Reflections from my journey along this wild ride of life…

I recently attended a Women's Writing Retreat at Pyramid Life Center in Paradox, NY. It was life affirming in so many ways.
​Below are the writings inspired in that time and place. I plan to add more as they come through.

My Introduction

A soul on a journey fanning the flame of existence. Taking up space in a wild and windy world. Allowing transformation to take hold, the water of life to wash over and create something new. Each lifetime, each decade, each year, each month, each day, each hour, each minute, each moment.

Wild

It’s often subtle when the psilocybin kicks in, like tendrils of a forgotten memory. 
Are the plants moving? 
Are the rocks breathing? 
Is the boundary of my body dissipating into something more whole? 
1996. We had just landed in Jedidiah Smith State Park amidst the sea of majestic sequoias and the river that runs through it. I had never breathed the air of trees that had weathered hundreds of years of change.
In all my Sunday mornings in church, I never once felt God there. I knew God was wild. God didn’t care if I was wearing jeans. God didn’t think I was a sinner. God was outside. God was here. In that quiet but powerful hum of the symphony that had been seeing the world alive for centuries. 
It asked for no donations or repentance only connection. To take our place in the circle. To add our song in harmony. It was here amid the mosaic of rocks and towering giants that I remembered my wildness. 
​Ilumed with the importance of pebbles. 
Disarmed by the rapture of wind. 
Enlightened by the glow of the sun. 
Wash clean with the coolness of water. 
Tethered by the steadiness of trees. 
Transported by space, time and psychedelics into something more true…
That place shook me awake from my tri-state rat race obsessed slumber and showed me the beauty of long slow growth. How much time it takes to lose our delusion of separation and weave ourselves back into the holy. 
​Wildness gifts us with communion. A sacrament that can’t be contained within four walls. It feeds our aliveness. It amplifies the whispers of our heart into the wails of the loon call.​

We spent the entire day wandering and wandering along a trail I would walk the next morning in 10 minutes. 
I didn’t get here because I knew where I was going. I was drawn…like a caged bird to freedom. Like hearts in the margin of this passage. Like that itch to begin writing something even though you don’t know how it will end...

Corvallis

When I walked into the house, I saw the happy version of the dark Christina’s World painting that had hung in my house while death swallowed me. This girl was joyful, bright, running with a kite in front of a red barn on a sunny, clear day. It made me stay. I felt the pull of home. 

The guy I was crushing over, helped too. As well as the warm welcome, the free room, the bike lanes, the co-op, the farmers market, the towering stature of Mary’s Peak looming over this fertile valley an hour east of the wild coast of the Pacific. It was close enough to the redwoods that I felt I could get there. It was enough of a city that I could get around without a car, but small town enough that I could stay sane and connected to nature. I was a little surprised that I had come all this way to live on a dead end street that looked like it could have been in the sleepy suburbia from which I had sprouted. 
But this place made me feel alive. I was grateful to have some community there despite being a total newbie. I love that Corvallis had the highest percentage of folks who bike per capita. I was excited excited to have done it. Finally! After years of longing to break out of New Jersey, I was free at last. The climate was an interesting adjustment - more of a wet and dry season than the four I had known. Winter without snow. Rain without thunder. A beach without fees or lifeguards or other people. Wilderness for days. A refreshingly smaller ratio of people to nature.

The song that is your life - Martha Postlethwait

Reflections on the line - “the song that is your life” from the poem Do Not Try to Save the Whole World by Martha Postlethwait

The song that is your life shifts my perspective away from the to do’s and productivity and reminds me that a life is a thing made of beauty. It’s meant to be a song, not hummed or whispered, but belted from a mountain top at sunrise. The birds remind us to sing life into existence each day and the connection that sound invites. How can we harmonize in the divine symphony of life? This line evokes questions and just as I promised not to worry about endings when I begin writing, I need not worry about answers when the question forms. Perhaps the journey toward the answer - the seeking, the being, the remembrance, the singing - is the answer itself.
Give yourself to this world. Make it a daily practice. Allow your boundaries to be firm enough to root you but wild enough to evolve. Change is life. Give yourself to this world. Give it your attention, your prana, your dharma, your prayers that are made out of grass...

I had nothing better to do than listen - Mary Oliver

Learn to be a Good Listener

A story inspired by the line "I had nothing better to do than listen" in Mary Oliver's poem Mockingbirds...
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I had nothing better to do than listen - sitting on the crosstown bus stuck in traffic. A man hopped on at the midtown stop – energized, bouncy. He sat down next to me and started talking. I hadn’t asked any questions. He told me of his separation with his son’s mother. How they argued. How he hit her. He didn’t know how to control it. Whoa, no. You don’t wanna be doing that. Not only for your son‘s mom's sake, but for your son. Meet at the library or grocery store or a park when you exchange your son. Don’t let yourself be alone with her if you can’t control this. He thanked me and hopped off at the next stop. Sitting on that bus as it began its jerky start to continue across town, I realized my dharma. I was here to help people. I remembered the wise words, my guru, my godmother, my aunt - Sister, Doctor Lorraine Reilly - had shared. Advice she got from her father, my grandfather, who had never met. “Learn to be a good listener.”