Wednesday, October 21, 2009

Things to Smile About (the Pennsylvania version)

1. At night, when we bring the chickens into the coop from their various huddled roosting-spots out in the yard, they're sleepy and tractable and easy to scoop. When I fold them against my chest, they murmur drowsy, confused clucks and flap briefly before wrapping their feet around my fingers and leaning their downy warmth into my jacket. They are exactly like sleeping babies, the way babies wake just enough to clutch your finger in their sweet, shockingly strong grip, then plummet back into limp and trusting unconsciousness.

2. My hands smell of peppers and tomatoes and basil, or vanilla and custard, and my clothes smell of good dirt and chicken shit and sky.

3. Local dialect and phrasing, so peculiar at first, is so easy to pick up. Frugal as Yankees and practical as rubber boots, the founding Pennsylvania Dutch must at some point have determined the "to be" verb unnecessary and thus, if not an outright sin, at the very least well worth avoiding; a moral edict that's imbued the local vernacular with such gems as "The potatoes need dug" and "The rug needs vacuumed yet." I'm not sure where the extra "yets" come from. Around here, people pour "yet" onto sentences as generously as they do syrup on scrapple.
For all their heavy-handedness with that particular idiom, though, they're shy with my given name, as if it's an obscure piece of farm equipment, practical in an emergency when "she" or "her" won't get the job done, but newfangled enough to warrant a cautionary pause before attaching it to any well-worn machinery and turning it on. I get a kick out of this; "Jessica" as a word of last resort.

4. The other night I spoke with my Boston aunt. She's a graphic designer, cosmopolitan in the way only urbane, childless people can be, and joyful in her freedoms. While the rest of us bundled our woolen sweaters tighter and piled into the minivan to go visit the grandparents at holidays, she and my uncle would skip town to race sailboats under exotic skies, bringing back delicious wines and beautiful tans. I admired her independence as some sort of Houdini-esque, over-the-top act of familial resistance, charming in its unabashed selfishness, and took great pleasure following suit in later, firmer years.
When I told my Boston aunt of the joys and respite I'd found here on the farm, that I've half a heart to settle down and become an Anabaptist housewife, spending the rest of my days baking pies and raising children and pulling warm eggs out from under the chickens, there was a horrified pause.
"That's crazy talk," she informed me, loudly, her voice taking me by the shoulders and shaking.
"The next time you think crazy thoughts like that, call me and I'll talk you out of it."
Coming as it did, it was testament to both her love and her concern for my general sanity.
But some people really just don't get chickens.

Tuesday, October 13, 2009

Dietz Family Farm (York, Pennsylvania)

I'm in York, Pennsylvania, staying with the wonderful Dietz family and helping out on the farm for a few days. In addition to being warm, gentle people, the Dietzes are generosity personified; another family that's taken me in and is teaching me about their knowledge and way of life after nothing more than a smile and offer of work on my part. Things I'm learning about:
Anabaptist history (and cooking!)
Chickens
Digging potatoes
Planting garlic and onions

I love it here.

Elderberry Syrup (Mechanicsburg PA)


(A Rosemary House Harvest: Susanna (aka Mary Poppins) with Elderberry Syrup and me with Hops Tincture)

Though time consuming, elderberry syrup is one of those "simplicity itself" recipes. It's incredibly effective at warding off the cold or flu, helps your body heal itself quickly if you do get sick, and above all (according to Susanna's "Mary Poppins' School of Medicine" mentality) it tastes delicious. It also tops my list as the most meditative concoction I've ever made. In addition to all the healthful immunity-boosting anthocyanins (those potent, purple antioxidants), elderberries also contain concentrated lessons in patience.
From harvesting the last clusters of berries from the top of the tree, to gently stripping them from their umbels, to reducing, flavoring and bottling the final product, it was a time-consuming process, though one that's impossible to resent. If you want to get this: you have to do this:.
And that, my friends, is a beautiful thing.
If you're lucky enough to have access to a tree, set aside a couple of hours and harvest those last few berry-bunches of the season and bring them on in. When they're finally simmering away with the honey and spices, the warm, scented steam will infiltrate your home and heart with tender, caretaking feelings, and your head will fill with thoughts of all the good the syrup will bring to those you share it with. Elderberry syrup is nothing if not a labor of love.

SPICED ELDERBERRY SYRUP

2 parts elderberries
2 parts water
1 part honey (plus a little extra, just 'cause)
ginger, cinnamon, cardamon, nutmeg, vanilla, or any other warming spices you desire

Simmer berries and water, covered, over medium heat for 20 minutes, or until it starts to reduce. Stir in honey and spices, mashing berries as you go, and cover for 5-10 more minutes. Remove from stove and pour through cheesecloth or metal strainer, making sure to press tightly at the end to get all the concentrated juice out of the "dregs." Pour into jars or cans, LABEL (very important in Susanna's kitchen!), and refrigerate for up to 4 weeks.
Take 1 Tablespoon daily; 2 at the first sign of sickness and/or until well again.

Sunday, October 11, 2009

The Rosemary House (Mechanicsburg PA)

To grow them is to know them, to know them is to use them, to use them is to love them, and then happily herbs become your way of life. -Bertha P. Reppert
(stripping elderberries at the Rosemary House in Mechanicsburg, PA)

No matter how you define Good People, there are few who rank as high as the wonderful folks at the Rosemary House in charming Mechanicsburg, Pennsylvania.

Master herbalists Susanna Reppert-Brill and husband David Brill are the owners of the Rosemary House herb shop, and culinary artist and sister Nancy Reppert runs the Sweet Remembrances Tea Room next door. The Rosemary House was founded by their mother Bertha Reppert, and if you hang around herbies long enough you're bound to come across one of the many booklets and books that she wrote. If you were lucky enough to have taken one of her classes, there's a good chance you became one of her many pen pals. In addition to being the very definition of a family business, the Rosemary House is one the oldest herb shops in the country.

I called Susanna on Tuesday about coming to work for them for a few days, and within minutes I had an invitation to come stay with them on Friday and Saturday, work in the shop, play in the garden, ask them more questions than any normal person has the patience to answer, meet the kids and cats, and even join them for dinners. As if that wasn't generous enough, they were kind enough to put me up in their spare bedroom, welcomed me to their church on Sunday, and let me sprawl my silly self out all over the kitchen as we made batch after batch of delicious goodies.

So what did we do?

Well, we started out in the herb shop. Susanna put me to work mixing and packaging teas while she mixed up a giant tub of their famous Roastmary spice blend. All the blends and teas are mixed by hand; from the moment you step into the shop, you're enveloped in the delicious scents of whatever culinary concoctions Susanna's working on that day. I didn't have too much time to envy her lucky customers, though, because after we finished in the shop, we headed out back to the garden to harvest the hops and pull as much as we could down from the greenhouse roof and the neighboring cedar tree.
(the gorgeous hops flowers, in all their sticky, itchy glory)

(Susanna and the hops vine)

After we finished with the hops, Susanna's wonderful daughter Angelica helped me harvest some elderberries from the tree at the back of the garden. We didn't take any pictures of that process, but here are some other shots from the Halloween-themed garden:









The next day was a busy one, too. We stripped the berries and made 2 kinds of elderberry syrup (great for warding off colds and flues and boosting the immune system), dried and pressed comfrey and tobacco, brewed a Four Thieves-inspired vinegar, tinctured hops in spiced rum, then again with valarian in Scotch whiskey (yup, I'm calling that one Valarian Hops-Scotch, cause I'm just that bad...), and blended sage honey. That evening I stripped the bark from the black willow I harvested at the beginning of the week, though I haven't yet decided which menstrum I'll use to tincture it. Here's a picture of some of the goodies.
(from left: spiced elderberry syrups, hops tincture, valarian hops-Scotch, and more hops tincture)
(yours truly with some fresh sage honey and the sage bush it came from)

Tune in over at the Rosemary House blog for info on making elderberry syrup and the Four Thieves-esque Vinegar! Until next time, stay healthy, have fun, and enjoy your Day of Rest. Blessings,
Blackbird's Daughter

Pennsylvania=Good People (Mechanicsburg, PA)

Take up the Mead of Poetry, for whomever drinks of it shall be skald or scholar...

Though I didn't meet Odin at the Mother Earth Festival, nor taste any skáldskapar mjaðar (the old Norse "Mead of Poetry"), I did meet the wonderful folks from Ambrosia Farm, and tasted several of their delicious short mead varieties. Here's a picture of Sherry Fergesen, co-proprietor of Ambrosia Farm and mead-maker extraordinaire:
Another interesting small business that had a booth there was Happy Hal's:

Basically, we can sum up my understanding of 'Good People' as 'People Who Make Yummy Food (and then let me taste it)'.

Wednesday, October 7, 2009

Mother Earth Harvest Fair (Spoutwood Farm PA)

So the other day we went to the Mother Earth Harvest Fair, an event that more than lived up to its long-winded subtitle as "A Fun-filled Celebration of Sustainable Living in the Chesapeake Region."
Here we are going:
And here we are coming back:
It was a day filled with more wild-bearded, Wicca-practicing, fairy-winged, drum-circling, face-painted hippie folks than I've seen since I left Vermont (besides Woodstock, of course, which may or may not have actually happened).

I'll post more about it later, but one of the nifty folks there, Christopher Eldridge, wrote a book called Environmental Practices: from living simply to global advancements, and emailed me today to tell me he's going to be interviewed tomorrow on a show called Soft Edge on VoiceAmerica, 7th Wave station.

Anyway, check it out - the book's a great read, and he's a smart guy.
And now they're closing the library, so I'm going home! Ciao-ciao.

Willow Gathering (Harrisburg, PA)

(courtesy of University of Texas)

There's a wind advisory today, and trees have been going down all over the place. I was dropping Dee's daughter off at daycare when we heard a giant crack!, followed by lots of smaller cracking noises coming from the wooded edge of the parking lot. One of the trees that lost a limb was an old Black Willow (Salix nigra), and I spent an hour or so harvesting bark from the fallen branches.
Common in eastern North America (especially New York and Pennsylvania), black willow's bark has the same analgesic, anti-inflammatary, anti-microbial, astringent, antiseptic, and blood purifying properties as its famous cousin S. Alba, though its roots carry a reputation as a powerful anaphrodisiac.
Taken as a tea, the bark has similar effects to aspirin, though less strong, longer lasting, and without the risk of internal bleeding that aspirin has. It's useful for back aches, headaches, arthritis, menstrual cramps, and muscle cramps, and is specific for lower black pain. The tea is also considered an effective blood-purifying tonic, and one that helps to clear up irritated skin.
Applied topically, the tea or tincture is an effective cleanser, toner, and purifier for troubled skin and acne, as well as an effective treatment for gangrene.

All these downed branches have me tempted to try my hand at basketmaking - maybe I'll make a basket to hold all the black walnuts I've been gathering.

Tuesday, October 6, 2009

Bits o' Wisdom & Crumbs of 'Huh': part 2

Pathway (Mt Tremper, NY)

I left the woods and drove down the mountain. The monastery, of course, was right around the corner, about a quarter of a mile further on down the same road I'd driven at least twice. Looking at the sign felt like a tiny memory-injection of Japan, but it was so clear that I'd already done all the things I needed to do in Mt. Tremper that I kept driving. For a couple of days, I wandered through New York state, and at one point I did indeed go to Woodstock (though I remember it, so maybe I didn't really go there after all...). By the time I started the drive to Pennsylvania, I felt pretty good - reborn, in a way, and definitely refreshed.

My itinerary was pretty simple - visit with my friend Dee and her little daughter, find a decent mechanic (my car needed a checkup, but nothing that couldn't wait), and maybe explore some of the Pennsylvania Dutch countryside. In the meantime, the sun was out, the scenery was beautiful, the traffic was cruising along at a steady pace...and then I hit New Jersey.
I found out later that the traffic in that (very rural) part of New Jersey was backed up because of an overturned tractor trailer, but at the time I thought it was due to rush hour. So I settled in for a long, bumper-to-bumper wait, and had just decided to make some phone calls, when my hubcap -my new hubcap, the one I'd been casually looking for for since last November, and had just found in the woods the day before, at which point it had fit perfectly- started rattling.
Now, I should point out that I drive a Chevy Prizm. And as far as I can figure, this particular hubcap came from a Plymouth Seabreeze. But still. It fit. And I'd been trying to manifest a new hubcap for months, so I certainly wasn't about to turn this one down because it didn't match. Also, I'd found it in the woods, which practically counts as wildcrafting, and I have what amounts to a near-compulsion when it comes to wildcrafting anything, be it edible, medicinal, or transportational.
The point is, I'm quite pleased with my new hubcap. My hubcap and I are going to cover lots of ground together. There was no reason for it to start making noise as we crawled along the backed-up New Jersey highway. But it did, so I pulled over, kicked it back into place, and started driving again.
Have you ever had a loose hubcap? You know that noise, that gravelly, vibration-y sort of noise?
You know that noise.
So do I. Which is why when I heard it again, about 10 minutes -roughly 200 yards- later, I sighed and pulled over. Again.
I gave it a few well-aimed kicks (again) and once again, it stayed in place for approximately 10 minutes, or until the next exit, at which point I was pretty much itching to get off the highway and out of traffic. I'd also been eying the really pretty adjacent country road with all the farm stands, so getting off the highway was a no-brainer. Ditto pulling into the first service shop I came to (which was conveniently located across the street from the campground where -little did I know- I'd end up spending the night).

Now, I'm a friendly sort of critter, and I like to think I know the difference between when people are being friendly and when they're flirting. I've got no problem rolling into a strange mechanic's and asking if they've got a new hubcap. I admit to being a little surprised when I mumble something to myself in Japanese and the mechanic replies in the same tongue; even more so when he seems less interested in the practical issue of whether or not he's got a hubcap that fits and more invested in hearing why I'm driving around with one from a Seabreeze, what all the plants that are drying in the back of my car are called, and do I happen to have any herbs to make his beard grow faster?
Still, unexpected as this is, I can deal.

What I almost couldn't deal with (really. I had a little hissy fit right there in the parking lot.) is the fact that when the mechanic in question happened to check the oil, it turned out to be empty. Like, 4/5 empty. And the transmission fluid was basically black. And, ummm, I hadn't checked it in months and I am on a ROAD TRIP. How did this skip my attention!?

I'll tell you how: I was operating with full confidence that I was going to find the right service station, probably in Pennsylvania, and anything that needed tending would be taken care of in due time.

Like I said, I was convinced of this.
Absolutely certain - so certain, in fact, that before I left New Hampshire I blithely turned down any and all offers and reminders to get it serviced, wrote down a list of things that my uncle suggested I have checked, set aside some money to have it all done, and -as of this story- was literally planning on finding a service station the next day.
So everything happened more or less as expected, if not a little sooner.
Nevertheless, there's a fine line between having faith and abdicating responsibility, and somehow, in the midst of everything else - and this kind of makes me cringe when I think about it, though that may have more to do with the scolding I got from the mechanic than anything else - I had forgotten to check the oil. More than forgotten, actually: I had sort of blanked in that linear-time-has-no-meaning-in-my-world way that I do, and was truly convinced that I'd had it checked no more than a month ago.
Which is practically yesterday, right?
Try several months ago. Several, several months.

In my defense, I'd like to point out that a) linear timekeeping is an incredibly new sort of mental technology, b) I naturally dance to a far older sort of rhythm, and b) if we'd just go back to the cyclical, seasonal sense of time that virtually all of our ancestors followed, we'd be much more aligned with our environment, our bodies, and the world as a whole, everybody'd be happier and probably healthier, and starting now, I vote to ignore all clocks as a symbolic gesture of resistance against the capitalist, anti-nature patriarchy! Who's with me??
...
......
...
Right.
So.
I'm obviously on my own on this one. Still, from now on I'm getting my car serviced every time the seasons change, as well as when the damn odometer says I have to. (And yes, I will also try to check the oil every other time I fill the tank, a practice I used to do when I bought my first car, and somehow got out of the habit of doing).

Anyway, the mechanic (who's given name is Gabriel: you know, the messenger? I'll give it a minute to sink in.) was on his way to yoga (thereby overturning the first of way too many stereotypes I'd been holding onto, and hallelujah for that, since they obviously needed changing even more than my oil), but he offered to come in early the next day to take care of all the stuff that needed doing. And invited me to lunch.
So I one-upped him and invited him to breakfast.

Now, I have to admit that I was thrilled at the idea of having someone else to cook for, but it didn't hurt that he keeps chickens and offered to bring some fresh eggs. Or that when he did come over to the campground the next morning, he brought me a dozen and a half (Dee and I are still working our way through them), fresh pears, and a bouquet of wild flowers. Talk about smooth...

Anyway, to make a long story short, my car is happy again, the hubcap hasn't whispered a word of discontent since he popped it back in place, and over a breakfast of coffee, pear pancakes with chocolate sauce, and scrambled eggs (that I sadly committed sacrilege against when I mixed them with canned milk) my curiously well-traveled and well-versed mechanic-cum-messenger gave me several good pointers regarding all of this reality/duality/back-to-the-land stuff I keep stumbling over.

My head is filled with thoughts of balance, and alignment, and the myriad ways the various mechanisms of existence fit together and overlap. Now to synthesize it all....

Bits o' Wisdom & Crumbs of 'Huh': part 1

It won't go in words but I know that it's real...
-Willie Nelson, Still Is Still Moving To Me

Brook (Woodstock, NY)

Long ago and far away, the favored servant of a favorite king was shopping in the marketplace when he came face to face with Death. The two stared at each other in surprise before the man, recovering his wits, ran to the king and begged the use of his fastest ship, "for death," he concluded, "is surely out to get me."
With the king's blessing, the man saddled the king's fastest horse and rode to the harbor, whereupon he set sail for a foreign land. Arriving in port the following week, the man stepped off the boat and onto the pier, only to find Death standing there, waiting.
Sighing, the man bowed his head in resignation, then looked up with a question.
"Before you take me, I have to know - why did you look at me so strangely that day in the marketplace?"
"I was surprised to see you there," she replied, "For I knew we were to meet here today, and I could not fathom how you'd manage to arrive in time."
-my retelling of Fudail ibn Ayad's "When Death Came to Baghdad" (9th century)

.........

So, remember my plan from a couple weeks ago, the one where I'd go to a Zen Monastery in New York where I'd find a Messenger who'd impart some sort of divine, critical wisdom?

Turns out he was waiting in a garage in New Jersey.

No, seriously.

But first...

...After traveling from Bard to Mt.
Tremper, only to not find the monastery, I held my own services in the woods. By which I mean the woods talked and I started to listen. What exactly did they say? How to "draw out" the arthritis from my hand by breathing in different patterns. How to receive blessings from certain place-energies, where the trees lean together to make pyramids with their bodies. How to look underneath horizontal branches to reveal the paths you might not otherwise see.

Believe me when I say that I know how strange that sounds. I, maybe more than most, have spent a good chunk of my life worrying at the line between what's Sensible and what Makes Sense, balanced nervously between what I experience as truth and what I know I can talk about without people thinking I'm unable to distinguish between reality and imagination.
These days, in some ways, that may be the case -but only because I've worked to become both practical in my methods, and expansive in my approach. And in doing so, here's what I've learned:
  1. Reality is obviously a web of illusions, individually and collectively crafted.
  2. Truth exists in fiction, parable, myth, religion, poetry, art, and dreams, and does so in quantities far greater than any one person's waking reality could ever hold.
  3. The imaginative and magical worlds are valid, significant, and real.
  4. There are myriad ways of accessing and experiencing knowledge and wisdom from the Collective, as well as those realities beyond the ones we're most familiar with. Every faith has them. Every lay person has access to them. From meditation to mitzvot to medicine, to just stumbling into the right place at the right time, we're constantly presented with opportunities to connect with the rest of existence, to establish and reestablish the little root-tendrils and hand-holds that bind us all together.
  5. The old phrase "all the Gods are one God, and all the Goddesses one"? True dat, yo.
I have a degree in Transpersonal and Counseling Psychologies, and the more I travel and talk to people about their experiences of reality, the more I learn that I've got about half a degree I don't understand. I'm tempted to go back to Burlington College and take up Consciousness Studies.

But back to my story. I should point out that I don't know how or why any of the things I learned in the woods the other day work. But I don't doubt that they do, and I'm sure that if I were to search around a little bit, I'd be able to find several cultures and faiths that understand those bits o' wisdom as common knowledge.
"What, you mean you don't get a tingly, breezy sort of feeling when you walk under those trees? Get out, everybody feels that."
So remember the first lesson the trees shared, the one about breath and healing? That one's really interesting. I bet it's entirely possible to do a lot of healing with bones and joints through different breath-work; that it's an entire field of medicine, like homeopathy or chiropractic.
Does anyone out there have any info on this? Maybe you've heard of some shamanic practice or folk medicine that sounds familiar? I am so curious, and it's so obvious that what I've got is the most cursory, minute bit of elementary knowledge.

Anyway, if this reminds you of anything, please call me.

To be continued...

Mushroom, Wild Greens, and Buckwheat Noodle Soup (Phoenicia NY)

Contrary to what previous posts might have you believe, I'm not always all about the crazy-unhealthy food. In fact, my first morning after leaving Bard, I made a pretty healthy riverside breakfast:


Mushroom, Wild Greens, and Buckwheat Noodle Soup

1 large handful of wild greens (dandelion, plantain, etc.)
3-4 dried (or fresh) mushrooms, broken into bite-sized pieces
1 small summer squash, sliced
a small handful of udon noodles
instant miso soup
2 cups water

Heat water and mushrooms, covered, to boiling. Stir in miso, add vegetables, and push down noodles until submerged. Simmer, covered, for about 4 minutes, or until the noodles are soft.
As they cool, any left-over noodles will soak up the broth and make a sort of instant casserole, aka lunch, which is more than you can ask of most foods.

Oh, see those super-cute chopsticks? I'm down to one now. As I was climbing down to the river's edge, I lost the other in the current - whoops! It was kind of a nifty accident, though, because I spent the next hour or so whittling a new set that I like even more than the old one.

Some more photos from Phoenicia, NY:

(the view outside my "bedroom" window)

(Morning harvest, clockwise from top: leaves to press, leaves to infuse in oil [mullein], seeds to dry [sunflower], and leaves to steep [lemon balm].)

(post-breakfast; obviously heart-broken over my lost o-miyage)

(bark and leaves in the river - can you see the mask?)

Nifty Things & Cards With Strings...

...that's what blogs are made of.

It occurs to me that I've got some long-overdue posting to catch up on - namely, from Montreal. This one, though comes from VT. My amazing friend Emily gave this to me - her man, Masa, found it in a museum shop, and I love it (though at the rate I'm traveling, I might run out of red string)!
Before I left Vermont, some friends took me on an edible tour of Montreal, from dim sum to chocolate crepes to Schwartz's smoked meats. Here's a taste of what we tried at Juliette et Chocolat:
Clockwise, from top to bottom: fresh fruit crepe with melted chocolate, "grandma's style" fair trade dark hot chocolate, and a chocolate shot. Not pictured: salty caramel brownie with white and milk chocolate chunks.
I know.
Lest that cup appear unremarkable:
It's not. That, my friends, is a Vessel of epically-proportioned goodness.
Do I look smirky? I feel smirky.
So smirky, in fact, that the next morning, as I sat licking my mental whiskers and hazily recovering (read: purring) from the previous day's gluttony, I decided to try and recreate the J&C salted caramel sauce. You know, the same way bloody maries are good for hang-overs?
Don't judge.
Anyway, the result was pretty darn tasty, which is why a couple of weeks later you got this post. I'm a little obsessed.

Friday, October 2, 2009

Fumbling Toward Ecstacy (Mt. Tremper NY)



We both, Vasili Ivanovich and I, have always been impressed by the anonymity of all the parts of a landscape, so dangerous for the soul, the impossibility of ever finding out where that path you see leads -- and look, what a tempting thicket! It happened that on a distant slope or in a gap in the trees there would appear and, as it were, stop for an instant, like air retained in the lungs, a spot so enchanting -- a lawn, a terrace -- such perfect expression of tender, well-meaning beauty -- that it seemed that if one could stop the train and go thither, forever, to you, my love ...
-from Cloud, Castle, Lake by Vladimir Nabokov
............

So, the monastery.
You know, the Zen one?
The monastery I've been talking about for, like, a month, in that very calm, sort of centered, Humble-Woman-on-an-Important-Journey voice? That one?
Didn't happen.

Went to Woodstock instead.

I can explain.

See, I left Bard on Sunday morning with every intention of arriving at the Zen Mountain Monastery in time to present my oh-so-humble, holy self to whomever was in charge of dispensing wisdom to wandering Jewesses and the like, before attending morning services. From there I would wander ever-so-intentionally around the grounds, nodding sagely at the various statues and shrines until casually entering into conversation with whichever intriguing stranger the Universe had planted for me to meet. My guide would then point me in the direction of my next path -maybe even the path!- and I would leave the monastery wiser, purposeful, and coated in the sort of incense-scented fairy dust that signals imminent enlightenment and general Omm-ness.

As you can see, I had a plan.
At this point, I think my ascent to Enlightenment can best be explained through the following visual:


To make a long story short, I couldn't find the Monastery, and determined that the fact that it wouldn't appear on my GPS was a sign that my plan, as obviously brilliant as it was, was not about to happen. So, in the grand tradition of several 'Jessie Goes Up the Mountain' moments, I found a mountain and went up.

And it was perfect. Scary perfect, actually, in that as soon as I got out of the car and into to misty, rainy woods, I found them so full of wisdom and lessons that I got a little intimidated. I don't feel ready to learn all the healings that the trees are so often willing to teach. And there were definitely paths in those woods that I didn't want to be able to see. But I did learn a little healing magic, and when I left I came away with far more questions than I had answers to.

And that, my friends, is a theme I'm getting used to.

Copyright (c) 2009-2014 Jessica Bellantone. Please email me when reproducing content. Thank you!

MyFreeCopyright.com Registered & Protected