Last night, I helped my dad put together a slide presentation for his condo association. He’s passionate about bringing in solar power to fuel their community energy needs.
This past weekend, my husband and I looked out on our beloved backyard and wondered together about how we could make our family’s life more sustainable. We’re thinking about changing the way we buy and use electricity, how we can change our eating habits, and what food we can grow in the years to come.
As headlines about ecological catastrophe and systemic climate change vie with the latest Covid spikes and variants at the top of every newscast, these conversations seem inevitable and necessary.
We all need to talk about our relationship with the land, with our resources, with survival, with creating a world where our children and their someday children can thrive.
Right now, I don’t know how to tell a story that isn’t rooted in the soil, soaked in the rain, singed by the fires, and aware of the climbing temperatures.
I may not be writing about the climate directly, but I find I am always in conversation with the Mother, with the Earth, with all the unseen interactions between humans and nature.
When we were visiting Maine last week, my aunt gave me three plants.
A white sagebrush from my mother and a periwinkle from my grandmother that grew beside the houses on Cape Cod where I grew up. Both homes have since been sold. And then, a primrose that my great aunts grew on Prince Edward Island. That place is still in the family, but it’s not possible for us to cross the border to see the Canadian cousins right now.
Three plants from forbidden gardens, from patches of land that have become inaccessible for one reason or another.
Three living beings that I can tend and touch, cultivated by beloved gardeners I can only visit in my memories.
Three delicate root systems I can protect and pray over, that (hopefully) will help me keep my family history alive.
How’s your relationship with the plants and soil that surround you?
I find myself wandering between my flower patches right now. I talk with the trees that have been here for decades longer than our house. I check on the perennials I have planted in my time here. I welcome these new plants and celebrating the bittersweet legacy of growth and change they represent.
This sense of finding solace and purpose amongst the blooms and blossoms is new to me. I’ve tried to make the place look pretty for the thirteen years we have lived here, but I usually tend to lose interest by August. Luckily, when September rolls around I can stick a new crop of mums in the ground to cover all the worn summer blossoms.
It’s different this year, however.
My new devotion to this rocky soil and the flowers I coax from the dry earth is inspired by my increasing awareness that our global environment is in trouble, surely. There’s something more to it, though. Something more personal and even more primal.
It was my husband who helped me see another dimension of the story. During our conversation about the future of the planet and how we can be better citizens of Earth, I marveled at how my relationship with our nearly two acres of garden, lawn, and forest had deepened over time.
“Isn’t that part of becoming the crone?” he asked. “The wise woman?” (Why yes, that guy I married has read—most of—my book.)
I write about the way we’re princess, queen, and wise woman through life in The Sovereignty Knot, of course. I write about how the concerns of the queen shift to encompass the awareness of the wise woman. The story becomes most true as you live it, however.
As my girls grow older and my business matures, I find myself switching gears. I don’t have to engage in constant mothering and I’m finding I’m less concerned with being the in-control queen. At 42, though I certainly have lots of queen energy in my life (and princess energy too), I am consciously moving into the wise woman’s sense of being present and receptive, into the crone’s sense of conscious care and divine surrender.
This planet needs us all to step into our wisdom in new, beautiful, challenging ways.
We’re being called to live a bolder, wilder, more compassionate story. We need to focus on the plants outside our door as we think about the ecosystems that enable us all to breathe. We need to set down the old ways of being and open our arms wide to a new devotion to the world as-it-is.
We’re going to need to get more centered and more Sovereign than ever so we can make the choices that support the human and the non-human collective.
As I’ve said before in many spaces, Sovereign is never meant to be a synonym for selfish. Instead, it’s an interconnected system of sovereign selves that can transform and heal this world.
Let’s be sovereign beings for the beautiful, burning sovereign world. One seed, one story, one wise act of creation at a time.
