Tag: healing

The Beauty and the Broken

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I am sitting this morning in the stillness and the beauty that surrounds me here in my small home. Wrapped in the ever-powerful presence of the Doug Firs that stand guard outside. These trees that have become such dear friends to me, the tall ones that stand in protection, sentinels looking out over the land with their roots reaching deep into the fertile dark soil.

I am sitting with the presence of a weight, a heaviness resting on my heart and my shoulders. There is so much to grieve in this time, I feel myself wanting to run away. Wanting to not be with this weight, the intensity of change I feel in my own life and maybe even more acutely in the over culture, the political climate, and the actual climate. Which we must remember is not an abstraction, is our ability to live on this beautiful green jewel we call home.

I see so much suffering, increasing poverty, spiritual disconnection, desperation in the eyes of people in the streets. The faces that meet mine as I walk through the grocery store. The increasing number of people living on the streets in the city near my home. It is all too much to bear. And yet, I have no choice. This is the time in which I was born, and in which i am responsible for being a faithful witness to the truth of these times, both the beauty, and the broken.

What is the appropriate response to this weight and darkness? Maybe a better question is what is my appropriate response? Being that I know truly in my bones that the one thing I am actually responsible for is the way that I move through this world and my life. What do we do in dark times? What comes forward to me in this moment, as  clear as day is this – we make beauty from the broken.

The shattered vessel mended with lines of gold. The shattered heart mended with a healing balm of love and devotion. In times of darkness, we must remember who we are. Not get lost in the clamoring of voices that would tell us that it’s over, that we’ve gone too far into the darkness to be able to heal the horrors that we are witnessing all around us. It is easy to reach for despair. It is also easy to reach for hope. I do not think that either of these are the path to healing. The path to healing lies in our individual and collective actions that bring beauty and wholeness into our own lives and communities.

This is outside the realm of despair or the realm of hope. This is a sober and truthful look at the situation in which we find ourselves. Being a faithful witness to what is unfolding all around us and not looking away, not burying our heads in the sand. Not burying our pain under rage, or a frantic busyness that never ends. We must make beauty from the broken.

I step outside under an uncharacteristically blue frozen sky. The heavy clouds and rain that normally meet me on a January morning are gone. And though my heart is filled with wreckage the sky is so blue and the trees are so green. The birds continue to sing, heralding a new day with life force flowing from their bodies, and strong wings that meet the cool crisp air. When I look to this wild and holy world I know that crumbling under the weight of it all is not an option. Doom scrolling through social media, watching the news, being pulled into all of the insanity, for me – is not an option.

So I choose the path that my heart speaks, the path that is true for me… I place my cornmeal on the ground with prayers. I lift my voice in song with the birds. I commit myself to another day of walking in beauty. I keep my heart open. I keep my eyes open.

The poet in me knows that even the darkest places in my life are fertile ground. As I walk this path I gather treasures and put them in my basket. The suffering of the world can become medicince when I hold my aperture open to see the fullness of the whole picture. It is in our descent to darkness that we really learn who we are in this world. I would never wish suffering on another human, and yet I know that my own suffering has been, again and again, the doorway into the truth of who I am.

I choose to believe that this collective underworld  it feels like we are walking in right now, can be that doorway into the truth that we all so desperately need to see, that we are humans who are born to praise life and make beauty. That it is through this turning to the sacred  through this passageway of hardship that we can begin to once again weave a fabric of humanity and consciousness that can bring us into the new world our hearts you know as possible.

That may sound like overly optimistic, spiritual mumbo jumbo… but all I have to trust in this moment is my own heart. My own heart, and the way that the trees are still standing tall so tall, and the way that the birds are singing to me, and the grass under my feet covered in heavy frost. All I have to make sense of this time is what was given to me. And in this moment my grief ladened heart is also singing like a bird.

May it be that our wounds, personal and collective, be alchemized into medicine to heal the whole. This is the prayer I place on the earth this morning. The prayer I share with you now, so tender and small. But seeds too are small, and they live in the darkness, and they, in good time grow to be grand trees that bear fruit and feed life. Remember the seed that was planted in your own heart. Trust in its ability to withstand the cold winter darkness, set the taproot, then the branch roots, then the blooming.

Seasons Turning – Autumn Comes

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Today is the autumn equinox in the northern hemisphere. We arrive again at the threshold, crafted by seasons and time, the changing of the sun, the tide ebbs. I’ve been feeling the change since the middle of August, the sun hanging lower in the sky, a little bit of chill in the air at night, dry grasses giving the land that tawny autumnal glow. It’s a bittersweet time, in some ways I’m always ready for the seasons to change, to step into something new, to recenter. And yet its hard to let summer go.

 Summer is a season of incredible energetic outpouring, working on the land, outdoor adventures, later nights and less sleep. Summer feels full of fervor and exuberance, and I truly love it. This whole span of time from late spring until the end of harvest season I am out on the land so much. Hands in the soil, feet in the soil, body in the river, hair soaked with sweat. I’m watching the seeds go into the ground and whispering prayers over them, I’m watching the little shoots sprout up and begin their cycle of life, watching them put on leaves and fruit, harvesting and eating and preserving. I love it, and I am exhausted.

And now autumn calls, with her soup pots bubbling and long walks with falling leaves. With quiet evenings at home, hot tea in my favorite mug, dreams of art supplies littering my little table, and driving home in the dark again. It seems to me that each year I get older the seasons grow sweeter, and I feel the changes more acutely, both in the earth around me and inside of my own body. The earth within me. It feels good to let things change, it feels good to surrender to the cycle of the year, the wheel of time, and the ever changing present. As if we had any choice! And yet, to see the pleasure of this seasonal arc, and feel held within it, is somehow so tender for me.

I think part of that is because there’s a way that I’m able to pay attention to life that is exquisite to me, and it hasn’t always been this way. So many years were spent in anxious survival. Being a young mother, and then in an absolute disaster of a marriage, never really making enough money, throw a little bit of addiction into the mix, and you can imagine from there…  It hasn’t been an easy ride. which makes me all the more grateful for the simple beauty in which I sit in my days now.

I can’t claim luxury, I have such a simple life. But it’s beautiful, and it’s handmade and crafted by me to suit my needs and my desires. I get to be present in my life, to be free of the chronic and painful tensions I lived with for so long. I get to craft my days so that I have time to be with the earth and the sky, time for writing, time to notice the changing seasons, to grow food and eat good food, to gather herbs and make medicine, to spend hours in the evening reading poetry, or lying on the floor of my beautiful little home with my cat purring at my side. It’s all so simple, and I’m simply so grateful.

In this time of seasons changing, this time of surrender, of looking within as the autumn calls us to do, I’m thinking about what skins need to shed. About what I’m ready to set down. About what I’m releasing and who I’m becoming. It doesn’t all feel clear yet, and that’s completely OK with me. Answers come when answers come, and the inquiry is really the interesting part of the journey anyway.

Over the summer months, there’s been a lot of inner work happening around some wounds that I have carried and the ways they manifest in the world. I’ve become aware of this cloak of fear that I’ve lived with throughout all of my conscious life. The fear of somehow not being enough, not belonging, being too much, being exiled. This undercurrent of fear has caused me to shape-shift and morph myself into a way of being that I perceive to be more pleasant to others. This is one of the big endings that I’ve been undertaking. The ending of the story that I need to be anything different than I am.

I’ve been growing braver, I’ve been speaking my mind more, expressing how I truly feel, even when it scares the shit out of me, I’ve been asking for more money, learning not to say yes when I want to say no, and figuring out how to truly listen to the signals of my body so that I can make choices that are in alignment with my true needs. It’s been subtle, my life looks much the same as it did in May, but my experience of being in it is really quite different. There’s a fierceness in me that I didn’t know before. There’s a resoluteness, something inside of me isn’t standing up. Broad-shouldered, strong-eyed, Free of the giggling simpering of girlhood. I think I’m truly becoming a woman. Which, at 42, you may think about time… But I would argue that many adults never really leave the stage of late adolescence. So I’ll take it. I’ll take this broad-shouldered, broad-smiled, strong spine, soft-bellied, wide open-hearted woman, I’m becoming.

So the seasons turn, and we turn with them. And as autumn arrives I take this opportunity to turn inside. I take this opportunity to close the hatches a bit, to lay off the throttle, to sit back into the sweetness of my life, and the unknown unfolding of my becoming. Before long rain will start to drip down my windows, and the tawny grasses will grow green again. And then, I’ll be dreaming of planting seeds in the soil and pea shoots and early blooms. But for now, just for now, I’m going to get still. I’m going to sit in the beauty of the simple life that I have created. I’m going to look into my own heart and see what’s ready to be set down. Emptying out the oil to make space for the new. Some interior sorting I suppose you could say. Sounds like a good thing to do as the days grow shorter.  I’m going to leave you with some beautiful words from David Whyte, this line hums in my heart so often…autumn blessings to you all.

“You must learn one thing.
The world was meant to be free in. “

Sweet Darkness
by David Whyte

When your eyes are tired
the world is tired also.

When your vision has gone,
no part of the world can find you.

Time to go into the dark
where the night has eyes
to recognize its own.

There you can be sure
you are not beyond love.

The dark will be your home
tonight.

The night will give you a horizon
further than you can see.

You must learn one thing.
The world was made to be free in.

Give up all the other worlds
except the one to which you belong.

Sometimes it takes darkness and the sweet
confinement of your aloneness
to learn

anything or anyone
that does not bring you alive

is too small for you.

Making Home

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Spring has arrived. I can feel it in the air, a breath of sweetness in the breeze, and evenings stretching out for what feels like forever, but is really about 7:45. I love the turning times of the year, I love the newness and the freshness, the shift and the change. The way the whole world feels different, and all of life is aware of it. The birds are up and singing songs that sound somehow brighter and more excited, than their winter chirping. The rabbits are back, though not quite as many this year, I doubt that has anything to do with this particular spring and more to do with my mother’s new dog, scenting the yard with her canine smell.

 We humans are different as well, around here in northwest Oregon, it certainly isn’t warm enough to be showing any skin yet, and with our faces covered with masks, flirtation is a challenging undertaking. And yet, spring always brings more wayward glances from the opposite sex, lingering eye holds in the grocery store, and all the subtle ways of communicating that we humans have, to say “its spring…wanna get busy?” we can’t help it, let’s just blame our biology.

I have shared in my last two posts, a little bit about heartbreak, and healing, and the sense of surfacing into life again that is now surging through my veins. And spring is quickening this tempo in me. I have been at the garden again, and there’s something about that soil and filtered sunlight, the birdsong and the river going by that make me feel so terribly alive. In some ways it feels strange to have a fluttering of joy in my breast again, and a little bit of dance in my feet.

I’ve been living here at Bunny Hill Farm, for almost a year now. It seems hard to imagine that it’s been a whole year, and in some ways, it is only now truly starting to become my home. Not a stopping place, not a pause, but my home, my true home. I have been walking this land, praying under my prayer tree, singing to the moon and stepping into relationality with my beautiful home place, and I feel received. I feel stabilized, rooted, at rest.

Come late June, or early July my beautiful new little home will be going up. I’ve ordered a yurt cabin kit in a fetching wine-red color, with open interior beams, an opening five-foot dome center skylight, and five large glass windows. I am extremely excited to craft my home with my own hands, and of course with many other hands helping me as well. Also, I do realize I am stepping into a project that is far outside of my scope, and yet, there is something about this undertaking that feels entirely right. I trust completely in my process, in my ability to learn, in my desire for beauty and creation. Nesting is in fact one of my greatest joys, and as I build this home, I will be constructing an actual nest! I will be living in the round, a longtime dream of mine. No other animals live in square boxes…think about that for a moment, what are the implications of this? A worthy inquiry indeed, but I will save this for another day.

There is incredible grace in my life. My parents having received me back into their daily lives, after my being on my own for more than 20 years. Their extending of hearth and home and land to me is a gift beyond measure. Not only in that I get to build home here, right beside them. It’s so much more than that, we are, in our own small way creating community. Learning to live together, to communicate, to support each other, and to share our lives in a more interconnected and collaborative way then many families are blessed to do.

Life is so interesting, how it can deliver to us exactly what we wanted and longed for and dreamed of, and yet the circumstances wearing an entirely different face then the one of our imaginings. For so many years my dreams of living in the country, of being in community, and of engaging in shared purposeful work with people who I love centered around an imagined Oasis, owned entirely by me, and had a definite flavor of independence. Which I realize is somewhat in conflict with the concept of community, but fantasies don’t always make logical sense. The truth is that the concept of the rugged individual has crept into my psyche, even though I was raised in a community, and with strong community ethics in my blood from the get-go. So, life smiles at me, with her trickster energy, and says “here you go, community and connection and family, all you have to give up is everything you thought you knew.”

Did I think that at the end of my 39th year, I would be sharing space with my parents once again? Did I think that I would be divorced, and have sold my house, and uprooted, and then re-rooted once again? Most certainly not. But life had other plans for me. And if there is one thing I am learning, as I round the sun for the 39th time, it is that I don’t always know what is best. And I am certainly not the one in control. I am becoming a surfer, a life surfer, riding the waves and again and again climbing back onto the board in an attempt to catch a breath and a view.

I find myself sitting frequently and quietly, and simply thinking “what comes next?” I do not mean the new house, or the garden, it is a fuller, purer, wondering. It’s a wondering that fills my whole being, that tingles my toes and makes my heartbeat a little bit faster. I have a deep knowing that I cannot rush this question, it has to linger in my heart and my belly, it has to rest and grow and become a bigger and bigger question, until life decides to descend an answer. The near constant refrain that I hear inside is the most beautiful line, penned by our dear Mary Oliver “what will you do with your one wild and precious life?”

For now, I will show up. I will keep showing up. For myself, for my family, for the aching beauty of this land I occupy. For the wide wonder of this beauty soaked and trouble-filled world, and these times that I was born so perfectly for, even though sometimes I wonder why. For now, I will drink my tea, and write in my Journal, and study all manner of things that light up my mind and my heart. I will attend to the beauty of my days and my learnings, and I will keep the doors of my heart open, so that when the grace of knowing arrives, I will be ready to receive her.

  • Magic light dancing on the tall ones.
  • My hand on one of my tallest friends

Survival

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2020 was a hard year, of course it was, you know this, I do not have to tell you.  It has become a slogan of sorts “2020 is the worst year ever…” said with a sigh and collapsed posture, about myriad occurrences from the merely irritating to the deeply heartbreaking. You have most likely had some flavor of this in your own life. 2020 was a damn hard year. It seems that everything was turned up and churned up, personal, public, political, for fucks sake, we’ve been living in a global pandemic. Everyone has been holding on, just by the skin of our teeth, waiting for the year to shift, a page to turn, holding onto the belief that somehow 2021 is going to be at least a little bit better.

I’m sitting in my little home tonight, my tiny little 250 square feet on wheels. It feels a little like a gypsy wagon, bright colors and blue velvet upholstery, twinkling string lights and a shelf full of all my teas and herbs, lending the air of a witches cabin. Sometimes I look around and I can’t believe how happy I am. Never before in all my 39 years have I had a place to live that was, well, entirely mine. Entirely mine to keep messy, or keep clean. To decorate with as much religious artwork as I want to, to string my crop of corn on colored yarn across my ceiling to dry. For a month and a half, I had to duck under corn just to sit at my dining table, do you have any idea how perfect that is?

 So here I sit at my gorgeous round and tiny dining table reflecting on this last year, on the troubles, the joys and the sorrows. Oh gods the sorrows. In some ways it’s kind of funny to hear people talk about how hard 2020 was, and yes I know it was, for everyone, and I’m not trying to diminish that fact. The last year tested us all in ways we could never have foreseen, or well, that we didn’t foresee anyway. Some of us lost our jobs, some of us worked waaay too much in nearly intolerable conditions. Lives and homes were lost, marriages broken.

 I guess it’s kind of funny, or peculiar rather, because what made this last year hard for me honestly had almost nothing to do with the pandemic. Yes, work was hard, and face masks and shields really are awful… But surviving a broken heart, a divorce, and moving out of and selling my home of 15 years, nearly killed me. There have been so many times over the last year that part of me honestly thought I would not survive. So to sit here tonight, looking around at this small but perfect, and completely mine, space that I now occupy, and it seems almost impossible. Almost too good to be true.

How is it that my heart can be folded in on itself, every bit of air sucked from my body, every bit of joy gone with the snap of fingers and my life cloaked an all-consuming grey fog for 10 or 11 months and then somehow, I survive, and the color begins to return. Beauty once again courts my doorstep. The sounds of wind and birdsong pierce me again. I see the purpose and meaning of my days once more.

Grief is like the ocean, you can ride on top of it get pushed around by the waves, you can submerge and go under and feel its tides moving your small body in the vast expanse of turbulence. The noise so deafening you hear nothing but its roar and then, one day, you surface again, head pops up above the water and you look around and lo and behold there is a patch of blue. A Patch of blue! You may have by this point, forgotten what blue looked like or perhaps even that blue ever existed. But there it is. There it is.

One of my wisest teachers told me never steal anyone else’s grief or pain from them, it is the greatest gift we each ever receive. This same teacher when I called her and told her that my marriage had imploded into a devastating pool of deception and pain, said to me “oh Marianna, I am so happy for you, this is truly the chance of a lifetime, the one chance you’ve been waiting for.”

I can remember that now, and smile. Read the words I just wrote, and smile. But when I first heard those words from her, although a large piece of my heart knew they were true, I could not hear them. I was so devastated that I could barely go to work, and when I did go, I would spend considerable portions of my day crying in the bathroom. It is all well and good to hear about or read about true heartbreak, but when you are in the ocean, in the depths of that suffering, it honestly feels like there is nothing else.

So to sit here tonight, in some form of radiant contentment, in the quiet of my own home, and to not have my heart encased in mourning cloths and to not have my mind filled with what ifs and oh if it could be and oh if I had. Feels like a fucking miracle.

I’ve been reading through my poetry written over the last year and a half or so. It is some of the most sorrow filled and darkest writing I have done in my life, and also some of the most beautiful. I’ve been playing with the idea of making a chapbook, or some other small pamphlet style collection of those poems. Maybe I would simply title this project Survival. I have survived.

As the days roll on, and moving towards spring life fills with more activity, and that all too familiar voice inside my own head will tell me “you should be doing more than you are doing.” I’m going to do my best to remember this quiet evening. I’m going to do my best to remember that come what may, I have survived. I have survived true darkness. And without knowing darkness, how could I ever begin to know light?

The truth is now so clear to me, there was no other way. My life uprooted, my heart pulverized, the wind whipped out of my lungs. All this suffering was extraordinarily necessary. Because without the suffering, I would never have been brave enough to be willing to begin a whole new life. And this is where I sit today, at the beginning of a whole new life.

My fingers on the keyboard, words fall onto this page, tears fall onto my cheeks, but my heart is joy- filled. I am bruised, but I have not been broken. And in the darkest night I have learned to trust my own strength. I have survived, and once again dawn returns to the frozen lands, and I turn my face to meet the sun.

This image is from some art process work I did this winter about connecting to the body of the Earth, my female form and boundaries. I am rooted and so I can rise, I am of the Earth and to her I belong, so I am always at home, and never alone.

Salmons Song

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Sometimes I go out for a day to ramble, no real direction in mind, no real goal. Perhaps just an inkling of a desire, a thought, a feeling I follow, such as “I really want to get out of the city today.” Or, as it was on a fine sunny day last week, “I wonder if I can find some Elderberries before first frost?”

There is something of the eternal in days like this when I leave all sense of “should” behind and follow my senses and the wise old beat of my heart. I drove up 26 that day towards the mountain, reveling in an unexpected day of freedom, and in my solitude, which is becoming increasingly comfortable for me as I adjust to life as a single woman again. 18 years in partnership left me far away from myself, on many levels, and these days half of what I do is simply learn to be me, on my own. This demands more of me than one could know unless they have traveled a similar path.

The sun was bright and shone in that early autumnal way, where gold fills all the spaces between, and the light imbues everything with a certain magic. Colors are brighter, or perhaps just different somehow, the sun hanging lower in the sky as we weave our way towards winter. Or maybe it is the knowing that days like that are few to come over the impending long darkness of winter in the Pacific Northwest, either way, the spell of the light was thick and lent itself greatly to the beauty of the day and my sense of enchantment.

I am a baby forager. By this, I do not mean that I forage for babies, in case you were beginning to worry and wonder if perhaps you are on the wrong blog. No, I tend to leave babies with their parents unless called into Auntie duty. I mean simply that my knowledge and skills in finding wild food are still growing and quite undeveloped as of yet. This being so, I was thrilled to see the plump clusters of dark purple my eyes were searching for, just off the roadside, even while traveling 45 miles an hour. I pulled over, flipped a U-turn, and parked on the shoulder. Basket in hand I made my way to the Elderberry bushes, and after a word of gratitude and a prayer of asking for permission to harvest, I began. Those deep blue, purple fruits, so tiny and fine, coming easily into my basket as if there was no place on earth they would rather be.

I am stunned, awestruck by the generosity of the earth with great frequency. Especially in my garden that freely gives me mountains of cabbage and potatoes, beans, corn, and beets. Yet there is some real labor involved on my end, a bit of a give and take. Foraging is like Christmas. “For me? Really!? Why thank you!” My basket half full in 10 minutes, I bowed my thanks and kissed tenderly the plants leaves, having nothing to offer but my gratitude and praying that this was enough for the code of reciprocity to be upheld.

Handful of Joy

Back on the highway and with my prized berries, I knew the day was not done, and drove east again, heading towards a place I know so well, to be as close as I was and not pay a visit felt like sacrilege. Bigleaf maples, dripping with golden leaves, hung low over the road as I turned off the highway and onto Salmon River Rd, heading towards a favorite trail, long beloved by my family. I love the way places become kin when you visit enough, much like human friends. This place fills me with a sense of belonging, of knowing and being known. Of all the beauty I have seen in this glorious old world, there is really no place I would rather be than Oregon old-growth forest.

I was not geared up for a real hike, a saunter was more my desire so I took my bag, with my water and journal and walked along the river trail, searching for a place to land for a while, a place in the sun, to put my pen to paper. A poem had been tugging at my heart asking to be born for 5 days, and it was time to let that baby come to life. I found some sun, and a large smooth rock, just the right size for me to sit on, contemplated taking off my shoes but that water, even in early October is so cold, I kept them on. I wrote, and marveled at the beauty of it all, the simple grace of my days, the quiet. All the struggle and worry I carry so heavily on my shoulders felt a million miles away. In that golden afternoon it was just me, and the river and the wild old trees, and God, and as I would soon find out, Salmon.

Poem finished and I stashed my book away, sauntering along the riverbank to a deeper pool I love, one with a pebbled beach, a hole deep enough for a dip on a warmer day. Looking out over that sacred place, sun streaming in the crisp blue sky, I smelled river, and cedar and humus and… Salmon.

I searched the shoreline until I saw her, nearly beached but still in the water, nearly dead but still breathing. Eyes mostly cloudy, but still seeing. I knelt beside her, eye to eye we looked at one another. And I began to sing, a song that came from where, I don’t know, but it moved through me like it was there all along like it had been waiting for just this moment to be born, right now for me, and for her. ” I don’t know how the Salmon sings, I don’t know how the birds get wings, but I am woman and for this I give praise, my body is my vessel for all my days, my body is my vessel for all my days…”

As I sang I began to move, clearing pebbles to make a clear smooth surface, gathering stones, pine cones, and moss, small bright rose hips. My hands making an image of a fish, an image of her, from the materials I gathered, an act of art to show my love, a physical prayer for her and her kind, a way of being in the presence of her dying, and her living, and the place where those two met, which was now and here. I placed three rose hips to be her heart and one last stone to be her eye. The working complete and the prayers prayed, I went to sit beside her once again.

Land art- For her heart and for mine

I beheld her in her dying for quite some time, not close enough to scare her, or at least I don’t think so. I noticed others then, their bodies already in various stages of decomposition, her sisters…all around her as she lay dying. I was so moved by this, even as I type these words the tears pour hot down my cheeks. I was and am moved, not by the sorrow of the thing, though that is present as well, but more by the strength, her strength. To travel hundreds of miles to her home place, through struggles unknown, following only the call of her body, her sense of smell, and the knowledge of home. To lay her eggs and then her body down to die in those cold dark waters, next to the bodies of her kin, the cycle complete, she had only her last breaths left.

My Salmon Teacher – Thank you

The knowing hit me like a strong wind, a force, a voice almost audible, but not quite, audible in my heart and bones and sinew, “why would you think you deserve more than Salmon?”

See, I am always praying for direction. I joke that creator needs to make some neon glowing arrows to toss at me so I can find my way, my mortal mind so dense I can’t seem to figure out what comes next. But maybe I have had it all wrong, maybe all I need to do, all I can do, is follow the tides in my body and my sense of smell, all the way to home. Maybe I need to leave behind the concept of a mortal body and crawl deep down into my creature body once again, it all seemed so simple, so apparent. What hubris I have been inhabiting. I would have laughed if I’d not been crying.

Why do I cling so tightly to this concept of “should?” Where in nature is there any such thing? “What should come next, what should I do, how should I be…” Does Salmon sing that tired old song? No. She simply swims in the direction of home and completes the cycle.

It would be terribly human-centric to say she came to teach me a lesson that day, but I know I came to learn a lesson, and I was fortunate to find her and to be slow enough to see her, and to be ripe enough to listen to the voice on the wind and in my heart. We humans, the younger sibling of all creatures, so brazen with self-obsession, looking only in behind our own eyes, miss so much. If there is one thing life is teaching me each day and each year, it is to slow down, open my eyes, and be amazed. As our beloved Mary Oliver has said, “Pay attention, be astonished, tell about it.” It may be there is nothing more I need to know.

I give great thanks for this learning. For my teachers who come in all forms, plant, fungi, human, animal, celestial, and, Salmon.

Driving home that day I let the sounds of the forest travel with me, I sang my simple song and let the cars drive by, busy in their doing-ness, and I quiet in my undoing-ness. Unbuttoning the heavy coat of shoulds, and sliding it off my shoulders, one note at a time. All I must be is woman, with my full- broken heart, with all my joy, with my one precious life. I ask for nothing more, I ask for no more than Salmon. May I be so fortunate.

The Good old Salmon River
Forest Magic

In Defense of a Simple Life

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I can’t sleep. Up too late with thoughts running circles round my mind. It seems that life is moving faster all the time, each year, no, each month, swifter than the last. I can’t catch up. Here, in this culture where woman wear busyness like a badge of honor, I just want it all to slow down.

I an eternal optimist, I can’t help it, I try to be surly at times but to no avail. I always optimistically believe, despite evidence to the contrary, that I will have more “free” time, sometime in the near future…but sometime is never here. It looms, ever in the future, just out of reach, I could almost touch it if I just reach a little bit farther.

The ideal of the woman who can do everything is a crock of shit. I know this,I feel it in my bones. I know how marketing works, how swindled we all are. If it isn’t a fashion mag we are comparing ourselves with, its that perfect remodel on HGTV. There is no end to the cascade of false ideals dumped on our doorsteps each day. How can we know what is real amidst this storm of consumerist coercion? It insidiously creeps into our minds, thoughts we thought were our own, when opened for examination have no origin in us. This is madness. This drives us to madness.

I myself, am in a daily struggle. The desire to “produce” more, be it income, social capital, or even beauty. Weighed against the truth that I am tired, and I don’t want to play the game anymore.  I cannot hold it all up, and hold it to the standard that I desire to. Things begin to crumble. I cannot be it all, I cannot do it all. I feel this, and I am in a two income family with one grown child. What must this feel like for my friends with little ones at home and bills piling up on bills? Is this the equality we have been fighting for? Somehow it feels like we have missed the mark. “killin it” seems to be killing us.
And yes, of course this is a grand generalization, and I can only speak from my point of view. Still, I see so many women suffering under the delusion that we can multi-task our way to a picture perfect life, that it is time to pull back the curtain on that lie, expose it’s ugly underbelly and begin to engage in some real revolutionary work.

Could it be that in my relentless pursuit of becoming, I have lost myself? Lost the thread I am meant to hold throughout my life, the thread that William Stafford calls to us to cling tightly to? If this is what matters, and I think it does, what has to be sacrificed? What must I lay down in order to have a hand to hold the thread in?

There is this thing, called “too much” that surrounds us. We are so inundated by the cultural messages of acquisition that we fail to see how deep this patterning is. Peers of mine who eschew the commercialized ideals of the “American Dream” (who knows what that even means anymore) still ascribe to the doctrine of acquisition and hope, through a Hodge podge of progressive spiritual ideals that are in fact selling us the same thing. Meet the new boss, same as the old boss. I am not above this, how many weekend courses have I taken trying to become a better version of me? How many crystals and smudges do I have right now in this very room where I write? Spiritual capitalism at its finest.

It seems that the only way to get off this mad train is to turn and face it looming behind me. To stand firmly in my two shoes and say “no more!” I am unwilling to trade growth for depth any longer. I am unwilling to sacrifice the sanctity of my life to meet some ideal that is not even my own. I will no longer be 3 miles wide and 2 inches deep, I want to be a  well, a spring,  dig deep and find sweet water, here.

I am learning to identify barriers to connection in my life, competition is one, perfectionism is right up there as well. What can I reclaim, or claim for the first time to bring sanity back into my life? I’ve been thinking on this and simple as it sounds, and not surprisingly, I think it has something to do with vulnerability and acceptance. If I can learn to see all the ways I am striving towards unreal expectations or doctrines, than maybe I can turn myself around. Connection is the antidote to bullshit, in fact,  I am pretty sure it is the antidote to all the woes of western civilization.

When I allow myself to be vulnerable, to show my multi layered imperfection, I am open to connection. I can have friends at my house that is messy, I can eat with joy and abandon without concern for what others think of my size or shape, I can speak my mind and heart, not tip toe around others. Which in this PC world feels like it is more an more necessary. Truly, it is not. Disagreeing with someone does not mean you don’t love them. In fact, differing opinions are a healthy thing, if we are all the same it is pretty boring out there.

So I am learning to be uncomfortable, to listen when the feelings of ” I need to be….” arise. It takes so many forms, there are so many things and ways I have been taught I need to be to, to  be worthy, to be accepted. It is a lie. I am, and will be, a whole healthy human woman, even if I don’t meet the standards, even if I look a little frazzled at the edges. I am taking a stand. Because you know what? No one else is going to do it for me. I am going deep, holy well deep. I plant my feet on this soil I call home and I will stay here. I will joyfully  grow my food, raise my hens, sleep beside my husband. I will listen to the quite yearning of my own sweet heart, and stay, home. I will, day by day divorce myself from the system that says I must be more. I am enough. I am woman,  I am home, and I am grateful.

Marianna Louise Jones

*image is of St Fumac’s holy well, Canmore Scotland

 

 

 

 

 

 

A Measure of Worth

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What does it mean to be worthy? This thought has been gathering in the corners of my mind for some time now, and in fact I have done some writing on this line of inquiry, but nothing that seems to articulate the true question I have fermenting in my heart. It is not how does one become worthy, but what does this worthy even mean, and where did this concept originate from?

In Indigenous cultures living their original life ways the idea that one could be worthy or unworthy would seem preposterous. Being human, being alive, you are obviously part of the fabric of life and therefore belonging to your people, sharing in life and community, and the joys and struggles therein. I am reminded as I write this of the stories of early missionaries attempting to bring the concept of original sin and baptism to native populations, who were so thrown off by the idea that they would just laugh at the missionaries. It was preposterous! Of course babies are not born as sinners, what an insane concept that it. I believe those cultures, so much older and wiser then our own, would have had the same reaction to this idea, spoken and unspoken that we all carry here in the west, that we are somehow unworthy and can attain worthiness through actions and appearances. Through becoming something other than what we are right now.

The etymological roots of the word worth come from multiple sources and cultures and vary some through the ages.  Many sources state a connection to value, price or merit. Old English, weorp, has the meaning of high value, equivalent, prized, but also hence, and toward. So you see even woven into the roots of this word we so casually and thoughtlessly use is this idea that we are heading toward something, that we are becoming. My teacher Stephen Jenkinson eloquently speaks about the concept of hope being a cruel sort of tyranny. I would propose that this idea of worth and the false god of hope live very close to one another, perhaps they are even bedfellows.

The idea that hope is anything less than a supreme healing and guiding force has been a hard sell for me I must say. I have long loved and quoted our dear Emily Dickenson’s poem that so beautifully states “hope is the thing with feathers that perches on the soul, and sings the tune without the words and never stops at all.” It has taken some time, sweat and befuddlement to arrive where I sit today, knowing that in hope we lose the moment we are in, forgoing the life we are in for an illusory golden someday that will, as much as we desire it to, never come to pass. When I fall into judgment of how my life looks, when I question my value in the world, my worth, I collapse into the idea that someday I will be more than I am now. This is a false belief.

I do not mean to say that I will never change, no contrary to that, I am changing all the time. I grow older, and a little wiser. I become more grounded and kinder. All this is true. And yes I can make more money and travel, finally write a book, get in better shape. All this can happen. Yet none of this changes who I am , and none of it affects my worth, or perceived lack there of. I am, by birthright, whole. This idea that is lodged in our culture and thereby in me, that I will someday be more worthy, is an illusion, a false god, a decoy.

I believe that trying to be of more worth, takes me away from the deeper work of  trying to be more me. It isn’t just me suffering with this affliction. I would wager that most of us, living in the west, suffer with this same damaged and distorted thinking. Fall prey tp that false god of perfection and attainment, and go to bed worrying about what we aren’t and what we could be, if we tried harder, if we had more self control, if we had a different set of circumstances at our doorstep. I know I do. I know many nights my last thought is a plan of how I will do better tomorrow, and on waking my first thought is how I will do better today. The idea of just being ok with how I am now, and now, and now…seems almost impossible. What would I do with my life if I was not chasing some ghost of perfection and worth?

The self help world does not help. I can scarcely begin to imagine how many guides to finding your worth, creating self worth rituals and becoming worthy there are lining the shelves of the local new age bookstores. The sorrowful thing is that as well meaning as this all is, it is actually nothing more than a distraction and a fantasy. What if we could simply feel that we were already worthy, that we have great value, that we are in fact mandatory to life as we know it. How would it feel to live in that reality? Awesome, it would feel awesome. You know who would not feel awesome about it? The publishers of self help books, the marketers that sell us products, the fashion industry, the car sales lots. The list could go on and on.

The capitalist, puritanical, colonizing voice of our culture sings loudly in our ears, ‘you are not enough” from the cradle to the grave, and we listen. We listen and we purchase. If we stay distracted by this never ending hunt for value and a sense of worth, we will continue chasing our tails in circles in a dark room. It is by turning to face the faceless voice that beguiles us, and challenging it that we can begin to come into right relationship with our own lives and the lives of those around us. You cannot put a price on that. It is valueless, or, is in invaluable.

As a woman living in North America I am personally deeply and darkly acquainted with this quest for feeling enough, and I see it in other woman as well. We all walk around quoting the same two lies, I am fine, and everything is ok. We say it so much we believe it, we say it so much when another woman breaks the mold, we condemn her. We are our own thought police. Living in cages that we have created and enforced, the cell walls of our own denial of suffering. In failing to speak our fears and inadequacies we add bars to the cage, so that less light can come through. All this is part of the ruthless oppression of the concept of worth and the constant searching and hoping that we can become more worthy and more whole.

I do not know how to banish from  mind and spirit the idea that I am unworthy. I do not know how to disconnect from my cultural conditioning and let go of these thought patterns that live so deeply in me. This way of viewing myself and my life may be here for the long haul. Thank god I do know, that I do not have to believe everything I think, and that shame cannot live in the light. It is dwells in the unspoken darkness and does not care for conversation. In being brave enough to dissect in myself this worthiness lie, and speaking of this process to others, I am putting a nail in the coffin of this manifestation of our cultural madness.

Healing does not happen in isolation, it happens in community. In the community that I share my sorrow, grief and shame in, and in my own inner community. I am learning to welcome home the parts of me that I have been hiding from. Learning that the very things I have felt made me unworthy are actually some of my greatest gifts. Retrieving  the pieces of me that I abandoned and beginning to do the work of figuring out why I abandoned them in the first place. This internal family that makes up who I am.

Instead of measuring my worth, I want to feel my life. Knowing that simply being here is enough.. The pleasures of having a body, a quite moment alone before dawn, the unspeakable beauty of morning birdsong. I am as whole as the birds that sing, as worthy of life’s beauty and abundance as the squirrels that visit each day. I do not have to be, do or change anything in order to claim my place in the order of things. I simply and sweetly show up in my life, and today, that is enough.