February is an imp, a trickster. She is dancing over my body with her tiny feet. “I cannot wait to open my presents,” she declares. “ I want them all NOW.”

February tears the covers off and laughs and claps and dances with delight. “Oh beauty. Oh riches.” Everything is a present to her. She opens everything.

“You,” she says, “sometimes you forget. Life is a celebration. But sometimes all you see is impossibility. Cold and gray. You stop. You forget to laugh and dance. You think: Oh I can’t. Oh it’s cold.” She is knocking me on my forehead, “Hey you in there – this is the party. This. This. THIS.”

OOO

I lean in through the fall of water to kiss her. She hands me the golden bowl. I haven’t received the bowl from her in such a long time. I cradle it in my hands and gaze down into the brimming light. The bowl is primary. The bowl and the Wellspring both. They are the two elements that began this whole dream sequence. The bowl and the Wellspring and a small white butterfly. I think perhaps it is the bowl that is dreaming me. I lift and drink. The water of light suffuses me, shining out all over.

My little frog heart is sunning on the stone edge of the fountain. He looks up and jumps into the water. I think there is no happier sound than the plop of a frog into water.

Urs is sitting nearby in reverent contemplation, his face lifted to the Wellspring. I rest my hand on his shoulder. “Do you want to come with me?” I’m not sure where I’m going, but somewhere, somewhere. I want to be out in the woods.

“You go on without me,” he grins. Meditating by the Wellspring is recharging him. I will need him when I leave here, but for this foray, I do not.

NH is standing a little ways off. I go to him laughing. Seeing NH fuels me. Touching the deep expansive darkness of him brightens me. I let myself lean into him. “I want to give you something.” I open my hand around a small clear smooth crystal, full of light. I press it to his chest. It’s a connection between us, a direct connection, a port. No matter the distance between us, we will be able to contact each other through this little bit of brilliance. He smiles his pain-melting smile at me.

“I am beloved,” I say, remembering.

“You are beloved.”

“And you are beloved.”

He steps closer, breathes into my ear. “There are tiny bells in your hair. When you move you make music. The music feeds the flowers. Wherever you go things flourish.”

These are the words he sends me off with. This is the blessing that launches me into the woods.

I climb the steep western slope of the mountain. The trees are thick and close here, the grass sweet and long. I find the Mountain Man in a crouch, gazing into the woods. Before I can call out to him, he lifts his hand to signal quiet, stillness. I stop. I stand still watching him watch a place where a small path passes between two bushes. I do not know what he is watching for or what he hopes to learn. I watch with him to find out.

I stand so still watching that I turn into a tree. I am an aspen among aspen. My roots twine in the thin dirt, skimming and skirting rock, weaving me together with my sister trees. My trunk is tall and gleaming. My leaves love the sunlight, and flirt with the wind. And still I am watching this small patch of green in the green. The Mountain Man holds so still he turns into a rock resting in the dappled light under the trees.

When I have become tree and he has become rock and nothing but the breeze has moved in the grass for some time, a small mouse steps out from under a bush and into the path. The mouse’s cheeks are fat with the seed she carries. She stops in the path and turns her black eyes in our direction. We watch each other. And then she is gone back under the cover of the other bush and out of sight. Somewhere in the grass a snake unfurls, sensed but not seen. Again nothing moves but the wind.

And then, something big is approaching. I do not hear it, or see it. I feel it. I know it is coming. And then, there he is, a stag with a full celebration of antlers. He stops and regards us. “You’re not fooling anyone, you know,” he says.

“The intention is not to fool,” the Mountain Man replies, “but to show respect.”

We three breathe together a long moment before the stag responds, “Respect accepted.” turns and is gone.

The spell is broken then. I am no longer tree and he is no longer rock. I sit beside him in the grass. “I wanted to ask you about enthusiasm,” I say.

“Hm,” he says.

“I’ve been tasked with raising enthusiasm, you know. And only just the other day I realized that I can’t sustain enthusiasm. It wears me out. And then I have to get quiet and rest and build my strength back. So I don’t really know how to approach this task. I thought you might have some guidance for me.”

“This is enthusiasm,” he says. “This quiet focused attention. It doesn’t have to be loud. It can fuel you.”

“Being a tree counts as enthusiasm?”

“Being a tree counts.”

“This is very good news. Thank you.”

“Glad to help.”

I leave the Mountain Man contemplating the green and head back to the Wellspring to say my goodbyes. NH sings me over, “There is starlight in your hair, it rings like tiny bells. The music feeds the flowers. Wherever you go, life flourishes.”

Not a bad way to start the day.

OOO

The river brings me a baby, swaddled in a reed basket, bobbing on the current. I lift the baby in my arms, cradling him to me, cooing and singing and rocking him. I want to rock him forever, but he grows quick quick into a lithe young man who stands beside me, raises his arms and laughs. Then quick quick he crosses the river and runs into the wood. I lose sight of him but know that he is busy, running here and there collecting and finding and rejoicing.

By evening he is home again with me. He has brought dinner which he cooks over a fire. We eat and sit together watching the stars come into the gathering dark, sharing quiet, sharing content.

“Don’t worry Mama,” he says. “I’ll look after you.”

He is my provider.

OOO

First, guardian of the left hand,
the gate of sleep and dreaming.

Second, guardian of the right hand,
the gate of work and craft.

Third, guardian of the brow,
the gate of knowing, of calm,
the face we present to the world.

Fourth, guardian of questions,
ears and shoulders.

Fifth, guardian of secrets,
waist and hips,
folding and protection.

Sixth, guardian of spine,
gate of power and lift,
the daily call to rise.

Seventh, guardian of answers,
the belly where new things begin.

And there, the outside oak,
guardian of the Other,
the mirror gaze, the self,
gate of the heart,
of attention and waiting.

This is where I live,
in the midst of all these gifts
and blessings.

We breathe together.

OOO

I lift my arms, face the far shore, open my mouth and sing. I step forward into the current. The river rocks settle under my feet. The water is fast and icy. I sing. The fish in the river answer me, silver flashes in the dark. The birds in the trees rise in answer. A shower of bloom moves through the branches. The ones who move on padded paws answer, and the flying bugs, the singing bugs, the legged ones, the larva, all life turns and blooms and I am thankful for all of this. I am nourished by all of this. I am thankful.

Let my every gesture be a resonance of thanks.

OOO

“Yes.”

“It doesn’t matter, does it? What I make of this. It is good of itself. It’s good just to be here.”

“What comes of this,” he says, “you wear in your face, wherever you go. A blessing to anyone you meet.”

OOO

I stand with Urs looking out over the rocky plain. “We need some kind of a wind break that won’t block the sun as well. A wall or something. If only there were some trees out there.”

“Or maybe,” Urs suggests, “we should go find out where this wind is coming from and see if we can do anything about it.”

There is nothing I like better than realizing a thing has a cause and going about seeking it out. We set off straight away, heads down, into the teeth of the hot wind. I begin to speculate on the source of the wind. Maybe the sun and the wind are having a wrestling match. Or maybe it’s a dragon with his foot caught in a fissure, bellowing out his distress. But it isn’t anything like that at all.

It is a small girl, not hip high, in a red dress with a white bib apron and shiny black mary janes. She stands with her fists clenched, her face red and her mouth wide, crying: “It’s not safe. It’s not safe. It’s not safe.” The heat of her cry scorches the ground from where she stands all the way to the river. She stops though, when she sees us coming.

“Hello,” I say.

“How did you find me?”

“It wasn’t hard, we just followed the path of destruction.” She grimaces a little at that and takes a deep breath to commence crying again, so I jump in quick with a question. “What’s not safe?”

She is glad for the chance to explain. “All that complicated greenery, all those trees and roots and grasses. When it grows all up like that you can’t see where you’re going. It’s easy to get lost. It’s easy to get tangled. You can’t tell where to put your feet. You make mistakes.” She shudders at that and draws another breath.

“What do you need,” Urs asks her, “to make you feel safe?”

“Forgiveness,” she says, pure and simple.

And oh, we are flooded with empathy and compassion. How frightened she is of making mistakes. We bathe her in forgiveness. Urs cups a golden light in his hands, a tender ointment we spread over the girl’s parched and blistered skin. I lift her into my lap and rock her gently. “It’s alright,” I croon, “you are forgiven, my sweet, you are forgiven. Everybody makes mistakes.”

“You know,” Urs says, ”mistakes are funny actually. There would be little comedy without mistakes. They catch you by surprise and make you laugh. And laughter is a good thing.”

“But,” the girl protests, “what if someone is hurt by your mistake? You can’t laugh then!”

“If someone is hurt, you apologize and ask forgiveness. Then you move on. That’s all.”

I look back across the rocky plain and see it has bloomed into prairie. “Not everything is forest,” I point out. “Look how open and expansive this place is, but still fertile.”

And then the buffalo arrive. A thundering herd that takes my breath away. Buffalo Man is among them. He takes my hand.

I recognize the place now. “This is the desolate plain you wanted me to build on?”

“Yes.”

“This is where the herd of stories roam.”

“Yes.”

I am so glad of all of this, to see the life come in to all of this.

Back at the river my garden is flourishing. The wind that comes off the plain now is sweet and playful. People are coming over the river to buy fruit from the garden. The ferryman handles the commerce. I sit in the shade of the willows and weave. I am making blankets. They are story blankets. Everything the world tells me is woven into them — the river’s song, the prairie wind, the herd’s thunder. It’s all in the weaving.

The ferryman himself is wrapped in one of my blankets.

I thank you all for this blessing.

OOO

A man came to a small house all alone. There was a kind of disturbance of air about him. Or about me when I came near him. I went to offer him aid and got fluttery.

I asked permission to lay my hands on him in blessing, “May I?”

He was shiny bald – a long strong head. When my hands rested on his temples and jaw, he brought his forehead down to rest against mine and a vast calm flowed into me. He was the one. We were a pair, a unit. He smiled and folded his arms around me, receiving me.

“What is the purpose of this union?” I asked.

“We will make good things happen.” He cradled my face and kissed my eyes and cheek bones and jaw, as if he were sipping joy.

“It’s lovely to be the source of delight,” I said, “but may I not take delight as well?”

“Dear One, it is your delight that I am delighting in.”

“How will we make good things happen?”

“My arms are strong. My back is strong. My heart is strong. Little star, rest in me.”

“Who are you?”

“I am yours.”

My strength. He is my strength, my worldly power and presence, my doing. He is a shining one, glorious, of the world, an anchor and setting for my bright fluttering spirit.

I will call him Urs Trewli because I’m funny like that. He doesn’t mind. We will walk together from here.

OOO

OOO

There have been countless risings and fallings, each beginning believing itself to be the first, though always and ever there was before.

Curious Joy awoke into wind and darkness. He believed himself to be the first and only. Above was black and open. Below was black and closed. This was the world and he was in it, the dancer in between.

Everything he knew, he learned by touch — lifting, turning and caressing. The edges of the world told themselves to him, stories of accretion and compression, erosion and fracture, fraught affairs with wind and ice, forgotten dreams of fire. It seemed in all the world he was the only breathing thing. Nothing told him different.

And then he came upon the bone.

Just the one, a singular thing, and ancient beyond measure where he had thought the world so new and he so first and only. When his fingers brushed against it, a golden light bloomed in his hand, a honeyed sweetness that moved up and through him in a wave and a moan. That bone, that bone. She had been, in a time before time, a being of infinite love. Golden and sumptuous as a cloud bank, she was music she was color she was light and she was gone.

Alone in the windy dark, Curious Joy discovered loneliness, and Curious Joy discovered longing. He folded the lone finger bone to his chest and he wept, and then he slept.

In his sleep he dreamt, and in his dream he saw the way and waking set about the task of delicately hollowing out the little bone, polishing it smooth and drilling holes along it’s length. Then he put it to his lips and he played.

His breath moving through the little bone flute was answered by her voice and light flooded into the world again and yes was born that day.

OOO