Summer Heat in the Garden

This is, ironically, the hardest time of year for me as a gardener: high summer. Partly because it's just so freaking hot here in eastern Colorado, but also because all there is to do is weed. And fertilize. And clean up after the chickens and heavy rains. No planting (though soon I will put in fall crops like broccoli and kale and parsnip). No planning (besides thinking about all the strawberry plants I want to add next year...). Very little harvesting as we are between the cool and warm season harvest - we still have lots of lettuce and a few carrots, but mostly it's wait for the baby pumpkins and tomatoes to ripen.

The heat makes me whiny.

This year my garden is doing far better than the last two years. I used a ton of compost to amend the soil last spring, I fertilized my plants with organic veggie fertilizer (I've been something of a fertilizer snob in the past, wanting compost to be enough, but in my leached soil it just isn't), and we've had a lot more rain. So I really have nothing to complain about. I'm just impatient for action. And cooler temperatures.

Interestingly, about the time of the harvest, I'll be harvesting a pretty sacred fruit from another of my gardens, my family: My baby is due September 15th. So again the veggie garden and the life garden align: we enter the horse latitudes, the dog days of summer, ripening, waiting, and dreaming of cool sweetness with the fruits of my patience and love.

I wish you peace and lemonade this summer, dear reader! I'd love to hear how you are spending your long summer days in the gardens of your life.

The Goddess of Always Enough

Bee Smith writes, "As I have grown older and my spiritual practices have matured it has been shown to me to have faith in the Goddess of Always Enough. She is always able to provide what one needs right on time. Generally, it seems wisest not to try and second-guess Her or try to tell her what she ought to be doing." (1) Reading this was timely for me. It's been a challenging year, with a lot of doubt about myself, our finances, our health, and whether or not we (as a family) are in the right place, doing the right thing. When I get scared about money, I tend to turn to attempted manifestation, and I tend to try to be very clear about what I feel I need. Then when my prayers are answered but not in the way I specified or envisioned, I get frustrated. When I read Bee's bit about the Goddess of Always Enough, something clicked for me. As always, we are okay. We have enough - even more than enough! All is well, even though by conventional terms I feel on a slippery slope of dept and doubt.

The image of the Goddess of Always Enough helped me to reflect on the challenges we've dealt with over the past few months, and see where She helped us, even though it was not what I thought She "ought" to be doing. A few days after we discovered our eroding plumbing needed to be replaced asap, we got low-interest-for-the-life-of-the-loan checks from a credit card. These were a lower rate than your standard equity loans - and since we haven't savings or equity, a bit of interesting timeing. Then we had to replace our only car. A few days before our old car got picked up by the insurance company's scrap yard, a friend got a new car and was able to loan us her soon-to-be-donated beater (but very functional) car. We found our replacement a week before the insurance was due to run out on our friend's loaner. We were able to get needed repairs done on our new used car just weeks before taking an eight hour road trip (sixteen round trip) that had been planned for months. I'm happy to announce that the car, and the plumbing, are doing great!

Then health concerns hit. I am a little scared and frustrated that we have spent our beefed up flex spending account half way through the year - and three months before our baby is due - but isn't it interesting that I had *just* enough in there to get the chiropractic work I desperately needed?

Speaking of new baby, today my husband and I sat down with the clothes, accessories, and toys friends have given us, and we were both totally overwhelmed. Such abundance! Such a community we have! I do not have to buy anything for this baby. Not even shelves if we can get around to using the last of the scrap wood we have (given to us by a friend) to put some shelves in the kids' closet.

And in case this weren't enough reminder that All is Well and She Watches Over Us, I flashed recently on a memory of about nine years ago. We had just moved to Colorado. I had just finished massage school and barely had a part time job, my then boyfriend had just started graduate school, and his father had just passed away. We drove to Wisconsin for the service, a sixteen hour drive with no air conditioning, paid for by credit card. We found out that my boyfriend had a disbursement coming to him from his father's IRA of about $23k. Recalling this time, I thought, "Things may seem scary and tenuous now, but compared to that time - whew! Life is settled, grounded, and all is well."

I can get so caught up in what I think things are supposed to look like, as in no debt, a fancy (if modest) house, and other wants, but really, if I step back and let my perspective shift, I am amazed at how blessed we are. There is always enough. Always.

Blessings, dear reader! May you too be blessed with the realization of always enough!







(1) Smith, Bee. "Seasons of Change: Gaian Rhythms for Positive Living." SageWoman No 76. 62.

Trusting the Inner Goddess

Whenever I teach a Reiki class (and when I received my own Reiki attunements) I always go through some sort of deep challenge or shift in energy before the attunement. Once I broke up with a boyfriend – an amicable breakup that just needed to happen; several times I got sick; another time, just before attuning a Reiki Master, I started a new and serious relationship (ended up marrying the guy).

I’m going through just such a shift now, I realized. Not because I’m going to teach a Reiki class but I because I am about to have my second child. Several mamas have told me that the transition to child number 2 was a biggie. I realized that must be a large part of the stressors and health challenges I’ve faced (and my husband has dealt with) since the beginning of the year.

If you’ve been following my blog at all you know we’ve had a few snafus regarding our house, health, and car lately. Last week I encountered another upset. I’d been struggling with moderate back pain, and then bam! My sacral/lumbar vertebrae went totally out of whack. I couldn’t drive, walk, sit, stand up… it sucked. Lots of metaphors here: paralyzed by life, feeling the total lack of support, sick and twisted (ha, ha). I found a fantastic chiropractor who also does acupuncture and kinesiology, who was able to straighten me out and helped me get at the emotional issues underlying what feels like the biggest health challenge of my life so far. The issue? Trust! You may know my other challenges of this year have dealt with Faith – well, this one went even deeper, to trusting those in my life and even my self. I saw how I have difficulty trusting people, and how this year with my graduating (pending, anyway) with my MFA and publishing a second book and writing my first novel I’ve been struggling with my deepest issues of self trust, like doubt, disgust, and lack of faith in my talent and abilities. Funny how success can make one feel both proud and simultaneously totally freaked out and inept.

The issue of trust goes so deep and can be so transformative. Trust versus mistrust is one of the basic foundations of the self according to Erikson. I don’t know if I didn’t develop a strong enough sense of trust in the world as a preverbal infant and toddler, and frankly I don’t care, but I could see in the present how hard it was for me to trust my chiropractor, my husband, my friends, and my work. And underneath all that, my self.

Something a friend said came to mind as I struggled with trusting myself and others. She said, “A goddess doesn’t look to others to give her love.” Something shifted as I inserted “trust” here: A goddess doesn’t look to others to prove their trustworthiness, to prove the trustworthiness of the world. She knows it, because her sense of trust and faith comes from an inner connection to the divine. I can’t go back and change what I might have felt as an infant (if that was even the problem), but I can cultivate a sense of trust in my inner divine nature, and go from there.

This realization paired with the EFT (Emotional Freedom Technique) and kinesiology my chiropractor used helped me clear a whole lot of old crap standing in my way.

And then guess what happened? We had a clog in our main sewer drain and had a guy come and rooter it! Talk about crap (and, yup, roots) being in my way. All cleared out.

So: I’m clearing energy to move to the next big phase of my life as an author and as a mama and as a person. I wish you, too, dear reader, clarity and insight and health on your own path. I hope my journey helps to illuminate some of your own.

Weeds and more weeds

The garden has me contemplating weeds and their lessons. I know - sometimes a weed is just a weed - but as I pluck bindweed from my yard over and over only to see it return with a vengeance I can't help but feel that maybe there is some lesson or opportunity here. All is holon, all is connected. I admit I am having a hard time with this one, though.

I was not acquainted with bindweed, Convolvulus arvensis, until I moved to Colorado and noticed the pretty white flowers of the vine growing alongside my beans. Ah, but now I know. "Field bindweed is more than a nuisance; it's a pernicious weed. Like many nonnative invasives, bindweed is a tough plant that threatens to take over once it gets a toehold. Its cosmopolitan presence in many temperate climates has earned it 84 names in 29 different languages — most of those names are not kind." Writes Sue Dockstader. (1)

My daughter (age three) had the solid suggestion that we should fill up two buckets of weeds a day, no more and no less. Unfortunately I have others things to do in life than pull up bindweed. And sadly my chickens don't eat the stuff. It grows through our weed cloth. I am tempted to buy weed killer - but then I read that herbicides actually don't work all that well. They say the best approaches to the noxious plant is solid weed cloth combined with steady pulling and the possible addition of bindweed gall mites. Lovely.

The thing is, I am not anti-weed. I pull dandelions and mallow if it gets too tenacious or thick in an area, but these plants are edible and return nutrients to the soil. They are not out to cover my entire yard and house. Bindweed is. And I don't feel safe putting it in the compost, where it will spread even more. So it's not even food for compost.

So... I am left trying to take a positive spin on the stuff. What has it to teach me? That life is full of weeds like credit card debt and leaking seals and dead branches? That we have to take a sense of humor and get a good pair of garden gloves? That life's bounty comes in unexpected places? I'm not sure. I'm reluctant to accept the suffering and hair shirt approach to growth, though I have yet to see the point of bindweed through any other lens.

I suppose weeds in the garden, especially noxious ones like bindweed, have something to offer about tenacity, as my daughter innocently decided. Maybe I need a bumper sticker that says Weeds Happen. Hmm.


(1) http://www.pesticide.org/bindweed.html

Chicken Meditation

Another thing I didn't know about chickens: watching them poke about my yard is a calming meditation. Thought I'd share it with you here. The film quality is a bit choppy - kind of reminiscent of old film footage, but in color!

Enjoy...




As these four little free rangers, Maisy, Millie, Sylvie and Tallulah, wander about my yard, pecking, picking and clucking, time slows and life is good.

The Law of Attraction Comes from the Heart

My husband and I were discussing our three-year-old daughter's stress level that she is clearly picking up from us. It got me thinking about how I broadcast my stress to my daughter, and how she is not only picking up verbal and nonverbal cues from me, but also swims in my electromagnetic field. The heart is the strongest producer of this field. "[T]he magnetic field produced by the heart is more than 5,000 times greater in strength than the field generated by the brain, and can be detected a number of feet away from the body, in all directions." (1) Via entrainment (2), anyone inside my heart field (as my daughter is most of the time), would pick up on my vibrations (I'm speaking literally here, not just esoterically) of frustration, fear, anger, and stress. She would vibrate with me. As would everything else in my field, to an extent.

This, I realized, is the key to the Law of Attraction. How I vibrate attracts like vibrations. If I am clenched and stressed, I draw constriction and fear. If I vibrate peace, abundance, and gratitude, I draw these energies to me. This includes wealth and success.

We can use our strongest field creator, the heart, much more effectively than just the brain (mind) to create a world we want to live in. Literally. The Law of Attraction requires the heart, not just affirmations said by the brain (though it is all connected, I realized how vastly powerful working with the heart directly can be).

This became my meditation, to feel these powerfully pleasant energies in my heart, creating a powerful field of attraction. What I discovered about myself was stunning.

I live a great life. I have an amazing, beautiful, healthy little girl. I'm pregnant with a strong, healthy little boy. My husband is a music therapist at a major children's hospital. I have published two books, one ebook, and dozens of articles in magazines I believe in. I have a truly amazing group of friends and family. We live in a more-or-less affordable house we've made into a sweet suburban homestead with an organic garden and chickens. In many many ways I am living the dream. But financially we are always strapped; the stress my husband and I have struggled with recently has been due to increased credit card debt to pay for a necessary and rather huge plumbing job, followed by a car accident that thankfully resulted in no human injury but meant replacing our old car. With another old car. We have money set aside for the birth of our baby, but that money has dwindled due to a tooth crown, new glasses, and other health necessities. Though we live fairly frugally, we are always scrambling financially. We have no savings (beyond meager retirement savings) and a big chunk of debt. We keep asking ourselves, what is it that we need to learn here? Why is money always uber-tight? In what ways, for instance, am I holding myself back as a financially successful writer? If money is an energy, an exchange of time, love, and human energy, then why are we chronically strapped?

Well, in tuning into the energy of my heart, I discovered some very interesting things that probably have something to do with our challenges. And are very interesting, too, in light of my family's medical history of heart disease and defects.

What I realized is that my heart is always clenched. Low-level anxiety always simmers, which I can feel as a tightness around my heart. I breathe into my belly, but almost direct my breath around my heart, rather than through or with my heart, as if avoiding the fear held chronically in my chest. When I pay attention to my heart, a panicky or sad feeling rises up my throat and into my eyes. I notice the clench of my jaw. I feel these things when sitting, doing chores, driving, and otherwise going about my day.

Then there is the added frustration I feel when doing something with my daughter. Like trying to get shoes on her feet or bake cookies. She is three. She does things in her time, and messes happen. While I am usually outwardly patient, on the inside, my heart waves are moving more and more towards frustration, impatience, and even rage.

I do not want my daughter to soak in this miasma of energy. Nor my unborn son, nor my husband, nor myself, nor anyone else.

So I breathe into my heart. I focus on the beauty of my daughter and my love for her. But sometimes, this is not enough to "turn off" the chronically clenched feeling. Baby steps, but not the huge shift I was going for.

Anyone who has dealt with anxiety (most of us to some degree), knows you cannot just dissolve the anxiety with deep breaths. Yes, it gets better, livable, but doesn't go away. To really heal the pain, to really find tools for a new relationship with anxiety, fear, and anger (3), we have to go into it. Not an easy task.

I won't tire you with all the details of my own "going into it." I highly recommend for your own journey tools like a journal, an art therapist, a shaman, or other support to help you do your own going into it. But I will share with you a deep insight I had in the process.

I was lying awake in bed one night, thinking. I was contemplating my family history of heart problems. As is easy to do when one is near sleep (and one is either morbid or prone to anxiety or both), I was imagining being in the hospital for heart surgery, which is how my paternal grandmother died when I was an infant. In my fantasy, I am telling the doctor I don't want to die - not because I am afraid of death, but because I didn't want to leave my children. I said I wasn't ready (am not ready) to leave this life yet because it's such a wonderful gift that I am not yet done enjoying.

My heart flooded with peace, abundance, gratitude, and joy. The anxiety stepped aside. The stress over money became moot. Life is bigger. Love is bigger. These are the energies I want to broadcast, to stew my children in. These are the energies that can attract to me the life I want, above and beyond the beautiful blessings I already enjoy. I found the tool I needed to change my relationship with my anxiety: focusing on the gift of life when wrapped in the loving arms of death. Forgive me for sounding morbid, but I can't think of any other way to say it.

What do you carry in your heart, dear reader? What tools do you need to create powerful fields of ultimate potential? I invite you to join me as a heart mediator. Let us see how our bodies and lives change as we go into the "darkness" (via negativa) and embrace the "light" (via positiva) (4). Truly anything is possible, and I'm excited to see where this path leads.

Namaste.



(1) Institute of HeartMath. "Science of The Heart: Exploring the Role of the Heart in Human Performance." 2009.
(2) See Entrainment at Institute of HeartMath.
(3) I don't mean eliminate it. Anxiety can be normal and valuable when directed well. See One Less Thing to Worry About: Uncommon Wisdom for Coping with Common Anxieties by Jerilyn Ross.
(4) The four fold path of Creation Spirituality: Via Positiva, Via Negativa, Via Creativa and Via Transformativa. See Matthew Fox's Creation Spirituality: Liberating Gifts for the Peoples of the Earth.

10 Things I Didn't Know About Chickens

...Until I raised four of my own in our suburban backyard (and this is pre-egglaying, so there is more to learn). In no particular order...

1. They put themselves to bed at night. Come dusk, they hop up into the coop and tuck in. Our four pile up on each other in a corner of the coop, though I keep adjusting their roost to see if I can entice them on to it. We shall see.

2. They are totally fun to just watch. A running chicken is really one of the funniest things ever. And no, I don't have to chase them, they run all the time as they poke around our yard. They sit in funny poses, they take dust baths, they do a little chicken dance to scratch at the dirt. Totally entertaining. Anyone who has chickens knows what I mean, and anyone who doesn't will think I've gone off the deep end. Which maybe I have.

3. They cost almost nothing to keep. I bought a fifty pound bag of chicken feed for less than $25. That will eventually get turned into eggs (the freshest there is!), and is already turning into awesome compost. My cats cannot boast such economy.

4. Along the compost theme, the nitrogen/carbon ratio of chicken poo to wood shavings we get from the coop, which we clean less than once a week, is ideal and breaks down very quickly. And it doesn't stink. I can smell it, but it's not unpleasant. (Poor cats. Can you see a theme here?)

5. They are really soft. Chickens look all tough and nearly reptilian, but their feathers are very soft. So are their legs. Who knew?

6. They make sweet crooning noises when they come over to say hi. Which they do whenever I sit in one place. One of our chickens is more imprinted on us, and therefore more friendly, but they all come over and croon. It's probably a plea for treats, but it's a very sweet sound. I also love the way they look at me: part curiosity, part affection, part wariness. All chicken.

7. They are fascinated with my cats. And not afraid of them at all. In fact, my boy cat is afraid of them. He is twice their size (but they're catching up to him). They are actually fascinated with just about everything, though somewhat easily spooked. They are chickens, after all.

8. I thought all chickens loved earthworms. Not ours. But they can catch a small green spider in the blink of an eye, and apparently they eat mosquitoes, too.

9. They eat dandelion seeds. Since I don't use any weed killer, this is a nice bonus. I have four chickens and a thousand dandelions, so you can guess who is winning, but it's a start. They also love pansies. Sigh.

10. They are really quiet. Apparently when they lay an egg they like to announce it, but for now the loudest squawk is quieter than a crow or a jay. Can't say the same for my neighbors' barky dogs. And no, we do not have a rooster, which you do not need to get eggs, so we do not bother the neighbors.

Can you tell I'm hooked? If you're considering chickens, I have three words of advice: Go for it! You'll love them!