I awoke with this dream on November 28th, the morning after a momentous neighborhood celebration of Thanksgiving in 1997. The celebration took place in Rivendell, Light Morning’s new and still-under-construction community shelter. Nearly twenty-four years later, “Crying For the Beauty of the Earth” remains one of the strangest and strongest of my strong medicine dreams. While it seemed to come out of the blue, it was presaged by a song by Bob Dylan called “Not Dark Yet.” The dream was a descent into unimaginable darkness, and the following eleven days were darker still.
Continue reading Crying For the Beauty of the EarthCategory: Transformation
The Lofty Chronicles: 1
Saying Goodbye to Early Childhood
The Lofty Chronicles grew out of a daily journal that I kept for several years during the early 1990’s. Many of its entries were about our daughter, Lauren. She turned six in 1990 and soon asked us to call her Lofty. Since she was the first grandchild on either side of the family, her geographically distant grandparents, aunts, and uncles were especially eager to hear what she was up to. So I volunteered to send them selected passages from my journal each season. I also sensed that a grownup Lauren may one day become curious about her roots.
The reason for posting those long ago journal entries here on Light Morning’s website is that peeking through the day-to-day concerns, wonders, and routines of parenting is a startlingly intimate view of the three core values of this community: living close to the Earth, in a new kind of family, and with a shared transformational journey. These foundational values have already been explored here. In The Lofty Chronicles, however, they come to life in a viscerally specific way.
We see adults trying to live simply, work closer to home, and become more self-sufficient. We watch a mostly self-chosen family of friends and traveling companions work and eat and play together, hurt each other, solve thorny problems, and slowly learn to truly care for one another. We catch surprising glimpses of what it means to “become again as a little child.” And we see that a path of transformation can be both long and arduous. There’s nothing quite like parenting for showing us our shadows and humbling our pretensions. It’s fully as good a teacher as marriage and community.
Now it’s time to let the stories speak for themselves. The Lofty Chronicles will be an ongoing series of posts, making way now and then for posts on other themes. After first setting the stage with a few journal entries from Lauren’s younger years, we’ll take up the story proper in May of 1989, shortly after her fifth birthday.
Continue reading The Lofty Chronicles: 1A Sword In My Side: 2
Everything Unresolved Is Recreated
This is Part Two of a three-part story, told from the perspective of how I experienced it twenty-five years ago this month, in December of 1995. Part One can be found here.
A Frightened Octopus
I’m sitting in Light Morning’s community shelter. It’s December 18th, 1995, and I have just returned from my first 10-day course at the Vipassana Meditation Center (V.M.C.) in western Massachusetts. When the course unexpectedly turned traumatic on Day 8, I stopped eating or drinking anything. Now my mental status is becoming marginal.
Continue reading A Sword In My Side: 2A Sword In My Side: 1
Everything Unresolved Is Recreated
The following story, in three parts, is told from the perspective
of how I experienced it 25 years ago, in December, 1995.
Prologue
After the trauma had served its intended purpose, I came to believe that the path I had traveled had to unfold as it did. The hard-earned clarity of hindsight showed me clues that I had missed and discernible traces of long-dried blood on the tracks.
But we don’t see what we’re not yet ready to see; or shouldn’t see. Foresight would have caused me to run from the pain that awaited me, and from the improbable healing and commitment that that pain would bring.
Continue reading A Sword In My Side: 1Letting Nature Take Its Course: 3
This is the last of three posts which chronicle Marlene’s
final journey home. Part One, which introduces this series, is here.
May 30th, 2018
May is a manic month in a homesteading lifestyle. Several of the past few evenings have seen me either hoeing or mowing by moonlight. Mama black bear passed through the orchard recently to taste a few small apples. Standing up on her hind legs to pull down one of the branches, she looked like a large man, with very good posture, in a bear costume.
Marlene is once more back in her bed and Ron is wrestling with myalgia. For the past month, Marlene has preferred to be on the floor. Ron didn’t want to keep the side rails of the hospital bed raised because it caused her to feel imprisoned, so Marlene became adept at lowering herself off the bed and onto the floor. Once down, she could scoot around from place to place using her hands and knees.
It was hard for Ron to minister to her needs, of course, while she was on the floor. But he was willing to do whatever it took to help Marlene regain some semblance of mobility. Her use of morphine also decreased significantly while she was out and about. For one stretch of ten days she didn’t need any at all.
Continue reading Letting Nature Take Its Course: 3Letting Nature Take Its Course: 2
This is the second of three posts which chronicle Marlene’s
final journey home. Part One, which introduces this series, is here.
April 9th, 2018
I checked in with Ron and Marlene yesterday evening. Much to my amazement, Marlene was her feisty, smiley old self. She was lying on her stomach instead of her back. As soon as I walked in, she asked me about Ron’s taxes. She’s done his taxes for years and, knowing that tax time is close, she was concerned. I told her that all the financial info she had stashed in Ron’s red folder had been delivered to a tax person in Roanoke.
She grabbed my hand and gave it a tight squeeze. “Thank you, thank you, thank you!”
Then she talked about the cards and letters she’d been receiving. She couldn’t understand why so many people were suddenly writing to her. I saw an unopened envelope lying on the bed.“Do you want to see who sent this one?” I asked. “Sure.”
It was a long letter from Jess, whose family lived at Light Morning many years ago. Marlene has remained close to them, so I read the letter aloud. Marlene listened attentively to the news about each of the family members and each of the family’s cats.
Later, Marlene said she wanted to have a chiropractor in Blacksburg fix her back. Ron paused for a moment before answering. Then he gently reminded her about the childhood injury to her back, the progressive osteoarthritis in her spine, and the cancer.
“No one can fix those things for you,” he continued. “You’re just going to have to learn to live with it.”
There was a brief silence as Marlene tried to take this in.
“Well, I’ve had seventy-seven years,” she said.
“Seventy-seven beautiful years,” Ron replied.
Marlene gave him a delighted smile. Then she reached up to where Ron was standing beside the bed, grabbed the sides of his face with her hands, and pulled him down to give him a kiss. A second and third kiss quickly followed.
Continue reading Letting Nature Take Its Course: 2Healing Deep Within: 3
Part One of this three-part series, which includes Marlene’s disturbing account
of the abuse she received as a young girl at the hands of her mother, is here.
The Chain of Abuse
At my mother’s funeral, I talked with one of my uncles. He told me that Leona had been horribly abused growing up, thanks to grandma and grandpa swinging the leather horse straps and the logging chains on their eight children. I was stunned! Never before, in all my fifty years, had I heard this story.
“Will this chain of abuse,” I wondered, “ever be broken?”
For the next two weeks I sorted through all of Mom’s “treasures on earth.” She had moved from the farm into town in 1965 and, except for the machinery and the cows, had brought everything with her. My God! Why had she saved this and that and everything in between? It was intense work physically, and even more so emotionally.
Continue reading Healing Deep Within: 3Healing Deep Within: 2
Recovering From the Wounds
of an Abusive Childhood
Part One of this three-part series, which includes Marlene’s harrowing account
of the abuse she received as a young girl at the hands of her mother, is here.
Reaching for Blackberries
I went off to college in 1958, at the age of 18, filled with excitement and enthusiasm. Even though my mother, Leona, gave the Dean of Women a fit, and some weekends at home were the usual hell, I was finally out of there. Free at last!
Or so I thought.
Continue reading Healing Deep Within: 2Liminal Gifts: 3
This is the final post in this series.
Part One and the introduction are here.
The Gift-Giver
Each of the first two posts in this series revolves around a strong medicine dream. But where do dreams like “Down Under” (here) and “Harvesting the Moment Points” (here) come from? They’re certainly personal. I’ve already shared visceral associations with the imagery. It’s quite improbable, then, that anyone else could have dreamed either of these dreams, any more than they could have my face, my voice, or my fingerprints.
Yet strong dreams can also be more than personal. Other people’s thoughts, words, and images sometimes come alive within us. That’s why poets, painters, and storytellers ply their trade. That’s what makes conversation and communion possible. That’s why myths and scriptures resonate. They help us approach the threshold between the worlds from one side. But what awaits us on the other side?
Continue reading Liminal Gifts: 3Liminal Gifts: 2
This is the second of three posts in this series.
Part One and the introduction are here.
Discerning Callings
I’m sitting in the Roanoke City Library re-reading portions of Citadel of God, an historical novel about Benedict of Nursia. I’ve lucked upon one of the few armchairs scattered among the stacks. Some newspapers had been laid across it, but I put these aside and become immersed in the life and times of the man who helped birth western monasticism.
A woman in well-worn clothes walks by, glances at me, then sits down briefly on the floor a short distance away. Some of Roanoke’s homeless people take refuge in the library when the weather turns cold. I wonder whether she’s the one who had marked the chair with the newspapers.
Later I lay the book down on my lap and stare into space, thinking about the monastic components of Light Morning. Then my gaze turns to the large bookcase across the aisle from where I’m sitting. The title of one book comes into focus: Callings. I’ve just been reading about how Benedict, a young nobleman living in the waning days of the Roman empire, followed a series of inner callings to leave Rome, live as a hermit, and later become the founding abbot of the Monte Cassino monastery.
I stand up and take the book off the shelf. The author is Gregg Levoy. I open it to the inside front panel of the dust jacket.
“How do we know if we’re following our true callings? How do we sharpen our senses to cut through the distractions of everyday reality and hear the calls that are beckoning us? …How do we distinguish the true calls from the siren song? How do we handle our resistance to a call? What happens when we say no? What happens when we say yes?”1
Continue reading Liminal Gifts: 2
Light Morning 