I’ve been chastising myself lately for my lack of exercise. When I’m writing, I’m usually sitting on the sofa, and I’ve been writing non-stop. I don’t believe in chastising myself, but I sometimes do it anyway where my health is concerned, because exercise is incredibly important at every age, but particularly important in one’s sixties. How much we choose to move our bodies now will be how much we’re able to move them later. And yet, my creativity doesn’t respond well to treadmill desk walking. My muses are like my late bulldog. They prefer to be curled up, comfortable, warm, cozy, and unlike the bulldog, coffee-fueled. (It’s decaf, but still works. It’s all what you’re used to.)
But now, oh now, dear lovely readers, summer has finally come. Spring has been cold and rainy. With a few more showers today we’ll equal or top our May rainfall record. But for a little while every day this past week, most of the days anyway, the sun returned. It broke through the gloom and warmed the land enough for me to spend time outside every day but one this past week.
There’s a spiritual lesson there, of course, because there’s a spiritual lesson in everything we experience, no matter how mundane. Because as above, so below. The light always returns to annihilate the darkness. And then the darkness always returns to challenge the light, which only serves to make it come back brighter.
This weekend is forecast to be brutally cold and rainy with highs barely breaking into the 50s, and most of the time it will be in the forties here in the Cortland County hilltops where we live. But the rain ends with the workweek, and by Wednesday we’ll be in the 90s.
My impeccable timing
I’ve just finished two major projects, the re-polish of an older novel whose rights I reclaimed from the original publisher, a romantic thriller called Hunted which will release from my current publisher, Oliver Heber Books, July 15th, and a brand new small-town rom-com, Honky Tonk Cowboy which releases August 12th.
My timing was accidentally perfect. I didn’t plan it that way, but I worked almost 7 days a week through the rainy month of May, and now that the weather is turning nice, I have finished.
Now I must give my muses time to refuel, as is my habit. There has to be some time spent in living to refill the well of creativity. I cannot write compelling stories if I live my entire life in front of a keyboard. Grist for the mill, we used to call it. Living life, every experience of it, is grist for the writer’s mill.
So it will be at least two weeks before I start on the next book, and I’m not 100% sure which one it will be. The muses are only whispering hints to far.
I do have work to keep up with during my “time off.” I have two weekly blogs, two occasional blogs, and a newsletter to put out, and my website is in dire need of some major updates. I do that myself too, because I am a control freak and nobody else can do it the way I like it done.
My new routine
And so where the days used to begin on the laptop, they are now beginning outside. Ever since the weather has begun to ease a little bit, Roxanne the aging, grouchy mastiff, insists on an early morning walk right after breakfast, forcing me to start my days outside. And most of the time, if it’s at all nice out, I don’t go right back in, but head to whatever project is calling to me outdoors. I have two tiered veggie gardens and three raised beds, and a “Garden Tower” and I want to double that next year. I have a stream and many little trees and multiple flower beds around the place that need constant trimming and watering and weeding and fertilizing with our homemade compost.
I’m starting most days with my hands in the dirt. I get to spend at least a couple of hours out there. My watch’s “activity rings” are filled in before I come in. (For comparison, prior to this, they usually weren’t all the way filled in by bedtime. I was really getting sedentary in the throes of my fictional worlds!)
Dirt Energy
When I work with the earth, weeding, and planting, and tending, and caring for what grows, making my outdoor space more beautiful, more serene, I’m not thinking about anything except what I’m doing. My mind is not on current events that make me crazy. It’s on how nice that black mulch looks as I spread it around the flagpole, and how many daffodil bulbs were in the overcrowded bundles of them that I dug up and separated and replanted.
My body is outdoors, my bare feet are on the ground. Every breath I breathe is a fresh spring breeze, scented with honeysuckle at the moment. All I can hear is the constant symphony of birdsong, and bug-buzz, and flowing water, with a passing tractor or car here and there. My skin is in the sun (for the first little while) soaking up vitamin D and taking on a hint of color. After the first half hour or so, I don my hat and long sleeved cool “Armachillo” shirt I got from Duluth Trading Company. (I got the purple one. Not an affiliate, just sharing cause covering up is way safer than sun block, which kills the coral reefs and leeches chemicals into your body through your skin.)
And I’m healing. Every day I spend outside, I feel myself healing and gently re-aligning with nature, with well-being, with goodness.
We are meant to be in community with the earth, I think, especially the parts of it on which we live. We’re meant to have our hands in the dirt, and to be as intimately connected to the plants, and bugs, and birds, and beasts who live where we do, as we are to the people who share our indoor space.
We are cells in a larger body, and the larger body is the earth. We’re parts of her. We evolved from her primordial ooze. That’s what is real and true. That’s what we are, physically. Part of the planet. We are in a very real way, the planet’s Consciousness. (And I don’t mean just we humans, but all who live on the planet.)
The Tortoise Mother
The planet is resilient. She adapts to change to preserve her existence and the health of all her inhabitants. But she adapts slowly to changes that are happening fast.
It’s a typical tortoise and hare story, though. While disaster seems to be speeding ahead in the race, and it’s hard to see how good can win, rebirth is building as slowly and as inevitably and as unstoppably as the movement of the continental shelves. As steadily and slowly and predictably as the planet moves through space. She recovers more slowly, more steadily, and more certainly than a cold, healthy glacier carves a path across her surface. More slowly and more inevitably than the Colorado River carved out the Grand Canyon.
She is the Tortoise
Spending time connected to the Earth, our mother, can restore within us that same slow, steady, inevitable resilience. It can reconnect us to the relative permanence and solidity of the planet on which we live.
It can restore us. It can infuse our spines with the strength of the oak, and the flexibility of the willow. These build within us the strength of mountains. The strength of stone. The strength of Earth herself.
If we can connect with her often enough, deeply enough, we will know for sure that we’re okay right now, and we’ll be reminded that right now is all there is. It’s all there ever is. Our physical existence is brief, and it’s made up of a series of moments. How we spend those moments is up to us.
We can milk them for pleasure and joy, fill them with kindness and love, enhance them with generosity and goodness. I feel that I want to also strive to make things better for as many of my fellow beings as I possibly can, during my time here.
The Exquisite Balance of Reciprocity
We can’t walk outside without stepping on bugs. We can’t grow food without breaking the ground. We can’t have heat and light without converting some other resource into energy.
But we can strive to cause as little harm as possible during out time here on the planet. We can do our best to make our footprints light, and to practice reciprocity. That is, the practice of returning as much as we take, in this case, returning to the earth as much as we take from her.
For legit reciprocity, what we return must be something she can use. The earth cannot use carbon credits. Carbon credits are a lie and a scam designed to make big polluters appear less guilty to the general public. But all they truly do is create a pollution permission structure that goes something like, “I can pollute all I want and buy carbon credits to make up for it.” Not possible, not true.
Reciprocity is giving back in a meaningful way.
Composting, for example. We take vegetables from the earth. We peel or scrape or core them. Then we compost those scraps and return the compost to the earth, where it feeds the soil and restores balance. It also nourishes the next crop of vegetables. This is a perfect example of reciprocity.
Planting trees and beneficial plants for birds and pollinators is a beautiful reciprocity, and caring for those plantings afterward. Leaving part of the lawn to grow wild and free, letting the wildflowers go to seed, is another lovely way to reciprocate.
We give back, too, though, in indirect ways. We do this whenever we curb our urge to click that “Buy it now” button for physical items. Every time we get by with what we have, repair instead of replace, every time we buy digital instead of physical items where possible (books, music, films) we are reducing our negative impact on nature.
Particularly powerful is refusing to use AI. AI is guzzling our earth’s water at alarming rates, and will bleed her dry in a very short time. Water wars are coming. And AI is thirsty. Don’t use it. Do the work yourself.
We reciprocate with every act of love we commit upon the earth.
We can do much better, I find, but parting with the fast, the convenient, and the easy. DIY that shit. Do the work yourself. Fix it, mend it, patch it, repair it, or get by without it. It’s amazing how much less I’ve bought since I decided to go all in on simply trying.
The lost art of observation
When we spend daily time in nature, our relationship with it becomes ever closer and more intimate. We begin to notice tiny changes in the landscape around us, and because of that, we start to learn what conditions our local flora and fauna like and enjoy and thrive on, and which conditions cause them stress and strain. And we can mitigate. We can conspire to provide shade for plants that wilt in the heat of the sun. We can add water for plants, birds, and animals who need it during dry periods, and we can provide feeding stations during the winter months for those animals willing to partake. Deer usually won’t, but birds will. And all sorts of wildlife will consume scraps that are too much for the composter, like broccoli stems or banana peels.
(*Bird feeders need to be disinfected frequently during good times. During periods and in areas where H5N1 or Bird Flu is prevalent, like right now, it’s best not to use bird feeders at all. They are spreading stations for disease.)
Natural Magic
As we get to know the nature of our area, we can really begin to tap into the natural magic that lives all around us. There’s so much of it.
Everything physical is imbued with non-physical energy. Life force. Soul. Spirit. Every mythology from the very earliest writings in Ancient Sumer describe mankind as having been made from the mud of the earth by a god, and then breathed into life, usually by a goddess. The “breath of life” that brings the first human to life in all these tales, is actually the insertion of the soul into the body. That’s the part of us that is eternal, that comes from Source and returns to Source when our bodies wear out.
This is true of all things in nature. This is why I suspect “heaven” doesn’t look different from earth. We simply move from the physical realm into its non-physical mirror.
There is vibration in all life, and there is will, and where there are those two things there is magic. But magic is an art. We seek out vibrations that match with our goals to add potency to our spells. And as we spend time in nature, getting to know the living things all around us, we inevitably learn the vibrations of these friends.
Some plants feel as if they repel, others attract. Some stones are hard and others are soft. Shale breaks apart in thin layers, while granite breaks in chunks. Some animals are timid while others are bold. Some bodies of water are choppy or fast moving, while others are still and placid. Some trees are shady havens, others sport thorns that warn one away.
As we get to know these friends, really know them, we’ll understand that each and every one of them has a personality, likes and dislikes, even moods if we pay close attention.
We can call on their energies to aid us in our magical workings, which really means, we can align with their energy to help us achieve the vibration that matches theirs, and if we’ve chosen wisely, also matches our magical goal.
If I need strength and resilience with a youthful energy, I’ll align with the young oak trees out by the pond. If I need to sustain my well being and kindness through a difficult and trying time, I’ll align with the old sugar maple I call Grandfather, out back. For the wisdom of the ages and to sustain my health, I’ll go with oldest apple tree on the place. When I want to watch over those I love, I look to the row of towering pines who’ve kept a lot of snow off our house and out of our driveway.
For perseverance when I want to give up, I’ll align with the pesky mugwort that grows no matter what I do to it. I mean, you only need so much mugwort. It’s choking out my irises, and I’m convinced its roots run to the earth’s molten core.
When I’m in need of some money, clover is my go-to gal, the ones with the purple flowers, the big, abundant ones.
For freshness and the ability to be noticed even if I can’t be seen, the attention grabber is wild mint. You ever walk barefoot through grass, your feet brushing against the soft soft blades, and suddenly, you kick up the fragrance of mint? It just wafts up to your nostrils, and your brain lights up with delight.
Every time, I bend down to find the mint among the grass. I find it about one time out of ten. It’s very good at hiding, while being noticed. What a wonderful herb for a reclusive novelist!
I don’t need to harvest these plants or dry them or burn them. I can, but I don’t need to. I grow herbs for that. I take very little from the wild, not wanting to deprive the people who need it. The bird people and the bee people and the chipmunk people (who want to eat my garden. I need to make a treaty with that bunch.)
I can meditate among them where they grow, or cast my magic where the clover lives, outside. I can stand in that spot where I always smell the mint as I walk barefoot over the lawn, and cast my spell from there.
The mint and the clover are friends. We see each other from spring through autumn. I miss them when they take their winter’s rest. They seem happy to see me when they awaken.
Nature’s spiritual parts are what some call the elementals. The clover has an elemental, the old maple, the young oak—they all have a non-physical mirror self, just like we do.
Note that we don’t take the energy from our friends and roommates outdoors. We align with their energy, we tune them in and as we experience them, our own vibration adjusts to a nearer match to theirs, and to everything else vibrating in that range, including our magical goal, if we’ve chosen correctly.
And when we match the vibration, the goal shimmers into existence in our experience. That’s real magic. We aren’t really changing anything but ourselves. We become the new and improved version of us, the one who has achieved the goal.
Relationships take time and attention
We don’t just walk out in nature for the first time, and understand all who live there. Relationships are built over time. Repeatedly being in someone’s presence is how we get to know them. Repeated pleasure in someone’s presence is how friendships are made, and they’re deepened when we share difficult times with that individual, as well as good times.
We talk to them and we listen. We pay attention to how they’re doing because we care about how they’re doing. We help where we can, but do so with a lot of pre-thought and research because most of our efforts to help nature do the opposite.
Summer is here
This is our chance to get to know all the people who live with us, right outside our doors.
Do a little basking this coming week. Do a little communing with nature. Make it a goal for the first week of beautiful, wonderful June.
Isn’t June worth celebrating? June is AWESOME in the Northern Hemisphere.
I hope our friends Down Under are enjoying their newborn winter, and finding the beauty there, too.
Huzzah! It’s June!
(Why don’t we say Huzzah anymore? I think we should bring it back.)
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