You can’t remember it because it happens before you’re even born, and it echoes through the rest of your life Photo by Evelyn Semenyuk on Unsplash Conception, gestation, and birth; you’ve been there, or you wouldn’t be reading this. You wouldn’t exist. Every human goes through these events, but our experience of them is uniquely our own. The most terrifying moment of life … Read More
Healing Prenatal Trauma, Part 3: The Environment of the Womb
Conception, gestation, and birth; you’ve been there, or you wouldn’t be reading this. You wouldn’t exist. Every human goes through these events, but how we experience them is uniquely our own. This series of articles is about my experience. If you read it and resonate with it, or if you find it affecting you deeply, I invite you to understand … Read More
Bow Drill Fire
Loved by the sun, a tree receives warm summer light, makes wood: sun’s heat held year by counted year within its rings In your calloused grasp you take the unformed fragrant wood An edge of sharpened metal in your hand you offer ancient gratitude to those who kept and taught these ways for we who hunger still to know. Wood … Read More
Healing Prenatal Trauma, Part 2: Your Own Conception
Conception, gestation, and birth; you’ve been there, or you wouldn’t be reading this. You wouldn’t exist. Every human goes through them, but how we experience them is uniquely our own. This series of articles is about my experience. If you read it and resonate with it, or if you find it affecting you deeply, I invite you to understand that … Read More
Counting Time
My years are not marked by seasons’ graceful turn from white to green and white again, nor is my month reckoned by the changing moon, she who makes the tides. I do not measure days as light to dark to light, sun’s faithfulness across the depth of sky; and least of all, the minutes and the hours: they do not move … Read More
Healing Prenatal Trauma – Part 1: Guinea Pig Number Two
All of us experience distress before we are even born. The events of conception, gestation, and delivery, and our emotional and physical experiences in our mother’s womb, are all absolutely necessary preparation for life after birth; yet if their effects are strong enough they can be traumatizing, holding us back later without our having any consciousness of the source of … Read More
Circle in the Sand
It’s early morning and the sun is about to appear. In the sand by the ocean I draw a circle, as perfect as I can make it. This sand already holds the tracks of waves, deer, crow, gull, otter, rabbit, dog, humans, and now this two-legged one. I mark the directions, the cardinal points of east, south, west, and north. … Read More
Walking the Razor’s Edge
When I move from here – “here” may be a teaching situation, a conversation with a neighbour, preparing a meal, or writing this piece – I can go to either of two states of being. Between them is a razor. On one side of the razor – the side of the linear, the physical existence we all participate in – is … Read More
Writing In the Rain
I am in the universe like a small child at a fair The universe offers a line or a poem a surprise balloon Sometimes like that small child I am distracted from my poet self by the pragmatics of this all too busy life But if I let go that line or poem like a balloon it soars away. So I … Read More