Depth: a sleight of hand moment

"The more I understand about the way that internalized oppression distorts my thoughts, feelings, and actions, the better able I am to compensate for its effects and develop specific strategies to undo them. Knowing, for example, that the Ashkenazi Jewish history of cyclical expulsions, massacres, and attempted genocide has left us jumpy, urgent, inclines to leap into action too fast and talk a lot helps me monitor my own urgency and disbelieve it. Knowing my ancestors survived by trying to be indispensable helps me rein in my tendency to take on way too much." - "Bigger is Better" from Medicine Stories, Aurora Levins Morales


We needed to get ourselves out of the wagon, into Scout the Subaru and make a move/slide into appreciation. With all those inconvenient, oppressive and too often overwhelming sensations and thoughts that would convince us -- it will never be any better, we could have cemented ourselves into self-inflicted oppression. But then, the contradiction of it all is ... it is better in the next moment, could have been much worse if we held fast to being overwhelmed. Instead we savored a wonderful salmon and millet lunch and made the decision to "compensate for the internal oppression".
Pete drove to one of our favorite beaches not far north of where we live. We forget the real name of the beach and prefer to give it names we remember. This one is the Annie and Nathanial Beach because young farmers we know live close-by.

We walked. The sun and sky were alive and blissfully blue. The Salish Sea magnificent in her watery way, shells emptied of their former inhabitants and trees cut for whatever reasons by humans lay along the shore. People and dogs were happy to be out of the house, and probably just as happy as we were to be walking on Earth, breathing sweet clean air, being part of the everything.

We shopped to fill our drinking water jugs, bought some millet and quinoa for future meals, butter to melt on pancakes or toast, and a pint of San Juan Island Vanilla ice cream to eat on the ride back home.
When we pulled up alongside the vardo, I was filled with that sweet depth of connection that comes most clearly when you return home and know this place anew. Pete put it this way, "It's really good to get out and see where we live." Though the sun was already turned to early shade, the sky above us was a feather bed turned upside down, or right side up. Spacious and warm, light and bright.

It was one of those 'sleight-of-hand' moments, David Abram writes of in his book Becoming Animal

" If we rarely notice such transformations today--if we seem to have lost our sense of the earth's audacious and metamorphic magic--it is likely because our depth perception has become impoverished." 


We live with dozens of wild rabbits. It's too easy to live with the illusion that these animals are domesticated 'pets.' We have little illusion about their real, and wild natures though we feed them regularly and they make our place here feel so much more because their lives are filled with wild. Yes, they huddle under our rigs, trucks and cars for shelter; feed on our veg and fruit trimming, and sometimes we get a little more friendly when a life event brings us closer.




Purps, the rabbit in the video, named because there is a purple-like tint to the deep markings that underlay the red-brown fur, was injured several weeks ago. A deep hole below the left eye. At first I thought the injury was a lucky escape from being dinner. But over time we see that rabbits have a very territorial and easy shift from docile to defender. Rabbits fight each other. We watched the injury closely, made sure Purps got extra greens -- especially Chickweed, to help nourish. The other rabbits singled out Purps once she/he/they was injured. I wonder if it's because we offer more attention?

It feels good to be blogging again. I've taken purposeful time away to ask my heart about writing. The answers are changeable, like the weather so my posts have been different. This one is filled with photographs the speak of the depth of feelings not easily put onto a flat screen page.

The Leo Full Night was bright and fat last night, maybe this post is one of the ways to play with words for a fun party. Hope you enjoy it as much as I did putting it together.







Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Conversations, karma calls, creating art ... and making Juk

Image
Draco, with Ursa Minor or the Little Dipper, as depicted in Urania’s Mirror, a set of constellation cards published in London c. 1825. I sit to write after waking just before (or was it after) midnight. It is newly 2020, two days old, a baby year. There was a dream needing to be washed with light, different images and nourishment; a bowl of nettles and oatmeal porridge with butter and maple syrup did the trick. And a new post makes the magic happen. 2019 was cleared and unplugged for us here in the Pacific Northwest with unexpected snow in Seattle; and wind, rain and power outages on Whidbey Island. Metaphoric and mythically, New Year's Eve was for us a necessary conclusion to a very intense year. Pete and I fled a year of betrayals, shuns and sadness at the start of 2019, and though we were blessed with kind welcomes, as an antidote , a final, and elemental cleanse was necessary ... and Lono the elemental god of Earth's atmosphere, did his work. As metaphor, unplug...
Read more

Fasten your safety pins!

Image
"It was a day a duck could love. For that matter the week was a duck's paradise. Dressed for the season in my long skirt, paisley wool shawl, and tea cozy hat with the red hibiscus over my left ear my feet splashed in puddles... The wind began to dance with me as I lifted my nose and sniffed from beneath the felt hat now much soaked through with rain. No fairies. But, a large copper pin about the size of a butterfly dropped from the cherry red awning above me and landed on my right shoe. A pin. A safety pin. "My Ma, "I said to myself. Besides being famous for carrying a flashlight my mother always wore at least one but more often a couple safety pins. Just in case. Long before it was punk fashion, safety pins are a talisman of security hard-wired in my DNA like knowing how to make something out of nothing. I fondled the pin and felt the distance of time between us compress... The Safety Pin Cafe Years ago, and not far away, we lived in the woods at t...
Read more

"Like myths, symbols are thus ambiguous; they resist certainty."

Image
Life is one crazy cake! Confined in our tiny home space the shuffle of cards (tiny) blends with what is around me and in me. The cut grass outside is discomforting to me. I have allergies. For a while the windows and doors are sealed shut. A big riding lawn mower cut the campground lawn on an otherwise quiet Sunday stirred up my aura, and Pete's. Stirred to craziness by noise and the conflict of differences in priorities sleep and calm were difficult to access. It's not the first time a big riding lawn mower has stirred me to craziness. It's not the first time for turning the fuzzy edges into cake. My mojo. My magic was tampered with. To reconnect I went to the metaphor of cooking, and cooked up flan. I was supposed to be taking a break from blogging ... and I did. And then, I felt the edges of my subtle body touched by the finger tip of aloha; someone had left her calling card and I could make space for change.  The card spoke in myth, woven with my Mother's ton...
Read more