Yesterday was endowed with a profound yet subtle magic.
Badger came to visit, with his Dad. They stood in the doorway, tall as giants and as gentle, too, mirrors of each other in spirit, one in his youth, the other endowed with the silver crown of age. They were on their way to a family reunion in Chapel Hill and made it a point to come and visit Berrytown. Badger is a dear friend, the kind of friend whose presence enlivens your soul, and so it was a very good thing indeed that he and his Dad made their way to our door.
I had the house clean and lunch was in the oven: roasted vegetables and quinoa with corn. While the vegetables finished cooking we walked down to the river in the slanting gold of the Sun on a November afternoon. It was a little parade: my daughter Renee, Badger, his dad Mac, me & my canine shadow Oscar, and Frost, the magical white cat (the link takes you to the story of why he’s a magical cat). As we walked I told Badger about my new year-long project of painting a biodynamic farm throughout the cycle of one year. About how Gerda the milk cow inspired me with her presence. About how in biodynamic farming a cow’s horns are thought to receive cosmic energy. And how a cow is perhaps the keystone of agriculture, for not only does she pull in this cosmic energy with her horns, she also eats the grass of the Earth and then eats it again in a meditative way, digesting it in her four stomachs, and then revitalizing the Soil with her manure. Badger and I are both Tauruses. We talk about the crescent moon, and the horns of a cow, both being symbolic of receiving cosmic energy, a subject near and dear to our hearts. Here, for visual import, is Badger’s Facebook profile picture:
Renee and Mac hunted for golf balls in the river (there is a golf course upriver), Renee going so far as to step into the river, trying to fetch the gleaming white orbs from the golden brown river bottom. This proved somewhat difficult for her, as the water was no doubt bone-chilling and the balls were at a depth beyond her reach. Badger and I stood on the dry, cluttered stones at the river’s shore and talked about Rudolf Steiner, who was the founder of biodynamic farming, as well as founding anthroposophy and Waldorf education.
“I’ve got his book How to Know Higher Worlds to read on my break,” he told me in his deep baritone voice.
“Are you serious?” I laughed. “I’m reading it too! I just started it though, but isn’t it true, what he says about devotion and reverence? How essential these qualities are to Life, and how absent they are from our culture!”
Suddenly I was bubbling with words. I had to tell Badger about the book The Kingdom of the Gods and about the string of events that let me to this book. How I picked The Findhorn Garden up off the shelf one night, for some easy bed-time reading, and found myself reading again the communications from the Nature Spirits. I was struck with the magic and importance of their existence. How had I forgotten this?
I told Badger about how the next day as I went about by work it occurred to me that I might ask the Nature Spirits to help me find my cat Mandolin, who had been missing for over a month. It was just a thought, like a breeze passing through, and I raised my flag in that breath of air and asked that favor. Twenty-four hours later I was walking down from my studio and McKinley runs up to me. “Johno found Mandolin! Johno found Mandolin and he brought her home!” Walking next door to thank him, a monarch flew in front of me. I asked the Nature Spirits for this I thought. And now a monarch dances on the path before me! It landed in the grass, and there was Johno. I gave him a great big hug.
“But wait, there’s more!” I laughed. Because after this I asked the Nature Spirits to help me find a calligraphy pen that I’d lost back in early Summer, and twenty-four hours later, in the course of the day, there it is. And then, in the course of a conversation with my sister, about rats in her backyard no less, the subject turns to fairies. And she has a list of books someone gave to her on the subject, right there on her counter. Three books: The Secret Life of Plants, The Secret Teachings of Plants, and The Kingdom of the Gods.
The first two books I have. I’ve read most of both of them, though a thorough reading of both seems required at this point. The last book I’ve never heard of, and so I order it.
Now, standing by the river with Badger, the sycamores standing in the sky, the Black Mountains stretching behind us, I tell him about the watercolors in the book, watercolors of tree-spirits and mountain gods, of oceanic gods and healing angels. I can sense the spirits shimmering in the tops of sycamores, and the mighty goddesses chanting high above us at the mountain peaks. Everything seems infused with Life.
an illustration from the book
“I think when you get that kind of cooperation like that, it’s definitely a sign that the Nature Spirits want to work with you, ” Badger says. “Human beings are meant to be a bridge between two planes.”
I think about biodynamic farming, and humans creating something that otherwise wasn’t possible by being truly present–to the meditative work of creating biodynamic preparations, for instance. In my mind an image appears of the human chakras that I saw just the day before, energy moving up from the Earth, through the rainbowed body, illuminating the star-like crown chakra. And of course, Cosmic life-force enters through the crown chakra, moving downward.
It’s time to go back. Badger rolls up his jeans and steps into the river, retrieving three golf balls for Renee, who receives them as treasures. We walk back. By the time we are at the mailboxes I realize that Frost the magical kitty has not joined in the return parade, and so I set back to find him. The Sun is low in the sky, bathing a field with gold. I pause for a moment, in the solitude, searching the grasses for my cat. A thin-bodied breeze rattles a small patch of the goldenrod standing brown in the field before me, then moves through me, the body of a sylph caressing my skin, moving around me, and on through the sycamores to join the river, and I am present to the moment, to sentience of air and golden light and river, knowing I am blessed and guided in a world filled with more Beauty than I have yet imagined. The task before me, I know, is to imagine it, feel it in the depths of my bones, and then paint it.
