a list of things to keep, for the Solstice

Sunday morning we got up early and went for a walk to watch the (near) Solstice sunrise. The sun was hiding behind a solid bank of stainless steel clouds, so it was more like an awakening than a rising, but we were glad to be out of doors to welcome the turn of the year anyway. It had been raining for hours by then and the path was littered by the last of the fallen leaves and long pink earthworms drummed up from their hideaways; egrets made patient stalks of the farm fields, arrows of geese passed overhead going north and south and every direction in between. I try always to be out in nature near the Solstice. That’s when the carnival of my mind can settle down and I can start thinking about the new year ahead and what I want to bring to it.

I’ve had so many conversations with friends lately trying to make sense of the world as it is, going over and over the possible whys and hows and wondering if it will ever be healed, but this morning watching the light on the winter grasses, I thought how weary I am of the striving, how ready I am to move forward. Not just from 2020, but from a lifetime of carrying too much weight that was never meant for me. Perhaps you can relate.

The lovely Niamh at Fairlyand Cottage posted a video yesterday about the 10 habits she was going to keep in the new year, and it just fit my mood. Let go the striving and focus on carrying good things forward. I thought about it quite a bit last night and made myself a list of things I have been consciously working on and want to continue in the new year.

Here it is.

I want to continue:

• moving away from a culture of suspicion and distrust and into my more natural state of openness, belief in the goodness of others, and hopefulness.

• releasing myself from relationship and association with those who want to stay in that culture (this is boundary setting for me, not a prescription for anyone else)

• releasing myself from dogmas

• healing my relationship with the feminine by cultivating friendships with women, removing internalized patriarchy, and believing myself

• finding middle ground. Avoiding bandwagons, slogans, labels, and easy jargon. (Work In Progress, for sure)

• not internalizing judgement or criticism from people who are not in relationship with me or who have not taken time to understand me

• cultivating generosity through deliberate giving, deep gratitude and presence, and a mindset of abundance (another very much Work In Progress)

• celebrating the ordinary year with small observances (the Wheel of the Year follows the natural world and makes it easy to be present to the time and place I’m in)

• nurturing myself through

  • daily yoga (I’m doing yin yoga every other day and it is life-changing)

  • walking (I’d like to double my mileage this year)

  • herbal infusions (which help balance hormones, mood, and energy levels)

  • Ayurvedic practices like abhyanga

• making small, daily efforts in writing (I’ve tried a lot of schedules, but this is the thing that works best for me, and it’s how I’m jump-starting my practice again after a long Covid-hiatus)

• building efficient and sustainable systems in my home and work (more permaculture principles, less waste, less consumption, more focus)

• beginning the day with poetry (I copy one poem by hand and read at least one other)

• learning new skills (currently: knitting, sourdough, and herbal studies)

• delighting in whatever feels magical to me: stories, music, art, nature, friendships, and more

• growing flowers everywhere

• challenging myself with books and movies that force me to pay close attention, be patient, and stretch my understanding and comfort level (with lots of room for entertainment too, of course!)

• working on an ebook version of my first novel to share with everyone

It was such an encouraging practice to sit down at this turn of the season and think about what is already working for me and see that I have actually put many good things in place. I don’t really need to make aspirational lists for the new year. I just need to carry on, a little bit every day. What a good feeling at the end of a year that often felt really bad!

I’d love to hear from you too. What is working for you? What good things have you done and want to keep doing?

Sending my heartfelt wishes for a lovely Christmastide to you all.

Happy Winter!

tonia

Writing soundtrack for this post: Henryk Gorecki, Symphony No. 3

Synchronous:

“My work: to do more than reproduce the toxic stories I inherited and learned…My work: to write poems that make my people feel safe, seen, or otherwise loved…”

Jose Olivarez - Ars Poetica

future reapers

Hot days give me a headache. Literally. I am not a big fan of ye olde summer, but it will keep coming around annually. The other day I went up into the loft of our garage/barn/shed and smacked my head on a low beam and banged my teeth together so hard that one of my front teeth cringes every time I have a cold drink now. Also, I hurt my wrist doing yoga and haven’t been able to down dog for a month. I could really use some yoga about now. Especially with the Federal invasion in my hometown streets and so many more presidential months to endure.

On the other hand, the poppies I planted a few years ago have self-seeded all over and keep surprising me with their happy little faces in unexpected places, the peaceful goddesses are rising, and hot days are also an excuse to lie in the grass and stare at the underside of trees.

Everyone I know is bent close to the earth with a lens, looking for something, anything, beautiful to focus on. “Look at these pictures of foxes!” someone posted online, desperation in the giving and receiving. I poured over them eagerly. Yes, foxes still exist. They are still lovely. So many lovely things still exist.

I’ve been trying to pay attention to my dreams lately, hoping maybe my subconscious (or perhaps the Divine) might inspire me while I sleep, but my dreams are painfully utilitarian. Recently, I spent an entire night cleaning a dream house. Once I registered an unknown child for school. Maybe that’s the kind of things dreams are made of in a dystopian year. Sparkling windows and fresh linens, the smell of carbon-paper enrollment forms.

I’ve been thinking of something Donna Cates said in her post this week: “the future unrolls from nothing other than the entire material of the present, like a roll of fabric unfurling.” I’m looking at the fabric in my hands wondering what I am weaving into the future. Do you see this thread that I spun from my fury? Here is the one where I walked away. Here is a cord made of poppy and nettle, a twist of rabbit fur, an image of a fox; I held it for awhile in my cringing teeth.

Then again, Jay Griffiths asks, “Would society be different if its profoundist models of time were not structured in a past-to-future narrative at all, but if time were seen as an unarrowed thing - if, for example, the Bible began with the rhapsody of a psalm and ended with the sashay of the song of Solomon?”

Perhaps I should imagine a garden, where my life is the fruit planted by gardeners long-dead, where others will one day reap the harvest planted in my body. (Forgive me, future reapers, there is still poison in my veins, but I have swallowed rhapsody for you as well.)

Last week, I found an old frame in a trunk. It enclosed two perfect butterflies mounted on paper. A google search tells me they are common to Asia, particularly India. Their antennae are delicately intact, a single one of each pair curving softly toward the right, like tiny signals from a dying hostage: “The way out is over there,” or perhaps, “Remember the way the sun glints on the Ganges.” I do not know, but I put them on the shelf in my office, where I can stare at them and wonder.

a late-June note

The New Moon has come and gone, as has the Solstice, and I am no closer to getting a newsletter out to you. I seem to be feeling the cumulative stress of these last strange months all at once. New food sensitivities, brain fog, fatigue, racing heart, apathy. I barely recognize myself. And this week, which I set aside specifically for writing, got sidelined by a family member in the hospital and a few days of really emotional decision making for one of my children (mamas, we feel this as if it were ourselves, don’t we?)

To help myself calm down, I put my loved ones on notice that I do not want to hear ANY news this week or any updates on anything that are not of an immediate life or death emergency. This is harder said than done! I have become profoundly aware of how much information our psyches are subjected to everywhere. It’s almost impossible to avoid stimulation. (I am thinking especially now of my dear ones with anxiety or panic attacks, addiction recovery, and auto-immune disorders that require a calm nervous system. <3)

Monday morning, just before the messages started arriving about my family’s needs, I was at the duck house doing my usual chores, head down, fiddling with water buckets and feed dishes, when I had the strong urge to look up. I did, and there, across from me was a doe, staring intently. I’ve written before that deer are indicators of the presence of God for me, so I stopped what I was doing and stared back. We kept eye contact for several minutes and I welcomed her as a God-message. She just stayed right there, holding my gaze and I stayed and drank it in. Then she casually left, and I went back to the house and the week fell apart. But every day I have revisited that gift of calm energy, that preemptive sense of comfort and with-ness.

During these days when I have tried to mute the world around me, I have been thinking about all the little practices I have been developing over these years. Things like leaving social media, non-violence, receiving the gifts of nature, meditation, learning to listen to my body, changing my spiritual communities, and others; things I worried over and felt self-conscious about, things I struggled to explain to others. Now I can see how vital these things are to my continued health, and how my intuition knew well before my head and intellect what would be healing and right for me. I am amazed by it, truly amazed.

Everything from religion to education to advertisements constantly tells us we can’t learn, we can’t know without their approval and expertise, that we can’t trust what is inside ourselves to be sufficient. Like most people, I have believed that all my life. But discovering that I can trust my inner knowing, that the path that seems right to me when I am listening and at peace is nearly always the right path, that Love is all around and in and through and always guiding, that is an amazing joy.

In the garden this morning, I noticed the cool-weather crops have been lingering around longer than usual and the summer plants are still small and unsteady, different than other late Junes - but not surprising for this cool and rainy one we’ve just had. There is no sense of frustration there, no anxiety vibrating off the tomato leaves. I want to live by such confidence, content with the sun I am given, and the rain when it falls, taking what I can and growing. I admit I am not there yet. A part of me is disappointed that I haven’t got a newsletter out for you. It’s been a year since I started writing about cultivating a quiet life, and it feels like a failure to break the string even for a short time. But I think, this too, is part of my healing and coming to be myself. This is not a commercial space or a business. I am not a machine that can pump out content. I am something more than that, of earth and blood, with all the wild sensitivities and rhythms of stars and planets and bees and rivers coursing through me. And so are you.

Be well, my friends. I’ll be writing again soon.

Peace keep you.

tonia

May Day

May 1st is one of my favorite days. Not only is it the beginning of the most beautiful month here at Fernwood (thanks to the former owner who planted for spring) but it’s also my husband’s birthday and May Day/Beltane. So many lovely things to celebrate all packed into one day!

“Now is the moment to flourish and thrive: to open our hearts and welcome meaningful connection with nature and with each other, and to revel in the joys and blessings of being alive in this beautiful world. It's no easy task at such a difficult and uncertain time, but if anything the spirit of Beltane is an important reminder to seek and offer support wherever we can, and to find beauty and contentment in the simplest of things.” ~ from the Folk + Field newsletter  

I have plans to gather some hawthorn branches and make some bouquets, plant some potatoes and sunflower seeds, and of course there will be a special birthday meal, and if the weather holds, our first outdoor fire. I find these little rituals so helpful in transitioning to a new season. (And we are on the cusp of more than just summer as we begin to enter a new phase with the pandemic. It feels more important than ever to ground and center, doesn’t it?)

Here at home I am leaning into some new writing rhythms that are working well and I have a head full of ideas. I just need more time (and er…discipline) to translate them to the page, but it’s hard to be disciplined when Mama Earth is being so beautiful and showy right now! I’ve learned though, that creative work is not just about the number of hours you force yourself to work but the amount of time you open yourself to life, to allowing the beautiful and the difficult things to work on your spirit and sharpen your senses. We live in a time of striving for notice and a certain type of accomplishment, but there is a lovely synergy and freedom that happens when you let that go and spend that striving time caring for your soul instead.

My Beltane prayer for you:

Peace to your heart.

Peace to your mind.

Peace in the letting go.

Peace in the receiving.

Peace in the being, just as you are.

Just as you are.

Peace, peace, peace to your soul.

<3

I’ll leave you with these little glimpses of home:

on my work desk.

dreaming of next spring….

daily harvest

kale magic

patience….

rewarded.

Oh my Heart. <3<3<3

Happy May Day, my friends.

So much love.

tonia

the holy hum

This year, Earth Day and the New Moon are riding close to one another, which seems fitting. We are now, more than ever, aware of the Earth’s call, but the New Moon phase echoes the darkness we feel as well. A New Moon phase is something like walking a familiar forest path at midnight: the darkness teases out sounds, experiences, and emotions we were unaware of when we traveled the path in the light of day. It’s a time to step tenderly but purposefully until we can see our way clearly again. We may feel things we didn’t expect, we may be frightened, or exhilarated, perhaps both at the same time.

It’s been nice to talk with some of you this week about this muddle of emotions, the pull we feel towards change, even the confusion we have about what to do next. No one knows the way. We are all children of the Earth born into the Machine-gods’ realm. How do we learn the language of our birthright again? How do we learn the steps that bring us into the dance?

Wendell Berry offers these thoughts in his essay, People, Land, and Community:

“…as [the mud daubers] trowel mud into their nest walls, [they] hum to it, or at it, communicating a vibration that makes it easier to work, thus mastering their material by a kind of song. Perhaps the hum of the mud dauber only activates that anciently perceived likeness between all creatures and the earth of which they are made. For as common wisdom holds, like speaks to like.”

What if the longing so many of us currently feel for change, the buzz in our chests that disturbs our peace with the status quo, is not a sense of dread, but the holy hum of our true home singing to us, like calling to like, pleading us back into our intended harmony? What if what we feel is the longing of Creation to bring us back?

Only beware…

“In a society addicted to facts and figures, anyone trying to speak for… harmony is inviting trouble. The first trouble is in trying to say what harmony is. It cannot be reduced to facts or figures - though the lack of it can. It is not very visibly a function.”

Part of the problem, Berry says, is that the things that are destructive to our world are systems that are easily explained and backed by information. Even though they make their gains by the oppression of ”nature, people, and culture”, they are surrounded by scientific reasoning and a sense of inevitability. A harmonic system, however, is not so easily explained.

“…it involves an order that in both magnitude and complexity is ultimately incomprehensible.”

Is it any wonder we are confused about what to do now? Our birthright is coherence with a complex system of mutual beneficence, wholeness, and health, yet we have only been taught the rhythms of dissonance. We are born into a system built on competition, where each decision, each tool used, has a logic that makes sense only on its own and takes into consideration only its own profit and success.

“Land, work, people, and community are all comprehended in the idea of culture. These connections cannot be understood or described by information - so many resources to be transformed by so many workers into so many products for so many consumers - because they are not quantitative. We can understand them only after we acknowledge that they should be harmonious…that a culture must be either shapely and saving or shapeless and destructive. To presume to describe land, work, people, and community by information, by quantities, seems invariably to throw them into competition with one another. Work is then understood to exploit the land, the people to exploit their work, the community to exploit its people. And then, instead of land, work, people, and community, we have the industrial categories of resources, labor, management, consumers, and government. We have exchanged harmony for an interminable fuss, and the work of culture for the timed and harried labor of an industrial economy.”

I fear the Problem of the Industrial Economy is only going to be solved by its inevitable collapse, but that’s not what I’m thinking about today. I’m thinking about how those of us who hear the hum can live in resonance with it (which is naturally in opposition to and in defiance of the Problem.) Last week a friend shared her happiness that with this unusual home-time she has been able to do so many things that she has wanted to do in terms of sustainable living, but she also feels a sense of dread knowing she won’t be able to maintain it when she returns to work. I understand that fully, and I want to offer more today than just an emotional invitation to join an inexplicable rhythm. I believe one reason we fail in these things is that we often take other people’s solutions and try to paste them onto our own lives. What we need is to understand our own place, our own resources, our own abilities. None of us alive now will completely escape the messy realities of our systems. We will have to compromise. We will create waste. We will have to decide which levels of exploitation we can live with. Our answers will not be easily explained or categorized, and they will not be universally applicable. We can only respond to our own situations with attentiveness and love. The important thing to remember is that we can respond.

Here are some ways to think, and some places to begin. I think they are accessible to most, if not all, of us.

Banner from The Far Woods, a couple of local artists whose Work I love.

• We can simplify our diets to take advantage of our particular resources. It isn’t hard to learn what the farmers in our own regions are growing. Then a plan can be put in place to support them on whatever scale we can manage, from roadside stands to Farmer’s Markets, to u-picks, to bulk orders, to CSA’s, to looking for their produce in the regular grocery store.

• We can examine our use of transportation to find the most energy-efficient and community-supportive means for us. It needn’t be all or nothing. Here at home, we cannot walk or ride straight from the house due to dangerous roads, so we drive to a parking lot a mile away and walk or ride from there when we can. My husband commutes to the city with an electric car and a bus pass. It’s not perfect, it’s what we can do.

• We can turn off lights, turn down the heat, turn off screens, dry the clothes on a rack. At least sometimes. And that’s a start.

• We can make our homes centers of production rather than centers of consumption. We can make birthday cards or poems or a loaf of bread or a pair of pants instead of paying others to do it for us every time.

• We can support the land by community clean-ups, voting against exploitative laws and businesses, and asking businesses we have relationships with to use more sustainable means and methods.

• We can reduce our reliance on convenience products by simplifying our wants. We can learn to snack on foods that don’t come in packages or boxes. We can take coffee and a water bottle from home. We can get out of the mindset that we deserve constant treats and make those things special and rare again.

• We can make our spaces safe for pollinators and other creatures by refusing to use pesticides. We can grow flowers to feed them and food for ourselves, even if it is a single pot on the front step.

• We can stop making so many online purchases. We can shop our local stores first and nurture a willingness to accept what is available to us rather than searching endlessly for the ideal product. By buying from a local store we can save local businesses, fossil fuels and trees, we can reduce plastic pollution, air pollution, and waste, wear and tear on the roadways from truck transportation, and our addiction to immediate gratification.

• We can choose tools that are fit for our tasks and not disruptive of the natural order. A good broom, a mop bucket. Fountain pens over disposable pens (this is on my list to conquer!), cloth bags instead of plastic or paper, a good knife instead of a plethora of one-use gadgets, a pot of mint instead of a box of mint tea bags, a healthy lifestyle instead of a cabinet of pills.

• We can hold simpler events. We can break up with Pinterest and decorate for these with natural and found items, make cooking and washing dishes part of the affair instead of relying on disposables, eschew favors and gifts that add to clutter, exchange gifts of pre-loved items and made things.

• We can make peace with our faces and our hair and simplify our beauty products. A healthy diet and water are the best path to pretty skin and hair. Apple cider vinegar and baking soda can do a surprising number of jobs. We can keep the things we really want to keep (for me it’s cruelty-free mascara, lipstick, and a touch of powder when I go out) and let the rest go. We can stop worrying about trends and find a simple, classic haircut that is easy to maintain.

• We can understand the true cost of the things we consume. Cheap chocolate is paid for on the backs of exploited people. The true cost of fairly-traded chocolate is expensive. The answer is to eat less, not buy cheaper. In the same way, budget meat is paid for by animals who suffer horrible lives and deaths, people who work in hellish conditions to butcher them, the land which is drained of fertility and poisoned, and government subsidies that promote it all. The electricity in my area is powered by dams that alter the rivers and damage endangered salmon populations and disrupt the rhythms of Native cultures. When we understand the actual price of what we are consuming so thoughtlessly, it can help us make better choices.

• We can commit to going outside and learning the hum of our own place. The Earth wants to teach us her ways. We can watch the birds build and take advantage of the seasons, which teaches us what we can be doing at the same times; we can learn the weeds that grow in the sidewalk cracks and use many of them for nourishing teas or addition to our meals; we can re-learn how to handle changing temperatures and the feel of the weather on our skin. The more we listen and watch, the more discoveries we make, the more the rhythms become our own.

• We can take inventory of our lives and time. Instead of feeling overwhelmed, we can choose one area at a time and ask ourselves how we could step out of the consumption cycle in our particular situations. We can make slow changes and take pleasure and pride in them.

I’m sure you have more and wiser things you could add to this list, but I offer this as a place to start.

This invitation to the holy hum is for all of us. It is not exclusive, it is not just for those who have time or money or health or off-grid cabins in the wilderness. It’s for all of us to join, in the ways we can. The more of us who do, the more we share, the louder the hum.

Happy Earth Day, my friends. <3