I loved this challenge.

To sit with an image for ten minutes is a gift to one’s self.

Of course, as an artist, I sit with an image for hours upon hours, and I have some theories about how that deep attention can connect us to deeper realms of consciousness.

So today I am inviting you to look at this artwork for ten minutes. Unlike the New York Times, I’m going to provide some audio to go along with it! So sit back and enjoy!

Or, you can do the usual and read the accompanying essay. It’s posted below.

The Energy Fields of Dreams

Bats carry out our projections of a “reverse” order that forces our perspective into the nocturnal, the underworld, and the equivalent cavernous depths of psyche. The twilight emergence of bats in the thousands or millions to forage embodies for us the concealed, primordial forces of the netherworld breaking out in expansive liberation.

Alchemy sometimes depicted the mercurial spirit of the unconscious with bat wings. It is a way of conveying not only the psyche’s darkness, mystery and ambivalence, but also its provision and unforeseen agency, the way it can lead consciousness into spheres requiring a different kind of orientation and in which can be found the fructifying unconventionality of nature.

-- from The Dictionary of Symbols

The Dream

On the night of a penumbral eclipse (when the Earth passes through the outer shadow of the Moon, resulting in a subtle change in light), I woke with a start. The light of the Moon felt strange, stranger than I could visually account for. In my half-asleep state, I stumbled from my bedroom out onto the deck, nearly tripped over a chair and, because my deck was in the process of being redone and had no railings, became certain I was going to kill myself. So I went back to bed, confused by the experience of the moonlight feeling strange but not observably different.

And then I had this dream.

I had journeyed to Mountain Gardens, a local herb garden and apothecary and library, every bit a small piece of paradise, created by the wizard Joe Hollis. In waking life he had passed away many months before, but in the dream he was very much alive. I sat with him on the deck that overlooked his magical gardens.

In my dream it was also a penumbral eclipse, and the sky had turned a vivid pink. It was an enchanted summer night. The chorus of night creatures in the dark belly of the forest carried an undercurrent of ecstasy, as if Beethoven’s Ninth Symphony had been translated into the buzz and chirp and rattle of the gathered beings of the forest. We gazed up at the wonder of the pink sky, and soaked it all in.

And then an immense bat—massive, archetypal—soared over us. We were awestruck by its size, thrilled with incredulous wonder, like how you might feel if out of the blue an American Mastodon strolled through your backyard. Without speaking we understood immediately that we had received a gift. The Great Bat had shown himself to us.

The moment passed. The pink faded to blue. Joe stood up and, turning to me said in his matter-of-a-fact way, “A special night.” And off he went to bed.

♦︎

Nearly a year after this dream, during a bout with covid, I watched the film Paradise, about Joe’s life and death. In his life he built Mountain Gardens and lived his philosophy of Paradise Gardening, Every year a new crop of young people would spend the growing season learning from him and helping tend the gardens. His impact upon the people who knew him, even for a short time, cannot be underestimated. He was a giant of a man, a wizard, yet humble and kind.

In one of the final scenes of the film, a close friend of his says, “…I saw what that meant, when someone spends like decades accumulating everything that there is to know about some particular subject, like bats.”

I must say, for the sake of clarity, that I had no idea that Joe Hollis had an interest in bats. So when I heard this my eyes grew wide.

Dream magic was afoot.

♦︎

Shortly after watching this film I had another dream. I went again to Mountain Gardens, to visit Joe as he was preparing to die. He was in a rocking chair, surrounded by books and herbs and young people, as he was throughout his life

I sat next to him and said, “I have to tell you about a dream I had. But I guess I’m time looping, because I had this dream after you died.” (For the record, this was the first time, dreaming or otherwise, that I’d used the phrase time looping.)

“Oh, time looping,” he said. “I love time looping.”

So then, in my dream, I tell him my great bat dream, and we laugh together over his understated remark at the end: “a special night.”

And then I got up to go, touching him lightly on the shoulder, not wanting to take up any more of his precious time.

I wasn’t close to Joe, but certainly I’ve been inspired by him, and what he created with his life, as anyone who knew him was. But for some reason unknown to me, in the Otherworld of dreams, a door opened and Joe was there. Together we witnessed something from deep in the Otherworld––a Great Bat. And then, as if by mystery’s own insistence, I dream again of going back and telling him of this dream.

♦︎

Consider for a moment that this constellation of dreams is not mine. That no dream, in and of itself, belongs solely to the dreamer. It isn’t a thing to be possessed, recorded, and then forgotten, but an aspect of the world, as real as the ocean, as necessary to life as rain.

Perhaps you balk at this metaphor, of dreams as rain, but consider how all living things sleep. Every living being must rest. Dreams flow from the river of consciousness that is the prima materia of the living world. It is likely that every conscious being, which is the entirety of the living world, swims in this river of consciousness with every rest period.

We are all swimming in it. What might happen if we reached out, and touched one another in the dark waters of the night?

Put another way: everything has its own inner world, a dreaming space, and all of these inner worlds are as connected as the living world is connected in the outer world.

It’s the thing I keep stumbling over, the wild truth that everything is endowed with consciousness. This elderberry tree growing outside my window has her own inner world, her own threshold into the mystery, and from this threshold she arises, and embodies herself in this world. I can reach out to touch her blossoms with my fingertips, but I can also reach out and touch her with my own consciousness, and I find her there, pleased and warm, with no other message than keep going.

It is difficult some days for me to remember that my work matters when faced with the fascist descent of my country. But we need thresholds to the otherworld now more than ever. We need to feel the spiritual forces that are the weavers of this realm, we need to know they have not abandoned us. We need to drink from the deep well of livingness that is ever-available, and that is eager to find joyful and determined expression in the experience of life.

A dream is a field of energy that we can enter into, if we can sink into our capacity to imagine and feel. Like creative work, sharing dreams nourishes our collective inner world. We need images of wonder and mystery to support our psyches. We need shadow imagery to shake us loose of our illusions.

This pastel is a visual representation of an energy field. Every piece of art is. The real question is how clear was the intent of the artist in creating the work. Did they do any ceremony to strengthen its accompanying energy field? And then, how deeply can the viewer drop into it, and participate in it?

So here is a scene, a dreamscape, and within it an energy field. It points to a living realm underneath ours, that ripples with consciousness, with wonders upon wonders (and, truth be told, terrors upon terrors). And in this realm there is a Great Bat, a numinous being, rare and omniscient. He has shown himself to us.

I invite you to cross the threshold. Step into the wild summer night, the sky pink and vibrant and strange. Hear the swell of insects in the shadows of trees that tower over you. Feel the thunder of awe in your bones when the Great Bat appears overhead, immense and ancient. To see him is to lose your breath for a moment.

He is a guardian of the Otherworld. He senses the world in a way that is invisible to us, he knows the song of the earth. His home is a cave, utterly secret, vast and deep in the heart of the earth. No human has ever entered it, nor will they. To even consider such a thing is a trespass upon the sovereignty of the numinous. No human consciousness could survive the repercussions of such a trespass.

His appearance is like a vision of a god, a divine being. He is gifting you with his presence, he is allowing you to behold him, to remind you, this world is more than you realize, this world is endowed with a livingness beyond your wildest dreams. This world is indeed, a paradise garden, and you are a part of it, we are all a part of it, even in the failings of our humanity, even in our apocalyptic enforcement of the patriarchal paradigm. The garden of Earth has not forgotten or cut herself off from the ocean of spiritual forces that weave this world from the warp and weft of consciousness. Walk in that garden. Feel the ocean of spirit that holds us. All the books ever written cannot begin to impart its greatness. It is incomprehensible. But without question we can feel its presence, for the living world is woven from it, we are woven from it, and it calls us back into itself when we dream, and when we die.

The sky fades from lustrous pink to a normal blue-tinged gray. The moon sets, as dawn approaches. A normal day will unfold, with grocery lists, and horrific headlines, with small joys and collective grief. And underneath it all, there is a river, sparkling with consciousness. Great beings rise up from its depths, and swing down from the stars, and they bless the water.

♦︎♦︎♦︎

Thanks again for engaging with my work. Let’s never stop nourishing the world in whatever ways feel the most meaningful.

warmly,

Stephanie

Share

Subscribe now

Dear Readers,

First! Because this piece is a journey into our collective inner world, I highly recommend listening rather than reading it. If you want to read the introduction and listen to the rest, the journey starts at 4:06. If you listen, there are notes at the bottom of this page that may be of interest.

Thank you for being here, for listening, and engaging with my work.

The piece I’m about to share is a little different. I had the initiating vision for it just this Monday, June 30th, and in an effort to complete it as an offering to the soul of my country I pushed to finish it by July 4th, which is the day that I’m recording this.

I love my country, this land, her many peoples, and the spirit of freedom that is in her soil. But this Independence Day is filled with grief. After writing this I felt that grief alchemize into determination and courage. I hope it does that for you, too.

And thanks again for being here.

Stephanie

I have this stone, a beautiful little stone, speckled and smooth from the shores of Lake Superior. I made a pastel of it many years ago, as an illustration for a post I had written. But it charmed me and I’ve since kept it tucked away in a box with other small treasures. In this box I also keep my passport. Recently I went to retrieve said passport and the sight of the stone gave me a soft shock of awareness, as if the stone was greeting me.

This little jolt of recognition, this small reverie, is just one example of many other experiences, some extraordinary, where my sustained creative attention has created a threshold in my consciousness through which other beings can enter. Once made, that threshold never ceases to exist. It does not close. It is a door that is always open.

Writing about these peripheral experiences for the rational mind feels like trapping something as wild and fragile as a butterfly, so that I can study it. Which is kind of a shitty thing to do to a butterfly, and also to yourself. So, to introduce what comes next, I’ll just say it’s an experiment, and one that does not involve caging butterflies.

Also, as I’m writing this Congress has just passed a bill that is a betrayal of Americans and a obscene rejection of our shared humanity. This experiment is an affirmation of our shared humanity. You could call it a guided visualization, but I think of it more as a journey into our collective inner world. It unfolded as I wrote it, active imagination style. I didn’t plan it out. We could say then that it is an engagement with the unconscious.

So, if you can, get in a quiet place where you can sink into this experience.

And above all, trust your imagination. It is your doorway into the soul of the world.

It is night in Washington DC, but it’s a strange night. It is utterly dark, and still. There is no traffic, no airplanes, no human-made noise whatsoever. There are no lights, only the skim of light from the stars.

You are standing at the East front of the US Capitol building, the immense stairs rising up in front of you. And when you look around, you see that you are not alone. A vast crowd of people stands with you, in profound silence. You feel a collective charge of grief, deep and pervasive, and an undercurrent of bone-deep determination.

High up on the steps, the one massive bronze door to the Capitol building opens. Two women walk out, holding candles. They stand on either side of the door. Then two more women emerge from the door. In their hands they hold large white conch shells. With solemn grace they lift the shells to their lips. A triumphant, calm, even tone moves out over the crowd, as if the Ocean herself had made the sound, a great, soft, holy sound that reverberates in your bones. It breaks something apart in your psyche; and cleanses you of despair.

People begin climbing the steps, slow and stately, and you do the same. The door is massive and foreboding. It is dark inside. The women with the candles stare straight ahead. You step through the door.

The line of people turns to the right, and goes through a small, nearly hidden door, a door no one would have ever noticed. Beyond it is a passageway lit with the soft glow of candlelight. When you enter, you see there a staircase going down. At the landing another flight of stairs, and another. The gentle shuffling of feet on the marble steps is all that you hear as you follow the line of people and make your way down.

The deeper you go, the rougher the walls and steps become, until the walls are that of a cave, the steps cut from rock. The passage feels alive, and breathing. You sense that it is aware of the procession within it, and that it is allowing it. Yu are deep, deep within the Earth, you are not afraid. You know that you are being guided.

The stairs end and you walk into a vast cavern lit with candles. The cavern is so vast that the candlelight does not illuminate the whole ceiling; at the apex it is pure darkness. You know this cavern is a holy place, deep underneath the Capitol building, a cathedral of the Underworld, a place so holy, so endowed with the numinous that you are can do nothing but surrender to it.

At your feet is a long dark pool of water. Water droplets fall from the ceiling of the cavern into the pool. You feel each drop is endowed with a pure emotion—courage, sorrow, love, fear, joy––and the sound of each drop falling into the pool carries that emotion into your body. The sound is your own humanity sung back to you by the Earth.

The line of people splits organically to walk along both sides of the pool. You walk along the edge, gazing into its depths. You can see beyond the soft ripples into the darkness, and as you gaze deeply your vision shifts. There is something in the water.

It’s as if the pool is all that stands between your world now and another realm, where all the men and women who have sacrificed much for their land have gathered, to meet you here. They are not just visions. You can feel them, their presence, their power, their sacrifice: Martin Luther King, Rosa Parks, Black Elk, Harriet Tubman, soldiers from the great wars, nameless to you, but whose sacrifices are evident in their eyes. You feel them all the same, their unwavering conviction, their absolute dedication. As you walk further you go further back in time, until at the end, there are only the great indigenous peoples of this land.

They are all transmitting their energy to you. They are reminding your body of the great truths. That this is a land of freedom, that the land herself demands freedom, demands equality, demand reciprocity, demands justice. You feel how you are one with the land, and realize that you are deep within her now, and that she is transforming you.

And then at the end of the pool, there is an immense table heaped with conch shells. You take one in your hands and move to make space for all the other people who are still entering the room. You hold the conch shell in your hand, feel its heaviness, its rough knobby exterior, and the smooth pearly interior.

Without warning or introduction, someone blows their horn, the sound once again shifts the energy of the people. Another horn joins. You put the conch shell to your lips, and blow. Your body knows exactly how to do it, your breath even and strong, pushing into the conch shell, and it resounds with your breath, as horn after horn joins, until the whole cavern is echoing with a great and mighty sound, a beautiful thunder that fills the Underworld, a song from the ocean, from your body, from the depths of your lungs and the lungs of all who are with you, a sound so immense that the surface of the pool dances, a sound so great, so strong, so numinous, that it rises up the stone walls of the earth, through the realms, into the Crypt of the capitol, into the Rotunda, further and further the sound travels, the sound that opens the gates, the sound that destroys falsehoods, the sound that rises from the land, from the people, the sound of freedom, the sound that transforms the world, rising up from the depths, tearing down the old world, the deceit, the greed, the sound of freedom, born from your own body, born from the depths of the land, heralding the way for the new day that is coming.

The ceremony is over. You place your shell on the table, and move up the staircase, flight by flight, back the way you came. But as you near the top, you see another door. It is slightly ajar, and a soft light comes from the space. You push against the door and walk through.

Now stay here. Let the room you’ve entered take shape before you. Wait and see if there is some movement— something or someone here—waiting for you. Let the experience unfold softly, follow its lead. Trust your own imagination.

Share

A few notes

After I wrote the first draft of this piece, which I would call an active imagination exercise (Carl Jung’s term), I went to the internet to get some clarity on the architecture of the US Capitol building. I had a pretty clear image in my mind of the front of the Capitol building but I wasn’t sure which direction it faced. A little zip on google maps and I knew it was not the west face that I was envisioning, but the east face. What I learned is that there is only one door on the East face. It is a massive bronze door known as the Columbus Door, and it is used only by the President on official business. It is known as “the door that never opens.”

Also, this little stone! Many years ago I wrote this poem that is very much along the lines of this post, an inner journey, which I recorded and posted on my website. I made the stone portrait for that post, and like I said, it really did charm me. This little stone reminds me very much of the thunderous presence I felt when I first stood on the shores of Lake Superior. Something happened to me there that I may never be able to articulate. I think the stone feels the same way.

My piece The Age of Repair Is Beginning and the one that followed it, The Light That Runs Through Everything, about my experience of Helene, explore the extraordinary experiences cultivated by creative attention.

Thanks again for reading. Please subscribe, comment, share if you can. I’m just a little colorful fish in a big ocean. 🐠

Subscribe now

Image Description: A valiant Fox Queen stands over the body of a bald eagle, while her three kits, one injured, eagerly nurse. A dead eagle is sprawled upon earth that grows only a few bunches of dried grass, and two ears of maize rot in the foreground. Underneath the body of the eagle are spots of blood, and from these clover grows. Coming through a dry cornfield and up the hill to join the Fox Queen is a band of eager foxes, and on the horizon, running under bare trees, are even more foxes. They are converging, along with a storm of crows, upon a forested hill where an eagles’ nest is surrounded by trees of green and clouds of polluted air.

✿ Here is a recording of my reading this essay ✿

The bare-breasted warrior woman, none other than Liberty herself, in Eugene Delacroix’s Liberty Leading the People has always struck me as a powerful, subversive rendering of the female form. Here is a woman who has roused the men around her, not to sexual excitement, but to battle, for Her. She strides over corpses, flag uplifted, and men armed to the teeth follow her without reserve. Perhaps most impressive to my younger self, she is entirely unconcerned that her clothes are falling off.

In France she is known as Marianne, the goddess of liberty, and she symbolizes the French Republic and the values for which it stands––liberty, equality, and fraternity. Her army is a melange of bourgeoisie, workers, and students, and the flag is uplifted so high that even the canvas can’t contain it. In the background a second flag waves from the towers of the Notre Dame, the spiritual heart of France. This massive painting––it’s over 11 feet wide–depicts the July Revolution of 1830, and Delacroix finished it autumn of that same year. Which means that Delacroix was on fire in the studio.

French government officials bought the painting from Delacroix for 3000 francs. They thought it would be hung in the throne room of the Palais du Luxembourg, as a reminder to “Citizen King” Louis-Philippe of how, exactly, he had come to power. Instead it hung in the palace’s gallery for only a few months, after which it was removed. Too inflammatory, the king said, no doubt reminding government officials that a king is still a king.

Two years later the government returned the piece to the care of its maker, after which it generally remained hidden away, in the attic of Delacroix’s aunt, until it was acquired by the Louvre in 1874.

For our bicentennial celebrations, France gifted the United States with the rare opportunity to display the painting, along with 148 other works, underscoring the unique relationship between France and the United States. We are nations who share the ideals of liberty, equality, and fraternity, and France has been generous with repeated gifts of Marianne, as a symbol of Liberty, to the United States.

✦

In my rendering of Liberty Leading Her People, there is no bare-breasted warrior woman, no flag, no human beings at all. But a sacrifice is made. A bald eagle is splayed out upon the ground, his feathers disrupted, his lifeless eye gazing upward. No longer does he scan the broad horizon from the clouds.

There is something hard about killing a national symbol in a work of art. As I worked I wondered, Is this too inflammatory?

Symbols are powerful things; they reach deep into our psyches. They are more than just an equation of meaning–more than just Marianne equals liberty, equality, and fraternity, or bald eagle equals the freedom and vision of the United States. A symbol is a reservoir for potent, activating energy, something akin to livingness, and when it is resides in the human imagination on a collective scale, well, that is no small thing.

But artists are in conversation with the Otherworld, and I felt the symbol was asking for its sacrifice. The energy it holds has, in very real ways, died in this world. The eagle stands for a nation that is now careening away from its foundational principles with unmitigated speed. That death needs to be accounted for, so that the symbol can be restored to proper livingness.

For Delacroix, the Notre Dame stands in the background as the spiritual heart of France. My rendering is decidedly American, and I place the spiritual heart firmly in the green and living world. Still, that green world is obscured by clouds of polluted smoke. Foxes and crows rush forward through a dry, fruitless plain and an empty forest, to the fallen eagle, and to the eagles’ nest that crowns the forested hill. There is an inequality that must be balanced.

Just as the air is polluted, the soil is barren. Corn rots in the foreground and little grows there but wisps of grass. But the blood of the fallen eagle has nourished the soil––enriching clover grows where blood has been spilled.

My Liberty (I call her the Fox Queen) is nursing three kits, and one of them is injured. His blood, too, falls to the ground. And why foxes? Why crows? These are tricksters of great renown. They move between worlds and bring us what we need most, but that is invisible to us. Like dreams, they serve the greater whole, and not the surface ego.

✦

Indigenous American writers and historians have long held that it was their cultures, with their emphasis on freedom, equality, and the balance of power, that provided the revolutionary ideas of the Constitution. In The Dawn of Everything, David Graebor and David Wengrow argue that, beyond the Constitution, it was exposure to Indigenous American’s critique of European cultures that challenged European thinking about how a society could be organized. The idea that of equality was fixed within natural law became the hot topic of books and discourse throughout the continent during the Enlightenment.

I first read about this Indigenous American perspective decades ago in Marilou Awiakta’s book Selu, Seeking the Corn Mother’s Wisdom. Awiakta shows us how the principles for democracy and reciprocity are encoded in the Cherokee’s relationship with corn, and in corn itself.

The idea that a relationship with a plant could be the foundation for a culture blew my mind open. Did the long and interwoven relationship, both material and spiritual, between humans and a plant create, at least in part, the organization of cultures that would later inspire the peoples of another lineage?

It could be argued, then, that Marianne is a European symbol whose roots are actually in America, and even more specifically, in the roots of a plant that has been in relationship with human beings for 8000 years. More than just a plant, she is known as Selu, Grandmother of many peoples.

In the making of this piece I prayed, may the true light of Marianne shine in the harbor of New York harbor again, as a beacon for freedom and justice for all who come to our shores.May the wisdom of the Corn Mother bring us back to the living world, to an ethos of wisdom and reciprocity.

It is our only way forward.

✦

Thanks so much for reading or listening! I would love to know your thoughts on the essay and the pastel.

Liberty Leading Her People is part of my Dreaming Animals exhibition, and I’m excited to share with you more pieces from this body of work. There’s a bat, a wolf, a horse, several owls, several deer, and even an American Mastadon. Please subscribe if you haven’t already!

Subscribe now

Next up—help me decide which story (and art) to share next. I’m rather inclined towards The Great Bat, because that dream was of a summer night, and the nights are just spectacular in June. But, come to think of it, the White Wolf Queen was a summer dream, too, and on the shores of Lake Superior. Cast your vote! And until then, may your dreams be filled with beautiful, wise animals. 🦢

In the empty forest of winter, two Cooper’s Hawks approach a holly tree. The tree is lit by a ribbon of light that has unspooled from a weak winter Sun. The ribbon wraps around the trunk, about to touch the earth. Underneath the leaf litter a red-bellied snake, a ribbon of darkness, awakens.

Several years ago I dreamt I was standing in a field. Above me two hawks were tangled in battle. From them a long ribbon fell to the earth. I reached up to pull on the ribbon, but suddenly there was an older woman standing near me. Don’t pull it, she warned, but I did pull it, and a part of a hawk’s wing dropped to my feet.

A few weeks later, I am walking on my little path, and there, at my feet, amidst the prickly leaves of a holly tree, is the fragment of a Cooper’s Hawk wing.

In my dreamwork practice I keep running into these seams of mystery, where dreaming gets tangled up with waking life. Something is happening, but what does it all mean? My logical, waking mind wants to untangle the dream and apply it to waking life, like a recipe delivered from the unconscious to the kitchen of the psyche. Let’s cook something up! But the dream refuses to be pinned down; slippery as a salamander it eludes my grasp.

I’m beginning to believe, from my own experience, that dreaming, as well as certain creative states, belong to different states of consciousness altogether, and in these states, the world is not at all what we have determined it to be. When we dwell in these different states of consciousness we likewise dwell in different layers of reality.

So what does all this dreamwork all mean? I don’t know, and maybe I don’t need to know. But that doesn’t mean this work is without meaning. Quite the opposite, it has immense impact, value, and resonance in my life. There are other spheres of reality at work here, and I am but a humble explorer, cooking things up in my creative laboratory, filled with wonder and covered in pastel dust, and absolutely guided by unseen forces.

For the past four months I have been working like a madwoman to bring forth what I feel are the most potent artworks of my career. I am so excited to share them with you! If you are in Western North Carolina, you can see my exhibition from April 19-May 24th at the Owen Gallery in Spruce Pine, NC. The Opening Reception is Friday, May 2, from 5-7 pm and I would love to see you there! If you are elsewhere, I will be sharing this body of work here on Substack over the coming weeks.

Thanks for reading! And may the seams of mystery spill their gold into our lives!✨

Stephanie

Subscribe now

Dear Readers,

First, thank you. Since Helene tore through my life you have been kind, generous, and patient. Many of you have subscribed, sent messages, bought cards, and coffees, and all of it really, really helped.

The essay that follows is long, and once I started writing it, shortly after Helene, I knew that it would also take a long time to really be in a place where I could finish it. Now that it’s done, the finishing feels like a new beginning, so I’m guessing that the timing is right.

I really wanted to record my reading this essay, to add my voice to it, and I may still do that, but truth be told, there is much of this essay that I cannot get through without my voice breaking, and tears flowing.

I am in the last month of preparation for my art show Dreaming Animals, of which the pastel above is a part. I will be sharing more of the artwork from that show in the coming months.

With appreciation,
Stephanie

1
First Hand Accounts

Thursday evening, September 26, 2024

It’s 8pm. I’m sitting at the kitchen counter, laptop in front of me, scrounging the internet for more information about the Great Flood of 1916, anything that might tell us what to expect. Around here, it’s the flood of ‘77 that everyone remembers. Now, apparently, we’ve skipped over that one for an even older flood. “Worst storm in recorded history,” another forecast warns. Rain, our constant companion for days, has grown to a loud static on our metal roof. More is on the way. A lot more. My husband sits across from me. More than anything, we are afraid for our daughter, with whom I share my studio. I work there, she lives there.

It’s an old Appalachian cottage, six miles down the road from our house, built in 1909, right on the banks of Brown’s creek. When I look out its windows I see the clear and laughing waters of that creek, and I see a great mountain: Celo Knob, the most northern of the seven peaks of the Black Mountains. She looms large on the horizon, an inky blue giantess gathering clouds. Her eastern face is the watershed of Brown’s Creek.

Brown’s Creek is not laughing now. When I left the studio at 7 pm it was roaring. I’d spent the day there, rolling up rugs and trying to imagine what might happen if that creek, doubled, tripled, quadrupled in size. In truth, I couldn’t imagine what the water would do. Nobody can. Scientists makes neat maps, but those maps don’t prepare you for the actual consequences.

As night closes the curtains of the day, and rain threatens to close the roads, I finally discover this first hand account of the Great Flood of 1916:

“The horrors of that night cannot be told. The rain fell in such solid masses that one seemed to be under a waterfall and it not only undermined houses but actually tore them to pieces. The noise of the rain was like continuous thunder, added to the roar of the river and the shock of the mountain sides literally crashing into the valleys. It was in fact a cataclysm, such as these mountains have probably not experienced in recent geological periods. The forces of nature setting themselves to a gigantic movement simply paralyzed anything that man could do and literally stunned imagination. The people who went through that awful night can never forget the shock of it.

— Dr. Lucious Morse at Chimney Rock, 1916

I close my computer and call my daughter. We’d talked about different scenarios, checked in with neighbors, made plans. But the phrase “stunned imagination” sticks . All the dire warnings have not had the same impact as this first-hand account from 108 years ago.

There is little time. Soon Middle Creek will go over the road to our home—this happens with lesser storms, and when that happens we will not be able to get out. My son, who lives next door, leaves in his truck to get my daughter. She puts her cats in pillow cases and they come here, to higher ground.

2
Stunned Imagination

Friday morning, September 27, 2024

From my journal:

It’s 9 am. The power is out and cell service also. So there’s no way to check on anything. It’s raining with untold ferocity. I think oh it can’t get more than this, and then it does. And then again. Thankfully the threats of wind have not played out —if that were the case trees would be down everywhere. I suppose we are in the thick of it. They said to expect the worst from 6 am to noon. It certainly became more pronounced around 6. I’d woken up at 5, and noticed the power was out. I checked my phone for information but there weren’t any posts from this morning.

From my bedroom I can see the little drain-seep that curls around the house. Usually it is just a trickle, but now it is a furious stream of water maybe four feet wide. I’m so glad my daughter came here last night—there’s no phone, no power, no access—we wouldn’t have known what was going on with her and that would have been so scary.

Noon. We all went out very shortly after the peak. Water was rushing over the driveway where our little culvert is, and then churning a massive hole on the other side. The driveway is badly damaged, but as we walked down we were stunned to see that the road was completely covered in water. The water was nearly up to our neighbor’s porch, and a sea stretched before us, the river swollen past anything I could have ever imagined. We walked through the water, which came to our knees, where the road lifts a little bit. From there we could see that Rock creek had swollen so much as to overtake the road. The asphalt, a fresh layer put down just a few weeks ago, was tearing way in chunks under the churning water.

My heart is heavy, for the prospects for my studio are not looking positive at all. When we came to the bottom of the driveway and saw the road, I just started crying. I think I will feel better once I know the extent of it. Not sure why that is.

In actuality, we were in the thick of it. Busick, just two miles up the road from us, had the highest record of rainfall for the whole of the storm—31 inches of rain. There’s a reason for that—it’s just past one of the steepest inclines of the Blue Ridge Escarpment. When Helene hit that mountainous wall, it squeezed moisture from her like a giant squeegee. And all that water went downstream, in all directions, more water and more water, decimating Micaville, Burnsville, Erwin, to the north and Swannanoa, Asheville, and Marshall to the South.

When I think back now, to that moment, of standing in my driveway worried about my studio, I’m almost ashamed, because also at that moment, and for several hours afterwards, members of my community—entire families— were drowning, houses were swept away, communities region-wide were on the brink of such devastation as this area has never seen.

That afternoon, flood waters still raging, my son crosses the swinging bridge over the South Toe River (a testament to older, more nimble engineering) and hikes to my studio. It still stands, but is filled with 6” of mud. He pushes out as much mud as he can, then drives our minivan, (luckily left there), as far up the highway as possible, then walks home the rest of the way. He returns with news. His childhood soccer coach has lost his wife. The road to town is impassable. Of the two large concrete bridges over the South Toe River, one is badly damaged and the other is gone. Ripped into pieces. That night I send a satellite text to my sister using my son’s phone: “We are all OK. Massive catastrophe. House studio OK. No roads etc. Love you.”

3
Myth, Nightmare, Dream

To recognize the symbolic significance which floods have taken in tradition and myth, is not to deny their occurrence as historical events. Of all natural disasters, floods stand out by their lack of finality. They are preeminently the sign of growth and regeneration. A flood destroys simply because the “forms” are old and worn out, but it is always followed by a new humanity and a new history.

— “Dictionary of Symbols”, Jean Chevalier , Alain Gheerbrant, et al.

In myth, the flood is near universal, older than Noah, global in its telling. In the coming days, though, I don’t think about flood as myth. Our reality is only devastation and survival.

There’s no electricity, no communications, and essentially no roads. So for the first week or so we just focus on the work of survival, which is its own kind of blessing. We haul water, clear out the mud from my studio, and later, procure a generator, groceries, help friends do the same. We check on our neighbors, some of whom we hadn’t talked to in years. Our volunteer fire department does remarkable work clearing trees, repairing roads, checking on all of us. Everyone that can finds a way to pitch in. There is so much that must be done, and so much horror region wide, that it is impossible to think, or feel. There is only doing the work that must be done.

But when we walk down the highway to our van, parked just past a sinkhole, and then drive down State Highway 80, weaving past fallen trees and power lines, our community is unrecognizable. Houses are shredded, piled against each other like bumper cars. The entire river and all the land around it looks like a a war zone strewn with enormous piles of trees, remnants of houses and sheds, twisted lumber, trash, mud, sand. The air is rank with the stench of busted propane tanks.

News trickles in, of neighbors whose homes were flooded or swept away. Down the road the little hamlet of Micaville is destroyed—the elementary school will never reopen, the post office is swept clean off its foundations, the Taylor Togs building, a former factory that housed several businesses and a health clinic, is obliterated. Cars are upside down in the creek beds.

Two miles down the road from my studio, an entire family—a husband, wife, child and grandmother who fled the war in Ukraine and established their home here, are all missing, presumed dead. Another family—a mother, her two young boys, and her fiancee—have also perished, swept away by a river risen to unimaginable heights.

Every day, almost continuously, helicopters fly over the course of the river. They are rescuing stranded people. And they are searching for human remains.

_____________________

For the first week I keep a detailed account in my diary. I’m not trying to process it all, just record our experience. But at some point, I turn inward. I remember a dream I had, only days before the storm, so I pull out my dream journal. Twelve days before Helene I had this dream:

15 September 2024

Floodwaters

I’m at my neighbors house [this house sits between my house and the South Toe river]. The neighbors are sitting on their porch watching the water, only it is an entirely different system, more like an ocean. There’s a great bay with a distant shore. It’s storming, though, and the water is fat, fast, and dangerous.

I scan further back and find a dream from last year:

December 2023

Micaville Renovations

Micaville General Store has been flooded, and there’s some kind of moat around it. The owner is running me out, closing her doors to figure out how to save her business from the water that surrounds her building.

And then even further back:

26 July 2021

Rock Creek flow

I’m standing with my neighbor in the field of her farm. There’s a sense of flow – it’s been raining and raining, and mule manure is spread across the field. We are talking, and the soil is part of our discussion and awareness. I’m going to walk back home along rock Creek. Here is the interesting bit – it’s like the road and the creek have merged – the road home is the creek, and it’s high from all the rain and difficult to navigate.

I have a lifelong practice of dreamwork, but I don’t know what to make of this. Each of these dreams, in their full recording, has weird, precise details that clearly connect to my lived experience. Did my dreams tap into some realm beyond time? How is it that even three years ago I was dreaming almost exactly things that would occur?

Rather than some sort of affirmation, this dream resonance feels disorienting, as if even my inner world has also been flooded. Everywhere I turn, even inwardly, I’m stunned, disoriented.

4
An Altered Landscape, an Altered Body

On Sunday we walk down to the river.

I know that it will hurt. That the river, always an agent of change, will have transformed my favorite spot there, where Rock Creek joins the South Toe River. A place that has given me innumerable gifts. I know that trees will be gone, the riverbed reshaped. I know that the familiarity of this place will be changed.

And all these things are true. It is a ravaged landscape, a different river. I stand on the shore confused by the change, disoriented by the altered landscape, struck with the loss of place. Perhaps twenty feet of riverbank has been torn away, and the path I’d walked innumerable times in my twenty-two years of living here no longer exists because there is no earth there now, no maples, no birches, no rhododendrons. Where my path had been there is now more riverbed.

And it does hurt.

_____________________

Twenty-seven days before the storm, in this place that is now gone, where a tree that gave me many gifts once stood, I sat cradled in her roots, journal in hand, and wrote:

I’ve come this morning to write at a place of power. I wasn’t planning that, I was mostly just planning to write outside. But I found myself instead drawn to the river, and more specifically to this place, where Rock Creek joins the South Toe River. And as I walked here, I mused over an idea I’d had earlier this week, about writing my own Catalog of Mystical Experience—a collection of all my experiences that are clearly-from-somewhere-beyond-this-realm. The place I was walking towards, I realized, held such an experience for me. I knew then, exactly, what the land wanted me to write.

More specifically, it was a tree that was communicating with me, and I wept as I wrote, feeling her presence so profoundly. Now, post-Helene, these words seem to foreshadow all that was to come.

Now as I write this I am quite literally cradled in her roots. She leans perilously over the creek, and I do not think her sap runs in this world any longer. I have watched her needles fall to the very last. But she is absolutely here with me, and as I walked to her, before I’d even put this pen to paper, she was telling me things.

The river, here especially, is always changing. The hemlocks have died, and a hundred years before them, the American Chestnuts. There have been floods caused by climate change, that carved deep cuts into the riverbank and grabbed whole trees only to deposit them downstream, scoured of life. To love this place is to know it will change, and to not fight against it.

But in all the disorder and change, as structures that have stood for decades, or ages, are broken, there is an opening to join our consciousness with the land, to build a relationship so deep that it extends into the foundational Otherworld, and we do this not with any great shaman’s skill but with the simplest of things embedded in every human being—imagination and love.

The changes of this time require of us our grief, for all things must change and should rightly be mourned. It might even be that the grief is what opens us, what rouses us from our slumber into a charged state. In mourning we can also begin to incorporate into our waking awareness the truth that our reality is but a segment or aspect of a much greater reality, a reality that is always speaking to us in a language that our bodies can understand, for it is a felt experience. And if we do not give the paradigm of the day authority over our own experience, and allow the Mystery to blossom within us, something wild happens. The world that is now crowning in our collective Imaginal realm, the world that will become in this next age, the Age of Repair, this world can begin to take root in the here and the now. We can begin the work of bringing it forth.

These words, read thirty days later, take on a deeper meaning than I can properly assimilate. I am still in a stunned state. Grief has yet to find a way to move through me. Now, only days after the storm, I’ve just begun to become aware of a great tearing of life energy that is both in the land and in my body. It’s something I can feel on the edges of my consciousness, like the finest roots of energy saturating everything. It’s something that is not yet part of our measurable scientific knowledge, and maybe will never be, but I know it’s there. And that everywhere it’s torn. It’s the source of disorientation that I, and all my friends and neighbors, are feeling. Call it what you will, the fabric of livingness is torn all around us.

5
Anger

November 6, 2024

I want to tear this essay to pieces.

I want to crucify any attempts to make sense of a destruction that was so clearly self-generated.

I want to catalog the highways and the concrete and the bombs and the plastic factories as evidence of our desire to be known as The Great Destroyer.

I want to say, I am one person, I am one woman, I will live my small life, I will not say I know anything because clearly we are sublimely arrogant.

I want to save the world, but now I know, we will make the world as we see fit, with a vision so short-sighted and numb to the living world that sustains us that our world is nothing more than a machine, and we the cogs in it.

_____________________

Once I had a dream that a star was following me through the sky. I was at a fair, and the sight of it in the sky was enthralling and terrifying to me. I dashed home but it followed me throughout the journey, a ball of otherworldly light. I wanted to shoot it out of the sky, so haunted I felt, but then a herd of horses ran after it, and only then did I realize that it was not threatening me, that it held a great consciousness. It landed in my driveway, then and—this is the funny part—opened up like a pod. Out popped a young man.

You live on a planet of LIFE! he exclaimed. How can you live like this?

I know, I know, replied my broken heart.

6
And Then There Was Ice

mid February, 2025

Things aren't normal, and never will be again, but we are all adapting, as humans do. I’ve started working on my art show, feverishly now, because I’d made a plan and then Helene came in and it’s been so much chaos and disorder and repair that it’s taken me until January to really feel like, yes, I can pick up my pastels, get to work. It feels good to be moving forward, to be making progress that is actual progress and not just cleaning and trying to make my studio functional again.

Then an ice storm hits. It doesn’t hit everywhere, but around my home the ice gathers like a shroud over the forest.

There is so much ice in the forest right now. I’m standing at its edge, holding my breath. The trees strain with the weight of the icicles; branches snap every few minutes–– great booming cracks, followed by a heart-wrenching cascade of ice and limb. The forest is breaking, and I don’t dare step into it, it’s terrifying, but it’s also beautiful. Ice is beautiful, that is, a glaze of light and gray. A breeze runs through my sweatshirt and on into the forest, a seam of crackles, and I step back again, knowing a tree will break from the wind.

The forest did break. The next day my husband and I walked up our path to survey the damage, and it was bad. Helene had felled a swath of trees, perhaps from a microburst of wind. Since then I’ve been scrambling over massive trunks on my daily hikes with my dogs. But the ice storm is worse than Helene. Trees are down everywhere, branches piled high across the entire forest floor.

Everywhere I turn, I feel the assault of climate change and our failed collective response to it. On a warm day I buy vegetables from a farmer-friend. Spring is coming, and in passing I say, “I think when I start to see the wildflowers emerge I will fall down weeping.” As if only then can I let myself let all this grief move in my body. Only then can I find a way forward, into whatever storm awaits us.

7
The Way Forward

We love the world, we destroy it. The pace of destruction grows. And it’s not us. It’s not our fault. It’s this snowball of an economic machine, a true monster driven by blind and greedy men, and it’s what this machine does to us, collectively. How it deadens us to the beauty and song of life, life, life! How it destroys that beauty, that song, bit by bit. It is breaking everything now.

We can’t see a way forward, but we know that much of this human world has been built on the wrong foundation, like a factory that sprawls and smelts our essence into something cheap, something less-than, cog-like, as if we are parts of their machine and not conscious living beings deeply connected to water, air, soil, plants, to all life.

We think maybe AI can save us, but even that vast reservoir of our collective knowledge has been usurped by, and feeds, the same monster.

There is another vast reservoir, though. We slip into its waters every night. When we sleep we swim in the mystery, and the mystery tells us stories. It’s a gift, dreaming is, and one I’ve cultivated my entire life. For so long I thought this gift was only for myself, that my dreams belong only to me, but now I am beginning to believe otherwise.

Dreaming is the living, inviolate collective mystery. The monster can’t touch it, can’t claim it. And the one truth, the one unshakable truth that my dreaming has given me is that this mystery, this Otherworld, is foundational to this world. It is from the Deep that we arise, floating on top of its vast ocean of consciousness. To truly understand the power of the Otherworld, the anima Mundi, the Soul of the world, is impossible. But to have just a glimpse of its numinosity, its power, and—if I am to report truthfully—its ocean of love, is to be forever changed, to be reoriented to the world in a profound and, dare I say, magical way.

There is something deeply felt about the experience of the dream. We don’t even have to interpret them. Really interpretation can be a precarious thing—once interpreted we tend to put the dream into a box on a shelf. Cage it. Lock it away. But a dream is a living thing, it arises from your body, and is embedded in your consciousness, but it is also feral, untamable, with its own purpose. Our dreams want to be honored, they want to be held gently, called forward, they want to hum in your everyday mind, like a note in the song of the world. They are resonant, they call the Otherworld into this world.

Truthfully, most dreams are just like little house-elves, doing their magic housework in the night, if your house is your psyche and the housework is what your deep self needs—a cleaning here, a rearranging of furniture there. But sometimes the doors of your house swing open and wild things come in. Sometimes the doors are blown off, walls disintegrate, and you have to build a new house, a bigger house, to hold what the dream has given you. Like the flood of myth, old forms are worn out, and new ones will arise.

Several years ago I woke from a dream sobbing from its beauty. I wrote it down, and stepped outside, then broke down sobbing again. I was broken open by it. In the dream I was given a vision of a violet-gold light so radiant, so infused with Otherworld energy, that it healed everything it touched. For months I held that gift, knowing that it asked something of me, but uncertain of what that was.

A dream like that unfurls slowly in this world. You have to build a bigger house for it. You have to hold it, let it go, call it back again to you. The energy it held roots into your consciousness, sends tendrils out, begins to transform you. Because the truth of it is that the dream comes from a place that knows, in a way we can't. It is your greatest teacher, if you are willing to surrender.

The violet-gold light of this most beautiful dream lives inside me. In my sacred imagination,where sight is a felt, inner experience, I weave this light into the Earth, where the trees have split and fallen, where the river has scoured her banks, where my heart aches from the insatiable monster trying to turn the living world, and my body, into a machine. I put this living, healing light into the roots of energy that saturate everything, and I feel again what I felt when that dream broke me open. My fingers twist the threads of light together. Oh world, you are beautiful, and your healing is all I have ever truly wanted.

And in sharing the living image of this dream, in letting it out into the world, and calling it back, over and over, something is happening. I don’t know what will happen, but I know we are meant to weave the mystery together, into our lives, because to experience the mystery is a gift that belongs to the world, not to the individual, which, after all, is naught but an illusion, because there is a light that runs through everything, and we belong to it.

Subscribe now

Years ago I read about Samual Adams and his propaganda tactics, which he used to stir the common people into anti-British sentiment. Let’s be honest, y’all, the Constitution is a lofty document, but it was written by a bunch of wealthy white men who were largely motivated by their business interests. The “Founding Fathers” (I hate this term) saw an opportunity and they took it. To rally the people, they relied on propaganda; to fill the ranks, conscription.

Democracy is as fragile as the human psyche. Both are easily manipulated. For healthy functioning both depend on a hefty dose of bias control and critical reflection, whilst also avoiding the pitfalls of emotional contagion and conspiratorial thinking.

Which is why I think, like Samual Adams, propaganda is the answer. We thought people would vote using reason, by looking at the facts, but people vote for story. People vote from emotion. We all do this. We say we are using logic but it is emotion that drives humans forward. And propaganda is just story used to manipulate emotions.

The emotional content of a conspiracy theory is always more compelling than that of facts. It has a narrative arc: you are the underdog, there is a force greater than you that constrains your full expression, but you have a small power—the truth—that can slay the giant. In this story, it’s not the logical truth that matters, it’s the secret truth that others can’t see. You have it and you can wield it. You have an emotional connection to this story. That’s powerful.

Take propaganda and craft it so it rides on the currents of unconscious bias—which is what Russia has been doing with their “political technology”—and you have The Secret Sauce. People will just feel in their bones that they can’t vote for a woman, she just can’t be trusted, her message is “word salad” or “without policy.”

My point here is not to blame the Democrats for thinking that facts and reason and hope would be enough, nor is it to suggest that these things don’t matter. They do, of course they do. But there’s also the context of a world view, of people feeling like the government is the giant that is destroying their world. (And let’s be honest, there is truth in this claim.)

My point is there is transformative fire in stories, that propaganda is nothing more than a story twisted to a particular aim, and that we are writers, we are creative powerhouses, and WE CAN PLAY THIS GAME. We are lit with the fires of truth and justice.

For myself, I am thinking about the Heritage Foundation. I am thinking about their decades-long plot to do exactly this. They wrote their playbook and have won their game. But I’m also thinking about Bernie Sanders. How close he came to something really big in 2016, for simply naming the giants and saying we can fight against them. People of all stripes rallied under his flag.

They rallied against the giants that are conspiring to destroy any chance of an egalitarian world. Against the climate-destroying corporations. Against the biggest giant of all—greed and lust for power. The black heart of the patriarchy. It is patriarchy that won this election, not because half of Americans hate women, but because half of Americans were manipulated by the force that has hoarded power since the dawn of history and disassociated human consciousness from the web of life, to this point right now, where we stand, on the cusp of our own destruction.

Shit’s about to get real bad, and millions upon millions of Americans just got played. Many of them will figure it out sooner than later. Let’s be ready for that. Let’s see the opportunity and take it.

What story can carry us forward? How can we write it to extract even more emotion? Because the truth doesn’t matter, y’all, it never did. But grievance and anger at injustice—that shit is motivating.

We were so close. So close. We may have lost the election, but I am not giving up. I thought I was. But the day after the election, I bought a pair of boots. My old shoes were quite literally worn out. And when I put my new boots on them, they told me a story. They reminded me of who I am. I know that’s weird, but I have a strange and creative relationship with my (mostly used) wardrobe.

My new boots told me you have a fire, you have a skill. Will it make a difference? Hell, I don’t know. But all the great women of history are calling me to this fire. And I cannot ignore their call. So I’m going to fight fire with my own fire. I’m going to fight with stories. I’m going to wear my boots and kick the shit out of the patriarchy every day of my life because it is the patriarchy that is destroying the world.

My community of Yancey County has been hit so hard, but my family and friends are all OK. People are still missing, entire sections of highway washed away, 130 homes (at least) washed away, communities isolated. so I’m feeling exceedingly fortunate.

We are all working together to get the things we need (it’s really beautiful), and Emergency Crews and Relief Workers are here en masse (also really beautiful). I was able to get to my studio today and scrape out the last bit of wet mud, but there is still so much to do. The great news is that we were able to snag a generator and a starlink for internet, so we can work remotely.

Your messages of support have meant so much! Several people have placed orders on my website for cards, knowing it will be a long while before I can fill those orders, and other folks have bought me loads of coffees from my “Buy me a coffee” page here. Thank you, thank you, thank you. Seriously, y’all, your kindness and generosity moves me to tears, even now. I can’t tell you how much it means, to know the big wide world has moved back.

I’ll post again, when I can. Thanks so much for your care and concern. The normal broadcast of art and hope will return soon. ☺️

If you want to buy cards and are willing to wait, you can place an order here (and make me cry tears of happiness):

https://stephanie.studio/product-category/single-cards/

or buy me a coffee. It will have more love in it than caffeine and I will be so grateful: https://buymeacoffee.com/stephaniethomasberry

Your words of kindness and support mean so much.

Thank you, thank you, thank you

Stephanie

I’m in the forest behind my home. It’s wet and drippy, but occasional bursts of late afternoon sun throw gold against the shadows. Squirrels chit-chat; titmice and chickadees squabble and fuss. Perhaps everyone is scolding me—an unusual visitor in their realm. Behind me, deeper in the brush, large sounds make me curious. I’m too close to my house for any substantial forest animals to come browsing by.

I hope. 

It’s true that all spring and summer, a particular doe terrorized us all—humans and dogs alike. She made easy meals of my carefully tended raspberry plants, which means next year’s crop will be slim. This annoyed me, but was nothing to what came next.

One afternoon in late June I was picking blueberries, joined by my sweet husky Willow. She’s a pacifist to the core, so when she charged down the driveway in a fury of hackles and howls, I was concerned. A quick glance revealed who else but the doe, slow-stomping up the lane. I instantly recognized her Mother Warrior March, and saw why: behind her wavered the tiniest slip of a spotted fawn. 

In quick succession: the doe stepped with her fawn into the tangle of underbrush; Willow asserted her territorial rights with long, lunging barks; the doe charged from her cover in a fury; Willow turned and ran for cover. 

I guess the doe decided her point was made because she did not pound my (formerly) pacifist dog into smithereens with her sharp cloven hooves. Still, for the rest of the summer, Willow’s first response to my question “Outside?” was a polite “No thanks.” 

This happened again with my son’s dog Appa—they both live next door. I was on my front porch when I heard him bark and bark, then a burst of yipes accompanied by scuffles. He came tearing through the brush towards me, the enraged doe hot on his heels. I stood in my path, arms outstretched, yelling HEY! She came barreling up within six feet of me before thankfully, mercifully, veering left through my coneflowers. 

After that we saw her daily. She ate the plants in my garden right up to my front door—hostas, blanket flower, and the trodden coneflowers. She ate more raspberries. And she would stand right on the other side of the fence, where my two Anatolian Shepherds live (BIG dogs, and yes, I have a lot of dogs). This drove them (and us) batshit crazy. They would vibrate with Shepherd Passion and bark their one thousand decibel barks incessantly. Not really to scare her off, but to express the emotional pain that they could not fulfill their purpose as both guardians and predators. 

My son decided he would solve this situation with his sharpshooting skills. One afternoon, as she munched on my raspberry plants, he pulled out his little .22 rifle and pierced her ear, Trump-style. (When he told me this I was horrified, but he’s an incredibly good shot, so we can all take a deep breath). He was sure this would persuade her to move on. 

It did not. 

So you see, as I write this, she could be around me right now, making large sounds in the brush, deeply offended by my presence. Which could prove to be tricky.

Aside from my own personal well-being, these interactions matter to me for another reason. My current studio project is Dreaming Animals. One of the largest pieces for this show—still unfinished, and for a reason I’ll soon explain—explores the dreams of deer. It’s called Dream Council of the Deer. It depicts three realms of the deer: in the middle, nestled in the grass and guarded by a large buck, is a harem of sleeping does; in an upper realm, little spirit-fawns frolic through the trees, and below them, in the Underworld of Dreams, the Great Mother Deer browses in a verdant forest. 

All spring and summer I’d felt that my relationship with the deer has been very activated, charged up in that creative-spiritual sense, and I was puzzled by these deer encounters which, in my twenty-two years of living here, had never happened before. The piece is very nearly done—the last unfinished bit is the Great Mother Deer. She’s just an outline in an otherwise finished piece. 

I felt, intuitively, that I needed to hold off on depicting her image. Creative works carry a type of spiritual energy, and I felt I was attempting to enter into the sacred realm of the deer without their permission.

So I drank a hefty cup of mugwort tea, and asked for a dream about the deer, because this project is, after all, Dreaming Animals. I didn’t dream of the deer, and figured my request had not been answered. But time and again I’ve learned, when you ask for a dream, you get an answer. The trick is untangling the threads so that the dream makes some kind of sense. 

Here’s my dream, as recorded in my dream journal:

I’m walking on the path [in the forest behind my home, where I am now] when I come upon a shed talon on the ground [because in my dream, apparently, talons can be shed, like feathers]. It’s very long, maybe 6 to 8 inches, and bulky, more straight, with a small hook at the end. When I pick it up I realize it’s a Griffin talon.

Then I’m walking along the top of a forested hill. Below me a field slopes downward. It’s not in use, except a woman has planted it with wheat. I look at the wheat stalks, they are dense and packed with kernels. The woman is there—she’s very strong and resilient. She has short hair and she’s wearing a white tank and jeans. She has a big bag slung over her shoulder, and in it are bunches of wheat kernels. I realize that she’s planted this field—a small field, and other small spaces, with wheat, and what she’s harvested is enough kernels to meet our wheat (bread) needs for a year. Also she’s done the planting and harvesting with complete lack of care for who the “owner” of the land might be. 

Writing this I realize she’s some aspect of a Grain Goddess, a strong and wild woman who pays no heed to the concept of property because it has no relevance to her realm. 

Curiously it took me some time—while sharing my dream with a dear (deer?) friend—to realize that this dream did have relevance to my relationship with the deer, because to the Goddess, there is no such thing as “my” land (or raspberries, for that matter), and there is enough for all. Point taken. 

The dream carried a message, clearly enough—but still did not release me from the sense that I needed the permission of the deer to depict their Goddess.  So I started making small studies of deer, like the one above. 

Creative work is a wilderness of mysteries. That wilderness begins in our intimate, personal inner world, but stretches on into territory that is quite beyond us. When we can trek deep into that territory—and bring something back—our work has an undeniable potency. (Whether or not it makes a career for you is irrelevant. I think the Grain Goddess would make that point). 

This kind of creative work demands we move with respect. We cannot go tromping off into any wilderness—inner or outer—with an extractive, capitalist mindset. The deer owe me nothing. Just because I have an artistic vision doesn’t mean I have the right to bring it forth. There is a felt sense that the way is open. Likewise there is a keen sense when the way is closed. I know that to proceed without permission would be a great disrespect.

Twenty-six years ago I painted this scene:

It’s from a dream—the first dream I ever painted. It was a sort of waking dream, for I was sleeping in this very field, around this very fire, and in the middle of the night I dreamt that the deer were leaping over me. Or maybe they actually did? I was never quite sure. 

One thing I am sure of, sleeping on the ground under the stars primes the self for fantastic dreams.

So now we come to my recent little study of a deer— she’s aglow in winter’s forest, around her the trees and the moss bask in her golden light. And there’s a little miracle—vines of passionflower have spontaneously grown up the trunk and burst into bloom in an otherwise sleeping landscape. 

I was just playing as I made this piece, trying to find my way forward, trying to feel the way is open. And I can only laugh at myself for taking so long—as in just now—to recognize that I have a thing for White Deer, and also see the message I made for myself. Because passionflower is a well-known sleep medicine. And I think what I need to do is to sleep on the ground, under the stars, and wait for a dream. 

It feels very risky to state this intention publicly. I will sleep here on the earth and the deer will come to me. What if the dream doesn’t come? What if stating this intention somehow breaks the magic? Inflates the ego? I’ve been working on Dream Council of the Deer for over a year, on and off. What if I can’t ever finish it?

But I came here to write, to go where it took me. I trust my creative instincts. So I’m just going to go with it. Perhaps I’m being pushed to open up my own creative process, mark a trailhead into my own creative wilderness. It feels incredibly vulnerable, but also necessary.

After all, my inner world and yours—they are connected, and this relationship is strengthened when we share our inner experiences. From mind-altering dreams to simple moments of awe washing over us—our inner world is imbued with a particular type of feminine spiritual energy that feeds the World Soul, the collective unconscious, the Otherworld. Like the water cycle of our shared outer world, this energy moves up through us, and outward, and back down again, into the Otherworld. This is how we strengthen the flow and intent of that energy. This is how we can heal our collective inner world.

I believe in the power of human creativity, in its expansiveness, in its healing capacity. It is at its most dynamic power when braided with our devotion and our love. Perhaps the White Deer has been waiting twenty-six years for me to offer my devotion. Perhaps she is waiting for all of us, in our creative wilderness, where we all, deep in the core of our being, belong. 

Dear Readers,

Thank you so much for all your support as I make my way on Substack. I’ve been really nourished by all your comments and all the evocative writing & art. Plus I’ve had the pure joy of sending cards to new subscribers as far away as Germany and Australia!

If you’ve subscribed but haven’t picked a card from my website, check your messages here on Substack. I’ve sent each and everyone of you a message with the link for you to pick your card.

Today is the Harvest Moon, and as promised I am posting with the lunar and seasonal cycles. My next post will be September 22nd—the Equinox. Until then, thank you for the gift of your attention.

Warmly,

Stephanie

I am very focused in the studio on my upcoming show Dreaming Animals, and this post explores one of my most profound animal dreams. This dream is interwoven with the hemlock tree, as you will see, and so I’m showcasing the portrait I did of this great tree twenty-one years ago.

I’ve come this morning to write at a place of power. I wasn’t planning that, I was mostly just planning to write outside, because when I write outside my body relaxes and opens and wild things come tumbling in. And I’d envisioned myself writing in the forest, because I am a Druid and I love the cathedral of a community of trees.

But I found myself instead drawn to the river, and more specifically to this place, where Rock Creek joins the South Toe River. And as I walked here, I mused over an idea I’d had earlier this week, about writing my own Catalog of Mystical Experience—a collection of all my experiences that are clearly-from-somewhere-beyond-this-realm. The place I was walking towards, I realized, held such an experience for me. I knew then, exactly, what the land wanted me to write.

First, let me describe the scene. I sit at the foot of a hemlock tree, right above the confluence of creek and river. As the creek joins the river it twists around shoals of ancient stones in meandering curves, so that water is flowing in all directions. In the west are the Black Mountains, at whose feet I both worship and make my home.

I have lived here for twenty-two years, and in that time, the hemlock trees have mostly died. To say that I love the hemlock tree is a poor description. It is more precise to say that I have a deep relationship with this tree, where I now sit, and also with the species of the tree. This relationship began in my early twenties.

It was a Friday night and I was on a camping trip, but apparently so was everyone else. I searched along a US Forest Service road for one of the little marked places where camping is allowed. But all the spots were taken, and it was getting dark. In a bit of desperation I set up camp (illegally) under the great sheltering branches of a hemlock tree.

That night I had a Dream. The kind of dream that absolutely changes you. In my dream I encountered a mammoth—smaller than the ones we usually think of, though its presence was decidedly not small. It was a tremendous being, electric with spiritual power. It came charging up to me, and trumpeting with its trunk, it demanded I accept the spiritual truth that nothing is ever lost.

I had been grieving hard the extinction of species, and after this dream I had something else to place alongside this grief— a dream-given knowledge that required a reformation of my psyche’s integration of my physical experience. This dream was so powerful, so direct, that to this day I have an unwavering faith in its message.

Fast forward maybe a decade or so. I’m now in my 30s, and married with children and stepchildren—a very full and demanding life—and I’ve recently moved to this place, which is a haven of beauty and also hemlock trees. This is when I learn the hemlocks will die, en masse. And I begin to meditate with them, when I can, which given my life circumstances is not very often. I draw a great tribute to them, Tree of Life, which I would call my first masterpiece. I write my first published essay in honor of this tree and the gifts she had given me.

More years pass. Somehow I find my way back to meditating with the trees. The hemlocks are still quite alive, but they all have the tell-tale cotton in their needles, the nests of the killing adelgid. I come to this tree, where I sit now, and lay my back against her, like I did before, not really thinking or seeking anything, just a little tired, and sad.

But then something happens—she recognizes me. It’s instantaneous, profound, unmistakable. The tree recognizes me with a prana-like embrace. It’s an experience I would absolutely highlight in my Catalog of Mystical Experience.

Since then I have had many other experiences. I believe that this tree opened up a pathway of communication in my body. She did it, and I did it, by developing both the relationship and the gifts of the dream she gave me.

Now as I write this I am quite literally cradled in her roots. She leans perilously over the creek, and I do not think her sap runs in this world any longer. I have watched her needles fall to the very last. But she is absolutely here with me, and as I walked to her, before I’d even put this pen to paper, she was telling me things.

The river, here especially, is always changing. The hemlocks have died, and a hundred years before them, the American Chestnuts. There have been floods caused by climate change, that carved deep cuts into the riverbank and grabbed whole trees only to deposit them downstream, scoured of life. To love this place is to know it will change, and to not fight against it.

But in all the disorder and change, as structures that have stood for decades, or ages, are broken, there is an opening to join our consciousness with the land, to build a relationship so deep that it extends into the foundational Otherworld, and we do this not with any great shaman’s skill but with the simplest of things embedded in every human being—imagination and love.

The changes of this time require of us our grief, for all things must change and should rightly be mourned. It might even be that the grief is what opens us, what rouses us from our slumber into a charged state. In mourning we can also begin to incorporate into our waking awareness the truth that our reality is but a segment or aspect of a much greater reality, a reality that is always speaking to us in a language that our bodies can understand, for it is a felt experience. And if we do not give the paradigm of the day authority over our own experience, and allow the Mystery to blossom within us, something wild happens. The world that is now crowning in our collective Imaginal realm, the world that will become in this next age, the Age of Repair, this world can begin to take root in the here and the now. We can begin the work of bringing it forth.

When we allow the greater reality to blossom within us it can take root in this world.

What I am saying is that there is a future for us, and by us I mean the living world. We are in the great shift from the Age of Despair, when human consciousness was severed from the living world, to the Age of Repair, as we take up the great work of rebuilding what was severed and remaking a global pact that honors the living world and the dignity of all life. This is the work of deepening our experience of consciousness and allowing the consciousness of the living world to speak to us in whatever ways our bodies know best how to listen.

Spaces are opening up, in the land, in our collective body, in our collective consciousness. And in these spaces we must make intentional, loving relationship with the living and elemental world. For me this means coming here, and writing. It means allowing my body to feel the praise and wonder of this ecosystem. It means laying my back to trees and connecting with them. It means tending to my dreams, sleeping outside, weaving my consciousness with the consciousness of the living world.

We can acknowledge the presence of the greater world in every moment we meet, even in the throes of grief and despair we can hold space in ourselves, or even just the possibility of that space, where we can use our love and our imagination in whatever way the land guides us, with intention and faith, to birth a new world. That, the hemlock tree tells me, is enough.

Twenty-seven days after I posted this piece Helene tore through my community. I live in Yancey County, NC, and by all accounts we were in the bulls-eye of the storm’s destructive power. The devastation was mind-blowing. But the conversation I had with this hemlock tree seemed to portend much of what happened. I wrote about my experience with Helene, and revisited this tree conversation, in my post The Light That Runs Through Everything. I think it’s the most important essay I’ve ever written.

Thank you for reading.

Stephanie

Let me know my smallness. Not an isolated smallness, not an insignificant smallness, but the smallness of a thread in a great and intricate tapestry, the smallness of one spider in a great lineage of spiders, the smallness of the blue-eyed grass, gazing into the Sun, eye to Great Eye, meadow of grasses and buzzing grasshoppers to meadow of Cosmic Galaxies.

That’s what I think, looking out over this valley where I make my home. It’s the middle of May, and the view’s great expanse swallows up everything dearest to me; holds it, like a great blue basket, turning green, dappled with light and cloud-shadow, the greatest basket of trillium and oaks and rivers and my home, and in my home another basket, of my own life. Baskets and meadows and the living world, folding and unfolding, miraculously, so miraculously that we can’t really hold it in our minds as we check our email and walk to our cars, but there, along that path, the Sun resides in the eye of the blue-eyed grass, and for a moment we glimpse the incomprehensible beauty that holds us.

 In April I went to visit the museum of Walter Inglis Anderson in Ocean Springs, MS. If ever I could say to you, let me introduce to you my teacher, then it is this man, this feral and tumultuous artist, dead some seven years before I was born. 

It had been decades since I’d been to his museum, since I’d moved  away from Mississippi at the tender age of twenty-one. It was a pilgrimage then, you see, to return to Ocean Springs, and paired with another pilgrimage, because I was also traveling to Texas to be in the line of totality for the solar eclipse. But that is another story.

Here is the thing I keep thinking about, from that visit: that Walter Anderson painted ocelots, native cats to his area then, but now long since departed. It’s easy to see why—the area is scarred now with highways and shopping malls, the scourge of our times that threatens to overtake every meadow and glade and makes traveling a challenge to the soul, if you are inclined, as I am, to converse with the living world. An impossible place, I would think, for something as elusive and wild as a family of ocelots.

But something about the ocelots and their disappearance—or rather, that they were there only sixty years ago, marvels me, in the way that a babushka doll might. This babushka doll, with her highways and tired shopping malls—holds inside herself another babushka that held World War II and Walter Anderson and ocelots. He too marveled at the different temporal realities of his home, painting murals in the Oceans Springs Community Center that depicted, among many other glorious celebrations of that coastal ecosystem, the arrival of D’Iberville to the Gulf Coast in 1699—another babushka— and the nearly lost legacy of the Biloxi people, who held the heart of the land for eons. They are the first babushka, at the center of these nested realities.

We can’t help but wonder how much tragedy we can enact upon the Earth, removed as we are, layer by layer, from that central heart, that babushka where we lived enmeshed in the livingness of the world, and when the human world was not so distinct from the non-human world.

But sometimes, staring into the great basket that holds us, I am reminded of that illusion of separation, the illusion of a human-only world.

I see my smallness, that I am a thread—only—in a world that extends both in time and place far beyond what my mind can know, and that, however strayed or errant our threads may be, we are a part of her, of Earth. We did not come from anywhere else, but arose from her.  

The mind loves to assert its dominance, to tell us what it knows. It demands the linear experience, and confirms only the reality that is mapped and recorded and tested. But the body holds the mind, and even as it ages, holds too the paradox of temporality and presence—great mysteries, even when they are mapped and spread out before us: how the DNA in our cells is marked for ages by the experiences of our ancestors. We are a nesting of paradox, of impossibilities, of miracles and destruction. 

Standing on the lip of an ancient ridge, looking down at where my home is, I let myself be held by the greater reality, the body of Earth. Overwhelmed with beauty, I ease into trust—trust in this multi-dimensional tapestry, and my woven-ness in it, trust in the basket that holds us,  trust like that of the blue-eyed grass, staring up at the Sun, fed by light, as small as nothing, but entirely not that, alive, miraculous, and participating in the livingness of the world.

Subscribe now

About the pastel “The Blue Basket”

One of the curious experiences that I have— when sketching, and later developing a pastel— is the sense of communion that arises with the subject. This is most pronounced when my attention is focused upon a single flower, or tree. 

The experience of taking in a landscape, and in particular a landscape with a sweeping view, such as this one, requires something a little more challenging to foster that thrilling sense of communion. A shift, or perhaps, a repositioning of oneself, to make room for the vastness before you. 

For a landscape, or any representational art, to really convey the livingness of its subject, this ephemeral thing has to happen. I’ve put the word communion to it, but its more like an exchange of consciousness, a spiritual movement. 

People sometimes ask me if I teach art, and to that end I could talk about how layered this pastel is, in a near pointillistic fashion. This piece is a vast collection of pastel dots, and it happened that way because the sky was so luminous and rich that I could not reduce it to broad strokes of singular color—I wanted it to dance with light, to play with the eye. I could say this was a logical, artistic decision, and I’m certain there was some logic to it, but truthfully the decision was made from the intent to reflect the spiritual experience of the sky, to relish the blue depths of a light-filled sky as both a wonder and an entity unto itself. 

This is why I believe creativity is not about craft, or technical prowess, but is at its core a spiritual path, where, regardless of skill, we can deepen our experience of life, and become more than just ourselves, expansive as the sky. 

Share

🍋 🍊 🍑 🍓

L  I  N  K  S 

🍓 🍑 🍊🍋
 

• The Walter Anderson Museum main site
   

• Explore the Ocean Springs Community Center murals here
   

• My website: Stephanie.studio

I woke this morning more thick-headed than usual. I’m blaming it on the Democratic National Convention, which my husband was streaming as he chopped vegetables for dinner while I worked on some painting in the next room. Eventually he went off to do other things, and I ended up watching the thing.

And then I couldn’t stop. I found myself utterly weeping at times. This is not entirely uncommon; I’m easily moved. I did not, however, expect Hillary Clinton to rouse my emotions so deeply. I’ve always found her to be sharp, and courageous, but not exactly stirring.

But she tapped a deep vein in my psyche—a yearning for representation, a yearning for a world that acknowledges the leadership of women. This yearning broke free from the tight twists in my body that rarely unwind—because one must survive in this world, and that means saving energy for the things that can be managed—and it let me feel hope, real hope, not just for a woman to be in the most powerful position in the world, but also hope for real justice—social, economic, environmental. Hope for the sea change that could bring us into the world we know we need bu t don’t know how to birth from the sterile parents of patriarchy and extraction.

And it wasn’t just Hillary. Raphael Warnock, circling back on the call to “Heal the Land,” with deep understanding of his spiritual tradition, had me and the whole of audience broken open, shattered with hope.

I could go on, but I’ll just toss one more moment here, when President Biden walked onto the stage after being introduced by his daughter Ashley: there were no microphones, just a loving father embracing his daughter after she gave him a deeply loving tribute. The camera kept swinging away, to scan the crowd, but still they stood on the stage, in their own world of love, while we all watched and marveled at this beautiful relationship. It was this intimate moment between a father and a daughter unfolding on the world stage. But it was more than that even; a symbolic event, of a great man holding up his daughter, of the curse of patriarchy breaking.

Eventually I had to go to bed.

I slept well. I slept with my body unwound, stirred and open, with feral animals let loose in my body—beautiful wild things that had come out from their corrals and roamed my dreamlands with hunger and purpose. They will refuse to go back into confinement. I won’t ask them to. It would take more energy now, to keep them confined than it would to let them roam about my thoughts with their coyote-song and pungent musk and visceral understanding of freedom, of healing, of sovereignty.

And this is how we will do it. This is how we will birth the world we know we need. Not from the zoo of capitalism, of beauty extracted from its rightful place, but from the wild things, who know the things we’ve forgotten, who know what it means to be of this green Earth, who have the instinct for justice and the teeth to claim it. They are the fiery angels of Earth, unleashed. They are coming. We have let them loose from our bodies and we are more alive than we have been in centuries.

I grew up in the Catholic Church, in the Deep South of Mississippi no less, to parents who were ardent in their devotion. They were determined to instill this same devotion into the souls of their five children, of whom I was the second.

Curiously, the instillation of Christian devotion failed to thrive in the souls of their three daughters (but took root in the sons’).

Regardless of their failure, I do think that ardency came from a genetic source, perhaps, because I feel sometimes that I am much like my mother: the spirits seems to brush up against my skin sometimes.

But I am entirely unlike my mother in the manner of my spiritual practice, because I left the Catholic Church as soon as I was able. First of all, I wasn’t really into Jesus, and that kind of seemed like a prerequisite. Also the whole only-men-can-be-priests-as-in-closest-to-god thing. Because even as a child I felt a presence, shall we call it, and had the wherewithal to know that it came from within, not from a Church.

As I got older, I could articulate clearly how Catholicism, in particular, and Christianity, more generally but with a few exceptions, was an institution that perpetuated a spiritual violence—it demanded that I surrender the power and legitimacy of my inner knowing and spiritual experience to an external source. Again, quite curiously, to a collective of men who claimed spiritual authority over their flock.

Clearly, I am not a sheep.

And also, no one, ever, has authority over another’s spirit.

Still, in great numbers, we hand over the keys to our spiritual life with regularity. Or we just leave them in the junk drawer because we don’t know where the door is, and what it might lead to. Or try out any number of doors—teachers, spiritual traditions, new spiritual practices evolved from old.

I’m suspicious of it all. Unless it’s meditation, which asks only for one to be present with oneself. No talking.

But I also have yearned, over the years, for the collective spiritual experience—I think most of us do. It can have a potency and beauty that is undeniable.

And then I found it. Or rather, I realized it was at my fingertips all along. Those keys to our spiritual life, they are a particular thing, inherent to every human being on earth. Creativity. Creativity is a key to our spiritual life.

Creative work and spiritual experience have been fused together so far back into our prehistoric past that we can easily say that we’ve been doing this for a long, long time. In creative work we connect with something greater than our individual self. Call it the unconscious, collective or otherwise; call it the animus mundi; the Otherworld, Underworld, Dream-time. It is a spiritual practice.

When we engage with our creative power, individually and collectively, we are transformed. Our awareness expands. Be it the dance, the song, the story, the drawing. All these practices take us deep within ourselves, sometimes so deep that we emerge from the experience completely renewed, baptized, remade, reborn.

It is also the longest spiritual tradition of our history. Accessible to everyone. Glorious and fraught all at once.

So pick up your pen, your brush, your instrument. Your god does not need a name, a prayer, or an evocation. Only your willingness to surrender—not to a tradition or external entity—but to the impulse that reside within you, deep in the cave of your being. That is the that spirit moves you, and all the world along with you.