Animalia

This is not the miracle I meant to write about in my next post, but today I received this picture of  these free-standing painted plywood animals created by artist Liza and ranger Marie at Marsh-Billings-Rockefeller National Historical Park in Woodstock, Vermont.  They're intended for use in children's programs.

I think they're quite miraculous!

Liza is looking for work, so if anyone needs an artist of this caliber, please let me know.

A Time of Miracles

Miracle number one is my friend Sally. I first met her in a dancing circle many years ago and we re-connected last year on the Winter Solstice at the Earth Clock in Burlington. Since then she’s become an intrinsic part of my group of dancing friends here.

 

Just over two weeks ago, on a Thursday, Sally’s heart stopped. She suffered a

massive cardiac arrest and fell down dead. Miraculously, in the room with her at the exercise class were medically trained people: two doctors, a nurse and an EMT. They sprang into action and began CPR. Someone fetched the AED from the reception desk and within minutes they had Sally's heart beating again. Someone had called 911 and the ambulance whisked her away to the emergency room.

 

Not Sally, but you get the picture.

Days later I asked her what she remembered: “Nothing” she said: “One moment I was in the gym, the next I was lying on a bed and some man was asking me to open my eyes. But I didn’t want to open them.” When she did finally open them at the request of a friend, Sally found that she was in hospital. Tests followed. The cardiac arrest hadn’t been painful, but the ensuing treatment was. The electric shock from the AED left her torso bruised, and then the doctors made an incision and implanted a defibrillator just above her left breast. That, apart from anything else, made driving impossible – she couldn’t wear a seat belt for a long time!  Now, she's a little tired but seems none the worse for her brief foray into the afterlife. She’s even being courted by heart charities as a poster child.

 

Sally always glowed with life and health, but now every time I look at her I see the very special rainbow glow of a miracle, the glow of a person who has died and come back to life. “I may change my birthday,” she says: “After all, I was born again that day.”

 

Thinking about this miracle moves my consciousness into a special zone, an elevated zone of feeling: sounds seem clearer, colors brighter, trees more beautiful, the world more marvelous. And it was in that heightened condition that I discovered the labyrinth I wrote about last week, a place of joy at the top of Church Street, just waiting to be discovered.  The labyrinth  spawned a story which I told last Monday evening at the Open Mic story evening run by my friend Recille in the UU church, outside of which the labyrinth lies.

 

That storytelling may have been preparation for the next night, when miracle number two, my own more modest miracle, manifested itself

 

Want to know about it? Read my next post.

 

 

Labyrinth

Seven-circuit labyrinth

It’s a word I’ve known all my life: the mysterious labyrinth appears in the story of Theseus and the Minotaur from Greek mythology, and my childhood was steeped in those sort of stories – I loved them. I didn’t really think much about labyrinths as a physical entity until the late 1990s when Lynn Hartwood, a sacred circle dance leader living in the North East Kingdom of Vermont, introduced me to labyrinth dances.

He liked to make labyrinths in the snow – I’m talking about the classic seven-circuit labyrinth that he, and I, too, learned to walk from memory. Lynn developed a “labyrinth step” for flattening the snow: you lift your first foot quite high – depending on the depth of the now – turn it outward at a 45 degree angle like a duck, and place it carefully in front of you, then repeat with the other foot, taking short steps to tamp down a path. It’s a sort of a forward herringbone and is designed to create the clearest possible path with the least number of steps. It works beautifully and, if I remember rightly, Lynn incorporated the labyrinth step into a dance he choreographed to a Loreena McKennit track.

I became adept at making snow labyrinths. Winter of 2000, when I was living in Orchard House at Camphill Village USA in Copake, NY, I walked out after a four-inch snow fall and created a labyrinth behind the house. I must have done a pretty good job because my house mother, Anna Ree, leaned out of a second floor window and said “Julia, you have an amazing sense of spatial awareness.” I hadn’t been aware of that but by 2000 I’d been circle dancing for seven years, and must have developed that skill. It goes to show how important a chance remark can be because Anna’s words revealed to me that not everyone has that sense, or, if they have it, has developed it. That was a revelation to keep in mind when leading circle dance and it’s informed my facilitation ever since.  In the wider framework, it led me to appreciate that what comes easily to me: writing, public speaking, dancing, remembering plant names, may not be so easy for others, just as what comes easily to them: singing, skiing, childcare, bread-making, may lie outside my natural talents.
 

Lynn led us in a different kind of labyrinth dance one night in Windsong and Paul’s lovely straw-bale sanctuary in Monkton, Vermont. He sprinkled grain all over the floor, put on a 50-minute track of music recorded in the womb-like temple of the mother goddess on the island of Malta, and led perhaps 15 dancers in a long dance. As we danced, we created the path of the labyrinth in the grain. Me, I remember the beginning of the dance and I remember the end of the dance but during the intervening 45 minutes I was somewhere else entirely, probably in the temple of the Mother Goddess.

The Burlington labyrinth

Since those days I’ve explored and created labyrinths in many places and many ways and just today I encountered one in downtown Burlington Vermont. Now, I’m an Aquarian and I take that for an excuse for my love of the incongruous, so there, beside the Post Office, among the surround- sound of fire engines screaming by, I walked the sacred path.

Backdrop of federal building and firetruck

And the labyrinth, of course, is more than a physical pattern in snow, grain, grass, stone or sand. It is a symbol, almost a manifestation of the subconscious. I've carried many questions, dilemmas and challenges into labyrinths with me, because walking into a labyrinth with focus and intention, I experience a journey into my inner being.  In and in and in, the paths may veer outwards but they lead inexorably to the center. There lies the heart of the matter: maybe the fearsome Minotaur, but here in Burlington a surprise awaited me: the central point, the pivot of this labyrinth is an ash tree (Fraxinus americana to those of us who remember plant names!)



Ash bark is said to resemble cantaloupe skin

Levity aside, the ash is a significant tree, being Yggdrasil, the tree of life, in Norse mythology, connecting the depths of the underworld with the heights of the heavens and providing a perch for the ravens of Odin who carry news of earthly deed to the gods.  In our local Abenaki tradition it is from the heart of the ash tree that the Great Spirit called forth the first human beings, the people of the dawnland.

 



Carefully placed bricks define the labyrinth

The Burlington labyrinth is traced in the grass around the ash tree with a double row of bricks, planted narrow edge up.



Leading ever inward

We’re in late Fall and parts of the outline were obscured by the golden fallen leaves of neighboring maples.  I was able to walk the path because of my superior spatial awareness and because only parts were hidden, but the leaves led me to discover that the bricks provided a tactile method of following the path. A person with limited or no vision could walk this labyrinth, could experience this journey, by following the bricks. Was this intentional in the design? It’s a beautiful aspect of the construction which elevates the provision of a labyrinth in a busy downtown, a considerate gesture in itself, to a higher plane of recognition of human differences and human compassion.

This idea resonates with me because I created the snow labyrinth at the Camphill Village for my dancers there, many of whom live with physical and intellectual disabilities. I set out lumieres made of candles in brown paper bags and that evening we danced in the labyrinth among their magical glow.  It didn’t matter that it started to snow, it didn’t matter that dancers blundered into the ridges and defaced my careful creation. It mattered a bit that the wind whipped up and caused the candles to ignite the paper bags – that was pretty spectacular!

 What mattered most of all was that the stars came out and we held hands, exploring the inner sanctum of the labyrinth and having a darned good time!

The candle-lit labyrinth brought to mind a line from an old Welsh song:  

“Dyma fford i fro gogoniant”,  
which translates as: “Behold a path to the vale of glory”, 
 from the song “Ar Hyd y Nos” – “All Through the Night”, about the gift of a starlit sky.
 

 

 
The End!

 

 

 

As the snow begins to fly . . .



Folding into the distance . . .

. . . my summer season ends.
 
Saturday November 1, I embarked on the next chapter of my life, celebrating it with a farewell hike on the stunningly scenic stretch of the Appalachian Trail from Pomfret Road to Cloudland Hill.



The trees are old friends here

I scaled the ladder-like set of steps at the roadside, climbed through a gloomy red pine plantation and out onto the meadow that soars upwards, rewarding the hiker with a view of gentle tree-clad slopes folding into the distance, punctuated with the scarred face of the Suicide Six ski area.

I’d not hiked the trail so late in the season before and it seemed unfamiliar in places (no wonder I got lost!) where deciduous trees had shed their leaves and the usually shaded trail was open to the snow-filled sky. Those leaves were inconveniently carpeting and obscuring the path! And yes, it snowed!

A solitary hiker

Just one other hiker was on the trail, well-equipped, and “stitching” together a section of trail from New York to Maine. Oh, and I got lost, unconsciously following natural flashes of white bark on aspen trees instead of white AT blazes.



I was on the downward slope by that time, so I knew which was the way to the road, but I was disoriented enough to enjoy the frisson of excitement and discovery as I encountered trees I had never seen before. Do I know every tree on the route, then, you might ask. Well, no, but large trees are so rare in this part of the world thanks to recurrent logging over the past two hundred years, that I do recognize the more significant ones.



Choke cherry colors

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Sunday November 2, Joanne and I rose early, because of the clocks “falling back”, wrapped up warmly and headed down the hill – in her car because mine was full to bursting with belongings to be transported to Burlington – to the Pomfret Teago Firehouse for breakfast.

It was the annual fund-raising breakfast, and very good it was too! We have a volunteer fire department in Pomfret, as in so many small Vermont towns with their wooden houses, so the atmosphere was one of happy appreciation and camaraderie.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

The event was well attended and the maple syrup, of course, was as local as can be: “Who made it?” I asked: “John Peters” was the answer.

 

 

 

 

 

Later that day I arrived in Burlington to be greeted by a sunshine-illuminated golden-leaved maple in my own back yard. Gee, but it’s good to be back home!

 
 
 

 

 

 

 

 

How to Remember Things!

 “The biggest reason we don’t remember is that we don’t pay attention."

 

(Psychiatrist Gary Small, quoted on AARP website).

 

 

It's true!

 

Tell your kids and grandkids. If you listen, you will hear, if you hear you will remember.

 

Even better: listen, hear, repeat - if you repeat you will remember.

 

 

 

 

7. Never Miss a Birthday

Sure, you can use mental strategies to help track friends’ birthdays, but sometimes it makes sense to use technology as part of your memory bank. Facebook will send you an email every weekend reminding you of coming birthdays: Go to the Accounts Notification page to opt in. Under the “Facebook” section, click “Show More,” then turn on “Has a birthday coming.” Similarly, use your phone’s calendar to set up an alert for appointments — you can set it for the morning of the appointment or a short time before it.

ColorBlind Images/Blend Images/Getty Images

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My Park Story

The National Mall, Washington DC
- cared for by the National Park Service

The National Parks Conservation Association, which is the voice of the parks, has set up a new web page to gather personal stories about the parks.

You can contribute yours at: myparkstory.org

Turn your special moments into virtual postcards to share with others and with legislators, to let them know that these memories matter. These places matter. These are the Treasures On Your Doorstep!


Artist's Palette, Death Valley National Park, California
 - incomparable and irreplaceable

Sunset over the Adirondacks, July 12, 2013