A Handle On It

How am I doing?

My front screen door has never fit well into the frame.  A few days ago, I am pulling hard, it takes an effort to close the door and snap.  In a split second, I’m on my butt with the handle broken off in my hand.  Unharmed and laughing.  I right a stack of books, toss the handle in the trash.  Then toilet won’t flush – the handle mechanism rusted through.  Hmmm.  Two broken handles in one day.  What is this telling me?

How am I doing in the practical?  How am I doing in the mystical?

NTD kitchen – No dairy.  No grains. No broccoli. No shellfish. No sugar.  No problem.  The menu and shopping list and time.  There is such abundance, we will eat well from the bounty of our Mother.  In gratitude, I offer a blessing for the water, the earth and the hands who tended the seeds, the salmon, fisherman and four-legged.  The meadow remembers the patterns of our feet dancing gratefully to give back to our Grand Mother Turtle, for her infinite generosity.  She knows we are coming.  I feel my connection.

Moccasin commission for a dance helper – completed  with the help of Osprey, Eagle, Pileated woodpecker and Dragonfly.

A drum birthing day is scheduled for the day after my return from the Night Turtle Dance ceremony.  I have prayed and prepared, hides and hoops are waiting.

The screen door handle remains broken.  The old toilet handle has been replaced with a “universal” handle.  Oddly this mundane object leaves me feeling a connection to the whole.  I feel the need to test it by reaching out, speaking – connecting the desires of my heart with the want of the mind.  How am I doing?

There’d been a chartreuse green cricket-like bug in my bathroom, I’d seen it on two consecutive nights.  This morning I found it treading water in the toilet (ironic), I scooped him out, set him free.  A juvenile Nuthatch crashed into the slider – there seemed to be a collision between him and a gray squirrel, the squirrel ran off.  I gathered up the little bird, flopping on his back, held him tenderly and singing until he flew away into the Noble fir.  And a Crane fly tangled in an abandon spider’s web, I rescued him from the stickiness and watched him fly free.  Not even noon, already three lives saved.

“…and there was a new voice, which you slowly recognized as your own, that kept you company as you strode deeper and deeper into the world, determined to do the only thing you could do – determined to save the only life you could save.”  Mary Oliver, The Journey

There’s an orphan juvenile Wood Duck on the lake, doing the only thing he can, saving himself.  How am I doing?

A’ho Mitakuye Oyasin  ~  All My Relations

Summer 2015 Workshop Schedule

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