safety, hiding, radiance

remembering a beautiful film, My Octopus Teacher, and how this unique one of the octopus is able to shapeshift into a perfectly camaflaged being to protect themselves from predators and danger. this kind of ‘cloaking’ becoming a beautiful kind of mask enabling the octopus to escape from harm. In essence perhaps, hiding their radiance but actually for octopus, it is impossible to hide their radiance, as even the “mask” has its own radiance. this past week I was walking near the bay, weaving my way through the harbor boardwalks and I came across the marine life center. they had a temporary visitor, a giant pacific octopus. they had been rescued from a shrimpers net with injuries to their body so they had kept them in a tank until their wounds could recover. they said they would soon be releasing them to the Salish sea . notice in the photograph of them the small and vulnerable eye that remains shut as they have no eyelid to protect from the bright lights of the marina.

I couldn’t help but think of this one metaphorically as I have been wondering about the one of me who wove a cloak to conceal my own radiance? I am uncertain now what the radiant one of me might look like, might act like? this radiance I might not even recognize? I imagine this woven cloak becoming like a skin, enveloping me in what I perceived to be safety but instead it becoming a place of hiding. and like the octopus-one, shapeshifting to ‘fit in’ . never wanting to seem different or be threatening in my difference. And especially wanting to avoid the risk of being rejected because of my difference..

aside from encountering my new octopus friend, I’ve been thinking a lot about some recent encounters with friends and my quite messy and oversharing need to set some unsolicited boundaries. This all began with Char at the end of the summer while we spent time on Guemes Island. She called me out for my superior-one who seemed to present that I knew more, thereby diminishing what she herself knew. and I think she is right, I do this sometimes. humbling. and unintentional but thereby unconscious. then there is friend tory, who’s brilliance and frenetic energy both overwhelm and gives me pause, in awe. without her request I reached out to her overexplain ing my need for solitude and focus in this year long intensive, something I failed to remember I had requested a full year ago after returning from the vision quest. clearly this work is activating one in me who is becoming both aware and less aware of my own impact on others as I move from and between my many protectors….in this case the caretaker and the one of me who is uncomfortable with attachment, mine and where I feel safe and the other in the sometimes unhealthy projects and attachment that I sense from others. then there is a new acquaintance in Dave, Amy’s friend. I intuited (perhaps falsely) a need, or desire for a kind of relationship beyond an occasional hiking friend. maybe true, maybe not but I made it clear that I was focused on this time and practices so maybe I’ll see you after September 2025! It seems I want CONTROL of when and where I expose myself to potential attachment, my own or others. there is a lot to unpack here….some of this was a reflection by Anouk but I am trying to come back to the language and understanding of the protectors.

how often I have not followed my instincts when someone has wanted / needed to attach to me, an unhealthy kind of attachment that keyholes into my IP of caretaker/rescuer. I am so tired of this one of me that I may now be too quick to assume this is what others want of me and what does this say about healthy and unhealthy attachment? remember the gesture Anouk shared with me from Eurythmy, open arms hands open in receiving, opening and then gently bringing arms back together and crossing over chest/heart in a gesture of sovereignty and standing in my north, my adult one and not in my child-one who is hiding or feeling afraid or shut down from opening to others. when is the open arms gesture one of the mother who believes her duty is to protect others, to be kind to ALL, to include ALL. what about the one who is loving observer who trusts in the wisdom of my-self as well as the wisdom of others inner knowing. Giving them support to find their own inner guidance. When does the gesture become an over extension and when is it closing off from vulnerability.??

i was a child who wove a cloak, wrapping it around me, hiding my own radiance

this morning i had a zoom session with palika in the bone hut ~ much was revealed and remembered in this session that i want to try and capture as well as the places i might explore to further deepen into this new and old terrain of the heart.

shared my dream of skins and furs and feathers; myself and others wrapping our bodies in these skins, furs and feathers so that we might be better able to acclimate to the environment of the ones we’ve come to observe. Rather that finding these others skins to be uncomfortable or cumbersome, i find them to be just right, to fit like a glove. the feeling of oneness feeling both old and new, familiar and lost. in my sharing i remember my conversation with owl heart and greenfire yesterday when charles shared the story of the cloak that the monks would wear when they came to the village so that they would hide their radiance. So that their radiance would not offend, or threaten, or set them apart. this felt so resonant with me as I imagine that I wove myself a cloak when i was a child, maybe a child of about 9 years old when I hid in my closet, my ro tun da club, a temple of my own creation where I did not have to hide the aspects of myself that I was afraid would be rejected. My love of dark places, my love of mystery, the lover of animals and the natural world (all I took into my closet were by books about horses and my drawing tools) the creative imaginative one of me, the sensuous, mysterious one of me. I remembered in this sharing the deep well of sadness I felt around my dad as a child, that I could intuit his grief but it remained mysterious to me, he remained mysterious and unavailable to me. I remembered that when I met a man and chose to marry him, Jon, I imagined a man who saw me for the fullness of me and when I began to develop and communicate in the new language of creative expression, of symbols and metaphor and dreams, instead of “seeing” and celebrating this one of me, I was critiqued and he began to distance himself from me. My radiance was threatening as he was trying so desperatley to find his own. So I pulled my cloak ever closer afraid to reveal this one of me who was finally coming alive. When I exposed myself again in my thesis show and my mother said, honey why are you so depressed? I again felt unseen and pulled the cloak closer. Some years later and I thought I had found another mate in Russ, an artist, one who understood better the vulnerability of the artists way, In this new relationship I began to experience and revel in my innately sexual nature. In this time while visiting in NYC with friends Holton and. Maria, he made photographs of myself and others, nude and expressive and so liberating to me. When I showed the contact sheet with Russ he was furious and confused about my “digression” and again, I pulled ,my cloak ever closer to me, hiding my radiance, again, this time the strong sexual being one of me.

a few notes from my pod zoom with greenfire and owlheart

hiding our essential nature ~ cloaks to cover our radiance

dissolution and middle world testing, trickster coming in with a possible distraction to get hung up on, to derail the YLSI process

navigating both chaos and order ~

living on ridges or canyons ~ rilke the poem; as onto a vast plain. The line appears in the context of exploring the threshold between physical and mental devastation, and spiritual becoming

Onto A Vast Plain

Rainer Maria Rilke, translated by Joanna Macy

You are not surprised at the force of the storm—

you have seen it growing.

The trees flee. Their flight

sets the boulevards streaming. And you know:

he whom they flee is the one

you move toward. All your senses

sing him, as you stand at the window.

The weeks stood still in summer.

The trees’ blood rose. Now you feel

it wants to sink back

into the source of everything. You thought

you could trust that power

when you plucked the fruit:

now it becomes a riddle again

and you again a stranger.

Summer was like your house: you know

where each thing stood.

Now you must go out into your heart

as onto a vast plain. Now

the immense loneliness begins.

The days go numb, the wind

sucks the world from your senses like withered leaves.

Through the empty branches the sky remains.

It is what you have.

Be earth now, and evensong.

Be the ground lying under that sky.

Be modest now, like a thing

ripened until it is real,

so that he who began it all

can feel you when he reaches for you.

the Dartington Yew tree which they both know well….a prayer for mystery that she says each day to herself upon rising. the

origin of the rivers in the celestial plain

the humpless camel who encounters the desert, does he think; I should grow a hump so I can sustain my time in the desert. Do we all grow a hump to sustain ourselves now or do we become the desert? Bayo Akomolafe’

those with uncompromising spirits who live in full integrity

with Palika:

in this year long we are asked to embody the wanderer….becoming naked, we are in a kind of preparation. what if i was to enact the cloak, perhaps outdoors in a forest wearing many layers where I might take one layer off at a time, speaking out about the one of me who is removing that which hid the one of me who….this cloak that has kept the mysteries of me safe from rejection, from fear, from exposure, from vulnerability. I am the one who as I communicate with the depths , with the dark waters, where are the layers of hiding….where does the tenderness show up?

then there is the dream of the stone and anouk speaking to me, she is in shadow, her hair is wild and she is missing one of her front teeth, she is bone hut, babayaga, a witch, the mysterious hag one of me….while she speaks I become aware that I am sucking on a small stone, smooth with angular edges, I am hiding it from her or others and then just as suddenly she stops speaking and I quickly remove the stone from my mouth and I insert it into my yoni. and the dream ends. This is another dream to enact, even while being witnessed at the next YLSI encounter, sucking on a stone, kind of concealing; what am i hiding? and why do I hide it in my yoni then? what is being hidden? how is it in hiding in the womb tomb temple of my inner sexual being/one?

re-imagine this threshold where I am with the one of me who is the hag with the missing tooth, i am also the one sucking on the stone and then just as quickly and mysteriously i put the stone in my yoni. I repeat this encounter as well with stone and do it enough to recall this when I am being witnessed so that I don’t physically have to do it but can recall the impulse, the gesture, the embodiment, the oneness with stone ….anytime I feel fearful of revealing something vulnerable about myself, something that I may feel I will be rejected because of, imagine this gesture of removing my cloak and exposing my radiance!

clearly dream maker and mystery has brought charles/greenfire into my world now six years ago to help me to learn something about my own beloved. is he my inner beloved/ in my longing for my own wholeness, how do I become my own beloved? Palika has asked me to re-call, to re-member as a practice….if greenfire out of stone was my beloved, what I am most terrified to reveal to him, if he is the masculine that I have hid from in many ways since being a child, or the masculine in myself that I hide from…what do I most admire about greenfire? this is a golden projection as well as a true appreciation of a dear friend. he is an agent of mystery for me. in my psyche, heart and body what do I feel when i imagine the one of greenfire? what is so activated in me, why did I think, fuck no I won’t do the ylsi with you! what is true in me but not been seen in me but /and I am terrified to own, what is my relationship to all of these qualities in greenfire in myself….

love his creative, intuitive, symbolic and articulate, mythopoetic mind and ways of articulating ideas and images creative, weaver of story, bringer together of relationships and communities, father, partner, patience, lover of nature, explorer, intensity, passionate, humourous, lover of language and books, we love the same books and authors and ways of living outside of the mainstream but recognize parts of ourselves that are too afraid to do so and wonder about that part. love his physicality, his body, his tallness, his relaxed way and lack of self consciouness (at least on the surface of things). The watery nature he describes, weaves and shapeshifts to accomodate others to avoid disruption and confrontation and conflict. so recognize this one in me.

What am I most terrified to reveal to the masculine in myself and in others?

Bone Hut asks me what am I able to sacrifice, to lose, in this YLSI?

probably 30 years old at Lake Minnewaska in the Catskills with Jon, not far from our home in Stone Ridge.

places of remembering

                        October 11th, 2024 end of our first session YLSI, Joshua Tree National Park

Sunday, October 13th

notes in my journal

Home. Waking early and I am struck by how quickly I return to an old habit of waking with thoughts of my children. Curious that I did not think of them when I woke in my tent to prepare for our pre-dawn wanders. My biggest challenge in meeting this new one of me, this one beyond how I know myself best in my home as a mother to these to two young adults. Notice this. And love this one of me here now and remember the one who buried her broken heart with a polished moonstone in the nighttime desert. This one of me who found the courage to walk out of the desert alone on a new path and into the night following our trance dance under the northern lights. This one of me who became so disoriented, who tried to walk in the dim moonlight until realizing I had become lost…I seemed to be in the wrong wash, too far down the road, casting about with my red light, then white light, then red. An hour goes by. Where am I? Actually, where the fuck am I? What is that rustling in the bush? Am I in any danger? Did I wait too long to begin this year long journey? Am I too old? I feel embarrassed and unprepared and arrogant thinking I could easily walk back and up the wash and find my way back to camp. Especially after moving in a drumming dance trance under these beloved skies, witnessed by these precious allies? What the fuck! Is this the way? Should I go back to the road? Have I gone too far? I seem to be headed to the visitor center? Perhaps I should just sleep here tonight and wait for daylight.

This path is unfamiliar, this path of remembering.

Wait, is that a red light, anothers’ headlamp? Why does it keep going on and off. I’m beginning to feel frustrated and angry, scared, sad, tears come. I can sleep here tonight, I have what I need but I then remember Dark Prophet saying that if we are not gathered with the group at 5:30 a.m. we will be considered lost. Do I blow my whistle now or do I blow my whistle at 5:30? Protectors are looming! I don’t want to be a disruption to the group, to cause a stir, a commotion, the one who needs help! No not me, I am not one who needs help.! So I call out, RED LIGHT! RED LIGHT! ! It goes on then off, I begin to walk towards it and the red light disappears again. I begin to think I am seeing things. Clearly they don’t see me or are they fooling around? Another protector shows up….you can’t count on anyone but yourself! Do I continue walking this direction even though the red light has disappeared? I decide to try and send a message, turning on my white lamp three times, on and off. I wait, becoming more and more uncertain what I should do. Then, in that same distance ~ the opposite direction from where I think I should be headed, where I think our camp is located, another red light and a dim voice;

ARE YOU LOST?

YES! I AM!

WALK THIS WAY TOWARDS MY LIGHT!!

So I do, quickly. It’s some distance away and as I approach I wonder, is this an ally? Either way it’s a contact and I’ll find my way back. I say as I get closer to the darkened figure with the red light; “are you one of my people?” I shine my light as I get closer, it’s Dreaming Salamander. I give him the biggest hug of relief as he says, it wasn’t me, it was Julia, Broken Bone. She’s been tracking you as you wandered and wondered if you were lost as your movements were so meandering and back and forth. I look towards Broken Bone to thank her and see that we are all up on the rise above the campground to the west near the wash.

I am moving in the west, to the west of my familiar and I am safe and my people are here to greet me.

longing & belonging

I had a vision in which I made love with the world. 

The form of my being, indistinguishable

from all else, married to atmospheric particle,

vibrated in cosmic intensitities, quaked

as a great mountain. I visited plateaus

of whole-body pleasure and pain, a trillion

years old, tied up in the archaic and endless

Gordian know of life.

these words were written by my friend alma in her long, prose style essay, In Fertile In-Between Places. they speak to me in what i long for. For porosity. Porosity, with boundaries of discernment as i seek relationship with this wild world of boundless beauty and heartbreak. as i seek to shed some of the cloak of hiding that i have created since my childhood. perhaps some of the feelings were too big, the possibility of loss too great that i needed to create compartments of expression. yesterday when i left the documentary film, No Other Land, i felt like my heart was breaking. i could barely contain myself just to exit the theater and get to my car. it is that level of empathy that scares me and that i have buffered myself from. i was overcome with a deep sadness for the suffering of so many people in the middle east, particularly the Palestinian and the Israeli people who see the suffering and feel complicit in that suffering. my sadness is mixed with anger and rage, at injustice and greed and the terribly complex circumstances that make this particular situation so difficult to solve. how to hold this grief and feel justified in my great blessing of a life and the need to create?

Wails, songs for grief

sunday Charles and his daughter Tilell came for an errand in bham and spent the night here. charles was anxious to share our anticipation and callings towards this YLSI. i found myself as i so often do talking, wandering around in circles looking for someplace to land in my telling that would feel genuine to me and articulate to charles. i spoke of my mom’s death, the beginning of a painting, of my hope to become more porous and able to connect more easily with the wildness of the world around me….i spoke of my recent dreams. he then shared his big dream of whale song and the mother orca, the two calves and the bony whale king, a threatening bull whale who spoke to him as he found himself in the belly of the female whale. the mother orca gifting him a tooth from the right side of her mouth. this dream in the spring was proceeded by an lived experience with a whale some 15 years ago. he went on to describe active imagination with the bull whale which led to purchasing a bronze casting of a whale tooth, a visit to a maritime museum 3 hours north of him and finding the place in the skeleton of a giant bull whale, the same placement of the tooth gifted to him in the dream. numinous, synchronistic, mysterious. i found myself feeling like an imposter…a. recognizable inner protector and subpersonality. going to bed that night i dreamt of myself attempting to help others who were struggling and sinking in black quick sand, only limbs and heads poking through as they struggled with their animal like bodies. in my attempt to help i also became stuck in the dense, black sand and struggled to remain above the surface. what an image to begin this journey…..i spoke with becky about my time with charles and she reminded me of the animus and the father who i witness charles to be to his daughters, and the longing i experience for not only the father that i both did and didn’t have as well as the father that my children do not have. there is a lot of sadness in this longing, a kind of grief. both grief and acceptance. I share this with charles in an email and in that reflection …

….Then extrapolating from this place I realize I have been working with this healing of the masculine and the feminine so much of my life. And then there is the tooth. In my re-membering, it was a tooth taken from the right side of the whales mouth. The right side often thought of as the terrain of the feminine, and the feminine as she appears to be in her current wounded ailing earthen body seeking healing and balance in this world, the oceanic emotional brewing of all that is …..and then Palika sent this lovely message this morning and the music below which is sprinkled with whale song………………………………..

Dear Ones Near and Far

You who love prayer song and singing together as humans deeply listening and loving - this is Ahlay Blakely. She has offered this heart tendering community grief ceremony for the world in such times as we live, dream and are dreamed. I have been letting myself be swathed in the abyss of this honeyed ocean of heartbreak that meets me in my longing, love and participating with the miraculous cosmos where our ocean planet spins. I imagine singing these prayers with you sometime and offering our tears to the holy ocean for the visions we carry of what is possible and of what we love and care about and tend.

and now in this writing i see the many interconnections. charles writes back that he sees in Blakely’s illustration for Wails, a woman in a fetal position in the belly of the whale ~ as he found himself in his dream, he then went on to remind me of my painting that i shared at our first residential, of a girl/woman in a fetal position in a watery world of her own birth, death and rebirth ~

i remember writing a poem i called flight and sharing that with my new cohort the first residential. i can't find the poem but i remember my experience....may 29th, 2017, olivia skye attempted to take her life....when we were being transported to seattle childrens hospital in a medivac helicopter after dusk, i was sitting in the passanger seat next to the pilot with my eyes closed, praying that olivia would not die. i could hear the nurses in back, the concern in their voices as they were with olivia on a life support machine. as we flew south over the ocean, the islands bodies below, i remembered the painting i had been working on now throughout the spring. i opened my eyes and looked below as we were flying below cloud cover and i could see in the diminishing light the tributaries and rivers flowing into the oceans surrounding the islands and shorelines....i knew then that she would not die. this painting was a premonition of a transformation, a birth, death, rebirth cycle, a painting of life and not of death. and she did not die.

my work has always been my window into the liminal, into the mystery of other worlds beyond logic and what is known. and now i thinking about how just one year later after this life changing event, i entered pacifica, a new  journey of the soul, ultimately exploring island bodies of another sort, those i had once viewed from above, isolated but deeply interconnected to one another.

                                        immram (a wonder voyage, a sea journey to another world),                                                                                                30"x40", charcoal and graphite on paper, 2020

mapping

poem shared by Marmot this past week as we gathered for our one year anniversary, questers of the small waters ~

Cargo by Greg Kimura

You enter life a ship laden with meaning, purpose and gifts


sent to be delivered to a hungry world.


And as much as the world needs your cargo,


you need to give it away.


Everything depends on this.

But the world forgets its needs,


and you forget your mission,


and the ancestral maps used to guide you


have become faded scrawls on the parchment of dead Pharaohs.
The cargo weighs you heavy

the longer it is held


and spoilage becomes a risk.


The ship sputters from port to port and at each you ask:


“Is this the way?”


But the way cannot be found without knowing the cargo,


and the cargo cannot be known without recognizing there is a way,
and it is simply this:


You have gifts.


The world needs your gifts.


You must deliver them.

The world may not know it is starving,


but the hungry know,


and they will find you


when you discover your cargo 


and start to give it away.

the photograph above is of an altar i have just begun to mark the beginning of the YLSI. it is a representation of a mandala inspired by Bill Plotkin’s map of the human psyche, marking the four facets of my Self, my Self in my wholeness in the outer circle and i will gradually introduce an inner circle that represents my subpersonalities or my woundedness.

the white sea/cluster/calcium/home faces the east, the “sensing” function, Innocent, Sage, Sacred Fool, Trickster. opposite on the mandala is the west and is represented by the river stone with crystal deposit and markings on top. the west is the “imagining” function, the muse, inner beloved, anima/animus and guide to soul. In the north, represented by the small black stone with layers of built up minerals in a cluster of circles, the north is “cognition” and represents the nurturing, generative adult. In the south, the “o” stone, a series of layered circles in blackened river stone; representing the “feeling” function and my Wild Indigenous One.

equinox dreaming

at this time of the fall cross quarter days, the fall equinox, I think of this place of in-between, a liminal space between what has been and what is to come. i’ve been transcribing my dreams that i have recorded in these past few weeks… some images that stand out…and feelings that arise as I re-read these dreams…

frustration, a feeling of being crowded, also feeling of relief as in “dad finally unpacking his boxes of books which include a box with a sweet yellow handmade shirt still with hem thread and needle attached”

iowa city with charles and rio, we are walking and find ourselves standing at the center of “a crossroads”, in what appears to be a mandala, the four directions; directly across is the iowa river with the downtown beyond, to the right, towards my parents house, to the south, the university hospital, to the west, the sprawling red brick buildings of the University of Iowa Art Department where i spent many hours….the ground is so wet we are unable to walk there without appropriate shoes or boots. charles is showing me beautiful images in a book of a far away place, there is an element of risk which i can’t put my finger on, there is another language being spoken and i sense a whole new world being opened to me.

my friend joanna drawing the future on large pieces of paper, she tells the story as she draws the story, words flow from her mouth at the same time the picture evolves through her fingers with bold black lines.

on a retreat, charles is there, maybe the YLSI, i seem to feel a lot of frustration and a need to manage things and take care of people as well as take care of charles and the horse he is leading by a rope, there is chaotic construction and earth moving equipment all about with water running in rivulets, in spite of the stinky poop found in the trunk of a car i hang a sunflower garland from a tree

another retreat, different circumstances, certain amount of chaos again and disgruntled people. leaders, teachers and guides, a man seems to sabotage a water system which results in an explosion of water lines in a small town thereby i assume the retreat is cancelled. artists making work, i am annoyed at being called the quiet one and i don’t know where the small glass jar of bright blue mineral pigment is?

Loyal Soldiers

                                    Pauline Aspel's apple tree May, 1978, Iowa City, Iowa

I am looking to fully live my multifaceted, wild psyche, committing myself to the largest story I am capable of living, serving something bigger than myself….daring to dream the impossible and to romance the world, to feel and honor my kinship with all species and habitats, to embrace the troubling wisdom of paradox, and to shape myself into perhaps, a student of the visionary, with the artistry and the energy to revitalize our enchanted and endangered world.

what did i know of this longing when i was just 20 years old? in my memory, this was the time that i first believed i had found a language that expressed without words, the deeper aspects of my knowing. this would have been when i was in college and first was introduced to black and white photography and the alchemical wonder of the latent image revealing itself to me in the developer bath in the dim red light. what i don’t remember is when or why i understood that images were safer than words to explore this mystery, these mysteries, within my self and within the wider world? it was in these early days that i began to be drawn to symbols and ultimately to the meaning of these symbols as i later, in graduate school in new york, began to pair elements within the frame in a controlled environment, still lives. Still Lives. I wasn’t finding these ideas in the world around me so I began to create these worlds in small tableauxs.

                                     Altar Piece, 1987, New York, New York, (29 years old)

                                                                1987/88, 23rd Street, NYC

“a pattern of Her pattern” (b.brownlie)

“For me we are the skin of Earth/Gaia. We literally sprouted from Her body…and are a pattern of Her pattern. To look out at the animate earth around us, is to look into a mirror”

my dear friend Becky sent this to me this morning in response to my beginning attempts at an elevator speech of WHY I am so drawn to this Animas Institute work….

In my search for the words, for the understanding of what is calling to me, I have found the help of others words as I so often do. Yesterday I had a talk with Wren Bear as well which also helped to illuminate and clarify this calling:

what if i allow myself to be more sensitive? The facet of the self that I most identify with is the North, the Nurturing Generative Adult., I am very good at getting things done, at being responsible, but am I good at nurturing myself, at nurturing and being truly nurtured by the world? I am not seeking to change myself or dismiss aspects of myself but to tend to aspects of myself that might be hiding, might have been left long ago in my childhood closet?

I am my relationships; my relationship to my work, to myself, to those i love, to other beings, to place, to this earth…

soul is not just a place “inside” of us but instead a place we inhabit, the relationships we tend

PRACTICE ~ continue to visit the west pasture next door, the big, wide open grasslands that remind me of my childhood and even my ancestral homelands. and visit the shallows, the seasonal creek found down amongst the big firs, cedars, hawthornes and big leaf maples. i will find there a one i have visited before, a grandmother maple…visit this being, offer something to her, words, touch, a gift, mirror back to her with and without words. allow myself to be nurtured and cared for by this one, this wild, old being who has been protected in this place longer that i have been alive most likely. this is a new relationship to help me to learn this aspect of my wild indigenous self.

what more have i not tended?

words found through others that are helping me to understand…

“Nature is an incomparable guide if you know how to follow her. She is like the needle of the compass pointing to the North, which is most useful….when you know how to navigate.” ~ C.G. Jung

….”Sometimes…

…I look out at everything

growing so wild

and faithfully beneath

the sky 

and wonder

why we are the one

terrible

part of creation

privileged

to refuse our flowering….

~ David Whyte, from “The Sun”

I am looking to fully live my multifaceted, wild psyche, committing myself to the largest story I am capable of living, serving something bigger than myself….daring to dream the impossible and to romance the world, to feel and honor my kinship with all species and habitats, to embrace the troubling wisdom of paradox, and to shape myself into perhaps, a student of the visionary, with the artistry and the energy to revitalize our enchanted and endangered world.

Year Long Soulcraft Immersion

This is where the story begins, although it began long ago, long before I came for this revolution around the sun.

On October 6th, 2024, I will join a small cohort of wanderers, visionaries, dissolving ones and guides for a year long immersion in the journey of soul initiation. I’ve been asked to weave together the numinous life experiences I am able to recall, those that feel most resonant to me in this particular time. NUMINOUS, what has felt sacred, holy, of the soul, in the underworld, in the realm of mystery. This might include recurring or supercharged symbols, soul encounters, archetypal resonances, big dreams (especially those remembered from early childhood), core wounds, significant intimate relationships (human and other-than-human) and how these have shaped me. What are they themes and motifs of my deeper life, encounters with remarkable people (human or otherwise). Gather the pieces of my deeper story, my mythic story, my soul story. This is not a biography of my everyday life, but more like “mapping”, possibly for the first time, the personal terra mysterium - the events, sensings, moments, encounters, and so on, when I most seemed to be in - or beckoned to- the deep under-stream of my life, or when the current beneath the surface of the everyday took hold of me.

As well as this narrative, we are asked to use verse or prose….drawings, paintings, objects found and made in nature. I might want to eventually weave or “plant” this story in a wild place, becoming a sort of map, or cairn, a mandala support by wild beings which have been placed in relationship with one another. Hang on to this until we meet together on October 6th in person in Joshua Tree National Park. Before my arrival to this council, take this story and spend time with it, embody my story, dance it, sing it, cry it, lament it, rejoice it.

i found a temple in my closet

i found a temple in my closet

one of the earliest memories I have is of my closet in my bedroom in my childhood home on Downey Drive in Iowa City, Iowa. There is no one who can confirm the truth of this memory but it’s story is very real to me, that it happened or was imagined seems unimportant. the memory and the place it holds as a childhood refuge is what matters to me. When I was about 9 years old we moved to a new town and into a new house. I had my own bedroom in this house, a small room with a small, narrow, elongated closet with a sliding wooden door. I recall taking all of my horse books (beloved) and drawing materials into that closet, closing the door behind me and sitting there in the darkness. I remember calling this private place, my ro tun da club. I distinctly recall the spelling of the word spaced out in three syllables as I might have found it in the dictionary. When looking this up years later I find it to mean a domed room possibly a sacred or temple-like space of prayer or reverence. I don’t recall how I spent time in my closet, did I lay on the floor looking up into darkness? Into an infinite space, into mystery? Fifty years later when cleaning out our family home I had looked at the closet wondering if I had really spent time there? Had I kept it a secret? Was this a refuge that I inhabited or was it an imaginal temple that only lived in my psyche or my dream life providing sanctuary from the mysteries of what was left unsaid in our family? I believe this memory of my childhood closet to be a foundational story, remembering the inner dream that brought me to life.

3 circus bears with drums

when i was a young child i had a reoccuring dream. this dream was only a fragment but i remember it being very frightening…three circus bears playing an eclectic assortment of instruments, i especially remember the drums which were very loud and unsettling.

Blog Post Title Four

It all begins with an idea. Maybe you want to launch a business. Maybe you want to turn a hobby into something more. Or maybe you have a creative project to share with the world. Whatever it is, the way you tell your story online can make all the difference.

Don’t worry about sounding professional. Sound like you. There are over 1.5 billion websites out there, but your story is what’s going to separate this one from the rest. If you read the words back and don’t hear your own voice in your head, that’s a good sign you still have more work to do.

Be clear, be confident and don’t overthink it. The beauty of your story is that it’s going to continue to evolve and your site can evolve with it. Your goal should be to make it feel right for right now. Later will take care of itself. It always does.