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…
After years of stimulating Barbara to wake up to the reality of the elemental beings that are the life force within the natural world of earth, air, fire, and water, Mano first introduced himself to her when she moved to the heart of a redwood forest. As she was walking through the forest he appeared within her imagination walking beside her. He spoke to her by putting his thoughts into her mind. Over the years this developed into Barbara’s recording of their conversations into the computer as they…
Barbara, through many years of concentrating on her interactions with the elemental world, has discerned a pattern of what works for her. She doesn’t assume it as the best procedure for everyone, but when Julie and I visited in November she prepared the following to help us connect. As she made this offering, she also left us in total freedom to use our own intuition and techniques. I think we both ended up using some kind of blend. I continue to refer to Barbara’s protocols, and I’m particularly…
Really, when Julie and I drove to Ben Lomand to pay our respects to Barbara I didn’t expect anything special to happen. I accept my slow trajectory and imagined I would just add a brick or two to the edifice, inching along to gnome recognition. But the weekend was more complex and quietly marvelous than that. To carve a “space out of time”, ritual is helpful, if not required, and so is the breathing in and out from group to individual, active to contemplative, reflective to expressive. Barbara…
As a long-time student of Rudolf Steiner and anthroposophy, I was delighted with Tanis Helliwell’s story of Steiner recruiting leprechauns who would help narrow the chasm between nature spirits and humans. It added a fanciful flavor to what I have often experienced as Steiner’s stern demeanor. Picturing him in the elemental world, though still on an urgent mission, somehow allowed me to imagine him kicking up his heels and laughing—though perhaps still wearing the long black frock coat of the photographs. This seriousness and delight mingled together in…
Tanis Helliwell, in Summer with the Leprechauns, writes that she rented a cottage in the west of Ireland with the intention of staying there until she reached enlightenment. She was immediately engaged and subsequently re-routed in her goal by a leprechaun gentleman, Lloyd, whose intention was to find out about her as she already was. At one point he tells her how, as a young leprechaun, a human being had come to his realm asking for volunteers to connect with and learn about humans—a need for reconnection and…
“We are truly real. We are not a figment of your mind. Your mind has had to be developed and fine tuned to be able to do this work. Your mind is the instrument. We are the teachers. Please, please stay open, stay present, stay real.” – Mano to Barbara Years ago, after reading Sandra Ingerman’s books on soul retrieval, I had a shaman do one for me. She brought back the news that my totem animal is the red-tailed hawk, and then she asked me to…
