initiation

Rode my Bike to get a few Groceries (and flowers) last week.

Hello friends,

It’s week 3 of isolation here and it seems like we’re in a new rhythm. Maybe we’ve worked through all the snarky first days of inhabiting the same space and trying to figure out how to honor each other’s fears (masks or no masks? Wipe down the groceries? Leave the mail on the back porch for two days? Weekly or bi-weekly grocery trips? Who ate all the nuts?) or maybe it’s the week of sunshine coinciding with the time to plant the garden which provides the feeling that we are doing something worthwhile with our time. Whatever it is, we seem to be less anxious and laughing more, which is a relief.

I read a short piece by Martin Shaw yesterday about whether or not this time in history is an initiation - a word I understand to mean a ceremony or event that ushers us into a new phase of life. Shaw made the point that if it is, our initiation has been organized by the Earth herself, and that is something worth pausing over. (i.e. It’s time to grow up, humankind.)

Whether or not it’s a global initiation (and I’ve big doubts about the receptiveness to such an initation for certain parts of the population) I’ve got my list of ways I want to mature, many of them around respecting the resources we use and creating a more community-centric sufficiency. (My friend Lesley asked recently what it would be like if we acted as though we lived in a small village that provided all our needs?) I already tend towards being a chipmunk and keep a well-stocked pantry (or larder, as the Brits say) at all times, but now our conversations have turned to the next level. Could we grow greens in cold frames? Harvest and freeze a year’s worth of berries and fruit from local farmers? Would it be possible to reduce our dependency on the grocery store by 50%? Install a rain-catch system? Only have toilet paper for guests? (Bidets are on the list of things to explore.) Things we’ve talked about in theory for years suddenly seem possible, doable, and even necessary.

In some ways, being forced to stay at home, dealing with the sudden disruptions in buying and consuming, is just what I’ve needed to push me forward.* I’ve spent a lot of time sitting outside just watching my world, suddenly aware of its tremendous abundance. (Consider the lilies of the field, they neither toil nor spin: a quiet cure for the panic I felt when the store was empty of so many things and I realized my survival skills are basically zero.)

Right at the beginning of this strange time, I signed up for an introductory course on Honeybees as a way to keep busy and distract myself from my fears. Our teacher shared the most beautiful quote at our last class:

“Every single bee relates to the other, and works for the whole of the hive. All is shared. All that is brought into the hive - nectar, pollen, propolis, water, is for the good of all.”

~ Heidi Herrmann

That spoke right to my home-keeping heart. “For the good of all.” I feel the invitation to make that a life’s goal and cause. Whatever comes into or goes out of my home, I want it to be nourishing for the whole community, from the Earth herself to the neighbor furthest down the supply chain.

In his article, Martin Shaw says,

“…if the initiatory experience doesn’t in the end become a gift to others, then it’s malfunctioned. Look for largesse. Look for gallantry…”

It would be lovely to emerge from this time with a feeling that it has not been wasted, wouldn’t it? That we’ve decided to make a better world.

I’d so love to hear what this time is speaking to you. Does the idea of initiation resonate with you? In what ways?

I hope you’ll share.

Thanks for always being here in this little community. I appreciate you so much.

pax,

tonia

A couple of links that have been meaningful to me this week:

Hearth: A Thesaurus of Home by Jay Griffiths. A four-piece meditation on what home means from a few years back.

Creatures of Place A short film about a family living a “radically simple permaculture life” on a 1/4 acre lot in Australia.

*I fully recognize the privilege and luxury of my position. Just trying to do the best with what life is giving me. <3

April book giveaway

Our beloved bookstore opened for online orders, so I was able to get a book for this month’s giveaway. This month, one of my favorite books of last year, The Overstory, by Richard Powers. A story about the complicated relationship between humans and nature. Just about perfect for right now.

Entry details are in the April newsletter!

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rattle

The tribal gods are rattling the skies.

The prophets of Mammon foretell the demise of the economy without a human sacrifice; the god of Fear extends the hours of the gun shop, weaves a fantasy-world of strength. Who do you worship? asks a famous preacher on the screen. Yes, who? Who, who? I ask myself.

In the woods, a pair of Owls talks through the night. In the morning, I step out the door and feel the nearness of some other Presence. I take the path to the pasture hoping it is the Deer returned with the soft-eyed Fawn whose legs have already grown long. Deer are the messengers of God, they always come when I am aching for comfort. I don’t know how to endure these days without longing to shed my skin and join the leaf litter, Fir needle, cast-off shell of a Hazelnut, lost feather, bird song, purr of Owl-conversation.

But up on the pasture, it is a trio of Coyotes who wait, panting hungry around the Duck house. Somewhere the gods laugh and the Owls hush. I can hear the Ducks locked inside their house, the morning shake of their feathers, the murmur of anticipation as they hear my footsteps, oblivious to what stalks them outside. Last week we lost the oldest of the flock, a black and white Drake, stubborn and mean. I thought he’d wandered off alone, ended his old age under the Junipers, but now I see I was wrong. The Coyotes and I regard each other and one takes off for the woods. The other two remain. I watch, afraid to move lest I send them running after their companion. The largest one and I lock eyes and I see she will break before I do; she is so full of knowing. She is a beautiful creature, golden and brown, her narrow face intelligent and wary. I grant her safe passage with a nod of my head and the two of them escape into the safety of the woods. Later, I will walk in the woods myself, our shared domain.

Rattle away gods of my past, I have forgotten how to fear you.

The next day, the Deer are waiting. How much more beautiful they are now, how patiently they come. They bend their tender necks to the grass. Their sentinel ears test the morning air.

Notes:

**The Chinook people, on whose land I now live, called the Coyote Talapus and saw him as a complicated figure, part trickster, part transformer. I found it interesting that in modern Coyote stories told by Oregon Indian communities “his chief function seems to be to satirize and "hold off" the encroachments of Anglo culture.”

**Joy Harjo’s poem, Grace.

we'll be wanting voices...

“Hard times are coming, when we’ll be wanting the voices of writers {painters, poets, photographers, artists, bakers, sculptors, musicians….} who can see alternatives to how we live now, can see through our fear-stricken society and its obsessive technologies to other ways of being, and even imagine real grounds for hope. We’ll need writers who can remember freedom - poets, visionaries - realists of a larger reality.”

~ Ursula K. LeGuin {addition, mine}

my repentant skin

“If we perish - I meant to say persist -

do we arise and turn

with the wind?….”

~Kyce Bello

I lose my appetite for distraction overnight. I’m full up with the world we’ve made, violent and exploitative, rapacious and unthinking. I’m full up on all the ways we can rehearse those realities as entertainment. I feel the great grief and burden of being human, full of possibility and yet incapable of restraint.

So many of our conversations now lead to: will the virus change anything? Will we just go right back?

My rational self fears writer Paul Kingsnorth is right:

“Now I will say what I believe: that this civilization will not learn anything from this virus. All this civilization wants to do is to get back to normal. Normal is cheap flights and cheap lattes, normal is Chinese girls sewing our T-shirts under armed guard, normal is biblical bushfires and barrels of oil, normal is city breaks and international conferences and African children poisoning their bodies sorting the plastic we have dumped on their coastlines, normal is nitrite pollution and burning stumps and the death of the seas.

We made this normal, and we do not know how to unmake it, or—whisper it—we do not want to.”

But maybe not for me, I think. Maybe for me (for you?) something else is stirring.

Prayer in the time of corona: Slow me down enough. Give me enough time to change, to really change. Drive the truth down deep of what I could be if I tried, of how I could really live.

Maybe I will not spend these weeks in the dark feeding from the trough of a broken culture. Maybe I will spend them instead under the sun, the moon, the rainy skies, listening to old wisdom, to the heartbeat of the world and its creative Spirit.

I went to bed last night sick of heart, but then I dreamed of bees. I was standing under the sun longing for them to find me, my arms held open, waiting for them to come explore the territory of my repentant skin.