Mother's Nature Journal: We exhale.

There are a few reasons why the chalk white arrows lead to Orcas Island.  There are no natural predators that we need to protect our children from (no rattlesnakes, no mountain lions, no FX billboards).  Phew.  Exhale.  There is also an immediate sensation of the "power of place."  It has to do with the size of the island, the various microclimates, the lack of sensory pollution, and believe it or not, the shape of the island.  From the air, Orcas Island is undeniably a pair of lungs.  After 20 years of living in Los Angeles, the last of which I thought just might kill me, I needed to take my own yoga therapy advice and find a place to exhale.  

Immediately upon landing on Orcas' green lobes I did just that.
And then promptly I took to bed with pneumonia.

The first gift that this adventure gave me was the space to have my full sickness.  In our new home of the Pacific Northwest, old and new friends let me collapse.  Other people fed and watched my children and I didn't have to pay them by the hour for it.  I let myself fully succumb, and I spent a week choking it all out. The hurts of the last two decades living detached from Nature.  The amassed traumas of mothering within a city and an over-culture that doesn't seem to understand, value, welcome, or protect children.  The profound suffering that mothering with mental illness and no village can inflict.  And, finally, and maybe most importantly, the subtle and chronic sadness of watching our children's one-and-only childhoods evaporate more quickly than they should under the harsh light of LA.

By the time we got out, we were in a full blown environmental and emotional drought in LA.
Although many have warned us that we might turn tail and run back when the rainy season arrives, a part of me knows that we've long needed water surrounding us in all directions - including falling from above and puddling up from below.

Absolution.  Rehydration.  Baptism.
Water,  we welcome you.
(Just please not in my lungs again.)

If my comments about LA and the over-culture feel surprisingly harsh (particularly if you are a friend and/or fellow parent that I shared that city with!) I thought I would pass along a piece by David Orr that in greater depth explores the topics that I blurted and butchered above.   (Loving Children, A Design Problem by David Orr).  It is an essay that I will be re-reading on the coming rainy days (weeks/months) on the island along with his essay compilation  Earth In Mind.

We won't be hunkered down in the woods forever - just long enough for me to lick wounds and for nature to impart her "radioactive gems" to our children.  We will be back soon enough to try to effect a new sense of stewardship while living within the flawed design.  All the while that I cough and curse our current culture, I know that I will return to it.  Hopefully, I will be holding bigger hands, ones steadied by at least a few years of living close nature.  Hands ready to hold a a complicated and compromised environmental inheritance and make it whole.

Mother's Nature Journal: Leaving LA

Where the Sidewalk Ends by Shel Silverstein

There is a place where the sidewalk ends

And before the street begins,

And there the grass grows soft and white,

And there the sun burns crimson bright,

And there the moon-bird rests from his flight

To cool in the peppermint wind.

Let us leave this place where the smoke blows black

And the dark street winds and bends.

Past the pits where the asphalt flowers grow

We shall walk with a walk that is measured and slow,

And watch where the chalk-white arrows go

To the place where the sidewalk ends.

Yes we'll walk with a walk that is measured and slow,

And we'll go where the chalk-white arrows go,

For the children, they mark, and the children, they know

The place where the sidewalk ends.

What follows is the true story of what happens when you follow the chalk white arrows of your children's natural knowing...