
Recovering from Caring
September 6, 2019I guess we were all wound a little too tight for a game as potentially violent as croqu
I guess we were all wound a little too tight for a game as potentially violent as croqu
Today I untethered the cart
and felt the space we’d made in me,
empty cupped hands.
What can live there now?
These moments pass between us, each one different, like tiny speckled quail eggs we’re sharing with each other. Trust becomes a tangible thing when you’re on a journey like this. Its become part of my daily mantra: trust & patience, trust & patience, trust & patience…
Its been storming hard here for weeks, they’re starting to call it the 100 year flood…maybe. The hillsides, sometimes barren from drought or fire, seem…
Our two year old has developed a seriously respectable roar in the last few months…
When we were out on a lake, Dad thought of me less as a son he’d taken fishing and more like a somewhat lame first-mate. He needed me to get the boat on and off the trailer, so I would do, but just barely so. He was kind to me, but within the understanding that, as far as fishing went I was a bit limited.
Since the big rains came, the Mushroom People have come out in numbers I’ve not seen in a decade. Everywhere I turn a new village appears, populated by fascinating folks.
I’d almost forgotten how deliciously ferocious our weather can be.
It was for that reason I was acutely aware of the power released as the roosters spirit passed.
The crucible of the alchemist, the container for his life opus, is symbolized by the egg. It is out of this crucible the true self, radiant self, finally emerges after the struggle of transformation. Tonight I’m stricken by the transformation of my daughter, considering the last two years and nine months – the world that made the crucible that fosters her emergence.
Now being loved this much is of course AWESOME, the first 5,000 times it happens.
What do we harvest within ourselves too soon? What do we harvest that the birds, the wind, the unexpected weights of life will harvest better for us?
The coyote tax liability we’ve built up is far greater than any national debt could ever be.
As the family cook, I receive great joy in working with fresh wholesome ingredients. Last night I served the best butternut squash I’ve ever tasted, the first one harvested from our garden this season.
“Olivia is still connected to my heart Papa,” Tadg said to me yesterday. Indeed, she’s still connected to all our hearts.
When you live on land thats been abused and neglected, you get to know the scavengers first. Ants, yellow jackets, black widows, gophers and coyotes were the residents when we first arrived.
Still high from watching Dan Barber’s Ted talk: foie gras parable, I’d come up with a phrase to illuminate a theme in his talk on a new way to approach raising food: self-reinforcing magical-delight synergistic loop.
The more immersed in that lore I become, the less I’m able to destroy new villages of volunteer plants. Like Ferdinand the Bull I’d much rather crouch down and push my face into the small new worlds forming all around us.
“Papa, the Lorax talks to me.”
“Does he?”
“Yes he does, and he tells me things about the trees. Yeah, and I talk to the trees too.”
Fog’s powerful presence has existed on our Earth for billions of years. It has inspired innumerable mystics and likely served the spirits in ways we can’t even begin to understand
I counted all the NO’s
in my life,
they didn’t add up to a single YES.
If someone sold pin-up’s of Amish farmers, our walls would probably be plastered with them.
I probably should have known that our marriage would be nothing like I expected, given that you dubbed me “stinky” when we first met.
Over the months the spirits I work with have continued to teach me more about how to trap gophers in a way that cares for their spirits.
I get to live in green. When I drive home, I pass farms and oak groves. I wake up to a forest floating on an emerald green understory that will become ignited at sunset when the orange tipped leaves of the native Pajaro manzanita turn into a million dancing candles.
The coyotes were celebrating their survival, calling out to all members of their pack that they’d discovered water, that they might all live one more season.
I used to think sustainability was all about what the land could support season after season without undue toxic amendment by us. As the space between the land and me diminishes, I’m learning that sustainability doesn’t mean a lot without including what I can sustain.
Our land is never fallow, something is always ripening, one of the blessings of living in California. This morning before he left for school, Tadg and I harvested some deep red prickly pears that seemed to appear out of nowhere.
In one of my first journeys to the spirit of the land she was engaged in a continuous dance of giving and receiving.
I want every day to feel like this, maybe you have a time of season and place that feel that way to you. Ever since I was a child this is the time of year that makes me feel like I belong here and now, I feel loved.
There are places of stillness in our lives, vantage points from which we can take in the transformations occurring around us always. The horse trough out our back door is just such a place.
I’m struck by the feeling of newness+oldness this time of year brings. Life bursts forth while ancient energies abound. Like practicing shamanic techniques in a modern culture, old and new are intimately entwined.
The shamanic journey awakens us to the spiritedness of all things, and to the special responsibility we have to creatures we kill for food.
I wanted to find a way back into the Earth, deeper into an authentic spirituality.
Lunacy overcame me this morning at about 1am. Laying in bed I was intensely aware of pockets of decay in my own spirit, and the palpable full moon energy showering me with its blessings. This is the second full moon in as many months to offer me energy to help in late night transformative work.
Yesterday I awoke with an image in my head of the Spirit of the Land I journey to. She was smiling, gesturing to the ground, a voice said – “Dance the harvest.”
Amazing foods have been hiding behind our industrial farming complex. Not just veggies like beets that have been packaged so far beyond their original form as to be unrecognizable as food.
I’ve come to believe traveling is unnatural in some way. If you really live somewhere, you leave a part of yourself behind when you go.The more invested in our homestead I become, the more it feels like I have to break myself up into pieces as I go. “I can’t take the compost part with me, defiantly not the chicken coop-cleaner part.”
The sweet earthy flavor of the beets felt the same as the energy of the dreams. Flavors and feelings mingled with the soothing breaths of sleeping wife, son, dog and cat. I swear those beets gave me the dreams.
The bien of the land requires the same attention and consideration. When it makes its presence known it is time to really show up and pay attention. As the years roll by I expect to be absorbed more and more into that presence.
It was one of those rare conversations our relationship gives us, like a secret suprise banquet, every couple of years. We both awoke well after midnight and began to talk about what it really means to slow down. Our son slept heavily between us, never waking.
Singing is the best part. I tone whatever feels right, let words come if they will. My foot responds – flooding with warmth, but not blood.
They’re called wake-up calls. When nothing else will bump us out of the groove we’re stuck in, life delivers something that will. In my case a newly sharpened chainsaw served as the messenger.
I have handled more frogs and toads in the last few weeks than I have seen on our land since we moved here. Most were bloatish and leathery, as big as a softballs and stuffed with pomposity.
I don’t stop to think about how much community flows from the couples in my life.
The event that turned the tide was completely unexpected but uniquely American: fireworks.
A culture that understands Solutio cannot pollute its Oceans as we now are.
conduits, metal seeds, oil drums
from the Del Monte’s who
shake the earth
to see what money will drop out.
My Mother keeps faded recipes crammed into a small card box in a cabinet in her kitchen. Each stained card is a ticket to a story about someone I would have dined with had I been alive when she was young.
We stumbled across the Barrel Race on a lazy Saturday afternoon drive in our new neighborhood. A strong tradition of horsemanship permeates life here, we…
As I’m writing this our Feral Kitty Momma is on her way to be fixed. Her ear will be clipped and, assuming she has…
This morning I arose at dawn to dance. Its a ritual I began over a year ago, just before we moved into our new home….
This evening I walked our acre of land with my son. We’ve only lived here a little less than a year, just enough time for…
Its 9:40 pm and I’m sitting outside in shorts, typing on my laptop as fire trucks scream out of the station up the street and…