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Archive for nature – Page 3

Solstice 07

Center

I just returned from a Solstice celebration held in a redwood forest in the Santa Cruz mountains. This ceremony and its ‘Dreaming’ counterpart held in the middle of winter have become necessary bookmarks in my year, rituals of integration and relationship that bring wholeness and balance to the busi-ness of my life.

One of my favorites moments in this pattern cycle is the night we dance a prayer dance in a medicine wheel built into a meadow, surrounded by redwoods and anchored by a mother tree that must be at least 600 years old. People have been dancing to the Tree of Life for millenia and you can feel a sense of eternity and timelessness that comes like grace as we dance around the delicate Oklahoma Redbud, our ‘tree of life’,  hour after hour.

Leg muscles powered by the relentless beat of a large hand made buffalo skin drum (and the energy of the rotating team of drummers that keep this beat alive), the dancers alternately rush to the center and ebb back to the perimeter, again and again. Running forward with outstretched hands, raising our eagle feathers to bless the tree that stands in the center representing Life, we offer our gratitude for the gifts she’s given us all year. Then we dance back in equal rhythm, gratefully receiving life’s bounty and drawing it deep into our own centers, again and again.

When the drums have stopped and we’ve finished dancing, those who want to stay pull a circle of chairs close around the tree … She’s lit from below by a thousand candles encircling her base, long white ribbons that decorate her branches dancing in the night wind. We sit in long silence as the stars and moon move above us and the night whispers its secrets to the trees. I drink this endless moment like water in the desert, stillness pouring into my body like holy communion wine.

.o0o.
My deep gratitude to my companions on this prayer dance journey, and to the hosts and conveners of this beauty: FireHawk and Pele at Resonance and their partners Bill & Marilyn Veltrop at Infinite Games and Craig and Patricia Neal of Heartland Circle.

Standing Stones

This stone is from the inner circle of a double ring of standing stones in the Berkeley marina that my friend Christopher Castle turned me on to during a beauty walk the other day.

Stone_2

By the way, this photograph is one of the series of loose images I chose for my final digital photography class project, which you can see displayed on my photoblog… check out the fliptychs I made from photos of the Dresden trip!

This Morning

I awoke this morning to the language of bird song – a new bird to me; its call rich with tonal variation, surprising and fresh against the early sounds of the city, somehow revived me more than the scant few hours of sleep I got.

Yesterday from the train window I noticed lilacs in bloom everywhere – that and oceans of brilliant yellow mustard rolling over the hills like waves.

Heartstone

Heartstone

"It is wonderful how nature is a part of us. The sun shines not on us, but in us. The rivers flow not past but through us."
-John Muir