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

Herba Magica: Ripe Salmonberry

Plants offer us a doorway into a very different sense of time and into the wonder that interweaves our world and is right outside. This plant, Salmonberry, is a particular friend and ally to those of us in the Pacific Northwest, coaxing us to head off-trail to taste wildness. What invariably happens is that one taste leads to the next and to the next, and soon we are in the greenwood, ignoring tangles, getting leaves in our hair, little jabs in our hands and arms, and delighting in sour-sweet abundance, even gorging on it, our child nature shouting, “Yeah!!!!!”

Which plants coax you to taste? Which ones lead you off-trail and into playful nature? Which awaken the green and giving wild within you? How does that quality of wild express itself in your life? Please share in the comment box below!

Herba Magica - Ripe Salmonberry Photo and Info
Herba Magica: Ripe Salmonberry by Jane Valencia

Into the Heart of the Dreaming

For it was said in that timeless moment that still echoes within me there are those among us who remember deep in some part of themselves–a part that will not let them rest–the forest and the living-ness of green things. It was said that it’s time for them to come home. Time for them to journey deep into the forest that birthed them. Time for them to take up their work–the work that resides in the deepest parts of themselves. Time for them to speak for the green things, to teach their children the way of Earth. Time for humans to think in new ways.

–Stephen Harrod Buhner, Plant Intelligence and the Imaginal Realm: Beyond the Doors of Perception into the Dreaming of Earth

Are you one whose Dream takes hold of you? Are you one who time and again has let that Dream go — the one Dream that holds all the smaller dreams. Perhaps it is not so much a letting go, as a turning away: to tend to the literal nature of daily life.

You are not making up your Dream. The Dream is speaking through you. It dwells in the deep and ancient forest within your heart.

Time and again I find reasons to turn away from the Dream and Soul that shines bright with images and feeling and initiative and a wise intelligence. Time and again, I find a deer trail that, when I take the breath to follow it, leads through gleeful and scratchy bramble back to the dragon clearing where the trees welcome me as a very young grandchild and the stones offer me their own sweet music. The plants set about educating me, and the birds remind me that the universe is threaded in song. And the land: the earth supports and voices the Dream.

Sword Ferns in Forest Halls - photo by Jane Valencia
Sword Ferns in Forest Halls – photo by Jane Valencia

I am always finding my way back to Forest Halls, even when I have thought I never left it (until I return: then I know I’ve only been groping through the salal at the very edges, with an occasional jab in the “I” by a twig).

The harp is one gate-opener for me, my foremost musical partner on the journey. The trees are my generous teachers, the plants my inquisitive co-creators, and the medicine ways of all are the ropes into the wise beauty and blessing that surrounds us and lies just below where I perhaps most typically reside.

There is beauty and blessing here indeed — as well as the sometimes terrifying dark that insists we choose, insists we follow the true nature of heart with eyes closed and hands and senses wide open. It insists that we decide to listen to the veriditas and learn its nature and wild poetic tongue … Decide: to listen …. or to turn away to head straight back to what we think is a place of safety. But what was once the cozy hut on the trail is in reality now a diminished and stunted expression of who we are. What suited and sheltered us at one point on the journey is not where we are meant to remain.

The world is alive, and all things within it are speaking. The trail we follow through the thickets and across open meadows, over waters and into the ancient mind of the mountains is speaking to us too. Take a moment and breathe into the pattern, the weave of all that is and the grace that lies beneath nourishing all. Where do you feel the language? Where do feel the song? Where are you in the forest, the deep, mysterious terrain of your soul? Where are you in the salt waters of your Dreaming?

Stories are welcome here. The forest is listening.

Hawthorn in Flower photo
Hawthorn in Flower: Do you see the faces in the leaves? – photo by Jane Valencia