A small stone circle / space to hold what needs holding

I have been away a long time, and there is much to acknowledge and make space for, both here and out in the world, in this timeline we are in of great horrors and tragedies and hurricanes.

Safety and sanctuary for everyone who needs it.

In order to write about what I want to write about today, I am making a small stone circle in this space, and in mind-space, to hold what needs holding, a space for whatever is needed.

The imaginary stone circle exists to hold all the many things that want naming and acknowledging until such time as I feel brave enough to do the work of naming and acknowledging.

And it exists to support me in letting the words come so I can share them with you, to figure out where I’m at, what is most important to say, or at least what is most indicated in this moment.

Thank you, stones

A breath, a candle, a good exhale. Thank you, stone circle.

Thank you, sweet friends and everyone who reads, everyone who waited patiently for what was next. A thank you as well to the parts of me who were able to wait patiently (sometimes) for me to arrive at this moment of stone-circle forming, this moment of locating the words and letting them find a home.

Not What, But How

An odyssey, a blur

My trip, which my friends keep referring to alternately as my ordeal, my odyssey, or my shamanic underworld voyage, lasted twelve weeks, or a quarter of the year.

A sojourn, at any rate. I went, it was rough, I returned.

I don’t have much to say about it yet; it’s a bit of a blur. Maybe it will catch up to me or I will catch up to it, and a sense of what transpired will land in my body, or a cohesive narrative will form. Maybe.

What transpires over the course of twelve weeks

There was a week of driving from New Mexico to Michigan, towards an experience I named the MMMM (Michigan Marathon of Mercilessness & Mercy), aka dealing with family matters and health issues.

This also involved going through piles and piles of items that each needed someone to make some kind of decision about them, and the deciding person had to be me, for complicated reasons.

Then ten long weeks of sleeping on a foldout couch spent alternately making these decisions and recovering from the toll the drive took on my unwell body, combined with the barometric pressure shifts, the stress, the humidity, the ongoing unpleasant discoveries related to old mysteries and old secrets…

When is a mission complete? What instigates a turning?

There was an overwhelming amount of things to be done and considered.

There were also some side quests. Kind of a lot of side quests actually.

When I had some strength back and the season turned (and my drivers license was about to expire!), I headed back west and spent another week on the road.

The labyrinth

Five hours is as much driving as I can manage before my back gives out, or my ability to focus, whichever goes first really, and the last hour of that is honestly torture.

Sometimes I don’t even have a last hour in me, and that’s how I ended up at a rural airbnb in Holts Summit, Missouri, which my mind keeps wanting to rename to Holts Creek, maybe because I was in search of a creek, for ritual-related reasons.

A text came in from the guy whose little cabin I’d last-minute rented:

“I saw on your profile that you love to walk a labyrinth, as it happens I have one here, it’s overgrown and hasn’t been mowed in months, I will mow it for you so that you can walk it before sunset…”

Barefoot, close to the earth

He said this particular labyrinth likes to be walked barefoot.

I love it more than anything in the world when someone immediately reveals how eccentric they are, so I assumed he was right, and he was.

Of course a fellow labyrinth-walker would know what’s good, and if he says this labryinth is particular, I believe him. Labyrinths can have very strong personalities, in my experience. Some are funny, some are intense, some can be a little pointed.

But that’s the kind of thing you can’t tell people because they will think you are even more of a weirdo than they already thought when you were excitedly info-dumping about labyrinths and how cool they are, and how they are not the same as a maze.

He didn’t seem to care what I thought though, and I immediately cherished that about him.

Of the earth, bounded and bounding

The ground was very spongy, almost bouncy and the grass clippings were soft to walk on. Barefoot was the right path, labyrinth-pun intended.

I felt as though I was drawing power from the earth but also as if the ground was bouncing me lightly, like you would bounce a slightly overwhelmed baby.

A labyrinth is a beautifully boundaried place, and this one also had a bounding quality, isn’t that beautiful, how those words connect.

I am thinking about being held, being lightly and gently bounced, in an invigorating way and also in a soothing way, within a boundaried space.

What if boundaries are how we make space to be soothed and invigorated by the earth…

The gift/offering of a question

I always bring a labyrinth a question, and this question felt especially pertinent, both on my way out of what was honestly an excruciating, exhausting, frustrating three month voyage of one hardship after the next, and for the day before the eve of the Jewish New Year…

I asked the labyrinth what is next.

What is next felt like employing a question as a form of entry.

What is next

What is next for me? What is next after the Michigan Marathon of Mercilessness & Mercy?

But also, what is next for this quarter from fall equinox to winter solstice, what is next for this new year, what is next in general?

Show me what is next, reveal a direction, give me an instruction, anything. What’s next?

NOT WHAT BUT HOW

I asked the labyrinth what is next, and it said, very clearly: “NOT WHAT, BUT HOW”.

The gift-offering of an answer can also be the gift-offering of realizing your question needs to be adjusted.

Not what, but how

I exhaled, and repeated: Not what, but how

Tell me about the how…

The next question felt obvious, tell me about the how…

So I asked it about the how and it said, “Gentle, soft, slow and delicious….”

Then I asked what else I should know, about that and in general, and it said I should just practice Not What But How, and Gentle, Soft, Slow & Delicious until at least winter solstice given how the last quarter went…

Did I get a side-eye from a labyrinth? You bet I did, and it’s not the first time either haha.

So we have a mission

Even though my trip to Michigan yielded more opposite-of-clarity than clarity, suddenly I had a clear mission. I received the answer i was searching for or hoping for on this trip.

And there are two parts.

The how is more important than the what, in all things.

And the how, specifically is about gentle, soft, slow and delicious.

The rest is commentary (go and learn), as we say, in the tradition of Rabbi Hillel back in the first century BCE.

Something about pain

Literally everyone I know, from my friends to my doctor to people who know me pretty casually but do know something about how Long Covid has changed my life, advised me in no uncertain terms not to make this trip.

And wow were they right. It was hell on my body and nervous system and did a lot of damage, and I did it anyway and that is not a brag. It may well have been the wrong move, though little point in dwelling on that, since it happened which makes it the right move as far as I’m concerned. We are here.

I have never had so many panic episodes in my life, so many nightmares, or experienced so many different kinds of intense physical and emotional pain and discomfort at once. Or at least not since the 90s. It’s hard to compare.

This was not so much a visit as it was a crucible.

And something about pleasure

I don’t want to forget to acknowledge the parts that were beautiful, meaningful, hopeful, sweet.

Some are too personal to share but here are some…

A magical grove, suddenly, inexplicably

Arash invited me to have coffee. And, FYI, if you are ever going to splurge on an expensive fancy coffee and happen to be in Ann Arbor, I highly recommend the cardamom rose latte from Songbird Cafe – my brother sang the praises of the rosemary sea salt latte there, so you could also do that, but I am a sucker for cardamom.

We sat beneath a row of trees at the edge of a parking lot and talked for hours, and somehow our conversation turned parking lot trees into a magical grove. I can’t really explain it but everything disappeared until we were just us, sheltered by an arbor of trees.

There are some truly good-hearted people in this world, and also some high-magic people with whom you can enter into a non-conventional experience of time and space.

What a special thing it is when a person has both these qualities, and what a treasure and honor it is to know this particular one. What remarkable good fortune.

Brunch of Circumstances

I did not have it in me even slightly to do any cooking on this trip or even to clean a kitchen to be able to cook, and I don’t have much of an appetite these days anyway.

The best and really only solution I could come up with was to coax myself into consuming one meal a day, one that didn’t require cooking or thinking, the same meal every day, for three months.

We’ll call it autistic excellence and leave it at that.

Good job to me for staying nourished in the way that worked for me.

When my brother came for a week, he joined me in this daily ritual, and it was honestly a delight.

Leisurely plus instantaneous

We took our time, luxuriated, laughed, told stories, got angry about the same things together, made coffee with cardamom, oat milk, vanilla sugar and the predictably stale Israeli instant coffee that is a staple of familiarity.

The word instant doing double duty here because not only is the coffee instant but it functions as an instantaneous sensory portal that whooshes me directly back into the 1990s and early 2000s.

Yup, my brother said, this tastes like strong memory.

It’s not good coffee, you couldn’t say that, but it is extremely powerful as a nostalgia device, and so, in the moment, it was good coffee, you just have to tweak what good means to you.

We remembered things and we laughed until we cried. We did this every day for a week. It was the best part of the three month odyssey.

The joy of a cowboy hat

Everyone loved my cowboy hat, including the checker at the supermarket who said, “Girl, you are WEARING that hat!”

But, compliments aside, probably the best hat-related moment is when my dad stole it off my head and put it on, and wore it for the next twenty minutes, absolutely grinning his face off and checking himself out in the elevator mirror. He even posed for pictures, and my dad hates having his picture taken.

LOOK AT THIS HAT, he said, at least twenty times.

Yes, it’s a great hat, and also: everyone should try on being a cowboy at least once.

I will be the one who

When I went to meet Arash, whom I had not seen in many years, we had a conversation like this…

Arash: “I will be the one who looks like me.”
Havi: “Got it. I will be the one in a giant cowboy hat.”
Arash: “Perfect, I will look under every cowboy hat I see until I find you…”

The many great mysteries

I went to visit my mom’s grave (ten years this week since she died), which seems impossible because did I not just write about her gravestone one year after her death, yes, I shared it here, how can it be ten years…

Time is truly a great mystery, among the many great mysteries.

It was pretty easy to find the Jewish part of the cemetery; there are zero crosses, and lots of stones and pebbles for placing on the low flat headstones.

But the last time I was there was at the burial, which was a trauma, and my brain refused to give up even a hint of a memory about which direction I might go in order to look for the correct spot.

Geese

I wandered in the drizzling rain, hoping for a clue, and there were geese absolutely everywhere.

Picture just the most plump, contented, happy-go-lucky geese, absolutely taking over the cemetery. Not a person in sight, just dozens and dozens of good mood geese.

I could hear my mother’s delighted laugh at these geese, at how content and at home they seemed, at the unexpectedness of the encounter.

Just when

Just when I was about to give up, I found the right spot, and placed some stones and talked to her, as if I hadn’t already been talking to her the entire trip, wrapped up in her blankets on her couch.

And I cried some more, as if I hadn’t already been crying the entire trip, and I felt a little worse but also a little better at the same time.

Thank you, stones. Thank you, happy geese.

And thank you, soft rain, speaking of things that are gentle, soft, slow and delicious.

An unanticipated sensory state of pleasantness and comfort to walk across the green grass, surrounded by green trees, in this very soft mist of rain. There is a superpower in there somewhere.

Entry for a new year

I spent the eve of the New Year at the Cactus Motel in McLean, Texas, and was too exhausted to do anything to mark it, so I set the intention that I would welcome the new year later…

Any grace period in a storm, right? And luckily for me, Judaism is very big on grace periods, as is befitting since we all have ADHD as far as I can tell.

And in the meantime I did a tiny amount of journaling on two questions.

Journaling question: This new year is for…?

This new year is for…

• joyful steady playful ritual
• creative time, writing time, bobcat time, cowboy chore hour time
• envisioning
• not what but how
• gentle, soft, delicious and slow
• being process-oriented…
• an aesthetics of activity / aesthetics of not doing and undoing / restful rest / contrast / intentional unwinding
• being generous with myself
• being attentive and accommodating with my neurodivergence & disabilities
• whatever is the opposite of twisting myself in the interest of accommodating others
• staying committed to life-enhancing deliciousness

Journaling question: What is already new and joyful?

What is already new and joyful?
A great new haircut, my first in ages, thanks to Ronnie, an absolute angel, who offers covid-safe haircuts, masked, on the porch or outdoors or in your space, and with the option of minimal conversation if you prefer. I have mostly been cutting my own hair and this was a treat.

(If you know someone in southeast Michigan, send them to Ronnie.)

New tires, this was not joyful at all since mine were definitely supposed to last until I made it back home but it is new, and new is something.

A new book to read, and a new desire to spend time reading, which has been difficult for me since my concussion in 2021.

The new and very joyful wisdom from the labyrinth to guide me for this new quarter, new year and beyond.

Some new excitement, some new hope bubbling up. Some new feelings.

Grace

I mentioned before that I want do-overs for entry into the new year.

And this is ongoing, the practice of do-overs forever, but I did take a beautiful side trip to have ritual by the Gila river in a lovely canyon.

I stood on a rock and talked to the river and tossed in tortilla chip crumbs to symbolize all I wish to let go of from the past year.

Most of my would-like-to-let-go-ofs are either in the category of times I was impatient and even unkind (with people, with situations), or too busy with my own shit to be a good friend, or in the category of ways I neglect myself or neglect to take care of myself.

And of course these are all related…

Related because when I neglect myself or neglect to give myself as much care as I need, or judge myself for needing so much more care than I used to, this exponentially increases the state of overwhelm and sensory overload that lead to being impatient or careless with myself and others.

All in right timing, all timing right timing

The sound of the rushing water was so peaceful, the light glancing off the cottonwoods making the silvery leaves shimmer in the breeze was so magical. It felt so good to be back in beloved New Mexico, home.

It was a grounding experience, and such a helpful reminder about All Timing Right Timing, and When Late Is Actually Right On Time.

Something about the superpower of What If The Right Moment Is When The Moment Happens To Happen. I hope I can keep remembering this.

A breath for this trust in time. Nothing is late, nothing is broken, it worked out how it worked out and now we are here.

And here we are / now we are here

Yes. That is the important part, I think. It worked out how it worked out, and now we are here.

Would we do things differently next time? Absolutely. And, also, now we are here, at this moment of what is new and joyful, or at least what is new and possible, new and potentially hopeful? New and grounding.

New and here.

What’s next? I have no idea, but I do have that beautiful clue from the labryinth.

It’s not about what, it’s about how

Not what but how. Gentle, soft, slow and delicious!

I am going to try to remember this hopeful and exquisite piece of wisdom, and when I forget, and of course I will forget, I am going to kiss the palm of my hand and place it on my heart and take a breath of remembering.

What are your wishes for this new quarter?

What are you seeding? Or, again, maybe not what but how…

And maybe this question also needs its own grace period, its own cocoon of time, maybe this question needs to percolate. Here’s to the percolation process.

Here’s to gentle, soft, slow and delicious in a variety of forms. To asking, and letting the question ripple out across the water, trusting that whatever is revealed will show up when it shows up.

(Now we are here, what treasure to be here.)

Come play in the comments, I appreciate the company

You are welcome to share anything that sparked for you while reading, anything that helped or anything on your mind, make some wishes, process what’s percolating…

I am lighting a candle for us. Oh wow, what beautiful wishes. What a brave thing it is to allow ourselves to want something better for us and for the world.

Or if there’s anything you’d like to toss into the wishing pot, the healing power of the collective is no small thing, companionship helps.

Whatever comes to mind (come to heart?), let’s support each other’s hope-sparks and wishes…

Thank yous, in the circle of stones

Thank you so much to everyone who reads. Here’s to loving breaths, the winding path, the many clues that land when they land, receptivity, keeping on keeping on.

Thank you to everyone who thoughtfully emailed or DMed to tell me that the website was down and to send their good wishes. Thank you to everyone who sent money to the Discretionary Fund. Thank you to Amanda who reminded me of the power and beauty of a stone circle, and who has seen the one on my property.

Ongoing wishes related to safety & sanctuary, a peace vigil of the heart

I am wishing safety and sanctuary to and for everyone, or whatever it is you need most, and I am especially thinking of friends in the paths of hurricanes, friends in the Middle East, and all of us who have loved ones in these places where awful, frightening, nightmarish upheaval is or might soon be whipping through the terrain.

At the same time I am thinking of friends whose emotional terrain is being torn up by terror. Wishing safety and sanctuary for them too.

There is too much hard, unfair, challenging and awful going on to acknowledge it all or to do enough acknowledging, but I am trusting that the circle of stones can hold my heart’s intention and can glow a steady peace vigil for us.

Housekeeping note: You can subscribe to posts by email again!

If you aren’t seeing these updates in your in your email and want to, you can can solve that here.

This will pop up a new page on Follow.It that lets you subscribe via email, newsletter, or RSS reader. They say “expect 50 stories a week”, and that’s a very imaginary number, once a week is the dream. I hope now that I’m back from the epic road trip of trials and tribulations, we can get on a schedule again.

Get the ebook on how I play with time

Aka fun bonus material on how I relate to time and map out my quarters for the year.

Anyone who gives to Barrington’s Discretionary this week (see below) will get this by email as a pdf. I am only checking email twice a week because I no longer have wifi at my place (long story), so be patient with me but if it doesn’t show up within the week then let me know!

I have some ideas for the next ebook but if you do too, shoot me an email or share in the comments.

A request!

If you received clues or perspective or want to send appreciation for the writing and work/play we do here, I appreciate it tremendously. Between Long Covid and traumatic brain injury recovery, things are slow going.

I am accepting support (with joy & gratitude) in the form of Appreciation Money to the Discretionary Fund. Asking is not where my strength resides but Brave & Stalwart is the theme these days, and pattern-rewriting is the work, it all helps with fixing the many broken things.

And if those aren’t options, I get it, you can light a candle for support (or light one in your mind!), share this with someone who loves words, tell people about these techniques, approaches and themes, send them here, it all helps, it’s all welcome, and I appreciate it and you so much. ❤️