Category: Seasonal Celebration
Thunderstorm Medicine
Like an anxious spike high on the thermometer, a hot summer day can hold a whole lot. The heaviness of the past, the humidity of future-tripping, the density of a too-tightly-packed schedule. It’s life, intensified, with everything being experienced at once. Like the sound of the cicadas rolled into one giant buzz or…
The Season of Pleasure
In the wheel of the year each season has its distinctive gifts, its own character and flavor. There is a time for hermitage and planting, harvesting, seeking, risking, budgeting and even dying. But it’s only in summer that pleasure takes center stage. Here in the mountains, we are just now tipping into the…
A Flower Portal
Every spring is a kind of portal. An opening where absolutely everything has the possibility to change. When what was dormant can become activated in an entirely new way. Every winter I forget something of what it means to be alive, and every spring, in the softness of the mud and rain, I remember….
Awakenings can be Gentle
a·wak·en·ing Coming into awareness, a shift in consciousness, appreciating previously unseen aspects of reality, enlightenment. In our culture we have an enduring belief that awakenings, in order to be profound, must be hard won. That awakenings always tangle with struggle. That they will be dramatic, epiphanic, and arrive like a bolt of…
Tending the Embers: Chaga + The Creative Spark
In winter we stir the embers. A motion of both caretaking and stoking, a gentle coaxing and potent remembering of that which lights our fire. Every winter, as color fades from the outer world, we are invited to journey into the vibrant tableau of our deepest self. To rekindle our inner colors with a…
Journey to Santa
Artwork – “Fly Agaric” by Amanda Clark This past week I had brunch with a dear friend. Over scones, she started talking about how difficult it is for her to get into the holiday spirit. As someone who grew up in a family that never celebrated this time, she shared that she is having…
Infusing Mysticism into the Holidays
In between the hours of gift buying and cookie making there is a pause. Can you feel it? Between the time spent navigating family politics and trying to get the tree to stand straight in its stand there is a stream of quietude that runs just beneath the surface. Can you hear it? Across the…
Walking with Ghosts
Autumn has fallen here in the mountains. The trees are turning inwards, curling their leaves into colors of copper, ember and dusk. The canopies empty in a thick caramel of fire, and suddenly that which felt obscured or far away is close and able to be perceived. There is a kind of haunting that…