seed season

Hello friends,

There's so much to talk about. First, I want to invite you to the fun writerly stuff I have coming up. You can find that on my home page.

Second, I want to share the video from my October 8 presentation with Big Muddy Speaker Series titled, Coming Home: Liberating the Environmental Movement from Supremacy. It was a terrific event in which we looked at how the charactertistics of supremacy inform the stories we have about ourselves, other beings, and Earth. We then considered how to create new stories so that we could relate in more expansive ways with ourselves, other beings, and Earth.

After you watch the video, please share what resonated with you. I took a big risk with the Muddy Speaker Series presentation. Heretofore, I'd focus on scientific facts, sociopolitical systems, and justice issues. I didn't speak fully from my heart. I didn't share what I consider mystical experiences with Earth because of internalized supremacy: facts are more valuable than non-quantifiable experiences or feelings. But is my deep pleasure to facilitate conversations that evolve relationships, within and without. Thus, I am reworking my workshops on ecology with that intention. Loosely quoting Robin Wall Kimmerer, 'we must re-story ourselves in order to restore relationship.'  Also, are you affiliated with a community interested in exploring ecology from a spiritual perspective? Please consider having me present to your group.

Which leads to the last thing I'm sharing. What restores and re-storys me is communion with specific places in nature. Like any relationship, I spend time with certain place-friends regularly. In that way, we become intimate, bearing witness to one another as we flow through seasons (Earthly and otherwise) together.

Much of what happens for me with my place-friends is healing awareness. Wandering topography I can almost navigate with closed eyes, I see something new each time. Not just with my physical eyes, but with inner sight. Each sighting feels truly like an opportunity to the re-story and restore. I'm eager to share what I see with you here over the next few posts.

I walk weekly at Jerry Smith Park (the largest remnant prairie within KCMO city limits), a practice started New Year's Day, 2023. My last post was from this beautiful place. It is also where I caught the above image of common milkweed loosening seeds to the wind.

As a woman nearing sixty, nothing reminds me more that human ideas of beauty are ridiculously restricted and restrictive, than seeing the myriad ways myriad species experience the autumn of their lives. False blue indigo, switchgrass, goldenrod, rattlesnake master, big bluestem, thatchgrass (pictured below) and more, each go from spring to summer to fall to winter in widely distinct hues and textures and shapes and curves, smells and even sounds. It is a glorious affirmation; an exhortation to luxuriate in my body as I autumn.

As I take in the variance in plants-even among the same species-I am astonished by my lack of judgement. In nature, it is effortless to observe distinctions and to witness "aging" without critique, without comparison or disparaging one for not having the characteristics of another or for looking old. Therein lies an invitation: to notice the granular outside the prairie, in myself, in others, with the same reverence.

What is even more exultant about watching plant elders dance in autumn is knowing it is seed season. In a culture that invisibilizes the elderly, particularly women, there is something deeply restorative and grounding in knowing plants drop their seeds in autumn. Since seeds are the literal blueprint on how to weather the weather, they are wisdom hard won by thriving season after season. Am I not the same? Full of seeds, full of wisdom, from the seasons I have weathered? For my own continued flourishing, I must loosen my seeds to the wind. I have to value my own hard won wisdom and grow from it. Further, I carry seeds vital to the ecosystems, the communities, I belong. After all, in the autumn of our lives, we are meant to share what we've learned. And in sharing our seeds, we provide for the flourishing of each other.