Introducing my beautiful book! Whether you’re a veteran outdoors type or only beginning to explore what the natural world has to offer, The Fairy Circle Way will lead you on a wonder-filled journey to recovering your sense of belonging and finding your truest self, rooted in the rhythms and raptures of nature. Lyrical essays, insightful narrative, inspiring visual art, and simple, step-by-step practices are designed to guide you in reconnecting with nature’s wisdom and your authentic self.
Praise for the Fairy Circle Way
“With lyrical storytelling and beautifully simple practices, The Fairy Circle Way guides readers back to the profound belonging that lives in nature—and in us. Sarah Croscutt’s insight into how landscapes shape, heal, and strengthen us is extraordinary. When I was grieving the loss of my father, Sarah walked beside me in the woods and reminded me of the quiet power and healing the natural world holds. This book carries that same wisdom forward. It is a gift to anyone navigating transition, loss, or the search for their truest self.”
—Kelly Palace, M.Ed., Bestselling Author, Take Your Mark, LEAD!
“The Fairy Circle Way is a beautiful blend of memory, guidance, and connection. Sarah has a gift of weaving personal stories and ecological science to offer a fresh perspective on how it feels to let the outside world embrace you wholesomely.”
-Jamie Nix, Founder at Plants & Poetry
Available at most book sellers. Here are the links to purchase on Amazon: Paperback/Kindle edition, Hardcover edition. If you feel so led, please write a five-star review wherever you review your books (Amazon, Goodreads, etc) It helps others find their way to the book more easily. Thanks so much for your support!
“A garden’s beauty never lies in one flower.” – Matshona Dilwayo
Biodiversity, or biological diversity is – the variety of life. It is the richness of our prolific planet that creates the enchanted, entangled web of life and breeds boundless abundance and beauty. Biodiversity exists throughout all levels of life from the genome of individual organisms to the elaborate integration of entire ecosystems. Bountiful biodiversity is essential to sustaining stable, well-functioning ecosystems, as well supporting the significant services from nature that benefit humans.
Species diversity is one level of biodiversity. Species diversity refers to the number of different species that are present in a community. We measure species diversity by species richness (variety) and species evenness (how many). Species diversity contributes to stability and balance in a community by adding complexity – complexity in genetics, in form and structure, and in energy and nutrient cycling – the food web. The more biologically complex a community, the more resilient and resistant to disturbances, like disease, habitat changes, and climate change effects. Complexity reinforces resilience. It is like that with humans. As we add complexity to our life, we become more resilient and able to rebound from difficult situations. We build diversity in our health and well-ness through nourishing our physical body with a variety of healthy foods and daily movement. Our emotional body becomes resilient as we build our self-awareness, process our trauma and “baggage,” open our hearts to connect fully and authentically with others, and embrace our gifts and talents to engage in the activities, hobbies, and inspired work that fills our life with joy and gratitude. We acknowledge and celebrate the diversity of the human collective – stories, strengths, talents, and unique perspectives – cultivating deeper connections and growing our community. Our spiritual body supports us as we explore our beliefs and values and expand our thoughts. Our ecological body is our relationship with nature. As we deepen our connection to the natural world, acknowledge our purpose and part in a larger system, tap into the feelings and emotions that nature’s wisdom so readily shares with us, we strengthen our sense of kinship and belonging to the world around us. It is here where we find our foundation of support, balance, and resilience. It is here where we re-integrate ourselves into our source of life. It is here, at the intersection of our physical, emotional, spiritual, and ecological bodies where we live in harmony, balance, and full well-ness.
Along with species diversity, growth in form and structure is a characteristic of communities that supports stability and balance. It is layers of assorted, scaffolded support that creates stability across the community. For example, the form and structure of a forest – canopy to forest floor – supports diversity in species habitat, communication, and food source. It provides consistent, cooperative, stable resources for all the living organisms of the forest, trees to fungi. Humans need growth in form and structure as well. Cultivating a strong web of support and structure in our daily lives is important for our stability and balance. As biological communities grow in their form and structure, we can look forward and backward in time to their succession. We, as a species, can reflect on our collective and individual developmental succession – our history and future – from many perspectives in hopes that we can build and support diverse communities, both human and biological, as we create policy and plan to guide us on a healthy, balanced, sustainable path for the higher good of our planet and all its beings.
How does the human species, as a large, pervasive population, and our relationship with nature play into this intricate dance, the eternal ebb and flow, the balance, or dynamic equilibrium, not only within the natural world, but within ourselves? Relationships in nature are countless, complex, and cryptic. Much of the natural world remains uncertain and mysterious. As humans have proliferated every part of the planet, we have lost ourselves in our own agenda. Our interactions with our beloved planet lack acknowledgement, reverence, reciprocity, and thought. We have upset the balance through our dis-integration. We are responsible for devastating habitat destruction, prolific pollution, growing global warming and climate change, obnoxious over-use of resources, and significant species loss that contributes to the chaos and unbalance around us. Even in our own individual existence, our lack of purposeful and intentional connections to ourselves, to nature, and to other humans has left us in a state of unbalanced dis-ease. To definitively move our story forward, we must honor the complexity of the world around us, embrace biodiversity, concede to the unknown, and cultivate our sense of kinship with the world around us.
Four months ago today, my mom passed away. Consequently, she died exactly three years later, to the day, from my father. I am eternally grateful I could be by her side as she left her physical existence. At 88 years old, her body was fragile and her mind clouded and confused by dementia. Her death was her release. I miss her, but I know her light-filled, wholly healed, liberated spirit is with me. These are the word I spoke at her service celebrating her life and legacy of love for her family.
As a family, and her family is Mom’s/Gramma’s greatest joy and legacy, we can look at each other and see the physical characteristics we inherit from our parents and our grandparents. My hair is the most obvious physical trait – a gene that has been passed on to my sister, my oldest daughter, and my niece. My elemental love of gardening, my sister’s intuitive artistic talent, and my brother’s deep-seated love, from a very young age, I might add, when he could name every president forwards and backwards, for politics, public policy, and the preservation of justice, are innately inspired by our mother. Mom/Gramma will be deeply missed, but today is a celebration of her life and liberation from her brittle body and her deteriorating cognition.
Mom’s life was not without significant heartache and loss. She suffered tremendous grief beginning with the death of her first-born child, a son, thirteen months before I was born and only a few short years into her marriage to my father. As the years passed, a move to Georgia, a devasting house fire which included the loss of two cherished family dogs, her mother’s long and painful battle with pancreatic cancer, the years of estrangement from her brother, a bitter divorce, and the early onset and lengthy illness of her beloved sister who succumbed to breast cancer at the age of 63 years old. Lastly, her father’s death only a few days after her sister’s passing. For as long as I can remember, even in my childhood, mom’s emotional state was often fragile, and her joy and ability to express her feelings freely were shielded by worry and fear. The way she loved us came from a wounded heart that had suffered deep, unhealed loss. Although it often created a chaotic environment, I would never deny that mom loved us. All of us with her whole being in the best way she knew. Her family was her purpose and she worked hard to create a home where her children and grandchildren would visit often and make a multitude of lasting memories.
In addition to her amazing artistic talent, of which my sister received every last gene, my mother was a hard-working gardener. She always had generous gardens, vast and vibrant, bountiful in vegetables and fragrant flowers in a variety of textures and colors. The process of tending her garden – planting, weeding, watering, pruning, raking, and mowing – was grounding. Each task brought joy, wholeness, healing, and connection. It was her therapy. I embrace my innate connection to the natural world passed down to me from my mother and her grandmother, a farmer, whose first name I also inherited! I am so deeply connected that I teach it to others. Our authentic connections to nature and to others is vital to our healing and well-being. After her divorce, my mother became fiercely independent. When her cognitive decline became evident, she was unwilling to accept any assistance or self-acceptance of what was happening to her. It was so difficult. As in natural systems where everything depends on everything else – independence without interdependence leads us to isolation and without the resources we need to adapt when our growing conditions change. She continued to garden until it just became too overwhelming, but I do believe until her last days of raking, watering, and pulling weeds, the garden gave her solace in the changes that were going on in her body due to her dementia.
In my work, I facilitate a lesson where participants imagine themselves as a plant. A plant that most describes who they are – their personality and character, their essence. As I was thinking about the characteristics of my mother that I most appreciate and from which I have learned lessons, I pondered what plant would represent her in my garden of life – I thought about the beautiful tea rose with its protective thorny stem, but beautiful, perfumed blooms that symbolize love in all its forms. The lotus flower with its single sacred bloom rising from the murky, dark depths of the water. Both these flowers would represent mom well – her love for her family that blossomed wholly despite her protective armor and growing conditions that were muddied with grief and loss. My fondest memories of my mom were the times she spent with her grandchildren, particularly time with my three children and my sister’s two girls. In choosing a plant species to represent mom, I chose the sacred symbol of the Sonoran Desert – the Saguaro cactus.
Last October, I spent some time in Saguaro National Park. These towering, tree-like, time-worn, columnar cacti are the sacred symbol of the Sonoran Desert. The creation stories of the ancestral and present native inhabitants of this land are steeped in the Saguaro’s origin and the significance to those who call this land home. Each Saguaro is an honorable relative, an ancestor that has passed on, returning to watch over them and sustain them physically and spiritually. As I gazed across the landscape, these cacti came alive. They are like families! Some stand in a circle holding hands, others extend their arms joyfully towards the sky, or encircle another cactus like the cradle of an ancestral mother. Like all cactus species, they are covered with sharp spines. Although they serve their purpose to protect the cacti from most predators, the spines are not completely impenetrable. Javelina, pack rats, desert tortoises, and bighorn sheep are not deterred by the prickly covering and eat the spines as a regular part of their desert diet. In addition, birds, like the Gila Woodpecker can turn this unwelcoming spiky structure into a home where it can safely nurture its young. The Saguaro cacti produce beautiful, but short-lived blooms that are pollinated by the desert fauna. These fragrant flowers bring forth fruit that is harvested by the native people of the region, the Tohono O’odham. How does the Saguaro symbolize my mother?
My mother loved her family and held them close to her heart. She held tight to her ancestors through photos, furniture, and stories. Mom would have loved nothing more than all of us to live together on a large piece of land. She loved being surrounded by her family. In the Saguaro, I see mom reaching out to hold the tiny hand of one her young grandchildren to walk them down Duke of Gloucester Street, here in Williamsburg, to the duck pond, or the candy store; scooping them up to cradle and rock them in her arms, smothering them with hugs and kisses; sitting on the blue rocking chair with the “little girls” squeezed in beside her. I see her leaning down to or sitting beside them in the sand at the beach and forming fantastical drip sandcastles on one of our many beloved beach vacations. I see her leaning across her dining room table, sharing her skill and love of art in teaching her grandchildren how to draw. I see her in the last year, with her once strong body confined to a wheelchair, mustering the strength to wrap her arms around her sweet great-grandson.
Like the spines of the Saguaro, for so much of her life my mom had a self-preserving protective layer. She did not express her emotions authentically and it was difficult for her to share her feelings freely. Nonetheless, just as the Saguaro gleefully welcomes visitors to the desert with their open arms, mom’s heart and home was always open to her family. I believe she blossomed as a grandmother. Spending time with her young grandchildren was her most fruitful time. Like the handful of desert animals that have an evolutionary relationship with the Saguaro, her grandchildren were not deterred by mom’s self-preserving layer, and I can say with confidence they felt safe and nurtured by her.
In the past 21 months, I have become a grandmother. It is a profound experience. The joy, love, gratitude, and wonder have multiplied exponentially in my life since my grandson was born – for him, for my daughter, and for her husband. Spending time with Paul (and his sibling in November) are my favorite days and I cherish every single moment. Seeing my mother with my daughter and my grandson was a very special moment. I know my mom is proud and pleased as punch that her oldest granddaughter and her husband are raising her great-grandson in the same house she bought when she retired and moved to Richmond to be closer to her grandchildren. Paul is digging in the same soil, appreciating the same beautiful garden, and playing hide and seek amongst the single stand of trees. I am reminded of how much my mother loved her family and now, with both my parents gone, I am the oldest, the matriarch, and standing right at the door of 60 years old. You can see me in the Ring camera! I look at photos of my children – the day after my son was born – I was 27, mom was 57 (two years younger than my current age, by the way) leaning over my oldest daughter and supporting my son’s head while he rests in his sister’s lap, and she holds his tiny hand. That will be me – in November when my second grand-baby, Paul’s sibling arrives. I have now moved into the gramma role. Where does the time go? How do I spend the next 30 years or so as Mom and Gramma?
I want to honor my mom and her love for her family. I want to create a place, full of love and joy, gratitude and wonder where my family can feel safe and loved. A place where vulnerability is encouraged, help is freely asked for, emotions and feelings expressed from an open, healed heart, and accountability for actions are acknowledged and accepted. Mom’s legacy is her family. Released from her suffering in this lifetime, her whole, healed, loving, spirit watches over us, reaching down in guidance, like the joyful arms of the Saguaro that represent and honor family members that have passed on.
Beauty is boundless in nature. From the countless clusters of stars that create the constellations scattered across the dark sky to the multitude of meaningful, microscopic members that mingle and maneuver through the massive, magical world under our feet. Beauty is almost an effortless feeling or emotion to experience in nature, but often it is the most elusive to embrace within ourselves. In so much of modern culture, humans have been persuaded to perceive beauty selectively through purposeless parameters, insurmountable standards, exorbitant expectations, and phony filters. Of the infinite species on our planet, there are none that are incontestably insignificant. Each organism is shaped from the same elements, strung together to create the mishmash of macromolecules and other substantial substances that weave together in a unique pattern to fashion its own authentic, beautiful body. By observing the beauty we see in nature – in all its stages, rhythms, cycles, and seasons, we can unearth and embrace our unique beauty and the beauty in others without judgement.
It is easy to recognize the bountiful beauty of familiar organisms or landscapes we see in nature – a majestic mountain view, a spectacular sunrise or sunset, a captivating, brightly colored flower, or balletic butterfly. However, there are obscure organisms and lesser-known landscapes where beauty is concealed and not so conspicuous. We must explore beyond the evident exterior to unearth the elegance of some ecosystems – a forest after a fire, a decomposing log, a vernal pool.
Vernal pools, or temporary or ephemeral wetlands, are areas of grassland or forest that are saturated with shallow water during variable times of the year. These pools, fluctuating in size and depth, are usually water-filled in the winter and spring months, but dry out in the summer and fall. Although diverse in many water-dependent species, these pools, by definition, lack one particular group of predators – fish. Seemingly, these sodden, seasonal sites are simply unsightly and insignificant – a breeding ground for a profusion of pests and a muddy, murky mess of a lackluster landscape. Looking closer, we discover vernal pools are vibrant, valuable ecosystems, vital to the organisms that live in these harsh habitats. Many of these animals, several species of salamanders, immeasurable numbers of invertebrates, and infinite numbers of frogs, rely on the pools for reproduction. In form and function, these animals have adapted to survive and thrive amongst the frenzied flow of male and female, the convoluted connections between producer and consumer, and the rapid race against time to fully develop and disperse from the dwindling pool before the dry season. After the pools disappear, what remains functions as food and fodder for various visitors to the desiccated, dry ground. Natural systems, like vernal pools, are beautiful in every stage – germination, birth, growth, death, decomposition – the entire life cycle – it is all part of the artistry of life – raw, unfiltered, naked beauty. Within nature, ourselves, and others, we often must look deeper than the surface to find beauty and magic.
When we see beauty in all our significant stages of development – through all our cycles, rhythms, and seasons, not just in form, but in function, we acknowledge and appreciate our boundless beauty and the beauty in others without judgement, filter, or expectation. With nature as our timeless teacher, we safeguard not only what we see in the natural world around us, but also our unique beauty and self-worth within. In addition, we cultivate the other feelings and emotions represented by the mushrooms in our fairy circle – gratitude, love, joy, peace, wonder, and awe – finding our magic as we grow our sense of kinship, belonging, purpose, and harmony.
This post is part of a series beginning with Cultivating Connection: The Fairy Circle Model. Inspired by the fairy circle, a unique and magical phenomenon found in the natural world, I have created a model, or means in which, we as humans, can connect more purposefully and intentionally with nature. I encourage you to read the last few posts to get a clearer picture of the fairy circle model. In addition, I produce a podcast, From the Outside with Sarah C, that explores my relationship with nature and the fairy circle model through stories and essays. It is available on Buzzsprout (click on podcast title), Apple, Spotify, and slew of other podcast platforms. Check it out!
Stillness is the absence of motion, inactivity, or inaction. For some, it is nearly an insurmountable state of being. To be still with our whole body takes effort – settling our physical self, suspending our thoughts, and slowing our breath. When we practice stillness in nature, it nourishes our intention to gather guidance from the Earth and frees us to inherit insights from the creative forces that brought us into being. Sinking into our stillness, we find our inner peace, our true power and magic.
The land on which I live is the ancestral land of the Algonquin-speaking Apamatic, Appomattac, or Appomatuck, people. They are one of four sub-tribes of the Powhatan Confederacy. They nurtured the land along the lower Appomattox River, the path I walk along daily. Although the small park is not far from the main road, this part of the river runs wild. As I sit in stillness along its bank, I often visualize the vigorous life that once encompassed this river – the deep love, respect, and kinship for land and water. I smell the wood fires and hear the wafting voices of those that once walked the river’s slippery edges.
At the Winter Solstice, I had reverently released the people and things that were no longer serving me. As I stood in stillness along the river one cold, cloudy February morning, I listened to its relentless roar. With large amounts of rainfall, the river was foamy and fast moving. Many of the rocks normally peeking above its surface had disappeared under the deep, deluge of water. As I stood along the river’s shore, I felt a shortness of breath, like I was drowning. The ferocious flow fervently brought forth together all that I had released and requested in the months of darkness. What I had set free was swiftly swept away by the current. I was not ready! Come back! Simultaneously, I stood inundated in the insight and intelligence of nature. As I sat still, the fertile flow of creativity saturated my spirit. Tears of recognition and relief ran over my cheeks. We are never quite ready, but we are courageous and adventuresome. Standing in our stillness, our inner peace, we openly observe natural systems, actively engage our ecological knowledge, and courageously cultivate our purposeful and powerful relationship with nature, recognizing nature’s role in our own lives when we listen.
“Solitude is the soil in which genius is planted, creativity grows, and legends bloom; faith in oneself is the rain that cultivates a hero to endure the storm, and bare the genesis of a new world, a new forest.”
Mike Norton
Solitude is a simple place where we can connect more deeply to self and to the world around us. It is in this sole space we sit with our state of mind, sort through our sizeable stack of emotions, stand up against our suspicions and skepticism, and settle into the sentient wisdom of our being. Solitary time with nature cultivates our connection to the very source of life, opens us to our creative forces, and places us firmly on the path to healing. We find our place and power. Without this purposeful, intentional, soul connection with what shapes and sustains us, we truly feel alone.
In October 2018, I left my community where I had lived, worked, and raised my family for 27 years. Feeling stuck in my comfort zone and in my life, I found myself down in the tall weeds and unable to see a clear path to move myself forward. Living in Alaska had been a life-long dream, so I made the decision to uproot myself and move to Wainwright, Alaska, a small, Inuit village wedged between the Chukchi Sea and Arctic Ocean. In a month’s time, I purposefully shifted my life from comfortable to chaotic. Alone and thousands of miles from my home, I was resolved to step fully into my life and the unique landscape that laid bare around me – to the cold, the isolation, the stillness, the culture, the darkness, the solitude, and the silence.
Solitude, even in its discomfort, is necessary for all of us sometimes. It is an opportunity to check in and be fully aware and present in ourselves, to peer into our heart to see if we are still manifesting the life that honors our vision, to explore our reactions and emotions and let go of what no longer serves us, and to sit in the quiet and hear our own voice. In solitude, we retreat to our center, recognize, and resurrect our authentic self, and raise our resilience. Through meaningful connections with nature, mindfulness practice, and meditation, we can discover and discern our own divine voice that proclaims our unconditional self-love and worth, our own wisdom, belonging, and purpose.
This essay is an updated copy of an essay that I posted here a few years ago.
Within the sacred sphere of the fairy ring, silence, stillness, and solitude are the outward ways of being that connect our whole bodies, our breath and our senses, to nature. Silence soothes us to receive wisdom from not only the natural world, but also deep within our own intuitive center.
Silence – the absence of sound. Quiet, hush. There is scarcely a sound in the tundra. The cacophony of the raucous raven. The dark, dotted silhouettes soaring against the winter white landscape. The oscillation of the ocean. Sometimes it is rowdy. Today, it is silent as it shifts slowly from the sway and swirl of its liquid state to its fixed, frozen form. The never-ending, nocturnal barking of the dogs that often keeps me awake. The raging roar of the wild wind as it blows brutally through the village. The high-pitched whine of a skidoo. The hum of the prop plane as it approaches the village. It is the rife reminder of my remoteness and my sole connection that will return me to the rest of the world. A selective smattering of sounds, but mostly a continuum of silence.
Plants begin their tiny lives in silence. Within the dark soil they remain still in silence, snuggled tight within the seed, awaiting just the right moment to burst forth. In silence, plants communicate with each other and their pollinators using a fragrant language, a collection of volatile chemicals that in certain combinations, produce “words” and “sentences.” Together, trees and fungus create a silent, underground, interdependent, communication network that transfers water, nutrients, nitrogen, carbon, and biochemicals between organisms, influencing germination, growth, survival, and reproduction of other trees within the stand. In turn, trees alter their behavior. Trees and other plants are not growing in isolation. They are connected to the rest of the plant world and receive important messages in silence. We, too, are connected in silence to our source of life, our environment, of which we are an integral part.
Silence provides us space to listen to Nature’s wisdom. It allows us to pause and position ourselves to hear our own inner voice of silent knowledge, our intuition. We center our silence in breath, releasing our compulsions that manifest in our mind’s eye. In our calm, we return to heart-centered thought. It is in the quiet where we can clearly cultivate our relationship with nature and ourselves, creating a silent network of feelings and emotions that relieves us of our isolation, connects us to others, and helps us regain our bearings that are so often lost in a world of chatter and noise.
“The world is magical. Magic is simply what’s off our human scale…at the moment.”
Vera Nazarian
Nature is magic. She provides us with a vast variety of landscapes and opportunities in which to immerse and restore ourselves. Her remedies are limitless. A daily dose of the outdoors saturates our senses and encourages emotions like joy, gratitude, wonder, and awe. It clarifies our thoughts, centers our awareness, and calms our anxiety. Nature’s countless concoctions connect us wholly to ourselves and our own magic. We ARE nature.
Recently, I spent time in the Sonoran Desert outside of Tucson, Arizona. Living along the East Coast for the last few decades, I was delighted to discover the distinctively different desert flora. The spectacular species of succulents and copious collections of cacti caught my curious eye. However, none of these significant species of the Sonoran Desert so swiftly swayed my sight as the spectacular Saguaro cactus. These towering, tree-like, time-worn, columnar cacti are the sacred symbol of the Sonoran Desert. The creation stories of the ancestral and present native inhabitants of this land, the Hohokam and Tohono O’odham, are saturated with the sanctity of the Saguaro’s origin and the significance of this species to their subsistence. The Saguaro fruit is faithfully harvested by the Tohono O’odham people and feeds their livelihood. Each Saguaro is an honorable relative, an ancestor that has passed on, returning to watch over and sustain them physically and spiritually. I, too, felt the presence of the Saguaro. By day, their ancient arms reaching out lovingly to me, welcoming me into their arid, acuminous landscape. I stood in their prominent presence, human-like in their habitat, hearing their whispers of wisdom. As the light drained from the sky at sunset, their shapes and silhouetted shadows were spellbinding! They danced joyfully! Their acicular appendages extended eternally towards the sky, or encircled a contiguous cactus like the cradle of an ancestral mother or the amorous embrace of a beloved. The Saguaro are people too! Even in death, the woody skeletons of the Saguaro are stunningly similar in appearance to other species, including humans.
As humans, our relationships with other humans are ideally cultivated with purpose and intention. Yet sometimes this may not be so. We sense ourselves still feeling lonely, disconnected, and insignificant. We should not limit ourselves to the human-human experience. We need to explore and expand our interactions to the non-human entities with which we share our creation, our source of life, and our planet. Nature, and life in general, is creative and transformative. Every being has a purpose and a part. In consciously cultivating our communion with the Nature collective, we honor harmony, balance, peace, and beauty as we immerse ourselves as an integral part of the system that sustains us. Standing fully connected in the bigger picture of Life we discover our planetary place, purpose, and power – our magic.
“The Universe is a communion of subjects, not a collection of objects.”
Brian Swimme and Thomas Berry, The Universe Story
A fairy circle, or fairy ring, is a scientifically sound structure, but magical, nonetheless. Just the presence of the colorful caps of mushrooms supported by sturdy stalks scattered across the dark forest floor, creating a community of kaleidoscopic canopies, leaves me awash in wonder. Much like the fruiting bodies of flowering plants, these unmistakable umbrella-shaped designs are the sexual reproductive structures of these spectacular species of saprophytes. The fairy ring is brought to life when these prismatic parasols of fantastic fungi, originating from the far-reaching fungal network underfoot, protrude above the ground to create a circular pattern. This awe-inspiring arrangement begins underground as a single spore settling and spreading its small, hair-like filaments called hyphae outwards to absorb nutrients from dead and decaying matter in the soil. Soon, other spores settle and join this covert circle, creating a colony of connected hyphae, a mass network of root-like structure called mycelium. However, the magic of the fairy circle manifests only if the fruiting mushroom bodies of the fungal network appear above ground. These mushrooms are mesmerizing, but short-lived. The fascination of the fairy circle is not without folklore.
There is a myriad of folklore that follows the fairy circle. Most of the stories do not bode well for humans. Fairy rings are the gathering spaces for nature spirits and fairies. Although humans are forbidden to enter the sacred circles, they are a symbol of good luck if you come upon one. I honor and celebrate the fairy circle in my model design for cultivating an intentional and purposeful connection with nature. If we look above and below the simple ring on the forest floor, we can imagine the 2-dimensional circle as a 3-dimensional sphere – a sacred sphere of life. Within that sacred sphere, we immerse our whole body to connect to the natural world through stillness, silence, and solitude. As we deepen our engagement, we explore and experience certain emotions and feelings – wonder, awe, love, peace, gratitude, beauty, and joy. They are the fruiting bodies of our richer relationship with our natural environment. It is in these emotions and feelings where we cultivate our deepest connections with nature, ourselves, and each other – kinship, belonging, purpose, harmony, and balance. It is here in the sacred fairy circle where we embrace our life source, unearth our place and purpose, and celebrate our magic.
Join me here, as this is the BIG journey for 2023. We can connect in-person and via Zoom for those interested. Look for my podcast announcement as that is coming in the very near future! I appreciate your continued support and look forward to connecting soon!
“Nostalgia is a file that removes the rough edges from the good old days.”
Doug Larson
Rosemary is the final plant in the series Pondering the Plants of the Winter Solstice. Rosemary is an easily recognizable, pungent herb often infused into our seasonal savory dishes. Its aromatic aura aids in memory and recall. It rouses our senses to remember, recollect, and reminisce. Memories of by-gone gatherings may muster up a mosaic of emotions and feelings that we must maneuver through in the latter months of the year. Where I reside, rosemary is a tender perennial and its presence in my winter garden is a fragrant reminder to be gentler with myself amongst my memories.
Ringing in a new year comes with a lot of expectations. Expectations of letting go of our old attachments and ideas, our tired negative self-talk, and our ancient patterns of worry. However, our genetic gifts of consciousness, creative thought, and nuanced, nostalgic tendencies rich in emotions and feelings, make letting go a much more complex construct than a calendar countdown to a new year. We must wallow through our ego, fear, illusion, and a myriad of memories and muddled feelings – sadness, loneliness, anger, resentment, insignificance, and a loss of control and connectedness.
With some practice and in our own time, we can live fully and free ourselves from suffering, attachment, and mental and emotional fixation. Engaging in daily mindfulness practice, grounding ourselves in the present moment, setting aside time for sacred self-care, and holding space for and fully feeling our emotions, wholly affirming that it is OK to not be OK. As we let go of what no longer serves us, honoring its place and purpose in our growth, we cultivate and carry forward a sense of wild freedom, unbounded happiness, limitless personal growth, and deep, engaging relationships with others.
