Restoration

Meditation on All Things Wild

& maybe it’s just that the old fires are burning
& we don’t see what we are feeling

—-Kaia Sand, "there are these old fires" 

Photo by Philipp Wüthrich on Unsplash

Hello Lovelies—

Buckets of gratitude for reading A Woman’s Place Is In the Wild. I appreciate all of you who sustain and help me grow these weekly meditations by reading and commenting or sharing and supporting my work with a paid subscription. Your generosity means the world to me. Thank you for being here.

Did you know you can LISTEN to A Woman’s Place Is in the Wild? Click the play button on the upper right of your screen when you go to the page of this post.

Each weekly meditation of A Woman’s Place is in the Wild is an offering, an evocation of the world around me. You will rarely find me writing about climbing to the top of a mountain or counting the miles I’ve walked as if collecting notches on a belt.

Instead, I want to adventure in.

This is the kind of nature writing needed now, narratives of place—localities, with its root in the Latin, locus, for place—the kind that rise over time out of relationship, that allow us to understand that we are place, too. As the Scottish writer, Nan Shepherd says, “The first law of ecology is that everything is connected to everything else.”

This is my project here.

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5 August, Heinäkuu - Waning Hay Moon

August opens hot and smoky.

This morning, the sun rises glowingly, a fiery face on the horizon. The air is tinted, pink-hued, not from dawn but smoke—the haze of western wildfires.

All morning the sky mimes an eclipse, obscured by a scrim of particulate, the same muted light of one planet standing in front of another.

It makes the morning feel strange, as if I’ve woken up on Mars. I watch the sun climb, refusing to shed her flaming corona and try not to think of Armageddon as another fire season in the era of climate catastrophe tries to do its worst.

My sinuses throb.

I try to flip the switch in my brain which is dropping down a dark hole, but, the rasp in my throat reminds me; the body always remembers.

I was going to write about the basket of August, about the imagine I have of summer as a woman whose gauzy skirts have gone out with the tide and who is now slowly gathering them to her, inch by saturated inch, into what will be her winter basket.

I was going to write about the new harvest, when the farmer’s market explodes with first crops of zucchini and eggplant and melons. How Palisades peaches begin to arrive and I will buy them by the dozen each week for as long as they last for the simple pleasure of their succulence and juice running down my face.

I was going to write about the inspiration I felt in an image a friend in Finland shared of a basket of bilberries she had picked in the forest and how I wished I lived where blueberries or blackberries grew wild, wished for late mornings filling pales of summer-ripened fruit and the beauty of gathering, that motion of pulling the bounty of world to oneself.

But, I have spent too much time this week among these and other wildfires—the conflagration of lingering trauma triggered by too many afternoon horror movies and evening true crime documentaries. I told myself it was research, even as I felt the moth in me flutter closer and closer to the flame. My body recognizes a gutting when it sees one and is draw ever back to the scene of the bloody crime.

This morning that sky outside mirrors my insides.

I feel myself tilt toward catastrophe and the alarming response of the mind that wants to pull every terrible event down from the shelf onto a pile on top of my head.

Most days I can resist by resting my mind of on the goodness of the world by drinking in her beauty.

Today, I struggle.

It’s a trick my mind likes to play on me—thinking I can handle anything—so that I forget my tender spots, carefully hidden, or worse, simply trample right over them.

Something in me is hypnotized by edges, some part stepping on the gas when what is needed are brakes.

I have barreled into August, armed with to-do lists and a bunch of scheduled last minute hurrah’s before the academic year starts. This week alone I’ve had four separate requests for meeting in the run up to classes. Everyone is in a last minute panic. I can feel the wing beat of anxiety beneath to the surface.

I cancel plans to drive down the mountain to shop, reluctant, after a sleepless night, to descend into the Dante’s Inferno of the Front Range where temperatures today are expected to tip 100.

Instead, I opt for a walk with Yuki and together we sit in the woods while she happily gnaws bone that looks too large to be deer vertebrae. I watch the pattern pine trees make on the forest floor, the shifting mosaic of needle and limb, then scratch beneath the tinder forest floor to find earth moist cooling earth beneath.

Here is solace.

At home, I open Substack and read to the litany of hope that is my feed, writers who not only do the important work of speaking up and about the natural work but whose words restore me.

First is Brigit Anna McNeill whose Into the Woods weaves the natural world in the most beautiful and organic of way, allowing readers to see the how the Wheel of the Year turns inside each day, each season. Her words are magic, an invitation to feel not just connection, but interconnectivity.

Next is Sue Kusch (For the Love of Nature), who lives in the PNW and is a wild tender both of land and her garden, and who, like me, believes in seasonal living and that nature is our most essential relationship. I love reading about the places she inhabits and the thoughtful way she enters her relationship with place. Plus, she’s a dog lover and so has my heart.

And then there is Susan J Tweit, whose haikus I followed many many years ago on Facebook and who I’ve found again here on Substack in her lovely Earthbound, which focuses on Terraphillia, “her love language.” Susan is one of the most generous and kind writers I know here. Give yourself the gift of reading about her love of plants, her projects re-storying buildings and land; she proselytizes, in all the best ways, for Earth, our home.

Finally there is Roselle Angwin, a poet, writer, and who foregrounds the sacred in the wild world in In the Beautiful Middles of Nowhere. Writing from Brittany, where she tends an ancient magical forest and a regenerative vegan smallholding, Roselle’s work is deeply mythic, reminding us that our wellbeing is tied to the wellbeing of land and the more-than-human.

Reading women dedicated to touching the beauty of the natural world buoys me on days like today when I’d rather pull the shades and go back to bed, when my darker inclinations want to get the best of me.

We, all of us need, kinship and kindred spirits to help us in these hard times and I am delighted to recognize these writers as part of my tribe.

We must nurture the communities that hold us, must celebrate each other as a way of acknowledging the goodness in this world. This reciprocity is part of the net that holds us.

So here is my thanks for some of the writers who I count as part of my circle and from whom I draw inspiration and hope.

I hope you will too.

(Postscript: Part of the work of this time is restoration, what Susan J Tweit would call re-storying. We are all working to re-member the sacred by weaving a net of beauty and wonder for this world. I would love to hear your suggestions of writers who inspire you.)

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Hold onto beauty, friends, and to each other. Carry hope. And practice being human, practice loving the earth and each other, each day. Thank you for reading.

Big love,

Karen

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Registration Now Open !

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Writing Wild: Ritual

Sunday October 4th 10-3:30

6 Spaces Left

As we prepare to enter enter fall, this daylong workshop focuses on not only helping your understand your own writing rituals (best times + places for inspiration, how to keep coming back to writing over and over) in order to help you feed your creative self, but also on inspiring some new ones. Plus, we’ll take a deep dive in the mystery with an intuitive inspiration hike and use tarot cards to help us access images, stories, poems swimming in our subconscious bodies to write a few incantations.

Rollinsville, CO

Space Limited to 8 Women

Full Day Workshop - $150 or $125 when you sign up with a friend.

Lunch + Snack included.

For More Information or to Register

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