Council of Gnomes Blog

Reminder from Mano: When you light a candle, give thanks to the fire spirit. Here (says Mary Jane) is a tiny story of my life. In mid-March a routine PET scan showed a small spot on my lung (probably a touch of pneumonia from The Cough) and another one on my breast near where last summer’s melanoma was removed. I can’t have surgery until the cough goes away, so I have come home to wait three weeks. What has slowly filled me is great happiness. My highest good,…

Reminder from Mano: When possible, have your feet on the soil as you walk. When on concrete, see your feet going beneath, to the surface of the earth. Send love through your feet to the earth and through your eyes to all of nature around you. Another admirable January event in Nevada City/Grass Valley (in addition to the Wild and Scenic Film Festival I mentioned last month) is the Food and Farm Conference. Among the local presenters was a mom I sometimes see at my grandson’s preschool, a beekeeper. I…

Reminder from Mano: When you drink a glass of water, say thank you to the water elemental. Each January Nevada City/Grass Valley hosts the Wild & Scenic Film Festival, with a rich offering of movies about the natural world, about people engaging in environmental and cultural innovation and preservation, about finding honorable ways of existing in this most interesting time. I have launched my own search, in these days, for people whose authenticity makes me feel alive and awake, who are unapologetic about their spiritual explorations, who can…

Mano reminder: Ask more. Ask more often. Ask more specifically. As my heart warms . . . breathing deepens, brain relaxes, spine straightens to align harmoniously with the flow of earth and cosmos. We all, I am sure, have these soft interludes, when we slide out of our logical brain and make way for magic. We fall in love, with other people but also with our dogs, our sports heroes, our music, our work, our gardens. We find ourselves longing to return to some beloved activity over and…

Reminder from Mano: Bless the objects in your house that serve you and give you pleasure (for example, the computer, stove, flower arrangements). All of these are composed of the elements of earth, water, air, and fire. A friend joked the other day that perhaps this election was a great conspiracy on the part of the gnomes to wake us all up. From one perspective or another, the vitriolic campaigning, the great confusion about truth, the shock of the result, the fear and then new resolve the election…

Reminder from Mano: Soften your heart and send love to the flowers in your garden. This blog will be Barbara’s writing about her two-month commitment in the summers to spend several hours in the amphitheater each day. First, though, comes my introduction. The three-way agreement among Barbara, Mano, and me is that I will start each blog with something personal. When Mano suggested to Barbara three and a half years ago that she ask me to help with the blog, we both expected that I would just edit…

Reminder from Mano: Say hello to the Spirits of the land, the Geni Loci, when entering a park, going to the beach, hiking in the mountains. Knowing that Spirit (angelic or elemental) is always placing “next steps” in my path and that I’m committed to paying attention, in mid-September I attended a Gift Economics workshop at the Lama Foundation near Taos, New Mexico. Two of the presenters are authors whose books have been very important to me in the past couple of years: Charles Eisenstein: The More Beautiful…

Reminder from Mano: If you live alone, after sending blessing to the food, open your inner awareness and notice if you feel a spiritual presence sitting at the table with you. For several months I have been engaged in an ongoing conversation with this melanoma that made its presence known in early May. My first melanoma, in 2010, was in my eye; this one appeared as a nicely contained lump in my breast. Since it’s a re-appearance—even though it’s seemingly not related to the eye cancer—the diagnosis was…

Reminder from Mano: “If you see a face in the bark of a tree or leaf configuration, say hello, I send you love. Last night I picked up a book a friend had dropped off—Talking with Angels: Budaliget 1943—a transcript of the Friday afternoon dialogues with angels four Hungarian young adults had toward the end of World War II. An opening line caught my eye: “The angels said, ‘What could be more natural than our talking with each other?’ May this book help many new dialogues to be…