My statement of intent for the vision fast

Dear brightly shining path lately disillusioned,

When I was quite small, in all the stories I ate, I knew exactly where the crossroads lay. The moment when the Trickster spills his riddled challenge, when the Crone offers her rigorous medicine. The moment when the Seeker stands in balance between ordinary past and unimagined future, and decides to take that next fateful step. The door through which the Seeker journeys to revelation after trial that he is a Hidden Prince, she a Magic Princess. The bowl in which the epic ingredients of any life (a mere mortal, a long walk away from home, a perfectly impossible task) catalyze into the stuff of myth and truth.

I looked everywhere for these doors, when I was quite small. I was disappointed at first that they were not obvious. That opportunities for adventure and transformation were not offered by every stranger I met, that riddle-solving and medicine-accepting were not taught in school. I adventured in the front yard and learned what I could from story books, and waited.

When I was a little taller I learned a secret. The crossroads are not only for heroines; they are everywhere, and we carry their doors within us. These can be opened, and cannot be closed again. Some we must open, and some we may choose to open. We must choose with care. If we pass through these doors without intention, if we pass the crossroads without wide-open eyes, a sense of moment, a sense of self-defining -- we will not hear the riddle, not receive the medicine. I stopped looking so hard for my own doors as began to feel them rising in me, to feel the Seeker awakening.

Growing tall, I found those doors and met at those crossroads all the riddles and medicine of growing up. In my first menses, first loves, religious taste-testing, teenage cutting, first sex, psychedelic exploration, world travels, self-identifying, I have seen the landmarks which herald the crossroads and showed me the directions of paths into my future. I have stood at these crossroads again and again, and chosen my next steps with as much presence and grace as I could find. I have tried to keep my eyes and heart open, and my feet on the path shining before me. At some point, having reached my full height, I realized my bowl was full also of lessons learned and boundaries crossed. I felt the need to seek transform into the need know. I stopped feeling for doors to open, stopped to use the tools I'd gathered, and deepen my eyes and widen my heart.

Now, I know I am again standing at the crossroads. I recognize this open landscape, this sensation of the familiar and precious falling away, this rising eagerness for the next step on the path. I know I am seeking again. But I cannot see my way. The heralds of this crossroads have been heartbreak and doubt, confusion and clouds across my eyes and heart. I think the door in front of me will take me far from knowing and what I have built, far into being, and seeing, and feeling. This door has a threshold made of fear and love, and I do not know it's name. And I remember the seeking secret I had forgotten in my years of knowing -- that to step through the open door is to step into faith, into unknowing with trust. That every Seeker starts out simple, that revelation begins in clouds. My bowl has been filled and I have eaten, my bowl has been emptied and scoured clean again.

The World Scent sent me Whirling

It's a tricky thing, talking about the way something smells. Unlike our other senses, we have very little common vocabulary for scent, and what we like and don't like is tremendously subjective -- sometimes incomprehensibly so. And all this is biochemically/neurologically strung just so, with all the imagery of Irish lace or dewy spiderwebs you could want. We smell differently. Not just the fragrance of each of us, also the way each of us perceives fragrance. And the way each of us are able to perceive the fragrances of the world. (The winning 2004 Nobel Physiology Prize work explains this beautifully.) And then, there are thousands of chemical compounds in the world, and limitless combinations thereof.

But that's not why it's tricky to talk about. All that is actually totally beside the point; the biology gets us there, but to hang the experience on the wonderful, exquisite and astounding hardware that makes it possible is like talking rods and cones while watching the the Perseid meteor shower under the purple skies of Utah's red desert. (Which I haven't done yet, though it creeps higher on my list of backpack plans every year.) The experience includes and transcends the biological hardware, and the chemical software.

The experience of scent transcends sense of self and preconception, more than any other sense, scent brings us to the immediate moment. And as quick, scent floods our minds with memories and associations, and tickles our body into physiological rapport. Talk about synesthesia! Each inhalation of scent is a microcosm complete, a dream and a true transport and a visceral root. The inhalation breathes into us an expanse that touches our cores and our voids, and the exhalation looses it all to the breeze. I think scent is difficult to discuss because at its depths, scent is a truly an internal -- an individual -- experience, and one that calls up all our own personal myths.

After smelling the concentrated essential oils of strong herbs, deep flowers and sacred woods-- and the fragrant growing world of a Northern California mountainside -- for four days, I think something in my metaneurology has grown. I notice scents more, but I'm also sure I sense scents more. The world smells so beautiful.

Home is There

Give me a backpack for a house and a good pair of hiking boot wings, and I'll be happy with the sunshine and the starlight. Give me a blank book and a properly weighted pen, and I'll entertain myself for days. Street food and the odd wild blackberry and my belly's glad, as long as there are noodles somewhere in it's future. And it turns out a rolled up tarp or nearly empty laundry bag makes a fine pillow.

All the world is a bowl of pleasure and care, and there is still nothing so fine, precious or incomparable as watching the sunrise in the park you have loved since childhood, the gold light of late Wisconsin summer, and warm freshpicked tomato sandwiches with cheese from folks who kiss your cheeks at the farmer's market.

The road is huge and beautiful, and home is always at its end.

Incubation complete!

Remember the first rechargable batteries? How the older they got, the longer you needed to recharge them? I think Compelling Inspiration is like that. The longer you live with it on the periphery, lovely to think about but not the driving core of your days, the harder it is to shine it up and warm it up til it's a perpetual energy engine. Stoke that fire or it will barely flicker forever, making no difference at all in your illumination!

No time like the present.

Sitting in simple presence with 95 others -- in the same pace of growing up, with the same concerns shaking off unhappy programming, the same undirected fervor that now is the time for something -- was a steady positioning of self-conscious sight in the lens of living today. Meeting in the woods with 560 others -- of four generations, with the same

Today I'm back from the women's herb conference, and I'm trying to polish this spark. This past month has been about settling and taking stock, a lot of internal work -- a lot of the time I doubt this "just thinking" (daydreaming, planning, remembering, hoping, fearing, wanting, avoiding, judging, justifying, narrating, actually seeing it all happen in my mind) and I have to call up patience to sit with it, still, and let this unravelling thing soften me up. Like a roast in Brother's crockpot. The meditation retreat was one thing, familiar, skill-building for its own sake. But a weekend with these women!, these herbs, this great yawning healing wellspring of magic; this is another continuum altogether. The weekend storming, in hurricane tail and drumming and honest voices, familiar in my marrow but like having my old face wiped away with snakeskin. A tipping point, I can feel something churning up in the silt of my soul, some molten thing sliding up behind me, some ladder urging me outward, upward, forward. And I'm ready to go.

No time like the present.

My dear, that thing you love, that you have always loved since you opened your eyes, that your body pulls to with the honest magnetics of trust; do that thing. Once. Today. Now.

Again.

"Yes, but what is she Doing?" -- a weather-check

I am in Boston, and trying slow down long enough to shift into a new gear. In Phase One of my adventure-sabbatical, I'm releasing --  home and homeland and purposeful career, identification as a brokenhearted girl -- and I've made time, little time at least, to clear the playing field. Call it gestating, or the quiet before the storm, I'm on purpose not-doing, and trying to meet whatever floats into the moment. It is surprisingly uncomfortable, with lots of grappling between claustro- and agorophobia-esque urges; but with a deep developing kernal of  freedom. And washed over with relief.

I'm in Boston til the end of August, which feels like spending all of summer with my Brother, since the weather has just gone golden. Heat, heat and huge thunderstorms -- they say it's the tail of hurricane Bill wagging its way up the east coast. Weekdays, Brother works and I read, get lost in the city, and master the public transportation system. the greater Boston metroplex is a great place for Phase One; a real puzzle city that defies all attempts of imposed order, with lovely little pockets of greenery, ocean views and architecture. Weekdays I wade through tiny unmarked colonial-city streets and find museums, bookstores, 99-cent Chinese-novelty stores and parks where I can read in the sunshine.

Weekends we play and talk. Brother and I are good talkers, and the conversation is excellent. He is a Budding Big Kid, and we spend time making his apartment more homely with useful tools and function-minded feng shui. On my first round of Growing Up Edits, I share the patterns that work for me and tap into his newer edition of formalized human training (Little Brother is a Compassion Commando behavioral-psychology-social-worker, and has a lot of useful "why" information.) 

This weekend is not such a good example, because I'm going up to NH for the women's herbal conference and Brother is going to NY to visit friends, but most of our weekends are together, mobile and fun. We get out of Boston altogether and head up the coast for pastoral drives, treasure hunts for antiques and architecture, or we go down the coast for beaches that stick out into the Atlantic on long fingers of sand marsh and good seafood lunches. We visit and compare far-flung modern-art museums. We go to drive-in double-features and compare them like they were modern art. (P.S. for pop culture conspiracy theorists: Consider G-Force and GI Joe. Obviously named by the same school of cool-marketing, both about elite forces -- yes, one is a group of guinea pigs, just roll with it -- that are chosen (no free will here) for their roles, both entertain a surprising degree of disregard for the laws of physics and the limits of science for being set in the "it could be happening today" world, and both use the same summer smash hit "Boom Boom Pow" for their theme songs. What does this tell us about the future of the supersoldier genre? About the way we market militarization to our youth? About the merging identity of Man and Beast? Discuss.) 

Since Brother went on retreat with me, we have a whole new shared vocabulary of perception to add into the conversation. And since he got a higher degree and found a job he loves since the last time we talked face to face, he is a whole new kind of awesome that I love getting to know, and insight that keeps me feeling well cared-for while I do all this less-than-concrete work. The weeks go and I will miss this daily connection, and my Brother has helped me find the lightness of foot and the solidness of heart that I needed from Phase One. 

Spiral staircases

What is this strong desire to move in circles? I revisit places from vacations, resee artworks that moved me, reread novels to feel again the flavor of their words. Is this reviewing a way of cataloging, closing a circle by putting rememberances in place? Or is it a hallmark of stuckness, a fixation or fear that binds me to the known, the un-put-away, the familiar no matter how it abrades?

Or is it something else entirely? This life, dizzy and delightful, moves in circles that change. These paths and patterns revisit themes, dreams, all our content, always from a different perspective as time moves along. So more spirals that circles, helixing onward. And what if, instead of the patterns we see being placemarkers along the line of that spiral, the constant, compelling and reccuring dreams are the hub we re-evolve around. The strong staff of content coiled 'round by the sinuous momentum of context, the rod of Asclepius the healer. The core ideas, sentiments, Big Work of a life constantly circled, reexamined, reapplied through the mobile mind of a being in growth. Always within reach, always ready with the infinite depth of the past and width of the future.

Delight & Wonder #1

Have you noticed we taste each bite of food during our exhalation? You probably know how intrinsically intertwined smell is with taste, how smelling is the better part of tasting, but now I also think that smell and taste are two terrific way-stations on the same sense-pleasure circuit.

Try this: Take a bite, a smallish one, of something delicious. Chew with your mouth closed. With each inhale, chew, and pay attention to smelling the delicious that's still on your plate. And then exhale, chew, and taste. 

What do you think of that magic?

For your kind attention, beloved

Dear        ,

For all the well-wishing, permission-granting and vocal support: Thank you deeply for seeing me walking out and about, attempting this great big adventure. For all the unspoken worry, awkward pauses and slight bemused distain: I wish I could take you on retreat with me. It is the straightest path I know to an honest, earnest trust that the world is whole and that humanity is good;  the simplest path between you and I, and us.

I sat a week-long retreat in an environment consciously crafted to give relief from the doing pressure of everyone's everyday, with teachers offering reminders that the simple act of being, and being aware of being, expands the horizons of a human. I sat with 95 others around my age, and we practiced in parallel our part of the Human Project. We sat in silence, which is to say we spoke very little, with much care. The teachers spoke with guidance, the bell rang with timeliness, the birds, wind, and highway sang the way they can; there is no true silence on Earth, but every small piece of quiet carries clarity with it. I settled after a while, able to watch the chatter and flash of my mind, the interpretation/narration of my imagination, at a relatively low volume and from a relatively stable seat. I let my eyes unfocus into the peripheral and my skin soften. The week I spent was not intense, neither dangerously volatile nor seductively blissful. It was simple. Quiet. Aware. Focused simply on breath, on body in movement through space, aware of others and the external world. After a while, my mind, so slippery and fast, itself relaxed a bit, and opened to awareness of the internal world. With perfect timing, just as I was ready to see with softness and clarity.

When I entered silence, I imagined dropping a small stone into a clear dark pool, a query without articulation. Before the week was through the delicate tides triggered by that small intention rippled their way back to me, intercrossing and threading together the deep things below the surface of the pool into one ephemeral crochet response. I have a disillusionment to see my way through, a break in trust to let heal, a gap between us -- between me and you, Life -- to step across. I will get there. It is today's Human Project. 

Step One

I start by leaving Home. Pack up everything that grounds me in Past, prepare a backpack with only the tools and trappings of Present. Ignore Future, let her slide in and out of the room at will, and try not to speak to her.

Begin by reconnecting with roots of heart, family, blood. Fly in a bright simple line to my Brother, the single shining being with whom I share the most biology. Talk about everything. Reground in the digestion of Ideas and the nuance of Opinion. Think in the moment. Eat when hungry, sleep when tired, be entertained. Pretend I'm on vacation. Be on vacation, for a couple of days. Let the knots in my shoulders untie, unclench the fists of Anxiety, Anticipation, Interpretation. Insist on pleasure. Look at the ocean every day.

Prime my many pipes of thinking with the easy fluids of thought, word and reaction. Tune the body to sleep and wake on demand. Repack a small bag with loose clothing, warm socks, a good bar of soap. Steady, each time I remember to take a deep breath, for the cleansing obliteration of Retreat.

The Plan

In accordance with the basic patterns laid in the foundational stories of travel and transformation, I will be journeying in a circle, observing cardinal rules of three, and passing once again through landscapes long foreshadowed -- albeit at a new fractal level. The language I will observe is symbolic, the stars that will guide me are Self, Community, World. Healing within, charging these hands to heal outward, and the open heart to hold both at once.

Having tried for months now to find this progress in the small hours of the night, in one small room in my smallish hometown, I am now taking more radical steps.

At the end of July I'll fly away to my Brother's nest on the wet, wooded east coast, and roost for a while. We'll sit a retreat at the Insight Meditation Society, and bring some quiet into ourselves. Self. We'll live together and enjoy each other's company. He'll work and I'll study the next chapters of my aromatherapy course. We'll cook together and I'll cajole him into getting a library card so I can use it. We'll watch trashy movies, play in the ocean, camp a bit, and eat good things from the sea. Community. In the middle of the month I'll drive further north to the Northeast Women's Herbal Health Conference, and dip into that green witch well. Grassroots herbalism, the quietly flamboyant family of people who talk with plants. A kitchencentric health care philosophy at once revolutionary and deeply precidented. World.

In the middle of September I'll fly to the deserts of the dry, rocky west coast, and forage for a while. I'll attend an aromatherapy retreat offered by Floracopeia, and welcome the lushness of sense sensitivity well explored. Deepen my study with experience, weave into the web of healers through scent, and the herbalist activists bringing this basal bounty to every day life everywhere. Community. Then further out west to the ocean highway and some tandem time with my traveling Mother, time visiting old friends, eating duck and noodles, soaking the desert out of my pores so I am receptive for more. And then, then, then! A vision fast in the School of Lost Borders. Alone at last, out into the desert unknown, to walk right up to the crossroads and sit at that bright intersection til every piece comes rushing back. And walk, upright, through the crossroads carrying that bright peace. Self/World.

And then I'll fly home.

The Goal

To find, via internal and external adventure, a clear path into the future and the compelling inspiration to walk that path with a whole heart.

After more than 7 years of immersing myself in a brilliant cooperative workplace, focusing on offering access to health/care/options to everyone I meet, I know that it is time for me to dive more deeply into the world. To seat myself more comfortably with learning, into the skills of healing. To reconnect with the roots of my activism and refocus the light I want to carry in the world. After more than 5 years of giving myself to a radiant relationship, opening to building home and intertwine with those closest to me, I know it is time for me to inhabit more fully my own heart. To infuse myself in sensory self and learn to trust experience, insight, intuition. To establish a balanced position between feeling/thinking/doing, and strengthen the sureness of being.

And so, I'm taking leave -- of contract and obligation, fear, habits of control, familiarity of surroundings, illusions of permanence, and the self-dampening insistence that I do not know what to do with My Life -- and for 3 months I will explore. To places I love and places I've never been, to deepen practices and begin new practices, in community and in solitude, with joyous noise and simple silence. This is the way I know to clear my eyes and discover new stories with which to live.