Simply Living

This little image is something I created for the Vashon Wilderness Program.

Today is a perfect late winter day -- dry, cold (but not too cold), and quiet. I began the morning as I often do, turning off the electric fence and letting the chickens out into the garden, checking the hen house for eggs (one already!), and then heading up to the wood pile to split some wood for a fire. I love hearing the morning sounds of the birds, and glimpsing the changing light of sunrise. The work of swinging that axe and guessing how the wood will respond as the blade sinks in feels good.

Life continues as a mystery. Two days ago, the amazing Mathias family who has lived and farmed here for the past two years or so, moved on to northeast Oregon to begin a new chapter in their lives. We have our own move from Vashon in the summer. The months stretch open before us. Surely there will be more to it than continuing to winnow our possessions, tending chickens, browsing the garden for lunch and dinner, making and tending fires and baking and cooking in and on the wood cookstove? And being together. But then I think, why does there need to be anything more?

The kids fight, but then they play together or hang outside with the chickens for hours. They have different methods of scooping up hens and carrying them around. They've finally managed to teach me to tell Bluestar and Sleeve Eater apart. They know the exact tone color of each hen's eyes, and how each hen sticks her claws out (or in) when she is held. The core routines for nature awareness development that programs like Wilderness Awareness School and the Vashon Wilderness Program practice are there naturally (as they are meant to be) with my daughters and their
love of the chickens: secret spot, fox walk, sense meditation, storytelling, thanksgiving, questioning, bird language, ecology awareness, and so on.

Our observations, interests, and reading lead us to sewing and story making projects. Family birthdays and celebrations inspire us to be imaginative in honoring our loved ones and the things that are important to them. Work around the house, in the garden, and with the chickens, grounds us in daily and seasonal rhythms, and leads outward to encompass just about any "subject" you can think of, into community, and deeply into the heart of our nature. In this kind of life we don't need "programs" to nourish our whole beings. Social, intellectual, emotional, and creative deepening emerges from the simple business of life -- our first teacher! Truly, do we need anything more?

Perhaps no. But we are human beings with longings, passions, and responsibilities. For me, longings drive me into "less". At this point, my life is very simple (I gave up driving three years ago and you wouldn't believe how much that simplified my life!), and my inner life is a multitude (visit my website!). Even though I've shed a good percentage of my personal possessions, I still feel that too much of my energy is ineffectively bound up in the care of our house (which is large, and no longer reflects our internal terrain of what we need in a shelter and home!). This weekend we move into our 24' diameter yurt, and will begin to focus our living there. Our house, of course, will remain, bountifully holding all the possessions that we don't deem necessary for our more focused living, but my thought (hope!) is that honing to our essentials in a living space more reflective (perhaps!) of our personal values will help us discern what we truly love and are delighted to carry with us, and what no longer serves us, and which can now move on.

To be continued!

Additions To My Web Site

As I continue to plow through everything I own -- as well as through all my computer files! -- I've been adding chunks of material to Forest Halls. Visit there for more details, but additions include a brief run of a music webzine for young harp players, a webbook, and miscellaneous articles and music arrangements. My imagination has ranged far and wide in the past nine years, so I'm also beginning to attempt to weave all those ideas together into a cohesive whole.

Oh, and have I mentioned that I'm having a radical sale of my CD's? Please visit my website and give it a good browse!

Winter Weave: Day Name "Milky Way"

The spiral galaxy M83 which is believed to be similar in size and shape to our Milky Way galaxy

Last year at this time, I experimented with creating a Devotional. Using various natural cycles, archetypes, and "essences" to inspire me, I wove blessings for each day, voiced to aspects of Mother Mary, or the Goddess, or fanciful imagination (you choose what you think I meant!). As I was also working hard on my Kamana nature awareness study, you'll find things of that nature woven in as well, as I post subsequent entries. Oh, and aspects of music enter into all this. I was working with various modes (scales) from The Harmonic Experience by W. A. Mathieu. I also used the Devotional as a way to focus on a song I wanted to learn/relearn during some days, that were thematically associated with this cycle in some way. With all these different "threads" woven into my experience of the day, I named the cycle WINTER WEAVE.

Here's how I began it, exactly a year ago from today.
Winter Weave
Celeste - Mode of Silence

The threads of the Weave resonate from the following sources:

First moon name is from Ogham lore associated with moons. Second moon name comes from the book Full Moon Feast by Jessica Prentice, Clan Mother is from The Thirteen Original Clan Mothers by Jamie Sams. The "Mode" and day names come from the ECOLogical Calendar. The musical mode name is figured out by me ("Silence" is the musical mode corresponding to Celeste). The Week themes are derived from a version of the Thanksgiving Address, an ancient honoring practice from the Haudenosaunee (Iroquois) tradition, that serves as profound nature awareness practice in the Kamana Naturalist Training Program.

Birch Moon - Wolf Moon
Clans Mother of the 13th Moon Cycle:
Becomes Her Vision


Week One: The Universe and Future Generations

Fifth Day (of 13th Lunar Cycle) - Milky Way / Christmas Eve
[note from me: of course in this calendar yea, 2007, we are just past the full moon on this day!]

Morning

I call upon you, Mistress of the Starry Sky, Queen of the Heavens, on this eve of the birth of the Child of Light I ask for your blessing on this day and long night of waiting, expectation. On this eve of Becoming.

I invoke and offer this prayer-song. May peace, joy, and light flood the hearts of us all!
Litany: Rosa Mystica

Vas spirituale Oro pro nobis
Vas honorabile Oro pro nobis
Domus aurea Oro pro nobis
Regina angelorum Oro pro nobis
Rosa mystica Oro pro nobis

I give thanks for the gifts of life, light, stars, nightscape, dark, and love that I have received throughout my life. They are as plentifiul as the many stars and objects of our own Milky Way!

Evening

On this night as I turn toward sleep, I ask the Mistress of the Starry Nights to bless my dreams, and the dreams of each one of us in this home. May we bask in the harmony and luminosity of your generous expanse, and drink of the lactation of your blessing. In gratitude and faith, we turn to you, O Queen of the Night!

For more about experiencing a natural flow of time, I invite you to read my essay Time Passages

Snowneck Moon and The Starry Night Birthday

Snowneck, our Full Moon chicken

Today is a full moon, what my daughters have named the "Snowneck Moon", in honor of our large white-necked 'black gourmet' breed hen. The name I've chosen for this day, The Starry Night Birthday is in honor of my mother-in-law's 75th birthday (today), and inspired by a tiny gold bell that we gave her called "The Starry Night', created by a silver/goldsmith on the island. This beautiful bell has a cityscape etched in it, and if you peer through the 'celestial dome' of its microcosmic sky, you can see a star pattern. It reminds me of cutting an apple open, sideways, and finding the star at its center! So on this bleak, dark, wet midwinter's day I dream a kaleidoscope of images ranging from the dazzling -- inspired by that celebratory bell and Van Gogh's Starry Night paintng -- to the mundane, with an appreciative nod to the plain old nature of our large hen Snowneck, Queen of the Crop, with her deep grumbly voice, and who strides through the chicken yard and the field! And I also remember to wish upon a star (cloud-obscured!) and offer good wishes and gratitude to and for the generous, kind, discerning. and courageous woman who is my mother-in-law, Denise.

As the night descends, I wander the field, gathering radishes here, beet greens there, mustard greens, mustard blooms, baby greens, red-jewel chard, crinkly kale, and stalks of parsley and celery, and a couple of sage leafs. The CSA (community-supported agriculture) subscription has completed, and so we are able to wander, wonder, and nibble our way through the fields as we will, enjoying the immense bounty and beauty of this good earth and of the careful, lovingly seeded and tended crops by the Mathias family - the family that owns and operates the Journey School Farm Community and this CSA. I am absolutely awed and filled with gratitude at what is thriving here in the earth-stone heart of winter.

pictured above: Van Gogh's "Starry Night"

Full Moon Root: The Nature Of Wind

"I am Fire-fretted and I Flirt With Wind ..."

Deepening into the earth ... let's see what emerges! Here's the first root of the Tree Letter!

The Nature Of Wind

The above image is inspired by a dream I had a week or so ago. Before I went to sleep I asked the Dreaming for an insight as to the nature of Wind. A beautiful dream unfolds, in which I see a fragment of an Old English riddle flitting between the trees of a woodland gallery (which, as in the way of dreams, is an art gallery). The riddle begins (in one translation) "I am fire-fretted and I flirt with wind."

Below are the Old English words of the poem. I created the image above to show the first line (in O.E.) flitting through the trees. It seemed to me that somehow I had indeed witnessed the nature of Wind: a riddle, certainly, darting through the trees as an essence-of-the world language. Something I could come to know, after a fashion: a way of seeing, a way of listening, a manner of speech .... a cause and effect, both visible and invisible, on all things. The riddle itself voices the nature of a very different element, and so I am tantalized by the notion revealed in this dream: that the nature of wind is often revealed by the interplay of itself with something more tactile, some other form, something solid, that we can "more readily grasp", so to speak!

Riddle 30

Ic eom legbysig, lace mid winde,
bewunden mid wuldre, wedre gesomnad,
fus forðweges, fyre gebysgad,
bearu blowende, byrnende gled.

Ful oft mec gesiþas sendað æfter hondum,
þæt mec weras ond wif wlonce cyssað.
þonne ic mec onhæbbe, ond hi onhnigaþ to me
monige mid miltse, þær ic monnum sceal
ycan upcyme eadignesse.
I am sun-struck, rapt with flame,


Here is a
translation