Return to the Teepee

Posted on September 13, 2011 by Deborah

In the teepee I feel a sense of sacred space. My imagination soars along the converging poles leaning toward the sky and something deep in my body feels at home sitting round the fire pit. The images on the wall spark my love for mystery and other lives.

After sharing a little about why we have gathered, I offer smudge. Smudging is a little like washing in the shower but instead of water, smoke from smoldering dried plant leaves swirls around me and rises up, carrying my prayers and releasing my monkey mind chatter in a visible way, revealing the air we typically forget surrounds us.

Smell, my most primal sense, alerts my rationality to acknowledge sacred time and space where “communion” may occur – this atavistic nudge is one of the reasons churches, shrines and temples have used incense for thousands of years – it encourages our experience of the numinous.

Our group is about to imitate a body posture based on our ancient human ancestors’artwork while I drum and rattle at a steady fast pace.

Here’s an example of a posture.

And another:

Our nervous systems are still hardwired to that fast paced, regular beat and many people burst into unbidden tears when their ears first register the surround-sound of drumming/rattling. .. a cocoon of sound, a womb of embeddedness,  a homecoming  we’ve unknowingly yearned for and forgotten until we experience it.

We are a hungry species and don’t even know what food we’re seeking!

Philosopher Bruce Wilshire, in his book titled  Wild Hunger – The Primal Roots of Modern Addiction, quotes anthropologist, Felicitas Goodman, who discovered the practice of  these postures we’re about to experience.

Long ago, Felicitas said, “In the long run. . .humans cannot tolerate ecstasy deprivation.”

As a culture we’re just beginning to recognize the truth of that statement.

Can you identify that ecstatic hunger in yourself? I sure can. I’ll have more to say next time.

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Honoring 9/11

Posted on September 11, 2011 by Deborah

Nine years before the planes hit theWorldTradeTowers, I painted a prophetic image while spending two months in solitude. I didn’t realize it was prophetic until two days after the event  happened. The painting hung in my living room and as I walked by it after 9/11 the painting reached out and literally shook me.

The odd feelings THEN that troubled me as the image spilled onto paper ripped open the significance NOW.

My paintings have always been another way – a more gestalt way – of expressing what I know to be true. Back in 1992, I was purposely painting the downfall of the American way, our profit motivated culture which greedily consumes whatever it wants with the best of intentions. I knew then, still know now, that way is a cultural fossil and needs re-storying.

So I purposely painted the power of love, forgiveness and intertribal-interdependency in the sweat lodge to rebirth modern humanity’s folly.

To portray that folly I chose the symbology of nuclear bomb testing in the Nevada desert, an environmental disaster for all life including our own and one on which I had done considerable study. I thought I’d show the potential of a bomb exploding near my old hometown of Philadelphia, a haven for highly paid lawyers.

What became uncomfortable for me as I painted was that I couldn’t paint just one high rise building. The reality of Philadelphia at the time – at least in my memory since I had moved away in 1980 – was that only one really tall building stood in downtown. But I HAD to paint two and they were IDENTICAL. And even more interesting to me was that I had to paint them sort of melting, folding over on themselves.

My rational mind kept telling me that a nuclear bomb would have splintered them, vaporized them but the buildings insisted on folding over. It wasn’t until I saw those videos replayed again and again of the twin towers crumpling that I felt the reality of what I had painted.

That kind of epiphany is uncomfortable. My ego didn’t know how to handle the possibility that I could see the future, so I diminished the significance and therefore my voice in the world. I wonder how many of us still are doing that – diminishing our “knowing” of where we are headed on this planet.

I find support and wisdom in rereading Eairth’s Imagination by Per Espen Stoknes.

He writes: The images that arise from such meetings of Eairth and body is what we call psyche. It might be a mystery, a type of magic, how all this spontaneously comes about but not mystical in the sense of other-worldly or hidden in other dimensions. Even though air itself is invisible, it is highly palpable: just move your hand quickly through it and feel the flow around your fingers. It is always already here and now.”

We need to recognize.  . . “the agency of the ‘ordinary’ Air at a concrete and immanent level. The Greek root of psyche and spirit both go back to breath – our most intimate participation in the air. Once our culture forgot about the air as a living entity, we needed to interiorize psyche not to lose her altogether. This interiorization left the Air itself bereft of any agency, intelligence and autonomy. The human mind always moving around in the brilliant Air, dependent on the air for every second of well functioning, still forgot the primacy of the Air to all Being, to all perception and knowledge.

The Eairth then is also the home to and the place for all images. Ever single image we work with in expressive arts is made available only as a gift through the highly impressionable, receptive and endlessly generous medium of the air. Without it we could neither breathe, speak, act nor draw. It is the forgotten grace of our being.”

It is that grace that saves me from hubris.

And perhaps from terrorism, too.

I’ll return to the tee pee tomorrow.

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Re-storying

Posted on September 9, 2011 by Deborah

I’ve mentionned our four day ceremony several times here and some of you, I hope, are wondering just exactly what we were doing.

I called the ceremony: Re-storying our Modern Lives – A Ceremony to Renew a Living Myth for Eairth.  For more about why I spell earth, eairth, please read Per Espen Stoknes essay titled: Eairth’s Imagination – Rooting the Expressive Arts in the Elemental Creativity of the Biosphere. I’ll refer to this essay again in my next post, so if you don’t want to read it now, there’ll be other opportunities.

Eight of us responded to the invitation to spend four days in creative, ritual space. Two men, six women, some local, some from far away, three of us Ph.D.’s, maybe a Master’s level or two thrown into the mix, one of the women drives a big rig and rides a Harley with the correct leather jacket,  two ride horses in the Olympic mountains, one nearly died from perforations in her intestine, another has fused vertebrae, one grew up in a huge city, another on a Wyoming Indian Reservation where she felt very much at home despite her Scottish and Scandinavian ancestry.

All of us appear quite ordinary, have families, jobs, obligations and response-abilities, successes and failures, fears and courage, love and losses; we vote in elections, take classes, travel to other places; some have I-pods and I-pads and I-phones while another refuses to watch TV though DVD’s are ok; some read kindles and others still prefer the sensory tingle of turning pages in books.

We range in age from 35ish to bordering on 72. ( That’s me – I still barely believe I’ve lived so long. )

And I think I can say unequivocally that we all love living on this planet.

In other words we are an eclectic gaggle of two-leggeds. We could be anybody and everybody. Like you! None of us shopping in the supermarket would be noticed as being different.

And yet we are different in the sense that we’re willing to make time in our fast moving lives to live in the creatively expressive flow for four days, to commune with forces larger than our egos, to imagine how we can be more fully human in this modern age.

Each of us feels the evolutionary tug to expand our human awareness of our interdependency on this tiny globe spinning in the vastness, to expand our human notions of what it means to be “normal,” perhaps to weave a more responsive and richer storyline for our urban, “techno” cultures.

We begin by gathering round the dinner table for our first night together knowing we are about to enter a tee pee. Do you hear the anticipatory drum roll?? dah da daht duh…

 

 

The story continues next time.

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Gossamer Threads

Posted on September 7, 2011 by Deborah

My friend flies in from Boise to assist at the ceremony, Re-Storying our Modern Lives – a Ceremony to Renew a Living Myth for Eairth.

She’s suffered a lot recently, so we walk a nearby beach to ground ourselves in sand and sea. My boisterous elder dogs gambol at the murky water’s edge, sluggish from heaps of seaweeds gathered at the froth line.

Dog gamboling produces the momentary squatting stance of obligatory pooping for which I’m always prepared with plastic bags. . . a conundrum if ever there was one. In this day of recycling and contributing to the well-being of the planet, I’m confused by whether it’s really correct to put poop in plastic into the landfill. Reallllly?

I see Taka far off behind a log with that classic silhouette of curved spine and tucked butt. I amble toward where he’s been. I can’t find “his business” at first, so squat myself to investigate more carefully behind the log and my eyes stumble on filigree.

What the H E doubletoothpicks is this???

Having spent time beach seining last winter ( see this post ) this delicate perfection of skeleton bursts open my memory banks of the tiny stature of many living sea creatures – Snout nose, needle nose, tube fish, sea horse…

But it is none of these and two fish biologists have declared they are not sure what it is.

Yet this tiny being once lived in this vast ocean.

The winged aspect blows my imagination open. The flared nostrils suggest a mini-dragon. It looks like it might have had a fan tail. The large holes in the wee skull suggest huge eyes. The arched bridge between brow and mouth, not as thick as a standard hand-sewing needle, suggests a Roman nose.  And looking through my ten power jewelers’ lens, I can see one tiny triangular tooth in the center of the top jaw.

EEEEEE gad what do we have here?

What we have here is awe. Grated over pebbles, refined by sand, tangled in sea grasses and tumbled through water, this tiny fleshy body morphed to this gossamer skeleton, snuggled momentarily against this log waiting for my wonder . . . reminding me of the tensile strength of living in this vast universe where my bones are but filaments, too.

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Persistence Paid Off

Posted on September 5, 2011 by Deborah

Around the Bend sold ten days ago at the same time we were engaged in our ceremony “Re-storying our Modern Lives.” Such serendipity!

I am jubilant and grateful.

Who’s Dreaming Whom, my first large Claybord piece ( 2 ‘ x 3 ‘ ) also sold. Both images almost flew out the gallery door. The smaller ones, which I thought would sell instantly, haven’t budged from the wall!

 

Who’s Dreaming Whom?

 In my dreams, the bear comes,
a mother with cubs inviting me to see:
frolicking, suckling, guiding, protecting
I wish for a mother to be that for me.

 In my dreams, the bear comes,
reaching for berries, startled by me:
Standing, he squints, weaves, sniffs the breeze.
Fur rippling over muscles, he chooses to flee.

 In my dreams, the bears come,
seeking garbage, ribs easy to see.
Anxious and collared,
pursued by dogs, darted from trees,
bears struggle to live, no longer free.

                  Do the bears have nightmares, dreaming of me?

What nightmare am I dreaming?

I yearn to paint big – I have wanted to paint big for years now – Many encourage me to paint big, yet I keep holding back using the depressed economy as my excuse. More expensive paintings won’t/can’t sell.

And yet when I review my sales over the last six years, every big one either sold promptly or was commissioned. One even sold before it was finished. The patron wanted it just the way it was!

As I look at these purchasing facts, it is obvious that I need to re-story my conclusion.

I have been blind long enough!

And I wonder what conclusions in your lives are you not seeing clearly?

It may be time for you to re-story your life’s journey, too!!

Happy trails…

 

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Persistence

Posted on July 31, 2011 by Deborah

Ten days ago I publicly shared my life’s journey to find my artist self. Three of us each had about 15 minutes to respond to the title: Art – Seducer, Healer, Ecstatic Transformer.

Here’s a link to the article which appeared in the Bainbridge Review, written by journalist extraordinaire, Connie Mears.

My lust for creating seduced me away from the career for which I’d trained, denying – and then forgetting – much of my true nature in the process.

Persistence.

It took me more years to remember my real passion for painting images of reality as I know it.

Persistence.

Developing skills required more time.

Persistence.

Believing in my art enough, to keep at it and share it in public, all that took persistence and a modicum of courage.

What is it in us that gives us the stamina, the will, to pursue a dream?

Persistence.

I don’t think I even mentioned it in my talk.

Where does it come from? It’s invisible, intangible yet real as real can be. Without it I wouldn’t be me.

Which brings me to my happy news of last Thursday. I finished a painting I started in 2006 back in Montana. It’s big for a watercolor – nearly 3 feet by 4 – and depicts the Colorado River in the Grand Canyon from the perspective of women rafting. I reached a stage where I faltered, not sure how to proceed and then life intervened anyway and I rolled the painting up and tied it with a green ribbon.

I unrolled it, maybe a year later and discovered that I had a problem. The paddlers in the raft were stuck under their masking fluid and I couldn’t rub it off.

But, persisting, as is my general nature, I got inventive and painted them over with white absorbent ground and painted them again.

 

They looked great but I was still mystified by the background cliffs. I didn’t know how to finish what I had started.

As before, I rolled it up and tied it gently but securely with a bow of green ribbon. Then more gears shifted and I moved to thePacific Northwest, where the beribboned roll of heavy duty watercolor paper found its way into a closet.

Zoom to NOW. I’m scheduled to be the featured wall artist in collaboration with Annette Fourbears of basketweaving and peyote beading fabulousness. See a tiny sampling of her work here. She asked me if I was going to finish that unfinished grand canyon painting – a reproduction of which I had flashed before her eyes when I was juried into the gallery. She said she’d never forgotten it and wanted to see it finished! At first I said, “ No.”…all kinds of excuses…too big, not enough time, too hard to frame, not on claybord which is my current love…She just gazed at me with her big eyes and a question mark floating above her head.

So, the painting, “Around the Bend,” is finished now and being framed this week. The problematic cliffs are filled with symbols and creatures, some of which appeared by the grace of watercolor itself. Others were pointed out by the magic of a friend’s pair of eyes who could see things I hadn’t noticed.

You can see the real thing at Front Street Gallery in Poulsbo, WA, from August 9th to September 6th. The exhibit is titled: Dreamweaving – The Visionary Intertwining of Art, Symbol, Story and Nature. Our Opening Celebration is 5 – 8 pm on Saturday August 13th.

I’m ever so grateful to persistence!

And the encouragement of friends!!

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No Choice

Posted on July 24, 2011 by Deborah

A few nights ago, with two other artists, I shared my life story …in fifteen minutes or so. I left a few things out! Our title: Art – Seducer, Healer and Ecstatic Transformer. The thread running through all our tales is that art in all its varieties creates new possibilities for all of us, every single one of us, all of the time, in every situation everywhere.

Really.

My life story could be anyone’s story. It’s the basic plot of starting out life being and acting one way and having life’s twists, turns and tricks make me think and act in other ways. It’s a story of how I have responded to how life has lived me. We all have that option to respond  – or not.

It’s important for all of us to think about our lives as story. Because we can change our stories, rewrite chapters, redesign our character. Evolution is now calling us to revise our storylines about who we are in relationship to culture, community and creativity. What is our source really?  How do we give thanks to this planet and the cosmos which have birthed us? Who are we as humans? Perhaps we’re meant to become aware that we are more than technological marvels and money making machines, that despite our greatest inventions and all our powers, nuclear and otherwise, we are not in control of LIFE, not king of the mountain.

Really.

I have reached a stage in my life where I have no choice but to think as I do…My options are closed and that’s a huge relief actually. I know we are all connected, that the world is a living being and that mystery is the horse I ride through my daily adventures. I have no choice but to be aware, to create and to care for the whole shebang.

I think I’m awake all the time, though my new author hero, Terry Pratchett, suggests it’s not possible to live that way. I disagree. His description of Tiffany Aching’s awakening, matches my own. What music to my eyes. Listen to this from page 341 of The Wee Free Men:

Tiffany wasn’t sure which of her thoughts was operating now. She was tired. She felt as though she was watching herself from above and a little behind. She saw herself set her boots firmly on the turf and then. . .and then. . .and then, like someone rising from the clouds of sleep, she felt the deep, deep Time below her. She sensed the breath of the downs and the distant roar of ancient, ancient seas trapped in millions of tiny shells. She thought of Granny Aching, under the turf, becoming part of the chalk again, part of the land under wave. She felt as if huge wheels, of time and stars, were turning slowly around her…

She heard the grass growing, and the sound of worms below the turf. She could feel the thousands of little lives around her, smell all the scents on the breeze, and see all the shades of the night.

 The wheels of stars and years, of space and time, locked into place. She knew exactly where she was, and who she was, and what she was….

Now I know why I never cried for Granny,” she said. “She has never left me.”

She leaned down and centuries bent with her.

“The secret is not to dream,” she whispered. “The secret is to wake up. Waking up is harder. I have woken up and I am real. I know where I come from and I know where I’m going. . .”

I’ll never be like this again, she thought…I’ll never again feel as tall as the sky and as old as the hills and as strong as the sea…No wonder we dream our way through our lives. To be awake, and see it all as it really is. . .no one could stand that for long.”

I experience another alternative.

I am bound to the awareness of those centuries bending with me – the centuries that made my bodymind, the miracle of the particles that have joined together to make me. That awareness rides in my bones, maybe in my neutrinos. That felt sense of the streaming is with me all the time – a constant on which I rely when I’m washing dishes, taking burrs out of the dog’s fur, flossing my teeth, typing this for you. I call it the “ischness” of what is…the ground of my being and the source of my gratitude. I can’t imagine my consciousness to be otherwise. I have no choice but to be awake and aware. It doesn’t mean that I am actively participating in those sensations of joining with the cosmos, but the memories of those experiences are always part of my awareness.

That’s the semi-permeable membrane between our human-ness and the spirit that animates our body’s intelligence, the heart’s wisdom, the whole brain. I think it’s time for a new storyline of human psychology – one that acknowledges our ecstatic communion with all that is –

What do you think?

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You Choose

Posted on July 14, 2011 by Deborah

“All our lives depend on how we choose to live,” I wrote on this blog in the page titled WHY? I haven’t reread that page in several months. I don’t think many readers look beyond the main posting page, so I decided I’d cut and paste it here, because I like what I have to say!

In 1994 at a workshop with Felicitas Goodman, Ph.D.,( www.cuyamungueinstitute.com ) the anthropologist who discovered Ecstatic Postures, I experienced a vision that still inspires me:

I see black and white Kachinas dancing in the center of a circle. Suddenly a tiny orange and red Kachina leaps into the middle   I wonder where the women are.  I find them off to the side, standing in a circle dressed in black shrouds as they help a woman give birth.
Suddenly I see through the eyes of one of the black and white Kachinas. I feel one very large tear sliding down my left cheek. I know it is blue. As I swing my head from side to side, I see the desecrated earth and the green beautiful earth and I hear the kachina chant, “You choose, you choose, you choose.”
Then the animals come spilling through, their eyes peering out of the rainforest, watching us, wondering if we will choose with their well-being in mind as well as  our own.  A huge heart rises in the midst of the circle of dancers.  I see its wounds and also that it is healing itself.  A river of green slashes through the heart, carrying compassion and love energy and spilling green all over the earth.  I see that the green river has opened the heart so I can see the texture of its interior.  I am shocked to see it is the same texture as that of the molten “hole-y” rocks I saw yesterday in the Jemez Mountains.  I wonder if our heart’s interior simply mirrors the earth outside our bodies, if all our bodies’ parts and functions reflect the earth outside us.
Can that be right?
Is the earth really outside us?
Maybe, instead, the earth is ourselves turned inside out.

That refrain: “You choose, you choose, you choose,” has echoed in me ever since. I’m glad to have lived long enough now to know that admonishment is heard by many all around the globe. It is in our human hands to influence the course of history. And if we choose to believe that “the earth is ourselves turned inside out,” we will recognize more readily how our well-being, personally and collectively, is inextricably intertwined with the earth’s well-being.
I long for my grandchildren and their children to have a sensuous, complex and life-sustaining world in which to live.
Don’t you?

If your answer is,”Yes,” then you can contribute to these great and auspicious turning times: the grand awakening of humans  to the fact that we are all indigenous to this planet. We are embedded in a living world, an eairth from which we are inextricable.  Maybe we can help each remember a greater gladness than acquisition of limited resources – the birth of camaraderie and communal playfulness, cooperative, creative challenges and ecstatic experiences, soul-filled communion and the spirit of laughter shared, loving and relating, . .“the rapture of being alive” as Joseph Campbell said. We have an opportunity to tell new stories. Stories that are fun-damental, perma-cultural guides to living on this globe, finding the grace in suffering, the humor in pathos and the joy in grief, revering the miracle of living and nourishing the sentient eairth for generations to come.
Please share your raptures.
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Full Cup

Posted on July 13, 2011 by Deborah

I know the world is in a perilous state, yet I am happier, more enthused and optimistic, than I have ever been, while being aware of the dark lurking in the light.

 

 

A new friend from the gallery told me about Terry Pratchett but I didn’t follow up his lead.

It took three highschoolers and they aren’t even aware of what they’ve done to me. Unless by chance K, K and J are reading this. Comment here if you are!

Here’s the scoop: I’m getting ready to drive toMontana for my first visit after moving to the Pacific Northwest. My 12 year old granddaughter has accepted my invitation to drive with me, leaving a week earlier than the rest of her family. I know she needs to escape from the last week of school having endured the year from hell. I was delighted to serve as her fairy godmother whisking her away from torment and thought how awesome it would be if I could get some advice, particularly book suggestions, from people close to her own age.

This granddaughter used to be a prodigious reader – consuming Harry Potter books as a young’un and The Twilight series two years ago , so I thought she’d be interested in some good fantasy about jealous mean girls, loves lost, sex, betrayal and mayhem. Kids grow up fast these days in case you haven’t noticed.

So I waltz into the public library on a mission. I must risk entering the glass walled, sound proofed, computer ready, sanctified domain of the adolescent- the YOUNG ADULT ROOM. Luck is with me. Three bookaholics are in there, all young women. They turn to gaze on me. Attentively they listen to my story and then generously offer up a kazillion ideas. Finally they just grab books from the shelves while one of them writes out an additional bibliography. I stagger out with a teetering pile of 11 books and love in my heart for these remarkable young people.

But the 12 year old granddaughter is not interested in the books.

Neither is her10 year old cousin who arrives with her family at the same time we do.

So you guessed it. I start sifting through the pile.

Now this interests me about myself. I hated fantasy, fairytales, especially Grimm’s, as a child growing up in the 40’s. Too many child victims, too many holocausts. Those stories of dark woods, demonic witches, battles and orphaned children, scared me and I was already scared. So I avoided that genre, despite being fascinated by mythology.

The stories we tell ourselves, the stories our culture lives by, these fictions have great psychological import. I have taught courses and workshops on Personal Mythology and benefited greatly from rewriting my own storyline – hence the title of this blog site – BUT I am not a reader of much fantasy – non-fiction mostly and English murder mysteries – but this stack of books I’ve been given sucks me in.

I decide to try my old childhood trick for choosing a book to read. I open up to the same random page – say 58 – in each book, read it, and decide which page 58 hooks me. In the case of the stack it is one by Alison Croggon called The Naming – the First Book of Pellinor. Bards and Treesong and the struggle for a more whole world. Right up my alley but I finish it before the Montana trip is over.

I return to the stack.

Lo and behold, I suddenly recognize the name Terry Pratchett, the one Ed had told me about. I pick it up, sample another page, read the fly leaf and note immediately, this time, the wit. Oh my golly gee whiz, this looks awesome. I consume it. Luckily another first book in a series in which imagination, satire, and outrageous humor reveal deep wisdom applicable to our planetary struggles, cultural foibles and modern psychological pitfalls. WOW.

Today, I mention my new reading habits to another friend in the gallery – here’s the link again in case you missed it above – and she regales me with her own love of the very same books – both Croggon and Pratchett – concluding with this: “You know what Pratchett says don’t you? Never judge a cover by its book.”

Brilliant!

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Living World Stories

Posted on June 12, 2011 by Deborah

I began this post on May 22, 2011. Here it is June, nearly mid June already.

Weeks and weeks have flown by with too many deep thoughts, new possibilities and unexpected connections making my head spin. How can I possibly capture the moment when the moment is so fleeting? I want to write about it, I do, and yet living keeps stopping me from pausing long enough to string words together.

The urge to begin posting again forces me to the keyboard where the computer screen confronts me with at least ten possible threads to follow…I have been jotting notes for the last several weeks you know…this blog world never far from my heart’s mind.

And the note that stands out in this moment is this:

We are all connected by the stories that stream through us.

AND we need a new story about how the world works.

 But oddly enough it’s a very, very, very old story.

I realized recently that I am in service of awakening the mythic consciousness and nudging us toward new cultural storylines, reclaiming the power of myth and story to guide us through these extraordinary times. We are the ones who bring the stories through. . .not necessarily the originators of the stories but the receiver of the storyline from the world around us – as nature and the world and our cultures change, so do the stories…we need not only to reclaim our ancestors’ stories but feel our way into new stories responsive to now, which may bring us back to the old ones.

David Abram pops into my mind, he who wrote Spell of the Sensuous and Being Animal. I remember the brilliance of his ethical thinking. He suggests that we need an ethics of reciprocity to help us stop pillaging and raping and devouring the very earth on which we depend. And he points out that it is impossible to have reciprocity when we consider the world around us as inert, dead, dumb. An inanimate world cannot respond to our overtures.

So it’s  simple!  Change our storylines. Begin telling ourselves that the world around us is alive and responsive.

That’s all! A simple change in our modern story.

Let that idea sit in you for a second.

Imagine how the world would be if we modern, urban people knew the world was sentient and capable of response, just as all our ancient ancestors did.

Do you sense the enormity of the consequences? Religious institutions would teeter. Psychology would be upended! Being schooled only by other two-leggeds would not cut the mustard.

But for us to survive on this wee planet, we need to take these risks.

Because I haven’t wanted to be considered crazy, I haven’t shared with many an experience that shocked me as a mid-life woman. I’m telling that pivotal story now!  Back in 1992, I spent two months in solitude on a wondrous island lying betweenVancouver Island,Canada, and the mainland. I was walking in the cedar forest and feeling bereft. Needing comfort, I spotted a grandmother cedar and without thinking rushed up to her with no introduction and flung my arms around her as if I had the right to invade her personal space that way…as if she stood there only for me. What hubris!

The instant my arms reached round her girth, a guttural utterance raced through my mind. “Get your f—ning hands off me.” I don’t generally use that swear word which made the statement all the more real to me. I reared back full of apologies and shock.

I had shown no respect, made assumptions and presumptions – the cedar spoke to me unequivocally and I had no doubt that this communication came from the tree.

My storyline changed for good then and there…

I’d love to hear some of your living world stories- the ones that reveal life pulsing all around you – the stories that catapulted you over a threshhold and into a new way of bone deep belly full knowing…

Thanks for joining me around this blog-lit fire.

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