"Morning Meds"

For some time now each morning, I've been fortunate to participate in a morning meditation call with friends who I came to know through Mystery School with Jean Houston. From Chicago to California we gather by phone, read a poem often written by one of the group members, then respond sometimes through silence and at other times with our own writings.

In order to return to and savor the rich images created by these women, I created a folder in my email that's titled "Morning Meds."

This morning I smiled realizing Morning Meds truly are my morning "meds." They are medication to my soul, jump starting my mood, fine tuning my senses, birthing a smile inside and out.

These 'meds' don't require a doctor's visit, co-payment and prescription. They not recorded in my health record as a preexisting condition. The side effects are pleasant, nothing like the ones heard in commercials. You know "the voice" that calmly states you may experience constipation, nausea and dizziness then just as calmly adds if you've organ failure, "Call your doctor."

Imagine how these 'meds' would radically shift the health care debate while not increasing the national debt.

Let's not wait for a lobby in Washington to take this on.

My morning ritual with friends, poetry, quiet and prayer is my medication. What soothes your soul and lifts your spirit making you smile inside or out?

-Dawn ! The Good News Muse, 31 January 2011

Impressionism, Potatoes and The Scent of Kids - On Being Fed

This morning as I pulled from my driveway I smelled children. Yes, the sweet, surprising scent of Ella and Lily permeated the car and until that moment I didn't realize my two favorite girls even had a specific scent.

We had the night prior finally made it to the movie "Tangled" (two thumbs up). I initially promised this adventure BF (before flu) to Lily the night of her piano recital. That evening my experience was auditorially enriched by Ella and Lily's performing their own compositions. I sat there sensing my heart and insides thanks to "The Happy Orange Inch Worm" and "The Stinky Cheese Man." Yes, speaking of scents......"The Stinky Cheese Man."

Something similar happened this week as I washed potatoes for lunch. I stood at the kitchen sink holding a potato when suddenly I "sensed" I was connected.

It wasn't news to me that I had been disconnected. For the past month, I had been episodically AWOL a result of lingering disappointment from having the flu over Christmas, an unusual white Christmas for us which I could only enjoy from the inside looking out.

It didn't take long pondering the potato in my hand to realize what had shifted. As with Ella and Lily, this potato and I have had a many-leveled, ongoing relationship. I had first seen these potatoes a year earlier in a gardening magazine. Our relationship ensued even as I anticipated their arrival by mail and heightened through summer as I planted them in mounds of earth and kept them moist thinking the green stems might never emerge and certainly not bloom. But they did. Everything happened as it was supposed to and in time, I turned over the bags in which they were planted and rummaged through the piles to find gems that had magically manifested. We've continued to be engaged for months as they're kept in a basket from which I occasionally choose 2-3 for a meal.

Just as magical is the fact that these earthen orbs become part of my body. Yes, concretely they are no more, but as they nourish me they only change form. They live on through my body as do the soil, rain and sunlight that nourished them.

This happened in early Winter BF with an apple. As I bit into it, I tasted summer and thought,
'How could that be?' until I realized this was the last apple from our tree, the tree which is home to many birds in winter as two feeders hang from it, then home to leaves of green and blossoms that become fruit. Thanks to my relationship over the seasons with the tree I tasted Summer in Winter. In the apple. I was fed.

I was fed repeatedly at the Frist Art Museum in the last several months thanks to the exhibit "The Birth of Impressionism" from Paris' Musee d'Orsay. Knowing the exhibit is in its final week, I went again wondering what experience I might have.

I arrived to find the parking lots full in addition to three empty school buses. I should have been happy, but instead I was sad, disappointed. I wanted to steal one last quiet moment with the paintings. In reality I knew the crowds don't really deter me, only my crowded insides can do that.

I thought of artists painting from experience so I had my experience -sadness- and soon it passed. (There is something beautiful I often find and forget about accepting 'what is' rather than resisting it that allows it to flow on like a stream within.)

In the place of sadness, I felt the paintings.

During my second visit months ago, I realized I was experiencing something I've only felt with Nature. I sensed energy in my body's core, energy that came to me from the paintings, energy that fed me.

Here I was on my sixth and probably last visit, feeling the cycle, a circle, complete as not only the energy came to me, but I felt my energy going to the paintings.

Knowing this time might be my last, I had such a hard time leaving each gallery. Sadness returned, for seeing France at the Frist over these months has resurrected me and I didn't even know I needed resurrecting. I've been reconnected with the experiences of my 50th birthday in France through the faces, the hands, the scenes and the countryside. I've been reconnected with something that feels old and dear, earthen and deep.

I really did not want to leave.

Then I heard: "Dawn, in your openness to experiencing these paintings they become part of you just like the potato or piano pieces played by kids and smells of soap and shampoo." How beautiful is that?

We are sensory beings, yet how often do we hear or say, "That makes no sense" or "He doesn't have any sense" as if sensing was a heady, brainy, mental process?

With scents, sounds, sights and the body, life is rich. In this richness, we are fed. We are fed by our senses, the arts, the Earth and others if only we are aware. And in this being fed we are given the opportunity to come home to ourselves, to be in relationship with our bodies and in turn with all that is around us.

-Dawn! The Good News Muse, 20 January 2011
dawn@imaginetheshift.com

To chew on:
How do you experience being fed?
How do you experience your senses?
When you find yourself disconnected, how do you reconnect?

The Sandhill Cranes & the Trail of Tears - The Return of the Relational

This week the Tennessee Wildlife Resources Agency will decide whether to adopt a proposal to hunt Sandhill Cranes. This disconcerting news reported by writer Anne Paine in last week's Tennessean prompted us to take a weekend road trip to visit the Hiwassee Refuge just north of Chattanooga near Birchwood, TN.

Eighty years ago there were only 25 breeding crane pairs recorded in Wisconsin due to hunting, agricultural expansion and drainage of wetlands in the 1700 and 1800's. Thanks to protections and habitat restoration these amazing birds with wing spans of 6-7 feet have gradually rebounded so that thousands winter over at the refuge before returning north.

I was quickly captured by the graceful landings of these tall gray birds whose periodic movements made the fields in which they congregate seem to come alive and dance. I was auditorily mesmerized by their trilling vocalizations remarking that it was a bit like listening to thousands of delighted Julia Childs. (No offense, Julia fans...that's a compliment.)

After two hours of savoring the sights and sounds, we drove down the road to another sight no more than a half mile away. Previously turning into the refuge, we noticed a sign for something called the "Cherokee Removal Memorial" and commented on the harsh connotation of the wording.

Arriving at the memorial, we realized the appropriateness of the word "removal" for we were at one of the starting points of the "Trail of Tears" where 9,000 Cherokee and Creek Native Americans held in stockades were made to sleep on the ground naked in the cold and rain for weeks in the fall of 1838.

Stunned and disconnected, I read the historical plaques summarizing the events that occurred. (It's one thing to read of the Trail of Tears in a book and another to actually be on the land where it began.) I found myself wondering, "How could these men force people to leave their homes and land?" As if on cue, repeated distant gun fire punctuated the quiet providing an auditory reminder of part of the 'how,' the part related to instilling fear. The Natives were forced by bayonet and gun to submit. I wondered what the wives of these men were thinking? Did any wife question her husband's actions? What role did fear and denial play in female silence during these times? I pondered today's parallel as fear is still used to separate and control us and how nearly impossible it is to have reasonable conversations about guns due to the high level of reactivity.

Now days later, I still hear and hold the beauty of the Sandhill Cranes, their graceful flight, their dance and sounds as well as their instinctually knowing when to take flight and return home. How have we become so separated over the centuries from our deeper instinct, from our inner knowing, from responses that are loving, thoughtful and relational? How might the events of the day be different if we made our way back to a deeper resonance found in our bodies from which we've been so disconnected?

Days later, I hold the beauty of nature juxtaposed to the unspeakable acts of human nature.

There is a deep and profound lesson offered just outside Birchwood, TN. Within yards of one another two very different stories reside, one of the beauty of Nature evidenced through the cranes who instinctively listen and know when to begin their migration and one of human nature at its worst as a people who lived instinctively honoring the land were forced to migrate by a people who did not honor the relational.

All things Native, the Indigenous Ones who lived here long before our ancestors, as well as the animals and trees, all of Nature, is offered to us, to reveal to us our capacities, the possibility for greater awareness or higher consciousness and awareness of our relatedness to all creation.

I do not say the following to diminish the tragedy of the Trail of Tears, but doesn't the Trail of Tears quietly continue as we live our busy lives, externally focused and separate from our body, instinct, intuition and heart?

Maybe the losses of the thousands of Native Americans will not have been in vain if we can during this time return to the relational, if we can see, feel and hear the trail of tears from our individual and collective unheard hearts, if we can migrate home to our insides, to remembering the instinct of love and in turn join with one another in a greater sense of awareness and relatedness.

May this migration within begin.

-Dawn! The Good News Muse, 18 Jan. 2011
dawn@imaginetheshift.com

1. Say 'No' to hunting the Sandhill Cranes by emailing TWRA.Comment@tn.gov
Public opinion is being collected through Wed. the 19th. Be sure to include in the Subject line: Sandhill Crane Comments.

2. Enjoy a 40 second video of the cranes HERE.

3. Watch the movie "Fly Away Home" to see the story inspiring "Operation Migration" in which people flying ultra-light planes have begun to teach juvenile Whooping Cranes to migrate.
4. Learn about Operation Migration at this LINK.
5. Go see the Sandhill Cranes this January/February in Birchwood, TN just off I-75 on State Highway 60 ... site HERE.
6. AND experience the Cherokee Removal Memorial Park, open daily. Site HERE.
7 Here's the link to Anne Paine's story in the Tennessean. Click HERE.

Reclaiming Fire

Monday night I sat outside before a fire under the full but cloud-covered moon, the moon that in the middle of the night would be eclipsed on Winter Solstice. It occurred to me that throughout childhood and my youth, I feared fire. I feared the fires of hell and the God of whom I heard would send people there. Who I was got repressed and suppressed in large part due to the fear of fire.

I sat before a fire and thought of the women who died in 1534 and the surrounding times, the last time this particular combination of celestial events occurred between the Sun, the Moon and Earth. I sat before a fire thinking of the scores of women burned at the stake by the church, through the Catholic Inquisition and the Protestant Reformation, the powers of the time, killing women accused of being witches. I thought of how these fiery deaths not only killed but instilled such fear in those left behind, their fullest selves suppressed by the fear of fire.

I sat before a fire and watched blazes orange, blue and red turn to embers shining like gold and I reclaimed fire, the fire for me and all my earthly kin, woman and man, young and old, who have suppressed who they are out of fear of fire.

I reclaimed the fire of love for fear may dim the light but the embers still burn bright.

Fire makes Love stronger.

-Dawn, The Good News Muse 20 Dec. 2010

Chords of Love - A Story of Guitars and Trees Inspired through Tim and Me

When I’m fully present and aware (not distracted by things I think I have to do or am suppose to do), I’ve a sense of being at home inside myself. It’s in those moments that I hear, sense and see at another level the richer reality by which we’re all surrounded and in which we’re all connected.

For example, recently I stood at the stove cooking when my friend Tim’s music crossed my mind. Thanks to Facebook, Tim and I have crossed paths again. Although we were in high school together we really didn’t know one other. (Can you really know another as teenagers when one hardly knows oneself?) Now over thirty years later, we’ve discovered we’re kindred spirits as we share a love of Nature.

About a month ago, Tim messaged me, requesting my phone number. He wanted me to hear a bit of music he had written. If I liked it, he’d in turn send me a cassette if of course I had a cassette player. I smiled. We’ve at least two or three along with cassettes we occasionally play.

Later that day, the light on my land line blinked alerting me to a new message. (Yes, we still have a land line too.) I pressed ‘play’ and heard these beautiful chords seeming to reach from Tim’s guitar out into the ethers, into the Universe.

A thought crossed my mind as I listened to the brief clip. I thought…

‘This would be soothing to the trees.’

I had no idea which or what trees, but I immediately emailed Tim and shared my impression. He enthusiastically wrote back “Yes, I’d love for you to play it to the trees!” and within days, the cassette arrived.

We had company so I set it aside but I didn’t forget. I sensed I needed to wait for the right time although I didn’t quite know what that meant.

The time arrived last week as I prepared lunch. I stood at the stove stirring when Tim’s cassette crossed my mind. 'Was this the time?' I wondered. 'And if so, why?'

Within seconds of my wondering, I knew. In a magical moment of profound beauty, I knew for I heard. I heard the chain saws.

Tree cutting crews had been roaming the neighborhood cutting the trees I connect and commune with on morning walks. As someone who deeply loves trees and also desires to hold the whole of our world including the tree cutters and loggers in a conscious, loving way, seeing and hearing trees being cut always evokes mixed and deep feeling.

That very morning as I drove Jerry to work, I had noticed two trees one block over stripped of all their branches. I was hurried and didn’t want to see. It was too early to be ‘stirred’ too early to be feeling deeply. I didn’t even walk that day due to the earlier snow. I came home and busied myself until that moment I stood in the kitchen cooking.

That's when Tim's music crossed my mind and suddenly I knew why. The two trees nearby were coming down as all the trees seemed to call to me, “It’s time. It is time.”

I put in the cassette, turned up the sound and imagined the trees as they were cut being comforted by the peaceful vibrations of Tim’s guitar. I felt the sounds reaching the trees all along Natchez Trace, trees now missing their limbs nearest the power lines as well as those that hadn’t been cut. I sensed them all finding comfort as members of their family left this physical plane.

I felt them being soothed by the chords of Tim’s guitar as musical vibrations reached the trees in a beautiful chain of connectedness.

I want to play Tim's music again while walking down my street. I want to play it in honor of the rolling country hillsides where trees are logged daily in our home county not faraway. I want them to feel the vibration of beautiful music as they give their lives to become floors, press board and beams in walls, as they, the trees, become our homes.

I envision ribbons of loving sound reaching around the Earth, wrapping in the vibration of love the great Sequoias and Redwoods of the West Coast as well as the tree covered Appalachians and Adirondacks. I envision all the trees and people on Earth feeling joy and gratitude for the dance that we share, human and nature, connected by the heart's vibration, connected in loving appreciation.

This magical moment while stirring at my stove reminds me there are no ordinary moments. We are surrounded by a much richer reality in which we're invited to engage as we’re present and allow ourselves to be stirred.

Tim’s allowing his heart to be stirred is what originally birthed the piece he shared with me. I learned as we continued to exchange messages that Tim's longing to connect with his deceased wife prompted him to play the guitar chords that resonated with his heart’s chords. These sounds in turn resonated with my heart and my love for the trees. (Is it a coincidence that cords of wood heat many homes?)

What beauty! Tim's yearning to connect, reaching for his beloved, allowed me to connect with my beloveds, the trees.

We humans get entangled debating global warming, the whys and why-nots and the right use of resources. I’m not saying that’s not important but it’s just as vital that we stop our side-taking and remember we are instruments of loving vibration walking Earth.

Nature, the trees, plants and animals, benefit most from our gratitude, from an awake heart, the source of Tim’s music and the source of all beauty.

On this Solstice Eve, the time of darkness, the world is made lighter by the chords of love connecting us all.

I'm grateful to all artists especially men who listen to and express their hearts yearning. And I thank you, Tim, for entrusting me with your music and allowing me permission to share this story.

-Dawn! The Good News Muse 20 December 2010

The Sacred Geometry of Bread Pudding

I didn’t intend to make bread pudding this year. Last year was my first attempt and although it was good, I’ve just not been in the mood that is until I pulled into Trader Joe’s parking lot.

Yes, as soon as I opened my car door, bread pudding crossed my mind’s radar, Butterscotch Habanero Bread Pudding to be exact. Then within steps of walking into the store, I spied Alex my favorite employee whose presence after the parking lot inspiration were the only signs I needed.

A bit of backstory: Alex and I met last winter as I debated which hot sauce would be best for this sweet/hot treat. Alex’s helpfulness merited bread pudding so I delivered some the next day. Alex wasn’t there. He wasn’t there for some time. Had I accidentally poisoned him? Was he hiding in the employee hang out room, if Trader Joe’s offers such, as a means to avoid me, the woman who thought he liked bread pudding. Alex was not from the South so I hoped he had not fallen prey to pretending to like things as Southerners seem prone even when they despise whatever's being offered. We finally happened upon each other. I was glad to see Alex alive and he enthusiastically thanked me.

Back to the present: When I saw Alex recently, just as the kitchen muse had struck, I told him bread pudding was in the works.

Yesterday I cubed three baguettes and over the course of the day, the bread soaked in rich concoction of eggs, heavy cream, milk, butterscotch chips, sugar and yes, hot sauce.

As I stirred, cubed and cooked, I realized the many circles and cycles of sharing involved in this gift of bread pudding.

Here’s what I mean. The first cycle of sharing started with a circle in the shape of a nut. This nut through many seasonal cycles grew into a tree. That tree gave its life so I could receive a newspaper. (Yes, I love trees but I still enjoy holding a newspaper in my hands each morning.) The delivery man shares his energy as he delivers the paper making him part of my daily cycle as I am his. In the local paper last winter, a recipe was shared, a recipe for the above bread pudding served at Nashville’s Sunset Grill.

The hot sauce/butterscotch combo got my attention. So I in turn shared money (shared with me by clients) with the grocery. Cows at Hatcher Dairy and hens from McDonald’s Farms both local were part of the cycle and circle of sharing.

These gifts from Nature combined in a circular bowl soaked for hours before going into an oven made from metals shared by Mother Earth and baked by circulating heat.

Later thanks to the many circles and cycles in my car (wheels, steering wheel and belts for starters) I will deliver bread pudding to Alex and others at Trader Joes and I’ll share this through the internet.

Most importantly I realized while engaged in this process, that the cycles and circles of nature -sunlight, rain and soil- provided the jump start for my baguettes. Thanks to Nature the grain became the wheat that became the flour that became the bread.

Bread, the Flour of Life, nourishes our bodies.

And even more beautifully, these many connected circles create what Sacred Geometry calls the Flower of Life, the basis or recipe of all Creation.

I think of the folks who first made bread pudding 800 years ago, people salvaging stale bread for sustenance, were onto something of great value to us today. Regardless of our state of affairs, economically or otherwise, you can’t feel poor in spirit when you’re sharing good food or sharing in the circles that are part of the economy of the heart, Love.

Recipes are used in feeding our physical bodies, but a greater recipe feeds the spirit in life’s kitchen, the circles and cycles of sharing presence in the connections we make.

We’re surrounded by circles, seen and unseen, circles and cycles of continual sharing, giving and receiving. May we all awaken to the beauty of being fed by the Flower of Life and Creation and in so doing share the flour of life so all people can be fed.

-Dawn! The Good News Muse, 16 December 2010

dawn@imaginetheshift.com

Thank you also to Leslie Blackburn at onespaceconnected.com for introducing me to Sacred Geometry and to Noa for just beginning to tutor me last summer. The compass just wouldn't work on that poster board :) .....

Holding Baguettes, Sensing Babies

This morning I sensed babies as I stood in Provence Bakery with five baguettes cradled in my arms.

These locally made loaves of bread were headed to my kitchen to be cubed and soaked all day in a rich concoction that would eventually be baked to become bread pudding to be shared with others.

Yet in that moment, bread in my arms, I felt kin to the world's mothers, all women and men who hold and have held babies in the bend of their arms.

How is it that we get so far away from our first story of Love? How do we get separated from that first sense memory of being held in loving arms?

Our bodies remember what our minds forget. And this morning standing in the bakery, my body remembered the sense of shared love!

Awakened by my senses, I knew and felt love that in turn was energetically transmitted to those loaves of bread the way parents share love with held babies. That vibration of my love will go out into the world through bread pudding, my gift of food.

I imagine bread pudding, as well as this story, awakening a loving sense memory in all who partake of them.

Bread and story filled (field) of love feed us, allowing our bodies to remember what our hearts and the child once felt.

Remember.

-Dawn! The Good News Muse 15 December 2010
dawn@imaginetheshift.com

Coming later, a video inspired by Butterscotch Habanero Bread Pudding.