Celebrating the Fall Equinox

September 17- 22, 2024: A full Harvest Supermoon and the Autumn Equinox created quite a celebratory week. I wanted to honor this transition of the seasons and the weekend responded with picture perfect weather - so I celebrated how much progress I had made over the summer in my pollinator garden plus the completion of my year-long appreciation art project (soon to be revealed!).

As the full-moon arrived, I was completing the last of 76 small works I had created throughout 2024 in celebration of my approaching milestone birthday in October. The full moon always increases my energy levels so I rode that wave and enjoyed the thrill of seeing the finish line. I love the feeling of completion. Then the weekend arrived and I began my Autumn Equinox celebration.

There's a farm market a few miles down the road from us that I had never visited, so I decided to head there on Saturday. My first suprise was discovering a massive field of sunflowers in full bloom on the way! It was an amazing feeling to step into such a vast array of the sunflowers spreading out over acres into the distance.

Then I reached the farm market. DuVall Farm Market is a family-run farmstand, just built a few years ago, but it has a charming country store feel to it that was just what I wanted to enjoy.

I found small, decorative pumpkins and also discovered they sell pie pumpkins, so I decided to make some low-sugar pumpkin spice bread, for the Equinox, which I did. It was tasty and didn't cause a leap in my blood sugar, a win-win.

Sunday morning I woke early, eager to make my garden mandala to celebrate the Equinox. I felt both joy and gratitude for all the work I'd done expanding my pollinator haven. Now the growing season was ending. Only the late-blooming false blue indigo had new blossoms.

I gathered leaves and flowers to arrange with the mini-pumpkins into a mandala at the edge of my native plant garden. From spring though late August, I planted between 40-50 new plants (lost count!), both sun and shade lovers.

I arranged the pumpkins and plant materials into circles radiating outwards. I loved the way it looked, simple andcolorful.

Once I completed it, I sat at the edge of the garden looking at all my old and new plants, filled with appreciation for the sheer joy of creating something positive and life affirming.

I had thought a lot about creating a ceremony to accompany this garden altar, but in the end I just brought out a stool and sat with all my plants and thanked them for growing, for flowering and bringing me joy. Then I thanked the earth, the wind, the trees and plants and birds and all the other-than-human beings who have brought me such purpose and pleasure working here.

I reaffirmed my pledge to create habitats for them to find food and shelter and places to reproduce and support the healing and regeneration of the earth for all living beings. I closed my time in the garden with a small prayer of blessing and thanks, because I feel a true love and connection with nature I didn't feel until I committed to doing this.

My vision is simple - I want to create a wide path of reclaimed turf through our seven acres that is dedicated to pollinators and native plants and bushes, and keep learning how to design, improve and expand that.

If the idea of helping pollinators calls to you, you will find a lot of support and information at Wild Ones for how to begin rewilding any size yard.

Writing as a Sacred Practice

September 10 - 17, 2024

I started this post on Monday morning, September 16th, the day before the Harvest Moon. I attended an online freewriting and sharing group led by Nancy Kilgore though Burlington Writers Workshop, which I just discovered and joined. Synchronistically, the class turns out to be a perfect fit.

I have returned to writing, not in the ways I wrote earlier in my life, not the teenage diary entries suffering over prettiness or boys, not the long, soul-searching essays questioning life’s purpose and meaning, not the magazine articles I wrote profiling artists, not the corporate marketing and non-profit development newsletters and fund-raising appeals I wrote, or even blog posts about process, art theory or practice.

My return to writing is driven, in part, by both hope and despair. I hold hope high in esteem, because I believe we create our lives by choosing the lenses through which we view the world. Division and destruction can challenge my hopeful beliefs about humanity and our future. But even at those times I can also see the beauty of human compassion and loving-kindness through all the turmoil.

As despair began creeping in with the 2016 elections, then multiplied and magnified with mass shootings, extremism and a global pandemic, I made the choice to withdraw from the world. The whole culture felt toxic and frantic and apocalyptic.

I did find some peace through nature and creating in my isolation, but I am a person who has a lot of curiosity and a deep need to explore the world and challenge myself. That brought me back to the idea of writing. I wanted to write again but I needed a new perspective on it to create a foundation I could invest in with whole-heartedness and genuine enthusiasm.

In the Monday morning writing group I just attended, we sat in silent meditation and the words “a sacred writing practice” popped into my mind. I pay attention when words pop into my head. I’ve learned, as a creative, they are often messages from my inner wisdom and merit careful attention.

Of course, my mind immediately leapt in and began asking, what actually is sacred writing?  Is it only about conventional religions and their tenets?

I contemplated the concept of “sacred” and how much I respond to the word on a feeling level. I was tempted to look up the definition in a dictionary, but then I realized the answer to that question is not what a dictionary or any "authority" says but rather, what do I say? What is sacred to me? If I choose those things and write about them, then is that not a sacred practice?

So what in my current life is sacred? I keep an altar in my studio that I change with the seasons, where I light candles and set intentions and reflect with gratitude on the many blessings that fill my life. I can write about that.

I have a growing passion for native plants and am creating a large pollinator garden on our property; by doing this, I join the growing movement of humans who want to be stewards to rather than destroyers of the natural world. I picture my garden forming a chain with others across this whole region and creating a large pollinator pathway where native plants, trees and bushes provide healthy habitats for these vital small beings. I can write about that.

I love learning and reading books; they provide insights and new perspectives and teachings. I don’t often read books cover to cover. When I have ideas or questions, I go to my book shelves and frequently find the perfect chapter or page that offers options and resources. I often build small piles of these books around me. When the piles grow large or unwieldy or I don’t need them anymore, I put them back on the bookshelves, and let the process begin again.

Happily I am also surrounded by objects that I call sacred. They are often simple, like the faded woven reed bowl I fill with found feathers. I purchased the now-faded bowl in New Mexico decades ago when my family was all alive and living there, from a large imported Mexican goods store that I loved to visit, filled with bright textiles and baskets.

Seeing the sacred in the ordinary and every-day is the direction my life seems to be taking.

As I move around our home and my studio space, I see items, some arranged intentionally and some by chance. They all take on a new importance when I pause and really take time to see and consider them. In this creative life I choose to live, they are touchstones, rich with memory and my own appreciation for their meaning. When I acknowledge them, my sense of rootedness in place, in time, in my own changing body feels supported and uplifted by their presence.

Perhaps it is not just writing that is sacred, perhaps my whole life, when I allow it, is as well. My whole experience and history as a human are unique and sacred and I can carry that with me, draw on it for strength and sustenance when needed and share it with others as a gentle reminder of our connectedness.

Of Cycles and Seasons

September 3 - 10, 2024 - New Moon & First Quarter of the Full Corn Moon

Since the New Moon began on September 3, my walks around our property are making it clear summer is shifting towards autumn. The coneflowers are mostly dead and drying out. The black eyed susan petals have all but disappeared, leaving round, black seed heads. The pods on the milkweed patch by the vegetable garden, just weeks ago (or maybe it just seems that way) covered with blossoms and bees, have dried out and are bursting open, their delicate, lacy seeds emerging to be scattered by the winds.

Old me mostly experienced nature from behind car windshields, hurriedly climbing in and out of the car to drive on major thoroughfares at high speeds. I was too busy trying to be successful as an artist to slow down and consider the other beings who inhabit this earth with me.

New me now savors slowness. I spend more time watching the natural world shift and change around me. I'm still very active creatively, but now my days revolve around building a more caring relationship to all living beings, including myself, and trying to pay closer attention to moving with the natural cycles of the earth rather than against them.

A question that has emerged for me in the past few years is: what would my life look like if I was fully connected and in harmony with the cycles and shifts of the seasons? I'd like to explore that and write about it, so expect to hear more about this as I try to combine my art practice with my love of the natural world and its inhabitants.

Since the world has changed so dramatically in the past four years, I have felt a strong pull to create positive change in the world. I looked around at where I live and what I could build on right here in my own back yard. I began reading about "rewilding" property, decreasing the amount of grass (which puts absolutely no nutrients back into the soil), increasing native plants and herbs and wildflowers, and creating habitats of native plants, bushes and trees to help pollinators find food and shelter. I started to reclaim my old, abandoned perennial garden and expand it to build a pollinator haven with native plants and bushes.

I knew little to nothing about what plants are native to this area. I did a lot of online research, found some great organizations like Wild Ones, https://wildones.org and read as much as possible about the most beneficial plants. The more I learned, the more my motivation grew. This entire summer felt like opening a beautiful gift each time a new type of plant I had planted this or the year before finally bloomed. It seemed to take forever, but the wait was well worth it.

For the first time in my life, I saw monarch caterpillars chewing their way through leaves of the milkweed plants, getting ready to find a sheltered hiding spot to make cocoons before morphing into butterflies (I had thought they did this under a leaf of the milkweed, but they crawl away and attach to well-hidden spots when they are ready to make their cocoons).

This is the first year I saw beautiful monarch and swallowtail butterflies. I saw my very first bumblebee moth at our hummingbird feeder, also called a snowberry clearwing, and oh how amazing it was to experience that.

Now that summer is ending, all my new native plants are still healthy and alive. A few, like the New England asters and one of the Virginia Waterleaf plants, got chewed repeatedly in early summer by the baby rabbits and possibly deer until they were just stubs above the soil, but they seem to have come back. While they didn't bloom, I learned there are fragrant plants the rabbits and deer dislike the smell of, so I added lavender and zinnias near those - and next year will plant lots of marigolds - as deterrents.

I expect the same learning curve with my pollinator efforts that I have with my other creative practices. I am always learning, always improving, and always encountering new problems and challenges that I have to figure out how to solve, work around - sometimes just accept and pivot to a new option.

The exhilaration and satisfaction come not in creating the perfect yard or pollinator haven, but in moving the ideas forward, bit by bit, staying with the vision and celebrating each small step towards what I envision as a haven for my little friends. In my studio and outside in the yard, I am learning how to see, how to listen to and care for these vital beings in our eco-system. As a result, I now feel connected to nature in a way I never did before. That means a lot to me at a time in human history when the natural world is being destroyed so carelessly and rampantly.

At first I felt what I wanted to contribute was too little, but now I feel my commitment to take positive action right where I live links me with thousands of others practicing acts of stewardship and compassion. As an optimist, I can't help but see the cumulative actions of individuals as a monumental force for good and I believe now, as I have my whole adult life, that loving-kindness and goodness will always ultimately prevail.

The gardens still have a lot of filling in to do, so I am already excited to see what happens next year as these plants mature. I planted in increments this season; about 32 shade, part-shade and full sun perennials, then about 22 more full-sun perennials. After the thrill of seeing both monarch butterflies and caterpillars, I planted five more milkweed plants! We have a patch of common milkweeds by the vegetable garden as well - they are invasives so I picked off all the seed pods, but the bees and butterflies loved them!