“So, you’re the one who does this?”

“I’m the one who does this.”

We chatted and chatted. I learned that she has two sons, and an aging father she cares for. I learned she does not have “green thumbs.” We talked about my why for the free little garden shop, and her concerns for her children’s future. We hugged before she continued on her walk.

Very few of my plant babies were adopted yesterday. Most people, separated from the soil and seasons, don’t think about planting at this time of year, though late summer and early autumn are actually wonderful times to do so. If no one takes them home over the next few weeks, I will find spaces for them to overwinter in my own gardens before setting them out again in the spring.

It is supposed to be a damp and warm week here in central CT, so I sowed seeds for fall crops in a newly cleared (of potatoes) bed: broccoli rabe in the southern half of the bed, and arugula in the northern half. I patted them down so they had good contact with the soil, and watered them in. Now, I will wait to see if they germinate, and grow on, and feed.

I have other seeds, idea-seeds, germinating within my imagination, too. Ideas about community; resilience; and organic, neighborly, human systems of connection, cooperation, and interdependence. I am getting ready to share these ideas. I will keep you posted.

In the meantime there is bread dough to mix, and a container of “Verdure in Scapece” (Italian grilled and marinated eggplant, peppers, and zucchini) to apportion out for myself and beloveds for tonight’s supper. I am learning to bake bread (which is quite a science, actually,) and remembering how to cook like my father’s people did: with joy; with fresh from the garden/farm produce and herbs; and with gratitude and generosity.

Courage my dears. Love one another.

I know (I know) that standing for is more powerful than holding against; it must be like a laser more than a search-light, though. It must be that it is energy and attention focused instead of scattered. It is magnified by the power of love, but it is often so quiet as to go unnoticed, even as it changes things. I am a quiet person by nature and upbringing. I trust that my quiet persistence in creating some space where the Earth can be healthy, where I can sow, plant, grow, reap, preserve, cook, and share, even as I write, protest (stand for what I want to see happen,) vote, organize, etc. is “a force more powerful” in the long run, and yet it is hard to watch the days go by in much the same ways while more sisters and brothers harmed; more civil and civic rights stripped away; as the planet continues to heat; and the people grow hungrier, sicker, and more entranced by the glitter of the fool’s gold held out to them by manipulators of minds and markets.

I keep coming back to the question: “what is needed here?” Here, in my own heart, what is needed is discernment and wisdom. My aging body needs compassion and more self-care than it used to. My gardens need space to do their thing, and a bit of tending from me. My beloveds (family, friends, community members) also need space, grace, freedom, love, and support, to be who they are and do what is their’s to do.

This morning I rose before the sun to greet the (mostly) full moon before she set. As I stood on my west-facing front steps to just be for a few moments the fox who lives behind the church crossed the road and parking lot on her/his way home for the day. I greeted the moon and the fox, and then I turned back to house where bread dough was waiting to be mixed so it could rise, and be formed, and baked into bread to nourish and sustain us for another day, through another night, and into the future, whether dark or bright … well, that is for us to decide: each of us voting our choice through our thoughts, words, and actions in every moment and with every decision.

Courage my dears. Do what is yours to do. Be discerning. Be focused. Be a “force more powerful.” Love one another.

Note: A Force More Powerful is the title of a book, and a video series on the power of nonviolent peacemaking. I recommend both. You can watch here: https://www.nonviolent-conflict.org/force-powerful-english/ or purchase the book at bookshop.org and/or thriftbooks.com.

“But I tell you, do not resist an evil person ….” is a teaching of Jesus of Nazareth from the 5th chapter of Matthew’s book, and part of what we have come to call “The Sermon on the Mount.” It is also quite consternating to any of us reared in the ways of the human world. To be clear, I want to resist evil. I want to stick my face in the face of evil, call it out, and shame it out of existence. I want to use the energy of my disdain for people who choose to be cruel; choose not to change. That is what my ego wants to do: engage in a shouting and shaming match. It makes me feel as if I have some agency, some power to effect change.

The truth is, I do have those things, though not if I behave like that, and only when I step outside the rules of the powers, and into the teachings of love and wisdom; when I become quieter, more aware, more grounded, and more responsive, and generative.

It turns out that “holding nothing against,” and “not resist[ing] an evil person,” are powerful, thoughtful, active, full-of-new-possibility, responses and not passive-acceptance of abuse and power-dynamics as our societies might have taught us they are.

I am writing wisdom into coherence, so bear with me here. If I “resist” and “hold against,” then all my energies and strength are being poured into (stopping) someone else’s vision of the world, and not into creating the new vision, the new world I already imagine. It is one way the current systems keep me busy and alarmed, instead of rested, well, and at peace.

If I let go, if I release the tension that has held me and whatever other locked in place I will be free to rest, to turn my head and see other perspectives, to stand at ease in grace, to notice what is needed, and respond thoughtfully. Does this make sense?

In Sub-Saharan Africa the people, across nations, are planting The Great Green Wall. They are using an ingenious way of planting native trees, shrubs, grasses, and crops into crescents dug into the earth so that water sinks in instead of running off. This process is almost always called resistance (and often in the languages of war) to desertification. It is my belief, though, that such a continent wide, human movement could never be held “against” something, but only for something. The peoples involved are creating and regenerating their own lives and livelihoods. The desert is not their focus. Their focus is food, and nature, and life. They are not standing against the desert, they are standing with one another, for life. (The image below is from the website kids.earth.org.)

Even the word “protest” has been coopted to mean standing against, hasn’t it? But the word is protest. To testify for something. To speak for something. To stand for something we want.

The suffragettes who stood outside the people’s house (then occupied by Woodrow Wilson) throughout 1917 stood for the right of women to vote. It took a full year for the “silent sentinels” to persuade the public and the then president to support their right. They stood for, and it worked.

I know what I stand for; I have not known how much I have confused the stasis of “holding against” with the power of imagining, creating, and acting for what I want. Now that I know, everything has changed.

Courage my dears. Love one another.

Holding something against is a form of leverage in physical sciences. If I am carrying something heavy, and I lean it against a wall or tree, the wall or tree bears some of the weight, but only so long as I stay there in a holding pattern.

If I am carrying a grandchild, holding the child close to my body is better for me, and the child, than trying to hold them at arms length. I don’t think the words were meant for this particular way of holding, though.

In the more spiritual and psychological sense (which is how I interpret most dreams) I hear more about forgiveness, and what some of my teachers would have called “holy detachment,” in these three words.

“Hold nothing against.”

I have some pondering to do. Here are some of the things I will pondering:

What do I hold against myself, and what do I hold myself against? An immediate answer is: very high expectations. Too high. A beloved and joyful friend who is recovering from surgery this morning (may she heal well and quickly) has told me more than once of late that I ought be more gentle with myself. She is right, as she so often is.

What do I hold against others? Definitely past behavior. I hold their behavior against my expectations. Sigh. Well, there are those expectations again.

Holding against traps only me. If I am holding something against myself or someone(s) else, I must stay still and hold tight. “Holding against” keeps me from the possibility of love, and uses a huge amount of energy that would naturally flow outward to heal and create. Holding against congeals energy in one hard place of accusation and opposition.

It comes to me that “holding against” keeps the barbs in our wounds. It keeps us wounded and unable to heal. This is not good medicine at all. It is, in fact, quite stupid of us.

Somehow, probably through practicing awareness, sight, and compassion, I/we must learn to see ourselves, others, and the world clearly. I/we must remember that patterns are only fated if we hold them so. I/we must develop the compassion to let ourselves, others, and situations grow beyond their own pasts. Oh, my.

What was was. What is is. Probability matters, but is not predetermined. What can be is filled with possibility if we are filled with possibility. Hmmm.

Three words. So much to be with, so much more to discover, and the rest of my lifetime to practice and realize. May it be so.

May we know and acknowledge our personal and cultural histories. May we see where we have erred. May we remove the barbs of shame, blame, and projection. May we atone and be made whole in ourselves and with one another. May we free ourselves, one another, and the human world from repeating the patterns of the past. May we create the world we want to live in. May that be so.

Courage my dears. Love one another.

I noticed in the long border that a hazelnut, Corylus avelana, who took awhile to get their roots down between the roots of the neighbor’s old maple tree, has sent up new shoots and has produced its first ever catkins (these are the male, winter, flowers that fertilize next spring’s female flowers.) It made me glad.

Another small tree, a native aronia, which had struggled in its space outside the kitchen door for a couple years, is lush and green and actually flowered in this difficult-weather summer. That made me glad, also.

This late summer I have found numerous witch hazel (Hamamelis virginiana) babies popping up in the vegetable beds. The mother plant is pictured in bloom in early March above. I have four or five in pots to find a home for and/or share at the Free Little Garden Shop this weekend. The garden shop has also been on summer break as any little plants left there would have baked in the bright sun of high summer.

I have many blackberry plants to share, and a few raspberries, too. Also, some wild bergamot, and rhubarb.

For now, though, I have some beloveds to pray healing for and Luna is telling me (in her speaking without words way) that it is time for a walk.

On into the day I go. May it be a day for making the good real (which is what realizing means, after all.) May we real-ize a good world in eight billion small ways; what a difference that will make. May it be so.

“As it was in the beginning ….”

Courage my dears. Love one another.

I know it helps no one to share this, except maybe that other people feel less alone; still, it is true for now. And that “for now” is important, I hope. I hope.

Disillusionment was more tolerable when the systems of life I have always depended upon were still somewhat dependable. But systems ensuring food safety, medical care and research, actual justice, education, national security, international relations, and environmental health (and many more I am sure) have all been hung, drawn, and quartered to the grunting hurrahs of those embodying ignorance and hate. I have learned that human depravity may actually be a bottomless pit. I see all these folks together in a hole that they keep digging deeper. Eventually the walls will give in on them. I wish they would put down the shovels and climb the ladders good folk keep lowering down to them. I wish.

For me, the disillusionment is getting down to the heart and bones of things now and even good people with quite some influence, like Pope Leo, or the Reverend Doctor William Barber, or Bishop Mariann Budde, or Congresswoman AOC, or the wonderful people I read here or in books (and I am and have been reading some wonderful books this summer, so there is a ray of that hope I hope for) are not able to rescue the systems from themselves. The systems forgot their purpose, which guaranteed they would undermine themselves. Either that, or they revealed their true purpose and nothing founded on untruth (sand) can ever stand for long.

These days are ripping away the veils at an astonishing rate. Scotus is supreme only in its flagrant disregard of justice. The minority leader in Congress has lost all credibility through his own actions and inactions. The nation is governed by weak and evil people.

The (mostly black and brown) population in Gary, Indiana is suffering and being as ignored as the suffering of black and brown people almost always is ignored by the powers that be. The world is baking, flooding, and eroding and a mentally unhealthy sycophantic young woman is capturing all the headlines while a monster El Nino forms in the Pacific and hunger crouches all along the margins of society. What the literal hell is this?

As Mr. Churchill said, “When you’re going through hell, keep going.”

The only good thing about hell is it nothing but illusion, and a weak one at that. It falls apart the moment anyone realizes this. Hell has limits. Hell is small, and tight. Hell is not a place outside of us, it is only a dark corner of our hearts and minds that we fear to shine light into and move through. Hell is not a place of punishment, it is a human creation. We can turn and leave it at any moment if we choose to do so. The best description I have read of it came in C.S. Lewis’ book The Great Divorce when an angel explained to the protagonist that hell is so small that a butterfly could swallow it, and it could pass through that butterfly and out the other end, without a moment of discomfort for the insect. Hell is an illusion, and those who squeeze themselves small enough to reside in its energies are projectionists.

Behind the veils of illusion lie billions of possibilities for better ways for the planet, and for us, the people of the planet, and all our descendants. We can choose to enter this field of possibilities, or we can join those in the pit.

As I was told so long ago in a night dream that changed my life, “The illusions will fall whenever [The Good] is born into the world again.” One way of looking at these times, then, is to see that The Good is being born quickly now. May it be so. May it be so. May it be ever so.

That is where I hold my hope: in The Good, and in every human heart that gives it a home and carries it lovingly into a waiting world.

Courage my dears. May our hearts be too big to fit inside the hell created by fearful people. May our generosity be too great to be held captive by lies and hate. May The Good in us all shine in the darkness. The darkness will never overcome The Good. May it be so. Love one another.

I spent most of yesterday not harvesting or doing much of anything else, but only trying to stay quiet and out of bright light as a migraine settled over me just before noon. Migraines crimp my plans. I feel well again this morning and am grateful for that as I sip my coffee and type this reflection.

The dining room table is still covered in tomatoes and hazelnuts, although I did get one batch of tomatoes roasted with garlic before the worst of the headache stopped me. These tomatoes won’t wait much longer now, they need cooking, so I plan to spend some hours this afternoon getting them preserved.

Late in the spring I planted three young blueberries into a back garden bed beside their six mature aunties. I love blueberries, especially when they are barely ripe and still a bit tart. All summer, as the aunties flowered, set berries, ripened, and were harvested (by me and then the birds) those young bushes have been quietly growing their roots in the deep soil of what has been an herbaceous perennial bed filled with monarda, echinacea, echinops, and heliopsis. May those babies grow on, and grow into, flourishing mature parts of this little ecosystem I tend. May it be so.

Yesterday we read about yet another outbreak of food-borne illness: this time it is e-coli in organic, frozen blueberries.

Our food systems in the U.S. are broken now. Probably purposely by those whose eyes have been focused only on profit, and not on providing sustenance. Years ago, here in the not-so-United States, we took our medical care out of the hands of healers and gave it over to insurance executives. We have done the same with our food: we have taken it from those called to tend the soil, care for animals, and grow crops for their own families and communities, and given it over to agribusiness executives and pesticide producers. The people making the rules are making them for one reason only: to line their own pockets.

Both are symptoms of societal insanity. All of us are now dealing with the results of those changes (and many others, besides.) The “temples” have been made into “dens of thieves.” It is time to turn the tables.

What can you do? You can starve the machines of energy (your money) however possible. Start small, lean into it, visit a farmer’s market or farm shop, plan to shop there weekly. Plant some fruiting trees or bushes. Grow lettuce in a pot on your steps or porch or window sill. Grow micro greens when winter comes. Feed yourself and your family with food you know. Get to know the farmers and farming practices in your community: who grows organically and regeneratively, who grows “conventionally” (using chemicals and GMO seed); who treats their workers with respect and dignity? Make good choices. Vote with your dollars and presence.

Buy ingredients. Spend a few hours a week cooking from scratch; make more than you need that day; freeze some for another day; share some with trusted friends and neighbors; accept what is shared with you. Make it fun, keep it human. It really is simple, and so very good for us.

Look, this will only get worse for a while at least. The systems are under incredible pressure now. There is drought or flood most everywhere food is grown commercially. Food is become less abundant, less safe, and less affordable within the systems we have created.

It is time to find new ways for most everything. Do you see, or will you continue to wear the blinders of convenience for awhile longer?

Courage my dears. May we open our eyes and see clearly. Love one another.

I feel done with summer (though it is not over,) and ready for autumn. I have gotten ahead of the season and am ready to be comfortable walking, gardening, and bicycling outside; instead I spend most hours of the day seeking cooler and dryer air indoors. August in Southern New England is usually muggy and warm, and this August is sticking with that pattern, and I no longer handle the heat easily.

I keep reading about the terrible heat and drought in Europe and the US west and, while this year has been hot here, it has not been that hot. I know our day is coming, though. I know none of this aching planet will be spared.

I keep waiting for a day with reasonable humidity so I can harvest the last bed of potatoes and sow some broccoli rabe without perspiring to the point of dehydration. That is not today, nor this weekend. Maybe next Tuesday. Tonight through Sunday we can expect up to four inches of rain. I expect there will be flood watches posted soon.

My dining room table is pretty much covered in ripening sauce tomatoes and drying hazelnut pods. My plan is to let the pods dry at their own pace, and to roast one third of the tomatoes for sauce I can freeze or jar, and jar the other two thirds as whole tomatoes for soups and sauces in the winter. (Note: I purchased these tomatoes from a local farmer when my own crop of sauce tomatoes was smaller than I hoped.)

The blackberry harvest is winding down, the second raspberry harvest is weeks away, and the Tulsi and Genovese basil need gathering almost daily now. My drying room carries the zing of their oils, and smells lovely.

My late sown crop of Romanesco zucchini (the most delicious kind in my opinion) is producing fruit and flowers; the Romano pole beans and pickling cucumbers are flowering and not fruiting much at all. Always, some things do well, and others do not.

Outside of my own home and gardens, I feel as if I am waiting for another shoe to drop in the human-world. It is very unsettling. I feel it everywhere and it feels ominous, though perhaps that is only the pattern I expect to repeat. We shall see.

Most of what we call human culture and society now seems trapped in a dystopic nightmare: a dream where people are entranced by monsters of their own making. The dream is in that strange stage when it begins to trouble the dreamers; when they realize they are in danger; that something is “off” in the dreamscape they inhabit.

I know that stage from my own night dreams, and I know it from my own (ongoing) awakening to what is Real and what is not.

What is vital now, as we awaken in numbers to the peril we are in and the work of creating a better way, is that we turn inwards and tend to our own hearts, then turn outwards, towards one another in open-hearted cooperation and community (and not against one another in fear and violence.) Each of us gets to decide our course; that is how it works with human animals. We can write a new and healthy future for our species, or we can continue down this dream-path towards what is terrible to imagine.

Courage my dears. “Fear not,” for there are “glad tidings” to be had if we only choose them. Love one another.

Note: This is an image of Hypatia of Alexandria from Wikipedia. I have learned a bit about her through my reading lately. Hypatia was a fourth century philosopher in Alexandria, Egypt. And, since I am philosophizing a bit here, I thought I would share one artist’s rendering of her in her honor.

The Sufi poet, Hafiz, said, “The words we speak become the house we live in.”

The Sufi poet, Rumi, said, “Wherever you stand, be the soul of that place.”

Jesus of Nazareth said, “If you forgive anyone, they are forgiven.” (John 20:23)

Such wisdom in these three statements; such agency and power to demonstrate cause and effect, to affect the fabric of time and space, to transform and free our own hearts, minds, and perspectives.

These statements cause me to consider myself, the words I build my life with; the spaces and ideals I stand in; and the reinforcing stories I revisit whenever I am feeling aggrieved. They cause me to ask myself more often one of the most powerfully transforming questions I have ever been wise enough to ask myself:

“What is needed here for healing?”

I usually have to breathe deeply before I ask it, not because it is a complicated or hard question, but rather because it often takes an open mind and undefended heart in order to hear the response. It takes me being willing to let go of something my ego wants to hold tightly to. It takes me being willing to step up or out when I really just want to sit down or retreat in.

If I am fraught or newly-angry about something, this question sits quietly in a corner of my consciousness until I calm down enough to hear it’s soft, gentle, querying.

If the powers-that-be are infuriating or frightening me, the question reassures me that we are not without agency, that my small actions do matter somehow, that rivers are rerouted one stone at a time, and even oak trees begin as little acorns.

Often, I am the one who needs healing, especially when my ego has wound and entangled itself into someone else’s actions and I try to infer meaning. I am always reminding myself these days that: what other people think of me is none of my business; what other people do is about them even when it affects me; how I respond is about me even when it affects them. That last one, that is where the question comes in: what needs healing, and what is the house/space/relationship I want to live in? How do I balance love with respect and healthy boundaries? What difference does it really make to me that whoever my ego is going on about at the moment does things differently than I do, or differently than I wish they would? Aren’t they also here to learn and to love? Don’t they also have tender hearts and eternal souls?

Often these days, malign men and a few patriarchal women seek and find new ways almost daily to work their injustice and terror-tactics upon anyone anywhere at any time. What needs healing in my neighborhood, my town, state, nation, and world? There is so much scope and need for healing it can be overwhelming, except that we begin with whatever and whoever is right in front of us.

One kindness at a time. One bit of generosity. One statement of truth. One call for justice. One wrong forgiven. One vote, one peaceful protest, one tree planted, one walk to the shops, one conversation with a neighbor, one hug, one smile, one pot of soup, one prayer, one realization.

May our words build houses/relationships/communities/nations and a world of love and justice. May loving souls radiate peace and all good. May we forgive and be forgiven for forgetting who we are and why we are really here. May healing fall like rain, spread through the air, grow from the earth, and emerge from the flames. May it be so.

Courage my dears. These are days we must reckon with. Love one another. I think loving one another is the cave we fear to enter though it holds the treasure we seek.* Shall we go in all together then? Let’s.

*Joseph Campbell, attributed

(Read with apologies for my husky morning-voice)

This table in my living room is one small space I am using to dry seed for next year, and herbs for tea this winter. It holds houseplants during the cold months, and helps with harvest and preservation in warm months. From the little statue of Brigid, moving clockwise in a spiral (of course,) there is rudbeckia “campfire” seed; sambucus (elderberry) drying until I have enough to make a small batch of syrup; red clover blossoms drying for a heart, bone, skin, and hair healthy tea; Berkeley Green Tie Dye heirloom tomato seeds; thyme drying on the blue and white plate; zinnia, red drying for seeds because the hummingbirds and butterflies love red zinnia; a tiny first harvest of chamomile for a calming cup of tea; white cosmos drying for seed to help fill the white, yellow, and blue front garden; more red clover; and large flowered, yellow petaled, annual rudbeckia for seed.

The very small harvests of chamomile, red clover, and elderberry would, in the past, have seemed insignificant to me, and not even worth the time it takes to grow, harvest, and dry the plants. Being a child of empire and the way-of-living it teaches, I used to focus on bumper crops for anything I planted until I noticed that (with a few exceptions for cherry tomatoes, or zucchini, or green beans) the only things that regularly provide such crops are things that grow because they decided to (things like pokeweed, mugwort, acorns, and dandelions.) My garden, grown according to a unnatural, inorganic, non-regenerative, system of bare soil and constant weeding, seldom provided bounty. It couldn’t because I was starving it of life, trying to control what I am only a tiny part of, though I did not know it.

Now I am an adult, an elder; and I have seen that all the lessons of empire are destructive illusions. Now, I have changed my perspective and am patiently learning all that Mother Nature teaches in the lesson plans she presents. I am learning that healthy, living, self-regenerating, soils provide me with the food and nutrients I need. I am learning that chamomile does not want to be farmed; it wants to grow (and there is a huge difference.) I have learned that stinging nettle (which I drink in a tea every day) refuses to grow where I think she ought; so I am waiting for her to show me if, where, and how she would like to grow here in my gardens, and until then, I purchase organic, regeneratively grown, bags of dried stinging nettle from a seller I trust.

I am learning that my apple trees do not want to be pruned hard this year, so I am going to resist pruning for anything other than good air flow.

I am learning that I can harvest hazelnuts before they are quite ripe, then allow them to ripen and dry inside the house. At this time of the year I am paying close attention to them, and will collect them any day now, hopefully taking only enough for me this year, and leaving plenty for the chipmunks, squirrels and birds big enough to carry them off before they actually do carry them all off, as they did last year.

Yesterday, I planted five rosa rugosa seedlings into a nursery bed inside the vegetable garden. I started these plants from seed in April. They will spend the winter, and probably at least another full year in their nursery, before they will be big enough to replant in a permanent bed along the back fence. I have always loved these simple, open-hearted, fragrant “beach roses” so successful at seducing the bees and making large, beautiful, vitamin-C-filled, rose hips as food for the birds, and tea for those humans who have learned how to make it. I have a vision of a bed of these bushes blooming, and setting their fruit along that back fence near some of the hazelnut trees and young elderberries. I am learning the patience of the land, visioning with it instead of for it or upon it.

I have been working with and within the gardens differently these days, listening to them, learning from them, being a part of them, seeing them as alive, with their own consciousness, wisdom, dignity, and purpose within the immensity of creation. I am become a student, a friend, a safe-space for bees, butterflies, birds, and this one-legged katydid to land (my husband took the photo for me, as the katydid decided to hang around on my arm for awhile and I waited, and waited, and stood almost within the raspberries, until my husband and I could encourage this little sister or brother to hop off and into its own living once again.)

Courage my dears. May we Love no matter what the powers throw at us. May we learn the good lessons the land, the wind, the water, the seasons, and even these fires, long to help us remember and learn again. May it be so. Love one another.

I plucked a second, and final for this year, ripe fig from the youngest of my three potted fig trees last evening, and will have it with my breakfast this morning. The two older trees overwintered in the greenhouse and died way back with the long and bitter freezes of last winter. They had overwintered in the greenhouse quite well the two years previous, but last winter was one for the record books, and even in the greenhouse with its black water barrel collecting heat, the temperatures went into the single digits and the water barrel froze solid. I thought I had lost the trees; I did lose another, but these two had some underlying green showing if I scratched the bark, so I cared for them, and spoke to them, and encouraged them all spring and early summer. They are in full leaf, and new pots now, and I am glad whenever I spend time with them these days.

The blackberries are holding their own and are in full fruit right now. I am harvesting a good number every morning; some for the freezer, some for us, some for sharing, and I always leave some for the birds. The raspberries are flowering and setting their autumn fruit on long and arcing canes, and I am resisting tying them in as they brush me with leaves and spines when I walk past them. I will get them tied in this weekend I hope, first though I would like to prune out the old canes to let some light and air in.

The last potatoes need harvesting and those beds sowed with broccoli rabe (my favorite bitter green) to keep me happy this autumn.

I will need to buy a couple bushels of sauce-tomatoes from local farmers as my tomato crop is good for these days, and not enough for winter days, too. I grew the same types of tomatoes in the same ways as last year with different results. The plants are fine, the tomatoes are delicious, and each season is its own season.

Each season is its own season.

Summer here has turned her face towards autumn and harvest.

My own face is now become an autumn face; it shows what I have planted and grown so far in my life; and what I am harvesting now. I have “thinking lines” on my forehead and between brows; laugh lines around my eyes; and kissing-lines around my mouth. My hands are veined on the back, though still strong, supple, gentle, and warm from all the tending and holding I do.

I am become a harvest-woman, reaping all that has been sown: seeds bitter and sweet, acts cruel and kind, decisions rash and wise. We really do reap as we have sown, and those who tend the land know that neither of those is something done only once. Seeds and fruit, sowing and reaping, seasons of life and death, growth and rest, these are all cycles that never end, though they always change. I will plant garlic in October, and though the next season bring ice, snow, and terrible cold, next summer will bring a new harvest again.

We are always sowing seed whether we know it, or not. We are always tending the soil of life, leaving it healthier or poorer for our children and grandchildren.

Do you see?

Courage my dears. Plant good seed. Grow the world you want to see. Love one another.

My silence here includes some days away in a place where a clear river runs through back yards, trees grow tall and close together, the air smells like pine resin, grandchildren can play in treehouses and sandboxes, and family meals are simple, delicious, and easy. It includes leaving home in one role, and arriving “elsewhere,” physically and emotionally changed. It includes coming home, (I love coming home,) where Luna waits, and tomatoes crowd the countertops; where basil needs to be turned into pesto, garlic can be made into confit, compost needs sifting before it can be applied, and the potatoes need pulling out of the soil.

The powers blunder and bomb on as the natural world broils and burns around us. The cowardly use civilians as decoys, and their deaths as numbers on some made up tote board of who is most powerful.

I voted in Connecticut’s primary yesterday; I voted for progressive change. Neither of the people I cast my ballot for won, though I am used to that. I do live in “the land of steady habits,” after all. Still, I voted for the world I want to see: a world where women’s and younger voices are more central to the conversation; a world where healthcare is a right for all people. A world in which the wealthy actually pay taxes instead of tax attorneys, and those taxes are used to build a stronger, healthier, more educated, just, and resilient society for “we the people."

I know I have written this, or maybe written around this, often before today: it is time to imagine and live into the world we want to see.

Do you want to see more equal representation? Stand up, say so, vote so.

Do you want lettuce (and all other types of food) that do not give you a serious case of “the trots?” Eat hyper-locally when you can, grow what you can, shop at local farms instead of supermarkets, put your feet in local shops, and your hands in the soil of your own backyard.

Do you want cleaner air? Plant trees. Plant shrubs. Plant anything in every corner you can. Walk more. Drive less.

Do you want community? Say hello. Put big tables in the shade under your front yard trees and have a neighborhood potluck. This is an idea I am going to try early this autumn. Maybe some folks will actually accept my invitation … I will keep you posted about this.

Look, we have the power to make change. We always have had. The questions are: Do we have the will? Are we willing to change, and to be changed, and maybe even transformed? That is the true work of change. It is good work. It is natural and human work. It is often the quiet and daily work of life. It is always quite simple, though seldom easy or comfortable.

I know we are tired. This is because we have been putting our energy into trying to change others, which makes us quite like Sisyphus. None of us can change any other of us. Each and all of us can only change ourselves: first our hearts and our minds; then our homes, our gardens, and our communities, by showing up, paying careful attention, noticing what needs healing, mending, listening to, and then stepping up and into those spaces and doing what we can because we have become the ones we have been waiting for.

Do you see?

Courage my dears. So simple. Seldom easy. Love one another.

In August the nights come home again, which is lovely for those of us “early to bed and early to rise” people.

In August the tomatoes, peppers, and eggplant ripen and the kitchen smells of marinara and pesto. The pantry begins to fill with jars of tomatoes, sauce, and preserves. The freezer is already stocked with berries, summer squash, and soup fixings for the cold days to come. My work room shares its space again between drying herbs, art supplies, and sewing projects. The garlic is cured, the seed-garlic saved, the small or incomplete heads have been made into garlic powder (a first for me, and one that had my visiting brother say, “Ohh, it smells so good in here. Like an old-time pizzaria,”) and the “crop” sits in its cool, dark pantry, cleaned and trimmed of stem and roots, waiting to be roasted, sauteed, and eaten up by me and those I cook for.

In early August autumn crops of bitter greens (my favorite kind) are sown in the beds where the potatoes, garlic, and summer greens have given way. August is the month of glory for annual flowers; the month when zinnia, tithonia, marigold, and sunflowers come into their beauty and abundance. Next year I will grow more of these from seed and plant more of them in the front gardens, which could use some color as the summer sun gives way and the shade grows into spaces unapproachable by it just a month before.

At some point this month, in the late afternoon of a fine day, I will leave the gardens to the care of Mother Earth. I will take myself to the edge of the sea to walk in the wavelets, then I will sit on the sand, and watch the lowering sun glitter like yellow diamonds upon the surface of the water and I will be with Mystery.

I am an earth-woman, with my roots deep in the soil, my hands filled with green energy, and my eyes seeing gardens (either those made, or those that could be made) everywhere.

I am also a sea-woman; someone with sea salt in my blood and tears. A woman more comfortable in the depths than on the surface; a woman sung to sleep by the sound of the tides, whose night dreams reveal her to herself as a mer-woman; kelp woven into hair. Gills and lungs, tail and legs, all in the same person.

I am one who lives between the worlds. So are you. Everything created does. Even the stones sing to those with ears to hear.

All is sacred. All is sacred. All is sacred. All is one.

Remember this my dears. Take heart. The essence of God is in you, and in all. Perhaps we might be brave enough to live our lives thusly. Wouldn’t that be something. May it be so.

Courage. Love one another. Love all.

These two things are a large part of what makes us human: our empathy, and our ability to see what is, and what is coming, then to face that future with clear minds and open hearts, reaching out to one another to do what is needed. And there is much needed right now be it building boats, bridges, reservoirs, swales, water-sheds, libraries of all sorts, or prompting us to save seeds, plant food forests, make gardens on roofs and along sidewalks; create and stock food banks and pantries; set tables, clear fire-breaks, support local growers and makers, and every other imaginable neighborhood network of resilience and care.

Since there is so much to be done, we must, as the wise-one’s have taught us, first go inside ourselves, and tend to our own hearts and spirits. We must be “inside ourselves” and “out in the world,” at the same time. There is no duality in this: we all have interior castles (as Theresa of Avila taught) and we all live in community of some sort. We have “caves [we] fear to enter [though they] hold the treasure that [we] seek.” (Joseph Campbell.) We all have hearts of flesh on the inside and skin in the game on the outside.

Basically, what is healed within us: our fears, our insecurities, our issues around trust, our expectations (our own and the expectations of others,) and the lies and hurtful nonsense of culture that we have taken to heart, becomes healed in the world slowly, one human heart at a time. What we are living through now comes from the loss of our interiority, our loss of sight about who we are and the sacred web of life that we are only a part of.

When I taught servant leadership at an urban ministry center, I would tell the people who sat circle with me there that God very rarely parts the sea. Miracles are plentiful, though certainly quieter and less flashy than that. Mystery does make a way, and the way begins in our hearts and minds and then, and only then, do we follow that way and change the world.

The physical world is on fire and at war. The oceans are too warm, so they spawn storms that churn their waters and disrupt the rivers of air and rain that flow over the land. The fields are brown, the crops are dying, the fossil fuels are running out, empire is gasping and in its death-throes, animals (including human animals) are going hungry, people are on the move, species are going extinct, billionaires steal from “we the people,” and rape the land, then build bunkers where they can watch others perish from the vaults they have locked themselves within.

I spent yesterday with a beloved. We went to check out a new fabric and yarn shop, and then had a late lunch at a favorite restaurant. We laughed, and giggled, talked about the world’s problems, the stupidity of nations, and the simple solutions no one wants to embrace. We ooh’ed and ahh’ed over quilts and beautiful patterns and textures woven into cloth. We talked about Mystery and politics; theology and feminism, our families and our aging bodies. We had a wonderful day. As she drove home we got down to the brass tacks of what we believe.

“My theology,” I said, “is this. I wake up every morning and ask how I can love the world today.”

I have my teachers, of course: my traditions, my books, my writers, my experiences, my ancestral family dynamics. I have a life of lived experiences.

I have little political power, though that never stops me from voting my conscience; voting for the imperfect people who best represent the world I would like to see.

What I do have is the tremendous agency that all human beings have: to be kind, to be generous, to make choices that do as little harm as possible. I can always live more mindfully, buy less, share more, grow regeneratively, own my own nonsense, speak truth, stand with those who need someone to stand with them, heal what I can, be tender with what I cannot.

I can live in such a way as to see spiderwebs dusted with water, caterpillars on the fennel, Monarch eggs on the milkweed. I can live so as to taste the green in broccoli, and the red in cherries; to hear the caws of the crows, the buzz of the bees, the wind in the branches above me. I can live so to experience the seasons, to live honestly into my own season of harvests and legacy and, in the end (which is not yet or I wouldn’t be here writing,) may I have had the courage to do what is mine to do, and to let go of the done and undone. May that be so.

Today is Lammas; the ancient celebration of first harvests. Lammas is a day to bring the wheat in from the fields (in those places where it has survived the summer) for blessing; to grind it and make loaves to be broken and shared: bread of life, indeed. Jesus of Nazareth understood that imagery and how it endures and sustains.

May we the people be wiser than those who “build bigger barns,” (Luke 12:18) and bunkers. May we build tables; communal spaces; community kitchens; front, back, and rooftop gardens; new economies; wide gates; friendships; and lives deep with meaning and love. May it be so.

Courage my dears. Love the world; it needs it. Love one another; we all need it.

The world burns, and I receive emails for shoes I do not need.

The Middle East and Eastern Europe are at war (not with each other, but with my own country feeding the conflicts, and taking the wrong sides (in my opinion,)) and I order soft neck garlic bulbs to try for the first time here in my “USDA Hardiness Zone 6” gardens.

Central Europe bakes and thirsts along with the burning; the Pacific west of the North American Continent joins that terrible party, and the smoke drifts towards New England once again; all this as I prepare to vacation for several days.

A soaking rain is predicted here this week; maybe some flooding, too, while the US West is in a state of “mega-drought,” and in Great Britain “hosepipe” watering is banned, while in France laws are passed that make it illegal to provide water for wildlife, though not to the monoculture fields of corn. People in power seem to always make poor decisions that compound the problems they create in the first place.

The world as we have known it is gone. I know that is a bleak statement, but it is simply the truth. We are in a new era that we have created and hastened, and now don’t know how to live in. We keep waiting for the season to change, for the next election, for the climate to right itself so we can go back to “normal.” The issue is that that normal no longer exists. The new normal, which is still building and revealing itself, is only extreme: extreme is all we can count on.

To my great sadness and dismay, world politics seem to be following the weather. The political climate is as terrifying as the planet’s weather. People in power make bad decisions seemingly at every single opportunity to do so.

There are two distinct types of human power that I have noticed: power that is held over others, and power that empowers others.

The first is the type of power we are most used to: this is the power that enriches the few through the impoverishing labor of the many. This is the power that sends other people’s children off to die in wars that are only projections of “powerful” men’s fears and egos. This is the power that divides, derides, and destroys. This power comes from fear. It is insatiable. It is violent. It creates hierarchies. It builds walls. It is power given by, or coerced from, the people, and then held over them. But the human spirit will not be held down for long; always it rises. Always, “power-over” ends, though it never ends well.

The second type of power is less flashy, more stable, enduring, resilient, organic, and much more abundant. It is power that is like the proverbial mustard seed. This second type of power is authentic, it comes from within us all. It is the power to self-actualize as individuals, communities; even as communities around the world.

This quieter power is collaborative, visionary, peaceful, and it understands justice as healing (not punishment and reward.) It is present in those who seek and work towards a healed planet, a loving society, a flowering of peace on Earth. I see it all the time, not in the news, of course, which loves sensationalism, but in the kindness of people to one another, to our sister and brother creatures, to the Earth Herself.

I hear it in the keening of those who grieve, in the lullabies sung to new babies, in the prayers said with those suffering, or with those whose souls are letting go of this life. I hear it in the encouraging, inspiring, truth-telling (even when the truth is sad, painful, angry, hard,) words of writers, ministers, people of faith, people who bring the good into the world, people who have decided to love even as hate becomes the currency of the human-world.

The human-world we set in motion is come to entropy. What we saw as order, has become chaos.

The planet’s systems are immense and complicated, and human beings can never master or tame them. Trying to be gods always ends badly, yet those who lust for power never seem to learn. We are not the alphas of the natural world, and in pretending to be so, we have only become the omega. We have undone a climate that was temperate, and predictable; a climate that allowed us to settle into place, to tend the land, and develop societies. What is coming now is hard to imagine, hard to plan for, but it is coming anyway.

Will we meet this new future with the power of love, or will we resist and destroy ourselves? It is up to us, individually and communally. Our choice will determine the future. Make your choice. Please, choose well.

Courage my dears. Love one another.

In the dream my mother and I were not Mother and Daughter (capital letters on purpose there,) we were two souls who love each other and were glad to be together. That was it. We sat and talked tenderly with no strings: no needs from me, no resistance from her, no ties to the dynamics of who we were with, for, and to, one another through the last sixty-plus years. We were able just to be with one another without expectation, without fear, striving, or eggshell-walking. We were whole and complete individually and together.

I have been sitting with this dream in gratitude for its personal and communal gift for a few days now. I have begun looking at all my relationships through its lens. It has been clarifying, healing, and relieving to do so.

We humans spend half our lives building an ego, and then the second half either hardening into it, or softening to let go of its illusions about our own self-importance (this has been a big one for me.) In the end, though, we are souls here to love, and to get love mixed up with desire, sex, romance, image, approval, and how we imagine things ought to be, and then we cry and struggle because, of course these things disappoint us. So we ache and get angry, and while some of us live in those places because the work of letting go is hard and scary, and like death in a way, some more of us do choose to come to our senses, and love and, after all this agita, let it all go to become Ourselves, Who Are Only Love After All.

I know it is the hard-hearted who capture the human-headlines. In the end, though, the headlines, the glitter, the power-suits, and our human bodies themselves, are nothing but dust. In the end, it is only love that continues on, only love that creates anything real and sustaining. My mom reminded me of this a few nights ago when she invited me to visit. Thanks Mom.

Courage my dears. Love one another.

And listen to this great music.

Wild bergamot, monarda fistulosa, has pink flowers that draw pollinators of all types. Last night, in this patch, it was bumblebees galore; all of them bumbling and tumbling from one tubular flower to the next, disturbing the foliage just enough for its oregano-like scent to rise into the warm air, along with my whispered gratitude to Mother Earth and Mystery that I have been able to help create, and tend this little oasis.

As I moved through the vegetable beds and came to the front gate, there is another patch of wild bergamot in full bloom, and there, in the company of a couple honey bees, was a hummingbird moth, or as I knew them when I was a child, a skipper. (The photo below is copied from Google, and was not taken by me because I do not bring my phone with me when I say goodnight to the gardens.)

I stood and watched for several minutes as the little creature dived methodically into one long flower after another. This is the first skipper I have seen in my gardens for a couple years, and it made me glad to see, and sad that there are so few now as our manicured and chemical-laden suburbia becomes a dead zone for wildlife.

In the Roman Catholic liturgical calendar, yesterday was the feast day of the Apostle to the Apostles, a companion of Jesus of Nazareth, a woman who understood the sacred teachings more deeply than many (any?) of the men could: Mary Magdalene. I am listening to her, and to what scholars are saying about her, more and more as I grow. It is not a coincidence that she encountered Christ in a garden on that first Easter morning. And, as someone who gardens, it surprises me not at all, since the garden is one of the “outer places” that opens my “inner spaces” (this written knowing my skin is a thin barrier, indeed, and there is no real “outer” or “inner,” there is only here, and now, which is everywhere and every moment, to encounter Mystery.)

The patriarchal, hierarchal, human-world fueled by greed, lust, and power, is a great mess right now. It is destroying much; killing many; poisoning minds, oceans, air, and farmland in its insatiable hunger for more. I will not add my energy to its evil insanity.

The natural, collaborative, generative, world, in which human beings are a part, and not the center, does its quiet work of healing, sharing, feeding, and being life-giving. This is where I will walk and stand; this is where my energy, my love, my vote, my prayers, my imperfect best, my life, is given. I have chosen.

Courage my dears. Choose wisely, and stand in your grace. Love one another.

My “wake me in the middle of the night” dreams are about my connection to Mystery, and these feel like being called, and reminded, to stay aware and connected.

My “just before I drop off,” or maybe, lucid, dreams are more visions than dreams: in them I am high up in the branches of some immense and vital tree. The canopy above me is lush and dense, the branches themselves strong and wide enough to walk upon. I can see the smooth bark and the whorls where branches have been, but have fallen off and so the tree has healed its wound with a spiral. In these dreams I never look down towards the ground, I have no idea how far I am from the roots. I do glance up. Mostly I am where I am and I hear the leaves rustling in the breezes, I see the light filtering through the leaves, deeply veined, green, and glowing.

I have been quiet here in my publishing again, too. The “powers that be” speak quite clearly for themselves now that the veils have dropped and we can all see, smell, and taste, their rot. Still, many of us pretend its not so bad, pretend that we are thriving even as our sisters and brothers struggle and go without healthy food, accessible medicine, decent housing, etc. Even as the air itself becomes smoke.

Many of us spend our creative hours amending and patching together our morals, and a belief system that some (we) deserve all we have, while some (they) deserve not having. This belief is anti-Christ, so those of us who grew up Christian have to ignore many of the teachings of Christ, and swop them out for the teachings of t he Powers, and then conflate them in our minds just to calm the cognitive dissonance. I can only speak from this tradition I was raised in, yet I would venture that they same goes for any of the religious traditions that began in love and then became part of the problem.

The natural-world is crying out for our attention and I am giving it all the attention I have in the places where I have agency. I am spending a lot of my day noticing, tending, watching, listening, seeing, heeding. I am spending hours in wordless communication.

I watched the first, and so far only, Monarch butterfly I have seen this year, flit around the milkweed that grows in spots all over my gardens, and lay one egg on a leaf, before circling the garden and returning to a fresh nursery (leaf) to lay the next.

I see the trails the leaf-miners leave on the chard and how like they are to the human roads forming cul de sacs upon the green fields of the earth. I notice which tomato plants struggle here, and which grow on, and I make note about seeds to save. I see that the flowers of escarole plants left to seed, and culinary dandelion doing the same, look the same, which makes sense since they are cousins (both Chicory and Asteraceae.)

I watch the eggplant (aubergines as they are called in Europe and the UK) flower and set fruit, and I have tasted the first cherry tomato of the season. I notice that the netting I used to protect the brassicas from Cabbage White moths has done its work, though at the expense of the volunteer calendulas growing beneath it. Those are infested with aphids, and none of the natural predators of aphids can get to them because the netting is doing its job. Human “corrections” to nature always cause issues downstream. I learn.

I watch the birds fledge their nestlings, the air go toxic and clear again, the trees stretch upwards or sideways in search of light, which is their food, and the seasons live into themselves and then become what comes next.

That last phrase wrote itself and stopped me, so I italicized it.

We are living into the season we have created for ourselves; the fruit is ripe and much of it is bitter. It will fall to the ground, though. It will die back and become compost for what comes next.

We are doing the same in our individual lives. We see what is real through the eyes of our hearts, which are either expanding and seeing true through love, or shutting down and seeing only distortions through fear. We are creating our future as a species, and as souls.

As physical creatures, we bend back to the earth long before our bodies are laid within it. Gravity loosens our skin and curves our backs; physical life tires us unto death, and reminds us daily, as my friend Jane used to say, that “none of us get out of here alive.” What comes next always comes.

Then, of course, there is understanding that “what comes next,” is only what has always been. Source. Love. Life. Mystery. Beauty. Consciousness. So simple. So integral. So present right here, right now, in every moment if only we Realize.

Courage my dears. Love one another. Realize.

The air in Connecticut is “Unhealthy for Sensitive Groups,” and good for no one at all right now. I keep trying to clear my throat as my body does its thing of needing oxygen, yet not needing “particulate matter” right along with it. This particular smoke is from the forest fires in Ontario, Canada and Michigan, U.S. We are breathing the remains of trees, birds, mammals, and homes.

I read a comment yesterday from some kind soul here on Substack who said she is heartbroken for all the people whose homes have gone up in flames. So am I. And it came to me with especial clarity, that what is burning is all our home. No matter the nonsense people the ilk of the world’s first trillionaire prattle on about, this planet is the only home human beings have ever known. This planet is the only home human beings have, or probably ever will have in the lifetime of these generations. We are all burning our own home to ash and smoke. Perhaps we ought beat our breasts and pray the old Latin words from the Catholic Mass, “Mea culpa, mea culpa, mea maxima culpa.”

As I wrote earlier this week, there is no Plan B. There is no Planet B, either. There is here. There is now. There is what we have done, and what we have damaged, and there is only us, here, and now, to begin mending, healing, regenerating, replanting, reimagining a healthy, equitable, just, and living planet.

There is now, and there is less and less future as each day goes by. As a friend said over dinner last night, “The people making policy decisions are not making good decisions.” He is right, “we, the people” cannot wait on them anymore. We cannot trust that they will do what is good and right for the planet they make money from exploiting; so that leaves us, “we, the people,” to lead the policymakers, and to act as, and how we can, to create the world we want for our children and grandchildren. Anything and everything we do now, matters. Courage, my dears.

Story Two: Gift Economies, Part One

Earlier this week (Tuesday, I think,) on a hot day before the smoke covered the skies here, I visited a farm stand in a neighboring community to purchase some of their excellent sweet corn for dinner. There were three people working the stand that morning: two young people working the cash register and the vegetable and fruit sections, and one mid-aged man who was stocking and selling the corn. As I approached the stand, a young woman was watering the few seedlings left for sale: a tray of tomatoes, and a tray of parsley. The man was making fun of her for watering the plants, which were small, pot bound, and sad looking. “What are you watering them for, just toss them,” he said. She murmured something about a sister who might want them, maybe could plant and nurture them, and he kept calling them trash. I entered the conversation without being invited to, “Whatever you do, don’t throw them away. If they cannot be saved, compost them.” They both went quiet, and the man looked at me askance before counting my corn.

“Actually,” I said, “if you cannot sell them, and are going to get rid of them anyway, I have a Free Little Garden Shop along my front sidewalk where I share seedlings, and perennials I cannot use in my gardens. I would be happy to take these plants and share them there. Maybe someone would have a nice tomato sandwich this summer.” The young woman was standing quietly with her watering can and listening to an idea I don’t think had occurred to her, and the man was looking at me as if I was either a great fool, or I thought he was a great fool. “Totally up to you,” I said to him as I thanked him for the corn and went to pay for it at the register. He laughed in a way that showed me he would not fall for my ridiculous idea, or ruse to get some free tomato plants, and I purchased my corn and came home. I hope the plants did not get thrown in the trash. I will never know.

I understand the plight of small, local farms trying to grow food and make a decent living. I support them with my dollars and my votes. I think even the Free Little Garden Shop supports them because, once someone plants something, and/or eats something grown in their own gardens, chances are they are going to want to plant more, and the “more” will come from local farms. I think gift economies nurture and support local legal-tender economies; they free up cash flow for those whose cash flow might be restricted.

Gift economies also build community; they get people thinking, sharing, communicating, giving and receiving. They provide a way of loving one another.

Story Three: Gift Economies, Part Two

Yesterday, I came across this post here on Substack, and it began a long, interesting, and heartening, conversation and provided new-to-me-ideas about what is possible. Take some time to read Ms. McCrohan’s post and the comments that formed in its wake.

I am about to dig the box of N-95 masks out of the closet so that I can put one on and go out to water the greenhouse and garden without coughing and hacking. The river of smoke in the atmosphere is due to flow in another direction later today, which will help my breathing; though it will only worsen a sister’s or brother’s in the mid-Atlantic region of the U.S. today. Me, them, we the living beings of this Mother Earth, are all affected. The smoke does not stop at the border; the terror and pain of wildfire, and the joy of living is not limited to human life: it belongs to the plants, the soil, the birds, insects, amphibians, mammals, reptiles, fish, and The All that imbues it.

The only way to come through these times alive is to come through together now. The journey to a healthy future begins within us; the first step is to go down and in. We can change nothing in the world for the better before we do our own inner work. I know it is scary, but it is the only and best way. Shall we?

Courage my dears. Love one another.

This morning, the sky is fairly clear of the smoke that drifted over us from the wildfires in Canada - at least so far. The sun rises far to the northeast in mid-July. The air is very warm and very humid. It will be another day spent mostly indoors for me. Like so many in the Northern Hemisphere this summer when we can no longer hide from what we have wrought and made room for, I am longing for a bit of cool, a breeze without humidity on clear days, and some rain to come gently, and with regularity. What I am longing for is getting more difficult for Mother Earth to provide.

This morning, I walked down the stairs and stood upon a worn, stable slate. I closed my eyes, and opened my heart and my hands. I prayed with and to a Mystery I am part of, but cannot fully comprehend. I heard the catbird and cardinal call from the trees, I felt the air stir around my body, I called the names I know for All That Is; the holy names of Mother and Father, Earth, Fire, Water, and Air. I felt the solidity of the ground beneath my feet, the longing of the earth for some tender care from us. I spoke words from my heart: words of sorrow and apology, a prayer to learn what more I can do, a desire to help mend what we have torn and set ablaze.

I am sad today; not depressed, not despairing, just appropriately sad. I am also determined to do and be what my soul promised to do and be before I came here. All of us are here, now, on purpose. All of us can do something to help, to ease, to heal, to teach, to inspire, to inform, to bring together, to plant, provide, protect, and to stand with and for The Good. All of us.

Be the good today. Stand in your grace. Plant something. Water something that is thirsty. Do it mindfully. Call your representatives and share your views. Bring a box of cereal and a carton of milk to your local food pantry. Think about your gifts and consider how to share them. Reach out to your beloveds and tell them you love them. Refuse to participate in evil. Pray strength and courage for yourself and for us all. Love one another.