Plant Medicine Making

Swedish Ramparts

Collection gathered with hands and heart open
Seeds, wood, shells, plants - surround with generosity of earth
A hole in a small shell gathered in Maine - mend a place in the heart
If thread is found begin to sew pieces of life back together.
Elevate the best intentions found in resting alchemy -
White pine is a memory carried from another place time -
As medicine melds into conscious carry - lift the last remnants scaled.
Rub two sticks together to create a story that is needed -
Ancient wooden beats are carried into the present -
If a rock skims across your path - remember the words unspoken.
Pieces of your life ask for clarification - rooted in surrounding objects -
Held knowledge is the shape note - do not ignore the riff -
Seasonal rhythm comes slowly by - while you were looking the other way.
I hold you in my arms - the softness like a baby loon -
Swedish ramparts were never this loud - ship holding all of you steady -
We rock - sideways the water splashes across the bow -
Sinking ships - when will the saving begin?

Tea Kettle

Today I am thinking about Life Ways. At The Bone Lines - we talk about simple - rustic - ancient - time honored - ancestral - worn. This is a place to come to settle and trust in yourself. It is a step away from the over culture that we are living in. I offer a slow moving way into developing insight about our own biography. The cloak of story is what we are here to carry and let unfold. I hope that you will find that you are most welcome here. It is a place in the woods where Life Ways with an edge is offered. Are we not all walking on some sort of edge? The edge of somewhere else. The edge of becoming. We find the edge is where the most diverse things can be discovered. Along the edge - things come and go. We walk from the edge of the wood out into a field. From a fields edge perhaps we find ourselves walking among the thatch of our own internal edges and how these rub up against the world.

Think about the edges of a map. The curving lines and patterns are really just random places that have been drawn on a piece of paper and declared “a place”. This is just a thought line made to keep containers of organization on land ownership. We are on the edge - visiting a place. In reality - we are all one place. A beautiful vision of ocean and land. It is here we walk and live and breathe - are born and die one day. All together we are here. If we take this to heart in our every day lives - we will find that the edge is - our bodily outline carved into the sky. The sky blankets around our shoulders as the stars twinkle in our eyes.

I want to share with you here the Life Ways that I have lived. It is a story that is outside of what is typical. It is a story of weaving a folk way of living. An embrace of healing ways is woven throughout. A basket holds a harvest of tools to make a life out of your own marrow. My frame is held in place by poetry and myth. Building a simple life made by hand is at the center of what we do here. We build our meaningful lives over many years. We have taken our life in our own two hands and wrangled it this way and that. Shaping and molding - adding to and taking away the forms that might need to change. It isn’t always easy. It is rewarding though. To live this way requires a giving up of some things. There is no such thing as having it all. Don’t let anybody tell you that. You do not need to know everything all at once. Is is a slow living orchestra happening within each of us that lives here.

I can offer here a pictured story of a family that lives within a wide ethos of curiosity and exploration. We accept that life is nuanced. We are excited by the idea of growing in our learning each and every day. Dialogue and discussion opens up our very own Chautauqua - leading us in divergent directions. One way of thinking about this is Home - School. How we have gone about learning in our own way at Home. This is not to imply that being a self taught individual is what I am discussing here. Though self-led learning is our ethos. I am simply saying that Home is where our Life Ways take place. It is where we have grown into who we are. It is the base of all our wild exploration.

It is a place that has arisen out of a lifetime of experience. I hope to grow this space into a community of like minded people looking to wander in similar ways of interest. Story - Myth - Imagination - Magic - all hold a strong presence here. It is through this lens that offerings will be shaped and released into the wild. A strong belief in our own ability to learn and find the answers to what we need also lives here. That most likely looks different for everyone.

a window in

So, a window in - a beginning. Writing here will be varied, as that is how I live. What begins to form will embody a life unfolding. I hope that others will join in with the interest that they have in living or moving toward living a life of slow growth. The layers that can exquisitely exist is a vision that I tenderly hold for all of us. May kindness and good things find you.