Redemption

 For the last year, I have rigorously avoided any form of augury or divination, for reasons too lengthy and personal to  detail, but I've  had this ability all my life and it seems, just deciding not to use it isn't entirely working. On impulse today (THAT kind of impulse, that comes not from you, but through you) I opened a book I was just putting away, one of a number in a large stack, and thought "whatever I open to is what  need to hear, germane to this moment in time".   And, this is what I opened to.....it absolutely blew me away with the relevance to this moment in time for us all, as well as my own journey through darkness this last terrible year.

Such a  gift. May it stir your soul's hopes as well.



Redemption

The fever breaks. The world returns.

How could we have forgotten this sun, this yellow day? Did we not see the birch, the pine? How could colours, and hope, have fled so from our memory? It was not good to live inside a scream.

We step cautiously toward the light. Our legs are unsteady. Outside, the wind still howls in the bones of the trees. The snow still swirls and rises, cobra-backed, into the frozen day.

But the sun again has life. After three weeks beneath a lifeless sky, we again dare to have a dream greater than survival.

We throw open the windows in the dark rooms of our souls. Light is streaming in.  Our spirits turn and rub their eyes. We are moving back toward the surface of our lives. Promise arches over all. We grasp, greedily, at time, and clutch it to us. All tomorrows’ mornings stretch before us, languid.

We are no longer islands. We gather, laugh, talk warmly of the time that has passed.
Who outside us knows of days where the cold stole away all the colours, where life was so frozen that every step had an echo?

Let others put names to our darkness, try to shape it into words and pathologies. They have not stared for weeks into a sun that gave no warmth, with the eye of a corpse, turning our every thought toward death? They have not watched ghost lights drop heatless and molten in a midnight sky, have not heard wolves cry out over frozen waters.

No, this is not illness. We may wish to have been born in the shadow of a mountain, where each day lifted our eyes in something close to awe. Or on the edge of an ocean, where infinity had a softness, and declared itself anew each sunrise. But we were born on the edge of winter, where our lives are marked by absences and fears, and a too intimate knowledge of the ways of death.

But, for now, it has passed. We have been plunged into frozen waters, held until we could not breathe, then lifted up, redeemed. The world assaults us with its beauty. No baptism could be sweeter, no salvation purer.
We raise our hearts in quiet joy and lay down our helpless sticks of fire.

Kent Nerburn

Native Echoes: Listening to the Spirit of the Land

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A Wolf on the Trail

So, today, which is Imbolc and thus a sacred day for those of us on the Celtic path, I took a break from endless "doing" and lay down with my latest Kent Nerburn book, The Wolf at Twilight. I'm about halfway through, having read that first half last Thursday while undergoing still more cardiac tests, and today I declared I would read some more, dammit, in between baking Imbolc delights, adjusting puppy diets for clients, and working on my courses...the ones I teach, the ones I take.
I read a chapter called Charles Bronson that made me cry so hard, I  wondered for a moment if I might not be really more overtired than I'd thought.

It's really a powerful chapter for me, with its message of gratitude, and with a little sickly dog at the centre of the story, a dog who embodies my  concept of "One Crow - Joy". . I want to write about the book, when I feel I can pull it together coherently. Today I just wanted to share something, about Danny, because all of this brought many things into my mind, about his life, which is not *over* but getting there, about our time together in Rupert, for which I grieve endlessly, and about an incident when he was first with me, maybe 14 weeks old, that I felt a need to share.

I brought Danny home on October 20, 2006, and this was in November, before the first snow, so he was really a little beezer, in his little puppy harness, which I still have and just fills me with heart-quaking, inexpressible love whenever I see it. It was mid afternoon, that day in November, and I was home with Dan, Lila and the guy who was staying with us, after getting kicked out of his last place, staying with us for a bit. I worked all the time and the guy who stayed with us didn't, so it got to me at times. On that day, I decided to get out for a while, just me and Dan - Lila had severe arthritis and was getting on, and I decided to just get in the car with Dan and drive to Gatineau park. I also left Lila because I needed to take Danny on the trail I used to walk with Luke, and just initiate him to the place.  Luke's death was very fresh and I felt it had to be Dan and me. Plus, the guy who was staying with us was driving me crazy, so off we went.

To back up - this was 2006 and I had been walking that particular trail since 1993. With Luke and Lila, with Jasmine, with other dogs. but it was really sacred to me as a place I could get away from everything, where I learned to ID so many plants and trees, where my dogs could run around off leash (not legally, but far enough in I admit to letting them go free) and a place of spiritual grace in my life. The last time I had seen my brother alive, was on that trail and he had said something incredibly powerful to me and we embraced, with so much pain passing both between us and then away, an important thing that needed to be let go. So I took this baby creature who had appeared in my life, just when I was most in need, and off we went. I knew it was going to be difficult.

What happened,  was this. We were only about 15 minutes in, I could still hear, dimly, the traffic on the highway; because Dan was so small, we weren't doing huge walks, but I decided to go a little further that day. Danny was on a long leash, busily doing his puppy thing, when I saw a very large dog, what looked like a German Shepherd, up ahead, just around the bend, half hidden by pines and the thick, dead stands of goldenrod and asters that lined the trail. I tightened my grip on Dan's leash, pulled him in, a little apprehensive because this dog was offleash and BIG...as we moved closer, the 'dog" stopped dead in his tracks and stared right at us...right at me....and, it was a wolf. This was on the exact spot on the trail my brother had stopped walking, looked right at me and said the sacred thing to me, four years years earlier, two years before his death. I have never seen a wolf on that trail before, or since, in literally thousands of walks. He just stood there, looking, and me looking back. Danny sat down and did nothing, which was, to say the least, very uncharacteristic of him. It was as if that moment passed through him, too. The wolf put his huge, sad head down and walked away. I watched him go, down into a valley, over a small creek, around a stand of red pines, and out of eyeshot.

It was one of the most powerful moments of my life, filled with such heightened emotion, one of those moments frozen in memory  with great power but ever mysterious..a Gift.  And now, almost fourteen years later as I read The Wolf at Twilight, I am reminded that in the heart of this sadness, all our human sadness both personal and global, there is still so much love, so much magic... so much to be grateful for in life - for me, in all the years Dan and I have walked together as one. And I am reminded too, that I  need to do as the other Dan - the 90 year old Indian man in the book reminds Kent, "You should always give thanks. White people don't give thanks enough...too busy or something".

Thank you to all my loves and all my teachers - the ones gone to the Spirit World, the ones still with me, and the ones still to come.

I Carry You in my Heart

It seems to me that many people know and love the e.e. cummings poem from which I took the title of this post: here's the full text in case it's new to you.

i carry your heart with me (i carry it in

my heart) i am never without it (anywhere

i go you go,my dear;and whatever is done

by only me is your doing,my darling) 

                                                      i fear

no fate (for you are my fate,my sweet) i want

no world (for beautiful you are my world,my true)

and it’s you are whatever a moon has always meant

and whatever a sun will always sing is you

here is the deepest secret nobody knows

(here is the root of the root and the bud of the bud

and the sky of the sky of a tree called life;which grows

higher than soul can hope or mind can hide)

and this is the wonder that's keeping the stars apart

i carry your heart (i carry it in my heart)

..and don't we all carry the heart of our dogs, our horses, cats, birds - as well as lost humans? Or maybe, we carry the heart of a non-human more easily, as they live with us in such simplicity and love, and ask so little, and teach so much. I will lose Danny soon; he will always be a part of me, I would not be who I am (that I feel good about) without him this past thirteen years.

many of you who read this blog will feel the same, I know, about their beloveds.

So last night, I was reading through the beautiful book Voices from the Stone:Life Lessons from the Native Way, by Ken Nerburn (I'm reading pretty much all his stuff these days) and a line jumped out at me, hit me so hard, I had to put the book down, let the emotions flood and let the message sink in.

The lines were these:
"I imagined a childhood alive with understanding, where the world is a vibrant, living place filled with lessons from the land and its creatures - where buffalo teach us about protection and calm by the way they surround the weak and infirm in times of crisis; where porcupines show us the humble use of strength and personal power; and where our dogs teach us about faithfulness by their steadfasts and unwavering love.

Had I been granted this way of understanding, my old dog's death would not have cast me adrift spiritually, but would have made my faith stronger and filled me with reverence and gratitude for the gifts she had given me.

She would have lived inside of me as a mentor and a teacher, not as a wound that would never be healed."

These lines, along with the author's description of putting his old dog  down (who had been his companion for 17 years)  triggered an explosive response in me; I knew that Lila lived inside me as mentor and teacher, and that Danny would always be my heart's peace and joy, but that Luke was a wound that would never heal - or at least needed healing as soon as I could address it. Luke was my first Ridgeback, I made mistakes with him, but adored him completely; his sudden death at 8 years old, from hemangiosarcoma, absolutely shattered me and I have always carried his presence in my life as a 'wound that wouldn't heal'.

So today, I'm thinking about loss - the dogs, cats, humans - the landscape, my former home -  I have lost, and how some of them remain as teachers, mentors and soulfriends, in my Inner Landscape, while others represents wounds, and therefore life lessons, which need to be healed. It all takes time...it takes a lot of time. But we owe it to them, and to ourselves...and all the world around us, to heal.

My spirit drum, decorated with sacred leaves from the trees around my ancestral home in Rupert, a loss I need to go very deep within to heal.

So today I'm asking - how do we transform the losses that live inside as wound, to the kind of grateful presence that a loss without regret will leave us? I'll share some of my own techniques along the way, in this blog, would love to hear from you.

New Decade, New Hope

Today all over Facebook I'm seeing  people making resolutions, others denouncing the practice of resolutions, some folks seeking omens as we weave our way through the twelve days of Christmas, and some reviewing the entire decade in a paragraph or three (2010 - 2020).

And I think that's all great, expressing wherever you are at, but mostly it's not for me this year  - I am trying to focus goals, work with the changes in my life these days, refine and reinvent my worklife...but I didn't do the omens this year, nor even draw my Animal cards on Jan 1. I did however, like the idea of reviewing the last decade... but not on FB. It will be long and I completely understand if no one is really interested! All I put on FB was a picture of Danny, yesterday (January 1) out in the snow, 13 years old, still with me after all these years. The joy of my days, the love of my heart.    Dan, whom I brought home in the fall of 2006, entered and exited 2010- 2020 beside me...every step, as we are basically never apart other than him waiting in a van with my partner while I see the doctor or do a bit of shopping. That's right - I work from home, and Danny is always with me, our routine has barely varied in 13 years - except for the fact I cannot go on walks (since last summer) and we had to move in 2017.

We had years that were truly idyllic, magical and blessed - most especially the first eight, 2006 - 2014. I adored my life in Rupert, the ancestral connections, the combination of open fields, small hamlets, hidden lakes and enchanted forest that makes up this part of the world. Danny and I walked daily, often for hours, in the woods while I looked for wild plants, worked on identification, and set small stone altars all around this sacred area, where not only my grandmother, as I once thought, but two great grandparents were born and died, buried in a  local cemetery.  It was a time that was timeless, as if lived in a faerie ring;  Danny embodied joy in living and I was at the height of my personal happiness and freedom. In summer he rambled closeby while I collected mullein flowers from a nearby field, he slept or sat in his chair watching  deer in the "the back forty" while I made medicines, worked, read and  he unwillingly! lay at the end of the tether I set for him when I gardened, in the small but intensely magical space where I grew borage, comfrey, elecampane, marshmallow, calendula, lady's mantle, mugwort, motherwort, echinacea, monarda and more.

In autumn, he loved the hours spent digging roots and watching me prep medicines for winter - elderberry syrup, all kinds of teas and tinctures, fire cider and more...loved the couple of "safe walks" we had during hunting season... crisp sunny days spent rooting through growing mounds of maple, oak and birch leaves...our winters were characterized by short intense bursts of walking, both of us bundled to the hilt, then home for warm bone broth (him) and cocoa (me)...long hours curled together under a pile of blankets, sleeping and dreaming, waiting for spring.

And spring, perhaps the most glorious of all, as the earth emerged from under all.that.snow, the energy of awakening here is indescribable!  All our walks were squishy brown and wet, but then, suddenly, overnight this burst of the deepest emerald all around. Birds returning, streams rushing, a zillion places to rediscover and explore ...of all our years and times in Rupert, it is spring...before swarms of insects, no intense heat, hunters or 30 below temperatures - that brings the greatest smile in remembrance, and is most sharply, painfully, missed.

And then, 2015. For DAN, it continued as usual - forest walks, garden days, long sleeps and great food - for me, it meant the loss of two of my dearest friends (I'd thought) then an attack on my reputation from a nasty competitor, then another of those - then my beloved cat Quinn getting killed on the road, and the whole thing winding up with Alex almost dying - which is horrific enough in itself, but the subsequent loss of income as he could no longer work fulltime, has shaped my life ever since.

And then, March 2016, as I struggled to get an herbal course going that would be a great offering for students and bring in enough to augment the modest income I make consulting - I was abruptly handed a "reno-viction" notice, meaning I would now lose the place that I loved more than anywhere else, despite it's myriad drawbacks - lose my garden, my deer, my well dug- in life....and where on earth would we go? Me and all my books, animals, my temple and apothecary? I barely slept from March 2016 to the following May, when we found Owlhaven, and I knew we'd be safe.

But, the enormous amount of work it took to pack up and move, on top of my need to basically work twice the number of hours I can manage, combined with the terrible sadness and loss, set me up for the physical collapse I went through earlier last year, which is too harsh, too complicated, to even try and sum up in a few lines here, or anywhere.

All of 2019 I was sick, dealing with suspected angina that turned out to be a peptic ulcer, then adverse reactions to the meds I was given to manage the ulcer, and lastly, a very nasty lumbar sprain in September just as I was getting on my feet somewhat. A chain of issues all relating the the same central patterns in my life, which I have been working to undo and amend. I lost a group of friends I cared about deeply, when I was unable to fulfil my work commitments at the time set out, and lost major website support AGAIN leaving me without means to figure it out and manage it myself (much less the strength just yet to put the hours in).  The work goes on, but it is not easy.
SO very briefly, in the last decade, I


-  went through menopause which was much easier than I anticipated, thank the gods

-completed several courses/diplomas in herbalism and animal nutrition, not as many as I hoped for, but advanced my knowledge a good bit

- built a strong reputation in my profession and increased income dramatically, to the point I can live - modestly, but live - on what I earn

- wrote for Plant Healer Magazine, which was a powerful boost to my work both internally (confidence) and professionally

-lost my Mother and a beloved Aunt, neither of whom I had seen in two decades

- learned such an incredible amount about plant medicine from the place I lived and the growing/gathering/medicine making that took place there


- discovered my personal resonance with Druidry, which changed my life immensely

-developed a couple of online courses (animal nutrition and herbalism) which proved to be popular and lucrative

- lost two friends I considered family

- lost several beloved animal friends, including Lorelei my dove, Quinn and Amidala (cats) Tina and Amara (dogs)  Clementine and Ben the ball pythons, and Ricardo the Bearded Dragoon.

-lost my beloved home, but found a new one; beautiful, safer, more secluded, and surrounded by owls.

                                     Barred Owl in the forest surrounding my home



There are other events, I mean it was ten years! Above all, I deepened my Spirit Work,  did so much innerwork I can say without hesitation, I left the decade almost a different human from the one I was when it started. If nothing else, if NOTHING else in my life, I value that.
I see so much loss above, but a lot of gain,too - and through it all, this. This is what I am most grateful for, my sweetheart, Anam cara, my heart.

This post is much longer than I had planned, so I am going to wrap up now. I have plans, hopes and goals for the year and decade ahead, but that will have to wait for another day. For now - reflections are good, clarity is power - looking back can be difficult but it can also be empowering. ..we can all benefit from self analysis, I think, much more than a FB post can provide. So, this today has been my little bit of public consideration of my last ten years...much more Innerwork to do, but isn't there always?
Happy New Year to all my friends and readers- if any, yet! . May the year ahead bring growth and hope and strength and love.


.

My name is Cat,and this is a blog I have needed to do for a while now, since moving from my former home in Rupert,Quebec,  to this lovely house we very gratefully call OwlHaven. Professionally, I'm a clinical herbalist specializing in dogs and cats, I love animals more than anything on earth, and I love herbs, trees, music, food, walking with the spirits, greatly. I live with two old dogs, five feline social misfits, a shy but good natured ball python, and Korky, the African Grey parrot. More on all of this, but to start, I thought I'd relate the story of this blog's name, and how it came to be.

A long time ago, I came to live in a small house on a swampy stream, in the woods of West Quebec, and for a time was distanced from all the things I had been engaged in - university, playing bass in my band, socializing, working part time in the local Occult Shoppe...I was alone, in this small house, isolated, with just my partner, who was gone a lot of the time in those days, working. I had cats, had always had cats, but my lifestyle hadn't really been suitable for a dog. And nor was I really looking for one, on that May Full Moon I found Lila wandering the backroads near my sister in law's house, five months old and scared of her own shadow. (Lila's story is detailed and radically important to me, so I'll save that fuller version for later).The main thing is, I found this terrified puppy, and fell so hard in love, my whole world changed and my life began to revolve around her, and not *just* her, but dogs in general.That was 25 years ago,and Lila was my first canine soulmate,she brought me to Tellington Touch (more on that later, too) to natural health and eventually nutrition, she was the impetus for my switching my herbal focus started in the mid eighties, to animals, at least professionally. But more than all that she was the Opener of the Way, internally, spiritually, she brought the healing I needed, as a damaged child, as a confused young woman, it was simply this love, companionship, the pure joy of dogs, that she brought, that began the process  that's still in action today, as I spend Daniel's last days (months! years?) with him, hoping to learn some grace and something about loss, gratitude and the nature of love.



But whoa, I'm way ahead, again.  I was trying to get to, the name of this blog, and it's tied to Lila, but so many digressions along the way. Lila and I spent 5 years in that house, The Swamp as we not-always-affectionately called it, and much of that time was painful for me, with illness, isolation, working through trauma - but always, there was Lila, that smile, poise, sweetness.I began to learn the power and beauty of solitude, inwardness, contemplation...mostly walking with eher through the forests that surrounded us on three sides, learning the trees, plants, and birds of the area, but often just Being , Listening, no goal or agenda at all, other than to take it all in with awe and appreciation.  On one of our snowier walks,  we were sitting on a stump, blissfully watching the sky, when a large crown flew onto a branch quite close, and sat surveying us meaningfully. I looked at Bo (one of my 100 nicknames for Lila) and said, "hhhmmm, the rhyme tells us that 'One Crow is Sorrow' - let's switch that around. I'm going to declare, right now, that One Crow is Joy!"

She smiled approvingly, the crow winked and flew away, seemingly gratified that the stupid human had got the message.

A week later I received a card in the mail (remember when people still sent cards?) depicting a lone crow in a tall pine, much like the one my crow had perched on, silhouetted against a huge full moon.
I decided then and there that "One Crow, Joy" would be the name of my book about dogs...about the way dogs bring joy to us in all kinds of situations... it was meant to focus on how dogs possess this indefatigable joy, happiness, good will, love of life -  as a species, and with consideration for all they give us, this to me is their greatest gift of all. Lila's joy in living carried me through such pain and disorientation as my body began to betray me, my life's plans all fell down around me and I felt such pain, emotionally and spiritually. She taught me about love, and the power of "positivity" long before the craze for a shallower, self centred version of this idea became popular...she was the bearer of much wisdom, a Master Teacher of love. Twenty five years later, 11 past her crossing over, I am faced with some serious health challenges, two very old dogs, and a need to work fulltime, basically, till I die. I have never felt the need for the message of hope as strongly as I do now - balanced, non-toxic positivity - love, gratitude and opening to grace. So, that's what this blog is about - my spiritual and this-worldly journey with animals - as an herbalist and empath - as well as the daily  challenges of living with illness and pain, older animals, and this world we live in. Daily joy, determination, love of the more-than-human world....hope.

And of course, it is dedicated to Lila, whom I miss every single day of my life, even as my heart is filled with the grace of many new companions.