9.1.13 In The Neighborhoods, Summer Storms

What a cracking, thunderous, slamming, then torrential storm we all had in the midst of last night, fiddling around approaching for so many days, then finally BAM and it's arrived, that's for sure, waking up the neighborhood.

So many times our bones or our eyes or our devices tell us rain is coming, but it did seem to be an ambiguous presence that would hover for a few days, wind blowing it through to cascade down upon some other town some place further down the line. 

So I went ahead and watered the gardens round the apothecary; then too, the beckoning  herb gardens at home. Parched, the farmers fields were.  Here, the grandmother Aster warning me with their browned lower leaves. The Skullcap had been announcing its dry displeasure with its brown tipped leaves. 

In the shaded North garden, Wood Betony has been gently letting go their lucid purple blossoms as the summer careens into fall, nourishing its leaves that ease the stagnant headache and digestive related spinal pains.  As their small tender roots sat  waiting for a cool drink of something to ease their thirst. So much from such a small quiet someone. 

Heuchera standing by, effervescent in its pink with greens, blossoming time over, watching for hose or violet cloud,as the truth of it is,  either one would do.

In garden and home I have been turning some of the Gwen's Magic Oil into a wound oil for the coming year, so to its golden liquid I slowly add plants picked  from the gardens and lands about us;  the bright yellow and orange, antimicrobial  Calendula blossom, 

the soothing, mucilaginous Plantain, the St. Johnswort of antiviral and nerve pain calming  ways, the Comfrey that can cover and dominate the old herb garden at Hampshire College like an invading army, never ever to be vanquished -  but whose leaf and root knit up a wound, a bone, a sinew,  like grace on a go-to-meeting morning. The Echinacea that silences small microbes in their tracks, in your scrape, your gash, your inflamed mosquito bite. 

So these and a few more friends are slowly being added together to sit quietly, the Slippery Elm bark powder and the Rose Hips precluding unwanted growths and the blessing of longevity, as the oil slowly becomes infused with the separate gifts of each small plant. 

In the night we awoke to the final burst of the storm as it shook the windows of our small house, lighting up the fields, its thunderous booms and cracks resounding across the range.

 Crinkly eyed, the pup followed me about the house, stumbling sleepily, as I thunked windows down, unplugging computers, then  sat and watched, him up close against me, his big boy weight, as we perched on the hall stairs, peering out into the dark then light then dark of the wild ways storm. 

 I soothed him with the stories we tell young ones. Of storms in the summers, oh how clouds gather up moisture from ocean and mountain, how cold and hot encounter each other, how the thirsty lands do then receive the life giving floods of this clean rain. Of childhood imaginings,  of bowling pins in the Adirondacks,  of a cleansing wind sweeping through, washing  forest and field.  Leaving behind the staid damp lands we discover when we wake this  morning, slip on flip flops, and venture out to the satiated lands.

But still,  in the night, we sat together , as the old, deaf dog slept and sputtered -  as the cats perched on windowsills watching, I imagine, some nocturnal scurrying, with grand interest, and I held the  young furred one  and muttered reassuringly about  all about the way these storms come, and the way these storms then do go on their way

 




Reassured, he climbed back on the bed, but there was no sleep for some time, only sitting quietly now, light on, cats filling the room with their acquiescent presence, the pastels calling to me with their creamy vibrancy, the guitar snagging second place as a song began to scamper up into consciousness. Spread out, the black shining young one kept his head upon my foot, his back up against the reticent old dogs, and kept vigil, as he is wont to do, begin a Shepherd. Poor boy, up whenever we do not sleep.

And as I, 61 with children all grown, so no young two footeds climbing into my bed, or crying out, or waking and ready to roll, got to sit up, drawing languid things with crusty brightened pastel sticks covering my hands and eventually nightgown with their smooth polished powders, as torrential rains poured upon parched farmer's fields round our valley, rains that fell like buckets upon the land, through thirsty rooted trees, our vapid, lazy streams I knew now filled  and rushing as I sat and drew in the night, the storm come to change all that.

The felines repositioned themselves, silently and subtly, as they do, all about the room, taking up places on a journal here, a pillow there, my lap filled with a stretching white and pink creature whose blue eye and yellow eye opened and closed in luxury while I sketched and smoothed and curved colors,






 until finally sleep wandered back into the room, and, turning light off, everyone sighed with relief as I eased us back into darkness, as the rain pounded the roof rhythmically, as we all curled into each other once again. And here, outdoors, maybe at your home too, continued something wild and ageless and full of earth's grace.

This morning we slept in, even the tired watchful pup, as the soil drank what was given last night, as the spiders began the reweaving of their intricate miracle webs.

 As crickets peered out from beneath rock and leaf to continue on
with late summer feeding and growth, and the butterflies awaited the drying of wings, resting beneath broad branches, the sun something reticent and unapproachable in the late morning hours.

Til finally the air did warm, the wings dried, and outside they danced about with delight, the new smaller ones today,

feeding greedily upon fragrant Hyssop and rabid Phlox as Echinacea and BeeBalm finished up for the summer, the small Skullcap blossoms and deep blue Salvia and reaching squash with its moon like white blossoms a pleasant breakfast for all.

Then up the wetted drive we wandered, the old one and I, her magnificent delight in all after-storm smells, as she would stop stock still, head 

raised, nose catching all that I cannot, passing by like a neighborhood song, in the morning breeze.

8.29.13 We're Surrounded

Surrounded this early morning by  our group of large and small four footed creatures, we wander sleepily outside to find that the country air has a sudden acquired chill , the sky  has darkened, abrupt as it leaves behind just yesterday's sweltering late summer mornings and evenings;  as here, we eek out the last few days of August. 

Gardening rumbling along toward a luscious, nourished nadir before herb harvesting and tincture infusing and drying and preparing oils and grinding,  as I look up overhead to catch..... the dark, sharp outline of a falcon just rippling across the sky  with innate grace and power. Noone in the neighborhood with speed like that, cutting through the air and then, gone.

The delicious 15 1/2 yr old dog gracefully comes into some appointments today... nudging up to proffered hands with her sublime sense of smell, then her turn away as she determines another focus. I tell people that the big boy Pits go belly up....belly up around this old, doddering, hard of sight and hearing, full of stiffening beauty, and they look on, saying "REALLY?". I say "Yeah, that's how it works. Dogs can tell who's alpha. " And I think to myself, as I guide her carefully out the door, how addicted we are as a people to appearance and acquisition determining our worth. Our power. Simply the antithesis of this in dogs.

Stopping by my old office/ still my herbal apothecary, I bump into three clients- what a delight! Hellos and hugs and such a shift from having responsibility for immunity and pain and alignment and all- to simply the loveliness of the hello and who they each so gracefully are.

 Truly missing my work; truly Immersing myself in a restorative lifestyle, out of necessity and realization and the miracle of somehow being able to have that choice, as full of rice and beans and austerity as it may be. Each day I pass by other humans who it seems do not have that choice....of stopping and restoring. Of scraping by somehow. 

With unconditional trust and support from a beloved. Here we sit in each of our lives, and learn to notice the marks of grace. The events and moments when it could go another way, but no, instead this time someone smiles or places their hand on our shoulder or utters small words of understanding or accepts the reality of our limitations without rancor or resentment. And on, on we go. The best we can.

 Today I spoke with someone known for so many years, listening as they contemplate the distance between their profession and their spiritual beliefs and the actuality of their dear one slipping away from here... to there. 

And all I can do is listen. 

But so often it's all we truly need or want. Not the advice or the jumping in or the admonishment or the agenda of someone else for us to be 'ok'. So often, no matter our age or circumstance, what we are truly fed by is simply the empathy. The sitting and watching and being with someone while they express. And then not trying to fix or quiet them ; but simply do the learning that enables us to manage...to just sit. And listen. And then teach those who care about us...to please just do...the same.

 I have been remembering all the clients I have accompanied , as Shepherd, during the 25 years of my practice.Part of life.  Kids with brain tumor and women with ALS and people with cancers and AIDS as they a jagged the' hoping for the best and preparing for death', nonetheless. 

Long ago a client sent me a dream, it turns out, at the same moment she died. In our dream, her mom was handing me some kind of phone, saying "Sandy wants to speak with you." And in the dream, I picked up the phone. Sandy said "Its alright now." And I woke. I woke up in my bed and a sob retched out of me, because I was younger and this was a new thing. My beloved woke and I told him to go back to sleep, but in the morning I told him. That day I called someone I knew who worked in hospice, and she  told me that the time I woke was when this person had died. That moment on the clock when I sat up from the goodbye dream. Can you imagine having it together to thank  your acupressurist as you die? Send her over a dream letting her know you are alright now? The terrible pain gone, the long path transitioned? 

Years ago a client asked me to do her a favor and  fit in a session for a dear friend of hers, from our community, whose partner had been on a bike and experienced a hit and run. Devastating injuries. But he was on his way, finally, from the hospital to a rehab center that day . Her friend was on the table as I worked, and I suddenly 'saw' a person next to her,lying by her side. Not accustomed to this, I continued working with a powerful feeling in the room. I watched as he turned on his side, and embraced her goodbye, as she lay on her back, eyes closed.

What do you say?   Nothing. Nothing. He lay back down beside her, closed his eyes, and I finished my work. Days later I mentioned it to her friend only. Because the following day he had died unexpectedly. 

Recently I had a young friend whose roommate had killed themselves in their bedroom of a household. This young friend I have known for years now, and cared deeply about him, so called to ask his family how he was. I then agreed to do a meditation and prayer, as it was Spring Equinox at that moment, a rustling by of such time and wind and space and history. So I sat outside with all that, and as I prayed, in my mind I saw a home and a room and a hanging person, with the person there, looking at me, to the side of their body. Yeah. Mustache. 30's. Longish dark straight hair. So in my prayer I simply sat and sat with this person as they watched me, and eventually something felt done and the whole deal stopped and I opened my eyes and there I was on the range, in my backyard, the conservation land fo such age filled with thick rich grasses, the deer lingering at the bottom of the slope delighting in the sweet meal, the small sound of the mountain stream passing down the ravine and out, out to the river's outwaters.

Later that day, I did look online at obituaries for this town, and there he was. The person in the prayer. 30's . Mustache. Dark longish hair. Hello and Goodbye. Bless you. Bless you. 

Here we are in our lives, whatever our age, regardless of how we feel about our circumstances; living alone, with parents, with friends, next to not very easygoing neighbors, by noisy factories, up too far a country road with an old rusty car. Here we are in our lives with children or aching for children or jobs we love or jobs that eat us alive. 

Here we are, sometimes over 60, like myself, contemplating the whole deal. Waking up to what our unquestioned expectations were. That today are NOT. Waking up to all sorts of surprises that are not a Disney Movie. Finding ways of not wasting out time whining and wringing our hands at how unfair or surprising or heartbreaking things became, when we thought....or we tried so hard.....or ...or.... . And then we sit back and settle into our deep wise selves and remember that this is just how it is. Life. Us. Our life. Surprises. Moments of extraordinary wonder. 

 Did you notice that one that just flitted by? Tucked the experience into your heart, that smile of that old uncle waving or that person who was so mean in  grade school and now is gracious. Tuck it into your heart and feel your heart full full of all that love. Of every dog or cat or person or house or teacher or job or moment that filled you and warmed you and now you see, was full of some sort of personal grace.

Sitting with our hearts, knowing some people live here a long time and some are here for a short time. Sometime our own time to be here will be done. Sitting with just a touch of what that means to us, at this moment. Then standing up and getting on with learning to appreciate what our lives have unfolded into. Getting on with learning what possibility exists for us. Right now. 

Here, on this almost September morning, there is the faint sound of cars driving between my small home and the emerging enormous rock wall of the small range. There is a flock of Yellow FINCH in the field out back, all racing about...greeting each other?? I don't know. I call to my neighbor "Hey, look at all those birds!!" and she leaves by her hanging up of wet clothes to step closer and gaze across the lands with me at the commotion of delighted avians, swooping and swinging by each other, all together maybe 50, some sort of Fall gala? She smiles at me, returns to her laundry folding, both of us grateful that her cat, once voracious, is not drawn to that field to end one life after another after another.

So much rustling around, the great numbers of hawk and harrier and falcon and eagle coming into town, bird hotels full up, as they call and seek and ready themselves for the great Convention up on the range, the annual fall migration. Chumming and seeing each other's young and stretching hamstrings and ruffling feathers and trying to fit in a smaller territory while trying to get along, ah the Great Migration. 

The calls sent out from so many birds, out across the range and the fields and ravine and outwaters, to bird young and bird partner and bird cousins and fellow Harriers, all tightening their shoelaces and checking their provisions and preparing for the time when they will all set off, set off to warmer climes and leave this precious land behind.

Next door there are new sweet people moving in, a parent and a child, in with the parent and child there, and so there are two young kids at the end of the days or on weekends who jump onto big plastic tractors or big wheels and push push them up the long paved country driveway and them hop on and come racing down the hill toward the two cottages, shirts and skirts and hair flying, faces screeching with a certain happiness, to turn round and do it again. and again. and again. Remember all that? Do you? 

Beginnings and endings  and all through us all, the depth, of love, of simply sitting with it, of continuing to breathe, of the endlessness of us all. 

8.28.13 We Wake In The Darkness of Almost Dawn

We wake in the darkness of almost dawn to a careful face lick from an enormous pup, signaling time to go out, which we do, stumbling into the front yard together ( don't bark and wake the neighbors; bear season beginning).

Back inside, there somehow is no return to sleep, not with chewing the bitter bit of Melatonin, not with meditation or breath; so finally we surrender to being up as the dark late August night falls away, the foggy, dew soaked morning slowly revealing itself.

Still in the relative darkness, I grab a large sketch pad and write without truly seeing it before me, drag out the pastels and mysteriously select a color for the trunk, then branches , then deep rootlets and finally the taproot itself, powerful and stabilizing, drawing nutrients from deep within the earth, aerating the soul, the synergistic relationship of so much in life. The room lightens, and I see the pastel was in fact a light brown, as I select a vibrant, true green and the stolid tree begins to sing with a leaf covered veil. A deeper green for grassy skirt between trunk and root; a deep rich brown for the soil that sleeps within the rooted soil, and finally a muted cobalt blue for the endless sky that surrounds all in that hint of ever present endlessness.

I think back to an interview of Joni Mitchell I watched last night, the careful interviewer with their thoughtful plan unfolded across their face, as she sat, brightest blonde hair in some elegant 50's wrap style, sitting, smoking away happily, legs apart, leaned forward without compunction, being her powerful, sensitive self.

Describing patiently but assertively the womb of her home, the absence of voicemail, the one phone, the sustenance of her paintings covering her walls in an ever changing ever shifting symphony of responsiveness, her lack of interest in listening to her music because it is always in the past, behind where she is now, or how she would handle that song now. The without doubt understanding of the necessity to take care... Of her self. To filter what comes from the world at her, to her. The care she takes so, like a sensitive plant, she owns responsibility for understanding the environment she must insist upon, for her to be balanced, to flourish.

 I've a bit of paper towel on one finger that sensuously traces first the deep edged brown line of the trunk in shade, then pats the leaves ever so gently to soften their lines of veins, and then the gentle methodical smooth ending of roots, of surrounding sky that becomes more cerulean by the minute, as I look up and then out my window to see the fog outside in the garden ,sweeping, pouring down from the dew soaked roses and awakening aster, pouring slowly down the fog filled field and skies, swept by an unseen breeze into the river's out waters below.

8.25.13 After the Visit

 

  

None of it was mine; that much I understood

from small childhood, it was all

hers-  my arms, my legs, my

dreams, my friends, my

waking moments, my

long brown braids; it was never mine, nor my

birthday, not my breakfast, ever my

sleep, nor my bedroom, not

one of me was

mine

And every morning with all those little brothers

and one big one she would

rip through my hair with a

comb, not a brush, pulling

down through the tangles of my

ancient, distressed sleep as she

Slipped elapsed knots from the

teeth of the comb as I

stood before her, obedient

my head pulled this way

and yanked that way as I

now and then dared an

“Ow!”, to her “It doesn’t HURT” and then

waited until the tight

tugs of my hair were

plaited, trained 
into Rapunzel’s 
stretching , quieted
down down

the length of  my own young

spine

Until one day at a

visit to grandparents, the

father’s parents we

hardly saw, when my

Grandmother, quiet and

Tall and elegant did

enter the room where I

sat only with my grandfather who

brought me to the beach just to

watch the waves and

sent me magazines about

writing , somehow knowing, and

one day a straw tourist hat with small

objects upon it that

made my eyes smile as we held

hands

She came upon us it was

not the dusk with the

hammock beneath scrub pines

the evening’s cranberry juice before us ; she

cocked her head, so easily bruised, and said

“Do you really want those

braids?”

Years later we all went, when she

sat in a chair, dying, the

doctors telling her it was

all in her mind the long

progressive abandonment of

all of her movements when

Lou Gehrig’s story

had not yet been

told

After she died my

small quiet grandfather

sat in the new home that she

built for a hobby

right next door and his

heart  became filled with 

boll weevils his

mind cantilevered his

hands wrung themselves raw then he

somehow found a gun and one day

put it neatly to his

head

But after the visit, long before,

I returned back home and

scrutinized my braided friends-

"Who can sit on her hair?" " Ha!

Mine is longer! " And I

turned to my mother, said

in front of her friends

“I would like to cut my

hair.”

    

8.13.13 All Night The Rain Fell, and Fell Again

All night the rain fell, and fell again, 

sweeping away bark and insects and layers of topsoil 

as it wound its way down the range 

pounding through the Beach and the aged Elms 

swerving past the deep layers of brown, fragrant pine needle 

 decayed humus and Mountain Laurel 

The torrent quickening my own breath when 

full of sleep, I did awaken

 the roof a cacophony of rainsong, the gutters shuddering 

with the flow of waters, sweeping cross the lawn and

 down into the herb gardens, then past as it spilled into

 rolling conservation fields, hastening along the steep descent 

through  dark speckled River Birch and deep purple Elder 

on through rocky ravines 

roaring among stagnant outwaters 

where rise up young duck , goose, turtle 

racing past the hard won hand made train buttress

clearing the murky stream waters 

 furiously sped down to the anticipating Connecticut

 all of a dither,  pouring out into the

  swollen river, current perilous 

beavers and wildlife pulled far into the riverbeds 

out of the way of such frantic waters 

down in underbrush, nestled neath roots and rock

fish hunkered down, marking time

groupings in havens, beneath the drumming rain

small gills moving silently, clustered politely

 in small eddies, tiny river basins

 waiting out the storm

Out my window,  I lay upon my pillow

neck craned back, sight upon open window

as trees bowed low, flashing their underleaves

 in the massive night air, the moon obscured by 

 heavy momentous skies,

my night sight  locked upon 

tall elms  pulled this way and that by the

riotous winds, as the Pine swished 

its sleek storm song

 as Birches swayed with 

penetrating agility

 the mountain lands washed clean 

The insects perched beneath any leaf in a storm 

until the next morning 

when I emerged 

the land quiet as a mouse

 the grasses sparkling in the brief sun lights 

 herbs filled with small winged and legged beings 

Dampened or downright sodden

waiting for the warm and light 

enable them to be mobile again, 

to blink their eyes, 

come through that storm, 

and wander off for breakfast.