FLAME

I didn’t grow up with fire. There were no forest fires where I lived. There was no ritual to greet fire as an ancestor, the way it breathes with generous lungs, the way it warms our bones with a primordial spark. I don’t...

ICE

There is a wind, a breath, a lingering contrail of energy left behind from all the interactions of nature. Everything is moving towards everything else, blood vessels stretching, rivers running, lungs expanding, roots touching, nerves...

WIND 

The breeze is my grandmother ancestor, running her beautifully veined hands through my hair. She is this gentle, not just to me but to the leaves and flowers too. I watch the branches of the sequoia lightly heave and settle in a...

FOREST

I have always gone to the living world with my loneliness, my failures, my heart aches. She is a friend that is unafraid of my very ugliness. 

This time is no different. But now it is nature herself that I mourn, needing...

FLOWER

It is the day after Mother’s Day and the unseasonably warm weather has made the peonies on the dining room table prematurely stretch all the way open. Last night I refilled the water in their vase, making sure it was icy cold...

If I could pocket this mountain for good, I would. My heart lifts every time I see her, ripped white skirts, unkempt hems peeking beneath velvet cloudscapes. It was this land that called me to her seventeen years ago and I have loved every moment...

^{“The root of suffering is resisting the certainty that no matter what the circumstances, uncertainty is all we truly have.”}

^{― Pema Chödrön, Comfortable with Uncertainty: 108 Teachings on Cultivating Fearlessness and...}

“Living in touch with our inner guidance system involves feeling our way through life using all of ourselves: mind, body, emotions, and spirit. . . . We have to give our bodies credit for their innate wisdom. We also don’t need to know...

It is that time of year when the forest floor is decorated in petal snow and the trilliums have aged to a darker magenta and the green is a presence so all consuming that I taste it on my tongue and know it in my cells. It feels like a serious...

“Resist!”

Rainbow colored, thick and bolded, or with a raised fist, I find these stickers everywhere, from car bumpers to rusted old street signs. Not just a written word, but a sentiment that seems to be constantly on the brim of our...