SMOKE LIKE WATER

Last night, I settled down by myself in the living room with my pipe and my computer for our monthly prayer ceremony. We’ve been having ice here the past two days that coats the roads, tree branches, decks, and fences. I’m glad I had decided not to invite anyone over for the ceremony. It would have been treacherous for them to come.

As always, I laid out my pipe and tobacco. After smudging everything with white sage, I opened my computer to the file where I keep all your prayers. Some had come in last-minute, and I was glad they slipped in under the door, so to speak. For each prayer, tobacco was offered and placed in a silver bowl. I added mine last. The bowl held prayers for the Earth, for certain loved ones, for help with relocations, right livelihood, new endeavors, hard times, and all our relations. There were prayers for healing, for gratitude, and for wisdom.

With all the prayers resting in the silver bowl, I began loading the pipe and calling in the seven sacred directions. Hannah, my dog, came and settled in beside me. Darter the cat rested on the ottoman at my back. The fireplace was warm and glowing, calling out to us with merry little crackles and sparks. Upstairs, Carter was in his favorite chair, watching the football games. Occasionally, I would hear him cheer on the teams with a hoot. The dishwasher was slogging along in the kitchen…

 

CALLING ALL PRAYERS—FEBRUARY PIPE

This coming Sunday, January 22nd, is the night of New Moon. Once again, it’s time for our monthly medicine pipe prayer ceremony. If you are new to this blog, please see this post for a description of this ritual.

February is the second moon of the year, and the spiritual home of Wisdom Keeper, the protectress of sacred traditions and the guardian of friendship. For those of you following along in The Thirteen Original Clan Mothers” by Jamie Sams, you’ll find a wealth of lessons about how this Clan Mother helps us to understand the unique wisdom of each life form. Wisdom Keeper also guides us on our path toward self-development and expansion. We can call on this Clan Mother for help in seeing the truth in all things, all traditions, all experiences, and all beings.

My birthday is in February, so I believe I have a special responsibility to honor and emulate the gifts and wisdoms of this Clan Mother. Sometimes I can get so caught up in “my truth,” that I forget to consider the many layers of truth regarding all things and all situations. And, I must admit, seeing the truth of my own actions is sometimes the most difficult truth to own.

If you have prayers you would like me to add to the pipe this month, please send them soon. I will keep them confidential, that is, I won’t post them on the site. I’m not sure how many will be attending this prayer circle yet, but know that even if it is me alone, I’ll be sitting beside the spirits of the seven sacred directions and Wisdom Keeper, so your prayers will be heard and carried by a host of angels.

 

Round Times With Toby

I’m not a good traveler. I used to be a veritable willow-the-wisp, dancing from place to place with the ease of a dragonfly. But no more. Carter and I spent December and the beginning of January with his son and family in Tampa, Florida, and it became a challenge for me to be away from my familiar environs for so long. It’s not that his family was not completely welcoming to me. They are great kids, and my little two-year-old granddaughter, Taylor, thought I was the cat’s meow.

Five years of regular meditation have made me (blessedly and) painfully aware that discontent arises in me not from anything on the outside of my skin, but from within. Within two weeks of our arrival in Florida, I was feeling anxious, unsettled, rudderless, and aching for home. Back here at home now, I am able to find some perspective on the out-of-proportion anxiety that gripped me in the warm, flatlands of Florida. But it was nearly impossible to do so while I was there. My reflections on our time away are proving to be bountiful and varied, and there is one particular aspect of these musings that I want to share here…

 

CLAN MOTHER OOPS

Ooops. That’s all I can really say in defense of myself. I forgot to bring my copy of “The Thirteen Original Clanmothers” to Tampa with me, and had to go online to seek out the Clanmother for the 12th moon. I goofed and shared insights about Becomes Her Vision, the Clanmother of the 13th moon. That would be the Clanmother of the blue moon—that once yearly lunar event when two full moons fall in the same month. The blue moon is the second full moon.

So, for all of you have been following along in our monthly new moon prayer ceremonies, I steered you wrong. But then again, I think that Becomes Her Vision is a fine Clanmother for very first moon of the New Year. The Clanmother who really presides over January is Talks With Relations, the mother of nature.

We are in the waning days of Talks With Relations (who is probably my personal favorite of all the Clanmothers), but there is still time to honor her ways and reflect upon her unique wisdom. Talks With Relations is the keeper of the natural rhythms, the weather, the seasons, and the tides. She is guardian of the languages of all our relations, including the stones, the trees, and the creatures. She teaches us how to understand the unspoken languages of nature, how to honor cycles, and how to enter the sacred space of other relatives with respect.

If I could have one gift of mystery, it would be to understand and to speak the languages of all our relations. I can’t know such a wonderful thing, but I can dream about it.

In the next few days, I’ll be posting about the next prayer ceremony, which will occur on Sunday, January 22nd. More to come!

 

DECEMBER PIPE: THE NORTH AND SOUTH OF IT ALL

Christmas Eve here in Tampa was warm, clear-skied, and starlit. I took my pipe outside onto the back lawn, and laid out all the many things that go into a medicine pipe ceremony: sage wand, lighters, bowls for the smudge and a bowl containing all the prayers I had already placed in small pinches of tobacco, my pipe bag, and the leather pouch full of tobacco.

This was my first Christmas Eve in many years that was not chilling cold. I kneeled on the damp lawn and withdrew my pipe stem and bowl from the bag I carry it in. The pipe bag itself is the upper body pelt of a gray wolf, shot decades ago by an arial hunter in Alaska. I came by the wolf skin hanging by its nose in a Jackson Hole curio shop. When my eyes fell upon it, I felt shocked and sickened. I’d never seen a wolf strung up that way before (I’ve seen many since…) “If I put that wolf on layaway, will you take it off that hook on the wall?” Yes, the clerk told me. It took me a long time to pay off the shop, but eventually, I brought the wolf home and decided that I would make its pelt into a ceremonial tool, so that it could be honored in some small way. The wolf has held my pipe ever since, its eye holes watching me every time I conduct a pipe ceremony…

 

MEDICINE PIPE CEREMONY–DECEMBER

Our next Medicine Pipe Ceremony for Prayer will take place on a most special day–Christmas Eve. In my family tradition, Christmas Day was pretty anti-climactic. All the real magic of angels and elves and stars, trees, and gifts and wise-men and holy babies happened late on Christmas Eve, when the night was at its darkest, and my brother and I had been sent off to bed. At least, that is how it was in my child world.

As a gray-haired, somewhat jaded adult, I find that Christmas Eve still holds magic. Perhaps it is just old habit, or perhaps it is because magic does indeed happen on that night of December 24th. No matter. I still can conjure up a sense of the mysterious and the holy on a late night, star-studded Christmas Eve.

 

NOVEMBER PIPE CEREMONY—BELATED, BUT BETTER LATE THAN NEVER!

So, this is where November and December went, and why I’ve not been posting as often as I like to: Hiccups  have befallen our family yet again. I finally broke down and got a new computer. Just two days after it was mailed to me, our car broke down and got a new belt of some sort. Then, Carter broke down with a ghastly respiratory affliction, and just as he was getting better, I broke down from the germs Carter passed on to me. Meanwhile, we had been in the midst of packing for a trip to Florida to see Carter’s kids and grand baby…

 

WORKING WITH HELPING SPIRITS

tree spirit helpers

I’m a believer in helping spirits—beings and energies that work with us to help us along the way. For some people, these spirits show up in dreams, in unbidden visions or quiet voices of advice and guidance. For myself, I have to remain aware enough to call on these spirits, or I can miss their powerful presence. It’s part of the loner in me to keep myself in my own head and heart, frequently forgetting to reach out to those precious, sacred, helping “others.”

This morning, I woke up thinking about helping spirits. I blessed them in my prayers, and gave thanks for all the helping spirits in my life. And it suddenly occurred to me that there are many, many more helping spirits that work with me than I commonly acknowledge.

Obviously, I recognize many animal spirits that walk with me—some for many years, some for just a moment or two when needed. Wolf, Elk, Hummingbird, Owl: These beloveds I know well. I’ve sat with them in formalized shamanic journeys, in quiet meditations. Sometimes, they show themselves to me in their physical forms, and I nearly shake with excitement in those moments…

 

LITTLE STEPS FOR LITTLE FEET

I am hoping your Thanksgiving holiday was beautiful. Ours brought much delight, good conversation, peace, and memory of Thanksgivings past. We now step gently into the lunar cycle of Gives Praise, the Clan Mother of the 12th moon cycle. How perfect that this new moon begins with a national celebration of giving thanks, or praise, for the gifts the year has bestowed upon us.

I’m going to do a bit of rambling in this blog piece, but if you stick with me, I will be pulling it all together by the end. The title—Little Steps for Little Feet—will provide the container for lots of ingredients/experiences I’ll be adding along the way.

First, as many of you know, I went off of antidepressants just a few brief months ago, after being on one or another for about 20 years. I know that many of my readers suffer from depression, and you’ve asked how I’ve been managing going off medications. It’s been a learning journey, and somewhat of a crooked path, but I’m still stumbling my way along, drug-free. I sense in myself a tendency to be grumpier than usual (I’ve blogged about this recently…), and a tendency, also, to be more emotional than usual—which I really like, as I’ve not had my full range of emotions available to me in 20 years. I’m relearning how to live with them…

 

HICCUPS

My life has the hiccups these days. I don’t know why. But many, many little things are not proceeding smoothly as planned. Sometimes, the cosmos arranges itself so that a few really big things go nutso in my life, but recently, for the past three weeks or more, a cascade of little things has been burping, hiccupping, glitching, and crashing down around my ears.

While none of these little things seem to be related, it feels like they are all related to some vibe in the ethers. It feels like the universe is giddily tossing bolts into the gears of my life.

First and foremost, my bank quit speaking to my online money manager. Finances have been a very weak part of my skill set for my whole life, so I was thrilled when programs began to show up on my computer that could help me keep a handle on my money and where it was going. Suddenly, that security is gone. Mess with my money, and I start to go crazy…

 

MAYBE I’LL BE A TURTLE

"Good gas mileage. Fully self-contained!"

Carter and I are in the planning stages of a move to Oregon. Yes, we have gone from a pondering stage to a planning stage. That means, we both have been wearing the idea of this move on our shoulders for months now, and we both have come to like the fit of it very much. “What if” has morphed into “When and how.”

One scenario that has been surfacing again and again in my thinking is that we might need an interim step between here and there. Between, that is, one family abode and another. We own a house “here.” We need to sell it and have money in our pockets to do a purchase “there.” Our kids will be joining us in the Portland area. We will need the flexibility with money and time to find the perfect place that can house us all happily…

 

NEW MOON PIPE AND PRAYER CEREMONY FOR THE 12TH MOON

November 25 will mark the third month of gathering for prayers and wisdom with my medicine pipe on or near the new moon of each month. If you’ve been following this process, you’ll know that a group of my readers are studying along with me in our readings of Jamie Sams’ “The Teachings of the Thirteen Original Clan Mothers.”

Each monthly moon cycle is expressed by a particular Clan Mother, who brings a particular gift to the people of the Earth. All thirteen moons together carry all the wisdom we humans need to walk in a good way upon the Earth. So Jamie says. Each month, I spend an evening with my pipe and my friends, reflecting on the lessons of the Clan Mother for coming moon, and using this gathering as an opportunity to send prayers…

 

WEATHER REPORT

Weather today: Sunny and cold

It’s a habit of mine to check the daily weather report. I look at my little weather box on igoogle, and breathe a sigh of relief when the weather icons show a yellow sun, with maybe a poofy cloud to the side. The little happy sun face tells me I’ve been spared Armageddon for one more day. All is right with the world when that sun face pops up—at least here in Bloomington when November is not normally a month that is about sun faces at all.

Recently, I’ve been taking notice of the weather in a different way. On my forest walks, I spend some time bringing a very focused awareness to the interface between my body, my heart, and the weather. Down in the hollows, there are microclimates and weather shifts every few feet. In one place, the air is starkly cold as I walk along to the tunes of the creek. The water brings a wet chill that rises from my feet up to my face. Turning round the bend, a breath of warmer air caresses my face. Now, maybe, there is a streak of sun that lances down out of a sky full of fat dark clouds. Or suddenly the sun breaks through for a bit and the entire forest sparkles in light.

Then, the cloud returns and I feel the cold settle back over my shoulders.

Sometimes, the wind plays down in the hollows, with a blast or a whisper, or a gentle and steady song. Then, perhaps, it will suddenly stop and go utterly still. Some mornings, the air fairly crackles in the forest. Other mornings, it is soft…

 

THE NATURE OF BELONGING

While Hannah is clearly an Earthling, it is not clear to me that Carter and I are 100 percenters. I know that some critics have asked me what planet I'm from...

It is past my bedtime, and I never write at night. Writing is, for me, a morning thing. But I made a promise to myself to try and write a bit each day (and post more…), so here it is. And perhaps it is odder than usual because of the late hour.

I’ve been questioning whether humans belong to—and on—this Earth. This is why I am asking myself this question: It appears obvious to me that everything alive on this planet—except us—seems to understand this most basic and necessary law of life:

Don’t wreck the ground you depend on.

Whether by design or intention, life on Earth—except for us—seems to get along quite well. Every living creature—but us—seems to have a naturally built in mechanism of some sort that keeps them from becoming the destroyers of the universe. Everything adds to the whole—but us. Squirrels and birds spread seeds around and keep the Earth garden growing. Buzzards and beetles and opossums keep the grounds clear of dead and decayed stuff. Fish feed water plants and water plants feed fish. Beavers take care of everybody. All life contributes to life—but us.

At WildCare today, I realized that every creature in our care at this moment it time is there because of some unfortunate run in with us: Fishing line, power lines, cars, lawn mowers, our cats, our poisons, our traps, our pollution.

We come onto the scene, and we seem to know no other way than to wreck things, pollute things, pervert things, and use up things. That does not seem to be the way I see Nature work. So, are we really a part of Nature?

Some native people say that we came from the Star People. Not to go all ufologist about this, but it seems to me that we behave as though we came from some place with other basic rules, or original instructions. We don’t seem to have any natural, built in ability to just get along here with all the rest of our “neighbors.” Hell, we don’t even know how to get along with air and water without wrecking them, let along polar bears, wolves, bugs, or frogs.

Spirit, wherever you are, please put some reins on us, because we seem incapable as a species of reining ourselves. Spirit, if you made us out of the very clay of this precious place, is it your intention for us that we serve as the destroyers? Spirit, if we came from the Star People, were they really such a bunch of rude, greedy clods?

Inquiring minds—mine, at least—want to know…

 

THE NATURE OF ROUTINE

He used to sing just outside my bedroom window every morning. I would open my eyes to the sound of his bellowing happy voice, and that is how my day would start. For a tiny bird, the Carolina wren packs a lot of sound into a very small space. When his sparkling call pierced the morning air, I would awaken knowing somehow all was right with the world. There is a gentle, soothing element present in a routine of any kind, and the wren’s call was part of my daily routine, until the day it wasn’t anymore.

It’s not like he died, or anything. He just decided to shift trees. I still hear him most mornings, but his call comes from far off in the forest, or sometimes from the front of the house. He moved his nest, too, after raising babies in the decorative straw fish by our back door for three years. Two bunches of babies a year he and his spouse would pump out from that fish!

Now, the fish sits empty during the summers, its round mouth inviting and hopeful. Maybe someday…

My mother is a believer in routine and schedule. And she will tell you whether you are interested or not in the importance of routines in a healthy life. I am nearly incapable of keeping a routine of any kind, but I believe what she has to say, I really do.

I do find the few routines I am able to keep together to be very grounding. They bring to me, as I said, a subtle, nearly indescribable sense of continuity and rightness with the world. My dogs know their dinner routine, and if food does not arrive on a certain spot on the kitchen floor at the prescribed time, they start dancing, squirming, and whining until it does. When the Carolina wren decided to leave his yearly nesting place, and to sing his morning song from other trees, I felt a bit squirmy and whiny, too.

But the world outside my window shows me that a regular routine is not a fixed notion in nature. The wren moved on. For all I know, he DID die, and the wren who calls from afar is someone else.

I keep a platform feeder for wildlife on a large maple tree on my deck where a possum and two raccoons visit regularly, but not routinely. Some nights, the food is there, but they aren’t. I wonder why they would pass up an easy meal? Then, the next night, there they are again, their round butts overhanging the wire mesh of the feeder platform. Many nights, one of the raccoons leaves me a pile of poop as a thank you card right in the middle of the feeder. Some nights, he doesn’t.

Cookie, my orphan possum lives in her own room where she has the run of the closets, dressers, storage bins, and feeding corner. She sleeps in a large, upturned laundry basket full of fleece blanketing. Except for those nights when she decides to curl up in an open cat carrier instead. I think if I offered her five more sleeping options, she’d use them all.At the bird feeders, the pileated woodpeckers sometimes put in a regular appearance for weeks or more. Then, even though the suet remains, the birds vanish for months at a time.

Mix it up, nature seems to be telling me. Move around. My heart trembles a bit at the realization that there is no place for true permanence in this world. It’s just not engineered that way. The thought brings me both comfort and discomfort. Maybe I’ll exchange my usual bowl of muesli for two eggs over medium this morning, and try on some flexibility. What could it hurt?

 

THE QUEST

Yesterday morning, the wind tickled the bellies of the leaves remaining on the hardwood trees and set them off like flocks of birds into the blue morning sky. Off they flew, in great gatherings, some dancing off toward the east, other flocks spiraling upward toward the sun. By mid-afternoon, the trees had been fully, finally stripped, and the leaves were still dancing on the wind.

On our daily forest walk, I tilted my head up in amazement as waves of migrating leaves moved across the sky, going wherever fall leaves go when the wind refuses to grant them a quick ride to the forest floor.

By sunset, the breeze had kicked into a full gale, and the bare trees groaned and creaked like old rocking chair runners on a stone floor. Some clacked against their neighbors in noisy, wooden duels. Small limbs crashed onto the roof and back deck. Darter the cat decided the house was a good place to be. But the dogs wanted to run up and down the street in excitement. Wind often does that to them—gets their juices running…

 

RIGHT TIME, RIGHT PLACE—A TALE OF TWO PONDS

Bathtub Pond in spring glory

The shaman called Rolling Thunder always said that most people just didn’t appreciate how important timing is to everything. And he is right. But I believe he could have taken that sentiment just one step further: right time and right place. This past summer, I’ve had reason to ponder the importance of place to the success of things.

I keep two small ponds. One of them is by my garden in the upper part of our property, and it consists of an old claw-foot bathtub decorated with old logs, stones, and many pond plants. It sits just under an old crabapple tree, and I let all the blossoms and leaves fall into the tub over the course of the summer, creating a fine boggy bottom for frogs and fish.

My second pond, I refer to as “the lower pond.” It is set at the base of a stone embankment down near our back deck. About the size of maybe two bathtubs, this pond is one I dug into the ground and lined. I set beautiful stone slabs around the perimeter, and placed creek sand and stones in the pond bottom. There is a small stream coming off of a tiny bog I also hand-dug, and a fountain of water that pours from the bog to the pond. Five fish—three goldfish and two pond chubs—live in this lower pond, along with families of crawdads and a host of summer frogs…

 

THE DELIGHT OF DECAY

Raking in autumn treasure

The great migration of the leaves has begun now, as they make their way steadily from their summer homes in the trees, to their deathbed on the forest floor. If the wind takes them, they tumble in droves in a lilting spiral dance. When the forest is still, the leaves come down singly, bumping branches and leaf neighbors on their journey. But whichever way they come, down is the inevitable direction.

When the wind is fierce, whole tree limbs—sometimes even trees themselves— crash to the forest floor and explode into shards of worm-bored decay. Twigs are always making their way to the forest floor, but I seldom see them on their downward travels. They are not as showy as the leaves, nor as noisy as the trees and branches.

Now and again in my forest wanderings, I’ll stumble upon the ripe, melting body of a bird, a turtle, a deer, or squirrel. In summer, my nose finds them first. In autumn, they blend with the color of the fallen leaves, all amber, gray, gold, brown, and scarlet.

Each autumn, I marvel again at the seasonal spectacle of the forest receiving and celebrating her dead, her offal, her decay. The concept of trash, of garbage, finds no place here. Such things are man-made. Here on the forest floor, everything is welcome with open arms, with instant activity, and with purifying purpose…

 

PUFFBALLS AND PESTO

Gifts from a generous forest

It is set in motion now. Big changes. Life will not be the same going forward. Just a scant few days ago, our winter housemate, Lauren, moved in. Never in my life have I lived with a roommate—husbands, yes, significant others, yes, but never a roommate. Lauren is one more piece of a big new puzzle Carter and I have tossed into the air. We are excited to see where all these new pieces will fall. Will they come together into a meaningful picture we can understand, or will they drift down in a crazy jumble, leaving us to muse “now what?”

In two weeks, we will be going to Oregon on a scouting mission for a new home. Not a house, exactly yet, but a new “home base” where we can build our dream for joining our families more closely together. Carter’s son Johnny and his wife Candice and baby Taylor are looking to relocate closer to Candice’s family, and to their west coast friends. Johnny and Candice currently live in Tampa, Florida, and are feeling a longing for a continental shift to the Left Coast.

My family lives in very northern California, on the coast. I have many friends back in Oregon from the days when I lived on BrightStar Farm, and wrote my first books. Carter’s dearest life-long friends live in Southern California. The west is calling us. Will we be able to create a family compound for ourselves and Carter’s kids? What a grand dream!…

 

MEDICINE PIPE PRAYER CEREMONY

Crow watches over prayer ties for this evening's ceremony

Goodness, the call to prayer got you all going! Many have asked how to be a virtual part of this monthly new moon ceremony I’ll be hosting, beginning tonight. So here is a way to do that: I’ve created another blog specifically related to this monthly ritual: www.susanmcelroy2.wordpress.com Welcome aboard lunar ladies and gentlemen!

Remember, there is still time to send prayers my way to be included in tonight’s ceremony…