… from Boulder, Colorado.
Sigh.
One of my colleagues said today that it feels like we’ve slipped over the line into Narnia, where it’s “always winter but never Christmas.” (–C.S. Lewis: The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe).
Cue the music here: ☆*♥¸.•*¨`*•♫♪♫♪ Someday our Spring will come…
This is just majorly cool: how water acts in outer space, without gravity to dance with.
Imagine you’re an astronaut. You’re orbiting the earth in a space station for weeks on end. At some point, you’re gonna want to wash yourself. Or your fellow astronauts are really gonna want you to wash yourself. How to pull this off?
Obviously, a shower would create a potentially tremendous mess. Plus water is very heavy and therefore fuel-expensive to carry, so you wouldn’t want to waste your limited supply on anything besides precious life support.
Enter the special astronaut washcloth. It looks like a little condensed hockey puck. So you shake the thing out until it looks like a small towel, then get it wet to give yourself what my mother used to call a “spit-bath.”
What happens when you wring the washcloth out in this gravityless environment?
Watch and be amazed.
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One more thing that adds to the overall fabulousness of this: the experiment was originally proposed by high school students! Go Canada, supporting the curiosity of your young people.
From the YouTube video site:
CSA Astronaut Chris Hadfield performed a simple science experiment designed by grade 10 Lockview High School students Kendra Lemke and Meredith Faulkner. The students from Fall River, Nova Scotia won a national science contest held by the Canadian Space Agency with their experiment on surface tension in space using a wet washcloth. Credit: Canadian Space Agency/NASA
CSA astronaut Chris Hadfield has made a number of interesting videos showing aspects of everyday life in space. Do check them out, and let yourself fill with wonder – plus perhaps a new appreciation of how gravity makes life so much easier down here.
Happy Eostre! May the increasing return of that glorious sun bring a corresponding increase of warmth, light and energy into your own life.
Easter is based on a much older celebration (Eostre/Ostara) based on this fundamental recognition of the rebirth of the planet, as it warms from the ever-increasing sun.
Have you noticed how Easter doesn’t fall on a regular, predictable day of the month — or even in a predictable month? That’s because it’s a seasonal holiday based on the actual wheel of the year, not just the Gregorian calendar. Easter is always celebrated (take a breath here) on the first Sunday after the first full moon after the vernal (spring) equinox. That’s when fresh green food begins to grow once more; lambs and chicks are born; the sap rises in the trees, and flowers open their lovely colors out of the dead winter ground. Crocus! Delicate purple petals rising from the snow! What isn’t possible right now?
Easter: note the similarity with the word “estrus”? All of our beloved Easter imagery — bunnies, eggs, flowers, chicks, baskets filled with green grass nests, Christ rising from the grave to live again — are based on the concept of renewed fertility and possibilities for life. It’s all about birth and rebirth.
I began the day with a sunrise ritual created by my pals at Milk and Honey, a goddess gift shop in Sebastopol, CA. (Yes, I was up before the dawn. Me! That’s very unusual: clearly that sun was calling.) Here it is, if you’d like to do something like that too.
The Ostara Ritual
Purpose:
To acknowledge the balance between light and dark; to revere the growing strength and energy of the Sun who is now strong enough to conquer darkness; to acknowledge the time of new beginnings; to bless new goals and projects; to thankfully reflect on the gifts of fertility.
Tools:
4 sticks of incense, blanket, 1 hard-boiled egg per person, cauldron & freshly cut flowers.
Time:
Sunrise (is best): anytime between the Full Moon or Easter morning
1. Find a special place outside. Lay blanket on ground with intention of connecting to the earth.
2. Arrange the egg(s), cauldron and flowers on the blanket facing towards the Sun (East).
3. Plant incense into the ground in all 4 directions, beginning with East, then South, West and ending with North to represent the 4 quarters. After incense is in the ground start with East, and moving in the same direction, light each incense stick and verbally welcome and honor each direction.
4. While standing, feel your feet on the earth and allow yourself to feel grounded and centered. Then allow yourself to relax and sit on the blanket.
5. Verbally state the purpose of the ritual.
6. Lift one flower at a time with great intention. For each goal or new project you want to begin working on:
- Hold a flower in your hands and focus on the positive end desire of your goal.
-Break the stem off and put the stem in a pile to your left
-Slowly, pull the petals from the flower and place them in the cauldron while reflecting on the meaning of Ostara.
-Repeat with a new flower for each intention and goal you are focusing on.
7. Stand up with your egg and throw it into the air as high as you can and let it fall to the ground.
It is said that the higher the egg goes, the better your luck will be!
Then sit back down.
8. Peel the dirt and shell fragments off of your egg and put them in the pile with the stems.
9. Eat the egg and let yourself become energized with healing and positive energy.
It is said that if the egg is eaten at sunrise, you will gain much luck, health and happiness.
10. With your hands dig a hole in the earth in the direction of south.
11. Bury the stems and eggshells.
This is an offering to the Earth! Verbally thank her for fertility and the gifts she presents us with daily!
12. Grab the cauldron of flowers and heave the contents upward and outward as hard as you can to bless your new projects, and to return to the Earth that which is hers.
Laugh or shout with joy!
The season of wonder is now beginning!
13. To close the ritual, beginning with North, going reverse to West, South and ending with East, face in each direction and thank the direction for holding sacred space for you and then release it. At each direction turn your incense stick upside down and extinguish it in the earth speaking, “So mote it be.” (Translation: So may it be).
May this ritual bring you exactly the energy you need in the days to come.
Blessed Be!
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PS – Just remembered that I posted on Easter last year too. For more: http://indigenize.wordpress.com/2012/04/03/happy-eostre/
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If you want to get to know your home place, playing with a “bioregional quiz” like this one is a good place to start.
There are many versions of such quizzes out there. I’m pleased to announce that this particular expanded version of the Bioregional Quiz, which I wrote, will soon be published in Planet Drum Foundation’s updated edition of Home! A Bioregional Reader.
How many of the questions can you answer, without referring to the internet or field guides first?
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BIOREGIONAL AWARENESS QUIZ
Bioregionalism is a call to become knowledgeable residents and guardians of the places where we live. Although we are seldom aware of it, we live in naturally unique physical, ecological, historical and cultural areas whose boundaries are more often ridgetops than county lines and state borders.
This is a call to get to know our local land and water; our local weather and sky; our local plants and animals; our local neighbors and communities. It is a call to join our hearts, hands and minds with what has been, what is, and what could be, in this place.
Getting to know the place where we live is important for both our well-being and for the well-being of our home. Becoming aware of our “sense of place” helps us to see it as a unique part of the living earth, deserving of respect, gratitude, and careful treatment. We humans can then begin to shift how we live more towards balance and harmony with the wider life community. Security begins by acting responsibly at home.
Welcome home!
This quiz provides a lot of starting points for getting to know your own living home region.
It can be sobering to realize how little we know right now. The intention of the quiz is not to make us feel bad about how disconnected we are, but instead to gain awareness of the multi-layered things yet to discover about the richness of our home place.
Please treat it as an opportunity. Maybe you want to only choose a few questions, the ones that call to you the most. Feel free to find out the answers in any way you can: Ask your neighbors, go to the library, read the newspaper with this sort of focus, go outside, wander around, and pay attention every day. “Waste time” doing nothing but noticing our world.
There’s no way to cheat. Spend some time investigating; ask for some help. And feel free to make up some more questions of your own.
MAKING CONNECTIONS
1. Where does the water in your house come from? Trace the water you drink from rainfall to tap. Where did the cloud gather its moisture?
2. Where does the water go that drains from your sink? What about the water (& other stuff) leaving your toilet?
3. Choose a favorite meal and trace the ingredients back through the store…the processing plant…all the way to the soil. How many people, states, or even countries helped produce this meal? What went into the packaging and transportation of its ingredients? How many of the ingredients could you (did you?) get locally or even grow yourself?
4. What kind of energy do you primarily use? Where does it come from? Trace the path of energy that powers your home from its sources to you.
5. When your garbage is thrown away, where is “away”?
6. What are the primary sources of pollution in your area?
7. What are the major natural sounds you are aware of in a particular season?
8. What agencies are responsible for planning future transportation and land use in this area?
9. List three critical environmental issues in your area. What can you do to help?
10. Draw a map of your territory, the areas you travel regularly – without using human markers like buildings or street names.
EARTH
11. What primary geological events or processes that shaped the land where you live? (Extra Points: What is the evidence?)
12. What soil series are you standing on?
13. How has the land in your area been used by humans, over the last two centuries?
14. Who lived here prior to white settlement, and what were their primary subsistence techniques?
15. What was the vegetation type in this area prior to white settlement?
16. Where is there wilderness in your bioregion?
WATER
17. What is the elevation above sea level where you live?
18. What is the average annual rainfall for your area? What was the total rainfall in your area last year?
NEIGHBORS
19. What Spring wildflower is consistently among the first to bloom where you live?
20. Name seven common trees in your area. Which ones are native? For the others, how did they get here? Why were they brought?
21. Which indigenous people inhabit(ed) your region before you? Are they still here?
22. What were the primary subsistence techniques of the culture that lived in your area before you?
23. Name five edible wild plants in your region and their season(s) of availability.
24. Name three medicinal wild plants in your region, and what they can be used for. BONUS: which parts are the most effective (stems, roots, fruits…)?
25. Name seven mammals common to your area. Which are native and which are new here? From where did they come? Which animals are extinct from your area?
26. Name ten birds common to your area. (Extra Points: Which are year-round residents? Which are migratory?) (For the EXPERT: Where do the latter winter over?)
27. If you have deer in your area, when do they rut, and when are the young born?
28. Name five grasses in your area. Are any of them native?
29. Name four wild mushrooms that grow in your area, two edible (only if you are an expert) and two poisonous.
30. Describe the defense techniques used by three different other-than-human beings living in your area. (Examples: camouflage, poison, thick skin, thorns…)
31. What are the major plant associations in your region?
32. What plant or animal is the “barometer” of environmental health for your bioregion? How is it doing?
SKY
33. Sitting in your living room, point North.
34. How recently was the Moon full? What phase is she in now?
35. On what day of the year are the shadows the shortest where you live?
36. From what direction do winter storms come in your region?
37. How long is the growing season where you live?
38. How has the typical weather changed in your area since you were born? (Ask an older person to remember weird weather.)
39. Name one constellation or star that comes out only in winter, and one that comes out in summer.
FIRE
40. When was the last time a fire burned in your area?
41. What caused it?
42. How did the land change after that? What grew back first, second, third? What bugs, birds, and animals followed?
43. How is fire dealt with where you live? (Controlled burns, completely prevented, seasonal controls – what sort?)
44. What are three of your favorite songs to sing around a campfire?
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Thank you so much for thinking about these things; for paying attention to y/our home place. May this Quiz contribute to your deep feeling of belonging here.
Feel free to post your reflections on both the questions and the process of facing the questions in the Comments section below. May you have fun getting to know where you are!
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These questions began with “Where You At – A Bioregional Quiz” by Leonard Charles, Jim Dodge, Lynn Milliman and Victoria Stockley, which was first published in the Winter 1981 issue of Coevolution Quarterly and subsequently reprinted in Home! A Bioregional Reader (New Society Publishers, ISBN 0-86571-188-7, 1990).
I (Tina Fields) made extensive further additions and when it grew unwieldy, created the breakdown by category to organize the expanding inquiry.
In addition, a few of the questions were gleaned years ago from the work of Fox Tales, Chas Clifton, & the folks at the Co-Intelligence Institute. (No, I don’t remember which. But the ones about whole systems flows and changes, native peoples, and songs are definitely mine.)
The late Peter Berg started the Planet Drum Foundation. I still miss his wisdom, humor, and wide curiosity about what’s possible to create in the world.
American Linden tree.
(Img: Pubs Int’l, ltd.)
“A beautiful essay on deep listening…to trees.” ~ Jamie K. Reaser, Courting the Wild series co-editor (with whom, by the way, it was a pleasure to work). She has made the essay available for free now via a link on the publisher’s website.
‘…The maple advised, “Be like the linden tree. It bends and bends in every wind, yet its roots go down deep, deep, deep.”…’ ~ Tina Fields
That line, which Jamie chose to highlight, is the core of the story. That is the advice a maple tree gave me when I was nine years old, and I’ve never forgotten it.
Click here to read Learning From Our Elders at Hiraeth Press,
or just read it on this page, immediately below.
I hope you enjoy it.
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LEARNING FROM OUR ELDERS:
TEACHER TREES
by Tina Fields
Featured in Courting the Wild: Love Affairs with the Land, ed. Jamie K. Reaser, Hiraeth Press.
I was considered a weird kid. When I was nine, my frizzy, dark auburn hair was far from the stylish straight-and-blonde. I didn’t care what my clothes looked like or whether they even matched, let alone what label adorned them. I was far from athletic. I wore glasses. I used big words, and understood their meanings. While other kids gossiped and invented small tortures for fun, I read, drew, and daydreamed. As an only child, I was poorly versed in mind games, and usually lost out long before I even realized the teasing had begun. When I grew up, I wanted to be a philosopher and a witch.
All of this added up to the bleak reality that I didn’t have many friends. Most of the time that was actually fine, as I enjoyed the freedom that came with solitude. Fortunately, I found myself to be pretty good company. But there were also challenges. Like many only children, I didn’t need to seek acceptance through pack conformity. (I knew it was a lost cause.) However, childrens’ cruelty toward the introverted social outcast can be brutal, and there were times when even my closest friends would turn on me in an attempt to keep their tenuous places in the schoolyard pecking order. When provoked, I wouldn’t fight with them; instead, this taunting made me turn even more solitary. The people-centered life felt hard, and I often turned to the more-than human world for companionship.
In the park across the street from my childhood home, a pine and a maple welcomed my dogs and me with open, low branches. The pine tree was enormous. I’d climb the rungs of its ladder self, rising as high as I could go, and cling to its wide but flexible trunk as the wind swayed us back and forth. It felt ecstatic to ride the wind like that, especially in a high storm. Upon my descent, I’d be covered with pitch and pitch-glued pine needles. My poor mother tried to freeze the hardened gluey gunk out of my hair and clothes with ice, only to give up in disgust time and time again, and hack it out of my lion’s mane with scissors. I endured all this with equanimity, as my tree time made me feel completely wild and at peace. The maple was smaller than the pine and oozed no pitch, so it was my most frequent tree-of-choice. However, it was also harder to scale, so I’d only go as high as its second branch. This was a comfortable branch; just the right shape for me. I could sit upon it for hours, and I would, too, especially when life seemed particularly hard.
Being aloft held its own surreptitious pleasures: People would walk by down below, and never know I was perched above them, overhearing everything. Giddy, I learned that most people rarely think to look up. By staying silent and observing other people’s behavior, I began to awaken to the dark holes in my own awareness, and decided to try to notice everything.
After particularly difficult days at school, I’d enter the maple in the way some church goers step into confessional boxes. Climbing up, I’d wrap my arms around it, lay my cheek against its rough-barked trunk, and tell it my woes and dreams. Sometimes I’d cry. Day after day, week after week, for a couple of years, I wept my sorrows into that tree.
Arborial consciousness t-shirt design by Tina Fields
And then one day, the tree spoke back.
This might sound crazy or like a make-believe story, but it really happened. I was so surprised that I nearly fell off the limb. I didn’t hear its voice with my ears. Rather, the message came in a word and picture combination that manifested in my mind, yet was not my own. The message didn’t feel like it originated from within me; the words didn’t sound like mine. In my gut, I knew they came from this tree. It was a full-blown couplet of image and speech, bearing a message I remember and live by to this very day.
The maple advised, “Be like the linden tree. It bends and bends in every wind, yet its roots go down deep, deep, deep.”
I had never even heard of a linden tree before, much less had any idea what one looked like or how it behaved. It would not be until twenty years later, while living in Europe, that I would meet my first linden tree and feel as though I’d been reunited with a long-lost, much beloved relative.
The ancient Greeks and the Slavs believed the goddess of love abided in the linden tree. Other Europeans, especially the Poles, regarded linden trees as symbols of divine power, family, faith, and valour. When Christianity arrived in the region, the linden became the tree of the Blessed Mother. In many a folktale, the Blessed Mother hid among the tree’s branches, waiting patiently to reveal herself to children.
The linden’s white blooms are fragrant, making them a favorite of bees and beekeepers. Bees produce wax for candles, honey for mead. Laws often protected the precious trees. To cut down a linden meant bad luck, perhaps even bringing tit-for-tat death to self or a family member. Such was the reverence for lindens.
The maple’s message to emulate this unknown cousin reverberated in me from that moment forward. The world was suddenly full of far greater possibility than I’d ever before imagined. A tree can speak? It’s conscious? What else is happening that I haven’t noticed or participated in? I set out – and within — on a mission of curiosity and deeper exploration.
Before that day, my parents had taken me camping many times. Every time, they had exhorted me to “look at the beautiful scenery!” but I ignored them, preferring to read a comic book. No more. Suddenly the world was so much more than mere stuff. I went from being surrounded by dead matter to being part of a community of aware beings with desires, thoughts, and volition. Life, motion, spirit abounded everywhere. I began to realize how how utterly accompanied I was in the world and how much I was missing because I had not been looking with truly aware, open-minded eyes. I began to closely observe other animals, plants, rocks, clouds, and to consider how best to serve our collective well-being. I became interested in mysticism and spirituality, and began to explore comparative religions, looking for human wisdom about relating to the numinous in everything.
Whatever happened in the purely human realm took on far less import. Personality glitches or opinions of me, whether coming from other kids or my own self-doubt, seemed fleeting and insignificant. I was determined to be kind, but to also put human interactions into a much larger context. Like a tree, I stood in a forest of mystery and hope. And amusingly, as soon as I stopped caring what anybody thought of me, I attracted good friends and even became popular.
Trees, each in their own way, have been my great teachers. They cradled me, brought me into contact with elemental excitement, and woke me up to the living world in all of its intense spiritual mystery and innumerable dimensions. They initiated me as a participant in life instead of a reluctant observer.
The influence of trees has made me a better, wiser, and more aware animal who lives fully in an expanded world sprouting with possibility, fun, and friendship. I will honor these elders of other species as long as I live. I hope that they will continue to teach us all, and that we youngsters along the evolutionary scale will keep actively seeking out ways to listen.
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When searching for a photo of a linden tree to include here, I came upon a fun site about word etymology. Its logo is a musical pun in medieval illumination style. Who can resist that?
Bill Casselman’s entry about linden trees has a component that blew my mind. It turns out that the root of its name means the very quality that was touted to me by my maple tree!
“Linden, like aspen and like ‘the old, oaken bucket’ was originally an adjectival form of Old English lind ‘lime tree.’ Many Indo-European languages have this root *len whose prime meaning is ‘flexible’ in reference, to flexible fibres of the inner bark, much like the basswood-linden-tilia labels. Compare Old Norse lind, modern German gelinde ‘gentle’ but first meaning ‘supple, flexible, soft,’ Latin lentus ‘slow’ but first ‘supple, soft, lazy.’ Other English words containing the same root are lithe, and perhaps linen and line, as Eric Partridge suggests, from an ultimate Indo-European root *li ‘flax.’ This would make *len an extension of the flax root meaning ‘flexible as threads made of flax,’ then of rope or cord made of other materials, like the inner bark of the linden.” (emph. mine.)
Another tidbit that I find here of personal import is the linden’s genus, Tilia. My mother’s name was Tilla. And what do the best mothers give their children but the combo of deep, secure roots and supple, flying freedom?
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I love it when synchronicities like this show up. The first one affords the mind-blowing confirmation that the tree was right.
On the one hand, duh! So when do trees lie? Yet on the other, how amazing is that to realize that this was not “mere” internal imagination, but actual communication. It’s so easy to default to lowest-common-denominator cultural normative thinking, and no matter how many times such things happen to me and how many times I’m shown that ‘there’s more in heaven and earth, Horatio,’ etc., I’m still always amazed.
Some might consider this focus on synchronicity to be overly magical thinking but to me, such occurrences signify that I’m in sync with the Tao; the flow of mystery in this planet and beyond, of which each of us is one small musical phrase. And since it makes the world more fun and encourages me to be even more engaged in life, why not think that way?
Go forth and listen to a tree now, and see if it changes you like it did me.
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(My essay is linked & presented here with permission of Jamie K. Reaser, co-editor. This version printed here has a few changes from the one published by Hiraeth Press. Artistic license, y’know.)
East of Niwot, Colorado, at the edge of Hwy 25, I may have experienced the early wisps of the powerful storm known as a “derecho.”
My friend Maria Gutierrez and I had just gotten out of the car to enter a coffee joint when a few raindrops began to hit us. We noted this as welcome coolness from the ongoing heat.
A couple of moments later, as we were choosing a table to sit at, the building we’d entered was suddenly slammed with crazy howling winds slinging rain and mud. The winds were so strong that men could not open the glass doors inward against the pressure. We were all trapped inside the building. (Of course, we did have coffee, so this could be worse.)
Out the other window, the one toward the freeway, we could see things flying by. Lots of things; large things. I was glad we were no longer driving in my little car – it could easily have been pushed across the highway into the other lanes by that intense wind. The sky looked dark and striated, like films I’d seen about tornado weather.
After awhile when the winds had passed, the first new people coming in commented, “What on earth happened to this building?” I went outside to look. Both the entire building and all of the cars outside, including mine, were absolutely covered in thick mud. Wild!
Later, I read in the news that an enormous storm had caused a state of emergency across a wide swath of the U.S. on June 29, 2012. Called a “derecho,” it was said to have spanned from the midwest on to Washington D.C. – but I think we got the beginnings of it in Colorado. I have certainly never seen anything like it before.
Above is a photo of the storm in its glory from NWS meteorologist Samuel Shea. More images and videos can be seen here: http://bit.ly/OQnljC
The birch tree outside my dad’s house contains a homemade birdhouse that regularly hosts three families, in sequence, per year. Right now, a sparrow family is in residence.
You might wonder, how do the parents keep the nest clean? They do go in and pick the poop out with their beaks, then throw it overboard. This I knew. But watching them now, I witnessed something that really surprised me.
These baby birds are toilet trained. (Or is that ‘nest trained’?)
Instead of a little head with a gigantic mouth, I saw one of them back up to the door. His or her tail poked out of the hole, then cleanly dropped a poop outside. Then the head reappeared, ready to accept a new tasty bug.
Isn’t that something? I’d thought the little piles of bird poop at the base of the tree were from the parents, but turns out that’s not solely true.
Good job, mom & dad! Yet another example of how “bird brains” are far more sophisticated than we’ve generally been thinking. And how, as many parents think, toilet training is indeed for the birds.
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If you don’t believe me, here’s a YouTube video where somebody else caught a baby bird deliberately pooping outside the nest (right at the beginning – around 4 seconds in). The woman filming that seems as surprised as I.
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