Spring 2021

Perennial Party

It’s the time of year when the light has come back without warmth; the time when the long dark has left its desolate grip. Already it is hard to remember the mysterious nightclub allure of the long dark, slipping in to a booth with hidden strangers, the glitz of Christmas lights, off momentary generosities, winks across the room: they are over, forgotten when the dark party is over. The lights snap on, revealing the shells on the floor, tattered bits of regalia, leftovers now decadent, tamasic, full of decay.

The annuals, they left the party long ago, in fall. The perennials? The trees? The old timers with sticking power? The ones who know how to hold their own liquor, at the bar for the long count? They are starting to move about, sap rising, stumbling into the honest early dawn, not a pretty sight. But still, somewhere our spirits are rising with the sap. We are planting seeds looking at the catalogues that arrived in January, planning the summer party. The longer sunlight is an invitation to dream; of summer weddings, porches, heat.

Everyone begins again.

Yesterday, out they came, ignoring the dirty floors of the winter dance hall, planning the next prom; lilac, crepe myrtle, paper mache flower petals, the mature romance of twirling maple seeds, and the enthusiasms of brand new annuals, tumbling into flowering for just this one season. I am in a kind of muted awe, beginning again.

One advantage of age of being perennial, is not so much the accumulation of wisdom, as the forgetting, and in the forgetting the opportunity to start over, to cycle, like the nascent perennial trees, shrubs, bulbs. I now do not believe they remember themselves pushing up, unfurling leaves, flowering, fruiting, themselves, not fully. I now believe each season, they, like we, after forgetting, reach into our heart wisdom, and begin again. It is a new party each turning, the oldest trick in the book. We begin again, again, again, not for suffering, but for love of the dance.

Words: Rita Stucky

Up-Cycle Ceremonials

It takes a lot of resources to produce a piece of fabric; a material so common and mundane we don't think twice about throwing it out. Think of the water needed to grow cotton or raise animals for fibers, the toxic dyes and chemicals that run downstream to surrounding communities. Textiles is a massive industry and leaves a big stomping footprint environmentally.

From these heartbreaking truths of our industrialized society, I get inspired to up-cycle. I turn trash into treasure; duvets into napkins, baby blankets into cleaning cloths, dresses into lunch sacks. People who know me send me their favorite jeans that no amount of patching could resurrect. I turn them into a treasured pillow that lives on in their life and out of the landfills.

Not only do I love recycling textiles and lower landfills, I love the ceremony that using handmade items imbues. I create useful objects that are celebrated with daily use. It helps me to slow down; to add texture and care to my life & loved one’s.

Words: Leah DeCapio

Foremother Meditations

Do I write by the sun’s season, the moon, or the auspicious and unknown fluctuations of the mind which, temporarily opens to inspiration, the happenstance of a momentary clearing? The moment when the muses tumble in, making words of their own?

The answer to these questions became clear at 2 am., when the thoughts are of dreams, not so much mine or the me I usually reside in, or even of the dreamer, but of the places between dream and wake, where the limitations of time, space, and self are suspended, and guidance has a chance to flash insights in to the mind. They are the same old ideas, the perennial wisdom, made to sparkle , to gemstones by clarity, by the cut of the day, by efforts at satva, which, even in the night, make the lens of the mind clear enough to transduce a bit of light, a bit of enlightenment, which clearly (except from the tantric point of view) is not mine.

There were several ideas in the avalanche, but now they are mostly lost in the rubble of waking, ablutions, and coffee, but one, I was able to hold on to; the pratyahara of aging.

Here it comes, then, writing for Mother Mountain, from, not the mountain, but the plains, the broad, open horizon place, of wind. It is not so awe inspiring, its subtle beauty rooted in the prairie grasses, designed to root deeply, reach, store their own water, and bend to the whims of the wind. They grow into the floor of an ancient ocean. From here, oceanic thoughts abound; thoughts of infinity.

What decades bring, when the work of budding, of leafing, of pollination, of flowering, are over, is the time where the material, living, incarnated consciousness innately knows it is time to forget growing taller, accumulating more mass, and get down to the glorious task of refining, of creating sweet fruit. This entices us to the core of the matter, to the seeds, which, as an eternally optimistic project, are flung to the 8 winds, to carry just a tiny fraction of the moments of living into memory for future unfurling.

This natural withdrawal, the waning of ambition, of energy, the thinning, the wrinkling, of the outer self could be considered a loss if one has forgotten what mystery the pulse rides in and out on. This mystery inexorably remembers, in our cells, that it is time to begin failing to replicate into juicy outer vitality, and instead to pull inward, away from the sensual pleasures of the outer world, and into a compact clarity. This essence is the distillate of light. Sweet fruit comes with age, a kind of accumulated nectar, and within that: seeds that hold a nearly forgotten purpose, a purpose beyond the individual self we think we are: the mystery of a tiny shell: its heart ready to unfold. Again.

Seen from the spring side of the year, this mystery of planting, the anticipated miracle of new life is full of hope, of aspiration. Seen from the side of waning, it can be a satisfaction, bowing graceful and tattered to the mysteries moving through us. This time of life looks into the magic of life folding into its essence; the knowing of its return to the wide sky, where wind, space, light; carry heart wisdom which, landing in an unknowable future, begins again.

Words: Rita Stucky

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