. . . .about when, as Barbara first began connecting with the gnomes, they gifted her with the Heart of a Gnome . . . Sometimes, along the way, I am just moving one foot after another when, suddenly, I receive a gift. For example, I have recently been seeing praying mantises—one on a sunflower, the next on a chair outside my door (this one gracing me with a slow sweeping waltz up my arm), and then yesterday, three in the garden: one that hopped onto my finger from…
Virtually everyone I know who has faced a serious injury or disease has molded their treatment to include (sooner or later) both allopathic and alternative approaches. I myself, when confronted in 2010 with an ocular melanoma, quickly did the recommended allopathic treatment—radiation—and then began on an odyssey that I suspect will continue for the rest of my life, exploring issues of inner and outer vision and health. The concepts of health and healing also continue to stretch, as more and more people embrace the way the physical, mental,…
Heart of a Redwood Forest The magic of Jim’s Road is a subtle and powerful force field that emanates from the area called the Amphitheater, an energy that supports creativity, spiritual growth, and awakening to higher dimensions of reality. Celebrating the Magic of Jim’s Road chronicles the consciousness of a small group of people who independently followed inner guidance and moved to the mountain. Artists, musicians, sculptors and creative inventors, each depended on and lived by spiritual and angelic connections in their own ways, gaining inspiration to fulfill…
“These are only hints and guesses, hints followed by guesses; and the rest is prayer, observance, discipline, thought, and action.” T.S. Eliot In my experience with doing the little drawings, two other similar exercises have come into my life. One is from Julie, the wildflower botanist, who has her students choose a plant that calls them, observe it carefully, draw it as a contour drawing (following the outlines without looking at the paper) or just look and draw, next draw its essence, and then record the message the…
Barbara is always doing these “little drawings”, and I have been attracted to the practice for quite some time. Sending energy and intuitive hand/heart impulses into art in this free, unthreatening way brings surprising messages and paves new grooves into non-linear thinking and the realm of the muses. I like doing them, and as our world strays further and further from my old “common sense” assumptions, the drawings are becoming a centering and enlivening anchor for me. Barbara began doing them as an antidote to boredom and, like so…
So, the other day I made a pretty simple commitment: every morning when I first go out my door (as close to dawn as I can make it), I will open my heart and greet the world, consciously sending love to the trees, the birds, the flowers. If I forget, I will come back and start over again. And it doesn’t matter if I’m at home or somewhere else—I will tune in first thing. Because of my sanguine nature, which loves to hop from one thought to another,…
Not long ago I was telling a young musician and composer about the project Julie and I have of talking with specific trees. He asked what messages I was picking up, and my brain scrambled around a little, thinking, “Is it the ancient apple tree speaking, or is it me projecting?” But then, put on the spot, I talked about this small extraordinary tree that has almost no interior but is just a curve of bark that sinks into earth in a couple of precarious places. She calls…
“Could you walk with me on my land sometime this spring?” a friend recently asked. She wanted to see what the land might reveal to us about who it is, how it has come to be as it is, what it needs and wants from its human tenants. In thinking of how to tune toward this walk, I randomly open David Abram’s Becoming Animal, right to a walking-on-the-earth invocation: “An old, ancestral affinity between the human foot and the solid ground is replenished by the simple act of stepping…
Brambles! An unfamiliar, uncomfortable medium to walk through. When, after several weeks, I went back to the overrun of blackberries covering a swath of this delicious new land I’m getting acquainted with, I discovered that the Conservation Corps in their work of making fire paths to the creek had cleared corridors, made inroads. The job isn’t finished, but it’s getting close to creating multiple access routes to water, to heightened connection. For many, the gnome medium is similarly difficult to negotiate and requires a certain open-mindedness and suspension…
Recently I was exploring a new piece of land (a richly faceted place I’m in the process of moving to) and, without knowing where my steps would take me, I moved deeper and deeper into an expanse of Himalayan blackberries. Soon going back seemed more chancy than pursuing my original intent of coming round to the more tended area I already knew, and I was absorbed into this world of brambles, slowing myself down to a total concentration on the terrain. I slipped through rounded branch configurations interwoven…
