BARE GRACE

My intention when I began this blog was to create a place to share reflections, essays, prose, poems and photos of the creatures that I have met or may yet encounter in the forest here in the western mountains of Maine or elsewhere.

As an cognitive ethologist and psychologist (Jungian therapist) when I observe animal behavior in the wild I am always asking myself what the animal might be thinking. I pay particular attention to the relationship that develops between an animal and myself over time. I also question the role of projection on my part when I am pulled into an animal’s field of influence without understanding why. Most important I follow gut feelings and any nudges when observing any animal. I am a woman with Native American roots – is that why I make the assumption that every creature has something to teach me? I think of the natural world as being a place of deep learning and wonder.

It is my experience that intention and attention on the part of the observer opens a magic door, and once over the threshold inter-species communication becomes possible. I would like to invite others to cross that threshold with me.

As a feminist, ritual artist, and a writer I am Her advocate, that is, Nature’s advocate. I believe that when I write about the animals and plants I am giving voice to their truths as well as my own.

I developed an intimate relationship with the black bear in the above photo for a number of years while I was engaged in an independent, trust based study of his kinship group (15 years). Little Bee interacted with me on a regular basis but always preferred to “hide” behind a screen of leaves and saplings while doing so. Whenever I was around him I felt touched by “Bare Grace”.

Please feel free to comment. I would love to communicate with anyone who wants to share experiences they have had in Nature or simply make observations about what I have written.

If you would like more information about me, please read the essay on how I became a Naturalist…

Unfortunately, I am dyslexic with numbers and directions and have a difficult time with the computer in general and with WordPress in particular so I ask the reader to forgive me for the errors I will surely continue to make.

Sara Wright

12/29/16

I am spending the winter in Abiquiu New Mexico and am currently using my blog as a journal of my experiences in this mysteriously beautiful place. I ask that the reader bear with me as I continue this process… some entries will, of course, be about my relationship with animals, but others will not.

As it turns out I am presently a “snowbird” having returned to Abiquiu for the winter and spring of 2017 and 2018…

Update: August 2020…. I have returned to Maine having spent four years on a circular journey the highlights of which are recorded here…New Mexico is a magical place, but the North Country continues to call me home.

In the past years I have used my blog as a kind of jumping off place for publication elsewhere – which is why many entries have errors that I haven’t bothered to correct. There is something about putting my writing on a blog that allows me to see it from a distance, and from that place I craft pieces for publication elsewhere… I  am still writing about animals and plants, and still enthralled by the powers of place – perhaps more so now than ever. Certainly more grateful. Without my primary relationship to the rest of Nature I would perhaps feel more isolated during this pandemic than I do.

With deep appreciation and gratitude especially to those who comment on what I write.

2021

I neglected to mention that I began this blog because of bear sightings than in the last years have become rare – and now with too much fragmented forest around me bears don’t visit here at all anymore. I have just begun to include poems about bears that I haven’t published before in honor of their scarcity.

I include some comments that have everything to do with why….

What Extinction Really Means…

Excerpts:  Eileen Crist

“What’s happening during this ecological crisis is the collapse of the web of life: biological diversity, wildlife populations, wild ecologies. We’re in the midst of a mass-extinction event. It’s called the “sixth extinction,” because there have been five others in the last 540 million years. Mass extinctions are extremely rare. They’re monumental setbacks, not normal events. It takes 5 to 10 million years for life to recover from one…Non human species are going extinct primarily because the environment is changing so rapidly, so catastrophically, that they can’t adapt. If we keep going as we’re going, we will likely lose 50 percent or more of the planet’s species in this century…

And in addition to outright extinction, there are wholesale eliminations of local populations of plants and animals. The killing of wildlife is so profound that scientists have coined the term defaunation to capture it. We’re emptying out the planet. Big or small, herbivores or carnivores, marine or freshwater or terrestrial — it’s happening across the board. There’s a sad and facile view circulating that extinction is natural, so what does it matter if it’s human-caused? What this ignores is that the vast majority of species becoming extinct are robust, meaning they’re well adapted to their surroundings. These are healthy species experiencing overwhelming pressure from the human onslaught…When we drive a species to extinction, we’re prematurely taking out of existence a unique, amazing manifestation of life that has never existed before and will never arise again, and we’re extinguishing all possibilities of its evolution into new forms.”

Black bears are only one example of an animal that is on its way to extinction.

How ironic it is that I should be writing about extinction on the day before Earth Day 2021 – a day that has become a time of global mourning for those of us who are still awake..

Only four percent of the non – human population remains on this entire planet.

7/22/22

I should note here that I do not advertise this blog – my intention is to combine writing that will be/ or has been published with personal essays, poems, writing that may or may not be published at all – I use my blog as kind of an editing place – but it’s also a place to keep track of my life as it occurs.

…I live permanently in Maine now have returned for good a couple of years ago after some wonderful experiences in New Mexico – a place of wonder but a place I could not find home…

North Country Woman…

Sara

3/ 1 /24

‘I write because I have to’ I have said throughout the years. ‘Writing is my survival tool’. I began this blog by witnessing the wonders of Nature and now I am living the anguish of being present to Nature as S/he crumbles all around me.

For the moment I continue write to keep myself visible to myself, I realized the other day. Even though few pay attention when I post a story, a poem, an essay, whatever, I am reminded that I have done what I could. I have tried to advocate, for trees and plants, animals and insects, the ground beneath our feet, even when I’m witnessing horrors I can’t comprehend, let alone embody. Pieces of my family story are also threaded through this blog because I cannot separate one from the other, inside from outside, person from family, family from culture, culture from religion, religion from nature. The boundaries are too fluid.

Up until the last year my love for the Earth has been my Refuge.

At present I feel like I am climbing a monstrous mountain, that words are no longer enough. That experiences are too painful. The view from the other side of this mountain is unspeakable. I am also increasing aware that sharing my experiences/ my love for Nature haven’t made much of a difference, if any… Most don’t even recognize that humans are but one species or that all of Nature is sentient…  we know almost nothing at all.

(Of course Indigenous peoples have always understood what most refuse to glimpse… namely that we are all related, but???)

‘What will it take’ I used to ask myself as I wrote and wrote and wrote… no answers came. Now I am no longer asking the question.

This last year has been unbearable because climate change and the frightening loss of Biodiversity is at my door – I am witnessing breakdown on a level that I haven’t experienced before.

One Magical Rainy Day

One Magical Rainy Day in May

There is nothing like a soft spring rain in early May to sharpen the images of every bursting crabapple or maple twig and leaf. Every year I celebrate a day like this by spending hours at my windows watching leaves appear while making periodic trips outdoors in the rain. 

Flowers literally glow. 

The Cloud People’s rain splashes over unfurling wood ferns covering the fronds in beads of silver.

 I am in and out soaking in each lemon and rose tipped leaf, burgundy bleeding hearts, mottled brown trout lilies, heart shaped violet clumps, peony shafts, fuzzy bronze Canada mayflowers even as I peer down at Solomon seal spikes breaking ground. By the end of this month every inch of this sweet earth outside my door will be covered in emerald and lime. Only hundreds of ephemeral wildflowers will provide stark contrast. I take picture after picture to record daily changes. Every year it’s the same. It happens too fast! 

One marsh marigold blossom just opened. Of all flowers, wildflowers are the most precious to me, perhaps this is why so many thrive in this small oasis, flowers that are so often ignored. Fragile wildflowers that are also the most vulnerable and are rapidly disappearing under a keening Earth that is still crying out to be seen as the sentient being S/he is…

I love my wild once cultivated garden just beyond the granite steps that surround the (basically) kidney shaped wildflower patch that surprises me each year by showing me her most recent boundaries! 

My old garden is just the right size (not too big), shaped like a gentle flowing wave with a hand built stone terrace above bursting with columbine. Bee balm and celandine rosettes creep out of the sides of each stone crack, cascading earthward. The best part is that I designed this space so I could sit on the porch and see the wildflower haven, the garden beyond, and still glimpse the pond with its (all too soon) masses of summery greenery that will protect emerging froglets from  predation.

Outdoors again I visit with the wood frog tadpoles feeling relief that they seem so healthy. I scatter bits of spinach and beet greens bringing hungry little ones to the surface. Yesterday I brought them some old reeds and algae filled water to supplement their diet after being led to  hidden vernal pool by a bittern.

Indoors the first passionflowers of the season have opened their petals; two blooms saturate the room with an indescribable citrusy fragrance. I can hear the hermit thrush trilling in the distance. 

Now I carefully remove and replace the week – old water from the tadpole aquarium. This year I am keeping a few wood frogs in the house since I will probably not be raising more. I add the rest of the detritus and algae filled water that I scooped up yesterday, while removing the old. Hopefully, every single one of these tadpoles will transform into a miniature masked bandit that I will release into my garden in a few weeks. 

Even if conditions are favorable and these days they are not, only about 4 percent of any egg mass will make it to adulthood, and the clutch that survived this year (only a quarter made it to the tadpole stage) is in the outdoor pond. I saw one wood frog all last summer, so years of raising them hasn’t changed the trajectory they are on.

For this magical May day I give thanks for being alive during a whirling changing moment in time.

 Just to experience the wonder that Nature offers to those of us who love Her is a gift.

Hell And Earth Mary Oliver

HELL AND EARTH  ·

 

“We will be known as a culture that feared death and adored power, that tried to vanquish insecurity for the few and cared little for the penury of the many.

We will be known as a culture that taught and rewarded the amassing of things, that spoke little if at all about the quality of life for people (other people), for dogs, for rivers. All the world, in our eyes, they will say, was a commodity. And they will say that this structure was held together politically, which it was, and they will say also that our politics was no more than an apparatus to accommodate the feelings of the heart, and that the heart, in those days, was small, and hard, and full of meanness.”

~Mary Oliver

Mary Oliver is best known for her beautiful poetry, her acute sensitivity to the Ways of Nature, and of course her Deep Love for the planet that drove all her writings…

Everyone loves her poetry, but my guess is that almost no one ever thought what it must be like for a woman to witness what was happening to the Earth right before her eyes.

I did. My love for Nature drives all my writing. Nature has sustained me when all else seemed lost. To witness what is happening now is intolerable, especially because most of the culture lives in a ‘happy’ place – a delusional place where everything will be just fine. These people are busy planting their organic gardens while choking on the air they need for breath. We will get rid of all the plants and animal ‘invasives’, never including the human race as the most invasive species of all. We will create new homes on the moon or fill in the blank, technology will save us, even as the last bird sings a heartbroken song…

Mary’s rage and sorrow are my own.

Mary Saracino

(Poem) Persephone by Mary Saracino

[Author’s Note: Originally published in TRIVIA: Voices of Feminism, Issue 6, September 2007, http://www.triviavoices.net.]

Mary is one of my favorite poets of all time.

Red Poppies Manfredonia Puglia, by Mary Beth Moser

She returns each spring to her mother’s wailing arms,

hair unkempt after months beneath Earth’s layered loam,

where she reigned upon a throne of amethyst and opal.

No underworld combs untangled the want of sunlight from her tresses,

no brushes rid her curls of the endless nights

that denied her the solace of her mother’s fierce eyes.

For weeks after her descent, her dress retained the scent

of September roses,

the metallic fragrance of autumn leaves, of acorns. 

But time stole such comforts,

dimming her memory of the place of birds and poppies,

mountains and seas, clouds and laughter. 

A sunless realm gathered

the darkness round her, silencing her smile.

Three seeds of ruby pomegranate tamed her tongue.

Three seeds of knowledge call her back to light sky and spring soil. 

From beneath Pergusa’s waters she rises,

as waves unlock the gates of winter releasing their Dark Queen. 

Persephone’s unruly hair flows loosely in the arms of the wild wind.

Her feral eyes scour the hills as she cries her mother’s name.

From the olive groves, Demeter emerges, waning torch in hand

to kiss her long-lost daughter.

Flowers bloom along her path,

fields thaw in her wake,

rousing life in every dim corner

Death in Spring

 To Death in Spring

‘Experts’ 

told me

you would
not rise

too old
they said

abandoned
purple and rose

no one

envisioned

resilience

patterns

and

roots

form

to

field

Underground

 an Ancient Story

Drums on.

Peepers 

chant Love

songs

Twin

saplings

rise

lime green

leaves 

seek 

sun star’s 

light.

Bittersweet blossoms

 bean pods 

close the Circle

Seeding Life.

Oh, Remember

who you

are!

Winter Wren

at Twilight.

Scarlet Runner

Sunrise.

Passion,

Auburn Light.

 

Queen of May.

About 70 years ago as a child I danced around a maypole ….we gathered flowers from our local country woodlands and wove our crowns from reeds, danced with abandon and joy.

I loved this ceremony and didn’t realize that I was participating in an ancient pre – christian ritual re-enacting celebrating the Queen of May until I was an adult.

As a student of mythology I learned that every tradition has some kind of celebration on or around this time each spring to honor spring beauty. Indigenous peoples included. What we are acknowledging here is the Power of Nature who is bursting with new life as Queen of May.

Only recently has dreary sentimental Mother’s Day replaced an ancient ceremony that celebrated Nature’s power to resurrect herself. Even the first ‘mother’s day’ came into being because women were advocating for Peace (thank you FAR). This day has little to do with motherhood that continues to be sentimentalized and commercialized, even as our cultural hatred of women is on the rise. Mother Blame is endemic crippling women even more.

Women have been stripped of their most basic human rights.

However, Nature holds Memory through Deep Time, and one day the Powers of Nature will once again rise to celebrate the Queen of May.

Swan Song

Swan Song

I have been raising wood frogs for about 40 years in the hopes that I could help populations increase. I have also been monitoring other places that once held wood frog eggs.

 Originally I was under the naive impression that I could ‘help’ wood frogs survive. I have vernal pools on my property but I wanted one close to the house and dug in a small pond so that I could hear the beloved spring quacking when the males arrived. For many years I had thriving wood frog populations, although I noted with increasing dismay that elsewhere less eggs were being laid, and overall I rarely saw adult wood frogs even in what used to be untrammeled forests that I routinely haunted.

 Two years ago all the eggs the pair laid outside my door went belly up in a deep freeze. Last year one male appeared but no female joined him. When no one came this year I visited a local ditch that I have been monitoring knowing that one pair of wood frogs laid their eggs there. I brought the one clutch home (they used to lay about five clutches a year), rinsed off the pollution, and kept the eggs in the house.Then I found another clutch elsewhere and brought them home too. Ditches are stand ins for lost vernal pools but all ditches are polluted by salt etc and dry up too fast for tadpoles to become frogs so survival rate is non existent.Three quarters of the two clutches died, something that had never happened before. Pollution, no doubt from two different ditches. I kept the ones that lived.

 Feeding the emerging tadpoles spinach and red lettuce fattened the first ones up until I thought most would be able to manage in my little frog pond. Last year some did become adults. Wood frogs return to their original birthing place to breed so at first, this year, I hung on to another shred of hope.

 Just two days ago I put what I hoped were some healthy round tadpoles into my little pond along with lots of vegetation. Suddenly, I felt compelled to keep some to raise indoors something I have not done for years. I followed my gut sense.

The ‘why’ breaks my heart.

 I’m keeping a few because I want to experience one last time the transformation of tadpole to frog – one of nature’s miracles. I just couldn’t face knowing that this was the end until that compulsion hit me. It is time to say goodbye. 

 It has become increasingly obvious how useless this practice of raising wood frogs has become and that it is time to surrender the last of my hope. The fact that I tried so hard to help my little friends doesn’t seem to have stemmed the losses that are beyond my control, so keeping this little aquarium signifies my Swan Song for both the wood frogs and for me.

I have loved frogs since I was a small child, my first doll was a frog. My brother and I haunted the vernal ponds on my grandfather’s property every spring bringing home wood frog eggs to raise and returning the adults to their original homes. We also raised green frogs and leopard frogs. When I moved here those quacking sounds filled a few precious nights each spring…Oh, the joy.

 Over the years I must have raised thousands and thousands of wood frogs. Wood frogs are an indicator species of the overall health of woodland ecosystems, but our vernal pools and wetlands have been filled in and now with very few exceptions the frogs have no place to go. Add this to the fact that these frogs are the most vulnerable of all amphibians because they must lay eggs in vernal pools or get eaten by fish. Wood frogs are disappearing everywhere. 

We have never cared much about frogs who have been around for 250 million years. Because they breathe air and water toxins in through their skin they have been in trouble long before anyone ever heard of climate chaos. We live in an increasingly polluted world. Even our human bodies are filled with micro plastics, polluted waters, smoke from fires, pesticides/herbicides, poisoned food.I guess it’s no surprise that disappearing wetlands and forest ecosystems aren’t the only issues affecting wood frogs. Rachel Carson brought the plight of frogs and other amphibians to the public’s attention more than 60 years ago in Silent Spring. Her dire predictions are now my reality.

For every quacking frog symphony I have heard and loved, I offer a prayer of gratitude thanking these amazing amphibians for their presence over the course my life, even as my grief overwhelms me.

Blessed Be

Caveat: Watch Out for the Experts

‘Experts’ in general worry me. You can become an expert in anything in a weekend, months, a year… One or two studies and you are an ‘expert’ or ‘master’ of something.Here is a recent example “Researcher finds that wood frogs evolved rapidly in response to road salt” (physics.org). It turns out this is ONE study and the frogs ‘survived longer’ supposedly because they adapted. It fails to mention that they actually lived for any length of time. I do NOT consider myself an expert in anything, but I have learned a few things because I am a naturalist who has been paying attention to nature since I was a child. I have been monitoring and raising wood frogs for forty years and KNOW that this is not true, not just in this area but extensive research by others across their entire range supports my observations. Wood frogs are well known to be an indicator species of forest ecosystem health. But one researcher can refute all other research with one study that doesn’t even indicate that these frogs lived long enough to breed? This kind of misinformation is rampant in our culture – Please don’t be fooled by those that think they have all the answers and don’t.

The worst part of this misinformation is that it suggests that pollution doesn’t kill. 

Deep Time

Deep Time – A Big Dream

   I am standing on top of a mountain looking over a landscape of unspeakable wild natural beauty that stretches as far as I can see. This is the ‘long view’ the dream -maker tells me. The trees are stretching out their lush green needles to the sky as if in prayer, and they are whole. The forests, clear waters, the animals, birds, insects, and All of Nature have been returned to a State of Grace.

An Old red skinned Indian Man appears. He is a Grandfather. He is on the mountain with me but also stands below (both and). He speaks to me.

 “Sit, listen, this is the Song of Life”.

The sound of a drum is deep and resonant.

 A finely crafted flowing red clay seat appears below (it flows like a wave) although it is situated a few inches above the earth. Almost hovering. I also see a drum made from deerskin and red clay on the ground. There is a four directional equilateral black cross on the skin of the drum. The cross is thick, around the cross an intricate design is etched/inked into its skin also highlighted in black.

The Grandfather speaks again.

“Sit and play this drum”.

 I protest mightily. 

“I don’t know how. I know nothing, I say.”

He replies: “Play! It is the Song of (a) Life”.

 My life? I am still protesting, but I know I will play the drum. I will do as he says, though I don’t know how. The drum is a prayer. Now, I am sitting below in front of the drum that is situated on the ground. I wake up.

I will play the drum.

 Big picture context: For Indigenous peoples the drum is the Heartbeat of the Universe and for some Native peoples Red Earth is Sacred. The equilateral cross speaks to the Four Directions that are called in during every ceremony. Indigenous peoples have also been crucified since the European invasion that has destroyed the beauty of this beloved country.

Indigenous peoples are the intergenerational seed savers, the story tellers that live on.

Personal context: Rain. I write a story called Gary’s Garden about the joy of growing plants for him, plants that include a a scarlet runner bean that is one of three of my precious heirloom seeds that uncannily survived being neglected, forgotten, saved in an unripe state last fall and miraculously came back to life again (see blog). Scarlet runner beans are Native to the Americas, one of or the oldest beans cultivated by Indigenous peoples. This bean sprout was a surprise for my Vet. All the other plants Gary has seen every time he has visited for months. In the story I am overjoyed to be able to share in the excitement of passing on these beloved  beings that are already so loved by this man.  And the scarlet runner was my special gift!  I was aware that by seeding this bean for him that I was passing on the seeds of an unknown future in the Indigenous way, one that follows  global collapse.

 In his story I write some words that I don’t really understand…. 

 Plants have invisible roots that attach themselves to the person who loves them for who and what they are. 

 Did the rooting plants catch him the way he once caught me? Rooted underground. 

This is, I believe, is the second Big Dream that I have that reveals that Earth has been restored a Peace that is beyond our present comprehension (if we are living the Reality of Breakdown).

The first Big Dream of this kind I had in New Mexico when I held in my palm a miniature lush green earth full of animals and every kind of plant but this tiny earth didn’t have any people and it was encased in plastic. I was looking at it from both perspectives – up close and from a great distance. Around that time I also had a visceral experience of light pulsing up from my feet as I walked by the river before dawn. The mycelial network was communicating with me, through dreams and pulsing earth light but at the time I didn’t connect the two.

Humans were absent from both Big Dreams.

The edge of hope in these troubled times lies in  “Deep Time” a period that spans millions and millions of years.

 Robin Wall Kimmerer gives us another example:

“Mosses are the coral reef of the forest. I have faith in photosynthesis. The plants know what to do. They know how to sequester carbon. They know how to cool the air. They know how to build capacity for ecosystem services and biodiversity. Will the world be different? It will. Will there be tremendous losses? There will. Heartbreaking losses. But the evolutionary creativity of the plant world will renew itself. Plants will figure out how to come back to a homeostatic relationship with the planet.”

Mycelial networks stretch back even further taking us back to the beginning of all plant life as they crochet their inconceivably complex webs of hyphae just below earth’s surface.

And before that alga floated on warm shallow waters until she met her first fungal partner. One ate light the other ate rock and together they moved to land. 

Partners.

In harmony Life will begin again.

Blessed Be.

Trout Lilies

Trout Lily

I eagerly look forward to these ephemeral wildflowers each year because they appear just after the bloodroot and trillium break ground popping up from leaf litter. This year except in the lower field, the others have not appeared although it is the end of April, probably reflecting the late snow.

Trout Lilies can grow in huge clumps that can completely cover a forest floor. It can take hundreds of years to create these large clusters. Corms (bulb like) will extend root-like structures called stolons into the surrounding soil. At the end of the stolon appears a tiny bud that will eventually grow into a genetically identical corm. Massive clonal colonies of trout lilies develop slowly. The corms are sterile up to about the seventh year and then produce only one mossy -brown leaf and no flower but eventually when mature, plants will have two mottled leaves and a single delicate nodding six petaled yellow blossom. Each flower has both male and female reproductive organs.  Exquisitely beautiful they are perhaps my favorite lilies of all. Colonies are also spread by runners and the seeds that each blossom produces. 

Like all wildflowers these trout lilies also have a complex relationship with the underground mycelial network that we know nothing about.

 Trout lilies (like Bloodroot) also have a symbiotic relationship with ants known as myrmecochory. The ants from the genus Aphaenogaster are attracted to the lipid rich gummy appendages that are  attached to the seeds (elaiosomes). The wily ants carry the seeds back to their colonies where the elaiosomes are eaten by their larvae. Then the ants deposit the uneaten seeds underground in moist places. Eventually those seeds will germinate to help increase the size of the colony. The ants also protect the seeds from predation. According to some sources if these ants vanish populations will drop by 70 percent. Just one more threat these ephemerals face.  

 The ‘experts’ assure me that Trout lilies grow in forests in eastern Canada, the United States, Europe and Asia. But I have found colonies growing in open fields like the one below my house. Most of mine prefer some shade. I used to find masses of them flourishing in sunny roadside ditches, but sadly those days are now long past.

 Most Trout Lilies are single-leafed plants and won’t produce a bloom, so if you are fortunate to find a clump of flowers you have discovered a very old colony. 

 It is against the law to pick, move, or harvest these fragile spring ephemerals,  because commercial logging, loss of habitat and humans have destroyed their homes.  If a person attempts to remove some trout lilies the plants will die.

The trout lily we are most familiar with in the Northeast is the yellow variety known as Erythronium americanum.  Our local version tends to have yellow flowers – though sometimes the back of the flower or the pollen-bearing structures (anthers) can be red. Most of their life cycle appears in that brief period between snow melt and leaf out.

Protecting forests, edge places, small moist fields that border mixed woodlands like mine from logging, recreational machine use, heavy human traffic and pollution also protects all of the plants and animals that depend on prolonged periods without disturbance to thrive, including centuries old trout lily groves.

If you are fortunate to witness this glorious little flower on your travels through field and forest, give thanks because we may not have them with us for much longer.

Seeds of Hope

The Circle of Giving and Receiving

 Yesterday my Vet and I created our version of the Indigenous Tewa Seed Ceremony, something I have not done since living in New Mexico (except to honor the Seed Moon). We didn’t plan to make an exchange of plants and seeds on earth day because neither of us believe or thought about it – (either do Indigenous peoples) – every day is earth day – so it just ‘happened’ on the day before the Seed Moon becomes full. 

After giving Gary a very special heirloom scarlet runner bean sprout of mine (and seeds) along with the rest of ‘his’ plants that I had been nurturing for months, we also split up a sedum to share, one that he had given me in the hospital last fall, closing another circle of giving and receiving. 

It wasn’t until after we parted that I was struck by lightning. Visceral memories surfaced as I relived the Tewa Sacred Seed Ceremonies I had attended in NM, gradually coming to the realization that we had unwittingly participated in an ancient ceremonial exchange that may have originally extended back to Neolithic times. 

 Astonished by the unconscious reenactment of an Indigenous tradition that honors the giving and receiving of seeds and plants I wondered how I had forgotten?

Like all Indigenous peoples in the Northern Hemisphere the Tewa celebrate this day around April’s Full Seed Moon. To the Tewa the exchanging of seeds acknowledges the sanctity and power of these beings to create new life. 

The Tewa recognize all Indigenous peoples as seed savers, people who are acting as guardians of the seeds that are passed down from one generation to another.

 Everyone that participates brings seeds to share with others affirming the critical importance of uncontaminated seeds as well as the unity that is possible between all peoples. 

The Tewa extend the sanctity of this day to protecting all wildlife and wild plants to sustain a way of life that began long before Europeans set foot in this country. The people believe that this is the only way they can continue to resist global food industrialization.

This is a Circle of Giving and Receiving, like no other, one that honors a way of life that sustained the Original Peoples of this country whose love and respect for their mother the Earth taught them that Nature must lead. Earth was not just their mother, but their teacher. 

Had Europeans followed their example we would not be facing the climate crisis that we are today.

What follows is what I experienced at one of the seed ceremonies (each one I attended was slightly different – Indigenous ways are flexible attending to the present moment).

Prayers begin. The four directions and the powers of water are honored, a large communal circle is blessed with corn pollen. A prayer for the dead is offered to those that came before. As each of us enters the circle we sit around a handcrafted altar situated in the center. Diminutivehandmade baskets are handed out and we place a few of our seeds in our baskets. When it is our turn to enter the sacred center, we are asked to speak our names, state which of the Four Directions we come from, and what seeds we are offering for a blessing (Mine were scarlet runner beans). We move around the circle counterclockwise (the Indigenous way) leaving after adding our seeds to the other offerings. An elaborate rain dance follows filling the room with vibrant rainbow ribbons, joyful music and prayers that center me so completely, that I too become part of the dance. The ceremony itself is solemn. Joy and celebration follow.

To participate in such a ceremony is a gift.

The seed exchange occurs afterwards with people choosing small envelopes full of seeds grown by others. Plants are shared. A feast has been prepared for all the participants. Three women speak about the hope that comes with the seeds. How each contains new life, and that each seed is a miracle, a perspective that is also my own.

For a person like me who has been something of an “earth mother” tending to and saving seeds for all my adult life, this ceremony felt like the first public acknowledgment and recognition of the critical importance of seed saving over the course of a lifetime.

 

I believe that seeds of hope are planted with each act of sharing – seeding a kinder more compassionate way of being on this Earth. If there is hope for humanity, we will find it here.

 Hours after finishing this article I turned on my computer and  read that a woman who is offering a class that I cannot afford remembers the Abenaki stories I told her 30 years ago and is offering me a free class as a gift!

For some of us the circle remains unbroken.

Quacking Masked Bandits

 Wood frog populations that breed in vernal pools are considered important indicators (or keystone species) of long-term forest and ecosystem health. Vernal pools are hotspots of life and Biodiversity. Other species, like spotted, jefferson, marbled salamanders and fairy shrimp (small, hearty crustaceans), also need vernal pools to complete their lifecycles. Although wood frogs, salamanders, etc spend most of their lives on dry land, these species would not be able to survive without mating, laying eggs and developing into adulthood without vernal pools. 

I have learned a few things about wood frogs because I am a Naturalist who has been participating in the Mystery that is Nature since I was a child. I rejoiced each spring when I heard the quacking of the first wood frog as my brother and I took to the woods with flashlights to see wood frog mating. As an adult I have been raising and monitoring wood frogs for about 40 years.

I am sad to say that wood frogs as well as vernal pools are becoming scarce. I have just lost a vernal pool on my property because of flooding and a shift in brook flow (natural cause). Although I am fortunate to have others, losing even one, especially the one next to the brook leaves a great hole. How I miss that quacking…

Habitat fragmentation due to the invasion of roads, construction, the illegal filling in of wetlands (yes this practice continues unabated), water ,soil, air pollution, a warming climate with erratic/extreme weather patterns will give any discerning person the all the information they need to fill in the blanks. It doesn’t take much imagination to understand why vernal pools are disappearing.

What is a vernal pool a reader might ask? It’s a depression in the ground that is filled with water during the critical spring months, water that may support breeders like wood frogs, salamanders and a number of other insects like fairy shrimp that need just enough time to mate, lay eggs, produce tadpoles/larva and grow into adulthood before summer heat arrives.

Salamanders get lots of attention on the ‘big night’ when these vulnerable species are run over by automobiles on their way to breeding grounds. This new phenomenon seems to ignore the fact that these salamanders, frogs etc are on their way to the ever shrinking vernal pools. Why are wood frogs not highlighted? Maybe because there are so few to be found? As far as I’m concerned a vernal pool without wood frogs is missing its own heartbeat.

Although vernal pools can support some/all of the above breeders these depressions disappear but they do leave tell tale signs like leaf litter, bulrushes, high bush blueberries, wild grasses etc to let the naturalist know what has transpired here. No fish live in these temporary ponds that are situated in both open fields and wooded spots.

Here at home I raise one batch of eggs in a pool just outside my door (4/15). Because the temperatures are now so erratic I keep eggs in the house until the tadpoles emerge and grow nice and round. Although I do have three more vernal pools on this property they are harder to get to and too far away to hear a night’s quacking.

Yesterday I was thrilled when a friend took me to a watery depression that she thought might be a vernal pool. The fact that it had been there for decades alerted me to vernal pool probability but when I discovered five glorious clumps of healthy-looking wood frog masses in this peaceful oasis I knew we had found gold.

Now if I should be fortunate enough to find more eggs in a ditch (another place wood frogs use to breed) I can take the overflow to a dependable source of water that is large enough to support them. Most ditches dry up too fast to support amphibious development even if they weren’t salt ridden (any eggs I collect I immediately rinse in clear water) and my guess is that the loss of vernal pools is why these breeders end up in salt ridden roadsides in the first place.

The joy I experienced over this latest discovery gives me hope that we can keep these little masked bandits around a bit longer. I include a closeup of a bull frog that you will NEVER find in a vernal pool. This guy is reminding all of us to pay close attention. We need to protect what’s left of our vernal pools! That means YOU!

The Little Seed That Could

The Little Seed That Could

Last year on March 1^st I believe, I accidentally rooted what I thought was a non- viable bean seed that I’d kept for about 8 years because of its beautiful colors. This seed was the last of my ancient heirloom scarlet runner beans. The others I had taken to NM, but left there in such a hurry (Covid) that I never thought about the seeds that were left behind.

When the bean germinated after I had stuffed it into a bag of lichen to view under a microscope I was astonished. Determined to help the seed survive I planted the bean months before I could transplant it outdoors, even though I knew what was ahead. My little vine thrived but grew so big it outgrew its pot twice. I groaned at the sprawling plant every time another deluge came and went. Months passed, the rains were  just too heavy. Now my bean was struggling to stay alive.

In desperation I took the plunge planting the floundering yellowing vine in the ground on the last day in June where it promptly died.

Sorrowfully, I let go. I knowing that I had done everything I could…

Imagine my surprise when a bean shoot broke ground about a week later. That seed turned plant wanted to live! The vine grew up the trellis next to my window and managed to produce flowers by the end of August. Every day as I soaked in those bittersweet deep orange hues I marveled over the miracle of an old discarded seed coming back to life – three times in all. 

Two weeks later I fell and broke my hip. Three pods emerged during my convalescence dangling from the vine. Unable to walk and fearing a frost, I asked friend James to bring them in although the pods were not yet ripe. There were only 4 seeds that were worth saving. I carefully wrapped them in paper towels and put them in a glass jar to winter over.

Now it is almost the end of April. Two days ago I planted my seeds. Then I went outdoors to prepare the soil, covering it with plastic to warm the earth under the trellis. I will be able to put the plants in the ground within a month.

Yesterday morning two and then 3 seeds emerged. By afternoon the leaves had turned green. This morning the beans have legs! I have forgotten how fast these beans grow. It’s a good thing I will be planting next to the house on the south side because the weather is too unstable now and at least I am prepared for a flash frost. There is nothing I can do about heavy rain if it comes.

The best part of this tale is that I am giving one of these bean sprouts to my vet who just yesterday prepared his little greenhouse for planting. I have been rooting cuttings for him since before his retirement and this Monday after we do some re-potting he plans to take home his plants. Hopefully little bean will bring him as much joy as growing all his plants has been for me. Little Been is a surprise.

Plants have taught me that developing personal relationships with them especially as individuals can lead a person into a magical place where anything can happen.

Plants demonstrate the Mystery of Becoming.

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