Gather Medicine

The final year of my eighth decade has begun. It was an especially warm milestone spent in a couple of commemorative dinners, in person, and also via a variety of communications including a Skype from Keoni complete with a complicated, exuberant violin rendition of Happy Birthday, and even one voice mail birthday greeting from my pharmacy—a local small business. There is a great deal for which I am thankful and these milestone memories are now a cherished part of it.

Over in Missouri, young Niece Lexie was celebrating her second birthday...

Pat and I took walks at a couple of the local parks and I could appreciate again the beautiful lands set aside here for the citizens to enjoy...

This is Chestnut Park. We noticed the trees are in rows--Chestnut trees--so once it was an orchard.

There is a small creek running through Godshall Park.

Pat and Marge went to Washington, D.C., to attend an award gala where one of Marge's colleague's received a lifetime achievement award for her work in the field of mental health and addiction recovery. There is no doubt where they are in these texted pix...

Gala outfits. Ready to hobnob with the DC glitterati.

One of the speakers was Patrick Kennedy.

The Farm Report:   

Aidan and I had a nice walk together and tasted a few raspberries along the way...

A stiff breeze was flipping the raspberry leaves.

There were plenty of goat pastoral scenes...

...and horse. Austin with her friends.

Rosie is all grown up.

The boys' hangout.

Neighbor Joe's barn top...

Toby hangs out on the porch in the afternoons...

Later in the afternoon, he was spotted disappearing into the tall pasture grass on another hunt.

The parlor chicks doubled in size...

Pin feathers are growing.

The chicks are the friendliest in Wendy's experience and don't mind being handled at all. They run toward knocking on their big plastic box. Aidan's clicking here replicates what mother hens and even roosters do when they find a morsel for a chick to eat...

Aidan is going for the summer soccer team along with cello work at Dali Quartet's ARCONET, and piano lessons he's taking with Seth (yes, that one of the BLTs). Aidan loves his handsome, new soccer shoes...

Sandy sent over a snap of her mouse drawing...

And, Jeanenne is watercoloring again...

Sandy and Jeanenne got together for a drawing session. Yay! Wish I was at that big kitchen island at Jeanenne's, too.

Over in Wyoming, Susie is at the festival she attends yearly and this time our nieces Kelly and Katie are with her.

Right here in Marge's garden...

I've been prowling the household goods shelves locally...

Additions to the future apartment. (The crochet is the topper on my bed that I made during my first three PA years.)

Keoni continues to include hiking up mountains during his Music Institute summer days in Aspen, Colorado, including a stop-off here...

Other hikes looked like this...

One of Keoni's friends snapped this one. Keoni is closest to the camera.

***

Five years ago this week, Toby, my pony Subaru, and I crossed much of North America to dwell here in Pennsylvania. A defining adventure in my life and certainly in Toby's. The changes in the world these five years since, are astounding.

There is more than a little going on in the world. Great societal structures from neighborhoods to whole continents, to the seven seas, in the air we breathe, day-by-day, minute-by-minute, hurtle from familiar pathways into mapless unknowns. Every new step taken challenges known with unknown.

But here's the thing...we can't go back. Summer won't become Spring again.

Scary is one way of looking at it. A little honest fear isn't a bad thing. It keeps us alert and aware. And awareness has another side--when we take new steps we find out where we are going. At first, we don't know and it's scary; then, after a step or two we start finding out. There's the adventure.

And, we don't have to walk alone. If we don't dig a foxhole and hunker down in it, or seal ourselves away behind walls, or load ourselves up with too much in our backpacks, we can trust ourselves, our families, our friends, our neighbors to find a common path together. We'll bring multiple wisdoms of what has already worked well; then, take action for good, for justice, respect for others and our beautiful Planet Earth, for compassion and equality for every human, and do it out of love. We can trust our innate abilities to learn and to create new solutions that will deal with whatever new need or problem we encounter. Some ways will work, and some not so much. We figure it out--together. It works like that.

And that's work. A lot of work. The adventure is worth it. In my seventies, Toby and I found a new life in a different part of the continent. We loved and embraced the old life and love and embrace the new one here in Pennsylvania. There were occasional, thumb-sized cockroaches for Toby to catch back in the Tucson condo days and here he learned how to hunt barn rats (and much else).

The ever-faster changes across our land and our good Planet Earth are enormous and all the dust hasn't even been kicked up yet; much less, begun to settle. We don't all look alike, we babble in different languages and evoke different cultures, but I'll guarantee that we are all in this together.

Yes, together. In isolation I would have had only my own resources, my own set of standards. Toby would have had to transition to a feral cat or been pawned off to a kitty rescue had there not been the farm shelters and steady supplies of cat food for the days he had no catch. My world would have become narrower and narrower without the many family, friends, and others who extended their hands to me and I to them, as best we could.

The good Earth is still spinning on her path around the sun in our familiar galaxy in a Universe incomprehensibly vast; yet, we are part of it. All of us.

Much lies ahead. I used to go to a mountain and sit awhile to contemplate and wonder about life, and though no profound revelations ever came, I returned to the valley healed inside, strengthened, and ready for what lay ahead.

Go to your mountain. Gather medicine.