three seasons in one

I'm pleased to report that the fluctuations and vagaries of my spirit and soul have conveniently corresponded to the months on the calendar this summer.

June was all festivalia and flights of fancy. I danced on more than one huge lawn, swam naked in more than one body of water, and found myself being courted by more than one eligible bachelor. I had a peaceful, easy feeling that snowballed right up until the end of the month, when it went splat and melted in the July heat.

July saw me break up with the man I was dating (which, let's be honest, was a welcome relief), return from my herbal apprenticeship backpacking trip covered in mosquito bites, and gain back some of the weight I'd lost. Turns out I can't just cross my fingers and hope that an unhealthy pattern will somehow heal itself. The work still has to be done and I'm still the one who has to do it.

On the road home from the mountains I picked up a dead bird on the side of the highway, and once home discovered that it was a perfectly intact owl. I wouldn't have gotten a gift like that if I wasn't worthy of it . . . so essentially, I'm in trouble now. The last weekend in July I participated in a fire ceremony that spun me out into the deep recesses of my shadow: disconnected, alienated, alone.

And almost immediately across the border into August, a shift: this time, a roller-coaster ride along the spiral of life. I officiated my oldest friend's wedding; spent a week on the road with my father; served as a kind of doula at my friend's birth; and got word that another friend and teacher, a true luminary, has died. Niall and Rivka's baby dropped into this world like a sheer miracle just a few days before Frank Cook, legendary plant teacher and wisdom holder, passed out of it, well before his time. I'm still stewing in the many hard and breathtaking truths of these past few weeks, as I rest here on the cusp of a journey to the world's strangest neon desert bacchanal.

But I notice an awareness, a lightness in me that I have never known before. A sense of being quietly awe-struck, holding a reverence for the meaningful meaninglessness and the meaningless meaningfulness of life, the world and everything. Some veil has lifted and I find myself viscerally aware of my power to choose at every moment, and the possibility of landing, over and over again, in the present. I am smiling into the mystery and in so doing find a tenderness, a forgiveness for myself that is entirely new. Facing darkness enables me to allow light in, as it turns out, and this bemusing and wondrous reality is the seed of my practice now.

Onward, into the dust . . .

spoils of the weekend

It's Sunday afternoon and my dining room table is overflowing with apples, blackberries, figs, tomatoes, calendula flowers, and seaweed. The apples, a bit bug-bitten and bruised, will eventually emerge as sweet and leathery rings from the dehydrator, a perfect snack. The blackberries stained my fingers purple, and there's a streak of tomato juice and seeds drying out on my cutting board. The figs are just perfect. And the seaweed was a trade for three or so hours of my enthusiastic saleswomanship at the Grand Lake farmer's market yesterday, hawking my friend and teacher Trish's mineral-rich wares from the sea.

The calendula flowers? Harvested in front of my friend David's apartment in Berkeley, before we drove up to a farm in Sebastopol this morning for a four-hour plant medicine class. We got there a bit early so I got to spend some time plucking blackberries from the bramble and picking apples off the ground.

During the class I sat with a living stand of calendula flowers for a long time. It's a simple, strong plant that wakes with the sun and sleeps with the night, a renowned topical healer. I talked with it for a while. Just open yourself to the world and shine out your light, it said. Don't question your choices. Just live, love, give your healing gift, rest when the night comes.

Over my time out there today I felt myself slowly coming into a human pace; my frenetic heartbeat smoothed out. Getting in the car and driving back to Oakland felt like a contraction.

I live in this city because this is where my life is, my community, the people I choose to experience life alongside, and who have similarly chosen me. I live here because my work is here, because I learn so much from the urban-based eco-intelligentsia's discourse on the environment, the world scene, the self and the spirit. I live here because it's fun and interesting, with great music, varied cuisine, and sexy people.

But when it comes down to it, I use that word "live" pretty loosely. When I am in the city, I do many things, I grow, I learn, I enjoy, I work and I play. When I am on the earth, though, I live. What's the difference? The best way that I can describe it is to say that when I am close to nature, my heart feels like it can open up and smile with life. Here in the city, the rushing and the fear tend to close my heart, or even break it.

That sounds dramatic, I know. But last weekend I got to witness part of a birth; I was there for about six hours while my dear friend labored, and then I was there the next day when their beautiful, miraculous baby girl was just a few hours old. The experience brought me into a visceral awareness of our fundamental embodied-ness, our fundamental animal-ness. We are mammals! We're given life by the waters and the plants and the sunshine around us. Women's bodies even cycle with the moon, which cycles with the tides, which cycle with the seaweeds, which bring nourishment to the community. We're part of this earth and when we deny that, there is always pain, however subtle.

It is when I am out on the earth that I feel the pain of this exile, when subterranean longings surface and come into sharp focus.

When am I moving to the countryside, you might ask? Not anytime soon. For now, I remain compelled to seek love and fortune within the urban grid. So I continue to eat wild foods, learn the plants, practice listening to the world, slow down every day. And give thanks for all of the abundant blessings that grace my life, including the greatest blessing of life itself, each day no matter where I am.

*In memory of and in gratitude to Frank Cook, master plant teacher, who left this world too soon*

OMG girl, where have you been?

The truth is, I've been scared to write.

Lately I've spent a lot of time looking back at all my old stuff, grimacing, wondering how I could ever have thought any of it was any good at all. It's purple! It's self-important! It's predictable! All I've had for myself is a panoply of distaste.

But today I had lunch with a friend, actually an ex-lover. We sat in the sunshine and conversed in the way that only ex-lovers can converse -- sweet, ranging, full of recognition. She asked me if I've been writing and I said I hadn't, that I'd been stuck in self-critique. Snap out of it, she told me, you're a great writer. Just start writing again, so you get the hang of it.

It reminds me of being in high school at the always-dramatic Young Writer's Retreats, which took place every year up in Lake Arrowhead or some such place. Watch what happens when you get 100 high school students from L.A. with a penchant for angst together for four days of writing instruction! A pot-fueled hook-up fest, that's what. But I digress.

I'm reminded of something that one of the teachers said to us, one morning in that big bright lodge. She read to us from an essay that was actually entitled "Shitty First Drafts." Oh, were we titillated! But she pressed on because the message was important. "Don't think, write," she read. I remember feeling distinctly giddy upon hearing this, and I remember the way it affected my writing immediately: I was suddenly liberated to just put words down on the page now and worry later about how they looked, sounded or tasted. Just find your big block of stone first, and then you can carve it into whatever fanciful shape you choose. Amazing! There's no room for self-critique in such an approach; it's actually against the rules.

So I've decided to start a practice for myself of writing in this blog at least once a week. To prime the pump, keep the wheels greased, make sure the ol' hamster is running in the wheel. You know? Keep the words flowing out of the chute. And stop fretting so much about how the words land on the page, that the chute breaks down for six months at a time. Keep 'em coming.

So that's what I'm doing! That's my commitment. So please expect to hear from me a lot more often, and perhaps in more experimental forms. And if you don't, please feel free to come check on me, and even nag me a little (but only a little) if I'm gone too long. Deal? Thanks.