At the beginning of my own emotional recovery, I was asked one simple question by a person with whom I am still working to this day. And the question was, “Can you just keep putting one foot in front of the other…can you just do that?”
It doesn’t matter what our recovery looks like. It doesn’t matter how long it takes. It’s going to move at its own pace.
And if we’re committed to it – deeply committed to it – we’re going to experience everything.
We’re going to feel everything…
When you spend your life with people – and you watch them getting older -and you look in the mirror and there’s an old man staring back at you, it tends to put things in perspective.
There’s a certain clarity that’s come with aging. It’s the clarity of knowing what’s important and what’s not; of realizing that the energy that we have is limited sometimes, and it’s up to us where we put it.
But as the wrinkles start coming on – and the hair starts falling off – it gets easier to put that energy into the things that matter, and to let the ones that don’t fall away.
One of the great blessings of my life is that I have found myself in the presence of some absolutely phenomenal people…Elders that I have respected – and continue to respect – to this day.
I have learned so much. I’ve laughed with them. I’ve cried with them. Worked hard. I’ve seen their humanity, and they’ve seen mine,
and they’ve loved me anyway...
One of these elders, someone whom I admire very much, said something one time that really cleared a lot up for me. We were sitting in a circle in a living room, getting ready to do some ceremonial work, and he said, “If any of you have any questions, ask me. Ring me out. Don’t make the mistake of thinking that you’re always going to have me. Don’t even make the mistake of believing that it’s guaranteed that we’re going to be together again…”
Statements like that can be a little unsettling, but they can also be liberating. They can free you from a lot of bullshit, if you’re brave enough to take them to heart…
One of the things I really love about these transitional seasons — like fall and spring — where things are busy dying and being born, is that it’s very easy to become aware of the fact that down deep, below all of it, there’s something larger, something much more powerful at work, pushing itself out into the world.
And so, on one level, we see the returning of the plants. We see the first flashes of greens and yellows and pinks and purples. We hear the birdsongs. We see the blossoms, like those in the ornamental Pear trees across the street, and that’s all just really spectacular.
But below that, way down deep, we’re also aware that that’s life… that untamable force pushing itself out into the world as these things, after all the stillness and death of winter…
Let me ask you a question.
Have you ever had a moment in your life where something shifted at a really deep level?
Maybe you’re not even sure what it was, but you just felt that change. And you knew that if you said “Yes” to it, that things would never be the same – that there’d be no going back.
And yet, somewhere, deeper down, you also knew that saying, “No” just wasn’t an option…
So, I’ve been spending a lot of time in the backyard lately, taking care of the ceremonial space that our Community uses when we come together on the first Saturday of every month. It needed a little work, so, I’ve been out there doing that, and it’s me taken a couple of days to wrap things up.
At the end of the first day, I was sitting out on the patio, surveying the yard, taking in my work, and as I looked over at that spot, I was hit with the feeling that the energy of the place had shifted dramatically; that the work we’d be doing there would be different from now on.
It would be deeper.
The place felt like it had grown up, like it had become more rooted, become more… solid.
And I also knew without a doubt that I had to say “Yes” to it, and that once I did, there’d be no going back to the way things were before…
Well, seemingly in spite of some of our best efforts, Spring actually came.
The daffodils are starting to open. The hyacinths are pushing their way up through the dirt. The walking onions and strawberry plants in the backyard are really starting to take off.
And the best part is, none of this required a damn bit of effort on my part. It all just kind of happened on its own – the same way it always does…
Well, it’s that kind of day; the first of many I’ll have in front of me over the next few months. I weeded the garden, brought out the grill, and dug out the Russian Sage from in front of the house.
I grew up hearing, “Ya gotta eat a peck a’ dirt before you die,” and on days like this I’m probably wearing almost that much on my shirt.
As I’ve gotten older, I’ve come to realize that there’s not a whole lot of things in this world that a good dirt bath can’t cure…
By the time I was born, little remained of the coal mining industry in Northeastern Pennsylvania’s Mid Valley region but skeletal breakers, ubiquitous culm banks, and the occasional rotten-egg smell of a still-active mine fire on the wind.
To some, this might sound ominous, or maybe even depressing, but for one particularly inquisitive child, who spent his days picking fossils and roaming the sparse Gray Birch copses dotting those same culm banks, it fostered a deep and personal connection with the Spirit of the place.
From the minute my bare feet left the linoleum and found themselves on grass and shale, I ran with it. I breathed it in, and felt its hand against my cheek in the mystery of every breeze. It offered something that the chaos of a household riven by alcohol, poverty, and emotional instability could not – it offered a deep and unshakable sense of home.
As I write these words, I am sixty-two years old. Many years ago, I traded the culm banks and Company houses of a small Northeastern Pennsylvania borough for the stockade fences and manicured lawns of a suburban vinyl village in Southern New Jersey, only to discover within myself a deepening sense of spiritual homelessness.
Fingernail Moon: A Coalcracker Looks for Glassboro, the first lines of which were written just a little over two years ago on an unseasonably warm February evening, are the result of a year-long endeavor to establish contact with the Spirit of another place, to make myself available to its idiosyncrasies and its graces, and if it so desired, to share with it a few of my own…
When you’re a kid growing up, you have certain expectations of what your life – what your immediate surroundings – are going to look like. You expect to be safe. You expect to be loved unconditionally. You expect there to be food on the table, stability in your home, enough money to take care of the needs that come up, whatever they might be.
But for some of us, it didn’t always work out that way – in fact, most of the time, it didn’t.
And those of us who grew up in households like that, where there was dysfunctionality or addiction – maybe abuse of some kind – we learned to come at the world in a certain way. We learned that the love that we received was conditional, and that we were always trying to be good enough to earn that love. And so, we learned how to please other people and act the way that they wanted us to act in order to give us that love.
And because of all that, we never really felt safe…
We’re currently in the aftermath of a pretty heavy snowstorm. We ended up with about 12 or 14 inches, and so, I spent most of yesterday outside shoveling us out.
Currently, the temperatures are rising, the sun is out, and the roads and the sidewalks are clean. In fact, they’re almost bone dry. But it’s still going to take a long time for what’s left behind to melt. It’s going to be a good while before we see any green poking up in the backyard.
Looking out at that unbroken field of snow, especially when it’s this deep and heavy, it’s very easy to feel the oppressiveness and the inevitability of it all.
Winter’s a time of dying off – a time of silence, of solitude. And that can be a little hard to navigate for some of us. It’s obvious that we live in a time that’s pretty oppressive. Things are coming at us left and right. They seem to pile up. The world can feel cold and heavy. We can feel alone and isolated.
But there’s another aspect to winter that’s important to keep in mind.
Yes, there is a dying off now, but it’s a necessary dying off. It’s the removal of the old things, the removal of the things that no longer serve. And as those things fall away, they open up space for new growth.
Yes, it’s a time of quiet, a time of slowing down, but it’s also a time of contemplation – of taking stock – of allowing the blessings that we’ve received throughout the year to settle into our bones…
I’m going to ask you two questions right off the bat:
“What are your gifts?”
and
“How are you using them?”
Y’know, it’s pretty obvious that there are forces in the world right now that are doing everything they can to keep us divided – to keep us at each other’s throats – so that they can grab all the power and control that they can. If you look at them closely, you’ll see that their actions come from a place of fear; come from a very, very deep wound. And the results of that wound have been pretty fucking horrific in a lot of cases.
But here’s the thing: in the midst of all of that, it’s also obvious – if you look – that a lot of us are starting to pull together, and come into the world from a place of compassion; a place of inclusivity and love.
Doctors. Artists. Musicians. Social activists. Politicians. So many of us are taking the gifts that we’ve been given, and carrying them into the world to serve the greater good…
Bonja the Bodger 