It's Time to Tell Stories That Are Rooted In the Earth

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.

An October Story for the Children of the Moon and the Daughters of the Earth

On the Friday before what you and I might habitually call Columbus Day weekend, my fourth grader and I went for a hike down by the Mahicantuck. I’m quite certain you’d simply call this “river that flows two ways” the Hudson.

This river is tidal. It rises and falls twice in a day and the salt from the Atlantic can reach all the way to Poughkeepsie during drought conditions. I am an ocean girl, born and raised, and the Hudson Valley can seem so desperately land locked… I forget that the river is just a few miles from my front door. I certainly forget that it has salt in its hair and sand in its shoes.

If only my mermaid self could remember that she has always been at home here. Then, maybe I’d be able to put down roots that would help me better weather the storms - those in this New York sky and those that churn on the internet and in the ethers beyond.

My daughter was born in this place. She’s made of this river and its tributaries. She’s held by its ridges and mountains and she skips along the trail and navigates the uneven ground as naturally as a grown faun - or is she now a young doe?

She tells me what she learned about Indigenous Peoples’ Day, about the story of Taíno boy who had his doubts about the men who arrived in their great boats. We talk about the way the boy was right and how the explorers became colonizers who would destroy the native way of life. We talked about how complicated it was, to feel grateful we lived on such beautiful, sacred land while knowing that it meant the removal and destruction of those were here first.

Conversations with my daughter enliven and exhaust me sometimes, especially when we’re trying to sort through stories about our beautiful, brutal, complicated world. Trying to put things into words she can understand when I realize I don’t even have the words.... This is one more thing they forgot to teach us in parenting school.

I hadn’t had time for my morning meditation that day and was craving it, so, as we approached the river’s edge, I suggested we do a “sit spot,” a mindfulness practice she’d learned in her wilderness program.

The water was high. All this autumn rain was keeping the salt-kissed currents well south of us, but I swear I smelled the sea. Tucked between the trees and the underbrush, we found a clear boulder, a perfect place to rest, our feet dangling over the steadily moving river five feet below.

I was entwining myself with the elements, feeling the sun and the wind and filling myself with the splash of the wavelets. I needed this. I needed to arrive at a point in motherhood when my older child and I could enjoy a long moment of silence, when she could respect the dance of nature’s movement and stillness.

So much felt possible now that I had a daughter who could allow her mother some stillness. I’d spent so many years of going through the motions of mothering. I felt like I’d earned the pause.

As I let my mind fly with the gulls, my girl was quietly busy beside me, grinding a tiny stone against our rocky seat. She was making a fine pile of dust. I glanced over to see her dabbing it on the tip of her nose, her eyes crossed as she focused.

Perhaps it would have been nice to mediate a little longer, but this was a rare afternoon, just for the two of us - the first hike we’d taken alone since her sister was born four years ago.

I think it must have been her idea to paint me. I didn’t know if it crossed her mind that this is how kids have “played Indian” for hundreds of years, but I didn’t mention it because I was caught up in a different world of history and myth.

I’ve been rereading The Mists of Avalon and felt that old yearning to be amongst the priestesses with the blue crescents between their brows. This book had rewritten my relationship with the Catholicism that raised me back when I was not so much older than my daughter is now.  It was necessary to make that sacred sisterhood real in this moment with my girl, here at the rocky edge of a rushing river, so I asked her to draw the moon on my forehead. And then, with the last bit of powder, I did the same for her.

It felt necessary to put words to this sweet little act, so I suggested we speak a prayer to the moon and ask her for a blessing. My wise, huge-hearted daughter, who has been raised to see the Goddess in the earth and in the sky and question why many people think God lives only in a Church, suggested “peace and love.”

This was the end of the week when Dr. Christine Blasey Ford had appeared before the Senate Judiciary Committee.

Around the country, women in particular were holding their collective breath. We waited to see if that man would be confirmed and added the Supreme Court. I didn’t have any peace and light left in me, and the kind of love I had was the fierce kind that felt more like a hurricane than a mild October breeze.

Though I was filled with prayers that began something like “by the power of this mighty river, by this great mother earth, women must be believed,” I was doing all I could to just look like Mom on the outside. My daughter has been raised to call her a feminist and she’s more politically aware than most nine year-olds, but I’d barely mentioned the Supreme Court. She knew it as one more messy political thing that would inspire mommy and daddy to go to an event in support of our democratic congressional candidate that night.

And so, I was called to walk the edge between speaking the truth and protecting the last shreds of my daughter’s innocence yet again.  I couldn’t erase or disown my weary heart or my boiling blood - this was a prayer to the Goddess, after all, and I needed to be straight with her about what really needed on this earth right now.  

I tried to tilt the specifics of my rage and said I was thinking about justice and about protecting people who are less powerful than the guys who have been in charge for so long.

We threw stones into the water to seal our prayers. We walked back to the car with golden moon dust on our faces. Later in the day, I’d listen to Susan Collins’s long rambling speech in support of the lifetime appointee who showed himself to be anything but an impartial, even-tempered potential jurist.

And the river would keep flowing with moon blessed tides. The autumn would stretch to become more brilliant before the weather turned and the leaves would be stripped and laid winter bare.

My daughter would grow and her innocence would slip away with every conversation, newscast, and great big book.

I would hold this story in the treasure chest with those that make me a woman raising up children, a woman with her eyes widening further open day by day, a woman full of rage and hope, a woman trying to find her way home.

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In honor of my daughter's ninth birthday, I invite anyone who loves this story to book a Story Healing Session for just $109 (offer valid through November 1, 2019).

You can get all the details on what’s included in this practical, magical offering here.

Book your one-on-one session with me to talk about the story you long to tell, the story that gets stuck in your throat and needs to be healed before it can be told.

Darkness and Light Upon a Summer Solstice Strawberry Moon

It is more difficult than we imagine to hold space with the ultimate power of the sun and the full revelation of the moon. But here we are on June 20, 2016. I’m so grateful to summer and thankful for its lush splendor. My eyes fill with tears that dry instantly on my cheeks in the face of a solstice sun at noon.

Is this what abundance feels like?

This first day of summer decorated by a full moon feels like a full belly and a hunger to show gratitude. It feels like being anchored in the light-drenched earth and flying into the air all at once.

Tonight, I know I will not sleep. I’ll curse that bright-as-day orb even as I long to dance through the yard, bathed in her silver glow.

My toddler and I just spent a leisurely hour picking plants that promise to be drought resistant. (I am assuming I can translate that into “hearty enough to survive the care of a gardener who is better at describing the act of planting and tending than she is at finding the watering can.”)

It’s time to rescue the flowers from the car and find my widest brimmed hat and start preparing our rocky ground. But all I can do is squint from the shade of the porch, dizzied with the luster of this Summer Solstice Strawberry Moon June day.

Today, the sun reaches its zenith. Tonight, the moon shines with her fullest glory. To be alive is to know such brilliant illumination - almost more than you can stand. And it is to remember, somewhere in the overwhelming bliss, that there will be a darkness as bountiful as the light. That is how the heavens teach us about the cycles of living until we die. The loss, the dissolution, the shadows we must cast if we want to make a home in the light.

I still want to cry. With joy and thanks. With the ache for all the lost friends and departed family who will never walk east with me at sunrise, chasing our shadows into a new morning.

I still need to weep with all the potential I feel too full to hold. All the love to give, the stories to write, the healing spaces to create.

In this day of all possible illumination I see that I am afraid of becoming parched, sunburned, bleached. I am in love with the light, but I am wise enough to name and allow my fear.

What does it mean to be so visible, to have every laugh line and squinter’s crease and typo brought into such sharp relief?

Up the Mountain by Guest Storyteller Sharon Rosen

“Thank God for those twice weekly yoga classes” is all I can think. It is a nearly straight uphill hike to the Appalachian Mountain Club’s Madison Hut, where we’ll spend this first night in the White Mountains of New Hampshire. I’m mid-menstruation, at the end of a sinus infection, and have a 27-pound pack on my back. This wasn’t quite the image I had in mind during all of our excited months of planning. One step at a time. I call out to my friends, so far ahead I’ve lost sight of them, grateful yet chagrined when one stops, waits and shifts her pace to mine.

I am aware of every muscle in my legs, hips, and butt. I thought I knew them intimately from my study of anatomy, the hundreds of bodies I’ve massaged, my erotic explorations with adventurous partners. But this has an intimacy and immediacy all its own.

Lift leg. Find footing. Shift weight forward. Bring body up, feel pack shift, breathe. Notice the strength the standing postures have given me — hips empowered from all that rising on one leg into Warrior Three —as well as the thump of my heart, the throb in my head, the heaviness in my uterus.

Up and up, one step at a time, 3500 feet in about 3.5 miles. It is a lesson in humility (but I’m young, I’m strong, I’m limber!). It is a lesson in pure presence and awareness (one slip, one wrong turn of the ankle and yikes). It is a lesson in activating strengths I didn’t know I had.

Finally at the hut, relieved of backpacks, my friends lightly take the last few hundred feet to the summit. I hang back, boots off and feet up, basking in the warmth of my tea, the crisp crunch of an apple. I savor every sip, every bite, every sensation as I await their return. Tomorrow will bring its own unknowable challenges.

Sharon Rosen is a spiritual healer, mindful living mentor and author who helps women learn to dance gracefully with the rhythms of their lives. www.heartofselfcare.com

To Become a Stronger Storyteller, Don't Write. Explore.

Sometimes the best way to strengthen your storytelling and feed your writing practice is to take a time away from the page. When my husband asks me what I want for Mother's Day, "time to myself" is always near the top of the list. I was looking forward to an hour with my journal to write and mourn my mom and follow a thought from beginning to end without having to play referee or ask anyone if they needed to use the potty.

But then, as he started to pack everyone in the car, it became clear that I needed to savor an even rarer pleasure - time alone with my older daughter.

As a rule, she asks for more of my focused attention than I could ever provide. Today, however, as we explored the acres of awakening woods behind our house, just the two of us, we met unfathomable abundance. Amidst the unfurling ferns, the scattering of wild strawberries, and the countless fairy dens, I could give her all she asked for and more.

Was it the magic of the date on the calendar, when the ubiquitous celebration of mother love made me a better mama than usual? Can I think Nature's May display of infinite enoughness? Was it simply that my relationship with my daughter makes sense when we have time and space enough to hold it?

On Sundays, the #365StrongStories project is devoted to offering up a writing prompt. This week, I invite you to take part in a BEING prompt.

Go out and explore. Break a writing date with yourself and wander with eyes wide open. Say "yes" and spread your arms wide to the unexpected. When it's time, come back to the pen or keyboard and start something new.

Where the Water Meets the Earth Day

Eight long months have passed. Finally, the moment I have been longing for. I’m standing at the edge. I am home. Water. Sky. Frigid spring sand cradling my white winter feet.

It happens to be Earth Day, but that is just a coincidence. I am much more interested in the ocean than I am in the earth right now.

I call myself a mermaid who accidentally found herself living in the mountains. Over the almost twenty years since I left Cape Cod, the only thing more troubling than a landlocked existence is the way I’ve almost stop noticing the dull ache of my separation from the sea.

But finally, I am here. And I feel… nothing.

Maybe it is because my head is full of stories that are about everything but the natural world. Perhaps it is the habitual lack of sleep that makes it hard to be present in the moment. A lot of my distraction is due to the effort it takes to keep a two year-old from falling into the freezing cold water while she tries to wade after sister.

Either way, I feel like a failed mermaid and an Earth Day flunkie.

Luckily, the Bay will be there tomorrow. The sky and the sand and those squawking gulls will  be too.

The Earth and her waters and her ceaseless winds have a way of forgiving us not matter how many times we forget and lose our way.

Thanks, Mama.