A New Year: returning to the origin of things

And stepping into the new year, a pause beckons to us from the shadows. "Slow down!" it whispers, inviting us to sit quietly, our focus shifted inward, reaching into the center and returning us to what is real, to what is original. "Original has two meanings," writes John Berger in Our Faces, My Heart, Brief as Photos. "It means a return to the origin, the first which engendered everything that followed; and it means that which has never occurred before."

In this new silence, the world (for but a moment and forever) still, may we learn to hold these tensions -tensions between the first things and that which has never occurred before, between the past and the present, the distance from and longing for - side by side, in a way that is no longer contradictory.

A piece of inspiration I caught recently on Studio 360- Origin Lessons by Amy Bender. Have a listen:

A Letter To You

I like to think of winter as a time of rest here on the farm. And now that the garden's covered over with snow, aside from collecting wood, it is. With more time on my hands, over the last few weeks, I've had a chance to look into funding for our up-coming projects. And a few days ago, I submitted a project to Rain Bird's Intelligent Use of Water Award. The award is, in their words, "an interactive grant program that awards funds to water conservation and environmental sustainability projects that promote green spaces. A global initiative, any Internet user can submit a project via the Intelligent Use of Water Awards website at www.iuowawards.com and promote it within his or her own community. All projects can be anonymously voted upon by visitors (one vote a day per project, per individual user), and the projects with the most votes will receive funding from Rain Bird according to their funding category.”

To help us meet our project goals (see goals below), we need your vote! You can vote once a day through March 1st, 2011. To vote:
• Click on the following link: http://www.iuowawards.com/Projects.aspx#search
• enter Amazing Heart Farm into the search
• click on the thumbs up sign to vote for our project
To increase our chances of winning, please pass along this information to anyone you know who might want to help out!

OUR Project Description:
With the help of her husband, community volunteers & a Project Orange Thumb grant through FISKARS, in the spring of 2010, Elizabeth Weller established Amazing Heart Farm, a Certified Naturally Grown CSA just outside of Gettysburg, PA. By harnessing the therapeutic benefits of creative and physical work, we aim to provide a safe space for members of the local community to engage in emotional work and healing, to gain access to community resources and to learn to use personal and community supports while providing themselves, their families and the local community with locally grown, fresh food.
OUR Project Goals:
To irrigate our crops, we currently harvest rain water and overflow from our well from two 275 gallon containers. As we expand our production, we’ll be using more water and we’ll need to have an irrigation system in place. We’d like to use the Intelligent Use of Water Award to build a small irrigation pond that will be store the overflow from our well and to build a corresponding irrigation system for an acre of Certified Naturally Grown vegetable production.

To learn more about what we're doing, please visit the Amazing Heart Farm web-site.

In the mean-time, please vote!

Many thanks,
Elizabeth

Now I feel the tenderness to which the season rots

"Autumn teaches us that fruition is also death; that ripeness is a form of decay. The willows, having stood for so long near water, begin to rust...

...Today the sky is a wafer. Placed on my tongue, it is a wholeness that has already disintegrated; placed under the tongue, it makes my heart beat strongly enough to stretch myself over the winter brilliances to come. Now I feel the tenderness to which the season rots. Its defenselessness can no0 longer be corrupted. Death is its purity, its sweet mud..."

- Gretel Ehrlich, The Solace of Open Spaces

posted for Deb.

The Unforseen Wilderness

"And the world cannot be discovered by a journey of miles, no matter how long, but only by a spiritual journey, a journey of one inch, very arduous and humbling and joyful, by which we arrive at the ground at our feet, and learn to be home."
-Wendell Berry

The Infinite: dancing from the tips of our fingers through the bottoms of our toes...

"Growth is a spiral process, doubling back on itself, reassessing and regrouping..." Julia Cameron

A Joyful Walk in the Woods

This magical pathway is a section of the AT just moments from my house, and 2 miles North on the trail... I discovered it a few weeks ago when my mom and I did the 20 mile section from Pine Grove to Caledonia and I think it'll be my new walking place. Dancing through the corridor of Rhododendron to the sound of water splashing a few feet away, it feels as though I've entered a sacred grove of the ancients, their wisdom breathing me, from the inside out, wide open and... free.

It's amazing how close adventure is, so easily found around the corners of our everyday world, as we pause to study it from new angles, in different light...

My heart is filled with gratitude for this sacred day.

The bridge between

"What is this flooding me, childhood or manhood...

and the hunger that crosses the bridge between?"

Walt Whitman

"And our faces, my heart, brief as photos"

The flower in the heart's

wallet, the force

of what lives us
outliving the mountain.

-J. Berger

More of the Milkweed. a Wild Beauty.

(more milkweed)

Being Different

How much difference between yes and no?

....climbing a tower...

Everybody has something to do

I'm the clumsy one, out of place

I'm the different one,

for my food

is the milk of the mother.

Tao Te Ching

Pauses

"How might your life have been different, if, as a young woman, there had been a place for you, a place where you could o to be with women? A place where you could be received as you atrove to order your moments and days.

A place where you could learn a quiet centeredness . . . to help you ground yourself in daily patterns that would nurture you through their gentle rhythms . . . a place where, in the stillness at the endsing of a task, you could feel an ancient presence flowing out to sustain you . . . and you learned to receive and to sustain it in return.

How might your life have been different?"

--Judith Duerk, from Circle of Stones: Woman's Journey to Herself

Macro Monday

In keeping with the tradition started by Georgia B, a few Monday macro shots and much gratitude to--

my parents, and their continued dedication as they celebrate their 35th year

ELK's bird song and loveliness

the life-giving work etched upon my calloused hands

and these magical colors, glittering in the afternoon light...

I've been missing all of you...

I have been gone for too long! The Four are already up to no. 11, Kirsten's challenge: “Then swing your window open, the one with the fresh air and good eastern light and watch for wings, edges, new beginnings.”
~Monique Duval

As I read her words, this photo flashed before my eyes...
It was taken on a hike with Lily after three days of rain. And scraping paint. Discovering roof leaks. And basement snakes...
Ahh, to be outside again, absorbing the sun into my skin! The morning light and fresh air circled round us like sacred fairy dust, singing songs remembered by heart:

What I remember by heart

This morning I rolled out of bed round five, threw on some layers and headed to the trail. Lily (my pup) and I climbed the overlook tower just as the sky began showing colors of pink. I lit three tea candles and stood wrapped in my orange hoody, breathing in this moment that once, so long ago, I had remembered by heart.

Today, a message from Yogi Tea

#57 Seedlings

TOMATO

BROCCOLI

It's rainy and cold here but watching these seedlings grow lifts my spirits!

And yesterday we received an order from Johnny's Selected Seeds: red romaine, bolero carrot, hansel eggplant, american slicing cucumber, smooth leaf spinach, echinacea, basil, chives, anise hyssop, sunflower, red bulb onion, watermelon, parsley, canteloupe, wild marjoram, bright lights swiss chard, long island cheese winter squash, zucchini squash, sweet peas, buttercup squash, butternut winter squash...

A bit much for the amateur gardener but I'm so excited for warmth and spring, for digging and growth that I could barely reel myself in!

#56 Glide

GLIDE

This photo, taken on my spring trip to New Orleans, reminds me of a scene from Refuge: An Unnatural History of Family and Place. In Refuge, Terry Tempest Williams writes about the ways in which her life and understanding are changed by the cancer slowly killing the women in her family and the flooding of the Bear River Migratory Bird Refuge, a Refuge she cares for, learns from and loves. Her experience of both beg the question: 'How can we find refuge in change?'

After heading to the Bird Refuge on an especially difficult afternoon Tempest writes:
"I love to watch gulls soar over the Great Basin. It is another trick of the lack to lure gulls inland. On days such as this, when my soul has been wrenched, the simplicity of flight and form above the lake untangles my grief. 'Glide' the gulls write in the sky--and, for a few brief moments, I do."
(quoted from Refuge: An Unnatural History of Family and Place, 75)

Joanna Greeting Light

Joanna, sharing her life in New Orleans, so vibrant and full.

Her kindness, her heart, explodes into the streets, like treasure.

[You can support her amazing work at the Kid Camera Project!]

greetings from the South

I've been visiting New Orleans, am now in Jackson, returning North on Sunday... It's been three years since my last stay here and my days have been filled with the laughter of old friends and stories of remembering.
Raw scenes torn from my heart.
Wounds bathed deep purple, strengthened orange,
the layers of color healing deep and settling into...me.

My first days here I couldn't pick my camera up, then one morning- alone with the light in my dear friend Joanna's kitchen- I couldn't put my camera down. I spent the next two days filling my memory card with painted doorways and reflecting stars, beaded costumes from the Sunday Indian parade and fences covered in flowers, in each picture trying to capture the deep resiliency bursting through, and pouring out of, this city.
(check out the Kid Camera Project's latest endeavors if you're looking to be inspired!)
But, long story short- in a careless moment, the wrong button pressed, I lost my photos.
(Does anyone know how to reverse formatting a memory card?)
And now I'm back to having trouble picking my camera up, as though each picture I take increases the distance between me and my rememberings, as though my journey-not over yet-has already been erased. The experience has me thinking about my photographs, the space they fill and what it means to me....

And my travels here have me thinking about Home, about my sense of place and orientation in the world, about my move back to Pennsylvania the beginning of May, my desire to root deep, beginning with a garden, to paint walls and open windows, to turn compost and put fresh bouquets of flowers in every room.

"Home is the return to where distance did not yet count," writes John Berger.
Perhaps we spend our whole lives remembering what it means to return...

#54 I saw light

On Foot I Had To Walk Through the Solar System
written by Edith Sodergran
On foot
I had to walk through solar systems,
before I found the first thread of my red dress.
Already, I sense myself.
Somewhere in space hangs my heart,
sparks fly from it, shaking the air,
to other reckless hearts.
(translated by Stina Katchadourian)

#52 I found grace

I found grace

painting her toe-nails

along a street filled with graves.

*

She wore a white-lace hat

and a dress to match,

its bottom corners stained with grass.

...

(written in response to the prompt "searching for grace" found here)