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Welcome to my Library and Hello to your Dragon Nature

I’ve started a personal library! It’s called the Greenwood Library in Forest Halls. The first book I scanned into the collection was the children’s herbal fantasy, Wise Child, (wise woman Juniper also plays the harp!) and the first book loaned is Flowers and Fables: a Welsh Herbal (both pictured here). You’re invited to browse the library. I’ll be adding many more items over the coming weeks — so easy to do with the app on my phone! Loans are available to on-islanders and other local folk. If you live out of the area (as many of you do), I hope this library will point you to some of the great resources that are available out in the world.

Greenwood Library "Firsts"
First book  entered into the system, first book loaned. Bookmarks are serve as reminders that these are library loans.

My 11-year-old self is in heaven. As a sixth-grader abandoned at the start of the school year by my until-then best friends (who, during the previous summer, had embarked on a mission to become popular), I deepened my friendship with the girl across the street. We spent  many recesses, lunch hours, and after school hours reading and imagining together, and much of that time was in our school library. My best friend Jenny had been helping the librarian with the circulation cards. When Jenny shared this part of her world with me and I started helping too, well, that opened the door to a new kind of awesomeness!

With my library, with its online catalog linked to the global world of books, my twenties self is in heaven too. The jobs I loved most as a young adult were the years I worked as a Library Specialist in Interlibrary Services at the Stanford University’s Green Library. My work involved tracking down and retrieving books and making photocopies of articles from the myriad campus libraries and from Green Library’s mysterious stacks and labyrinthine regions (some so little used and remote that you had to snap on the lights when you entered some  areas, and snap them off when you left).

And quite happy too, thank you very much, is my inner dragon and voracious lifelong learner self who has always loved books, gathering information, and prowling the long shadowed corridors of the anima mundi, nudging open the compact shelving of the heart with secret words, and discovering the hidden treasures that nestle within each one of us and which glimmer and ring with the true nature that is the world.

It seems that with the opening of this library, I’m saying yes to my imagination. So here is fair warning to you, and an invitation. With the opening of this library, I dedicate this blog to fully expressing my magical life and peculiar take on this world, and to welcoming you into a story of myth and medicine, true nature and kindness. This walk through the woods and words, however, isn’t a one-directional path. It, I hope, is a conversation, a polyphonic and polyrhythmic musical improvisation, a reciprocal sharing of resources in terms of tales and imaginings and illuminations, such as is enjoyed in book and article form by the research libraries for whom I once served.  I look forward to hearing your stories, your ways of perception, the heart of the world as it expresses within your singular and beautiful dragon nature.

Water Snake Wonderings - art
Wonders at the Heart of our Nature – art by Jane Valencia

How is magic and sweet surprise alive and well in your world? How do you live it out in your daily life with family, friends, community, and with nature? How does your unique take on life and your way of being nourish the children, help heal culture, and better our world? How do you experience yourself as Nature, as a child of the earth, imagination, and the Sacred? How can you and I grow our magical nature — our medicine selves — in service to living out our responses to questions such as these? What are your dragon nature questions?

These wonderings are the waters from which this blog springs.

I invite you to record your musings in the comments box below.

Visit the Greenwood Library in Forest Halls here.

Books Are Magical Doors
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Full on Spring: What are you Planting or Gathering Now in your Life?

Chickadee - art by Jane Valencia
Chickadee – black and white gouache on Bristol board – by Jane Valencia

Greetings to you, at the New Moon – we are well into spring!
It seems strange to me to be posting black-and-white art when the world has become so bright and colorful. Each day seems to bring a new breath of color into the world. Last week was the yellow-green of Big Leaf Maple in flower, and the bright sunshine face of Dandelion. This week Wild Cherry is in full white puffy blossom attire, and the Italian Plums are beginning to wake into white blossom as well.

My Illustration class resumes next week. I’ve been working in black-and-white since September, my watercolors and colored-pencils — favored medium for more than a decade — set aside so I can just focus on the kind of work we’re doing in the class (no color until you really can handle pen & ink, and black-and-white gouache). With all the color of spring, I’m starting to yearn to return to my style of art. But, as with spring, so much is in flower. I don’t really have time to do much beyond the parade of commitments I have in motion, tending to the outcry of new leaves and flowers, and the harvest that’s demanded — now.

What’s full on for you this spring? What are you having to set aside, to come into right timing in some other season? Drop me a note about it — or them — below.

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Spring Music: How are you Poised and Listening?

Early Cycladic Harper - art by Jane Valencia
Early Cycladic harper – 3rd millenium BC – black and white gouache on Bristol board by Jane Valencia

Above is art that I created for my illustration class at the Georgetown Atelier in Seattle. The figure is an Early Cycladic sculpture of a harper. The Cyclades are a group of Greek islands in the southwestern Aegean sea. In the third millennium B.C., these island developed a distinctive culture and art, of which this harper is an example.

Back in the late ’80s, in my first months taking harp lessons, a group of us made a trek to the De Young Museum in San Francisco to see an exhibit of this sculpture — which I’m pretty sure included this figurine. I was — and am — captivated by both the style of the sculpture, and particularly by the harper, a colleague from more than four thousand years ago!

Early Cycladic Harper - Sculpture
Early Cycladic Harper – sculpture from 3rd Millenium BC

The harper is attentive, listening– it seems to me — to whatever else is taking place. He is poised to play when the appropriate moment opens. As one who has performed at many events during which I too waited, listening, until the moment when I would play, his bearing is oh-so familiar. Perhaps you can relate to such moments in your life as well!

Here, in this moment, how are you listening? How are you poised to play/create/take action when the moment springs awake? What music is this changing season whispering, laughing to you? If you wish, please share your thoughts below.

Here’s another “ancient” snapshot: two harpers listening as a third harper plays (some of you readers will recognize these lovely folk!)

Harpers of all levels enjoy sharing the love of their instrument with others.
Two of these harpers are listening too.