Sophia Bonnie Wodin

  Harvest season is here! As we settle into the shorter days here in the Northern Hemisphere we gather the fruits of our labors from the long summer days. Perhaps you have a garden, perhaps not. Perhaps you grow some of your own food, perhaps not. Perhaps you grow beauty, perhaps not.   But whether or not you engage with Earth during the growing season, still there are harvests. At this time of the year, we look at our all of our harvests: the harvests from our gardens, the harvest of our lives.    We may wonder, is this harvest ‘enough’? Will it get me through? Am I ‘enough’? Can I become the fulcrum through which my life can maintain its every-changing balance in order to know  I Am Enough ?   We are like Pamela ‘Pixie’ Coleman Smith’s rendition of the Two of Pentacles in the Smith-Waite Tarot (a.k.a. Universal Tarot or Rider-Waite Tarot), juggling to keep our lives in balance, to keep our balls in the air or in our hands.  The dominant paradigm cond...

  #1   Tumbling over boulders We merge  and separate, and merge once again.   Rising and                     falling   Spiraling      Inwards   Stretching   o  u  t  w  a  r  d  s     Drawn  ever  onwards.   The swirling vortex                                       beckons         # 2 In a moment the heart lifts.   Awareness…   and Water  and Fire  and Air align with Earth.               The Cauldron of Mystery                          ...

In the dark of the moon, in flying snow, in the dead of winter, war spreading, families dying, the world in danger, I walk the rocky hillside, sowing clover. - Wendell Berry -   At the beginning of many of the trainings I offer, I ask some version of the question:  What do you bring?   I hope to get answers like: a questioning mind; an open heart; an adventurous spirit; resilience; my yearning inner child; my questing young adult; and the like. I ask because I am interested in how we recognize ourselves as resources. Through our days and years we have gathered vast and diverse experience. All too frequently we don ’ t recognize the value that these experiences offer. And we forget to honour them. Yet we are resources and the best resource for our own lives.   The responses I get are frequently something along the lines of: I am a teacher/parent/office worker/student, etc. You get the picture. We are used to responding with one or more of the roles that we carry ...

Sometimes our lives are pretty. Other times they bring us to our knees. It is in how we rise, get our feet back under us that opens the portal to Beauty. The outcome is never known as we travel our path. But we walk and keep on walking. In the end there’s not much else to do. Walking tall is Beauty. 

One morning in early spring, some friends and I walked along the river on one of our favorite walks. On the way back we turned away from the river to explore the uphill side of a flood plain* and plunged more deeply into the forest. The woods here were thick with both mature and young trees; some upright others tilted crazily, an outcome of wind and seasonal rains. The trees were so thick that even though they had not yet leafed out we could barely see the houses at the crest of the hill beyond. It was idyllic. Then I looked down. There was this plant newly emerging from the thawing earth. It covered the forest floor. It looked oh so familiar. As we walked along, I noticed that this plant was everywhere. Then, with a sinking heart I recognized it. Gout Weed, Bishop’s Weed, Ground Elder (Aegopodium podagraria)**. Whatever you call it, once it has entered your life you will work long and hard to extricate it. And, ultimately, you will fail. You will have to keep after it year by year. I...