solstice
these days my husband, daughter, and i celebrate an array of holy days - those passed down to us by our ancestors as well as those that we have come to honor simply because they resonate with our souls. the winter solstice is a treasured day of ours (and this winter solstice is an exceptional one: it's a full moon AND a lunar eclipse). we pause to marvel at the light and honor it’s return. i consider, if only for a day, how astonishing it is that we are all alive on this swiftly twirling planet. i take the chance to ponder my place in this universe and be grateful for every day and every night i have here.
this december my family gets to celebrate solstice as well as hannukah and christmas. i’m profoundly grateful to be a part of a great big family of folks who have wildly different belief systems and backgrounds, yet share the same love. how fortunate i am to be able to celebrate another year of light and dark, another year of life.
at the center
we just got back from a month in santa fe. every year we try to trade austin’s hottest days for the respite of santa fe’s summers. i spent most of my hours in our herndon heald studio, which sits on the santa fe river at the foot of the sangre de cristo mountains. it’s calm outside our studio – babbling water, rustling leaves, the crunch of the gravel beneath one’s feet.
but inside the studio, it’s buzzing - machines humming, folks talking, music playing, everyone moving about.
herndon heald summers are marathons. the world blurs as we race on. i am reminded of the chaos that is so often in the middle of apparent stillness, the restlessness that can reside under ostensible calm: the storm at the center of the eye at the center of the storm.
the monsoon storms were magnificent this summer. it was my daughter koruna’s first thunderstorms. she said ‘hi’ to the thunder. she said ‘hi’ to the rain. she has just turned one and says ‘hi’ to everything - to the raspberries in the yard, to the bird as he flies by, to the morning moon as she makes her way across the sky.
her greetings are not casual; they are invitations to engage. the ‘hi’s actually sound as if they might be a response more than an initiation. one morning on a hike i found myself addressing objects in this way and discovered that i like the subtle shift in viewpoint. saying ‘hi’ to the trees allowed me to feel a kinship. it required me to pause and to find the calm in me that recognizes the calm in them.
it seems fitting to greet the wind, the stars, the water in the land of the pueblo indians. but i wondered how the conversation would translate to my austin life. i now say ‘hi’ to my studio when i arrive in the morning. i greet the pile of dishes in the sink before i wash them and the beans as i pour them into the pot. it alters things for me. it alters me.
a scepter
i love sunflowers - especially dying sunflowers. they’ve sprouted up and are now fading in our vegetable garden – volunteers whose seeds dropped from the bird feeders. i went out to the garden the other morning to spend a few minutes with their wilting bodies and encountered a familiar face there. it was the face of a big papier mache head that ian was making the moment i first felt koruna moving inside of me. that face has been perched on a dead tree all the days and night since, hands outstretched, and is beautifully weathered now. like the sunflowers. when i look at that tattered man amidst the chorus of dying sunflowers I think of him as the deliverer of sermons in Ginsberg’s "Sunflower Sutra".
“So I grabbed the skeleton thick sunflower and stuck
it at my side like a scepter,
and deliver my sermon to my soul, and Jack’s soul
too, and anyone who’ll listen,
--We’re not our skin of grime, we’re not our dread
bleak, dusty, imageless locomotive, we’re all
beautiful golden sunflowers inside, we’re blessed
by our own seed and golden hairy naked
accomplishment bodies growing into mad black
formal sunflowers in the sunset, spied on by our
eyes under the shadow of the mad locomotive
riverbank sunset Frisco hill tincan evening
sitdown vision.”
koruna just turned one on father’s day. the speed of her first year astonishes me though i reckon it feels a lifetime to her. some days i feel aged and am glad to count as kin those beautiful weathered things out in the garden.
mamas day
last mothers day, koruna was sitting breech in my belly, stretching my body, my heart, and my imagination.
for months we knew koruna was breech. she tucked her head up under my ribcage and wouldn’t budge. I chose to think of it as her desire to be near my heart and that helped (a very little bit) with my frustration. I had long envisioned koruna’s natural birth and her position seemed to alter that vision completely. our midwives would not deliver a breech baby to a first-time mother and no doctor in austin would do it either. we researched the risks and truly believed that a natural birth was still our best option.
ian and I did everything we could think of to change koruna’s position. I elevated my hips for 20 minutes 3 times a day. I did yoga, got regular chiropractic care (the webster technique for turning babies), acupuncture, moxa, mayan abdominal massage. I went swimming at barton springs almost every day, turning flips and diving deep under water. ian laid his head on my pelvis and sang to koruna, flashed lights at her, read books to her. we went in for 3 external versions (a procedure in which a doctor uses what seems like all of his or her might to turn the baby manually). and koruna didn’t move. she was certain that she was where she wanted to be.
and so I tried to trust the unfathomable wisdom of my child and to find the poetry in surrender. a week and a half before koruna was born, we were ecstatic to find in denton, texas an extraordinary doctor schooled in the art of breech birth. koruna’s entry into this world was remarkable. and there hasn’t been a dull moment since.
last mothers day I knew I had a daughter. this mothers day I know she is koruna.
