Thanksgiving

I've never seen crows collide. Wheeling and crying, they are aware of each other, of negative space. Only their shadows tumble to the ground. Under the soil, roots touch. Blind, white, sheathed in bark, they lower their lips to water. Even after the motor oil, the tires sloshing with mosquitoes, water rises and falls, rises and falls, another breathing. The sky divides itself so neatly between morning star and meadow, nothing is lost--not the grey shed or the muted cedars or the tractor snoring in its gravel bed. Thanking one, I must thank them all: the rusted tip of barbed wire that tattoos the buck, the pointed antler dropped among hen mint, cold grass so jeweled that if I lie on my back and close my eyes, it's impossible to tell where the frost ends, where stars begin.

The Poo

Dogs are good at so many things. Cuddling. Playing fetch. Guarding your house. They are also very, very good at pooping. If you are thinking about getting a dog, you may not know how much poo you will encounter. Here is the list I wish someone had given me so I could prepare myself mentally.

The Bombing Run

is when your dog walks and poops at the same time, often in the middle of a road while you are walking without a plastic bag. Your dog will “duck walk,” hunched over, like a soldier taking fire, which is awkward for everyone.

Two for One

is when he poops in your yard before the walk, but is so excited to smell new grass that he conjures up a second poo minutes later. Where does this poo come from? You have left the bags at home and your neighbor is watching through the blinds.

The Midnight Rider

comes in the middle of the night with the consistency of cafeteria oatmeal. Usually mixed with a Bombing Run and spread across the floor. Gag potential is high. Probably your dog was too sick to wake you and now he looks as guilty as a politician caught on tape with a cross dressing hooker. 

The Shanghai Surprise

is a Midnight Rider, but the electricity is out and your neighbor is banging on your door at 5 a.m. because she’s in some kind of trouble with her boyfriend again, so you step out of bed, into your pants, and into something gooey. Requires two people to clean, one holding a candle at various angles to highlight the poo. 

Smog

Just because you’re in a moving car doesn’t mean you can outrun the poo. Smog often happens on the Interstate where you cannot pull over to clean it. If you are not careful it falls between the seat and the interior where it hides for days. If you have two dogs the one surprised by the poo will try to climb quickly out of the backseat, and this may be your only warning.

The Mudpie

is the poo your dog eats. Usually not his own. The dog has outsourced the poo. Most likely sources: cat 65%, other dog 34%, human (when camping) 1%. You will not know he has eaten a Mudpie until he licks your face. If he comes back from the kitty corner, the garden, or really anywhere licking his lips, run. 

Blackout Blues

Night comes early without electricity, and even on the edges of the city with the Interstate whirring by we can see a few stars. I’m getting used to the rhythm of natural light again, the way 7 p.m. is a grey spider stretching its legs from the corners, slowly filling the house. I’m getting to know the neighbor more as she smokes in the twilight with a jar candle flickering beside her on the driveway and her baby giggling in the carseat. 

Day five of the Chattanooga blackout. The roads are mostly clear, powerlines still loose on the grass, and Dani is going stir crazy without a shower. The blackout bothers me less than her, and I figured out why today, as I carried the food from the humid fridge out to the trash can. I remember months on the Southwestern roads in a sandy S-10, crawling over the tailgate into the halfshell to sleep, the mountaindark around my cabin in Dahlonega, bearblack nights beside campfires. I’m used to questioning my way into darkness, brushing my teeth in the red glow of a headlamp. 

I could use a shower, and I’d commit small crimes for unscented pillar candles, but I get bored in the city, and this feels like an adventure. Every day Dani and I eat out together, which is seriously helping with the whole “I forget to ask her out on dates because we live together” thing, and the second night I built a fire because I had nothing better to do. Dani’s white shepherd paced in front of the flames while Riley chewed any stick I left lying around. 

On the list of gratitudes: the dogs slept beside me while the storm raged, and Dani drove home safely--my phone was out, so I drove to the restaurant and told her the route without trees and powerlines--and the kitchen doesn’t smell that bad and now that the soil’s dried the garden bed looks good. We pickaxed the chertclay soil and hauled a dozen buckets of stones and concrete bits off and it’s almost ready for topsoil and plants. 

Our household came through the storm without a scratch, and I send my respect to the people who, at some deep level of their praying souls, chose to embrace the storm more deeply, who lost lives and loved ones and homes and businesses and cars and gardens and pets and livestock and hope in the embrace. 

The dreamway of the shamans has taught me to see everything, even a storm, as alive, ensouled, with purpose, so I thank the storms for being so full of power that they can wake us up to what matters. Stormfathers, please be gentle with what’s left. And those who are hurting, know that you are held by us, and that in nights as black as these there may be many more arms around you than you see.

You Are With Us as We Prepare the Lodge

The day after I post my grades I am back at the lodge, mopping the pinewood floor around the folding tables, guest beds pushed to the walls under rabbit and buffalo robes. I am beginning to think of manual labor as ceremony. Push pull of the mop, sorting split wood in the fire pit, carrying burnt stones from the last sweat out of the lodge. It all adds up somehow to the laughter that will spill over as we stand in line around these tables, to the sobs around the fire. This pre-ceremony is the breath before the song, the moment God shuffles her sheet music and looks up. I'm here the night before the lodge not only because I love the spirit of this place, the sweet energy of my hosts, sleeping wrapped in pine walls, the gray mountain dawn like a mourning dove brushing the windows--but because I want to go deeper than ever into the lodge. I need to strip off my skin and let something out, something I've carried longer than I've known any of my friends, so old only family knows it. The buried life surfacing, an old whale. Maybe I'm here for myself, because I know the more I give the more the lodge gives back, and maybe I'm here because I like sprinkling my own prayers into the space my friends will enter. I like petting the old stones as I carry them out of the pit and stack them on the growing walls. I like talking to the cut wood, the living trees, I like breathing gratitude into the sometimes-creek and watching that energy run into rivers, oceans, sky. I like being here in the mountains while the world starts listening, while the angels shuffle in through the trees, fur snagging on winter branches. I feel in this concentrated air my prayers fly farther, touch people more deeply. I am welcoming in the light, and everything, even angels, likes to be noticed, likes to be told, It is good you are here. It is good you are here, reading this, as the propane heater kicks on and the fan dries the just-mopped floor. Here in the mountains we are remembering you, your first belly laugh, the first grasshopper that flew out of your small hands, the wind of your first downhill bike ride. All of these moments are heaped beside the granite stones, an offering. All of these moments, which are still alive in you, are part of the song, and, with your permission, we are breathing them in. This may tickle a little. You may burst into laughter. It is just the song working its way deeper into you, or out. I sit on the guest bed, lean against the rabbit fur, and listen.

Birthing The Mesa--Or, What I Did For Christmas Vacation

Meditation space. Medicine bundle. Map of the dreaming soul. I describe my mesa differently depending on whom I'm talking to, my mood, my last experience with this healing altar. In the Pachakuti Mesa Tradition, the Peruvian lineage in which I'm apprenticed, the mesa is described as "an altarlike collection of objects," which nicely suggests the sacred without scaring off anyone who equates native altars with, say, sacrificing chickens. (No chickens have been harmed in the making of my mesa. But there is a turtle shell, and I think the turtle became soup.)

A friend asked me tonight about the mesa, so here's the definition that comes to mind. A mesa contains stones, shell(s), feathers, crosses, santos, and other objects blessed with prayer and charged with healing energies. There is a candle, because both God and children are fascinated with fire, and often in the center of the woolen cloth is a cross in a seashell, signifying the place where the spirit enters into the world, the place where we feel the touch of the divine.

How you use the mesa depends on where you live, who taught you, what the mesa whispers to you. My first mesa helped me teach classes in shamanism and sacred dreaming and became an anchor for the intense energies of healing sessions. I've dismantled this mesa, after some significant personal transformations, and I know that my new mesa will have its own personality, its own gifts. So far the nature of the nascent mesa, according to my dreams, is to help us wake up, remember our divine nature, bring our unique gifts into the world, and laugh, laugh, laugh.

A mesa is a landing strip for angels, a beacon that, when we open it with prayer, calls in the energies of the earth, the skies, the celestial. Spirit bears come snuffing into our circle; we hear the rush of rivers, feel sunlight on our eyelids in a dark room. The mesa is a telephone with all of creation on the other end of the line. And each mesa is unique, growing with our experiences and intuitions. The mesa becomes a physical reminder of our inner life; new pieces find their way onto the altar cloth, carrying our deepest intentions and prayers.

In short, it's pretty awesome, and I'm full of gratitude for the friends who've helped me develop this relationship with the sacred. If you'd like to meet the mesa that's coming to live with me, please consider joining us for a workshop or apprenticeship in the new year.  If you're interested in birthing your own mesa, there are some workshops coming soon to Atlanta through elders in the Pachakuti Mesa Tradition, and I'd be happy to share details with you. Whether or not you have a physical mesa, of course, you have your heart, the original altar, and I can see from here that it's shining, and the angels are changing course, headed your way.

The Man Who Married the Bear

is what my first book of poems is calling himself these days. Based on an old native story about a teenage girl who wanders off while picking berries, falls in love with a handsome young man, and finds out after the kids come that he's a bear. In my title poem, it's the other way around, a man falling for a bear, a man loving the wild, the rivers and fire and rock in our blood. So, The Man Who Married the Bear is off to his first book competition, and I'll be sending him off to grateful, delighted editors around the country until he finds a home. Here's how you can help: Imagine The Man Who Married the Bear getting accepted easily and quickly! Envision an editor unbundling this packet of poems--grounded in nature, arching into spirit and the mystical--and falling in love with the wild through these pages. Now that I'm sending out The Man Who Married the Bear, I feel free enough to move on to my second book, a collection of essays about the wild heart of the South. Bears and horses and rivers, oh my! Do you know a horse whisperer, a log cabin builder, an old woman who still catches fireflies every spring? I'm open to ideas, and letting the spirit and my pen lead me....