wait, in the pale diffuse light reflected in snow from an overcast sky, blankets of white covering the world. Instead of trudging the well-tracked margins, I'm waiting for some urgent mission to send me plowing my own track across the pages, ledger lines drawn out for me like corn-stubble marching through a snowy field. I'm waiting to be hit with sudden inspiration, before I take my morning shower. Waiting for the call of life to grip me as a hand grips a pen, waiting for life to make me its instrument. Indifference or merely indecision will dissipate, going the way of the cloud cover as a beam of sun, a clarion call, comes to galvanize me into aciton. I'll sit, then, alert, bare feet barely feeling the chill, and I'll swim through the meltwater from the thaw that was my fear bound in blocks of ice, shocked by the cold and by the pouring torrent of life rushing all at once to fill and flood the unused corners that lately were settling fields for my imagination. I'm waiting to write until I am struck forcefully on the temples by something worth writing. With all the expectancy and hush of winter, I am waiting to live until I find a reason worth stepping oug my front door, so I can knowingly take that risk and go about the dangerous business of living with the eagerness of a beloved. I'm waiting, sweating under my bathrobe, with ice cold, purpling feet and stubbly unshaven legs, my blood racing with sweet expectation that can only be the ice block's lusty dream of running fast across a plain, in love with the flowering of spring.

It's been becoming more and more obvious to me that writing, and especially writing science fiction and fantasy, is the best way to open young minds to new ideas, the meaning of life, and to convey the importance of protecting the planet we live on and creating a livable future for all. Speculative fiction, as it's called in the 'biz, gives all people but especially young people, a chance to imagine 'what if' and to explore beyond the boundaries of the known. It is through such exploration that we dream and invent and make something more inspiring of ourselves, and escape beyond the confines of current expression and conventions to realize our own potential. I was thinking about this when I found the following letter, drafted circa 2006. A bit childish, simple, but my sentiments have not changed and neither has the overwhelming message that fiction is what feeds my passion. I have a habit of writing to authors as I finish a book, my mind afire. Maybe only the last sentence is worthwhile, but for context, here is the letter I wrote:

To: Diana Wynne Jones, on the subject of The Merlin Conspiracy, a thoroughly excellent book.
This was fabulous. I must say the cover art had me quite skeptical at first. But I opened the book and immediately was plunged into an intricately, vividly entertaining story, that was both amusing and profound. With each page, a new layer was added, the whole piece weaving itself together into a delicate, delicious and exotic tapestry, like the people in the canyon world.
I enjoyed most of all Nick, Romanov, and Maxwell Hyde, the latter two for having real power and enticing complexity, and the former for not having either quality. Nick seemed so genuinely a teenage kid, with absolutely no clue what was going on, but who wanted to do something important. To have a grand adventure sprung upon such a character rings true for me. I feel sometimes that school, homework and worrying about college and test scores are just fillers, things to take up time until one day I'll just take a step sideways and find myself plunging into my real life, which will of course be full of adventure and excitement. There's got to be more to life than existing and consuming, even soaking in knowledge has begun to seem pointless and anticlimactic.
I enjoyed the very British flavor of your story. British lore can't help but have something of chivalry and King Arthur, of Stonehenge. There is a connectedness with the land, history, something archaic, something greater, that you just don't get in America. Your whole country is steeped in history and myth and magic; everyone just breathes it in I think, and the resulting works are refreshing to those surrounded by raw commercialism daily.
Thank you. I'm sure you get fanmail, but I wonder how much genuine appreciation and admiration actually gets through to fantastic authors. Definitely not enough. Thank you for a moment, a point in time, one page, when the world was still, and time held its breath, and the universe fit inside a book, and a book was a wealth of universes.

From the Farthest Shore

Ursula K. LeGuin's third novel in the classic Earthsea trilogy holds these pearls, which I gather to me now.
"It is time to be done with power. To drop the old toys and go on. It is time that I went home. I crave to walk on the mountain, the mountains of Gont, in the forests, in the autumn when the leaves are bright. There is no kingdom like the forests. It is time I went there, went in silence, went alone. And maybe there I would learn at last what no act or art or power can teach me, what I have never learned."

"A kind of weariness of dread, of waiting for the worst, grew in Arren all day long. Impatience and a dull anger rose in him. He said, after hours of silence, "This land is as dead as the land of death itself!"
"Do not say that," the mage said sharply. He strode on a while and then went on, in a changed voice, "Look at this land; look about you. This is your kingdom, the kingdom of life. This is your immortality. Look at the hills, the mortal hills. They do not endure forever. The hills with the living grass on them, and the streams of water running... In all the world, in all the worlds, in all the immensity of time, there is no other like each of those streams, rising cold out of the earth where no eye sees it, running through the sunlight and the darkness to the sea. Deep are the springs of being, deeper than life, than death..."
He stopped, but in his eyes as he looked at Arren and at the sunlit hills there was a great, wordless, grieving love. And Arren saw that, and seeing it saw him, saw him for the first time whole, as he was.
"I cannot say what I mean," Ged said unhappily.
But Arren thought of that first hour in the Fountain Court, of the man who had knelt by the running water of the fountain; and joy, as clear as that remembered water, welled up in him. He looked at his companion and said, "I have given my love to what is worthy of love. Is that not the kingdom and the unperishing spring?"
"Aye, lad," said Ged, gently and with pain.
They went on together in silence. But Arren saw the world now with his companion's eyes and saw the living splendor that was revealed about them in the silent, desolate land, as if by a power of enchantment surpassing any other, in every blade of the wind-bowed grass, every shadow, every stone. So when one stands in a cherished place for the last time before a voyage without return, he sees it all whole, and real, and dear, as he has never seen it before and never will see it again."

November's gift

The earth in late November is transmuted, or simply muted, by the cold--no longer snapping sharply with the sudden shock of early autumn, but penetrating deep into the bones of the ground and settling there in a long persistent throbbing.
Grass bleaches, showing the raw earthen colors beneath, ochre, gray, and brown beds laid bare on the hillside, and trees assume their purple silhouettes, skeletal finery slender and tall against the mountains' shadow.
November is life turning over in bed and dreaming of the bones of the earth.
Not black-and-white, not technicolor, this dream is filled with sepia tones, faded textures, and nostalgia for the liveliness of summer. Clay and slate predominate in a once-vibrant landscape, violet and charcoal populate shadows that pooled in summer with deepest green.
"Purple mountains majesty and amber waves of grain" were not the mountains and fields of late November. These mountains are far from cartoon, the purple a silent and waiting color, the wisdom of the bare trees written on the hills, grief at the season's end tempered with the maturity of a landscape that endures the test of winter, scrupulously saving to emerge again in spring. The stubble and straw remaining reveals the plow's furrowed tracks, script of a different story, what people have made of the land, their conversation with or their conversion of the earth, schooling it to articulate careful rows of corn, silky tops waving, or whispering seas of alfalfa mingled with the hushing of grasses. November winds have no reeds of grass to caress. Nobember winds go hungry and gnaw bitterly at the land. November's grace is tarnished silver, precious metal weathered by the ravages of time. This time of change and lengthening shadows does not yield up its secrets easily, and all yield to the relentless turning of the wheel.

weather report

The rain that pattered through this November day was the kind of rain I always write about, the rain I add to a scene if it needs the grace and inward turning of reflection, that extra whooshing of a passing vehicle or the eloquence of dripping clothing as it dries, slung over a chairback. Spattering my windowpane, beating a gentle tattoo on the roof above my low ceiling, whispering to me as I lie in bed, this rain makes a space in my life around the sheltering roof. In rain the aromas of the earth come rising up to blend in endless conversation around each inhaled breath, and I stand sniffing like a dog, tracking down the experience of the weather. Expressive, gentle, everywhere at once, this rain is a miracle filling five-gallon plastic buckets left in the driveway.

As if I had lost

Tonight the words are addressed to my sadness, coming from everywhere and enveloping me fully in my memories. In autumn, I remember other autumns, other years past, as if they were coils of wire touching each other at the rim, separated by whole years but located in the same space, other wraps of the scarf around my neck. (I wear layered garments of memory, each one brightly insulative against the tugging, scattering winds.) So I've found that in sadness, I remember past sadnesses standing out sharp and clear, tingling along the length of my arm like bangles sliding neatly together. Or it may be that my memories of grief stand out strong as the most vibrant experiences of my life, when a hurricane rocked through my body, more strongly still when I felt the tidal pull of strange waves. I know that I love doing this, that it keeps me alive, and that without this rocking motion another feeling I love would end, which is why I am sitting with tears streaming down my face, as if I had lost a child. Not merely finished a book, where I was witness to another's grief, and the laying down of burdens, fictional and twenty years in the past. Not merely held someone else's child in my arms, astonishment melting me under the light of the infant's gaze. I had not just heard it as a story, seen it in the face of a friend, listened while the parentheses closed. Are these the echoes of some future grief ricocheting off a rupture in the fabric of my life? I honor this feeling and any who can call it forth with as much grace and tenderness as Barbara Kingsolver in her book Animal Dreams.

So Winter Begins

This is a time for remembering, as the first snow falls to the ground, as the winter wraps me in close in deep folds of cloth. A time for turning inward into the heart, beyond the rattle of beech leaves still clinging palely gold, rasping on their branches, the last sensory organs of a dried up season, the last glory and color of a changing perspective. A time for the stores of memory to unwind, a time to examine each garment for holes that would let in the cold, a time to shore up the foundations and the structures that support each of our beings through the long night. This is a time to sit by the fire and tell the story so that we remember who we are, and where we are going. In the dark one's identity is in question, in ways it would never be under the plain illumination, the clear brightness of day. A time of endurance and strength has come, a time of waiting while plans we have dreamed lie asleep still, waiting for us to wake up into them as to a new spring. A time that tests our preparation and our dedication, that seeks out the weak places in us and cracks us open in all our flaws, right there on the icy hillside. In this time, all our acorns must be in, and the long long arms we stretch beyond our valleys to distant lands be pulled back. We are small in winter, small and close, and we keep the heat in but the cold outside of us, and we know when to keep moving, and sometimes we stay still. And in the space where there are no cricket voices, that breath space of cold, ice cavity of a silence instead of a chest, where billowing steam on the breeze replaces the effervescence of a butterfly's lazy trace, there we hear our blood pound through hot vessels, there we hear the clear ringing of the mountain voices, a raven's startle.
I sit and I remember. I remember how the mountains never felt lonely, on those gray blank days when they were wrapped in snowy blankets. Quiet but purposeful, the mountains bowed to receive their caps. It was beauty on a scale only my heart could conceive of, large in the child's chest that housed it. I would tromp along willingly in the wake of its tug, my boots flopping in time with my flouncing scarf and windmilling arms, mittens securely attached. I didn't know why the resonant chords of the mountains, the fact of their presence, laid bare against the snow, should leave such a welling sadness within me, so solemn for an eight-year-old experiencing the weight of the world. The enormity of the love I felt consumed me without outlet, I could not relate it on a human level, nor understand it. I was simply covered, like an avalanche. I found myself running, running, struggling through snowdrifts, wading when it became deeper and entered my boots, urgently heading somewhere, collapsing in the blank hysteria of an empty field, white as a page, my footsteps laid out behind me. Those footsteps proved the pinnacle of my grief, that I would move a tiny mouse pinned to the land, so removed from the rolling vastness of the mountains I longed for, encompassed but never encompassing. I sought the memory I now hold, memory of flight. Memory of my true sight of the world, my falcon's eyes, with which I envisioned all laid out before me, beat wings with which I gave thanks for all laid out beneath me. A hopeless, sweet child I struggled in utter confusion, barraged by the senses I once knew how to make sense of, fledgling in freefall, not yet knowing to spread my wings. The mountains received my keening and echoed back my cries to the crisp, falling snow.

knit one

I have been working on this piece of knitting for quite a while. It will be a spiral pattern shawl, and it is a gift. I love how the spirals fit together so nicely, and I end up thinking about honeycomb and the center of daisies and soap bubbles and everything that has either the spiral pattern or hexagonally-packed radially symmetrical designs. The practice of knitting says a lot about who I am, and what I do. I get very quiet and still, I work with a focused intent, and I keep a pattern in my mind that represents the whole I am creating. In this state, I will happily untangle snarled yarn, all the time thinking about the mittens I'm going to make. I usually hum wordless tunes, or talk to the person I'm knitting for, or think something nice about them. I watch each stitch carefully as I make it, even if I'm sitting in front of a TV, or in a seminar (I made several seminar scarves. I swear it kept me awake and listening all through senior year). I explore the idea that all the stitches are interconnected, and that a piece of string can become anything with the right guidance, and that patience and craftiness are warmly rewarding. And, slipping into metaphor, if each stitch were a species in an ecosystem, then a slipped stitch, a species going extinct, would create a widening hole in what is meant to be a whole garment, as the species most closely relying on that link in the foodweb are effected and the links begin to crumble. I examine the pattern laid in front of me, counting carefully, and if I see a slipped stitch, my breathing stops for an instant, as I stay perfectly still to keep the run from getting any bigger. I pick up the stitch and work it into the pattern, if there is enough room, and only then do I breathe easy again. Sometimes I undo entire rows, unraveling the mistake and returning to an unbroken pattern. This is what ecological restorationists do for a living, isn't it? Unravel anthropogenic "mistakes" and return to an unbroken pattern, except that there is no knitter, the stitches (species) weave themselves. Which reminds me of a Chinese medicinal text called The Web That Has No Weaver.
At any rate, the study of patterns is necessity to me. If I weren't memorizing carpet squares, I wouldn't have been able to sit through middle school, which moved at a snail's pace, nor even sit in my own room talking on the phone. Out in nature the patterns are so obvious, they have names, aspen, maple, birch, basswood, and I know them the way I recognize voices or handshakes. If you ask me how I know, I will need to think a minute to put it into words, because the patterns do not have words. They have entire stories. But indoors, I compulsively study fabric motifs, wall hangings, and paintings, looking for the same regularity of character or design, looking for something predictable, something that grows and becomes and creates more of itself, as patterns can, and as life can. And so I knit, taking on projects of increasing complexity and scale. Each one I try is a little bit harder than the last, so I keep pushing the envelope. I hang onto the predictability of a pattern in the face of uncertainty. Stories hold patterns that I search for, and they provide an experience of a pattern unfolding and reaching completion. Stories model life. I follow the thread along someone else's pattern, and feel safe and assured, and more confident about my own leavings and tracings, my scribbles, the bits of knotted string that are preparing me for the patchworking of my own life.
This is how knitting is important.

Hello folks. I'm on the open road, discovering a sense of possibility and questing for a personal direction or a sense of purpose beyond the general save-the-world thing. Really I believe this means I'm looking for a place to belong to, a grounded central space to put down roots, to move and have my being. It's fitting that the tarot card I'm working on at the moment (as part of a new and exciting art project!) is the Ace of Pentacles, which embodies exactly such potential, the energy of the seed and keeping things safely in hand for another season of growth. For now each day is full and the uncertainty is a welcome expectation of change. I thank several artists for my new outlook: Ben Karis-Nix for his excellent album We Are Giants Now, a beautiful artistic rendering of the state of flow that I've been trying to cultivate. I play it when spinning poi and lately while driving. And Big Sam's Funky Nation, the New Orleans funk band that I heard live. Big Sam plays the trombone, wears sunglasses in a dimly lit bar, and dances fit to beat all in his very shiny shoes. He even smiled at me. I doubt I will ever buy a funk album because I don't see how it could duplicate the extraordinary experience that occurred in that bar. The guitar twanged away, the brass reverberated and suddenly the whole audience was swimming, as if in a fishbowl, moving through water, not air, and Big Sam performed spectacularly. He told everybody to shake it, pointing with his trombone, and they did. I swam through the best hour of my life completely sober yet in a deep experiential state of wonder, and I drove home with complete confidence, yet the familiar storefronts I passed looked new to me, like I was driving through someone else's hometown. This has stuck with me in my travels, but it began in the place that for so long I called home. Not the meaning of life, but the experience of being alive, someone told me, that's what you are searching for, what we are all searching for. An interesting idea, like a trail of incense smoke dissipating over a crowded street. Nostrils flared, I'm ready to follow it to its source.

Three

I'd like to talk about a symbol that's become important to me for a number of reasons. This is a triquetra withing an interlaced triangle and circle. A friend and I came up with a proposal recently for a circus training and alternative health facility that would utilize warehouse space in Brooklyn. It would also boast a rooftop garden and a juice/snack bar. We dreamed big, and no surprise that this plan will not be carried out. But the exercise was far from wasted, and we worked out some very important components while envisioning our future lives (in a warehouse). One of the things we thought was most important was a really cool name, Trifecta, which led to a whole discussion of what the three subcategories should be, body, mind, world, like the different spheres of influence we want to be moving in? or heart, soul, spirit, like the different layers of energetic imprints that surround our body? What I like the best is the illustration above, Body, Mind, Soul. It focuses my attention on maintaining a balance between those concepts as a stable equilateral triangle.

The name of our hypothetical, moonbrainchild circus? The Threefold Circus. Again, the fun would be in telling everyone who asks three completely new things that the name stands for.

I've also been toying with the idea of my own stage name, especially after meeting such cool folks at Wildfire. A name sets you apart and gives you a clear identity, a clear presence, so I have been thinking hard about what it could be. I came up with Delta, which is the greek letter d, represented by a triangle. In scientific notation it denotes change, as in temperature, slope, moisture content, etc., but basically a reaction or a transformation, it's the shifting variable. And I'm also enjoying the association with a river delta, the land mass at the outflow of a river where it joins the ocean. I like the changing and mixing aspects of that environment, and it's a fertile ground for the proliferation of the ideas I sow. I think I would be an edge species, so an estuary is a great place for me, dynamic.

I'm enamored with the three-petaled antispin flowers that poispinners call 'triquetra', which really do look exactly like the above.

And I've been looking for a symbol to put on a business card. And in my journeying work with sage, I joined with two other aspects of the plant spirit or myself to form a symbol, we held hands like we were in freefall and wove this design around us. Welcome welcome!

a note about process

Writing is what happens in between. I live at the edge of something, the causeway connecting many things. A river empties where I stand. And in this land of ebb and flux, I simply arrive to find something waiting. There is writing happening all the time, everywhere I meet inner light manifesting Truth through form. Sometimes it appears on paper, but sometimes I write on the inside of my eyelids, or in the sand, or on the skin of a beloved. I write trails through the air, and send messages on the wind. Most of it is in the language of my living cells, though English occasionally predominates. Even if I decide ahead of time what to write, what appears will be markedly different, and not of my choosing. The only thing I can do is be ready, be skillful, and craft myself into the finest instrument for some larger (and as yet unknown to me) purpose. And then I show up to play. It is wild. It is an untameable ride on the rollercoaster of the cosmos. There are no guard rails. And everything I bring back with me counts as another star, a fresh start, a word added to a bag full of sand. The magician never reveals his tricks, because there are no tricks, just the magic of perception. The five year old, wide-eyed, knows it all. Nothing is written in stone because the word, nothing, is written in stone in the sidewalk. It's a joke. And I have so far to fall.
It's true that I have no expectations, but is the expectation of expectations an expectation? The anxiety is all me, but I empty out through this work. My vital spot is the meeting place, the ecotone, the blending and opposing forces as they join. The front and back covers, yin yang. All I am certain of, all I name myself, is change.

What shall I write next?

is always my question. And the glass of water answers, telling me of cool thirst slaked, and the sparkled beam of sunlight answers me, disappearing in the shadowplay of the willow. And the traffic of the road answers me, sounding like an unfolding ribbon or cascade of pavement, musical more than other times when it rains. And the whisper of the stars answers me, sending me all the information I could dream to write. And the blades of grass answer me, cool and perspiring beneath my feed, green and full of two-sidedness like my pages, becoming the leaves and sheets of parchment that I will write. And the spines of books talk to me, divesting secrets with an intimacy that shocks me at times, pouring forth to the empty air--patient and meticulous verbiage. And the quiet chair answers me, holding me up within a pocket of time. And my pockets answer me, containing as they do my memories and old smiles, worn and soft handkerchiefs, and the chocolate wrapers I opened at the theater. And the windshield wipers answer me, shhing in the gloom, and their story is about seeing new possibility, keeping the doors of perception fresh. And the empty air holds my reverberant breath. And I dowse each movement of my pen, finding water underneath, a flowing torrent the life water that becomes real and flows as ink to the surface.

What I thought about last night and what I am right now, these are things not taken lightly. I dreamed a burning house. I was the house and the dreamer. I burned myself and I was relief in the wake of those ashes. The clarity. And I think that the house was unwanted. And if there was anything that I needed, I didn't need what was in the house, the house was wrong.
There are hours of the day where I have time to myself. I go infinitely in, like the hanged man on the card. If there was something for me to do I would keep it to myself. A true meaning presents itself. And the fortune on the cookie left ripples in the air. If there was a message written on a little slip of paper... A man reads a fortune cookie and has a perfect realization. What happened, what brought him to that dawning? What were the events that made so much sense when he read that slip of paper? If we could be so lucky, our lives would fit like novels into sense and cohesion, ended by two books, one beginning, one closing, and all the threads neatly tied. But the center of self cannot hold in coheshion without sacrificing a swim. The neurotic drowns in water he was meant to swim in. The mystic swims in the sea. I think I'm setting out in a boat. If all the docks are dry where do the ducks go in winter?
I am on a journey. What house will I build to replace the one that burned? I think I will live in the old and worn house of Joseph Campbell. I will walk the tattered floor where I felt vertigo. I will converse with pale clapboards and the slate-grey sky. I will associate with the wind.

now you see me...

I practiced invisibility for many years. When you say that no one should go out expecting to be invisible, know that as I left my child's body I tried to keep whatever quiet and nondescript silvery film covered me. I tried to keep still as a mouse, still as the books I read. I stayed passed over, or imagined myself passed over. I became an eddy in the flow of humanity. The first time I came into an understanding that I was not invisible for all practical purposes, I was twenty and in a foreign country. A country, moreover, where dark-skinned (mostly smiling) faces insisted on meeting my eye. Here I could not escape by being in my own head. I was loudly, publicly white, very much an object of curiosity and conjecture. And there I realized I had never been invisible. I had never come to terms with the striking truth of my own identity. The closest I had ever come to wearing my own skin was when I mingled with performers, bravados, young lions boastfully holding a posture, their swagger all tail and flowing hair. Among people to whom a mask was so essential, people who maintain a separate stage identity beyond all proportion to a normal human ego, and who may not mingle easily with the common fold, among such people I found a strange kind of freedom from my self-imposed exile by invisibility. Their masks oddly freed me from my own. I could slip out of my dull cloak and stand, feeling myself no longer all elbows and knees and knobby shoulders. I felt that what I had become was not so foreign after all in their company, where it could be taken for another mask, and where those with true seeing would not mind. Knowing that my full realized existence would challenge social conventions, I kept my moments of lucid embodiment to the practice of performing, a new skill I exercised as I once had invisibility. The three months I spent under tropical suns were three months of constant performance, constant embodiment of an identity, when I knew that I exist without borders when no one is looking. (I am like the cat, everything, nothing. Examine me Schrodinger, and I am fixed, a contrary to your constant.) The exhaustion of stares, blazing stronger than the sun, weighed on me. That battle constantly waged within my face. Knowing that I will fight to be seen, to express myself, knowing that an aggressive assertion is linked to some presentation of selfhood, I yet linger in the penumbra, whispering what I would shout. Awaiting some cue to step from backstage and to take my place in the spotlight.

thoughts from wildFire

A good performance makes me want things that I didn't know I wanted. Or more properly, a good performance reminds me of my desire to reach beyond myself into limitless possibility, there to become a conduit and to shine as incandescently as the soul I see before me, with gestures burning at the edges of memory and imagination, shining new light on some very old part of human understanding. Inspiration has wings born painfully from the destruction of my restrictive self, the critic that keeps me on the sidelines. I am rocked by sharp pangs that accompany the razor-bright illumination of my feathers unfurling. The crumbling of the inner life that once bound me now brings me both a sense of loss and a sense of release from the safety and limitations of my incubation. A good performance shatters the smooth eggshell calm of my unfulfilled potential.

Cool event happening nearby:

The Northeast Healer's Symposium is October 3rd, in Johnson, VT. Check it out!

Offering Healing Sessions & Tarot Readings

Hi folks,

Most of you know how concerned I am with the fate of the environment and with the large social rifts that keep our society separated from nature. I have been developing tools that I think can be applied to help heal the environment, to heal individuals and to heal wounds in our communal psychology. In addition to finishing my formal schooling for conservation and ecology, I have had the privilege and the good fortune to be in the exact right place and time to receive instruction in Plant Spirit Healing from an excellent teacher, Pam Montgomery, and in permaculture design from Starhawk through Earth Activist Training.

The courses I have been taking have been amazing, and I'm eager to share and explain and geek out to anyone even half-interested. AND: I have mostly paid for the tuition for these classes, and I could use a little help making ends meet.

Here's where your support can help me:

I offer to share my services in these new skills I am learning, and you can support me in two ways: by asking for my help, you will give me a much-needed opportunity to practice, and in exchange for my services I am requesting donations to go towards paying the balance of my tuition.

I am offering consultation sessions in PLANT SPIRIT MEDICINE. This alternative healing modality gently and powerfully works on an energetic level to heal the spiritual and energetic causes of illnesses. I am just learning these techniques, and I would be delighted to work with people who understand that I need practical experience and who are open to healing in whatever form it may take, even simply an honest dialogue. I will of course remain completely confidential.

I am ALSO offering TAROT READINGS for those interested. Tarot is a divination tool that reveals how to bring into balance the symbolic archetypes that are influencing your life. More than simply reading your future, tarot maps the forces converging on your soul's path, and can shed light on how to navigate those forces.

Typicaly a professional healer charges $60 per hour, or they may have a sliding pay scale, and a professional tarot reader charges $40 for a full reading. Because I am in training and I view this as a learning opportunity for myself and a charitable act on your part, I suggest donating whatever portion of the fee that you feel is feasible, but I would really appreciate $20. And keep in mind that donations will be used specifically to pay for the healing courses I have described.

You can contact me by email: daniellemarielaberge@gmail.com, to arrange a meeting, or to arrange a time for a phone conversation. Please do not feel shy about asking me, and thank you for your support.

Keep shining!

Love and Thanks,

Danielle

It's just another task, another tidying up.
Like pulling up last season's weeds,
Ripping out the eyes I saw with in
the summer, waving on their long stalks.
This movement is a turning, an effort
around the axis of the year, as I
balance an egg-shape of transformation--
of space inside me. If hope's a
feathered thing, I cannot yet tell
whether this shell contains a bird.
But my first inclination is to
another realm, glittering, airy
with the carapaces of insects
irridescent in the day that dies.
Who kept the long memory of ages
would know the fields of autumn
and call them with their truest title:
birthplace of the dragonflies.

Dream:

Either I was a girl or her beloved. I opened the door... or I proposed-- in this way-- I made a pun about zoo animals, then said 'Will you marry me,' placed her own ring on... my finger, I was disappointed that it wasn't new. And then ...I grabbed her breasts and walked her back into the apartment, murmuring. We sank down onto the couch... It felt good so I didn't stop him, but the door was open so I went to get it to close it. Then I said, I'm pregnant... and as she talked I felt a huge disappointment, (This is not how it was supposed to go, by any measurement.) We abruptly changed places.
In my dream, the couple goes on to find and then escape from a meeting of the KKK, led by Starhawk, who says, "And if we don't catch them, oh well."
My rationale: I feel like I am a surprised young couple not ready for committment, rushing into things, not knowing how to show I care for myself. I am being chased and dogged by my missing convictions.

In a time of great change and upheaval, fear is my inheritance, my shadow-self clinging and dragging at my feet, my belly, my throat. Fear is my keeper. I miss more than I see. But I see the great old tree at the bottom of the garden.

Waking to my disconnection I have nowhere to go but into myself, yet I flee. I may be on the fast track, but it's not a smooth ride.
And today I have been reminded that everyday life is the extra-ordinary one that I seek, and instead of seeking to intensely change and shape my life every day, I might find it intensely changed simply by experiencing it in the moment. Who or what might I fall in love with? The irreplaceable, vulnerable beauty of strangers' self-conscious postures on the subway, the way they carefully avoid making eye contact with me. The world is so big and so beautiful, I used to cry. Where is there room for me when even the smallest feather crumpled in the gutter shines, when each brick laid is laden with significance? Reading each nexus of power and information, reading the city, reading tiny details, reading the lines, and the newspaper flapping its way down the sidewalk, would I ever arrive anywhere? Or would I simply stay frozen in a moment's observation, of wood grains, of graffiti, of rain in rivulets, and the smell of new pavement, a sea of wobbling umbrellas? I will be examining an old locket, a cat, a faded flyer, the nearest mural, and the shoes of passersby. And if I examine enough cups of tea, perhaps I will look up to find some new revelation has settled around my shoulders. The world is big enough for me.

trust the water

What can I meet you with, holding out in my open arms? If you told me, would it be as freely given, or as highly prized? I could open my flowers for you, and you could feel the saffron-threads of my tender joys. Love the light, I love. My love. But not any exception keeps you from meeting. Lovers interrupted in a half-grove of moonlight and attention, vying for significance in each others' hearts, still very much a dance, two roles, the moon and tide, but no question as to who responds, who sets and wanes. In an instant I am moving beyond the better part of doubt into knowing that a certain center of the self is always present, watching, a voyeur in the game of love until the undulating body prudently closes its eyes. Unbeknownst, unknowing, it waits balanced like an egg, to fall on either side. The better part of valor is hope. And each encounter makes one more sure that the beginning is time well spent. How can something end if nothing ever begins? Has the courage to begin? wet.

I knew there was a reason. That vague unsettling feeling that led me three months ago, the dissatisfaction, the burn of things not lining up, of too many things jostling for attention, coincidence upon haphazard colliding with force, simultaneity and synchronicity impacting, and the collisions were too forceful within my warring selves. I wrote apocali (?), not one, multiple apocalypses, saw the wrongness of that word, the lack of it, the very wrongness an unease I couldn't pinpoint. How could it not encompass the multiplicity of endings being drawn together? That noticing made me afraid. The bling-sightedness of all those prophets. Mass hysteria and conspiracy, all singular and selfish. And here, just on page 84, something I didn't know was true, yet, has just been confirmed by China Mieville. A bit dramatically, but all the same. The right chord is struck. The brush takes the next stroke. Is it any wonder then that I feel... vindicated? relieved? Someone else noticed and wrote to my fears. Made them sane. Made them fictive and poetic, spelled them out in myth. Which has its roots in the collective unconscious and without reason, beyond reason, draws us in from the night of logic. Here you're not alone, he whispers, here the world is raving mad. Some comfort.

"It's the ends of the world."
"End of the world?"
"Ends."--- Kraken, by China Mieville

Dreamstates: Vision and flight

This is another attempt at documenting my inner landscape. Let's hope it sticks this time. Each narrative is related in a larger whole through journeys into the dreamtime. My goal is to make the stories relatable and inspiring, and leave some personal details out of it. Dreamwork is pretty easy, all you have to do is close your eyes.
* * *
An inner voice impelled me to sit down, and then turn to face a closed door, and next to close my eyes. I found myself flying on the back of a peregrine falcon past a stream of colors. A great owl was ahead of us, and time stretched as the tiny falcon and I encircled his enormous shoulder to face him. The owl, not gently at all, said, “Wake up, the phone call is for you, stupid!” He then touched the tip of his wing feathers to the center of my forehead. Light began to beam from the touch and swirl all around us. Then the owl brushed me with his wings, as if removing dust from the space all around my body, clearing out my aura. I remember thinking how much I want an owl wing. As I am thinking about wings, he traces the place under my arms where my wing feathers will grow. He tells me that when I get back to the real world I will be able to fly. Then the owl pauses, examining my arms. It is as if something is missing from among my invisible-as-yet-ungrown feathers. “Where are your pinions?” he asks. With that question, I resurface.

I awoke to find the world windy in its grey cloud cover. What a day it will be today. I thought that it was my imagination. Those owls of the mind that never swooped except in self-recrimination, levelling loneliness into a silhouette with tufted ears, but maybe there WAS more, a creeping, inching enjoyment growing from a shadow to cover the moon, who had his intentions elsewhere. What does an intentional community really mean? The rustle of the open wind gave no answer. Instead, the whole sky was a shepherd, and gusted about sheep clouds, fat-bodied in their layer of the atmosphere. At night the stars went deep into the rich velvet of the sky. But no one stayed to watch them long. Everyone tried sleeping and found that they were waking to another time, the dreamtime. If there were any approximation of luck in the universe, the measure of its joy would be all in carelessness, care-free-ness. So we will see how soon I become someone warmer. I am not the most solar of creatures. Maybe I can be you though. Maybe the act of writing makes me large. If there was ever a way to go from here, I would be borne upon a paper flying carpet with a big pen in my hand. What do I want you to say, my friend? Words of praise, comfort, criticism? But you stay silent. You are wise. I don't want those things. You cannot address the question of what I want. You are not my god, my muse, the big thing that calls me in form the universe to do it honor. I am rolling with the air above, I am pictured in the halls of mountains. Their valleys pine for me, leave a negative space for me to fill, like the gently curving back of the lover, wishing to be held. I am coming home. I am coming home. I am coming home into myself.

The Money Tree

- a story I wrote when I was 11. The best story I've ever written, in my opinion.

Susan came running back to the house breathless. She gasped out "Tree!" and pointed toward the trails she had been on near their summer house. Mark asked if she could show him the way and Susan only nodded. She walked slowly up the trail and began to recover her breath. She told Mark that she had decided to explore the grounds around the summer house and had followed this trail for about a quarter of a mile, and then there was a little clearing, with a single little tree in the middle. It was a kind of tree the children had never seen before, and it had beautiful flowers on it. They were silvery with golden centers. They brought a bouquet home for their mother. They went there every day until summer was over and it was time to go to school. They went back to the tree for the last time and saw that the tree had seeded over and now had bright green pods. They opened some, and a silver dollar fell out of each pod. "Quick," Mark said, "gather lots of the pods and open them all! It might run out soon and we could be rich!" They did become rich and next summer they went back and got more money. They had enough to get both of them through college. They got an early retirement plan and lived in a mansion in the winter and they always went to the summer house in the summer.

The chariot

I see the charge of my task as a rocking horse on the tidal sands of a beach. This horse is stationary like the Chariot in the tarot deck, yet they both contain the meaning of direction. One foot in water, and one on land, the charioteer brings together opposites, light and dark, to guide them in the same direction, steering opposite forces to move in a productive direction. At the moment, I stand in an estuarine environment, a changing borderland where forces impact and diffuse, bleed one into the other. The question that the charioteer must answer: does this movement carry me closer to my goal? And then comes the knowledge that headlong pursuit may be ruinous. As the chariot draws up alongside its opponent it is victorious. The chariot says that victory is what happens after the battle, the governing of a new kingdom, and drawing from that polarity into a united directed purpose.

Tidbits from Earth Activist Training:

Weeds are the Earth's immunological response to an open wound.

Make running water walk and walking water stand still.

We can solve climate change by building carbon (read: organic matter) into our soils.

We are the rising sun
We are the change
We are the ones we have been waiting for
And we are dawning.

Swedish Saffron Bread

After a lovely weekend class, I felt like making myself a treat. I've always wanted to use saffron in cooking, I wanted to know what it tastes and smells like, and I've heard the color is unparalleled. I spotted the spice when helping a friend clean out an entire kitchen. College is (was, alas!) full of freebies.
It felt wonderful to use and enjoy something so precious, and tell myself that I am worth a half-teaspoon of saffron. I can't wait to have this with poached eggs in the morning. Milk, eggs, a lot of butter and flour went into this recipe, but if I'm going to go all out, they look so good, and I couldn't substitute every single ingredient for something different that might be easier for me to eat. I mostly made this recipe to see if I could. Someone else can eat it.
The saffron turned a deep red when I soaked it (for 12 hours!), and it reminded me of the St. John'swort oil. Both plants are yellow but dye a deep clear red in extraction. In retrospect, maybe all that work with St. John'swort really turned things over for me. All about letting my light shine and directing my energy smoothly outwards. The recipe even called for 7 spiral shaped buns. So there we have it, my chakra healing class represented in food form.

Is this my lake? Is this the clear water of my reflective self? Tall water moving. Old water sleeping. The reservoir of being. When I picture a container, perhaps it should be a lake: spring-fed stream flowing in, river estuary flowing out, standing in the footprint of mountain ranges, mirroring my silver soul with the upside-down summits. What dreams are bourne across those waters, what secrets buried in their depths? The echoes of any sound I make can be heard from miles off, transmitted in a perfect crystalline whisper. I brook no interruptions in my musings but my mermaid mind merges with the waves of millfoil. Mine is a feathery, rolling sea, and if I were standing on a moor in England the heather tossing in the wind would remind me of it, as alfalfa and mugwort do, in the sighing fields of home. 'The tide! The tide!' young Keats would bellow, from the lookout of a pasture stile, and I would bound with him, pointing out the undersides of leaves visible on the nearest oak or maple, meaning that a storm is on the way.

I'm moving along the color of a honied dream.

how peaceful the rain

Put me in a painting from Japan.
Hiroshige, maybe.
I'll be a figure carrying water.
I'll push back my hat.
I'll say how lovely the sunrise looks
through the clouds around Mount Fuji.
And all of my extra lines will disappear,
the lines of hope, tangles of fear.
I'll be in the tender brushstrokes of a master:
quiet and serene as he loads ink on brush,
a curl of steam, his companion,
rising from the clay teacup at his side.
I'll be his creation while he makes ripples out of rain,
and then I'll carry home the bundle tied on my back,
sandals flipping away,
shedding the waters of contemplation.

I love the Literary Book of Answers, compiled advice from great works of literature. I always consult it when I visit a certain friend.

Question: What do I do now?
Answer: Thou must gather thine own sunshine.
Question: How do I find my own way?
Answer: Be still.
Question: How will I communicate what I find to other people?
Answer: You shall not fail.-- Sophocles, Oedipus Rex

I forgot to cite the first two answers.

Take the Cake

Or, A Happiness Unquation.
an anecdote that may explain a lot.
I am a passenger in a car. My friend is sitting next to me. On my lap is a beautifully decorated vegan cake. I am twenty-one, and I am excited because I can eat it without feeling bad later, and because there are pretty flowers and hearts all over it. I am so very happy to be holding a cake on my lap. I feel very special. Like a five-year-old. Like a five-year-old princess. Make that a fairy princess. You get the idea.
All of a sudden, I realize SOMETHING IS WRONG. I am happy. I am holding cake. I feel special. WHAT IF my friend sitting next to me is not feeling special, or like a five-year-old-fairy-princess?
What if she is upset because she doesn't get to hold the cake?
More to the point, what if she is upset because I feel special?
And so I offer to let her hold the cake.
She is bewildered by my offer. She is not aware that I felt so very happy about holding the cake, and it certainly won't make her as thrilled. She has no desire to hold the cake. She says so. We both laugh, and I grin sheepishly, clutching the cake a little tighter.
I reflect on the enormity of my errors in the areas of subjectivity and the transferability of happiness, as well as my own sense of self-worth. I refer to this incident as a "Take the Cake" scenario. I use it to measure whether I am denying myself enjoyment in a fruitless attempt to make others feel happy. Is this a Take the Cake scenario?

Positive heart impulses

Tonight I forgive myself for holding on too long to what no longer serves me.
I forgive myself for fearing to grow bigger than my censoring ego can criticize, to shine so bright that I cannot be stopped by doubts.
I forgive myself for wishing to keep myself small and invisible rather than to walk with my radiance revealed.
I forgive myself for believing anyone else's opinions over my own judgment.
I forgive myself for placing the happiness of others before my own, and choosing what does not serve me in an attempt to make others feel special.
I forgive myself for seeking approval from others, because I did not approve of myself.
I forgive myself for a deep-seated belief that 'I must be doing something wrong,'or that 'I'm not good enough.'
I forgive myself for acting out of desperate fear and hurting others.
I forgive myself for staying disconnected rather than listening to the hard truths of friendship.
I forgive myself for filling my mind with worry and doutbt instead of peaceful solitude.
I forgive myself for remaining tense and alert when there are no longer stressful stimuli.
I forgive myself for undoing knots with my left hand even as I tie them with my right.
I forgive myself for tying knots with my right hand even as I undo them with my left.

Some things which are new

the month of July
blueberry bushes
a Subaru Outback
brakepads for the Outback
socks (I'm really proud of this one)
a checking account
more television than I ever normally watch
a hammock with accompanying stand
an herb garden
hibiscus iced tea
a haircut
bills
postcards from Amsterdam
a vase of flowers
the finale of the latest Doctor Who
a craving for corn tortillas
homemade strawberry jam
a notebook and mittens that Danielle couldn't take to NM
a teapot that doesn't leak!
space for spiritual matters
a journal where I write three pages, every morning
books that are not texts for class
a cool spiral knitting pattern
affirmations like: I create the world that I live in
a swishy red linen skirt
a blue sundress covered in tulips
semi-effective bouts of cleaning and organizing
lavendar soap
a leaf I am turning over

out-standing in my field

The plant that nightly makes meadows smell sweet is rightly named fragrant bedstraw, along with purple and pink vetch clinging to tall grass stalks full of grain, and daisies waving gently in the breeze, campion forming white pillowy clouds, and elecampagne sweet and low to the ground. Clover awash in white and red, and strawberry peeking from low-growing beds. Black-eyed susans and loosestrife, buttercups too, and parsnip and goutweed, goldenrod, alfalfa, dandelion, morning glory, aster, and the twinkling silver coming from the underbellies of waving leaves on the small aspens growing casually, five feet from the edge of the field, as if no one would notice their encroachment.

The sound of home is the rustle blue-green of these leaf beings on a summer night. A creature sound. They are tall and have stood there ever since I can remember. Can they remember me? I ask. I am a wild one, a small bark scrambler with barked shins, scratches where I scrabbled up the trunk, perfectly perching high above a burbling river bed. This is what the trees remember, my almost still gaze, blood pounding as I crouch, precious gasps as I wonder at the set of day, elated and pleased to be several dozen feet higher than usual as if I had gotten away with something.

My heart has always been in the heart of a certain field, a low point on the land but an open one from which the sky is apparent, and the nearby mountains make their presence known, the funny one shaped like an anvil. An itch that I've had since I was small urges me to run towards open sky, and standing here, I can see wide vistas. A glitter, the light reflecting off a metallic angel, that pilot and I the only ones who know the secret of this sky, its freedom. You and me, buddy. You and me. I don't envy him, whoever he is. He has to look at his instruments, and focus on work, and is surely above the brilliant color display. I in my field see it all pass before me. Like one of my trees, my glory is in watching the world passing by and furthering, becoming. Who else will take the time to notice? If I do not stand out in the field and gaze into this stretch of sky, my stretch of sky, with weather passing across the canvas in a brilliant ever-changing show of wonder, if I do not stand here, will someone else?

The colors of home are the light on hills at evening. How can green become so pink before it all goes dark blue? The clouds on up through the stratosphere each in their turn follow suit in a gentle blending motion. It is suddenly not fair that every sunset has been painted as if only in one moment, when sunsets are temporal events, changing from one moment to the next, now it is the most beautiful, no, now, now, now, until it's blue in gray or is it gray in blue? and I can no longer tell the clouds from the sky nor distinguish the patterns of the leaves and the dew brushes cool against my scraped shins and I turn my steps for home because the day is gone.

A Longer Trail for some

But I enjoyed the 30.8 miles of it that I hiked, in the best company possible. I had all sorts of worries and personal concerns that melted away with the first mile and a half of uphill incline. Nothing like straining at your backpack straps and wondering whether you will keep breathing in a minute or if your boots are actually crushing your toes to jelly, to drive away worries about things like what you're doing for the rest of your life. And oddly, or perhaps not so oddly, I found that what I was doing for the next few days at least was beating a pretty hot pace over and across the Long Trail with my friends, and it didn't matter what appointments I had made, or what I might think my parents might not approve of, or what serious thing I needed to sort; worrying wasn't going to fix any of that anyhow. My problems didn't melt, but I packed them away when I packed my backpack, and I conveniently left them on the shelf at home, along with other things that were too heavy or too useless to take with me. I needed to travel light. Getting things done turned out to be the order of business, and the first step to finishing is, well, the first step. The dao has never been so sweaty, heart-racing, rocky, and rewarding. All around me, every step of the way all I had to do was stop, and look around at the cathedral of the forest canopy and the velvet moss carpet and the weird mushroom priests. Any moment of the trail contained the whole of the experience and I wasn't afraid I'd miss any of it, because it was all around me. I didn't hurry because I thought I'd be left out, instead I took my time. What fell into place was my perception. I absorbed the mountain-ness from the mountains. I asked where my roots were, why did I choose this place, these structures and people, what led me to the path I now walk? I looked long into my own memories. I looked long across the view, and into the daydream of the mountain. The lighthearted dream of summer, and a deeper sense of well-being and purpose, a way of being, a -ness that grows like mountains do, older all the time. I laughed and bantered along the trail. I settled, like the mountain settles, into an understanding of myself as I am, as I am forming. The seed of the mightiest mountain is a single grain of sand. And if I build it out of weekend hikes, hands of cards, bunches of flowers, a really great porch and shade with the summer sun through the leaves, instead of church suppers and hook-rugs and big, sweet dogs and sweeter maple toast, I still might live to ninety like Grandma Frances. The secret is just living one day at a time. I just added a pebble today. I'm in the business of mountain-building, so excuse me if I don't take some time off. If I ever stopped, how would this mountain get built? I have the most lovely sense of not wanting to step out of my self and miss a bit of my life as it goes by. I deserve it and I will savor it. If every day can be as satisfactory, as filled with endorphins and fellowship and silent, quiet spaces in the cool and the green, I shall feel fortunate indeed.

The time is now and if I do not write, what good are all the hours of my life? Too long I lingered in the shadows, pale imitations of a dream, whiling away my time with fancies and with fantasy, but NOW those shadows I shall cast, that stand out bold and clear, distinct from every meager spectre of the dying day. What good the empty page? Yes, just so. The page. Who ever heard such pouring forth, extemporaneously, there is not time enough to send my thoughts to shake the fount and center of the earth. But here is this, I cannot form but wish a form to life, exhale my breath as prayer and come an empty vessel to that humbling page. And all those spectral auditors, the shadows spectating even as I who came a member of that formless audience beyond the form of Life, a story, Truth; a witness in the dark to the illumined forms of Love spelled out upon the stage, and those spellbound amazed listeners will heave and sigh, breathe, gasp in my breath as I, exhaling, now send forth words. Not my words but words unto themselves, that struggle out their meaning, flare and die, even as their light illumines and inspires. How shall we fare when entertainment's cheap, the word a silver seed stolen, ransomed, bargained, begged, thrown away out in the gutter? I cannot see the fruits of what will be but toil upon the circle's edge, a leading spiral spinning, spinning, yet never to reach the center nor see the whole complete. Here's to the rim, the narrow path, the ledger lines of profession, duty, fate, or is it will? To bind myself to words, is this my choice?

green summer grass

Ah, the groans of summer
a lazy lawn-mower, shirt
left slung across the porch rail,
where a tall glass of ice water,
lemon and mint, sweats bright beads
of moisture in the afternoon shade.
The chlorophyll smell, grass greener
with two l's, fresh cool whisper
saying 'water, water;' lapping
little tongues of the earth's delight.

the four letter words

Dear ____,
I just had a dream which is about to slip away. But I want to remember the sense: we do what we do, save the world or author it, shape it, become its architects, because of the strenght we get from being with other significant people. The architects of the world, the true Poets, its saviors, create spontaneously, without apparent effort, but always because they must, because some need, some impulsion drives them to great urgency. At this time their great precision, their carefully schooled behaviors and skills, allow them to flawlessly tap that which is the power of the universe, and use it in the service of Change (which should be a four letter word but isn't). Despite Fear, our strength.. no, BECAUSE of Fear, our strength lies in unity, not separation, unity centered on the perfect and abiding quality of LOVE. We are small in the measure we separate and close our hearts, and we are great in the measure we dare to let LOVE dream through us and imagine the blossoming of the future of the world. This is why the world needs LOVE above all else, and why the greatest force for altering current situations may still exist, dormant, among the masses. A friend told me evolution has not been survival of the fittest, all these years. In Darwin's later writings he theorized that LIFE was kinder than that. What would a world look like if we turned to the understanding, like he eventually did, that we evolve best through (or rather, in the direction of, towards) our experiences of Beauty, Truth, and LOVE, and through our integrity to those concepts and a deepening of the experience of humanity?
What might the world look like with calm LOVE at the wheel, instead of raw Fear pushing from behind, propelling us? Is that not a worthy goal?
If we stop to calculate everything in our Fear and our isolation, then what we miss is LIFE! And the vibrant, insane, jerry-rigged inventions of the dream will never come into being. But our science, our art is far greater than mean calculation, and as we talk to the universe, we shall become its next shapers, for ill, or indeed, for better.
***
All such power is metaphoric, and if I told you the contents of my dream, the horrors, the struggles in their particulars, it would mean nothing to you, less than nothing. Yet what I have read from such images may, I hope, be writ large upon mankind.

light in the dark forest

As I drifted, I saw a luminous being arise from my seat beneath an old spruce. She was ghostly glowing in a flowing gown, and she ran into the forest suddenly stretching out before me, though I called out to her to wait. I tried to catch her, I tried to keep her from leaving me behind, but she twisted and turned, becoming a pinpoint of light that disappeared into a deep and needle-cushioned corner of my mind. I worried that something had left me then, that I would not have a hold on all that was myself, and I would not return fully intact. What if I severed the connection abruptly and a part was lost wandering with the forest girl?

Then Alberto Villoldo, whose words drop like stones into a still pond, so that a few sentences send ripples to my very core, had this to say:
"The shaman with whom I studied believed that he could track his luminous nature--what we call the soul-- through time the same way that he could track a deer through the forest. He claimed to have followed the luminous threads of his being as far back as the Big Bang at the beginning of time, and into the future, tasting who he was becoming, and beyond, to when our universe will again return to that singularity from which it was created." (excerpt from Shaman, Healer, Sage)

I saw the girl again, as my fleeting soul scampering ahead of me down some path only visible to her deep into the forest before me. I did not need to stop her, because she had not lost her way. I had rather to follow her, and come at the last to the very heart of stillness and age, where I will step into her as she stepped out of me in pursuit of that becoming. My future self scampering off to become, and me following in its wake, stepping into each new future, each new second, following the thread of light.

the nature of subjectivity

A fascinating examination of the cultural lens of science with which we view Nature, as described in Steven Buhner's book The Secret Teachings of Plants:

"Any measurement of Nature that smooths out its irregularities in order to allow measurement is not objective. It is, in fact, highly subjective.
The observer, by determining the degree of measurement (or magnification) that will be used, and thus how the lines will be smoothed out, interferes with what is being measured. The observer intervenes in any resultant description of Nature by subtly altering its description, a description that depends on a preference for one level of magnificaiton over another. It is an error that is not rectifiable--not correctable--because the error comes from the way of thinking itself. It comes from applying a linear, static mode of cognition to a nonlinear, always changing and flowing reality. That this resultant description is then taken as an accurate portrayal of Nature injects an unreality into our collective consciousness. We are slightly moved away from Nature, and everything we do begins to take perturbations that grow greater the farther away in time we go from, and the more decisions we make based upon, that original error in description.
The truth is that in the real world, in Nature, quantification is a projection of arbitrary human decisions. It is always subjective. Nature contains no fixed, measurable quantities." and if you would care to find out how he justifies it, the book is quite interesting.

On Leaving

(a mostly all-right sonnet whipped up for an assignment)

When now I leave, I notice as before
On ent'ring these great halls, a muffled hush
Of memories that, piled years in store,
Weigh down with gravitas the students' rush
Past trees that grew from seed with wisdom's care
Down worn stone steps where generations trod
Through amphitheatre empty, where the air,
Expecting pomp and circumstance's plod
Resounds with mute, remembered happenings
Which can be heard extolling like a bell
Past students' joys and fears. Their dreams on wings,
Like mine are left to ghosts of mem'ry's well.
My footsteps' echo fades yet to new skies
I leave these walks familiar and arise.

souvenir de printemps

Past Danielle seems to be conversing with my present state, leaving hints and clues of what is happening now, premonitions of what is to come. This was written two years ago, April 16th, and is still true:
Every day of spring is better than the last. I love that about it. Each day I say, "This! Here! This is really spring! Today is the first day!"
And more flowers are unveiled and the sky gets more and more blue, and everything--even the air--becomes delicious.
Warmth, vibrant colors, the feel of grass.
It is almost easy to miss the changes on campus, because we are so walled in by buildings. I have to remind myself to look up, look around, look out, listen to those birds. And once you first start, you cannot believe the noise the birds can make, and it becomes amazing to you that anyone could sleep soundly through all that.
A week and a half ago, I drove my car off campus just to get away from school and to notice spring. It is hard to notice in the place where you spend all your time, like the way you don't notice that a friend you see every day has grown taller. There was classical music on the radio, WMHT I think, it was a cello concerto by Dvorak, and the strings became the telephone wires singing down the road, the pavement and later the dirt flowing out beneath my tires. I was driving because I didn't want to stop listening to the music, and while I drove anywhere, nowhere, I went, somewhere. It was a place where the music ran like sap through the veins of the trees and hints and promises and tempting glimpses of the finale appeared in the haze of flower and leaf buds. It is only in silence that a sound can exist and be observed, and perhaps likewise spring feels so joyous as a result of winter's hush and the stillness of snow. Spring would be diminished were there not the space and quiet of winter to anticipate its arrival. There is an injunction to stop, and wait, and observe what will unfold.

If we do some further archaeology, here is a poem scribbled on the margins of an article "The Trouble with wilderness" by William Cronon, 2 weeks prior to the above. It stands in response to a single line quoted from Owen Wister: "That moment in the year when winter is gone and spring not come, and the face of Nature is ugly."

The face of nature is not ugly
there are hints and happenings,
preparations for the spring, and the
gradual gathering of greenery behind the wings
it is so gradual that you don't know
until afterwards that it has been taking
place--you only know once spring
has sprung.
I want to fall in love that way,
the gradual budding and unfolding of the heart
until it seems so natural to open your
petals to the warm sun and blue sky,
and you are amazed that things could
be so green, and you, oblivious to the
change while it was taking place.
Every spring can only be the first
spring, the true one, all others buried in
layers of dust and dry leaves in the corners
of our memories, not quite as bright
and breezy as the one expanding
before us this moment.

Iceskating

There is that moment of fear
right before each skater lands;
your heart flinches to soften the
intended blow, tightens and
then releases with a sigh
as they land and float like
swans, across the frozen pond.

I wrote emo poetry in high school: Exhibit A

I steep in misery
the bitter brew secreted from my soul
diffusing into the cup
to linger at the bottom with the dregs and hopeless dreams.
It hangs on the back of my mouth
long after I swallow and grimace.
If I let the tea leaves lie long
after the steaming mug has gone tepid
will they mellow, losing their bite?
Can hopelessness and anxiety
be washed off with scalding water?
or will I only be damp and depressed,
borrowed British serenity fading away
as the tea cools in my stomach?

Dozed off in the middle of 'Alice'

Dozed off in the middle of 'Alice'
dream'd of things wild and wet
and woke to just a hint of Carrollian imaginings lingering on the tongue and crusting about the eyes.

a heads-up

I'm digging out journals from four years ago, and I will be cringing as I (mostly) faithfully copy them out. I really did compare my soul to a teabag. I was in some distress at the time. Share with me the humor of some of my early works when viewed in hindsight, and critics, please realize that the writer was an extremely shy sixteen- or seventeen-year-old with a great deal more books than experience, who would probably take comments very personally, and internalizing them, would write more bad poetry on her yearning for a turtle's shell! Thankfully I am a bit more sturdy now.

Spring flowers at Vassar

lines written inside a gift and then forgotten

This is a camera.
Use it to capture the wide sweeping landscapes and close-ups of glittering trash in a gutter, the laugh-wrinkles on an old lady's face, and a sweaty, adolescent embrace.
Sow a garden in the mind of your reader, of ideas to burst into fruition.
But write always with an old-fashioned fountain pen. It's the secret to really good writing. Something about the ink flowing with your creative powers. The closest thing to goose-quill.

Being

This quote by Albert Einstein keeps following me.

"A human being is part of the whole called by us the universe, a part limited in time and space. We experience ourselves, our thoughts and feelings, as something separate from the rest, a kind of optical delusion of consciousness. This delusion is a kind of prison for us, restricting us to our personal desires and affection for a few persons nearest to us. Our task must be to free ourselves from the prison by widening our circle of compassion to embrace all living creatures and the whole of nature in its beauty. The true value of a human being is determined by the measure and sense in which they have obtained liberation from the self. We shall require a substantially new manner of thinking if humanity is to survive."

More Earthsea

As I said, Ursula K. LeGuin is good if you have trouble with your shadow.

"Ged stood up, and took his staff, and lightly stepped over the side of the boat. Vetch thought to see him fall and sink down in the sea, the sea that surely was there behind this dry, dim veil that hid away water, sky, and light. But there was no sea any more. Ged walked away from the boat. The dark sand showed his footprints where he went, and whispered a little under his step...
He strode forward, away form the boat, but in no direction. There were no directions here, no north or south or east or west, only towards and away...

At that Ged lifted up the staff high, and the radiance of it brightened intolerably, burning with so white and great a light that it compelled and harrowed even that ancient darkness. In that light all form of man sloughed off the thing that came towards Ged. It drew together and shrank and blackened, crawling on four short taloned legs upon the sand. But still it came forward, lifting up to him a blind unformed snout without lips or ears or eyes. As they came right together it became utterly black in the white mage-radiance that burned about it, and it heaved itself upright. In silence, man and shadow met face to face, and stopped.
Aloud and clearly, breaking that old silence, Ged spoke the shadow's name and in the same moment the shadow spoke without lips or tongue, saying the same word: "Ged." And the two voices were one voice.
Ged reached out his hands, dropping his staff, and took hold of his shadow, of the black self that reached out to him. Light and darkness met, and joined, and were one."

sensitivity

Right now I drink
the slightest sound.
I am a still pond
and my whole being
is dizzy with listening,
waiting, watching.
I am so wrapped up
in sensation, so wrapt
in my attention
the slightest dip of a robin's wing
is enough
to fill me completely.
I am a pregnant tummy
so full of my own being,
that funny egg-question of a soul,
tapping on the shell, hearing
echoes from the world, dreaming
of no time at all, resting
in the dark and quiet, changing
ever so softly.

Changing.

While the golden egg
of my mind waits,
I need not say or do
anything of import.
That waiting itself
holds a gift.
I will bear my mind's treasure
on some sandy shore
and swim back out
to the milky stars of silence.
I have no room for anything else.

wink

Here it is, the poem
towards the end of the book
about fireflies.


Go into the twilight.

I've been thinking a lot about the end of the world, and our slow-burning chosen apocali. Would apocalypses make more sense? It's sick that we could even think to pluralize apocalypse, but we are dying by chemicals and radiation and wearing away all the capacity of our own planet to protect us from the sun, from the extremes of nature's capriciousness, and so it is not just one thing but a whole host of endgame players, check and mate, the confluence of our self-will and the world's will, our intent suicidal and the world's, homicidal. In that, I suppose there is only a singular, apocalypse, to describe when it finally becomes too late for any actions to sway the course of fate and annihilation is assured.

autumn's ghost

Crisp sky and the crunch of gravel,
leaves slip through the air in an
evasive dance around my hands,
the scent on the wind hints at frost,
And the uphill climb stretches unused leg muscles.
My mind's eye sketches your outline
against the falling leaves,
tracing the ghost of your footsteps.
Your imagined presence warms me
as much as the climb
and a small hope twinges as the leaves
spiral through the space
where you could stand.
I keep walking, but I glance back
to watch the shower of yellow,
sundappled in the empty road.

Ritualized verse for everyday occasions

The inspiration for these little couplets or single lines I owe in part to Jason, and his recommendation for finding lost objects. Now it is not only Catholics who utter a short couplet prayer to St. Anthony:
"St. Anthony, St. Anthony, please look around,
my _____ is lost and cannot be found."
St. Anthony takes his time, but he has never failed me yet.

Anyway, the concept behind this little ritual struck my fancy, and I've been dreaming up little singsong rhymes for more occasions than I can count. The rhymes may not be very good, but I think what is important and healthy is opening up one's mind into prayer, addressing the universe in a formal-humble-intimate way using 'thou' and 'thee,' and taking a moment to say something beautiful about the world. Prayers of gratitude are shown to be much more effective than prayers of supplication in changing our perception of goodness in the world. The words you speak have never been used before in the exact same combination, so each of your sentences is a new creation. Might as well say something that has a positive effect, at least in yourself if not in the world around you. Here are some lines I have come up with recently:

When watering plants: Thou gentle spirits of earth and air, be well.

When in the shower:
To thee, o power of water I yield
myself to be cleansed; my wounds to be healed.

When picking up a musical instrument: O beautiful instrument, grant me congress with the air.

When lighting a fire:
Flame of the Earth,
strong before our birth
begin with a spark
from the deep and the dark.

When moving into a new house: This dwelling is dedicated to the Earth, whose shrine all homes are.

Arrivals & Departures

I looked across the grey
water to where white wings
splashed on the grey sky,
and I thought how grey it
must all look to people in airplanes:
grey and sleeping.
And I thought how Liz would
have us, once she got off, and
it wouldn't be grey anymore for her.
And I thought that everyone
should have someone, you know,
for color. To brighten up
their grey terminals.

history from inside the bars

It's important to remember that our agricultural industry is our war industry. Chemical fertilizers were generated by our war engines and pesticides were converted from nerve gases. Beat our swords into ploughshares, have we? Then instead of buying war bonds, we buy cereal. We feed our animals subsidized corn, and grow fat with surplus. We won a war but lost ourselves. We consumed the battleground and now are eaten by it.

Earthsea

I have reread Ursula K. LeGuin's fantasy masterpiece A Wizard of Earthsea. Always a good decision. Especially if you have trouble with your shadow. Predictably, I find nature sorcery riveting.
"Ogion let the rain fall where it would. He found a thick fir-tree and lay down beneath it. Ged crouched among the dripping bushes wet and sullen, and wondered what was the good of having power if you were too wise to use it, and wished he had gone as prentice to that old weatherworker of the Vale, where at least he would have slept dry. He did not speak any of his thoughts aloud. He said not a word. His master smiled, and fell asleep in the rain."

"He stood in the innermost room of the House of the Wise, and it was open to the sky. Then suddenly he was aware of a man clothed in white who watched him through the falling water of the fountain.
As their eyes met, a bird sang aloud in the branches of the tree. In that moment Ged understood the singing of the bird, and the language of the water falling in the basin of the fountain, and the shape of the clouds, and the beginning and end of the wind that stirred the leaves: it seemed to him that he himself was a word spoken by the sunlight."

... and it's raining

Who doesn't need a personal laminator?

It seems appropriate that today, given inclement meteorological phenomena, my task should be waterproofing pieces of paper.  Much more practical than writing poetry about how the slippery ooze reflects my inner state.

a glance at ecological restoration

excerpts from Bill Jordan's book The Sunflower Forest:
"Besides this, in attempting the paradoxical trick of reversing and reliving history in order to escape it, the restorationist creates a context in which to explore, experience, and perhaps even reconcile cyclic and progressive time. In fact, this double experience of time is implicit in the word "restore" itself. The "re-" suggests the cyclic and dynamic, while the "-store" indicates the stable, the stationary, and the unchanging. Combining the two--the circle for return and regeneration, and the line for progress and change-- generates the figure of the rising spiral or helix of evolution, each turn of which marks a return to the old and "original," but at a higher level of self-awareness."

"the idea that the goal of restoration is a "self-sustaining" ecosystem is so misguided--not only because the idea is ecologically untenable, but also because it is precisely the effort of sustaining the ecosystem against the pressure of novel influences that accounts for much of the value of restoration as a way of defining and making us aware of our relationship with it. "

"Properly and reflexively carried out, it generates nothing less than an ecological definition of who we are--that is, a definition of our species, or of a particular human community, expressed in terms of how it has influenced and interacted with other organism and with whole ecological systems over a particular period of time."

from my readings:

"It is not numerical singularity that guarantees uniqueness; rather eachness derives from the imaginal potential, the God, in the thing."

"We can respond from the heart, reawaken the heart. In the ancient world the organ of perception was the heart. The heart was immediately connected to things via the sense. The word for perception or sensation in Greek was aisthesis, which means at root a breathing in or taking in of the world, the gasp, "aha," the "uh" of the breath in wonder, shock, amazement, an aesthetic response to the image (eidolon) presented. In ancient Greek physiology and in Biblical psychology the heart was the organ of sensation: it was also the place of imagination. The common sense (sensus comunis) was lodged in and around the heart and its role was to apprehend images. Sensing the world and imagining the world are not divided in the aesthetic response of the heart as in our later psychologies derived from Scholastics, Cartesians, and British empiricists. Their notions abetted the murder of the world's soul by cutting apart the heart's natural activity into sensing facts on one side and intuiting fantasies on the other, leaving us images without bodies and bodies without images, an immaterial subjective imagination severed from an extended world of dead objective facts. But the heart's way of perceiving is both a sensing and an imagining: to sense penetratingly we must imagine, and to imagine accurately we must sense. "
-James Hillman, Anima Mundi