How Your Friendships Could Be Saving the World

Posted on May 14, 2012 | Leave a comment

The women in my family take friendship seriously. 

On a quiet afternoon sometime in the early 1950’s, my grandmother famously took a long bath in her house in England and came out of it deciding that she must take her dear friend Valerie to tea as soon as possible.  At a time when she didn’t have much money, she got out of the tub and picked up the phone to arrange to fly to New Zealand to meet Valerie the following week.  My grandmother had impeccable intuition.  She knew something was going on.  Valerie needed her.

My mother and her brothers never learned exactly what Valerie had needed.  Maybe she’d had a miscarriage?  A broken heart?  A broken bone?  Maybe my grandmother had needed her?  My grandmother took her secrets to her grave, only saying when she arrived back in England almost a month later that Valerie had been relieved to see her.

My mother taught me to nourish my childhood friendships, the way that her mother taught her.  Always gardeners, the women in my family cultivate their friendships with careful feeding, watering, and pruning, but without too much fuss.  A little black spot on the leaves or a few aphids on the stalks are greatly preferable to spraying nasty chemicals everywhere.  Basically, be there for each other and take it easy.  Take friends the way they are, and maybe they’ll do the same for you.

Thanks to this great family gift passed down from my grandmother to my mother to me, I have friends that I’ve been lucky to keep from preschool, elementary and high school, as well as deep, important friendships made later in life.

In the community garden where I mentor kids and youth, I watch friendships between young girls grow and mature over the years.  I see how girls thrive on each other’s support.

Then, ages 11-12

 

Now, 3 dear friends, ages 16-17

I’ve noticed how, as there is no “best friends” button on facebook, many teenage girls are now “married” to each other.  In it’s tongue-in-cheek way this speaks to the importance of close friendships in girls lives.

I’m interested in what these deep bonds that often form between girls and women mean.  They are powerful.  There seems to be a current of support for these friendships that is only just starting to materialize for men as well in the culture at large.

When these friendships are nurtured over the years, building trust through shared histories and experiences, working through blocks, learning to differentiate in adulthood, creating healthy boundaries, sharing skills, knowledge, wisdom, and resources as well as fears, women are much more likely to reach their potential.

Friendships this flexible and exuberant are invaluable, often under-appreciated in the larger culture, and they are potentially revolutionary and world-changing.

Bestselling author, psychologist, and women’s and environmental rights activist Jean Shinoda Bolen writes in her book Like a Tree: How Trees, Women and Tree People Can Save the Planet about the power of helping just three friends, who in turn help three friends, until the circle wideness to one million in only 36 cycles.

When women support each other’s true spirits instead of a culture that tells us to shop, to worry about our weight, to underestimate our worth, to fear differences in ourselves and others, we are strengthened.  We are able create cultures of respect, nurturance, common sense, humor, and love of the imperfect.  We are able to support men in their deep friendships with each other and with women, friendships that have not historically developed the same cultures of nurturance.  We are also more able to open our hearts and lives to the wisdom of trans-gendered people and all forms of difference because we feel more comfortable in our own skin.

I am deeply grateful for my beloved friends, near and far. I know that step by step our friendships are making the world a more compassionate and saner place. Let’s celebrate these friendships and learn how to encourage them in each other.

Join the conversation!

Has friendship played an important part of your life? How do you cultivate and celebrate friendship?  Was it encouraged in your family growing up?  If so, how?  If not, what have you learned about how to encourage or support friendship since then? 

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Posted in gardening, Healing, nature

How to See Magic

Posted on May 7, 2012 | Leave a comment

Synchronicity was described by Carl Jung as two or more events that are grouped in the mind by meaning, not by some other grouping, like chronology. In his book The Three ‘Only’ Things, writer and dream shaman Robert Moss says that magic is “the art of reaching into a deeper reality and bringing gifts to the ordinary world.”  Things have meaning when we choose to give them meaning; when we choose to make it so, to see the magic.

On a cold windy day in the fall of 2010 I found myself selling books behind a card table on the sidewalk outside of my community garden on the Lower East Side. Most of them came from my own library.  I had already let go of all books I didn’t love.  These were almost the last, most prized books.  I didn’t know where I was going, but I knew that it was time for me to shed even my most beloved things.  I allowed myself to keep one box of books, no more.  I was due for some radical change and the community garden needed some money.

One of the books on the table was The Empty Space by Peter Brook, which I’d first read as a theater student in high school.  It had been read and reread, with passages underlined and starred, dog-eared in college and out of it.

I exchanged it for two dollars with a delighted young woman (most likely a theater student) in front of my community garden, dead leaves mixing with cigarette wrappers against the chain link fence, telling myself that it was time for some more empty space in my life. Manhattan apartments are small.

A year later, there it was on my shelf again, a little yellow shelf in a different apartment than I had lived in before, this time in hardback and with none of my underlining.

I share the shelf now with my beloved, after he moved off half of his own treasured books to make room for the few I had sequestered in my cardboard box. The copy was his. I chose to see the presence of a favorite book there on the shelf in my new home as a sign of welcome.

I open ‘the Empty Space’ randomly to a page about Shakespeare’s King Lear, “A play which we begin to see not as a narrative any longer, but as a vast, complex, coherent poem designed to study the power and emptiness of nothing–”

For my 34th birthday, the same year that I sold my copy of The Empty Space, I went to BAM to see Sir Derek Jacobi perform Lear.  Nearing the end of a crumbling relationship, I was alone by choice in the center of the front row of the balcony, my favorite spot in the Harvey Theater.

When I bought the ticket it was the only one left, not just on that night, but for the entire run of the show, as though it had been saved for me.  I couldn’t go back on my wish to see Shakespeare alone on my birthday.

Sir Derek translated shades of the human experience through the words of Shakespeare that are too subtle and true to be captured in prose.  After the performance many people reported feeling like me, hyper-alive as though each intake of breath, each moment of life had become imbued with a simple secret, we are here.  We are present on this earth.

In the months that followed that birthday and performance, I went through tremendous changes in my personal and professional life.  I took a leap of faith and decided to dedicate myself to my writing.  I left a relationship that had been dying for years and entered one that felt more aligned with my spirit than I’d ever thought possible.

During these months of change it has been helpful to turn away from too much story, to look at life for its poetry rather than always trying to figure out the whole sweeping arch of the plot.

I think about power and emptiness.  What does it mean to be powerful?  To be empty?  Maybe to be powerful is to be fully alive and not so filled up with stories as to miss the immediacy of sensation— of the present. Maybe emptiness is allowing life to happen, to unfold, and not to have to figure out what it all means beforehand.

There are always signs and wonders, fools singing in the wind and the rain. There are always synchronistic lamp posts to light our way through the dark when we look for them, when we choose to see them, when we want to experience the gifts of life’s poetry.

For this Moonday, 2 days after the brightest full moon of 2012, what  synchronicity has been at play in your life lately?

 

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Posted in creativity, Healing, poetry, theater

You Have Everything You Need

Posted on May 1, 2012 | Leave a comment

I have a dream of an unrecognized authority, an old woman in a meditation room.  No one is paying attention to her. The male meditation teacher leaves for an unspecified amount of time and everyone confers about what to do.

Should we stay together as a group, or go off meditating on our own?  We are stronger as a group, but there is no leader, no head bird for the flock.

I notice an old woman.  She is sitting in a corner of the meditation room in the shadows covered in a brown shawl. No one else has seen her.  I tell the group to look at her and to notice what they see.

Her face reminds me of handmade paper, soft and flecked with furze.  It is some shade between brown and grey.  The meditation students look at her as though they are just realizing that she is in the room.

When she begins to speak people listen.  Her voice is low, full and has the power of winter wind.  When she looks at you, there is no doubt that she’s seeing your soul.  Her eyes are kind and the gaze is tolerable.  She’s pleased that I’ve recognized her, because this is the only way that she makes herself known.

Her authority is absolute.  It is also loose, gentle, forgiving, and often unrecognized.  When it is unrecognized there are problems.

Silence deepens in the meditation room.   She is looking into us, giving us the essence of what’s inside us in one word, our true names.

“Coraggio,” she calls me.  “Coraggio.  Coraggio,” she says many times so that I won’t forget when I wake up.  And I wake up so that I won’t forget.   It is the day before my thirty-fifth birthday.

Coraggio is Italian for courage.  I don’t speak Italian, but I studied Latin.  Cor translates to heart in many languages.  Ag means agent/ doer.  Gio, well, Geo is earth.  My name, according to the Wise Woman in my dream, is Courage/ agent of the earth’s heart.  This is me, my core, and it is the best birthday gift I could imagine receiving.

It takes courage to do my work, writing and healing.  It takes courage to dig deep into myself and beyond myself to find the stories.  It takes courage to grow fruit trees and vegetables, roses and community in the middle of New York City with my neighbors in my community garden.  To defend the community garden against those who would rather it become a luxury apartment building.  To tell people that I talk to trees, that I listen to trees and plants, to teach them that they too can have this deep connection to the earth.  To stand up for people and the earth.  To not worry about being called crazy.  To dance. To love. To succeed and fail.  To remain humble.  To be powerful.  To share stories with others.  To remember that I am an agent of the earth’s heart.

sitting inside a 1,400 yr. old redwood tree

That’s how the Wise Woman rolls.  She gives you gifts of yourself, gifts you always had, and she reminds you that everything you need is already there.  She doesn’t tell you to have courage.  She reminds you that you are courage.  You are courage.

I’ve spent years working with the Wise Woman archetype.  Like most women connected to earth, I’ve known her my whole life, and have been working with her consciously since I began my herbal apprenticeship with Robin Rose Bennett in 2002.

Ten years later I find myself drawn deeper into endless mysteries of this archetype—this aspect of womanhood— that exist inside of me, and also in the manifestation of wise elder women who are spiritual teachers, healers, and wild women who walk between worlds.

When we listen to this archetype inside ourselves, both in women and also in men, we unlock our potential as healers of ourselves and of our earth.  The Wise Woman comes to us when we ask for her, when we are quiet, when we are desperate, and when we are open.  Her message is always healing, not fixing.  We become whole; we become more fully ourselves.  We have everything that we need.

Have you met the Wise Woman?  How has she helped you?  

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Posted in creativity, Healing, nature, writing process

Everything you loved is gone

Posted on July 22, 2011 | Leave a comment

To be a nature person in 2011 means you are in touch with deep loss.  This poem is dedicated to all who are grappling with that loss and finding ways to heal.

Song For Perdita

Orphan, there is a door.
Look inside the hollow
where your thumb meets your wrist.
Or maybe in your elbow joint
in the center of the bend.
Or behind the armature
of your left shoulder blade behind your heart.
Slide your hand down your back
and feel it there.

The door is carved
from a two thousand year old olive tree
that grew in the garden of Gethsemane
with a coral handle traced with Dodo feathers.

Sometimes its rattled open by thunder.
Sometimes by the dry wind from a forest on fire.
Sometimes it is sealed with resin.

There is no light behind the door,
no darkness.
There are no swollen-eyed mourners or bloodied fists,
no wide boulevards or sand beaches.
No hunger.
No dreams.
A wail will lead you to the door
but inside there is no sound.

Only you can find it, you,
all the Perditas abandoned in all the storms.
It is never found in a grandmother’s garden
of carefully trimmed box and well-fed roses.

You have to walk instead to a wild lot
inside the footprint of a forgotten building
left to crumble and seeded by rubble growers—
fast thirsty greens that bloom with spiraling ghost flowers
under white skies.
Jimsonweed and bind.

Behind the door nothing is ever lost.
Slip in Perdita.
Slip in,
little lost one.

 

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Posted in gardening, Healing, nature, poetry

Good Advice, or Why I Read Blogs

Posted on July 11, 2011 | Leave a comment

Something happened in my personal life last week that upset me too much to write.  In my off hours I took to my bed reading Jane Austen.

Today I read this post by Bindu Wiles entitled Taking Refuge in your Art, which reminded me that writing would have helped me even more than Jane Austen’s deliciously crafted sentences.

More writing, including my last 2 posts on roses, will be forthcoming here in a week or so, as I’m off on a fellowship for community garden leaders for six days with no cell phone or computer.  Six blissfully unplugged days spent in nature with like-minded people sounds  like good medicine.  I’m also packing lots of pens and paper.

Thanks Bindu.  Alice Walker once wrote that books come into her life like magic just when she needs them.  I’ve had this experience time and again, and I’m happy to report that the same is true for wise digitally published writing that sometimes falls in front of my often over-stimulated eyes.

 

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Posted in creativity, writing process

In Praise of Thorns: Day 5 of a week about Roses

Posted on July 2, 2011 | Leave a comment

“You can’t have thorns without the rose. Be careful of them in the dark.” –Tom Waits

I loved listening to trickster Brer Rabbit tales as a child, especially the ending of Brer Rabbit and the Tar Baby. If you don’t know it, spoiler follows.  Brer Fox has captured and is about to kill Rabbit who keeps repeating something along the lines of, ‘hang me, skin me, burn me alive, just don’t throw me into that briar patch!’, Of course Brer Fox tosses him in and Brer Rabbit crows that he was born in the briar patch and hops off.

The briar patch.  Just don’t throw me into that briar patch.  As a child who spent countless hours playing in the Virginia woods, I walked through many a briar patch, which I called “the prickers”.

No one could get me, no one could find me in those prickly woods.  I learned how to  navigate the briars so that I could slip between them with nary a scratch.  In the places that got enough sun for flowers and fruit, I would nibble on the bright red rose hips in the fall and sometimes sit with the canes arching above me to silently observe snakes, squirrels, and yes, rabbits ambling through.

Thorns are boundaries, marking land that needs protecting.  My briar patch, full of tulip poplars, multi-floral rose ie. the prickers, and poison ivy,  had once been farm fields.  These plants were the first generation of fast growing, opportunistic species to reforest the area.  These ‘weeds’ are less invasive in more well established, old growth forests.  In my woods the briars ended where the old growth Walnut, Oak and Sycamore trees began.

Thorns can also act as nearly impenetrable hedges (around magical cottages perhaps). They are a sanctuary for rabbits and the occasional child.

Thorns are a necessary part of the rose plant, a species full of physical and emotional medicine for the heart and sexuality.  Wild roses are not easily trampled, not easily destroyed.  Drinking wild rose tea helps me to open my heart, embrace my sensuality, and strengthen boundaries at the same time.

In my soul’s forest, impulses that keep me from saying yes when I need to say no are like thorns.  They scratch if someone gets too clumsily close.  They reforest parts that have been clear cut.  They hide, mask, and shield.  It’s just as important for me to cultivate my relationship to the thorny canes as it is to the flowers and fruit so that when I’m thrown into a briar patch I feel completely at home.

I recently loved reading my friend, writer Karleen Koen’s thoughts on thorns in relation to her creative process on the publication of her new book, Before Versasailles: A Novel of Louis XIV.

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Posted in creativity, gardening, Healing, herbs, nature, permaculture, writing process

Mysteries… God & Sex: Day 4 of a Week about Roses

Posted on July 1, 2011 | Leave a comment

How
did the rose
ever open its heart
and give to this world all of its beauty?
It felt the encouragement of light against its being,
otherwise we all remain too
frightened.

–Hafiz

The rose is a great-mambo spiritual symbol.

Here are just a few examples from some of the world’s major religions:

  • Ecclesiastes 24:14 “Wisdom grew up… like a rosebush in Jericho.”
  • There’s the rose in the Song of Songs.
  • There are the Rose windows in Gothic churches and cathedrals.
  • In esoteric Christian writings the rose is a symbol of the soul that has recognized the presence of Christ.
  • In Mexico, Our Lady of Guadalupe was recognized as a visitation of Mary by the Bishop when she made roses bloom in December.
  • Rosary means garland of roses.
  • The rose is also a major symbol in Islam.
  • Rose is a symbol of the Prophet Mohammad.
  • In Sufi poetry, the rose garden is often a symbol of God dwelling in the heart.
  • The 13-petaled rose is a major symbol in the Jewish Kabbalah.
  • There are many secret and not-so-secret societies that use rose iconography such as the Rosicrucians.

Rose is also a great-mambo symbol of sexual love.

What is meant by 'great weekend' is pretty clear, no?

  • Rose is one of the most well known aphrodisiacs in the world, second only to chocolate.
  • Roses have been given as symbols of romantic love for a very long time.   As poet Walter De La Mar put it:

“Oh no man knows

Through what wild centuries

Roves back the rose.”

  • Roses are major ingredients in love potions,
  • perfumes,
  • and food designed to entice.

So…  That’s interesting.  Most aphrodisiacs bear some resemblance to genitalia. I think it’s fair to compare the rose with the beautiful, exposed deep pink to purple-red flesh of a woman’s coochie.

The physical medicine of the rose benefits the heart and women’s reproductive systems.   Rose helps to regulate hormone production as it is high in phytosterols, and its astringent qualities strengthen the uterus.

You see where this syllogism is leading, right?  If all roses are sacred, and all roses are symbols of women’s sexuality as well as the heart, then…  women’s sexuality, as well as the heart, is sacred.

Of course that’s true.  And it’s hiding in plain sight, in major religions all over the world.

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Posted in Healing, herbs, nature, poetry

Carmen’s Rose; Healing Trauma: Day 3 of a week about Roses

Posted on June 29, 2011 | 2 Comments

The rose has long been a symbol of the heart.  It’s also one of the first herbs I turn to when dealing with trauma.  When taken over time, rose can slowly and gently help the spirit and body to feel whole again, to come back home.  I’ve used it with herbal clients who have experienced rape and sexual abuse.

When someone experiences violence, either directly or by being a witness, there is a certain type of frayed quality that manifests as shakiness, inability to concentrate, and fear, even of soft touch.  Rose seems to ease this state and replace it with a feeling of grace and ease.

On a physical level rose gets the blood flowing after trauma has literally constricted the blood vessels, and it nourishes the nervous system.  On an emotional level it opens the heart and restores people’s sense of beauty and awe both in themselves and the world.

There is a large tea rose bush in the Children’s Magical Garden, my community’s garden on the Lower East Side of Manhattan,  that was planted by the garden’s founder, Carmen Rubio, over twenty-five years ago.  Carmen was a low-income housing activist who started the garden with Alfredo Feliciano when the neighborhood was overrun with crime and drugs.  The site was painstakingly transformed from a burned down building full of garbage where drugs were pushed and shot up, to a garden where school children play to this day.

I’m working with current volunteers to assure the permanent status of the garden as a place of nature learning for the neighborhood’s kids.  Carmen’s rose, which blooms almost continuously from June through November, is a constant reminder to me of what can be accomplished with determination, heart, and bravery.

Recently there has been a string of domestic murders of women in the neighborhood, with the latest happening yesterday.  I knew the woman who was killed, as her son played in the garden when he was younger.

Violence and abuse of women happen so frequently that it’s easy to become inured to it, but when it happens to someone you know– a neighbor, a friend, a former classmate, it hits the place inside that’s always raw with this too-common tragedy.

Today I went into the garden and shared an impromptu pot of rose tea with two other gardeners as we discussed the recent tragedy and plans for the garden’s summer season.  The rose tea lifted our spirits, as did our fellowship.

The rose is both a symbol and a powerful physical medicine for the deep healing work that needs to be done in our world.

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Posted in gardening, Healing, herbs, nature

Rose’s Gentle Power: Day 2 of a week about Rose

Posted on June 28, 2011 | 2 Comments

“Give me the strong stuff.”
“I need something stronger.”
“I want the strongest thing you’ve got.”

When we are very ill or unhappy, almost everyone, no matter what their philosophical or political leanings may be, asks for something strong– strong herb, strong drug, strong drink.  Strong seems like, if not a guarantee, then at least a good bet that the treatment will be effective.

“Give me the gentlest remedy you can think of,” is something I’ve yet to hear.  But sometimes gentle is actually more powerfully healing.  Sometimes when we think we need strong, we really need gentle.

Rose is an excellent example of gentle yet powerful medicine.  A cup of rose tea is safe enough to give to someone who has recently had heart surgery, and yet it is potent enough to bring down a high fever.  It opens the pores, calms the nerves, and strengthens the heart and circulation.  Even just the smell of roses has been shown to relieve stress and help move the blood.
Rose petals are very soft, but the canes and thorns create formidable barriers.  Roses are used as hedges, and wild rose survives deer overpopulation to save its hips (fruit) for the birds, balancing the ecosystem and securing its own survival.

Rose reminds me that gentle and powerful are not antonyms, not at all.

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Posted in Healing, herbs, nature

Rose Discoveries– Day 1

Posted on June 27, 2011 | Leave a comment

tea rose

Every day this week I’ll be posting something about the much misunderstood rose.  While having the reputation as the most romantic of flowers, I often hear people sneering at it.  The rose’s blooms fade fairly quickly in water.  If you don’t live in a climate that gets a lot of rain and cool-ish temperatures, it can be fussy in the garden.

But rose is an incredible healer, worthy of love and devotion.  There are aspects of rose that most people have never imagined.

Poet’s have long noted rose’s mystery.  As it’s Moonday, here’s one of my favorites, by Rilke, translated by Stephen Mitchell:

Rose, oh the pure contradiction.

Delight in being no one’s sleep

under so many lids.

Have you had the experience of thinking you knew all about something, only to discover later that it was so much more interesting/complex than you could have imagined?  What was it about?

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Posted in gardening, herbs, nature, poetry