Author: Mary Jane Di Piero

On a recent misty morning, entering the amphitheater with Barbara, we first acknowledged the trees—admirable old friends, even of mine by now. We had just a bit of time to do this ink-stick drawing exercise we had in mind, and Barbara had greeted the Mother Redwood perfunctorily, then turned to set out our materials. “Come back here,” she heard the Mother say, “and greet me with your heart.” She laughed and happily complied, setting the energy right for our meditative task. We began by choosing our “brushes” from the sticks…

One day as Barbara walked to the amphitheater, she heard Mano say,  “You were an exuberant child raised in a household of repressed adults.” “Looking within,” she says, “I could see the truth I had never realized before. I wanted to be free to express that exuberance, that passion for life, the joy and delight in the mysteries Mano was revealing to me. It didn’t happen all at once. I had to deal with the fear of being ‘too much’ for people. This dilemma was solved when, talking with…

. . . . in which the gnomes encourage Barbara to call on Faerie Time when she’s feeling there’s not time to do all she wants to do What is time up to? Everyone seems to be talking about how fast it’s going (like this comment from a friend: “I blinked, and September was OVER”). For myself, Monday becomes Friday in a quick morphing flip, but then when I think back to Monday it seems ages ago. I stopped in at the local tea house the other day and, when I…

. . . .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,…

“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…