Tag: Nature

Braiding Pieces of Thought from January 20, 2025

Post author By Jen Payne
Post date January 21, 2025
1 Comment on Braiding Pieces of Thought from January 20, 2025

“They tried to bury us, but they didn’t know we were seeds.”

Yesterday, I had the privilege of attending the 40th annual MLK Breakfast, presented by the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. Heritage Foundation. It was a beautiful community event that included readings, music, and a presentation by Pulitzer Prize winning author Dr. Jeffrey C. Stewart who spoke about the history and importance of non-violence.

I went at the invitation of my friend Laura Noe, who has her finger on the pulse of activism in truly inspiring ways. She reads voraciously, volunteers liberally throughout town, and knows how to make good connections for others. She’s currently working towards her second Master’s Degree, in Public Health (her first was in Gender Studies), and she’s teaching two courses at Southern Connecticut State University this semester, Psychology of Women and Adolescent Development.

For several years, Laura has recommended I read the book Braiding Sweetgrass by Robin Wall Kimmerer, about the reciprocal relationships between humans and the land, with a focus on the role of plants and botany in both Native American and Western European traditions.

So yesterday afternoon, while the world around us marched to a seemingly different beat, I picked up my beautiful hardcover copy of Braiding Sweetgrass and began to read.

I suspect this was a divinely inspired moment — something somewhere knew it was exactly what I was supposed to be reading yesterday, the odd ironic day in 2025 when we simultaneously honored a great leader like Martin Luther King Jr. and inaugurated a demon and his minions.

I wanted to share with you this gorgeous passage from the new Introduction in the 2020 edition…it delivers, I think, beautiful blades of hope.

I began writing Braiding Sweetgrass in what seems, from this moment in the midst of a global pandemic and the upheavals it has generated, a more innocent time, when climate catastrophe was a hot glow on the horizon. We could smell smoke but our home was not yet engulfed in flames. There was guarded optimism for leadership on climate change and justice for land and people, human and otherwise.

A lot has happened since in climate urgency, with the political pain of vile Windigos come to office and all the wounds they have inflicted. I don’t need to say more. This evidence might suggest that the medicine of plant stories has not worked very well to heal our relationships with land and each other. The powerful purveyors of destruction are still in power, the skies darkening. But as always, I take my guidance from the forests, who teach us something about change. The forces of creation and destruction are so tightly linked that sometimes we can’t tell where one begins and the other leaves off. A long-lived overstory can dominate the forest for generations, setting the ecological conditions for its own thriving while suppressing others by exploiting all the resources with a self-serving dominance. But, all the while it sets the stage for what happens next and something always happens that is more powerful than that overstory: a fire, a windstorm, a disease. Eventually, the old forest is disrupted and replaced by the understory, by the buried seedbank that has been readying itself for this moment of transformation and renewal. A whole new ecosystem rises to replace that which no longer works in a changed world. Braiding Sweetgrass, I hope, is part of that understory, seeded by many thinkers and doers, filling the seedbank with diverse species, so that when the canopy falls, as it surely will, a new world is already rising. “New” and ancient, with its origins in the Indigenous worldview of right relation between land and people. What the “overstory” of colonialism tried to suppress is surging. It is the prophesied time of the Seventh Fire, a sacred time when the collective remembering transforms the world. A dark time and a time filled with light. We remember the oft-used words of resistance, “They tried to bury us, but they didn’t know we were seeds.”

Kimmerer, Robin Wall. Braiding Sweetgrass: Indigenous Wisdom, Scientific Knowledge, and the Teachings of Plants. United States: Milkweed Editions, 2020.

Tags book review, Books, braiding-sweetgrass, martin-luther-king, mlk, Nature, resistance

Creativity Storytelling

A Hemlock Story

I find I have fond affection for the small hemlock under whose wide branches I sought refuge that cool October day. The soft rain having changed its mind turned cold and hard, and I — caught without a hat or jacket — had no choice but to suspend my walk for a while. And so it was I tucked into a dry spot beneath the hemlock at the side of the trail and leaned into her, perhaps for comfort or camaraderie — we will wait this out together. You can form bonds like that, you know, with trees. It comes almost instinctually, as if pulled up from some deep primordial well of remembrance. She was and remains like kin, and I wave when I pass her now. I like to think she nods back.

Tags bonds with nature, Jen Payne, Nature, nature wrting, video

Creativity

Sunday Morning

This morning, I stopped along a narrow trail, enveloped by the sweet scents of honeysuckle and spicebush. Memories of last night’s rain skipped from leaf to leaf, while damselflies danced and a lone catbird sang. From branches sixty feet above, pollen drifted down like snow, illuminated in the first light of day. Oh the bees, their sunrise fête in blooming vines, and mine — oh mine — below.

Tags In the Moment, Jen Payne, mindfulness, Nature, poetry about nature

Creativity mindfulness Nature Writing

The Healing Process

The storm took so much it’s difficult to consider — gone the familiar, the known path. Feet so sure there was no need to gauge progress. It was how I became present again, how I stepped back in the moment.

It was where I could breathe, let go, release my rooted stride. Slough off thoughts. Embrace the solitude with just a heartbeat and birdsong for company.

But her wide canopy of solace is gone now, and I have been hobbled.

Those sacred spaces of breath and respite are changed.

And so am I.

So I take a different path this morning and it comforts me.

It whispers…

This rabbit will caretake the old path.

This turtle, hopeful, lays its eggs. As does the robin.

Part of this snake is here but its heart has moved forward,

and this spider writes her poems in the spaces left behind.

Essay ©2021, Jen Payne. If you like this essay, be sure to purchase a copy of my book LOOK UP! Musings on the Nature of Mindfulness, available here.

Tags Grief, Jen Payne, loss, mindfulness, Nature, the solace of nature, Three Chairs Publishing, transition, walking in nature, Writing

Nature Poetry Writing

Sanderlings

Perhaps it is the same flock,
the one I met years ago,
the one that startled me
here on this shore
that very first walk,
when every rock and curve,
every wind and wave
was unfamiliar still.

Perhaps it knows me now,
this flock of small fidgety birds,
always nervous or impatient,
quickened by anticipation of
the next wave, skittering
to the beat of their sharp trills,
quickly quickly ahead
never near enough for hello again.

Until this morning when I,
in keen focus on a resting shell,
became for a moment
likewise and warmed by the sun,
looked up to find myself surrounded,
heart quickened and nervous
that one false move would startle them,
their gathering at my feet.

Poem and Photo ©2020, Jen Payne. If you like this poem, then you’ll love WAITING OUT THE STORM, a collection of my poems about Cape Cod. Click here to buy the book now.

Tags books about Cape Cod, CT Poet, Jen Payne, Nature, nature poems, poems about Cape Cod, poems about mindfulness, writing in a pandemic

Poetry transition Writing

Sun Rise

This morning, I watched the sun rise —

or rather, I watched myself move forward
forward uncontrollably into the sun

The owl went first, the one sitting on a branch across the marsh.
Then the giant maple, her arms outstretched and welcoming.

I seemed to step into the rising myself though I made no movement —
none that I could tell mechanically, despite the velocity of change.

The velocity of one thousand miles each hour, imperceivable —
imperceivable almost, except for the first bird who let out a gasp,

a tweeeeeet! as the she smashed into the first rays of light,
a joyful surprise at how quickly the change snuck up on her.

Or how quickly she snuck up on change — remember?
She, without a lifted feather of flight, raced forward to meet the sun.

The owl and the marsh and the maple went into the light, too,
a face-first dive into the oncoming rays, into the change of day.

How easily we forget this constant movement, this constant change
give up our own velocity and blame it on the sun rising,

roll over in bed to look out the window, tucked under illusions of security
think it rises to spite us, harumph at the inconveniences,

forget to marvel at the wild magic of it all, the whooosh! of day
the velocity of our lives careening without injury forward.

Tags Jen Payne, Nature, poetry about transition, watching the sunrise, writing in a pandemic

Writing

When the rain, rain, rain came down, down, down

Post author By Jen Payne
Post date November 27, 2020
4 Comments on When the rain, rain, rain came down, down, down

This morning, not feeling particularly one way or the other, I took a walk in the woods. My Eeyore-gray rain jacket seemed enough, I thought, until the louder rains came. So, I tucked myself under the branches of a sweet, young hemlock who smelled green and damp and seemed not to mind me much. I was less alone than one might imagine, there on the torrential edge of morning — in the air, I could smell the fox lingering and musing to herself on my wet and getting wetter predicament. I think I heard her laugh. Then the storm subsided just enough for me to start again, and so I did, up and towards the simmering pond when there — just around the bend — I spied the bobbing yellow coat of a kindred spirit. He sloshed through a puddle or two, and nodded with a smile that said Hallo as we passed. Hallo I smiled back, good thinking, that umbrella. Yes, yes. Good thinking and good morning.