thereishopeinbeauty

Did I tell you what happened when I pressed my ear to the earth? She tremored, “Love me.” It was Springtime, 2011, and she’d cracked from soaking up our stresses. Earthquakes. Terremotos. Giant waves and radiation in the jet stream.

I gathered my friends and said I felt sick. “What would it look like if we gave to her, just for one day?” Ceremony: Like our forefathers and foremothers knew to do, instincts and tradition mixed.

So we picked a site where all the elementals would see us. A stage in the wilderness—green platform of land suspended in skies—with the mountains as front row audience. “It’s our own little Tibet in the Tetons,” my sister said.

Brad, the woodsmith, carved seven prayer poles in a circle. A team assembled. Cloth cutters. String stitchers. Rock carriers. Making the theater by hand, eight thousand feet high.

Set free by our dreaming—children for a day—we painted flags and banners, adorning the trees, because beauty heals.

The medicine woman brought her drum: stretched buffalo hide and colored sticks. She taught us to play earth’s reviving rhythms. Chanting Mother’s songs back into harmony. For we are the rainbow path; the makers of rainbows.

With our presence, and our naked feet on emerald grass, we asked this corner of Wyoming to be our sacred space. Smoking the air, we stroked her softly with grey.

Lyn, the poet, read a devotion. She called us, collected, “celebrants of wild beauty.” Racing winds carried her words to four directions, swift as a river. “A holy love of place/has brought us here today/with wholeness in our hearts/we sense a returning Grace.”

I danced. A girl spinning her hoop. Reviving buried memories of women spinning circles, and weaving the web of the universe together.

Humans as conduits. Humans as lightening rods. Play more. Laugh more. Feel more. Live life to its edges and surge upwards to the sun.

If you’d been there with me, you’d have loved how our little tribe of celebrants didn’t know what we were doing, that Saturday in June. We simply gathered. We just showed up.

To make beauty. To love our land fiercely, strong as warriors.

If you’d been there, your spine would have tingled with mine, when our gifts were given to the fire. Sacred alchemy: A fire prayer from Deirdre, and shimmering, golden gongs played by Nancy and Dee Elle. Waves of unearthly notes transported that prayer up to the stars, and God.

We call now all of the spirit beings of light, the great Ancient Ones who guide us through the centuries. We call now all Angels, the Great Winged Ones, the Angels of Light. We call now the Ascended Masters, our Grandfathers and Grandmothers to bring us wisdom. We call now the sacred dance – the Lela of creation – to create a living temple around this fire. We are here as the columns, the Pillars of Light, to receive the love you have to give us.

Fall silent, mouths agape with wonder. The light of this moment becomes the matter in our cells. Love leaves a footprint; a phosphorescent trace.

Lyn’s poem, again: “We are embedded in this land/Timeless      yet eternally new/We are wedded to this land/Constantly renewed.”

Late in the night, after the dancers and drummers, hoopers and prayer-givers, had watched the fire fade to black, and nestled into their tents, the skies exploded—just for a minute. Thunder, lightening, and hail performed on our stage. Long enough to impress, not long enough to hurt.

The spirits of this land that owns our hearts so wholly were speaking again. “Thank you for your presence. Thank you for your gifts. Thank you for your hope.”

photos by Lynsey Dyer (mountains scenes, banner, hoop, drum, warrior), and Heather Erenson (sage, tribe), and me. Thank you!

The Elk Refuge under the Full Moon, Jackson WY

I drove up alongside the spine of the mountains last night. They’d come alive under the moonlight—the pure, steel-white brilliance of December’s ripe, eclipsing moon—in a way I’d never seen. Like actors revealing themselves after the curtain’s gone down, the normally monstrous, imposing, majestic Tetons showed themselves for what they really are: the feminine presences that anchor our world.

I understood everything in that moment under the moonlight. Why I’m here. What God is. The whole point of us all vibrating and shivering up from sleep. And I felt inutterably happy, bathed in waves of kinship. The mountains whispered, “We are yours. And you are just like us. Woman—a rock made of light.”

Some people talk about spiritual ecstasy, and heights of revelation, as states that may come over the special few. I experience otherwise. Moonlight. Snow. Peaks. Quiet. Conspire to palpate the heart fully open. And today, this year, it will be a heart unlike the heart we had before. Everything is changing; the highest elevation.

Last night, this line from Mary Oliver’s poem, Spring, danced like a snowflake across my thoughts, with its perfect, definitive, silencing grace:

“There is only one question/How to love this world.”

there’s nothing to say here except: Shivers. They dance, so that you feel your animal-electric self surge and gasp in wonder.

Someone I love asked me, “How can you stay hopeful, when the world’s going to pot?”

Feeling drawn and quartered; wresting inner storms. Wrangling outer hurricanes. Today, I thought I might never figure out who I am.

So I slipped into the forest and it received me. Sanctuary.

Its trees were screens through which you could glimpse the Other Side, and God. Air so plum with invisible magic, it quivered. So much excellence in the curls of undergrowth and puffs of overgrowth, such displays of perfected art, that any human muddles molted. Spinning hurricanes got soothed and stilled by quiet giddy thoughts: If This exists, then despair and disorder cannot Also exist.

Bark and mulch and leaf-shadows and lichen, and white swans on the pond, weaved themselves into a soft, surrounding fabric. Like a net, knit from the smoke of an old, enduring fire.

Take a walk in a forest with your six senses willing to be—perhaps desperate to be—fed. Where sharp sticks were stuck in your eddies, jabbing the banks, hope flows in.

i have a beautiful friend named tereza scharf, who left LA about the same time I did to return to her homeland of brazil, and set up camp in the wilds of coastal Bahia. she whispered something about my move to the wilds of northern wyoming into the ear of armand, one of the editors at w magazine who i have known since we were fresh-faced new yorkers back in the day. and he asked me to write a personal essay about why i had, since that early time of ambition and hipsterism, shifted farther and farther away from the fast lane and all its glittering possibilities, and closer to america’s wild, lonely-looking edges. what a dream assignment. thank you T, thank you A, and here is the piece. you should be able to read it if you click on the pics, then zoom in on your computer (command + on macs). i would love your feedback and comments!

we were coming down from gros ventre butte the other sunday evening, after climbing and climbing up through the sage brush, hearts pounding, hamstrings firing, to find a long lost medicine wheel that crowns the top. wind clouds grey green vastness. “this is our town! this is our home!” i said to my friends, as we gazed at 360-degree views that baffle logic and knock over the expected. we took turns tracing ley lines across the landscape – noticing the way one high point aligned exactly with another peak miles away. nature bulging into being along electromagnetic lines?

on the way down—swift and fearless as only wyoming women and men know how to do it—i turned around to see the heavens crack open, right above the valley floor around wilson. spotlighting my neighborhood. blazing a hole into the landscape. i saw my friends silhouetted against that monumental landscape, as monumental and blazing themselves in who and what they are, as the land, the weather, the elements they came to live in.

first, we would get to the end of my drive, and notice how the numbers on the downed ranch posts were swinging in the breeze. 350. 350… I might say, dat reminds me of the guy who painted numbers on the ground with a paint roller, in Sesame Street.

then we would watch the light playing off the water in the ditch for a second, to clear out any last cobwebs of sleep. i’d tell you this is exactly where the red fox was headed yesterday morning, when, at about this time, he and I watched each other through the mist. “You so foxy.” “You too, baby!”

i’d take you down my winding road, to meet a new friend and nuzzle someone soft for a moment. it’s a good way to start a wednesday, out here in the West.

and hearing the hooves squish in feet of wet loam, you’d say, Damn I see why they call May “Mud Season” round here. But then the view when you turned around and faced East would be worth all the mess.

i thank god for the backyard i got this year. it’s got all the elements in one: water mountain cloud space. Uma, Akasha, and more. we could stare at it for hours, but duty calls. computers. email. green tea and getting it done. i take your hand and walk you back to my little glade, cutting back to the left there, just where the road switches right past Fish Creek Ranch. we stroll back past the 350 350, towards the mountains, thankful for sun after days and days of rain. i think you might even find yourself saying my trademark phrase, just like we used to cry out on the banks of the Ganges, water glinting in sun like it is here in Wyoming: Today is a very good day!

It has been raining here for days now. I never thought the wet would be so welcome. After five months plus of snow piled up on all sides, covering the creek where I live and making my microcosmos silent and still, moving water is a miracle. Falling from the sky, moving through the creekbed, tapdancing on my cabin’s tin roof all night long—sorry to be so corny, but it is music to my ears. It is damp delicious relief after all the crystalline dry. Skin cells lap it up. Hair wants it, too.

And another bonus: Water breeds color. I was driving home two nights ago in the rainy dark, and as my headlights bounced off the rutted driveway back towards the mountains, I gasped at what their dancing light was catching. What is this? Shards of…. something bright… almost neon bright, kind of perky, like messy daggers of punk rock hair sticking up into the gloom? Oh yeah, Grass!

Can I tell you how happy green grass can make a girl feel after all she’s seen for months is white? High level happiness. The kind that comes totally free but fully valued. Grass, grass, come on, bring it! The whole world felt like a supersized, sprouting Chia pet. Sprouting. A good feeling. Buzzy. Sexy. I walked into the world today and soaked wet into my cells and thanked the creek and heard frogs chicking-clicking-buzzing somewhere nearby that was extra damp. Better yet, driving into town, the hundred-strong gang of horses in my neighboring pastures had stepped out of winter. No more cold-dazed swaying on snowpack (meditative trance?). Now it is all about lawnmower-style nibbling on growing green. With adorable, tiny fuzz-bomb donkeys at their sides for a visual kicker.

Oh God, how color can make you happy when it is new and almost forgotten. Look for it today. It is everywhere. Red gold chartreuse sage green and more. I can see a rainbow.

… there are worms galore under my feet today. Those critters are in wormy wet mud heaven. Mmm-hmm rain! Makes you want to wriggle. (Didn’t Marvin Gaye write a song about that?)