The Beauty and the Broken

January 21, 2025Leave a comment

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.

Leaves – A Love Song

October 27, 20234 Comments

The trees astound me with their generosity. They hold nothing back. Each year the cycle begins again, the gathering of sunlight, the storing of energy, carbon, the creation of new leaves. Leaves that emerge baby soft and fine, pale yellow, light green, chartreuse. Leaves so tender they look like blossoms. Putting on bulk and weight, spreading out over the tops of canopies, glorious crowns, snarled reaching branches, forming the lush foliage of summer’s blessed shade.

Autumn comes and the slow surrender begins, the letting go. Leaves lose their luster, the edges beginning to dry, spots of brown or gold mottling their surface. Some change to brown, light and crisp; they float on the air, piling up in mounds, drifts, oceans. Some blaze bright before they fall, gold and red, orange and amber, and every shade in between. Death can be beautiful too. This I learned first from leaves, and then from old people.

The trees seem to surrender their leaves so easily, they must trust that next year the cycle will begin again, they must know that as long as they are standing tall on this earth life will move in them, and through them, creating the magical rhythm of leafing out, spreading wide, and falling to the earth again. What if we had trust like that? Trust in our cycles, in the turning of time, in the rightness of it all. What if we knew our place in the web, could we surrender as completely as trees?

I walk among the leaves, and I bend to pick them up with delight. To look at their shape, the pattern the veins make across their surface, to feel the firmness of a leaf stem clasped between my fingers and thumb, I roll them back and forth admiring how the colors shift in the light. I will never grow tired of autumn leaves, the wonder of this generous beauty will always leave my heart humbled, gratitude echoing around the chamber inside my chest, a whisper of thank you on my lips.

I remember when I was small, and we lived in the city where streets had sidewalks, and many of them were planted with trees. I knew those sidewalks so well, I knew where every tree root pushed up against the surface of the pavement to create a crack, and I would roll over those cracks on my scooter, or my bike using it like a little jump of sorts, some novelty in my ride.

I remember walking in the autumn with my mother, and her teaching me the French words for the colors of the rainbow. Jaune is yellow. Yellow like the leaf fallen from a big leaf Maple, on the grey sidewalk, before it’s been crushed under foot. Yellow leaves lying perfect in their form, utterly beautiful. I kicked them with my boots, my small feet loving the sound of the crunch crunch as I walked through piles of leaves.

I knew a marvelous old woman once, Ruth. Who lived in the retirement home where I worked. She was that perfect combination of spicy and sweet, a woman who loved deeply, and would also take you down a peg if you needed it, or maybe, if she was just in the mood to do so. She was legally blind but could somehow always tell if I’d gained a pound, and would not hesitate to tell me “ you are so beautiful, but honey you need to watch your weight.” I know you probably cringe reading these words, but I smile in fond remembrance. Those words truly were spoken with love.

I remember sitting with Ruth on an autumn day and speaking of the leaves. The beauty of autumn in Oregon, the way the sky sparkled blue, and there was a nip in the air, and the lovely scent of summer ending. The earth getting ready for a long winter sleep. A soft dreaminess came over Ruth’s face, and 100 watt smile emerged, drawing back the corners of her mouth creasing the corners of her eyes, the wrinkled cartography of her face transforming as she traveled in her mind. “You know I used to love to kick the leaves on the street, I can still hear how they would crunch crunch under my feet… I can’t walk anymore, but I remember.”

When I am old and grey, and sitting in a window. Will I still remember the look of the leaves on the sidewalk, the sound of the crunch crunch, the pleasure of walking hand in hand with my mother? Will I remember the generosity of trees? The thousand ways they’ve blessed my life, the hours spent sitting nestled in their roots, the days spent hiking looking up at their towering trunks and canopies… I think I will. And if I’m fortunate, I’ll have someone to tell about it.

Could I be like maple?
Standing tall, always reaching for the light.
Roots sinking down through dark, rich soil, winding around stones and broken pipes
to find the wellspring of life.
The living water.
Could I burn brightly?
My leaves shimmering in an exaltation of gold and red and scarlet, vermilion, even lavender.
A cacophony of color, unbridled life that gives way into death.
Leaves falling from maples high branches litter the ground in a carpet of glory.
I walk on them, my boots feel too brown to trod on such a delight as this.
In a months’ time, these glorious tailings, falling from maples branches
will turn to brown and then to soil.
Feeding her roots and preparing to once again set leaves come springtime.
Oh, how much I learn from the trees.
Their constant and ever-present generosity, their willingness to rise again, and fall again
and rise again, and fall.
Do they grieve their leaves as they drop towards the Earth, or is it pure surrender, the letting go of what must be done in order for something new to emerge, to sprout, to rise upward
Carbons knitting together, to create the pattern of life, everybody is reaching for the sun. Everybody is reaching for the water.
And this is life, the somersault of beginning, and ending, the way form gives way to absence and then form again, and I too am part of this.
I too, in my woman’s body one day will become dust and then perhaps, I will become maple.

The Dance of Change – On Christmas Quiet and Lifes Shifting Tides

December 25, 2022Leave a comment

It’s Christmas morning. The hustle and bustle of Christmas mornings in the past feel like an ancient memory, an entirely different life than the one I now live. All those years of rising early to make a special breakfast, celebrate my husband’s birthday, open stockings and gifts with my daughter, and then rushing about visiting are over.

My daughter is now a young woman living on her own, and I am divorced and living in my little cabin in the woods, it seems that almost everything in my life it’s entirely different than it was three years ago. And there is freedom in this truth, and also a healthy amount of sorrow and longing, and wishing that endings could have been different than they were. Though not wishing that the endings hadn’t happened.

The heart is such strange territory to travel in. I wonder if while I am alive in this human form I will ever understand my own heart’s ways. How it can long so deeply for the past, while simultaneously knowing that in that past, my heart longed even more deeply for something to change. For some new beginning to happen. For a new life to be born. And now it has, and my tricky old heart cooks up a stewpot full of nostalgia. Maybe she’s just fucking with me.

So Christmas morning I wake alone, well, not entirely. My cat is remarkably good company, and a generous cuddler on winter nights. I climb down from the loft and heat some water on the stove. Some things never change, coffee being one of these solid fixtures of my days.

I take my coffee to my altar, sit on my cushion and light my candles. My life now has a generous space woven into it. I have time each morning undisturbed to set and say thank you for my life, to appeal to the forces of nature, and the deities I work with, to know them, to be of service to this life, that my family be held and well protected, that a new world be woven again out of the wreckage and ashes all around us.

As I sit on my cushion, something within me settles deeply. I feel the weight of my own form become somehow more solid and surrendered. I feel my breath become fuller and my eyes fill with tears. How grateful I am for my life, daily I am astounded by the depth of this feeling. Honestly, I can hardly believe the beauty. I can hardly believe that I get to be alive in a human body today. That I get to breathe air, a gift from the green bloods. I get to look up at my tallest friends, the Douglas firs that surround my home, I know there are ways now. I know how they look in the summer in the winter. I know how they look and the dawn and at 2:00 AM in the morning. I know their scent and they know mine.

Years ago a friend of mine who had been through a divorce told me that it was like a death. I listened, but I didn’t understand. I spent so many years in a marriage that felt like a prison, the anger and resentment in my heart growing high around, like a wall of briars that I couldn’t see through. I couldn’t understand that even through that impenetrable wall of thorns, that the ending of a marriage, my marriage, is a death. I couldn’t possibly understand then how painful it would be.

I sit at my altar and I allow myself to drop into the empty space between my ribs, around my heart, down towards my belly. It’s heavy and dark, it pulses with the soft ache of lost dreams. The tender hunger of a little girl that believed in forever. The desperate which gyrations of a young woman trying everything in her power to make something work that never could have. It was rotten at the center. My marriage had a grail king wound. and neither my husband or I knew to ask the sacred question. So it was never asked. And only festered. Until it grew large enough to swallow all of the attempts at beauty we had made.

Sometimes the space in my life feels like a joy, and sometimes and endless chasm. Over the last three years as I have learned to be a woman on my own in this world, I have had two, no, I have chosen to sit down and learn to face myself. The constant noise And endless doing that we find ourselves Addicted to and this time, are an incredibly convincing distraction. More space and time is what we all say that we want, but once we have that what will we do with it? And how does it actually feel to have the time to sit and know yourself.

I can only speak for myself. It is Absolutely gorgeous and totally terrifying. Without so much of the constant doing and hubbub of living in a small home with other people I find myself frequently deep in thought. Rolling ideas around in my mind, feeling my emotions and reactions more deeply, creating a rhythm of my days that holds me more gently.

Spending so much more time alone has dramatically changed the way that I move through the world. The sentience of the world has shifted, and life has come alive in a way far greater than I imagined was possible. You’re never alone when you feel connected to and held by the more than human world. The Douglas fir trees, my tall friends, know me and love me as much as I know and love them. And this is not an abstraction, this is not a thought, this is a deep knowing in my bones. We belong to each other. I to this land and this land and all her inhabitants to me.

It’s interesting to reflect on how aloneness has really taught me relationality. In the acute stage of rending, as my world tumbled apart, I felt that I would forever feel abandoned and alone. But gratefully that is not so. Gratefully I have not only a human community that loves me deeply, but I have found my way into the wide lap of this great and generous earth. And we have claimed each other. My life path utterly changed by this truth.

As I sit here now at the end of my second cup of coffee, I feel peace in the quiet around me. This day when we celebrate the birth of light, the birth of the holy, the possibility of the sacred walking the earth, I welcome the newness in my days. Even when there is a taste of sorrow, or a breeze of fear blows by me. I am eager to continue walking this path of my life, to see what is being born anew inside of me. And how it will root down and rise up in this world. As always I have more questions than answers, but I no longer think of that as a fault. I think of it as a gift. My life is a gift. One I am so grateful to receive.

From my quiet little home and heart to yours wherever you may be. I wish you comfort and joy, I wish you the sense of being held and tendered well, and I wish all of us peace on earth and goodwill towards all of life. Let us all birth the holy on our breath and with our hands, and do the good work of weaving a new world together.

The Voice of my Soul

October 24, 2021October 24, 20216 Comments

I have sat down three times in the last week, preparing to write a post about a journey that I took, both an outer journey in the form of a road trip, and an inner journey, diving deep into my soul and the lap of nature, through the ancient practice of vision fasting on the land. I sit down to write, and yet the words don’t seem to want to come. My attempts at coaxing them have been trying and I think I’m going to allow that experience to settle into my bones a little bit more before I share it here, though pieces of it may come forward sooner.

However, there is something coming forward to be spoken tonight, something unbidden and wild and terribly alive. Something that came clear to me on my time on the land, and made clearer over the last 24 hours. My body hums with something electric in nature, it’s not exactly excitement, it’s not exactly grief, I think it might be purpose. I think it might be my soul speaking. I think all of this time of wandering around and saying “what shall I do with my life?” It was right here in front of me. No, inside ME. Begging to be birthed into the world.

There’s a saying that goes something along the lines of “sometimes you need a story more than food to stay alive “

I agree with this, and I believe this. And what has been coming to me the last week is this deep knowing that what we need, much more than food, is ceremony. We are starving for a ceremony. Our children are starving, our families are starving, our schools and public organizations are starving, our souls, especially our souls are starving. And this is not something to be taken lightly, or turned away from, or seen as inconvenient, or that we just don’t have enough time. This I believe is deadly. We are starving for ceremony, and without it we are dying.

Yesterday my older brother called me when I was at work. He asked me if I was somewhere I could talk, he told me I might want to sit down. This is never good to hear. He told me he was going to tell me something that it was hard to hear, but he wanted me to hear from him. God, what a loving brother. He told me that a dear friend of ours had died the day before, that it looked as if he took his own life. These are the things we are never ready to hear, never ready to cope with, cope is a crap word, but you get the point. These are the types of wounds and sorrows that rip us open, that can fester for a long time,that call us reevaluate things in our lives.

My heart sank, like a cold stone settling down into my belly, the only thing I could say was “we loved him so much “and Matt said, “yeah, we loved him so much” and we wept together then, me sitting in my small office, and him at home, but both together in this grief.

This friend, this man that went down never to rise again, was a bright light of a human. Beloved by everyone, cherished, valued, believed in. He was gracious, hilarious, connected, and so very alive. The sorrow of his death is rippling out through our community like a boulder dropped in a small pond. The stories of love and care keep arising. My own memories keep surfacing and growing in form and texture. The vastness of the hole he leaves behind astounds me.

I’ve been thinking a lot about heartbreak lately. About love and grief and the way that they are twins of one another, the way they are inextricably woven, wedded. Like an infinity sign looping back on itself forever and ever, where one ends the next begins and so on and so forth.

I’ve been thinking about how to truly love is to be broken open. To be broken open again, and again allowing love and sorrow to rip through the very center of your being, and to not turn away. To keep your heart awake and aware, to keep your eyes turned to face whatever comes, to truly love is to lose. Is the fall, is to be broken. To love is to mourn, to regret, to weep. This may sound dark, that is not my intention. Nor is it to say that all of love is grief, of course this is not true, blessedly. But to be willing to stand in the fire of what love really means, requires a certain fortitude. A certain willingness to be with the trouble. To make one self large enough to hold suffering more enormous than you thought possible.

Let me now return to ceremony. In my four days and nights alone, fasting on the land, I came into the presence of myself that I had never known before. Deep healing happened and seeds of the future were planted. Both in my heart and in the land. I came away with an inarguable truth and knowing that my path in this life, and one of my offerings to this life, is the gift of ceremony. It seems so clear now, so simple, as if everything I’ve ever loved or longed for has been leading up to this, to step into the role of serving myself, and my community through offering healing ceremony, working in conjunction with the land, my guides and ancestors, the more than human realm, and the fully human realm.

It seems clear to me that ceremony is the key to bring us back into right relationship with all of life. And that this return to our place within the order of things is the balm for the broken-heartedness of our times. Wise, well, initiated adults are what are needed, to heal one another, to pull eachother out of the darkness, to know our purpose. When we are on purpose in this life, it is to precious to even consider throwing it away. We need a return to the tried and true ways of becoming human on the earth. And I am stepping in. I am stepping all in to service of life through the container of earth based ceremony.

My soul has spoken, and I have heard her. Loud and clear, the direction has been given, and to turn away now would be futile. The thing about the soul is she makes you work for it, she doesn’t deliver a full packet of instructions, she speaks in image, glimpses, urges and feelings. What does it look like for me to make my life a living vessel for ceremony to grow and to wrap around me, and my community? I’m not exactly sure yet. But I am sure that this is the healing that I am being called to, but this is the healing that is really needed in the world right now, and that I can think of nothing more important to do with my life.

Thank you for being here, for reading my words, for being a human in the world at least for one more day. If you need support in creating or tending in the ceremonial realm, please reach out to me. If you need an officiant for a wedding or a funeral, please reach out to me. Those are areas I have already had some practice in. As I continue to listen to the voice of my soul, and this calling from within grows and becomes more solid in form, you’ll be hearing from me. What a beautiful gift it is to travel through life together, hold your loved ones close.

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What is Disaster?

September 1, 2019Leave a comment

I wrote this short, unedited piece in my kitchen last week. In a flurry of madness to close the oven, wipe my hands, find a pen and give the words life before they abandon this host and move on to one more ready to receive them. The “bite” of a poem is a fast and fleeting as a fish on the line, if you are not ready, and your hands not fast, you may miss out all together. I have learned to drop everything and write, a charming first line beckoning in my mind seems to stale and sour if kept trapped for later in the notes section of my iPhone.

This poem is a response the fires burning in the amazon, and in my own life. I too, just as the Earth herself am in a massive die off, much of what I have held solid now melting away before my very eyes. I think of Joanna Macy’s language frequently, it seems business as usual has broken in my own life, and this is a great mercy. Could it be the great turning has come? Both within and without?

Disaster

They say on the news that the Earth is burning
the Amazon is on fire – Earths lungs scorched and charred
in a wicked rain of dust and ash.

I still have to get up and go to work tomorrow
and most likely- you do too
If the Earth is burning up – shouldn’t we stop and pay attention?

My heart longs for reckoning – meaning – action
but my body is so exhausted that I cannot even turn my face away
from that dreadful smoke filled screen.

What is it like to be a woman at the end of the world?
let me get some rest and I will tell you
just now- I am too bone-weary to even begin to think…

The world is burning up – but here it rains in August
my garden could actually use a little more sun
the weather is strange – but is it really a catastrophe?

Or is my own decimated heart
that old woman at work who never knows where she is
my daughter who may never know breath without fear again

These- are these catastrophes?

I don’t know
somehow from where I sit it seems
that both everything – and nothing means disaster

what becomes of meaning when there is no future?
It grows– oh god- it Grows

A woman at the end of the world
learns to love fiercely (she must)
or she has no chance at all.

Marianna – August 2019

Morning Practice

January 23, 2019January 20, 2019Leave a comment

I am going to start sharing more of my daily writing practice here. I am engaged in the practice of daily poetry writing, each morning before the world can rob me of my time to create and connect. These poems are not very worked, free form and unfiltered.
I have found it so interesting to be doing this morning writing through poetry, my morning writing used to be in the form of journaling. This poetry practice in some ways is more honest, more sincere, simpler and radically raw, than my journaling was. This form of writing allows me to express feeling more directly. I am enjoying the discipline of this daily practice and happy to share some of the writing that comes to being through this commitment to a daily honoring of the muse.

How long will it take to heal
The shattered pieces of my broken heart?
I sweep the rubble clean away – then low and behold
once again – disaster.
The roof is caving in and hurricane warnings tell me that
a storm’s coming, always is, on nights like this.
I plant seeds on the good days
days when warmth blooms in my chest
and I can see vision of summer evening – soft tides – soft smiles
I bury the seeds deep , to keep them safe until the grow
after the flood waters have receded
after the strong words have died down.
I place my hand on my chest
a shelter of a sort
to hold close this heart of mine
the temple of my love.
You are not forsaken – I tell her
Life leaves rubble in us all
we sweep and sweep again
we plant seeds and wait
it’s like the garden love-
give time – take time
one day a mighty Oak will grow
just don’t stop planting acorns.
These words are scattered seeds
this page a love letter to my own sweet heart
Take root now- grow.

photo- coast range, near burnt woods Oregon, baby big leaf maple.

Solstice Prayer

December 22, 2018December 22, 2018Leave a comment

The sky is dark- clear and cold,
dawn did not come until 8 oclock this morn.
Frozen ground firm beneath my feet
the first sun of this shortest day
reflects off diamond dusted boughs of cedar
leafy holly, hardy grasses
All ablaze with light.

In days gone by when winter crept into our homes
and cold claimed penance of the skins of those like you and I.
When darkness came at dusk and lasted all night long – all long night,
with only glow of candles flame to keep the dark away and cold away
in those days, this day, this shortest day- had meaning
had power.

The longest night- rabbit, underground
lies buried deep, warm bodies of her kin beside her.
Goose has flown south by now, warmer climes await
Squirrel, now nested, acorns stored in plenty,
even worm is tucked away, slumbering.
Until soil warms and springs good work begins again.

Human builds a fire- to drive the dark away
to welcome visions of spring
call warm days back
recall the smell of sweet grasses
the taste of May’s first strawberry
remembering the living world will bloom again….

the dance now calls our feet to dance, our bones to move, our voices chant
to pound our feet upon the earth- voices raised in sacred laughter
faces ruddy in the firelight
Call back the sun! Sing back the sun!
Pound hard on frozen earth with joy!
We have survived this longest night, to see
a new years morn arise again.

The sky brightens with the dawn
we greet the day, alive and well and grateful
For all that has come before
and all that will come after
the magic of surviving
of belonging – here- on this land and in this time
New years sun above us once again
and kinships bonds to keep us warm.

Solstice Blessings to Your Home and Hearth.
Marianna

We’re going to die one day….

November 12, 20185 Comments

I might not wake up tomorrow morning. Yes I am 37, and in apparent good health, but this is not a guarantee of another day breathing, not for me, nor for you dear reader. No matter your age. Life is precarious. Unlikely in fact, and the fortune that finds us here, me behind my screen typing away, and you reading me on yours is almost to much to bare.
This fact that we are alive, alive! and breathing is enough to make me draw that same breath in sharply with wonder, the awe of it all….but only when I am paying attention. Which I do confess I am not always doing, and more likely than not, even though today I am writing of the incredible power, fortune and beauty of being alive, by tomorrow morning I will most likely be griping about going to work and feeling less than charmed by my circumstances. This seems to be the way of it for me, at least for now.

And yet even in that, the remembering and forgetting, the high and the low, is life. In the words of Mary Oliver- my one wild and precious life. Which is not guaranteed, it has no warranty, no insurance, no claim, only presence. The only claim is the one I stake, the stake I put in my own fertile ground. How alive am I willing to be while I am still alive? How much can I love being here in this body? Today, it is enough to make me kneel and kiss the ground.

There is so much unlikely fortune at play in my life, small wonders that I so often take for granted, the spices and salt I use with such abandon, the foods in my fridge, my fridge itself! Water that runs clean, well reasonably so anyway, from the tap – warm or cold. I know my ancestors would have been in disbelief at these luxuries. My aim, my prayer is that my life be a living testament to the gratitude I feel for all this I am blessed with. For all this abundance and ease and wealth beyond what most women living in this world will ever see or know. These wealth’s I reference here are only a drop, a small one at that, of all that I am grateful for…truly. And sometimes I am still a shitty whiney human being. Sometimes I am pissed off cause I have to plan and cook my own dinner, and I am tired and worn down and so so lonely.

When I try to write about this I feel lost, spiraling around in my mind, the absolute wonder I have at being alive, the knowing that it will end. I will die, all this, all this beauty and wonder and love and aliveness will be gone…. I know it. I know it, deep in my bones kind of knowing, feel it in my belly kind of knowing. Its not a theory or an inkling, or an idea. I am going to die one day. Wouldn’t it seem, that in knowing this I would stay present to the magic that is my life? That I would each moment of each day be singing praise for all that has been given by this great blue planet and my ancestors that dreamed me into being here? If I am going to die, why in Gods name would I ever watch a TV show?!

But I do, in fact Outlanders upcoming new season is being eagerly anticipated by me right now. I can’t wait for more Jamie Frazier in my life, or on my screen anyway.
So what gives with this dichotomy? Am I missing something, does my lack of vigilance with how I use my time mean that I am less than stunned by the beauty of this human beingness? I am not sure. I seem today to only have many, many questions. Perhaps there are more question marks in this post than any prior one I have written. I say perhaps because I have not counted and I will not, I have more important things to do! Like sit and type and wonder at the apparent insanity of my own existence.

I just don’t want to miss a thing. When I get to the end of this run, this life of mine, I want to leave knowing I drank every drop. Be it next year or 70 years from now, I want to leave this earth exhausted by the beauty of it all. So I wrestle with myself, with my choices, my done and undone deeds. I suppose it is human to do so, to take a tally every now and then. Thing is, I don’t think there is a score per say, only a knowing, a felt sense of purpose, fulfillment or lack there of, connection or disassociation. All in all I think I am pretty damn present to my life. And yet, there is learning to happen there as well.

As I go to sleep each night, I do take time to reflect on the beauty of my days and ways. As I rise I rejoice to feel breath moving in my body once again. I bless my food and know that it is not a given to be well fed and housed. I know I am here by the grace of those who came before me, my kin, human, animal, plant, stone…. the truth is, if I was truly present each moment to the majesty this all is, I would be weeping on the ground. It is to beautiful to ever fully grasp it. This life. To precious for words.

May I wake up tomorrow, another day to learn and love, and maybe even watch a little Outlander. May you wake up as well. And if the Gods are willing, someday perhaps our paths will cross, and we can speak of such things as life and death, beauty and sorrow, the meaning of it all, the majesty of this life. Until then, may you be known by your old ones, and may you in turn teach your young ones well.

Marianna

In Defense of a Simple Life

September 3, 20184 Comments

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

Clear Cut, Reclaiming the Desecrated Lands

May 17, 2018May 17, 20182 Comments

I walked alone, gravel beneath my feet, rough even through the soles of my worn rubber boots. These are not boots for hiking but foolishly were all I had brought with me. I love them, red and well fitting, perfect for foraging in wet land and working in my garden, less than ideal for gravel and elevation changes. Yet, they would do. I walked slowly, no dog, no company, I set my own pace. The pace at which I could absorb the most green freshness possible, breathing it into my lungs, my whole body aching for this, this communion with the more than human world.

I had gathered greens already that day, the sink at the cabin had a large bowl of nettles in water waiting for me to feast on them that evening. My foraging bag hung empty, tied to a strap on my backpack, no goal in mind, no aim. I simply walked.
It is cool along Shot Pouch creek, dense canopy above and moving water beside the road creating a tunneled effect, breeze moving through, kissing my body. It was not hot, but warm in the sun and to walk there, in the shade felt divine.

As I crossed a small bridge and rounded a bend in the road, my path began to move upward, leaving the creek behind, now only a small trickling stream ran beside me, silent as it moved over rocks and fallen branches, forming the occasional 3 inch deep pool, travelling down to meet with the waters of Shot Pouch. Ahead the canopy was fading, giving way to sunlight. I could see the brightness ahead of me as I continued to climb, focusing on the plant life, the birds, 3 butterfly varieties I had never seen before. And then I was in the sun.

I stopped suddenly, trees behind me, in front of me a graveyard. A torn mountain top, a logging truck abandoned on the side of the road, tires flat and vines growing up, reclaiming it, nature is not elitist, she takes everything as her own. I felt stunned a moment, unable to walk, I just stared. I have never been in a clear cut before, harsh and jarring, I could smell the sawdust in the sun, the wind was stronger here, the butterflies were gone.

Desecration- there is no land that is sacred and land that is not sacred, only land that is sacred and land that has been desecrated. The many stumps were themselves torn, a jagged line through the center of each, a spikey crest where the wood tore as the tree fell. The piles of branches, bark and snags were huge, 15 feet high or so. The entire surface of the earth covered with the remnants of the fallen ones, littered with past lives of what once was, bodies of trees strewn like waste on the ground.

“What was it like to watch them fall?” I asked the still standing trees, my heart in my throat and beating very loudly. Waves of grief and recognition flowing through me, I began to walk, still climbing the road, slowly, eyes open and filled with tears.

I recalled a story told to me by my Auntie, of my brother as a young one. Seeing a logging truck roll by them as they came home from a camping trip. On seeing the logs piled high he had become very quite and then asked in his small voice ” but what happens to the souls of the trees?”
My heart broke for him, for me, for the trees who’s souls where displaced as their bodies fell. I can’t speak for all trees, or all clear cuts, and certainly not for all experiences, but for me, that day, the souls of the trees were there, circling that wreckage and wailing like banshees, longing to be seen and remembered and grieved. So grieve I did.

I walked to the top of the cut land, the edge of where green life began again, high above the pits, snags and torn earth. I sat among the dry rubble, rough under my legs, took my boots off and put my feet on the broken pieces of life resting under me. A wise teacher I am blessed to know has told me, “look for your God’s in desecrated places, you may find them hiding there.” I looked, looked hard with my eyes and my heart, and sure enough, the land rose up in answer to me. I could feel the love and longing of this place, the loneliness, the heartbreak. So much like my own.

Hunger growled in my belly, so I took my food out of my pack, this feeling like the right place to take my simple meal. Eggs, cold sausage, seed crackers. I ate there in the scarred land, high above the world. Looking out over the clear cut and beyond to hills forested and green, bird songs filled the trees behind me and circling over the barren land, birds of prey glided softly on currents of air. It was right and good to eat there, feeding my body as my prayers fed the land, feeding my soul as the land filled me. Greif and reverence mixing together in my gut. A witness to this destruction, a sorrowful ambassador, atoning in my way for the wrongs of my own kind.

I spoke to the land, poured out my prayers, begged for forgiveness, poured a libation of spring water on the parched earth, sang medicine songs and stood with me feet bare and my eyes open, sometimes seeing is enough, sometimes speaking is enough, and sometimes nothing is enough, the pain still remains. Some wrongs cannot be righted, sometimes contrition is the best we can give.

As I sat and prayed, my eyes and mind began to see another layer to this place, life. Clinging desperately to the hillsides, growing and rooting even in this seemingly unlikely place. Sword ferns burned by sun, Salal cheerfully spreading her leaves, Oregon grape so very hearty, even small trees beginning to again root here. Life returning to the land, maybe it had never left, some survived, some remained. A bright bird, red and gold, so very exotic for Oregon, burst forth from the trees behind me in joyful song. Life.

The sun growing lower in the sky I began to make my way down the hill, still speaking to the land and fallen trees, my voice the only tool for healing that I carry with me always. Words with intention have a magic of their own. I picked up a piece of wood, my intention being to take it home, to keep this place with me, to bless and love, to gather in that which was torn apart. Then stopped again to put it down, realizing that it was not mine to take, perhaps that one wanted to stay there, close to the ones that it fell with, touched by sun and rain, kissed by wind and snow, part of this place, not mine.

As I bent to set it down, kissed it and put its body on the earth, my eye saw a familiar shape, Morel. Morel! Here in this harsh dry place a proud mushroom stood, growing in the bark pile at the verge of the road. I was elated, never having found them before, and my gathering sack still hanging near my hip. I felt a knowing in my body that these ones were for me. A gift from the land, a precious gift. I gathered just a few, cutting them with my small knife. A knife made for me by the hands of my dear husband, may be my most treasured possession, to use it in this way so fitting, so very right. These ones would come with me, in me, become me. This place now living in my bones.