I’m a dweller of the threshold and I’m waiting at the door, and I’m standing in the darkness, I don’t want to wait no more. –Van Morrison

Greetings Dear Ones,

We did SO much work here at the Land of Lost Plots two weekends ago! I got totally worn out and needed a week to recover. Some of it was actually even three-dimensional work, though the true heavy lifting of it turned out to be spiritual for me. Two dear friends came and camped on the land—one in a tent, one in a tent-hammock, and helped my daughter and I find what we came to call “the spiral path” around this place.

The land around my new home is anywhere from waist-deep to neck-deep (depending how tall one is) in weeds and brambles. The women who came to help, both in their mid thirties, agreed that it is as magical and darkly confusing as an old fairytale that makes no sense until you realize it is actually a map of the female psyche. For one thing, there is no way into the house except through the garage, which seems weird. This place, with its slightly slanted barn, the mythical meadow we never actually found, and the deep, dark tangled gulch running steeply through the center, could be anybody’s psyche for sure. It is the stuff of giddy daydreams and ghastly nightmares. There are doors, but they don’t go anywhere reasonable. (One of the first things I did after moving in was fall out the front door onto a rock that is way too low to be a step and sprain my foot. I had to crawl back inside and hop on crutches for a few days.)

The ladies arrived Friday night. “What is our goal? What can we do?” they wanted to know, as they unloaded baskets and armloads of newly canned garden produce and summer squash and turnips and homemade pickles. While we feast on both their fresh garden abundance and the energy surge they bring, I say “I don’t care what we do—we just have to do Something. It’s like a tangled necklace. We just have to start picking away at something to see what can come free. Let’s try to make some sense of this by what gives way first.”

We decide to start by creating a fire pit so that we can drag two cords of rotted wood away from the side of the house and burn it (the wood, that is, not the house). We want a fire pit anyway so that we can sit around it and play fiddles and chat. To get to the wood, some of which has actually turned to compost we could shovel rather than logs we could lift, we have to saw through brambles as thick as broomsticks.

“Where should we make the fire pit?” we wonder. We all agree that making it someplace convenient to the house, where we would not have to drag the wood too far, is an absurd idea—not nearly as much fun as exploring the twilight for a fairy circle, a little glen, a remote location with an opening in the canopy to the other world, where we can watch the stars. I pause and feel grateful that I am not dealing with Practical people. These women are strong and wise and magical. Intuitively, they align with the priorities of having a fire pit and getting an outdoor claw foot bathtub operational over the need to build some front door steps or clean the garage.

One friend, dressed in a linen dress, work boots, and gloves, fires up her husband’s weed-whacker and buzzes a trail through the grass. Shadows lengthen around us as she meanders downhill until she comes to a level place that we all agreed “feels right.” I fetch the push mower and the two of us hack a wide circle in the brush. The stalks next to the ground are like straw. We’ve had a drought this summer. I worry about sparks. With a pang of anguish, I think of friends in California who are displaced from their homes, sheltering in fear of the fires raging there. I don’t want to be the one who burns down Vermont.

I run uphill, fetch a shovel, and cut a bulls-eye of sod out of the center of our circle. “We need rocks around this, and at least four big buckets of water—one for each of us,” I say. I lumber back up the hill for buckets and water while the other ladies bring chairs and wood. I point out a place where they can go to find rocks that will be the right size for our pit. They are large grey hunks of granite in a disorderly pile near the edge of the driveway. They begin to peel them from the dirt that has scabbed over them, ripping roots away to free the stones.

“We must Name these rocks,” says the woman with the weed-wacker, her bright eyes glowing bluer than the rim of the fading sky. “Rituals are the things that tell us about transformation. We cannot transform anything without simultaneously transforming ourselves. There are four of us—let’s each take three stones and carry them to the circle. These are three burdens we are tired of carrying. We must name our burdens and decide to carry them no further.” Ok, she didn’t say it exactly like that…she was far more eloquent…but that’s as close as I can remember.

I fetch a metal hand truck from the garage. These “burdens” are actually just a little too big for us to carry so we go one by one, down the path alone, using the truck. When it is my turn, I load three huge stones on the hand truck and head down the winding path, dragging the stones on wheels behind me. As the pitch of the slope increases, I realize too late that it is really dumb to be in front of the Burdens, which are pushing me faster and faster down the hill, until I am running wide-eyed, blasting past the fairy circle, past our circle of earth, past our water buckets, into the weeds beyond. One by one, scratched and laughing, I drag my burdens back to the circle, name them, and lay them down.

Gradually, we have all the elements assembled—the fire, the water, the stone, the air—and we four humans who are made of a delicate recipe of each. We nestle in to the camp chairs on that line between earth and sky and talk about our lives, our hopes, our burdens. The pandemic has been hard on us as women, artists, and craftspeople—we share our fatigue, our fear, and our gratitude for having made it thus far. We acknowledge the symbolism of letting our old burdens be the boundary around a new spark. These are dark times. We are here to bring Light and keep each other warm. This is our own private Solstice.

We talk through the night until a new day. I listen to the wisdom of those far younger than I and marvel. They talk of what they want to “birth” into this world on the threshold of becoming—their babies, their music, art, and stories. A dog crawls into my lap and he and I dwell silently as possibilities get explored. We gaze at the dear faces in the firelight. The youngest is no longer a child. She is a radiant Maiden. The Maidens are ready to be Mothers. With a sudden start, I realize I have been the maiden, been a mother. It’s my turn next to be the Crone! To the shock of those around the fire, I announce abruptly, out of context, that it is my intention to be a Badass Crone. “Check my Facebook profile tomorrow,” I insist. I’m going to update my job description to read “Badass Crone.” We all agree it is time to go to bed. The Crone is getting wound up. “We are each called to step across the threshold of what we already know into a world of challenges in order to measure ourselves differently,” I shout as they stagger towards trees, hammocks, tents. I go inside. This badass Crone sees no reason to let a perfectly good bed indoors go to waste.

The next day, we set out to explore the land beyond the fire pit. We make a strange processional—there are four women trudging along in a variety of what each terms “work clothing,” which includes everything from canvas trousers, to yoga pants, and a 1950’s vintage Moo-moo and boots—followed by a small dog and a socially awkward rooster with separation anxiety named “Bertie” who thinks he is a house pet. The brush closes around us quickly. As we slash our way along the path, we come upon a new threshold. At this moment, the pain of continuing exceeds the pain of stopping and turning back. What feels like defeat becomes instead the realization that to continue the way we were going was just going to lead to more poison ivy, a lost rooster, not to mention possible self-inflicted machete wounds. We pause. The Crone loves the choice to stop doing what we have been doing, to honor the emerging wisdom that is telling us to turn around, to breathe, and feel the sweat trickling between our skin and clothing choices. We always have the Choice to stop living in discomfort, to stop doing what we have been doing just because we have been doing it, to overcome our cruelty, which is rooted in dedication to an old idea, and choose a clearer trail. Lack of comfort is usually a sign that we are on a threshold of new discoveries—or about to have to carry a rooster. (Trail-blazing Soul work is not for the light and fluffy.)

__________

Mere hours/days later, I find myself at yet another threshold: the loss of a dear friend and cohort of the past 28 years. As I spiral my way through the grief, I see that it is a coiling path with many doorways leading me over old familiar ground as I make my way through a series of memories—most of which make me hold my sides and laugh in tear-streaked howls. Like the time she and another friend had to go to the local emergency room dressed as Cleopatra and a jungle explorer (complete with gum boots and coconut bra) after a Halloween party at my former home… Or the time she and I drove to Portland, Maine after midnight, after hosting a house concert, to run a half marathon the next day. We were so late to the race we had to start running from the parking lot to the starting line after the gun had already gone off. It took us six miles to catch up to a one-legged woman on crutches (who, it goes without saying, was Magnificent). Or the time we went out to lunch and accidentally threw our car keys away with the picnic wrappings and had to get local officials to come unlock the municipal trash cans.

What I love best about this dear friend, apart from the fact that she was constantly tidying up and making tea for everyone, is that she was always getting caught in the act of being herself. She was Herself, Always—from the time she spent half an hour kicking a car in a public parking lot because her key didn’t work (turns out, it wasn’t her car!), to the time she accidentally brought a group of realtors to what they thought was a broker’s open-house on a sale property but turned out to be a mercy meal after a family’s funeral instead. (Imagine laying granny to rest and coming home to discover her house crawling with realtors because someone had gotten the address wrong!) She was a source of Light and a profound influence on me through many stages of my life. Her follies, which delighted us all so much, actually made it ok to be Me, by giving me a window to accept my own. She was my dear companion through my own journey from maiden to mother to crone. I miss her more than words could ever say.

Now, her spark has gone out, but not before she ignited other sparks. So! Who will tidy up and make tea and make us laugh now? We will. We must. Whether we be mothers, maidens, or crones, it’s our turn to keep a firm grip on our car keys and Step Up. Gaps are being made, spaces created so that each of us moves one step forward to take on a new role, a new growing edge, a new part in the pageantry of Life. Though none of us could ever be like her, what we need most is to be Ourselves—moo-moo dresses, machetes, and all. What each of us is being asked is “Hey, it’s your turn now—Are You Available?” We don’t exactly know where we are going or what is at the root of this jungle mess of a world we find ourselves inhabiting… nor do we need to have the answers to any other question… Just this: Are you available? Do you have the capacity, energy, capability and willingness to show up where you are needed, where you may be called? Put down your burdens; they aren’t worth carrying. Make some tea. Imagine what shape your love will take next.

Chardin says, “The truth is, indeed, that love is the threshold of another universe.” (And its portals are DOGS, right, Nora?) Love is how we continue to hold those who have left us. Love is how we reach for those yet to come. Love is how we dance, Right Here, Right Now by the fires of our dreams. True Love is our threshold.

I’m off to don a moo-moo and machete. This is one Badass Crone saying “I love you so much. Let the mending continue!”

Yours aye,

Nancy