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Hello friends,
I started this note a couple weeks ago, and had intended to send on the new moon, but life has its ways. So today, on solstice, is the day! You may find another little treasure in your inbox soon because I am feeling inspired. I debated sending this one along, how to work with pieces underway when new inspirations hit? I’ve decided to just send it! Sometimes more abundnant lots of let’s do this, is okay! And it fits this note perfectly. I have a bonfire ready from weeks of working with my yards debris and duff and old pallets ready to toss on the pyre. If the wind stays down it will be quite the fire, and deep late evening when the dark finally arrives here in the northern hemisphere. To those in the southern, I send you some glow on your solstice.
Often I forget, opposites hold the self same energetics. The whole pendulum is a ride through this truth, and as Jon Kabbat Zin notes in his book Wherever You Go, There You Are1, “not doing yoga, is doing yoga”. Not practicing, is still a kind of practice. If it sounds a little like old men with long chin beards in a 70’s kung-fu movie talking in circles over tea, it is! But experientially we all kind of know that we learn everything on the same flipping coin. This has stuck with me. It’s tough to put into words, isn’t it? Poetry has always been easier in that way for me, and interpretive dance, or simply standing shoulder to shoulder silently in awe of a tree. But this is a writing practice, and so I try to transmit something of its flavor in the middle of my stretching limbs. This note is about the front porch, and the medicine of portent questions, and how we slowly and steadily receive the information which will set us free, if we are keen enough to see ourselves. And in all loving goodness, even if we are not. Practicing, and not practicing.
Tasting the bloom of our very real lives.
It’s my 46th birthday month. And there’s no denying it. I am here, wherever I’ve been. I took a long look around at my vast library of books. I see the question on every cover: Where does this wound come from? Driving me (you?, us?), on and on to discover its sources, to uncover the delicate roots entangling. I have spent the better part of 30 years (an exhale as I recognize the right of passages here, yes, since puberty; is this when we realize, something is undone already? and then possibly as we traverse our mid-life, as our bodies shift again… we re-visit) trying to understand the answers to this question, but I’m reminded it’s experience that nourishes my questions. My answers arrive; in the flower bed, in the bending arc of the near summer’s sun pressing its shine on my front porch, the wholeness embodied in
it is time to see
this is how you invite in now
This week I have been working with a newly revived, old interest of mine, wildcrafting and making medicine. It’s so much fun to consider each element of this practice! Research. Listening alongside nature. Apprenticing shapes, colors, smells. Finding and connecting with a place, a micro and macro landscape.
I spent my birthday collecting arnica in the high mountains near my home, looking up how to preserve its alchemy for future me’s aches and pains, reaching out to friends in the know, reading the library of herbal books my lifetime of collecting interests bequeathed me, and revisiting ones I sat with for hours as a child that were once on my mom’s bookshelves. I felt a kind of full circle return to something I had always loved.
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I set the arnica flowers to wilt, which I learned is a good idea, filled a quart jar with their golden petal and pistil, slender green stems and poured a luxuriant amount of oil to fill the jar. I placed the glass quart in the hot sun, come out in full brilliance after weeks of cumulus, wind and cool, on the deck, which my partner had scrubbed and sanded of oils and stains weeks ago. As it goes with warming and filling to the brim, it weeped oil all over the railing. I moved it near the flowerbed at the base of our entry steps half hoping the bricks might stay oil free, but knowing I just needed to remove some oil or add a lid.
When making the oil I learned it’s helpful to let the moisture out of the wilted but not dried arnica by keeping it covered with a breathable (read: leaky and wicking) material like cheesecloth or a thin flour sack cloth; or lace. Our south facing entrance is baked with sun, and especially in the northern latitudes as the sun hefts its glory all the way up to the peak of our patio roof, it is like a beam of light traveling directly to my porch. Maketh these herbs potent it says! Set the paint to stripping off the trimboards. Grow the biggest succulents! It’s the perfect spot for the brewing and curing of all kinds of earthy, witchy things and setting things into the vibrant yang arc of the pendulum.
When I was around 9 my best friend and I made witchy brews that we would concoct, save and later try out for their magic powers. One such batch was made from all the dirt filled plant we could find, toothpaste, mouthwash, some other liquids and elixirs we scavenged from around the home. Nothing too toxic, but nothing we ought to drink either. We had waited for what in my young mind felt like years, but was likely weeks, to take the bottle out of the cupboard in the green bathroom, our creative sanctuary of fern wallpapered walls, bamboo handled cupboards filled with my mom’s non-bathroomy things: rosewater, crayons, cut dried flowers and embroidered tablecloths from my grandmothers; its fully mirrored sink vanity cut into large squares. We sat on the pastel swirl of green faux marble counter on either side of the sink, multiplicities of us broken into tiny squares and infinite bathrooms, and told each other that if we began to laugh hysterically and couldn’t stop then it was a true brew. We sipped. We looked into the mirror at our Selves. Laughter ripped through the room, tears streaming down, eyes wide with knowing that what we had created was indeed powerful, ours, to be guarded within our sacred green lair. We laughed our bellies strong, and then some more. We couldn’t stop, eventually we wore ourselves ragged with the premonitions and inside jokes we had made about our witchy powers. We swore off brew making for awhile after that, and decided the magic(k!) was far too mysterious for us to continue. We told ourselves we would be back to make more magic when we knew whereabouts it came. For some reason I think of the tale of the red shoes2, eventually we took other medicines that weren’t our own. Don’t we all, in some small way, forget this power of creation along the way?
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At the bottom of the steps, on the edge of the brick, a familiar old friend of mine, the desire to fill myself with old, rusty, comfie, well worn things caught my attention. As sure as any portent question could divine, I was told it was time to let in another type of energy, a new, shiny, available, attractive energy. I was told this by a rusty bucket up-cycled to planter (can you hear the wholeness from this statement too? we get to hear from more than each other in this world!) filled with lilies that come back brilliantly year after year. I had a shocking sense of struggle, of survival as I looked at my rust filled pot comfortably blending in at the entry of my home. It was pure yin energy, it was gorgeous, merged. And I realized (felt, wordless) that in the heart of its own deteriorating I was asking this releasing vessel to bring *in energy* through my front door. I am a being born so truly sensitive I feel this information in my body. Feng shui isn’t the lens I’m working with here, though it likely intersects. I’m really just talking with a rusty pot! Truly bizarre, and totally normal occurances. As an energy practitioner I feel a responsibility to note that I personally find it most helpful when we do place our experiences into a pre-structured system, like feng shui for example, if it’s potentially culturally appropriating or semi-untethered to our own work (unless it isn’t!), we do it in partnership with our own felt physical response to objects, orientations or patterns we’re honoring or discovering. Does this feel true to me now? These are living practices. Pointing practices, not telling. And for the most part I find them common sense, or what I call innate. I won’t turn around and tell you not to put a rusty pot at your entrance! So this expression isn’t so much : always place this color at the entrance, or element to that direction, but is more intersectional in that this information came from a whole engagement of native systems held in my inner and outer nature and understanding from practice. I’m so new to expressing all this outside of myself in words that aren’t energetic signatures themselves (poems, hybrids, lyrical texture, embodied sculptures) ~ if you have more to add ~ or comments on this description and process, would love to hear it! Maybe I didn’t need to add this, but there was a part of me going, it’s an entry, so um, ya. Invite shit in! I don’t believe that’s always the case, and this is an instance where it is, because:
I absolutely love
old, rundown, beautiful, forgotten things. They feel safe, real, unapologetic; me. They are the signature of organic processes, cycles. I derive deep pleasure out of finding used, castaway objects, and repurposing them. The juxtaposed tension of old and new, and the lovely alchemy rusty metal has on the colors of blooms. It’s not about the pot, really, it looks good here, it could stay. Maybe you have something akin to this, something you hadn’t noticed, but suddenly it dawns on you, you have changed, your tastes, needs, ways of looking at life, have shifted. A new medicine has arrived.
As surely as these feelings arose in my body mind a tender understanding, a sense of placement and gestures revealed over time, rose to greet me.
I was given over to this understanding:
fill your entry with life giving, fresh and brilliant new things. A shiny colorful pot, new and freshly glazed (I could taste the luscious rich colors ~ nourish me here) to incite and invite in the energetics of new life (felt down in the belly ~ being born). Of come see me here and enter this place (heart opening is soft). Celebrate, protect, energize, circulate what’s fresh.
That it’s okay (ah, this ease of safety) to invite. In that moment I could feel release: everywhere I have held the view of restraint in the spaces of expansion. Of negate in spaces of shine. Of someone else’s medicine or shoes, or vision. My own protection. Gone.
My heart felt peaceful, it wasn’t an epiphany of sound, or exclamation, but of a remnant spell finally blowing off on a gentle breeze.
Our life is courting us.
Gifts come with their own pendulums, they come with tradeoffs. We ride them back and forth until one day they simply fall at our feet in the middle of our everyday life.
For me, for so long I’ve felt tethered to losses of unencumbered exuberance, of heightened vigilance, in trade for a capacity to sit satsang with pain, to see life’s tragedies and the beauty in loss and decay. But I’ve also many times held restraint and pain as a badge of honor, as a place where my integrity meant I was safe, sturdy, unassuming, humble in the way I put myself in the ground to rust and not shine too bright. Rebalancing this has been the arc of a wounding. My biggest teacher has been learning to shine, through all this dimming.
What if joy is right under our nose?
What if we embrace everything, and let it tell us where it wants to bloom or decay?
What if we let something knocking, in?
Are we brave enough to be someone shiny and new?
Are we same brave to let it all go?
Here now, on my patio there is a well placed, considered, felt, energy supporting the best kind of qualities: attention and tenderness, recognition of wholeness, choice, exuberance, discernment, equilibrium. Medicine. Untethered. Swinging. Flowing.
Perhaps this is the absolute geomancy, feng shui, environmental protector: our relationship to now. Our sensing being receiving through the antenna of our body life’s love language on its terms.
If you ever have the opportunity to work with arnica plants you’ll notice their leaves are heart shaped (Arnica cordifolia, or Heartleaf Arnica is one of the varieties that grows near me). ❤️🌼
Today: I am choosing to dress myself with divine laughter, from the belly, opening the sacred green lair back up, letting the medicine of ease and play into my heart, shining out all my gifts to welcome others on to my front porch, this newsletter stoop.
Welcome!
And happy longest (or shortest) day of the year, whatever latitude you’re orienting from today. May the pendulum swing beautifully and rest where you are seated center, just so, this dynamic middle, breeze blowing off a remnant spell towards your liberation.
I’m trying out bookshop.org for linking books I recommend, they support indie bookshops and buying through my links you can support me with a small kickback. I noticed other writers and authors doing this and they were people I admired so I decided to try it out. I would much rather do this than send you to Amazon! Where possible I will send you to internet archive, the authors own website or the publisher themselves. Thanks for your support of my research and for supporting authors by reading or buying their books.
“The Red Shoes is a dramatic excursion into the realm of the soul with analyst Clarissa Pinkola Estés. In our culture, she begins, we may travel life’s path in one of two ways: 1) in handmade shoes, crafted with love and care according to the unique needs of the individual soul; or 2) in Red Shoes, which promise instant fulfillment, but ultimately lead to a painful, hollow "split" existence… By listening to your instinctive forces, she says, you can free yourself of the exterior traps that torment and destroy the soul. This is the way to construct a life that is uniquely your own―"a life made by hand." The Red Shoes is a treasury of ideas and counsel, threaded with magical storytelling about the complete life each one of us deserves to lead.”