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Woolgathering & Wildcrafting

Woolgathering & Wildcrafting

Tag Archives: nature

Summer’s Fullness

16 Tuesday Jun 2015

Posted by Asia in Earth Medicine, Inspirations

≈ 10 Comments

Tags

bill plotkin, busyness, consciousness, earth, earth-based living, ecocentric, ecology, fullness, gardening, herbal medicine, meditation, nature, philosophy, sacred work, soul work, summer

Red Clover Blossom

On the other side of the strawberry moon, after the late spring blossoms of Beltane and the thick pulses of Hawthorn blooms arises a season that weaves itself around the helm of a single word – fullness.

At this point in the season the full arrival of summer is undeniable. Roses are spilled like wine over the countryside and the branches of riverside trees are heavy enough to sweep the water’s surface with their wands of green. Light finds its way into every leaf of the day and even our nights are lit by the floating embers of fireflies.

rose wall with stool

Here, the fullness of summer arrives in waves both infinitesimal and quick. Like a jar left open in the rain. Slowly, in swells beneath the perception of our fast moving eyes, everything becomes full. The arrival into summer can be like waking up with a jolt in the bright light of late morning. As your eyes adjust to the fullness of the day you realize that the slow trickle of dawn, with its dispersed moons of early morning fog, have all but disappeared. There is only the high sun and ocean-bright light and insects running like waves through the thigh-high grass.

Daisy Gift

Motherwort Essence

Summer’s fullness is a mantra, known and carried by every species in these hills. For us humans it means planting the last stragglers into our gardens and tending the sudden tangle of weeds, late-night parties and an endless train of events. It means wild harvests of herbs that last only a week and calendars so full of bustle there is barely enough time to keep the floor swept of barefoot dust and weeds. To embrace summer fully is to be like a bee, in constant motion from the lip of one sweetness to another, to exhaust oneself with so much color and opportunity.

Harvest

We are just a few nights away from the longest day of the year, our Summer Solstice, and the very strand of life has tightened into an almost watertight weave. Open fields are a ticket of thimble flowers, blackberry fruits and rose thorns. The canopy is crowded thick with ropes that wind themselves from forest floor to crown heights in a cordage of grapevine. What was once a wind blown cove is now a cave of green and shadow. Every branch is so full of life, the mountains themselves change from the blue hue of a winter-colored moon to a newborn coat of emerald. In Summer, the entire world of growing beings weaves itself into a kind of container, a place to hold even more than was possible before. The crosscatch of canopy and forest floor braids itself tight as rivercane, the traditional baskets of the Cherokee people of these mountains. The sheer abundance of life works together to create space for more.

Rainsoaked Woods

++ Weaving Yourself into the Basket of the World ++

In Appalachia, life grows upon life. There is no end. As a temperate rainforest with some of the highest biodiversity in the deciduous world, the warmer months can be dizzying. Summer here is an initiation into a world of almost overwhelming life. This year I seem to have taken on more than ever before (Hence my two month delay in getting up another blog post!). My schedule from now until the last sigh of summer is already at its brim and, if I’m to be honest, sometimes I wonder if I have enough hands to hold and plant and tend it all! On those days, I like to walk out into the arms of our forest caves, or find the perfect circle of a deer bed in the high grass, and remind myself that the world can contain it all, and so can I. I must only let the earth weave me into its own way of embracing fullness.

Red Clover Basket

Catbriar on Hemlock

Whenever it seems that I am whittling away my life with To-Do lists and calendar dates, I remember this—we are, in truth, nature creating itself. We are a part of this vast and precious ecology, a spectacularly tiny but unbelievably special node in the consciousness of this entire world. When I feel as if I couldn’t possibly hold it all, I return to my place as co-creator on this earth. I bring my heart back to its roots, at the humble foot of this mountain of growth. I am here to bring the gift of myself to this world and when I allow myself to become a prayful part of the container of life on this earth, I can always hold more. In nature there is always space for growth that benefits the whole. When I connect into the gifts that arise from a consciousness of connection, there will always be space. When I give such soul gifts, the world itself expands, and I end up finding more fulfillment than I ever thought possible before.

Wonder

In Bill Plotkin’s book Nature and the Human Soul he talks about this idea of widening the circle of your identity to become a part of this basket of the world. In an eco-centric society (a culture based around the ecology in which they live), as a person ages they naturally come to a place where the hoop of their recognized identity includes the more-than human world. As we come to understand ourselves deeper we can find more levels on which we can identify with the earth and through this widening we stretch ourselves into vessels of meaning that can literally hold more.

Valerian Essence

Circle of Identity

What makes busyness so exhausting is its divorce from soul. The problem isn’t that our days are full, it is that we don’t fill our days with that which truly fulfills us. The only reason why we can look at the growing world and feel such dismay at the blackberry bramble that continues to peek up through the steps or the weeds that must be pulled is because it strikes such a low-hearted chord of recognition in us. So many of us are like gardeners, pulling that which grows wild and cultivating perennials that don’t actually bring us joy. So how can we begin to grow gardens that truly sustain us? Find work that, through its fulfillment, we feel deeply soul-full? Perhaps the best place to begin is simply to ask yourself what you truly want to be full of…. Curiosity passion, wonder, trust? Begin here.

Fog in Madison County

++ Into Emptiness ++

In these mountains the stumble into summer means the arrival of near-daily storms, afternoon tempests of thunder and green. After a full day of humid rocking the very mountains themselves seem to creek with the need to release. Soon enough, a dark, wasp-like cloud gathers on the late afternoon horizon and you know relief is just a strong wind away. The fullness reaches it brim, and then it spills over. The gardens are watered, the plants in the meadows drink deep. There is an almost audible sigh as the forest refills its streams. It is one motion, the filling and the spilling. Without reaching such a state of fullness, the rain in the wooly tangle of clouds would never be released. Without this constant emptying, Appalachia wouldn’t be the unbelievably ecological rich place that it is.

Pisgah StreamIf I watch long enough everything in the world seems to tell the same tale. Fullness leads to emptiness, and emptiness to full. In order to experience emptiness (the pause before the inhale, that space in which anything can shift, the nothingness out of which newness can take hold), we must always move through a moment of being unbearably full. Even as I resist the fullness of my schedule I look out upon the world and see a place that relishes such a brimming basket. Waterfalls and the full blown bloom of lupines. An entire ant colony under each rock in my garden and the red clover blossoms that arise every time I neglect a corner of my lawn. The world speaks in such tones of fullness, and so I embrace my own place in creating more. I spend my mornings writing, I prepare for classes until late into the night. I eat honey by the spoonful and tend my garden between bursts of harvest rains. I buzz from flower to flower covered head-to-toe in the sacred paint of this earth’s pollen and, in between, I find moments, if only as brief as the span between a hummingbirds thrum, to empty once more.

Butterfly on Clover

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First Camping Trip of the Season

15 Thursday Mar 2012

Posted by Asia in Appalachian Beauty, Wild Foods, Wildcrafting & Collecting

≈ 5 Comments

Tags

appalachia, blue ridge mountains, boulder, camping, creek, fire, harvesting, herbal medicine, national forest, nature, partridge berry, river, stars, wildcrafting, wilderness, woods

At the beginning of the week I loaded Mr. Forester (my Subaru who also goes by the name “silver fox”) with sleeping bags and long johns and friends and headed to the woods.

The drive itself was beautiful. We passed through Appalachian farmland, admiring the weathered barns sliding drunk from the hillsides and the empty pastures with their solitary tree swings and watchful grazers. This is the time of the year for which the Blue Ridge Mountains are named. With the trees still bare, the gently rounded peaks of these ancient mountains remain cloaked in a dusky blue twilight. We drove straight into their folds.

By the time we hiked up into the woods, it was already mid-afternoon. Unlike time’s normal routine of skittering past your grasp and forever down its rabbit hole, this bright day just seemed to get bigger and bigger. Sometimes, when you really lose yourself in nature, time stretches so thin it almost ceases to exist. We spent long, sun-dappled moments swimming in the cold mountain river, leaping from one boulder of moss to another and exploring the awakening forest.

I got lost for hours laying in a bed of partridge berry. This lovely, creeping evergreen dripped from rock faces, tree roots, and rhododendron shade everywhere. It was profuse. An incredible native medicinal, I leisurely collected handful upon handful as the day drew on. (If you want to know more about this humble and powerful plant, check out Juliet Blankespoor’s awesome post on her blog Castanea).

Partridge Berry- Mitchella repens

black walnut extravaganza

We snacked on black walnuts (gathered this past fall by many friends with black hands!) and ate dried wild apples.

That night we cooked local deer and wild rice (harvested, danced upon, and carried back to Appalachia all the way from Minnesota) over an open fire. We rolled our sleeping bags out on the ground, spent one last moment looking up at the black silhouettes of the trees, and then fell asleep under the stars.

In moments like these, I can’t help but be left in wonder. How charmed life can be.

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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.

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I Had Been My Whole Life a Bell

20 Monday Feb 2012

Posted by Asia in Inspirations

≈ 4 Comments

Tags

annie dillard, books, nature, quotes

“Then one day I was walking along Tinker Creek thinking of nothing at all and I saw the tree with the lights in it. I saw the backyard cedar where the mourning doves roost charged and transfigured, each cell buzzing with flame. I stood on the grass with the lights in it, grass that was wholly fire, utterly focused and utterly dreamed. It was less like seeing than like being for the first time seen, knocked breathless by a powerful glance. The flood of fire abated, but I’m still spending the power. Gradually the lights went out in the cedar, the colors died, the cells unflamed and disappeared. I was still ringing. I had been my whole life a bell, and never knew it until at that moment I was lifted and struck.“

-Annie Dillard, Pilgrim At Tinker Creek

Photo by John Suler

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The Web That Speaks of a Weaver

17 Friday Feb 2012

Posted by Asia in Appalachian Beauty, Inspirations, Wildcrafting & Collecting

≈ 2 Comments

Tags

art, leaf, meditations, nature, winter

I found this lovely piece of spider’s lace out on a trail and I carried it in my hands all the way home. Isn’t it incredible? The substance of a whole summer of fluffing out and catching the sun, now crumbled and gone.

Winter has its way with us. The cold and quiet can strip us free of such broad, carefully sewn layers. Maybe this is why I love winter. Isolated inside one’s coat and chimney, you are left with only the fine, bird-wing bones of your life to mull over. Winter is such a precious season of thought, introspection, and examination. But isn’t it lovely, to slow down so much that you expose the delicate lattice of a life built, and rebuilt, and ready to be built again?

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Fawn Leaf

06 Monday Feb 2012

Posted by Asia in Appalachian Beauty, Inspirations, Wildcrafting & Collecting

≈ 2 Comments

Tags

abstract art, art, fall, fawn, leaf, meditations, nature, winter

Winter treasure found on a newly discovered trail.

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Defined

[wool-gath-er-ing] v.
daydreaming, the gathering of thoughts and dreams as one might collect fallen tufts of wool

[wild-craft-ing] v.
the harvesting of herb, root, flower or inspiration from the wilds

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