The winds are fast and high tonight. The mountains are roaring. It means the world has changed in this moment and that I could as well. I could be swept clean with this elemental energy and start again.

Arrival

The forest is gently swaying and creaking. I can still see across to the opposite slope, but not for long – the leaves are nearly half cast. The trees have awoken and authored their dreams in this surface world of space and form. The branches are reaching out to taste the air and join the wind. The warblers’ calls fill the empty space that wasn't there until they sang.

April Heat

A magnificent silver cloud is glowing white around the edges. The mountain is a dark hulk of ancient rock behind a screen of lime-green pubescent leaves. A breeze plays around in the treetops, warm and wild, but is gentle where I sit. The air is not spicy even though it’s hot; it carries the faint scent of quickly decaying leaves in the northern forest. Despite this warmth, there is stillness, like we are still waiting for full awakening. The warblers are not here yet (one day away) and we’re waiting for them to sing the abundance of our sister continents. Today, it is surprising new growth turning into flower. The violets dot the yard like perfect amethyst gemstones. The sun outside the cloud is pleasantly hot on shins and face.

White Pine Forest

Tiny pink firebombs
Jewels of the white-pine forest
Old and wizened spring.

Between Air and Water

There’s a fine mist falling. The light is dimmed. It’s soothing. I want to be where the soft rush of water falls through the air. Brushing past the air molecules and pulling them downward, charging them with the energy of friction.

Early Spring

The sun is warming
the air still cool
what moves the most
is wind in the pines
everything else
is building strength
and waiting.

Which Way?

I've tried to investigate many different traditions, secular and non-secular, to see if any feels like a perfect fit. I recently read an interview with Stanley Kripner. He doesn't deny the reality of so-called psychic phenomena or subtle energy, but doesn't think it's supernatural either. He keeps an anthropological perspective on individual traditions. What I take away from this is that my individual experiences are legitimate in their own right. Anybody in this western culture at this point in time is a pioneer of their own way. I don't need to join anything just to give legitimacy to my practice. To the extent I am able, my practice involves following the lead of dreams, visions, and instinct and what comes through, contained within the body and stance of the witness.

First warm days

All is stillness -
A proto-planet,
like the glaciers
just receded and
no one knows,
not even the land,
what will emerge.
The sun moves the air,
the matted grasses
and soil are spongy
and the waxy evergreens
lift uncurled leaves
into the light.

Wind

I spent some time this winter with the wind shearing across the escarpment and through the pass. The place where air condenses into mist and a new balance is received. The place from which change comes. Spring was born in winter, when the great cycles awoke and moved and all life danced in the wind. Wind the great cleanser, the great healer that refreshes our place. It moved through and trimmed the dead or dying tree limbs, or the live ones that had become too heavy to carry. It removes attachments and over-growth. We are reduced to what can be afforded. The wind sweeps in from some other region of the planet cleanses and recharges the stale air. The movement cleared the space for new life and left behind new energy. The pump is primed for becoming.

Leaping

This winter I turned a corner and allowed myself to embrace my visionary nature. I've had visionary experiences my entire life. I've known that, pondered it, been disturbed and intrigued especially about the premonitions and what they suggest about the nature of time, but not really embraced and allowed. And so I've denied myself conscious development and haven't let this fully express in the world. Most of these experiences fall somewhere on the range between common daydream or flash of intuition (like who's calling) and the grand, life-altering vision.

But all of them are meaningful. These days I long for more meaning. The pain and desire of sensing there's something more that is just out of my reach, has become unbearable. I feel I have no choice. I've done the rational thing. I have been my father's daughter. I have a career and have honed my intellect, applied my focus to a societal and institutional project. I can support myself and have a mostly functional personality and persona. But there's a part of my being that's received attention at the edges all these years with attendance at weekend workshops or brief toe-dips into book-lead investigations, but that now wants to develop into something fuller.

Taking this step means loosening the grip on control and letting myself transform. It means trusting and letting who I've become die a little to become someone new. This is a process and maybe my feet have just stepped over the thresh hold. Even this wouldn't have happened without a lot of encouragement from a creative counselor/teacher who provided the loving support I hadn't received before. And from my significant other with his unfailing belief in me.

So, during this winter time of going within and entering the silence, I finally gave in and let my rational brain just be there, without making it the final arbitrator. Two books have helped me take my vision by the hand and fly: The Practice of Ally Work by Jeffrey Raff, and Shamanism As a Spiritual Practice for Daily Life by Tom Cowan. I've resisted shamanism as a modern endeavor, but that was a mistake. I may never become someone who offers traditional services, but a lot of this comes naturally. And this year, I will search and feel and most of all listen for the best ways to use these abilities for the good. I strongly suspect from the visions mentioned above, this involves working with the landscape and its beings.

Moon over Catskills

I once had a discussion with a scientific rationalist friend who told me a story of a woman dying and the clock near her bed ceasing to work at the moment she took her last breath. The family member at her side believed this was proof her spirit had left her body and caused the clock to stop. My friend would refuse to take such coincidence as proof of anything. The point I made was that ultimately it mattered less to us whether the spirit story was true, than the psychological effect of the clock stopping. I was thinking that was a perfectly respectable and wonderfully pragmatic response. That was many years ago. I don't really reject objective observation of surface reality and consider it important and useful. But I don't embrace it as whole truth either. Tonight driving home what I saw in front of me was dusk on a very early spring evening. The Catskills were a dark purple haze blending with the softening indigo of the sky and the moon a bright bare sliver pointed downward toward the earth. I now believe (and science heading this way too) that it does matter that my experience of that moon, large on the horizon, changed me and that the effect of my change is not "just" psychological, because when my interior experience changes, the arrangement of matter changes. We feed the Earth around us with our bodily experience of its beauty and splendor.

Early spring

Slush, snow, ice. Not much changes in February, except for an ever so slight stretching of the stalks a little straighter, a little stronger.

Relaxing in being

Approaching the Hudson River's Kingston-Rhinecliff Bridge there are rock cliff faces with ice falls gushing from fissures in the rock. Over the days of melting and freezing, these solid cascades have grown impressively large. They are a fascinating mixture of opposites. Water usually flows - the form is of flowing water, but it stands still and translucently solid with that lovely mysterious glow of deep ice. When I look at them I always feel reassured and like they are having fun. I feel they are enjoying the sensation of arrest, momentarily hanging out and watching everything move around them for once. There is a sense of ease in the acceptance and enjoyment of yet another state of being and the new experience it brings.

Beginnings

I've thought a long time about starting this website. I want a container in the world for what has been forming inside me. I want to give it expression. I know from my studies of ecology and more importantly through my own felt and known sense (basically moments of grace, vision, and mysticism) that I am part of this vast network of life around me -- that it and I are not separate, but reflections and in fact embedded in each other. Most magnificently I am manifest as Earth, full of deep mysteries and moving beauty. Full of pain and suffering that comes from lack and separation in a land of fullness, at least in potential, at least in truth. This is true of my experience. I can sense from others and what they write (especially indigenous writers) that I have a ways to go on this journey. The journey that the sages say brings one back to the beginning. One of my teachers says all the time -- it's never one, it's always both/and. My practice of choice recently has been to enter an altered state and actually enter the landscape and get to know it. I'm starting with my most immediate neighbors, the beings inhabiting my property and the land around me. I have a responsibility to my immediate environment since I "own" this land. And a responsibility to myself as well, since it really owns me and will shape me. I'd rather be a good participant in this community.