What transforms us?

It has been a long couple of days for me. I've been starting with new positions a little farther from home, and I've been working hard. I love my work, mind you, so it's definitely a pleasure, but it is hard labor nonetheless. To top it off, something I ate today has had me feeling, this afternoon, like, well, like a ticking bomb. Sorry. Too much information, I know.



Then I went to meet a good friend for a meal and a nice visit to catch up a bit on each other's worlds. After dinner the sun had already set, but it was still plenty light, so we walked in the local community garden, where she had started working a plot and I recently inherited one that desperately needs my attention to get it up to speed. I was walking uncomfortably around the garden - I have never experienced quite this type of sensation before so it was fairly distracting, and I couldn't help thinking how I would really not want to have to go to an ER on a holiday weekend (ok, I have a hypochondria streak).

As I was turning the car around to take my friend back to her car, I noticed the wall up the hill from where we were. I had to get out of the car and go take some photos. "These," I told her, "are the photos I started with," meaning the first photos I ever took. In the beginning it was all about the transformation of decay in various forms. This has always be the case. I imagine it always will be, in various iterations and of various stages of transformation and decay.


After I captured these images, I got back into my car and realized that I wasn't thinking about my guts at all. Isn't it funny what art can do. Getting into the state of "flow"- as Mihály Csíkszentmihályi coined it - is so powerful. It is one of many ways to inspire our bodies to slip into parasympathetic nervous system state (which massage also invites). It's amazing how simple that is. Completely the opposite of what my body did as I sat at the dinner table trying to figure out just what exactly was going on inside all my tubes and organs. Just taking some photographs, riveted by beauty, turned my system around.

On the way home, the last pink and dark violet wisps of clouds were barely illuminated by the already set sun. They looked a lot like some of these photos.

Take off your shoes...

Three days after my recent post, I came across this image on Facebook (I really hope I can find a way to post it here). I was struck by the image that also conveyed something that I was addressing in my post. I did in no way plan the post. I sat down to write about my afternoon and how it struck me, and the post is simply what flowed.



Then, days later, I saw this image. I saw the little shoes there, just outside of the line demarcating "Mother." The sacredness this child (perhaps subconsciously) attributed to the idea/image/representation of her mother. Our mother. How can we separate these? She removed her shoes before entering the container of the mother she has never met, and lay down to rest in the imaginal womb, in the place of the Heart.

Only the wisdom that is simply natural within our spirit would know how to do this. We cannot claim this wisdom as our own. We can simply feel the reverence and fall into it. I am so grateful to feel this just enough to fall into it - on occasion.

Walking the Sacred Cove

I take off my shoes and socks before alighting on the trail into the sacred forest. Today this forest is almost overwhelmingly fragrant. It is so very quiet around me, save for birdsong and the occasional mysterious wail of one tree’s rubbing against another, both shifting in gravity’s pull. Joe would always get excited and exclaim, “sounds just like a woman moaning!” But I hear something else in it - something more like a gentle sigh or a stretching creak. Sometimes it’s a sharper sound, like a squeaky door.


(It was this tree, for whom Joe lovingly scraped paint off of its bark. When I am here, I remember Joe, and sharing chocolate and oranges. I remember taking his photo one year ago right in front of this tree.)

The only other sounds I am noticing come from underfoot. The soft crinkle of papery leaf litter and duff, the muffled crunch of tiny twigs under those leaves under my footfalls. I feel the soft clay, firm but not quite granular and just cool enough to differentiate from the warmth of my feet.

As my soles meet this clay it’s more like meeting the flesh of another. We meet each other. I am not walking on the ground. The clay and I are greeting each other. We welcome each other with some vague knowing that we are related - deeply so.

I move slowly through the forest, deliberately and gently. I allow myself to be called by the beauty - by the pink Trillium, fading fast, its cousin whose burgundy hue is so dark as to appear black in contrast. I am called by the gently flowing water, right over the path. My feet find clay under the water - black clay. The soil in this cove is rich and dark - the blackest brown I know. The water surprises my feet with its fresh coolness, flowing across my toes in ripples.




I step off the trail up into the spring ephemerals, sinking into the loose earth. I imagine this rich dark soil is a result of the graceful decay of a natural forest, largely left alone and unmolested by the hands of men. Each time I return, resting logs have melted further into the earth, acorns resting around and on top, litter of the little critters of the wood. Each time new deadfall and this time a young black cherry laid open in a storm, bright with shades of warm fire in its flesh.



My favorite ancient Black Gum tree lives along this trail, a spry youngster standing close in reverence. He is so old that clumps of bark have dropped away, leaving smooth expanses accentuating just how deep and thick is the bark that remains.



Meandering through the soft filtered light of the end of day, I make my way to dinosaur rocks who feel like ancient beings to me - sometimes whales, sometimes the spine of an unnameable creature, alive and breathing so slowly as to appear stone still. I walk out on the narrow bridge of this boulder, its aliveness meeting my feet - almost as if it reaches up through me just to look out through my eyes - maybe even to show me things.

As the sun is dipping lower behind the ridge, chartreuse and vibrant greens shift toward muddy grey, and I know I should begin my return back down the mountain. I make my way down below these silent giants, through the slightly drier, more westerly slope, back north toward the trail.



I had hoped to glimpse a Yellow Lady’s Slipper today, among the Foam Flowers, Umbrella Plants, blooming Blue Cohosh, Trillium of various colors, white Clintonia just opening, Blood Root leaves still standing and not yet blooming native Geraniums. I wonder if something has eaten them or if someone has taken some away, but having been away so much this Spring, I figure I have simply missed them. Of course sometimes they simply hide there in plain sight, how I think some species, people, places find a simple grace of protective invisibility.



I look further across the wildflowers and decide to step lightly back up to the trail. I don’t want to disturb any more delicate plants, as even in my bare feet I know I can. As soon as I shift my gaze back toward the trail, there she is. This lonely lady with long tresses and an intensely cadmium yellow slipper. She greets me as if to say “thank you for caring where you step - now you may see me.” I turn and look back down the slope and see a plant I don’t remember ever seeing before. It shows up like a trillium, but without a flower and with 10 instead of 3 leaves. I wonder if this is a fluke of nature or maybe a rare plant. Continuing along, now I am called by a Showy Orchis with 5 flowers on its stalk where I usually only see one.





There are other treasures on the way back to the trail, and I gently step back onto the path out of this sanctuary, through the sweet fragrance and melodious birdsong, past the sighing trees, down past the rushing branch - full with recent rains - and into the warmer air on the southeastern slope back down to the car.

There are truly no words or images to convey this experience, so I heartily encourage you to slow down. Take off your shoes and socks. Let your toes find the earth - if tentatively - and remember what else these feet are for.

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...