Blankets of Stars, Six Soft-Eared Deer & The Homelands of the Heart

And….One Inch Photos

“We are told a story, and then we tell our own.  Each of us harbors a homeland. The stories that are rooted push themselves up like native grass and crack the sidewalk. —Terry Tempest Williams from  ‘Pieces of White Shell’

I stepped out of the tent in the middle of the night. We were camped in a high altitude meadow in the Andes Mountains.  We had been hiking for several days through a remote region of Peru on a pilgrimage carrying water, food, the wordless weight of loss and a container of ashes.  It was the night before we were going to climb and then descend through a high mountain pass that topped out at over 14,000 ft.  This was a pass used mostly by barrel chested locals but even these travelers would lay stone upon stone at the apex of the trail in gratitude for safe passage this time.  I was a bit nervous about the next day, some people get in trouble at such altitude.  Age or fitness level often had nothing to do with whether or not a person would be struck with altitude sickness, a serious condition that required oxygen or  help to breathe and to get back down the mountain as quickly as possible.  My husband, Robert, and our traveling companion, Thomas, were both asleep as I pulled on my down jacket and stepped into the cold autumn air beneath a star map comprised of the unfamiliar constellations of the southern hemisphere.  What I saw caught my breath, tears brimming and then coursing down my chilled face.  Hours from the nearest city lights and at such high altitude the sky becomes brilliantly clear.  It was like The Astronomer had poured out an endless number of stars, spilling across the sky like luminous slow moving liquid.  I’d never seen so many stars, never experienced what the ancients saw when they created stories to explain a mystery that appeared every night. Under that dome of heaven, beneath bolts and bolts of celestial fabric tossed like a twinkling blanket over the wide shoulders of the world, I thanked The Astronomer for dumping oceans of stars into the cosmos, and that I, small and brief as I am, was allowed to spend time beneath such wonder.  After a long time I crawled back into my sleeping bag, dozing and then dreaming with unforgettable, unimaginable images  now living in the back pocket of my eyes and the open book of my heart.

Recently I brought soup and bread to a friend who was isolating with a case of covid.  They had just moved into a new home, and as I carried my Mason Jars of butternut squash soup and love to her front door— yes we are always carrying something, water and food, grief and ashes, soup and bread and love —  her young son came running up and beckoned me to follow him to their new back yard.  Behind his family’s new home is a beautiful stand of winter woods with a small creek running through it.  His eyes were wide as he spilled out his breathless run-on narrative,  describing the six (yes six, he counted them twice) soft-eared deer browsing along the tree line that morning and the muddy raccoon tracks he and his father had followed the day before tracing its journey from the creek up and around their back porch, then obviously stopping to check out what was happening on the people’s side of the glass, before heading back to the creek.  I said, “This feels like such a magical place — like the very best best best kind of magic.” He nodded in said, with the kind of sincerity and unabashed awe that is the province and realm of only the very young, the very old and sometimes the occasional poet,  “Oh yes, Auntie Carrie, there is SO much magic…and it’s right here in my backyard.”

The Navajo believe that the sacred laws are written in the sky, and when the people stop listening to the wisdom of the stars, if they stop living in communion with the vast and faithful movements of a natural world (laws that measure time in eons instead of human life spans) then the people will suffer and the tribe come to an end.  There is wisdom in this story, as there are in many stories of the ancestors who understood more intimately our place among the land and stars and the slow unfurling of time.  There are powerful connecting stories that have sustained us for centuries, voices that have come to us in whispers or songs, stories we hear and then tell in our own voice, stories that are like the native grasses the come up and crack the sidewalk.  It is not too late for us, for the people to pay greater attention to the sacred laws written in the sky.  There are still threads connecting us to the ancestors who looked up into the dome of heaven and sensed a celestial order worthy of our attention and the stories born out of our individual and collective imagination.  There is still a blanket of stars (even when we cannot see them) wrapped around the world like the blue, pink and yellow flannel a mother wraps around her beloved infant child.  There are still threads that connect us to one another, if we dare to unzip the door and step out of the flimsy safety of our tents and look up and around.  There is so much that still makes sense, that is sacred and holy and utterly magical…waiting for us to notice….right here in our own back yards.

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Practice

1. Take a moment this morning to name something in your own back yard (or night sky, a tree or park, or kitchen, or neighborhood) that feels like a miracle, for you sense to be holy, sacred and made mostly or in part of magic.  Write down what you have named on a piece of paper.

2. Now fold your piece of paper and put it somewhere you will bump into it later like; your wallet, a shirt pocket, maybe in a recipe book you use often, your car cup holder or glasses case, anywhere you’ll find it when you’ve kind of forgotten its there.

3. Eventually, when you bump into your piece of paper, remember to nod or smile or say “amen” silently or “hallelujah” out loud or…… share it with another person.

Question

Is there a story that you heard in an old story or song that you remember and now tell in your own voice, framed by your own experience? Come back and tell us what it was like to “bump into” your naming of a miracle

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Tour Information

Exciting shows coming up this season. I’ll be taking most of the summer off to do some writing (and being), but I have some really fun events happening this season including; workshops, retreats, concerts, a double bill with my friend John McCutcheon, two string quartet performances, and the cosmic songwriting festival!  For more information visit my website tour page at www.carrienewcomer.com/tour

March 9, 2024 String Quartet Show in Indianapolis

There are only a handful of seats left for my March 9, 2024 Great Wild Mercy String Quartet show  at The Tarkington Theater in Indianapolis with Gary Walters, Allie Van Wassanear Summers and The Gathering of Spirits String Quartet!  I’m so delighted to present Gary Walter’s beautiful string arrangements.  Get your tickets right away if you’d like to join us!

One Inch Photos

Miracles in motion….woody Guthrie, OH Landscapes, oceans and birds and right in my own back yard.

From the Woody Guthrie Museum in Tulsa

On a walk in north east Ohio