Finding a part of myself on my hedge // I am a Beacon.
I used to ride my bike in the dusty, hot high desert plains on the edge of the terraformed city known as Denver. I haven’t done that consistently in a while, what with a child, dealing with my own trauma, and working with this project. That changed this week. I am not sure what came over me last Sunday, father’s day, but I felt this need to move my body in a way that I find joyful. This is a big deal, because I have lost the ability to do many of the joyful bodily movements that I engaged with in the past due to repetitive use injuries or just wear and tear from decades of tennis. I just don’t have the money to spend thousands dollars to body workers to keep me in one piece to only get the same injury again and again and again. That’s a death I am still grieving to this day. Regardless of all that I have lost with my body and mind, I still have my slow meandering rides into my hedge, a practice that is so immensely pleasurable and joyful. So, I jumped back on the old pedal bike and went to visit my Chamisa, pika, and milkweed kin on the edge of town.
I felt awkward in the saddle at first. I don’t usually ride for joy and exploration any more, having given over all my bike riding to the utilitarian purpose of transporting sweet little juju to school and back. There is a big difference between a steel touring bike and an electric cargo bucket bike. Those first miles felt like a portal back into a different world, a world before wearing a mask while riding a bike and having a kid in an international pandemic. Despite the familiarity, I felt wobbly and unsure. It’s always hard to re-integrate parts of who you used to be into who you are now. It’s especially hard when you feel like there is this gigantic chasm between the version of you who performed that activity and the person you are now.
Let me lay it down straight, this all about the work of integrating the free-wheeling druid I used to be on that bike with the seething flame on the hedge that I am now. This is the simple work of taking practices from former versions of your life and bringing that back in to nourish your current life. I suppose this is what Hannah was getting at last week when the reading noted, “You need to find a way to work with the pain that still haunts you.” I mean I can just keep writing essays about what grinds my gears. In my flaming bush era, I seem to never run out of things that never make me snarl. Yet, it sort of just wears you down finding a new reason to hate the worst parts of humanity each week. At some point, I gotta get back to just practicing my plant communication at some tucked in, out-of-the-way area of a multi-use trail or park. So, I let “gentle garden father jim” me get on that bike and get into places that we tend with our observation, admiration, and love.
This is a funny week to have that come to Gaia moment with myself given the difficulties I have with my own father. I certainly felt my own grief acutely due to my own absent father last weekend on father’s day. I think the most gut wrenching thing for me to work through is how much time I spent focusing my energy on things that he would notice me for doing (tennis). Like what kinda knucklehead doesn’t just like get down with whatever their kid is into? It just sucks to always feel like you need to earn love from a parent and have lost the parent who nurtured all that I have grown into. The heartbreak I feel is for all that I could of explored as a youth if I wasn’t so focused on tennis. I could have become a musician and been in my friends’ band. I could have explored fiber art. I could have done any number of things, but I was too busy trying to earn attention and praise. I didn’t feel the typical anger I have felt a lot this last three years. No, it was that sorta wounding where you feel a molten-hole-through-your-heart pain. I didn’t feel like writing another polemic about man babies. And I think that Father’s Day ride had a lot to do with it.
Ole wounded me rode out into my hedge where a county jail, wildlife corridor, and highway pass-thru all converge. It’s a place where you find white prickly poppies, cotton thistle, and Chamisa thrive without any aid (There is a whole essay on abolition that oozes out of these spaces that I will eventually write). It’s a place where you hear incoherent screaming from a 4-person, purple tent propped up on a hill. It’s a place where a tree full of magpies will welcome you, reminding you of the squirrel carcass that they offered you at the cemetery a few months ago. It’s a place where a woman yells at you, “No one ever has time for to help,” when you couldn’t stop to help them with their broken wagon. It’s a place where chittering pika carry on with the work of thriving despite all the best attempts to eradicate them. It’s a place where you can watch clear water, moving fast or slow depending on the time of year, slide down a creek toward an outflow to a river. Yes, it’s a thin place where I can intuit messages much more clearly than if I had just stayed in my basement.
Yes, my hedge is a place of the vast extremities of the sublime, a topic I learned of from comrade Sharon Arnold’s recent essays on the topic. You see in my hedge, you might as well be in the upside down. You will be subjected to the will of the spirits of that place who have no need for our artificial hierarchies and dualities. Yes, you will be challenged for your cowardly denials of help, revealing where you aren’t living up to your values. You will bare witness with rapt “awe and wonder” when your bird kin will plop down right in front of you for a visit. You will ride through someone’s living room while they are experiencing a crisis and will be subjected to the horror of knowing that this is their safe space to have their say. You will sit in absolute amazement as what feels like an entire hive of bees pollinates a Chamisa that is three times your size. And yet, what better a thin place to traverse as a weirdo druid who knows how vividly alive everything is when the spirits are communicating in such a direct and truthful manner.
Yes, Sharon is right about the sublime, and I think it holds great insight into why I felt heartbroken on Father’s Day. This sublime is so inextricably linked to magic, because that feeling of “awe and wonder” she describes is a direct indicator that the magic is enveloping us. I know that visceral sort of second sight and slowed perception of time when the threads of the great web become visible and they are connecting everything in sight. And all it takes is the curiosity and desire to repeatedly observe the kin around us, which Sharon describes in her essay, “The Sublime Beauty and the Land Where We Are.”
“I am broken open by the sublime beauty of the world. I am left rapt, in awe, of the infinite and the infinitely interconnected. These feelings don't come from a sense of safety at a distance, but from the intimacy of having my hands in the dirt on the land where I live, from listening to the 30 different calls of the Steller's Jay, from observing the daily changing angle of the light across the seasons, from hearing the whisper of pine needles and the soft murmur of crickets, from smelling the pungent aroma of salt from the Salish Sea on the wind, from tasting the bright flavor of salmonberries in spring, from perceiving the shape of the mountains even through the clouds on overcast days. I am deeply in love with the devotion of hummingbirds' flight in early dawn and late dusk, the rippling creek that meanders from spring through forest to lake, the flood of brilliant sweet peas across the field, the crowd of nootka roses on the trails, the river's rise and fall and calm and torrent, black walnut's majestic stature and dance through the seasons, and madrone's blossoms, bark, and berries. Here, time collapses, the self collapses, and all seasons exist at once; the moon in all their phases, the sun traces an infinity loop across an ever changing sky, the stars reveal their great wheel. Forests, rivers, seas, and mountains rise and fall. How much more sublime can our experience of the world possibly get, than this? Humans have been and are here throughout it all.”
My own experience of the sublime in my hedge in all its extremities is what brought me to feel into the wounding I felt around fatherhood last weekend. I probably would have bypassed it or just expressed my anger in my situation. Yet, there was something about the experiences in that thin place that brought me to this place where I worked with the actual heartbreak of that day. That hedge opened up something in me that allowed all sorts of personal healing magic to take place.
Ultimately, I think this return to omen riding, riding a bike with the explicit purpose of going to visit, meet, and channel messages from your kin, on the hedge will be very healing for me. In my essay last week entitled “Sensing into the Mystery of Disavowal,” I talked about extreme music concerts and tattoos as provisional practices that provide me outlets to express my pain. These omen rides could also be part of the answer to the mystery of how I might find a way to express the pain that is still haunting me. I am already feeling love love love fill my heart on these rides. I am feeling less cringe at saying that, because I am in *it* that unmediated, direct relationship with my kin on he hedge not just sitting in my basement seething.
This reintegration process is the sort of experience Mindy Stock of Sea Song Root speaks of when she discusses her soul retrieval work. It certainly felt like I was experiencing this gentle retrieval of this part of of myself that was SO IN LOVE with the world while conducting this very gentle body movement, embodiment, and intuition session. I have been caught in the trauma of losing that love and trust through the pandemic and family traumas. I suppose this is the precise moment and bodily movement that made my retrieval of that part of who I am possible. All I can say is I am thankful that I stuck with the trouble enough to re-find this part of my self. Also, I will be listening to all of Mindy’s music as the soundtrack for this ongoing soul retrieval work that I will be doing. Check her otherwordly performance of her project Virusse for Salem Public Television below. When we getting the new ep, Mindy?
All this sort of inner work is important, because it helps me keep my beacon shining bright to channel the sort of messages I want to be a conduit for. Again, Hannah’s work in her Mourning Light Divination Holy Coven is especially helpful in clarifying why retrieving this part of myself may be helpful long term. In a recent love note to our coven on death work, Hannah clarified that one has to do the inner work and continue to do the sort of practices that signal to your guides and team that you are ready, willing, and available to be a conduit:
“I like to describe your gifts and your willingness. It's like opening a beacon. It is partly your responsibility and job to let the universe or in great spirit and spirits like the dead or other kinds of spirits your ancestors, God I mean whoever you are trying to communicate and work with and be in a relationship a spiritual relationship and communion with it's your responsibility to let them all know you are open and you are interested. Right, you are ready for this work. You are ready to experience magic in a way that you will be able to receive, that is also an important thing to ask your team.”
In my case, riding out to my hedge is important, because it has always been a part of my spiritual practice and the way I received messages on the nature of this whole existence. I developed my first energy exchanges and communications with plants on that hedge. I learned of the great web that connects us all on that hedge. Without engaging in that omen riding hedgework as a devotional discipline, I am not doing the daily work that is needed to keep this beacon shining for all my kin to reach me. As I spoke about in that devotional discipline essay, I want this omen riding to be a an offering that may not be explicitly seen as we are today on these mediated spaces, but whose “sacred reverberations (may) be felt in distant times and spaces that will not know my name but may know my spirit.” DANG, that essay slapped. I was feeling myself then. Check it out at the link below if you want to read the rest.
Anyways, I hope you are well and safe and sound, dear reader.
James
Thanks for reading my essay. I appreciate you and hope you are well. If you liked what you read, consider subscribing for free so you don’t miss any future essays.
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