There is a certain way you feel and I have told it to the moon.
She lights the way I’m seeking, bringing yellow to my blue.
When the day arrives and I see you standing there—
Into green we’ll go.
With our hands, the earth we’ll share.
I could not do much on the equinox and full supermoon yesterday. I tried to work. I ended up scrapping the piece I made. I thought perhaps the motions of sawing silver, filing rough edges, sanding away imperfections, staring at stones, would give me some direction but all I ended up with was a piece that seemed was made for nothing other than its process. The process of making it, I see now in writing this, was the important part.
This stone is Polish flint. Does it not have a series of paths? Do they not run all parallel until they reach the point of light? Is this point a sun? A god? A dream realized? Some of the paths are straight. Others bend, with a sort of warp that lends a more surreal way they reach this light—yet each path goes to the same place.
I thought about this as I listened to this stone, the ways my path to my own dreams, to my sun, my greatest light, my ways I know God, seem to weave like a snake across sand. Sometimes it feels like lost wandering but most of the time it feels like a dance.
Another story in this stone tells the way the sun is surrounded in a halo of white light, as if this is what pulls those paths toward it. Then off to the right is a darker point, a second, false, sun—its shadow. There is a gap before the paths reach the light sun, and some veer off to this shadow. This is the place we find ourselves sometimes, is it not? When we are on the way to our dream, sometimes there is a diversion. When we are on the way to love, sometimes there are antagonists. This is an archetypal story that reaches back into our ancient collective memory.
This stone is incredible!
Taken on the spring equinox laying under a mighty tree after a swim in a ice melt river. From dark to light.
So while I was musing on these things, I found myself in a shadow. The nature of an equinox is a time of balance. Our life, the earth’s life, our cosmos, however wide we spiral in or out, there is an underlying foundational truth of balance. Nothing is all light or all dark. There is both. Our dark universe springs forth the light of suns, and those suns die back into dark. It repeats, so far as our minds can determine, forever. Our hearts see moments of overwhelming light, and they know the depths of dark. What makes yours spring back?
My shadow yesterday held me in fears that what I am doing with my life is meaningless, that what I am reaching for will not be held, and the things I dream for will not be obtained. I felt this in the deepest sense. I became unable to focus or even stand up at my bench. All I could do was go sit in the sun, with a cup of plants steeped in warm water.
Iceland, 2017. A premonition of a dream. The land there reminded me so much of New Mexico, and this is where I sat in a hot spring and saw my farm.
Plants. Sun. This is what brings me back to light! This is what brings anyone back to light. It is science and spiritual at once. It is the supremely healing gift of our earth. It is real. While I was sitting trying to wade through the thick mud of my fears, I held firm to the dream that I have: I want to give the love of the earth to people. I want a modest piece of land to fill with medicines and foods. I want to share these with those I love, my family and friends, the people of my community. I want my days to be spent in the dirt, in the kitchen, at tables where we dine and share our lives, in chairs where we hold mugs of medicine and witness plants bringing light back into eyes. I want to learn all of this in deeper ways. I want a partner who sees and knows the earth path too, for in our merging the growing and giving becomes grand, like the rays of a sun.
And so the light came to balance the shadow. The tears that flow at the power of this dream water me like rain upon the grasses. Snow falls at my window now, a way the earth tells me Yes. The things I do are not meaningless. I will reach what I want to hold. I will obtain my dreams.
We all will.
So says the stone: It is the way.
A peach pie my mom made for my 33rd birthday. We ate it in San Cristobal, New Mexico. A land of beautiful farms at the foot of mountains. A tiny hamlet. I believe in the power of having a meal and making a wish over it. It is prayer.
I sit in the foreground of this picture, in the dry hostile dirt of mesa land, in my very long trek to the green.
The Rio Grande Gorge, water through rock