My body quakes like an aspen leaf. I’m alive I’m alive I’m alive my brain repeats but I don’t quite believe it. Everything is moving like molasses, thick and heavy. There is blood. I crawl through glass and there is more blood. I don’t feel anything at all.

I’m in shock. I think I might actually be dead and this is all an illusion, an elaborate hallucination from my brain. I feel like I’m outside of my body as people rush towards me from every direction. The compass spins. There is no north. People are talking to me, it sounds like they are underwater making a long distance call. I can’t make my mouth move. I can only stare down at my body and my trembling, bleeding hands.

It was the loudest sound I’ve ever heard. Metal screeching, whining, crumbling, compressing while I was nestled within. The sound of glass ricocheting into a thousand tiny shards and then a hundred minuscule lacerations.

I didn’t sleep for approximately 72 hours after the accident. From brain injury and shock and adrenalin, but deep down I think some part of me thought if I slept I would never wake up. When I finally did sleep, it was all sweats and nightmares. I woke up in the night gasping, heart accelerating like I’m still doing 65 before impact hits. Impact. The body is keeping this score.

I walked around in a daze for weeks convinced I wasn’t really alive. I was in the bardo. I was not here or anywhere. Had I jumped timelines? Had the impact sent me across quantum universes and that is why the life that was my own was so unfamiliar to me? I stared at the wall. I contemplated the nature of existence. I couldn’t look in the mirror and didn’t recognize the face staring back. To admit I was a corporeal form was perhaps too much to behold. Life felt increasingly absurd, I would break out into fits of spontaneous giggles only to find myself sobbing later in my bedroom. Turns out brain injuries can feel like insanity, can feel like you don’t even know your own mind. I had to go through a grieving process, for the person I was that no longer existed, a life that no longer existed.

When my truck flipped into the air and I realized I could die, everything slowed down, just like they say it does. I took my hands off the wheel, took in a breath, and relaxed every muscle in my body until I was as open as the dawn. At that moment, I made the choice to surrender. I would greet death with acceptance. I would herald my death with love, for the thought I had in what I thought were my final moments, was of a man I have never once stopped loving. And didn’t they say, the drunks always survive these types of tragedies because they remain loose and limber like a willow branch?

I am still unraveling the transformation that took place in those split seconds. The slate was wiped clean, but I am only just now understanding it, because in my porousness, trauma quickly filled every open space. I had to slowly untangle those knots to find that what lay underneath was more beautiful then I could have ever imagined.

What I found was Freedom.

You see, I’ve always been called brave. I can go leaping off of cliffs laughing. I think I am brave in that Aries sort of way that means I just don’t know another way to move through life. For some people, bravery is less of a choice, and more of an instinct. We don’t think, we do. I have a long list of things I’ve done that other people have called insane.

Yet, for all that exterior bravery, there were still so many ways I avoided risk. Most notably, in the dance between being in and out of control. There was some deeply ingrained dark and old part of me that could not fucking let go. I learned to come at them sideways, sneaking up from around corners. There were certain experiences I could lose myself in, like through sex. In the bedroom, bound with rope I could find what it felt like to yield. Under the influence of psychedelics, I could soften my grip. I could clear the brush but never pull the root. I could not completely surrender. There was always that small muscle, the piano string wound just a little too tight, a tension that would not dissipate.

You can imagine my surprise, as I sit here, two months later, wondering if this accident was the best thing to ever happen to me. I have never surrendered to life in totality like I did in that moment, because I also surrendered to death. And now that I crossed that threshold, I find myself liberated, free in a way I could only imagine before, but now embody. Where there once was doubt, now lives trust. Every day I am driven by the radical pursuit of being fully alive because no day is promised.

I surrendered to death and was given freedom. There really is nothing to fear but fear itself. I am alive, and that is enough.

The use of green paint on steel bridges originated here in Oregon, back in the 1930’s when architecture still used to mean something and bridges were built to look like cathedrals. The specific shade of green paint was chosen to blend in with the northwest landscape and cures well in a damp environment. Since then the practice has been adopted across the country, and the shade is named ODOT (Oregon Dept. Of Transportation) Green.

The bridges themselves serve as a sort of ceremony, each one there to greet me after my pilgrimages, anchoring me back into this land and its impenetrable density. The fecundity in the air is both clean and musky. I am once again blissfully swallowed up, claimed by the forest as it ultimately claims all who rub up against it.

It’s almost June and everything is verdant green and lush and the grass gets taller by the hour. The roadkill deer has antlers of the softest velvet. The foxgloves are flowering and the air is salty but getting warmer, not the kind of briney cold that eats at your bones. For three years I have marked this time as the season of Baby Ravens. It has been potent, each year, corresponding with some pivotal transition in my own life that strikes me as eerie yet without explanation. I have come to consider the mated pair of Ravens that live in the old growth spruce tree near my house to be kin. Each year, their young begin their strange, shrill, screeching squawks as they learn to eat, fly and behave as ravens. On fledging wings, they harass their parents and other birds, swooping awkwardly through the sky and creating a haunting, murderous cacophony that would be alarming if it wasn’t so endearing to me.

The intimacy I’ve developed with these calls has increased over the years. Listening with eyes closed, I can now determine how far away the parents are from their young, as the calls change as the parents return. The vocalizations are slightly different for each parent and change when food is brought. The slower rhythmic chirps the babies make when their parents are with them in the nest differs from the startling scream when they are hungry and calling their parents to return. Young ravens are exceedingly playful, attracted to shiny things, and have on more than one occasion stolen items from me only to return them in a different spot.

This is what it means to be home.

My favorite holy place is made of water and stone. The balance of these two elements is healing in a way I cannot fully articulate. There is more life here in this small waterway than you would think; baby cutthroats and crawdads, salmon even. There are clearcuts not far away, and this too is something I admire about this place. It isn’t perfect, and despite the manmade destruction, there are still Camas flowers blooming proudly on the roadside and Columbine by the riverbank. The expanse of stone stretches out wide enough to host a small gathering, worn clean and smooth by years of flowing water, but I am the only one here. I bask like a snake in the warmth, feel supported by rock and earth. The current rushing so close by creates a swirl of white noise that washes over my brain and leads me into a trance state. This is an effortless meditation. When I reach maximum penetration of heat, I jump into the canyon of deep blue water. The coolness pours over my head, enveloping me into it’s womb. I linger, under the quiet weight of water. This is my church.

I like to pray with my hands busy. Today that means a bucket of fresh fish skins, a deer scapula, and a few shells.

I have worked skins in all sorts of places. From old growth forests to the chaos of apartment complexes. I have skinned a raccoon in a city backyard and a coyote in the desolate desert. I have softened and racked and scraped and fleshed where ever the animals take me.

But there is no better place to work a fish skin than in flowing water. Fish skins need to be kept cool, and the river supplies instant refrigeration. I use a mussel shell to scrape off lingering flesh and scrape the scales against the worn stones. The scales sparkle and fall into the water, moving downstream and I watch them until I can no longer see their iridescence.

Something has taken hold of me, working with the fish. It’s invited me into deeper relationship with this coastal landscape, but also something older. It feels the same as when I harvested my first deer, and it felt like my hands knew something my brain did not. I might be working the skins, but in truth - it is them who are working me, stretching my fibers, opening me, changing the course towards uncharted waters. I wait to see what I will become.

Yellow dog is asleep in the sun

on the white front porch

at the corner of Moon Creek.

I’m driving slow

down gravel roads

with windows down,

sunlight casting shadows

in the shape of alder.

…

The old dairy barn is gently descending into the thick mud,

in the great tradition of old barns all across the West,

left to quietly and softly sink,

a last dignity.

…

I’m somewhere between the Pacific Ocean and Willamina.

I’m somewhere between grief and ecstasy.

…

I wind along the river, serpentine

hot tears stream down my cheeks and

I do not thwart their journey,

let them curve and caress me,

making their own irriguous path

like flooded water across the plains.

…

I pull over,

leave the keys in the truck,

float to the river.

A butterfly lands on my collarbone,

drinks the salt from the tears and I feel so whole

I could die, so fully a part

of this place, this place I sometimes hate

and sometimes love,

both my undoing and my liberation.

…

Are you a mother because you birth,

or are you a mother simply because

you have now held life within you,

that potential seed took root and

something ancient and old took hold of you.

A doorway appeared,

a window opened, and life itself

appeared to me in new colors

I could not see before.

…

I could not see before,

I could not know, the way a tadpole could not

imagine its own transformation.

You were a fish

too beautiful to keep,

that slipped, wet and writhing

through my hands

back into the river

that is time.

…

At night,

I still think

of your scales.

Today is March 11th. Last night I slept twelve hours and woke to pounding rain on the roof, again. It hasn’t stopped raining in nine days and there is no end in sight. I listen to Undone in Sorrow by Ola Belle Reed. I remind myself that everything is temporary. I drink coffee and smoke a joint and stare at the canvas, thumbing a chunk of charcoal, as I ponder what wants to be.

I am drowning in the rain, in the air as thick and humid as a slice of fresh sourdough bread, so thick I feel I am breathing in something solid and real and mammalian into my lungs. I remember being in the high country of New Mexico and how thin the air was, like I couldn’t ever gulp down enough of it that first night in the cabin, my sleep restless and fitful as I would drift off, then suddenly awake with a gasp as my brain adjusted to the lack of oxygen. Here, I am gluttonous. I may be poor in money but Gods, I am rich in oxygen. Gelatinous, heavy, salty sea air that penetrates so deeply if you cut me open you’d find brine in the marrow of my bones.

What is it about me that yearns for extremes? The razor’s edge of life where I stand on the margins, balancing the incomprehensible. What is it about me that pushes myself to know what I am capable of? I have fasted for days, just to know who Hunger was. I run, lungs gasping for air, and my mind says more. My lover wraps his strong hands around my throat and my eyes say more. My heart swings like a pendulum from the drowned depths of this godforsaken coastline to the high desert steppe with her dusty roads and cracked clay.

I wonder if I make the move permanent, how I will adjust. If I will mourn the sea or if she will become a part of my past just like some old lover that I can think fondly of but no longer miss. Will I make pilgrimages to bathe my soul in salt? Or will I assimilate to red dirt and nights so clear and vast I sprout wings out of my back and take to the skies?

I follow owl feathers and dreams and the prophecies made by my childhood self more than I trust the best laid plans others try to make for me. I am stubborn and strong but not unyielding, like a willow branch I like to think. I can bend and not break. I can carry the weight.

I am all fire and water and these parts of me are ever at odds with one another, each threatening to smother the other, the proverbial angel and devil on each of my bare freckled shoulders.

Out here, the water has her way with me. I sleep ten hours a night and dream like it’s my full time job. I wander the coastline and collect tendrils of seaweed and shells and make abstract driftwood sculptures. Under the moon, I pass through walls of mist as thick as castle walls as I drift along the sandy dunes. I live in this temperate rainforest that is so green and fecund that my boots are never not covered in mud that squelches under my feet.

This place is soft, like the ceaseless mat of lime green moss under my feet when I race barefoot beneath the snake barked spruce trees. This place is dark and dense, like you are always underwater even when you’re not. It will consume you if you let it, take you over, wrap your body in the roots of licorice fern and lichen until you are as unmoving as a cedar. I wonder how many of the trees behind my house, trunks burly and wide, were once two legged souls with ribcages and tendons until one day they laid down in the moss and never got back up. What kind of tree would sprout from my body? What kind of mycelium would take hold, threading in between my fascia and muscle? The longer I’m here the closer I feel I am to finding out. Days go by where I don’t leave my house, I don’t speak to another soul, I wander the forest in silence and wool and come home drenched and quiet and older.

I am fire and water and these parts of me are always at odds with one another. The part of me that is born of water is content to disappear. She does not want to be perceived. She is not of this world and thus her needs are different. She does not seek validation. Her primary value is in connection with the unseen, in the flow state that emerges within her when she is by a rushing river or the pounding sea. She is an old woman, a gnarled branch, timeless, eternal. Timeless, but not still. No, she is a current, flowing. The current does not concern itself with where it is going, and neither does she. She doesn’t need control, doesn’t need to have the answers, the movement alone is her medicine. This watery part is so deeply feminine, so comfortable in the darkness. She exists in the canal, in the cave, in the chasm. She understands the knowledge that comes from not knowing.

The part of me that is fire craves to be seen. She is lawless and untamed and chaotic like the winds rushing through the arroyo and the thundering hoofbeats of a herd of horses across an open plain. Sometimes, I think she lets herself be fenced in, just to taste the thrill of escape. Freedom is sweeter when earned.

She is the child in me, playful and pure and honest. She has so many ideas they swirl around her as she twirls like a dervish, laughing. She is the child who would swing higher and higher on the playground, close her eyes, and jump - just to imagine for a moment that she was flying. Sometimes she really believed she could, if she ran fast enough, if she jumped high enough. That is a currency she is never short of - Belief. I fucking love her for that.

My fire self is hungry, always, for more, because she knows it’s out there. She values freedom and expression above all else. She wants wide open spaces, clear skies, and a sun so strong it would kill a weaker man. She can take it. Lets it fill up her every atom with light until she’s burning as bright as a bonfire. If I let her, she’d burn herself up just to feel what it was like. Her favorite forms of pleasure have a lick of pain in them, just so she can feel that she’s really alive. She’ll throw the first punch. She’s not afraid to bleed. She’s a shot of whiskey, a howl, the raw blisters on my hands from hard work. She is a dare incarnate. Her existence is a love letter to life.

To harvest cottonwood is to receive a most generous gift. There is no need to pluck buds from the trees themselves, when an abundance of medicine surrounds the river banks. This offering is one of kinship, and solidifies the relationship between the people and the land. We, in need of medicine after a long winter, and the Tree, who has stored enough energy from summers past to have buds to spare.

I wander along the river taking note of the just budding nettles and beaver tracks through the squishing mud. I tend not to bother with the small twigs of buds that lay whimsically here and there. Instead I look for a large enough branch where I can fill my basket easily.

Pulling up water from the boggy banks where they thrive, rapidly growing Cottonwood branches fall and break during winter storms or amidst high winds. I listen to goose song overhead, enjoying the rare February sun on my skin. Ahead I see what I’ve come for. A large branch recently fallen that is laden with fresh buds.

When harvesting buds, I am meticulous about ensuring each bud is bright and lively, not showing any signs of brown rot. The butt of each bud should look white and green; if you see brown it’s a sign that fungal rot has begun within the bud. The branch has most likely been broken off for some time, or occasionally buds will rot when the branch was still attached to the tree.

Too cold of a day and your fingers will become numb, too warm and the resin oozing out of the buds coats your fingers in an ever thickening layer of balsamic stickiness. An important note; jars, pans, or any processing equipment will become coated with resin. I don’t recommend using your brand new Vitamix or your grandmothers measuring bowl. Dedicate tools you won’t mind getting gummed up. To remove resin from your hands, high proof alcohol or oil works best. Soap and water won’t even make a dent. If you have neither with you in the field, rub some dirt on your hands to at least remove the stickiness until you make it home or to the salve waiting for you in the glovebox of your car.

I tend to put up with the stick as it smells heavenly and I'm the tactile sort of human that likes to knead dough with their hands and is frequently elbow deep in soil while tending to the garden. Besides, the resin is why I’m here.

Cottonwood’s are native to Turtle Island, and our variety runs along the west coast and up through B.C. to Alaska. In Oregon, they grow alongside rivers and streams where sunlight is plentiful and are a keystone species west of the cascades where they form gallery forests (forests that run long and narrow, usually along waterways) along floodplains where soil is rich and fertile.

Cottonwoods are in the Salicaceae family which includes many species of aspen, willow, and poplars. All the Salix plants contain varying amounts of Salicin (Salicin being the precursor of Salicylic Acid - pain reliever & inflammation modulator) in their leaves, bark and buds. The buds of cottonwoods when infused into oil or alcohol, create potent medicine that can treat many maladies.

The oil is highly anti-inflammatory and is helpful for swollen joints, aching muscles, and arthritis. Cottonwood’s branches even look like the gnarled hands of an elder grandmother, and the oil or salve brings relief to aching fingers. The anti-microbial properties help heal infections, and can be used on really any sort of skin irritation be it a rash, burn, fungal infection, insect bite, or eczema.

I make an internal preparation by soaking the fresh buds in honey and alcohol to be used as a cough syrup. Cottonwood makes for an excellent expectorant for thick unmoving bronchial mucous. Analgesic and anti-inflammatory properties can soothe the lung conditions and spasms. The longer the extraction, the stronger the medicine, and I'm partial to letting them sit for six months or more. If you harvest in early spring and let them sit until autumn, you’ll have potent medicine to support you through the winter.

Cottonwood is a prolific sort of grower, so much so that if you take a recently broken stick and squish it into the mud, they will root down and grow right where you’ve planted them.

Some gardeners use willow twigs to brew a tea that can then be used to encourage rooting in propagating plant cuttings due to the high levels of rooting hormone. I prefer to use Cottonwood, collected during my annual early spring harvest, and available to use during the spring growing season.

You can prepare this as one would with willow, cutting small stems into smaller pieces, bringing to a boil and steeping overnight. I soak the cuttings for a few hours before planting to give them a good, long drink. You can water delicate seedlings with the same brew. Keep in the fridge for up to two months.

Cottonwood Oil

There are a few things to remember in crafting cottonwood oil. Some have been mentioned previously, which deserve to be mentioned again.

Firstly, use fresh buds. They are far superior to dried, and gathering them yourself is the best way to get the strongest oil. Be diligent about rot, and seek buds that are closed and have not started to open yet. You’re looking to fill a jar ⅔ full of buds.

Secondly, warm your oil. There is a contradiction about infusing fresh plant material into oil, because this also increases water content, increasing the risk of mold. By warming the oil for a period of days with the lid off, water content is able to evaporate. The heat also helps in pulling the resin out of the buds and into the oil. This can be done on a wood-stove or near a heater. I keep mine on a ledge near the woodstove, or will do a double boiler method with hot water. Keep the temperature around 115-120 degrees F. Stir multiple times a day if you can, really whenever you remember.

I like to add a splash of high proof alcohol before adding the oil, just enough to coat the buds. This works to break down and extract the resin, resulting in a very potent oil, and most of the alcohol is evaporated off during the heating. I oscillate between using organic olive or sunflower oil, or grass fed tallow as my preferred menstruums.

The more time you give your oil, the more potent it becomes. After a solid week or so of heating and stirring, I let the buds sit for a lunar cycle. Continue to keep the oil in a warm place in your house. Some folks leave for longer and that’s fine too.

Before straining your oil, make sure the oil has rested unstirred for a few days. Carefully pour the infused oil into a clean glass jar, (make sure it is sanitized and completely dry). I do not press the buds at this point. Cap, label, and store away this first press of medicine. I will then either add more oil over the half spent buds and allow to sit awhile longer or press right away. I am careful not to combine the first round of decanted oil with the second as the goal is to make an oil free of water (creating a shelf stable product for many years) and avoid rancidity. I will warm the pressed second round of oil on the stove to ensure there are no lingering water droplets, (droplets will linger visibly at the bottom of the jar). After I’m sure the oil is completely dry, I will cap, label and store.

Cottonwood oil is high in antioxidants and if done correctly, will last for many years. Small amounts can even be added to other herbal oils that you might make to enhance shelf life.

The swelling late winter buds bring me great comfort after a winter where most of my kin pull their energy deep into roots. The sticky unfurling is a milestone of my year and marks the beginning of the harvest season. It is an opportunity to give thanks, to begin the season in right relationship, and celebrate the return of spring.

I admire poplars for their focus. They do one thing at a time, completely. Whether it be growing roots, branches, or buds, there is a steadfastness to their energy. Poplars are beings of presence. They are not fazed or worried by the winds and their medicine is that of embodiment.

In the winter, their song is low and deep, the stillness of roots anchoring them to the riverbank. In spring, it is balsamic and swelling, hopeful, yet ever so patient. And in summer, it is the swish-swish-swish of heart shaped leaves that echo like a rushing stream.

With the return of spring, especially those of us who tend gardens or land may feel the frenetic pull to do, do, do. The slowness of winter feels crippling as the pulse of spring brings us up and out into the world. If you find yourself in this untethered place, I recommend sitting at the base of an especially large Cottonwood, and offering the gift of your presence.

I’m falling in love, fast.

Like a newborn horse,

I am born into this world

wet and warm and hungry.

Before I’ve even caught

my first breath,

before I even know the sky

from the ground,

I’m up and running,

towards you,

towards this fertile darkness.

This is how I love you.

Suddenly,

urgently,

and without question.

.

Falling in love with you tastes

like indigo oblivion.

Time doesn’t just stand still,

it ceases to exist.

I become nothing, no one,

with your hands

gripping my hips,

your mouth swallowing me.

I am in the belly of the whale.

I am the hollow bone,

empty vessel,

waiting to be filled by

you.

.

I love you without choice,

like the way my breath

fills my lungs after each

exhale. I mean to say that

loving you

is as natural

as breathing,

as easy as falling asleep.

I wake up every morning

with your name in my mouth,

and it sounds like a prayer.

.

I am not afraid of your scars.

I will get down on both knees,

I will lick your wounds clean,

devour you down to the rind,

show you that this love is

worth believing in.

It was February 2025. It began as a single thought; high off of an edible dose that was frankly more than I needed on a red-eye flight somewhere over South Dakota while blasting FKA Twigs through my headphones. You could just go.

The notion filled me with a perverse sense of euphoria. I wanted to erupt into a fit of giggles at the thought. The plane was full of slumbering passengers, but I was wide awake in the dimly lit cabin, fantasizing about an Irish Exit so big I’d never come back.

Looking back, with all the bias of hindsight, I can see the threads were already being cut long before that pivotal night that landed me in the emergency room; the night that shattered me, broke me, into a creature unrecognizable to even myself. But depression is funny that way, how it can sneak up on you like a bad habit, a shadow always just out of reach. I couldn’t see it for what it was, and no one else around me did either.

I did not know then how dark the room was that I sat in. I did not know then that I would have to sacrifice everything on the altar, disappear into the fertile nothingness of the void in order to come out reborn. This is the cost of a new life.

There’s no easy way to say, I find myself to be a stranger to my own life, like I’ve just awoken into a dream, and the “I” who you have known is not the self that stands here now, so alas, I must go.

But that’s exactly what it was; I was inexplicably a stranger in my own life, and the thought of carrying on the performance with all the other actors entering off stage left and right was horrifying.

I’ve sat down and tried to write an explanation, write apologies, more times than I can count and perhaps the effort is futile and there is no pretty or tidy way to coax out the vowels. The fact is, I changed. Everything did. My future, my identity, my body, my relationships, all up in flames, and I, a wraith floating through surveying the damage.

I cannot sugarcoat that the last 12 months were the hardest of my life. I left a man I’d loved in totality for six years all while navigating a new diagnosis and a collapse of my health. I live alone, in the woods without cell service, and I sometimes wondered if I would die there. I abandoned the livelihood and business I’d spent the last five years building, had no idea how I was going to pay my bills and no fucking idea who I even was anymore. This was the compost of my chrysalis.

So, I waited. I slept. I fed myself. I made art even when I hated everything I made. I forced myself to visit the sacred waters, trees, beings of my life even when I resented their silence. I stayed, begrudgingly, alive.

One day, Spring arrived, and she surprised me with her softness, all lilac blossoms and verdant hills. And so, I softened more in return. I continued letting go. I let myself keep falling, deeper into more nothingness than I’d ever touched before. The well of my grief seemed bottomless. I peeled back masks like onion skins and I wondered if it would ever end or who I would find when it did. I reread Steppenwolf. I screamed into the blinding storms of high tides, drowned myself under crashing waves, and cried so much I burst a blood vessel in my eye. I let myself keep falling, without judgment or shame or some imposed timeline. I saw no one. I let myself feel everything.

When Summer came, I found my joy. I found I could hold both pain and pleasure, like that holy angel in the Temperance card. Back and forth from my cups I poured out joy and I poured out grief and something was alchemized, tempered in that process. I started making art that felt good. I started writing again. I was in a new town where no one knew my name. The sun was a breath on the small, smoldering ember of my spirit and fuck if it didn’t feel good to feel alive again. There were days I was so high on life and sunlight I felt manic. I foolishly thought myself healed, the cycle complete; I was Ready now, ready to love again, ready to open, ready to be seen.

And then, it was Autumn. I resist her, year after year, not ready to let go of the feeling of being so immersed and drenched in light. I held a funeral for summer down by the river, eating the last ripe, full peach as the juice ran down my arms staining my white skirt. My tanned skin began to pale. The days darkened, my distractions lessened, and my grief returned, louder than ever. I thought I’d touched the bottom before? Fuck, I didn’t know anything. And so again, I let myself fall; grief is a spiral after all. My dreams became battlegrounds and I wandered the Bardo without rest.

It was here, in the deepest, darkest cavern of my being, when suddenly and without warning, someone opened the door, held out their hand, and I took it. I walked through the threshold and I did not look back. I’ve never believed in fate so fiercely as when I found the Coyote who I’d been dreaming of for years; this man whose depth is fathomless and familiar all at once, this synchronistic moment of collision that hit us both like a freight train. On the Winter Solstice, when I lay in his bed with my body coiled around him like a snake, I felt the world rearrange itself around us as we fell in love.

In that moment, I understood, everything.

To protect the integrity of the dreaming and the dreamt, I will only share the closing scene of the dream. 

In this final chapter, I lay in my bed sleeping when a rustling outside woke me. I rolled over to see Coyote moving silently through the mesh that hangs over the sliding doors to the deck that I keep open all summer. In their mouth, limp and soft, a baby bobcat nestled between ivory clasps of tooth.

The coyote's eyes were pale yellow, like two full moons peering back at me.

They drop the bobcat at my bed, sit back on limber hind legs, and stare. 

They open their mouth and ask, 

“What do you hunger for?”

I awoke abruptly, adrenaline spilling through my blood and turned over to see a small rabbit with their neck snapped at the foot of my bed, lying exactly where the coyote sat. I assume it is a gift from my cat but the similarity startles me. My stomach growls theatrically. And I feel a deeper growl, a growl beyond the physical, echo within.

I spent the next few weeks mulling over the dream and the ever present feeling of hunger that filled me. Whether it was always there unnoticed or it grew after the dream, I couldn’t tell you, only that suddenly, I was acutely aware that I hungered for more.

“What do you hunger for?”

Weeks went by and the gnawing in my soul continued. I rolled the question around in my mind back and forth like waves on stone. 

Where was I afraid to own the monstrosity of my desire?

Where was I making concessions, settling for less, playing it small?

This hunger was so unacceptable to my mind that it had been relegated to the Shadow Lands of the subconscious, left to whimper in darkness. 

More. 

Everything in my life was suddenly squirming on the rust stained butchers block. Everything was to be Marie-Kondoed, picked up, examined, questioned.

I liked my life, didn’t I?

I chose this life… didn’t I?

What was I too afraid to ask for, lest the disappointment in not receiving it crush me?

Where was I too afraid to take up space, lest the rejection leave me wounded?

The question is never how did I get here. It is easy enough to psychically retrace our footsteps through the woods and see the people who hurt us and how life molded us into the shapes we come to hold. It is much harder to see how to get there. To the other side, to the place where desire leads us.

How do we find our way back to desire, to a life not merely inhabited, but lived?

Last autumn I fell in love again, for the first time in a long time.

Not with a person, but with a place.

There's a part of me that didn’t come home from the desert. She is still out there, sitting beside the raven on a juniper branch and dancing through the arroyos with the wind. She waits poised, stuck in the throat of a coyote, until their joyful croon sets her free to rest in the crook of the cottonwood, roots drinking up the river. 

She didn’t want to leave, and now, like a horcrux, she remains, sworn to the land that gave her new life under skies wide enough to hold all of her vastness.

It was dawn and the desert was a blanket of sparkling, iridescent white as I awoke to below freezing temperatures in the back of my truck. Crawling out from my nest of sheepskins and down, I made coffee with frozen hands and watched the cup steam into the crisp air. Snow clung to the carmine cliffs and revealed cloven tracks through the sagebrush. I was to drive north from New Mexico towards Utah.

I awoke that morning with the memory of a lone howl in my dream. It lingered with me longer than most fleeting dreamtime fragments. Unbeknownst to me, I had slept that night a few miles outside of a town called Coyote. When I drove through the next morning, I felt it was an auspicious sign.

There was no traffic on the roads, and I left the radio off, listening to the rhythmic hum of the road and the heater in my truck as I drove. I could’ve driven north up through Colorado, but something pulled me east, towards the Badlands.

The Bisti Badlands feel other worldly. Swirling sandstone morphs into curvaceous shapes and spires. There is a ghostly, spirit rich scent in the air, like all threshold places that are thick with transcendence. It was in this thick air that I found Coyote.

In my time midwifing death, I’ve seen an animal's spirit leave its body right away, and other times felt them stick around for a while. As soon as I touched her, I could feel her presence close. I scooped up her soft, still warm body off the side of the road and gently placed her in the back of my truck.

I drove for a bit, away from the highway towards BLM land. There are many people who loathe coyotes. They look at them and see a story of domination and hate. But when I look at her small body, her winter coat dense and thick, all I see is beauty. This perfect, beautiful creature.

In that quiet, still morning, cradled in a sandstone embrace of blooming blush, we entered into ceremony together. I wept for her short life. I sang as I buried her bones there and salted the hide, leaving a ring of salt atop the earth with seeds of datura. I named her Bisti.

In Dan Flores’ Coyote America: A Natural and Supernatural History, he tells the story of one of the most vilified mammals on the continent, and how despite the extermination campaign determined to wipe them out, they continue to not only survive, but thrive.

An estimated half a million coyotes die every year, led by federal agency Wildlife Services, big Ag, and gleeful hunters. They are shot from helicopters, left to die in leg hold traps, or poisoned.

In spite of these horrors, the Coyote persists. They show exceptional skills of adaptation and evolutionary flexibility. Flores writes that, like human animals, “coyote young have lengthy childhoods during which they learn from their parent’s cultural skills and critical information about the world.”

He explains “Coyotes have been in North America far longer than we, they are not going anywhere, and history demonstrates all too graphically that eradicating them is an impossibility." In response to their attempted annihilation, coyotes began having larger litters, changed behavioral patterns, and seemed to shrug their shoulders and laugh in the face of those that would destroy them.

Poignantly, Flores concludes that “all along, Coyotes have been saving themselves.”

Recently I was at my parent’s house looking through a box of old art and stories I'd created as a child. I was shocked to find a number of my own original “coyote tales” written out in childish scrawl. I still remember the first time I saw a coyote. I did not feel the horror or resentment that emanated from the adults around me, only curiosity at this animal that seemed to defy categorization as they slipped easily through the cracks of the known and the wild.

Coyote is the main character of many American folktales across turtle island from Canada to Mexico. Coyote is the classic trickster archetype, meaning they are neither good nor bad, sometimes the hero and sometimes the villain. Often Coyote stories are told as a warning of how NOT to act - other times Coyote is the teacher.

What strikes me most about coyote stories is Coyote’s role as a Creator, shaping the lands and people who dwell there. 

This is how Coyote comes to me, as a rule breaker not for spite but for reclamation. They show up as an anarchist and visionary who will push you to build something new, to think outside of the box, to find your freedom. Coyote forces me to question everything, noting that often all is not as it seems.

Coyote doesn’t let me lie to myself. Coyote pulls back the bandage and licks the wound. Coyote doesn’t want me satiated, they want me hungry, hunting, opening, becoming. Coyote will not tolerate a life half lived. They laugh in the face of doubt. They are a dare incarnate. Coyote loves an underdog. Coyote tears up the furniture because we never liked it anyway. Coyote snarls and bites the hand that gives advice that while well meaning, would be better given to Horse or Toad.

Coyote wants me to live.  

In the year since Coyote asked me that question, my life has been entirely rearranged. It has been a messy, terrifying, and liberating journey. Every one of my worst fears came true and I am still here. I am not the same woman I was then, forced to strip away the very foundations of my life in order to build something new.

I feel that hunger still, in the caverns of my belly and I am not afraid. I lean in to my longing. I say yes, give me more.

Recommend Reading:

Coyote America: A Natural and Supernatural History by Dan Flores

Prodigal Summer by Barbara Kingsolver

Coyote Stories by Mourning Dove

This month the question I have been rolling between my teeth is about Clarity.
Specifically, is clarity something you find or is it a thing you make?

If only it were so easy- aha! there it is, under the laundry in the corner, I’ve found my clarity - but clarity is not an object or tangible thing, clarity is a state of being.

Is lacking clarity really a problem, or is it my impatience that is the problem?

If we do not trust ourselves, if we are disconnected from our bodies, will we ever truly feel the presence of clarity? Will we know it when we see it or will it slip past us on the wind? 

What if a lack of clarity is a certain type of ambivalence that means it really doesn’t matter what we choose, that what is seeking us, what is meant for us will find us one way or another?

Is waiting for clarity really a mask worn by Fear, who wishes to avoid making a choice?

Is waiting for clarity really a mask crafted by Perfectionism, who shackles us into non-action so we do not dare make a mistake?

Is clarity just another word for Faith?

I’ve come to find that more than anything, clarity is a space we create inside of ourselves. Have you ever been stuck on a problem, sought your answers from tarot cards or the mouths of others, and still rejected the call to action you received? Answers do not equate to clarity, especially answers we do not want or are not ready to hear. We can say we are “waiting for clarity” as a way to prolong making an inevitable choice or facing our inner truth.

The more I stew on this, the more I come to see that many forms of clarity are actually little more than golden mirages we craft to give us the bravery to finally j u m p - because there is no ultimate way of knowing exactly how something is going to turn out, despite how right it may feel or what the oracle spoke, life is mischievous and winding and the only thing certain is that nothing is certain.

Often we will not know for certain, we will not feel the crisp, clear air of clarity and we will still have to choose. We will struggle and writhe and not know what feels right, and yet we must have the courage to leap in spite of it.

And so, clarity becomes a choice, clarity becomes an action, and it is one with the sole purpose of moving forward.

If you’ve ever spent time with an indecisive person, you too may know this trick in pulling a choice out of them: you simply, and randomly, choose for them. Through the action of moving forward through choice, they are suddenly aware of what they DON’T want. Either they are pleased with the choice you made or they are not, and either way it is more information than they had when they sat at the crossroads of indecision.

There is another type of clarity that is found deep in the wells of the body.

It is a feeling, a bell ringing, a vibration that we attune to. In the cacophony of the mind, our sweet endlessly busy mind, running scenario after scenario, we cannot tell where reality ends and the fictionalized future begins. We must turn to that knowledge that is knowing without and beyond reasoning, that bell that tones in a pitch that is uniquely yours-

then, all that is required is holding that hum in your body, letting that timbre wrap around your cells and sing in your blood until you become it.

You are the bell ringing. You are the reflection, the light ricocheting off the glass, you become clarity incarnate. 

Three Herbs for Clarity:

Mugwort: Helps you find your intuition, no matter how buried deep or tangled it has become. Speaks through dreams and omens. Comforts a lost stranger and feeds them supper. 

St.John’s Wort: Helps you remember your Purpose and burns away self doubt. Infuses you with solar radiance. Wake up and do the fucking thing.

Rosemary: The bluest flame of a candle, a warm bath, a well worn hearth. A reminder that you aren’t alone. It is safe to begin again.

There are lilacs on the dashboard and labyrinths on my mind. The heady scent of lilac wafts through the truck as I drive through verdant green hills alive with spring. California poppy, sunny balsamroot and various biscuitroots are in bloom amongst the oak savannah. I have five hours to go and as I drive my mind walks a spiral.

My preoccupation with clarity, fate, and choice comes from the inner crossroads I sit at. I’ve been dwelling here for quite some time now. I have been dreaming about mazes; thick walled hedges or complex palaces. In my dreams I feel a sense of panic looming. This is not the playfulness of the corn maze but the terror of losing one’s self completely.

The first story I ever wrote when I was 10 years old was about a magical library that was also a labyrinth. I have been enamored with both (books and labyrinths) for the entirety of my life.

Often I see people talking about the Labyrinth as a metaphor for the creative process or our inner spiritual journeys. There is usually an allusion to the wrong turns we take along the way and finding our way through. We use the word “labyrinthine” to describe maze like structures that are intricate and twisting,

However a true Labyrinth is not multicursal, a design that includes multiple choices of paths and directions; a maze is multicursal. A labyrinth is unicursal. There is only one way in and one way out. There are no choices to be made along the way, no way to use intelligence or memory, all that you can do - all that you need to do in walking a labyrinth - is keep moving forward.

Labyrinths are not puzzles to solve, you cannot outthink or outmaneuver a labyrinth, they are singular paths to walk. Despite our fear or uncertainty of what we may face ahead, all that we must do is continue.

All you must do is continue.

What if we stopped thinking of life as a maze and instead placed ourselves in a labyrinth?

This is the mindset I am embodying this month. I am placing movement of the body over the reticulations of the mind. I cannot outthink my fate, I simply keep moving forward.

“A maze is designed to make you lose your way, while a labyrinth is designed to help you find your way.”

On the Nightstand: I Who Have Never Known Men by Jacqueline Harpman

“I was forced to acknowledge too late, much too late, that I too had loved, that I was capable of suffering, and that I was human after all.”

This book is a descent into an absurd and irrational world. It is a sparse and stark dystopia, haunting and unsettling, where we are left deliberately in the dark. We will not receive answers and are instead left with the question, what does it mean to be human?

There is so much vastness in this novel it feels like night in the moonless desert. It is spacious and silent and leaves one to ponder the philosophical. It meanders similarly to Cormac McCarthy’s The Road and reads like a sequel to Plato’s Allegory of the Cave, after you have left the cave, what then?

On the Wall: Birthday by Dorothea Tanning, 1942

One of my favorite self portraits is Birthday by Dorothea Tanning. These days I often feel like I am drifting down endless hallways filled with doors. I pace the halls, sometimes pressing an ear to a door, to see if I can hear what lies on the other side.

She stands with her hand on the doorknob, waiting. Is she coming or going? She is somewhere in-between. This is the portrait of a threshold. This is the void. Her dress is made of roots, made of bodies, her chest bare.

The yellow-eyed winged lemur.

Something deep within me goes still when gazing down that hallway.

Neptune in Aries came in with a flaming sword. Venus was the first to come to me, bathed in fire. She took my hand and led me into the flames and showed me how I would not burn. She disappeared from the night sky soon after, invisible, a smoldering presence all that she left me, left me standing in those flames. There was a story, etched and deeply grooved like the striated walls of a canyon, that said those flames would burn - but I did not, could not resist, because I was birthed in fire. 

I screamed into this world in the high heat of summer, with a moon of ruby fire. This gift, this moon, that was not like the soothing folds and gentle pastures of other moons, or my parents' oceanic temperaments. No, my moon was a bloodthirsty eruption. My moon burned with the energy of creation and desire and an unyielding courage. 

The night Neptune sailed into Aries I had a dream of a sword on fire. I clutched it in my bare hands and it did not burn, it’s warmth instead wrapped around me like a cocoon, cradling me in flames of blue and gold.

I woke up and my hands found the amethyst stone that hung on a gold chain around my neck, letting it roll underneath my fingertips. My mother’s mother died last year, and before this, it once lay around her neck. I stumbled upon the small wooden box holding it, and a matching pair of amethyst earrings a few weeks ago. I instinctually unclasped the necklace and tried it on. I looked in the mirror and admired the way it lay, how the chain was just the right length. I could not bring myself to take it off and haven’t since. 

That night, the dream of the sword still blazed into my mind, I suddenly remembered that the last time I saw my mother I had asked her for the record of when my grandmother was born, had entered the data into my phone, and never looked at it again. 

The moon lit up my bedroom from the skylights above and I leafed through the ephemeris to the year 1937, hungry for some comfort of knowledge. My fingers slid across the page and I blinked, a key sliding into a well oiled lock. I knew her, of course I knew her, because she and I were born from that same molten place. Her fierce independence and stubbornness. Quick to fight but just as quick to forget, a stinging nettle woman. Everyday, she was moving, moving, moving, never sitting still. She was cherry pie and baseball games and dancing to Elvis in the living room. An Aries moon, and sitting right beside her, was Venus.

More than anything, I remember every time us kids would arrive at her house for a visit, and she would run outside - if she already wasn’t there waiting- and wrap her arms around me so tight I could scarcely breathe. So tight, as if her body could communicate what her mouth could not. Gripping me in her warm arms, her small body so strangely strong, a kiss planted firmly on each cheek. I never once doubted she was so glad I was there, this woman with a heart of fire, pulling me into her embrace with all the love of a burning sun. It was her who had gifted me my fire. 

I have a tattoo on my hip that says tahrir (تحرير), or liberation. At the time I was learning Arabic in university. I still remember the conversation I had with the tattoo artist, that it was not liberation from but liberation to. An important distinction, as one looks to the past, one to the future. It is not the noun - who - we are freed from that is important, but the action form, what choices we make in our liberation, liberation as celebration. A liberation that is not hyper independence but radical sovereignty. Liberation is the war cry Aries screams on the battlefield. Aries is not the individualist, but the freedom fighter, swinging their sword for the liberation of all beings, so we might all taste the spell of true liberty. 

In my Headphones:

Eartheater - Phoenix: Flames Are Dew Upon My Body // Massive Attack - Mezzanine

I’ve been listening to both of these albums on a loop while painting this month. Music I paint to is very different than what I listen to while driving or writing. I can’t pin down or categorize it, but when I hear it, I just know it’s the vibe. I’ve been a fan of Massive Attack since I was a teenager and don’t think there’s anything I could say that hasn’t already been said on this atmospheric masterpiece. It is dark and sensual and lush and will transport you to other worlds.

Eartheater’s album was a new discovery that had me in a trance for about 6 hours with paint and canvas until hunger pulled me back to reality.

Lyrics from ‘How to Fight’ from Phoenix: Flames Are Dew Upon My Body

“I've tasted metals of my own blood
And learned to like it
I've gone under the knife of love
Dissected every vein and vessel

I know how to fight
How to fight
How to fuck
How to fuck
How to die
How to resurrect my pride

I've learned by now
That my strength has been forged
In the fire of pain
It's a warrior's world
Watch the daybreak
Set my heart up to be broken again

I've cast myself into the flames
And risen once again
Coated with dew like the morning
Wet as a newborn
Little horns
Little hooves
Sure feet
Uncut wings
Uncut wings
Uncut wings"

Every song on this album conjures flaming harps, phoenixes ash coated wings, angelic wolves, and trembling volcanoes. This is an Ariesan ode to re-birth.

On the Nightstand : Água Viva by Clarice Lispector

Água Viva is meant to be read all at once, taken down like a gulp of water. It is meant to be read with a glass (or two) of red wine, blurring the edges just enough for you to feel what is written in between the words. Água Viva is written like a painting or a piece of music. It is not obvious, and if you pay attention only to words and syntax you will fail to grasp the message that is between. It is written in a stream of consciousness that requires a certain place and state of mind to comprehend. This is not a book to read over espresso at the cafe or on the scratched vinyl seat of the train. It lives in the loose place between concentration and undiluted presence.

“What I’m writing to you is not for reading— it’s for being.”

This is the sprawling prose of a creative mind, one that questions the very nature of things, of language, of feelings. It is a doorway into the deeply feeling person who within the structure and rhythm of language finds the rules lacking, finds the syllables themselves insufficient. It is existential, but joyful. Multi-dimensional, like the artist who wrote it. Água Viva is less a descent and more a sideways step out of Time and into the Void.

“But I also know of yet another life. I know and want it and devour it ferociously. It's a life of magical violence. It’s mysterious and bewitching. In it snakes entwine while the stars tremble. Drops of water drip in the phosphorescent darkness of the cave. In that dark the flowers intertwine in a humid fairy garden. And I am the sorceress of that silent bacchanal. I feel defeated by my own corruptibility. And I see that I am intrinsically bad. It's only out of pure kindness that I am good. Defeated by myself. Who lead me along the paths of the salamander, the spirit who rules the fire and lives within it, and I give myself as an offering to the dead. I weave spells on the solstice, spectre of an exorcised dragon.”

Clarice’s writing style is entirely her own. She recounts that having no literary circle or writers around her as a young person meant she was left to her own rhythm and voice. There are very few writers she cites as influence. Reading Dostoevsky and Herman Hesse’s Steppenwolf (both authors that deeply shaped me in my own youth), propelled her to write her debut novel Near to the Wild Heart that was published near her 23rd birthday in December 1943. Critics wrote that “the whole book is a miracle of balance, perfectly engineered,” combining the “intellectual lucidity of the characters of Dostoevsky with the purity of a child.”

“But the most important word in the language has but two letters: is. Is. I am at its core. I still am. I am at the living and soft centre. Still. It sparkles and is elastic.”

If you want a book that is more like a meditation, I highly recommend Àgua Viva. I read it in a single evening over pasta, red wine, and chocolate cake while snow cloaked the hills around the deep lake I spent my childhood summers at. There are lines that have stuck with me, long after the book has been placed back on the shelf.

ARTIST: Leonara Carrington

I began writing about Leonara and quickly realized my devotion to this surrealist artist cannot be contained to this piece, so I will be publishing a post on her in greater detail in the next week or so.

POEM: The Journey by Mary Oliver

I love a bit of poem bibliomancy. If you haven’t partaken in this before, I recommend you begin. Take a volume of poetry and blindly open to the page that calls to you. This poem came to me in such a way and has become my mantra for this season.

One day you finally knew

what you had to do, and began,

though the voices around you

kept shouting

their bad advice-

though the whole house 

began to tremble

and you felt the old tug

at your ankles

“Mend your life!”

each voice cried.

But you didn’t stop.

You knew what you had to do,

though the wind pried 

with its stiff fingers

at the very foundations,

though their melancholy

was terrible.

It was already late

enough, and a wild night

and the road full of fallen

branches and stones.

But little by little

as you left their voices behind,

the stars began to burn

through the sheets of clouds,

and there was a new voice

which you slowly

recognized as your own,

that kept you company,

as you strode deeper and deeper

into the world

determined to do

the only thing you could do-

determined to save

the only life you could save. 

I did not come to herbalism on a traditional path. There was no curriculum or required reading. Enveloped in the fragile, liminal bubble of chronic illness I waded into the waters of the green world with an open, outstretched palm and the willingness to leave my preconceived notions of how the world worked and what was possible at the shore. My first teachers were the plants themselves. There is an irony in calling this untraditional, because personal gnosis is, in my opinion, the well trodden path that humans have been walking since time immemorial. In the age of information with so much knowledge at our fingertips, experiential gnosis is a bit of a lost art. 

I am an avid and voracious reader, yet I believe we do ourselves a disservice when we remain lodged too firmly in the realm of intellect. Certain we know a plant's properties, we can become deaf to the clear voice calling out to us, or if you’re like me, the not-so-subtle physiological response that your body produces in the complex, undulating conversation between you and the plant. Sometimes, it is important to simply sit before a plant, empty your mind of what you expect to happen, and notice what does. In my experience, very often what I’ve learned directly from a plant is confirmed by others later on. Occasionally, it’s not, which I find to be particularly fascinating. This does not at all mean that what you ascertained is invalid, rather you have now expanded your tool kit and understanding of a plant's qualities in a personal and relational way. 

Aster is a plant not commonly discussed in contemporary materia medica. Few books, if any, mention Aster/symphyotrichum family plants despite their ubiquitous presence in late summer across Turtle Island. For the most part, this friend goes unnoticed. I began working with Aster years before ever coming across a written word about them.

I first met Aster back in the summer of 2018, a few years into my journey as an herbalist. It was the summer of flower essences, and I spent my days lounging in alpine meadows and cool creek beds, my backpack full of crystal bowls. This year of my life was a total immersion in experiential learning. I did not look to books or the vast mycelial network of the internet to let someone else tell me what each plant or flower  could “do”. Instead, I returned to the wisdom of my childhood where I would steal my mothers finest crystal from the china cabinet, slip out the back door, and wander around the neighborhood collecting flowers for my “potions”.  Satisfied with each intentionally placed flower and the glint of sunlight against the bowl, I would lay under a shady tree and drink my sun tea, watching the clouds swirl and shapeshift overhead. 

Sometimes the call of a plant is a whisper, and other times a shout. Alpine Aster was a clap of thunder, a reverberating gong that I felt move through my whole body. The first thing I felt was their radiance and the way I felt bigger in their presence; confident and expansive. I laid down under the noon sun in this meadow of lavender and soaked in their medicine. Their golden center surrounded by dusky purple was a sigil of radical expansion and solar power. Eating a flower I felt my lungs spread like outstretched wings riding the wind, felt my spirit unfurl and unroll like a great rug over rolling hills, continuing on and on and on. Aster is a deep breath and a wide sky. 

As an essence, I believe Aster fills us with purpose and strength. They have an ability to lift up what is unique in all of us, building confidence in our gifts and giving us the courage to share them with the world. Energetically warming, they are a solar remedy that can thaw out rigidity. Aster is big picture medicine, zooming us out from myopic stories and helping us see ourselves clearly from a broader, wider perspective.

Last summer in the high country of the Wallowa Mountains, Aster covered the mountainsides interlaced with Yarrow, Fireweed and Pearly Everlasting. They filled me with that same sense of radiance and purpose and as I hiked, chewing a handful of resinous flower in my mouth, I felt my breath smooth and deepen, despite the fact that I was trudging up switchbacks. My lungs felt relaxed and open, and I thought how appropriate it was that Aster bloomed in late summer, corresponding with wildfire season here in the West where many could benefit from released lung tension and respiratory anti-spasmodics. The flowers that were the deepest in color seemed to be the most resinous compared to their paler kin, and the resinous quality reminded me of Calendula’s carminative, warming and bitter qualities. 

Returning to Joseph, I was curious if other herbalists were working with species of Aster and did some research. What I found confirmed what I’d theorized and also provided more case studies from herbal clinicians. Most of what I found referenced New England Aster, but in my experience, the volatile oils present in Asters (such as the alpine variety I chewed on) are similar enough through various bioregions to say that they can be used interchangeably.  

jim mcdonald, in his monograph on New England Aster references the relaxing and dilating effects of Aster on the lungs passageways. He, among others, finds Aster to be uniquely effective in the treatment of asthma. He writes, “...in the numerous years that have followed, I have repeatedly (though of course not always) seen this… use of aster tincture offers a lasting (and seemingly cumulative) effect and can often lessen a person’s dependence on their inhaler.  I’ve on several occasions seen people who used their inhalers several times a day be able to reduce it to once a day or less.  As a respiratory relaxant, I think of using New England aster when tension is “quivery” and irritable, whether such a state is acute or chronic.  It’s less valuable in treating severe spasm states than it is in preventing severe spasm states.  I picture quivery, shivery, shuddery lungs which, if they shudder just enough, trigger coughing or asthma or whatever baleful respiratory woe the afflicted is predisposed to.”

Seán Pádraig O'Donoghue writes of New England Aster, “A tincture made from the flowering tops can immediately relieve muscle constriction around the airways. I tend to use about 15 drops in acute situations – most effective when there is tightness around the airway that signals that an attack is imminent but spasms have not begun.”

Kiva Rose Hardin referencing a local southwest Aster, “I’ve seen a simple of Aster flower tincture both reduce and eliminate the need for inhalers during allergy and fire season. I’ve also seen it dramatically reduce chest tension, wheezing and shortness of breath in those with mild to moderate asthma during exposure to wildfire smoke. This often works well both symptomatically and long term.”

I don’t think Aster is relegated to only treating asthma, but any sort of dry cough that tends towards spasmodic, or if one holds tension in the lungs, especially in wintertime when breathing in the cold, harsh air. I have only used the fresh flowers in a tincture so that’s what I recommend. Aster’s tend toward fluff, similar to Arnica when drying so it’s a bit of a nuisance to try to save them for infusions. jim mcdonald does note that the leaves of Aster have a rather mucilaginous quality to them, and when included in a tincture could offer assistance to drier coughs. 

I think Aster could also be used in a formula for grief, which can settle in the lungs as they feel dispersive and expansive. Combine with mullein, mallow and plantain for a good wildfire/protective formula.

I have somewhat hesitantly and other times robustly declared myself to be entering an Artist Era. This is not some elitist expression, but most simply it is a reclamation of my girlhood. The first thing I ever wanted to be, when my brain could conceive of such a question when asked, was an Artist. And from that moment onward, I can remember my parents, teachers and culture at large telling me that making art was a nice hobby, but not a real job. This coupled with a sometimes crippling perfectionism led me away from pursuing art as deeply as my younger self desired. I was still enamored with the idea, this archetype of the artist, but kept it arms length away. In classic Freudian fashion, as I got older this repressed part of myself is what I was attracted to most fervently in others. From lovers to friends, I adored artists and felt at home in their chaos. I deeply understood the sometimes all consuming desire that to the uninitiated could be taken as selfish, but I had experienced enough myself to know was inspiration.

I often took on the role of Muse. If I wasn’t going to create art, I could then inspire art. I knew the energy of Eros intimately and it needed to be channeled somewhere. I needed to be adjacent to spaces where art was valued, yet even in these spaces the chasm between myself and my inhibitions did not let me pick up a paint brush or pluck a guitar. 

Looking back, I recognize that the Muse actually is a part of the art. The Muse is essential, in fact. Muse comes to us in many forms. Sometimes muse is the bridge of a song, or a herons wing, or a cup of coffee. There is also the living muse, the individual who aims to live their life as if it is Art: as if there is no separation from the mundane and the magic. For the muse, every small act of your life is sacred and you yourself are a walking embodiment of art. (Aren’t we?) That energy flows out from you in reverberations that others can feel and taste like salt on wind. 

As a film obsessed teenager I often was both director and muse, gazing at my life as if I was telling a story, and this inspired me to live a life that was worth telling about. It inspired me to go through life as if these moments were poignant enough to capture, beautiful enough to matter. It also taught me the power of narrative and how inevitably we embody the stories we tell ourselves. Plots can be rewritten.

Within each of us as individuals I believe lives both the muse and the artist, the witness and the witnessed. What does it look like to hold both?

There is something very comfortable about being the Muse. I enjoyed the singular attention given to me when an artist, sometimes a lover, other times platonic, became infatuated and inspired. To be a Muse you are simply being. The pressure of translating is off the table, as is connecting with an audience. You are not concerned with capturing the light just right, you become the light itself, and that is a very different type of magic. 

Is the artist the one who captures the light, or is the artist the one who shines the light? I think about all the femmes throughout history who have inspired men in their respective creative works, many of them artists themselves. I wonder how much of what we applaud is merely a translation of the art that was their lives.

Dalí seemed to understand the blurred lines of muse and artist that his wife Gala embodied: “It was she who chose the image with which she wanted to present and, especially, represent herself. It is possible to design one’s own self-portrait without producing a tangible pictorial work.”

Salvador even signed some works with their joint signature, “Gala Salvador Dalí,” in honor of his belief that it was “mostly with your blood, Gala, that I paint my pictures.”

Gala was without a doubt the muse of Dalí’s work. He painted countless portraits of her. When she had a hysterectomy, he painted The Bleeding Roses, which shows Gala’s mane of blonde hair and her figure with a bundle of crimson roses across her stomach, the petals of which turn into drops of blood. He captured and fed off of her volatile emotions and translated them to canvas, and was aware enough of this exchange to credit her as an artist alongside him.

In the literary world, artistic power couples like Virginia and Leonard Woolf, Georgie “George” and W.B. Yeats, and the ever infamous Fitzgeralds come to mind. While Leonard Woolf’s wife Virginia eventually eclipsed his own fame and recognition as a writer (which he accepted happily), Zelda Fitzgerald frequently had her diaries plagiarized to be included in her husbands fiction. Zelda was as much a co-author as she was a muse despite her husbands attempts to suffocate this knowledge and claim her work as his own.

And there is perhaps no greater artistic love affair than Frida Kahlo and Diego Rivera. Frida’s art embodies something specific that I find myself chasing and stalking like a wolf. She was sovereignly her own muse as well as the one holding the brush. It is her own gaze which pierces back at us from the canvas, the face she replicated again and again. She claims herself boldly, turning her gaze inward and then outward in raw declaration.

She was also fascinated, inspired and influenced by her husband Diego. They creatively supported and energized each others work. While their dynamic was sometimes tumultuous there was always mutual respect and an undercurrent of passion. This dance of mutual inspiration while maintaining individual expression is one I find myself hungering for, this fluid axis where to perch and balance there feels like finding perfect pitch. This is what it must feel like to meet your equal.

Currently, I am filling my house with large canvases. I am scrying into the colors of oxblood and ochre and indigo. I am dancing with as many mediums as I can get my hands on. The mirror becomes a tool more than a reflection. My daily to-do list includes killing my inner perfectionist and playing with childlike abandonment. I will leave this post with the words of Anaïs Nin, for I too have come to realize, it’s time to do the job myself.

I miss the internet of my youth. 

Back before everything became a marketplace, every individual a brand, all of us falling neatly into the polarity of influencers or consumers. 

I was born in ‘94, part of the last generation to spend a childhood without tablets and smartphones and the constant blue glow of the screen. Our family computer was a beige, hulking creature that lived downstairs in the central hub of our suburban house. My brother and I had CD-ROM computer games we were allowed to play in lulling afternoons after we came back in from outdoors. The bulky keys clacked so loudly you could hear them from another room.

My parents, overprotective as they were, forbade us from MySpace accounts or any first gen social media sites, probably convinced predators would find us after watching an episode of Dateline, or maybe just trying to shield us from adulthood for a little while longer. 

As I didn’t have many friends anyhow, I wasn’t particularly interested in what seemed like a digital popularity contest of friend counts. 

What did interest me on the internet was its spacious anonymity. On the internet - you could be anyone. As an angtsy, well read, 14 year old girl, I felt grossly disconnected from my peers. On the internet, hidden beneath the handle of a blog, I could rant and write about life in radical liberty. 

My teen girl blogger days are a massive, labyrinthine archive of both my life and my inspirations. Books I was reading and albums I discovered. Years of short stories, prose, embarrassing poetry, cut and pasted films, all of it being poured out to thousands of strangers on the internet that I somehow felt closer to than anyone in my “real life”. This was the era of long winded captions and heart felt ramblings. Blogging was where I taught myself to code and first received feedback on my writing. We weren’t making “content” we were radically expressing ourselves and it was pure catharsis. It was messy and vulnerable and a small corner of the world that I made my own, this strange blurred sphere of private and public. While what at first was just me shouting into the void, quickly became the void echoing back, seemingly infinitely as I found myself at the center of an unfurling spiral. 

For my teenage self, the internet became a Portal I could open and close freely. The World Wide Web became a literal tapestry of connection and influence, and I, the weaver.

All the time now I see people talking and writing about leaving social media. Those Exodus posts usually have the most engagement that they’ve seen in months, or sometimes years. I can relate. Just last month when I posted to my IG stories about shifting my focus away from Instagram, it received the most views of any story I've posted. Ever. 

Obviously the sentiment is mutual. Obviously we the people are becoming restless and dissatisfied with the direction that Big Social Media has taken. 

Our attention is the currency we have to offer in the wild west of the internet. Where we place that attention gives power to what our gaze becomes fixed on. The more we consume, the more we feed this dragon, and the larger it becomes.

Can we wake up and recognize that we are in control of our attention? You have the power to create new realities, to place your attention elsewhere, to water the long neglected seeds that linger in edge spaces and alleyways. 

If I don’t like the type of relationship that social media creates, then it’s time to create something different. 

This is not some call to arms for everyone to take up blogging like it’s 2009,  this just so happens to be my expression of what I want my internet experience to be like. Because we do have the power to shape our experience here. The topography of the internet has always been molded by its users and I believe we should keep it that way.

The artist decides the medium. Not the app.

I’ve been struck by this idea for some time now - the stranglehold of invisible limitations these apps create. For example, when was the last time you saw someone post anything horizontal to their feed? We are now programmed to capture photos and videos in vertical, reel sized format. There is a distinct style and medium to conform to should you want your posts to get the most reach. So we shorten our thoughts to catchy quips. We shorten EVERYTHING. Videos, ideas, educational posts; all for what?

It’s insidious, really, how slowly it begins to seep in where you start curating your own creative energy in order to get the most views and appease an algorithm designed to make our attention spans shorter and shorter. The societal shrinking of attention spans deserves another post entirely - but suffice to say, one of the primary things substack has going for it, is that it’s users (you!) are those who are still interested and capable of holding their attention on a single piece of writing without compulsively scrolling away.

Having a business or being an entrepreneur massively shifts your relationship with social media. Over the last couple years I have found myself become a diluted, straight jacketed and a hollowed out version of myself online. The pressure to be professional and palatable and Taken Seriously engulfed me. When did I decide that everything I posted had to be appealing or “on brand”? 

I’m much more interested in documenting my life and experiences and sharing them openly. I’m interested in connecting with fellow weirdos, daydreamers and misfits. 

I want to create in a way that feels like I've captured a slice of what Life is like in that very moment, like an out breath, like a receding tide, and not give it a second thought. Tomorrow a different story is told. We are always growing and changing and so are our stories. Can we let the act of storytelling be a practice of impermanence? 

I see other creators continually share on their platforms about the same subjects/themes and marvel at the tidiness of such an endeavor. I’m a hot mess of a human who has her hands in dozens of different pots, and wants to share about ALL of them. To be anything else I’m realizing is inauthentic. 

This experiment is boldly childlike in that there is no endgame other than the game itself. This is not a strategy to outsmart an algorithm, this is a return to what I believe can be possible. This is me reclaiming and carving out a space for myself that can be whatever the fuck I want it to be. This is my liberation.

What does that mean for this space going forward? 

More of me. Not just talking about plants or business adjacent spheres staying in my perceived lane. Letting this space become more personal, feral, chaotic, multi-faceted, vulnerable and real. I will be showing up here much more regularly (and maybe even with some sort of audio medium/podcast?)

It means that I’m no longer comparing what type of “content” I am offering to anyone else's. I’m not worried about how it will be perceived or if I should be more “professional”. I’m releasing myself from the snare of “niching down” and instead gleefully committing to writing about anything and everything. 

For you, the reader, I invite you to stick around this evolving space to watch what new course this river decides to take. Read what resonates, and leave the rest. You are most welcome here.

It’s been two moons since my last post. I am a bear awakening from hibernation. Months are but blinks of an eye. This season is all music without words, feet without shoes, and red wine stains on my lips. I announced aloud that I would start writing a book, and a world opened before me, characters slipping through the spaces between spruce boughs and salmonberry. Not only this story, but others too, begin to pour into my consciousness. How had I not heard them before? Or perhaps they were always there, lingering like static in the background, a frequency I did not attune to. Now that the door is open it spills out like milk across the table. 

If you asked me about writing fiction, I would have told you a resounding, “yes - but not right now”. Turns out, “not right now” or “it isn’t the right time” is just code for I don’t have the guts to give myself over to that right now. It also turns out that Saturn had other plans for me. Plans that included doing things that make me want to barf and squirm. 

I’m in that place of creativity spiraling and daydreaming so integral in world building. I am beginning to taste this novel, feel the rhythm with which it moves through me. I am speaking less, cocooned in what still feels like the fragility of a new world, still cautious as to not break the spell, to keep the portal open.

I’m beginning to think this book will unravel me. I wonder how much of myself do I write into this story? Or am I myself impossibly interwoven?

This revelation occurred as Saturn stationed over my own natal Saturn at 11 Pisces. I have been grappling with the growing pains of my Saturn return since last March. 

I think about all the people I thought I would be and all the things those people would do, and with all the seriousness of Saturn's weight, wonder if I ever will.  From childish daydreams to the buoyant fantasies of my early twenties, I am aware that not all will survive this flood. This is the place where dreams die. Yes, it sounds dark, but in giving up those dreams I welcome others. I commit more deeply to what truly matters. 

What survives will persist. 

I am more aware of time than ever before. More aware that we are always choosing, even when we are not making a choice, and that I am responsible for the life before me. Another word for Saturn is Accountability. I feel like the Hanged One, waiting, lingering, in this limbo of choice, the chrysalis not yet broken open. It is hard to not feel the weight of urgency. My friend reminds me that urgency is a construct of our culture, of capitalism, and I breathe into that, albeit shallowly. 

What does it mean to meet God halfway? I tell my ancestors to speak louder. I say I’m sorry I’m so thickheaded, but I can’t decipher these messages. Talk to me like I’m five years old again. Tell me everything is going to be okay. I make an arrangement. Okay, I will meet you halfway. I will put myself in spaces and places, across state lines and the facade of borders. I will sing to new rivers and walk down crowded streets in search of whatever it is I’m meant to find. I will write new worlds and build in the wreckage of this one. I will make room inside this body for Possibility. 

Perhaps the meaning is, in times when there is no sense making and the fog rests upon the shore so thick and heavy it wraps around you like a woolen cloak, all we have to turn to is our Practice. The discipline to continue despite not knowing the outcome. The strength to come back to the simple things, the humble moments, and let them be enough, for now. 

So here we are. Bare feet crunching through last autumn's sun kissed musked maple leaves, cupping into the hollow hoof tracks of an Elk. Notebook in hand I walk to the river, ground myself on a large lichen covered stone, and practice.

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blessed are the bogs,

fecund and wet.

beneath your waters lie worlds

within worlds

teeming with life, microbial kingdoms bloom

a hundred shades of green.

budding up from the fertile mud,

you, guardian of the wetland

each year I stand by the wayside,

searching for your light,

the first harold of spring.

your scent ripe, acrid, and feral awaken my senses,

your large leaves soft

and supple against bare skin,

I could wrap myself in your stench,

bathe myself in your muck,

shapeshift and return

a creature reborn out of this pregnant swamp.

a toad croaks near by

a newt stirs

the lone lantern

intoxicating inflorescence

I’ve got a thing for summer storms. Maybe it’s because where I come from, the fecund rainforests of the coast range, all our rain comes with a cold lingering mist, summer being the rare few months where precipitation is absent from the weather report. Or maybe it’s because I yearn to find the edges, those spaces where one comes up against the raw power of life itself. 

Why am I here? What draws one to Land? Pulls at our tendons and vibrates our blood with a longing that whispers “come closer”? 

It isn’t a simple answer, nor one I fully understand. 

Three months ago when my bare feet first touched the mesa of wild onion, yarrow and biscuitroot, as the sun collapsed behind cumulonimbus clouds in an explosion of scarlet and tangerine, it was the Sandhill cranes that extended their welcome. 

I heard them long before I saw them; garbled trumpeting calls, emerging over me like heralds from heaven. I was low on the ground, my cheek against the rocky soil, and I rolled onto my back to find the source of the sound. It was so still you could hear their great wings cutting through the air, looking like prehistoric birds in their size and majesty, a mated pair circling the sky above me. Their call was jubilant and against the backdrop of a paintbrushed sky, there was a feeling of devotion as they midwifed the day to it’s close. I lay there long after they returned to their nest, long after the sky bled to black, gazing at the bright stars as the cranes song reverberated within me.

Sandhill cranes are among our planet's most ancient beings. In northeastern Nebraska, fossilized crane eggs and a wing from the closely related ancestor Crowned Crane are dated at 15 million years old. Fossil records tell us that this migration has been cyclically repeated for millions and millions of years. Cranes are described as birds who “follow the edge of winter”, and it is speculated that during the ice ages, they followed the retreating ice north - where Nebraska lies at the edge of the last glaciation. 

Aldo Leopold wrote in A Sand County Almanac:

“Our appreciation for the crane grows with the slow unraveling of earthly history. His tribe, we now know, stems out of the remote Eocene. The other members of the fauna in which he originated are long since entombed within the hills. When we hear his call, we hear no mere bird. We hear the trumpet in the orchestra of evolution. He is the symbol of our untamable past, of that incredible sweep of millennia which underlies and conditions the daily affairs of birds and men.”

Every year 400,000 to 600,000 sandhill cranes—80 percent of all the cranes on the planet—congregate along an 80-mile stretch of the central Platte River in Nebraska. They fly over fences, over border walls and dammed rivers, in an ancient ceremony that has existed for longer than we can conceive. Beginning in mid-February and ending in mid-April, cranes converge on the empty cornfields to feast on waste grain and prepare for the journey to their respective nesting grounds.  Cranes mate for life, with an average lifespan of 20-40 years, and both parents take turns incubating the eggs, looking after their chicks, and teaching them calls and dances. 

The Sandhill Cranes saxophone-shaped trachea is capable of amplifying their call to ranges of over two miles. Humans have deciphered only 16 of their vocalizations, noting they mean different things in different intonations and situations, but I imagine the nuance of Crane tongue is lost upon us. 

Aldo Leopold, writes in “Marshland Elegy,” 

“Our ability to perceive quality in nature begins, as in art, with the pretty. It expands through successive stages of the beautiful to values as yet uncaptured by language. The quality of cranes lies, I think, in this higher gamut, as yet beyond the reach of words.”

Crane culture is one of ritual and expression. Young cranes begin practicing dancing for three years before they mate, taught by their parents who take turns dancing with them. Dancing is a way to express the intimacy of pair-bonding, acknowledging decades-old relationships, and is a way to ritually relieve tension and aggression between rivals. A bow is offered at the completion of the dance.  A female crane must be danced into egg production. The presence of her mate is of deep importance, the two must dance 2-3 times a day for two lunar cycles before anything happens. On a biological level, this ritual stimulates the hormones to prepare for mating. The two cranes engage in unison calling, where the female makes two calls for every one from the male, a synchronized duet signifying their bond.

Allison Hedge Coke is a poet of Cherokee, Huron, métis and European descent. For decades she has worked at the axis of migration and waterways, retracing indigenous crane clans and their stories. Hedge Coke says that the Chippewa call the cranes keepers of language, and that native crane clans were responsible for keeping the history of the people. The Hopi had a crane clan; the Mojave and Anishinaabe-Ojibwe still do.

Speaking on sandhill crane culture, she says :

“the rituals are symbols of how to keep a family strong.”

She continues,

“… if you remove a crane embryo from its kind, take the egg and hatch it elsewhere, the chick fails to fly where his lineage journeys. No, it has no idea where to go and will not leave without an adult leader teaching it to do so…

…Karine Gil’s work at the Whooping Crane Maintenance Trust and in the field following tagged cranes for four years has verified what Indigenous oratory has asserted, that the families of cranes are conditioned by their parents to know when to travel and where to go along their up to 10,000-mile stretch of seeking a place to feed, nest, raise young chicks, and return to warmer wintering ground every single year of their 30-some-year lives. The teachings create the united journeys and the learned behavior is shared time and time again to make the journey successful and to allow the cranes to come together for this significant shared work.”

I cannot release these words from my mind and they loop again and again, in-between the haunting call of the cranes that I recorded in that meadow and listen to over and over and over again.

As I think about the someday journey I will make into motherhood, I find myself asking more questions and compulsively digging into the ancestral dirt of the past. I am exquisitely aware of the lack of symbolic rituals and record keeping, the lack of cultural tradition, in how I was raised.

I grieve for all that I was never taught and the elders I never met. That I’ve been left to catch wisdom like feathers falling, like whisps of smoke while I learn to read with eyes closed and move with soft, bare feet. 

For my ancestors I am in a strange land, yet it’s the only home I’ve ever known and I fold my body like a bridge so they might meet me here. I was not taught to speak in my great grandmothers native tongue, but my grandfather taught me of salmon and elk, five generations under the cedars on stolen land. I was not invited here, nor were my great-grandparents as they sailed on wooden ships across dark waters.

This is the dance of the cultural orphan. There are no road signs or directions teaching us right relationship and diasporic healing. 

I am an apprentice, and newly so, to the cranes and their wisdom. There is a thread here that I cannot stop pulling, that I roll back and forth between my fingers at night when I cannot sleep.

We must forge a new way, a post colonial path, to wholeness, for if we do not,

who will teach the children?

who will hold the memory?

what stories will be told?

what horrors could be repeated?

The branching form of a family tree was referred to as a "crane's foot," or pied de grue, from which is derived the present word pedigree.

The Latin congruere, meaning an agreement, is the origin of the English word congruence.

My great-great grandfather James O’Connor arrived in Lewiston, Idaho, the traditional lands of the Niimiipu, in the early 1900’s from the craggy shores of Kerry County, Ireland. He was born in 1810 on land that knew all the songs of his cells and died at the ripe old age of 105, a world away in Moscow, Idaho. They were Irish immigrants who were poor farmers in the old country. They started a homestead and began growing potatoes on stolen land. 

Then there is Wilhelmina, who is buried in the Cameron cemetery in Nez Perce county next to her husband. She was born in 1858 in Szczecin, Prussia (what is now known as Poland) near the Baltic Sea and is one of the rare ancestors whose face I’ve seen from an old black and white photo that someone, somewhere, thought important to hold on to. Ironic that despite the photo, no one remembers her story.

The third line of peoples that met in Nez Perce, Idaho were the Fillitreauts, great-great grandmother Zelma and her daughter, my great grandmother, Emelda. How Zelma and her family ended up in Idaho is lost to me. Zelma was born in Quebec, where centuries earlier, an ancestor from La Rochelle, France arrived in 1663.

These threads, and so many others, tangled together to form the blood and body of my paternal Grandmother, who grew up near the Snake River and the smell of sagebrush, amongst the landscape I find myself in now. 

These ancestors who came from cultures once upon a time so vast and rich, have been watered down to be unrecognizable in my family tree. They all traded their culture in exchange for Whiteness; that bland flavor of domination and privilege. They adopted whiteness and no one remembers the old songs because they aren’t sung. They adopted whiteness and named their children Christian names that wouldn’t call attention to themselves, names that didn’t require tongues undulating and rolling against syllables like a formed memory of the land from which they once tended. 

I think about how the oldest ancestor here I have was born on turtle island 363 years ago, and how in the long continuum of time, that is but the blink of an eye. I think about how conversely- when we are born on to land, that land is all we know. We are raised up by that dirt and that sky, with the innocence of children who still know nothing of displacement and war.

Is home a place I was born, deep in the dirt and thick roots of the trees that raised me? Or is home across an ocean, a place I’ve never been, where people speak a language I was never taught, amongst the rolling hills and lakes that fed my kin since time immemorial? 

There are plants that act as bridges from here to there, like juniper or yarrow. I know the name for yarrow in gaelic and chinook and when I speak them aloud they make no preference to which I use, or if we abandon words all together and exchange greetings through gentle touch. Sometimes I leave home grown tobacco and other times baked bannock. 

I strive to be a noble guest and tend to any and all spirits who find me on this land. Am I called here, retracing the steps of those who came before me to offer, in some small way, repair? I do not know, only that this land asks for more of me.

I carry a bag of seeds and plant as I walk the ridge trail, the Imnaha so far below me that I no longer hear the sounds she makes as she glides through the canyon. Rattlesnakes bask between warm stones. The sun is hot overhead, I carry water and offer a drink to the thirsty. I carry a song and offer that too, to be carried on the wind, to say, I see you.

I suppose the other day was a premonition of what was to come, that swelling fervor that never fully cracked open and spilled out into the world. The static held and contained, pulsing and waiting.

Rain began to fall in soft patters that clinked off the roof of the truck canopy where I slept. As the thunder grumbled louder the melody became a cacophony as the sky broke up, alive with flashes of light.

In my half sleep, I thought to go out and dance, like the cranes, ceremonially cleanse my body in the storm. Instead I sit on the tailgate, still wrapped in blankets and sleep filled eyes and simply taste the electricity, content to be held in my den of sheepskin and goosedown. After sleeping in a hammock for days on the trail I'm grateful for the shelter.

How clean the world seems after a deluge, the world smelling of rain on pine duff, alive, hopeful, renewed. The storm passes and the sun crests over the mountainside, flooding the river canyon I camp in with light and birdsong and promise. 

References:

Hedge Coke, A. (2022, October 8). Migratory. Terrain.org. https://www.terrain.org/2012/currents/migratory/

Leopold, A. C. (1966). A Sand County Almanac. O.U.P.

Meillon, B., & Adamson, J. (2021). Dwellings of enchantment: Writing and reenchanting the Earth. Rowman & Littlefield.

Sing: Poetry from the Indigenous Americas, Ed. by Allison Adelle Hedge Coke, The Univ. of Arizona Press, 2011

Shoumatoff, Alex. (2014, March 1). 500,000 cranes are headed for Nebraska in one of Earth’s greatest migrations. Smithsonian.com. https://www.smithsonianmag.com/science-nature/500000-cranes-are-headed-nebraska-one-earths-greatest-migrations-180949816/

The First Quarter moon is a crisis. Splitting the moon neatly in half like a line drawn in the sand, it requires a choice to be made. This is not a moon of ambivalence or compliance. This is a moon of courage and truth. This moon begs the question:

What do you stand for?

The First Quarter moon is a call to action. Home of activists, rebels, revolutionaries, and those who dare. Yes, this is a daring moon. It takes risks. Those born under this moon are born with will power, hunger, and voice. There is an impulse to stretch up and out and explore new horizons. Quarter moon people are leaders not because they want to be, but because they don’t know any other way to move through the world. 

This moon is the tension of a tightly pulled, quivering bow and the relentless focus of the archer who holds it. 

What is it like to be a seed in the soil? To feel the earth warm around you and know, yes, this moment is right, this moment is ripe, to emerge? The First Quarter moon is the thrust of energy propelling us out of the earth and into the rays of the sun. It is the mother bird who whooses us from the nest, simply because it is time. It is the genetic memory of the citrine monarch butterfly that calls them towards the migratory journey of their mothers mothers. We can not stay nestled in the world of dreams forever. We must take the chance. We must risk new shapes. 

Thus, the question of self emerges with this moon. Who am I? this moon begins to ask, propelling us to seek definition and individuation. 

The moon asks, 

What is your song? 

This moon is a Song Moon. It is a chorus, loud and proud. With the power of the voice we declare ourselves to the world. There is both vulnerability and bravery in letting your voice be heard, anticipation and release. 

The Song Moon is an estuary where near a flow of swiftly moving water, the verdant leaves of Calamus grow in stiff, erect towers. Yellow spadix emerging from brackish water, Calamus sings of vibrancy. The rhizomes of Calamus are said to resemble the throat, and we find by chewing the aromatic and pungent roots that our mouth softens, our throat opens, and our mind begins to expand and creep outward. 

Calamus gives us the gift of clear perception when we are clouded. They connect us to our animal bodies when we begin to bleed into dissociation. They are a teacher of radical presence and unashamed expression. 

Calamus smells like courage. Courage to speak honestly and with integrity. Courage to quiet the mind when it whispers doubt and discontentment and find a center of truth within ourselves. 

We all have a voice, Calamus says.

How will you use yours?

As the moon grows, a story is told. Where we enter this story shapes our lives and creates the lens from which we come to know the world. Over the next few weeks, I will be sharing on the archetype of each of the eight phases and the medicine that they offer. 

Mothers Moon

Dreamers Moon

Song Moon

Unfurling Moon

Visionary Moon

Storytelling Moon

Weaving Moon

Bone Moon

Perhaps the racoon was the first omen. The price of entry into this portal of deathwalking. It was late at night and the fog was stretched out thick over the estuary as I approached the turn off towards the winding road through the forest. In the beam of the headlights ahead, I noticed a bright smear of red and a small body lying in the road. I pulled over and got out, leaving the car running and the headlights on so I could see through the moonless night. 

I have a practice of moving any roadkill I find off the road. Sometimes the animals ask to come with me, like the young deer I found just after Summer Solstice whose velvet antlers were still as soft and tender as his spirit. Other times I just show them the respect of not being driven over repeatedly and smashed into pavement, and allow for the other creatures of the ecosystem to safely consume and feed on their bodies. 

As I got closer to the small raccoon in front of me, I saw their lungs expand with shaky breath and realized they were still alive. I laid a hand on their belly and felt their very spirit tremble. Without thinking, I began to sing, in the wordless way that I’ve come to let move through me when my throat inexplicably opens before my mind has the chance to catch up. We stayed there, cloaked in mist and night, my hand resting gently, listening to their heartbeat slow as the sound of my voice wrapped around us. I closed my eyes and let the song massage around their spirit, releasing them from the grasp of bone and fur. I sang us to a wide meadow, where on the other side lay a thick hedge and Hawthorn, naked except for blood red fruit and thorns. Racoon waited in the meadow for a while, before walking through a small hole in the hedge, and the breath exited their lungs for the last time. 

It was the first time an animal had died in my arms. 

Three days later, Coyote came to walk beside me next. Humble me, open me, like the Hanged One I swing, swing, swing against a backdrop of blooming daturas and howls. I haven’t been the same since Coyote entered my life. Those echoing howls. I could feel it as it was happening, my knuckles pushing through fascia with eyes closed, lost in a sort of time travel that tethered me to the nowness of the present while the movement of my hands, so familiar to my ancestral DNA, spun me to a place outside of time as I pulled their hide from their body. How little I know, I think as I unravel like a ball of string across the floor. I scrape the membrane and with each stroke, everything becomes a question and I am spinning plates. Later I dream of the coyote pup and Owl sitting in a tree, the howl and hoot rolling together to form one call, paw and claw wrapped around the finished hide, the skin dyed red from alder bark and wake up in my bed with an owl outside my window. 

The owl was the third. Staring right at me with an intensity that sent a chill down my spine. I didn’t have to wonder if this was an omen. I simply felt it course through the animal of my body in a recognition that superseded my mind. I had crossed a threshold, I had opened a door, earnestly and honestly, and in return spirits of all kinds were making their way to me like moths to a flame. 

A few weeks later, it’s October and the sky is starling blue. The moon is a halved shadow in the sky. The groves of alabaster alders lining the Quinault river shimmer in a hue somewhere between green and gold. It is the big leaf maples that sing the loudest. 

It’s October and my stomach is bare, the faintest hint of chill in the air as it blows off the river bringing goosebumps every so often, but more so it is gloriously warm. I bask like a coiled serpent on the stones, that in autumn lay wide and barren, the river has not risen to greet them in many moons. Come afternoon, the stones will radiate and pulse with stored sunlight. 

I’m laying on a sheepskin, near the stone cairn where I buried the owl. I still smell the musk of their wings as the crisp, fall air rushed through them, feathers dancing above me as I held them to the sky like a prayer and I felt their spirit rest on my shoulder. Stone by stone I buried their body in a cairn grave at the fork of a river, a crossroads - a place fitting for Ereshkigal's messenger, the myth of her descent playing through the speakers in my truck when I found the Owl’s body lying smack in the center of the road. I gathered water from the river, cupped hands dripping as I walked to pour the water over the grave in offering.

How far do owls travel, I wonder? Was this so far from their home, or sacred ground they remembered? Was it them that brought me here, our wyrd weaving together, two destinies charged and vibrating towards one another in a magnetic attraction that once begun, is impossible to stop? 

The days before were spent walking. I move through the forest at a botanizing pace with my vision softened and widened. Each day I move steadily, I have many miles to move before sunset, but cast my gaze out so as to take in my surroundings.  So often I see people plunging through the forest, oblivious of what’s happening around them in a race to get there and back, scarcely taking in the moments between. How else would I notice the young black bear crossing the river in the distant canyon below me? Or hear the softest swoop of an owl's wings overhead, lift my head to find them perched above me, head cocked, beckoning. I lower my head in acknowledgment and they hoot in return. We stare at each other for a moment and then they take flight to another towering Hemlock. I follow and below them I find the mushrooms I’ve been looking for. 

I do not think these experiences are uncommon, or at least once upon a time they were not. 

What is and is not an omen? What does it mean to move through life under the tutelage of omen logic? 

I’ve seen others disappear down slippery slopes of narcissistic self delusion. Humans are by nature meaning making creatures, designed to see patterns and perceive between the natural chaos of the world. But what happens when the toxic individualism of the west meets ancient traditions of intuitive wisdom? Without a tether, it is easy to begin to perceive that everything is about you and for you. 

I believe omen logic is specific to land. There is no untangling the two. Thus to receive an omen requires a certain level of intimacy with place. 

If you enter on to land you are not in relationship with, how are you to know what is common or uncommon? 

A rabbit crosses your path. A heron flies overhead. Are they an omen? Or are they creatures of an ecosystem, following the patterns and routines of their lives. An omen is not always an omen simply because it is uncommon to you if it is, in fact, common to the ecosystem. 

Being in relationship with land is the original divination. Being so intimate with a place and the creatures that inhabit it gives you information that to our modern minds would seem like a form of magic, but underneath is pattern recognition and place based relating. Noting the behavior of animals, the shifting wind, where the moon lies in the sky, can all lead to ‘prophetic’ knowledge that for our ancestors, was simply practical wisdom. 

Omens are most often repetitive. They grab your attention. Perhaps the first or second you barely noticed, but by the third nudge, your body wakes up. Omens speak loudly when they need to, especially when you start to pay attention.  

Omens occur on multiple planes; they visit you in the physical world, in dreams or memory, and take form in various shapes, like letters on a page or smells in the air. Omens register deep in the animal body long before the intellectual mind catches up.

There is no unequivocal definition of what an omen does or does not mean. Like dreams, omens are unique to each of us, each with their own message and purpose for entering our lives. 

Omens are quintessentially Mercurial. Messages from beyond cloaked in meaning that requires our minds to shapeshift and bend? Omens are a trickster's language. 

Mercury has been tragically devolved in modern conversation as a being of logic, tech, and the rational mind. This says a lot about the culture we live in. Mercury rules the mind and perception, yes, but we perceive beyond what the left brain shows us and what linear reasoning can conclude. We perceive through dreams, the heart, intuition, omens and divination. 

Mercury is the most multidimensional of all the planets; a raucous cacophony and chaotic splendor. Mercury defies gender, refuses to stay in one place, and has infinite sides that stretch out backwards and forwards like a fun house mirror. Mercury is never either/or, and always both/and. 

I feel it’s forgotten, or maybe just less acknowledged, that Mercury is a God of Death.

It’s Mercury I call to while ushering a spirit out of their physical vessel onward and outward; the winged foot psychopomp, so fluid, malleable and comfortable between each veiled layer of the world. This work of deathwalking that seems to permeate my days this season.

Mercury rules the crossroads, all things liminal, and threshold states of being. Mercury rows the boat that carries souls from one world to the next. Mercury is the Great Translator, carrying messages back and forth. Mercury rules communication in all the myriad ways that the body can come to Know. 

Mercury is a Roman name. You might know them as Hermes or Hermanubis, but I’ve come to know Mercury as Odin, accompanied by his two ravens, Thought and Memory. Odin the one-eyed magician, master of disguise, the mythology of Odin retains Mercury’s complexity and the Ravens hold the duality of reason and passion, logic and emotion.

Thought and Memory

every day fly over the earth.

I fear for Thought,

that he may not return

Yet still more I fear

the loss of Memory.

Mercury is the trickster, friend of storytellers, travelers, clowns, and thieves. Mercury orbits earth closely, every year falling in and out of the shadows. Like Coyote, Mercury skirts around the edges, traveling quickly, showing up in unexpected places and playing tricks on anyone who finds themselves too dug in to one side or the other. 

Coyote asks me, 

What identities am I attached to? 

Who would I be if I wasn’t?

Who would I become?

Or rather

Who am I?

The Crescent Moon is quiet, like a late winter blanket of snow that falls softly overnight while you’ve been sleeping. You awake to a world of white, icicle fantasy that shimmers with a special kind of magic, that childlike wonder that beckons us into our dreams. Below ground, the plants have already begun to stir with the increase of light, but they do not yet dare to emerge, instead they lay under the pearl comforter of snow, and dream.

The Crescent Moon is a Dreamers Moon, a moon full of ideas that have germinated their hard shells but are not ready to sprout. Thin white roots form tributaries through the soil, drinking in water, drinking in life, and dreaming of sun on fresh, green leaves. 

The Crescent Moon is but a sliver in the sky, cut out like the thin curve of a fingernail. 

They are the first hint of light that follows a moonless night and with it, we are renewed. A new cycle has begun, and we too feel reborn, us children of the Moon. Crescent Moon people are born tasting hope; born into a moment of expanding possibility. They are not afraid to ask, ‘what if?’ 

For the Crescent Moon the future is fluid. The future is wet clay to be molded and shaped by hands that move with the curiosity of a child.  Crescent Moon people are not afraid to return their creations back to amorphous blobs and begin again. There is no rigidity, only playful exploration. 

Those born under a crescent moon are people who know the power of Dream. 

Once upon a time, Dreamers were respected. They would sit on high councils, govern leaders and imagine what others could not. They knew how to resurrect themselves each morning from their otherworldly journeys and untangle the omens from the bramble. 

To be a Dreamer is to be more than just a colorful imagination; to be a Dreamer you must participate with the Dream. To dream deeply is also to be dreamt, and a Dreamer knows how to keep the mind  l o o s e.

A Crescent Moon is dreaming itself into being. 

The Crescent Moon is a frost covered forest where there stands a grove of alabaster women with thin, peeling skin. Stark white bark against gashes of charcoal, she is Birch, the one the Celts called the Lady of the Woods. Beneath her papery exterior is the deep mahogany bark that smells of hope and wintergreen. Birch is a keeper of dreams and a beacon of renewal.

Like the Crescent, Birch is the perpetual maiden. Birches are short lived trees, 100 years of life is elderly, and more often their lives are shorter. They are fertile beings, stumps will eagerly sprout new shoots from the flat cut tops, ever moving towards growth. They say Birch was the first to seed the ground after the glaciers receded, that it was Birch gum that held together the Stone Age tools of our ancestors, and Birch sap they fermented into ritual drink. 

Brooms made from Birch twigs are bound together to purify homes and gardens, inviting in the fertile new beginnings of Beith or Beth as the Druids named her. Still today, Birch brooms are used in shrines and temples, and the bark is placed on smoldering coals in saunas and sweat lodges to cleanse and heal the body from the inside out. 

How many cradles were carved from her bark to hold the babes born of love, their placentas buried under trees of Birch as an offering to Freyja? 

How many dreams have been scrawled on the flesh of her paper skin, and burned as a prayer under a silver crescent? 

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As the moon grows, a story is told. Where we enter this story shapes our lives and creates the lens from which we come to know the world. Over the next few weeks, I will be sharing on the archetype of each of the eight phases and the medicine that they offer. 

Mothers Moon

Dreamers Moon

Song Moon

Unfurling Moon

Visionary Moon

Storytelling Moon

Weaving Moon

Bone Moon

This is the dark moon. 

The dark moon is sonographic communication and sleeping serpents. Those born under this moonless sky are born knowing. With the sky looming like an infinite obsidian pool, they come to rely on other senses. 

In the darkness, eyes become a useless vestige of solar knowledge.

In the darkness, the body wakes up. 

Dark moon natives are intuitive because they have to be. It is a matter of survival. It is a matter of trusting one’s own instincts over all else. They will not have neat and tidy answers if you ask them to qualify their assertions. Trust them anyway. 

The dark moon is a beginning that doesn’t yet look like a beginning, a seed that has not yet broken open, that lies in wait under the blanket of fertile earth. Here, nestled in rich, black soil, protected from the harsh elements, a seed dreams. This moon is not so much the seed, as they are the dirt, the becoming. 

On the dark moon, the sun and moon are joined together in the fecund darkness of possibility in a lovers embrace that sounds like a chorus of renewal. There is cohesion in a dark moon, the solar identity braves the chthonic depths to return to their lunar lover. To be born on this moon is to embody this wholeness. Dark moon people feel at home in themselves, find peace in the comfortable caverns of their being. It is a moon of unity between body and spirit.

The dark moon is a womb.  It is warm darkness, the place of all creation and birth.

The dark moon is the pup born into blindness who instinctively roots and nuzzles their way to their mother; to the mothers milk, that nectar that sustains life, which we come into this world hungry and yearning for. We do not need to be told. We simply know. 

The dark moon is an oat top, succulently dripping with lunar nourishment. 

Oats? Yes oats. Those ubiquitous, common creatures escaping cultivation to thrive along roadsides and empty meadows. Oats are plants of the moon, soothing and nutritive, they ooze fertility. Ooze out lunar wisdom. 

Oats are teeming with nourishment and overflowing with minerals. They provide the building blocks a body needs to survive. They fill the vaults of our body so we may have deep stores from which to draw from, from which to build our dreams up and out of our bodies into something tangible and real. Without this fortifying base, we falter. We may dream, but our fires burn low and we’re unable to actualize them.

Oats are the medicine of the moonless sky because they are mothers, giving of themselves so another may be fed. 

Oats are a sheath for the nerves, they offer protection from the harsh and abrupt edges of the world. Dark Moon people are sensitive beings, splayed open and vulnerable to the onslaught of frequencies, intentions, projections and noise buzzing around them. Oats are the tonic, creating a shield of sanctuary around us so we might move through life with more ease. 

As the moon grows, a story is told. Where we enter this story shapes our lives and creates the lens from which we come to know the world. Over the next few weeks, I will be sharing on the archetype of each of the eight phases and the medicine that they offer. 

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Pattern recognition is lunar. Humans have always tracked time by moons. Women have bled by moons. Coral reefs spawn, oysters open, sand hoppers emerge, animals mate, all by the light of the moon. We watch the moon dance across the sky and we watch the world orient around them. We watch as patterns develop. We develop rituals in response to the patterns that all stem from the moon. The moon is a calendar.

The moon is a clock; the lunar cycle pulsing like a beating heart as all creatures under their glow succumb to a rhythm as ancient as the bacteria inhabiting this earth. All life as we know it emerged from the great primordial womb of the sea, but it was the tides, the ebbing, undulating lunar tides that hold the key.

The moon rules over that which changes. The moon is a paradox, being that which is constant and yet with every phase, with every shift, a new face appears. The moon is steadfast, returning to us like gravity, like sap running in the spring.

The moon is the milk that nourishes the world. How much poetry has been written, how many songs crooned, as an ode to the muse that is the moon? The moon is the original matrix, original mother. They are death, birth, death again, the endless cyclical nature of life is taught to us, by the moon.

The moon does not make light, but reflects and digests solar light, acting as a translator of light into lunar consciousness.

The moon is consciousness itself.

you say I make everything

complicated, 

that my words spin

in circles, 

waft into mist and

weave webs 

that stick

and itch. 

but I am not the sun, 

clear

and bright and full 

of easy illumination,

I am the moon. 

my nature is

shapeshifting

shadowdancing

culminating and disintegrating

my messages emerge from

pools of deep

lazuli water

I am a scrying stone

a thrown bone 

a reflection in the mirror. 

I emanate more than I articulate

I embody more than I define

just when you think

you’ve got me

all figured out

I will change

I could wax and wane (pun intended) about how our bodies are 70% water and like the tides, how we are coaxed out and returned to ourselves by nocturnal illumination. I could tell you how hospitals fill up on full moons and the stark potency of an inky, moonless sky, but I trust if you’re here reading this, you already know - or perhaps the innate wisdom of your body knows - that the moon is always walking us home. 

The moon shape shifts across our sky, with each synodic cycle taking us on a journey and returning us home. Starting to pay attention to these cycles often transforms one's life and opens the door to planetary relationships. Far less abstract than Saturn, the Moon is familiar and wrinkled like your grandmother's hands. 

The moon moves quickly from sign to sign. Unlike the sun (roughly a month), or Jupiter (roughly a year), the moon completes their dance across the sky in 28 days, spending roughly two and a half days in each sign. From New to Full, a story is told, unique to each of us as the moon circles our natal chart. The nature of a waxing aries moon is far different from a balsamic aries moon. We are able to experience the full spectrum of a zodiacal sign through the year. 

As the moon grows, a story is told. Where we enter this story shapes our lives and creates the lens from which we come to know the world. Over the next few weeks, I will be sharing on the archetype of each of the eight phases and the medicine that they offer. 

Mothers Moon

Dreamers Moon

Song Moon

Unfurling Moon

Visionary Moon

Storytelling Moon

Weaving Moon

Bone Moon