Moving To Jane's Medicine Tree

The Tree Letter has morphed (via A Harper's Garden) to Jane's Medicine Tree. Please view my current musings there! Gracias, Jane

Announcing "A Harper's Garden" Blog

This is the last posting on the Tree Letter -- at least for the foreseeable future! I invite you to switch your subscription to my healing artistry blog A Harper's Garden. I hope you enjoy the art, content, and good wishes of the garden! Thanks for being a Tree Letter reader!

Graces,
Jane

Lightening Up

If you know me well, you know I've spent the past few years trying (desperately, at times!) to lighten up. When I'm at my most grim, I believe that it's all about downsizing my ecological footprint (the amount of resources I consume), and the amount of things I possess -- or allow to possess me! When I'm feeling merrier about it, I know it's about discovery and delight, putting my feet on the ground (preferably barefoot!), and playing with chickens, children, and friends!

As we approach our move from Vashon Island and our forest-and-farm life to a San Francisco Bay Area suburb, I am aware of less of what I'm leaving (which is immense -- an amazing dynamic community that accepts my family and me just as we are, for one thing!) and more of what we might discover "this time around". My husband and I grew up a half mile apart from each other in the heart of what came to be known as Silicon Valley (yes, we knew each other as kids. In fact, our parents knew each other before we were born, having all met their respective spouses and each other in a "Catholics Graduate Club" ... ). And the house we'll be moving to is actually a house we used to live in before -- a "Monterey-style" house on the Peninsula built in 1936 for my grandparents, and in which they lived for most of the rest of their lives.

Sketch of the house by my grandfather, Jose Flores

So we know what we're "going back to". Or do we? We've lived on Vashon Island for nearly ten years. All our cells have replaced themselves -- as has everyone else's in the world -- so each one of us is completely different from who we were before. Hm! So if we raise chickens and veggies in our backyard, and choose to take trains, buses, or our own feet to farmer's markets, family, and friends, maybe our neighbors won't totally think we're off our rockers. Or maybe they will. "You don't know what it's like down there," one friend, who has a 60-mile commute, tells us. "The traffic is worse than ever." We do know that. Every visit to family in the past decade has demonstrated that, outwardly, the Bay Area is just as it was, and more so. More cars, more "starter castles', more housing developments crammed in any possible place, more upscale shopping malls and throw-away strip malls. Affluence dependent on those with little means, but few liveable places open to those with much less. Surface stuff. Stressful lifestyle, hectic pace.

And at the same time, Farmers Markets abound, many cities up and down our train line offering them twice a week. The Bay Area is the home place of the Locavore Challenge -- a group of individuals who are making an effort to eat only foods grown or harvested within a 100 mile radius of San Francisco and who are encouraging others to eat locally as well. I imagine we'll discover a whole new Bay Area in this circuit -- one where folks are engaged in all kinds of experiments -- from nature awareness to blacksmithing, organic gardening to buying locally-made and grown products, from numerous grass-roots engagements with community to the zen and artistry of chicken-raising. I imagine that I'll discover that my neighbors, who I never really got to know last time around, have some intriguing facets to themselves that can teach me a thing or two.

Who knows what awaits us, but I intend to experience the nature of this place along a different trail. I expect to be pleasantly surprised.

And I also expect to continue discovering what seem like absurdities to me but which are considered by and large "the way it is" and "necessity" to others, and ponder why folks choose to engage in those things. Here's one: in our upcoming neighborhood, parents, family members, and college students other parents had hired, began lining up two days in advance of the official enrollment day at the public school in order to sign up their children for kindergarten. In such a place of "affluence" why does this seem to me to be a huge expression of poverty? Lack of enough "good schools" or other education and learning options for their children. Lack of enough spaces in this school to fully serve its neighborhood children. And if folks from other neighborhoods are battling to place their children in this particular school, what's the matter with their own schools? For all these people. why does this one public school contain their entire idea of "opportunity"? Or am I missing some essential point here?! In any case, the vision to me of these people prepared to wait two days and nights in line to ensure that their children attend this school smacks of those images of Soviet Union food lines.

It never occurred to me to rally my Bay Area family members or to fly south to stand in line so that my six-year-old daughter can attend that school. Our decision to homeschool frees us entirely from participating in this scrabbling for space, and because of this, I realize that I'm not able to fully comprehend why folks choose to do this. My hope is that their consideration of this action as "necessity" stands on a foundation of values that they have carefully sorted out for their family and stand by, and not just because of a desperate sense of "at all costs, our child must get into this school!".

Yurt Living
A month ago we moved from our 2,500 sq. foot house to our 24' diameter (440 sq. ft)) yurt. I love living in the yurt! Cleaning it is a breeze, and it's easy to involve everyone in the task. We have our essentials here -- for cooking and enjoyment. For us this includes the computer, ham radio, fabric and art supplies, books, toys, herbs, notebooks and pens -- quite a lot really. We cook and heat with our wood cookstove. The yurt heats quickly and the fire burns with very little fuel (compared to what we had to use in our house!). Oh, we fight sometimes, and get on each others' nerves, but the small space also motivates us to sort it out, and figure out what will work for all of us.

Anyway, here's a glimpse of various spaces in our yurt:














I love the order, symmetry, and essence-of-being that I experience living in the round!

Simply Living

This little image is something I created for the Vashon Wilderness Program.

Today is a perfect late winter day -- dry, cold (but not too cold), and quiet. I began the morning as I often do, turning off the electric fence and letting the chickens out into the garden, checking the hen house for eggs (one already!), and then heading up to the wood pile to split some wood for a fire. I love hearing the morning sounds of the birds, and glimpsing the changing light of sunrise. The work of swinging that axe and guessing how the wood will respond as the blade sinks in feels good.

Life continues as a mystery. Two days ago, the amazing Mathias family who has lived and farmed here for the past two years or so, moved on to northeast Oregon to begin a new chapter in their lives. We have our own move from Vashon in the summer. The months stretch open before us. Surely there will be more to it than continuing to winnow our possessions, tending chickens, browsing the garden for lunch and dinner, making and tending fires and baking and cooking in and on the wood cookstove? And being together. But then I think, why does there need to be anything more?

The kids fight, but then they play together or hang outside with the chickens for hours. They have different methods of scooping up hens and carrying them around. They've finally managed to teach me to tell Bluestar and Sleeve Eater apart. They know the exact tone color of each hen's eyes, and how each hen sticks her claws out (or in) when she is held. The core routines for nature awareness development that programs like Wilderness Awareness School and the Vashon Wilderness Program practice are there naturally (as they are meant to be) with my daughters and their
love of the chickens: secret spot, fox walk, sense meditation, storytelling, thanksgiving, questioning, bird language, ecology awareness, and so on.

Our observations, interests, and reading lead us to sewing and story making projects. Family birthdays and celebrations inspire us to be imaginative in honoring our loved ones and the things that are important to them. Work around the house, in the garden, and with the chickens, grounds us in daily and seasonal rhythms, and leads outward to encompass just about any "subject" you can think of, into community, and deeply into the heart of our nature. In this kind of life we don't need "programs" to nourish our whole beings. Social, intellectual, emotional, and creative deepening emerges from the simple business of life -- our first teacher! Truly, do we need anything more?

Perhaps no. But we are human beings with longings, passions, and responsibilities. For me, longings drive me into "less". At this point, my life is very simple (I gave up driving three years ago and you wouldn't believe how much that simplified my life!), and my inner life is a multitude (visit my website!). Even though I've shed a good percentage of my personal possessions, I still feel that too much of my energy is ineffectively bound up in the care of our house (which is large, and no longer reflects our internal terrain of what we need in a shelter and home!). This weekend we move into our 24' diameter yurt, and will begin to focus our living there. Our house, of course, will remain, bountifully holding all the possessions that we don't deem necessary for our more focused living, but my thought (hope!) is that honing to our essentials in a living space more reflective (perhaps!) of our personal values will help us discern what we truly love and are delighted to carry with us, and what no longer serves us, and which can now move on.

To be continued!

Additions To My Web Site

As I continue to plow through everything I own -- as well as through all my computer files! -- I've been adding chunks of material to Forest Halls. Visit there for more details, but additions include a brief run of a music webzine for young harp players, a webbook, and miscellaneous articles and music arrangements. My imagination has ranged far and wide in the past nine years, so I'm also beginning to attempt to weave all those ideas together into a cohesive whole.

Oh, and have I mentioned that I'm having a radical sale of my CD's? Please visit my website and give it a good browse!

Winter Weave: Day Name "Milky Way"

The spiral galaxy M83 which is believed to be similar in size and shape to our Milky Way galaxy

Last year at this time, I experimented with creating a Devotional. Using various natural cycles, archetypes, and "essences" to inspire me, I wove blessings for each day, voiced to aspects of Mother Mary, or the Goddess, or fanciful imagination (you choose what you think I meant!). As I was also working hard on my Kamana nature awareness study, you'll find things of that nature woven in as well, as I post subsequent entries. Oh, and aspects of music enter into all this. I was working with various modes (scales) from The Harmonic Experience by W. A. Mathieu. I also used the Devotional as a way to focus on a song I wanted to learn/relearn during some days, that were thematically associated with this cycle in some way. With all these different "threads" woven into my experience of the day, I named the cycle WINTER WEAVE.

Here's how I began it, exactly a year ago from today.
Winter Weave
Celeste - Mode of Silence

The threads of the Weave resonate from the following sources:

First moon name is from Ogham lore associated with moons. Second moon name comes from the book Full Moon Feast by Jessica Prentice, Clan Mother is from The Thirteen Original Clan Mothers by Jamie Sams. The "Mode" and day names come from the ECOLogical Calendar. The musical mode name is figured out by me ("Silence" is the musical mode corresponding to Celeste). The Week themes are derived from a version of the Thanksgiving Address, an ancient honoring practice from the Haudenosaunee (Iroquois) tradition, that serves as profound nature awareness practice in the Kamana Naturalist Training Program.

Birch Moon - Wolf Moon
Clans Mother of the 13th Moon Cycle:
Becomes Her Vision


Week One: The Universe and Future Generations

Fifth Day (of 13th Lunar Cycle) - Milky Way / Christmas Eve
[note from me: of course in this calendar yea, 2007, we are just past the full moon on this day!]

Morning

I call upon you, Mistress of the Starry Sky, Queen of the Heavens, on this eve of the birth of the Child of Light I ask for your blessing on this day and long night of waiting, expectation. On this eve of Becoming.

I invoke and offer this prayer-song. May peace, joy, and light flood the hearts of us all!
Litany: Rosa Mystica

Vas spirituale Oro pro nobis
Vas honorabile Oro pro nobis
Domus aurea Oro pro nobis
Regina angelorum Oro pro nobis
Rosa mystica Oro pro nobis

I give thanks for the gifts of life, light, stars, nightscape, dark, and love that I have received throughout my life. They are as plentifiul as the many stars and objects of our own Milky Way!

Evening

On this night as I turn toward sleep, I ask the Mistress of the Starry Nights to bless my dreams, and the dreams of each one of us in this home. May we bask in the harmony and luminosity of your generous expanse, and drink of the lactation of your blessing. In gratitude and faith, we turn to you, O Queen of the Night!

For more about experiencing a natural flow of time, I invite you to read my essay Time Passages

Snowneck Moon and The Starry Night Birthday

Snowneck, our Full Moon chicken

Today is a full moon, what my daughters have named the "Snowneck Moon", in honor of our large white-necked 'black gourmet' breed hen. The name I've chosen for this day, The Starry Night Birthday is in honor of my mother-in-law's 75th birthday (today), and inspired by a tiny gold bell that we gave her called "The Starry Night', created by a silver/goldsmith on the island. This beautiful bell has a cityscape etched in it, and if you peer through the 'celestial dome' of its microcosmic sky, you can see a star pattern. It reminds me of cutting an apple open, sideways, and finding the star at its center! So on this bleak, dark, wet midwinter's day I dream a kaleidoscope of images ranging from the dazzling -- inspired by that celebratory bell and Van Gogh's Starry Night paintng -- to the mundane, with an appreciative nod to the plain old nature of our large hen Snowneck, Queen of the Crop, with her deep grumbly voice, and who strides through the chicken yard and the field! And I also remember to wish upon a star (cloud-obscured!) and offer good wishes and gratitude to and for the generous, kind, discerning. and courageous woman who is my mother-in-law, Denise.

As the night descends, I wander the field, gathering radishes here, beet greens there, mustard greens, mustard blooms, baby greens, red-jewel chard, crinkly kale, and stalks of parsley and celery, and a couple of sage leafs. The CSA (community-supported agriculture) subscription has completed, and so we are able to wander, wonder, and nibble our way through the fields as we will, enjoying the immense bounty and beauty of this good earth and of the careful, lovingly seeded and tended crops by the Mathias family - the family that owns and operates the Journey School Farm Community and this CSA. I am absolutely awed and filled with gratitude at what is thriving here in the earth-stone heart of winter.

pictured above: Van Gogh's "Starry Night"

Full Moon Root: The Nature Of Wind

"I am Fire-fretted and I Flirt With Wind ..."

Deepening into the earth ... let's see what emerges! Here's the first root of the Tree Letter!

The Nature Of Wind

The above image is inspired by a dream I had a week or so ago. Before I went to sleep I asked the Dreaming for an insight as to the nature of Wind. A beautiful dream unfolds, in which I see a fragment of an Old English riddle flitting between the trees of a woodland gallery (which, as in the way of dreams, is an art gallery). The riddle begins (in one translation) "I am fire-fretted and I flirt with wind."

Below are the Old English words of the poem. I created the image above to show the first line (in O.E.) flitting through the trees. It seemed to me that somehow I had indeed witnessed the nature of Wind: a riddle, certainly, darting through the trees as an essence-of-the world language. Something I could come to know, after a fashion: a way of seeing, a way of listening, a manner of speech .... a cause and effect, both visible and invisible, on all things. The riddle itself voices the nature of a very different element, and so I am tantalized by the notion revealed in this dream: that the nature of wind is often revealed by the interplay of itself with something more tactile, some other form, something solid, that we can "more readily grasp", so to speak!

Riddle 30

Ic eom legbysig, lace mid winde,
bewunden mid wuldre, wedre gesomnad,
fus forðweges, fyre gebysgad,
bearu blowende, byrnende gled.

Ful oft mec gesiþas sendað æfter hondum,
þæt mec weras ond wif wlonce cyssað.
þonne ic mec onhæbbe, ond hi onhnigaþ to me
monige mid miltse, þær ic monnum sceal
ycan upcyme eadignesse.
I am sun-struck, rapt with flame,


Here is a
translation