I can’t imagine how many times in my adult life I have scoffed and thought “unbelievable” as someone I really like fails to update their blog/social media/whatever on a regular basis. The audacity! I was that person this summer and felt deeply annoyed with myself. While I consider writing my oldest and truest gift, I don’t necessarily love doing it. It’s an emotional chore, something to fuss over, wondering if you have said too much or too little. Every story told I am right back in a tiny sterile art school classroom listening to others and myself critique my work. This morning I woke up after a series of bad dreams. My dreams have always been vivd, unusual, oftentimes hilarious and even in animation with music. They tend to do their worst when I’ve been disturbed at an odd hour. 3:30 was the time Jadzia woke up and had no idea where she was after being out of town all weekend but quickly pulled herself together and dozed off. Fifteen minutes later I heard the familiar clatter in the radiators of our cat, Sausage, scraping desperately after a mouse. It took so long to fall back asleep, and then an hour of hitting snooze, and the dreams came melting down. All morning I felt off, full of dread, depressed, easily bothered, raw nerves frazzled by events that never happened. My dreams have so much control over me it can affect my hopes, self esteem, daily plans. 

After putting Jadzia down for a nap I thought again about how I hadn’t written anything in over a month. I laid in the dark on the couch, feeling the whipping air from the ceiling fan, listening to the dogs sigh and take turns napping in each other’s kennels. I knew I needed a spark. I needed something to get me out of the post-dream dread. I reviewed what events have occurred and tried to sniff out a pattern. I thought I would be writing about skills, education but I was getting the sense of something else. That’s how writing goes. There’s what you plan to write about and then the screaming ugly newborn baby you push out that’s what was really underneath it all and now you have to just accept and take care of it. Fine! Ok but now I have to get up and DO something about it.

I jumped off the couch no longer feeling the need to nap and hopped on my laptop. Much to my excitement I learned my Postpartum Doula Training is now available online. (Thanks, Covid!) I was trained years ago and have been wanting to get back in the game now that Jadzia is nearing preschool age. I seized the opportunity and felt excited to do the work again, but also that I didn’t feel trapped by lack of childcare or physical ability. I am not great with money or planning. Despite being a pretty calm, collected person I can be quite impulsive. It felt like a personal milestone reached that I had spent months hoping for the right opportunity to get back into doula work instead of trying to force extended childcare for an expensive, in person workshop far away. I am very anti-career, and very pro “not real jobs.” The not real jobs tend to be the most emotionally valuable for everyone and fly under the tractor beam of capitalism. Not real jobs are also more intuition based. Perhaps that is why I feel called to work with the greater realm of the natural world (foraging, herbalism, gardening, children and mothers) because at the end of the day I can go with my gut feeling. You can have all the extensive training and classes and certifications available but intuition will determine survival.

In August we went Up North for a family wedding. Jadzia saw a lake for the first time (Michigan.) What a wonderful blank space for a child to play. We saw multiple juvenile bald eagles on Matt’s Aunt’s property and managed to get a photo and video of one via Matt’s telescope. I am finally downsizing the garden to about 25% of it’s original size. I will be moving to a no-till raised bed and “lasagna layer” gardening technique. This is a huge change but I am relieved. The size will be much more manageable while still being a pretty sizable growing place. The bus is almost ready to paint after a few days of sanding. So much dust came off I looked like I was wearing a black and orange halloween costume. This weekend I will be picking out paint with my sister who is much more experienced in renovation than I am. All our squash has been harvested, there’s only a few ears of Bloody Butcher corn left with zinnias, marigolds, cosmos, and herbs for drying and bouquets. My friend Emily was kind enough to give me some sourdough starter. I’m trying to incorporate more fermented food because they’re good for inflammation but also just really fun to create and eat. I’m working on my bread recipe but knocked it out of the park with sourdough waffles. I never knew how bland bread was until I got back into sourdough. Jadzia has suddenly started talking, naturally after I was worried and enrolled her in a speech class. Amongst using new words her current interests have been eating autumn olive, examining anthills, picking mushrooms (and shoving them in my tail pipe), feeding the chickens all on her own, asking incessantly about colors, and even reading and saying the number “one.” She will be two years old in less than a month. Her eyes seem to be finally making up their mind about what color they are and seem to have settled on hazel. She and I have had so much time with friends and family the past month, and even more visits to come, and are so grateful. The growing and peak foraging seasons we are at home a lot because there’s so much work to do, so much growing. This sudden saturation of whole days away from home, or even entire weekends, feels like a nice transition to holidays and winter. 

To finally return to the original idea of this post, intuition, I will be talking about a rabbit. If you don’t like to hear about dead animals stop here! 

A few weeks ago I found Yushi acting strange near the back of the bus. She seemed agitated but wasn’t stalking or pawing at anything. Next to her is a newly killed rabbit. I lost my breath in excitement and overwhelm. This was an amazing opportunity. Unfortunately the meat was too far gone to harvest. It was a hot day and the bees and flies had already arrived. If I had been one hour earlier we could’ve used the whole rabbit. A few weeks before this was a dead rabbit by our mailbox. Every time I drove out of our driveway I felt frustrated with myself. This animal was a gift and despite my previous experience with other animals I just couldn’t readily pull up that skill set. I didn’t know what to do. I had lost my confidence and felt legitimately depressed that I could not remember how to skin a rabbit. To have this whole rabbit, a clean kill just magically fall at my feet felt like a miracle. I knew I had to just go for it. Jadzia was napping, Steve was home if I needed him to watch her, the sun would be setting soon, the time was now. I grabbed a bottle of strong bug spray and gave a few puffs to drive away the yellow jackets. I scooped the rabbit up with a shovel and tied it from the maple tree. I watched a 30 second video on how to skin the rabbit. I felt annoyed with myself that it was so simple, so much like other animals, that I hadn’t had the confidence to go for it previously. After sharpening my knife and getting the dogs inside, I soaked the rabbit in bug spray again. I sprayed repeatedly until the bees had left just long enough for me to make the initial cuts. It is amazing how heavy a dead animal feels. The loss of life is so physically heavy. For a moment I worried if it was truly dead. I rolled down it’s skin and there it was. It’s raspberry colored flesh softly rolling over ribs and bones. Quickly I ran inside and tossed the hide in a bowl of water to wash and just a minute later Jadzia woke up. 

Thank you, rabbit, for providing me the opportunity to refresh my knowledge, to operate with urgency, the opportunity to trust my instinct.