It was getting quite late and dark,

nearing the point of no return. 

Little flickers of terror were lapping at the heels of the mothers;

of the people,

of the bears,

of the aspen grove.

Whenever February felt too cold and dark, I found myself bundling up and trudging out to the greenhouse. I would scoop soil into little pots and create little seed beds with my finger, as I looked out at the frozen, leafless back yard. I poured tiny tomato seeds into the palm of my hand and scooped out a few to bury, marveling at how much life can burst forth from such a tiny thing. I dropped the seeds in and covered them with soil and water, knowing that much of their lives were out of my direct control.

My grandma religiously fed the crows in her front yard. I found this endearing and curious as a child, but mostly took it for granted, as I schlepped the leftovers from our latest meal into the metal tray and carried it out for the hungry corvids. I wish now, that I had asked her more about what compelled her to do that.

When you find resonance in nature and it mirrors back to you a struggle you know well in your heart.

I am struck by the many ways and times we leave home in our lives, sometimes never to return. Other times we come back again, but we are changed and home is not the same, home is no longer home.

How can ceremony and ritual help us find our way back to belonging? And if we can start a new way, how can this affect the next generations. Imagining what the ripples can do…

I piled my arms full ,

of the baggage and sustenance

needed for the day,

and heaved it into the backseat.

I reached into my pocket,

but the key wasn’t there.

The mother-child relationship in human, animal and even many plant populations is one that when nurtured, honored, and given support can make both entities into something much more whole and fulfilled than they ever would have been alone.

This is a part 2 to Rae’s article “2024..a year to rediscover cycles.” She reflects on how grounding further into cycles she recognizes her belonging in all things and feels more acceptance to shifting energy throughout the different monthly moon phases and seasons.

“I imagine a Mother Tree standing tall, firm, rooted, with a wise awareness of what is going on around her. She isn’t fretting and running in a million directions to create the most accomplished saplings. Rather, she watches over them, nourishes them, and tends to them with the things they actually need to grow.”

When we learn and begin to use the practice of ritual and ceremony in an intentional way for our modern times, there are powerful and unexpected portals to doing our work.

Reflections on how beginning to observe and take keener awareness of the various cycles in everyday life shift my perception of myself, the more than human world, and the belonging within all of it.

Neurodivergence is not the problem. Humans who are neurodivergent are actually picking up on the adverse conditions we are all living in, and many of these humans, in my experience, point to a better way for all types of people.

I often hear the phrase “too sensitive” thrown around as some kind of admonishment or description of weakness.  I have heard it used to describe teenagers, mothers, fathers, children.  I watch people with this deeply sensitive nature learn how to cloak it, put it away, keep it hidden and sometimes build walls so tall and strong around it that even they forget it is there. 

What if we are beloved to the Universe? What if it is waiting for us to come back to it? What if it is watching us and hoping we remember what we are a part of? And maybe in the remembering, we will realize we need more than a 10 year plan. We need a much, much longer plan.

Most mornings, I drink my coffee and with the extra lift of the flavor and its sustenance, I pull on my running shoes. I dial my sister’s number and as our talking rocks connect, we start our almost stream-of-conscious sharing. We talk about what we sense in the collective field, our griefs and longings, our joys and celebrations and our attempts to understand our own ways of showing up in the midst of it all.

As we played around with words for describing the mission of this website, and also a title for a manuscript we are working on, the word “mother” came up over and over. It always seemed to be a major part of the description, but my visceral reaction to this word, and my need to lean away from it is curious to me.

We have grown up in a place where beautiful, enormous ponderosa pine trees have been a backdrop of many of the places with which we are most familiar. In fact, Spokane, Washington is actually the place these great trees were first given their own unique name. On November 17, 2015 something that is not native to the rhythms of eastern Washington swept through Spokane.

One hot and humid Friday afternoon, I took my computer and my lukewarm iced coffee and relocated myself away from the kitchen table laden with crumbs and a lanky, brooding teenager to the front porch. Here I sat, surrounded by beauty and a different kind of unfinished chores, and looked through lists and calendars, things to schedule, places to be and my head started to feel like a slime container I once found that had been left in a hot car for several days.

Last year, at the small multi-age school where I teach, we started a Project on the Shrub-Steppe. Partway through this exploration of the ecosystem that we are surrounded by, but often know so little about, we met one of it’s inhabitants that completely captured our hearts and imaginations.