EARTHDAY 2011

Happy Earthday.

I changed my profile picture to the tiger to celebrate and honor this magnificent endangered creature. When I selected the photo, I was transported back to my small child self sitting under a bed-sheet tent held up by a desk chair on a Sunday morning. I was singing softly to myself and lying in the sweet privacy of my white tent space having a conversation with my favorite animal...my stuffed tiger.

It has been a very busy two weeks...visiting my sister and her kids in Norton, picking up my Mom and bringing her up for a visit here in Maine and then taking her home again to attend a musical tribute with Stephen for a friend that recently passed away. The week came to a crescendo with the musical tribute because it was a reunion of souls, some of whom haven't been seen since 1970 or so. To describe the week as intense is an understatement. By the time we got home after taking Mom to a birthday party for her friend, and cleaned up after a very carsick Sadie Hopkins...I felt like I had been shaken to my core. We have a quiet life these days. Music is acoustic and more in the background than it was in the days when I was angry and blasting my songs at top volume from the car radio. We live in a place of deep quiet and bright stars; long, cold winters and space between neighbors. Our lifestyle is home centered and only gets wild with people when the boys come home with their friends.

Today...Good Friday, I feel the cross of my past with my present. Maybe I'm flooded with images of my child self because of spending such uninterrupted time with my mother. Or maybe the revisiting of so many forgotten friends from so many years ago stimulated the tsunami of memories. Whatever the reason, the effect is such that my usual state of consciousness feels shattered and my energy is depleted. Who was I then and who am I now and how has it all happened that I am here now?

I imagine my child-self talking to my precious tiger under my tent. Growing up in a family of 5 girls forced me to seek solitude in Sunday forts or at the tops of trees. I have always been a child of the Earth, a nature lover and grasshopper feeder...a self appointed protector of toads and turtles...a singer of songs from the treetops. I remember the velvet feel of my toy tiger and stroking it to soothe myself. Sometimes it actually seemed alive and it looked back at me challenging me to grow my fierceness and protect my boundaries. I have always struggled with finding the right balance between territory defense and an open door policy that translates at times into doormat. Quite frankly, I still do. Now the tiger is endangered. When I was that child the Eagle was endangered; a victim of DDT and the early warning signs of American agricultural mono-cropping. As a grown woman, the Eagle is part of my daily life...wild and free and cruising the Androscoggin River with regularity. Now the tiger struggles to survive the pollution and poachers and I struggle to listen to it's quiet communication.

The great cat lies poised but relaxed with dark eyes riveted to my every move. It's whiskers twitch as it sniffs the air determining my scent and whether or not I can be trusted. As I gaze into it's eyes I see the fierce wild edge that develops on the skin of a survivor. I see the quiet yielding to the dictates of nature...the weather, water and wilderness. Health is about working together with the greater patterns of our mother Earth. How can I do that if I am surrounded by too many humans? Many humans means lots of dynamics, vibes, busyness, traffic, noise and pollution. How can I live with too many too close? I need space to run and allow the Earth to strengthen my thigh muscles...power and speed for the hunt...speed and power for survival.

Relaxed and confident. Wild and free. Please let me be a human that allows for diversity of species and can celebrate differences. Let me be a human who can trust the laws of wild mother nature and can thereby be an inhabitant of a peaceable kingdom...let me be a human who values the myriad forms of life and who, when the time comes, can accept death. Yes I am a child of the Universe...no less than the stars and yet no greater than the animals and plants that sustain me.

Please guide me in living a balanced and sustainable life that is gentle on the Earth so that she can be gentle on me. This whole write feels like its turning into a prayer...a Sunday morning under the tent prayer...because I'm waking up.

I'm waking up in a nearly 60 year old body looking out through eyes of a child who has and always had, the wisdom to seek the wild places where she can be one of many species and not just another one of many in a multitude of one species. When I am exhausted by urban rush and vibrating with the buzz of human beings, take me back to nature...back to the woods where I can visualize myself as a being embedded in the nature of our planet Earth, grounded in my dreams and a part of the solution to the problems created by my species. It is not a weakness to be sensitive to the brass and metal of my kind. It is a kindness to restore balance. I am the hippy that has aged and gazed into the mirror of the past, but in this present life, I am the aged human looking out of child eyes and finding a friend in the endangered wild...there is a mirror in the eye of the tiger.

A SEED FIRST

"Who says you can't go home?" Not I. Lucky for me, my mom is still alive and very much herself and she lives in the same house we've lived in since 1961. It's the place I feel most rooted to...lots of underground connections and it's walls sing memory songs. I'm reflecting on all the residual stuff that surfaces only when I sleep in the spaces of those songs during the quick visits I make to visit with her in our old home. And I'm thinking of Priscilla...free at last from the anchors that kept her here on Planet Earth long after her quality of life ended. Does she stand at a threshold looking back? Or does she have her back to the gate and her face to the future? Is she wondering if she can ever go home again? And can she? Does she feel cut off from her roots or has she actually returned home to those roots that are made of soul and spirit? I want to write my blog because it's been quite awhile since my last posting. I'm making myself write a brief entry because my Mom is here visiting us in Maine for the first time in a year. This is a symbolic action. Being the caregiver that I am, I usually drop everything for my visitors and put my wholehearted focus on them. I do that at my peril because in doing so, I neglect my self care when I have company and my focus becomes split between my guests and what I "should" be doing. So today, I'm stepping away from my Mom and her thoughts to tend my own... however briefly and hope to be planting a seed of self nurture so I can stop this damn cycle of overcompensation, do do do do and then burn burn burn. It is how I burn myself out and then require several days or even weeks in a vegetative state to balance my energy.

So there. I've taken a moment to fullfill my own need and planted a seed that I hope to tend more dutifully as the days roll by. I've got to or I will lie on my deathbed wondering what happened to my life while I was so busy taking care of everyone elses. After spending Priscilla's last hours with her in her state of active dying, I am suddenly feeling intense...fervent about claiming my own life...my own time and my own choices. It's great and wonderful to be a cheerleader for the ones you love...supporting their efforts and praising their successes while soothing the failures that bring them down. But I've put my self on the backburner so long that I may boil over if I don't take immediate action.

There. Done. A seed is planted in light....it's that easy.

APRIL REACHING

April in Bethel, Maine is an intense month. There starts to be a warmth to the sun and an ever so slight smell of damp earth but the air is cold...in the 20s most mornings. It's an ambiguous month filled with hope and dissappointment, promise and broken trust; though one is surely a fool to put their trust in April as one of the months of spring. I can't quite break my Massachusetts habit of including April in my mental months of spring. But the cycle of seasons is a little different up here. Now that we've lived here 11 years, you'd think I'd be used to it. But the cold shoulder of April takes me as much by surprise as her moments of promising heat. I get this feeling...perhaps it is due to the mid-March tapping of the trees and the final bottling of syrup that usually winds up the first week of April...but my blood flow begins to quicken. I have my reptilian days when all I can do is surrender to the warm sun to gather energy from the light. Nothing seems more important. My body stops creaking like the popping of the trees in January and begins to yearn for the opportunities to reach upward and stretch beyond it's winter limits. I have a strange affinity for the bare trees. Perhaps it is due to the desire to shed a few layers of defensive protection. Maybe it is the craving for the truth that lies buried beneath the dirty pitted snow. Maybe it is simply because I've been tuned into the rhythm of the trees and the moving of their lifeblood by partaking in the ritual of making syrup, but lately on my little walks with Sadie, I feel drawn to the company of the bare limbs and I feel in them a sisterhood embedded in the yearning and the reaching for what is just out of reach.

The cold April winds give the bare branches voice and my ears are busy listening for their song. While walking I have to be careful not to trip or step in a hole because my focus becomes lofty, with my eyes riveted to the canopy and blind to what lies directly underfoot. I would do better rooted like a tree, to listen for their special springtime song. At least it would be safer. But alas, I am just me. The bare trees dance against the bluebird skies and I just love to watch them...the crowns of the diciduous trees full of spaces and stirring the space against the movement of the evergreens, from the bluish spruce to the lighter greens of the white pines...they are all dancing and whooshing and yes, reaching.

We share our upward reaching...me in my prayers and yearnings for what is yet unmanifest. They in their naked grasping for the returning birds. I think the trees in April are hungry for their winged friends to return, just as I am. They wait in the cold for the quick little clicky nails to grab hold and for the sweet song to fill them in on news from yonder. They have been lonely for their feathered friends and miss them. Yep...they are reaching for them like I reach for news of the warmth underground. I've broken the ice and now I am reaching through for the solid hand of spring...feeling through the dark. I know she's coming and I want her to come with confidence and gusto. But she is April...and she flirts with a warm few hours here and there, a whole day of melting. Then she turns away and sends snow spitting through space and leaves me wondering...will she ever really come? And I think...of course. Though April may be a season unto herself, May is on her heels and mud season becomes planting time. And while I wait, the birds are coming in waves...first the robins, then raptors and grackles and soon the redwing blackbird will chirrup us all awake to find the darting swallows and bluebirds are back again. They all bring affirmation of the warmth to come.

AS THE SAP BOILS

After the April snow joked around with my faith in the coming of spring, I began to notice a certain parallel between the process of boiling off the water from the sap and tuning my mind to a more friendly and supportive bunch of self talk tapes. Or perhaps the awareness comes from being grounded by my wounded knee which seems to keep getting injured as I keep trying to accomplish more than my physical body will allow. Or maybe the awareness is a gift of being unemployed and therefore undistracted by outer events that draw my focus away from the task at hand. In any event...the Soap that I'm living right now is clearly called As The Sap Boils....and for whatever reason, the distilling process reflects a refining of my ability to extract the sweetness from every aspect of my present moment.

Stephen is clearly the farmer of the maple trees. For 28 years, I have observed and appreciated how accomplished he is at balancing his work time with play time. At times, I have been a bit envious. I am prone to being over-dutiful and denying myself playtime in favor of finishing up what I consider my "responsibilities". I don't really know where this trait comes from...but it smacks of a Puritan work ethic and the image I have in my mind is the depression painting called "American Gothic"of the farm couple with their stern faces holding the tools of their trade. Stephen's joyous passion and sunny dispositon defy that image...but at times I can see myself in that mirror. Every spring almost...we go through the ritual of making syrup. Some years I am more helpful than others. Most years though, Stephen sets the taps, hangs the buckets and commits to the daily collection of tree sap. He also builds the evaporating stove and contendedly sets up his boil where he eats peanuts, drinks a few beers and soaks in the early spring sunshine. I imagine myself as his assistant. I keep the boil going when he has to work and I am in charge of the sanitation of the jars and putting up the finished product. This year I've been totally unable to help collect the sap because of my knee. Even walking up to our funky red barn has been challenging because the snow is soft and yielding under foot and it can throw me off balance easily...tweaking my knee. This year...he sits on his boil while I ice my knee by the fire inside. My inability to do the usual routine causes irritation and frustration. Mostly, the problem is that I'm not able to get my usual amount of exercise. Suddenly, where I generally find myself mentally avoiding exercise but forcing myself to JUST DO IT...now I am fantasizing about doing physical things that I just can't do. I sit. I sit and I see the circles that my mind is so fond of creating. And I write about it.

I write out my frustration and sometimes a poem or a whimsical thought comes. I am just like Sadie gnawing on her bone...chewing on the hard things in my life...the places that could soften and melt...the issues that I can't quite sink my teeth into. This bone is about 28 years old. I bury it and forget about it for a long while and then some unconscious impulse stirs me to run and dig it up and bring it in to chew on all over again. And it never is really gone. I just hide it from myself until the bone calls me and I heed the call...dig it up and gnaw somemore. When I chew on it, I generally bring up the issue in conversation and Stephen and I are drawn into a conversation that we always have but never quite resolve. I wonder if it is a Karmic bone...or maybe a dinosaur bone from a past that is so long gone that I can't identify it's source. When we chew on it together, a struggle usually ensues. He tries to tell me how to fix the bone and I keep trying to blame him for it. When I realize I'm trying to blame him and apologize, he listens without trying to fix and we are able to forget about the bone and get back to the distillation of sweetness. One year we were so busy playing tug of war with the bone that we burned a batch of syrup...a sad but necessary lesson in losing focus...and not easy to clean up.

Now it's April. The birds are coming back. A flock of Robin scratches around the yard. The immature Eagle and Coopers hawk we saw are at the headwind of the returning raptor migration. The 8 inches of Foolish snow is almost melted. I've re-tweaked my knee and Stephen pulled the taps last night. I've chewed long enough to recognize this old bone and I have matured enough to claim it as my own. As Stephen sits by his boil happily shelling peanuts, I sit with my ice and realize that my joy depends on digging around in my soul with my Gel pen. I write myself home. I use the pen to distill the sweetness of my life and unlike Maple sap becoming syrup...I must not bottle up what I render. Farming is a metaphor for growing your earthly gifts and luckily, it's a new time...despite what things look like...there is a green growing under the snow and a Spring coming regardless of the weather. I'm actually grateful I'm being forced to sit and focus while Stephen sits on his boil because I am writing in sweetness and a joyful lightness of being into my image of toil. Its a kind of composting the soil.