Seeding the New Moon Heart (And Introducing Two New Story Projects!)

A small revolution has been recently taking place in my heart. A humble upheaval of an old order. Perhaps it is better to say that the revolution has taken place in my mind; my heart (all of our hearts) always knows, always has known, and has been doing its work despite certain aspects of my mind for many years. The revelation is really quite simple, but its effects on me have been rather profound.

Over the past few months it came to light in me that for a very long time--since I was a little girl, in fact--I've been using urgency and high stress to motivate myself to get things done. This is hardly news to any of us I'm sure, because this is the story of our culture. This IS the story of Western Capitalism, no doubt about it. A story of urgency, fight or flight panic, even competition over who is the most stressed out, the most burnt out, who gets the least sleep and never takes a weekend, etc. For some people, this model may work well enough; for others, like myself, it's actually quietly devastating. I'm a very stress-sensitive person; I've struggled with anxiety and panic since I was small. For a long time I've seen them as the other side of the coin of devoted creativity; two sides of one whole. As richly as I can spin a story onto paper, I can also spin off into obsessive panic about any number of worst case scenarios.

But recently, I've come to see that by following the story of the over-culture, I am helping to create conditions in which this kind of mindset can thrive. By using urgent stress to motivate, I create a landscape in which anxiousness and fear thrive. (Sound familiar? Sound like the world we see on the news?) It is not an inevitable state, nor is it even native to me. I don't have to claim stress as a birthright. I can see it as a product of the power of storytelling. It's funny, because I make my living, and feed my own spirit, by writing stories that grow taproots through the cement, that offer wild windows, old valleys and firesides full of hope, that attempt to give voice to the more-than-human world, to offer another set of narratives in which to view this place, this life, the problems at hand.

My heart is well versed in this way, devoted to it, and fiercely loving. When I am writing a story, I am deep in the heart of the pulse of things. Everything else falls away, and there is only this, the flow of words which is a flow of blood and wildwater and light through me. And yet crowding in around the work, when I step away from notebook and writing desk, are the tensions and conflicts of the overculture. I run my own business and make my own days and yet I find that the stories I am trying to subvert in my writing are still there in the narrative I tell myself as I work—a narrative of urgency, of stress, of strain. I've bought into the scarcity mentality our economic system feeds us, despite my every effort! This is rather funny, all of it, when I step back and look at it. Quite hilarious, and humbling too.

I know I am sharing more personal details than I normally do here, but I am doing so because I have a feeling that a lot of you out there know exactly what I mean; because I hope that sharing something of this struggle and the ways in which I am moving through it may be helpful, or galvanizing, to others, in addition to the hope that some of you may have wisdom or stories in this regard to share in the comments with all of us!

So, back to my revelation. It came while I was on my moon cycle last week. I think this is an important detail to share here in part because I will admit that it makes me slightly uncomfortable to do so, despite the passion I have around the deep feminine power of menstruation, the rage I feel at all the subtle and not so subtle stories we're told from a young age that make us feel shame and shyness and embarrassment around this most sacred of cycles. My slight discomfort is another example of an over-culture story that has deep roots in me, in so many of us.

Anyway, the revelation was really a synthesis of thoughts that had been stirring in me for a while, and amounts to this—let the heart, not the mind, be in charge. The heart is its own mind; let the brain-mind bow down before the way of the heart. Let beauty motivate you. Let the absolute astounding beauty of this life motivate everything you do. 

None of this, I daresay, sounds like news. In fact when I look at it, it sounds very obvious, like I've heard it five million times. But sometimes something shifts subtly in the way of the telling, and everything becomes clearer. In part this shift in perspective came from an interview I'd listened to earlier in the week, on Unlearn and Rewild, with Charles Eisenstein. In it, he discussed the "sickness" our culture has around time and efficiency. That it's an obsession with being efficient that makes us get things done (aka urgent stress). He suggested this alternative, to ask yourself--how can I create something in the most beautiful possible way? And this just astounded me. When the hostess, Ayana Young, asked him--well what about those environmental concerns which are really quite urgent, shouldn't we be efficient there?—his reply was: and how well has that been working for you so far?

And I just had to laugh, and laugh! Not well at all, of course! Not well at all on the cultural, global scale, nor on the individual level either! The mind balks at the idea of doing things with beauty alone as a motivation, fearing that nothing will get done. The mind balks at the idea of letting the heart really and truly lead the way. But perhaps what's really balking is an old story, hearing its death-knell. For there is a great, deep relief in the body at this idea too—what if I let beauty and heart lead me, truly? What if I trusted this wholly, every step of the way, not just with pen in hand? What if we all did? What would this world look like? Oh my.

The radio program Unlearn and Rewild describes the revelation occurring inside my mind rather well. Commitment to really unlearning the stories we are fed, not just the stories I see outside myself, but also the stories hiding within me despite my best efforts. Commitment to rewilding the body and the mind by letting the heart lead. Herbal healer and writer Stephen Harrod Buhner has written extensively on the neural networks that exist within the heart, and between the heart and brain; I think we all instinctively know that the heart "thinks," the heart knows things, before even the mind. It is the heart the speaks with the plants, animals and stones. Indigenous and pre-modern peoples the world over located the self not in the head but in the heart. If you think about it, the heart is a far, far more ancient organ than the human brain. The human brain, beautiful thing, is a troubled brain. The heart is the wilder of the two in the sense that it isn't very different from the heart of a rabbit or a doe or a fox. So by letting it have full rein—well, who knows what might come?

I would add that it's all well and good to come up with this kind of decision, to say oh yes of course, my heart is in charge, Let the Beauty You Love Be What You Do, etc. I've come to this decision many times before. What has changed this time is the realization that in order to change a story you have to tell yourself the new one all the time. Just as obsessively as you told yourself the old one. You have to practice telling it. You have to bow down to the heart, take the leap, putting your hand over your chest every time you forget, starting again each moment.

All of this leads me, in a very wordy fashion, to two new projects which I'm very excited to share with all of you. Both of them are as much medicine for me as I hope they will be for you—for in the end isn't this how the cycles of nature work? The berries are as much fed by being picked as they are food for the eater? And the creation of them as necessary to the plant as their consumption?

The first is called Morningstory. Here is its description from Wild Talewort.

For twenty-eight days, the number of days in a moon cycle, receive an illustrated story-vignette (500 words) in your email box, a cup of story to wake you into the wildness of your own body, to help re-story your morning, your afternoon, your night, your month, with the voices of the wildly human and more-than-human worlds.

In the face of the social, ecological and spiritual starvations and destructions of our time, we cannot hope for true transformation without also transforming the stories we tell ourselves and each other about our own hearts and our relationship with the more-than-human world—our belonging (t)here, and also our necessary humility in the face of so much robust, miraculous, diverse life and all the ways that it cradles us, from birth to death. We become the stories we tell, for good or for ill. May Morningstory be a cup of embers to fill your morning with, to warm you through the day, to help your soles stay wild, stay on the path of dust and elk-hoof and beauty, despite all attempts to sway you.

Every day, the culture we live in will try to steal you from yourself, says the inimitable Dr. Clarissa Pinkola Estés. Every night, she says, you must steal yourself back. Every morning, come sunrise, full of a skein of star-thick dreams, you are your own once more. The night has made you wild. Your heart has moved the rivers of your blood through every bit of you as you dreamed quietly under a changing moon. The earth has turned on her axis in the great black ember-bed of the galaxy and the sun has climbed up over her rim to feed every last thing the warmth and light it needs.

May Morningstory help to keep you stolen back every morning, back inside the great, feral cup of your own heart.

I've written a full sample Morningstory vignette, and it's available for you to read over in my shop! The first cycle will begin on the new moon of July, the 16th.

The second is a long awaited and deeply treasured collaboration, called Kith & Kin Medicine, with the wondrous medicine maker, writer and dreamer, Asia Suler, of One Willow Apothecaries. Back around the solstice, a dream fell into my mind—Asia's medicine is always so full of story, so full of her own potent dreaming (truly, this woman is amazing), so full of threads and lands that resonate deeply in me. A vision came to me of a project in which Asia, in her wildwood witch way, would brew up a special medicine whose ingredients she kept secret from me. I would then take the medicine and write a story based on the visions, paths and beings that arose in my imagination through it.

We decided to call it Kith & Kin in honor of our own storied connection, in honor of the kinship between stories and plant medicine (stories, after all, are one of the oldest medicines we have), in honor of the lands and all their inhabitants which we both love and are devoted to, me in northern California, Asia in the mountains of North Carolina. Originally, the term Kith referred to the living land, the countryside upon which one lived, and so the phrase "kith and kin" meant family, friends, and all the wider relations in the more-than-human world. Asia puts it beautifully: "Named Kith & Kin Medicine for the wild lands that gave it life and the kinship (between medicine and makers and dreamers alike) that it arose from." This is a deeply co-created project that blurs the lines between story, stone, root, petal and word.

Today the collaboration officially began, under the dark moon of June. I sat down at my desk, cleared my heart and mind, took several drops upon my tongue, and let the sensations and images begin to flow in. For several days, I will make no attempts to grab at stories; I will simply sit with the medicine, and see what tidbits, seeds and feathers come in. I will get to know it. More than that I will not yet share, for it is a secret place, the early stirrings in the creative heart. As the project evolves and matures, we will be sharing little peaks into the journey, here, for you to follow and see. In the spirit of intuition and wild-heartedness, we have no set release date yet, though rest assured it will be within the summer season.

The end result will be a story in the mail and this vial of Asia's extraordinary, earth-moving medicine, for you to follow into your own heart of hearts.

Elklines

"Going in search of the heart, I found

a huge rose, and roses under all our feet!

How to say this to someone who denies it?

The robe we wear is the sky's cloth.

Everything is soul and flowering."

-Rumi

Sometimes it feels to me that looking into the pollen-dusted center of a flower is just that--looking into its soul, which is not hidden away but boldly there for all the bees and hummingbirds and wandering humans to see.

In the past week, the season passed on light, poppy-pollen gold feet from the tender new flush of spring into the full bloom and coming dryness of our summer. I always feel that here, the beginning of summer is Beltane, May 1st, the old pagan holiday of fertility and bloom, and not June 21st. The hills are already tinged gold. The nettles are going to seed. The buckeye is in full intoxicating bloom.

In our own rambling yard, the kiwi is flowering, a perfect, moon-made flower for that furred and strange and delectable green-fleshed fruit that is to come.

And in the spirit of flowering, and the pathways of the seasons, this May Day, I had a very special visitor, a woman whose heart is full of blossom and seed and root, Asia Suler, the magic-maker and herbalist behind One Willow Apothecaries.



Asia is a medicine maker of great power and old, storied magic. I now have a little collection going of her seasonal medicines, each timed with the cycles of the plants and stones and our human hearts too, full with such ancient wonders as turmeric and tulsi, sassafras and moonstone, hawthorn berry and rose blossom, maple sap and crocus essence. I can attest first-hand that these are magnificent and powerful medicines; that they twine up from your soles to your crown like the blooming of May's flowers, clearing and opening and brightening all the shadowed or stiff or cobwebbed places that need it, just when they do.

We wandered the fog-held valleys and windy trails of Tomales Point, where the tule elk roam. It is a place of ancient and quiet strength, the matriarchal wisdom of elk-cows in their birthing herds, and the great, queenly bulb-patches of purple iris.


It was an honor and great fun to wander together through a thickness of pastel-sweet wild radish and cow parsnip, our soles tracing out some yet-unmade, yet-undreamed medicines across the paths, some yet untold stories made of mineralled stone and coiled root and purple iris petal.

For after all, it seems to me that stories are medicine, and medicine is made of story.

And the paths we walk, the act of walking, can bring us right back into that flowering, storied soul-- our own, and the world's, wearing the sky's robe, our feet gentle as rosebuds. 

I have been reading Robert MacFarlane's The Old Ways: A Journey on Foot, and it has caught my heart deeply; be sure you will see more of it here later this week. For now I want to share the following passage, which clicked open a little lock in my mind, as good writing often does-- an idea heard and known before, presented anew, that finally comes fully alive. 

"The best known connection between footfall, knowledge and memory is the Aboriginal Australian vision of the Songlines. According to this cosmogony, the world was created in an epoch known as the Dreamtime, when the Ancestors emerged to find the earth a black, flat, featureless terrain. They began to walk out across this non-place, and as they walked they broke through the crust of the earth and released the sleeping life beneath it, so that the landscape sprang up into being with each pace. As Bruce Chatwin explained in his flawed but influential account, 'each totemic ancestor while travelling through the country, was thought to have scattered a trail of words and musical notes along the line of his footprints.' Depending on where they fell, these foot-notes became linked with particular features of the landscape. thus the world was covered by 'Dreaming-tracks' that 'lay over the land as ways of communication,' each track having its corresponding Song." (page 30).

My Earth Constellation sketches for the week are also Songlines, Tracklines, Dreamlines. The red alder tree is also a great old wayfaring path, the bare human footprints have eyes in their soles, and each being is hitched to a set of lines... the traces of their literal tracks, coming and going; the lines they make through their own ecosystems, each being a thread in a great web; the lines they make with their hearts and their animal and plant dreams; the stories that unfold from all of these things.



Elklines, nettlelines, otterlines, ospreylines, hedge nettlelines. And also: the elk are calving, the osprey are here and hunting and maybe breeding, the stinging nettles are seeding, the hedgenettle is growing big, the buckeye spires are blooming, the river otters are pupping.

I imagine these "lines" unfurling before and after each being like narrow paths amidst the coastal scrub, amidst so many other stories, each utterly wild and its own. 

We can't forget all the lines made by the beings just under the skin-surface of the earth, like this magnificent, fresh, new moon entrance to an American badger dig. 

And then there are the histories of human places that leave their own pinwheel of storylines, like the old hay barn of Tomales Point's Pierce Point Ranch,  rising up through the fog and the drying fields of radish and cowparsnip like a ghost or a memory. In part of my imagination, it now holds within its peaked ceiling caverns the tallow-makers in last June's Epistle, Amelia and the Elk Tallow Moon.  But that is only one of many stories held in its lined beams, in its dust motes, beneath its foundation. I often wonder if it is lonely now, without people and cows to be its heart and its dreams, but maybe it prefers the fog, the ocean wind, the mice and foxes, the coyotes and barn swallows, the passing elk. Maybe that is more peaceful, as they leave their own tracklines through and under and over and around it.

It seems to me that animals and plants and stones and clouds always reside in that space of timeless creation that Aboriginal peoples have beautifully called Dreamtime. I wonder what it is like, Elktime. I wonder what it is like, walking the Elklines.

Elk create their own spidery footpaths through the land, as you can see here on the far hillside, while a small female herd rests among the cowparsnip, and is very difficult to discern from those big white umbels. They rest their bellies on the ground, and their growing calves, floating in that dreaming wombtime, can perhaps hear the songlines of the old earth of Point Reyes herself, moving north.

"Footfall as a way of seeing the landscape; touch as sight—these are notions to which I can hold." (Robert MacFarlane, The Old Ways, page 29). 

Here's to the footpaths of new friendship, of the new deepening summer season, of the old elk and all the beings their own elklines are hitched too, from oatgrass to vole to mountain lion to faraway hunter's star. 

Singing in the Rains of California

Oh my dear, sweet readers! Some brave, sturdy clouds have at last made it through that great Ridge of High Pressure, and over the past two weeks they have brought us small rain (and then a big rain, of which I shall tell!) like a thousand little glinting jewels strewn through the nasturtium leaves. 

The first morning of wetness—only a couple days after I wrote here of the Drought, in a fit of despair!— barely coaxed the dust to settle, but it coated the clovers and the dead raspberry canes with a silvery glow, it seduced the smells held too long in the leaves and grasses and dirt and tree trunks and even the asphalt roads out again, so that as I road my bike through the morning to my dance class, I kept inhaling, inhaling, until I thought I might pass out with the sweetness of it (and a tad too much air!). 

And as if they had been on the edges of their loamy seats all this time, seemingly overnight, the tiny green ones began to pop, beginning at the edges of the paths and lanes. The sky looked cleaned, somehow.

I had been afraid, deep down in my heart, that maybe nothing would grow this year, that no new leaves would come out— no elderberries! I was half weeping already at the thought, though I know, I know, it is not the worst of the concerns brought by a drought—but the dear fecund cleavers, the fierce nettles, the hardy blackberries, they positively danced, even with their scant half inch of water.

I went walking in Point Reyes, along the Muddy Hollow trail, to visit with the red alders, and the new nettles—I had feared there would be none!—and a special grove of alders that grow close and pale, where the tule elk pass, rubbing their antlers on the bark, where the bobcat moves, out of sight of human trails, coming down from the scrubby hills where she hunts the voles, the gophers, the small birds, like this darling fox-sparrow above, of whom I've been seeing much recently—it is a subspecies known as the Sooty Fox Sparrow that winters in the Bay Area from farther north, and what a sweet gift it is to get to meet them! (For beautiful photos of this bird, see here. I can't seem to quite get over the sweetness of those speckles.) Once, last winter, a wildlife camera (which I helped set up with Felidae and a tracking group called Catscapes, since we tracked bobcats and cougars) near this special grove of alders caught a shot of a lone mountain lion, passing gracefully at dawn. This is a special place, a place of old magic. When I visited it last, it was so brown and gray and dead I felt tight and a little sick in my stomach, a panic beginning to rise in the back of my throat at the hot sky, only blue, empty of clouds, desert dry. But after even two days of scattered rain—so little, in fact, that I heard people joking that the poor clouds were trying hard, but they'd quite forgotten what it meant, to rain— the land began to move, like my own spirit did, and throw its whole heart up toward that water.

I tell you, those weeks of stark blue skies were so unsettling to me (downright awful, though everyone kept saying the weather was so gorgeous—and it was, in its way, in the way any jewel-bright thing is beautiful, but somehow too bright) that after that first speckling of rain, just enough to wet the streets, when the skies finally changed, I positively drooled over the clouds. I've never appreciated them so much as that first day when I noticed them again, big sculpted creatures migrating the skies, nomads from far over the ocean, far over the mountains, changing form as they travel but also somehow always themselves. 

I spent half an afternoon gaping at their shapes, up in our attic windowseat, which I've since renamed the Cloud Window in their honor.

I brought my knitting, and my tea, and my watercolors, and basked in the cloud-light.

They are a gentle relief, clouds. Sometimes the sky is too big and too blue and too bright, and we need clouds to wrap us, to darken our days so that we may slow, and quiet.

At long last, just a week ago, a bigger cloud mass moved in. It came all the way from Hawaii— I shall never think of clouds the same again, after all of my slightly obsessive weather-researching, the clouds great intrepid travelers of our seas and skies, coming thousands of miles, trying to keep the rain held in their bellies—and, dear readers, it was a downpour.

I'd been so grateful for any wet at all, even the tiny gentle drops; any is better than none, I said, but those small tastes of rain wer making me long for the thrash of storms, the release of those clouds, breaking open upon us, torrential. I was filled with memories of big childhood storms, or storms when I was sixteen, and newly in love, and wandering out in the torrents.

Last weekend, that great creature, a Storm, finally visited us.

The radish seeds in our garden burst up through the mud.

The new raspberry leaves gathered, and pushed out.

The cleavers went rampant.

The birds came out in droves, shaking their feathers with what I can only call glee in all the wet, puffed and gloating like this towhee, and like I was, sitting out in it with the raindrops falling down my nose, a mad wet laughing sight, I have no doubt, to my neighbors, holding my hands up to it all.

I went for a walk to the lovely apothecary around the corner from our home, just to have an excuse to walk in it, and came back with the new-blooming violets which I discovered grow in patches right across from the beautiful hawthorn tree I found some time ago growing boldly from a sidewalk.

I tell you, the first true rain got me into a quite a flurry of joy. I put the milk on the stove, I melted chocolate, I filled up the silver chocolate pot, I ascended the ladder to the Cloud Window, I reveled. Really, there is no other word for it. I was meant to be working at the same time, and I did (a little) but mostly I drank a whole pot of chocolate and opened all the windows and grinned.

I anointed my chocolate-shot teacup with a beautiful elixir purchased from my friend, the lovely Asia Suler of One Willow Apothecaries, called White Sleigh, made to stir up all the magics of winter. It was the perfect thing, as this rain, I think, was a magic of the highest degree.

Raising a cup to the rain!

The next day, my love and I set out for Mt. Tamalpais, the beautiful Bay mountain where we both grew up. On that day, Mt. Tam received ten inches of rain— much more than Oakland's 2 inches (the mysteries of microclimates!)— and we were out beneath them, drenched to the bone within about 30 minutes, and laughing wildly. I did not bring my camera—if I had, it would have been ruined! And it was the sort of day no camera should touch, because the heart holds it all. It was a day of frothing rushing creeks, spontaneous waterfalls, getting down on hands and knees in the mud to exclaim over new pedicularis blooms, the trilliums nodding under the weight of raindrops, their white petals going transparent, the foam coming out of the redwood trunks from so much water (sacred stuff, it must be, redwood foam!) Simon has a keen eye for oyster mushrooms-- I never seem to see them until I am three feet away-- and so we came home with several large ones from logs fallen over rushing creeks, from the front porch of a woodrat nest... jewels made from rain and dead wood.



The only photo I captured was the aftermath, as we dried off at Simon's family home up the redwood canyons—and somehow, it turned out like this, capturing the feeling of that gushing rain better than any straight image could have.

I visited the creeks of Mill Valley later on with my father, and while I have no photographs, let me tell you, they were rivers, muddy and flooding and higher than I ever remember them. We stood behind the park where we all used to come and skip rocks when I was small, and crooned at that rushing muscular ribbon of water.

In the East Bay hills, the soaproots are now positively bursting, and the deer know it too. They seem to have munched almost every bunch I've seen!

At long last, not just the sides of trails but whole hillsides are starting to shudder and glow with green grass.

What a blessed sight it is.

New wild cucumber vines have appeared, as if out of nowhere, as they are wont to do.

And last years wooly blooms are at last put to rest.

Everywhere the raindrops look to me like the most precious of pearls, more beloved to my heart than any gem could be, because they coax each seed open once more, and my own heart too.

And bless her, my old friend Nettle, she seemed to laugh at me, and then stung all of my hands in scolding, saying—how could you ever doubt me? I will always return.

I know that California is still in a severe drought. Our rainfall is minimal compared to previous years. I know, the ever cynical News Folk tell us to not celebrate too soon, we still need another ten inches or so to be "normal,"but only two weeks ago, they also said that the High Pressure Ridge wasn't going to budge— and then, this, this miracle of flooding creeks.

So I am hoping, and I am bowing down to the rain, and I am bowing down to the cloud caravans that brought it from far over the ocean. We love you,  I want to say to them, we raise our hands to you and kiss each raindrop-world that lands, a gift, in our palms.