May We

 May we walk light-hoofed and together into the new year, finding the sweet and damp new grasses with our teeth when we need them. (And may the deer of this land find enough moisture this dry, dry winter!)
 

May we remember that our minds can look like the many rippled and reaching bay laurels, rooted in moisture, undulating their bark and spiced leaves toward the sun.

May there be labyrinths in the sideways hearts of long-gone volcanoes to walk our feet in, holding the seeds of prayer under our tongues.

May there be a bounty of acorns (whether they be dreams, or loaves of bread, or beets, or candlesticks), and may we treasure each one, making the perfect hole to hold it in, as the acorn woodpeckers do all together, drilling the old trees full of bounty, full of their woodpecker songs.

May we stop in our tracks at the wonder of berries and seeds and the sweet sugars of fruits, made for the tongues of birds, the tongues of foxes, the tongues of people.

May we remember that we too are made of so many veins, like rivers, like branches, like leaf-arteries, like wisps of fog, and that within us there are many maps, and many journeys.

 

May the bracken ferns turn green again (oh rains, do come!), and may our days be full of many gentle colors.

May we spend afternoons with our noses close to the moss of treetrunks, remembering the worlds of the little-folk— lichen, ant, moss, spider.

May we dance with our shadows, and find that sometimes they look like deer, like hares, like woodrats or owls.

May we reach our palms out in kinship to our brother and sister animal-folk, to skunk and squirrel, to deer and elk and lizard and bobcat. 

May we remember that the land is sometimes like the skin and the body and the muscles of a dreaming animal, furred, shifting her colors as the sun sets, receptive to our words of praise.



May we open our hearts to the wind, may we hang them from high places, from bay branches, by the ocean, may they catch the sun and the rain alike, and always be full, and never be dry.

May we pause long in the tide of each new day like the heron, and before hunting a morsel of breakfast, breathe the salt, breathe the sun, taste the air.

Thank you all, dear readers, for your kind words here at the Indigo Vat this past year, and your support of the Gray Fox Epistles and the Leveret Letters. My heart is huge with gratitude for this story-making work! I so look forward to all the new tales to come, and to share, this fresh-growing year.

Blessings upon all of your wild hearts this 2014 Journey Around the Sun!