SHELBY

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. WILD EARTH CHILD .

at Toketee Falls

with

SHELBY

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She scrambles with me,
bare feet over twigs and moss,
to step into the wilder places,
off the beaten path.

she sits beside the river,
toes dancing underwater,
her dress caught up in the eddies,
oblivious to the cold.

🍃👣🍃

This Goddess Portrait session was born as a dream upon the wing of our imaginings, under the blanket of the blue-black sky one night, when we laid side by side listening to music.

“I still daydream about that night… [when we dreamed up this idea]… laying under the stars with the music in the background. Smells of the cedar wood, and the warm feeling of closeness, on the blanket.”

~ Shelby

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THE THOUGHTS OF THE STONES

The stones have known that noise, unrelenting, for millennia. Carving the noise into their being; if they spoke, it would be of thunder. Each drop of water is a millisecond, is a grain of sand on the beach, is a star in the sky. The passing water beholds me, and I am almost immortal… but to the stones, I am a slight flutter in the breeze, and no more.

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REDWOODS

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TREE VISITING

REDWOODS NATIONAL PARK

4 June 2018

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A visit with a tree is much like a meeting with an old friend.

I knock on the door of the forest, singing a song of hello, greeting the plants and flowers, running my hands over bark, skin to skin, sometimes pausing under fallen branches - asking a silent permission to pass through this portal and join the continual dance of life, death and spirit in the realms of the dryads.

When I meet with a tree, I stop, and standing still, I put aside all thoughts of dinner and tomorrow’s plans…

and then I listen

… I listen for the whisper in the leaves above me, for the quiet wisdom held within the heart of this giant being. Slowly, ever-so-slowly, a voice speaks words through my fingers, a conversation made of feeling. It is a language that must be felt to be heard. Subtle, quiet, something intuitive and soft - these conversations could easily be missed if I did not give my time or attention.

Then, I will leave a gift : an offering, often a strand of tawny golden hair hung on a fern or nestled in the crook of a curled root. Sometimes I bring other gifts, tea leaves or a small rock from my gridding collection. I give thanks for all that has passed.

Sometimes stillness and silence can be even more adventurous than walking!

“They are not like trees, they are like spirits. The glens in which they grow are not like places, they are haunts - haunts of the centaurs or of the Gods.”

~ John Masefield

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I SPY:

a yellow banana slug

millipedes

a florescent sea anemone

barnacles and a green striped crab

a grazing deer

ripe orange salmonberries

rhododendron flowers

ferns of all kinds

white, star-like marah oreganus flowers

sorrel leaves

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NATURAL BRIDGE

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THE DOOR TO TIME

Millions of years of Earth time and Earth water create a natural arch, rib bone of Earth - red sandstone, pale limestone, dark basalt - by flaking small pieces of rock off a slender wall until a hole finally forms. Water, the agent of erosion, dissolves the rock and gathers in its small cracks and fractures, freezing and expanding, loosening rock grains sometimes too small to see … Sea arches occur in coastal bluffs, where the constant pounding of ocean waves wears a hole through the promontory wall … Arches are Earth clean to the bone. A person walking through one walks through Time.

~ Linda Hogan, Home Ground: Language for an American Landscape

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