Tag Archives: Touchstone Farm

Women’s Joy Circle: Sacred Circles

1049059_10151531378135749_496021118_oI have been remiss in posting lately, and I apologize.  Summer is gardening and long days at the stream picking mulberries and creating new herbal infusions and cordials and rosemary cakes and wonderful kombucha pickles, summer is leisurely visits with friends and watching the children catch fireflies.  My laptop just doesn’t even begin to figure in.

This week has been full to overflowing with laughter, realizations, music, dance, and incredible food, courtesy of my adored friend Anja who has been visiting from New England.  There is nobody like Anja.  As a child she used to bike several miles to her school, collecting apples and pears from wild trees along the way, then joyfully handing them out in the city.  When she was 15 she decided never to wear shoes, and went barefoot everywhere.  She sewed skirts out of old scarves and traveled all over Europe collecting folk songs and studying herbal medicine.  Now she leads circle dances, teaching ancient steps that peel away everything but the sense of sacred time.  She uses laughter about as often as words to communicate.

She traveled down from new england to help us dance the summer solstice in.  We gathered candles and torches and cakes and kombucha and scarves and guitars and packed them all into the car, merrily traveling toward the outdoor pavilion where the dance was to be held.  Then the heavens opened.  I mean it.  It was as though someone had slashed a hole in the sky and instead of space, there was an ocean up there.  The car was not driving, it was swimming along the road, and there was no airspace between raindrops.  There was only water. Continue reading

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Women’s Joy Circle: Divine Feminine, Sacred Masculine

Franz von Stuck Ringelreihen

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

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April 23, 2013 · 3:16 pm