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“Why think of this life as separate from the next, when one is born from the last…”- Rumi from Look at Love

The fine line between life and death…It is that line that we not only walk as humans, but that we carry the chalk for in our back pockets. Meaning that, our understanding of the two points in the continuum of a “lifetime” has allowed us to think that we can draw the line at any given moment, to form an opinion, to stick it to someone who feels otherwise about beginnings and ends. I, for one, am influenced mostly by intuition when it comes to my view of the beginning of life and its end. For example, although I don’t consider myself to be a “pro-lifer” (since this implies that people who believe in legalized abortions are “pro-deathers), but I have a really hard time pulling out my chalk to say that when cells begin dividing a spirit doesn’t begin to grow as well. In fact, I know the ever-changing, ever-dualistic nature of the human language. I also know the vulnerability of humans we call experts. Two words divide life from nothingness in this case: “embryo” and “fetus”. And we continue to use words to divide life into its stages. A “baby”, a “toddler”, a “teenager”, a “senior citizen”. Each stage makes us SOMETHING to be analyzed and defined (for we are bound to keep running from NOTHINGNESS). That’s why we have experts to name and explain the unexplainable in our life cycle. These experts are the same ones that not too long ago were fairly certain that the earth was flat…But I digress.

The Earth, along with many phenomena upon it is cyclical. Round. We DO believe that much, right?

If you have ever felt your lifespan might be over (a car accident? an illness? a moment of blinding shock?), then you know what it is like to see your life as a series of moments, flashes of something unexplainable that constitutes a period of time. A period of time we expect to survive. A period of time before the line is drawn for us or ours.

People have been dying lately. People MY age. People I knew, liked or disliked, people in a stage of their life that wasn’t supposed to be their last. First my high school friend Chris Thibodeau, a man who smiled nonstop to the point where I can’t picture his face without that expression. He died flying, in a moment when his helicopter crashed in Iraq. Then my friend Ace, an overbearingly opinionated, loud, balls-to-the-wall woman, whose line was drawn after the cancer in her body could no longer be fought off. And so on and so forth…After hearing of another death of a young woman this morning, I wrote, “What are we? 80?”

And there I go, defining. Compartmentalizing. Drawing MY lines. Deep down terrified that this isn’t promised. An embryo is not promised life as a fetus, a fetus may never become a baby, and a baby may never get to be a senior citizen. So why all this language? Why the illusion of a guarantee? Why do we fight so hard for our belief that we are entitled?

A couple days ago Chris’ wife LeeSandra gave birth to Chris’ son Liam. She wrote that she could feel love again when she held him. That in him she saw hope. And as our winter slowly cycles into spring, I conclude that this is what we do with language. It is our chalk to try to draw love. To explain to ourselves and those around us just what that one moment can be like. Just what it can do in all of its confusion, devastation, and joy.

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The holidays, especially ones before the proposed apocalypse of 2012, can be a very bipolar experience. On the one hand, there is a sense of warmth, comfort, generosity, and family. On the other is the feeling of anxiety in regards to kind gestures and unconditional money spending, followed by the heaviness you carry when your eyes open on January 1st of a new year and you feel no older, wiser, or healthier. In fact, you feel somewhat lonely. Surrounded by your new gadgets, dressed in your new clothes, you feel as though something has swept over and left you in a position to re-evaluate. To do it differently this time around. At least until you know for a fact that the world is not coming to an end and you end up here, in this same state of mind, in 2013.

And so, will we break our patterns? Will we change in any lasting and impactful manner to become more sustainable and healthier, not so much as a planet, but as humans? Something about this cycle brings us back to this point of New Year’s resolutions and resurrections (look at me resurrecting my journal in 2012!!), and isn’t it tired?

The last couple of days the moon has been haunting. It is red or orange, full-bodied and hefty on the horizon. I know because I have been trying to chase it by driving towards it, hoping maybe for an opportunity to drive into it…

What’s worse is that I’ve been chasing it with two cameras. One is my point and shoot, and I won’t insult it since it is the vehicle for some of the brilliant images W-Words and I have been sharing over the years. The other is part of my new iPhone, a Christmas present that has the quiet presence of crack cocaine in most people’s daily lives. These cameras have both failed me in so many ways on my moon chase, but have rewarded me so deeply with a certain understanding, or rather reminder of an understanding. I told W-Words today that I didn’t feel the world was going to come to an end in 2012. As someone carrying new life inside of me (from now on known as K-Words) and raising a two point five year old human (T-Words), I cannot think in terms of extremes or lean towards certainties of doom. I told him that, rather, I felt that what many have said about this year to be true.

It is a turning point. A point of reflection. A moment during which we are forced, by discomfort perhaps, to look all around ourselves and notice all the little things we have been stepping on. Those our ancestors have stepped on and trampled as well. And once you hold a realization, once you see clearly the challenge of change, where do you go? You can’t un-know something, as many have said. You can’t un-learn something you have learned with your very spirit. We don’t get a do-over. But we do get another day (maybe), (maybe) another year. Who knows? But something tells me that global warming will not melt us into the dry pesticide-ridden earth any time this year. A hurricane the size of a continent will not sweep away all of us sinners. Even atomic weapons will likely not destroy us this year.

But I would be lying if I said I wasn’t curious about just where we will turn from here. To the circus of politics? Entertainment? To growing our own food? To focusing on our own hearth, or to welcoming someone else to it?

I hope, I sincerely hope, that there is a connectedness that is seen when we begin to wake up. A kind of undeniable cellular glue that is so radical that it is hard to ignore. Just in time for me to post this, a friend forwarded me the following observation by Andrew Sullivan:

During pregnancy, cells sneak across the placenta in both directions. The fetus’s cells enter his mother, and the mother’s cells enter the fetus. A baby’s cells are detectable in his mother’s bloodstream as early as four weeks after conception, and a mother’s cells are detectable in her fetus by week 13. In the first trimester, one out of every fifty thousand cells in her body are from her baby-to-be (this is how some noninvasive prenatal tests check for genetic disorders). In the second and third trimesters, the count is up to one out of every thousand maternal cells. At the end of the pregnancy, up to 6 percent of the DNA in a pregnant woman’s blood plasma comes from the fetus. After birth, the mother’s fetal cell count plummets, but some stick around for the long haul. Those lingerers create their own lineages. Imagine colonies in the motherland.

And so here is my wish for 2012, as we digest and settle into it. I wish for all of us to, one day soon, in a unique and relevant to us way, to find the colonies in the motherland. To not forsake the mother as a source of our failure and inadequacy, but to explore our connectedness to where we are. Not where we WANT to be (for that would entail colonizing other lands), but where we ARE. Only from there can we battle the illusion that everything will change for us without focus, effort, and change from within us.

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A set of unique business cards created for an independent press client. Only recycled and repurposed paper was used. The cards were printed using soy-based ink and cut by hand.

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A large-scale unique book, printed on vellum, written and photographically illustrated by Maria Stenina. Blind-stamped hand-bound cloth cover. First exhibited at the Cleveland Institute of Art as part of a BFA thesis installation in 2005.

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Winter is difficult. Few, even of those who claim to love the romance of pure soft snow and glistening ice, would sign up for quite so much of it. In the city, it’s night-time by four, and the difficulty of the cold air stinging through clothing doesn’t add any love to spending time out of the box we call home. So what happened to jungle girl (or urban jungle girl, if you’d just met me)? I have, admittedly, become a victim of anxiety, depression, and this feeling that everything is at a standstill. Why? Because it is. My grandmother, largely at peace with aging and the process of death, likes to say that the winter of our lifetimes is given to us for one reason alone. Relflection.

Being still and looking at your path is by far the most difficult journey one takes. In today’s world, inundated with social media, uninvited scrutiny, junk information, and (yes, I’m going to say it) the internet itself, it is that much harder to come up for air and have it taste fresh. Upon hearing that Egypt’s internet was turned off (the possibility of this still paralyzing the minds of many), I felt a sense of awe at the idea that paranoia, stress, and distraction can be quelled by the flip of a virtual switch (or was it a physical one?). Is it so simple? So stoic? Can I turn off the anxiety and the loneliness in the moment where my mind reels and submits to the paralysis of fear? When the world seems colder, is there that one source of warmth that is to remind me that I deserve something larger? A climax?

I don’t know that I have the answers, or that I have arrived at any point of reflection. What I do know is that self-care becomes of superior importance in the winter months. Instead of setting our bodies and spirits to hibernate, we can truly reflect and renew. As I watch the wind sweep heaping curves of snow and the cyclical dance of patterns in the heavy snow through my legs as I attempt to straighten my spine in Adho Mukha Svanasana, as I feel the bottomless freeze of the cold tile shoot up through my ankles, as I remind myself to fill my belly with my breath, letting it down past my lungs, pushing it in as nourishment, I contemplate the stillness. I watch (still upside down) the steam from my jasmine green tea (deliberately brewed in a spring green mug) disappearing into the space over the floor. I wash my face and hands, feeling for crevices I have long neglected, smoothing organic aloe (inner fillet) onto my face. Blushing from the moisture. I take my food-based vitamins, treating myself to the extra B and D, and a separate C pill. I swallow them one by one, washing them down with the tea, talking myself through the benefits of each. Reminding them to strengthen my body. Reminding them to help lift my spirits. I breathe in for two counts, I hold it in, breathe out for six. I pack my lunch with dark greens, quinoa, wild-caught salmon (fish oil is another miracle mood genie), and snack on organic blueberries two hours later. I give regular bread the evil eye and stock up on sprouted bread. I’ll take all the sprouts I can get right about now. I finally try the carrot raisin manna bread. It’s more of a dessert, so I treat myself to its cakey sweetness.

And then there are the words that refocus. Disease is the body not at ease. It is the body reminding you that you are not grateful. It takes only a few years to create a new body.  Only seconds for a new mind. Healing is shifting your attention from being sick to being well. Reorganizing, receiving, reordering, renewing. Don’t give energy to eliminating and obliterating. Stop fighting, because fighting takes energy. Don’t give your energy to suffering. We become what we think. Become still. Be informed, not inundated. Energy flows where attention goes. It’s not our job to change the world. It is our job to flow. You are born to add value. Imagine what you can do NOW. No one else can dance your dance. No one else can sing your song.

I am so grateful. Winter is so important. There is also no doubt that things sprout in Winter, and survive.

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I am always surprised to hear that many lament Autumn and equate it to a death. It is true that death is side-by-side with (re)birth on the wheel of life, but I cannot imagine a better time for self-reflection, gratitude, renewal, hope, honor, and spirit than the time when the world is painted with the color of surging power, the air pierces through skin, and the sun becomes a low, heavy golden glow. I am reading Russian Mythology at the moment, and am feeling a sort of renewal myself, mainly a long-forgotten connection  to the spirit of the earth (earth here being dirt itself). It is strange to trace things back to their earliest known origin and realize that something so intuitive within you has been passed down to you from ancestors you will never know. The rituals that my people still mindlessly execute, the ones that have become second nature, as it turns out have powerful roots in the understanding of the human frailty on the earth.

In that spirit, I share with you my favorite prayer, from the Native American past. Try reading it in the morning or at sunset. I promise it will clear a path to happiness and wisdom.

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O Great Spirit,

whose voice I hear in the winds

and whose breath gives life to all the world,

hear me.

I am small and weak.

I need your strength and wisdom.

Let me walk in beauty

and let my eyes ever behold the red and purple sunset.

Make my hands respect the things you have made

and my ears grow sharp to hear your voice.

Make me wise so that I may understand the things

you have taught my people.

Let me learn the lessons you have hidden

in every leaf and rock.

I seek strength not to be greater than my brother and sister

but to fight my greatest enemy, myself.

Make me always ready

to come to you with clean hands and straight eyes

So when life fades as the fading sunset

my spirit may come to you without shame.

Great Spirit of love,

come to me with the power of the North.

Make me courageous when the cold winds of life fall

upon me.

Give me strength and endurance for everything

that is harsh,

everything that hurts,

everything that makes me squint.

Make me move through life ready to take what comes

from the North.

Spirit who comes out of the East,

come to me with the power of the rising sun.

Let there be light in my word.

Let there be light on the path that I walk.

Let me remember always that you give the gift of a

new day.

Never let me be burdened with sorrow by not

starting over.

Great Spirit of creation ,

send me the warm and soothing winds

from the South.

Comfort me and caress me when I am tired and cold.

Enfold me as your gentle breezes enfold your leaves

on the trees.

And as you give to all the earth your warm,

moving wind,

Give to me so  that I may grow close to you in warmth.

Great life-giving Spirit,

I face the West,

the direction of the sundown.

Let me remember every day that the moment will come

when my sun will go down.

Never let me forget that I must fade into you.

Give me beautiful color.

Give me a great sky for setting,

and when it is time to meet you,

I come with glory.

And Giver of all life, I pray to you from the earth,

help me to remember as I touch the earth

that I am little and need your pity.

Help me to be thankful for the gift of the earth

and never to walk hurtfully on the world.

Bless to love what comes from mother earth

and teach me how to love your gifts.

Great Spirit of the heavens,

lift me up to you

that my heart may worship you

and come to you in glory.

Hold in my memory that you are my Creator,

greater than I,

eager for my good life.

Let everything that is in the world

lift my mind,

and my heart,

and my life to you

so that we may come always to you

in truth and in heart.

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Whenever I smell an editorial project and I hand someone my card, they are sure to ask me what it is I blog about. They want to know about my traffic, my platform, my subject choice, and whether I am able to eat good food bought with the profits from my many per-click advertisers. I always pause during the questioning to gather my thoughts.

I remind myself to sound confident in my lack of certainty of a connecting thematic thread. I hold myself back from ummming a lot and concluding with, “Well, really, I just like to live beautifully.” If I say that they may take me for a motivational speaker, a spiritual guru-in-training, or worse, a design blog. I can’t ever really find the right way to say that beauty and transformation fascinate me. My platform consists of a couple hundred (pat yourselves on the back) good people who like to see beautiful images, be they of food, plants, or….ummm..other good people.

We like words, especially stream-of-consciousness, often incoherent spurts of it.  I dance to everyday poetry and rich prose and I feast on simple breath-taking moments. I have sponsorship for the journal, but you will not see any ads flashing because, well, that wouldn’t be pretty. I don’t know why I do this. And that’s perfectly fine. Really.

I am Blessed to have a sacred hideaway in the city of sin and grime and to glimpse the change in light from one season to another. Although I have lost sleep howling at the moon this last week, I have bounced back with photographic vengeance and I present to you an Indian Summer visual garden (unscathed by the strange tornado spell we had in old New York recently…).

Feast on the saturated colors, the surprising pastels, and the hint of a foggy view of the Palisades. The image at the tippy top is of my morning teacup, by the way. I have splurged (and not on mulled wine ingredients, which will be purchased shortly) on organic hand-woven green tea blooms. In these sensually round buds hide cream-colored jasmine blossoms, and they bloom in your mug to the tune of you waking up. Great investment.

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It seems I have hibernated early and, due to feverish end-of-summer-escapism into the last glow of the orange sun, have retreated from this space. All I can say is that it’s glorious Fall on the horizon and that sensation of falling into something crisp, chilled, and flavorful is spread all over everything.

There is nothing that gets me all romantically hopelessly breathlessly twisted up like that first breath of yellowed branches, the darker earth, the bounty being pulled from it and chopped, stewed, and boldly displayed. This is where the summer’s cashed in. I offer up the bounty of the last breath of a misty summer escape to an organic farm in Vermont and I anticipate pumpkin soup in its own shell, radish salad, potato stews of all sorts…Stay tuned.

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superior water

piles of runaway pine cones gathered for the burning of sugary smoky flames

seemed lemon yellow when the sun went red

agates lined finely cave drawings mineral deposits in pink on green flecked pocked oval

blue spheres of tart clear flesh seeded and patina wetting indigo to pale dust skin

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Live simply that others may simply live. It is, at the end of the day, a bumper sticker. But it makes a good lifestyle too. It isn’t devoid of joy or laughter (in fact, arguably, laughter is kind of a crucial component of it), or food, or clothes, or even baths. The truth of the matter is that upon stopping at a rest stop on the road back from the sustainable organic farm where we’d been living and working, I stood in awe of the fifteen plus immaculate plastic-laden stalls in front of me. How many people were at this remote rest stop at a time? Five cars at the most. I almost forgot to flush, too, with my hand reaching for a soft handful of sawdust, which, of course, was not there. America is amazing. We live and defend (tooth and nail) a way of life that is deadly. Am I being dramatic? I am prone to it, but I feel surprised that more people aren’t crying out about it the same way they are about a certain basketball player switching teams.

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What is there to defend? Our kids don’t know their own mother’s breast milk. Nor can they tell a potato from a tomato, let alone point out one or the other when they are still rooted in the ground. If they know things like that grow in the earth, that is. I am not a prophet of the apocalypse by any means. I just know that currently, it takes almost 2 acres of land to feed a typical American for a year, with consideration of the corn and soy we grow to feed the sick flesh we consume. By 2050, there will only be .6 acres of land available due to our inability to nourish it and protect it. Our equally sick farming practices. It is time to meet your maker. It is time to figure out what that potato plant looks like (they’re gorgeous!), or what a tomato actually may taste like when it remembers its vine. It isn’t tedious or crazy or extreme. It is quiet and beautiful and life-changing. It feels……right. If Europeans have their “agri-tourism”, we’ve got wwoofing. Well, technically, the whole world has it.

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We arrived at the farm clad in our urban gear, and as we slowly shed it (i.e. trunked it into the back of the car for the duration of our experience) and said a prayer of thanks for lack of mirrors on the forty acres of wildflower land, we began to forget. The anxiety and the neuroses we are prone to when we live meaninglessly routine lives doesn’t leave a trace when it evaporates off of your skin. It is replaced by some dirt, yes, but there is so much on your exterior to awe you that you somehow lose your outline. You forget the boundaries of your body. It bears no pain at all.

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We lived in a trailer adopted from the side of the road by our hosts, who went on to build a solar-powered house using salvaged materials from carpentry jobs. Alongside the house was a smaller building with an architecturally mind-blowing brick oven, in which they baked sourdough, 8 grain, and a handful of artisan breads for a csa (community supported agriculture) and to take to market. We made no waste. Food and human waste was artfully composted to enrich the soil. Plastic bags were washed and reused to store food, as were glass jars. Newspaper can be used as groundcover and composts (if it uses soy ink, of course). Oh, and chickens will eat almost anything you no longer want. Pest control was not so tedious, either. Some row cover for the poor kale that got beheaded by a deer with the munchies. Some ducks to pick up the slack. Good times.

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We drank mead brewed from organic local honey, we danced to car music in the cherry orchards, we ate soups and stews made from vegetables yanked by our own hands from the earth, we perfected the tahini salad dressing and the almond granola, we splurged on some locally-thrown ceramics when we stumbled upon woodland studios, and we spoiled ourselves by making bonfires in the morning to drink tea by.

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