Intending to Balance

I was determined to get outside and enjoy the unseasonably warm weather this morning and not spend the entire day in front of the computer, working.

It was warm but incredibly humid, everything shrouded in gray and glistening with raindrops. The blanket of fog must have made the skies unfriendly for the small aircraft that are usually buzzing overhead, and similarly unfavorable for hunting or for target shooting. No gunshots punctuated the silence of the woods, no chainsaws whined, and Vixen and I walked in the complete silence that must have been commonplace centuries ago but is now maddeningly rare, at least here.

Even now that I'm working part time at home (though my schedule is hardly part time at the moment) it's challenging to strike a work/life balance — and that's surprising since for so many years I've had an easy donkey on which to pin tails of blame for all that was not being accomplished in my life; the walks not walked, the yoga classes not attended, the mediation time not set aside, the made-from-scratch meals not made, etc. And while having to commute and sit in an office all day had much to do with those "failures" to live up to that idealized version of life I carried around in my imagination, it obviously wasn't the only culprit. So every day I must remember to make a renewed commitment, and as soon as I wake up to set an intention for balance between what I have to do and what I want to do.

In class we see a lot of patients who will say, "I'm only working 60 hours a week until my loans are paid, and then I'll live the life I really want to live" or "Twenty years from now when I retire I'll get back to doing the art I don't have any time for now." Of course these people are dealing with dis-ease. On a physical level, faulty often sluggish digestion is involved, among other symptoms, but digestion goes beyond food into the realm of how we digest our emotions and that emotional digestion dictates the state of our physical digestion.



Are we maintaining equilibrium between the needs of the body, the mind and the spirit. Or are we telling our spirits, "Not Yet, Not Now, Wait two decades and maybe then..." and expecting our physical bodies to respond to that with good health, undisturbed sleep and smooth digestion, our minds with clarity and proper recall, our emotions with happiness?

It doesn't work that way. We aren't the machines we often demand ourselves to be. There's no guarantee any of us will live long enough to pay off those loans or retire — myself included. The time is Now, and while it's true that we may not be able to fully realize our entire idealized life plan Now, we must be mindful to try and taste at least a little bit of its sweetness every day.

That little taste may be all we get, and if that turns out to be the case it will be far better than nothing.

So I recommit.

I must work, but I must taste the sweetness of walking in the quiet woods with my dog and my camera. 

I must tackle the sink full of dishes, but I must also taste the sweetness of a slow-cooked meal, a hot mug of tea.

I must keep my bills paid, but I must also taste the sweetness of spending time being creative just for the joy of it.

It's incredibly easy, when a patient comes in, to see their story from the compassionate but detached position of an outside observer. It's not so easy when the mirror turns so we can view our own lives in that way — we are all immersed in the movie of our own stories, and from that position it's impossible to objectively recognize the many, many factors that are affecting our health, causing our dis-ease. Having true good health is about far more than eating one's veggies.

I leave class exhausted by the human condition, by the layers upon layers that build up on the pure spirits we come into this world with.

Our teacher says every case could eventually come down to the question, "do you meditate?" That's where we find a little space to step back from ourselves and our movies. The fog lifts. The sun behind it is shining.

Wabi Sabi Woods Walk...

As I mentioned, last Sunday's woods walk was full of discoveries. J and I took a route we've never ventured down before, and discovered and old household dump where unwanted glass and metals were hauled and discarded in the days before recycling.

Chances are if you live in an old house in New England you have a dump like this somewhere on your property. Ours is out the back door, but covered over by dirt, and it's only when we sink a shovel into the backyard soil that we discover forged nails, brass buttons and broken glass mingling with rocks and earthworms below the grass.

This dump lined the banks of a small river. It was amazing how many of the old bottles were unbroken, and I can only imagine what's beneath what we saw on the surface, partially (or fully) obscured by autumn leaves.

I have an affinity for the aged and rusted with their hints of letters and logos, their weathered colors and crippled shapes. An old spring lay in the river like a ribcage, the exterior of an ornate metal fan was hidden beneath a Hemlock bough. There were horseshoes and car parts, malted milk, ketchup and Vaseline jars, an old alarm clock whose numbers had worn off decades ago, its time run out. We even found the blue enamel coffee pot whose lid I found further down the river over a year ago. I wanted to reunite them, but the lid was washed away when the river swelled with Hurricane Irene's torrential rain.

Strength Soup with a Side of Gratitude

J, Vixen and I just took a brief walk through the darkening woods, over the matted carpet of snowy wet leaves, beneath the dripping ink black outlines of Hemlock branches. Back at the house vegetables were sizzling in the oven and stock simmering on the stove, an alchemy of adding fire and water to ends and shavings to arrive at the rich, nutritious liquid we use in everything from miso soup to rice. I even slipped in a few cubes of frozen Wei Chi soup broth from the pot I cooked last week — a  power-packed immune booster of ingredients like Astragalus root, Shitaki mushrooms and Goji berries, Wei Chi is especially helpful during the winter months for internal strengthening and rejuvenation.

I am grateful for both external and internal sources of strength, including friendship in both the real and virtual worlds. I'm grateful to not be sitting in an airplane right now, or worse, sitting alone in my casita because I did not have time in the demanding school schedule to come back for Thanksgiving, which probably would have been the case. I'm grateful that even though he won't be able to join us at my brother's house tomorrow as we'd originally planned, my dad is in a safe place where he is well cared for, and even if he doesn't remember who I am when we visit him in the afternoon, I am grateful to be his daughter, grateful to bear witness to his life.

I am grateful to be learning all the ways in which our emotional health affects our physical health and grateful for all of my teachers. Grateful to live in an area of the country where "organic," "locally-grown," and "sustainable" are the norm and not the exception. Grateful to my own plot of land for continuing to provide food from the garden! Grateful that the people I work with and for appreciate (and acknowledge) that I am doing my job not from a place of ambition but from from a place of love, "directly from the source" my boss wrote to me today (and I am grateful to have recieved such a supportive email)! I'm grateful that through some twist of fate I have the job I do.

I am grateful to J for ironing out the many wrinkles of my day-to-day emotional state, for never judging me harshly and for making me laugh when I don't feel remotely like laughing.

I could go on! May we all be grateful for the blessings we have. Happy Thanksgiving!

New England Indian Summer...

 

Thank God for J who dragged me away from the glowing computer screen
(with its lists of bulk green teas and
hang tag designs and
orders for essential oil diffusers)
and brought me out into the glow of a gorgeous Indian summer afternoon
where the world is slowly turning to seed,
where stumps of bright swiss chard and neon green parsley are still
struggling up from the garden's dark earth.

Our  hike was full of finds, including this small animal skull tucked into the grass by the side of the trail. Any ideas what it could be? Cat? Skunk? Woodchuck?

 

Since I have class tomorrow morning I'll wait until my next post to show you what else we found.

The Light

An excerpt from a letter author Miriam Stone writes to her mother in her beautiful young adult novel, At the End of Words, A Daughter's Memoir:

". . . there are certain things you don't know, things that should be said. Like how beautiful your death was. How simple, on top of its intricacies. Your decline poetic, your fight heroic, the love that poured from you and to you so astounding, it swelled even the room you died in. It still billows in me every time I breathe. Your death gave as much life as it destroyed. It marked my passage into my new life, equipped with the strength of a mother and daughter wrapped in one. It gave me love without boundaries."

It's astounding to me that two years have already passed since losing my mom. The deep slant of November sunlight reminds me of that morning in Rhode Island. I've shared many feelings and words about her and the experience of working through grief here including this wish, expressed in January 2010...

Me, I wish for a "time out" card I can't produce. I wish to find an unfading flower, an undying truth, an idea whose time doesn't come but always has been and always will be. I wish for faith that doesn't burn down with the church, and for love that won't decay with the heart.

An in this little poem from a post a year later on what would have been her birthday,

freedom from the grip of pain: reunions.

the absence of tears: peace.

the reaping of faith's rewards: love.

the realization of eternity: truth.

A mother is hard to lose and faith hard to find, but the compass needle hasn't failed to point from darkness to light, even if the way forward can only be found by taking one small, uncertain step at a time towards it.

What I've Been Up To...

because obviously it has not been writing.

Two Fridays ago it was revealed at a work meeting that we still had some of our super comfy organic cotton and bamboo tee shirts in stock at the apothecary, but they were in a bag somewhere behind the counter because a proper way to display them hadn't been discovered yet.

Well, I'm no retail genius but I do know that it's hard to sell something your customers can't even see, and as I own two of these very tee shirts myself I know how wonderful they are and that as soon as people are able to touch them they're going to disappear. I also love this kind of challenge and immediately began to imagine what kind of display would be affordable and in keeping with the apothecary/farm asthetic of the shop.  Fortunately/unfortunately I didn't stop churning the issue over until the concept came to me at 3am on Sunday morning.

At breakfast (after a big cup of chai) I sketched and described my tee shirt display plan passionately enough that J offered to help in manifesting it...

and I immediately headed outside to the brush pile to gather some birch trees that had been downed in a storm last winter. J took over from there.

Attaching the base.

Scoring the crosspiece.

Cutting a space where the crosspiece arms will attach using a Japanese saw.

Success!

I then designed these hang tags, printed on kraft colored card stock and attached to the rolled up shirts with a bit of jute twine.

The display itself needed a couple of signs for the top, so I had J cut a slit in the birch branch just large enough to tuck them into place. Voila! By the time I left the deserted shop on Monday night I had set these up on a small burlap-covered table by the window for my still unsuspecting coworkers and boss, who loved seeing the display when he walked in on Tuesday morning. We are now ordering more tee shirts to have in stock (and sell) and next Monday night I'll include an iron in my bag of ninja marketing tools, because those wrinkles are killing me!

It is also Immunity Month and the front table that my coworker built this summer is now my responsibility to stock and decorate. I also design the posters and overall theme for the monthly theme materials...

Here's the 24" x 36" poster hanging in the frame J built this summer.


And below the poster a hint at what's inside. Our products are so small (and in some cases delicate) that it's difficult to display them effectively in the window. These signs are letter-sized card stock, folded in such a way that the "extra" elements stand up (with the exception of the final "Immunity!" sign, which is cut from two pieces.

Smaller posters lead the way to the door...

...and inside the shop the table is stocked with our own line of immunity-boosting elixirs, tinctures, honeys, and teas as well as a big basket of organic garlic from the farm, some Ayurvedic neti pots and nasya oil and (just in case your immunity wasn't quite ready for the season) cough syrups and teas for either wet or dry coughs. There are also informational pieces I designed about some of the most powerful immune-stimulating herbs, Echinacea, Elderberry, Garlic and Astragalus.

Over the course of the next month there will be four Wednesday night classes covering exactly how to keep ourselves healthy this winter using time-honored natural approaches, and even a groupon offer for a discount on the $25 admission to these informative evening sessions.

For the next 3 or 4 weeks I'll be working 35-40 hours ordering new product and overhauling the entire retail space piece by piece in time for the holiday shopping season (yes, we are a bit late in deciding to do this). There will be herbal and Ayurvedic books on the shelves, a whole new line of kid's medicines, a renewed selection of the best quality essential oils, resins and charcoal, diffusers, and an entirely updated tea section including a beautiful selection of infusers, matcha and yerba mate supplies, lidded tea cups, and new bulk teas from around the globe.


I thought  that by leaving publishing I was leaving the world of deadlines and super-busyness behind, but apparently those elements have followed me into this new world of retail and small business-building. I'm starting to think that potentially those elements are something within me and that even if I tried to retire to a remote island off the coast of Maine or hide behind a cactus in the desert a certain amount of frenzy would find me.

And what would I do without it?

So I am crazily busy, crazily inspired, and crazily happy to be working for such a great cause, with great people. And I hope those of you who are within driving distance will come visit the shop before Christmas and see what's happening, perhaps take one of our evening classes, or maybe you will wait and join us for a special night time essential oil distillation at the the farm this winter and experience all the sensory pleasures (and healing) that herbal medicine has to offer — good health is definitely about far more than taking a spoonful of medicine.

Let it Rain Pairing

 

There's something so soothing about raindrops on green.

Light Pairing

Pairings

Distinctions

Sky over Jemez Springs, New Mexico, sky over Cummington, Massachusetts this summer. I've been grouping some of my old photos together and will share the simple pairings with you this week. There hasn't been much time for writing or commenting on blogs these past few weeks, but the start of winter is often like that, isn't it?

I could write a long post about distinctions, about east vs. west, about what I thought I would be doing this winter compared to what I am doing, and about where I am compared to where I thought I'd be...but ultimately my conclusion is that I seem to be exactly where I'm needed at the moment. That gives me faith that in coming back to New England I made the right decision, and that as long as I stay true to my intuition everything will work out the way it's meant to going forward.

Striking my Fancy

Some recent moments in Northampton, MA and Brattleboro, VT (digitally enhanced).