Tag Archives: denizens

Learning to walk in the dark

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This guest post is by Lindsay McLaughlin. You can read a bit about her on the “Denizens” page. 

Advent always was an interim time, spanning the threshold between the harvest festivals of autumn and the vulnerable, fierce hope of Christmas. That “betwixt and between” time and place, where things tend to happen, wove itself around us as we gathered for retreat in a time when the forest waited, bare-branched and leaf-carpeted, for that first snowfall, likely still weeks away.

In a season when it is traditional to think about the coming of the light, I was pondering darkness. It seems that this Advent falls at a moment of history when the world is in an up-ended, uncertain, and, yes, frightening between-time, when we struggle to know how to be and what to do and how to behave as things all around us in politics, in governance, in world affairs, and in our psyches, slide toward the dark. Continue reading →

How silence will save the world  

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This guest post is by Lindsay McLaughlin. You can read a bit about her on the “Denizens” page. 

Our country and our world is in a good bit of trouble right now. We live in what storyteller Michael Meade calls “black dog times”. The tale goes like this:

The Old People of the tribes tell of a special cave where a woman is weaving the most beautiful garment in the world. She is almost finished, but while she stirs the soup in a great cauldron at the back of the cave a black dog awakens and moves to where she has left the garment on the floor. The dog begins pulling on a loose thread of the beautiful garment. Because each thread is woven to another, pulling on one undoes them all. Soon the beautiful garment is a chaotic mess on the floor of the cave. When the woman returns she sits and looks silently upon the remnants of her once beautiful design. She ignores the presence of the black dog as she stares intently at the tangle of loose threads and distorted designs. Then after a while she picks up a thread and begins again to weave an even more lovely cloak, the most beautiful garment the world has ever seen.

The story is longer than this summary, with a wealth of meaningful detail. It was featured in the retreat “Thriving on the Threshold,” held at Rolling Ridge in October. Yet even this abbreviated version of the tale holds nuggets of insight and meaning. One could say that much of the fabric of human culture today is unraveling, and nature with it; our civil society and our connection to all that is meaningful is coming undone, our creative efforts to build a more beautiful world have seemingly come to naught. The story offers hints of what to do and how to behave when the black dog begins pulling on the loose thread and the dark times come around again, as surely they have.

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Different, therefore the same

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This guest post is by Megan Carlson. You can read a bit about her on the “Denizens” page.

When I was ten years old, a friend’s mom said—to my face—that she felt sorry for me because of how hard my mom worked. She was “worried about how I would turn out.” My mom, a graduate of Johns Hopkins Medical School and entering into a field, at that time, heavily dominated by men, was somehow an unfit role model for her daughter in the southern eyes of women in our community.

My parents, though, carried on in discarding gender roles. My dad had me in the lab with him on Saturdays running “experiments” at the age of six, and my mom decided to keep being a great physician despite the questioning looks and muttered concerns. However, in spite of their great efforts in molding a daughter who was fearless, I still had issues with confidence and self-doubt, something that was invisible to most. Luckily, my professors at Auburn and Clemson saw the weight of my insecurity bearing down on me, and day by day they chipped away at it until I discovered what it felt like to move freely. Continue reading →

Does “Nature” need a new pronoun or do we need a new story?

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This guest post is by Duane Marcus. You can read a bit about him on the “Denizens” page.

I saw a meme on social media that suggested we need a new pronoun for “Nature,” a pronoun other than “it.” This got me thinking about “Nature.” Is nature an entity? Is there a thing we have named “Nature”? When we suggest someone spend some time in “Nature” what do we mean? Most would agree that canoeing through the Everglades or hiking the Appalachian Trail would constitute spending time in “Nature.”  Is an urban park “Nature”? Is the beach in front of a wall of million dollar condos “Nature”? Are fields of corn and soybeans “Nature”? How about a street full of weedy abandoned lots in Detroit?

Nature Deficit Disorder is a hot topic these days. Wikipedia describes it thusly.

Nature deficit disorder refers to a hypothesis by Richard Louv in his 2005 book Last Child in the Woods that human beings, especially children, are spending less time outdoors resulting in a wide range of behavioral problems. So would walking down Madison Avenue help alleviate this? Don’t let your kids do this without adult supervision though because you might get arrested for neglect and child endangerment. Continue reading →

Alive: the extravagant vitality of the late-spring forest

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This guest post is by Lindsay McLaughlin. You can read a bit about her on the “Denizens” page.

The fields of our residential community: the little one behind Pinestone, and the larger one that embraces the garden and often hosts the sheep, are awash in shades of green. The grasses are growing, it seems, more than an inch every day. The hummingbirds are back, dancing in the azaleas; the whippoorwill sings like a fool in love outside our windows and doors every night. Rabbits and squirrels hop and scamper. In the garden, radishes are busting out of the earth, lettuce and kale and an array of other growing things make a thick green blanket from fence to fence. Insects buzz and hum and chirp and whirr. The wood frogs trill and the air is thick with pollen dust and the smell of warm earth. The rain and chill of only a couple weeks ago is another world.

All this heat and bother is waking up the reptilian, cold-blooded creatures in our neighborhood. Scot, who seems by some charm to find or be found by such as these, has encountered (so far) a milk snake in the sheep field, a black snake in the wood shed, a ribbon snake by his front door, and a very stubborn copperhead in the woodpile. Each time Scot tried to catch this copperhead, it slipped the noose and dropped down into the woodpile, wrapped in a cloak of invisibility.   Its disappearing act forced the practice of patience, as Scot waited for it to emerge and settle on top once more. This dance went through four revolutions until finally, after re-designing the snake stick, Scot was able to catch the snake and escort it far up the power line. Continue reading →

Giving tree

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This guest post is by Art Vandelay. You can read a bit about him on the “Denizens” page.

We are the universes favorite memory downloaded

our pains absence from photos stars exploded

each breath etched life cycles light recycled

our nature’s inertia to nature spinning infinite

Love. forgiveness. stretching generations our children’s fingertips

Self maps across spines spirit vines speaking

metamechic meanings divine tree breathing sacred pictures Continue reading →

Mist ecology, or, a thought for the new year

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This guest post is by Lindsay McLaughlin. You can read a bit about her on the “Denizens” page. In this story, Erin is the sweet, boundlessly energetic dog who came to the residents of Rolling Ridge out of the woods in October, a little more than a year ago. She has a bed and a place in every one of the community homes. They are her pack.

We have reached the turning of the year, at least according to the Julian calendar. It is the time of beginning again, the time of emergence and wonder. As Rainer Maria Rilke wrote, “And now we welcome the new year, full of things that have never been.” Traditionally, it is a hopeful time. But hope is tricky.

“Dark ecology” is a term I have just encountered, coined by Paul Kingsnorth. It is both a defiant affirmation of our living planet and a lament. Kingsnorth observes human techno-culture rolling on relentlessly over the wild Earth and asks, “Is it possible to see the future as dark and darkening further; to reject false hope and desperate pseudo-optimism without collapsing into despair?” Continue reading →

Learning to listen

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This guest post is by Lindsay McLaughlin. You can read a bit about her on the “Denizens” page.

Annie Dillard wrote a book called Teaching A Stone To Talk. It’s a trick title. The book is about human beings learning to listen. Stones talk all the time.

In early December, there was a retreat at Rolling Ridge for Advent and the Winter Solstice. We spent some time in the Meditation Shelter tuning our senses and psyches to awaken to the animate, breathing world around us. We gathered by the glowing woodstove in candlelight and read poetry, danced gently, sat quietly, sang a bit, and told stories. Then we went out into the forest, that world, which as Mary Oliver says, “is faithful beyond all our expressions of faith, our deepest prayers”, and listened. Continue reading →

Searching for spirit in the garden

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This guest post is by Duane Marcus. You can read a bit about him on the “Denizens” page.

We are stardust,
We are golden,
And we’ve got to get ourselves
back to the garden
~ Joni Mitchell

I went to college to study science of horticulture. I came to believe that if something cannot be measured empirically then it could not be true. I have spent most of my life working with plants. Through this work, cracks in my belief system began to appear. Mysteries abound in the garden. I came to understand that all things are connected, that all things are energetic beings. Trees, rocks, rivers, the soil, the mountains, the deserts, people, animals all share the same source. We are all parts of one entity made up of the same swirling atoms exchanging energies with one another and with the vast universe. Continue reading →