new year

Misshapen pottery filled with smudge sticks filled with mugwort for dreams and shamanic journeying, and cedar for prayers and sage for cleansing and palo santo for stinking up the place. There is a turkey feather in it, and my friend calls it Southern Eagle. My husband and I make a board with pictures and words and a check we wrote to ourselves for the amount we want to save with a photo-shopped print-out of our credit card balances at $0.00. I made a magical wand this year our of rosewood and kunzite and crystal points. I wrapped sari silks with blessings around the wood, then tied knots. I held the prayers tightly over my chest, then blew like a whale, sending it off for crow to take for answering.

There was spittle mixed in there, and a little man whose boat I must have swallowed.

The palpability of this new year makes me want to bite a calendar, suck on its pulp, juice the awesomeness out of it. And I want it all now. I see a year of magic, healing, learning, release, visioning, goals set and goals accomplished. It feels different, already. I feel different. I bid 2012 farewell with a prayer for healing. On Winter Solstice I burnt all the things I wanted to release now--anything not serving my highest good, and then the specifics that screamed, "BURN ME IN A FIRE! LET ME GO!" I believe in the power or ritual and prayer and intentions and magical thinking.

2012 was about all the shit falling around me and me not losing my shit. I didn't drink or take hostages--emotional or otherwise. I joined circles, more than one, of women, and those women help me soar and love and be better. I checked my Android at the dinner table and cussed at drivers who don't use their turn signals. I judged things and people and gossiped more than I'd care to admit. My emails were still too long and wordy and I cannot stop run-on sentencing. This year, I aim for five sentence emails.

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January 1, 2013, 10:30am. We go for a walk in the woods. The trees thin in January, like everyone except me. Their bones stick out in all directions, and I catch my sweater and knit hats on them. The thin ones are restless and irritable and eat nothing but cabinet crumbs. But not me. I eat small ships and calendars and new years for breakfast. Burp up harvested retreat days and fires and tarot cards left out for further meditation and explanation. Death. The Tower. And Five of Cups. Right in a row. It is the new year reading that shocks me again-- some change, transformation, catastrophe and grief for 2013. Metaphorically, I hope.


I thought about it as we walked through the sparse wood near our home. The houses hide behind the green and the lake in the summer. Now the trees look cadaverous, the cheap plastic toys in primary colors behind their meager branches like the gunshot that took them out, the stain on the rural identity they were cultivating on the internet. There is nothing to gather for supper but dried up gas grills and Christmas lights. The trees empty and solitary and sadly suburban. Spray paint arrows pointing to HELL and the smashed beer bottles I beg my children to watch themselves near. I kick a baggie that must have held some weed. There is an urban duck, head bare, like a vulture, honking and skittish around the dog. He flew too near the sun, he eats the carrion emptiness of the Starved Forest of the Strip Mallsley Land. 

It is New Year's Day, and the illusion is gone. We need to get out of here. This place was beautiful five months ago, and we pretended it made up for all the other suburban bullshit we deal with, like traffic and high taxes. This place is the illusion of woods and solitude. I want no part of the lies anymore. My daughter finds a lean-to and asks me who lives there.

Homeless people and gnomes and a raccoon with rabies.

I look up into the sky. It is gray. I beg it to rain. On me. Purgation and blessings and baptism. And let all this attachment to space run off of me, or I will have to burn it in a fire next December.

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On our visioning board we cut out a huge headline that says, WHERE TO LIVE NOW, and another that begs for the "Freedom to Roam." Besides the hefty check I keep worrying will be stolen out of our home, there are pictures of mountains, of soil, Buddhas, rivers and hiking trails. There are words and phrases like nourishment and healing, {uncluttered}, gathering, creativity, find your balance, wisdom, peace, awe, mindfulness, loving speech and deep listening. In my 2013 INCREDIBLE YEAR! workbook, I write a list of 100 things I'd like to do this year. They are super-positive! Happy! Really awesome! BUBBLES! UNICORNS!

21. Climb a mountain!
28. Be SUPER frugal!
33. Eat super healthy (AND LOVE IT!)

They get less enthusiastic.

61. Dance to Hare Krishna music after dinner, instead of watch Real Housewives of Anywhere and eat icing off of cupcakes.
67. Ask less advice.
75. Make a backyard sweat lodge so I can be alone.
80. Cry when I need to, instead of stuffing it.

Hold onto what is good, even it is a handful of earth. I read it off my visioning board and I nod.

"You are right, wise Pueblo proverb. That is why I put you on there, to inspire me to be better." Yeah. I used to be a cynical bitch, jaded even. It creeps out here and there. It's all so hokey. Magical thinking and work books for my goals and visioning boards, but I need hokey right now. I need simple. I need to declutter. I've decided I'm checking email once a day, not carrying my cell from room to room. I'm not going on Facebook fifteen thousand times a day to read posts in my forums. I want to live in awe of spirit and nature and then figure out where to live now, and what to do now and how to do it now.

And maybe I will be here more because of it, or maybe less. What is your new year all about? Do you have goals, aspirations? Are you hopeful? Or not so much? Tell me about your process. Or just say hi.

protection from leaving a trail

We raked the leaves from the hurricane. Rather than having the tree drop them all, the hurricane winds pulverized the leaves in the backyard. Bits of yellow and green, like herbs seasoning our land.  Granulated tree.

Everything I start to write seems useless, trite, redundant. I stand arms by my side, looking west, like an Easter Island head. There is something there beckoning me. What comes out of me lacks color. I sketch everything in vine charcoal. Nothing color, just grays. It is all easily smudged. And yet what is inside of me is bubbling and vibrant. I just cannot translate it. It is indigo and violet and smells of cedar and sage and pinecones. Between inside and outside, I feel restless, depressed, because writing has always come easily. I don't have writer's block, per se. But the past few weeks, I have felt stuck in my language. It is not enough. I need twenty-four words for the idea of identity and restlessness. Nothing is quite right. When I meditate and sit still with my discomfort, I see corn fields spread around me. Signs of fertility and prosperity, but to me, it is a sign of home. While I love many things about our town and neighborhood, I miss wide open skies and spaces to run. Though place has never meant a terribly great deal to me, the suburbs are driving me gray and fat. I can't muster the energy to leave the house anymore. I cannot get excited about the farmer's market and the dying lake.

Wherever you go, there you are, as the saying goes. Or not matter how light you pack, you always take your shit with you. That's another saying. But I don't want to run away. That is not my goal. I am tired of New Jersey and no left turns. I crave wide open swaths of land in which to roam. I have nothing to offer here, and here has less to offer me than before. I want to watch the children run, learn the land, tend a large garden. I want them to learn to track and build lean-tos. To have moonlit rituals without people asking me what the fire was for and why we were dancing. I pace my cage. There is a fish aquarium quality to the suburbs that unnerves me. Our dining room windows look out on our neighbor's unfinished house. From the windows to their driveway is fifteen feet. I must pull the blinds if I don't want people to wave to me inside my own house. I hear the idle gossip from Facebook and texts and who gets invited where, and I just want to opt out now. 

My feet crave earth beneath them. My fingernails call to plants to break them down. I chew them now, because outside work used to keep them short and sweet. I want to talk about canning food and chopping firewood. I want to talk about existence rather than boredom. I want to help raise barns, if I have to interact with my neighbors, not hear fat jokes, and chitchat about who has what and how much. Around here, the trees are all being removed. It makes sense. Our land is too wet to support such large trees, which uproot in hurricanes and winter storms. I mourn each one, even as I know the necessity of removing them. It is this place that demands it. And I think I want a place that can handle large trees. I crave a surrounding that venerates solitude without whispers or fear of depression. I don't want to fit in. I just want to be. These suburbs beg for peering out curtains and drawing conclusions. I engage in it too, and it is a part of myself that I hate.

I read this book recently called the Snow Child. It opens with a stillbirth. Set in 1920s, it is about this infertile couple who decide to homestead in Alaska, because they can no longer handle the world after the death of their only son. They want to be alone. Completely, utterly alone. Until they make a snow child who comes to life.

It took me months and months to read this book. I would start it. When the stillbirth was mentioned, I would place it aside. I no longer want to read solely about this heartbreak I know intimately. No longer. And yet, the book was not about stillbirth at all. Just one part of their story. And the rest of it, I got it. I wanted that self-sufficiency of an Alaskan homesteader in 1920. I understood the way stillbirth makes you crave mere existence, rather than the idleness of wealth and comforts. As I read, I coveted the harshness of winter, the land that runs for months around that. The part that is most decisive and positive of what is needed and important. I am mostly indifferent, and wishy-washy here in this life, because nothing seems that important or life altering. Do I want to eat at Cheesecake Factory or Applebees? Do I want to shop at Lowe's or Home Depot? 

I move through this life after Lucia's death. Stillbirth is just one part of my story, but it is the bend in the road. The thing that reprioritized everything. That part of me, the one before Lucia, falls on my soul yard pulverized. I keep thinking of that Pema Chodron quote, "Only to the extent that we expose ourselves over and over to annihilation can that which is indestructible be found in us." And maybe I am ready to move past the annihilation and into that which is indestructible. That part of me that seeks aloneness is getting louder and louder. May I not leave a trail.