Gathering and Transforming

My daughter has forever loved to gather flower petals and make them into potions and magical elixirs.

We recently gathered chamomile flowers, lemon balm, peppermint, plantain, red raspberry leaves, and alpine strawberry leaves.  We made fresh chamomile/lemon balm tea, and set the rest to drying.

Chamomile blossoms

We gathered white peony, honeysuckle, and lemon balm and started it steeping in water and vodka, meant to become floral water. 

Peony, honeysuckle, lemon balm

My kitchen is decorated with bunches of herbs hanging to dry (the only practical option in such wet weather).

A profound feeling of abundance and satiety rises when I look at an array of freshly thrown pots, a season's jars of canned produce, freshly made soap, or gathered herbs hanging in my kitchen.  I feel very connected to my forebears, and not so far removed.

Nettle-Oat-Lemon Balm Soap

I experience an oddly ancient-seeming sort of feeling, which comes of producing for and sustaining my tribe. 

This feeling also holds the energy of transformation.  I live for it-- the moment of opening the kiln, pulling a print off the press, birthing the baby, opening the soap mold, flowers becoming fruit, the moment when dissonant voices find harmony.  One thing becomes another, and everything is new.


Abundance, Connection, Sustenance, Transformation.  Whatever I am, I want to live at the center of those four words.

My Plane, My Fridge and my Spring Peepers

Long ago, before I became a mother, I used to sit zen.  A dear friend in college introduced me to Pema Chodron and Charlotte Joko-Beck.  I'd sit on my round purple zafu cushion, and try to follow my breath, and experience each moment.  I'd sit on the city bus on my way to or from a temp job and practice tonglen, breathing light into the back of strangers' heads.  I sat with the local branch of the Kwan Um School of Zen (Korean).

This one time, curious and wanting to deepen my practice, I went on a 3-day sesshin (meditation retreat) on a nearby island.  I sat there, hour after hour, alone with all these other people dressed in our grey robes.  Sure, my back hurt, my hips hurt, I stood up periodically and did what I needed to do, but the thing that really stopped me was the Noise.

I'm hearing-impaired, but that wasn't an issue.  It was a silent retreat, anyway.  It was the tinnitus.  Normally all the sounds around me give me something to tune it out with, the deafening ringing and buzzing cacophony in my head.  Sitting in the beautiful meditation room, I had to listen.  The way a person generally copes with tinnitus is by learning not to pay attention to it.  What happens when your only intent is to, in fact, Pay Attention?

I notice the loud, sharp, high pitch on top, like I'm plunked down in the center of million of spring peepers.  Underneath that there's a loud middle tone, rougher, like the background noise on a plane.  Below that is an incessant low hum, like I'm walking around with a loud refrigerator beside me.

So I sat, all through the day, on my plane, next to my refrigerator, surrounded by a million peepers.  Then an enormous wave of grief moved through my body, grief and longing for Silence.  Even as I sit here and type, I'm filled with grief for Silence.  I remember what it was like, when I was little, to stand in a field in the dark, in June, watching fireflies, with it almost silent.  Just a little wind, the rustling of the tall grass.   I stood up and left the retreat, on the morning of the second day.

I grew up walking in these woods, in silence.

That sesshin was the last time I sat down and meditated.  In the last ten years, I haven't even been able to breathe tonglen for myself.  That is a long time to grieve.  My kids have been a very handy distraction, with all their ruckus and endless demands for Attention.   Recently, my son has been complaining about his ears ringing.

Eventually, somehow, everybody has to deal with the Noise in their head.

Laboring/No Way But Through

The first time I birthed a child, I very badly wanted someone else to birth her for me.  I had a 3-person birth team and a partner waiting around for me to do my thing.   I was terrified.  In the end, after 36 hours of labor, someone else did do it for me.  Someone whose name I don't recall pulled and tugged her out of my sliced open and exposed uterus, under a very bright light.  I remember glimpsing my daughter yelling lustily, covered in green meconium, before she was summarily suctioned, rinsed, wrapped up, and shown to me by her father, before I promptly became nauseous and passed out.

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When you give away your responsibilities, you also give away your power.   I didn't really know that before my daughter was born.  Learning to parent my daughter, I learned how to parent myself.

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Two years (and one week) later, when I woke up one morning and promptly went into labor with my son, I knew nobody would do it for me.  I just buckled down and worked through whatever resistance I had.  It took 5 hours of dancing and swaying, completely alone, and 1 hour of pushing and birthing (with support).

Center Square of My Birthing Quilt

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Homeschooling has been a remarkably similar experience.  I've lost less blood, but it has been to date a long, difficult labor,  as I have struggled to find my strength.

In the course of the last five years, I've listened to lots of Outside Voices from one place and another, telling me I was Doing Everything Wrong.   Don't let your child stay up past dark!  Don't force your child to go to bed before he's ready!  Don't give your child refined sugar!  Let your child choose her own foods!  Don't teach your child to read until they lose their teeth!  Don't teach your child to read at all!  Let the child copy you! Don't answer questions about The Difficult World!  Challenge your child to think critically!  I have often been miserable.

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At one point, I signed my Daughter up for Suzuki Violin-- a terrible match for her particular nature--  and she lost all her joy for music.  "It took all the fun out of music for me!" she said to me, at 6.  The same thing happened with reading, with writing, with spelling.  Her joy was stolen, her self-esteem was headed straight down, and this time it was her voice that told me I was Doing Everything Wrong.

Unlike all the other, Outside Voices to which I had reacted, one pendulum swing after another, I didn't react to my daughter's voice.  I responded.

We stopped what we were doing, entirely.  I am focused on responding to my children, and trying my best to figure the rest out.

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Rivulet of Consciousness Blog

Sometimes I imagine conversations with trees.  I'm a little weird that way.

Hello, Forest, It's been awhile.  How sweet and rich you smell!

Hello, Melissa, welcome home!  We know you are happiest beneath our trees.  Here, have some salmonberries!

Oh, thank you, Forest!  It's been a long time.  I love these!  They're so beautiful. 

Thank you for bringing your children here.  We love the way they delight in us. Look how muddy they are!  They belong here, too. 

Thank you, Forest.  I love you.  We'll be back soon.

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How does the world look from up there?  I am always looking up at my children.  The opposite is so often true, people looking down at them. 

I love the way you fly, even as it makes my ankles hurt to watch. 

The top of a baseball backstop is a fine place to spend an afternoon.

It takes time to find community.  It usually takes shared experiences, and many, many hours.  Sometimes years.  Sometimes we find ourselves in such lonely places, in the in-betweens of our lives.  It happens at all ages.

It's okay to feel that.  Don't you think?

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The Moon of Yellow Singing

In my own native language, I would call this part of June, here where I live, The Moon of Yellow Singing.

To walk in the foothills toward sunset, the banks covered with great fountains of brilliant yellow broom, the salal blooming, the thick blackberries budded out, waiting their turn, the foxgloves and daisies just beginning to open, the brilliant yellow goldfinches zipping melodiously overhead, little crimson moths fluttering through the yellow, and everything smelling sweet, and grassy, and broomy, and rich, with the cottonwood fluff blowing through the low sunshine: this is the Moon of Yellow Singing.

As I follow the deer paths through the tall grass, and wind my way down out of the hills, and into the subdivision, and the smells of the hillside mingle with and eventually give way to the suburban smells of laundry and barbeque, I see that it might be hard to remember the Moon of Yellow Singing.  Here, among the houses and beneath the Rule of The Lawn Emperor Known as HOA, it is another time: perhaps it is the Moon of the New Sprinkler.

It is important to walk away from this.  It is also nice to come home, when the darkness falls, and find your daughter has joyfully and intently constructed a pair of shoes from packing tape, silk flowers, bows, pipecleaners, and cardboard, with attractive nerf dart soles.

Any Ordinary Thursday

A startled snake zippers down the hill away from me, a brown cottontail bunny eyes me warily, the tail of a lizard slips under the rocks.  There are secret passages and rooms in the banks of broom.  Big rocks make a satisfying splash, over and over again.  Vetch and broom make a satisfying bouquet.  Wildness still creeps around the edges, even in the suburbs.  We will find it.

-Real freedom lies in wildness, not in civilization.

--Charles Lindbergh

A Dream Fulfilled

70,000 souls, U2 360º Tour, Qwest Field, Seattle WA, USA

Complete, utter Happiness.

I was born to sing for you 

I didn’t have a choice
But to lift you up
And sing whatever song you wanted me to
I give you back my voice

--"Magnificent" by U2

Friday in Almost-Summer

Northwest Folklife

A dragon for the fierce girl.

Highlights of our visit: 

Accordions and banjos everywhere!

Amazing tap dancers.

Kettle corn and curly fries!

My personal favorite thing about NW Folklife: trying on this buttery soft pair of perfect bright red swirly "Caracola" snail shoes handmade in Spain, which I will not buy:

Life is Good

2011 Life is Good Unschooling Conference, Vancouver, WA

"In a nutshell, people whose lives are hard, boring, painful, meaningless—people who suffer—tend to resent those who seem to suffer less than they do, and will make them suffer if they can. People who feel themselves in chains, with no hope of ever getting them off, want to put chains on everyone else." 
—John Holt, Teach Your Own, Introduction.