12 Sunday Jun 2016
Posted in Nature/Environment, Writing
Tags
inspiration, life, nature, photography, poetry, spirituality, writing
Even on the most blustery day, the mountains are steady
Learn the lessons of the wind and earth
Walk between the two
Let your breath ramble across the sky
Let your body feel the slow pulse of the land, the cool solidity of stone
Learn to be weightless and grounded
To be pulled and anchored
Learn to live between the two
to be achingly alive and free
04 Saturday Jun 2016
Tags
inspiration, instagram, life, nature, organic farming, photography, summer, wildness
Summer’s vibrancy is here, infusing into me, or maybe it is me infusing into the landscape of greens and blues.
Most of my writing these days is over in the farm blog, and instagram vignettes. You’re invited to join me in both of those places for the summer, as I share in words and photos the curiosities and creativity that is flowing through me.
Be well, dive deep, get dirty.
Happy summer~
15 Sunday May 2016
Posted in Morning Inspiration, Writing
Tags
beauty, breath, happiness, inspiration, Mary Oliver, meditation, peace, poetry, spirituality, Thich Nhat Hanh
sunset, friday night
“Beauty can both shout and whisper, and still / it explains nothing.”
—Mary Oliver, “Leaves and Blossoms Along the Way” from Felicity
These lines caught me immediately. I’ve been rolling them around on my tongue for days, though part of me wants to erase the second half and still, it explains nothing. Until this morning, I couldn’t tell you why, exactly, I wanted these words gone, except I didn’t understand what she meant; I wanted to say back, yes, beauty can explain everything.
And then this morning, I read this from Thich Nhat Hanh’s How to Sit :
“If you ask a child, ‘Why are you eating chocolate?’ The child would likely answer, ‘Because I like it.’ There’s no purpose in eating the chocolate. Suppose you climb a hill and stand on top to look around. You might feel quite happy standing on the hill. There’s not a reason for doing it. Sit in order to sit. Stand in order to stand. There is no goal or aim in sitting. Do it because it makes you happy.”
There is no purpose. There is no goal or aim. Do it because it makes you happy. And yet, beneath this is the understanding that the meaning is in the mindfulness. That beauty or action alone explains nothing. That they are not, in fact, trying to explain anything anyway.
Amidst the industry and utility of this world, I easily forget the simplicity of being.
I forget that we aren’t meant to explain so much as to experience.
Beauty has its way of catching us and bringing us into presence. Beauty has its way of bringing us beyond the explanation and into the heart of experience. And so beauty has no duty to explain. And neither do I, except to tell you what I’ve learned:
Beneath beauty is breath.
You don’t have to explain anything. Just breathe. Do it because it makes you happy.
23 Saturday Apr 2016
Tags
“We can live any way we want. People take vows of poverty, chastity, and obedience—even of silence—by choice. The thing is to stalk your calling in a certain skilled and supple way, to locate the most tender and live spot and plug into that pulse. This is yielding, not fighting. A weasel doesn’t ‘attack’ anything; a weasel lives as he’s meant to, yielding at every moment to the perfect freedom of single necessity.”
— Annie Dillard, “Living Like Weasels”
I haven’t yet learned how to yield.
In her essay, Annie Dillard recounts a story of an eagle shot out of the sky and found to have a weasel skull attached to it’s throat; the weasel having had fought back against the eagle and almost won, never letting go despite its defeat. The weasel dying as it lived, yielding to its single necessity of being.
I haven’t yet learned how to yield. More accurately, I haven’t unlearned bias and motive and endless thought.
There have been moments. Glimpses of the yielding, when my body has laid on the earth and the hard barriers have melted away until the movement of breath came not from my lungs but from the ground; moments when experience overtook thought.
But the weasel. How it held to the eagle’s neck. Have I held to the eagle’s neck?
Haven’t there been times when I’ve dangled from necessity? Times when thought played no role in decision, times when I felt the pull of life beyond choice, and followed.
Yes.
But I’ve let go.
At least, I’ve unhinged my jaw and questioned.
Is the process of unlearning the same as the process of learning? For so long I’ve thought that letting go was what I was after. Letting go of bias and motive and thought. Letting go of assumption and comparison and judgement. I’ve leaned so long on the phrase “to let go” that I’ve let go, too, of living like weasels.
The weasel doesn’t spend so many words on something like living.
Of course. And I’m not a weasel, though I can learn, or unlearn, in order to live like one. To yield, to grasp, to dangle from my one necessity and let myself fly to wherever it takes me.
03 Sunday Apr 2016
Posted in Morning Inspiration, Seasons
Tags
change, inspiration, life, nature, spirituality, Thich Nhat Hanh, yoga
Years ago, sitting cross-legged in a yoga class, my teacher spoke about the muck on the bottom of the pond. How the muck is home to the roots. How it gives birth to the lotus. I sat there, grounding my sacrum to the floor, strengthening my spine, feeling the opening at the crown of my head, and breathed in the lesson. In that moment, the relationship between the mud and the lotus was so clear. You’d think as a farmer I’d never forget it.
But I do forget it. Despite the compost we shovel on our field each year, despite the fact that my livelihood depends on manure, I forget the balance. I have to re-learn it each spring.
The month of March churned up the internal muck, and I caught myself there, in the opaque sludge of worry, in the heavy suction of resistance. It took weeks to remember that pushing down to find grounding is futile in the muck. It took weeks to remember how to trust in letting go. How to trust in the mud.
Eventually, movement returned. I don’t know if it was external validation or the wind bringing in warm air and clear skies, or the exhaustion of trying so hard that finally brought me to letting go, but I’m shifting into spring and feel the shoots starting to rise from the murky base.
Somewhere in all of it, I remembered sitting in that yoga class, remembered the space that filled my body as I breathed from the flower down to the roots, remembered that this cycle has spun through me before. And I’ve woken up into trust, into space, into abundance.
I’ve woken up.
No mud, no lotus, Thich Nhat Hanh said, and I remember that the pond, too, sleeps and must wake each spring. That the lotus, too, must bloom anew each year.
02 Saturday Jan 2016
Tags
I’ve been thinking about stories lately, about the larger story of our society that plays out over and over again, and about the undercurrents of alternative stories that whisper through the static.
At a Hanukkah celebration a few weeks ago, our host stood to give his yearly toast, and he said, “I’m having a hard time celebrating the myth of Hanukkah this year.” He went on to tell the story of Hannah and her seven sons, all slayed in front of her as they refused to denounce their faith to the invading army. Eventually the Jews won, and the story told was one of martyrdom and the birth of Hanukkah, and so we celebrate the victim overcoming the enemy.
And this is where the tiredness came into Harlan’s voice. He spoke of the terrorist attacks in Paris and San Bernadino. He spoke of the whole of written history with all its beheadings and wars and conquering of one group over another.
“It’s always the same story of victim and martyr. It’s not getting us anywhere. We need a new story, and I don’t know what it is.”
I was quiet as a discussion ensued. His emotion swirled around inside of me as I herd his plea and understood the depth of yearning for change, for peace, for a future that will hold our children safely after we have gone. In the weeks since, that one statement has gone through me over and over as I try to answer it: we need a new story.
As his words resound in my head, others come in to answer. I think of my friends who run Earthwise Farm and Forest, and how Carl said, “Our lives are not a rehearsal. We advocate for the life we want by living it.”
I look at their lives and see another story: one of resilience, of interdependence with their land and community, of activism balanced with the steady building of a home and family and farm. I look at their lives and see how true their words are, how they are living the story they want to bring forth into the world.
I think of Harlan and the weariness in his voice as he said I don’t know what it is.
While I may not have the complete answer, either, I do know that while the world is bigger than any individual, change is not. Sometimes we all feel small, and that is okay. Sometimes we all feel defeated and frustrated, but still it is important to witness. It is important to feel. The only true defeat is in thinking we are too small to matter. You are not too small to matter.
Every beginning, every story, starts out as a seed. Some of us are the seed sowers. Some of us are pollinators. Some of us are the wind and birds that scatter the seeds wildly across the land. Some of us are seed savers that carefully and tenderly carry the story into the next generation.
You do not have to play every part. Only your part. You do not have to be recognized with a Nobel Prize or a plaque or anything at all. Just discover your heart. Discover what makes you feel light and do more of that. Share it. Most of the time you will have no idea how many lives you are touching by simply living in a way that brings you more alive.
This is what brings me alive: touching soil, planting a field of vegetables, growing flowers, feeding others, writing. In my personal story, I’m a seed sower, but in the larger story of the world I think of myself more as a pollinator, helping a new story bear fruit and flower.
Think of pollinators: insects, bees, butterflies, birds. They are so small. And we need them.
Don’t wait until you have more money or a better car or more time. Create the life you want by living it.
That’s the only way a new story will take root.
06 Saturday Jun 2015
Posted in Wildness
Tags
gardening, growing flowers, inspiration, land, life, nature, photography, place, spirituality
planting flowers
You can plant beauty
You can create beauty
Your life is a unique expression of energy
Your expressions are powerful
How do you choose to move?
27 Wednesday May 2015
Posted in Morning Inspiration
Tags
farming, happiness, inspiration, life, Redefined Life, spirituality, writing
Monday whispered thoughts of rain all morning and afternoon, with undulating gray clouds stretching across the sky. I was beneath them broad forking the lower field and feeling anxious about money, as so happens from time to time. As I worked, I listened to an episode of Redefined Life, a podcast my friend Aaron Mead recently began.
The conversation between Aaron and Jeff Shapiro, a wing-suit BASE jumper, played in my ears as I pushed the tines of the broad fork down into soil and pulled back, loosening the bed. The rhythm of the work slowly eased its fingers into the jumbled knot in my stomach, and as it loosened, the conversation turned to happiness when Shapiro said that happiness is a choice, and that nothing outside of us can give or take away happiness.
The warm air and cloudy sky afforded the perfect temperature to be working outside; the trees in full green framed the field and rose across the hillside into the mountains; my body was moving, and I felt that choice to be happy.
The antidote to anxiousness is presence. Out in the field, working with soil and plants, I fall into rhythm and it leads me to presence, which in turn opens my body to choices beyond anxiety. Like happiness, presence and awareness of the now is a choice, and like anything else, the more you practice making that choice, the more you say “yes” to it, the more natural it becomes.
We are creatures of habit. I’d like my habit to be happiness.
Aaron also interviewed me for Redefined Life. We spoke about writing, farming, and creating a business. I was nervous to hear the episode,not quite remembering all that I said, but it served as a reminder to me why I do all that I do. To hear it, visit Redefined Life online.
15 Wednesday Apr 2015
{In celebration of National Poetry Month, I’ll be posting a poem each weekday through the rest of April, and I invite you to join me! Leave a link to your poem of the day in the comments section below.}
Some questions cannot be answered in words:
Why are you alive?
We can say: because my parents made it so
We can say: to make the world a better place
But there is something more
that can only be felt:
the wind tugging at your limbs, whispering in your ears
the song of air
the rhythm of water tumbling
the immediacy of a pumping heart
dancing the body into freedom
16 Monday Mar 2015
Posted in Morning Inspiration, Seasons
“Part of being our best selves is having the guts to not avert our eyes, to look closely at what scares us, what disappoints us, what threatens us. By looking closely we have a chance to make change happen.”
It’s a messy transition between winter and spring. The white canvas of snow that welcomed reflection melts into mud, ruts up the road, and floods the river.
When we are finally ready for long days and warm air and the time to put our dreams into motion, we get pulled into potholes and have to inch along when we are ready for speed.
It’s the moment just before the leap, the transition between planning and acting, that we must look at the things we hold and decide what to let go of, decide what will serve us and what needs to melt away with the last of winter’s snow.
It’s the transition that asks us to slow down and look into the mud. It’s not always easy, but if we don’t slow down, the ruts and potholes will break us before we get anywhere. Now is the time to look closely, to sink in, to plant a seed in the thawing earth.
Sometimes–often times–slowing down and letting go are the first steps in creating change.
