Beauty Way

A thick layer of composted manure hides the cardboard. Grass and chickweed yellow and wilt against crumbly dirt underneath. There is death and decomposition and the nourishment of the soil, but it takes time.

After a week we plant squash by shoveling through soggy cardboard and into the hardpan. A dusting of fish meal fertilizer and a handful more compost, a tucking in of roots, a blessing on leaves. Months from now (if all goes well) there will be butternuts and delicata and sweet pie pumpkins swelling in girth and stretching vines to far corners of the garden where the mint grows in clumps and the snakes lie still in the sun. The popcorn seeds will have outgrown their hulls, grown into the sky with dark tassels waving, waiting for specks of life to brush against silk and crawl into the belly of kerneled possibility.

Changed, all of it.

We nourish the soil for our own purpose, for this food that is growing that will fill our bellies in the winter. We nourish the soil around these little islands of seeds and stalks so that the ground will repair itself with microbes and worms. We nourish the soil to nourish the soil. I may not be here to reap the benefits of the latter. I may have moved house or leapt into the stars. It doesn’t matter. In this moment, with these hands, I am creating beauty and healing in this place.

When I first moved in it was difficult for me to look past the chipped paint and cracks in the wall and overgrown weeds in the garden. Why should we fix up land and a house when we are not sure we are going to stay? I stared at the crabgrass in the flowerbeds and the piles of dead blackberry branches and gnarled pear trees and felt hopeless and resentful. Why should I fix up someone else's house, why should they benefit off of my hard work? Why didn’t they do it to begin with? Why can’t it be exactly how I want it to be!

I was startled by the ferocity of my reaction. Where was this anger and resentment coming from? Aren't most of our waking hours spent doing things that benefit other people? What happened to the young girl in the family kitchen who only wanted to help for the sake of helping?

Out into the garden, out into the world is what needs to happen when that anger arises. I picked up pieces of plastic twine and bottles, chip bags and wire as I went along up onto the hill and deeper into the jungle of Scot’s Broom, entangled in my thoughts. Tiny purple flowers led me to a clearing underneath a pine where deer dream and squirrels chirp. Each step is connected with the past and future ones and they overlap with all the other beings that have stepped and slithered and floated onto this earth before. We are layers of being. Layers of beauty and destruction and care.We can leave the trash on the ground or pick it up to reveal the growth below.

It hit me.

Beauty Way. The concept seems simple: leave a place more beautiful than you found it.

It is that simple to do. It can be sweeping a floor or placing a rose in a vase. It can be leaving a piece of art by a trail or filling a bowl with water for the birds or changing a roll of toilet paper before it totally runs out. Beauty Way can also be amending the soil and planting and tending even when there is no plan for the future. The ‘why-should-I-bother’ sentiment disappears and an attitude of service fills in the void the more it is practiced. Why not make a room, a garden, a patch of land, a community more beautiful than how one found it just for the sake of beauty?
Why not give without asking to receive?

I’d like to think I’ve been doing Beauty Way all my life but...yeah right. On the scale of generous verses transactional I do believe my scale tipped towards the latter. That is how we often survive. And then, in a very short time, I was shown another way to live. I don’t think I was fully conscious of the magic and complexity of Beauty Way until staying at The Ojai Foundation where I learned how to be of service joyfully instead of with a sense of obligation or direct (or indirect) personal benefit. The transition was steep and I spent more than a couple weeks checking my watch to see when my three hours of “Beauty Way” chores were done each day. And then they ceased to be chores. And then I stopped checking my watch and instead started watching the birds play in freshly drawn water and felt the intense energy of the Beauty Way-ed land. I realized that sitting in Council circle with others, listening for the sake of listening, that was a form of Beauty Way, too.

It clicked that I was fully capable of choosing to live the Beauty Way instead of a life of begrudging obligation. I still forget this when the bills are due and 18-hour work days leave me exhausted or the weeds in the garden grow faster than the peas or I get pissed off for having to clean up somebody's mess. If I can breathe and switch gears, refocus on giving freely instead of conditionally, I am able to live in this beauty. It doesn’t always work, that’s for sure, but when it does I am filled with a gratitude that seems almost silly while washing dishes. And it is fun! Finding ways to nourish the land or a relationship with little notes and sweet gestures makes me realize that this life is a game. It is a choice to see that game as warlike or joyful.

Dishes for Beauty. Toilet Paper for Beauty. Squash and Cardboard and Manure for Beauty.

Life is beauty if we can just nourish the seed of playful generosity within us.

Under A Harvest Moon

The quilt holds us in the moonlight. 

We stretch out and sing loud and lay tangled in a nest of strong bodies, heads on hips, fingers woven into each others hair, shoulders against bellies. 

We howl at the harvest moon and plink hawthorn berries into tea as we whisper of letting go, of love, of growing our hearts open.

We laugh and strum and growl and lay silent and waiting for the light in the darkness to tell us something. 

We listen. 

We write our own stories as we stumble across the rocky earth, we draw the others in with our voices clear and joyful. 

We are each others heartbeats. 

We (I) don’t want the moon-bathed night to end.

I fall asleep under the trees alone in my nylon cocoon. 

I hear the coyotes and chickens and trucks and oak leaves create a symphony of the valley around me.

I leave tomorrow.

Another full moon, another place, another life awaits. 

I will bring my quilt, I will bring my big ole heart, I will let the seeds germinate and grow and create lives of their own. 

I will sip tea and think of these (us) souls on top of a hill in the moonlight, singing, howling, comforting, being. 

I will love and cry and laugh and break open.

I will carry this gratitude with the rocks and shells and notes and tiny flower buds in the cracked mason jar of this one infinite home.

Slow is Beautiful

Blown out hair and Paris Twilight nails. Frozen eyebrows and painted penciled lips. Suitcases stuffed with Lulu Lemon stretchy pants and coolers full of expensive juices. Spike heels and belly tops.

I am in shock. I tug at my skirt dirty with compost and oak leaves, wipe my face with the back of my hand and hope I sucked all the kale greens from my teeth. My fingernails are black with soil from the farm, my arms and face brown and freckled from living and working outdoors.

I help load a cart to help one of these LA yoga retreaters up the hill. She insists on pulling with me, a refreshing change from some of the others who call us porters or girls, their Om t-shirts and Namaste greetings thinly veiling impatience and a distant questioning about room service. 

I breathe in, ground myself, ask where are you from, how was the drive, have you been to this semi-wild land before? She is steps ahead of me, pulling pulling pulling and the cart starts to wobble with the disparity. “Am I walking really quickly or is there something wrong with...the cart?” she asks me. “You are walking pretty quickly,” I answer. She doesn’t slow down. I sense her frustration. But I am not going to speed up. I am quietly laughing to myself, not at her but because I am astonished with myself; I am usually the one who is pulling the hardest, glaring at the slow movers, wanting to get things done done done. 

But on this land I have slowed down and want to welcome that pace in others. How else can you notice all this beauty? I wake with the sunrise with roosters crowing in the valley below after the coyotes have sung their final verse. I move and write and sip and read. I wander through the oaks and wild buckwheat and stop to notice the scrub jay on a branch or how the lizard moves over the dusty clay road. I have time for two-hour meals and take even longer to chop, blend, press, preserve all those farm vegetables I picked this week. I have time to ask, “How are you doing?” and not mean it as a Hey. I actually want to know, want you to talk with me, want to hear your stories and dreams and what you cried about all morning in your tent or why you've been singing love songs all afternoon.

And I don’t want to go back to a place, a space where this isn’t normal.

I lead her to her sleeping space, this woman in a hurry to meditate, to retreat. She loves the view of the orchards in the valley, the rustic beds in the yurt. She wonders about finding the bathroom in the night. I say you can always just go here, motioning to the leaf-littered ground. 

She looks confused. 

I don’t explain. 

I leave her to unpack, feeling a strange pause, knowing that she wondered for a moment about tipping me for my help. I walk away, dragging the cart behind me. Slowly meditating on how I would explain to her that this is my service, this is my way of making this land a more beautiful place by welcoming those who may experience the magic too. That generosity with time and help is not a transaction here. It is an offering. An invitation for connection and interaction, with the people, with the animals and plants, with the everything. 

It took me weeks to get to this unwinding, slow, deliberate point. To the point where I am shocked at this group of “mindful” people and depleted by the searching superficiality I sense in so many of these yoga-fit bodies. I don’t want to judge; I’ve been there too and perhaps am better able to recognize this desperation because of my own struggles. My own weekend retreats (Fix me! Fix me! Give me peace and love in my heart by Sunday, goddammit!), my mala bead groping on the stern of a yacht (dissipate my anger! Maybe one more chant will make me see the good in these people!), my stack of expensive spirituality books (one more paragraph closer to enlightenment). 

I still have a long way to go. 

I am grateful for how far I have come.

I look forward to seeing the transformation. To seeing the woman who brought only heels barefoot on the land. To seeing clean, unvarnished faces sweaty with hope and motion. To seeing the inner workings rise and the chaos of LA fall away into the spaces between the flagstones where the bobcat preens and stalks. I don’t want to have too many expectations, to harbor too many dreams for this bunch. But why not? Between the moving and writing and sipping and reading, why not cast out dreams of healing for these wanderers? That is my service, that is my unbinding contract with the transactionless universe. That is what the land has given me: hope, dreams, and a heaping cart full of love that I can slowly pull and disperse as I go. 

This is what I will take with me when I pack up my car in a couple of weeks. 

This is what I will remind myself of when I slip on heels and brush on mascara and play Big City with the rest of mankind.

This is the space to which I will always return now that I've tasted it. 

Not necessarily to this location, 

but to this groundedness, 

this sacredness, 

this wholeness, 

this living.

Patterns Alive

Oak leaves and clumps of dirt cling to her old patterns, old memories of baby blankets and calico dresses and tweed slacks. Books, a journal, a mason jars of herby water, a yoga mat, a headlamp compete for space on her calming flat body.

She found me in Oregon. In the back of a house in a front-yard-garden kind of neighborhood. A basement full of porcelain cherubs and yellowing prairie-themed books, the back patio adrift in broken toys and bulbless lamps and penguin ashtrays. 

She lay folded on a table underneath other folded warmth and effort. A pile of blankets and quilts, stained and torn and perfect for picnics and roadtrips and campfires under tall trees. I scooped up the pale pinks and violets  and once whites and promised an extended life, if not an easy one. 

She cradled me back, soft against my belly, and promised she’d seen her share of love and loss and adventure and was ready for more. 

The quilt is the storyteller of blanket world.

Last night,  the ants created more lines and circles and marched spatters of red and black on her back. They found my bare arms, flung out of the too warm sleeping bag and resting above tangled hair. I woke to feathers of touch on my hands, forehead, on bare legs covered by covered down. I brushed little bodies from my sunburnt face, I picked them off my mud flecked chest. I tried not to crush, squish, maul. I just wanted to sleep in my bag on my quilt on the ground underneath the oaks with the sliver of a moon coming over the mountains. 

Maybe they were just a few and would go away, grow tired of this game.

Then I noticed the smell. 

Strong. 

Sweet and spicy. 

Strangely minty. 

Was it the sage growing into the valley? Or that these little mouths ate that sage to give off this dusky incense? Without flicking on a light I knew they surrounded me. I could almost hear them. What by day was an ant-free domain, by night was the I-5 of this acorn antdom. 

And I was the center divide. On a lawless highway.

Have you ever noticed how ants seem to bump into one another as they pass? Like a small town where crossing to the other side of the street isn’t a true avoidance technique, these ants forgo the cowardice and simply body check one another as they move down the way. I’m sure there is information being passed, but I like to imagine all their little ant arms meeting in microsecond Namastes before moving on. Or even high fiving. The things you think of at three oclock in the morning when you discover you are covered with ants and after enough swatting you finally surrender, yes this is happening I need to move back to my hammock. But not before staring at the ants who pay no mind to your squirming body or blinding headlamp and continue with their Very Urgent chores. 

You are slightly miffed to be woken up from intriguing dreams and you dread the fatigue of the morning, but you soon laugh as your days consist of moving rocks from here to there, of sweeping leaves from ancient rugs under more ancient trees, of finding shade to nap under, of talking and laughing and (gratefully) grieving at picnic tables and in tiny kitchens that remind you of boats. 

And you are excited: that you have time to notice the ants’ customs, to see this nocturnal commotion, and most stunningly, to recognize that you (I) were able to SMELL ANTS and know that that is what you (I) were smelling!

I know in my sun strengthened bones that the wild is returning not only to this campsite but to my body and heart night after night, day after day, breath after breath. That sleeping outside is not a punishment, it is an honor; to hear the coyotes scream their prayers into the canyons at dusk, to breathe in the midnight breeze as it flutters past my face and into the trees above, to feel the vibrations from roosters crowing as Venus skims the mountaintops, to step onto the leaves and dirt and feel the earth on my skin first thing after sunrise. 

Primal is not a derogatory term here. It is welcomed, nourished, bathed in sun and starlight.

Here I can howl with the wild. 

Here I can hold the earth in dirty fingernailed (happy) hands.

Here I can SMELL ANTS.