I am unsure if I will bring these pieces I wish to share into cohesion, but they are reflections on the most immediate couple of days.

We have started hosting "Grief & Gratitude" Lodges here in Jefferson County Washington -- a community effort for holding space for each others' grief -- and I am deeply appreciating the tone in which we are trying this... that in our culture, we have forgotten how to do this, how to stop what we are "doing" to be with each other when something happens that stirs the deepest parts of us. So we say when we are beginning our ceremony, that we don't know what we're doing, and we're kind of making this up as we go. And stating it in this way I think connects us to the threads of humanity, where we remember that we need to call out for help in remembering how to do this, and that we have always called out for help -- from the guiding spirits, from all the beings who make Life possible, from any name we have called the divine, from our ancestors, and from each other. There is wisdom in knowing that we cannot do this alone. We can try. We can cry for hours and days and weeks alone, and it is honorable to choose to feel, and out of it we may realize how many hundreds of thousands of others are grieving the same way. Alone. 

We do have guidance from those who have shared rituals for this work, Melidoma & Sobonfu Somé, Stephen Jenkinsen, Francis Weller, our dear elder Laurence Cole, and the courage of everyone in our community who is choosing to show up for this work. It is courage because it is, in a way, still an act of independence, to choose to share grief, and support grief in others, when today it is not so automatic, not so readily available, not often modeled. 

Why has this happened? Why if all of consciousness lives in each of us must we struggle and suffer and come so far into a place of wreckage of the earth and our bodies and our spirits? 

Children are naturally hungry for understanding how to Live on this planet. It was a five year old I heard wailing with his whole heart who inspired the poem "Galactic Grievers". Two mornings ago, I sat on my front porch, on the phone with my mentor, and I had been crying for ten or fifteen minutes before I realized that the 4 year old I live with was watching me from the other porch. This child will walk with me in the forest and when a spider web crosses our path, he will follow it to find the spider and watch it for a while, before we gently break the strand and move along. He wants to see the world. He wants to see grief. He doesn't interrupt because he is learning. I don't hide because I love him enough to show him the truth about my life and what I feel. I keep crying. Later, when I have stopped, and he has stepped into the yard, we blow kisses to each other with smiles. But both the crying and the smiling are happening at once, in this life we are sharing together. His seven-month-old baby sister shows us frequently that our capacity to laugh and cry simultaneously is a natural human ability.

And out of this symphony of Being, music carries the revelations of our life into songs we sing and share with each other. Songs which echo our griefs and songs which carry the lessons we draw from them. Great thanks to music for holding us.

Grief and Praise -- Martín Prechtel says -- they sleep in the same bed. Our heart and our lungs rest on the bed of our diaphragm, and the same muscles are used, our same abilities are exercised, when we truly grieve, and when we are truly joyful. 

We are always all of our ages. There is a child inside all of us which longs to understand how to cope with living in this world in a way that uplifts everyone in our lives. In a way that honors the Love we carry and wish to express, for we all have Love to express, and we all long for our Love to be needed. There is an elder inside of us that knows how.

All place-based cultures through time knew ritual to be work, important work, the work of tending to our grief, others' grief, the stuff of Life on this planet. It has been said that seventy percent of all life was preparing for ritual, doing ritual, or processing ritual. By creating space to fully Love that which has been so meaningful to us, we remember that this life does have meaning, and that our connections with one another and our connection to our self and our unique expression of life matters.

I sense nothing about that has changed. We are each, seemingly alone, as individuals, experiencing a life in which seventy percent of our life is preparing for ritual, doing ritual, or processing ritual. We have all been preparing for the ritual of coming together to create community, because first we had to know loneliness. There are billions of people experiencing loneliness. I have experienced loneliness. Part of my loneliness rises up in a desire to share these words with you. Because I know you will understand. Because I know you have loved, and lost, and dreamed. You've been disappointed, and you've been celebrated, and you've felt profound things, and all of them have passed in a wave of impermanence that left you feeling hollow. Because I know how meaningful it has been for me to hear another person tell me how I've made a difference in their life, and how it's inspired me to share with others what I have learned from our connection, and to share the songs of our Place and the culture we are creating.

​There is a courage to use words honestly about what we feel, to remember that we all feel the same thing. To sing our stories alive. The journey we all go through is so similar and yet for each of us long to know that our personal visions matter. We must hold the other up in their visions too for their life, so we can experience what it is like for others to hold us in ours.

So we know we are needed. So we know we need each other. 

We are all involved in the evolution of the human species. There is nothing wrong with what we feel or what we have done. Love has the power to transform us. In an instant, we can feel everything that has ever been felt, and know that it was true, and what we feel in this Earth Life brings us all simultaneously to laughter, to tears, to rage, to resting, to curiosity, to great thankfulness, and to peace, because there is space for it, just as the Earth has demonstrated, there is space for it, and we are allowed to feel these things.

Have you not felt all of these things? 

Barbara Kingsolver writes, "In my opinion, when you find yourself laughing and crying both at once, that is the time to write a poem." I think she is right, although, it is difficult to find words for the feeling that all of life is always happening at once. We are all one consciousness, and all of time past and future exists inside of each of us, already. It is what makes us able to make great leaps in evolution and growth inside of ourselves, when we let our bodies tell us what we need... when these moments happen... of simultaneous union of feelings... I find I almost cannot remember what happened, because it lives as an experience inside of me, and therefore in all of consciousness, and it doesn't need words to be a poem. All of life becomes a poem and the way it is written is in the living landscape of the world we are creating with our Kindness.

Every person is a piece of one great consciousness, near and far, everyone and everything living, and the people we are physically sharing our life with are worthy of our attention, praise, gratitude, respect, and courage to connect with in a true way.  Celebrate where our visions align and let go with grace where our threads lead us in different directions, knowing that we are still all part of the same cloth and will never be disconnected from each other, so we don't need to sacrifice our personal expression for fear of loosing connection.

We can only become more connected. More embedded. 

I feel it almost as a promise to know that this world can only become more beautiful. 

It is a worthy struggle, to go inside oneself and into the chaos of darkness, and then emerge into the physical world to open the eyes to the eyes of another and speak words of Kindness. Our actions may be only for ourselves, but our words and our Love for others live eternally. They will live forever in the memories others, and in the landscape itself, which will provide the material for our expression, and the physical world in which our physical lives depend. 

What is it that you need? It is the need of everyone. 

And soon everyone's life, through all their struggles, will be living proof of miracles.

​

I showed him this video from this summer's Working Song ---
as we sing Laurence's song,
   "Busy yourself making beauty,
    busy yourself making love,
    busy yourself making friendship,
    and everything else will work out,"
​--- Mike is heartened. 

​He says, on the ferry, people used to talk to each other, play games, and now everywhere you look people are on their phones. But here we are, building the culture of working together again!
"Keep up the good work!" He says. 

​Seeing these old videos of the Railroad Gandydancers is inspiring, and also humbling. We are doing good work for sure, and we have a ways to go, continuing, as we engage in this work as free people. We can make it the norm for us to work together again, to talk with each other again, to sing with each other again, and with every generation, better than before. With every generation, more just than before. With every generation more beautiful, and more healing. People have always -- long before the railroads, long before slavery -- done this, this work of singing together, of working together, of being together. Sometimes to merely cope with the grief of life and the need to live and work despite the circumstances. Sometimes out of pure joy. Sometimes more seen than others, but it has never died, and it will never die. We can only be carriers, continuing to use these tools we have to create a better world, every day, today, right now. 

We have a long ways to go. Let's keep working.

Here is two more recent videos of some working-and-singing together, as we prepare and install an earthen floor at the Port Townsend Ecovillage. 

​​The opportunity to work on this project came at a turbulent time for me... things were stressful, and I realized I needed a daily practice and could think of only one thing that I really wanted to do every day --- swim in the ocean. Day One of this personal commitment, members of the Ecovillage were also at the beach, at our regular swim spot. They expressed a need for help with their earthen floors. I happened to be out of work for the rest of the month. 

While I was an answer to their immediate prayers, they were an answer to a specific prayer I made back in the spring, for clients who would offer my opportunities within my skillset where we would create something beautiful on their land with people I love. 

The whole project has been full of mutually beneficial expressions. A consistent stream of angels passing through Port Townsend have put their love and song into the mud. Thanks especially to Marlow, Searra, and Liat, helping hands from out of town, Dan for your commitment to helping with what ever is happening, and Gretchen for your neighborly enthusiasm. Thanks also to the crew of a dozen or so friends who helped us harvest clay that had fallen from the high cliffs down onto the beach where we swim (and I'm so grateful we only got a warning and not a ticket for our illicit activities!) Thanks for Terri & Jim for being amazing people, coordinating the whole project and working harder than anyone, and being open to collaboration, and for Bekka entrusting us to work on your room. To everyone who brought and taught and sang songs. It's an honor to work with all of you. This project has had a lot of ups and down and I'm proud of us for persisting and finding solutions through trial-and-error-and-error-and-embracing-the-process-and-error-and-working-and-success. 

The floor is dry and ready for oil this week. 

One more story I'd like to share from this job site. 

Yesterday was a slow day, mostly at spent at home, contemplating, grieving, creek swimming, sun laying. I finally came to work in the late afternoon. I was there about ten minutes, making a whole bunch of noise chopping straw with a weed whacker. At some moment, I looked up and saw a huge heron walking across the lumber pile. Ha! I couldn't contain myself... since the weed whacker was then off, I yelled, "What are you DOING here? You're so beautiful!" It was the closest I've ever been to heron, the pleating dark and white neck feathers, the subtle colours, the graceful movements of its neck. I called Jim out of the house to see, and it didn't pay us much mind as we kept our distance enough.

With my yelling out of the way, I followed silently for some time and my heart felt like it was generating a bubble of happiness the size of the entire neighborhood block. The heron walked the rest of the lumber, back to the foam insulation, across the sand pile (I'm peeking around the big machine of a mortar mixer to see it), around the house, and through the neighbor's garden, finally flying over me toward the swing set... all in hot sunny-September dry-land. How unusual! Earth and its creatures know just the right medicine needed for these kinds of days; awe and a little bit of humour. A heron on a lumber pile. Hearing protection and respirator dangling off my face. Unexpected and odd beauty. Goodness. 

I have been oscillating much recently with the work-track I've gotten myself on or into, somehow, busy with building projects. I often doubt that this - building - is really what I'm "supposed" to be doing. I feel like Jaber Crowe, in the novel by Wendall Berry, who comes upon barbership in his life pretty much by continuous happenstance.

But I think I made peace with doing building projects; there is no need to force another way of being in the world prematurely. This is good, how it is, now. I used to hesitate when I would say, "I'm a builder." Am I? I'm a poet. Am I? I'm an astrologer. Am I? I'm an organizer. Am I? I'm a gardener. Am I? I'm a griever. A healer. Who am I? 

And it's clearer to me now: it is much easier to manifest a feeling than an actual thing, a path, a picture. And the feelings of working with people who value song, ritual, deep connection, grief, patience, healing, love... this is coming to me through the building world - to my surprise? Not really, surprise, but sort of surprise. Definitely humble delight. Now I say, "I'm a builder," and underneath my words, I know what I mean. I mean something literal, and I mean that I doubt myself sometimes and that's okay. I mean I build with and share my life with people who value song, ritual, deep connection, grief, patience, healing, and love. And it's maybe just for now, and it's certainly only one part of me. But it is a reflection of all of me, and all of us, and we're doing it well, as well as we can. 

I am - we all are - souls in a body, growing slowly. We are always in a continuous state of becoming. Becoming ourselves. Coming home to ourselves. We are messy and ungraceful and full of boundless creativity. And we're here to grow. To bump into each other and learn from each other, honor each other, let go of each other, embrace each other, be alone, be together, sing, dance, yell, sit, express, silence.

And we absolutely need each other, to hear each other's stories, to work together to protect our Home. To fight for our Home. To stand up for what we know is right of us, right for Earth, right for water, air, soil, people, creatures of all kinds. We need each other to do this. 

​It all reminds me, magic exists everywhere, every day, every way, with every one.
​Singing thanks.

There is a group of us - travelers, locals, family, friends, lovers of the world - gathered around the dinner table at Fern Hollow. Some of us, including me, are almost 2,000 miles from our home of the northern Cascadian rainforests, taking in the old beauty and birdsong of the Driftless region of the mid-west; never glaciated old forests and fossil creek beds and deeply kind-hearted people, in Decorah, Iowa, in the home of Liz Rog & Daniel Rotto. 

Many times I hugged my fellow companions from Port Townsend and could only say "We're in Liz Rog's kitchen in Decorah, Iowa."

Deanna Pumplin might chuckle, "I know! What are you doing here??"

Wild. Wild means something so different now, not only the exquisite wilderness of the Olympic Mountains, or the changing courses of Canoe Creek, but the taste of a great homemade wine, or the feeling of holding someone you love thousands of miles from where you usually see them. Like geese flying high, like doing something you've never done before, like the wine sliding down the tunnel of our throats, like speaking truth. 

Laurence Cole says, "We're a long way from home, but you people are who I live with." 

I am learning perhaps culture lives inside something much bigger than just a place. Though each place I have been has put itself within me - wood nettles, forest licorice, sugar maples - and other travelers bring things from their places - rhubarb wine, ceremonial cacao, fresh sunflower oil. I think it's impossible to know exactly what we're "supposed" to be "doing" to do "good things" in the world right now. I do not believe there is a way that it should look, like planting trees, or making houses out of mud, painting the street or carving spoons, or singing songs together -- any of these things can be done without opening ones heart to experience what it all means to us. 

What I feel, having been back in Port Townsend for less than 24 hours, having driven alone across the country - there and back - is the necessity of doing only what it is that I Love, and working with those that I Trust. We have the capability to travel across the world, in a way that isn't going to last much longer, and who knows for what purpose or to what detriment. I don't know that we can know. We can opens our heart :: to love, to fear, to anger, to joy, to music, to tears, to Life. And choose to live inside of all of it. To sing inside of all of it. Wildly.

Village Fire is the gathering which inspired this trip across the county. There are so many people to name which made the photo below a possibility, and Liz Rog shared the grand tale of the Sky Lodge's journey on opening night of the gathering. My piece in its way was agreeing to bring the Sky Lodge from the west coast to Iowa. I met the Sky Lodge's maker - Jaybird Cramer - in Bend, Oregon and we left the four tarp pieces and rope with dear friends in Bend. Our friend Nick Wenner picked them up and delivered them to Port Townsend a few days before I would leave in Aimée Ringle's two-door Honda Civic. Set up, a fire in the center and 200 singing people can fit under one of these fantastic outdoor structures, and now Village Fire has one of its own.

It's one of those things - like a set a paints or a musical instrument - that is physical and yet will be the vessel for countless memories, the universe itself expanding all the time. 

The hour of arriving in Decorah, Iowa, two and a half days of driving, a convergence began:

From left to right: Ida Rotto (daughter of Liz, co-organizer of Village Fire), Liz Rog (organizer of Village Fire), and Mila Redwood (organizer of Singing Alive Kauai), Hannah Poirier (organizer of Working Song). Preparing for the gathering was such an honor to do with these wonderful women.

I'm struggling to find words for what I wanted to share here about what I'm bringing back for Working Song Gathering. This trip has been life-changing, some aspect of describing the 'outcomes' is feeling mechanical. The moments of tears and tenderness, and harmony and discourse all folding into something of a generator inside, making new cells in my body's life. And here we go with an outcome: so, Ida brought an organizing structure called "8 Shields" from her school in California. Working Song has started to model our organizing structure on the Singing Alive structure of "ensembles" (using Dynamic Governance). I'm looking forward to figuring out how we can spread out the responsibilities and tasks of the group by what people care about by meshing together the ensembles, the diagram Mia Van Meter & I developed over David Holmgren's Permaculture domains flower, and fit it inside the 8 Shields model so that we can collaborate with Village Fire. 
​
This looks like: ensembles + permaculture = 8 shields for Working Song. 

Why 8 Shields? In short, my love for the people who run Village Fire. It is interesting to me, for our first Working Song in February we didn't use a formal structure, but we had a large group of people who were holding various aspects of the gathering - opening ceremonies, food, venue, song circles, craft teachers - and through many individual meetings the sharing of responsibilities naturally flowed to people's desire to help. With no structure, though, Spring Working Song showed us we need something to hold us together. I find it exciting to use something like 8 Shields so we can use the same language as another organizing group to collaborate on organizational structures and growth of an organization. It is also true that I like the 8 Shields model, but every organizational structure I've been inside of deviates from what is intended. There's what is "ideal" and then there's who is there to do it. What I see helps groups the most is not having the most perfect structure, but the people within having Love for each other, and the structure allowing for people to connect in a genuine way.

​We sing. We sing all the time, for joy and gratitude, grief and sorrow and silliness. For revolutions, for peace. Music unites us.

When we left Village Fire, the first text message I received was from my birth-father, who told me about the shooting at Pulse in Orlando, Florida, where he and his wife had their first date. 49 people killed. All the more, facts on climate change, war, social justice, key species die offs becomes more quantified, qualified, measured by sciences. On my drive across the country, I passed dozens of fracking facilities. And what will change us? 

Some of my favourite words on the topic are by Gus Speth: "I used to think the top environmental problems were biodiversity loss, ecosystem collapse and climate change. I thought that 30 years of good science we could address those problems. But I was wrong. The top environmental problems are selfishness, greed, and apathy... and to deal with those we need a spiritual and cultural transformation, and we scientists don't know how to do that." 

No single group of people will "know" in a concrete way how to "do that". How to radiate - like an enormous, massive, gravitational sun from the center of your chest and through your whole being - a great Love, how to tend to broken and fearful hearts, how to heal a wounded culture. But when we sing, all differences melt away.

​Another attendee of Village Fire wrote an article in the Iowa City Press-Citizen about such: here.
​

Last night, when I arrived home, I biked to the ocean and ate my dinner there, taking with a friend on the phone for building plans to come this month. Mt. Baker was snowy and pink with sunset and the water was calm. The longest day of the year. Like writing the words "Village Fire" on the calendar, I could never know what the experiences inside this coming project will be. There's the words, and then there is what happens Inside. Sea water washes over my feet, and the water touching me touches all the ocean. So too our hearts touch each other. So too the songs carry our lives.


Only in silence, the word. 
Only in dark, the light.
Only in dying, life.
Bright the hawk's flight on the empty sky.
~ Ursula K. Le Guin

Hey there -- things picked up this summer and I've been working 7 days a week, or traveling away from home. The business aspects of this wild idea of Placecraft are taking off, sometimes running way ahead of me! It has been, at times, overwhelming. Overall, I'm glad about it. I've got a wonderful feeling about winter, sing-ins and craft-ins  with friends, family, and community already bringing us together this autumn. But is is autumn yet? Today it is October 22 and I took off all my sweater layers, it's sunny and hot. Our draught year continues. 

​
Here's some summer photo updates, for a taste of all the clay:

The first set of photos is from a small earthen floor installation just up the mountain from Discovery Bay. This floor cracked a lot and was a good learning experience for me, both because I had to fix the cracking problem, and also because it was the first project I've been the lead builder on in the Jefferson County area. I'm realizing, in a way, this project kicked off my busy summer of mud, and a growth spurt in the business. 

​
The next set of photos is from the First Annual Port Townsend Village Building Convergence.

​
​Can't-stop-us, the weekend after the Port Townsend Village Building Convergence was completed, we jumped right into Cob-N-Straw building series on Marrowstone Island (my new home!). We made two cob walls, two straw-clay walls, and finished the building with an interior clay plaster and exterior lime plaster. The final coat of exterior lime plaster will go on in the spring, after the first coat has has plenty of time to cure. I feel so proud of all of us. Some people came and went only for an hour, others stayed every single work party weekend. Nearly forty different people worked on this wonderful little house, including a few handfuls of kids. This place is full of joy and song. Thank you all so much!

This is the first project in which I took on a workshop leader role as well as lead builder. I feel great about it, and the feedback has been so wonderful as to be quite humbling. I feel thankful for all of my guidance in teaching, particularly from Mark Lakeman of Communitecture, Eva Edleson of FireSpeaking, and Joseph Becker of Ion EcoBuilding. They have grown me so much in the areas of teaching newcomers and coordinating work sites. I learned much of what I know thru years of work parties and I'm glad to be able to share what I have learned and continue to pass on the wisdom of these traditional building technologies. I see no end it to in any time soon.

​
​First heavy rain of the season (and still the only heavy rain of the season) happened the day we finished the Hugelkultur at Song House Sanctuary. Great to see plants go into the new soil! 

Below are photos of finished interior clay plaster for a client building a house out of train shipping containers outside of Port Townsend. Very beautiful finish work!! It is a treasure to work here. Next month, we start building interior cob walls to enclose kitchen space, and pour a small earthen floor.

Warm Muddy Walls - work parties for interior clay plaster on a Faswall house built outside Quilcene, WA.  The Yeakel and Gunn families have been coming out to get muddy together and finish their house. Nice to work with folks who have known each other for so long in such a beautiful place. Thanks to all of you! The Yeakel family has an abundance of horse manure, so this plaster is very manure-rich, composing of roughly 25% of the plaster body. Manure has excellent fine fibers and the active enzymes in the poop help to create a stronger, harder, more durable, and water resistant plaster (chemistry has a field of study on these kinds of "biopolymers"). So far, we are thrilled with the results. 

I continue to build Masonry Heaters with Jason Temple thru TempleFire and this house features a masonry heater built by us in the spring of 2015. It's fun to come back and finish the walls in the house we built this heater for. Jason and I are currently working on a large Russian double bell heater on Bainbridge Island, and you can watch the progress of that stove -- and others -- on TempleFire's Facebook Page.

Personal update in the land of Making Things: 
2015 is my 5th year at Saskatoon Circle - a traditional living skills gathering outside of Twisp, WA. Under the guidance of Ira Christian, five of us made gourd ukeleles, starting from a cherry stick, a gourd, a deer hide, and a goat hide. Five days of carving, drum strapping, nylon stringing, and collecting ponderosa pine pitch, deer poo, and charcol for the pitch glue -- we made fetless instruments that give off a rounded and rich tone. The curved sound holes on the side of the gourd were carved by firelight during the total lunar eclipse... & I was done carving by the time the moon was full and bright again. I love the way this little uke sounds. It's the first stringed instrument I've ever had and I'm enjoying playing it every day!

​With Love & Mud & Music, 
​~ Hannah

This poem is from my body resting on the beach by the Point Hudson Marina in Port Townsend.
​8/23/2015

Being adopted, "nature, nurture" is always been interesting to me, and it continues to have many layers. The soul quality and the active circumstance, the personality and memories, the tendancies and patterns. 
​
My friend Paul Crawford, reflects on this poem:

     "I feel the grains of sand beneath me and they are ancestors going back dozens or hundreds of generations  They're all there.  Every one is propping me up as needed.  And other grains are experiences, my own and those of all those ancestors.  Places we've been, things we've done, things we've learned.  Family and friend, those past and those still with me. Wild places.  And music.  Always music.

     "Oozing out of the firm conforming sand is LOVE.

     "It's a question of whether all those grains are molding me or whether I'm doing the molding.  Are those grains of sand conforming to me or I to them?  The answer must be "Yes"."