From “Hippie Woman Wild” by Carol Schlanger

“When we Indians kill meat, we eat it all up.

When we dig roots, we make little holes.

When we build houses, we make little holes.

When we burn grass for grasshoppers, we don’t ruin things.

We shake down acorns and pine nuts.

We don’t chop down the trees.

We only use dead wood.

But the white people plow up the ground, pull down the trees, kill everything…the white people pay no attention…

How can the spirit of the earth like the white man?

Everywhere the white man has touched, it is sore.”

-Wintu Woman, 19th century

Be notorious

“Run from what’s comfortable.

Forget safety.

Live where you fear to live.

Destroy your reputation.

Be notorious.”

-Rumi

… … … … … … … …

There is a balance to the planet that us humans insist on trying to wrest awry. I still haven’t figured out why our natural inclination is to fight it so. I got taken up in the imbalance, the fears of the masses became my own, people incessantly needing my attention, time, responses. I forgot my own rhythm, my own carols and songs, I cut my hair, I succeeded my lands to their invading forces.

And then the pandemic came, stopping us in our tracks and making us see in 20/20, 2020…we retreated and tried to keep contact with our loved ones. Interactions were digital and not in person anymore. Our animal senses wilted, we didn’t evolve for millennia to be robots. My mind fought the new digital world, yet I needed the connection. I thought it was okay, as I’m a loner and humans exhaust me, even the ones I love the most. I’m a girl wrapped in barbed wire, don’t get too close or you’ll bleed.

The ice storm compiled the isolation…all of a sudden I was separated from the earth as well by inches of snow and ice, we all huddled in our homes and tried to stay warm, stay fed, stay connected. I wasn’t even one who suffered the greatest, my water stayed on, pipes didn’t burst, heat worked. When the ice and snow began to melt, though, so did my mind. The rivulets of water streaming off our roofs echoed the tears that wet my cheeks, and I couldn’t stop them, no matter how I tried.

I was terrified my son would see me like this. Mortified, encased, unable to escape my own racing thoughts, they swam in the air around me and blurred my vision, made me forget how to breathe properly, I saw the world through pinholes, walking into doors that shouldn’t be there.

Breakdowns are essential when you don’t listen to your body anymore. And here I thought I was. It took firmer hands to show me how wrong I’d been. Ones that wrapped around my lungs and heart, crushed them mercilessly, until I had to

Stop. And listen.

And so I listen.

For a loner, a perpetually alone child who grows into an adult with the same tendencies, I thought I was best on my own. I still firmly and stubbornly cling to that thought. But I’m listening. I do need my people. On my own terms, but I do need them. I need my sanctuary, my time to recover after being social, the right to say no without hurting feelings. Time to dance under the stars with fire spinning around me, losing myself in music and cricket song and pinpoint stars above. But then I need to be able to walk back to the circle of people when I’m ready.

I miss my tribe. My family. The ones who knew me best and loved me anyway. The ones who saw me clearly before I could. I won’t have those again, they are unreachable to a now apostate. I left one tribe, though, and made my own over the past ten years. A decade removed from thirty years of indoctrination and worship of a heartless god and the men who represent him isn’t enough.

This weekend past I went to Faire with my kiddo and his friend, and saw some of my tribe at long last. Some of the crowds and noise were a bit much for my still-healing mind but my heart was fuller than it has been in a year. My Leather brother met us there, as did my faireslave, and to be able to feel their love and acceptance healed me in ways I haven’t been able to identify or articulate yet. I’m not sure I’ll do them justice here either. In time the revealing and unfolding of my mind will be able to sing it into words, and I’ll dance my fingers to write it. Suffice to say, the trees, my chosen family, my son, they all surrounded me with a haze of love that helped me to see more clearly.

Philial love…it has been long said to be the strongest. That love without romantic attachment, that between family members, close friends, chosen family, that is the love that shall heal me. I know it now. With romantic attachment comes expectation, and I’m not ready for such yet, don’t know when I will be again. Those who were there with me through the past year have shown me acceptance without restriction, without expectation, they love me for me. ME. Not for what I can do for them. They wouldn’t change me if they could.

Striding between the spring green trees and lush fresh grasses newly sprung forth, hearing the laughter and shouts of clan members finally able to share faire again renewed me. Getting to hug my fairepeople as I passed and recognized them behind their masks made me wiggle with happiness. I was a puppy who had been kicked repeatedly for the past three and a half years, finally rescued by those who only wanted the best for me, and I was turned free into this bright emerald blooming world I barely recognized from before. All I had to do was find the yellow brick road and then I’d not be in Kansas anymore…

I felt I was learning to walk again. And here the strength had been inside the entire time, I just had to be reminded. My chosen family and my son were the canes that helped me hold myself up until I was strong enough to stand beside them on my own terms. And instead of resenting me for needing to do it my own way they applauded with my tentative steps.

I’m listening. I’m walking again.

Who knows who this woman is that I’m becoming…she’s been hiding too long.

From “Orlando” by Virginia Woolf, 1928

“The English disease, a love of Nature, was inborn in her, and here where Nature was so much larger and more powerful than in England, she fell into its hands as she had never done before…

She climbed the mountains; roamed the valleys; sat on the banks of the streams. She likened the hills to ramparts, and the plains to the flanks of kine…

Trees were withered hags, and sheep were grey boulders. Everything, in fact, was something else…she prayed that she might share the majesty of the hills, know the serenity of the plains…as all such believers do. Then, looking down, the red hyacinth, the purple iris wrought her to cry out in ecstasy at the goodness, the beauty of nature; raising her eyes again, she beheld the eagle soaring, and imagined its raptures and made them her own.

Returning home, she saluted each star, each peak, and each watch-fire as if they signaled to her alone…”

Poem 133: The Summer Day

Who made the world?
Who made the swan, and the black bear?
Who made the grasshopper?
This grasshopper, I mean—
the one who has flung herself out of the grass,
the one who is eating sugar out of my hand,
who is moving her jaws back and forth instead of up and down—
who is gazing around with her enormous and complicated eyes.
Now she lifts her pale forearms and thoroughly washes her face.
Now she snaps her wings open, and floats away.
I don’t know exactly what a prayer is.
I do know how to pay attention, how to fall down
into the grass, how to kneel down in the grass,
how to be idle and blessed, how to stroll through the fields,
which is what I have been doing all day.
Tell me, what else should I have done?
Doesn’t everything die at last, and too soon?


Tell me, what is it you plan to do
with your one wild and precious life?

—Mary Oliver, 1990

On Disobedience – Eric Fromme

“In order to disobey, one must have the courage to be alone, to err, and to sin. But courage is not enough…only if a person…has emerged as a fully developed individual and has thus acquired the capacity to think and feel for himself, only then can he have the capacity to say “no” to power, to disobey.

The capacity to doubt, to criticize, and to disobey may be all that stands between a future for mankind and the end of civilization.”

– Eric Fromme, “On Disobedience”

Thomas Merton, 1958

“At the corner of Fourth and Walnut, in the center of the shopping district, I was suddenly overwhelmed with the realization that I loved all those people, that they were mine and I theirs, that we could not be alien to one another even though we were strangers.

It was like walking from a dream of separateness, of spurious self-isolation in a special world, the world of renunciation and supposed holiness…if only everybody could realize this! But it cannot be explained.

There is no way of telling people that they are walking around shining like the sun.”

– Thomas Merton, 1958

Witch-Wife

She is neither pink nor pale,

And she never will be all mine;

She learned her hands in a fairy tale,

And her mouth on a valentine.

She has more hair than she needs;

In the sun ‘tis a woe to me!

And her voice is a string of colored beads,

Or steps leading into the sea.

She loves me all that she can,

And her ways to my ways resign;

But she was not made for any man,

And she never will be all mine.

– Edna St. Vincent Millay