Embracing Darkness

Our striving for consciousness and enlightenment that has been at the forefront of the New Age movement has in a sense uprooted us from the earth, our lower chakras, and a place of deep feeling and passionate living. We continue to seek our answers from the light and turn away from the darkness and dangerously "lift" ourselves above any pain or thoughts viewed as negative. Why I refer to this as dangerous, is because in doing this, we create our lives from a false center, one that is not rooted in the earth, authenticity and truth. And from this place, we struggle to create the lives that we truly desire leaving us frustrated, confused and exhausted.

There is much richness found in darkness and as we enter into the darkest times of the year, I invite you to embrace it, to sit in the stillness and seek your answers from within the darkness. Darkness is the place where all things come from. It is the seed buried deep in the fertile rich soil gathering its nutrients through out the winter months and it's the depth of our soul where our untapped potential lives. As you embrace this time of year and your own inner sanctuary, you will find the return of light from within as the Winter Solstice nears and new ideas and wisdom begin to ignite your inner flame.

Nanny Berry Pudding

We don't always find a place that has enough nanny berries to make it worth our while harvesting them. But this year, Ric found a number of bushes abundant with berries on his way back from one of our after school programs. For those of you who have never had Nanny berries, they are black/blue in color and have the taste and consistency of a prune. They have a fairly large flat seed in them making processing fairly tricky. They make a tasty fruit spread, but this year I made them into pudding and then poured the pudding while still hot over a warm, vanilla pound cake. It was really delicious so thought I better pass the recipe along.

- place berries in pan and just barely cover with water

- boil and then when soft and tender, mash them the best you can separating the pulp from the seeds.

- boil some more to reduce the water by about half.

- I then put it all in my food strainer and tried to get as much of the juice and pulp as I could by using the food strainer attachment for pumpkin. I would have liked to have had a lot more pulp, but ended up with a fair amount of a thick juice substance.

- I put the juice back on the stove, added just a little sugar, some vanilla, and about 1Tbs of flour for thickening. I could have used cornstarch but didn't have any on hand.

It made a dark, rich pudding that would have been wonderful served in small bowls with a bit of cream poured on the top. However, since I already had a pound cake in the oven, I poured the hot nanny berry pudding over the warm pound cake. YUM!

Autumn Olive Berry Jam

Every fall, Ric and I go in search of Autumn Olive Berries. They look similar to honeysuckle bushes, however, their red berries look as if they've been coated with glitter and their leaves are long and slender. Some say they are the next pomegranate because they are so high in antioxidants. One year we made fruit leather from the berries, but we prefer filling our shelves with jars of jam. It's so delicious, good for you and is a beautiful rose color. Here is how I make it.

-Place berries in a pot and fill with just enough water to barely cover the berries.

-Cook over heat until the berries become tender and are easy to mash.

After the berries have been heated and mashed, strain through a wire mesh strainer to remove seeds. I push some of the pulp through the strainer, which I wouldn't do if I was making jelly. But because I want to use as much of the berry as possible, I prefer

using the pulp and making jam, although it still has the consistency of jelly, just not the clarity.

-Measure the juice and then return to your pot and add 1 box of pectin for every 4 cups of juice.

-Bring to boil until pectin is fully dissolved.

-Add equal amount of sugar to juice and bring to boil once more stirring frequently.

-Pour hot jam into sterile jars and seal.

If a lot of foaming occurs while you cook the jam, add just a bit of butter to reduce the foam.

Enjoy this beautiful and yummy tasting jam on your warm bread and biscuits during the cold winter months.

Mary Lane's Fall Tonic

Fall is such a wonderful season as we gather and prepare plants, berries and nuts from the wild to support us during the winter months to come. My dining room table is covered with a variety of different herbs and flowers drying. Some are for adding to my fall and winter stews and homemade breads, others are for teas and salves that I will be making. And spread out across my drying rack are beans and squash seeds that I'm drying for next year's garden. It's such a great feeling!

I saw this fall tonic that Mary Lane, author of Divine Nourishment had on her most recent newsletter and I just had to pass it along. It's a wonderful combination of plants that make a truly supportive tonic. Here are the plants that she suggests using and if you want to know more about each plant, go to Fall Tonic where Mary offers a detailed description of each plant.

1 cup Nettles
1 cup Goldenrod
1/2 cup Lemon Verbena/or Lemon Balm
1/2 cup Mugwort
1 cup Mullein
1/4 Flax Seed

As Mary suggests, store this mixture in a glass jar with a tight fitting lid. When you are ready to use it, make an infusion steeped with boiling water for a nourishing cup of tea. Enjoy!

Healing the Pain Body

A few years ago I read Eckhart Tolle's book, The New Earth. I thought it was a great book for many reasons, but what I loved the most in his book is the idea of the "pain body". I have found this term to be a great way to frame that part of ourselves that can so easily sabotage what we are really striving for in life. Many times, whether I am teaching or counseling someone, I struggle with finding a language that everyone is comfortable with. Often times, a story or relating a situation to a myth or an archetype is helpful and other times I may refer to it as the shadow. But I have found the term "pain body" to be most useful and a comfortable term for many.

The term alone allows us to make a separation from who we truly are and that of our wounded selves. This separation or space between our pain bodies and our true selves is the first major step in creating change and healing. Once we can experience this space, we can then work with the pain body as opposed to being the pain body.

What exactly is the pain body and how do we recognize it? The pain body is the voice that creeps in to our consciousness that tells us all the reasons why we can't have what we want. Perhaps it tells us that we "aren't smart enough", "we are too old", or maybe "too young", or "we aren't good enough", or "not worth being loved". Whatever our internal message(s) are, it is a message that will stop us in our tracks and prevent us from experiencing what we really want in our life. Most often we have to quiet ourselves and slow down to even hear these messages because they have become such a part of ourselves. The messages from the pain body can be as familiar and unconsciously followed as breathing or blinking. However, once we slow down and bring our awareness to our own internal messages, we can begin to hear the pain body loud and clear.

Where does the pain body come from? Often our pain bodies develop very early on in our childhood, but not always. Whether it's from something that someone said, a situation or an event that brought about fear, the pain body is a belief that we take on about ourselves. It is a false belief based on what someone else may have said or done to us or sometimes the way we perceived things as a child. Whatever it is, the pain body and its internal messages keep us from truly experiencing love, beauty and our personal power. Its main goal is to keep us separate from who we truly are and what we truly desire in life.

So how do we heal the pain body? As I mentioned before, the first step in dissolving the pain body is recognizing our internal dialogue as our pain body, which in turn establishes a necessary space between us and our pain body. Being able to discover the truth of the situation and having a willingness to move through the fears that counteract the pain body is the next step. I have a friend that is great at tricking the pain body. I was talking with her about my own inner dialogue that comes up every time I'm about to do something that is really important to me. My pain body tells me that I can't help anyone. She suggested that in each moment it comes up, acknowledge it and respond by saying, "I'm not trying to help them. I'm just observing." When I did this, I could literally feel my pain body shrink away as if it just got called out on something and became powerless.

Another helpful tool is what I call flipping. Once when I was working on healing something very big in my life, the voice of my pain body had such a grip on me. I began using a technique that I refer to as "flipping". Every time I would hear the voice of my pain body, I would repeat over and over a mantra that instilled a message that was supportive and loving - the opposite of what my pain body was telling me. The words held a very different vibration to them than the words of my pain body and the pain body eventually began to dissolve.

The beauty of this work is, that once we discover the power that our pain bodies have had in our lives and we begin the process of healing, we awaken to a power so much greater than our pain body. We realize that we have been living our lives from a false center. No wonder our life isn't mirroring back to us what we want! Once we discover our authentic self free from our fears and our pain body, we can begin to create our lives from a place of truth and begin manifesting the life we desire.

Late Summer's Gifts for Dyeing Wool

As we approach the end of summer and are just beginning to feel a chill in the air, there is an abundance of plants that make great dyes for your winter knitting projects. I just recently bought several skeins of natural white yarn made from a combination of merino wool, silk and alpaca. It's soft with a beautiful, natural creamy color that would make a great sweater on its own. But with all the colors available in nature, I decided to dye the yarn for making a sweater this winter combining the soft hues of nature.

Early one morning, my dog Libby and I set out to collect our dyes. As the golden rod is at its peak this time of year, I collected a large grocery bag full of the golden flower heads. We then stopped by the elderberry bushes and picked a small bag of elderberries. I had dried onion skins from yellow onions sitting on my counter that I had been collecting for a few weeks. In my mudroom, I had baskets of dried black walnut hulls and dried hickory nut hulls that I had collected last fall. So by the time I was done, I had a full basket of things to dye with. I then took my yarn and using ammonium alum and cream of tartar as mordants, prepared a pot of hot water. The mordant helps to break down the lanolin in the wool so that it will receive in the colors.

Next I "cooked" my nut hulls, plants and berries in pots over the stove for about an hour or more and then strained the pots. I was amazed at how quickly the colors came about. It was exciting to say the least to put skeins of yarn into each dye pot watching them absorb the yellows, purples and browns. After I felt the yarn had sat in the dye pots long enough, I rung them out and brought them outdoors. I had a small bowl of water and ammonia along with a jar of vinegar and rusty nails. I tested strands of each colored yarn into the solutions to either brighten the colors or to sadden them(which is what the rusty nail solution does). The elderberry was the most fun to work with as it would change from pink to green in the ammonia and from pink to blue in the rusty nail solution. I am so thrilled with the colors that I got and am looking forward to working with even more plants and nuts. I'll be sure to post pictures of my sweater when I finish it. Although next fall seems far away, we will be having a four day knitting retreat here at Hawk Circle next September. Along with a chance to be out in nature during one of the most beautiful times of the year, participants will learn how to dye wool, felt, knit and spin. It's going to be a GREAT time!

The Juniper Retreat

The Juniper Retreat was awesome! We created a week of living in an intuitive culture that was so deeply aligned with the rhythms of nature. Upon waking, we sipped our hot mugs of herbal tea before venturing off to our medicine spots to slowly wake to the rising sun and the singing birds. During the days, we baked bread, made homemade butter and hearty soups to sustain us during the week. We collected plants for dyeing wool and yarn, felted medicine bags and collected roots and berries for our medicines. I think my favorite part of the retreat, was entering into the tepee for our nightly women's lodge. It was the perfect ending to each day, as we stoked the fire and found comfort in the wisdom of the words and stories we shared. I am already looking forward to next year's Juniper Retreat and hope that more young women can join us!