last week we did portrait painting at yip and kailea, an amazing young woman from hawii, wrote this blog, check it out!
And yes this week started the monday after the saturday that i kept hitting my head, and needless to say it was a challenge! the participants were (are) incredible and the course was good, but i didn't start feeling really like myself until tuesday of this week, ten days later. i am still oddly accident prone and am having this nagging sensation that i am missing something, so i am continuing to try and let go. i continue to be committed to not making up the internal world of somebody else, and now that i feel better, i can continue to practice yoga and try to find my way out of this phase.
i fly to the US on sunday morning and will be in northern california, north carolina and boston until January 27th!
So i keep thinking, 'ah man, my face hurts!' and i can hear my brother say, 'yeah, well it hurts me too!' which makes me smile, which leads to me thinking 'oh my face hurts' and then i can hear my brother say 'yeah, well it hurts me too!' which makes me smile ... you can see where this is going! ouch!
view from the platform in september
Last saturday i woke up and things weren't quite right in my world. It wasn't that time of the month, nothing tragic happened with anybody close to me this week and in general things are pretty good, maybe it was the deafening silence of an email still unanswered or the amount of things i still want to finish/do before christmas, or the continued frustration of not being able to support my family better, but somehow i woke up wrong. So i turned to my trusted therapist, the woods. These past few months i have spent quite some time walking around and sitting in the woods. Something always seems to heal, lift and/or get better there, and i return to the world of people and things refreshed and improved. Nature is our oldest and wisest teacher, we just have to remember to listen. Well, the wind was cold and biting but the thin layer of snow made everything sparkle and glitter. Yet even in the sparkle and beauty my heart was heavy, dropping low and pulling the tears down my face as i walked up the road with the wind against my back, up and into the forest. I ran up the first wooded hill and then wound my way along the ridge. The snow dampened the usual sounds and the trees seemed dressed up in thin layers of white. Even though it wasn't my usual route it delivered me to my usual place, the sanctuary of the platform. Despite my reverence and holy feelings for the place, that sentiment, is shared by many, but not by all. Or at least i can say that not all demonstrate their love the same way i do, and the planks that are up there as low benches often get thrown off the side. Feeling like i wanted to do to make a difference and have something to sit on i decided to carry one back up. i lift it, and its quite heavy ( it's not really a plank, more like a really thick piece of tree) and i am feeling strong and proud. as i am half way up with this lumber on my shoulder it falls from resting on my arm to smacking me upside against the head! ouch! i don't fall (which was awesome) and i don't even drop the board or stumble, but simple keep on going a couple more rungs, drop it down and rub my head thinking, well shit maybe that is what i need to get me out of this rut! well it turns out that that wasn't enough.
oddly enough, though that trip into the wood helped, it didn't do its usual tricks.. so it continued to be a weird saturday.
ceiling in berlin, but feels like the dream.. not sure what is what
After trying to make right all day long i give up and give in and go to a party. Now mind you i am living outside of a little village in sweden, so when there is a party that is put on with flyers and, well, nearly all my friends attending it's a pretty sweet thang. It was beautifully set up, not at all what i expected upon hearing it was in a factory (albeit for choroi flutes, the wooden pentatonic flutes that litter the waldorf school's third grades around the world)! So yeah, sweet lighting and the music got better and better and i danced and danced and things seemed to be just right. But not right enough. i had probably about two drinks and was feeling pleasantly warm, but not drunk and felt like it was time for a smoke, so i sat down next to my friend to roll (because it was snowy and cold outside) and the next thing i remember is two of my friend helping me up off the cold hard ground asking me if i was ok. i felt like i had slipped into a dream, and was falling back and forth between it and the party. Apparently i slipped on the icy ramp and hit the same bruised side of my head, but this time more my face really. Here it is two days later and my whole head still aches, it hurts when i smile or chew or heaven forbid, laugh and all i can think is what am i supposed to wake up to? what am i needing to shift? what can i do different? well, i need to sleep more, maybe i will find that dream that i kept slipping back to and maybe i will find the question that i am answering by hitting my head, bruising my skull and generally aching for.
And here's a little freaky kids song (not really for kids) to keep everything in perspective.
lots of love to you wherever you are.
good night!
This autum in sweden has been epic. I can't begin to do it justice with just these couple of snap shots, but the colors have be audacious, wild and unforgiving. By unforgiving I mean in a relentless, impersonal way, where one afternoon you will be so moved by a fantastic fuchsia flower with orange balls and the the next day it will be even more pink, orange and ridiculous!
On days where the sun is shining its gorgeous and everything looks sun-licked and happy,
on days where it is cloudy the leaves all over, look like they have swallowed pieces of sunlight from yesterday.
and then there are these confused moments of the past and the future meeting in unusual ways!
Nature displays with no fear of seeming ridiculous! If you look closely, you can see a September sunflower growing out of the pine tree branch. There are a lot of things you can't quite see or know from this sub-par photo! The first thing is that this is directly out of my bedroom window and I live on the second floor. The second is that this flower grew and hung out there for weeks, it felt like it came there for me and my friends to remind us that what was happening was special. And the flower fell, and disappeared at the same time my friends did continues on their journey too. But then again, most magic is ephemeral ;-)
One of the sweetest gifts of this fall was the building of the phoenix, the new nibble barn. I will tell you the whole story one day, but for now, just know that this barn represents true goodness in the world, and in our community here in ytterjärna it represents the beginning of recovering from death and fire, rising again. And it was built by some of my favorite people <3
As the leaves fall and the wind picks up winter's chill, the image is that all the elemental beings return from the cosmos and enter the ground to live in earths structures through the winter. Interesting to think about, and here the feeling of beings all around us supporting the growth and death in nature is palpable. If you don't believe in fairies or elves or such things, try living in the Swedish woods for a while.
till my thighs are steeped in burning flowers I will take the sun in my mouth and leap into the ripe air Alive with closed eyes to dash against darkness in the sleeping curves of my body Shall enter fingers of smooth mastery with chasteness of sea-girls Will i complete the mystery of my flesh I will rise After a thousand years lipping flowers And set my teeth in the silver of the moon
this poem right now gets closer than anything to touching on the what has set my skin aglow and my heart on fire. i am about to be 39 and i am in awe of this tremendous world that doesn't seem to tire of showing me new faces of love despite my feeble insistence that i know what i want or who!
