ELEVEN!

It's Lunasdal Eve, 2012.

Lunasdal, (a.k.a. Lughnasadh or Lammas), the old Celtic feast of the grain harvest, has been my mini-New Year for these last eleven years, ever since I boarded a plane in Scotland and ended up in Maine on August 1st to begin my post-seminary life on a new coast. Each year at this time, I do my own bit of in-gathering as I consider the harvest the past twelve months have brought.

I hardly remember that first year, except for the waves of grief and despair that washed over me and lapped at the edges of every small, anxious attempt to explore new ways of working, thinking, loving and being. Just prior to my month-long Trip of a Lifetime in Scotland, I'd been told by the pastor of my home church that my gifts were not evident and my vocation to Christian ministry was unwelcome. Just prior to that, I'd graduated from seminary with honours in a beautiful ceremony that abounded with signs of grace, welcome, and radical inclusion. The pastor's words were a spiritual sucker-punch from which it took years to thaw out, heal, and recover.

The Scotland trip passed in a blur, my intended joyful adventure lost in a fog of pain and betrayal. How I'd love to go back and experience those things while fully alive, fully engaged, fully awake! Still, it was a good gift and I tried to make the most of it, intellectually if not emotionally. There was a week at Ceolas, the traditional Scottish arts school on the isle of South Uist. The Piper and her two sons travelled with me. During the days, I studied traditional singing with Margaret Stewart while The Piper and her eldest son studied with Allan Macdonald and other tradition-bearers. There was a week at Sabhal Mor Ostaig on the isle of Skye, where I took an immersion class in intermediate Scottish Gaelic with Muriel Fisher. There were wonderful rambles up and down and around the Highlands and Islands, with stops in Lewis, Harris, Mallaig and Oban. Finally, there was a week on Iona, place of dream-pilgrimage, heart-home of Celtic Christians the world over.

When I returned to the States, my head was buzzing with cultural riches and vocational longings, neither of which had any apparent outlet. I had only one firm plan in place: get to Maine and find a small place just big enough for my and my shadow to set up housekeeping. Essentially, I went underground, hoping that the old promises of seed and harvest would still prove true, hoping that time wrapped in darkness would one day lead to emergence and fruition.

It was not the darkness of death. My Piper lived only one town away, and her constancy kept the darkness warm and rich and full of earthy promises. Slowly, slowly, I began to put down roots. Slowly, slowly, my new life began to unfurl. The string of hand-to-mouth jobs included barista, deli worker, house-cleaner, nanny, farm-sitter, craftswoman, Gaelic teacher, concert promoter, and "educational technician." Yet there were also days spent tending The Piper's garden and talking together of how we might create a shared life, a shared farm. There were nights among friends, singing our hearts out and playing centuries-old tunes into the "wee smas." While my seminary colleagues were out serving churches, raising families, and organizing labour unions, I was arduously seeking my place in the grand scheme, listening for the sometimes faint, but always present, whispers of guidance from a loving Cosmos.

Many days, my conversations with God felt like the Burnistoun elevator sketch, where two office workers in Glasgow try to direct an elevator's voice-recognition system to reach floor number eleven. (Watch it here. Note: contains a smattering of terms common to frustrated Glaswegians.) There were so many things I wanted to share, wanted to give, wanted to offer up to my community and the world beyond, but I no longer trusted myself to communicate in ways that would reach others or be recognized. And then, one day, I found myself in church again--not the denomination I'd grown up in, but a different one, where I'd heard that all people were actively welcomed. Four years later, I have now passed my Ecclesiastical Council and Examination for Ordination in the United Church of Christ, and I'm now in the process of seeking a church to serve as a local part-time pastor. Yeeeeee-haaaaaaw!!!

Eleven years: eleven season-cycles of fallow time, planting, growth, and harvest. In that time, I've planted fruit trees and watched them bear, taught students and watched them thrive, served churches and felt the Spirit move in our midst. (In between, there have been plenty of failures, plenty of frustration, plenty of hand-wringing and exhaustion!) I've come to understand that my vocation to ministry includes this history-rich, nutrient-poor parcel of land on which The Piper and I have created our farm. Here, rooted in this place, surrounded by love and all the challenges and joys of our rural community, my spirit has been nurtured and restored. Other travellers have found their way here for a weekend, a fortnight, a season...and they have been restored and nourished too. Their paths toward wisdom have varied widely and rarely matched mine. This, too, has been a source of richness!

Eleven years--and was it really two years ago that we bought the farm, after all those years of agonizing? Last year, we bought a Highland bull, a Tamworth boar, and a Devon sow. This year, with the help of friends and WWOOF volunteers, we've raised two greenhouses and an artisanal outhouse. We've welcomed a new heifer calf (born at Bealtuinn/Beltane) and Welsummer hens. A friend stopped by for a music session a few weeks ago, sized up the new greenhouses, and said, approvingly, "You know, this place is really shapin' up to look like a farm."

Happy Lunasdal, Y'all. May your own hardscrabble efforts blossom and bear. May you be blessed with the riches of harvest, joyfully welcomed and safely gathered in.

Muckle Thanks!

Somewhere on the other side of this continent, my Slighe nan Gaidheal friends are first-footing their way through the streets, romping and merrymaking, singing and hailing the incoming year with warming libations and lumps of coal in hand.

We're having a quieter night, but our hearts still sing with the joys of fellowship and the many gifts that threshold-crossers bring. This night, we look forward to the unfolding of another year-full of possibilities, a year of wee craiture-bairns and towering trees, berry-blessed bushes and mushrooms that will silently unfurl from the damp, dark forest earth.

The year ahead would be nothing without the year behind. Our greatest gifts of 2011 came in the form of WWOOFers, blown in from the four winds with unexpected capability and vigor. We weren't sure to expect, and that was part of the magic: each traveller arrived with his or her own distinct interests and skills, as well the specific insights and stories of their richly varied life experience. A farm temporarily hampered by three-kneeness was transformed, by these travellers, into more than we thought possible. We watched more soil get tilled, more seeds get sown, more buildings rise, more trees turn into logs and chips, hoop houses and hugelkultur beds take shape, and mushrooms get foraged, cleaned, and laid out to dry in the sun.

Other important tasks were accomplished as well: meals and laughter shared, board games played, instruments strummed, poems written, pictures taken, tales told and songs sung. Oh, and let's not forget the most important work of all: Zoe the Border Collie got to play ball with every single one of them, over and over and over and over again.

We have loved the adventure of opening up to wider possibilities, the adventure of sharing this place, of sharing the skills and resources we've acquired and the lessons we've learned with people who share our passion for good stewardship of the land. We have loved working side-by-side with our WWOOFers, and we have also experienced the joy of coming home from other obligations to find animals and pastures, gardens and woodlands well-tended and our temporary farm companions glowing with the quiet pride of honest labour well-done.

Thank you, 2011 WWOOFers. You have been the greatest--and most unexpected--gift of this initially challenging year. We are profoundly grateful... and we look forward to a whole new year of more adventures, more accomplishments, more shared creativity!

Blessed Solstice, Merry Christmas, & Happy Hogmanay
from the CowGaels to All of You!

Quoth the Raven: Galore! Galore!

Samhain comes at sundown. The Celtic New Year signaled, for our ancestors, the end of a half-year's intense outdoor labour. Samhain ("sow-when", literally "summer's end") heralded the onset of the year's dark half, a time to come indoors, gather around the fire, share stories and music, and re-weave the deep roots of cultural wealth and wisdom that bond us to this dear old Earth. Samhain--or, if you prefer, "All Souls' Night"--is also a time to honour our ancestors and all other dear ones who've gone before us, a time to acknowledge and even befriend our grief. Older reflections may be found here and here and here.

It is a time to embrace the gapped and tattered nature of life. On a recent foraging walk in the woods with two of our WWOOF volunteers, one of them noticed that, in the woods, almost everything was nibbled at the edges. Every leaf, stone, hump of earth or bit of bark was food or shelter to some living thing. Most of the mushrooms we found had been delicately edge-munched to satisfy some itty-bitty appetite, but creatures seemed content to share. Nothing was left perfectly whole, but neither was anything eaten down to the stem. Just as all foodstuffs of substance were nibbled, so too were gaps quickly mitigated: an ongoing dance of presence-absence-presence. Edges were quickly claimed by lichen, mushrooms, and insects. Other creatures claimed hollows as water or food caches, hiding places or homes.

There is a word for this strange harvest-time ache of awareness, the wisdom that comes from working with bushel baskets and sharp-edged knives. The word is GALORE. It comes from a Gaelic term variously spelled gu leir, gu leoir, or gu leor. It means both "sufficiency" and "abundance." In the Gaelic worldview, we are surrounded by abundance--and we are also expected to honour this abundance by living within the limits of the goodness the natural world provides. There is no need to hoard or overconsume: with goods gathered sufficient to our needs, we have wealth galore. The key is to perceive and celebrate this basic truth: Enough IS abundance. Or, as a related Scottish proverb says, "enough is as good as a feast." Perhaps our greatest "sin," as humans, is our tendency to forget this truth, to hoard and grasp too much, to dwell in the illusion of scarcity so masterfully crafted by the magicians of merchandising. When we take only what we need and give the rest back, the anxieties dissipate and we are freed to unclench, to recreate, to heal and dream.

We have gathered in the gifts of the earth. We have harvested herbs, flowers, and vegetables from our gardens. (The land was gracious and merciful: when all of our squash vines withered, pumpkins and butternut vines sprang forth from last year's pig-grazing range and mostly ripened in time to harvest before the frost!) We have gathered berries and apples and preserved them for the cold months to come. We have respectfully raised and butchered birds for our winter meat. We have taken five well-tended pigs to the butcher so we may feed other families as well. We have foraged for wild mushrooms and harvested them gently, always leaving some for the rest of the woodland creatures to enjoy. Now the larder shelves and freezers are full and the dark is rapidly descending. Music of thankfulness wells up in us. We dwell in remembrance of all the lives that enable our own.

So it goes. We enter the dark half of the year ready to share stories, ready to sing, ready to dance. We carve pumpkins as our ancestors carved turnip-lanterns: a creation of absence and presence, of wholeness made hollow and emptiness illuminated, all to shine the Old Souls home to the Land of Plenty. Welcome to the season of Samhain. May you all be graced with sufficiency and abundance, goodness and grace galore!

P.S. Buidheachas gun sgur-- unceasing thanks to Andrew, Amy, Robert, Antonn, and all of our other WWOOF volunteers who have contributed to our sense of abundance. Without your contributions of time, enthusiasm, curiosity, and energy, we would have much less to celebrate!

We Bought the Farm!!!

It seemed right to save the 100th post for something special. Does the act of becoming full and rightful owners of our property (albeit with a 40-year mortgage) count as special enough?

We think so.

More news later... right now we're too exhausted from signing papers. Also, we're waiting for the full reality of this great news to sink in after some very long, hard years.

WE BOUGHT THE FARM!!!

Everything but the Kitchen Sync

Some days,
you forget.
You stand in the hall closet,
trying to candle the eggs
in the only dark spot
and they roll and tip
into a cataclysmic fall
landing as eggshells
and yellow-yolk muck
on the small
hardwood square of floor.

Some days, you try to hang
the clean wet lumps of cloth
up to dry in the freshening wind
But a chicken distracts you
and the sound of a distant dog
and at noon half the laundry
waves at you,
bright cheerful flags on the line,
and half of it peers,
sullen, lumpish, wet
from the basket on the rock.

Some days, you stand
in the garden despairing,
wondering how and when
you will find a source
of more bamboo poles
for the pole beans
and then you notice, forty yards off,
a forest of saplings
tall, straight, and true
waiting patiently
to be thinned.

--copyright Mainecelt 6/30/2010

2009: A Term for the Verse

Today marks the Winter Solstice-- the year's shortest day and longest night. As the minutes slipped away prior to the Official Astronomical Event, I wormed my way under our new house for one last intimate encounter with the earth. (The practical reason for this ritual was that a faulty extension cord needed replacing; the shower drain--so carefully surrounded with heat-tape, insulation, and a tyvek-wrapped, earth-banked styroboard frost wall--would do us no good through the winter's whistling winds if the heat-tape could not be trustworthily plugged in!)

Now I am back inside the house, grubby but warm, relaxing into the knowledge that the last great ritual has been successfully performed and we shall henceforth be able to Hold The Wolf of Winter At Bay. (We won't make any bold predictions about any other wolves just yet, but suffice to say that we're really boning up on our wolf-wrangling skills and getting better every day!)

The Proper Activity of Northern Winter Folk is repair and creation: the careful tending of tools and gear, the mending of strained relationships, and the creation of things both useful and beautiful. My heart is ready, now--and if you will permit me a bit of creative indulgence--my rusty bardic muse is in need of some warm-up stretches. Like any stretch, the following will involve the potential of painful reaches and the appearance of ridiculousness, but these seasonal tasks simply MUST be done...


2009: A TERM FOR THE VERSE

January started out
cold and full of gripes:
Our year began with frozen folk,
cold house and frozen pipes.

February came along
with icy, sparkling jaws--
We went outside and froze some more--
for a worthy local cause.

March brought hard digging
and--finally--joy! Let
us now praise installers
of pipes, shower and toilet!

April--on windowsills,
seedtrays sat out,
dark soil dreaming
and sending up sprouts.

May--month of sweet melting
and warming and growing!
New piglets were bought.
In the fields we went sowing.

June--to market and home again,
all in a whirl
to host a church picnic
and the dear Wild Girls!

July started wet and grew wet enough
to douse any forest fire.
Pigs being pigs, in the mud they did dig,
and slipped out under the wire.

August brought an island journey--
oh, sweet farm-women's reprieve!
Our first home-grown bull met his meaty end:
a choice we did not grieve.

September: batten down the farm
and rush to catch a plane
For a family wedding we piped and preached--
so good to see kinfolk again!

October came to
a bittersweet end.
With bards and musicians,
we mourned a dear friend.

November brought the cold and dark--
a fearful time for the farm.
But oh! We gave thanks for our sweet new house,
where the woodstove kept us warm!

December sang softly of flickering hope,
now fanned to a stalwart flame.
We plan for years, fields, and friends to come.
Solstice Blessings! May you do the same!

--copyright MaineCelt 12/2009


(This post's images were taken during a visit to Trustworth Studios.)

Rock, Paper, Sisters

Soft warmth whispers from the smooth grey stone in my lap. I don't know the history of this stone--where it was formed and quarried and how long ago, how it was cut into the smooth hymn-book-sized rectangle, how many hands handled it and wore the corners down--but I love its weighty, enduring and immediate presence.

This small soapstone slab is a treasured fixture of our home, one of a small family of such stones that congregate on the woodstove, always ready for use. In warmer weather, they gather dust on that stove--like everything here gathers dust: blown in from the dirt road, drying and crumbling from the soles of workboots, sifting down from the crumbling horsehair plaster of our 1830s ceiling. The daily go-round with the broom and the weekly vacuum attack seem powerless to clear the dust from the stones' smooth, cool surfaces. But when the weather turns cold and the stove is fired up, the dust no longer appears. The fire-warmed stones come into regular use, set on the floor of a chilly room to warm our feet when sitting, or wrapped in raggedy towels and tucked under blankets to warm the sheets at bedtime. Today, in this achingly cold old house, the stone shifts between lap and desktop when the icy air stiffens my fingers and slows my typing.

I have always loved stones, smooth or rough. I have always loved rocks of every kind. An entry in my baby book describes a toddler reverie during a family trip to the Pacific Northwest coast, where all my attention was given to the gathering of smooth black stones I called "baby crow eggs." Such searches have always been a joyfully meditative pastime... and I fuss over each beautiful little treasure like a mother hen tends the dear eggs her nest.

Last Friday morning, I found a rare thing: an unwelcome stone. It was a bread-loaf-sized rock--we actually mistook it for an escaped loaf from the bag of "pig-bread" we glean from a local bakery. I noticed it near my car when our dog took me out for our morning walk. I made a mental note to carry it down and feed it to the pigs sometime later. My partner noticed it too, in her rush to start the car and head off to work. Then, she sat down in the driver's seat and discovered "the strangest frost pattern" on the windshield. Only it wasn't frost... and it wasn't a loaf of bread.

We were the fourth call to which the deputy responded. It seems some kids went on a midnight spree and we were one of the seemingly random "beneficiaries" of their little KristallNacht. We comforted ourselves with that randomness. We smiled a little wearily, but smiled nonetheless, when the deputy asked if there was anyone we'd argued with, anyone who might hold a grudge. No, sorry, not one--we two earnest community servants could think of nobody we'd angered or offended. The deputy nervously mentioned my "Celebrate Diversity" bumper sticker, but it didn't seem like a factor of provocation--since I always back my car into its spot, the sticker is never visible from the road. We later learned that a plant nursery had also been vandalized. That reinforced the apparent meaninglessness of it all. Why would anyone purposefully attack a place that grows hostas and heathers and daylilies for a living? They simply saw it as a grand place to smash a great deal of glass.

Well, the deed was done, and there was nothing for it but to file a police report, make an insurance claim, and look with despair at my checkbook. There was less than I needed to cover the deductible, and other than calling up all my friends and asking them to come over and buy meat and eggs today, I couldn't think of any way to bring in lots of cash in a hurry. We didn't want to use a credit card--not when we've been working so hard to pay everything down. With the morning eaten up by waiting and making our police report, my partner got off work for the rest of the day and we threw all our frustrated energies into a review of our farm accounts.

Mountains of receipts were scared up from various dark corners and assembled on the table. We sorted and tallied together: feed bills, new chicks, seed-starting supplies, glass to repair a barn window... like the old soapstones, these little slips of paper hinted at hard knocks and careful attentions. Stacked and tallied, they helped tell the story of our attempts at a well-rounded life. Even as we marvelled at the great outflow of money, even as we pondered and despaired over the national economic downturn and the dwindling income of my off-farm job, we found pride in the evidence of all that we'd done. I was reminded of Douglas Adams' wry observance in The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy: "most of the people living on [Earth] were unhappy for pretty much of the time. Many solutions were suggested for this problem, but most of these were largely concerned with the movement of small green pieces of paper, which was odd because on the whole it wasn't the small green pieces of paper that were unhappy."

Receipts are useful records, but they do not change the situation. Stones give beauty and warmth, but not kindness. What repaired the fractured web of our windshield was not glass, glue and tools, but the people who knew how to use them--the two lads in the white van who did their job with sympathy and care, then stayed to scratch our dog's belly, admire the strolling bantams, and take pictures of our cows to share with their families. What repaired the web was the quick response and expressions of concern from neighbors and friends. What repaired the web was our church family's willingness to pray that the perpetrators cease their destruction and come to know some sort of peace and restorative justice.

What repaired the web was a circle of love and connection: farmers and tradesmen, deputies and ministers, brothers and sisters. Oh, and the little green pieces of paper may help too, according to the mysterious e-mail that reached us last night:

"Dear Representative of the Hard Times Corp

Let it hereby be known that Mr Scot Brievewit is checking his bank account to see if he has enough overtime money in it to cover the deductible on your windshield that was destroyed by Mr Random Violence in a collision. Stay tuned for further developments. The aforesaid Mr Brievewit learned of your mishaps this morning. He is considering the reward for your Perserverance, Hard Work, and Ability to stay Focused on your Mission. Also because you are his daughter.

The Financial Committee of the Brievewit Family Unlimited"

Well, it's starting to happen: the soapstone is beginning to lose its warmth. Time to put it back on the stove and tackle some other paperwork, so I'll be ready for tonight's church meeting and tomorrow's New Ventures class. In between the fiduciary fuss and encounters with the elements, as we move through this season of harvest and thanksgiving, let me offer up my "two bits":

1. I'm thankful for all who keep me connected.

2. My Parents Rock.