Recently a dear friend went on a spiritual retreat. She asked if I'd be up for spending some time with her while she integrated afterward, so we spent a couple of nights nearby in a round, one-room, tiny house made from a single tree at Compass Rose Farm. The first morning I stayed in bed for hours. I'd gaze up at this beautiful handmade shingled ceiling letting my eye trace the patterns, wondering. Was this beautiful cedar felled by a illness or storm? Or was it harvested to make room for gardens or habitation and given this new life as a home to honor it? I thought about the hands that laid the shingles and wondered there, too: did they lay it all out on the ground first, or make it once, just like this? Are there nails at the hidden end, or staples, or is it all just tucked together? Did they sing as they worked, or pray, like I do when I knot malas or chop vegetables, investing the work with loving intention?
Questions would arise. I'd let them roll about, holding possibility without settling on answers, and then I'd then drift back to sleep. Then wake again, wonder more, doze again. My energy is still low these early weeks post-covid and rest is a healing gift. My writing, too, feels a little softer, more meandery, less focused than the way words flow when I'm feeling crisp. That's okay; in fact, it feels just right for this season of foggy mornings and sunny afternoons, of lush melons and figs and oh, dahlias! The harvest is on. The children are going back to school. Turning is afoot.
As I lay abed, the life of this cedar sprawling out above me, I thought of you, as I often do when I see beautiful things. So I took this photograph to share with you.
This kind of pattern: organic, naturally arising, with inherent order yet without "perfect" symmetry, makes my brain profoundly happy. I can gaze and wonder and wander at such things with great joy: up into the branches of the trees around the house as the float on the breeze – as I typed that I glanced up at them, and in the very tippiest top of the fir out past my feet is a single pine siskin. They're all a little lumpy and awkward right now; molting season is afoot, feathers shedding. Oh, how long I can gaze at a feather, eye tracing the individual barbs. Do you love to do this, too? I wonder what your eye loves to linger on? I'd be so happy if you wrote to tell me!
In this image my eye wanders the little paths in the grasses, noticing, wondering. There are the clumps that form from the way the grasses grow. There are, to the right of the braid, a few round dark holes in the gold-and-green grass that tell me someone scampered through there. I wonder who? Someone very small, most likely: deermouse, mole, vole, rat. Probably not a snake, though they are surely in those grasses somewhere. They don't leave big holes, though, so hmmm, nah, not snake. Bird? Birds nest in the grasses, too, but I haven't seen a hole like that leading to a nest. Have I not seen them because I don't look into the holes closely enough? Perhaps after I finish this I'll head out to the meadow and look into one.
The braid was made by Jeanne Simmons, whose art this is; it hangs just inside my front door as a statement of our intended relationship to this place. I fell in love with Jeanne's work when this image went viral some years ago and was astonished and delighted to find looking for it later that she lives here in the small town near my home and, in the way of small towns, works with the friend I was camping with. Jeanne has kindly allowed me the use of the one image above from her Extensions and the one below from her Grass Cocoon for our autumn Workshop, as touchstones, metaphor, doorways.
If these images call to you like they do to me, check out her shop, where prints are very accessible: $55 (11 x14.5") and $75 (14.18.5"). Feed the artist, nourish your heart! And tell her I sent you if you do, please? To strengthen the web.
We love these images, I think, like my brain loves the patterns of the wild life of the Earth: because we are made to thrive here. This is what we belong to. If you'd like to consider that with me this autumn, it's the theme for the autumn Workshop for Living. The Story of Belonging: Myth, Meaning, and Meditation will begin September 12 and run through November 19. Prices start at $250.
The squirrels at my house are Douglas Squirrels, so we call them all Doug; well, the big ones; the little ones have become Douglets. They love to visit the nut feeder hanging in our front grove for the nuthatches and chickadees, the downy woodpeckers and the Stellar's Jays who will be down soon from the mountains to winter here in the lower elevations – nope, scratch that; the first has in fact arrived this afternoon, between my first draft of that sentence and sending this along. What a blessing! I'm telling you about the Dougs because I feel like that right now: tucking away little morsels all the time, "Oh, wouldn't that be wonderful for the Workshop!" We'll be reading Mary Oliver, scientific studies about how our health resounds with the wildness, gazing at Jeanne's art, and feeling in meditation into how we co-respire with the trees and the oceans. How we belong. Ahhhhhh.
Love,
Dahlia
Resources
Yes, Again
The longer I am alive, the more I savor both memory and anticipation; playing with time and perception. Some memories I review deliberately to polish them, keep the hallways to them in my mind bright and clear. Sometimes I get to the end of a book and start again at the beginning right away – most recently with Amal El-Mohtar's Seasons of Glass and Iron. I'm not usually a big reader of short stories, as they so often leave me aching for more. This time, upon reaching the end, I realized I could simply begin again. I've been reading it at bedtime for weeks now, looping. Which is wonderfully apt given that my introduction to this writer was her collaborative novella with Max Gladstone This is How You Lose the Time War, among my all-time favorites.
I mention this today because the full solar eclipse of last week is over, but we can savor it still, lean into it, find the place in time where it is present-tense, living, and resonate there. Earthsky has an incredible collection of images to explore. Their livestream of the eclipse is also viewable. I particularly love livestreams of cosmic events for the sheer delight of watching scientists giddy like kindergartners at the grandness of existence. This was my first time watching an eclipse livestream – not sure which one I was on, honestly, but it was magnificent because once totality was complete in one area, the coverage would hop to another and we could feel it again. Again! Oh, yes, life: more, more, more. Again.
Speaking of the joys of revisiting: I recorded the casual Meditation Gathering which I offered on August 8, and it'll be live on Zoom for a few weeks if you'd like to nip by and savor a little guided meditation.
Speaking of looping: because orbits are round, solar eclipses are followed about 2 weeks later by lunar eclipses: first the new moon the moon's shadow causes a solar eclipse, then the full moon passes into the Earth's shadow causing a lunar eclipse. On the night of Thursday August 27, a lunar eclipse will begin at about 7:25pm, peak at about 9:12, and end at about 1am. Griffith Observatory will have a livecast from LA for folks who don't have visibility; they are calling this a "partial practically total" eclipse; the moon will be 96% covered. Crossing my fingers for clear skies in Washington!
Resistance is Love in Action
This week has been declared a National Week of Action Against ALPRS – automatic license plate readers – by the folks at DeFlock who are organizing against Flock, the most widespread purveyor of this surveillance technology. There's been a rising wave of awareness and rage against ALPRs of late. There's been tons of coverage in even mainstream media about abuses (NYT, WaPo) and a rising wave of action. In my favorite, someone in Winona, MN cut down all 8 of Winona's cameras on the night of August 1. Now there's some direct action!
77-year old Carl Gunn spent 7 hours sitting in front of a Flock camera holding a 12' pool skimmer with a sign saying DOWN WITH FLOCK CAMERAS. There's the viral video of a guy draped in an American flag carrying a chopped-down Flock camera while dodging security guards. One of my dearest has been conversing with her local politicians and police chief about local use of Flock cameras! I love to watch people get active.
For me, my local gleaners have just begun to pick fruit to send to our food banks and schools and I'm hoping to get out with them soon! The year anniversary of my daily resistance actions is coming up at the end of September, and that feels lovely. Yesterday I went to see a new Traditional Chinese Medicine practitioner and in the restroom saw the adorable sticker below that says COMMUNITY IS RESISTANCE. This is the work of artist Lori Roberts of Little Truths Studio near Portland, OR. I ordered that and her version of John Lewis' excellent MAKE GOOD TROUBLE. You can, too!
Here's my doc with resources for stepping up. Your additions are warmly welcome; just drop me a line!
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