Beyond Pumpkin Lattes

The Deeper Teachings of Autumn

Hi dear ones,

Happy October! It’s my favorite time of year! And FUCK it is hard right now.

I’m writing from my tent up in the wilds of Northern New Mexico. The nights are so dark the Milky Way glows overhead, a rainbow of white across the sky. A few days ago I woke up to the sound of elk bugling nearby. The last of the summer wildflowers, purple asters and yellow daisies, soften the landscape with swatches of color.

For days before and after the Autumn Equinox and New Moon in Libra I sat down to write this weekly missive. And for days I trailed off, losing the thread of what I was sharing, closing my computer and promising to return tomorrow.

Tomorrow turned into days, and then into weeks.

Yesterday I said yes to a challenge from one of my favorite writers, Luvvie Ajayi Jones: to write for at least 1/2 hour each day in October. I needed a structure to help me find my way back into regular writing. To stay accountable I’m going to write and post a short note each day ; ) Ugh, I know I am going to regret this commitment at times this month, and I’m also so grateful for the discomfort of discipline with accountability.

People, it has been a couple of weeks here. We’ve been in a work party with about 15 people coming and going, helping with a list of projects. It has been our spring and autumn work parties where we’ve slowly crafted our wilderness retreat center. Each work party we create a list of tasks, from building projects to beautification to land restoration, and we happily celebrate checking off things and adding new things. We eat meals together, work together and apart, and love this place and each other.

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This particular work party was more a painful reckoning for me than a joy. There were definitely moments of laughter and connection, long healing conversations and creating art. There was also the juggle of very different perspectives, personalities, and experiences. Basically the Universe took a big stick and stirred up to the surface layer after layer of emotional hurt, unresolved experiences of harm, and uncovered misogyny, racism, and power over dynamics in our core group tending the land. My mission has been to create a physical space so people can come and reconnect in the sacred temple of nature; I’m learning this also means creating structures, agreements, and doing work to make an emotionally safe space as well for diverse needs and perspectives.

I always ask myself when things get hard: How is this an answer to a prayer? What intent did I set in the past that is now showing itself in an unexpected way? I’ve been praying to clean and create systems for more ease. I of course visioned this as a slow and sweet Autumn cleaning out my literal closets and inbox and doing more ceramics and writing. Surprise! Plot twist. And so I breathe, slow down, and turn toward the bigger cleaning being asked of me and our community.

Autumn isn’t just about pumpkin lattes and cooler nights. It is also about learning to let go gracefully. In this time we can use the wisdom of water; to let the rains wash away what is not ours to carry, and the rapids of these times to hone our skill and presence. We can do hard things. And often hard things require a new level of trust and release. More love and compassion, and more dedication and hard conversations.

In the midst of everything a very physical prayer blossomed: My dear friend Emily K. Grieves came from Mexico and painted a mural on the 27-foot long west side of the community kitchen. I’m going to share her two writings of the experience, and next week I’ll share more pictures of the process.

Take care dear ones.

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Click here to read, or I pasted both her articles below. I highly recommend joining Emily’s substack, The Creative Threshold

Restoration Sanctuary

Restoration Sanctuary

A mural, mullein, and the Milky Way

Dear Creative Beings – I’ve just returned from 10 days in the forest of northern New Mexico painting a mural for HeatherAsh Amara at her extraordinary Warrior Heart Ranch where she is working hard with her community to bring restoration to the land after a devastating wild fire a couple years ago. The mural is named “Restoration Sanctuary.” My time there was intense and felt like an initiation on many levels. I’m deeply grateful that I was able to create and complete the mural. It feels truly miraculous. I feel deeply tired and fatigued, and I feel deeply activated at the same time. Quickened in my soul. For many reasons.

One thing I observed is how wonderful it was to be off grid and not at the constant beck and call of my cell phone, my email, my social media…. I’ve never really taken a break from those things, and it was really eye-opening for me to observe and experience what a relief it became over the days to not have my attention hooked by the constant consumption of the algorithms.

Another thing I observed about myself was how deeply disconnected I am, as are many of us I believe, from nature… from the real truth of nature, not the little doses of it we may find in our daily urban or suburban lives, but real wild nature with its vast and imposing nights … total new moon darkness except for the Milky Way glittering overhead between the ponderosa tree tops … total silence except for a few crickets calling, or maybe an elk bugling in the distance if you’re lucky.

By day, the stream tumbles poetically over boulders and mullein gleams backlit across the slopes, a golden backdrop for the burnt trunks with green heads clinging still to life, soothing the soil, softening the healing of the land… and yet I walk gingerly through the forest, spooking at thudding steps echoing upon the ravine, realizing that the deer people are bouncing above me, not a human, not a bear.

I leap twice across the stream, testing the stones, measuring the distance, called by two giant boulders I see perched high upon a hill, finding the grandmother and grandfathers stones. I wonder how many millennia they have witnessed the turning of time, the growth, the decay, the fear, the wonder that passes through beneath them, above them, hearing the raven call and the hawk cry.

I turn to a tree and place my hand on the burned bark, whorled with red and black scars, dry resin frozen into long drips like old candle wax, and I feel the tender healing pulsing beneath the surface. All I can do is pray for it. And for all the trees, the little mushrooms popping from the bed of pine needles between the rocks, for the bushy squirrel who skitters from sight, for the gentle purple asters and the baby cottonwood trees. For the new young blue spruce that Ernesto planted up and down the mountain. And I pray to heal my connection to nature.

I have much to ponder and process now, but I wanted to leave you with a little creativity prompt today.

Creativity Prompt: What is your relationship with nature? Have you felt disconnected from the real wildness of nature like me? Can you imagine yourself under the Milky Way on a dark night or in a forest on a sunny day? What element around you can you call on to bring you a sense of restoration? And what prayer of restoration can you give to nature in return?

Create from this place. You might write, sketch, paint, or simply let the vision move through you in any way that feels right. There is no right or wrong—only the courage to show up and create, even now.

The courage to make a creative act and bring beauty into the world with intention can light up your path and show you the way forward.

Love, Emily xoxo

Image: “Restoration Sanctuary” Mural at HeatherAsh Amara’s Warrior Heart Ranch, New Mexico, copyright Emily K. Grieves

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And Emily’s first article from September 25th of getting ready to come to New Mexico:

Seed balls

from Emily K. Grieves, The Creative Threshold

Dear Creative Beings!

I am leaving in a couple days to go paint a mural at HeatherAsh Amara’s Warrior Heart Ranch in New Mexico. In May 2022, she lost 175 of 180 acres of the land she stewards to New Mexico’s largest wildfire in their history. Since then, she has been slowly but surely guiding it on a path of healing and hopeful restoration. I’m very excited that she has invited me to paint a mural on the west wall of the community kitchen building. The building survived the fire with the miraculous help of some volunteer firefighters and lots of prayers marked into the very handmade adobe bricks with which the building was built by HeatherAsh and her amazing community helpers shortly before the fire happened.

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Our intention for the mural is that it convey both gratitude for what was saved and survived and as a blessings and prayer for the healing efforts and what is coming back to life and being born anew. I’ve been working on the design for several weeks now, and haven’t quite found the “portal” in, so to speak. Part of me imagines that perhaps things will fall into place once I actually arrive to the land and get a feel for the energies in person. Looking at photos or videos can only convey so much.

The wall is huge, measuring 10 by 27 feet with a door and a window in it. It’s way more than anything I’ve ever done of this nature, and my mural experience is extremely limited… On some level I’m petrified, but on another I’m inspired, grateful, humbled, moved by the opportunity to take on this project.

I just had an intuitive hit today that the Mother, Guadalupe, Tonantzin, who will be an integral part of the mural by HeatherAsh’s request, needs to be moved to a different place in the design, a much more central place in the design. There will be butterflies and bees and ravens and flowers of all kinds. Stars. Honey.

As stumped as I am in the design creation, and how to efficiently project it and mark it on the wall, up on the mountain in the wild, I also feel that I’m being tested to trust in myself and in the divine guidance for healing that I’m being called forward to create for this intention…

Something seems to be telling me to release control and surrender. My nervous system has been majorly chafed lately, with floods and fires erupting in various ways in my own world, and so perhaps this mural mission is for my own healing as much as it is for the Warrior Heart Ranch and the community that calls it home.

It will be the Autumn Equinox, and the New Moon, and the perfect opportunity to bring our creative energies into prayer. HeatherAsh has a practice of making “seed balls,” little balls of clay and seeds mixed together and shaped into little spheres. She plants them intentionally into little areas that she is cultivating on the burned land.

And here is your creative prompt for today:

What wildflowers of healing will you plant?
Imagine your creativity as a seed ball — small, humble, packed with possibility. Create something this week that you could toss into the burned places of your life or the world, trusting it will take root in its own time. What seeds of beauty, prayer, or resilience are you planting?

Create from this place. You might write, sketch, paint, or simply let the vision move through you in any way that feels right. There is no right or wrong—only the courage to show up and create, even now.

The courage to make a creative act and bring beauty into the world with intention can light up your path and show you the way forward.

Love, Emily

Image and words copyright Emily K.Grieves www.EmilyKGrievesArt.com

Image: “ In the Palace”