Start Close In
This month I'm featuring this essay by Mary McIntyre, a young and gifted writer who shares from the soul of her wild heart. While I've known Mary since she was a young teen, our relationship has deepened the last two years as she participated in my plant apprenticeship, Medicine At Our Feet, and the Inner Forest Journey- a rite of passage immersion. You can find Mary's writings here.
For the past few weeks I’ve been working on an owl awareness project with my neighbor, Constance Lynn, in our small southern Utah town. The ‘awareness’ part is about recognizing these creatures as the highly skilled hunters they are1 and trying to prevent secondary poisoning – when owls and other hawks, eagles, or carnivores are accidentally killed by ingesting a rodent who has been poisoned. In this long-time ranching community, residents have been waging battles with the fluctuating gopher populations for decades, if not a century. Some years aren’t so bad, while others, it seems like entire acres are consumed by tunnels and dotted with fresh piles of gopher dirt.
Right now we’re in one of the population surges, and the topic of what to do about these ‘pests’ and the use of rodenticide has come to the surface once again. As a side note: one of our neighbors up-valley told me he planned to flood his fields at the end of the summer to get rid of the gophers on his land and I imagined a gopher tsunami coming our way. This is definitely preferable to poison, though also just moves the problem to someone else’s fields… Owls help us!
My imaginings of a gopher tsunami.
I’ve heard our local owls almost every night this winter, sometimes from three or four directions at once. It’s incredible. I can feel my whole body settle and calm as I listen to their cooing back and forth. The huge birds have landed on our roof a few times, hooting out into the dark, star-scattered sky from just 8 feet above my head. I’ve shared these experiences with friends and thus been asked if I wanted to help spread the word about how we can give them a better chance of survival. According to Constance's research, Utah’s DNR has seen an increase in the number of owls killed by poison this year. We want to help prevent avoidable deaths and have open, respectful conversations with residents who currently believe rodenticide is their best option for dealing with the gophers.
This whole experience got me thinking about the act of caring. In the chaotic, scary, dark times our society is currently living through, caring seems both essential and dangerous. There are so many things I care about that are under attack every day that I run the risk of burnout and apathy as my heart tries to protect itself. But I also think caring is one of our greatest powers and greatest gifts.
All of this had me flashing back to highschool when I tried so hard to dim that caring part of my heart and mind. Even though I grew up loving forests, mountains, deserts, oceans and all of their beings, and went on to become an environmental sustainability studies major, there have been so many times where I’ve distanced myself from my caring. During junior and senior year we were allowed to leave campus for lunch at my school. I remember multiple times when I was in the car with friends and one of them, laughing, threw entire bags of trash – the wrappings from whatever food we’d picked up – out the window, just because she knew it would get a rise out of me. I HATED littering and I got so upset every time she snuck something out the window. She would nearly cackle with glee at how much I cared, how much this hurt me. I quickly realized that it was safer in this instance not to speak up, and when I didn’t react, the littering became less fun and eventually stopped. This specific memory made me realize how caring, in my life at least, has so often felt discouraged and like the epitome of ‘uncool.’
Caring can be dangerous; it sets us up to be hurt, to be disappointed. But I care instinctively. I care deeply. But this part of myself, through schooling and socializing, was slowly siphoned away. It was much more preferable to be aloof, and in many circles, still is. It’s only in the last few years that I’ve come to more fully embrace how much I care and how much this sensitizes me. I still feel the difficulty of fully accepting it, in not shying away.
For me, caring extends to witnessing and sharing beauty, too.
It can be overwhelming to feel so much, so often. I can easily enter a black hole of spinning thoughts just considering how many plastic bags and wrappers are going into the trash everyday, to sit in holes in the ground for the next several hundred years, slowly filling our beautiful world. I know these thoughts are important and can drive change, but they can also overwhelm and freeze me into catatonic fear and inaction. There are so many important issues facing our world that I cannot fix on my own. As I’ve been getting back in touch with my caring and working on doing something about the things I care for, I’m reminded over and over again to start small, to start close in, with what is near, with the places I call home.
I was recently inspired by another story of my community’s caring that I heard about in-depth for the first time last month. Starting in 2009, the community united to prevent the use of rotenone, a piscicide frequently used in managing fisheries, on the headwaters of the creek that runs through town.
That year, Constance and her partner, Matt came across hundreds of dead fish while hiking along Boulder Creek and after reporting the issue, discovered that rotenone had been used without first notifying town residents. It was a fight that took a decade of back and forth with the Utah Division of Wildlife Resources (UDWR) and the United States Forest Service (USFS). In 2019, the project was deemed “not currently feasible due to local opposition,” as Tessa Barkan wrote for the local Insider Newspaper. It took the whole town coming together to stop this project; people who don’t often see eye-to-eye or hold the same values. But the importance of clean water and the understanding that poisoning water sources is never a good idea made collaboration possible.
This sentence from the article linked above gives me the good kind of goosebumps, the kind that makes my body and mind feel like they are swelling with possibility, maybe even with righteousness?
“This project is a monumental example of how the voices in a small community can, when in unison, change government policy. This could set a precedent for other communities fighting the ubiquitous policy of chemically sterilizing watersheds for the purpose of fish management.”
Through these different projects, I’ve realized that one of the big reasons I love living here is that it allows me to have a more intimate connection with the world around me. The water, the plants, the animals, the birds, everything is so close. Yesterday, a flock of more than 60 meadowlarks landed in our orchard, flitting around the dried rice grass and clover and mare's tail stalks from last year, swooping in veils along the edge of the pond. They sing perhaps my favorite song of our local birds, and twittered and chirped as I sat on the deck in morning meditation.
A Western Meadowlark by Lucien Julian, creator of Boulder Birds
I’d never seen more than two of these beautiful birds together at once. I learned that a flock of meadowlarks is called a pod and during winter months, up to several hundred birds might gather to forage for leftover seeds. We’ve had bald eagles, golden eagles, red tail and cooper’s hawks in the field this week. And as I sat listening to the birds sing, I realized how good this kind of noise is for my nervous system. If the birds are singing, it feels like all is right in this little corner of the world. I hope we can keep them singing.
1 Footnote
A Great Horned Owl usually eats 3-4 rodents per night, and during nesting and fledgling season, that number can go up to 50!
The Nature Mystic with Practical Feet
An invitation to my new offering for 2025
I just wanted to share this invitation that I sent out in January to those who have participated in the Inner Forest Journey and others in our community who have completed a rite of passage ceremony. I’m happy to say that we currently have a lovely cohort ready to gather this season.
May this invitation inspire you to walk the path of a Nature Mystic with Practical Feet and please reach out if I can support you in any way.
~ deer friends ~
During a month of Silence in a Threshold Ceremony, this December, Mystery gifted me with a vision for The Nature Mystic with Practical Feet. And with this, I've always appreciated the Indigenous Perspective of how our visions and dreams are for the community and that we need to bring them to life through action.
In the words of Black Elk
"I have told you, but if I have not, you must have understood, that a man who has a vision is not able to use the power of it until after he has performed the vision on Earth for the people to see."
May you receive this invitation in your heart and soul and if you feel a resonance or a call to participate, please say yes to walking this path together.
with love and blessings,
Constance Lynn
Night Mystery
The Nature Mystic with Practical Feet
Community-based Sacred Activism
Guided by Soul
By definition…for an initiated individual to be in service to soulcentric community, there needs to be an ecological awareness and responsibility to act on behalf of Earth and All Beings. My intention for the Nature Mystic with Practical Feet is to facilitate an experience to align more fully with our soul power, calling, and gifts so as to move into sacred activism with care and love for our more than human community.
This offering has two phases:
Tending to Our Soul Fire:
In this phase, we will come into harmony with ourselves, our deepest truths, and our highest intentions to be in a good relationship with all the life around us.
Our time together will include:
*Daily Life as Ceremony and Sacred Reciprocity
*Nourish Self***Nourish Earth
*Identifying our power leaks and aligning with our true power
*Listening for our calling
*Council
*Ritual performance
*Embodied inquiry
*Journal prompts
*Open awareness meditation
*Medicine circle/sit spots
For this phase we will meet one weekend a month in April and May in my garden
The Nature Mystic with Practical Feet:
In this phase, from the place of our true power we’ll extend our personal wholeness into the world by giving the gift we came to Earth to offer as a giveaway to All Our Relations. This will be a dance between experiences with Mystery, Nature, and Soul and the practical actions to tend to our more than human community.
Our time together will include:
*What is Sacred Activism?
*Council
*Medicine walks
*Ceremony
*Fire circle (pm)
*Dream circle (am)
*Guidance on the topic for the month
*Somatic experience
*Silence and solitude with Nature
*Deep listening
*Enacting our giveaway
For this phase we will meet for an overnight
Nature Immersion in June-October
Sample Schedule:
My preference is to work out a schedule together based on the availability of all those who are interested.
Reciprocity:
*Enacting a giveaway to tend to our more than human community.
*For facilitating this offering I feel aligned with the Lakota tradition of gift giving to those who support journey work
*A gift from each of these categories: food; home; clothing; ceremony
*A commitment to attending all the sessions.
Prerequisites:
*Having completed a Rite of Passage Journey such as The Inner Forest Journey, Courting the Mystery, or a quest with AVI or SOLB.
*A 15 minute conversation with me to discuss your interest, answer any questions, and share details about this offering.
Additional information:
*If you live beyond regional travel to Boulder and are interested in sacred activism guided by your soul calling, please contact me for personal mentoring.
*Or please contact me if you are interested in beginning your own Nature Mystic with Practical Feet group in your community and perhaps we can create a mentoring group from afar.
Suggested reading:
*The Serviceberry by Robin Wall Kimmerer
*Summoned by the Earth by Cynthia Jurs
*Love Letter to the Earth by Thich Nhat Hahn
My work is loving the world.
-Mary Oliver
