River Prayer

I have been going to the river for years. It is where I re-find my center, my wholeness in the center of the world - the tiny dot that I am, right in the middle of it all, and when I say all, I mean the entire universe. I don’t mean I am the center of the universe, except in the way that each of us is. This is the only perspective each of us has - it’s the place from which we see everything we can see and feel everything we feel. It is also the place from which we make our ripple out into the universe.

When I go to the river, I find myself. Every time. Each time I go, I am coming from some place inside myself, and through my movement into the woods, down the trail, over the rocks and red clay, the hemlock and pine needles - releasing their fresh, uplifting fragrance underfoot - to where I can hear the rush of water coursing through rapids like blood through arteries amplified, the inside of me is approaching the outside of me. I can feel the gentle air on my skin, the ambivalent breeze through my hair. I can hear the rustle of leaves and the crackle of softening acorns and brittle branches as I continue around the bend, descending closer to the beach, which is different every time I see it - sand being heaved from one side of the great snake and drifting to the other each time the flow swells in a storm.

I feel this place through all my senses, thus defining my own borders. My senses each define me differently. How far can I see? How quiet a noise can I perceive and at what great distance? What plants can I detect with my nose? Is that the river’s mud or an otter or some rotting leaves that smells so pungent? What is the temperature of the air on my skin? How fast is that wind, and from what direction? What time is it, based on the lean of the sun in the sky, or is it too cloudy to tell? Is there any moisture in the air? How soft is the dirt and clay underfoot, and do these rocks shift when I put my weight onto them? Can I taste rain or the sleepy spring bubbling out of the ground on my tongue?

Here i am. This is me. This is where I am, and these are my edges.

Really?

No. I am not a place. I am not a sensation. I am not a person. I am not the sum of all this information I am taking in with my senses.

I am a relationship. I am an interaction. I am a subtle response to elements. I am a continually changing relationship of my own elements, in no way independent from these shifting elements wherever I am.

I am an act of faith, in reverence to beauty. Every step I take, each breath a savoring of it all. Every movement a knowing, a deepening of this relationship to the wholeness. The minutest shift a coming closer to yet another center of the universe, each step opening a whole new world as I look from an ever new center. I cannot walk into the same woods, the same house, the same river twice. I can never take the same route or follow the same path again. Coming back it will all be different. I will be different. The air will have changed, with the light and the humidity and way the trees sound and the gravel under tires. And the ripple that is mine will have, ever how subtly, changed everything.

I have gone to the river for years. It is where I can let go. It is where I can come back. It is where I can say what needs to be said. Sometimes I write things in the sand for the river to wash away. Some times I give it my pain. My desire. My beg of forgiveness. Sometimes I send someone a message. Sometimes I reiterate the words of a friend who has passed on. I trust the river with all of these. The river does not judge me. The river will not tell anyone. The river can receive me. The river carries me. The river hears me. The river sees me.

The river feels me, but without specificity. You see, the river is made of so many drops of water, and they’re moving so fast that when I slip into the river, those drops each feel a tiny bit of me and their stories of me change so fast as they all keep flowing down stream, feeling the fish, the rocks, the sand, the trees the deer, the panther, the bear, the otter, the crawfish, the great boulders keening in the current. The river’s story of me is in such small increments I am of no consequence. And yet I return and return and return and return.

I return so many times that the drops of water that touched me have made it all the way to the ocean. They have made it all the way across the ocean and up the coast. Those drops have made it all the way up into the sky and been squeezed back into the field, soaked down into the aquifer, gurgled back out through a spring, into the creek and stream and back into the river again. Just like the molecules of air out of my lungs have been around the world, so have those drops of water.

And they carry me. They carry my heart. They carry my wishes. They carry my energy. They carry my prayers. They carry the prayer that I am. And there are more of them every time I go to the river.

When I put my prayers into the river they will grow. Each drop in the river will tell the others. Each tributary will bring more friends, more prayers, and by the time my prayers reach the ocean, they will be strong. They will be millions - no quadrillions - strong. And who knows, maybe someday they will fill the ocean and water the forests I love so much as they keep returning to the river.

The river is a prayer. It is a prayer for life. It is a prayer for survival. It cuts its way downhill - always following gravity’s pull, always to a bigger body of water, as if iron to a magnet. It is a prayer for wholeness, always completing its cycle, with no knowledge of itself - just doing what it must, the only thing it can do.

I send my prayers of gratitude into the river. The most important prayers of all. I am so grateful to the river. I am so grateful for it. I am so thankful for the boulders and pebbles and grains of sand - transformed as such by the river. I need not explain this gratitude, for a tree once helped me to understand and feel the difference between “thank you” and “thank you for.....” There is no comparison.

Be ever grateful. Be ever grateful for beauty. For the trees - each one by one. For the water, which is the same water that has always been here. for each person who graces your life. Tell them why from time to time, but most importantly, just acknowledge them. See them. Feel them. Let them know you do. And tell the river, too.

c)Honor Woodard February 2013

Photographic Prints Available

Ok - Here are the 30 recent photographs that I have had printed. These are photographic/chromogenic prints, made on metallic paper, and they're 8x8 inches. I am pretty sure that Michael's sells a frame that will fit them perfectly - 12x12 with 8x8 mat opening - for 20 bucks. Please email me at silvermoonfrog at gmail if you are interested in purchasing one or more of these. I have only made one print of each - first come first served. If demand is high I will consider printing some more. I'm asking $70 per print, plus shipping. Click on an image to use as a slide show...

The Bear...

Yes, this is the bear I braked for!

Friday evening I was doing chair massage in downtown Clayton, at the First Friday event. It was a really nice evening, with some great music and lovely folks. I really love working outside with live music, bare feet on the grass and people loving the chair massage - especially the children. I just love how curious the kids are about it, and how they will keep coming back to get on again.

At some point, an older gentleman approached me and asked if I was the person who had wrecked on Betty Creek Road. I told him yes, and he said that although he wasn't there at the time of the accident, he lives in the house opposite where my truck landed. He thanked me for sparing the bear. Then he told me that the little bear had been in their yard all afternoon. It sure made it seem like that little bear waited around just for me... It had already rained when I came along, meaning he had been out in the rain, too. Anyway, the man told me that they had some video of the bear, and he was kind enough to put it on Youtube for me. In the video, it looks older and larger than I remember the cub that I braked for, but hard to tell, since he/she's laying on his/her stomach while gorging on birdseed...

Interesting Times...

This post comes a week after I had a pretty exciting, bad accident, avoiding a black bear cub who stepped out in front of me on the road. I hyroplaned, skidded, hit the bank, flipped, rolled more than once and ended up mostly upside down/on the side against the bank - all in less than 3 seconds, I think. Imagine my shock and awe, when after climbing up and out of my truck (which was quite a challenge, doors being super heavy when held shut by gravity), I did not notice any significant pain in my body. I imagined I might be in shock and just not noticing everything, but I was able to walk up and down the road, seemingly intact. There was blood down my shirt, and I could feel minor cuts and such, and there was a place on my head I felt had glass in it (I hoped not too deep), but all in all, I felt pretty good. That was shocking to me because a very brief moment earlier, I was sure I was going to die. When I was headed for the bank straight on, I didn't think any other outcome was possible - that was the end.

I am most grateful for grace and whatever spirits or beings helped me to survive this. It seems most unlikely.

At the river yesterday, the first rock I picked up had a cross on it - one line (the longer one) was white, the shorter one crossing it on the other axis was iron oxide color. Fro me, the white (vertical) axis represents the spirit. The iron (horizontal axis) represents humankind (iron being a main component in blood). I have long seen it this way - that we are anchors for spirit, sending it forth across the world.
Then I balanced a large white stone on one of the river boulders. Next, I slipped into the river, halfway, and stood in the river’s sway, shared some of my DNA, sending it down the river’s way, feeling how inextricably we are all connected/related. After submerging I found a yellow/golden triangular stone resting on an underwater boulder - its brightness made it stand out (at first I thought maybe it was an orange peel), and it was the only thing resting on this boulder, other than silt. It was a fragment of a much larger stone, rounded on one side as if the curved face, that had been chipped off by some great force. Emerged from the river, I began balancing rocks on the river boulders. Several along the lower stretch, right at the river’s edge just above seven foot falls. It’s been a while since I’ve balanced rocks, too long perhaps, and it felt good to set some up and step back and see their line, their grounding.

Then I lay across a boulder to soak in some sun, to ground, to meditate and open to receiving any message that I could capture after this intense week. The great stone under me was warm and cradled me gently in its great heaviness, allowing me to feel the grounding of its mass and composition. My mind opened and I got a distinct intuition with an image. I got that vertical time and horizontal/linear time have now crossed/come together. This is just like my photographs from 2010, and where it meets is inside of US, in our axis and how we ground the energy and participate with the EARTH in this way and bring our experience into our HEART and reach OUT from our HEART is what creates this greater being. That the EARTH is the HEART of our world, if we just get the H and move it to the front. Is this what my photos have been about? I even titled one “Crossing Time” (which echoes the shape I saw in my intuition - the vertical axis resembling a chalice or hourglass).

“Crossing Time”
In fact, this reminds me that when I made a holiday card with this very image, the message I put within the axes, was “PEACE ON EARTH”, but I had used color and space to make it also say ONE HEART.

I wasn’t interested in generating more folds in the images, just the two, which open up new worlds in the images - whole new places to explore. Just like the mandalas.

Getting up from the boulder, I looked back to realize that the pareo I was resting on has a celtic design on it of a cross within a circle. Of course it does.

This last week, the road/way has been blocked twice, after seeing a bear cross my path from right to left. Both times I was unable to show up as expected. Both times I ended up in the ER with Dr. Hon. Both times a hand was x-rayed.
Bearing has changed...?
Much letting go of things and ways of being.
The mother and her children are making adjustments.
X-Rays (rays in two directions) --- seeing INSIDE --- Introspection (what bear medicine is about)
Specifically of the hand one uses - or mother’s giving hand and daughter’s receiving hand.
Bear with me.
Bear it with me.
Mother Bears child.

Get my Bearings. 


“Bearing” 2006

"Lake Dreaming" 2006 “Lake Dreams” 2006

Well, it's been quite a full almost three months since my last post. Sorry for the gap. Starting a new career while trying to get a mountain cabin compound back in order after leaving it for a year and a half has been something. And in the midst of all of that, my finest friend and companion vanished. Honeybear, you expanded my heart and soothed my soul more than I can express, and I hope you have peace, love and lots of half & half wherever you are now.

Getting the career going has been a lot of fun. In addition to working at the cabin, I was practicing in Clarkesville (a small town about 20 miles from me) in a wellness center with Network Chiropractic, Acupuncture, Massage Therapy and Hypnotherapy (along with Qi Gong and Yoga classes), and that was a nice re-entry to the mountains and an opportunity to meet some folks in a community other than my own. Unfortunately the office space was too small for me, so I consolidated my practice to my home office in the log cabin. I just typed "unfortunately," but actually I rather think it was fortunate. Driving back and forth all the time and carrying my table around was a bit of a drag, and further developing my practice in the log cabin has been really sweet, in so many ways. My clients have been wonderful - and they keep coming back, which is most reassuring - and the cabin has always liked visitors, so it's happy too. Also, at this point in my life, it feels really right to be growing into both my space and my work in a new way, and honoring the process of that. Spending more time here, and a different quality of time, has been sort of a ripening. I haven't forgotten the art. I have been enjoying the iPhone camera along and along, with some fun photographing a forest cathedral in the Smokies on a camping trip, the mighty Chattooga, of course, some sunrises out at the lake and continued lily photos around my pond here in Moonfrog Hollow...

Always, the water...

This particular trip to the river, I noticed how the water and stone mimic each other - in these photos I can see how they run right together, almost indistinctly. This fascinates me - that water and stone can so mimic each other and appear as one...

Of course the contrast of soft water and hard rock is somehow reassuring...

And if you live in the mountains, you know how amazing almost everything that blooms has been this year. I have never seen such prolifically beautiful blooms in my life as I have this year - these rhododendrons are a prime example - they just go on and on, and so paper white...

And of course, good, quality time in the woods with special friends needs no further explanation, and I am grateful for these folks who are even willing to follow me bushwhacking into uncharted territories...