“That night, you turn in your bed
to watch the moon rise, and once more
see what a small coin it is
against the darkness, and how everything else
is a mystery, and you know
nothing at all except
the moonlight is beautiful –
white rivers running together
along the bare boughs of the trees –
and somewhere, for someone, life
is becoming moment by moment
unbearable.”

~Mary Oliver from ”Twelve Moons,” 1979

Friends, I haven’t had the inspiration or will to post a blog I wrote this week. The CA fires, the stressful political situation, and now extreme cold and wind leave me drained. I don’t forget my life is easy and peaceful compared to most. I have food, water, hot tea, and warm blankets, but my health struggles in this cold. Still, I send you love and a Mary Oliver poem written after the loss of her friend.

May all be well in our challenging world, including our stressed bodies and minds. May there be calm and peace. I took the moon photo this morning and saw the first Mourning Dove of the season a week ago before it turned so very cold in the Finger Lakes of NY.

The post January Morning Moon after a Frigid Night appeared first on Elaine Mansfield.

I honor the winged Goddess Psyche, Greek Goddess of Soul and Butterflies, and all other  Deities with wings who visited my land in 2024. Beloved Monarch Butterflies were scarce last season. May they get help and thrive again.

Monarchs were just put on the Endangered Species List, so I hope this will help save their habitat and save them from harmful agricultural toxins.

I included just one photo of my beloved bluebirds. They had a tragic year with ruthless House Sparrows, an invasive non-native species that thrives in many parts of the world. We have new tricks to try to keep House Sparrows from killing Bluebirds who don’t know how to fight back or protect the young. I hope the new techniques (a new part of a series of attempts over the years) will keep House Sparrows away from Bluebird nests so Bluebirds can live here in peace.

May Bluebirds, Butterflies, Bees, and you thrive in 2025. I’ll take a week or two off and resume my blog in January 2025.

The post Deities with Wings appeared first on Elaine Mansfield.

Awake at 7 am.
November snow, wet and heavy,
Dark face on the electric clock.
No electric power today.

Pine branches bow to
Kiss the cold white earth.

Graceful curving limbs break under
The burden of wet snow.

I cancel appointments and wait,
Snow is too heavy for me to shovel.
Electric poles and trees lie broken.
Roads are closed.

A few days later, the weather softens.
My helper comes to plow the drifts.

Snow melts enough to walk the wind swept trails.

I fear I’ll find more damage.
Instead I find deciduous trees,
that had dropped their autumn leaves,
are unbroken and whole.

Yes, pine limbs broke in the wind.
But Hickory trees, related to the Greek God Dionysus,
gently dropped their load.
Oak trees sacred to Zeus held strong and sturdy.

Like me, they had sacred protectors.
We all survived the storm.

***

For more about the deities who rule my forest see Lessons From Artemis, Goddess of the Wild. For an article about healing gods in my dreams, see The Green Man’s Guide to Life.

With gratitude to New York Electric and Gas and to my internet provider Empire Access. These heroic workers dealt with fallen and broken wires, broken poles and trees, a tangled mess, and they kept going in the cold wind and often in the dark.

The post Zeus and Dionysus Protected the Forest appeared first on Elaine Mansfield.

I awaken with pale pink light flooding the eastern windows, illuminating the spruce and pine treetops in the National Forest. I pull a pillow over my head and float between waking and dreaming as I resist this post-election world.  My dog Disco lies on top of the blankets pressing her black sleek body against my legs. I shift and Disco rolls toward me with calming warmth. Her exhalation isn’t audible to my deaf ears, but the movement of her breath comforts me. I don’t want to face the news of the day, so I doze.

In a dream, I join a gathering in a large auditorium. The audience quietly waits for Marion Woodman to arrive. My sons David and Anthony sit a few rows ahead of me. Marion enters the room alone. She’s around sixty, the age she was when I first met her in 1988. She looks around at faces and smiles radiantly; her blond-gray waves bob as she nods.

It’s a joy to see my beloved wise woman and Jungian teacher. After Marion sits, I kneel at her side and whisper, “I’m here with my sons and want to introduce you.”

“I’m so happy to see you and happy your sons are here,” Marion says. “We need more young men”

“Marion,” I whisper, “I have to leave to take care of our family dogs, but I’ll be back before you go.”

Marion smiles with genuine affection and pats my hand. My shoulders relax because she knows it’s important to take care of the instinctual and animal life. I hate to leave Marion, but I’m glad my sons are here. I’ll be back.

I wake up fully to write down this dream. Then I sigh. It’s another day struggling with election results and lost hearing. It’s another day of women and children being bombed and terrorized in Gaza and Ukraine. It’s another day of decisions made by men with tight jaws, hard heeled boots, and the power they craved. I want to escape, but don’t know how. If I could talk to Marion, she would have wisdom to share. She would put this experience in an archetypal framework like the violent warrior years of the Iron Age (1200-800 BC) when the Goddess Tiamat was killed by the Gods. Marion’s wisdom would help.

So much is gone. Vic won’t come back except in dreams. Neither will Martin Luther King. Neither will my hearing or my dreams of democracy. Neither will Marion who died in 2018. I need to accept what is and live.

I walk downstairs to the back porch, inhale the cold morning air, and admire the golden light in the east. Disco stands close to me, pushing her head against my leg, soothing my grief. So much is broken and uncertain, but we will adjust because there is no choice.

***

How are you handling the rage unleashed by the election? I’m finding it difficult to witness the suffering when we could be spending money on food and medicine, not bombs.  I don’t understand the human romance with violence. For other posts from more hopeful political times, see Giving Hope a Seat Between Anxiety and Grief: Women’s March on Washington. Or The Sacred Water of Life: Prayer Walk for Seneca Lake.

The post Marion Woodman’s Wise Presence in a Post-Election Dream appeared first on Elaine Mansfield.

I cling to the calmness of nature’s autumn departure in these agitated times of elections and war. It isn’t easy, but I repeatedly bring myself back to the beauty surrounding me.

We’re having an unusually dry autumn in the NY Finger Lakes, but no violent weather. The days are gentle and soft. Of course it won’t last, but I’m grateful for calm November days. And a few poems, too.

Song for Autumn
Mary Oliver

Don’t you imagine the leaves dream now
Of how comfortable it will be to touch the Earth
Instead of the nothingness of the air and
The endless Freshets of wind?…

(published in Poetry Foundation, 2005)

The Oak Leaves
Edna St. Vincent Millay

But my heart goes out to the oak-leaves that are the last to sigh “Enough,”
and lose their hold;
They have boasted to the nudging frost and to the two-and-thirty winds that they would never die,
Never even grow old.
…These are those russet leaves that cling
All winter, even into the spring,
To the dormant bough,
in the wood knee-deep in the snow the only colored thing….

Collected Poems of Edna St. Vincent Millay. New York: Harper, 1939.

Nothing Gold Can Stay
Robert Frost

Nature’s first green is gold,
Her hardest hue to hold.
Her early leaf’s a flower;
But only so an hour.
Then leaf subsides to leaf.
So Eden sank to grief,
So dawn goes down to day.
Nothing gold can stay.

***

For other posts about the changing of the season, see First Monarchs Arrives: Symbolism and Soul. Hurrah! The summer Monarchs are now arriving in Mexico. No one knows how many there will be, but some are there clustering together on old trees. A census will tell us more in mid winter. After the Storm is a piece about the fate of the forest in a wind storm when the winter winds damaged some old trees and made a mess in the forest.

The post Autumn Farewell appeared first on Elaine Mansfield.

I haven’t been on this trail all summer and didn’t plan to walk so far from home today. The trail marks the border between my land and the National Forest and occasionally there are hunters here, but not this early in the season. Today I don’t hear one human sound except my own footsteps and breath. With the help of my cochlear implant and hearing aid, I hear loud crunching of dry leaves as I walk.

Disco sticks close to me on quiet paws. I search for red leaves on the forest floor, but most leaves are yellow or brown. It’s early for the forest to be so dry on this usually wet hillside. Fallen leaves cover the trail.

I hear a sharp crack as I step on a fallen branch and then the crisp sound of more dry leaves. Chomp and scrape as Disco pulls at a stick with a cluster of leaves still attached.

There’s a rustling overhead as wind tousles the leaves clinging to the trees. Most of the maple leaves are on the ground here. Oak and hickory leaves hang on, some still green. Maybe they’ll turn red and yellow later.

My footsteps are quiet as I walk through a grassy area where wind blew the leaves off the path. I hear insect rhythms from the nearby swamp. The creek is dry, but the damp swamp still hosts the cricket choir. When I pass the swamp, I’m near a trail that leads me home.

I climb the hill to Vic’s cairn with gratitude for the trails and beauty here, thankful for the many walks we shared. I circle the stones while Disco sniffs the earth. This natural oak labyrinth centered on the cairn circles back downhill, so I pause and offer a prayer before heading toward home.

On grassy paths my steps are almost silent. The harsh cry of crows echoes in the distance. Branches creak as they rub together in the wind and early evening crickets chirp. The maple leaves are redder near the swamp, sharing the color I long for every autumn.

Rustling trees along the edge of the swamp whisper sacred prayers with each step. Soon the chickadee-dee-dee of the Black Caps at the bird feeder says, “We’re here. We’re home again.”

***

This post was the experiment of an almost deaf woman sharing what she hears in the forest. I hear better in the forest than with the electronic sound online or Zoom. How are you doing with sensory awareness, with hearing or vision? For a post about getting a cochlear implant, see A Healing Ritual in a Sweet Grass Bowl: Self Care for Surgery. For a post about creating a memorial cairn, see Pushing Through: A Poem for Grieving Hearts.

The post Autumn Forest Symphony appeared first on Elaine Mansfield.

Brilliant and beautiful, Elaine Mansfield’s essay, “Wild Nights: Grief Dreams, Mythology, and the Inner Marriage,” delves into the depths of sorrow through the lens of dreams, mythology and poetry. Her work, which won first place in the C.G. Jung in the Heartland writing competition, explores the powerful emotions and spiritual journey that accompany the loss of Vic, her beloved husband and reimagined Green Man. Elaine’s narrative weaves together personal reflections and mythological motifs, offering her readers a unique perspective on the transformative power of grief and the enduring bonds of love. Highly recommended, and you’ll ab-soul-utely love her artwork too!”

        ~ Deborah Gregory, Poet, Author, and Jungian therapist

In 2016, my book development editor Jill Swenson told me about a writing competition offered by Jung in the Heartland. It fit my interests in Jungian psychology, dream, and mythology. Still, I hesitated.

I’m not a therapist, although I began studying C.G. Jung with my teacher Anthony Damiani in 1970 and went to many workshop with Marion Woodman, the first in 1988. I’d also attended dream workshops with Robert Bosnak. I studied mythology with a group of like-minded women in a class that began in 1990 and continues still. I wrote a book called Leaning into Love: A Spiritual Journey through Grief following my husband’s death in 2008 and my book was awarded first place for Aging and Dying in the IPPY (Independent Publishers) awards. I was a prodigious dreamer, especially after my husband’s death.

The competition topic was “Jung, Dreams, and Sensualities.” I decided to give it a try and created one of my best pieces of writing. I now share it on my newly remodeled and updated website. My essay “Wild Nights: Grief Dreams, Mythology, and the Inner Marriage” had all the ingredients for the competition: C.G. Jung, dreams, and sensuality.

Nearly finished with the essay, I emailed Deborah Gregory, an English friend, accomplished writer and poet, and Jungian-oriented therapist. I asked for her feedback although I had never met her in person. Deborah wrote something that still guides my writing: “Follow the image!”

I had lost focus, so I returned to the main dream image and painted it. (That painting is in the essay.) There were only a few main characters in my dream–my husband Vic, the Goddess Inanna and her companions, Marion Woodman, and the Green Man. Vic had appeared in my first dream after his death as the Green Man, a Northern European God. The image of the Green Man anchored me and, in one of my paintings, he pulled me out of water when I was drowning in grief.

“Wild Nights” won first prize in the competition, so I’m now sharing the essay at my website. It’s in the section called “About Elaine,” just below a short section about my history. It was a pleasure and honor attending the conference hosted by the Jung Association of St. Louis and reading my essay to so many Jungians.

“Wild Nights” is longer than most of my blogs, so I decided against breaking it into small pieces and share the whole essay introduced with Deborah’s review. I didn’t ask Deborah for a review, but she sent her comments after re-reading the essay. It’s a gift to have generous friends. The full essay is the second entry on the “About Elaine” page and includes the painting that inspired the essay. The painting is near the end of the piece: dream-like and sensual.

With thanks to Deborah and Jill and always to my teacher and inspiration Marion Woodman. Find information about Deborah’s three books here. I recommend all of them. She’s working on a fourth. Follow Jill’s fascinating exploration into indigenous and settler history in Warroad, Minnesota on Substack. If you need help with a book project, I suggest contacting Jill at Swenson Book Development.

***

If you’d like to make a comment about the essay “Wild Nights,” please leave it on this page. Thank you and may we all have sensual, mystical, and transformative dreams.

The post Wild Nights: Grief Dreams, Mythology, and the Inner Marriage appeared first on Elaine Mansfield.

Good morning, my beautiful migrator. I see your orange wings through your black chrysalis shell. Are you ready to fly today?

In the nursery in a mesh butterfly crate, your friends are eclosing from their chrysalises and getting ready to fly.  They were the last to join the nursery and they’ll be the last to leave. There’s plenty of food for everyone in the fields of asters and goldenrod, and you have an early start for your journey.

I’ll miss you, dear children, but you need to leave. I don’t expect you to wave goodbye, but when this day warms, you’ll flutter your wings and cling to the sunny south of your habitat. I’ll put you in a lidded bowl with soft tissue padding and carry you to the edge of the field. I’ll open the lid and off you’ll go. I hate saying goodbye, but the summer is ending. I’m grateful you thrived in an inhospitable world. 

I’ll miss you, sweet ones, but it’s time for your heroic adventure to your winter home in Mexico.

***

I hadn’t seen one adult Monarch all summer until a handsome fellow landed on a milkweed plant in my flower garden on July 19. I imagined more the next day, an egg laying female or two. I was sure of it, but I was wrong. I didn’t see another adult until July 30. Another male.

My friend and helper Matt cut trails through the milkweed fields, mowing a few mature plants that had already flowered. I first inspected the plants to make sure there were no caterpillars. There were none.

A few weeks later, tender sprouts emerged from the mowed milkweed below my barn. My dog Disco and I wandered the paths, and I found a few eggs each the size of a sesame seed. I didn’t see the female who laid them. Every morning, I turned over fresh young milkweed leaves and usually there was nothing, but occasionally bingo. I gathered five eggs in an hour one day and for another week, but when it rained, there were none. Spiders, ladybugs, and ants were searching, too, so I hurried to get there early before they arrived to eat the eggs and early caterpillars.

In a month, I gathered almost 50 eggs and 38 hatched into tiny Monarch caterpillars less than ¼ inch long. Each tiny caterpillar felt like royalty. I gave them fresh milkweed leaves in small individual jars in my back porch. They like their greens tender, just like we do. As they ate and grew, I moved them into communal crates with other caterpillars and more milkweed.

By mid September, I released more than two dozen adult Monarchs with ten more maturing in their crate. In the past, I housed over 100 by late summer, but climate change has been hard for Monarchs and many insects.

When I awaken in the morning, I hustle to my back porch to visit the butterflies. “Will you fly today?” I ask the darkening chrysalises. Some mornings I see Monarchs nectaring in the asters near my porch and wonder if I raised them or if they’re migrating from Canada to Mexico.

Monarchs are my soul friends. When they fly, I fly, too.

A Monarch Farewell Haiku by Deborah Gregory
Wings flutter, last dance
In silence, Mama watches
Farewell, gentle soul

***

Do you have a summer nature passion? One of my son has about twenty hummingbird feeders and the other has a huge flower garden. I grieve for the scarcity of Monarchs in most places in the United States. There’s a possibility that could change because females are prodigious egg layers, but I don’t count on it. For a post about how I’ve raised Monarchs in previous years, see Dancing with Monarchs, Defying Despair. With gratitude to my friend, the poet Deborah Gregory.

The post Thirty-Eight Sparks of Soul appeared first on Elaine Mansfield.

They disagreed about most everything.

The right food to feed a baby. The best card game. How much a woman ought to weigh and whether or not she should wear a whalebone corset and stockings even in August heat. Whether she should sit by the pool at the country club or work in the garden when it was 100 degrees.

Grandma loved home churned butter and ice cream made with cream from the Jersey cow, mixed with peaches from the orchard. Mom disapproved and favored salad made with spinach in the days when no one put dark green anything on their iceberg lettuce and cucumber. Grandma liked homemade bread with thick slabs of butter. Mom wanted Rye Crisp with no fat.

Mom made homemade yogurt, so sour everyone wrinkled their nose when they got near the jars of curdled milk. Grandma wouldn’t touch it, of course. She made rice pudding or bread pudding, especially good for babies she thought, with sugar and a sprinkle of nutmeg.

When my mom first visited the Missouri farm with my dad, she offended Grandma by bringing food for my brother and me. Hadn’t Grandma raised two sons? Wasn’t she known at the Audrain County Presbyterian Church as a fantastic cook? My mother disagreed.

My dad went to the county fair for fried chicken and pie. My mother got colitis.

Still, these women who both loved my dad agreed on a few essential things. They both loved Franklin Roosevent and especially his wife Eleanor and wanted me to love her, too.

Grandma was grateful for the rural electrification program since she’d spent years on the farm in Missouri with no electric lights. When I was a child, she still pumped water by hand from the deep well in the yard, but electric lights were everything! Grandma could read sheet music on winter nights and play her piano. She could read a book to me when I stayed the night, rolling into her soft body on the soft bed where my dad once slept.

They also agreed that Eleanor Roosevelt was a powerful woman, almost a saint. When Eleanor helped arrange for Marion Anderson to sing at the Lincoln Memorial at the top of those wide broad steps under that statue of Lincoln, my mom and grandma were thrilled by a dark-skinned woman giving a concert with her huge rich voice. The Daughters of the American Revolution had canceled Anderson’s concert in Constitution Hall. Good Missouri Democrats, my mom and grandma were outraged when Marion Anderson’s concert was canceled because she was black.

Mom honored Katherine Hepburn’s lean silhouette and Grandma admired an opera singer’s full body, but they both loved Eleanor Roosevelt. Together they taught me that racial tolerance and fighting for equality makes every woman beautiful.

***

Were your political ideals shaped by the women in your life? Mine certainly were. For other articles about my political activity see Giving Hope a Seat between Anxiety and Grief: Women’s March on Washington.  Or for something earlier, Make Love, Not War: 1967.

The post The Woman They Loved appeared first on Elaine Mansfield.

Will I always remember your laughter?

Will I remember the dancing?

Will you visit in dreams?

We met in a motorcycle shop.

I was in love, but you were afraid.

We grilled sandwiches,

Drank wine, and smoked Mexican pot.

Your resistance vanished like smoke in the wind.

I was 22 and you were 26.

…Death felt far away.

Dedicated to Vic Mansfield (1941-2008)

***

Do you have love stories to tell? I’ve told so many, but I’d like to hear yours if you’ll share a few. In time, life taught me how love and sorrow travel together.

I wrote Leaning into Love: A Spiritual Journey About Grief about the joy and sorrow of our time together. You might also enjoy Love Notes: The Magic That Made Our Marriage Work.

The post Tell Us a Story about Love appeared first on Elaine Mansfield.