the story beneath.

i am off work today.

my legs burn as i push up the incline and turn right onto the trail toward home.

walking turns me inward. under the small dome of my own head my racing mind clicks away over an interior landscape of lists and remembrances. for a while i hear only the tread of my feet, birds chirping and my heartbeat.

but cicadas keep breaking into my remembering.
i take a deep breath. i am here. now. alive. walking.

i arrive at my back door.

ben is sunning himself waiting for me.

walking opens my heart. it widens my aperture for seeing beauty everywhere.

last year…they turned the field behind our house into a subdivision. i mourned. one of the reasons we rented this house was for that view. for the field. for nature.

a small thing maybe but it anchored me living in a town.

mother nature has become more of a priority and a place of discovery for me over the last few years. i have always been a deep noticer of beauty. i can NOT not see it. but lately it feels like there is some kind of conspiring to bring the world within me and the world outside me back together.

what’s happening at my doorstep is happening in the world.

anyway. i digress.

half of the field is now a subdivision. they are building two houses. the other half is still a field but i can no longer see it from my back porch.

they mowed and baled the hay this week. walking past it this morning i thought
i love a field of baled hay.

now i am sitting on my couch writing this. i can see through the back door. ben barks. there is a mower moving through what remains of the tall grass and wildflowers around the subdivision.

i cried.

i feel myself wanting to sit more lately.

i am tired. the kind of tired where no matter how much you sleep you are still tired tired.

the smell of tomatoes is on my hands.

and we are in mercury retrograde. a time of re’s.

returning. remembering. reconsidering.

i find myself remembering the life i lost. the home i tried to make inside other people. the woman who became her own shelter. the memories that keep returning because they are not finished speaking.

i’m listening.

the story beneath misfit table.
the story beneath the bible.
the story beneath us. america. the land.

i feel like i have been going through a creative identity awakening. a regeneration. it is touching everything i understand about home and belonging to oneself. to others. to the land. and to god.

a metamorphosis. letting my gray hair loose. my body rearranging itself. what if middle age is a we get to be someone completely new? like for real!

maybe metamorphing causes fatique:)

i know now that not every heavy feeling is prophecy. i am listening for what gives me life force and what does not. i am writing down the revelations now so i can create from discernment later.

create, don’t wait someone said.
feels like kindling. or a plow.

i feel like i am gathering roots. like gathering roots holds up a mirror between the map in the earth and the map inside our bodies.

maps have always been a red thread in my story.

heart cartography. body cartography. i keep feeling that these need to become something functional. something we can use.

curious for new ways of being in this world. the old ways tied to old systems
don’t work anymore. maybe they never did.

maybe this is what happens in the silence and the singing and with our hands and our feet in the earth. at a certain angle the maps begin to meet. the routes converge. we find our way back home.

i don’t know what this means yet. it may mean nothing once retrograde is over.

but i am listening. and writing it down.

something has been returning to me over the last couple of weeks.

eve and the garden.

god naming the first human.

adam renaming eve after the fall.

the women at the opening of exodus.

then, mostly, the disappearing of women from the stories.

and more.

my head catches fire when i begin reading everything again.

i have not been in the bible in over a year.

now i bury my face in these stories and hear the sadness beneath them, still. something turning me over inside. something that cannot quite be said out loud. it feels like it is crying for its people.

for me. for us. for our home.

earth. mother nature. gaia. whatever we call her.

come home.

come home.

i cannot tell you more about this holy place. the words blow away. today, it feels like i can only be with it.

i sit with tears running down my cheeks. the emotion has no name. it tastes like joy and grief.

joy for the being of this shimmering world.

grief for what we have lost.

i am encouraged. the land remembers.

we have created an odd division between loving people and loving land and loving god.

we know that loving a person has agency and power. we know love can change everything. yet we act as though loving the land is only an internal affair. a feeling contained inside our own heads and hearts with no energy or consequence outside of us.

i don’t know what i am sensing yet.

i am listening.

maybe i am cartographing.

i love breadcrumbing my way into all the places i have been told not to go. the way fire loves grass. the way papa loves their creation. all of their creation.

ever since leaving the church building (the system, the institution of christianity) it feels like i have being shown things again through experience.

papa led me out on a breadcrumb.

now, in the remembering, i can see how i have been learning to bring the pieces back together.

the stories. god. gaia. humans. animals. the land. all of it.
the map of it.

i have been slipping out of my own human skin and trying on the stories of others. trying to know the land. trying to know other as fully as we can know anything outside ourselves. not face to face. in my heart. heart feels like a good place to begin.

old notes in old journals are finding me again.

why? i don’t know.

i think i am being circled back to the story underneath the story.

not the day story.

the night story.

the story i was taught, and the one papa has been breadcrumbing me toward all along.

last night was the new moon in cancer. i wrote this ursula k. le guin quote in today’s discovery journal:

“the dance of renewal, the dance that made the world, was always danced here at the edge of things, on the brink, on the foggy coast.”

the edge of things.
on the brink.
foggy.

i think i am going to begin sharing some of my breadcrumbing and discoveries here.

for those whose curiosity is inflamed like mine.

this will not be about belief. not some abstract thing you have to agree with or hold as true. it is about experience. especially the experience of creativity. the way it connects us to something deep within us and beyond us.

when i say god or papa i am not talking about the god the institution handed many of us. the one whose name was used to control and harm.

i mean the enlivening animating life force moving through everyone and everything.

you may call that spirit. the universe. creativity. gaia. love. use whatever word connects you to something larger without requiring you to leave yourself behind.

i keep wondering what might happen if we approached these ancient jewish stories as a portal instead of a rulebook. if we read them again. reimagined them. breathed into them and allowed them to breathe into us.

not to keep the past alive exactly as it was.

to build a bridge between the stories of the past and the stories we are living now. maybe even the stories we have not written yet.

i am not coming to this as someone who knows.

at all.

i am coming as someone listening beneath the story for the story. noticing what catches fire in my head. what finds me in old journals. what i experience and sense. what opens my heart wider toward god, people, animals, the land, and this shimmering world we belong to.

maybe this becomes a practical starting place. a way of finding our way toward more compassion, creativity, and care for all of it.

maybe it is another map.

i don’t know yet.

i am writing it down.

in the way tiff does all of these things.

flourish anyway,
tiff