a leap into Life

a dance with Aliveness

It’s these old cottonwoods, I’m convinced.

They are the reason I’m here, back here, in this little house on this little acreage along Minnesota Creek, three years later.

I placed tobacco and herbs and poems along the grassy earth near their roots, asking for their help, and now they’ve called me back here, as if to answer those prayers, adding stanzas to the unending poem that is my life. These old trees are giving me the opportunity to trace the ripples back to their source.

We lived here once, my family and I, thinking we might be here for a long while, when the universe gathered itself up to toss us deeper into our own dreaming, leading us up a winding deer trail to the side of a mountain where we learned to plant roots for our young daughter to grow and listen and come to know the color of sunrise.

I’ve been speaking to this icy creek here, still flowing beneath the frozen flakes of February. I’m whispering soft stories of sea and rose and starfish, deep into that unknowable mystery that is Water.

अंब, amba in Sanskrit; מים, mym in Hebrew; Mni, mnee in Lakota; ཆུ, chu in Tibetan; 水, mizu in Japanese; amanzi in Zulu; vesi in Finnish.

I’ve made offerings to that silent sphinx-like pyramid cliff off to the west, overlooking the valley below, as the sun rises springward and something new comes our way.

When I finally made the decision to move our family from this house up to that mountain, where nothing but a dilapidated shed and trailer existed for shelter, Scotty looked at me and said, “You look 20 years younger.” And so we agreed to take a wild leap into the unknown.

A small group of blessed souls came together to quickly put our 20 ft yurt up, after proper prayers and offerings had been made. It felt very sacred there. In that flat place where we eventually set up our yurt, there was a small pile of stones, stacked by the only other person who had lived on that land in recent history. He was a Buddhist practitioner and used it as a smoke offering tower for Tibetan herbs and prayers. As we gently dismantled it, I could feel the aliveness of each stone. We placed them closer to the waterway, standing there like a little village of stone people. The light seemed to shift there in that spot.

Our first winter on the mountain was the biggest winter Colorado had seen in some thirty years. I was very minimally involved in human or online community, so there I was, just deeply immersed in the rhythms of snow storm and winter nights, nursing my young daughter from a wooden rocking chair near the stove, watching the wind shake the window of our eastern facing door. I read books, Dolores Cannon and Malidoma Somé. I was introduced to the teachings of Martin Prechtel. I was convinced we would look out the window one evening, into that deep blue ice, where the cold and weathered deer looked longingly in at us, and see either extraterrestrials or yetis, or both.

That deep blue blanket of snow and ice was ripe with mystery.

One night I did hear something otherworldly. It sounded like an ancient warrior of this land, an ancestor, making war cries from the top of a juniper tree near our yurt. I stood at the door, my mouth hanging open, as this most strange and slightly terrifying sound rained down from above us and echoed out into the cold night. I still have no idea what it was. Some bird maybe. I have never heard anything like it, before or since.

When Scotty would go into town for the day or the night, I would imagine myself armed with a flaming log or a pitch fork, chasing away mountain lions and ghosts.

My family visited us that Christmas. We all hiked up, all seven of us, each helping to carry a sled full of groceries and red cedar bows from Oregon. We feasted on chili cooked on the woodstove, and my little sister sipped hot whiskey as she and her boyfriend sledded down the hill in front of our home. It was the best Christmas I’ve ever had. I didn’t know then that my older sister was pregnant.

When the tilting earth brought the hummingbirds, the spring winds and the melting of hundreds of thousands of acres of snow, the little waterway by our home was flooded with an incredible volume and velocity of water. It sounded like we were living next to the ocean. When spring finally, blessedly arrived, I found the first little patch of bare earth and rubbed it all over my skin, barefoot and naked for the first time in many long, cold months.

It was around this time that I started hearing the water speak. Calling my name. Children laughing. People talking. The ions from the rushing water must have energized our air because that spring we felt like we were living in another country entirely, another time. Transported, completely.

The spring was holy. The green was holy. The wild sprouting onion, holy. The blue skies and bare earth, the baby goats, the rushing water, the blue skies, holy, holy, holy. The warm expansion of the sun. My bare feet against the earth. That we survived.

It was then that the magnificent meaningfulness of living within, rather than apart from, the living Earth revealed itself to me. This revelation continues to shift the very fibers of my being, the subtle longing of my heart.

And now, being back here, in this home, with running water and electric heat, on this two-acre property where it all began, I realize, with utmost clarity, my commitment, allegiance and devotion to that Great Mystery school that is Life, that is the livingness of Earth.

I want to live among Life. I want to sniff the snow before it comes and hear its pitter-patter on my roof. I want my home among the wild aliveness of Earth, woven in as a fragment of it. I want that special flavor of strength that comes from living among the mud and wind and rain, among the bugs and flowers and red willow. I want to stay attuned to the holy walk of Sun across the sky and the deep mystery of starlight at night. I want to know the heat, the cold and the dawn, as some of us know our microwaves, couches and televisions.

Life, as it manifests on this planet, is much greater and wiser than we are.

Having fire at the center of our lives is an invitation to dance with an ancient wisdom and its endless mysteries. To have the privilege to live among Life, among the rich and intelligent cycles that flower here on Earth, is to learn the many things we simply can’t learn by living “inside”.

I would rather attune my being to Nature’s enormous harmony than shove myself into modern man’s experiments in industry. Life is where we belong because we are life itself, blooming and hibernating, envlivened by the sun, mystified by the moon.

And I can see it, so clearly, reflected in the aliveness of my child, who would rather be barefoot and naked, snuggled against a goat or running across the field, than clothed in polyester pants, playing legos on the carpet in a humming house that makes it so easy for us to forget the daily pilgrimage of the Sun and the ancient mystery walk of the Moon.

In the words of Robin Wall Kimmerer, “All Flourising is Mutual.”

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 a monthly subscription, you can always, Buy Me A Coffee.

Much love,

Leah