What follows is yet another story of how patriarchy is destroying our culture through the lens of personal narrative. This is a pattern we must uncover, reveal for what it is and refuse to participate. As bell hooks once said, “your silence will not protect you”. Especially from insanity.
I was gone when the U-Haul moved out.
For almost 19 years Ugly neighbor lied, manipulated, tried to steal land, stole my young balsam trees, ignored covenants on our deeds and most recently started to set off explosives.
Six months after moving in here this guy cut down my trees and built a bridge over the brook on my land. It never occurred to me that he did it. Oh, I wasn’t accustomed to this sophisticated level of manipulation. When I approached Ugly neighbor (alias ‘nice guy’ with a fake halloween pumpkin smile) to tell him what I believed someone else had done, I discovered he built the bridge; he cut down my trees. Stunned, it barely registered when he said “I did it for you.” WHAT???
Accustomed to the old fashioned ‘respect your neighbor policy’ I had no frame of reference for the hell that was coming my way.
I have this image in my mind of standing on one of those moving floors at the carnival. It is hard to get your balance because it is constantly shifting.
The world is constantly shifting at the moment.
It is unsettling.
You think you have found your equilibrium, and then the next experience or conversation occurs. Financial upheaval. Health concerns. People dying.
The fear calls.
Three months officially out of my second marriage, I am still in a transitory period. Juggling as I normally do so many things and people. Which ones will I catch? Which ones will I let go?
Every morning I wake up and stand on my deck with my arms thrown up to the sky in gratitude. I love my deck and my old 1961 home. The deck needs care. I have replaced a couple of boards, but there are many more in need. I wonder if it is even savable at this point.
I let that thought come and go. It is okay for now. It holds my weight.
Nothing lasts forever, and this does not make my top ten list.
The client that I had for seven years on and off is now gone. With my veteran husband gone and now that we have moved to Alabama, I am officially no longer a small Illinois Veteran Owned Business so I will officially no longer be part of their budget.
My main priority right now is finding a job and income. It can be overwhelming. I do not want to sell myself short as I have done the large majority of my life. I also do not want to be in a job that I am struggling. I want to find, like the new relationships in my life, ones that are just the right blend of challenging, interesting and rewarding: ones that fit into the puzzle of my life. The adventure.
At times it seems a high order: especially in the shifting sands of the world at the moment.
Every morning after greeting the sun on my deck, I go into my sunroom and meditate.
The view out of my back window is of crepe myrtles, pines, a maple tree and a corn field. Birds fly past. My cats lie lazily on the chairs. My stones and statues and other precious items surround me.
Isn’t this moment enough?
Isn’t it enough to be happy in this moment?
I start to stress about money or people, overthinking, analyzing and panicking as I am wont to do and then I stop myself.
I remind myself.
It is already here.
The people I want in my life. Who truly see me. Who I see. The ones where we support each other. Allow each other. Touch each other physically and mentally.
They are already here.
The means to pay my bills in ways that fill and align with my soul.
It is already here.
They both just need to catch up with me. Turn a corner, and they will be there. All I need to do is ‘encourage’ the things I want in my life, and let go of the rest.
Step by step. Breath by breath.
The future is already here.
Yesterday I returned from my Land in Appalachian mountains of North Carolina: ten acres of unrestricted land with a bog and a creek on one side and a mountain on the other.
A few days ago, I bought the land. When the check cleared, I was left with $20 in my bank account. I had a momentary panic wondering what I am doing.
But then I left that thought behind as well.
It is the third time that I have been there. It is the first time that I went alone.
I sat. I listened. I meditated. I got lost in the woods climbing up the small hill and forest that is already beginning to feel like home. I napped in my hammock, took off my clothes, sang, danced, cried, touched myself. Said hello and thank you and I will take care of you. Take care of me.
Almost half of my land on the right side is bog or a wetland: nature protecting itself, impassable and overgrown by invasive porcelain berry plants. The last time I came my friend tried to get to the creek and did not even get close: his feet sinking into the earth a foot, a huge smelly fly ridden animal bed, plants everywhere. The real estate description suggested putting in a pond to drain the bog so that you can use the land.
No. Protect the bog. Protect our earth. I deeply respect that side of my land knowing that it is cradling precious carbon needed to maintain the balance of life. I talk to it and tell it that I just need a small way in to get to the creek so that I can have water and a shower. A small path.
I find another way down a road to the creek. A snake scurries away in the water. The neighbor says good, I see that you have a machete. You will need it. I would suggest a firearm as well.
We shall see. I feel the fear and respect that I carry.
This is the Wild. She is often unforgiving. I get that.
But I believe that we can come to an agreement and a relationship.
It is one of the balls that I am juggling at the moment. To get to the land from Alabama, I drive along the Ocoee River, rushing water and rocks, majestic steep mountains forming a gorge. It leads to my land, out of the gorge, up a small highway, past buildings that nature has reclaimed, no chains, few stores and onto a dirt road.
‘Home’ pops into my mind several times.
Home.
BIO: Caryn MacGrandle is the creator behind the Divine Feminine App which has been connecting and inspiring women [and other genders too] throughout the world since 2016 as a directory to find Sacred Circles, events and resources. Women find the app each and every day, and it currently has almost 8000 users from around the world. Caryn has also hosted Sacred Circles and events for the past nine years and is passionate about the power of a Circle to heal individuals and the world. She has participated in numerous online and location events such as the World Parliament of Religions in September of 2021 in which she presented a workshop on Embodying the Goddess: Creating Rituals with Mind, Body and Soul and just recently a webinar/panel with Dale Allen presenting Dale’s Indie film award winning “In Our Right Minds: Leading Women to Strength as Leaders and Men to Strength without Armor.” Each and every day, Caryn (aka Karen Moon) works tirelessly towards her belief that the most important area to first find equality and balance is the divinity found within yourself.
Waxing moon pierces fringed Hemlocks Starbursts blink in and out Owls converse from Needled Crowns bathed in Air and Light. Refuge Tree soothed by Familiar calls sighs deeply, soaking In the Night.
Refuge incarnates as Aphrodite…
In the forest I slip into a lime green skin with the help of one hemlock, under whose feathery wings this transformation takes place. I breathe her sweet scent through my supple membrane. Standing beneath Refuge, whose roots claw the edge of a steep slope that bows to the river, I can barely see the crown of the tree, maybe 150 feet in the air. This hemlock towers over the rest. Moss and lichen adorn her limbs and the tree’s deeply ribbed reddish brown bark is an invitation to touch that I can never resist. Scrambling down the slope with care I lean against the tree and listen, always hoping… sometimes I think I hear a low hum if the wind is still. Perhaps I’m imagining.
To spend time in nature and deeply connect with Her is to allow enough time for Her surprising wisdom and dreamlike insights to open up for me. I call this “Plein Air Poetry.” It’s a joy to wait in nature and see who connects with me on any given day.
These poems come with the gratitude of very early Spring when Her first shoots and flowers, such as the weeping cherry which birds have planted all over my yard, begin to appear like mysterious veils over winter’s greyness.
Deb Pollard Greening
Greening April 6, 2022
Suddenly I awaken, early April, and a diaphanous green veil has draped over the weeping cherries, the first to bloom with delicate, drooping grace.
My son is into Alan Watts. He was speaking about him to me yesterday. It made me think of an old blog I had from 2014 where I quoted Alan Watts.
“Advice? I don’t have advice. Stop aspiring and start writing. If you’re writing, you’re a writer. Write like you’re a goddamn death row inmate and the governor is out of the country and there’s no chance for a pardon. Write like you’re clinging to the edge of a cliff, white knuckles, on your last breath, and you’ve got just one last thing to say, like you’re a bird flying over us and you can see everything, and please, for God’s sake, tell us something that will save us from ourselves. Take a deep breath and tell us your deepest, darkest secret, so we can wipe our brow and know that we’re not alone.”
– Alan Wilson Watts | 29 Best Quotes about Writing: We are Legion
I awaken to the common yellowthroat warbler’s song. A light breeze wafts through the open window intensifying the scent of wild honeysuckle. Phoebe chimes in followed by Ovenbird, another warbler. Mama phoebe takes flight from her nest as I open the door. I peer out into emerald green – sweetly scented hay ferns define the edges of the mixed conifer and deciduous forest that overlooks a mountain brook. My home. A canopy of leafy limed branches protects the house from what will become fierce heat from the noonday star… summer is almost upon us. But not just yet. For now I am still living in the space in between. Fern hollow is an edge place, etched out of olive and jade.
Seduced by moist air, stillness and dove gray cloud cover I follow my Forest Muse wandering down to the protected field through the pines. The mountains are still shrouded in mist. Lupine spires and lemon lilies peek out above a raft of sensitive ferns. Deep blue iris startle sensitive eyes. I breathe in the intoxicating aroma of the last flowering crabapple as I examine unfurling ostrich ferns. Always the spiral. The Wild Goddess lives here. Once, just after I moved here, She rose up out of the field to embrace me, told me that I was loved… She spoke through pure feeling in that place beneath words. Now She comes to me through the trees…
With May coming to a close in a few days, I am feeling nostalgia. This month is both elusive and dramatic – from bare trees to lime green, and now lilacs so heavily laden with blooms that some are bowed as if in prayer. Wood frogs and peepers bring in the night and the first toads are hopping around my overgrown flower garden; in the forests I surprise them when peering closely at small flowers. Gray tree frogs trill at dusk. Violets of every hue grace the earth outside my door along with robust dandelions, forget – nots, rafts of deep blue ajuga, delicate bells of solomons seal, mayapple umbrellas, false solomon’s seal, wild columbine and golden celandine all nestled in long grasses and moss. No mowing happens here!
On my woodland paths starflowers and Canada mayflowers are now so thick I fear treading on even one, as if one foot could destroy the whole. Down by the brook white trillium bloom on, both painted and purple are setting seed, while bloodroot, arbutus trumpets and delicate anemones have transformed into leafy memory. Ostrich and hay ferns are unfurling, creeping blue phlox and dames rocket are budded or blooming; pink and white lady slippers are beckoning both here and in the woods. June is in the air.
Very early in Henri Bosco’s 1948 novel Malicroix, a young man, Martial de Mégremut, living placidly amid fruitful orchards in a tame Provençal village, receives a letter informing him he has inherited “some marshland, a few livestock, a ramshackle house” from a reclusive great-uncle, Cornélius de Malicroix. Against his family’s strenuous objections–with alarm they speak of “marshes, mosquitoes, miasmas”–Mégremut resolves to travel alone to the remote Camargue to claim his “wild” Malicroix inheritance. The house is on an island, and to reach it Mégremut must cross a rough river, at night, in a frail wooden boat piloted by a taciturn old man who meets him at dusk in the middle of a vast plain.
So begins a deeply internal quest narrative, an initiatory journey that forces Mégremut to come to terms with himself and with the elements–earth, water, wind, and fire–that are ever-present, sometimes terrifyingly so, on the island. For once he arrives, he learns that he must remain there alone for a full three months if he wishes to obtain the inheritance. Torn about whether to stay or leave, he finds that the decision to stay is made of its “own accord,” unconsciously.
Feminism and Religion 