​

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.

I smelled the odor of permanent marker. 

"Call this number if you get arrested." Blank ink stood out boldly on my forearm baring a ten digit phone number which she double checked with the number matching on her arm. Her words sounded strangely like music, and I felt almost amused. "This is a lawyer, in Seattle. If you do get arrested, you only have to give them your name, your birthdate, and, uhm, your address." 

"Okay, thanks." The numbers are easy to read. I smiled. Kayaktivists and people on shore alike were gathered in protest of the Shell oil drilling rig headed for the arctic. The rig left Seattle before dawn trying to avoid what has been a revelatory turnout of small boats in the water blocking its passage during its unwelcome visit to our water. So the event in Port Townsend came together only over the course of the day as groups organized up and down the Salish Sea / Puget Sound to meet the pillared behemoth in the water. 

I only arrived about an hour before the lawyer's phone number is on my arm, parking my bike and walking over to the marina where my boat is stored and paddling over to a small group of others in the bay. We formed a large raft of multiple kayaks, and steered our funny group around, singing and chanting as we held each other's boats to keep us all together. Rocking on the water like loud, colourful driftwood. 

"We are rising up like the phoenix from the fire
Brothers and sisters, spread your wings and fly higher,
We are rising up like the phoenix from the fire
Brothers and sisters, spread your wings and fly higher,
We are rising up, we are rising up
We are rising up, we are rising up."

Some had been here for hours already. Others had been on the move since 4 AM when word got out the ship was leaving Seattle. 

"What do we want?!"
"Climate justice!"
"When do we want it?!"
"Now!"

We gather on shore to regroup. I gather it's been slow-going deciding if we will go all the way out into the rough waters or not, if it's safe to hold signs or carry flags since the wind seems to be getting worse, and there's miles of white cap choppy waves between us and Shell. Motor boats decide to tow kayaks across the open sea with the intention of getting into the kayaks nearer to the rig, across Admiralty Inlet. 

In the time between breaking the kayak-raft to come to shore and leaving for the open water, the group's energy elevated. Where before I was feeling surprisingly calm, tranquil but engaged, I was starting to feel sad from the level of stress and urgency I was watching multiply itself around me. 

What is the point of doing any of this if what we build is negativity? - the same poison that has closed our hearts enough to think we need things like oil to meet our needs, to continue to perpetuate violence (as a feeling)? My anger for what we were doing wasn't helping me, I knew, because I didn't feel as good as I had when I arrived. Of my entire experience this evening, this was the low point. The hum of unanchored adrenaline on the beach felt heavy inside me, and I longed for a place to express the collective grief I could feel, right on the surface, and our anger, for something much more than our own sense of being behind schedule or worry about waves. For our broken culture. For war and desolation. For our feeling of hopelessness. 

So I sat down on an old bleached log and prayed, my arms hanging from my paddle, forehead pressed on the oiled wood, the strings from my hat taught at my neck as it hung against my back, feet tucked into the many colours of pebble-y sand, my eyes closed and caressing the inside my chest, searching my heart for the place to rest from again. 

I wished our signs read "TOGETHER ON THE WATER" instead of "SHELL NO". I longed for us to know the stories of everyone who drives their ships. To see where in their family line their hearts were closed. To understand why. Because if one ship went down, another would come, but people are more unique than that, and there's a reason culture pushed them that way. I imagine the stories of everyone on the beach with us, and everyone who has protested this machine's intended work, and the war against the war this rig represents to us. I listened for earlier memories of myself in the same withdraw. I listened to my breath, and I listened to the waves, and the seagulls, and I let the sound of everything else take a higher volume than my thoughts, and wash my heart until I felt calm again. I could hear the Love that was behind the wind in the Sails of Stress in people's voices. I felt gratitude for the simple action of standing in the way. For my own sense of resolve. For all the hard work and organizing. We live in crazy times. We are only bridgers. Working together, doing the best we can. 

Another woman comes to us. "You know I prayed this morning that the Earth would come up and swallow that thing, and guess what? That's exactly what it did, it got grounded in the mud at Brainbridge Island earlier today. Stuck in the low tides." For some reason, her comment irritated me at first, because I wasn't praying for anything bad to happen to the thing, only for my own resolve, so that I could feel connected again. The moment passed when I realized she didn't have to "get it". We may express our Need to be here this evening in different ways. We may pray differently. And that's okay. Our ability is only to say what is true for us, (and seeking that Truth is enough to keep us entertained for a Lifetime). Not one over the other. Together.

By the time I was in a motorboat, pulling away from shore with our kayaks in tow, I felt expansive peace again. Three of us in the boat, and one in their solo kayak holding on, riding along side us sometimes, and paddling others. 

An hour or so on the water, the waves are high, and we're moving slowly keeping track of the towed boats and each other. A bottle-nosed dolphin is cresting near us. Ducks, coots, seagulls, a seal, and piles of bull kelp also make appearances. Bald eagles chased by crows at the windswept firs lining the northern bluffs. An expansive view of the Olympic Mountains I've never seen before, from this far spot across the water. Awe. And less than 8% our usual snow pack this year, which you can see, because you can't see much white. We do see the rig around the tip of Marrowstone Island. The ship is an astonishing shape to me. I built my baidarka (kayak), and every step of the way (in its thousands of years of wise iteration) was the consideration of how it would move thru the rough ocean waters, how it would be carefully designed to paddle the sea, to be itself a skeleton that knew how to drink turbulence and keep its own course in wild conditions. Its materials, too, an expression of the landscape, a continuum of forest to ocean. A tradition of unity, sustenance, and communion. The giant rig in front of us was so odd! I could hardly believe it wanted to move in any direction, let alone in a straight kind of line. It lumbered through the waves. Coast guard boats motored at its either side, like loyal dogs in uniform, their noses stuck up to sniff the wind for those (like us) who would cast themselves in the way. The rig's overall ugliness seemed to me as much a testament to its misplacement in the ecology of this planet as its purpose. And our motorboat needed what it could provide.

We're in constant white-caps now, getting newly wet by the Pacific Ocean which was being anything but Passive. If I thought the oil rig was ugly, soon a cruise ship passes between us and the rig, and I can't help but think how iconic this picture is. We saw our other boat towing kayaks turning away from the scene, and for the shore. A large freighter is making its way to pass between the cruise ship and us (which is between us and the rig) and it's nearly right in line with us. "Wow, it's bookin' it." None of us speak anything else about it. While before, at least our boat could amount in size to the size of the waves we were facing, looming below the freighter we're nothing but a speck. I want nothing more than to be headed perpendicular to this enormous ship tearing through the water, but our solo person paddling in their kayak is struggling to turn his boat that direction - with the way the tides are pushing us, to be in line with the freighter is what a boat wants to do, but it's the last place I want to be. How is it such a massive ship moves so quickly? It blasts forward, ripping a white seam in the salt water and the edges with it into the sky, just so it can smash itself into its own spray like someone slapping their own face. 

It passes maybe 100 yards from us. I feel amazed. Sensing we were safe, a mixture of scared and calm, nothing comforting about being in such proximity to something so deadly. As we struggled to keep our small boat oriented in the direction of the beach, the freighter peeled in front of the cruise ship and the oil rig, like turning a page in a book. Carrying important cargo from one far place to the next.

These are bizarre visual metaphors to witness when one is gratefully wrapped in the borrowed coat of the very capable driver of a small motor boat, as the water splashes us again, and I see my kayak turn over and begin to fill with water. 

We weren't reaching anyone on the radios. 

The only way to tip the kayak in a way that it wouldn't fill with water more was to bring it into the motor boat and dump the water in with us, so it's what we did. Putting my weight on the far side of the boat so they could pull it up on the other. We released it back to the ocean. The other kayak flipped minutes later, followed again by mine, so we held them on board with us until we reached the northernmost tip of Marrowstone Island, leaning forward so the motor boat's bow wouldn't dive. The coast guard followed us by circling orange helicopter, their noses stuck down to make sure they could rescue those who would cast themselves into the cold ocean. 

We couldn't be near our solo kayaker anymore, and we saw a speed boat catch up to check on him, so we knew the three of us could split and motor for the beach. When we landed, we met with half the others, the rest already on their way back to town. We hug and pull the boats ashore, splitting the water and food we have with us - a banana, an apple, a granola bar, chocolate - equally. Like the story of Jesus sharing fish and bread, it's all enough, and we feel satiated by our survival. A yellow "shell no" flag staked in the sand, we sing to the ocean as the sun sets the clouds beautifully and Shell slowly continues on course for the arctic until it passes behind the lighthouse out of our sight. 

"earth and ocean, 
sand and rolling sea
wind in motion, fire be lit in me. 
Sail away,
let me fall down to 
earth and ocean..."

It's summer, and the air and sand is warm, I've dried nearly completely by the time we're driving back in the dark. Gathering things left at the beach in town, loading and unloading kayaks, checking in and splitting off. Because I'm house-sitting, Bellingham people can come over for midnight dinner and a place to sleep, and we eat salmon and garden vegetable soup, integrating. The permanent marker comes off my arm easily in the shower.

The reason I consider this event a "success" is the number of people I knew whose connection we built upon, and the number of people I met for the first time with whom I now have a new connection. Not a large quantity - but a genuine quality of seeing new facets of the human experience thru relationship with others. This revolution is about connection. 

It is the absence of relationships with others that lead us to believe we need to meet our needs so far outside our immediate lives that we must harm the world we live within to satiate our emptiness. Yesterday morning, the summer solstice, a group of us met for a ceremony on the beach, and swam into the cold ocean, and as I rolled out, a song rolled out of me which we were soon singing around the fire we made to return to.

"Many a cold mornin I swam in the ocean
return to the fire and the warmth of our friends
we sing to the dawn and we sing to each other
and we feel the ocean, it never will end." 

Isn’t that what this new culture is about remembering? We celebrate together in simple ways that awaken our bodies that we put to good use, hard work, and honest hearts that endure storms and streams, darkness and snow, and sunlight and summers. From being a lover of this world, skills continue to grow. 

This revolution isn't happening fast, and it shouldn't. 

While it is satisfying to put ourselves in front of a ship as a testament to our love, grief, anger, solidarity, and integrity -- the act itself isn't what's sparking the change. It is also the shifts in our every-day lives. In our awareness of our piece in the whole - the whole of our towns, our neighborhoods, and our families - and the wounds and roles we carry from those places that become our gifts as healers. Because we care, we are able to feel what it is like to be entranced by the Life that makes us feel a part of this planet. That we carry precious cargo. And that takes time. Sensation and memory accumulating in the cells of our bodies like slow-release fertilizer. We must choose to do what is nourishing to our spirits so we can carry our strength with us in this way. 

My first teacher in shamanic healing imparted to me early on, that shamanism is not a tool, it is a life path. It is about being in it every moment, listening, and moving. Shamanic healing is simply - at its core - choosing Love, and acting from that place. A place you can act from all the time, 'cause Spirit's definitely going to call on you if you're ready to pick up.

To do this, there is much that must be done in the way of celebration, and also in the way of grief. For the spectrum of these things, we need each other to hold what is impossible to see pass thru only one person at a time. We need other people, yes, and also other plants, landscapes, elementals, animals, minerals, and guides of all kinds. We need our dreams, and we need our attention. 

Find ways to talk with each other. Send that oil rig into the ground by becoming grounded yourself, and in your own soil, find the ways that truly nourish your Soul. We live in crazy times. Our generation won't see a healed world. And a forest will never proclaim it is done with its work. 

We are only bridgers. Whatever we do, we do together.

#shellno

"How long does it take to do that?" 
A common question to artists, tending to be asked by "non-artists". It's really the first line to a never-ending cosmic joke as we're all artists in one way or another and at some level we know that really it took us every moment of our life up to now to be ready to create what it is we're examining this question by. Be it a poem, a clay pot, or a house, there's a level of time not measured when you take into account all of its story and our attentive thoughts to its creation, and all its iterations.

As an example, I will use a poem called "Don't Miss Out" I wrote in October. 

Chapter Style!!!! (You can also use the fancy yellow box on the right side of the screen -->)

Little line pairings start to dance together. 
An overall theme gets stuck in my mind. 
One sensory-rich memory lingers right on the edge of having words. 

The Poem "Don't Miss Out" probably truly started in 2010 when I became aware of the concept "Fear Of Missing Out" -- FOMO -- which I noticed made people I knew arrive late for one thing to leave early for the next, never settling into their experience in any given situation. (I know it is not always the case for attending many things: that one always sacrifices their presence. Only was my observation from that time - when I felt the FOMO notion was ridiculous). 
Parts of this poem started to live in snippets in a document "Don't Miss Out" on my desktop in September as I was traveling in Oregon. 
Parts of it started to live in my now-exposed addiction to swimming in very cold rivers.
I was at a dance in Olympia, on my way back North, and one song actually had the words "Don't Miss Out"; it struck me.
There was another, separate doc called "I don't care about politics" that started when elections began to get closer. -- And the bit about friends being advisors I had woken up thinking about one morning before the Incident with the Tree.

I'm walking along North Jacob Miller Rd. back in Port Townsend, where I live. I had come here to take a photo of a particular signboard declaring "WATCH FOR NEWTS". In the wet season, they do like to cross the road, and yes, people do stop and move them along so they don't get squished. I find this action of honoring slimy, fragile amphibian life to be much more significant than any other action taken by consequence of the other signboards posted in late autumn...

All of a sudden, it's there. A dead mossy tree. It is significant, standing in the throat of a green tunnel that opened up in the forest along the road, and hit me square in the heart. I "knew" instantly that it was a poem, standing there with soft green moss all over it - already its own syllables of rainforest loveliness and eeriness and interest. What I DIDN'T know, which I almost never do when these things hit, was that the poem in this case, was in fact, "Don't Miss Out", the poem that had been rolling around in my mind for nearly six weeks. What I really didn't know, was that this other "don't care about politics" poem was also the same. And it was the moment with the dead mossy tree that made me sit down that evening and write it.

Read: The moss made me do it.
Read: The newts made me do it.

Three hours.

Confession: I'm kind of impulsive. 
I write the thing and post it on Facebook after little more than a spell check. About half the time - and in the case of "Don't Miss Out" -  I'm actually writing it in my Facebook Status Update. Why? I'm not really sure. Because the header is a picture on the farm I worked in for four years. A place I love more dearly than I can express. It's a consistent "virtual office" that exists anywhere in the world there's internet enough to get to the crazy blue and white Facebook world, and it used to be the only place I published my writing at all. 

I follow the same sorta-slip-shoddy post-and-editing style for these blog posts.

I edit, I move things around, I change words, usually the next day. 
Not much change other than errors. But if you thought you read it differently yesterday, you're probably right. I'm no professional.

I post immediately because otherwise I wouldn't. The next day, sometimes I wake up in the morning wondering if I really "got it right". Second-questioning if it's my story or the poem's story. Second-questioning if the essence is there for-true. If the picture is the right one that matches the Moment. And the next day I wake up, and read it more than once. And as the week goes on, I read it often. And I'm always surprised and honored by the words.

Every now and again, I edit something several months old. 
I'm a little bit of a perfectionist. I keep going back. 

Yet, the essence of the poem never changes, even from when it was felt, before words. I can never change it more than to clarify one word here, a little punctuation there... never big changes. Ever! If I tried, then poem would say, "Nope."

I felt a lot of relief after I wrote "Don't Miss Out". I don't think I'd really held on to an idea for such a long time and truth be told, I felt a little cynical about its origin because in a way it was a retaliation on the life I was witnessing around me during my time in Oregon. I felt like in a way I was bragging, proud of my life, and in a way I was begging, wishing more people felt proud of theirs, and overall I didn't really like it! Ha! 
So there was some editing about my feelings about it that happened in the aftermath too, because I think I feel my own cynicism more than anyone else can. In any case, when it was done, I felt like I could "move on". And it grew on me.

The poem picked itself.
A friend invited me to an open mic at The Boiler Room. Whoa. I'd never read my poetry out loud before. Really, I hadn't even been reading them out loud to myself. The idea had started to trickle in my mind maybe three months prior, and I learned about a few open mics in town. With an invitation? I printed out a few and figured that when I went, I'd feel into which ones wanted to be shared.
I read a short poem about how rainy it had been that day, and then I read "Don't Miss Out", and another one I wrote for my cousins in Bend. People's reactions were very heart-opening. I returned the next week and read another poem. I was getting pretty high from all the sharing, and also from listening -- I enjoy open mics for their diverse swath of community talent. It's very touching. I was excited to share more places. My friend is the coordinator for "First Friday Story Night" and there's a rule about "oral tradition only" for the open mic portion. That means no reading. I asked if there was any exception? She said no. 

Okay. The Boiler Room was easy in a way because I didn't think many people I knew would be there. Mostly strangers? Awesome. First Friday Story Night is a lot of my community. Scarier. Memorizing? Never my forte. Remember the previous chapter about writing? The words come and they go and how in the world was my mind gonna go back and take in their exact order more slowly? I'd never memorized a poem before. Well, I could pick a short one, and I could do that for my first time. 

Guess who wanted to be memorized? You got it, 3 pages of "Don't Miss Out". 
The long poem I didn't even really like. I tried to think of doing others, but they weren't the One.

I recorded myself reading it -- a couple times, so I wasn't memorizing by too many stutters -- and listened to nothing else for a week straight. By the day of, I had it! I did it at least 5 times without the recording. 

Although things did not go so smoothly at the mic, it was still received with a standing ovation, and I was flushed with greater than ever appreciation for the words. 

I'd NEVER done that before.

Now, I read poems out loud when I write them. The Atmosphere seems to like it. 
I read them to friends, too. 

The most common question I get about this poem is, "What is a crag?" Which I would not have known without my introduction and induction into the world of rock climbing in 2008. [Wiki Crag.]

In College, my 2012 thesis was titled "Placemaking and the Ripple Effect of Community Organizing and Sustainable Culture Building" ... and in those days I was astounded continuously by how widely and deeply Placemaking projects effected people, and these days I am astounded still by how widely and deeply our little every-day actions give us tools and inspire others. 

May 2014, it's two days before Portland Village Building Design Course and I need paints for our rock painting exercise. My friend Cait emerges from the basement with this gem: 

created by our friend and stellar natural builder, August "Auggie" Mann. I've done the rock painting a lot of times with acrylic paint... these are even better. Straight up clay and pigments, in an egg carton painted on the interior with beeswax. The paint will exist on the rock until it rains. It will inspire the student to check on it, wonder what's happening to it, as the weather washes it. Their art is ephemeral. Lovely while it's there, inevitably melting. Forever reverberating with their care and attention. The perfect pair to my paintbrushes, added to the VBDC-teaching-toolkit.
(As a side, I notice no difference in the level of effort put out by the students if they know the paint is clay or acrylic -- whether it will wash away or not, students always make them beautiful.)

Fast forward, November, I'm passing through Portland and it's my mentor, Mia Van Meter,'s birthday and we go out to coffee, walking in the cold-cold to the nearest neighborhood corner-shop. We spend a bit of time talking about her "Solar Returns" astrology chart -- which is a planetary map drawn up for someone's birthday giving a tone for the year -- generally catching up, singing songs back and forth to each other. Somewhere along the way the bit in "Don't Miss Out" about asking your friend for advice comes up. I ask, "Do you want to hear the whole poem? (since now I have it memorized!) it will take me 5 minutes to recite it." She does. I do.
And she wonders, "You don't like it??" 
I grin, "Well, I do. I feel hot from the inside whenever I speak it. And it makes me all jittery."

This week, Mia declares that she has a wonderful Solstice present for me, however, it requires my help. I say I'm game. The vision: very light watercolour background, blueish-green, "Don't Miss Out" printed over it. Mia's bought special thin watercolour paper that will fit in a printer. She's inspired.

I brought Auggie's clay paints with me to use for another purpose. Now, we tried them as watercolours. They worked! Neither Mia or I had watercoloured much at all. For about an hour, we painted over each others' brush strokes and filled in spaces.

[Editing, Part 2]: 
For the following hour, I lightly coloured the white edges.

How do the words fit? I like the idea of hand-writing it. 

We let it sit for a couple days.

Mia's oldest son suggests we measure the paper and count the number of lines in the poem and be more mathematical about how it will fit. This is eventually how we come to the layout, 
and how I come to be on the floor of a former City Repair co-conspirator's office, before lunch on Christmas Day, with a drawing pen in hand (a summer gift) and the watercolour background taped to the floor. 

It takes me exactly two runs through Emancipator's album "Safe in the Steep Cliffs" to write it all. 

I gave away my only printed copy of the poem to the first person who asked for it -- the Storyteller at First Friday Story Night in November. Now this is the only copy I have on paper. I'm happy with how it turned out, Mia is thrilled, and our Christmas lunch hosts read it for the first time. Even without reading it, as it is rather long, the colours covey a story too. What if we did this for more of them? I'm inspired.

This poem, all the poems, live and breathe a life of their own. Some of them want to be shared more widely. Others come and go quickly. I read them all over and over again trying to understand my experience in the world, always feeling so grateful for the array of emotion they each Remember for me, and share outwardly. 

There are many stages to this story, full of things I'd never done before. In writing this post, I also learned new things. I had never made navigation like I used for this blog post. Never made a floating menu to the side. Living, breathing, learning system, all depending on what is inspired.

Mia and I look at each other and smile. I walk around, waving the page like a flag or a cape. The poem feels pleased -- maybe even more pleased than either of us -- about the Way of Things. Hand-written on its very own watercolour.
A thought strikes me, "You know that funny question people ask about How Long it Takes to make something? Like how long does it take to do the watercolour and write the poem?" 
We banter a few moments on the topic, covering all the bases I outlined in this post:

Within each chapter of this post, there is a measurement of time. But... does it even make sense to add them? What do you get when you add four years, plus an instant, and fifty+ rounds of 4 minutes and 56 seconds? This post took five hours, and I know I'll edit it later. Never mind the age of rocks and forests that retain themselves as characters within the poem. 


...and she finally concludes, "So, about four hours."
"Right!" I pretend to calculate, "Now, twenty bucks an hour and... done!"

We laugh. Can't measure Love.

[[The Poem: Don't Miss Out]]

I push my boat off the sandy beach and paddle. 
I've still got dirt under my fingernails
And the evening sky is warm and clear, 
enough to see the North Cascades, 
enough to see the Olympics
and me,
balanced between the mountains.

I'm thinking about my upcoming classes.
I realize I long to be like a rock.
Because when a rock soaks up a way of being
on a mountainside or in a riverbed
it becomes infused with its own history and the story of its location.
Imagine it is pulsing with it.

I want to show up and pulse,
let the energy wash over us.
easily and completely
and recognize that all of our pulses from all of our places
create harmony.

Like an Mbira. 
Playing a song on Mbira is like recalling a memory
of when all the voices
represented by the different octaves
were singing together as an ephemeral choir. 
The togetherness around the fire 
captured and able to be shared
many harmonic frequencies
in one instrument. 

Rocks hold a very steady frequency.
When people say, "Crystals
are good for transmitting information."
The term 'information' is kind of used loosely...

When crystals travel somewhere, when they go to a new place
All they do is keep their pulse.
The new place has a pulse, it's different than then its pulse.
And through vibration, 
the rock tells the story of where it came from. 

Some things are better at being 'programmed' with vibrations than others.
If you become good at feeling them
this is how one can transmit information.

Something about a small cave in the high desert in Central Oregon
wants to be taken to the Southwestern United States, 
and my friend picks it up, one rock, that says it wants to go and
doesn't yet know what to do with it
other than listen. 

A stone, I thought was for my boat
falls out of a hole in my pocket I didn't know I had.
It had other plans,
using me only to get where it wants to be for now.
Transferred from the its origin to the Salish Sea.

A forest does this to plants, 
bringing things where they need to grow, 
and the Earth does this to Us, 
moving us to places our work is needed. 

I'm floating as I cut up cheese and carrot.
eating locally -
to have the same bioregion infused into the food
which becomes infused into the body -
helps strengthen a Being's pulse.

It is why it is important to Live in places that feel good to us.
 What am I doing out by the Mill?
I wonder,
and leave a cedar bow
left on my boat from yesterday's ceremony
as an intention of healing,
as a blessing to these waters, 
polluted by our industry.

I can feel myself, a nice big rock,
dense and speckled,
floating out in the sea in my kayak.
Nothing but a vibration.
A rock, sitting in the middle of class...

Isn't it incredible
that we're alive at the same time?
Let's forget about age for awhile and relish this:
That you and I may pick from the same exact plant
and find nourishment. 

People say, in our culture, you cannot build your own home.
That food is expensive, and you get sick when you're old. 
Hitchhiking's dangerous and the soil is bad.
"Live while you're young and single!" So drab.

I can build my own home, and make soil all the time.
We sing around fires and listen to wind chimes.
And I think the only reason I feel satisfied
is I can look up at this nearly full moon in the sky
and feel as though I don't need to know anything in the world. 

I watch the firelight on the clouds
as the sun goes down
and feel Welcome here.

We must ask ourselves:
Are we in balance with nature?

And we must consider:
We are nature
and balance is the posture of belonging.