🍃 Leaves of Three, Leave Them Be
Taking Root: poison ivy, aurora, decorative fencing, and hearing voices
Taking Root is my weekly gathering place for thoughts, events, wonders, and insights that happen in my life, in my mind, and around my farm. Free subscribers are cherished and you’ll receive this newsletter in your inbox each week. If you’d like to support my work further and gain access to my creative nonfiction and poetry while joining the conversation with monthly meet-ups and coaching events, consider becoming a paid subscriber.
Leaves of Three
One moment I’m breezing through life — mostly — and the next I have a poison ivy reaction spreading across, over, underneath, and throughout the length of both arms. It’s in the shape of my border collie who recently fulfilled my ten-year dream of allowing me to hold her for a moment at bedtime.
I’m calling the dog Typhoid Mary now and she doesn’t understand why she’s not allowed to luxuriate nappish-ly on the duvet, as she does. She intimately understands the spoken word in several languages so she knows something is up and she stares at me pointedly and somewhat annoyed, like she knows this pertains to her.
I escaped this plague until now even though most of my life has been spent outdoors. The farm is blanketed in sumac. Nature waited until the student was ready, like being stung by a bee for the first time when I was in my thirties.
“You can get goats,” Brooke said. “They eat poison ivy.”
“Will they eat it off of my arms?”
Before I noted the distinctive border collie outline, I’d diagnosed myself with every possible malady (thank you, Reddit) except the most obvious. Now that it’s here, I’m regretful of everyone I’ve encountered with a poison ivy rash that I didn’t take very seriously.
I can’t think about anything else. I can’t function. I stare at the walls. Relief comes with scalding hot water. I dip a cotton swab into a ramekin of bleach. I purchase every scrub and ointment available.
Slow down — the earth says. Be still. Listen.
I hear the staccato air thrum of wings before I notice a bird at the feeder. The sound is a felt sense, like a horse shaking after a roll; it moves through me. Over-stimulated, my skin is alive with sensing.
The coolness as the cloud passes; the warmth of the sun when the clouds part — the way the tiny solar panels charge the fountain and the fairy lights — how we’re all energy and motion.
Sitting still, I feel the energy in my immobility, I notice the charge of my being.
I am aware.
The big, black horse moves close to me and scans me with his nostrils. The entire organ of my skin screams FEEL ME.
My antenna, my perception, my connecting partner of touch, I’ve ignored you. Until now, I’ve only believed you when you’ve asked me to touch with love, if then, or to reach out in fear, shaking.
As the border collie regards me balefully, I’ll sit here a while longer and feel into the space that I’ve created.
I guess this is what they mean when they say plant medicine.
I’m cool with that — and with the heat from the scalding water soaking me into myself as my skin asks me to rest.
Aurora Borealis
I’m aware that many of us experienced the rare, southbound aurora borealis that escaped the fence around the Arctic Circle this week. And there are many of us who missed it.
I discovered the event by accident. My ex-husband texted from his boat to say that we had a chance of seeing them in South Carolina a few hours before the light was due to occur. I feel like the possibility didn’t receive enough airtime in the lead-up.
Curious about the plural of aurora borealis I discovered the definition describes the noun as “uncountable,” so the words, like geese, remain unchanged. They’re unquantifiable — again, like geese.
The projected time for visibility was midnight, but something told me to walk out from underneath the porch roof around 10:30 Friday evening. My timing for a lot of things is slightly off — it’s pointless for me to purchase a lottery ticket —but I nailed it this time. The sky was glowing red and moving, streaked like a prism.
And while the majestic display was jaw-dropping, I wanted to know more about the rare solar storm events that brought the northern lights to my southern spring.
Trish Finley who reads the farm bedtime stories many evenings as she tucks us in and can also be found managing us with great sensibility on Saturdays is a bit of a solar storm genius. She’s brilliant in a lot of things, but if anyone wants to know what the electromagnetic fields are doing at any point in time, Trish has answers, graphs, and research.
If you were standing at the center of the earth, head north, feet south, facing the sun, Bx is the vector directed and running through the center of the sun. But it faces out at a right angle. Both are parallel to the ecliptic. In order to have an aurora with a northward Bz, you need exceptionally high solar wind speeds generating a Kp5 or higher storm. This is stripped down and simplified . . In other words, we don't know shit until the incoming solar wind structure reaches the Sun-Earth Lagrange Point 1. (a fixed point between the sun and earth about 1.5 million km from earth). It's there that our satellites measure those properties. DSCOVR is stationed in orbit at that location and it's what gives us a good bit of our real time solar wind activity data as well as our interplanetary magnetic field data. The sun gives off several things. Solar wind - tends to come from coronal holes. Solar flares - these are wave flares thrown off on sunspots that have specific magnetic classifications/components/structure. CME’s (coronal mass ejection) are basically very large expulsions of plasma and magnetic field from the sun's corona. Where flares are waves, CMEs are 'particle' by comparison. They can eject billions of tons of coronal material basically packaged in a magnetic field that is stronger than the background solar wind magnetic field strength. Flares, take a few minutes to reach earth. CME's take half a day to a few days to arrive. So, effectively, the sun flings off coronal material that is frozen in flux by the magnetic field thrown with it.
-Trish Finley
And that’s how we get aurora (auroras? auroriases?)
If you haven’t stopped by a stall on a Saturday and asked Trish to remove her earbuds and prop her pitchfork on a wall so that you can ask her a question of any magnitude and be wow’ed by the answer, you’re really not taking advantage of the full spectrum of auxiliary services offered in my farm.
And if you live quite a distance from Bramblewood Stables and you have a detailed question that involves physics, mathematics, psychology, or the esoteric, just leave your question in the comments and I’ll have Trish get back to you right away.
When I accidentally stepped out from underneath the porch and saw what was happening in the sky, I grabbed Christopher and we camped out in the front lawn on a blanket.
Our eyes scanned the sky. The northern horizon glowed red and simmered into violet, like a lesson in Roy G Biv. Above us, white streaks formed and moved and fluttered and danced.
At the mercy of the elements, in thrall to the beauty of the convergence of the triune of me, the sky, the sun’s chemicals — it made me vulnerable and blissful, like first love. Heady.
“Do you see this?” I said to Christopher. “Do you see this?”
A few minutes later I’d gasp and exclaim again, “That! Did you see that?”
We lay on the lawn blanket and stared as the colors blended and faded into night.
“More, please,” Christopher whispered.
Yes. More please.
Thank you.
Who Am I Writing For?
Long after I had made this beloved land a home for my business I was given the opportunity to move into the farmhouse and make it my home. I never knew what home meant until I inhabited these rooms.
And not too long after moving into the farmhouse, I was presented with the opportunity to give a reading of my writing at a local theater. I have given readings before, lots of times, but I really hate doing it. Uncertain of how to proceed, I employed the help of Sara Parlier, my friend and voice-over artist.
I chose the first chapter of a fiction work in progress for her to read called Theotokos (I’ll post it here next week for paid subscribers).
The feedback I’d been given for this chapter from my writing group at the time, and before the chapter went through forty edits, was that it was too byzantine, too dense, too much.
I’d used too many words.
Making the transition from poet to fiction writer was hard for me. I was unable to simplify a narrative. I was too caught up in the words. I wanted to describe everything at once.
I had no idea who I was writing for.
Ten years have passed since that chapter was read by Sara Parlier and I’m back to writing as a practice after a long hiatus. I’m prioritizing my writing time and noticing how much has changed while also remaining the same. I’m a morning writer now when I used to write into the wee hours of the night. I compose more on a keyboard than I do in a notebook, but ink on a page connects me viscerally to the ideas in a way that the screen does not.
I was aware of my shifting processes and trying to give they what they needed, but the question still haunted me — who am I writing for?
I put the question out to the universe and was amazed at what came back.
“I don’t like to read, but I love reading your words.”
“I’ve never been much for reading, but I stop and read what you write.”
“Keep writing. I don’t like reading. Will you write a book?”
My readers are people who do not know that reading can transport them. My readers are people who feel that reading is a chore. My readers are people who seldom feel that writers are writing to them.
I am writing to convert people to loving language, like a mad preacher who rolls up in town on an ancient horse and spouts a bunch of nonsense that makes the passerby feel heard.
I want my writing to help you understand that I see you, that I too have struggled a lot and somewhere along the way I realized that we never had to get it right the first time.
And if you’re coming to me as a reader who has been madly in love with words all your life, I welcome you as a kindred sister and thank you for inviting my words onto your brain-shelf.
Let’s wander through this world (and others) together.
I’m really okay with this mission.
Choo will always be a limited-edition
But now you can buy the print.
In partnership with Jessi Nichols, an artist who takes photography to the next level, we’re offering limited edition prints that capture Choo’s essence.
Printed on acid-free card stock, these 5x7 images are a lasting legacy waiting to be framed and put on your wall — or wherever you would like to honor him. The print is packaged in archival materials for safekeeping until you’re ready to place him in a spot of honor.
Whether it’s for yourself or a gift for someone whose love for this horse will continue into infinity, your purchase will help fund Choo’s Memorial Scholarship so that his legacy keeps giving.
We still have a few of these prints remaining and the price is $50.
Contact me via comment, email, or text — or grab me in the barn when you’re next at the farm — and I’ll reserve a print for you.
The week in bullet points:
If you’d like to see a reenactment of me and Black Truck taking out the decorative fence at Sushi Shack as I was pulling through the drive-through, please visit this video with Willie.
If you missed last week’s Taking Root, where I explore grief and accepting help from others and flowers, you can find it here: Planting as a Subversive Act.
From Friday to Sunday and the following weekend there are multiple opportunities to take part in Journaling Workshops with me, both online and in person. You can find more information about the workshops here.
Flowerhouse Market is the brainchild of Angie Couts, one of our beloved farm family members. If you’re local to upstate South Carolina, this market is worth a visit and is bound to become one of the best markets in the area as it gets rolling.
Flowerhouse Market, based in Piedmont SC, is an eclectic cooperative of growers, makers, artists and teachers uniting to create a fun and quirky open air community market every Saturday 10-3 from May-November . The market offers many local options when shopping for the garden or the home, whether you need plants and seeds, in season produce, locally made skin care products, herbal teas and tinctures, a cute vintage wool skirt, or a thoughtful gift basket for a loved one- we have something for everyone. If learning is your thing, we also offer weekly workshops on topics from art to self development to homesteading crafts.
And the farmhouse porch at Bramblewood has been revived and restored to sparkly glory, thanks to Christopher’s fairy lights and a fountain that mostly works depending on the cloud cover. I’ll be using this spot for workshops and coaching sessions and can’t wait to see you there.
I caved and contacted my doctor for relief from the poison ivy. I’m typing these words on a hefty dose of Prednisone so I will be mostly functional by the time we greet everyone for Saddle Club this evening. Brooke asked me for a topic and I just stared at her blankly, so the plan is an open mic that I’m sure Sarah and I will steer into a topic.
Or as Sarah said to me this morning as we were watching the new farrier work his magic on the horses’ hooves, “You are the most annoying little sister ever.”
My work here is finished.
Love,
Kim
Hi Kimberly- Thanks for sharing these. I particularly loved the Borealis photo-journals. Hope the week has been kind to you, Kimberly? :)