Sparkling Lotus Ink

ouch

Hello.  I'd like to introduce you to one of my most important tree friends here in the walking-around world of my life since the late '90's.  This is a Shagbark Hickory that may or may not still exist within the energetically percolating surroundings of a nearby nature sanctuary that's definitely still "with us".  I'd planned to take a jaunt over there at some point during the weekend to see if the tree still stood.  My sense is that it does. 

The plan was to go there on something of a re-con in and out mission due to hunting season.  After not being there for ten years the instinct is to wander around at length looking and examining privately while also documenting all areas that I used to document when this was my Wild place to go.  Take an offering of a very specific nature for the tree, hug it if it still stands.  Take some pictures if that felt right.

The idea's been germinating since partway through my reading of The Overstory but by last mid-week it felt imperative that I take myself there ASAP.  Not sure why.  But it's certainly true that this specific tree  remains a shining beacon to me in meditation, dreams and by way of the infinitude of pictures I took of it during all seasons over the course of 6 or 7 years' time.  But then something or other that I did on Friday made my lumbar spinal region quite unhappy.  It coulda been anything, really, because I was 'way more into getting things done bing bam boom than I was mindful of how, exactly, I was [evidently mis]-using my body along the way.

In consequence I'm currently having a lot of sciatic nerve pain from its root allllllll the way along its course, top to tip.  This is not a new thing for me - it's just a thing I generally stay mindful enough to avoid aggravating to the degree that I have to stop my life to get things properly soothed and healed.  I haven't answered any emails since this re-injury made itself known.  Will get back to everyone as soon as it's no longer foolish to sit up and type in this manner for more than the time it's taken me to get this written and posted.

LOVE.

This was the third or fourth time I hugged the Shagbark Hickory.  The scarred-over wound portrait at the top of this post contained holes where I left many gifts and healing talismans as offerings to the tree's medicine spirit.  Did this for more than a year before telling the tree I was moving in for the embrace.  Will tell that story at some point after my spine's in a better state of balance.

Place/Keeping .1

Walden Pond.  Living Deliberately.  Long revelatory conversations with significant friends talking passionately together while perambulating the pond; deeply immersed in the details of whatever we were deliberately making of our shared and individuals lives.  Tourists speaking animatedly in a number of languages.  People walking quite deliberately by themselves; often with a book in hand and a special passage within it marked by a careful finger. Looking around.  Looking Within.

Walden Pond. 

In the image above the right hand side of the background features a long tiered wooden structure where people sit, talk, and ease themselves into the water for a bit of swimming.  My son learned to swim in that spot as a young boy.  We were inner city dwellers at the time and summertime weather could get stifling despite the harbor breeze.  Looking back at my small but mighty family's shared root system, I often reflect on the innumerable times we'd pile in the car and arrive at the pond just in time for the magical early evening glow's debut.

I went to the woods because I wished to live deliberately.

My interest in/appreciation of Thoreau began in childhood.  My grandmother used to read me Walden Pond any time I got upset and couldn't find a way to calm down again.  That's what it used to be called, especially for children: calming down.  But now I see what I needed to do was nothing short of totally re-rebooting my emotional barometer.  I'd be spinning out emotionally in a very unquiet way and she'd firmly open to the bookmarked page and begin reading in a loud unquestioning tone from where-ever we left off the last time this happened.  She wouldn't stop until I'd long since stopped out-bursting emotionally and was actually listening.  Had been listening for quite a number of minutes.  Because she was reading me something other than the bible.  That alone gave this book and whoever wrote it very special status, indeed. 

Whenever we reached the end of Walden Pond we'd begin again on the heels of fresh Upset.  This went on straight up until she went in the hospital and, eventually, died there from stage 4 lymphoma cancer.  I was seventeen and it was the literal eve of Nixon's resignation.  My mother came home said well it's over, and asked me to give her the name of somebody she could call to be with me while she devoted herself to calling relatives and friends.  I blurted out the name of a 21 year old guy I knew through church and community theater.  Once, about a month earlier, I'd gotten tipsy on beer in his back yard and boldly sat on his lap unannounced and uninvited.  She called him, not knowing what else to do.  And he in turn had notknownwhatelse showed up with a six pack and willingness to drive us both around town barely speaking until we settled-in at his newly married buddy's house.

It embarrassed me tremendously to be in a married couple's house when the people involved were just 3 and 4 years older than me and we all knew all sorts of weird and mortifying things about each others parents due to being from the same church group.  I didn't know where to look or what to say but fortunately I was largely ignored. There was a single bookshelf with mostly high school 70's english class  novels sitting on it.  Walden Pond was there.  I stared at it for a long time, wondering if I should be worried that I had no desire or ability to cry and couldn't really remember my grandmother as she'd been when she read to me.  It took her a long time - well over a year - to waste away to death without once knowing why it was happening.  Her doctor and my mother believed if she knew she'd stop wanting to live.

[no comment.  Which of course means I actually have several in mind I'm all too prepared to share but this is neither the time nor the setting.]

It really bothered me that she didn't know why she was sick and unable to ever be well enough to return home.  If she couldn't get home, to her bible and various representations of her faith, would she be able to move on to where-ever?

On the first evening of her passing I abruptly stopped worrying about whatever might or might not happen when I got back home and whether or not Pearl would be able to make her way towards St. Peter and her deceased siblings without her bible.  Because the newly married couple had weed in addition to seemingly endless beer. Had I not reached out to accept the joint I would have become the focus of the entire evening.  I didn't want that.  They were leaving me alone because they thought I was numb with grief and it was fine with me to not-realize they were absolutely correct in that assessment. 

Nobody wanted to talk about The Whole Nixon Thing.  They talked instead about camping at the Delaware Water Gap.  I'd smoked before but not effectively.  My grandmother was dead.  That left my mother in charge.  The only other time I've felt that specific combination of terror and dread with such intensity was later in the evening on election night 2016.  At that time I thought not so much of Thoreau but of Emily Dickinson.  I'm nobody who are you.  We'd all be nobodies soon.  That was so clear to me I'd been clinically depressed since the previous summer.  I might have remained in that condition if  closed head brain trauma hadn't shifted the narrative in so many unexpected ways just a few days later.

Back in the Nixon era thread of this post I effectively got high for the first time on the night of the day when my grandmother died.  That's how one of the assembled Old Friends in that living room put it.  I was effectively stoned which in my case meant sitting stock-still and silent.  Looking around with enormous eyes.  Our hosts had a land tortoise.  Sometimes it was on one floor of the house and other times it was lumbering in an excruciatingly slow way in a quiet corner of the other.  I once saw it climbing up the stairs.  On that night the weed was stronger than usual and an enormous need to speak instead of Just Sitting There suddenly overcame me.  I stood up with dramatic pointing of fingers on both hands and shrilly announced the reptile's laborious movements.  

The tortoise - about whom I never once asked a single question although I was even more painfully curious in those days than I was shy - was, ultimately, pretty much the most interesting and tenderhearted aspect of that elongated moment from my past.  I was intensely curious about the creature and wanted badly to get to know it better but I never indicated any such thing in the months I dated That Guy and therefore spent more weekend evenings than not sitting in that specific living room.  Smoking just enough weed not to be noticed and then potentially questioned by the group; abstinence of any kind at any point in the proceedings was viewed as subversive rather than sensible.  Or inhaling with clear intent to keep going until the last seed popped whenever my mother happened to be Acting Up. 

Nearly everyone who gathered there in that plaid-upholstered '74 living room of Young Lives/Anytown USA had at least one parent who Acted Up on the regular.  All I had to say upon arrival was that tonight it was once again happening at my house.  I learned how to relay the information breezily and without the slightest inner feeling.  Managing a smile at times, almost, and oftentimes while UNawkwardly accepting the proffered joint that hovered closest to me once Acting Up was mentioned .  Then I was free to get back to watching the tortoise because everyone involved accepted that's what I did once I smoked.  My grandmother remained dead.  She'd been the one who raised and cared for/about me.  She was gone with a finality that for me befitted the way she'd lived.  So I kept that in mind in place of grief expressions that 'wouldn't bring her back.'  It seemed likely she'd be proud of me, if she was able to know about it, for holding that kind of line as she'd worked diligently to teach it to me.

Be sensible.  Have a bank account into which you unfailingly put a solid half of everything you earn. No use in crying over spilled milk.  One way or another pretty much everything in life boiled down to spilled milk and I'd see that for myself once I was Old Enough.  Respect the president of the country no matter what he does.  Never LOOK at a hippie let alone become one.  BE. SENSIBLE.  Always be clear about  what you love and don't let anyone take it away from you, ever.

Everyone I knew fully realized she'd been my lifeline.  Everyone, including That Guy and his friends who all understood I was even more transient from their point of view than I felt myself to be, kept eyeing me nervously waiting for me to lose it in some spectacular wreckage of a Way. 

Maybe I never did - then, or any time since, because my grandmother was no longer available to read Walden Pond to me until I pulled myself back together.

I went to the woods.

The above image was taken from an outlook that's either two or one third(s) of the way around depending on whether you proceed clockwise or counterclockwise at the pond's beach-based entry point. I used to walk the perimeter paths a lot during the year when my son was learning to swim in the company of his father and, oftentimes, a family friend with a loud hearty laugh.  T. would laugh as loudly as he could in imitation of the sound.  I'd hear them both as I walked no matter how far away they were; their joy amplified to ambient status thanks to water's sound conduit properties

In my own case I initially 'went to the woods' because it was there in a way the civilized world was not and could never be.  And because I thought dominant culture was based on absolute insanity borne of shortsightedness. (Plus the way our culture arranged itself with our complicit acceptance if not approval into contortions so toxic or soul-numbingly petty and trivial in comparison to what society could be).  I didn't see how I could possibly live well or even at all with the hurt and apprehension that conventional living evoked in me.  I started reading Thoreau for myself as a young adult for much the same reasons.   More than once I've found my sense of personal equilibrium and resolve through the words I do indeed at times read aloud to myself.  I sit bolt upright when I do it, holding the book and my uncompromising tone of voice just like my grandmother would.  But I never really thought about that until just now.

Above is my favorite outlook point at the pond's perimeter.  The first picture in this post features the view Thoreau might have seen when he ventured out of his cabin and took in the new day's air.  Once, back when the second bush-president had declared the official opening of the second gulf war, my moments of peak despair were interrupted by news of an impending release of Faith in a Seed.   Just thinking about that (and a fresh out-loud re-reading of On Civil Disobedience) kept me going until J. gave me the book as a Christmas present.  I read it with such tender love and gratitude that each sentence took root in my soul.  And grew outwards embodied within my own faith in seeds of many kinds.

*****

Ever since children and babies started living in cages at the pleasure of our federal government - like that's a perfectly okay thing for an even partially civilized nation to do - I have been thinking about the stability and grounding I know I'd get from reading Faith again.  All the same I have been totally unwilling to give a book that means a great deal to me a connotation of this particular magnitude.   Maybe it's time for me to learn how to change my mind about these kind of things.  It's now.  It's happened and continues to be happening.   And yet.  When has faith in seeds ever been more relevant and meaningful?

healing light(s) .1

Wasn't sure what image to choose for this one but finally settled on this fragment from a long ago Business & Communication altar in a place I no longer live. I chose it because the topic of this post first made itself known in my bubbling consciousness during that linear time frame.  Gazing at the image it's not that hard to send myself back to Then during this same time of year in 2002.  I'd been distributing homemade flower essence preparations for just a few years.  Hardly a week went by when I didn't spend meditation time actively seeking a sense of connection to others who were pro-active and committed in our patterns of inter-species communication.  People absolutely called - beyond a shade of doubt - CALLED to prepare and distribute flower essences.  Not (ever) as a business.  But just because.  What else would one do if so called?

In the larger human world of daily context I was still learning what it meant to live in xurbia rather than a thriving metropolis.  I cultivated social ties with other Gaia lovers (and more specialized plant geeks) in a local radius that, over time, proved nothing short of transformational.  I also treasured a circle of more far-flung friends with similar interests.  What gave me a sense of being set apart from those connections was a lack of knowing anyone else who was making their own essences.  That specific form of circumstantial loneliness guided me to seek psychic contact with whoever these unknown people might be.  I formed the habit of moon gazing  while asking if anyone else was Out There doing and thinking and learning the same kinds of things.

yes 

Sometimes I would have the sense I'd managed to connect somehow and in response the connection was reinforced with that single word.  It didn't take long to begin wondering about matters that no longer seem strange to me - not even when I hear myself saying them aloud to somebody else.  I wondered if these affirmations were an actual reception and transmission process in the classic psychic sense OR if they might spring from the collected energy within whatever groves we claimed as part of our particular sacred space(s) - whatever rocks we might have collected and carefully configured - whatever dreams we might share, person-to-person, without even properly remembering a single one of them.  Surely our most potently sacred and personally true self releases particles of itself in such ways.  Within those places where we danced unself-consciously and at times without clothes.  Within the places where we saw - just for a split second of linear time - another sort of Being caught offguard by our presence.  Moving swiftly through something seamless and fluid that separates their time in shared spaces from ours.

yes.    yes.  yes.

One long summer evening back then I sprawled on my bed staring lovingly into the wide flung bough of a silver maple that became deeply meaningful to the point of feeling like a member of the family during the 14 years we lived there.  I was looking at the tree and then all of a sudden I was looking at a kind of holographic map of the country, seen only in shadow form but yet quite clearly that's what I saw.  I don't mean in the hallucinatory sense, I just mean my inner visual screen superimposed itself in a way that was far more compelling.  Because I was seeing beautiful leaf green, electric blue and buttery yellow lights twinkling and gleaming here and there all over the country.  I saw rose and turquoise and a deep jade-like green so exquisite that I wept in gratitude the first time I realized I might be able to replicate it with just the right mixing of watercolor pigments.

we are here.

It was such a perfect summer evening that magical abilities such as these seemed as natural and ongoing as the presence of whatever favorite cooling beverage you sip as you gaze long and deep into the sky.  I had no trouble believing there was cumulative value in what we do at the earth loving and healing level that moves far beyond whatever our specific reasons are for following our inner and outer guidance systems.  I understood this sort of thing was moving and transforming just as it always has on this continent.  Throughout the planet, come to that: the universal power of Word transferred to other forms of universally understood language.  Fragrant smoke from a sacred fire wafting beyond time and space.  The earth's heartbeat mirrored in a drum's steady rhythm.  When-and where-ever we set our messages of love and commitment to each other in place through the way we dance along with the flickering elements of sacred flames or add pop and sizzle to a heart drumbeat's foundation with rattles of all kinds and spontaneous wild-timbred vocalizations. 

we are here.  we are doing what we've learned it's important to do. 

[This post serves as a prologue to something long and more layered concerning how and when I received confirmation of another person having an empowered and empowering moment quite similar to my own vis a vis a sudden beauteous awareness of other human souls projecting themselves as colored lights - here, there and everywhere.]

~frost has arrived~

This is a picture from yesterday morning.  An hour earlier I woke to see light tracings of frost on the two bedroom windows we've left un-winterized until this first November weekend.   It's something of a tradition for us to stick our heads in the sand in this particular way; to pretend at any moment we might have a day so warm and intoxicating we'll be glad we left the screens down in order to savor those last precious moments of seasonal experience.  But this morning I woke from a dream about making glittery winter solstice ornaments.  Not to mention knowing it's time to pull down those storm windows and also stop kidding myself that a t-shirt and thin cotton work pants are going to be sufficient for getting to the level of gardening clean-up that's still on my summer-soaked plate.

And so I went out to see how Our Mother may have helped me.  I discovered she's not yet brought on the black killing frost.  But every organic sensation within me can feel it moving ever-closer.  There's a sharp blasting burr of clarity seeded into the typical chilly new england morning's air quality.  It's something I deeply treasure about living here - along with the murmuring pre-slumber feeling tones swirling through all the garden spaces.  And in truth that much was obvious to me just the way the birds were congregating on the feeding rocks and scavenging as a collectively fused group among the stones.  I'd watched them briefly when I first got out of bed before re-focusing to morning yoga practice. 

After that my focus sharpened exclusively on assembling warm enough clothes to feel comfortable rather than slightly shell shocked.  Because I knew I had to be outside ASAP.  Not just to scatter bird seed but because I was strongly drawn to be in the day.  Since last Thursday we've had wind so powerful entire trees fell to block both the roads adjacent to our place.  For a number of hours on Friday the road closest to the picture above was further closed so workers could remove a number of branches that had fallen to balance on the electrical lines.  Primary limbs crashed to the ground a couple of times somewhere on the property.   When it happened the cat and I looked at each other with a steady direct gaze.  And I said what I say in these moments - have always said to whatever collection of cats and people have been startled-alive by that particular sound rather close at hand:  We're in no danger.  This particular cat has eyes so emotive it's almost disconcerting.  They always seem to add the word.  Yet. 

~*~

The garden in this post's single image is called The Evolving Sanctuary.  The picture lends an up to the minute view of a small and particular section of the property's original (and I bet it was show-stopping. so much wish I had a map or even just the scaper's sketch/species notes!) landscaping tour de force: an undulating band that stretches from the stone walls to the hemlocks that separate the frog pond from the field's gateway passage.  On my watch - well.  That's about a thousand different stories for as many different days.  For today I'll say that on my watch I myself have been watched with tireless rigor.  By innumerable tribes of birds and insects and small rodenty mammals and a steady handful that are not so small, such as bears and deer.  By domestic cats and my neighbor's lonely goat and a different neighbor's equally different goat (who has, at least, an eldering cow - who watches or not at irregular intervals - for a herd) and raccoons and foxes and coyotes for sure.  Things undetectable to a naked human eye have most definitely watched and I sometimes wonder how.  I don't sense they have eyes so much as multi-sensory... sensors. 

Most of all I've been watched by neighbors as they walk their dogs or their children or just themselves up and down the hill where we all live.  And while driving by in cars.  One neighbor slows his vehicle to an unashamed crawl even if we're right there looking at him while he does it.  We always smile and wave.  If we're in the house and see him doing it we'll sometimes stand and watch until he's rolled his car out of sight range. Why we ask each other.  Then we generally laugh.  But I do at times wonder why without laughing because this is how my head works: If it's so fascinating to watch human life successfully co-exist with birds weaving in and out out of largely ungroomed foundation plantings or leaves quite reliably decaying back into the soil on a yearly basis why not just do a bit of this in your own yard where you can see and actually participate in an up close and personal way?

~*~

  What you see in the above image's foreground is a tiny area in which I've concentrated more than half my hands-on gardening energy and off-season planning over the past two growing cycle.  It's a place I once wrote about in comments at Grace's concerning a glowing and supernaturally perfect frog I encountered back in the later spring.  During the warmer weather this space was filled with butterflies and a hummingbird family of five from sunrise to sunset.  All year round this specific spot also houses a colony of mixed sparrow species.  Their ranks have been steadily growing since our third year in this place  The flock doesn't yet visit the rocks because they'd prefer to graze the other readily available options up until the last possible second.  Knowing this I planted several amaranths that flourished.  From seed to careful pinching and grooming, through more diligent watering than usual and singing to the flower heads as they grew and turned to seed, my efforts were intended for the benefit of these tiny sweet singing birds..  And despite their increased number they're still feasting exclusively from their self-selected sanctuary space.  Although they're down to the final leaning stalks in the foreground of this image as far as Amaranth is concerned.

While I took this picture the sparrows fluttered about in the dense thicket of fenced ornamental vines that are part of the original landscaping. You can't see it here because there's a wall of goldenrod stalks 5 to 7 layers deep blocking the view. By then the jays and titmice had already flocked to the rocks.  All those leaves in my pictures from a few weeks ago are just where they fell; slowly drying and breaking into pieces. 

The low-slanting much slower path of the rising sun during our cold eternity portion of the year is something I authentically enjoy embracing.  It's the first consciously willing shift I tend to make each year - since childhood I've relished the special portal that opens when garden spaces fall closer to sleep.  In the here and now I enjoy the way my morning inspection tours are sliding into a later autumn groove that's a very different type of sensory experience.  Although my attitude and emotional response to the die-back have become softer and more appreciative as I age, it's still essentially a goodbye tour in search of small intimate details that can only set noticing-root after several yearly cycles together.

In the time since we moved here the land and I haven't just been getting used to each other.  We've also been getting used to steadily obvious evidence of climate/earth change.  Last year at this time the area "suddenly" started experiencing weather that was formerly typical for the region.  Earlier today I wrote about that in my journal - how the local weather patterns ever since have been equally unusual in place of normalized fear madness and flying saucers.  Seriously.  Our now-considered normal weather patterns have been bonkers.

Through that lens it was a bit eerie to inhabit a landscape as indelibly familiar as the neighborhood of childhood. This sensation stayed true until we got close to summer's end and everything suddenly became its old self jacked-up to the eleventh power.  And also coming at us in all sorts of scrambled out of order weather-like sequence.  At this point I'm losing track of exactly how many weeks we've been having Nor-easters every few days without much calm in between.  Dramatically intensified wind action on the daily has left an imprint of tempest on all the gardens.  And yet yesterday's demeanor was calm enough to capture the sense of authentic sanctuary that's so gloriously evident in the above image.

The landscape herself is changing more dramatically now as the ground grows a bit colder each night.  Her gait and demeanor shifts with the hourly spiraling of available light.  All the warmth and turbo-charged energy necessary to sustain summer's elaborate panoply of abundance is heading far south.  Whenever I think of it that way - not as summer leaving so much as simply continuing the necessary fulfillment of her seasonal purpose in another place - I feel my heart expand with joy instead of shrinking right along with the inexorable retreat of green. This shift has been revolutionary especially in relation to my ingrained  thinking and emotional patterns of the season.  Originally, before I was shut out of Typepad for most of a day and evening, I thought I would simply post the title and image.  And allow that unadorned pairing to tell its own story to individual eyes and hearts.  But then (retro merc always tends to work this way for me when it comes to slowly enlightening my presumed communicative intentions) there was the gift of enforced time in which to slow my roll all the way down vis a vis sharing only the image. 

Off and on throughout my day I paused to consider what the picture said to my eyes and heart instead of showing me things I've already seen/felt of the land, automatically, throughout these precious years of coming to know it a little.  This allows me to deepen my connections to awareness itself, not just what I do with it; to consistently ask more from and for myself  than what's already "a given" and thus easiest to articulate through the power of word as well as the power of image.  All those hours of sporadic contemplation pushed me to evoke a couple more details concerning what it's like to live here; to walk around in this place where I really hadn't the slightest clue what it meant to arrive and announce myself, with great confidence, as a willing and able participant in -- I knew not what, really.

Still don't.  Probably never will no matter how clearly I may perceive windows of time and experience along the way as an endless magic corridor of clarifying revelations.  Eldering has brought me in deep to the presumed autumn of my own life.   At a personal level I'm finding this to be the most (em)powerful season so far.   Yet this is also the very first literal autumn season in time when I've perceived the year's ebb and flow through such a radically shifted prism.  As a creative I always find it very exciting to be at least a little scared and ever so slightly out of balance.  Up to a certain point I find I'm able to thrive within not knowing quite where I stand beyond sensing potent ambiguity - about my intentional direction shift and blank space in the mind and heart rather than going forward in time with a strongly established notion of knowing exactly what I'm trying to convey.  

The very best moments of my life's trajectory have occurred when I consciously put down one of humanity's favorite go-to prisms - the one labeled How It's Always Been.  For us as a group or for myself at a largely internalized and strictly personal level.  And focusing on that specific aspect of telling Story so it remains true to itself rather than wrapping itself in whatever personal aesthetics feel most flattering or comfortable.  For me it feels increasingly important to include that not-knowing arc of experience within our stories of Shift in this time of routine quantum leaps.  My sense is that, in allowing ourselves to write and read such inclusions, we collectively weave into place a personalized grace note to the story of Timelessness.  In that specific frame I offer you the pairing of these words with a particular image evoking a visual eloquence only Gaia can bring.