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~
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.
17 Sunday Apr 2016
Posted in Nature/Environment
frog eggs in pond, april 30 2015
The frogs are back.
For weeks before they returned, Waylon would pull at me as we passed by the pond and say, “froggies sleepin’?”
“Yep, the froggies are sleeping under the mud,” I’d say, and continue the walk to the greenhouse.
They broke their sleep last Wednesday night; as I turned the lights off and walked upstairs, their croaking bubbled its way through the walls and into our bedroom. It took me a few moments to make out what it was as I stood still by the window, stretching my ears to their call. For the first time since we moved into the house, I missed the thin walls of the yurt, how they let all the sounds in.
We are close enough to the pond, though, closer than we were in the yurt, and so even now as I write these words on Sunday morning, windows closed, I hear them: their popping percussion aided by the swinging notes of chickadees and the tinny flitting whistles of robins.
We counted 33 yesterday, legs all splayed out as they floated on the pond’s surface. Waylon’s counting is sequential up to 10, and then erratic after that, going 15, 18, 16, 17, 19, and so on, all the way up to 20-10. He corrects me when I say 30.
I wonder how much he remembers of falling asleep and waking to the springtime concert when we lived in the yurt. Yesterday Edge asked Waylon if he remembered where he was born. He replied, in mama’s belly.
“But do you remember where you came out of mama’s belly?” my husband asked, and then answered our son’s stare, “right over there; in the yurt.”
It’s only recently that Waylon has started saying, “member when…” and part of me smiles at his development, and part of me wonders what language is worth when so much of it is spent on the past.
What use does a toddler have for memories? What use do any of us have? Sure, there are the necessary elements of learning so we may know how to feed and clothe and shelter ourselves. The necessary learning to stay alive.
But the frogs are awake now, and there’s no use in dawdling over last week, when we’d stop and talk about their muddy sleep. The frogs are awake, and Waylon is counting, and there are stones to throw into the pond, and there is mud to play in.
What use are memories when all of this is at hand? When the sun is warming the water and maple buds are flowering and there is a whole, waking world to be present in.
08 Friday Apr 2016
Tags
4/6/2016
6:12 am — A periwinkle sky, soft and bright and so translucent it seems to levitate above the mountains. Which of course it always does, but only now do I see just how the horizon is born from light.
6:22 am — The sky drifts into pastels, pink and peach. Waylon sleeps curled next to me as I read, and I think I am happy, content, peaceful, except none of these words are right. It’s something quieter, deeper, something nameless that fills me.
It eases the urgency of doing.
6:32 am — The light has cascaded from the sky onto the mountains themselves.
The mountains are like a farm woman: strong, steady, curves around the muscles. Sometimes they’re merely noticed, but eventually truly seen, causing the observer to stop and breathe in the beauty, the wildness, the stateliness, the pure bedrock of life at once tangled and ordered; a being large enough to hold contradictions and surprises and still offer comfort in the sheer mass of her embrace.
When I hold my son, I imagine the mass of the mountains in my hug.
When I hold my son, I feel his energy and I realize how much slower I’ve become. How motherhood necessitates that. How the wind, which once directed me, now flows through him. How I’ve come into conversation with the roots of trees. How I’ve learned to match the pace of mountains.
He is the wildness. I am the wild.
When I hold my son, I realize I have become a home.
6:38 — He sleeps. I write. The light pours down the mountainside.
In another few hours it will reach the west-facing hillside and be upon us all.
14 Tuesday Jul 2015
Posted in Wildness
Soil has worked itself deep into the crevices of my skin, along the outside edges of my forefingers, where I grab at knotweed and plantain, twist the roots of grass and pull them from beds.
It colors the half-moons of my fingernails and stains beneath the tips.
On my palms, three callouses rise on each hand, trailing from the base of the middle fingers in a slant to my pinkies. I didn’t notice their summer return until a chef-friend (with impeccably clean hands) pointed them out as he looked at the engraving of the arctic landscape on my wedding ring.
That was a month ago. Now they rise from soft valleys, blunt peaks born from hoe and shovel.
Enough scrubbing could clean my fingernails for one night, though the next day the soil would again find its place on my body.
And the callouses–what else is there to do but celebrate the mirror of mountains on my palms.
08 Friday May 2015
Tags
garden, nature, perennials, small farm, springtime, Vermont, wildness
Coltsfoot was the first to emerge, pushing its dandelion-like yellow blooms up along roadsides and old gravely logging roads.
Then came the peepers in an evening chorus around the pond, and the bubbles of frog eggs floating in the water.
Just a few days ago, a friend pointed out a splash of white flowers beneath maple trees on the road, bloodroot blooming out of leaf litter in the filtered sun.
And yesterday I noticed a carpet of trout lilies blooming behind the yurt, the yellow petals flexing open, faces slanted down to the earth.
The perennial gardens are waking up, too: peppermint and spearmint, peonies, iris, dicentra, yarrow, echinacea, rudbeckia–all coming back, finally, and bringing the last sleeping parts of me back with them, too.
30 Thursday 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.}
I am searching for wildness,
proving it lives
among us
despite us.
Why do I walk slowly
in the woods, why
do I stop at the rhythmic beating
of a woodpecker, why
do I pause to take in the shape
of a leaf, or a paw print, or the
curve and drop of a stream?
Terry Tempest Williams wrote:
the degree of our awareness
is the degree of our aliveness.
I want to be alive.
If I am to live,
if my cells are to awaken
and if my breath is to expand
into my lungs
it will be because wildness
pulled me out of sleep,
splashed me with cold water,
and poured wind through
my hair, into my mouth,
deep into my body.
If I am to live
it will be because this world
also lives
tangled and pure, wildness running
through the veins.
16 Thursday 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.}
I.
This is what I know:
All energy is
Wild
All bodies are
Energy
Let yourself
unravel
Become the
howling moon
Learn the language
of the wind
II.
Some creatures can only
be seen in
darkness.
Go to them
Take your hunger
Your open mouth
Your heartache
Walk into the
darkness
Discover the song
of your soul
III.
We all have spirits—
Stone and Rivers,
Fox and Snakes
Reveal Yours
The wind is waiting
to lift your song
to tousle it in peoples’ hair
to weave it among needled branches of pine
to whistle it across the seas
IV.
Remember this—
You are of bedrock &
mountain streams
Still and flowing
At once
The wind was there
at your birth,
blew into you,
became your first inhale
Root into the Earth
Tumble in the water
Exhale and set a gust
twirling around the world
05 Monday Jan 2015
Snow Drift
The wind is whipping, howling, pushing, crashing
It holds steady around 20 mph, then throws a big gust, shakes the whole yurt, pulls me from my chair to go sit by the dogs and tell them, “it’s really windy out there,” just to hear my own voice, to be sure I’m still firm inside this circle of made of saplings and canvas.
Just yesterday I wrote how important it is to be gentle with ourselves. That’s not to say the world won’t shake us awake at times. Lessons and change come in many forms. Sometimes the wind will weave gently through your hair; sometimes it will blow you from your feet, upend your whole world; sometimes this is exactly what we need to learn how to open our eyes.
I feel my heart a little more with each gust that rumbles my home. My body’s awareness piques, and suddenly I am more animal than I was yesterday, attuned to the rhythm of my breath, the strength of the wind, the pulse of my veins.
It’s all practice–I’m learning that stillness isn’t static, but rather flexible, steady, and constant. The lesson is rushing across the landscape outside, perhaps it is the land outside: how to be still and open to the changing winds at once.
02 Tuesday Dec 2014
Tags
Wildness can find you anywhere. Don’t be surprised if it shows up in a New Jersey back yard as heavy flakes sink to the grass and pull spruce boughs down to kiss the earth.
