these are the things my soul was made for

This morning I woke up a bit disoriented by the still-dark sky and had to blink at the clock for awhile to figure out what was wrong. After I dragged myself from bed, I texted a good morning to my daughter, and she returned with a disoriented, “Why are you up so early??” reply from France, who is still on the old clock. Outside, the frost had returned and all the daffodils were bent over at the knees, but the geese and the ducks, sun-centered as they ever are, were entirely unfazed by the new time-keeping. The sun came up and shortly thereafter, the food and water arrived; they honked and chattered their way out of the pen and into the new week. It’s a kind of simplicity that tugs at something deep within me.

In a somewhat serendipitous moment last week, I finally found a copy of Cal Newport’s Digital Minimalism (which so many of you have told me to read!) and spent the weekend highlighting it and reading passages out loud to my family. (I just love it when I find a book that echoes all the thinks I’ve been thinking and says it even better than I ever could.) I realized there are about 30-ish days left in Lent, so I’m beginning his Digital Detox today. No technologies “including apps, websites, and related digital tools that are delivered through a computer screen or a mobile phone and are meant to either entertain, inform, or connect you,” for 30 days. (Exceptions for essential work-related tech, which for me includes my blog and email on a limited basis. I’m also keeping limited text messaging and my photo journal since that is a daily project I don’t want to disrupt.)

My favorite part of this Detox though, is not just eliminating time-wasters and distractions, it’s the encouragement to craft a new life: “During this monthlong process, you must aggressively explore higher-quality activities to fill in the time left vacant by the optional technologies you’re avoiding. This period should be one of strenuous activity and experimentation.” I convinced my husband to join me (such a sport) so I’m looking forward to a fun month. I can see that this would be a good practice yearly - more like twice a year, if I’m honest - since technology has a way of sneaking up on you and hooking you when you don’t even realize it. I’m no longer tempted by social media, but don’t ask me how many times a day I read the New York Times and the comments. (Why??) That addiction to novelty is always needing to be tamed.

~ Truthfully, I feel like I am circling ever closer to the life I am supposed to be leading. I have a mental playlist of images and quotations, the witness of particular people, that I return to continually. And there are certain themes that spark a flare within me every single time I encounter them. It has only been recently that I’ve realized that they are endlessly fascinating to me because they are mine. These are the things my soul was made for and I will only ever be my best self when I fully embrace them.

Terry Tempest Williams wrote a story last year for Orion magazine in which she talked about her reciprocal relationship with nature, the way it is always calling to her and she is always calling to it, and how they are constantly calling each other into being. I think about that in times like this, how often I hear the world speaking to me, urging me toward what I know is my own truth. I do not mean truth of a theological nature, per se, but the truth of who I am in this earthly community and my purpose for being here.

A few years ago, maybe a decade or more, I was walking with my family on my Grandmother’s property. The kids were chasing each other around in a grove of Russian olive trees and the rest of us were climbing the rise along the horse pasture. It was a beautiful day, not too hot, though the sun was overhead and bright. We followed a line of old elm trees and I let the others wander ahead. I had heard an owl calling in the trees and wanted to look for it. I walked around, squinting up into the canopy with my city-blind eyes, but I couldn’t find anything. I gave up and left the trees behind, heading out into the open pasture. The kids were shouting and laughing, the voices of my husband and uncle drifting down the hill. There was a scent of sun-warmed sage in the air. I turned to look over the land my Grandmother’s family had homesteaded over a hundred years before. Just as I turned, there was a snap at my ear, a taffeta rustle that brought a kiss of cool air. It was a Great Horned Owl, skimming the space above my shoulder. It flew to the low branch of a tree directly in front of me and bobbed its head. I locked eyes with it for just a moment, dazed, grateful, astonished. Then it hunched itself and leapt into the air again, gone. All these years later I can still feel the pull of him, drawing me into a world of solitude, stillness, attentiveness, space. He was calling me to my own life, though it would take me so many more years before I recognized it as anything other than a memorable experience.

I believe there is purpose in my being here now, and so I believe the world is as much in need of my presence and witness as I was in need of that Owl’s and all the other living things that have graced my path. I believe it for all of us, whether we speak with the hurricane or the whale or through other languages of faith and presence.

This next month I’m going to be listening deeper, following the path I know I’m supposed to take.

Tell me, what are the messages your life is bringing you? Who are your messengers? I’d love to hear more.

peace keep you, friends,

tonia

EDITED: I don’t know what I was thinking when I wrote this earlier and talked about the New Moon. Clearly it’s a Full Moon now. Whoops! I wasn’t quick enough to edit it out before the post went out via email. :)

Brigid's Day

A photo from earlier in the week.

The rain has swollen our community creek, so we couldn’t go down to dip our hands in it as we’d planned on this Brigid’s Day, but we prayed a blessing over it anyway. It’s home for fish and frogs, crayfish, the giant salamander that surprised our son one day, countless insects and creatures and birds, stones and root and branches, silt of our common land, and most importantly, water, which grows more precious to me every year. (Do we ever dare complain about rain and snow in these days when so many in the world have no water at all?)

“Let us bless the humility of water

Always willing to take the shape

Of whatever otherness holds it…

Water: voice of grief,

Cry of love,

In the flowing tear.

Water: vehicle and idiom

Of all the inner voyaging

That keeps us alive.

Blessed be water,

Our first mother.”

~ John O’Donohue

***

This week, I also found a lovely series of house blessings in my Northumbria Community Prayer Book to be said on Brigid’s Day. You stop at each room of the house and give a blessing specific to that space. We’ll do that tonight.

Here are a couple of them:

At the Doorway:

May God give His blessing to the house that is here.

God bless this house from roof to floor,

from wall to wall,

from end to end,

from its foundation and in its covering.

We call upon the Sacred Three

to save, shield and surround

this house, this home,

this day, this night,

and every night.

In the kitchen:

Seeing a stranger approach,

I would put food in the eating place,

drink in the drinking place,

music in the listening place,

and look with joy for the blessing of God,

who often comes to my home

in the blessing of a stranger.

May your homes and your places be blessed as well, friends, with generosity, compassion, abundance, and life this weekend.

Peace keep you,

tonia

there is a place

This weekend, we took to the woods to learn how to find mushrooms. We had a gorgeous day, and the woods were eager to share their treasures. Our guide took us off-trail, taught us to let nature lead us. We looked for open, mossy spaces, free of tangled undergrowth, the places where mushrooms want to grow.

Every species has its ideal conditions for growth, he told us.

I thrive in these cool, damp, shadowed woods.

I would like to unwind time like a ball of wool, get back to the unformed part of myself and let her know: not every creature thrives under the sun. There is a place where the soft, deep parts of you can live.

Give me the quiet, secret spaces. Let me hear birds and rain at their work, follow truth like a deer trail through the trees.

A long time ago I lived under a steely sun, among false prophets, confident of voice and reasonable-eyed. They said the path to truth was too difficult to find, I would lose my way. They taught me to harden and to doubt.

But now I know truth spreads itself secretly underground, waits on every trail, waits for me to arrive and take it up at the right time.

I am un-hardening, un-doubting. I am looking closely for what’s real, what emerges from the fern-soft ground.

It was the Romans who taught us that time is a line stretching forward, but the Greeks believed time was a circle that comes around and back again. Perhaps that unformed girl is here, only waiting for me to come back round to her.

Perhaps she will step out now into this kinder world, perhaps she will find a place to fruit and grow soft under this understanding sky.

what i do with myself

October feels like returning home from a long and tiring trip. Home again to writing, early mornings in the dim little room next to the stairs, view of the woodpile. Cup after cup of tea, laundry humming in the dryer, garden slowly dying outside, to-do lists stacking like cordwood in my journal, breath prayers to keep it all from toppling. // In the morning, cold, my hands ache and the chickens’ feet are mottled red. Summer’s banishment was swift and I wonder about winter, feel the presence of it looming heavy, brittle, just out of sight. More wool socks, I think, another pair of waterproof gloves. Soon I’ll be breaking ice on the water buckets, scurrying to get back inside, my glasses fogging up when I cross the threshold. // France lives nine hours ahead. We text from our beds: her waking, me settling in for sleep, and again at midday, when she says goodnight. The afternoons are the loneliest. // At dinner we talk about the justice of various world economic systems - pick your poison, they all need to be vigilantly humanized - and wonder how to be free and just within our own. I want this in my bones. // I clean the pantry, scrub away the trail of some little creature who came looking for warmth and a meal; my husband lays a trap, rightly so, but I wipe peppermint oil on the shelves and secretly hope it will be deterrent enough. // The youngest discovers 70’s folk music and it plays all afternoon, I make bread out of buckwheat and sunflower seeds. The hippies were right about everything, we say, and laugh. // Someone asks me what I’m going to do with myself now, empty nest and all. Love, tend, grow. There is no economic system for that, it has to be carved belligerently from the one you inherited. // Once, many years ago, we pulled up an old log in the forest and under it curled a clutch of newborn mice, fat commas shuddering in the naked air, their flesh translucent and rose brown, their unopened eyes a tiny violet gem swelling beneath the skin.

hips and haws for the equinox

Today I brought a basket and clippers on my walk and gathered some rosehips and hawthorn branches for the Equinox altar I talked about in my newsletter. It was a cool, rain-free morning, and the sky was the perfect shade of grey to make the greens and reds look deep and vivid. (I never know why people complain about the grey skies here…they make everything else glow!)

I also gathered a jar full of hawthorn berries to experiment with. Did you know they are good (emotional and physical) heart medicine? I plan on trying a hawthorn cordial and I will dry the rest for tea. Maybe next year I’ll make a jelly with them.

My simple altar, honoring the gifts of the season, the softening light, and an attitude I want to take into these next weeks.

This print was a gift from Lesley and it captures what I’m longing for in this time of life so well. I’m learning that I do best when I focus on small, seasonal goals, a week or a month at a time, instead of big, ambitious goals (like say a no-shopping year….sigh). It makes more sense, doesn’t it? Realizing we are tidal in our own way, ebbing and flowing out of attentiveness, circling over and under the same ideas but responding to a changed shoreline each time we approach. Most of this year has been gathering, building, sending, and now I approach the quieter months with a need for rest and contentment, a time of trusting that what we have is enough.

Today the sun rose here at 6:59 am and will set at 7:06 pm. The midpoint again. Tonight after the sun is gone, I’ll make a simple supper of brown rice, mushrooms, some kale from the garden, and roasted sweet potatoes. Earthy things, dark and full of life. We’ll have apples and pears for dessert, some good wine, and welcome what Keats called the “season of mists and mellow fruitfulness.”

“The hedges are full of berries now, Hips and Haws; Elder-berries and Black-berries are the most conspicious, also the bright crimson berries of the Bitter-sweet. There is a plentiful crop of Acorns and Chestnuts.”

~ September 22nd entry, Edith Holden, The Nature Notes of an Edwardian Lady

Happiest of days to you. I’d love to hear how you are celebrating your own place on earth and its particular beauties.

Peace keep you,

tonia