Sophia Bonnie Wodin

It has been a very long time since I wrote in these pages. Rather than staying inside and writing these past weeks, I have been outside where, for the first time in several years, I have been able to garden, connecting once more with the earth, one of my passions.   Previously a vocation, touching earth and tending her has become a simple joy. The garden responded and I feel renewed, able to listen to the calling of my heart. For me, this begs a question: How do we hear the calling of our hearts, our passion?   And once found, how do we open to it and feed it so that in turn, it can feed us? Passion is easily confused in our culture with the desire of the moment, constantly changing as though it lives outside of us, appearing at the will of another, the whim of today’s fad. Or we may have been taught that our passion must be dampened down or it will control us rather than being the music we play when our own fires are stoked with the truth of our whole being. But ...

On Solstice Eve the Catalpa tree standing in her slow moving dance, somewhere between the west and north corners of the yard, gifted us with bloom. For weeks we had watched her, slow waking, as is her spring time habit. Would harsh winter’s hand be felt, we wondered, taking Catalpa’s flowers as it had so many others? And then we began to see them pyramids of swelling buds held jewel-like in the palm of her heart-shaped leaves. One by one they opened. Slowly at first, and then many. Tonight they burst forth stars bright against the dark. And so, the magic that is Solstice began. Flowers, stars or Fae ones, you name them, I just watched as they jumped and slid down from tree to darkened ground, dancing and laughing in the fading glory of the sun’s last rays. Short work they will make of this night but powerful joy they bring those fae ones, wise ones, dancing with their hearts ...