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Hello beautiful human,
I’ve been away from these Reflections most of the month, putting my energy and time into creating a lovely, cozy experience for The Circle peeps, playing around with different elements and figuring out how everything wants to fit together. To create a place within this Inviting Space that feels held: welcoming, nurturing and encouraging…and also alight with inspiration and discovery.
It’s been wonderful…and I’ve missed this Inviting Space for Reflections and a looser, wider attention to the world.
We’ve had a lot of rain but recently a few hot days with no cloud in sight saw me traipsing out into my yard to move the hose – long buried in the undergrowth where I’d dropped it weeks ago—over to the new little apple tree (Candy Crisp) for a good watering. The rains have kept me from tending to the yard. It seems my free days never quite align with the weather necessary for mowing and trimming. So once again, the back has grown up feral into a meadow, wild and tall and terrifically diverse. The milkweed seeds I gathered from local ditches two years ago have germinated this season.
You should have seen me that fall, swerving my van over to the side of the roads as soon as I saw a stand of milkweed. Putting on the hazards and carefully finding my footing as I descended into the roadside ditches to gather up a few seed pods with their escaping treasure. Milkweed fluff floated through the van’s cabin and gathered in the side pockets of the doors. And I would crack the pods wide and lace the fluffy seeds through the yard, to perch and catch on the grasses and few wild things already growing there.
Last summer I believed the project had failed, sending up from hundreds of seeds only one half-hearted shoot, which died midway through the summer. Oh well, I thought. It was always about the process.
But I was wrong. It wasn’t failure just a slower calendar, and this summer I have probably twenty plants, healthy and tall. Next year I expect more. I didn’t see many flowers but now a couple of stalks have small seed pods of their own developing. I glimpsed a monarch butterfly the other day and I’m hopeful there may be some caterpillars and a chrysalis or two to come. If not this year, then next.
The lesson of the milkweed has been patience. Wild things are on their own schedule. Completion and fruition within the growing cycle of a single year is only one possible timeline.
Maybe we should ask…what are the multiple possible timelines for me, for my projects, for my life?
I’ve once again begun to enjoy and be aware of the simmer in the far back reaches of the mind, the way that poems and paragraphs slowly stir themselves, sticking here, breaking apart there, becoming tender or diamond hard as they refine themselves. Good writing takes time. Shoot, good living takes time… something we can forget in this moment of AI, automations and insta culture.
I’m here to take time. More than that, I’m here to make time. Chances are, if you’re reading this, you feel called in your heart and spirit, perhaps pulled from somewhere deep, to that idea of making time, slowing down, and expanding into the quiet and the questions.
I’m glad you’re here.
Wild things are on their own schedule. Writing, and any kind of creative practice, takes us one way or another to our own wilderness, the whispery places in the understories.
I wade through the grasses in my back yard meadows and see all the woven spider webs collecting dew, the vines and tendrils, the drift of seeds.
And did I tell you? The little apple tree, the Cortland, the first one that I planted with my kids two springs ago, has a handful of apples this year, ripening in the sun.
xo
S
I believe our world needs new stories. what if those stories lie curled within us like seeds? This is An Inviting Space to experience where and how we might discover, recover and nurture the secret, magical gardens of soul day by day. Starting where we are, as we are.
Words from The Circle: “I was able to approach my assignment with more presence and found myself unbothered by any attachment to outcomes.”
Enjoy this lovely moment of grace from Catherine Wilde - SoulCareMom
I’m moving back out into the circles of creativity and poetry and play… Here’s where you can find me in the months coming up:
Around here, I’m in the Circle a couple of times a week. On Mondays, an invitation to the Weavery for a start-of-the-week meditation. On Wednesdays, we gather via zoom at the Well to strrengthen our creative practices in community. Join the Circle here.
July 30-August 3 I’ll be presenting a poetry workshop and attending as many other workshops and panels as possible at the International Listening Association’s convention in Washington DC. (No Wednesday Well next week.)
October 3-5 The wonderful Elizabeth Shepley and I will be in Missouri, presenting a “playshop” experience at TLAN’s conference, The Power of Words.
November 13 The Wisconsin Fellowship of Poets is hosting my online workshop, “Three Questions and a Poem,” a workshop designed to generate new material and new approaches to listening, for poets and non-poets alike.
Your support is welcome, and your attention and time are true gifts. Thank you.
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