a final offering

to the fallen feathers of remembrance

All human culture should be this: that we can really feel love and friendship, and that the loss of friends and loved ones actually is the prime motivating force that all the beauty of the way we do anything with our blessed hands, mouths, and life ways: how we build our buildings, the way we change our speech patterns, make songs that make cow’s milk flow, of the magnificence of how we make our bodies move, how we dress and express, how we love and grieve, our food, how we grow it, how we actively grieve for all that tries to feed us in every moment.

Our actions, thoughts, speech, and gratitude had to become beautiful, life-filled, and artistically integral to qualify as that kind of praise that could water the Holy’s heart. If the land got dry and there was no rain, it was always because of how the people were going about their lives. For that reason our actions, speech, thoughts, everyday actions, and gratitude mattered. And they still matter. Praise matters.

So praise is the general output of all human goodness and beauty. It is the honest attempt to give life to what gives us life. This kind of praise is the type that is so beautiful that even when it fails, like a kid’s first homemade kite, so beautiful as it crashes to the earth, for the magnificence of even its failure feeds the Holy somehow and makes us breath by breath a little better at it every time we try.

Praise is not a goal, but the constant purpose of being alive. We praise by ritual, by walking, by grieving, by eating, by kissing the babies, by admiring the conniving bull snake for trying to take the flycatcher’s hatchling, admiring the hatchling’s parents for diverting the snake away from the nest, by seeing and speaking out loud, singing out loud, hammering and painting art, cooking, gardening, sewing, cutting wood, making fires, weeping over the land we have to plough, and still weeping for joy over the food the grieved-for land sends us from it’s steel-ravaged heart. Praise has to be in all we do and try to think.

- Martín Prechtel, The Smell of Rain on Dust

We walked up the mountain once, carrying our daughter and a backpack full of herbs, fruits, baskets and instruments. We walked through gentle snow and snow blowing sideways, and when the sun would peek out from behind the thick grey water-filled clouds, we walked in the sunshine.

As we walked, I felt the ancient people walking along with us, watching us in our polyester nylon body suits traversing living rocks and herbs and muddy ravines. It was like the ancient onces were an almost unrecognizable species to us, more like deer and elk than human people, clothed in the hides and furs, with a perception and ability far greater and subtler than ours. We felt like space aliens, but with humble heart, trekking the mountain, we went to feed the Holy in nature.

I had to eventually surrender the directions given to us by the elders. In order to offer my most authentic beauty to that ancient cottonwood there, I had to drop all the ideas and guidelines, and just sing my most beautiful offering to the tree nation, those who had come before, those here now, and those yet to come, feeding them with the beauty of my surrendered, loving heart and voice.

We were heard. The ancient ones of this land, manifest as they are today as coyotes, rocks and trickling springs, greeted us in our praising of this land, as if the elementals rose up their hands to receive our offerings.

We are now close to making our final offering to this sacred land here.

We have fed the prayer flags to the fire and given our goats to new pasture. We have rehomed (almost) all our beloved animals. We are emptying ourselves and our lives in order to heed this irrefutable call from the South. There is something there, waiting for us, something for us to learn, some new tunnel of transformation that we must be ripe for walking.

We give thanks.

We pour water of praise to our beautiful beloved community of humans that have joined, loved, surrendered, endured, assisted, transformed, metabolized, grieved, given up, tried again, renewed, rejoiced, remembered, restored, rebalanced, got pregnant, gave birth, lost babies, lost partners, lost homes, revisioned, held space, held grief, tried again, were vulnerable and seen, sang, uplifted, guided, shot across the sky, were buried in the earth, dropped the body, claimed a body, composed poems, read stories, danced in musicals, planted trees, built the soil, saved seeds.

We give thanks.

We pour water of praise to our beautiful beloved community of Life: to the sacred and pure trickling springs of Mt. Lamborn, to the hallowed snow and headwaters, to this unfathomably alive and sacred mountain, to the wind that brings storms and seeds and hummingbirds in the spring, to the falling rain and pebbles of hail, to the sloping earth, to the greening yarrow and meadows of wildflowers, to the blooming of all seasons, to the mighty sky nation twinkling magic of winter starlight dancing, to the silence of winter, to the birdsong of spring, to the flowering of summer, to the migrations of autumn; we give thanks to the bear nation, the elk nation, the deer nation for teaching us how to be silent and beautiful; we give thanks to the eagle, hawk, sandhill crane, crow, chickadee, blue jay and towhee; we give thanks to the mice and their tracks through the silent snow, to the oak and juniper and cottonwood, to the mighty flicker and fawn; we give thanks to the willow, rose and wild mint, the cattails blooming, to the ditch company for bringing the water down (!) so we can feed our blooming cattail, aspen, cottonwood and wildflower meadow. We give thanks to the seeds that have made it, to the corn in our pockets, to the breath of life that gives us wings and to the transformative powers of mother earth, living, breathing, remembering herself through us.

We give thanks.

And to the sacred holy life giving fire: eternal, eternal, eternal gratitude. Without you, we would be mummified icicles, buried in blankets of snow, crystallized in roots and blown away in the dust. You kept us alive. There are no words to parallel your life-giving presence on earth.

We give thanks.

We pour rivers of gratitude to the spirits that have, are and continue to guide our oftentimes helpless, wandering human hearts, towards the people, places and events that catalyze our evolution, growth and ultimate enlightenment; to the spirits of this place that have so lovingly recieved our family, our daughter, our livelihood, our community; the spirits that have spoken softly through the water and in dreams; to the spirits of the sky here that have carried our prayers to Creator; to the soft invisible beckoning of Life to make more Life, we give thanks.

And in the midst of all this emptying, I wrote a poem. Thank you, thank you, thank you.

✧ ✧ ✧

For A Moment

how refreshing
it is
to completely

in a moment
drop
the story of me

of leah
of mom
of daughter
of sister
of partner
of person
of body
of breath

how refreshing 
it is
to be none

of the strings
attached
to sagging sagas
heavy with conviction,
and belief and 
identification,
released, for a
moment -
from the neural grooves 
of bondage,
free
from the
echoing thoughts
in the canyons
of my memory

i am, then

golden
before the moon,
holding water
beneath the full moon
reflected here,
in my hands:
the miracle
of not
becoming
anything
at all

for no reason at all,
for no purpose at all, 
no path
just here,
lovingingly loving
the miracle manifestation
that Is.

✧ ✧ ✧

Thank you for reading this edition of Wild Leaf. May it be of benefit to you and yours. If you like what you read, consider becoming a paid subscriber, or, if you don’t want to pay for a monthly subscription, you can always, Buy Me A Coffee.

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Much love,

Leah