The Mythical Human

A brief Winter Solstice Blessing

12/21/2022

Dear Possum, may the darkness keep you, as loyal to you as you are to it. May it protect your passage like fur, may it soften your hard living with kindness. May the rubbled, decaying floor of the earth be your feast, and may you be absolutely capable. There is no situation in which you could not survive, for death does not frighten you; you practice it constantly. May only the trees know you, beckoning you up into their firm, round arms. Mouth like a shark, nose like a pig, tail like a rat, womb like a kangaroo, may you live independent of every norm, blissfully unknown and therefore free. Adorable little nightmare, thank you for cleaning up.

Dear Butterfly, may you sleep the sleep of the dead, without work, without plan. May the place of your sleeping never be found, warm in your webbing. May the perfect stillness of winter, strung as tightly as the strings of some angel instrument whose song (like snow’s) is only imagined, keep you whole. May the taste and the seeking of sweetness evolve in you slowly, but surely, as sure as the days grow long again, and may the colors of your ancestors pattern your new, folded sails— at first in flashes, like dreams, and later set in geometric certainty, like stained glass. When you emerge, may the sun fill your wings, and may the breezes all be gentle. May the spiral of your longing unfurl amidst petals and surprise you with a joy that caterpillars are unequipped to feel. Thank you, for proving that flowers can fly.

Dear Owl, may your eyes light all the world, but with subtlety, like moonlight. May you hear the whispering ghosts and the small, warm-blooded answers, and may you know the difference. May you trust your knowing. May the darkness love you, and feel warm to you, and carry your fluffy wings like the sleeping breath of gods soon to be reborn. May you find your lover in the bottom of the night, in the center of the winter, in that cold time when the weeping is over and broken hearts lie open, and any sound at all sounds like the oldest desire. That knocking, echoing hoot in the blackness, that boom in the belly. May your lover’s feathers feel as soft as your own. May your talons strike true. Thank you for your sound and for your silence: for meaning in the darkness.

Dear Chipmunk, may your warm room be filled with the delicious fruits of your labors, and may your space be just yours, as you like it, and may you rest now, knowing you’ve earned it. May you own this cocoon, all cozy, and blanketed by earth which freezes and hardens to wall out danger—but turns to you, inside, its warmer, friendlier face. May you be safe, your midnight snacking unheard and unashamed. May the roots of trees wind their living presence around you, keeping you with their silent song of wholeness, and may the dirt taste like their love, and may you dream wise with their wisdom. And may your heartbeat slow, and slow, and your breathing relax, until that beat is the same as the earth’s, or feels that way. May you know the peace that only a wintering chipmunk knows. Thank you, for the tenderness we feel, just to think of you.

Dear Snake, may the cold not hurt you, because it becomes you. May the sun be the thing you rise with, the thing that is simply life, as in the days of old. May you sleep with your fellows in some vast den under my barn that would terrify my neighbors, but I don’t mind. I like to think of you, wound together like guts in the earth, a collection of lightning, power of medicine and death, all your potential unseen, unheard, unmeant for us and yet more thrillingly symbolic than anything we know. And when you are sleeping, this winter, may you never be found, and may you keep the earth pure, may you keep it holy. And when you slide out in spring, like small thawing rivulets of hot water, into the grass and into the seeps and into the low, curvaceous ground, may we leave you to your lowness, thinking ourselves so high—may we leave you there, oblivious to your glory, and let you live.

Whoever your animals may be, the animals of your place, wherever you are—in your trees and your frozen grasses, beneath your floors and your eaves, webbed softly between your stones and frozen quiet under your streams—may they rest undisturbed, may their darkness be unpolluted, may they be free to live their natural ways in the wholeness of the beauty they were born to.

And you, too, whoever you are, may the animal in you—whichever one reflects the innocence within you at this moment—be cherished, the object of your most perfect compassion, your most humble respect. May you hold your own space sacred. May the darkness of the longest night hold you safe, and may the light, when it returns, return you to your true self, the wild one, the one who recognizes sweetness (though before the cocoon, you never even noticed flowers, you only looked for leaves), the one who knows the way now, without knowing how you know it.

(photo-- cropped from photo by John Bedell for cover of Beauty, by Mindi Meltz)

2 Comments

Summer Savoring . . .

6/22/2022

0 Comments

Summer Solstice can be a hard time of year for sensitive people . . .

The fullness, the ripeness, the abundance of all things and the injunction to live big, throw off the oppression of darkness, party all day because the night will never come—yes. But to be so busy, so full, so loud, so constantly stimulated can be overwhelming. And the heat! Blogging in winter is easy for me. Easy to find time. Easy to reflect. Easy to write about the forgotten value of limits, silence, the infinite within. At this summer peak of outer activity and pleasure, I start thinking about greed. Consumerism. Endless making and taking, and why are we never content with what we have but must keep destroying the world to have more?

However.

Why aren’t we humans, after all, ever content with what we have? Are we really just greedy? Or are we only afraid to be grateful? Taught to feel guilty, when we relish our abundance. Taught to keep glancing over our shoulder, lest the gods should take back what they gave us, if we enjoy it too much. Maybe the endless wanting comes from forgetting how to feel what we take in. Because we lost the self-confidence with which to contain it. Or lost touch with our soul—I mean isn’t the soul, after all, a kind of spiritual belly that receives and digests the beauty of life into meaning? So that we can just feel it—not do something to it, or take it or change it, or post a picture of it so someone else can imagine us enjoying it—but just feel, and that’s all.

Maybe Summer Solstice is about savoring. I think the Earth, like everything that gives, wants that. The birds are singing all the time, all the time a celebration, all the time busy with joy and unafraid to be proud. Their songs make everything look healthy and okay, the light looks heavenly, the leaves are translucent, they glitter like the ideals of a child. The sun is so high today, it has all day long. There are no limits to this day, and the light itself is singing. My cat curls by my elbow on the picnic table and watches the endless show. A vulture soars over the space between treetops, searching—so casually—for death. There’s been no rain for way too long, but the life around me doesn’t feel like suffering, only like a subtle stillness in the heart of the heat, determination without despair. And every leaf flutters and flies, a perfect jagged cutout of the thinnest cloth, and every leaf is a different letter to the wind. (Remember before texts there were emails, and before emails there were letters? Remember before letters there were just cairns and marks beside the road? Remember before cairns and marks, there were just a thousand leaves, each one with a message to and from the universe itself?) The low arc of a hammock, the white-lit body of a tree, the leaf-veiled peak of our roof, the homey, striping slats of the woodshed—all passing in and out of the gift of sun, the gift of shade, like a bright kind of dream. My cat is on the ground now, her nose wrinkling, her ears moving every way. She is watching a butterfly, while the butterfly dances. She is peaceful and yet wanting. Her instinct is to want, and her wanting is to kill. I have to live with that killing, or I have to keep her inside and listen to her cry. It’s things like this that keep life from ever feeling comfortable. No way to live life fully that doesn’t hurt.

To savor everything—this is the only simple truth I can find. If we don’t savor what feels good, we will always feel empty, and always want more. If we don’t savor what feels hard and painful, we will always be passing it on to someone else—in gossip, in social media, in a verbal unburdening whose only goal is to get others to feel the pain we don’t wish to feel.

We can feel this ourselves. All of it, all that we witness. We are made for this. For Summer Solstice, let us savor what we consume. Let us love what we enjoy. Let us learn to feel satisfied, not as an act of humility, but as an act of deserving. Yes, I deserve to taste what I consume. I deserve to draw nourishment from what I swallow into my belly. And even the pain, let it be an experience. I cannot release it without experiencing it, for experience IS the release. It is the passing of life’s essence through the momentary beauty of this body. Feel everything, because when we avoid a feeling, we avoid also the part of us that feels it. To feel everything is to access the power of our full selves. The earth is everywhere. Let it carry you like the sea; you weigh nothing. Everything is a gift. There is a belief—I think I got it from Thoreau—that the point of life is not to be happy, but to live as deeply as possible. I think this is what the soul wants. This is what allows us to finally feel full.

I dreamed recently that I was surrounded by lightning. I was in a room whose walls were literally lightning, a world defined by endless strikes of lightning. It was terrifying. Yet this is life. I found, in the dream, that there was no secret door, no hidden space, no escape. There is no rest. Yet somehow, in surrendering to the feeling, there is a kind of rest—the way there is peace in surrendering to a river or a wave, only not the kind of peace you can sleep through.

I wanted to write this post before Solstice so that I could post it on that day, on time. But Summer Solstice isn’t about dreaming or reflecting, it’s about living right now. So the writing itself is the experience, and it’s happening today, and this has been my Solstice meditation, this writing. This is the offering. Happy Solstice.

0 Comments

Gravity

4/6/2022

0 Comments

Published in part by We'Moon 2022:

   Doesn’t everyone have some place somewhere that they are so sure remembers them? But now not even a bird could recognize it from the sky. And sometimes I wake up scared, to know I was born into a world like a giant mechanical body, a world made of truck and plastic and supermarket, and no matter how much I think I love, every time I do anything, I accidentally knock down forests with my giant mechanical hands.
   But I go to sleep among Fireflies. And the Earthworm tells me how deep within where we cannot see, he is she and she is he, and they are integrating it all, reweaving the groundwork for life. Young monarchs with stained-glass wings tell how it took generations before they even looked beyond the next flower—how their early spring and summer ancestors could not imagine the new worlds they fly toward now, so who knows? Vultures tell how they seek death out: that’s where the nourishment is. Cicadas must drink from the roots of history for a long time, before they can rise and sing. Deer tell how to lay their antlers down and give it up, trusting that new ones will grow back stronger next year. Hermit crabs are willing to walk naked on the beach, from the old shell to the new.
   Cardinals never fly away south, no matter how cold it gets, but call up the sun with their red songs each morning. Bears make the spring come by surrendering to the darkness of winter; desire wakes the groundhogs in spring. Salmon, moving impossibly uphill against the flow of time, tell me that really, they’re only returning home. And Canada Geese tell how spring is nothing more than circling back to the wholeness we once knew.
   I dream the earth holds me tight—they call it gravity; I call it love. The river is going down, down to the center. It is always going there. Whales were once land creatures, but they returned to the sea.
   And I’m not afraid.

© Mindi Meltz 2019

0 Comments

Deer Community . . .

3/21/2022

1 Comment

Deleted from my upcoming novel, The Queen’s Rain (third book in the After Ever After trilogy):

Impressions of a Fawn--

   If I lie very still, like nothing, I will be safe. I will live.
   My legs fold tight and flat; I collapse down so low, I am the ground. I am like the frog or the crocodile who watches from the water—I see, but am not seen. I sense, but am not sensed.
   Between my ears like long, cupped hands, I feel the wind open me in a joy of understanding. I hear the dead leaves clicking point to point, each day releasing one more mote of dust like an offering to the cold soil. Even the sun makes a sound, drying them. Underneath me, beneath the lowest leaf, a salamander pads tiny, starred footprints. He’s curved like a crescent moon, and each time he steps, he flips the moon. Walking in the shape of a snake.
   His skin is just like water, so unprotected even he can’t feel it. Like the surface of an eye—that smooth, that helpless. Everything goes right through it. But he’s hidden in the silence of the under-leaves, where the wet keeps him. Where thoughts cannot reach. He’s hungry, and he eats quick, armored, animal things, things that crunch when he snaps them in his silky little jaws.
   A fox—he doesn’t walk, he only goes by running—traces the ground with his nose. He has an idea of me, he is trying to scent me, but it is I who scent him. I scent the plumes of scent from his busy, hot, smoky tail, and I scent how the spongy fungus grips tighter the rich, rotting base of the dying tree he passes, and I scent the pulse of the birds as they burst scared from a nest there, hearts pattering, and I scent the goo the snail leaves on a twig that hangs just above my nose, an ancient smell, a smell from the beginning of the world. I know these scents. These scents, someday, shall be my memories. They are my soul.
   Snake, I know you. Her head like an arrow, she inserts her interest between these two layers of leaves, into this hole and out of that one, around the corner of that tree, down the dry path of that streambed whose deeps I hear the wind tickling and the sun cracking open. She inserts her head and the river of her body follows, curve after reversing curve, not the way legs walk forward and onward but the way hips swing side to side like laughter—this and also that, that and also this. I hear her, I hear the shape of the ground and how it moves. The shape of the earth and how it swims.    Below the snake, inside the earth (though snake can tunnel there too—there is nowhere she cannot enter), some round, warm mother quivers in some cold, packed chamber, wiggles her nose, her haunches, into her nest of down and grass and someone else’s fur, pops her babies out in tiny globules of tightly sacked fat, blood, and bone, nibbles their tiny heads, licks their closed eyes.
   Some great field opens near me. I feel it open to the wind between my ears. I smell its careless sunlight, too much sunlight for the grasses to drink and so it floods the air and smells like gold.
   How can I sense this dragonfly? How do I know she is rising like vapor from the muck around the field? Her whirring wings make no sound. They seem like a stillness, like me invisible and transparent, yet they lift her high. How do I know? I see her. I see her sitting high on the air, now sliding straight sideways, now elevating, now sinking, now zoom. She comes sudden. Everything she does is impossible. Does she see me, in her globes of many eyes? She sees only droplets of me, mingled with droplets of the world when the world began.
   Some things I have been seeing all this time but not believing. Some things I have been hearing forever but have not noticed. How long has that bird been singing so high above me, I cannot imagine its color? How long have I not known its name?
   I don’t know the color of the bird but I know the color of the song. Every shade of blue. Notes of color I’ve never known and yet remember. Merciless, the bird sings on, tugs me by the heart, drags me up into the world--

****

   Why did I delete this section? Because I’d written the same story many times. Here’s something personal about me, which made it into my first novel (Beauty), too: When I was a little girl, I used to believe I really was a fawn. I felt so certain of this, I felt I was communing with deer wherever I went, and I used to daydream about the relief I would feel when I somehow managed to transform into this creature which I truly was, and people could see me at last for myself.

   The fawn is stillness, familiar to me, the shyness of my childhood. Meditating comes easily to me and I am still so introverted, so inward, with the world so infinite within me, I am more comfortable listening—watching the wheels go round, feeling with all my body and mind the wonders of other lives whirling round me—than speaking. To me, that’s being a writer. It’s when I am alone in the mystery, like the scentless, invisible fawn disappearing into the forest, that I feel closest to my version of God. That is the witnessing.

   But in this trilogy, which is about female sovereignty, I was writing about growing up. I was writing about womanhood, the heroine’s journey. One of the queens in my story morphs into and out of the form of a doe. And in this blog post, in honor of this season which is my birth season (and the birth season of fawns and most other beings), and in honor of having just completed my trilogy, I’d like to explore with you this more personal animal symbol—my totem animal, perhaps. Deer. How can we mature in this particular kind of feminine way, into grace, into gentleness, into community?

   She is my animal, yet I am still a child when it comes to really living her ways.

   I would like to be able to trust my own fleetness, my ability to survive not only by freezing still but by sensing accurately, responding, and acting. My knowing of how to find what I need, my discernment in the dark between what is dangerous and what isn’t—so I don’t have to live in the tension of constant anxiety, but instead use fear wisely, when needed. I would like to walk with such grace, which comes from knowing a place so intimately I belong to it, a knowing that arises from that silent, whole-body listening. I would like to know that my belly can be trusted to seek out the right nourishment in the right season, and that the earth will provide it. I would like to learn the grace of surrendering to what is necessary, of becoming the gift when the gift is called for, of becoming part of the whole and letting myself go.

   Even the stags live this wisdom of surrender. They are the heroes of myth, that rise with the summer and drop their antlers in sacrifice each winter. Trees grow out of their heads. They fight epic battles, but the nobility of trees is in them, and their heroism is cyclical, it is bound by nature’s laws.

   I would like to think in community, not always as a lone entity. I don’t have to depend only on myself to watch for danger. In my web of relationship, I have a hundred eyes and ears. We speak of herd mentality like its only meaning is stupidity. But what does it mean to learn intuition through the eyes and ears of those known to us, to sense deeper and further, in more nuanced layers, because of one’s interconnectedness, one’s trust in the differing awareness of many? One member of the herd can hear a difference in footsteps a half-mile off. Another can be trusted to find the very first shoots in early spring. Another has a sharper sense of smell when she’s pregnant. Another’s mood shifts when the stags come around. There isn’t any kind of judgment. But everyone understands everyone else’s perception, and by this unspoken empathy, survives.

   A doe is the ultimate prey animal; she is absolute fear, and yet her grace shows she is absolute trust. Here is a paradox I would like to live out somehow: to live with the awareness of death constantly present, all the time, and to be so alive, so precious. So that awareness is not oppressive in its terror, but beautiful. To be beloved by every predator. To be the spirit of the forest. To be love itself.

   Happy slightly belated Spring Equinox, friends! We listen through each other’s ears and sense through each other’s senses. If you also have thoughts about how to live with such beauty and grace in these times, my fellow deer, I would love to read them--Post comments! Let us learn from each other and our animal community.

1 Comment

An Answer from Crows

12/23/2021

3 Comments

Winter in the forest. Silent as an owl. There is no snow but I can imagine it, the way snow falls like imagination, without sound. I press my cheek to the cold trunk of a bare elderberry tree at the center of my softly iced garden, and go still. I become aware, over the next hill, of so many crows shouting, it is like rain coming over the ocean. They are the only ones who dare make such noise, I think. They can utterly rend the silence, and yet somehow they do not destroy it.

In my last post, I asked you to send me your questions, and promised I would choose an animal who could answer one of them. Thank you for your responses. Here is a combined version of a few of them: How do we deal with our concern about toxins and other unknown substances in our food, environment, and bodies?

An even more general, and perhaps deeper, variation to this same question might be this: Influenced by so many unknowns from greater forces that I cannot control or perhaps even know, how do I know I can survive? What is my strength, subsumed in the great, impersonal, globalized, industrialized modern world?

I found it fascinating that the animal I chose to answer this question— picked at random from a bowl full of hundreds of animal names— was not a sensitive creature, not the kind endangered by slight alterations in its habitat, not the kind that breathes through its skin or succumbs to pesticides or depends on one kind of caterpillar to survive. No, I picked the Crow.

One of the survivors. The kind who adapts to whatever mess we make. The kind who might even still be around, after we have destroyed ourselves.

A crow is not afraid of anything.

Why not? Because crows can eat anything, and have eaten everything. They have eaten the egg and the adult. They have eaten the living and the dead. They have eaten pure innocent newborn life, and they have eaten garbage. They have eaten the beautiful and the ugly. They have eaten gifts offered in friendship and scraps discarded in despair.

And because they are free. They are free because they are thinkers. They are smart and they know it. They are said to eat anything, yet they are said to be selective. They won’t just take whatever’s thrown to them, they’ll scope it out first. They’ll talk about it with their families, their communities. They’ll call a council. And no one is afraid to speak out, if something seems a little wrong. They are problem-solvers, like we are.

Because they are tough and they know it. Because eating all that stuff, from every level of the food chain, makes you wise. Because they share and teach each other what they know. They keep a lookout for cars while their friends are eating roadkill. They differentiate friend from foe, food from danger.

Don’t let this world bully you into small fears. We are not as fragile as we think. Know what you know, and spread the word among your people.

That’s what I get from crows today, anyway. Maybe you get something different, when you listen. Winter is for listening, after all. I was standing in my garden today, talking to my elderberry tree—a tree I sometimes send prayer through, when I want to pray for the world. On solstice, I pray for the winter. That it not be lost. The arctic. The cold. The glaciers. The other half of the balance.

And the tree prayed back to me: it said, Be what you want to see in the world. Honor what we are losing by becoming it. Be the winter.

The truth is, the forest wasn’t really silent today. I could hear my neighbor’s dogs barking, a sound from the house, some heavy vehicle pulling up a dirt road. And even so, I am privileged to hear much more silence than most people, I know.

But the silence is here, whether we are able to hear it or not. It is always here, around and beneath all things. And if we want to "combat climate change"—that is, if we want to call back the winter—we need to believe in that silence. We need to embody it. We need to practice more stillness, less doing, less consuming, more depth of being. Those of us who still remember that the light in the center of Winter Solstice comes out of the silence of a womb, out of the darkness, let us go dark now. Let us nurture the light in the depths. Let us move upon the earth as if we come from it. Let us commit to the power of winter silence. Our soul is here.

Crows are a cry straight out of black-feathered unconscious. They are right at home in the heart of the winter. There is silence all the time, even in the midst of all the noise, it is everywhere, and the crows know it. They are shouting it out. They are shouting the enormity of such silence, with their brazen, courageous, magician's call to live the truth in our prayers.

Thanks for reading my blog. You can always feel free to send me a question, personal or global, and I will explore some animal’s wisdom to try to answer it. And I welcome your comments—any lessons you may want to share, through your own experience, from your animal and earth relations.

3 Comments

Resurrection by Vulture

10/31/2021

5 Comments

Previously published by We'Moon 2021, on the page for this weekend:

Imagine a world whose creation myth begins not with Light, nor even with Darkness, but with a vulture picking clean the bones of a dream we finally admitted was dead. Our own magic destroyed us in the end. Humanity couldn't rule after all; our own bodies betrayed us. But for the vulture with her naked head, her naked face, the comforting tent of her black wings discreetly enfolding our dying, there is no shame in a body, no shame in our mistakes. Every sinew, every organ, is sacred in its undoing. She scented out our grief. She traveled down from the highest pinnacles of the sky to alight upon our bare, helpless bones. Her body is a crucible that destroys every foul pathogen; she comes to cleanse the earth of its suffering. She comes to ingest our unfinished stories, the sweet intentions in our lies, the meat of our devouring, the wounds of our losses, our shapes that once cast shadows. She comes to recycle them into muscle and wing, and remind us they belong to the universe.

Yes, this is our time of belonging.

Imagine a world whose creation myth begins with letting go. Letting the ugly vulture unbind our beauty, letting the form unwind, letting her prepare us to become the earth. From her nest on the highest cliffs, she digests us and watches the release of our remains now available for new nourishment. She's going to live a long, long time, as vultures do, because they eat truth every day. And for all the thousand ways we resurrect into new lives, new worlds, out of the green heedless fronds of the earth, we are also living up there in her wings, forever, in the absolute stillness of her flight on skies of forgiveness.

© Mindi Meltz 2019

5 Comments

The Heart In Autumn

9/22/2021

2 Comments

Not being a painter myself, I don’t have names for all the colors that will come to the trees. That purpling, wound-red fever, those oranges both earthy and flaming, those yellows that wake us each day innocent, and the copper and bronze and yes, true gold. We think of fire colors, but then there’s that surprising mauve, that violet maroon reminding us of some old love we felt in our gut.

Autumn will make an artwork of grief. A painting of loss. The most festive funeral. She does it every year! And yet we still fear dying. We humans.

Sometimes it feels like autumn is everyone’s favorite season. For some—for the food-makers of this world, the humans I bow to—it is the age-old harvest. For some, it is that sentimental crossroads between the memory of precious summer held and lost, and the promise of cold and coziness to come. It ushers in a time of wrapping in, burrowing down, valuing nourishment, touching and holding. A time of necessary closeness, of home, of forced reflection: now we will be cold, we will be survivors, and we will seek meaning instead of pleasure, while the earth listens. For some, it coincides uncannily, year after year, with powerful life transition, as if the wind blew it in from some far place (you really can smell other places in that wind). For some, the veils thin, and we make fire and speak with spirits. For some, it is merely a relief from the heated overwhelm of summer. The opening for breath.

For me, the katydids are singing their last songs. They were an all-night, all-August party, a pounding, chanting, rattling, ritualistic, shamanic-like tunnel into erasure, and every night I lost my mind into that sound, into dreams like drumming beasts, like Mayan temples, like the source of life. I loved that sound like food. When I am dead someday, sitting around the campfire with the other ghosts reminiscing about the things we miss most about having senses, the chant of katydids is going to top my list.

It’s not quite autumn yet where I live. The earth smells overripe; the air still hangs heavy. But I wake up in a morning too cold for katydids—they went silent while I was sleeping—and listen to the feeble, leftover cricket song that carried on beneath them, straining to bridge the dawn. Faint, it feels, and yet it lasts all day. It lasts forever. Sometimes, for a little while in the afternoon, only one cricket carries on. The sun shrinks and brightens beyond bearing, focused, achingly warm just in front of me, intimate as a face. The crickets don’t sound the way they did all summer, that deep and settled luxury of rhythm. Now their song sounds so tender, after the katydid party all night, as if they hold infinity taut within each beat—hold it up for my awareness. Whoever heard of a sad summer morning? Yet I swear, it is. The ghosts know it. It’s the infinity of it that makes it sad.

Here comes autumn. And I want to talk about grief.

The crickets are throbbing their sweet, tentative, infinite song, a rhythm we’ve known since before we could speak, and we’re standing in the center of a heart, and this is that rhythm. The heart is beating. This is our heart.

   I know people who say they can no longer bear to read the news.
   I know people who choose different news.
   I know people who believe salvation is coming, that darkness is a prelude to light.
   I know people who believe there is no hope for humanity, or for the earth.
   I know people so sensitive, the feeling of one tree machined down, or one creature denied its right to live freely its nature and beauty in this world, is more than can be borne.
   I know people who hurl blame in many different directions, with varying levels of passion, for these things and more.
   Of course, I am some of these people.

We want some kind of escape. Grief can feel suffocating. But really, the heart is infinite. I invite you to crouch down with me in the grass, close your eyes, and listen to our hearts beating along with this rhythm. Feel every one of these colors. Grieve the grief of the world. We don’t have to predict or explain or pretend it away. Only to feel it is sacred. Such colors! To grieve something is to honor it with the greatest love we have to give.

A couple of years ago I started a little dream group where I live. We gather at night, sometimes around a fire, and tell each other the dreams that pull at our hearts, no matter how strange or embarrassing or simple or complex, or ugly or seemingly meaningless or frightening—we just tell the ones that pull at us. Then we reflect back to each other what we hear, from our own hearts, never with any certainty, only as an offering. We have fallen, by this sharing, into the most profound sense of community. We have seen ourselves and the world reflected in this watery, nighttime mirror, and have mirrored each other, celebrated each other, grieved each other, and sometimes dreamed the same things.

At moments when the world was much in our thoughts, like when the pandemic began, there were dreams about the color blue. There came, I thought, a healing in this color, and I’ve been thinking about it ever since. About how blue comes at the end of the rainbow. After blue, we go indigo, we go violet—we go into the colors that will turn us back to red again. But blue is the last primary color, the end of the story before the turning, before the rebirth. You can’t skip it.

People have died, in ways we feel helpless to stop. The world feels crazy. Whatever happens, whether the good guys win or not, whether humanity gets it together in time or not, whether we convince other people to agree with us or not, whether there’s hope or not, nothing can change the fact that creatures, places, whole landscapes, whole realities, whole seasons are being lost from this earth and they will not come back. The losses are real. They are more than the mind can contain.

Yet the heartbeat of the crickets is so comforting, gentle, quiet, and yet so eternal. To grieve is our hearts’ great power. This is the time of deepest feeling, deepest wonder, deepest celebration of the departed. We owe that to the earth, and to each other. To love with all our hearts. When I write books, I try to break people’s hearts, but not because I want to hurt anyone!—only because to me, we source all the answers, and all the healing, from these deeps. There is no way out but through.

If you do not have crickets where you live, I hope you have some sign of autumn. Some color that breaks your heart. Some thread of wind from another place that makes you stop still. And if you don’t have autumn where you live, I hope you stop and wonder at what landscape you do embody and inhabit, and love it for the earth that it is, love it as if it is dying, and as if you are dying, because we all are, and that’s why we’re beautiful.

Where I live, at the end of summer, all the forest is webbed together by the most determined spiders, huge and small, there’s hardly a span of trail or a pocket of negative space that is not connected. Sometimes, attempting to take a walk, I try to duck under and step over those webs until I’m exhausted, until I’m so overwhelmed by the impossibility of moving through this world as a human being, without constantly destroying, that I want to sit down and not go on.

But other times I feel glorious, so aligned with the colors of the day, full of the wilderness I carry within me everywhere, in my love and in my heart, that I press on through, laughing, and web after web collapses over me, enfolds me like a blessing, so that I emerge later into the fields of my home feeling sad and jubilant all at once, and covered in the brokenness of everything, webbed tight, sticky with the world. Dressed in silk. Feeling beautiful.

Feeling every tiny, subtle thread.

2 Comments

SUMMER SISTER

7/4/2021

2 Comments

On the day of Summer Solstice I flew South to Costa Rica, to see where Summer comes from. I’ve written of the Winter Sister and the Spring Sister. Who is Summer? The abundant sister, the fecund, the mother sister. I wanted to experience virgin rainforest, that hot soup of life’s beginnings, where everything’s still possible. I’m completing a trilogy this year whose central thread—as in all my novels—is a yearning to reconnect our broken world in the face of seemingly irredeemable loss. I wanted to go back to the source, back to that place where once we were monkeys, and see if I could know something. Something about what happened to us, maybe. Or why.

So I flew south, bought some groceries, waded a river, hiked a mountain, and lay down to sleep in an open-air hostel in the jungle, listening to the clacks, moans, and bells of that night chorus, thinking that never before had I heard such innocent enthusiasm for just being alive. It filled every leaf-wrapped nook and wet green pocket from every angle on every level of the hundred-storied, high-rise, loud, messy city of that humanless forest. That life was so pure, I felt blissfully meaningless inside it. In the morning, I tried to walk backwards in time. I followed the roots—blood red roots threading the soil, gigantic roots rising like sharp fins from the sea of the earth, webbed dinosaur feet. I looked out at the flanks of the mountains, saw trees breaking out of them as if for the very first time, tethered at every limb by vines that made them look like teeth trailing strings of saliva from the opening jaws of some beast who yawned its first hunger at the beginning of the world.

It amazed me to think that we ever broke from such a hold. That we ever became separate. That we ever walked away so seemingly free, we never had to look at the ground.

Yet from these massive roots, and despite such furious ropes of vine, these trees grew recklessly, so high beyond my seeing, their very hugeness seemed its own kind of innocence. You couldn’t stop it. You wouldn’t think to.

The Priestess in my trilogy, Priestess of Hummingbirds—she comes out of the jungle. I had never walked alone and deep inside one, before now, yet she must have told me something of it, because I recognized her here. Her always open heart, her noisy passion, her overabundance of life, her ignorance of limits, her luxury, her sensual splendor. Her culture descending from mother by mother, endlessly from the Great Mother, of course—and yet also her people of eternal youth, her lack of elders, for in these mountains, trees ten stories high are only a few years old, and they fall early, die young. Yet the forest itself is old. And I understood why she wanted, with all the desperation of being alive, to return here. Here she had hummingbirds of every style, she had the calls of parrots clattering like any jeering birds and yet at the same time eerie, like sirens, and ringing too, like coins, like so many riches every sunset. She had every shape that a leaf could be, and everything bigger. She had frogs made of glass. There was this butterfly, wild, erratic, hand-sized—when I passed a certain place, it flew up before me, flashing its iridescent blue wings whose color could only be seen when open, and it would startle me every time. That’s how this creature survived. By being so beautiful, so suddenly, it knocked its predators off their feet.

I sat in a waterfall, beneath it and within it, and felt how the stone was caressed, constantly, without break, forever, like a heart always open and endlessly broken. I thought, if you died in the jungle, you would die by drowning. You would die thick, hot, wet, smothered with life—without perspective, without wind. You would die at once of wonder and of fear. Life endlessly fountains up and is endlessly quashed, forming and decaying—and humans do not matter here, and there is a coldness in that, like the sea. I could understand, I thought, the violence in some jungle mythology, that wanton violence of a child’s zest for life, who has not yet been softened by experience. This is the great womb, but it’s a dangerous womb. Everything is fighting so fiercely to live, and yet life is nothing. The jungle would as soon eat you as inspire you. The tree of good and evil is here. Everything is here. The Summer Sister—who is she? I think when she grew up, she became the Sister of Compassion.

Hiking back to the hostel that day from the furthest falls, I took ten steps off the trail. Or maybe it was eleven. I thought I was on it, but then I wasn’t, and I knew because I hit a dead end. Scrambled, fallen trees criss-crossed before me—X after X. You cannot pass, human. You’ve got it wrong. I closed my eyes, scared. I am not the Priestess in my story. I cannot live here. I have “evolved” too many thousands of years away from knowing my place, and I don’t know where I am going, and I have come to a point where I cannot seem to see my future. Our future.

I prayed to the Mother and opened my eyes. The prayer was simple but it got me centered. I thought, I need to backtrack. Somewhere, I have lost my way. I retraced my steps and found where the trail had veered off at a right angle. Something I never would have seen unless I was paying attention. Humans are so young. And the trees are young, and they die young, but the forest is old. And it isn’t only brutality and violence and life competing with life, after all, no—there is another way. I turned up this other path now, glorying in relief. A lizard eyed me, and I stopped to eye him back: Lizard, that ancient dreamer of Stone and Sun, that warrior of stillness. For a moment, everything was consciousness. For a moment only. It passed between me and the lizard—all the jungle, in an instant. When people talk about consciousness, I don’t even know what they mean. But I knew in that moment. It was still impersonal. I still didn’t matter. And yet I was the center of the universe, I was everything, and that felt , too, intensely personal—and warm.

What is it? I whispered. Why are we here? What’s going to become of us? How do we reclaim what we lost? Can we really destroy everything? Is this really happening? And there was just this consciousness, like a heart, pulsing, and knowing me, insisting. Life. Life. Life.

The indomitable beauty. The darkness that is limitless beginning. The first color, the first song. The ten thousand birds. The ten thousand coins of the parrots’ keening, the way they spill out of the sky at dusk, and the grief. And all that giving. And there are so many doves, did I mention? And their calls, too, to break the heart ceaselessly, and with that same innocence that makes the trees gigantic, that makes their roots swim. And there—yet another invention of butterfly. And I’ve walked here three times now, yet am startled again out of my mind, because that blue seems, to my human eyes, impossible.

There is something that does not die. I am sure of it.

2 Comments

Spring Sister the Source (Happy Equinox!)

3/20/2021

2 Comments

(photo by Calla Papademas)

   It’s time. Spring, the youngest of the sister seasons, journeys up from the Southern Lands ruled by her sister Summer to bring tidings of warmth and blessing to the world.

As she kisses Summer a sweet goodbye, her arms full of flowers, Summer admonishes her, as always, saying, “Now Spring, don’t be silly about it. Be responsible with the gifts I give you. Give them with grace and good pacing, and gradually, and graciously, and don’t waste half of them on a whim or burst out in too much color all at once or . . .”

   But Spring wasn’t listening. She was too excited, she couldn’t sit still. She was already on her way.

   And Summer shook her rich dark locks and sighed a luscious sigh and thought, She never learns. Every year it’s the same. She goes bursting into the world as if there are no consequences, as if there were no yesterday. She never plans, she’s inconsistent, irresponsible! Oh the ideas she gets into her head! A crocus blooming in the snow? New frogs cheeping and laying their tender eggs in the very first warm spell, with Winter still planning ice storms? Leaf buds bright red? Pink flowers in the trees before the branches have even leafed out? Oh, she’s rash, immature, she doesn’t think! She’ll toss a zillion seeds and insect eggs into the world to try their luck, without help, without thinking what will become of them. And she’s so moody, you can’t reason with her. It’s all balmy sunshine one day and howling winds the next. Rain and bees one minute, then sleet and chilling fog the next. Grass shining so psychedelic green, it’s more than mortal eyes can take, and then she covers it in mudslides. She’s incorrigible! And she starts a thousand projects she’ll never finish.

   Up in the Northlands, their sisters Queen Winter and her messenger Autumn were conversing along similar lines.

   “Spring thinks everything is rainbows and butterflies,” explained Autumn, who was very cool, and highly respected for her dark, cynical poetry on death, loss, and decay. “She makes every feeling so obvious, wears her heart right out in the open every day! She’s so naive, it embarrasses me. A hopeless idealist!”

   “Yes,” answered Winter, after long thought, “she’s a dreamer. She really believes in fairy tales. She’ll never grow up. It’s as if she believes the world can survive all that’s been done to it, all that’s been lost, all that will be lost. Doesn’t she see?” But she looked rather dreamy herself, seeing Spring in her mind.

   “She has no subtlety,” added Autumn. “No artistry. I mean she covers all those stark, skeletal, totally unique tree shapes with amorphous foliage, fills in every single space without design, as if life were limitless! She’ll birth helpless baby animals all over the place— just adorable cuteness wherever you look! It’s ridiculous. See how the humans behave during her time! Like absolute fools. I mean really. She has a thing they call a pussy willow? A fuzz ball on a stick? And a frog called a peeper? Who names these things? They lose their heads to her, that’s what they do.” But Autumn was smiling now, in spite of herself. I wonder what she’ll come up with next? she was thinking.

“She’s so loud,” murmured Winter. “Those colors are so bright! The way the sun melts the scents out of the earth, you forget everything. And she’ll dissolve all my snow and ice in an instant, send it gushing down the hills without care for where it goes, clogging roads, making marshes of meadows, making such a mess of things. I prefer to keep quiet. She takes such risks.” But she spoke with admiration. She was Winter, the season of death. And her favorite time of year was her own ending. She yawned and closed her ice blue eyes. For weeks now, she felt like she’d been holding her breath.

   Spring didn’t care what they said. They’d adored her all their life, and she knew it. She was running north, giddy with sunshine, and all the songbirds went with her.

   Everyone was waiting for her show to begin. She rose up and stretched out her arms, and the flowers and birdsong flew out and rained down where they would, and she did not plan it. She stretched her arms wide open and loved out loud, with her whole heart, and her love poured clumsy, inconsistent light—red and yellow, budding and blooming, ground-bursting and tree-expanding—from the valleys all the way up the mountainsides, rolling up warm and melty, hill by hill, to the coldest peaks.

   And when she arrived at the highest high, the peak of purest thought, the vista of hopeful splendor and infinite imagining, Spring knelt down and kissed the spring that bubbled forth from the stones, from the roots of stunted, enduring, ever-wind-blown trees. She kissed the beginning of the river, the little streams that would become it. She blessed the beginning of all rivers. She said,

   “Oh pretty stream, so sleek here where I touch you, so lacy there where you curve and dally—go and caress all the forms of Earth with life and beginning! Oh wider creek, spreading and speeding up, here ridged and dimpling, there plunging into frothy piles of foam, there slashing sideways, then slowing down again with question, then flowing on with answer—How I bless you! Go on and rush, go on and plunge, and have no thought, have no reason, have no doubt.

   “Bless you, little streams, for you always land beautifully. Bless you, for you always find each other, you always come together, you always agree at last. Bless you River, becoming the River, never alone, for you are always carried. You are always held. Trust the path this Earth gives you.

   “And dear River, may you always be innocent. May you fulfill all your promises.

   “May you quench the thirst of rabbits and birds, deer and coyotes, turtles and people, mice and beetles. May you raise forests upon your banks, and feed swamps with your resting where beavers cocoon you. May you flow undirected, unsullied, undammed by cities. May you deepen with life, with trout, with otters, with snails and with salmon, with kingfisher dreams and with crawfish and water-strider footprints. May your quieter rooms be nurseries for the fairy-ruffed nymphs of salamanders, for fat tadpoles, and for the little moulting monsters that will one day unwrap flying dragons. May you renew every land.

   “May your wild song open hearts. May lovers and poets rejoice alongside you. May the weary bathe in you and rise up refreshed; may you wash and restore; may you be the reason life lives. May you give the gifts you long to give, and may those gifts be honored.

   “May your sound be every story. May you be comfort, may you be faith. May you wash away sorrow while remaining ever pure. May you be the gathering place for celebrating multitudes and devout mourners, and may you be worshipped, and may your worshippers care for your body and pick you clean of anything that does not belong to you. May they hold back their toxins for you. May they live carefully for you, that you may go on beautiful, always, and may their children splash in your sand and your mud; may they find and lose treasures in your crumpling eddies, daydream in your depths, find salamanders beneath your stones and then release them gently right back where they found them.

   “And may you enjoy all the long falling of your life: sometimes sinking so wide and buoyant, like a mother, and other times shooting out into space and then crashing so fast over sudden cliffs that your water seems to freeze in midair, all white, like a meditation on motion. May you be held sacred, everywhere you go, by every being, and may the love of you make them holy. May the love of you make them whole. May you be remembrance. May you be peace. May you be salvation. May you be what everyone longs for in a river, in their good hearts, because I am Spring, and I know that their hearts are good.”

   The River flowed onward and outward and downward from Spring’s passionately loving touch, and it did not pause to question, and it did not pause to doubt. It did not say, What you ask is not possible. It just flowed on, and was happy.

   And Spring said, “Dear River, we are fools. But be forgiveness.

“For as you pass through this world where innocence is uncool, where even this sentence and this prayer is uncool, where others curse and talk jaded and talk snarky… As you pass through this world in which excitement about animal life is something only children feel, and Earth-worship is not counted among the major religions, and magic is unscientific, and earnest emotion is embarrassing, and hopeful stories are not gritty or modern or post-modern enough, and the feminine spirit cannot get a job, and sweetness is weakness, and mythical creatures are for escapist fairy tales, and the thrill of Spring is a thing one outgrows, as one outgrows “Nature” when one is grownup and realistic, and the “real” world is the sad world only— don’t worry, don’t be afraid, for I am your Source.

   “Because you know where you are going, River. Because the sea calls you there. Because I am Spring, and I forgive us the Winter. I forgive us the sorrow of yet another year. I forgive us our pain, our cynicism, our foolish despair.

   “Dear River, be forever. Dear River, be free.”

2 Comments

OUR WINTER SISTER

1/28/2021

1 Comment

   Once upon a time, the Earth and the Sky fell in love. They gave birth to four daughters, whose names were Winter, Autumn, Summer, and Spring. They were dutiful daughters; they kept house for their mother, and were the inspiration of all her days. Their father the Sky was a wayward, fickle lover to the Earth, sometimes tender and sometimes distant, sometimes nurturing and sometimes cold, but he loved his daughters dearly. He dressed his eldest, Winter, in the most luxurious snows. He gave Autumn the weather to play with. He lavished Summer with his most splendid, golden heat, and pampered his youngest, Spring, with his sweetest tears, which yielded her every shade of luminous green.

   Spring, the baby of the family, always idolized Summer’s confidence and dazzling color. And every now and then in a wistful afternoon, lazing about in crickets and bees, Summer secretly admired Autumn for her courage and freedom. Autumn in turn respected Winter’s stoic strength, and Winter, in her silent heart, absolutely adored Spring—though nobody knew it.

   When they were children, they used to dream up the world together. Spring came up with all the ideas—leaves and birds’ nests, flowers and frogs, dewy mornings and first kisses and melting rivers. Whatever she wanted, she wanted with ferocity, and sometimes she startled the others with her outlandish creations, but everyone loved her for her endless optimism and sweet disposition. She was the inspiration of all their lives, their great hope for the future. Summer embraced everyone’s ideas with unconditional love. She felt they could do anything. Her love felt like the sun, and all were drawn to her warmth, her sensual dance, her love of life, her exuberant heart. She gave and gave, and never ran out of love to give. Autumn, wild and adventurous, was more unpredictable. If she didn’t like an idea, she could be quite cutting in her critique. But everyone went to her if they wanted honesty, for she saw truly.

   Winter never said much. No one knew what she was thinking, she didn’t contribute any ideas to their dreams for the world, and some called her cold. But no one noticed that late at night, after the others had gone to sleep, she cleaned up all their toys, threw away their rejected creations, and laid the world quiet again so they could wake up in the morning and start fresh.

   The four sisters grew up, and Summer became Queen of the South, while Winter became Queen of the North, for these were the lands their mother bequeathed to them. Spring and Autumn served as messengers between them. Spring brought warmth up to the in-between lands from the South, to enliven the bodies of all beings. Autumn brought the cold down from Winter’s land, to enliven their spirits. It was understood in their family, without ever needing to be said, that this balance was necessary in order for life to exist.

   Summer married first: she married Thunder, for his heavy, fruitful rains. It was a practically motivated, yet fond marriage, extremely busy, extremely fecund. Summer lived for her children. Her little sister Spring used to adore them and make them presents, and when they grew older, Autumn helped them choose their careers, guided their purpose, gave them advice which Summer sometimes appreciated and sometimes did not.

   Spring’s romance began in her childhood, and never lost its innocence. Her marriage to Rain was a glorious event celebrated in every fairy tale, a soulmate love of eternal youth, and it never faded. Their children were more fragile, and many didn’t make it. But nothing could quell Spring’s eternal buoyancy, and always she had her sisters to comfort her with the wisdom of time—for she was their darling, and no one could ever be angry with her for even a moment, or cease believing in her.

   Autumn married late in life. She was independent and fierce, she smelled of spice and rot, and men feared her. After breaking a thousand hearts, she eventually married Wind, and they grew old together, always traveling. They never had children. They were both artists, and they liked their freedom.

   Winter never married at all. She seemed to grow only more silent, more cold, as she grew older, and her thoughts turned ever inward. Sometimes, said Summer once to Autumn, I wonder if she is even capable of love! They never invited her, anymore, to their children’s births or achievements, for they feared she would hurt them. It seemed she brought a chill to every event, and her mood of sorrow and emptiness ruined it. They never noticed how, with steadfast and unwavering gentleness, she took care of their mother all the years of her life. She was the only one of them who comforted their mother, lay a blanket over her when she was sleeping, gave her rest. She dreamed with their father, and learned all about their ancestry, where they came from. Unlike the other sisters, she seemed to care more about the past than about the future. If you won’t marry, what will you do with your life? they asked her, for she didn’t even create art, like her sister Autumn. Nothing, she said, and did not explain.

   They began to mistrust Winter, and then, without really intending it, they began to leave her out of their conversations and plans. There seemed something wrong about her, something dangerous. Their mother noticed, and asked them please to be at peace, to love each other always, for her sake. But they didn’t feel angry with Winter. They just didn’t want her around. And Winter, in her humble way, never protested. When they forgot about her entirely, she did nothing to remind them.

   The more disconnected they became from their cold sister, the more a restlessness grew in them, a feverish dissatisfaction they could not define. Summer, always productive and energetic, pushed her children to work harder, achieve bigger, build higher. Her children made cities, fortresses, wars, technology, and future after future after future. She taught them always to want more. Spring, whose cheerful inspiration began to seem a bit manic, taught them to always want something shiny and new. And Autumn, who’d turned cynical in her old age, taught them always to want something different.

   So the beings of Earth worked on and on, creating and creating, changing everything, destroying and remaking, so that in the end, there was no more room for Winter. Their father the Sky, hot and irritable, grew more fickle than ever, and started playing games with the weather. When they begged him to stop, he wouldn’t listen.

   “He used to be so tender with me,” wept Spring. Summer and Autumn had found her crying by a little, lily-covered pool in the forest, and they put their arms around her, but they were afraid. They had never seen Spring cry before, not in all their lives.

   “You don’t know it,” cried Spring, “but I have cried many times. In my childhood, I used to cry at the beginning of every year. I used to feel lost, and not know the meaning of things. What is the point? I used to ask myself. Why create the world all over again? But you know something? It was Winter who comforted me. I could never tell either of you, because I knew you counted on me to be sunny and cheerful. But Winter always knew. And she always understood. Though she never used any words, after she held me for a little while, I felt strong again, and everything made sense, and I was ready to begin.”

   Summer and Autumn were silent at first. No one had mentioned Winter for a long time. But now their memories were also returning to them.

   “You know,” said Autumn. “I haven’t wanted to say anything. But the truth is, my art is empty these days. The songs of Wind sound hollow to me, and without purpose. My stories feel ungrounded. And I think it has something to do with losing touch—with our sister Winter.”

   “I haven’t wanted to say anything either,” said Summer. She lay down her giant arms full of fruits and flowers, and bowed her head. “But sometimes, I’m just so tired. My children fight with each other. I work so hard. And somehow, it always gave me peace, just knowing Winter was there on the other side of the world.”

   They all sat silent, as silent as Winter herself. They thought of Winter’s bare, naked trees. Without saying it aloud, they realized that this was the gift Winter had always given them, or tried to—the ability to be honest with themselves. To look within, on those coldest, loneliest nights.

   Spring stood up with her characteristic passion. “We must find her! We must bring our sister back to us!” she cried out, with the petulance of a child.

   “But I cannot leave my lands and my children,” said Summer. “I have too much to take care of here.”

   “And I must stay and nurture the most fragile new shoots and buds,” acknowledged Spring, upon reflection.

   “It is I who will go, then,” offered Autumn, “and search for her. There is nothing to tie me down, and anyway, the responsibility falls most of all with me. My stories were always about her. Winter has been the inspiration for all of my art. I just didn’t realize until now.”

   So Autumn journeyed back to the North, where she hadn’t been for a long time. She couldn’t find Winter anywhere, nor any trace of her—no ice, no snow, no freezing nights of wonder. She asked the stones, she asked the animals who’d once hibernated, she asked the birds who used to migrate, she asked the skeletons of things that used to be. She called deep into still water. No one had seen her. Though Winter had never married, nor ever had any lover, she had birthed many spirit children, over the ages—creatures of shaggy white fur, snowy feathers, or sleek undersea grace. But these were all gone now. They had simply disappeared.

   When Autumn realized that Winter was truly missing—and that the North lay in ruin, leaving the whole world teetering off balance, oceans dying, kingdoms once beautiful now in danger of burning up—she sat down and wept.

   Then she returned to her other two sisters.

   She returned to Spring shaking with fear, and Summer crushed with guilt. The more they had missed her, the more Winter’s loss had begun to really weigh on them. They rushed impatiently to Autumn—“Where is she? Didn’t you find her?”

   “No,” said Autumn. “I did not find her. I found nothing.”

   And they were angry with Autumn, for disappointing them. But Autumn was never one to be fazed by others’ judgments.

   “Listen,” she told them. “Winter IS nothing. She is the loss. She is the grief. That’s the time of year she is. That’s what we never made room for before. And that’s what we have to feel now, in order to reclaim her.”

   Spring and Summer went quiet, listening.

   “This is Winter,” said Autumn. “Our sister. She understands everything, you see. I think she always knew this would happen. She knew we would deny her and forget her, because she understands history. She understands forgetting, because she is memory. She knows what has happened, and what will happen again. She is the wisdom we know when we see the whole. That’s why she comforts us. She’s just being what she is.”

   “I am so sorry,” said Spring.

   “Me too,” said Summer. “I was afraid of her. I let myself forget.”

   “It’s alright,” said Autumn, “because Winter is forgiveness.”

   “What must we do now?” said Spring.

   “Nothing,” said Autumn. “Let’s just listen. Let’s listen to each other.”

   They sat for a long time in circle, like the quiet council in winters of old. They listened to the echoes of Spring’s first chirps, the bursting of dams, the strain of new seeds sprouting, the peepers. They listened to the memories of Summer’s symphony: the bees and cicadas, laughter and waves, hammering and howling, crowing and singing. They listened to Autumn’s eerie, haunting songs about letting go.

   “I would like to honor my sister Winter,” said Spring. “What gifts can we give her, to tell her we appreciate her at last?”

   “I will give her,” said Summer, “a cozy fire for story-telling in the heart of her age-old silence. It will bring people together, so that they think of her with fondness, and remember her even in the middle of my pleasure and my dancing.”

   “I will give her the stars on a great, clear night,” said Spring, “and Northern Lights, and unexplained dreams, and wishes.”

   “I will give her a swirling wind,” said Autumn, “to make beauty of her snowflakes and play with the shapes of her curving white dunes.”

   Then they were quiet again. They still missed her. The sun was setting, and their father the Sky was listening closely. It was the first time in a long time that he had felt so present.

   “I think she will like those gifts,” said Summer at last. “But I wonder how we will ever bring her back, for real, so that we may give them to her? You know we cannot live without her.”

   “Then I think we must die,” said Spring.

   They all looked at her. They didn’t know what she could possibly mean—and yet they did know. Winter is sacrifice. Winter is giving back. Summer was weeping, but it was beautiful, and they did not tell her to stop, they did not tell her everything was okay.

   “Don’t be afraid,” said Spring, as they lay themselves down. For the first time in her life, it was she who comforted Summer, reaching out her small maiden hand. “For Winter loves us. And we are going to be reborn.”

   “Yes,” said Autumn, as she covered them all with the most heart-breaking, intricate, glorious collage of flame, mauve, crimson, and scarlet leaves of every pattern. “Just trust. Winter is trust.”

1 Comment

<<Previous

A brief Winter Solstice Blessing

Summer Savoring . . .

Gravity

Deer Community . . .

An Answer from Crows

Resurrection by Vulture

The Heart In Autumn

SUMMER SISTER

Spring Sister the Source (Happy Equinox!)

OUR WINTER SISTER

We ask

Archives

Categories

We ask

Archives

Categories

Subscribe