Rhythms disrupted settle in the arms of Mother Nature

Rhythms disrupted.

As I began to write this morning, my MAC’s little rainbow wheel kept spinning, yielding up one letter or three or four at a time. Pretty much how I feel in week five of “recovery” from the flu. Not sure when I respond to a question, a directive, an email what might come out by way of wisdom or irrelevancy. As a human I am a creature of rhythm. My rhythms have been wildly disrupted between ragged breathing, coughing, and no routine. I have felt out of sorts.

 

Then last night I stumbled into a wonderful antidote: reflections on the relationship between human nature and Mother Nature.

I sat down to leaf through two photo albums I had put together during my second year as an herbal medicine student. Our assignment had been to spend a full year exploring some aspect of “People, Plants, and Seasons,” and present our learning to our classmates in some material form. As I began to work on the project in the spring of that year, I had a fundamental question. What is the relationship between human nature and Mother Nature? Between the patterns, cycles, behaviors of humans and other living creatures and the whole messy collective that we are?

Over the course of that year I filled three sketchbooks with field drawings, botanical and medicinal information, and personal reflections. I took photos, pressed plant material, tucked away quotes that touched me. I lived life, became a grandmother for the second time, and tended my mother through what turned out to be the final three months of her life.

As the project due date approached, I spent several weeks sifting, sorting and ordering images and words, and they took on a life of their own. I remember sitting on the floor, surrounded by scraps of paper, photos, dried plants and glue sticks. The process of cutting and pasting and arranging to making a meaningful whole of all those moments. How absorbed I was in making meaning, in finding the story that was mine to tell about people, especially my people, my plants. my seasons. How much room there was for the fresh grief of my mother’s death, the joys of grandmothering and the wonders of the green world. How healing it was to assemble and offer this story to my classmates, and be fully received.

 

The unsettling and awe-filed potency of birth and death, the generational shifts, full of feeling and poignancy: the relationship between human and Mother Nature revealed through the seasons. 

What astonished me last night as I paged through the albums was how the whole experience sprang fully to life. The observing and recording. Aromas and sounds and places. Voices of teachers and classmates. The excitement of discovery. Sorrow and delight.

 

 

IMG_3043 photo                    IMG_3047 photo 1

SPRING: Andre’s birth and garlic mustard                      SUMMER: nettles and St. John’s Wort

 

IMG_3048 photo 5                     photo 4IMG_3050

FALL: Ginkgo leaves, and fall too and fruit harvest        WINTER: Seasonal forms and light

 

Sometimes life says, “you’re on”  when I am “not ready,”  and I am reluctant to act in the face of unknowns. Other times life gives me room to recover and shift in ways that feel natural to me – breath, pulse, night and day, work and play, season, giving and receiving. Change of viewpoint, change of heart. Refreshed rhythms.

As drawings and photos and words transported me back to my true place in the large scheme of things, there was a place even for being out of rhythm and cranky. And then I had a change of heart.


 

Invitation to practice:

Pick an outdoor location that you regularly pass through and that draws your attention.

It can be as simple as a square foot or two of ground.

Or a place where you stand and slowly turn in a full circle, taking in the unique features of this place and your viewpoint.

Revisit it regularly as the seasons unfold. Observe. Sense. Notice changes.

Notice colors,  smells, textures, light and shadows, sky and clouds, effects of rain or snow,  evidence of insect or bird or animal life.

Notice changes in your relationship to this place, your relationship to yourself.

 

Keeping a simple log of your observations, taking photos, drawing are icing that will enrich the experience, but there is plenty of cake in the practice itself.

And let me know how it goes!

 

 

 

 

 

I welcome the lengthening dark

This season I find myself welcoming, even craving, the blue hour deepening to black. My moods shift frequently and want more space, and quiet, than daylight and activity allow. It’s a bit odd, since I almost entirely missed the summer sun and garden, pre-occupied with endless sorting and winnowing and boxing and giving-away and shredding and discarding STUFF. That is done. So is the painting and the refinishing of floors.

Only in the past few days have I been able to get outside for a few hours to cut down the dead blackberry canes, the brown, dried stalks of Joe Pye, echinacea, and mullein. According to my garden log, in other years I have finished shutting down the garden as late as December 27.  Still, that work seems unseasonal this week.

The lengthening dark somehow offers a balm to my disrupted seasonal rhythms that involves curviness and word-play, a different flavor of sitting in the dark.

 

this lengthening dark

by Sara Eisenberg

 

this lengthening dark

this early dark

draws

me

in

 

twenty-one more nights

geminated

resolve

me

on-

 

ward

mood-

blue slopes

clarify space

 

trewe as any bonde

true as innocence

true as magnet

to iron true

and

pauseless

as the pulses

as true as Tristram

and Isolde were true

as stars true as I live

 

wildly irreverent

 


 

For my poet-loving readers: can you match the “true-ism” to the author?

Elizabeth Barrett Browning                       “true as magnet to iron”

Geoffrey Chaucer                                          “true as innocence”

John Dryden                                                  “true as stars”

John Keats                                                     “true as I live”

Walter Savage Landor                                 “trewe as any bonde”

Thomas Moore                                              “true and pauseless as the pulses”

William Shakespeare                                    “as true as Tristram and Isolde were”

 

 

 

 

I’m gonna rock my rhythms into 2017

I am about to rock my way into 2017, re-membering and re-calibrating to my own rhythms.

As the year turns, I will be blessed once again to visit Assateague Island, wonder at the shaggy wild ponies as they wander roadside fields, see what changes the weather has brought this year.

Assateague is a barrier island, 37 miles long, stretching offshore of Maryland and Virginia. At no point is the island more than a mile wide. Overwash continues to move the island landward: winter storms move sand from ocean-side beach and dunes and deposit it along the landward side, sometimes opening new inlets or closing old ones. Depending on the severity of the storms and the extent of the changes, recovery may or may not take place over the gentler summer months.

I will take some time to sit in one of these generous wooden rockers on the deck at the Visitor’s Center and consider how the year has re-shaped me.

A year a go I found myself aware not only of possibilities but also of hesitancies, uncertainties, limitations: irresolution. I passed up goal-setting in favor of some open questions – and now I have a few answers.

How am I being drawn forward in my life as well as shaped or impelled by my past?

I have been drawn forward into teaching and group facilitations by hearts, minds, and hands extended toward me in partnership and collaboration. And impelled forward by consuming interests  from my past (I mean past, as in 20 years!) that have reappeared, seeking re-integration: social activism, Jewish renewal, the texts of Kashmir Shivaism.

It has, in fact, been a little spooky how people from that earlier era have made a series of reappearances into my life, and we have picked up conversations as if we had left off just yesterday.

Clearly there is some Very Large Rhythm at play here.

What is the thread I have followed, sometimes consciously, sometimes not?

When I posed this question a year ago, I had in mind some theme, a result perhaps, like, oh, becoming more myself. But I think the thread I have followed has been a process thread: listening and choosing. Listening to what Life is saying, what Life is offering, what Life is denying. And then choosing. And then making myself responsible for my choices.

What do I know that I have not allowed myself to know that I know?

That the Universe has my back. And not just sometimes. All the time. I’ll admit I have come to this from a place of doubt, even skepticism. I came to it through outcomes much grander than my partners and I could have created out of our own volition and skill. And through losses that did not fell me.

That with the Universe at my back, I need no longer sit when I should stand, stand when I should walk, walk when I should dance.

Which is a very good thing, because, my friends, 2017 is calling us loud and clear to stand together, walk together, dance together. 

There are some very Large Rhythms at play, and some very Large Dissonances at play, and the Universe has our back.

Birthday Gift

The anxiety of being human runs through our soul, fiber, bone and blood, attending both the existential anxiety of death, and the more personal anxiety that rides on it, schooled even from the womb by our mothers’ mood and stress, and by the ways our infant bodies sense the ever-changing shapes and forms of our immediate surroundings.

But we are also birthed into, of, and held by the larger rhythms of the natural world, which is utterly without anxiety:

human nature, Mother Nature, inseparable.

 

birthday gift

by Sara Eisenberg

Tendrils of intelligent vitality
creep in at every pore,
embed me,
another green being in a sea
of sentient Ones.

I conspire with
plain-speaking pine,
cicadas courting with their forewings,
while the landscape whispers
in myriad tongues,
“There is no longer
in your face
the anxiety of being human.”