Friday, December 6, 2013

I Speak for Tree and Forest

Just because I don't say anything doesn't mean I don't know anything
Rooted here, aging, I can't help but know.
I know when the sun comes and when it goes
I know when the rains fall and the waters flow
I know that lightening strikes, that the winds rage
I know dry spells, scarcity, scorch and scathe

I know thirst, the yearning for life juice
And I know bounty, abundance; wholeness too
I know when the seasons shift
I know when something is amiss

I know fragmentation
Habitation destruction 
Senseless wasteland production
A war against our own womb
I know short-sightedness
Lovelessness turned lustfulness
For power, weapons and control
Beneath this ancient domination
A sad need to be seen
Something missing
A hole needing filling
And for lack of love
They fill it with money
Made out of my leaves

I know injury, trauma
I know grief
I know my sister tree who died next to me
I know dark; and I know light
I know acceptance
And patience
And letting go

I know more than meets the eye
Eyes I have none
But wiser am I
For my blind feeling into earth and sky
With my rooting roots and sensing shoots
Rings in my wood storing stories so true

If you listen
Listen differently
I would tell you
All that I know

Saturday, October 26, 2013

Canning: every broken jar is a resource

Vats of boiling water
CLUNK-POP
Oh no
Not another one!
BROKEN
Peaches float about
Frustration
Indignation
I don't know what to do
Why this keeps happening
I've tried everything
I'm tired
I want to stop

And then I realize that I could.
The only thing holding me
To this task of canning peaches
Is my own self will
My heart-desire to re-skill
My deep knowing that this is ever so important

Patience befalls as my body eases into this wisdom
I need not succumb to discouragement
I need not get angry at broken jars
For they are not failures at all
But precious, precious resources
In my learning journey

With each one is filed away
In my memory and my body
What to do when this happens
What happens when I do this
Now I have that knowledge
Now I have this skill
That I will build
In canning seasons yet to come

And it is part of the shift
Already it makes a difference
Like all those other resources
Edges I am living.

"Pretty" by Katie Makkai


Really great spoken word!

Sunday, July 14, 2013

One step beyond

Noticing that in nature flows and structures complement one another, that when one can be sensed, the other is there too even if it is harder to identify ... noticing that nature is marvelously exuberant in profuse exemplars and instances of the interplay of membrane and vibration too, I am encouraged to suggest an invitation to another kind of complementarity.

What could it look like to receive in manners that are new to you, in flows that are guided by structures you do not recognize, and to give in a manner that is likewise unfamiliar? To be in complementarity in receiving in ways that show up in structures unlike those you know to be workable, from someone who is able to try a new way too? To give in a complementarity that has new life to it, because the gift is received by someone in a way that expands their sense of possibility?

I say that because I am hoping you are ready for imagination and intuition, and when a chance arrives to let life flow in your sphere in a structure that isn't old hat to you, you say yes to a bit of adventure.

I'd love to see more flow of life encouraged in this community.

I'd love to see you invite and encourage flows that happen with more verve because giver and recipient both are allowing something beyond the same old ways. That happen because a single step was taken, just not one that had been taken before.

And I am ready for you to encourage me to give and to receive in ways that are exciting to me, and create more possibility.

And I am ready to encourage you, and hope that these words already have, to say yes to flows and structures that expand your repertoire for giving what is good for you to give and receiving what is good for you to receive, creating more possibility for you.

I truly would be pleased to hear that you experience that kind of verve, however it might show up for you.

Tuesday, July 9, 2013

Feeling food systems in my body.

I distinguished something today.
The sense of protectiveness I have had of my kitchen time has come from a place of fear of being judged. Beneath the boundaries that have come up around me when it’s kitchen time for me has been an extreme sense of vulnerability around my process with food.
I consider myself to be in a process of re-learning how to eat. What has been “normal” doesn’t work for this body. More and more bodies are speaking up about this.
My body knows the stories of the foods that come into it. Tuning into this knowledge is part of the process of re-learning. It is sitting with the pain and complexity of the systems that produce our food.
When an avocado or banana is the best thing my body could want in this moment, I cannot make the choice free of the impacts it has on the systems.
Perhaps my body will never be able to make complete peace with the foods it eats until the systems en masse are re-invented.
Offering my opening to non-solution-focused understanding.

Sunday, July 7, 2013

Rewilding

An amazing day at the house of trystuff.
The second day in a row it has been primarily Sean and me in the house for most of the day.
Ingrid has gone. James has gone. Fron is out on adventures as usual.
Surfing my coercive patterns by day for the second day now, the depth and mystery of which confuse me, I sail into the afternoon with weight and a determination to shift my perspective.
I sit like a rock on the garden bench for a while. I stand up and walk out into the street.
Then the rain begins.
Blood runs to my legs and lips, turning them to a smile. My walk morphs into an exuberant jog. I begin to run up the trail into the park.
I meander into the thick of underbrush beneath a clump of trees and sing and dart about like a nymph.
Things only get better from here. No one is around. Some dark, shady figure on the park bench with a scraggly ponytail. Perfect. As focused and aimless as me. A few dogs pass me and people with smiles or cigarettes. I continue on my private song and engrossment.
Drops continue from the sky. I walk down to the edge of the river and stand by the rocks squeezing out rushes of hasty water. Heron comes flying low along the bank and lands before the rocks, where it always likes to. I nodded. "I saw you coming," I say to the Heron. I thought I had seen it this morning, but it was just a piece of wood then. Now it's here.
I sing to the rushing river. The rain begins to pelt. Shady ponytail is still there. No one can here me because the raindrops are catching my song and throwing it out to the river.
I turn and run out from the tree. I run for cover under another tree.  I sing more. I wait for the rain to let up.  It doesn't. It keeps going strong.
I have an urge to run back out to the river's edge. I do. I stand and watch the water rush and watch the drops land and they soak into my clothes.When I am done standing, I begin to run home. I run under the rain and it soaks through my clothes. I surrender to the wet. My smile grows bigger. I laugh. I laugh harder. I sing louder, and my chest bounces and my song gets cut with each landing. I feel the re-wilding happening. The re-wilding others have been talking about.
I run home and take off my clothes. I run to the pond. I put my legs in, then I slip right in and shriek and yelp while I wonder what lives in the bottom. All I feel is rubber and leaf guts. I shake a little and pull my legs back out.
Then I lie with my legs in the pond for a while, and try different positions of lying over the pond and try out different rocks to sit on. I get up and lie on the rocks in the garden. I feel the tomato plants' relish and promise of growth.
Finally I am cold and my soul, very reluctant, follows me and my clothes in and we ring ourselves out and take a shower.
I go upstairs and turn up Simon and Garfunkel really loud. I've got paints out and a brush in hand but I can hardly focus for all the dancing and singing I'm doing. I run downstairs and Sean takes a break from his sauce and dances with me for a bit.
The sauce wafts into the rooms of the house. I pour my tea and sit impatiently on the stairs, watching the rain get in a frenzy again.
I go into the kitchen and impose my impatience on the process. So the sauce is declared ready. Sean and I dish steaming heaps of simmered tomato and vegetables into our plates with rice and sit in the dining room. Mouths and bellies suddenly grow hot. We talk about cottage memories of rainy days foods.
Soon I am in the living room again, dancing and singing. Who knows where anyone is. I swirl and dance and sing with the freedom I used to know when I was alone. Magic runs through shakers and my hands and the piccolo I try to play with my lips and my feet and fingers and I feel magic rise from my throat and I belt like there are no prosecutors anymore. I am free. I dance into the rainy night.
This makes me want to live this life! This makes me know I live with people who want me to be myself freely. By day, miscommunications get in the way and seem to impinge on our freedom. But that's not all. I sense the possibility of creative collaboration and I sense the many avenues through which we can connect. We can nurture this mystery. We can re-wild ourselves, and meet that way.

Friday, June 21, 2013

Considering possibilities for intimate love

Consider the possibility that falling in love doesn't have to look like what it looks like in the movies.

Consider the possibility that true love is far more abundant than the movies will have you believe.

Consider the possibility that a person can be genuinely passionately whole-heartedly in love with two or more people at once.

That love for someone else doesn't detract from love for you. 

(Perhaps it amplifies it.) 

Consider the possibility that falling in love doesn't have a destination.  Two people can be in love and it is not goal-oriented.  It is just the pleasure and mystery of the moment.  
Or the pain and confusion. 

Consider the possibility that I can be having an experience of scarcity, entitlement, jealousy, but Nothing's Actually Wrong.


Over and over again I let go of old concepts of intimate love.
Over and over again I shake with fright.
Over and over again I find my ground.
Over and over again I cry with gratitude.


Everything's okay.  It's okay.  Those are just possibilities.  You don't have to believe them.  You don't have to subscribe to them.  Just consider them.  Try them on.  If you hate them, you can let them go, too.

Monday, June 17, 2013











Trying Stuff

A view from my bedroom window.







Intimate Relating

My relating with You has catalyzed major rearranging in myself around intimacy, love, beauty, value, and just about everything else. I am deeply grateful for this catalyzing. And I also have felt shame and embarrassment that so much has unfolded for me around You. Yet in the process I became so clear - viscerally clear - that it wasn’t about you. AT ALL!
I experienced hope, attachment, and fear in my relating with You...which led to a profound and vivid connection to myself as Love. My sense of desire, fear, and hope around You ultimately led me back to a profound sense of love in myself - the infinite kind that connects me to all beings. It also stimulated in me an enlivened connection to my own sensuality. I distinguished that, in historically relating intimately with people and then becoming attached (or repulsed), what I am ultimately attached to is a chance to express myself intimately. Historically, I have believed this chance is scarce.
Upon realizing that, I sailed into a current of discovering a way in which I can relate to the world where I do express myself intimately, abundantly. Including in non-sexual situations. I realized there was the possibility of being much more open-hearted with the wider world in ways which I have historically only been with lovers. I had the experience of the possibility of feeling “in love” with anybody, at any time when I chose to drop into the moment. It was easy. I realized that I am in control of choosing to open myself up and fall into someone else’s presence. I can do that at anytime, with anybody.
I have also distinguished that intimate relating feels like a way for me to get to know somebody...the visceral, word-sparse or wordless experience of connecting with someone physically feels natural to me and can make more sense than talking, particularly talking without touch. In a society where non-touch talking-relating is more enforced and supported than touch relating, it makes sense that I am distinguishing this as my own preference, as I return to being a physically-relating being. This preference of mine to explore people that way has been a new awareness for me and helped to clarify why I like to relate intimately.
My new expression in the world has been fulfilling for me. I am opening up to the possibility that many people can help take care of me; that I can walk as my sensitive tender lover-self in the world; that it is a gift to the world; that intimate relating is not taboo; that I can express my needs, including needs for intimate relating; that I am a powerful being in the world of intimate relating. These are all exciting and new ideas and are changing the way I am relating to people. I can feel my trust deepen and expand that other people are allies, and can help me meet my needs. And that makes my needs more worth expressing. And that allows people to connect with me more.
It is new learning for me to realized that I create the conditions for intimate relating, sexual or non. Not someone else.

And that we are ongoingly co-creators in any moment. This replaces the power-over-under humanity 2 dynamic which I have historically perceived and generated in relationship.

Monday, June 3, 2013

06-02-13 stream of consciousness

I am interwoven in a web that won't let me disappear
Won't let me self-isolate
Won't let me slip into abysses
Won't let me succumb to the old stories
Of scarcity, seclusion, aloneness.

So long I have been a single lone star
Swimming small in an ocean vast
Singing my own song, a lonely little tune
A single voice a capella
Crisp and clear and strong and longing
Now I am joined by other spirits so numerous
A whole orchestra so luminous
Filling--no, flooding--the ocean with love
Loving harmonies and dissonances
Full and joyful and fucking weird
Calling attention to the spaces between us
That hold us and bind us
That separate us --
Only so we know Who We Are
Selves defined
In connectance with each other

The light we shine is unstoppable
The light we shine on each other, for each other
Magnifies each other
Magnifies our brilliances
The light we shine is so blinding
The light we shine is so explosively multiplicitous 
The light we shine excites the Earth
The Earth brilles and shivers
The magnitude of the light we shine is rolling thunder
The magnitude of our brilliance multiplies manifold magnanimously
The light we shine on new ways of being!
The future looks impossibly bright.

The urge to leave is so strong in me
In my ancestry
It's been generations of training to prepare
In case of emergency
In case of battle and combative egos
Soldiers at your front door
Pointing guns at your brothers and sisters' heads
My dad, a little boy, watched them die.
In case of disease and body withering
Frailty into nothing
No more breath to argue
One last breath to defend herself
My dad and I, an old man and a young girl, watched her die.
In case of loss loss loss.  Loss.  Loss loss.
Loss is inevitable.
LOSS IS GUARANTEED.
Loss lives strong in our experience.
So we prepare.
So we demarcate our boundaries.
So we strengthen borders.
So we don't hurt so much.

Despite knowing
Hurting means loving.

It is possible to lose without getting hurt--
IF you are willing, too, to give up people.
Without people, there is nothing to lose.
Without people, you are invincible, forever.
Without people, you are unstoppable.
All the way to the fence around your house.
Your house for one.
Back door open.
So you can run from yourself, too.
What kind of ecosystem is that?
Unsustainable.

I feel bad for my dad.

In the other room, my dad says
"Open your heart"
Open, open
Let it open
Let it breathe
Let breath in

Everything will be okay.

It's not a problem.

Family.

The rapidity with which my cells are re-organizing
Overtakes me.

Everything about me screams power.


Saturday, June 1, 2013

When I Remember My Joy

Drumhand say, in the words of a folk song from southern Ghana, "When I remember my joy, something happen to my system."

Thursday, May 23, 2013

Wednesday, May 8, 2013

Digging Into A New Garden

No garden fork in the shed. Really?

Really.

It soon became clear why. The soil is so sandy that it simply doesn't clump. A regular spade is all that's needed to dig into the root zone. Then lift out the stems, and dirt falls off the roots and rhizomes very easily. Of curse, that makes it easy for new roots and rhizomes to move back in from the edge of the yard, where there are all manner of plants that get called ground cover and are really tenacious spreaders.

Much respect for the tenacious spreaders. The stones of the path down the yard will need digging under, too, or roots under them will spread into the new garden right away, before germination.

The other thing about the soil being so easy to lift is that it won't be hard to mix in compost or manure an keep it aerated ... and it will be just as easy to compress again if stepped upon.

And the other thing about the soil being so sandy is that it will drain well. Good in downpours, not so good in drought conditions. More organics mixed in and mulch on top will be a must to keep a vegetable garden going through the heat of the summer.

So it looks like a fork will be a tool needed after all.

With nothing like a real frost forecast in the next two weeks, it's getting to be time to get ready for planting.

A strange thing it is, uprooting so many plants that have been good to this place, to do that.

Tuesday, May 7, 2013

talking in the morning

I'm interested in that moment in the morning when I come downstairs for breakfast, and someone starts talking to me, and I'm not really ready for talking yet.

I'm not sure what happens to me in that moment.

I feel annoyed and I feel like my morning is invaded.

I want Quiet as I open my day.

I feel dismayed that the person who talks doesn't 'get' this. 

Depending on what is said, what energy it is said with, how long the talking takes, how awake I am, how hungry I am, how available I am, I feel more or less annoyed.  Sometimes I'm not annoyed at all.

When I am annoyed, my reaction is to give curt responses/physically turn away/physically leave the space.  Sometimes I'll 'suffer through' the talking, and this is not something I want to be doing, because if I suffer through, then I breed resentment towards the talking person for 'making me' suffer through, and then I have resentment instead of closeness.  I think I try to communicate non-verbally that I don't want talking right now, but this feels pretty ineffective sometimes, and it is not all that satisfying.  I think, also, it might be hurtful and make the other person feel unwanted without them knowing why.  I find it enormously difficult to communicate verbally about my annoyances.

I suppose that's why I'm blogging, though I'm not sure how appropriate this is either.

.........There it is.


Wednesday, May 1, 2013

3o Minutes alone in the kitchen


It may not sound like much, but 30 minutes alone in the Kitchen in the House of Try Stuff is a lot.  Yesterday, I was blessed with two circumstances: One was that I arrived home 
NOT

with low blood sugar.  The other is that those who were in the house floated away around the time when I went to make a meal (unrelated, I’m sure). I was in a mellow headspace (which is unusual) because my blood sugar wasn’t screechingly low, so I had time to casually think about what I wanted to put together and allow for creativity.  At first, I was uninspired - it had been so long since I’d cooked from a creative headspace that I robotically began with the necessities.  I settled into the process, and relished the chopping, celebrating the lack of urgency and haste around it.  Then new ideas began to spring in.  I began to re-gain the sense of flow that can occur in the kitchen, where the food talks and you listen.  Hands become a conduit for the dance of the foods that want to come together that night.  A small smile spread across my mouth, and I sensed a shy joy bubbling up within me.  I began to dance a little with the food, and intuition took over.  


Before long I was sitting at the table, ingesting a meal that spoke to my senses in a way that a meal I’d made hadn’t done in a long time.  I was re-connecting with flavours that fire off my pleasure and digestion. The simple remembering of what a vinaigrette can do for my satisfaction is enough. 30 minutes alone in the kitchen was enough to make me joyful and reconnected.  

Monday, April 29, 2013

Look! A post!

By the Speed, on a sunny spring-y morning in March:

Reaching

Fron

Sparkly pokey cone thing