As I write this I am listening to ancient Greek circle dance music. After high school I spent a year WWOOFing, traveling from one organic farm to another, exchanging labor for room, board, and instruction in horticulture and permaculture. My travels began in North Carolina, led me to Oregon, Ireland and France, and eventually dropped me at the Springfield, MA bus station, looking out the window at the scruffiest pair of derelicts I’d ever laid eyes on.
“Please, let it not be them,” I muttered under my breath as I exited the bus with my framepack and guitar, scanning the crowd hopefully for more wholesome-looking farmer-types. But sure enough, it was that scruffy pair of derelicts who had come to escort me on the next stage of my journey. I climbed into their rusted repurposed ambulance, and thus began two of the most soulful, most transformative friendships I have ever been privileged to build. Continue reading →
I took my first driving lesson today. I’m not counting the time that a man I was doing a landscaping project with left me in his truck, in neutral, on a hill, to jumpstart my learning process. Or the time that my boyfriend drove me to my evening bellydance class only to discover it was canceled; he took one look around the cavernous, deserted parking lot and decided he’d use the time to teach me how to execute figure eights with an engine instead of my hips. It was a giddy, pleasurable evening, but we broke up soon afterward and with no follow through, I forgot everything I’d learned.
I am thirty four years old and have never driven a car. Over the years I’ve had to explain myself thousands of times, and my story has evolved to suit my audience. (I eventually told the story so many times that I wrote it down. I’ve put it in the “Stories” section, if you want the background.) It actually pisses some people off that I don’t drive. Others think it’s compelling. Many, most of my close friends included, simply don’t notice. I’m quite skilled at finding my way nearly anywhere by foot, bike, bus, or thumb. I’ve had life-changing adventures that would never have blossomed had there been an easy, gasoline-powered alternative. And the botanist in me has never stopped believing that variety will be the saving of our species. The more diverse our strategies, the higher our likelihood of survival. So we need a handful of people who negotiate the first world without cars. I was more than happy to be one of them. Continue reading →
To all my beloved male readers (if, indeed, there are any?)—will you please help me out?
Next week, our women’s joy circle is opening to men. This is scary for me.
I have loved men, I have deeply bonded with men, I have birthed men, but the sacredmasculine still remains mysterious and a bit forbidding to me.
I believe that at the holy core of masculine experience is a deep faith and desire to serve that is staggering in its strength and purity. I believe this because I have seen it again and again, and it leaves me breathless.
So why is it that when women gather to talk about men, the traits that we most often complain about are the faithlessness, the egocentrism of our partners and lovers?
The work I have done with women—with myself—is to slowly regain the inner equilibrium of the divine feminine. This equilibrium expresses itself as a beautiful self-sufficiency and joyful caretaking. I cannot do this work with men, because I do not know what it is to be a man.
But I can open our circle to men, with love, and show them what we have done. And we can share our self-sufficiency, our joyful caretaking, our carefully tended well of divine femininity, in hopes of inspiring an emergence of that soaring, sacred masculine that weakens the knees and staggers the breath.
Or maybe there will be a lot of awkward silences and giggling. This is why I need your help.
In the comments below, will you do the human race a solid and answer the following questions? (And female readers, will you pass these on to the men in your lives? I really, really, desire some answers before next Monday!)
1. What makes you feel comfortable and safe around women?
2. What do you most fear/dislike about women?
3. If you could ask a woman any question without fear of offending her, what would it be?
4. What is your deepest wish for the women in your life?
5. What do you most appreciate about women?
If you don’t want to answer these questions in the comments, you can also answer them anonymously by taking this survey: PLEASE TAKE THIS SURVEY!
Thank you, so much, for your honesty and bravery! Next week I’ll write how it all went, and spill some juicy secrets, and hopefully answer some of your questions. In closing, the sexiest appreciation of men I’ve ever heard.
It has taken me so long to plant my little garden here. There was far too much information coursing through my mind—ecotones and hedges, guilds, layered food forests, medicinal companion plants, swales and ponds and microclimates. I would gaze out at the muddy clay of this unfamiliar soil and feel too overwhelmed to start.
Or, more truthfully, too fearful of making a mistake. Of not building a garden complex enough, beautiful enough, after all of these years of landscape design and permaculture training. Garden after garden that I’ve designed, labored over, loved, and left behind. After a while it hurts. So I built no garden here.
But somewhere I read this, or heard this—I forget now where— “the perfect is the enemy of the good.” And I realized that I was doing what I have done far too often in my life, letting my desire for perfection inhibit me from acting at all. Continue reading →
I brought a lot away from the radical pleasure workshop I taught March 30th with the inimitable Briana Schuck and the incomparable Laura Alvarez. The ringing one-liner, though, the kernel around which last night’s joy circle crystallized, was something Briana said about the difference between a want and a desire.
When you want something, you are aware of a lack. You are bemoaning what isn’t. There is a gulf between you and what it is you want.
I wrote this song in the throes of want, languishing in an unhealthy relationship and confused about what I really wanted. The misery of wanting is downright audible!
When you desire something, however…ahhh. You feel it in your body. You come alive with the tingling sensation of desiring this beautiful thing. You luxuriate in the knowledge that it is already in you. And you celebrate every time you see what you desire, because the fact that it exists at all just lights you up.
Last night’s joy circle was a celebration of desire. We ate the lavender-infused truffles I keep going on and on about (because they are THAT GOOD) and sipped kombucha and rose petal tea. We did a lot of yoga. We turned off the lights, lit candles, and had a sweaty no-holds-barred dance party with the delicious help of Modest Mouse, Florence + The Machine, MC Yogi, and Garmarna. And then we settled in with our notebooks and wrote down our desires.
When you write down a desire, it should feel really, really good. Your whole body should come alive. Here’s an example:
“I desire an exquisite, handbuilt earthen cottage set into acres of gardens, overflowing with light and scent and flowers. I desire built-in windowseats with bookshelves for curling into on a rainy morning, and an airy kitchen with space for all of my drying herbs. I desire a little bathroom with large, light-filled windows and a clawfoot bathtub surrounded by blooming scented geraniums and dozens of varieties of lavender. I desire gardens that contain cherry, raspberry, peach, plum, sea buckthorn, goji, jojoba, hawthorn. I desire winding paths through my acres of medicine herbs and food forests that end at a year-round creek that supplies my little home with abundant microhydro energy, a cool place to submerge and swim in summer, a quiet place to meditate in winter.
I desire to share this beautiful space by hosting earth-centered events, exuberant parties circling on the wheel of the year, counseling circles, healing herbal gatherings and permaculture courses.”
Wow. That feels so good, just writing it again. So different from wanting it...desiring it, feeling it, sensing it already there. It’s a joy to desire something. It’s agony to want it.
Knowing what you desire is an immense boon to those around you. Taking the time to write down your desires, in great detail and specificity, gives all of your tumbling tumultuous creative energy a locus point. And in time, you become so comfortable with what it is that you really, truly want that you recognize it when it comes. You make the choices that lead you to it. You tell everyone you meet about the fulness of your desires and they voluntarily enlist in helping you achieve them.
Because our deepest, truest desires are for the things that lead us home. And when we are home, creating what we were made to create, living the life that lights us up, we are doing the best good we are capable of.
I’ve been musing lately over the relationship between our treatment of our bodies and our treatment of the earth. For many of us, our bodies are the only animal we have close contact with each day; they become our exposure to the natural world, the only wild landscape we inhabit.
Yet think of our bodies: we work them, groom them, put chemicals on them; we sanitize them, remove some parts, and inject foreign substances into others. If we take the time to think of them, it is with frustration or dislike.
If there is a locus point for this analogy, it is the soles of the feet–where we touch earth. I love the biblical story of Martha and Mary. As Martha bustled around, righteously busy, Mary ignored what I imagine was a lot of passive-aggressive sighing and carrying on, and focused on sensuously bathing Jesus’s feet. When Martha complained, Jesus stuck up for Mary, essentially stating “she’s got her priorities straight!”
When we really think about it, where has all of our righteous busy work gotten us? Would we not be better served to slow down and bathe the feet of those we love, tend the places of connection, honor the hard work of these bodies, these landscapes?
I’ve been building gardens lately, spreading compost and decomposed leaves and layering bark into pathways. I take great pleasure in doing this work barefoot, the warming soil of spring beneath my feet. At the end of the day it is hard to tell where the earth ends and my feet begin. Last night, after dancing contra barefoot, I returned home and set the water on to boil. I scooped a little sea salt and honey into an empty lemon peel, then used the peel to carefully scrub the soles of my feet. When the water boiled I poured it into a mason jar filled with fresh rosemary, let it steep, then added it to a basin of warm water and slipped my salt-and-honey-coated feet in. I sat there for several minutes, letting the rosemary tea work its magic, feeling so grateful. For everything.
This is a recipe I have used with great effect in my workshops; tending people’s feet tends to bring them right into a state of receptive openness for whatever comes next. To tend your feet or those of a loved one, here’s what you’ll need:
-Mason jar filled with fresh rosemary, lavender, calendula, or rose petals (dried is fine; you’ll need about 1/2 cup)
-Boiling water
Pour the water over your herbs and leave to steep for several minutes. Strain, and add this strong tea to a basin of warm water. Add a tablespoon or so of baking soda for especially tough callouses, and a few drops of essential oil if you like (rosemary and lavender are both wonderful.) Have a towel ready near the basin.
Place the honey and salt in the cup of the peel; use it as a washcloth to gently exfoliate the skin of your feet over the basin of tea. Place your feet in the basin and continue to wash them with the citrus peel. Relax.
It has been a while since I’ve written, but I have the best of reasons. For the past ten days, I’ve been sojourning in my old hometown, too busy living and creating and experiencing deep beauty to write. Also, my computer was broken.
elder blossom
But now, I do want to write, I want to write about all of it, and I am overwhelmed with all there is to say. So I will start slow. I will tell you about my Saturday morning.
I woke at the top of a mountain, before dawn. My hosts were still sleeping (not graced, as I was, by the benefits of jetlag) and so I slipped out quietly to walk. The air was cold, touched lightly by a fog rising from the sea, and smelled of sage, salt, and artemisia. The gate at the end of the road that led to the park was still locked, so I slung my bag over it and climbed carefully over the spikes.
All this little-known path was lined with flowers, bougainvillea blooming into huge melting puddles along the ground, spicy gallardia, geraniums escaped from someone’s long-ago garden. I tucked several blooms into my hair. A lemon had tumbled down to freedom from a fenced-in tree, and I ate it. The peels I kept for the feast I had planned with friends later.
The front side of this mountain is set with several stories of recycled-concrete steps, and each morning they are lined with fitness pilgrims marching all the way to the top. I took great delight in floating past them in my skirt and sandals, taking the path of least resistance for once. The sun was rising now, and the mountains all took light with breathtaking suddenness. No one stopped climbing—they were facing the wrong way—but I first froze at the beauty, then started running, two steps at a time, laughing all the way down. Continue reading →
English: Persephone kidnapped by Hades. (Photo credit: Wikipedia)
A few years ago I heard herbalist Deborah Frances use sacred stories to describe the rhythms of living in a female body. She spoke about the underworld journey of Persephone, and the plants whose medicine specifically strengthens women who go on that journey. I have been pondering this ever since.
Yesterday evening we gathered in a circle and took some time just to breathe. I am coming off of a long illness (that I recently realized was in part due to a severe iodine deficiency— a widespread, dangerous, sneaky condition worth checking into!) Just standing there, breathing, felt wonderful.
Our topic for the night was ‘Everybody’—you know, Everybody. As in “Everybody will think I’m a failure if I don’t go to grad school” or “Everybody knows good mothers don’t go on long trips without their children” or “Everybody will think I’m crazy if I quit my job.” The interesting thing about Everybody is that it’s different for each person. Everybody is cobbled together of our family, peers, significant others, perhaps even a few acquaintances we met just once. Unfortunately, Everybody does not have our best interests in mind.
We people our Everybody with the MOST critical people we’ve ever encountered. This is reasonable, really, because if we carry these critical voices internally and use them to guide our behavior, then hurtful people won’t get the chance to shame us again. The problem is, unless we are aware of our Everybody, this can get real maladaptive real fast…imagine choosing your career based on what your dead grandmother thought was appropriate for a young lady? Or your evening attire based on an ex-boyfriend’s long ago comment? We all do this. So tonight, we decided to figure out who was on our Everybody panel… and do some hiring and firing. Continue reading →
Recently I received an acrimonious letter from a person who has been a great teacher (read: tremendous pain in the a**) in my life. As I was composing my reply, carefully choosing each word, deleting many entire drafts, it struck me how much time I have spent communicating with this individual. Hours upon hours: deliberating over how, and whether, and with which medium I should communicate. Days: reading his poison-pen diatribes over and over, taking each painful word deep within.
And I thought about how I dash off letters to my friends–fragments of sentences, sometimes omitting both my name and theirs, when I remember to write at all. I suddenly recalled a handwritten love note sent to me years ago, still tucked carefully away in the secret drawer of my desk. When had I last read it? Continue reading →
truebeautyalways 