Something Small & Bright

02 Thursday Mar 2017

Tags

florida, Ocala National forest, overwhelm, The Calusa, wilderness

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Last week I took a legitimate vacation. An honest to goodness, leave-the-computer-at-home and pack a sun hat, vacation. Those just don’t happen all that often for me, I can probably count on one hand the amount of real vacations I’ve taken in the past decade. But something inside was tugging like a sailboat in wind to be cut free so I loaded up my pack basket with my camping gear, weighed my car down with snacks, and headed to the wilds of Florida for a week.

I’ve been in a love affair with Florida for years. An entanglement that never fails to set my heart aching whenever I think upon that pastel stretch of earth whose very name, the land of flowers, is a droplet of poetry. Florida, wild Florida, is a dreamscape in hues of tropic— hibiscus, emerald and aquamarine. There are roadside thickets full of tangerines and crystal clear springs so deep, blue and clean that they’ve been likened to the eye of an angel. Upwellings of water straight from the heart of the earth that form entire rivers, clear as glass and warmed to a perpetual 72 degrees.

Florida itself is something small, and infinitesimally bright. A disappearing peninsula gifted from the sea, submerged, revealed, shaped and changed countless times over the eons by the touch of ocean waves. What we know of as Florida is just a tiny flicker in the monument of time. A coastline that will always return, sooner or later, to the sea. It is a place of microhabitats, hammocks filled with dwarf-sized trees, middens made from shell fragments, and springs that glitter in the shards of a thousand crystals.

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I went to Florida to remember, in blessed relief, what I truly am – something small and infinitesimally bright. And it was a kind of bliss. To strip down my thoughts to simple, light-filled things. Like how far I wanted to paddle for the day or when to feed the fire with palmetto fronds. Noticing how much closer to the horizon the north star is this far south, the tiny diamonds of the Pleiades. Small things, like the whole constellation of seeds in a single wild tangerine. Or the tiny bits of Spanish moss the cormorants carry, beak by beak, back to their collective rookeries.

I gathered seashells, one at a time, and at night I gazed up at the sky, remembering that there are more stars in the universe than grains of sand on all the beaches of this earth. Before sleep I found myself repeating, I am cozy inside this world. And every morning I woke up, clear as quartz.

When we become small, when we acknowledge that we always have been, a truly incredible thing begins to happen. We can allow ourselves to be cared for. We remember that to be on this earth is to live in a cradle of nourishment. And Florida, land of flowering abundance, is a place that shows you how very deeply we can be cared for when we cherish our minuteness.

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The Calusa, the native people who built a complex and enduring civilization across Southwestern Florida, lived inside this knowing. The Calusa are unique among the large civilizations of native North and South America in that their vast society was never sustained by agriculture, but by the sheer bounty of the ocean. With nets and boats and vast estuaries, they lived solely off the shoals of the sea. The water teemed with such life there was no need to spend much time cultivating fields of sunflower, corn or squash. They ate heartily, with their hands, from what was offered. Which was, in short, everything.

It is a luxury that is hard to imagine these days, but it is also not a luxury at all. It is what it means to relish the seed of one’s being, to embrace one’s smallness in the wider orchard of this world.

Our perceived bigness in this time of human history is a burden that ripples out devastation in its wake. A cultural ethos of primacy and grandiosity that is a heavy weight indeed. So what a relief it was, for a week, to put aside being anything but tiny, being anything but me. To let go of the feeling like I must always be wide enough to hold all the responsibilities of the world. As if it were up to me to change the unchangeable, to shift the tides.

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Like many indigenous peoples, the Calusa believed in reincarnation, but their hue of rebirth looks very different than what has become our common vision. For the Calusa, reincarnation began with being human. And instead of getting larger, wider, and more expansive with each go around, our selves, instead, got smaller. Once you shed the skein of being human you could become a jaguar, an alligator, a deer. From there you might pick through the marsh as a heron, run under the waves as a pinfish and finally, alight upon the world as a mosquito, the ever-present wetland companion that is known to those who live here as swamp angels. Until, one day, you became so small and so bright you simply disappeared into the vast light.

There is something so liberating about this to me. Instead of the pressure to become larger, what if we are actually here to get smaller?

marsh-flower-1

This one idea has helped me so much upon my return. To let go of multitasking, the impetus to be always expanding my attention out to what will be, what might be, what I should make happen. Instead, since I’ve come back, I’ve let my attention be small and bright. Alighting only on the task at hand, moving like an egret, one foot at a time, through the pond of my day.

I let go of big ambitions, the need to be grandiose or successful or even seen. The endless scrolling and complexity. I let it be simple. I let it be… just me.

So if you are feeling overwhelmed, join me in this place of the small and bright. Give yourself permission to take on tiny tasks, one at a time. Go outside to feel the sun on your face and remember how deeply you are cared for.

It is a blessing to be a grain of sand with you here in this wide and wondrous world.

Florida Grief + Inner Worlds

16 Monday Mar 2015

Posted by Asia in Earth Medicine, Inspirations

≈ 25 Comments

Tags

contemplation, ecological grief, ecology, florida, grief, inner world, live oaks, mantees, metaphysical, rewilding, spanish moss, spirituality, springs, wild florida

Last week I arrived home from Florida with a heart blown wide open, swamp-leveled and exposed. I have, of course, been down south to this land of tangelo sunshine before, but sometimes places wait until we are truly ready before their inner souls unfold. After a long weekend of sand pines and spring water and the sky boughs of Spanish moss I felt as if I had been initiated into another world. And in many ways, I had.

Every time I travel I seem to step out of the heavy patterns of expectations and inertia that settle into the crevices of my day-to-day life. I discard the constriction of outside expectations, and release myself to roam, once more, the hills of my innermost worlds.

At some point in my life I conditioned myself to believe that to be in one’s own world was to be unforgivably self-absorbed. To be completely in one’s experience was to be at a distance from the “real” world. I adopted the belief that, to get lost in your own wave of thoughts, was to be considered out to sea. As an empath who has always been as sensitive as a spider with all eight legs on an ever-branching whorl, I have spent much of my adult life training myself to be so delicately in tune with the experiences of others that I have sometimes forgotten the soil-deep feeling of what it is like to truly just inhabit my own inner terrain. Being in Florida, soaking in a land of such wildness and such decimation as well, the ways in which I have not been allowing myself to sit at the center of my own being hit me like the bright blue of high tide.

To be in one’s own world is to acknowledge oneself as a creator. Letting yourself be fully immersed in the weather-whims of your own organic way of seeing and knowing and growing is more than just a luxury of individuality, it is a radical act of reclamation, the first step in the process of re-wilding our world.

Florida, wild Florida, is a place that belongs solely to its own imagination. The evergreen oaks and hidden rivers, sub-tropical flowers and life-soaked everglades. Each ecology in Florida is a rich tableau, a watercolor of wild citrus groves and dolphin-filled coves and mirror-clear springs that sing upwards from underwater caves. There are abalone-colored beaches and ancient shell middens the size of white columned estates. The sheer uniqueness within the diversity of Florida’s ecology sets the heart a’spinning. As the study of the relationship between living beings and the living land, ecology is not just a branch of scientific inquiry, it is the actual observation of a collective consciousness creating itself.

Once upon a time, every niche of our earth was a land dreaming itself into being, living in its own world. The desert and loom-patterned sand and stars. The high mountains with its icy howl. The swamplands with its long-legged egrets, and cypress knees and warm-centered storms. Then, one day, humans beings appeared and, as our indigenous ancestors would will tell it, we too became a part of the dreaming of this world.

As dreamers, we are the creators of our existence, we are the progenerative seeds of our world, and all worlds. We live on a planet of such diversity, dreams that are as variant (and symbiotic) as feathers in a flock of southern-tipped parrots, as the songs they sing, as every seed of every fruit they eat…and every fruit, also, that is left to ripen. The sheer multitude of this multiverse of worlds we live in is staggering…and yet so many human beings have forgotten so fully what it feels like to honor the agency and diversity of such worlds because we have forgotten to honor our own. We have ignored, or devalued, that vital ecological relationship between our deepest passions and most uniquely creative soul, between our wildest selves and our unbelievably compassionate hearts. We have dimmed our own inner dreamer, and so we have forgotten how to nurture the dream of this world.

For every heartsong in Florida there is a heartache, a grief that is so heavy as to be unbearable. There are two faces to Florida. The wild, the unbelievably beautiful, the un-civilized— the land that owns itself and dreams as fiercely as it always has. And then there is the Florida that comes to most people’s minds: the paved roads through the Evergaldes and Disney worlds and Miami lights.

We all feel such loss, whether we bury it like a shell at the bottom of a midden or let it wake us up in the middle of the night. There were times during this trip— watching the manatees drift with motorboat scars or picking trash from the arms of a pristine shore— that I felt heavy enough to sink like a stone off-shore. To see a wild place drained, paved, forced into someone else’s vision of productivity, engagement, entertainment or even normalcy, is to literally see a world destroyed.

So many of us look back with a similar ache to our own childhood. As children we spent the vast majority of our time as wild creators in such inner terrains. We look back with such nostgalia on the joyous times of childhood namely because of how supremely natural it feels to live and inhabit your own particular way of seeing, being, appreciating and creating.

To live in your own world, that innate place of individuality and colorful soul, is to recognize subjectivity everywhere. As a child we make no distinction between a tree and our experience of a tree, the two were one in the same. By being in our own subjective world we literally empower, and allow, for the possibility that everything we interact with its own subject as well. We can acknowledge that every being on earth has their own personal reality, their own consciousness, their own truth, and their own world. It is only as we age that we begin to be asked to draw a distinction, gradually distrusting our own experience as somehow less correct than some objective reality. By exiting our own worlds, we literally leave behind a universe of subjects (conscious beings at the center of their own creation) and enter into a world of objects, unalive entities that we (as the dictionary defines it) can direct our efforts and goals upon.

Is it any wonder that we have drained and paved and built over so many worlds?

I hear, in my friend’s voices, so much grief over the collective damage done to this world. But I truly believe that one way to begin to heal what has been done is by reconnecting to the regenerative truth of our own inner worlds. To be in one’s own world is to be closer to the very heart of this world itself. Do you think the cypress trees are constantly fretting about the experience of the crane? Or does the gopher tortoise impress its own view of reality upon the roots in the earth? The manatees, no matter how wounded, continue to swim in their own underwater universe. They are so deeply enmeshed in their own experience that they can ignore the throng of onlookers who come to snap a quick Polaroid, and remain a vital part of the dreaming fabric of this world.

It has taken me years, this many years in fact, to realize that being in my own world doesn’t mean I won’t feel the feelings of others, or experience heartbreak over the plight of this earth. In fact, it is the opposite. It means I can feel it like the everglades can feel a storm. I can embrace it fully because I have the resources to bear it. I have not drained my swamps or turned my inner terrain into a plantation of sugar cane— all sweetness, and flatness and one-dimensionality for sake of societal demands or the expectations of others. When I allow myself to exist within my own dream of my world, I am complex and internal and whole. I have so many roots and wind breaks and hollows and sheltering coves I can bear any storm. I can be constantly creating, recreating, constantingly giving, grieving, and continually regenerating new worlds.

Photo Credit – John Sinex

Winter Pearl Diving

02 Monday Feb 2015

Posted by Asia in Earth Medicine, Inspirations

≈ 15 Comments

Tags

ama, appalachia, caspar david fredrich, chaga, florida, hematite, herbal medicine, intuition, meditation, pearl diving, shamanic journeying, southern appalachia, springs, stone medicine, winter, winter weather, wintertime

Today is Imbolc and winter has reached its fullest depths in our blue-hued mountains. Here in Southern Appalachia we don’t get the same thick quilts of winter-hewn snow as our neighbors farther to the north. Instead, we are tucked in by the frost that touches the early chickweed and the amber fountains of summer’s lemongrass still left in garden plots. The earth resumes a subtle wheel, one of silver on gold, glimmer on pewter— a frostshine that disappears with the afternoon sun. Here, we normally get only a dusting of snow, subtle gusts that come through like the tiniest song. A sonatina, quick and small, relished and then released in warmer winds. Here, winter is a fawn-colored mixture of dried beech leaves and muddy raccoon prints. Rivers of grey clouds and frost-covered stones. The white pines sigh and reach upwards through the empty forests, bare armed in the white milk of sunny winter skies. The spruce and fir grow imperceptibly. This is a season that belongs to such evergreen, to winter grasses and standing stones.

There is a mystery to winter days, a fated subtlety. Even in their sameness, each day turns itself over anew, like the dried bones of yarrow stalks, thrown and scryed for imperceptible hexagrams. As the outer world seems to stay stationary, the inner hues change from day to day— from calmness to tumult, interiority and hope. I’ve always cherished the divinatory mystery of winter. It is the only time when the exterior word is allowed to go fallow and the interior worlds, our innermost places, are given permission to take up all of the sky. It is a time for inner wonderings and wanderings, woven blankets and wool gathering, self-study and the smallest sensual delights.

I’ve been cultivating these inner depths ever more richly this year. Researching, gathering and mapping for my newest class series (Winter Intuition School) and beginning the journey of writing my very first book. It has been a time of deep self-exploration, of sea depths and unknown spelunking. It has been a time of seeking hidden treasures and swimming in the conscious unconsciousness. This winter I have been practicing the art of pearl diving.

A few years ago I traveled to Florida to stay in a house that had been built and then carried, and then built again, along a cold spring fed river. Only a few minutes walk from the spring’s origin source, we would make daily pilgrimages to its depths. Upon my first visit, I had expected to find a sweet bubbling pond, a crystal clear brook that was all invitation and gemstone clarity. Instead, after a couple paces, I found myself on the edge of an actual chasm, an electric blue crater whose sheer depth was fathomable only by the deepening gradients of sapphire, cobalt and navy blue. It took me a little while until I felt comfortable enough to venture beyond the ledge, a kitty pool expanse where one could sit comfortably with both knees on the shallow under-rock. The distance between one edge and another was punctuated by an enormous blue hole, deeper than an iris and wider than a full-grown whale. Finally, gathering my courage, I pushed off the crushed rock edge and let myself sink feet first, knowing I would never touch the bottom. It was a thrill and a fear, a fantasy and a kind of ecstasy of bravery all at once. Over the course of the next week I went everyday, and everyday it took a bit of coaxing, heart in my throat, to re-approach the sharp underwater edge once more and throw myself eagerly overboard.

In many ways, this is how almost every day of my winter has begun. Free diving into one’s own depths requires much courage and bravado. To explore the inner realms often means plunging with naught but your hands and the bellows of your lungs to seek the deepest veins, those that seep warm mineral clouds and hold such surprising life. It requires skill, a practice of patience, and the innate knowing of when to kick and surface. When to return to sunshine and sea waves and rest like a seal on the rise. Such inner explorations is its own kind of pearl dive; what you seek is a rare treasure, one that exists solely within the soft bellied shells of the deep.

Traditional Japanese pearl diving was done by women called the “Ama” – sea women. These women of the ocean often lived independently, many of them diving until their elder years in naught but a single loincloth. You do not need to carry much to find such pearls, and here, age is an asset—for it means wisdom and untold skill. It takes great practice to be a pearl diver. Navigating depths with only quick fingers and seaweed strong lungs.

In many traditions, the unconscious (or wider consciousness) of the soul was symbolized by water. Water is an entirely different medium than earth, an entirely different world. In water, our bodies must learn how to move as another type of species. In the waving depths of consciousness expanding meditation, creative work or shamanic journeying, our embodied selves must learn an even deeper fluidity. Exploring one’s deeper self and opening one’s intuition doesn’t happen or unfold all at once. An Ama must sometimes open a thousand mollusks before she finds a pearl. Such exploration is not built as a ship, simply navigated with wheel and star. You must be committed to diving down, over and over, practicing how to keep yourself alive in other worlds. With each dive, frigid and thrilling, we learn how to go deeper and how to sight the glimmer hidden in the centermost folds. Sometimes, it takes pulling open a thousand shells, each one with a kind of learning, to find that absolutely perfect round of pearl. That opalescent build up of years, the gem that results from a single irritation. The desire, first, to know more.

This winter I have been a sea woman, but I have also been a hearth-tender and earth watcher as well. In the midst of such explorations it is always important, vital really, to return to shore. In water, we can be both weightless and as heavy as an anchor. On earth we must stretch these sea bending bones and reground in our solidity. It can be easy, in wintertime, to float away. Whether to different realms of light-bearing consciousness or even into the dark stagnation of our own personal underworlds. Even in the midst of our deepest mid-winter imaginal navigations, we all must come back to the tangible world— the life-giving practices of fire tending, hearth sweeping, water boiling, bone saving, stock making, tea sipping, drop spinning, nut roasting and reading. Winter exists within the halves of both dark night and dry light. We must keep ourselves balanced and whole.

There are many ways to ground in wintertime. Simply getting yourself outside, inspecting ice crystals or the dried heads of winter seeds, can do wonders to re-earth us once more. Often times, on the coldest days, I find that my best grounding happens in the kitchen. Like a sea-farer arriving home to a salt-creaked cottage lit by puffs of woodsmoke, I am often eager to get my fingers in sacks of winter-stored roots or kneaded dough.

In winter, I seek balance within the insides of most things. My home, my heart, the marrow in fresh cooked bones, the sweet blood of oranges that travel hundreds of miles from their Florida homes. I find balance in beginning an evening with a single recipe, working my way from the inside out.

Shortly before the holidays I fell in love with a new chocolate stove-top concoction, created from the core of such interior magic. It has been my dark winter companion ever since. After a full day of deep diving, long travels through inner places seeking pearls, I return home to rough-hewn cups of this Chaga Hematite hot coca, sip and rest once more in the nurturing opportunity of this dark and mysterious Winter’s embrace.

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Dark, earthy, and profoundly grounding, this mystical hot cocoa will settle you in to the warm and nourishing delights of wintertime embers and star rich skies. Crafted from the stone that lies at the center of our earth and the mycelium within and underneath every inch of soil, this drink is a hearty root bringing you back to the warm heart of the day-to-day world. Sweetened with maple syrup and lightened with rich sea-foam dollops of coconut milk, to bring in the milky remembrance of diving for the deepest pearls. Warm yourself a cup of Chaga Hematite Hot Cocoa and settle in for a profoundly meditative wintery evening.

Chaga Hematite Hot Cocoa

Recipe makes two mugs of hot cocoa

(Optional) Vanilla Extract
2 oz maple syrup
2 oz coconut milk
¼ – ½ tsp cinnamon (or to taste)
2 tsp cocoa power
1.5 cups water
½ oz chaga
1 piece of Hematite

Place a piece of hematite in 1.5 cups of water. Let infuse anywhere from one hour to overnight.
Pour the water off your hematite into a separate pot.
Decoct Chaga. Combine chaga with your hematite water and bring to a boil. Reduce heat to a simmer. Cover and let churn for at least 20 minutes (or until your tea turns to the shade of dark wood). When your decoction is done, strain the tea into a separate container.
Sir in cocoa + cinnamon powder until all lumps are dissolved
Add Coconut milk and Maple syrup
Garnish with a cinnamon stick and make a toast to all rich and nourishing worlds!

Hematite is what makes up the core of our earth. It is the stone upon which our entire world is balanced. Iron rich and dense, Hematite is like the open arms of a profoundly grounding mother, welcoming us home after a hard day with a warm apron and bone stock bubbling away on the stove. An intensely sturdy stone, Hematite reminds us that we are here, now, and that to live on the earth fully is to recognize that we are unconditionally loved. Hematite helps us to come back to the bedrock of who we are, connecting to the precious anchors of body, embodiment, and our own inner places of self-love. Protective and solid, hematite can provide us with the sturdy container needed for shamanic journeying, creative visualization and explorations in consciousness. Hematite reminds us that we do not need to try to survive, this skill comes as naturally as the sunrise. This raw stone can help to bolster our deepest hearts so we know that we will be able to make it through even the longest winter. Hematite is a wonderful stone ally for the wintertime scholar and student of consciousness; this solid stone helps to concentrate the mind, bringing deep focus and balance to any wintertime pursuits. (To learn more about an ancient Daoist Hematite stone treatment for ghosts, check out my Samhain blog post from this past fall)

Chaga is a medicinal fungus that shows us the literal roots of the world. Often called a mushroom, Chaga is actually an outgrowth of the mycelium (or root system) of the fungus itself. Found most often on black birches in our Appalachian forests, chaga is a nourishing immune tonic. Antiviral, immune modulating, and adatogenic, chaga is an indispensable wintertime decoction in the far northern climbs of Russia. Simmered for half an hour or more, chaga makes a rich but mild tea high in antioxidants. Traditionally used internally for cancer, chaga has been shown to have an antitumor effect in clinical trials. Also called tinder fungus, chaga is renown as an excellent ally for catching coals of fresh drilled hand-fires and holding the spark for a deep amount of time. A vital companion for travelers and those who need to bring the spark of new life with them whenever they go. Chaga has been used in this way for thousands of year, it was even found in the pouches of Otzi, the Copper age man who lived and died in the Alps around 3,300 BCE, and who slept in the alpine glaciers on the border of Austria for thousands of years. Chaga is an ancient medicine of fire and continuance. Bring this nourishing companion into your world of tea kettle and late night inspiration and ignite a spark this winter whose embers will carry you through untold distances, perhaps, even, until the spring.

** Paintings by Caspar David Fredrich. Photograph by Iwase Yoshiyuki

Wild Citrus

23 Thursday Feb 2012

Posted by Asia in Wild Foods, Wildcrafting & Collecting

≈ 1 Comment

Tags

citrus, earthskills, florida, fruit trees, lemons, nature, oranges, wild food

A friend of mine recently returned from the Florida Earthskills Gathering, an event that brings together builders, hunters, herbalists, basket weavers, storytellers, tool makers, woodworkers and other generally talented and awesome people of all kinds. It is also an incredible excuse to jump ship in the middle of Appalachian winter and head down to sunny, breezy, sweet-livin’ Florida, where February means flowers as big as your head and citrus that literally drips from the trees.

Dreamy.

Anyways, a couple friends of mine live on land down in central Florida that is surrounded by nothin by wilderness– live oaks, long leaf pines, cypress trees and, you guess it, citrus, citrus, citrus. From what I hear from those lucky post-Earthskills visitors it was a veritable feast. As with all wild foods, you never know exactly what you’re going to get. All the variants that come with living and growing in the wild means, well, that the results are a bit wild too! Some years the citrus is bitter as seed, while others they are all as sour as unripe lemons! This year, apparently, was a very good year.

When my friend showed up in my kitchen last week with a whole potato sack of wild citrus I was elated! He had just spent the entire day traveling back to the mountains, a long drive fueled solely on citrus, so he declined any further bites. I, on the other hand, palmed an orange immediately and dug right in. Wow! I have never tasted such crushingly sweet, juicy, and interestingly delicate citrus in my life! I swear, I can taste the sun inside of them. Every time I imbibe I must eat them over the sink or out on the grass because its like cradling a bowl of OJ. I love everything about them. How rough and weathered they appear on the outside, how stubbornly they give up their skin, even how many seeds pop out into my mouth or flow down my hands like small canoes on a sweet and frothy river. Perfection. Winter has been pretty mild around these parts but, even so, halving open a beautiful wild fruit in the middle of a bare February day in the mountains is nothing short of bliss.

Woolgathering & Wildcrafting

Tag Archives: florida

Something Small & Bright

Florida Grief + Inner Worlds

Winter Pearl Diving

Wild Citrus

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