Somebody pinch me.

These Tuesday mornings at the medicinal herb farm are heavenly. A small wood stove warms the little barn where we gather, setting up back-jacks and director's chairs to settle in, pouring hot water into giant white mugs for fresh tea. After one or two hours of informal class (punctuated by dropper-fulls of various tinctures) we head out to the gardens, which are just waking up.

While they're not always pleasant tasting, sampling the tinctures and paying attention to our physical and mental reactions to them is an important experiential part of the class. It's one thing to read or be told of rosemary's attributes, while quite another to experience its scent in your nostrils, its taste on your tongue (astringent, bitter), and its almost immediate effect on your physiology (invigorating)! Not only are we learning about herbal actions first-hand, we're slowly honing our senses, becoming more attuned to subtleties. This week we experienced tinctures of lavender, rosemary, Valerian, golden seal, bayberry, cardamom, and coriander. We took turns inhaling the clean scent of freshly distilled spruce, and spritzed ourselves with a pine-scented spray.

In the gardens, our tasks included removing pervasive Burdock from of a nettle bed (the long roots of which many of us took home to cook), clearing mulch and weeds from some of the garden rows, and trimming and raking in the circular learning garden. One of my jobs involved coaxing a row of lavender plants to give up the dried tree leaves they'd gathered in their branches last autumn — a pleasant chore made even sweeter by the intoxicating scent released as I brushed my hands through the bushy lavender branches. Beginning next week, we'll be potting up hundreds of seedlings just emerging from their flats in the greenhouse. . .

At lunch I wandered alone through the learning garden, my camera in one hand, a container of curried tofu salad in the other. These were some of my lunch-buddies...

Lunch break was followed by class in the barn, then a couple more hours of working in the gardens. By mid afternoon the sun had burned away the moody mist and fog, and scattered along the edges of the gardens were the jackets and sweaters and hats we'd arrived in.

Though I feel happy and engaged the entire time I'm at the farm, its when I'm driving home at the end of the 7 hour day that I experience the most amazing sense of peace, joy and rightness — a feeling of healthy wholeness that's in disturbingly stark contrast to the rest of the work week.  It's almost indescribably satisfying: my muscles have stretched, my lungs have breathed fresh air, my skin has soaked in the sunlight, my senses have experienced these new medicines, my mind has been stimulated with learning, my heart has been opened to new friendships with both the other students and the herbs themselves, and my spirit knows that my work in these gardens will, in some small way, help to alleviate the suffering of those who will use the medicines that we bring forth from the earth this season.

Mother Nature

 

Foxglove in the garden last summer.

"One of our greatest fears is to eat the wildness of the world.

Our mothers intuitively understood something essential: the green is poisonous to civilization. If we eat the wild, it begins to work inside us, altering us, changing us. Soon, if we eat too much, we will no longer fit the suit that has been made for us. Our hair will begin to grow long and ragged. Our gait and how we hold our body will change. A wild light begins to gleam in our eyes. Our words start to sound strange, nonlinear, emotional. Unpractical. Poetic.

Once we have tasted this wildness, we begin to hunger for a food long denied us, and the more we eat of it the more we will awaken."

Some lines from the book I'm currently immersed in: 

 
I bought this as a bit of a personal preparation for the herbal internship I began last week, and as it turns out, the choice could not have been more appropriate. Over the course of the next 7 months each of us in the program will be choosing a "plant ally" from the gardens with which we will be learning to converse with in a decidedly non-linear, heart-centered form of communication. We'll be sitting with our plants for 15 minutes each week, listening to what they have to tell us about their medicine, and journaling about our unique findings. We're also encouraged to photograph and sketch our plant, and at the end of the program we'll each give a 15 minute presentation to the rest of the class.

Before science's double-blind studies and rationalistic approach, this is how native cultures learned about the unique medicinal traits of plants — by respectfully asking them for guidance.

I'm grateful to have spent most of my childhood outside in the yard, immersed in nature — watching birds, collecting salamanders and frogs, climbing pine trees, gathering acorns and berries, cracking open rocks, overturning logs to see what lived beneath them, hanging out in the neighborhood of ants, building myself pine-needle nests. Decades later there's still not much I love more than simply sitting in the presence of Mother Nature, especially in summer when the gardens are in bloom. Some afternoons when I'm lucky enough to be home I find I can do little else, and at times I've actually felt guilty for not being more "productive" when the sun is shining and the flowers are swaying. To begin this internship and find that I not only have permission to sit quietly with plants but that I am required to do so...this is luxurious indeed. And to read that in this quiet sitting a conversation can actually happen, a real exchange...that's magical, like discovering there really is a hole at the back of the wardrobe and a Narnian world of possibilities awaiting.

Deep down I always knew these things to be true — or at least I've held on tightly to my childhood hope — but it's so easy to lose sight of the world's magic, isn't it? It doesn't scream at you, like so many aspects of life do these days. One has to be mindful of its whispering.

What a fascinating aspect of spirituality, healing, and mindfulness. Next on the reading list are these:

Here's a big jumble of random things I'm thinking about.

That's honest, right?

Books:
First, this past weekend I finished reading Dr. Claudia Welch's new book Balance Your Hormones, Balance Your Life and I think it should be required reading for every woman. It will definitely help you to recognize and interpret what your body is trying to tell you, and Dr. Welch's recommendations, based on principles from Ayurveda and Traditional Chinese Medicine, will allow you to respond to those messages in a gentle, natural way that restores equilibrium. I love the daily Ayurvedic routine and diet I've adopted over the course of this year, but after reading Dr. Welch's bok I was left with the urgent feeling that I need to take a bolder step towards eliminating the major source of my stress and frustration, rather than simply trying to sooth it away with massage oils and diet. Scary, yes, but the alternative — letting my already out-of-whack hormones wreak more serious havoc with my health as I grow older — is even scarier, and not an unknown but a certainty.

Movies:
Also this past weekend J and I watched 3 out of 4 episodes of "Medicine Men Go Wild" on Netflix. From a review of the DVD:

Chris and Alexander Van Tulleken, British identical twins who both became medical doctors, roam the world to see if we can learn from the ancients in Medicine Men Go Wild, a TV series released on DVD on February 23rd by Gaiam/Discovery Channel. They traverse the earth, traveling from Peru to Tibet to India to Siberia to equatorial Africa, searching for medical answers to our current Western problems and contrasting and comparing how medicine is practiced.

This is fascinating, entertaining, funny, (and sometimes gross) territory, and Chris and Alexander are open-minded, brave, and honest guides. I wish there were more episodes!

Appliances:
On a completely different note, our clothes drier broke a few weeks ago and for the time being I've decided not to replace it. I'm very curious about what this will do to the electric bill. We hang quite a bit of laundry out on the line in good weather anyway (I love the clean fresh smell), but you all know how it is when you have a convenient option sitting right there and you're in a rush or feeling lazy...
Well, that convenient option is no longer available. I'm not sure how this will work out in the winter when wet clothes tend to freeze solid.

I'm also really intrigued by the concept  of this little Wonderwash Mini Washer.  

"Washes a 5-lb. load super clean in just a couple of minutes. Uses far less water than even hand washing. Uses no electricity (hand turn) and therefore economically sound, and great for environment."

My thinking is, if I took a few minutes to wash my laundry in this thing every couple of nights, I could eliminate the need to run the regular washer so much on weekends.  

Has anyone used one or something similar?

Yes, I am currently eyeing every appliance with suspicion lately. The portable dishwasher that came with the house no longer fits the new faucet in the kitchen — so, goodbye, ugly noisy thing. I usually do the dishes by hand anyway. And last night I even cooked dinner and a huge batch of vegetable soup stock on the wood stove, pioneer-style.

Break out the candles and kerosene lamps!

This simplification is partly inspired by the nuclear crisis in Japan (if we didn't demand all this electricity we wouldn't need all these nuclear power plants to begin with, right?) and partly because I want to continue to bring my living expenses down as far as possible and claim back more of my time, my sanity, and my health. I also suspect that all the talk of e-readers and e-books I've had to endure lately has pushed me over the technological edge. I'm tired of feeling like I need more and more expensive gadgets to keep up with the next trend (not to mention that I adore "real" books).

I'm interested in pursuing a more simple, authentic, "chop wood/carry water" kind of life (but with high speed internet access), and buying an old house in a rural area only took me half way there. How much  closer can we get to all the way?

I know some of you are adjusting your lifestyles as well, and I would love to hear about what you feel has been the most effective/rewarding change you've made in the process.

 

Since we're being random, in closing  here's a random picture of Vixen wearing J's fleece vest this weekend.

Woven, warp and weft.

 

I just glanced up to see that the kitchen windows and door are dotted with raindrops, rendering the still-bare trees in the field across the street monochromatic pointillist visions. What a cold, raw day this has turned out to be! Undeterred by the wintery weather my one Hellebore was in bloom today, tucked into the leaves that gather beneath an old cherry tree every autumn. I thought Hellebores were supposed to spread, but this one has remained stoic and single where I planted it 5 years ago. Perhaps it needs a companion or two to inspire it.

***

Reveal.

Lately my attempts to sit down and write a simple blog post are thwarted by how increasingly difficult it's been to put into words all that I'm experiencing and learning. I find myself continuously amazed at how the same symbols and theories keep revealing themselves to me from different angles as I progress along this path, and how concepts I was only just scratching the surface of two decades ago have returned full-force despite years of my setting some of them on the back burner for pursuits I deemed as more practical.

Embody.

I feel now as if I'm walking in an ever-widening circle, a satellite in orbit around a great energetic bundle of spirituality, mindfulness, nature, and healing. As I circle, the orbit continues to widen, growing to encompass more aspects of my life. It's as if all of the interests I've been most passionate about (some of them new, some going back as far as childhood) — writing, photography, gardening, nature, Eastern spirituality, Ayurveda, herbalism, holistic healing, mindfulness, cooking, meditation — are long-lost relatives finally meeting each other at a kind of "family reunion" embodied in my heart and mind. Their reconciliation is causing quite the happy, excited din as they recognize their family resemblances and scramble to organize and cooperate with each other. Now that they're all assembled in one place they'd prefer to stick together.

Materialize.

My goal is to weave them, this bright pile of related passion-threads, into a strong fabric, and this fabric, every warp and weft of it, is clearly my dharma. Catching sight of even the blurriest vision of what its pattern might look like inspires me to focus on continuing to manifest it.

Go wherever you please

‎

"As a bee seeks nectar from all kind of flowers,
seek teachings everywhere.
Like a deer that finds a quiet place to graze,
seek seclusion to digest all that you have gathered.
Like a madman beyond all limits,
go wherever you please and live like a lion completely free of all fear."
— Ancient Tibetan text

A post-work hike to the boulder to watch the sun set...

and listen to the first frogs chirpping in a nearby vernal pool...

Still laying low, still secluding a bit. Still avoiding most of the news from the outside world, still thinking about those bees sealing off their hives, and about all of us. Last week I rediscovered a Rumi poem called The Tent that feels appropriate...

Outside the freezing desert night.
This other night grows warm, kindling.
Let the landscape be covered with thorny crust.
We have a soft garden in here.
The continents blasted, 
cities and little towns, everything
become a scorched, blackened ball.
The news we hear is full of grief for that future, 
but the real news inside here
is there's no news at all.


Friend, our closeness is this:
anywhere you put your foot, feel me
in the firmness under you.


How is it with this love, 
I see your world and not you?


Listen to presences inside poems,
Let them take you where they will.


Follow those private hints, 
and never leave the premises.

 

spring melt

"If you are experiencing an increased awareness of your challenges and difficulties—rejoice. Your clarity is removing the shadows that once hid them." — Guru Singh

"may all the saints and deities help me!" j implored, shaking his head as i sat across the dinner table tonight, tears falling into my soup. the song he'd cued up on his ipod was just too sad. 
"it's beautiful! it's sad but it's happy!" he tried, but i continued to spew tears 'till he turned the music off entirely and then i laughed at myself. it's been one of those days. i cried most of the way through my morning meditation, and as we were sitting on the couch reading after our breakfast pancakes, and as we sat on the boulder in the woods looking off into the distance and listening to ravens and chainsaws and wind and small aircraft. actually it started last night at kripalu, where we went to chant with guru singh, and therefore i can't tell if this is hormonal or brought on by the heart-opening effect of the evening, or both. or perhaps i'm crying with joy for the sun and warmth that caressed new england this weekend, burning my neck as i sat out in the yard reading. whatever the case, no sad songs are currently allowed, however beautiful. because everything already feels way too beautifully sad and sadly beautiful for me at the moment.

 

guru singh has an amazing presence.

tonight is the start of a big week. grace, my sister-in-law-to-be, is flying into boston from china as i type this, and by now my brother is on his way there (via town car, thank god not driving) to get her. j and i will meet her on easter sunday. it would have been sooner, perhaps even this friday, except that this will be my first friday in years spent working because on tuesday the internship at the herbal farm begins. it's also the first of two notoriously stressful, difficult weeks at work and lately i'm feeling my ability to deal with stress has been completely, 100% depleted. i'm working my way through all of this. as marion wrote in her post on grace yesterday "the job that isn’t fulfilling is asking something of you. And the friendship that feels unsatisfying is asking something of you. And the feeling of accomplishment over mastering a new task is asking something of you..."

new questions, new beginnings, excitement, nervousness, tears and laughter all around. life.

Protecting the hive.

"The significant problems we face today cannot be solved at the same level of thinking we were at when we created them." — Albert Einstein

Earlier this week I read an article about how honeybees, in a radical but (so far) futile act of self-preservation, are now trying to "entomb or seal up hive cells full of pollen to put them out of use, and protect the rest of the hive from their contents." Bees do not normally seal off cells, but in these cases "the pollen stored in the sealed-up cells has been found to contain dramatically higher levels of pesticides and other potentially harmful chemicals than the pollen stored in neighbouring cells, which is used to feed growing young bees."


The bees, instinctively knowing that something is terribly wrong, are doing their best to protect themselves and their society. I now encounter people on a daily basis who feel the same, myself included. It's not just the enormous world events causing me to really question and change my course but the daily toxicity of stress and negativity that I see as being corrosive to health.

It makes me want to seal myself off as much as possible from that which isn't nourishing to body, mind, and soul. This is my response to what I see as a world increasingly polluted in so many ways. Like the bees, those of us who recognize the toxicity around us need to protect the hive of the world, the hive of our communities, the hive of our selves. Like the bees, the outcome isn't ours to know, but that doesn't make the effort any less important.

Rubber Soles

 

Don't let this cheery, springy little face fool you. It's still winter in these parts, and there's still a good amount of snow on the ground — especially in woods, as J and I discovered this weekend.

We made it to the river but I must admit I sulked most of the way, my new Bogs filling up with snow as one or both of my legs suddenly disappeared into a thigh-deep drift.


I really should have worn snowshoes, not gardening shoes. Apparently I was wishful-thinking when I prepared for the hike.



The play of light and sky made the orange hued rocks beneath the river's current glow and dappled the water itself with shades of green and hints of silver. It was worth having wet, cold feet to see it.

Did I dream you dreamed about me

Gratitude from Jennifer.

In the past few weeks I've had some very interesting and intense dreams which I don't mind sharing here (as I love to read about other people's dream lives.) I think all three are closely linked, and in reflecting on them I can see that my subconscious spends the evenings grinding away where my waking conscious leaves off — on issues related to gracefully balancing my secular and spiritual life as the two occasionally feel as uncoordinated and out-of-sync with each other as two men in a three-legged race.

In this rich dream state I occasionally even get to visit with people I love who aren't otherwise accessible to me for one reason or another.

The first dream found me standing in the long, deserted hallway of what appeared to be an old school. The natural light in the hall was filtered and dim, the predominant colors the earthy brown and gray of the floor and wood wains coating and the blue and deep green of the aging, painted walls. Appearing directly in front of me was a small antique table with a wooden box-type top, similar to the kind one would see holding an old sewing machine, except this table was more square than rectangular and it had sturdy wooden legs beneath it. Overall the table was neither plain not overly ornate, but well-made with a few small, carved details.

Sitting on top (and seemingly attached to or rising up out of) the table was a smooth, shiny white porcelain head, life-sized, in the likeness of a teacher I greatly respect. Though the face wasn't extremely detailed, the distinct shape was immediately recognizable and I placed both my hands around its lower jaw and cheeks, cradling it, and leaned my ear close to its mouth. Through the motionless porcelain lips the teacher was speaking to me, and I was responding by speaking into the ear of the statue - almost as if the statue were a kind of telephone, a direct line between us. I wish I could remember the exchange, but it's very rare for me to recall more than a snippet of conversation from dreams - in fact conversations in my dreams seem to be more telepathic than spoken, which may be why I don't recall "hearing" them when I wake up.

As this statue and I were communicating, I kept a careful watch on the hallway beyond, aware that what I was doing would look extremely unusual to anyone turning the corner, and sensing that both J and my brother were approaching. Alas, as they appeared I quickly straightened up and stepped back from the statue and the dream ended.

The second dream was a brief vision. I was standing on a footbridge above a canal, the walls and bridge and the hint of buildings around me the color of terra-cotta, the rushing water below and the sky above, brilliant blue, everything illuminated by bright sunlight. Someone — it could have been Jesus but I'm not entirely sure — had just been crucified and rather than taking the expired body body down his executioners had decided to lower the wooden cross, body and all, into the river and send it downstream. I was alone on the footbridge with my camera, waiting for the cross to pass by, simultaneously filled with a mix of curiosity and dread. As it approached — face up and feet first — a large black bird, a raven or crow, flew down suddenly and landed on the body's right hand, remaining there as a passenger as the current swept the whole scene beneath and beyond the bridge. I'd been so surprised and mesmerized by the appearance of the bird I'd forgotten about my camera until it was almost too late, and I could tell the photos I was frantically trying to take were only capturing a small part of the fast-moving scene, and probably not very well. I hoped to myself I'd at least captured the bird.

In the final dream I had to drive a long distance at night and in bad weather to an unfamiliar place (all three presenting a real challenge for me in my waking life) to participate in some kind of group meeting taking place in the basement of what I believe was a temple since the activity seemed related to Hinduism and there were lots of Indian people there —not to mention that we were all sitting on mats and blankets on the floor. There was quite a bit of contrast in this dream's light - bright florescent from the room's doorway poured in but the space was otherwise very dimly lit. There were activities going on at the front of the room on a small stage, and I vaguely recall being anxious and excited about the potential of reciting the Hanuman Chalisa.

As the evening wore down I turned my gaze towards the back of the hall and there was AJ, my friend who died suddenly last October. I still miss my brief visits with him at the gas station and have been thinking of him a lot latley. In the dream AJ was seated on the floor next to another middle-aged Indian man, and they were talking and laughing. I watched them both rise from their places and saw AJ pull on a brown leather bomber-jacket. As he glanced up from zipping it he spotted me, and we made our way towards each other, smiling. Embracing him in a giant bear-hug I exclaimed, "My friend! I can't believe it! I'm so happy to see you and have you back!" Again, a rare moment of dream-speech, and another encounter with someone I've lost (though this dream wasn't quite as intense and lucid as the one I had of my mom after she died). Seeing AJ and getting to express my feelings to him made me overwhelmingly happy to have made the long trip to wherever I was, and I returned to my car in the almost deserted parking lot in high spirits.

Snow and wet rain were still falling and it was quite late at night/early in the morning by now. As I pulled out of the lot I noticed a restaurant that was still open. Through the window I could see people eating, drinking and socializing, but along the roof line of the building were orange flames beginning to leap upwards. There were flames on the next building too, and the one after that — it appeared the whole block ahead of me was in the first stages of a massive blaze. I knew the right thing to do would be to stop the car and run into the restaurant full of people to tell them the roof above them was on fire, but as I considered doing so I had a vision of the street erupting into a wall of flames and filled with emergency vehicles. There would be no way to get home. I drove on.

If you're still with me there's one more thing I wanted to mention that happened as I walked to grab lunch this afternoon. While not a dream, it was quite dream-like. An older woman had parked in the lot at work and was making her way from the driver's side door around the back of her car, moving ever-so-slowly with the help of a black cane. Even though my mom didn't drive and probably would never in a million years have agreed to go out with a cane, something about this woman - her hair, her skin, something - immediately reminded me of my mom. This woman was so focused on her careful journey I didn't think she would notice if I stared at her for a little too long (as I did in that dream I had of my mom, actually) but I felt guilty and rude doing so and turned my gaze downwards again as I drew closer. Just as I passed by however I could not resist sneaking one more peek, and as I did so the woman suddenly turned her head and gave me exactly the kind of mischievious, knowing, I-beg-your-pardon-but-I-can-see-you-looking-at-me grin and glance my mom would have. Her eyes actually sparkled, meeting mine directly. I grinned back and walked on.
 
 In dreams I feel the veil get brushed aside. In waking sometimes too, I think, when one looks with dreaming eyes.
All one.