Are We the world worth saving?

Here is a newsletter/email I sent out today…

Yesterday was Lughansa, August 1st, a day of celebration for  some of my ancestors, a day of joy and gratitude– the harvest is here. If you've opened up this e-mail, Thank You. If you decide to read it all the way through, Thank you. If you end up at the bottom and click, yes, to any of the invitations I'm offering, Thank You. 

      I walked a path today through wild roses and trembling aspens with a big blue sky overhead. Barefoot, I stopped on a hill and laid down. I felt the cells of my whole being in vibration with the earth. A deep sense of calm and steadiness filled me. I continue to hold the calm as I write to you now. 

      I have three purposes today:

• We are the world worth saving, a definition. 

• An unfolding pathway.

• Three invitations based on We are the world worth saving.

  bonus…Gifts for writers and peace lovers.

We are the world worth saving, a definition.

       I've been hearing this phrase in my thoughts and my dreams: We are the world worth saving. Seriously. Today it appears I am going to take responsibility for these words. Even though I notice a younger version of me is afraid someone will disagree, today's version of myself is interested in a conversation, many conversations.

       We are the world worth saving. 

       We as in: all. 

       We as in: you and me and all. 

       We as in: you, me, them, river, ocean, rose, tree, mouse, elephant, mountain, and all.

    I notice when I'm in despair about the world, I forget we are a we. 

    "What can I do to help?" I think or "How can I not think about this anymore?"

     I also forget all of life is founded on basic goodness. I notice my caught-up-ness with the details of the unfolding events. Scrolling increases. Wandering around with my mind buzzing. I begin to internalize feelings of division and hopelessness. 

     "I can't do anything to change this situation." 

     Loneliness shows up. 

     Oh, my. The stories I can imagine about how bad it can all get, how bad it has been. 

     Bad. Bad. Bad. 

    Then, the ember of worthiness glows deep within me and, eventually, I feel warmth. I notice my heart and mind opening. I let in pain and suffering. I breathe out calm and good wishes. I learned this practice as Tonglen. (meaning: giving and receiving)

     I notice an emotion takes about 90 seconds to run all through the body. 

     Dislodging a stuck emotion, the remainder of a division of some sort, can take years and years. Little bits of relief, letting pain in from a traumatic memory and breathing out calm, matters. Breathing in others' pain and breathing out calm can become almost like a muscle memory. 

     Sometimes we go a lifetime with an obstacle inside us we never identify, we grow crankier and crankier, we avoid certain topics of conversation or people or situations we don't like. We don't want to be triggered by anything, anywhere. I spent a lot of time avoiding triggers. 

      My experience is: building capacity in the inner experience needs space. Spaciousness is a physical situation- an open heart is more spacious than a clenched heart, the gut can feel tight or relaxed and spacious, the mind can be obsessively thinking or we might notice the gap/the space between thoughts. Often, we need time and tools to develop space. Letting go of stories (which take up a ton of space) can be a challenge. 

    So...why engage in all of this work? Why go canoeing when we can sit on a beach and have the drinks brought to us? Why work through stuck emotions? Why willingly experience pain?  Watching the Olympics, I wonder if the athletes push themselves physically because the arena of physically-meeting-an-edge is where they want to play.

    The arena I want to play in? Peace. 

    Peace is the physical, mental, emotional and spiritual arena of our times. 

    I just wrote that. Is it true? I don't know.

     I was born in 1966 (my birthday is 18 days from now!) and I've read: babies born in this year share an experience of wanting peace. The Vietnam War was on. Star Trek debuted on television in September. The pull of peace was in the air, the cosmos. My direct experience tells me peace means being open to the uncertainty of life, of things falling apart. It's responding with clarity and compassion, sitting with fear and anger and joy and love simultaneously, holding space for whatever arises, and not fearing or grasping the outcome. Peace. 

    Peace is my experience of the We. It's my sandbox. It's how I'm playing with life. My three invitations are to ask you to join me in this big peace experiment where Deep Listening, Deep Play and Deep Trust work through us. 

    Peace is possible. 

    Peace begins in one expression of being. 

    We are the expression. 

    We are the world worth saving. 

My pathway. 

If you know me, you probably know I'm a writer with a love of all words (especially yours!) and a woman who has restarted her life more than once. 

You likely know me as a curious and playful person. Perhaps, too, as serious about what it means to care about another, open-hearted and open-minded, willing to learn, persistent, a lover of cake and cookie, and in the last ten years especially, a human with a beautiful relationship with our natural world. 

As I near my 58th birthday, I can point to a few choices I made over the last 10 years which have brought me to this moment. I share them with you for context, perhaps for my own clarity to see how I got here today, to write this newsletter and send it out:

• I didn't know how to live the life I was living anymore. I applied and accepted the invitation for a canoe trip with Outward Bound Canada, specially designed for women who'd experienced violence in their lives. On a solo-night on a tiny island in Desolation Sound, I wrote myself a letter. My wilderness coaches mailed it to me six months later. I wrote to myself, You will be in healthy relationships and canoeing will be part of your life from now on. 

• I learned to hike and camp alone and to love it.

• I met extraordinary humans at pivotal points who helped me cultivate positivity and clarity.

• I quit a job I loved in arts management. Despair lived inside me for many months.

• One of my children told me they didn't want to talk to me anymore because I didn't listen. I trained myself to listen, fully. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. 

• Two granddaughters came into my life. I wanted to show up for them even when I didn't think I could.

• I started and completed an MFA in Creative Writing. 

• I spent two weeks with the Indigenous Leadership group at the Banff Centre for the Arts- one program on Right Relationship, the other on the ways of Indigenous Leadership. 

• I took over 58 courses/workshops on-line and in-person on topics from baking to writing to becoming a Bodhisattva (a warrior for the human spirit) with Margaret Wheatley

• I dreamed of buying a house near nature with my daughter and son-in-law so the grandchildren could play outside. We bought one. 

• I canoed lakes and rivers in long journeys with my steady and skilled canoe partner, Tom, who was forced to change his life after a physical disability at age 28. He holds a phd in Peace Studies. The word peace really excites me. haha. 

• I experienced so much fear I put us in danger on a canoe trip. Joy Harjo's poem, Fear, I Give you Back, has helped me let go of my grip on fear. 

• I've written hundreds of pages of a novel I do not want to end. I love the characters. I love the horror story they're navigating. I love the place where they live- Ghost River Wilderness. The genre: Mountain Gothic. 

• I've published short stories and essay pieces and worked on a wonderful novel.

• I nurture nests of writers who are brilliant and compassionate. 

• Writing nests have led to the development of deep noticing as a key part of nurturing a peaceful life. 

• I'm in collaboration with some wonder-humans. I look forward to all of you meeting one day. 

• I'm letting go of story after story, even the ones who have been the catalyst for my biggest insecurities and my biggest successes. The stories all seem to have a pleasantness about them as they drift away, even the worst of them, a bundle of memories about what I learned then. 

• I notice I'm carrying the peace I've been seeking.

My Invitations.

      I've been in retreat for the past several weeks. My retreat space: one-on-one relationships with family and friends, strangers who become friends, with dog Athena, with water, with plant after plant after plant. I've been asking big questions about the narrative I weave in my head of the world I've Iived in and the world I'm living in now, at this moment. 

     Now, I'm metaphorically paddling the canoe in the middle of the river and I don't know what's up ahead. I know what I have in the canoe. I know what I sense around me. I am keen. 

   If you've read this far, thank you- again!- my inbox is full of wonderful newsletters I read or don't depending on the day. As I mentioned, I love learning experiences. I love experimenting. I am keen to experiment and play with anyone who is curious about what I'm putting together... 

 Here are my invitations: 

Cabin Falls 2024: Retreat and Write

Six days and five nights in one-of-kind luxury and people

• Increase Spaciousness in your life.

• Experience doing one thing at a time.

• Engage in deep noticing; build your muscle memory for accessing presence in each moment. 

• Will my wellness last? Is this enough of a beginning? Is it possible? Of course it is. 

• Research shows 72 hours in nature leads to wellness. Sweden is trying this, too! 

• It is possible to experience life in many different ways. It is possible to spend six days and five nights in one of the most incredible places on earth. Imagine the energy of water falling. Imagine the moon gathering us in her fullness. (full moon alert!)

• Writing and sharing is always by invitation to express whatever arises. Writers are often surprised with the goodness they find showing up. 

• So much can be seen when you're guided by the stewards of the land, when you're playing with deep noticing practices. 

• Yes, it's worth the cost. Yes, it's worth the time and the travel to arrive. 

The official invitation is attached to this email. You can also find more information on my website. Here. 

Writing Nests, Fall 2024
Early Registration for Writing Nests begins on August 4. 

Some details:

• Limited to six writers per nest. 

• We begin in October.

• Weekday mornings, afternoons and evenings will be available.

• Scheduled for 1.5 hours with a five minute break partway through.

• You can curate your own writing nest with friends/family.

• Sliding fee scale always available

• Format: meet the screen with ease, engage with a playful invitation to notice, take action: move, listen to the inner body, write, share the present moment and presence. 

• Deep Listening. Deep Play. Deep Trust. 

If the world is falling apart, what can you do? Clear your perspective. Become an island of sanity for all you love. We need you.  

Peace Practices, Fall 2024

Early Registration for Peace Practices begins on August 4.

Some details:

• Free. 

• Sent to your inbox on Sunday and Wednesday.

• Playful invitations for expression.

• A monthly zoom call.

Peace Is. Deepen Your Experience.

You can also schedule 20 minute meetings with me.  

Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. 

So much gratitude in my life today. 

My apologies if you run into any issues with navigating my website. I'm doing the best I can with the energy I've been allotted in this life! 

I Notice. March 14, 2024

“I notice is a practice of embodiment. To be present in the body, the space, the is-ness. ”

— Mar'ce Merrell

I notice the late afternoon sun coming in through the window. I notice the shadow of the fence on the screen. I notice the fence lattice leaves diamond shadows.

I notice the rug under my feet is green and beige like lichen on stone, lichen of the fall- a fading lichen, not a springing forth lichen.

I notice I’m feeling older these days: why do I have so many medical tests to see if I’m too one thing or not enough of another? My ecosystem is expected to fail at this point or at least to need some kind of mediation. 

I wonder if there is a place on earth which is my sister ecosystem- what place feels vibrantly alive with some wear and tear? A gravel pit seems too barren; an oasis in a desert doesn’t fit either. A mountainscape might work. Mountain and erosion: stillness and perseverance. 

But, maybe, it’s a meadow- a mountain meadow- and it’s been suffering from cycles of drought and clouds not carrying all I’ve needed and now I’m suffering a bit from having survived with less.

I’ll need deeper roots, a tap root, perhaps, to find my way into ground water and perhaps bigger leaves to capture more sun energy- more photosynthesis. And, perhaps, I already have all that I need and the tests are there to affirm: I have all I need. 

I notice the sound of small-kid voices. The negotiation of sharing space and time. My ecosystem is full of so much. 

I notice a pulse in the bottom of my left foot. A call from underneath.

I am here. I am here.

I notice the call rises up through my foot and to my belly and my chest begins to expand.

What a beautiful meadow life is. 

No wonder we want to analyze it, notice it, protect it.

Life is precious and wild, resilient and unraveling, all at the same time.

I wonder at it all. 

Wonder and Wander

The Writing Nest!!!

What would it look like to radically trust yourself in writing and beyond? 

What would it feel like to know you are empowered to meet the edge of what you know and don’t know? 

Are you curious about these questions?

Mar’ce Merrell, writer, and Christine Bizzell, strength guide, are co-creating an experience in uniting the power of presence with our natural gifts in writing.

To REGISTER: https://sutra.co/space/u8vtmm

In this Leap Day Writing Circle (and writing nest for the entire month of March), you will have the opportunity to see your power more clearly and wholly at the edge of creation and transformation.

Christine will guide four students in recognizing their natural strengths– the strengths which emerge from natural patterns of thinking, feeling, and behaving. We will all:

- complete a rigorous 177-question survey to reveal our natural patterns. (CliftonStrengths34)

- work with her one-on-one in strength coaching

- access an on-line learning course connecting our strengths with our experience.

- have the opportunity for more one-to-one coaching

ON Leap Day, we'll all be gathered in The Writing Nest (hosted on Sutra). We will all:

- engage in contemplation and creation through writing through daily invitations and feedback.

- play with words

- meet and share on live zoom calls each week. 

- notice deeply, share our presence, and witness one another. 

It's a pilot project! We think the people who would benefit most are

- in transition

- feeling anxiety/worry/confusion/excitement about where they fit or how to move forward 

- interested in their inner exploration

- interested in building nest buddies for life- relationships they can always come back to.

- interested in writing as a creative act

 Grounded in the theme/thread/root of our own stories, we can emerge with greater freedom – with wonder and curiosity of what could come next on our journeys.  

We, your nest buddies and newest symbiotic community, will be witnesses to your strength and emergence.   

Volta. Change. Response to Writing Call #3

Dearest reader, I am sharing some of my responses to the 42 days of writing calls we are all engaging with during the Being A Writer | Becoming Who You Want to Become writing circle.

Instructions: The writer is situated in a specific context. Write towards the Volta, the change. 

We are in an urban forest, among long grasses and bushes, small trees. We stand in the center of a copse of aspen, branches covered in hoarfrost from a wet and cold evening. The sun shines nearly overhead in this mid-morning. 

hoarfrost

My cellphone is in the breast pocket of my long coat. It plays a podcast with the episode title, Life Without Unnecessary Suffering. 

I wonder if I can be here, in this moment, among these trees while also listening to the recording of someone else speaking from Paris, one evening weeks ago? 

I wrap each arm around an aspen trunk, clasp my hands in front of me, at about level with my heart and I squeeze. I hug the trees as if they were twins. As if they are related. I am the middle space bringing them together. I hug them as if they are living beings who can feel my presence, not just as pressure on their trunks, but as affection. Appreciation. 

Their roots intertwine far below my feet in swirls and arches, in patterns of branching and connecting. I breathe in the oxygen they make. I breathe out the carbon dioxide I make. We take our breaths from each other, we give our breaths to each other. How deep is our love, I wonder? 

I float my gloved hands, one on each tree trunk, palm flat, about ¼ or ½ inch away from the tree trunk. I’ve been trying to feel the energy of trees. I feel a faint buzzing feeling, the invisible wings of a bumblebee between me and the trees. I wonder if it is coming from me or from the trees. It seems so important to know what I am achieving. What I am capable of. If I am growing. If I am doing good in the world. Could I harm the trees with my games of perception?

I back away from the two trees, from the 30 or so trees who make a copse, who connect wide and deep with the root system they share which may be a hundred or two hundred years old, even if the trees above only live to an average of 50 to 75 years. I want to know so much. I observe this about myself.

I step back, walk a path from the trees towards the primary path. At about 10 feet away, I feel an impulse to turn back. I turn around and see the group as if for the first time. Hoarfrost covers the top branches of their trunks and with the play of light, they almost appear like sparkly-haloed ones. Dancers on the dance floor, striking a pose- en vogue. 

Thank you, I say aloud, though I’ve been told it’s not necessary to say thank you in order to express gratitude. Gratitude, I’ve been told, can arise in the moment of appreciation. It is a felt expression in this way, not a reflective gesture, not a rote experience. A full experience of expression arising. A body being. 

Hoarfrost body

The noticing of a body being: 

I notice my hands tingle slightly. I notice when I breathe out, I relax my shoulders. I notice my vision softens at the edges. I notice an urge to take a photograph, to hold this moment even though I can never hold it. I have such appreciation, I realize. For these trees. For all trees. For this day. For all the days. For the hoarfrost. For the light of the sun.  

I walk a narrow path between two paths, the diagonal line connecting the two parallel lines which make up a parallelogram. How funny I remember parallelograms and geometry right now! I wonder why geometry is here? 

I notice the bush branches, the long grass and arching stems of wintered plants I can’t identify: whitened and heavy with frozen dew. Hoarfrost. Hoar, from har an old english word meaning elderly, old, venerable, gray. Frost from forst or frustaz meaning to freeze. 

The day will bring enough sun to melt the definition away. The grass will be only grass soon. The winter plant will be undressed, again. 

Life without unnecessary suffering, I hear from the recording, is possible when we accept what is, without resistance.

Soon enough, my mind is restful, my body being a body walking, a body listening, a body…

Hoarfrost Wow.

Being a Writer | Becoming Who You Want to Become

Facilitated Writing Circles: Craft Invitations and Live Connections with writers

When: 

MORNING: Wednesday, January 3 @ 10 a.m. PST, 11 a.m. MST, 12 p.m. CST, 1 p.m. EST, 6 a.m. UK

EVENING: Wednesday, January 3 @ 5 p.m. PST, 6 p.m. MST, 7 p.m. CST, 8 p.m. EST

January 3 

January 10 

January 17

January 24

January 31

February 7

Length of meeting: 1 hour and 20 minutes

Group size limited to five students

Where: VIA Zoom, link will be shared after sign-up

Expectations: Please click HERE to read the invitation.

- come as you are

- past-participants have experienced a deepening of their moment-to-moment awareness, of their connections to themselves, other human beings, other non-human beings. 

- intentions include: deep listening, deep play and deep trust

- all interactions are held by all in confidence, with kind regard, and generous respect

- sharing is always optional

- open your arms

My commitment: 

- to attend and attune

- to hold our group with awe and wonder and curiosity

- to adapt to our learning needs; to provide us with support materials, inspiration and deep love for the process of being a writer and becoming who we want to become

- Being a Writer- Craft specific lessons will be delivered to your email on Tuesdays. Topics include: Context/Setting/Description from the earth and the sky, Point of View and all beings-ness, Writing Emotion and the body, Form/Structure and mountain climbing/flow/branching, Indirect vs. Direct discourse and scenes with dialogue/movement.

- If a one-on-one session is something you'd find helpful, let's schedule one during our time together. 

To sign-up: Direct message me to my email: marcemerrell@gmail.com, 

1. Tell me your preference: Morning or Evening

2. Ask any questions you may have.

3. You will hear from me in 24 hours or less

Cost:

- $155 via e-transfer, $160 via paypal or visa (I will provide links for you in a follow-up email) 

- Payment required by January 10th unless other arrangements are made directly with me. 

- If you'd like to attend our January 3 session as an experiment to see if this is the right fit for you, please let me know. I understand. You are welcome to come as you are. : )

If you'd like to know more about me or about my work, my website, www.marcemerrell.com is a pretty good starting place. I will be updating it starting this afternoon.

Frequently Asked Questions:

Will a recording of the sessions be available to me? No. This is an emergent process from the human beings in attendance.

Will I learn what I want to learn in this work with you? You don't need me to learn anything. This is an opportunity to open your arms and engage in a process with many possibilities. When you attend and attune to the group, you create with me, with us. 

Will I receive the craft handouts/lessons if I cannot attend the session? Absolutely!!

Will you be offering more classes/sessions at another time? I don't know. This is what I have the capacity for right now. 

Can I make up a session if I miss it? I'm happy to schedule a one-on-one session with you for the first missed session. I'll engage in an extensive e-mail discussion of your process/your work/whatever is emerging for you for a second missed session. If you miss a third session, I'll send you a package of care-taking strategies for Being a Writer. Most importantly, I'll ask you to be gentle and kind with yourself no matter the context in your life situation. Being a Writer and Becoming Who We Want to Become looks different for each of us. 

With much love,

Mar'ce 

Being a Writer PDF Invitation

Novel Notes: December 30, 2023

Notes from December 20, 2023

In an effort for transparency, for being a voice listening to a voice, I am typing out my notes from ten days ago. If you, reader, are interested in reading where a novel might come from…I offer you this:

This novel is an expression of grief. I didn’t realize it, and it is true. This novel is about grief.

I began writing it as my last novel was being finished for publication. As often happens in a life, particularly in a writer’s life, what reveals itself on the page can frighten the writer, send the writer running from the page, into a space of being distanced, or blocked, or dissociated from the story which wants to be told.

The writer may immerse themselves in the task of becoming for a long period of time; resting in the being helps them to remember they are a writer. Being is the moment of surrender. The moment where the gap in becoming is noticed and a column of light connects the earth and the sky. And the writer is the gap– is the being. Light-filled and aware. Surely, this is the cause of the pursuit of the writer. Parts of the writer, it appears, experience this moment of being and are able to stay with it, even when they are not able to recognize fully, yet, what they are experiencing.

The writer’s experiences add up to an understanding: the being experiences, the listening experiences, the grief experiences, the joy experiences. The desire to “have become” already is familiar. The imagination of publication, of speaking to a room full of readers, of being heard, of being understood (finally, and, dare-fully, completely). Of course the writer, without understanding their own journey, is seeing visions of home. Home, where the welcome mat is a heart, where the kitchen is filled with music and delight, where the food is soothing and soul-filled by the ones who create.

The writer is a human being, often in deep wonderment about what this experience, experiment, is. The writer is an archetype of the whole– searching, searching for a story to express the experience. A story to serve as a pathway forward for themselves, for others. A writer is an explorer, a colonist, an earth being, a mother, a monster, a sage, a child, a betrayer, an innocent, a victim, an outcast, an oracle, an Arbornaut, a predator, a saviour.

The writer in me, the writer persona of this body, this expression of consciousness has been asking for help and feeling at times undeserving of this help, unworthy of this task to write a story to help the humans of this gathering of humans to recognize their being, to connect with love, to recognize the power they hold to create.

This writer is distracted by relationships in the field of connection. This writer is distracted by the ideas of becoming vs. the ideas of being. This writer fears the loss of connection. This writer worries too much time alone or away will sever her relationships with the ones they love.

This writer asks for help. Again. Still. Help from a spirit she has been away from, from a spirit she detached herself from years ago. A spirit who told her, one day we will meet again. She was a young girl then, 9 years old, harmed and betrayed by her protector, ignored and neglected by her protector, told it was time to grow up.

Her spirit has been trying to reach her across the veil for many years, now, when the nightmares escalated, when the darkness began to subsume her. She lost everything in those years. All the security she’d worked so hard to fix and control in her life. She lost it all. It’s hard for her now, even, to witness the waves of grief from those events and she lets them come. A buzzing sensation enters her, a concentration of vibration in her throat. Heal me. Heal me.

At night, her spirit left her. Didn’t leave. It went deep inside her. Deeper, into the deepest part of her, deep within her belly. Just recently, she felt it emerge again. She lived in her own Harry Potter world for nearly 40 years, in the unseen and not-understood battle between good and evil, between two experiences– being and becoming. Real. Unreal. Darkness. Light. She lived between wanting and rejecting. She, as was mentioned earlier, experienced glorious moments of true being. Most recently in nature, this writer began to feel a relationship between this spirit, this soul inside her and the spirit and soul outside her. We all harm. We have all been harmed. What a difficult experience of becoming she has seen, witnessed. The oppressed and the oppressor living inside her. The betrayed and the betrayer. The loved and the unloved. Being is here, now. The becoming will unfold.

Yes, the practical will continue to be a challenge, but less so, less so.

Open awareness. Listening.

Ghost Lake. A few days before Solstice. A holy time. A few days retreat before the celebrations with family and friends. .

I breathe in cool air and breathe out, slowly; relax the forehead, soften the eyes, relax the jaw, the tongue, the throat. I swallow. The back of my throat aches. I’m fighting a cold. I breathe in cool air and breathe out, slowly; relax, relax the shoulders, the heart area front, the heart area back. Relax the area between the shoulder blades; ice melting to water, water evaporating to gas. This is helpful. This area is tight. Ice to water, water to gas. As the muscles let go, I remember my flying dreams as a black bird, a raven. Pleasant.

My gaze is in front of me. I hear traffic passing over the bridge. I let my attention open wide. I am here. This is my practice: experience the body, experience nature.

I look up. Mountains rise in front of me; mountains sculpted into triangle peaks and crowns, slabs of rock layers forced sideways and reaching up, and frozen-in-time flat-topped mountains standing guard. Thank you. Thank you.

My body yearns for a connection to the earth. I breathe in cool air and breathe out slowly, relax the torso, the belly, the hips and thighs, the calves. Feel the feet root into the ground.

Lovely. The center of each foot blooms, as if a prairie crocus opens its petals.

Oh, hello, mama.

Snow rests in bowl-shaped mountain hearts, fills veins and arteries of rock crag and canyon and though I can’t see them from here, the banks of the nearby glacial lakes, (Minnewanka) and rivers, The Bow and Ghost Rivers. Just below me, the Bow waters flow east towards Calgary through Ghost Dam, one of several dam projects east of the Rockies, changing the flow of water and, some might say, spirit, in this area of the world. The Ghost River, off to the north from where I stand, ends here at Ghost Lake

I am peace inside though the world is anything but peaceful. Children are harmed, some of them dying in armed conflict, suffering starvation, lack of care, lack of acceptance for the colour of their skin, the way they dress, the pronouns they prefer. Children. Violence. Aggression.

I breathe in the suffering, remembering my own child self– scared, terrified, curled in fetal position. The physical feeling of fear rises in my torso, my heart tightens, the shoulders freeze up. I picture them in my mind’s eye. I notice the urge to shift position, to look away. The grief spills through me. I breathe. I breathe. See. Notice. All lives have value. I breathe out and relax, relax, relax. Peace. Through pain. This is my practice.

“Your suffering matters. Your journey is not over. Travel safe.” I say this to my own small child self, the one who sought refuge in a circle of oak trees near a river, watching dust motes filter through the late afternoon light. Tears come. I repeat my words. “Your suffering matters. Your journey is not over. Travel safe.” This, for the ones in the field of all beings. If they hear me, they may stay awake, they may take the journey with eyes open.

My breath rises and falls, rises and falls. Wind whizzes dry snow over the surface of the lake. A skate sail surfer zigs and zags in the gusts of the wind. Catches an edge. Falls. Stands again.

I pick up my journal. I write.

James Hector, surgeon and hunting expedition leader on the Palliser Expedition in the late 1850s, first wrote about Ghost River, as populated by ghosts. Hector may or may not have been told or understood the nuance, the context, the fullest perspective of ten thousand years of Indigenous engagement with this land. 

I don’t see ghosts. I feel them. I sense them. We communicate. I don’t really know how. I’ve been reading about time. Despite my devotion to comprehension of written text, I can’t explain exactly how, but time doesn’t exist. We have created it. Humans make containers, systems. I’m interested in what’s outside the container.

We, the uninvited guests/settlers/colonists/descendants of the ones who crossed the ocean and made their way west, primarily rely on the accounts of the earliest Europeans who traversed this land. Some of their stories are corroborated by Indigenous land historians. Many European stories leave out pertinent details.

The shared story of the Ghost River tells us of ghosts walking along the river, collecting the skulls of fallen warriors who died in battle. The walking ghosts place the defeated warriors’ skulls on the steep walls of Devil’s Head mountain, a flat-topped mountain. Cultures all over the world say spirits inhabit mountains.

What is real? What is not-supposed-to-be-real? Do spiritual beings inhabit these flat-topped mountains in front of me? How could anyone know the truth? Can any human being have direct experience of the land? 

Actually, I have direct experience with land. I feel it. My whole being feels it. When my physical being is relaxed, when I am open to the present moment as it unfolds, I experience a deep, reverent and physically felt connection to the earth. 

Why? How? I don’t know. In my research on this topic, it appears awareness arises and develops as a consequence of deep suffering. I have been harmed and I’ve harmed. 

Why? How? For 20 years, I have devoted my life to healing wounds, overcoming the conditioning which has driven my behaviour, and living a life through, with, and for love. In my research on this topic, it appears I am not alone in my quest to serve life through love. 

Why? How? Is it possible my very distant ancestors have pulled on a thread of connection and awakened me to learn how to listen? Did my ancestors open their senses to listen to mountains speak? Did my ancestors devote their lives to the earth? Did they experience the separation I am struggling to bridge with my presence, my willingness to write? 

This is what is true for me; this is what is real;

My body is of the earth. 

I am the earth. 

The earth has a voice. 

The earth speaks through me. 

The earth is both inside me and external to me. 

My voice is devoted to the earth.

My body rests in stillness near Ghost Lake, Alberta. 

In breath: Thank you. Thank you.

Out breath: Thank you. Thank you. Thank you.

The target of your anger.

The target of your anger: a list of most unwanted.

a non-listener

a betrayer

a coward

a bully

a former-friend

a misguided __________

a lonely ___________

a thief

an ignorant _____________

a harmful ____________

war-mongerer

peace killer.

The target of your anger: an awakening

a doorway to feeling

the depth of emotion

to meet yourself, also, as

non-listener

betrayer,

war-monger,

peace killer.

To accept the truth: we all have the capacity to harm

To start where you are.

To begin with what you have.

Walk to the store. Pick up any object.

Remember how you once stole something from a store or wanted to.

Let your body feel the pull of wanting.

Let it rise. Let it fall.

Put the object back on the shelf.

To want is human.

At the checkout, choose a line with a human behind the cash register.

Look at them with both of your eyes, with your full attention.

Say thank you.

Say have a nice day.

Mean it.

This could be another beginning.

Surprise Yourself. An unexpected poem. : )

Surprise yourself

Expect your days to flow

like water.

Your nights to deepen

with harmony.

Expect the sunrise to awaken

who you are.

The sunset, to remember

what you yearn for.

The surprise is the depth

of the process.

to reveal you to you.

The thread of you spins

from way back

to now.

Now is a tapestry:

shimmering, glinting, glittering,

swimming, flowing, nurturing,

holding, noticing, celebrating.

You are the cloth,

the space between the fibers,

the wool and cotton,

the flax, silk, and jute.

Natural fibers bend and break

under pressure, with climactic changes.

Heartbreak. Heartmend.

Wound. Scar. Mark of beauty.

You.

Surprise!

I am a mother and a grandmother, a listener, a wave rider, a force of nature, laughter emerging from the dark.

I have surprised myself over the past three months of being away from the security of home, of a place I recognize, a place which recognizes me.

To write of pilgrimage seems…well, big. Bigger than me. Today is the beginning.

Sounds.

Dearest of the Dearest Ones,

My apologies for the length of time between one conversation and the next. When we left Calgary on September 10, I couldn’t have known the significance of the landscapes and the people we’ve met, we’ve shared meals with, we’ve written alongside, we’ve listened to, we’ve shared ourselves with–  the mystery of life being lived while moving.

dawn.

November 7, 2023

I’m writing today in the wee hours of the morning after falling asleep last night by 8 p.m.. We’re staying at our friends’ home in New Jersey (though they are away)– a beautiful and comforting refuge, an old and grand home with many doorways and windows: three floors of views. The sound of an aquarium trickles nearby, reminding me of the rivers and lakes we’ve paddled. My shoulders remember paddle-ache and my vow to build arm strength in the off-season. I’m wrapped in a blanket, resting in my friend Tess’ chair. I feel her presence.

To be awake when all else is asleep is a gift this morning. Today, my love of the sunrise extends to a love of the dark-before-dawn. My heart spills emotion. I start sentences and they fade.  

Athena is restless, too. We are out of a routine. Yesterday, we drove more hours than usual without stopping. She stands up from her bed beside me and wanders to the back porch for water and back again. She returns. Our eyes meet. Deep brown pools of Athena-ness. She wills me to understand something. I encourage her to rest. Sing to her. Run my hand over her back. What is here? Athena rests, briefly, and then, wanders into the kitchen. Is she looking for food? I hear the beginnings of her vomiting. Oh…my heart breaks open. She’s suffering. I find her leash. 

My attire? I wear the pyjamas my sister bought me in a generosity-of-many-kindnesses to replace pyjamas-I-loved-and-forgot in a motel room last spring on our ocean-to-ocean trip. My feet walk in croc shoes with faux furry lining, shoes my family members equate with a clown. My jacket is a gift from my son. I wear Love and Good Humour. 

Outside our shelter, the night is misted and the plant life damp. The Rockaway River flows sound. I wonder if our canoe, beached on the back deck between two Muskoka chairs while the car is in for diagnosis and repair, feels the water vibrations resonate up the sloped backyard? Does a canoe long for water? Does a stuffed owl or stuffed bunny breathe with the sleeping granddaughter who holds it while they sleep? What are the limits of reciprocal flow?

Athena walks with me under street lamps past piles and piles of dried oak trees. She seems quiet but okay. I don’t know if her ears might be infected or if her body is integrating something else. So many ticks in this part of the world. We’ve met dozens of them. 

Josh the mechanic will diagnose the car today and we’ll take an Uber Pet to the vet. I remind myself, like I did yesterday while enduring the car’s shudder– six hours of an erratic panic attack– This is the only moment I am in. And all is okay. Boonton is our refuge. 

beauty.

Part Two- November 8, 2023

4:21 a.m.

I am awake with words, sentences, paragraphs. 

Saltspring Island. Pandemic writing circles. Buzzing energy. Forgiveness. Intuition. Cabin Falls. Northern Paradise Lodge. Manitoulin Island. Warbler’s Roost. Pamet Hill Haven. Names rise, too many to list here. If you are reading this, your name is part of the fabric of this life. We are kin. 

No one does this alone. No one. All your relationships = all your kin. Love flows between all your kin. We are on a pilgrimage to meet our kin. They are. We are. Everything is. 

Peace-making requires many beginnings. Meeting face-to-face with the intention to love begins a new story, continues an old story, allows grief to flow, dissipate. The composting begins.

I am a Warrior of the Human Spirit. 

Meg told me I would know what to do and when to do it. Yes. I am ready.

flow.

Create the Conditions for Sanity and Love

An Arbornaut’s Dispatch: Friday, September 15, 2023. 

I woke up a bit grumpy this morning. Bear-aware weary. I slept intermittently, vigilant for the snuff of a snout, the breaking of a branch. I had not set any alarms- maybe a bell on a string between two trees and in the space between us and where we cooked our food- I had no tools or experience of doing so. I listened to the loons calling out late, a few long sounds echoing across Lake Marie Louise in Sleeping Giant Provincial Park near Thunderbay. We slept in the wilderness walk-in campsites, away from running water, and lights, and far away from our closest campers. It’s as wild as car camping in a national park can get. And, yet, it felt very wild. 

The special notice on our park pass: “Recent black bear activity in compound. ZERO tolerance for unattended wildlife attractants.”

I like wildness. I like feeling a bit scared and sleeping outside. I like the sounds and smells, the petrichor (the scent of the world after it rains) that night in particular. 

Tom was bear aware last night, especially anything related to food. We walked the dirty dishwater back up the path to the road where we left our car. We tried to keep things clean. Except, I wasn’t very bear aware earlier, when I was starting to make dinner. We arrived at about 6:30 which is early for us but we’re in trees and the lake is in a wide valley area so it was near-dark upon our arrival. So my focus is on hurrying. How do I do more things at once and all of these things faster?

I felt like I was a mom of five kids again, worrying for future Mar’ce’s future. Trying to get everything done all at once so future Mar’ce could rest, feel less stress. So… I missed the opportunity to do my part, front-line, of keeping us protected from the bear. 

We had car camping ingredients: red curry paste, rice noodles, red pepper, and Tom’s homegrown shallots and strips of raw chicken. Each time I handle slippery chicken meat, I grieve for the chicken who died. Slippery chicken feels so alive to me. And I thank the chicken. This occupation with my being-to-being responsibility is also one of my focuses and, therefore, might have contributed to my lessening bear awareness as I cut raw chicken on a table about 200 feet from where we would be sleeping. 

Photographed by someone else…

The cutting board swam in raw chicken juice and ice water that had seeped in through the packaging. Raw chicken juice dripped from the cutting board onto the picnic table and onto the ground. A bear smelling the petrichor of raw chicken juice infused forest would come looking for cheap happy hour. 

I could not bring myself to tell Tom. I carried the small scary truth inside me. I rationalized: I can’t add to his worry. Honestly, he keeps me so safe. He protects me from a whole lot of harm because I can attend very closely to one thing and not sense the bigger thing happening around me or behind me. He is aware of so much: the possibility for danger in the landscape, the weather, the roadway, time of day. His experience is wide and deep when it comes to the wilderness. He can alert me to signs, patterns in forms and movement. But, he has one area of weakness: sound. 

As I read this to Tom, he says, “What?”

“Sound,” I say. You can’t hear. 

Sound Waves. Sonic Resonance. What is not heard might be felt??

Something we don’t talk about is: Tom’s hearing is not as reliable as it once was. 

Three summers ago, I heard a bear moving through the forest towards us, breaking branches. 

On a bright morning in August three summers ago, I heard the bear we would end up having a serious and heart-pumping conversation with… 

Tom didn’t hear anything. 

He listened to me, though, and maybe he sensed the bear. Certainly he knew the bear or anything else in the forest would be interested in our food. Our food barrel, lid off, seemed like an invitation to a friend. We weren’t vigilant that day. If we had been vigilant we might have met the bear later in the day, maybe even during the night when we were sleeping. Instead, we survived a stand-off of epic proportions with both Tom’s face and the bear’s face mirroring each other’s What the Hell expression. And, me, I practiced unholstering the bear spray. And then the bear backed away from us and the food barrel, climbed a tree. The bear grumped and humpfed and Tom repeated, over and over, “Hey, Bear, this is our food. Our food. We don’t want any trouble.” The bear, 15 feet up in the tree was so pissed off or scared, he shit down the tree. It’s hard to know exactly how he felt, but did it matter with a marker like that? The bear stretched into a sort of cat yoga pose while holding onto the tree, arched back, butt hovering. A bomb of poop exploded and arced through the sky, fell and fell, smacking leaves and branches. 

We left right away. Took us way too long to pack up the tent, the food, all of it and we’d planned to have a great day of adventure there. We had no reason to complain in the adventure department. 

A sign we could have posted.

So…all of this leads me back to last night. The night when I didn’t sleep well. 

Tom and me are surviving this adventure. Together. With each other. And Athena. Athena is part of the whole story, of course. If not for her, we wouldn’t stop at three lakes a day to walk the shore and throw sticks and play. 

I stayed awake because I was afraid of the bear. Of having set up the precise situation where a bear would arrive in camp. Not that I don’t like telling real-life stories of bear encounters, but, the danger is real. Who knows how anything is going to react in a situation they haven’t encountered. 

So…I was grumpy.

__________________

We packed everything up amid my long sighs, my near crying episode, my long stalk down the road and back. And as we drove, I tried to relax my body, let the stress go. Build some space in for future Mar’ce to have a break. 

In all of my grumpiness I blasted, perhaps like the bear and the poop, that maybe I was tired of routine: drive till dark, eat, put up tent, sleep, wake up, do the same thing, over and over. Drive every day. I may have gotten firm in my desire to be heard. I like to create, I said. I miss creating. 

Obviously, I’d run out of imagination for what fun I might have in the rain. I avoided thinking about another possibility than “I need to be dry tonight.” We drove towards the dog-friendly new hotel in Hearst, Ontario and the rest of the decisions fell into place. Tom wanted me to enjoy camping. He enjoyed camping. I needed a break from being bear aware or rain weary.

Was I prepared for nine nights on the water and land? We’ve done this many ties, This in-between time of the journey makes me uncertain of my future- terrific time to realize I am more than I think I am. Stronger. More capable. More connected. 

We listened to CBC radio Thunderbay as we drove highway 11. Mid-morning programming on CBC Radio is a call-in show, about the Right to Repair bills being introduced and passed through the world. The good news is: we might get our appliances repaired instead of adding them to the landfill. The bad news: so much complaining, and anything without add-on gadgets (ice/water dispensers, ice machines, electronic anything) will last longer than we expect. 

CBC Radio reminds me of both old and new, old and new.

On Highway 11, we travel some of the prettiest highway scenery of our trip. Low clouds drift and dissolve in branches of evergreen and birch, yellow-leaves still hanging on. Steep cliffs rise up, like waking giants on either side of the highway, surrounding lake after lake after lake. 

Radio caller: “You don’t get anything that lasts 38 years old nowadays, but my Maytag washer just died.”

We are in the country of the rock palisades, north of north. We are in the land of the Raven. We are in the land of the Black Bear. We are listening to CBC radio. 

Radio special guest from ifix-it: “Our appliances are complicated. They are not robust and reliable.”

Radio caller pro tip: “We fixed our stove with a q-tip, rubbing alcohol, and a you tube video.” 

Radio special guest: “If you look at restaurant stoves, there are no electronics. Cooks who rely on their equipment need robust and reliable.”

Boreal Forest. Stock image. This scene seen many times though.

Soon we will be in the forest with a butane/propane stove to boil water, to heat our dehydrated veggie curry and spaghetti sauce and noodles. Robust. Reliable. 

______________ 

Athena Swimming at a Lake off HWY 11, Macdiarmid. A scottish/irish lad visited here once.

By the time we were at first lake stop and I met Cedar by the water and Birch in the middle of the grassy picnic area, my mood had lifted, like a weight growing lighter or a veil of fog clearing. 

Clouds hung all around, but I found small flowers to notice closely and the whorls and knots of Birch. I took a photo of paper bits from a birch rolled like tiny scrolls. I imagined all the tiny invisible stories in all those scrolls. I picked up the garbage scattered on the ground: Labatt Blue beer cans and the case, some water bottle lids. 

My mind had been going as we drove, listening to the CBC radio show and thinking how it might be good for the world, you know, if we developed an understanding that each of us could, actually, learn how to repair our washer and stove and dishwasher, or maybe it would be just one person in our family, but somehow knowing this would help us learn how to repair other things, maybe relationships. People are really having a tough time getting along with each other right now. And, our relationship to the earth seems to require a listening process to understand the schematics, to learn how to communicate in a language of machine, of earth and human. We could become robust. We could become reliable.

Rest now. I heard the words as I was standing next to the Birch.

Rest. Listen. You’re on the right path. 

Sometimes this is how the path feels, no matter how beautiful the context.

Tom, Athena and I sat in the car while I wrote this:

We are at the picnic area with the concrete structures for toilets, five weather proof picnic tables, a birch with four fingers extending from an upturned palm. Birch’s four white primary trunks, like four long fingers extended from an opened palm, rise up straight and steady towards the sky. Sixty or seventy or one hundred long willowy branches rise up, too, their stems ranging from deep red in colour at the top of the tree to a dark brown nearing the bottom of the tree.

Birch’s profile is a column shape, a column of golden leaves with white stems of energy connecting sky and earth. Birch is a beauty. When I look now, I think I might see a face. A kind face. Long but with large vision faculties, not eyes, but space, space for reception of something else. The wind, maybe has shaped the growth of the leaves and the falling of them now. The wind whistles from the north east and it pushes the leaves in the middle and the top of the tree harder, these leaves take the biggest hit of wind, meet it head on and they fall fastest. Thank you Birch. Robust. Reliable. 

__________

Calgary Colours : FryWay 11: Leah and Marcia. Friendly. Curious. Adventurers in Food and Friendliness.

We stop at a FryTruck an hour after my encounter with Birch. First time this trip. Highway 11 is famous for FryTrucks, but we haven’t seen many. Two weeks from now, we’ll be out of luck because they’re out of season. But…today is extraordinary. We get out. Look over the menu. 

Leah Deans: Food truck owner and Face-at-the-window: How are you today?

Me: Good. Great. How are you? 

Leah: Living the Dream. 

Note the Specials Board. Recommended…to-go, after fries and a burger or fish…cream puffs or Nana’s banana bread…

And she is, she has been. It’s how she sees it. She always joked she and her mom would run a food truck one day. And they are. Marcia (Mom) is the cook in the truck today but they both love making good food. The short story is Leah and her husband and kids moved from Calgary to Kitchener, Ontario. Her husband learned chainsaw carving from the former owner of the chip truck who bought it for his kids and they worked it for three summers to pay for all their college expenses and to buy the truck! 

Leah: Fryway 11, I told my husband, wouldn’t it be a thing to have a food truck on Highway 11? 

She mentioned a chip truck isn’t the same as a food truck: fries and fries and fries are available in the most delicious combinations– hand cut and perfectly fried, with Quebec poutine (fries, Quebec cheese curds and gravy). Optional accoutrements: bacon, onion, sweet potato fries. Also, Burgers, Fish Fryday, Nana’s Banana bread, cream puffs. I want to buy some banana bread to go. Maybe cream puffs, too. My engagement in everything about Leah and the Fry Truck is so off the charts! 

As Leah widens the doorway to her ever expanding story and I meet her mom and ask question after question, I have a wondering. Often, I keep these wonderings to myself. Today, I did not. Perhaps comforted and emboldened by the Birch, I just let the words fall out of me: 

Me: Hey, Do you like writing?

Leah: Yes.

Me: Do you want to write your story?

Leah: I do.

Me: Oh. Great. I think you’d be great at it. It’s a great story. I’m a writer.

Leah: You’re a writer?

Nod of head.

Leah: Cool.

Me: I do all kinds of writing. Lots of projects. I’m in the middle of a project right now. 

Leah: You are?

Me: Yeah. A couple of times of year I facilitate circles for writers. I mostly meet people and ask them if they want to be part of something, like writing-wise. You might be interested.

Leah: I am. 

Me: Cool. They’d like you. I think you’d like them. 

What I didn’t say: it’s interesting how you talk about your future. How your future includes all your relationships. You remind me of someone I know. And your engagement with life? With strangers at a chip truck window? With your mom cooking next to you? With your husband and kids who are all part of adapting to a life far away from Calgary and the Ingelwood neighborhood where your mom and you lived? It’s inspiring. 

Leah: Mom and I spent six years apart and now we’re next level. Next level of life. 

Me: It’s wonderful. Your life is great. 

Leah: Becoming a pilot is my retirement plan. Not where I’m responsible for people. You know a Canada Post plane or FedEx. It’ll be expensive and it’ll take awhile, but what am I gonna do? I’m not gonna sit around my house knitting. I am not a knitter.”

Leah: I’m not gonna sit around my house knitting. I am not a knitter.

“Foods Up!” A second sliding window, near the truck’s rear wheels opens. Marcia hands us our food, a fork wrapped in a napkin. “These fly off on their own.”  

The smell. Yummmmmmm.

Not these fries, though these do look delicious like FryWayf ries. Their fries were so great, I did not think of taking a photo of them. I only wanted to engage with them hands-on. So…you’ll have to imagine hand cut fries. Although I will replace this photo with one of Leah’s if she sends me one!!!!

My meal is delicious- Sweet Potato Fry poutine, two pieces of Haddock and Fresh Fries shared with Tom. Cheese in all the correct gooey-ness. Dill sauce for the fish and lemon wedges.

We share a picnic table with a couple of local policeman from The Anishnaabeg Police force. They mention the weather has been overcast and cool for weeks, but farther east it’s 20 degrees and sunny. Maybe they want to reassure us we won’t be in rain for a week while we’re paddling. It’s not fun to pack and unpack a wet tent, but once you accept you have no other choice, it’s easy to do. 

(In an on-line drawing course with Janice Tanton I learned, draw what you see, not what you think you see and sketch lightly, find the line.)

I sketch, with beginner level skill, the Fry Truck in my watercolour notebook. I show it to Leah. She hands me some fancy stickers- FryWay 11 stickers. The stickers are AWESOME, but they are tucked away inside a book I cannot reach.

I started out grumpy. I ended up not. 

Change happened at a Park. Near Trees. At a FryTruck.

Thank you Leah. Thank you Marcia. Robust. Reliable. 

And This Thought from Chogyam Trunpa:

Sacred Names or Swear Words?

Chogyum Trunpa’s Commentary on the slogan: If you can practice even when distracted, you are well trained.

We have all kinds of situations that we have to handle in ordinary life, even states that we are not aware of. Usually, we are not particularly concerned about our existence; we are more concerned about our neurosis and our games. If we are in a very high level of uptightness, as soon as that happens there is not awareness. But we can immediately experience a sense of awareness!

Traditionally, any chaos that came up was regarded as a shout for some kind of holiness or help, blessing, or prayer. In our ordinary, everyday life, each time something unepected suddenly came up, we would say, “Goodness, Look at that,” or we might utter sacred names. That was supposed to be a reminder for awareness. But these days, we never use the situation that way. We just use swear words in the most degrading way.

From Training the Mind and Cultivating Loving-Kindness, page 86, brought to my attention through a newsletter sign up: CTR Quote of the Week.

What sacred words would you say to remind you of awareness when you are in the midst of chaos? I wonder about the denial of reality which happens when we become angry instead of curious.

I don’t think I have any words right now. OMG, maybe. Sometimes I catch myself saying OMG or all the words. So…those might be my sacred words.

I have sacred images, too. Images which bridge the gap between the unexpected and the accepted/acknowledged.

A rock I’m carrying with me. Out of focus. I’m not sure what I need to do with it yet. Athena likes it.

An image for me is the crow (also the raven and the magpie), because when I see them or hear them, I pay attention to them. I am in an unfolding moment instead of writing or reflecting or narrating a story I’m creating.

This is an example of how I attempt to remain in the body (and the unfolding moment) while writing: I notice wind. I notice sounds of Tom moving about in the car, of a small dog barking far off, of the trembling aspen, the quaking leaves, the noisy tree closest to me, though my immediate friends are the white cedar and red pine. Big, tall trees.

Living through it and recording as I go physically feels like movement. I don’t know the reader’s reaction. I don’t know how the reader might define “remaining in the body”- maybe remaining aware of the body while writing or doing anything.

Here is one way I think of being in the body: I used to dance. I stopped dancing. I now dance.

Round and round or spiral in and spiral out…we each have a pattern, don’t we? The way the cedar leaves are patterned from a great schematic. The way birch trunks are individual expressions and part of the great whole? We have patterns of growth. Mine involve movement. Mine want to experience the ground, the water, the tree, the night sky. Mine want to find the answers to big questions about ways to engage with the rest of the world. My patterns ask, even on the grumpiest days, How do I serve love?

Beauty someone else documented. I’d like to see this up close, woudn’t you?

I’m ending this dispatch 2 days after the writing began, at 1:46 on Sunday, September 17. We will be launching in Temagami tomorrow, September 18, 2023. We are in for some fair to great weather over the next several days and we are adaptable to our route and circumstance.

When we return, we’ll be meeting with five others up at Hap and Andrea Wilson’s EcoLodge at Cabin Falls. Truly something special. Gratitude for this opportunity. And I intend a reliable and robust response to the challenge of all that lay ahead.

I have been writing small pieces for months as practice for this piece, weaving together the forward moment with a brief touch from the supporting memory, an experiencing of the felt emotion, and the return to the forward moment. I think of in waves. I try to remain attentive, connected, noticing. I’m curious to know the limits of exploring the present moment, of creating with the present moment. As a warrior, it seems wise to create the conditions for sanity and love. Much gratitude for this day.

Much Love, Mar’ce

Beauty in Riding Mountain National Park

Dispatch from An Arbornaut September 13, 2023

Two things.

I am not sure I’m comfortable with calling myself An Arbornaut for these reasons:

• I am not sure what An Arbornaut is and who defines what An Arbornaut is

• I am afraid of what other people might think. 

• I am not afraid of what other people might think.

• The experience of living an Arbornaut’s life defines what An Arbornaut is.

An Arbornaut communicates with trees. An Arbornaut pays attention to the space between the forest and the field, the mountain and the prairie, the human and the other in nature. As in nature, as in life. An Arbornaut lives a life of being in nature and being in community, no matter the chaos. 

I guess that’s the first thing. 

The second thing is…update from here. 

I’m driving through the land of the birch, the bear, the moose, the lynx, the white sucker fish. We are driving through Riding Mountain. Riding Mountain is not a mountain; it is an escarpment, a birchwood forested rise of earth and rock in the middle of the inland sea. A former shoreline. A place where people would have gathered. Where the Sabre Tooth tiger, the mammoth, the great bear and beaver lived as predator and prey. It might have been a place where beings were visible who are not visible now. 

Corn fields grow here. And, hay, hay, hay, hay. We’ve driven through great dust clouds rising from the combine engine as it pulls roots, rolls stems, orders and compacts the plant and whatever wild-like experience it’s had in the field. 

The rocks have held significance on this trip. In Grasslands National Park, we rubbed up against a buffalo rubbing stone, a great pink and purple/red piece of granite (I’ll have to look up the type of stone) on the top of a bluff. In Riding Mountain the eastern end of Clear Lake, an amazing fossil lays in two pieces. One half of a two-bums-wide rock is one piece of the fossil- it has a converse impression - (a sticky-out impression)- of a long ridged…something. A snake, a reptilian behemoth neck or spine, about 50 cm long. The ridges are well-defined. The second half of the rock lays two metres away. It is clearly the other half of the first rock because it shares the fossilized impression. This half is concave, caved-in, with the same ridges as the first rock in the same placement and order. Surely this find is significant to many. 

The eye is drawn, at the Wishing Well park away from the impressive rocks to an English garden with a bit of wildness in plant choice and decomposition.  Two red Muskoka chairs set under a big tree signify “this is a spectacular classic Canadian stop.”

The small flowing river wends back and forth and five or six bridges span her curves as she empties into Clear Lake. A pathway connects the land between bridges and leads up a south westerly slope to a Wishing Well, a semi-circle bricked and mortared wall one might lean over and look down into. A sign suggests all coins will be collected and donated to help keep the area blooming and tidy. 

I wonder if it’s a good idea for people to throw money into a body of water?

I wonder if where that well is, if that spot was a spot where people came to drink from a spring, long before it became a well for wishes you could buy-in to get a chance at having them come true?

A cedar tree stands at the last groomed bend of the river before it flows under a road bridge and into Clear Lake. The cedar’s three trunks emerge from the ground as if to open to the sky, like an early-stage of a blossom. The cedar’s flat, lacy leaves are green with orange-dying speckles from skirt to crown. I moved close to the cedar and asked, How’s the view? I looked ahead through the trunks. The lake shimmered blue, the air smelled of cedar spice and sun and a bit of water. It was cold last night. And damp. A perfect nasal sensory condition. What’s happening to your leaves? I asked. The cold, I heard, and something they’re spraying on the lawn and flowers stresses me. 

As the set of red Muskoka chairs signals, this is an Important Location and Instagram-worthy-stopping-spot among the wild and tidy flower beds. Here, you look out and see water, your ally. Whether or not your mind remembers this fact: 95% of you is water, your body knows. You feel a pull of a smile on the corner of your lips, a softening around your eyes. You let your gaze wander, let your hearing surf on the trickling of the water. Closer to the river, just west of a set of picnic tables, the unusual rock with the fossil impression (the sticky-out half) is in the middle of a circle of rocks– a circle marked by solid rocks placed equidistant from one another, north-east-south-west. Three smaller-sized rocks were placed on an imaginary line between each large rock and the next: 12 smaller-sized rocks, four larger sized rocks, and one 1/2 of a largest, fossilized middle rock. 17 rocks total…that I could see. Did someone like me, someone who listened to the cedar tree, ever sit here and watch the water and listen to the trickle of the river? Did the someone see beauty? Did the someone say thank you? Did the someone find a way to give the cedar a drink of water?  

Do you see the fun in all of this? The fun of listening to a tree, of noticing the way the light touches leaves? Of drawing what you see? Of writing what you hear? Of letting the imagination expand? Do you think it’s possible in your sometimes tamed life for an expanded way of noticing?

We’re sleeping outside, under the shelter of our tent, on the comfort of our thermarests (we travel long days to our put-in five days from now). Each night, we are in a new land. Each land has something to say. Sometimes I hear little. Sometimes I hear more. 

An Arbornaut is a risk-taker in the area of communication. An Arbornaut wants to be understood and wants to understand, but may make many mistakes in translation. An Arbornaut wants to sing, to dance, to draw, to photograph, to communicate in sign language and symbols. An Arbornaut is looking for the evidence of love. An Arbornaut wants to be evidence of love. 

I’m handing out bookmarks I’ve made with pencil and watercolour. The back of each bookmark includes my email address and my website. This is a project of engagement: An Arbornaut’s Dispatch, a documentation process of thread and needle, watercolour, scroll and drawing pencil and fine point black pen. 

I dreamed earlier of a sticker on the side of the Subaru. A tree as symbol. An Arbornaut’s web address. Why? I wonder. Is there something about what I’m doing which might help someone? Is the novel I’m writing the help I’ve been asked to provide? Is all of it, all the time, the way of being in the world with gratitude? 

Recommendations:

National Grasslands National Park in southern Saskatchewan. West block has an incredible 11 km hike through hills and valley among sage and bison, rattlesnake and hawk. East block has an awesome ecotour and a campground with a panorama view. 

We listened to Becky Chambers’ second novel in the Wayfarer series. Highly recommended. Love is always love. Even in the future. Even among inter-species. Also by her: Praise for the Wild Built and Prayer for the Crown Shy, future monk meets robot. Much more than I thought it would be.

Mixed Nuts and Seeds as snack mix! I roasted them myself- salty and delicious and whole food. 

Falling. Rising. Breathing out. Breathing In.

First, a poem. By Alice Oswald, a poet who listens and plays, listens and plays. Please read it aloud, two times.

A Short Story of Falling

BY ALICE OSWALD

It is the story of the falling rain

to turn into a leaf and fall again

it is the secret of a summer shower

to steal the light and hide it in a flower

and every flower a tiny tributary

that from the ground flows green and momentary

is one of water's wishes and this tale

hangs in a seed-head smaller than my thumbnail

if only I a passerby could pass

as clear as water through a plume of grass

to find the sunlight hidden at the tip

turning to seed a kind of lifting rain drip

then I might know like water how to balance

the weight of hope against the light of patience

water which is so raw so earthy-strong

and lurks in cast-iron tanks and leaks along

drawn under gravity towards my tongue

to cool and fill the pipe-work of this song

which is the story of the falling rain

that rises to the light and falls again

When I read this poem, I notice cycles of being, cycles of growth, cycles of decay. I notice the feeling of a drop of rain in a being… I notice a lifting of energy from the base of my spine to the top of my head. The energy oscillates back and forth across my spine like the switchbacks in a steep mountain climb. At the top of my head, the breath pauses and, then, as the out-breath begins, the thoughts, the tension, the holding of anything lets go and a stream of letting go flows through me and out through my feet.

I practice this letting go all day long. Any emotion arising through me, I notice and let go.

I am practicing an experience of peace. Long ago Pema Chodron’s book When Things Fall Apart helped me to recognize: things fall apart and they come together again.

At first I focused on not freaking out when things fell apart. This was very helpful. I’d remind myself, “Oh, looks like it’s all going to fall apart.” And, then, I’d practice relaxing the body. I’m reminded by the story of victims in a car crash who are relaxed as opposed to clenched and tightened at the moment of impact. The relaxed bodies make it through with less harm.

A Noticing: deepening the practice of relaxing the body in the face of uncertainty or pain expands the capacity for holding more uncertainty. The practice will adjust to the practitioner’s capacity.

More recently, I’ve been focusing on not expecting the form of how things will come together again. This has been fascinating. I have so much expectation! I want to be pain-free! I am closer to pain-free when I have no expectation and allow life to unfold.

A bee, between one and another. Intention: to be here. now.

My Intention Today: To Bee here. Now.

Notice. Notice. Notice. You are safe. You are safe. You are safe.

I’ve been waiting for this morning. I’ve been writing for this moment.

A moment of clarity. Of kindness towards this body, this body’s experience.

I detailed my suffering, best as I could, through the previous blog posts. I wondered if it might be helpful to read later, if it might reveal a pathway. If I might be able to follow it again. It’s been an experiment in holding myself, paying attention.

Holding myself doesn’t equal peace. Holding myself equals noticing and observing everything which happens. I have been the observer. (Thank you all the beings in my life for the pointers towards noticing!)

Lone Pine, Bow River, just below Ghost Dam.

I visit Lone Pine regularly. I sit under their branches, sit beside the big root which erupts from the rocked embankment and roots, deep and deeper and deepest to pull water from under rock and dirt.

I wonder, when we love the land, does the land begin to help us work through our troubles?

Through symbol and metaphor Lone Pine helps me and has helped others, too. How does Lone Pine help me?

Water, being pushed and pushed and extruded and released, flowing by Lone Pine.

I haven’t noticed until this moment the way the water’s release from the dam– big, big sprays of water under pressure– mimics my own rise of the blockages in the unconscious erupting into conscious.

I haven’t noticed until now the way Lone Pine drinks from the water however it can, like I might drink from the unconscious made conscious, the invisible made visible, grateful for the opportunity to be freed from pain by going through pain.

I haven’t noticed until now how the felled mountains, eroded into rocks, become rocks eroded by water and weather. How rocks become beauty and beauty and beauty and beauty. I, too, have grown more beautiful by erosion, by weather.

Flowers amid the rocks, in view of the water.

I haven’t noticed until now: small pines and flowers and plants I cannot identify, grow and flourish among the chunks of concrete and rusted iron rebar from the dynamite-blasting of the energy-hungry seekers. I am the plant and the beauty among the blasted-out bits of my childhood.

Beauty, up close.

I notice I am wary of grasping onto all this beauty I’m seeing. The swing of pendulum from beauty to fear (and memory) is a swing I experience in my heart and my body. So tense and painful my muscles! So weary my body from the onslaught of the unconscious blocks. Be wary of grasping. Be wary. Let it all flow through. Pain and Joy.

The tiniest of flowers, sky blue, amid the rockiest of ground.

The need for safety is something I’ve been noticing. And, underneath this need:

• I want a heating pad along my low back and/or low belly.

• I want to hear someone reassuring me about how there is a pathway forward. I would also like instructions, life-hacks, pro-tips. I ask for help and the help comes from people I love, from the beings I love, from the observer who is observing all of this.

• I want to center self-care and I’m confused about self-care: juice, silence, soothing music, walks in nature, stillness in nature, stretching, going to sleep early, waking up early, waking up whenever I want, napping whenever I want, moving when I feel low energy, talking to others, meditating, being all alone and doing nothing.

• I notice I envision safety as as being loved by anyone and everyone.

Small Lilac Love.

Isn’t that funny? I want to be loved by anyone and everyone!!!! I want to make them see me, love me, listen to me, want to hear me, make myself irresistable! So much want accumulates when the small girl feels the betrayal, the harm, the embrace of love and the withdrawal of love. I have so much love in my life. I have all of the love I have ever wanted. I remember. I likely will forget again. I have forgotten many times. So great is the harm the small child endured.

I’m trying to make the invisible visible. Yes, to pain! Yes, to pain! No need to skip over the mud stage of the lotus growing through the mud! That would be cheating. Not seeing reality. Clear seeing requires a willingness to see pain, to experience it. The practices of the Warrior for the Human Spirit help in this regard.

Some clarity/honesty: I notice other writers, other storytellers, other facilitators, other teachers, other culturally-aware humans and I want what they have, the safety of being someone who listens to themselves and is heard by someone in their group. This want feels like jealousy and I hate feeling jealous because it feels like I’m being the lowest of the low of who I am. I have rejected jealousy as embarrassing, immature. I have rejected myself as embarrassing and immature. I have wanted to feel superior to this feeling and have thus attempted to experiencing superiority over others. And, here I am, admitting to my jealousy! Suddenly, I also feel like laughing.

Hello, envious Instagrammer Mar’ce!

Hello, jealous Leo-in-the-limelight Mar’ce! Hello Mar’ce who would love to learn the secret of being whole through any cultural practice/belief I notice! Such a seeker I’ve been. Such a seeker I am!

Hello, girl who could not listen for fear she wouldn’t have a chance to speak! Welcome. Welcome to the party we’re throwing for you!!

What might this party be?

• Photos of you posted everywhere with waterballoons filled with orange and blue- the liminal colours of dawn and twilight- to throw at your green eyes?

• How about a big pinata in the shape of your body and filled with candy? (thanks to my sister for the pinata idea) We can hit her with big sticks and let all the love out!

• A rock cairn with something inside, some scroll of symbols showing the seasons of your life, the time loops of joy and love, of despair and fear?

• A funeral for who you have been. A celebration ritual for you who have always been! Both are true.

Sunshine yellow reflections.

Somehow it feels I’m zooming past of all these rituals already, as if they’ve happened and I’m just now noticing.

The sun is here. The birds call. A swallow family with brilliant blue wings (the colour of twilight) nests only 10 feet from where I sit. What do they know of my fingers tapping? How do they react to the humming sounds I make? What do they feel when I am silent? Me, Silent: when the stillness flows through me, like water, like energy, like sound vibrations, not heard. Sound vibrations, felt.

What will today hold? I have so much more to say, but the moment is calling me and I don’t want to write anymore. I’ll come back later. I promise myself.

All of my cheerleaders. Embodied. : ) Thank you, Tanya.

Morning. Witnessing and Rendering.

I remember striving to write beautifully. I experimented with rules for beautiful writing: eliminate most adverbs, use adverbs near the end of a piece as a way of deepening the emotional connection with the work. Use adjectives sparingly. Focus on nouns. Focus on verbs. Thinking of these rules today, was I attempting to embrace minimalism? A writer in a workshop said, “the writer’s” (my writing was being heard) “writing is beautiful but I have no idea what it says.”

Ouch. I stumbled over her words then and I’ve replayed them now for five years, as if it’s a skip in a record, or a rock in the middle of a trail, or a trail I randomly walk, over and over.

“I have no idea what it says.”

I have felt this way when I am in a forest. I have felt this way in conversations with people I have just met or people I love. Sometimes I walk away, confused. Sometimes I stay still, I keep listening, and, then, I being to feel what is being said.

When I say feel, I mean my body feels. When I am aware of what my body feels, I might also be aware of content, of expression.

To express the experience of life through words, the way a writer does, might be an attempt to communicate- “is anybody out there??” or “this is noticed” or “love” or “beauty” or “pain” or “fear” or “we are”.

When listening to writer Melanie Rae Thon’s interview with David Naimon (Between the Covers podcast), the room filled with a confident voice, a jazz singer’s voice, a jazz writer’s words. The experience filled me with wonder. Here are some of my notes, followed by italics of wonderings:

There is no safe place in this story.

The safe place is in the body. Love is here. Fear is not.

The literary, the spiritual and the scientific converge in this work.

The fullest experience of life connects the mental, the spiritual, the physical and the emotional.

Anytime you remember an event in your life, the memory changes.

Anytime I offer water to a tree or a conversation, does the tree change?

I’m not writing about my experience, I’m writing from my experience. I’m writing out of my experience.

If we write out of an experience, do we let go of the experience, do we release it into the flow of life? Does it become part of the pattern of patterns?

All Life is Love: the name of an essay Thon wrote.

This is in my bank of experience.

Surrender to love is my life quest.

Can I put this on a t-shirt? Surrender to Love.

Witnessing and rendering story is my pathway to surrendering to love.

ahhh. I think back to the comment which has stung me repeatedly for five years. “The writer’s writing is beautiful but I have no idea what it says.”

Perhaps witnessing and rendering beauty was necessary in that draft of the work. Perhaps some writing is a way of describing experience with little story. Perhaps some writing is a way of only witnessing.

Perhaps beauty is just as important as understanding.

The interview is wide and deep. Melanie Rae Thon is generous and authentic. Intention: I will write today, witnessing and rendering story.

Solstice 2023

Gratitude.

Intention: Let the old decompose, let it nourish the emerging new, let all be held with love, with compassion. Let all beings be seen and heard.

Peace. While Reading the News.

I avoid “the news.”

This is a statement from observation.

I notice my attention focuses on what is in front of me: the rain, the trees, the water, the swallows, the ravens.

I notice my recent internet-surfing followed a deep plunge into this body’s memories of darkness. Perhaps I surfed to distract myself from my dark memories? Or to dig deeper into the shadows which are always here (not just the ones in my memory). Perhaps to inspire me to keep courage alive, to stay with the body and to listen.

This writer’s job is to listen. To allow whatever comes to be seen and held. To trust the unfolding of movement; the shifts into pain, the opening of the chasm, the moments of great beauty and emerging life.

To listen to the emergence of our collective experience is a deep act of trust.

After surfing collective experiences captured by the internet, I noticed three stories settled with me:

• the sinking of the people-smuggling ship off the coast of Greece (I noticed I read three or four accounts of people who made clear why their loved one left- the desperation of poverty and lack of opportunity and the promise of a better life in Europe for themselves, their loved ones, their descendants.) I wonder if my own ancestors were operating by similar motivation/intent when they set off to locate themselves from Ireland, from France, from England to North America?

• Hunter Biden: tax evasion and firearms offence. Does it matter I don’t remember the exact details? What I remember is holding Hunter in my noticing and asking for grace, if it’s possible, to move towards him. Perhaps grace will help him to open his heart even as he’s suffering such a public humiliation, being used as a pawn in a great game of chess. Let him begin again. Let him become the person he’s always wanted to be.

• Donald Trump: going to court in Florida on August 14. I have family and dear friends who don’t like Donald Trump but like his policies. I’m confused about loyalty at this point in my life. Loyalty, it seems, should be reserved for the most trustworthy in your life. Loyalty, it seems, should follow from a reciprocal relationship, one where honesty and integrity are evident, are directly experienced.

Human beings, I’ve noticed, follow beliefs down many pathways. I have gone down many a path with untrustworthy others. I have been an untrustworthy leader of others on paths. Perhaps this is the experience we are meant to have in order to let go of our need to grasp and hold what seems to be secure and safe. So much harm has been caused to create safety around a person, a people, a nation, a government, a political party. We have convinced ourselves we must build safety like we build houses and nations. We have convinced ourselves safety is found in a building or a nation or an ideology or a set of beliefs.

Safety has been one of the biggest needs in my life. As a little person I experienced harm from my father, a man who I loved and trusted, a man who I laughed with. My body held the experience of his betrayal in the fascia, the muscles, the blood, the organs, the skin. Sometimes my small self comes to me in my dreams and I cradle her against me and hold her and stroke her forehead, run my hand from the part in her hair to behind the ear, this sweep of love over her head seems to calm her. I tell her, we are safe. we are safe. we are safe.

Decades. I’ve held and comforted my small self for decades.

The experience of betrayal of this magnitude begins a cascade of explosions, a cascade not unlike the factors which trigger a great flood. A great flood which changes the trajectory of the river. A trajectory which destroys life through rocks thrown, through drowning, through sweeping away the soil and the small plants, through destroying the dens and homes of animals, through wiping out so many future possibilities. The experience of a small girl being betrayed by her father shapes the landscape of her life in ways she cannot understand. She ruminates for decades on the importance of being good as a way of being loved again and not-harmed again.

For five decades I’ve lived in various stages of trying to navigate the chasms left in the wake of my father’s betrayal. Some of those stages have included trying to recreate my father’s betrayal, but having a different outcome. Heart-break begins with hope. Discernment begins with clear-seeing.

My father was abused as a young man. This information came out not long ago and in an email to me. Was I the victim of his replaying of the chasms in his life? Did he, drunk and acting on impulses he could not acknowledge in the light of the day, repeat, over and over, versions of what was done to him? Did he end these experiences feeling relieved that the pressure was no longer contained? Was his shadow side allowed to live, where he could not see it or know it?

And when I spoke up– I did speak up– did he begin to tell everyone a story of me which he wanted to believe was true? Dad: She makes things up. She tells stories. If she tells people this story, they will think she is crazy. Dad: You don’t want people to think you’re crazy, do you? You’ll have to go away. Live in a place with crazy people. Bad dreams are bad dreams. Dreams are not real. Dreams are not real. Dreams are not real.

And when I spoke up again as an adult– I did speak up– he suggested I suffered from false memories. Such pain he caused by not being honest.

I’ve noticed the news seems to be a continually reporting of the shadow, the harm. It appears we are both perpetrators and consumers of the shadow, we obsess over the shadow, we carry the shadow thread through our conversations, our negotiations, our precious moments with ones we love, even the smallest among us. Our children grow up with the shadow, whether we acknowledge it or not. What would clear-seeing of the shadow look like?

I’ve noticed sanity lies in the practices of listening to the body. With practice and intention, the body’s sensory receptors seem to be able to notice a shadow and to allow a shadow to come and go. I’m writing these words after being tossed and turned again by the shadow for days now. I’m allowing writing to happen through me, the way I’m learning to allow the shadow to move through me.

Met with the posture of peace, the intent of peace, the response to the shadow can be acceptance with intention to respond.

My intent to be a Warrior for the Human Spirit, a journey I began in response to the pandemic, asks me to take my seat with this vow: I cannot change the way the world is but by opening to the world as it is I may discover that gentleness, decency and bravery are available not only to me but to all human beings. Chogyam Trunpa

Millions and millions of human beings are practicing the peaceful ways of warriorship in this way.

It appears many of them are writers. I notice many of them are my friends.

Writing as a Warrior for the Human Spirit feels like being An Arbornaut: willing to live with an open heart and clear seeing in a space between. In a space between the chasms created by great harm from another. Among the great liars and murderers and the power hungry, is it possible to know gentleness, decency and bravery?

Writers who live in this space may be able to live life-situations of gentleness, decency and bravery. Their words might invite communities of gentle, decent and brave others to gather.

Their actions might be guided by a community of gentle, decent and brave others. All actions might be guided by a community of the gentle, decent and brave.

In my writing today, I notice I am attempting to embody the principles of the gentle, the decent and the brave. I notice I am attempting to acknowledge and see the reality. I notice I will publish this post. This will be my first response today.

I notice the tossing and the turning inside me is calming. I notice I love being alive. I have a reason to be here. I have meaning and purpose. I have loved ones all around me. Cheering me on.

In my darkest hours, it is possible to remember I am safe. I don’t need to take someone else’s land. I don’t need to repeat the harms I’ve suffered on others. I can acknowledge the shadow, the impulse, even the desire for revenge and I can listen, in stillness, to the gentle, decent and brave voice I’ve been tuning into for years now.

This is the possible dream.

This is the possible news stream.

This is the possible way through the river after the flood.

Much Love, Mar’ce

Peace. Even in the experience of a monster.

It is easy for me to write, to be honest, about joy– about the joy I’ve experienced again and again as observer of the weft and weave of this life situation.

Writing joy=a spider and their web glistening in the morning dew and the light sifting through the forest canopy.

It is harder for me to be honest about suffering. I have a deep collection of memories of darkness.

Yesterday, despite instruction and daily practice to welcome any emotion in my guest house (this body I occupy), I projected a dark cloud of rain above my head, an arrow piercing my heart, a snake strangling my gut. My jaw tense, my shoulders spasmed as I tried to control this life situation.

Why so much resistance?

The content of the memories. Betrayal by a father remembered on Father’s Day. Twenty-four hours earlier, I played out in my mind a potential phone conversation with my father- the first time I might speak to him in over a decade. Words of forgiveness. Patience to listen.

Me: Hey, Dad. Just wanted to say I’m grateful for the teaching, the experience of being your daughter. I’m grateful for the pain, it’s made me who I am. I have a great life. An amazing life. (Christina Aguilera’s voice plays in the background- thanks for making me a fighter.)

Dad: Princess. Oh, princess. I’ve been wanting to hear your voice. (Much crying.)

Me: (Calm tears flowing.) I want peace in the world. This is very hard for me. The suffering is still deep, and very painful. Peace begins with me. I’m calling to repeat, again, I’ve forgiven you. I’ve let go of this heavy anchor that’s kept me from growing up. I’ve let go of the shame. I’ve let go of the expectation that you will show up for me. I’ve let go of the belief that any of your actions was personal. I have compassion for you.

Dad: ?

Me: ?

When, yesterday, Father’s Day arrived, I woke up with a heaviness in my body I describe as sadness: a numb gut, a dull heart, shielded eyes, a tight jaw.

I’ve survived many a Father’s Day with little or no thought of my father. Instead I’ve celebrated my children’s fathers and in recent years my son-in-law’s fatherhood. I remind myself we can create in our own families what we did not receive in our first family.

We can create an experience of life and it can be full of joy. And…sometimes the ways of our conditioning will return and we will be asked to greet them. If we do not, we will further deepen the groove in our psyches about who we are and what has happened to us and we will further cement a perspective we might, actually, wish to set free.

Skin of Rock

The victimization of a small girl can last her whole lifetime. She can carry the monster’s memory for so long she loses her ability to imagine herself as something other than the monster’s daughter, marked by the monster, scarred by the monster, dreaming of the monster chasing her, catching her and her…allowing herself to be victimized, again and again. The small girl’s belief that it was all her fault– didn’t she ask the monster to notice her, to target her– may also lead her to believe she is flawed and worthy of whatever betrayal comes her way. (even if she angrily denies this is true, she might still believe it)

She might re-create, the way the monster did for himself, situations where she experiences again and again, the victimization. When she realizes what she’s doing, she might try to hide her own monstrous wishes for acknowledgement and forgiveness. Or she might try to face the horror of it all. Of her actions. Of the monster’s actions. She might begin to love the monster for what it was always trying to protect, to avoid, to run away from, to bury: so much pain.

I moved far away from the monster (who was also a charming human) when I was a teenager and each time I visited I looked for evidence the monster was gone, but I always found the monster again, in a squeeze or a too-long lingering of the eyes, or an inappropriate sexual kiss on the mouth or innuendo, lying, or the clear alarm at a statement I’d make pointing towards the way I experienced my father in childhood. I cut all contact decades into my adulthood when it was clear his honesty was buried under a cairn of protection and denial.

I’ve used rituals to forgive my father. Years ago I worked with a writer in an online class to transfer my pain and suffering into an amethyst stone. The ritual led to deeper ways of exploring forgiveness, to expressions of deep wailing and keening as in the Irish tradition over the grief of these victim-memories, over the grief of losing so much. I let it all flow through me, the way the buddhists describe.

Yesterday’s experience took me by surprise:

Me: Why the resistance?

Me: I’m tired of being human.

Me: Really?

Me: I’m tired of the suffering we’re causing.

Me: I have incredible experiences with other humans in writing and life. I am so glad to be alive. I love life. I experience deep joy.

Me: I don’t want to be reduced to weeping. I don’t want to be immobilized by this suffering. I want someone or something to fix me.

Me: The only way through is to allow your body to feel the pain.

Me: Not again. Not again. I’ve done this enough times.

Me: Let go. The feeling will pass.

Me: I do not want to do this. I do not want. I do not. I do. I

Me: I’m falling apart again. My psyche parts are scattered everywhere. I’m getting flashes of memories I don’t want. My body is inflamed in pain. Every cell howls. How much longer do I have to suffer this?

Me: Call them back.

Me: Who is them?

Me: All the parts of you. Call them back. Gather them. They are scattered in memories. They’ve been waiting for you. They want to come to home. To come home to you.

Me: Who am I?

Me: You already know. Remember. Remember.

If you find yourself confused about this reading experience, please forgive the confusion. Some experiences, when exposed to the light, retain their shadowy and obtuse natures. I’ve avoided writing about all of this for so long. I’m surprised by my own actions! I’ve thought the world does not need my suffering added to the pile. The world needs peace.

I listen to a beautiful song on repeat as I write this: The Lost Words Blessing

A harmony of voice sings instructions for experiencing the present moment, for holding bravery and revealing the peace inside you.

Enter the wild with care my love

and sing the things you see.

I work with writers online and in person and I ask them to notice, notice, notice. To sit with stillness. To allow. This instruction is founded in my experience of greeting peace in my life-situation.

The Rocky Mountains face me. Clouds, grey and dark grey seem to be stuck above me. To the northwest, the clouds are blue-tinged– evidence of a shift in density, of water, released. Rain has already loosed itself in the northwest, like my wailing earlier today, like the tears I let flow and did not stop.

The back of my throat aches. My jaw muscles pull from so much clenching. I listen to the song. I notice the horizon. I feel my body in this moment. I am here with all the parts I’ve called back.

• two year old me meeting my sister

• four year old me meeting my brother

• six year old me waking from a nightmare which will repeat and repeat and repeat

• nine year old me in a circle of trees by a flowing river meeting nature’s reassurance: I will survive. One day I will be able to handle all of this.

• all the other me’s who remember the hope and the inevitable heart break.

Enter the wild with care, my love,

and sing the things you see.

We are all here like a Best Of tribute album. All of us in our hilarious hair and fashion. We lived through Three’s Company sitcom influence of ponytails all over the head, the 80’s flashdance phase, soccer mom nostalgia, Back Street Boys concert with a thirteen year old, all black, all yoga clothes, torn jeans, and now, a ball cap with the words: Love Can Make It Better.

I remember the brilliant yellow finch who flew into the window behind me two mornings ago, the day before Father’s Day. I heard the strike. I wrapped the dead body in a gigantic rhubarb leaf and left it in a high place where Athena couldn’t get it. I cried. I’m sorry, I said. I didn’t want you to be harmed. I saw other birds around the yellow body on green leaf all day. Tom buried the little finch in the late afternoon. He, too, said last words in his own way.

At twilight yesterday, the small watching birds called out to me, two of them, over and over. I don’t know what they were saying.

I understood, though, that this is the way of things. The experience. This depth of suffering is important to feel, because this is how we arrive at the peace underneath.

We can give up the blame. We can forgive. I would like to go on record to say I am not special. I am not more able to forgive than the next person. I am responsible and I have been irresponsible. I remember: I have children and grandchildren who deserve a mother and grandmother who can be present to them.

In my life situation, forgiveness has been necessary to drop the obsessive thinking about who is at fault and the regret about what I’ve said or done. Forgiveness has allowed me a doorway into being present. Being present has opened up this: a way of seeing the world in all its beauty, of gratitude which flows through all moments. For example: I am, in this moment, grateful for all the suffering I experienced yesterday and today and three minutes ago. I am grateful for the victimization. I am grateful to be here. now. I understand you, dear reader, might think this is strange. I think all of this is very strange, too, sometimes.

This is what it means to be a warrior. A Warrior for the Human Spirit.

This is the vow I’ve taken, under Meg Wheatley’s teachings from Joanna Macy, from Chogyam Trungpa:

Our Warrior Vow: I cannot change the way the world is but by opening to the world as it is I may discover that gentleness, decency and bravery are available not only to me but to all human beings. Chögyam Trungpa

Peace is possible. It begins with me. It begins with you. Our peace ripples out and it influences those around us. One day I will call my father, or I will meet him in a park. I will thank him. It didn’t happen yesterday or today. I am gentle. I am decent. I am brave. I will find my way forward.

Thank you for reading this far. If I haven’t met you, perhaps you’re on a journey like mine…trying to find voices in the community, on the internet, who might shed light on how to survive unbelievable pain, imagine a life-situation of peace, and experience the balance of peace.

When We Break

I have no wisdom, only direct experience. Direct experience is the moment-by-moment awareness of life.

I worried yesterday: Writing takes me away from the direct experience. Why write? Indeed, why do much of anything if the direct experience, the present moment is here? To be present is to feel a current running through the body, a buzzing, an awareness.

As I write this I listen to Ludovico Einaudi, a composer who, unknown to him, collaborated on one of my first experiments in 2017: I walked long and slow kilometers each day with a heavy pack on my back, my headphones tuning me into his Seven Days of Walking album.

Today, Wind is playing on the speaker not far from me. Rain falls in noticeable splat sounds on the roof above me, on the roof of my car outside my window. Athena wakes from her nap-after-a-long-swim-in-Ghost-Lake and stands to watch the rain fall. Thank you rain. Thank you rain-maker, perhaps a dragon deep in the lake. Perhaps a dragon released from a multicoloured rock, glistening in the morning light and smooth. Perhaps hit by lightning over the last weeks, lightning which started fire and fire?

My imagination is high today. I woke with stories in my head, both at 4:47 a.m. and again at 7:28 a.m.. I am imagining a moment like this moment: who might be here? What might they be doing? What is their intention? How do they live?

Now, Rolling Like a Ball is playing. A pattern repeats: Da. Da. Da. Da. pause. Da-di-da

Thank you, Ludovico.

The rain is paused, the swallows swoop again. Two of them have nested in the small swallow house on the back porch. Baby swallows wait for their parents to bring them food. I delight in such direct evidence of emerging life.

Ghost Lake, this morning. Cloud Light. Cloud Shadow.

I am patient this morning. Each time I feel resistance rise (often accompanied by thoughts of what am I writing? Am I wasting my time?), I notice my breath coming in, I relax my jaw, my shoulders, my forehead. I close my eyes and exhale. Tension fades. I relax and relax. This is the moment I am in. Is this a way of listening and writing? I guess it is. Would I recommend it? Yes. Experiments with the breath can be helpful in accumulative ways. I like accumulative ways, gathering, perspective shifting, relaxing. I’ve noticed when I relax, I make more space for peace, for the inner voice of peace to come in.

The big question I’m holding today: “Why am I writing this novel? What is the vision for the story?”

When I woke in the early hours and the sun was just making its way above the horizon, I wrote down my dream of approval for my writing focus. When I woke again, about 3 hours later, I wrote some of the vision of the novel and of a newer work, a non-fiction piece, a memoir. I am surprised and grateful.

Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. I repeat these two words often.

When the vision was still fresh, Athena dragged me to the lake and while she swam and in-between throwing sticks, I noticed, noticed, noticed. The lake’s smooth surface. The clouds in the sky. The shapes of rocks. The colours of rocks. The dense-ness of rocks. I took some photos, as I do, to document the beauty of this life-situation. Even on a day when I also think of the victims of mass shootings, of mass criticism, of mass harm.

I imagine a dragon or a lake monster lives in this lake. The rock (the one I’ve taken a photo of) is broken and, now, the dragon is released.

While I was making coffee earlier, I listened to Rick Rubin’s interview (author of The Creative Act: A Way of Being) with Krista Tippet, On Being podcast. Cam, one of five brilliant children I’ve had the privilege of nurturing [;and listening to and doing homework with and playing and playing and playing with, gave me Rick’s book. It sits next to me as I type. I’m tempted to open it up and start reading. I’m tempted to pick up my phone, too, to see if anyone out there is noticing me or if anyone out there is doing something interesting I want to participate in. I’m always on the look out for friends I can trust.

Ghost Lake, this morning.

Dragons must go into hiding because they can no longer trust the predators who might have once been friends. The mudfish. The humans.

We need humans who can live with dragons and not freak out. We need humans who can live with each other and not freak out.

I think this is the vision for the novel: what can we withstand without freaking out? What happens when we remain calm and centered in the midst of the suffering?

It makes me cry. I’m tired of people hating each other, not understanding each other, being willing to hurt one another in the name of ideology, belief, and power. I understand they do not know what they do- to them it is the only option they have. We’ve created a society with layers and layers of conditioning and protection and fear and drama.

I’m excited to notice we are also awakening to consciousness, to knowing peace in the direct experience of life.

I think this is the vision for the novel: what happens when we see clearly? What happens when our youngest people hold themselves relaxed and at ease in the moment as it unfolds?

Have you seen a video of an old woman on a subway, holding the hand of a man who was, moments before, enraged and losing his shit? Her head is bowed, as if in prayer. I imagine her saying, “please, let us help each other.” I imagine her calmness comes not from her fear of the future. Her calmness comes, I imagine, from an awareness that peace begins with one person and it can spread and spread and spread. What if he turned on her? What if he did? Wouldn’t it still be worthy to reach out a hand to help peace spread? What better moment than the one we are in?

Life is not a fist. Life is an open hand waiting for some other hand to enter it. Elie Weisel

Atoms is Ludovico’s track I’m listening to now. My heart, expanded, notices Athena is playing with her tail and the coffee I made an hour ago is cold. I’ll read back over this piece and notice what arrived when I was listening and feeling my body.

I’ve noticed the title of the piece is When We Break. I smile. I’ve noticed writing today felt like the direct experience. I smile at the wonder. The wonder of how writing is a direct experience, of how writing uses the mind as a tool in conjunction with the body, not in exclusion of the body.

Athena now has her arm over my outstretched legs as if to say, “let’s go outside, the rain has stopped.”

Thank you for reading. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you.

An Arbornaut at Ghost Lake. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you.

Saltspring Island Retreat: Thoughts on Deep Trust. Deep Listening. Deep Play.

We’ve been running an experiment. A fascinating experiment. A significant workshop completed its run a few days ago. 

What an amazing experience. The things we navigated! Warriors. Amazing warriors!! We did our best to care for one another, for people closest to us, for strangers, for new life emerging. We practiced our roles within the container we created. We practiced bringing in parts of ourselves we were afraid of entrusting to other people’s noticings/observations. 

We took care of ourselves as best as we could. We committed to this experiment. 

On our retreat we completed one major experiment with writing. It began with Bri’s generous leading of us all on a hike. The silence we walked in led us deeper and deeper into the forest and inside ourselves. When we stopped, we were lighter, more at ease. Bri’s provocation, deceptively simple but delivered with such playfulness and authentic curiosity: what would your 9 and 90 year old self say in this moment? 

The words we heard set the stage for the next few days. Their responses revealed insight into each person’s lens on the world, what sort of thought loop they might be investigating. Bri held quiet and sacred space for all attendees, taking into account layers of direct experience with some people and just meeting others for the first time. 

Our first evening together ended with an invitation to walk in nature, to revel in it and to wake up the next day for action, for fun. 

Our Writing Experiment asked us to sit or walk in stillness and allow whatever comes. We each experimented differently.

Our experiments, offered up in trust, told a shared story of deep connection with the present-moment-experience and the expressions-of-past-events, the desire for connection with others, the desire for forgiveness and peace.

We listened to each other’s voices outside sharing, honing our abilities to notice, observe and respond. Grounded in love and wanting freedom to be our selves, we challenged our habitual patterns and noticed the effect of our being on others.

Deep Trust. Deep Listening. Deep Play.

Not always bliss, not always pain. An on-going experiment with life.

I witnessed a show of strength I am still marvelling at: a partnership I will always be in awe of. A partnership who inspires with their desire to embody love and compassion and to face their anger/fear over what it means in our society to represent a way of knowing unfamiliar to many people, feared by many people. 

In our communities, we encounter people with pent-up rage about difference and discomfort. Many humans want to relieve their suffering.  Our unconscious patterns are difficult to notice. We despair over our inability to communicate and/or to resolve our differences.

Intense fear spirals out a community of confusion, of dulled antennae, of static communication. Turned on one another through blame and anger? It’s a knot of buzzing and tightness, of strands coated with layers of suffering. It’s a very hot experience, this fear meeting fear, like a solar storm with lightning.

To embody steadiness in the storm requires practice. 

To be willing to live life intentionally with a set of principles is a profound shift. Startling. What will you do with your power?

Sometimes being present feels like bliss because it feels like you are in the place you belong. You breathe the air of the cedars and you are a cedar. You are fully you and more than you. You imagine a future where this happens minute by minute, hour by hour, day by day. You would like to transcend. You’re willing to try to earn it. To practice. To listen. To be patient. You test yourself. The more care you give yourself through a cycle of attending/meeting the present moment, the deeper your ability to process your experiences. And when this shift is happening, the magic begins. This is the time when openings occur whether realized in the moment or not. In the evening, the moon entered the horizon: a huge ball of light-reflected shone shades of dark yellow tinged with orange.

We took care of the others on our retreat in the best ways we could.

All of our retreat participants expressed gratitude. 

We built relationships with our retreat members. We expressed a lengthening of the number of days. Also, a pre-gathering experiment to prepare our retreat members for content they might experience as we deepen our inquiry into relationship and various expressions of life. 

Stay tuned for an opportunity to join us in our next experiments.

Dream it

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Dream it 〰️