Maia Toll's Blog

I started holding my breath in late February.

Breathing, this thing I’d done daily and mostly unconsciously since I came screaming into the world, was suddenly dangerous. Not only was it dangerous to myself, but it could be perilous for others. So, as I passed people in the newly widened aisles of the grocery store, I found myself quite literally holding my breath.

My metaphoric breath followed suit, and soon I was holding everything close: my emotions, my money, even my dreams. By spring I was in a state of almost spasmodic contraction. This wasn’t the 2020 I had imagined when I sat down in January to write my intentions for this trip around the sun. 

Sometime in May, after months of being painfully clamped down and drawn in, the exhale came in a torrent. Andrew and I decided to move ahead with the solar install we had been planning pre-Covid, I began re-envisioning what our retail shops would look like in this strange new world, and most importantly, my literary agent and I decided to shop a book deal for my fifth manuscript.

This seemingly simple act, something I had now done successfully four times, was suddenly a scary decision, not because of the usual adrenaline rush of facing possible rejection, but because the world felt like a shaky place for dreams. Being an author and writing books has always been my dream. But was writing a worthwhile venture when the structures of society were torqueing violently? How could I know that a book I wrote now, that wouldn’t wend its way through the publishing process for two years, would still be relevant? Is 2020 really the year for exhaling a dream into the world? I wasn’t sure. It felt potentially perilous.

But perhaps the world has always been perilous. That was my thought as I watched a tribute to Ruth Bader Ginsberg. Her challenges were both personal and systemic. It probably would have been easier to put on an apron, bake brownies, and kiss the kids when they came home from school. And she could have done that, but it probably would have broken her heart.

What does your heart want from you?

Do you have a dream you’re holding so close it can’t breathe, expand, and come into the world?

What are you scared of? Is it 2020 and the uncertainties this year has brought or is it something else?

I don’t ask this question lightly. In the midst of a pandemic, a cultural re-imagining, and the most divisive political situation I’ve seen in my lifetime, I’m well aware that it feels like a fragile time for dreams.

But I would argue that now, more than ever, we need our dreams. Passionately following a true heart’s calling allows you to step into the most powerful and vibrant versions of yourself, helping you to grow the kind of personal power that’s going to propel you to the other side of the pandemic, the cultural shiftings, and the political divide. This is not something someone else can do for you, this is a gift only you can give to yourself.

The evening Ruth died, there was a telling divide on Instagram: some people where eulogizing, not only RBG, but democracy itself, as though one woman held all of our futures in her hands. Others, meanwhile, were finding inner-fortitude, writing things like “today we mourn, tomorrow we rise” or “Ruth has passed the baton. Let’s not drop it!”

What would it take for all of us to rise and reach for the baton? 

At a moment like this, feeling the void left in our hearts with the passing of a cultural icon, it easy to think grabbing the baton means following in her exact footsteps and becoming a lawyer or a judge and fighting tirelessly to shift cultural norms (it’s also easy to think you are taking a step in the right direction by wading into the Instagram culture wars or turning to Facebook to find someone to browbeat).

But pause for a moment.

What if the grabbing the baton means and, like Ruth did, following your heart’s passion?

Remember Ruth Bader Ginsberg was not always the inimitable (and notorious) RBG. There was a time that she was Ruth. Maybe there was even a moment when she was Ruthie.

The lesson here is not to jump to the end of her story and try to become RBG, the lesson instead is to learn from her journey.

Ruthie had a dream. And Ruth didn’t let hard things– like being one of the few women in her class at Harvard or raising kids while going to law school– stop her from pursuing it. Step by step she charted a course that led her from the imagined Ruthie, to Ruth, to RBG. She couldn’t have known the entirety of her journey, but she still walked her dream– her heart’s purpose– to life, step by difficult step.

You don’t have to walk Ruthie’s dream to life: she already did that. Picking up the baton does not mean becoming RBG; it instead means hearing the beat of your own heart and dancing to its rhythm. Opening yourself up to your heart’s purpose builds trust in yourself, courage, and resiliency. It helps hone your “follow through” muscles.

Ultimately, if you stick with it and work through the hard parts, this journey will help you to know yourself, deeply and truly. This knowledge will become solid ground on which you can stand through pandemics, cultural shifts, and political divides…. and it becomes how you can support others in standing strong as well.

Maybe you think someone else is better suited, that you aren’t smart enough/ rich enough/ magical enough to pull it off. Maybe you gave up dreaming a long time ago and think you have forgotten how. Maybe you think your dream isn’t worthy of the dreaming because it can’t change anything in this crazy, confusing world.

That last story is mine. This story made me put off writing my first book, The Illustrated Herbiary, for years. Somehow a whimsical picture book didn’t suit the needs of my ego to be a serious intellectual, to do something that mattered. I couldn’t begin to see how writing this book could possibly help create a better world. But, somehow, I started writing… and I finished… and then the emails began: the emails that explained how the book I wrote got someone through the death of a parent or losing a job, or how a ritual or reflection guided someone to the other side of a particularly bleak situation. As we prepped to launch my latest book proposal into the world, these emails helped me understand that it’s impossible to know how your dream will alchemize. A heart’s calling is a catalyst. You will become someone new, just like Ruthie, by living her dream, slowly and steadily became RBG.

So… what are you waiting for?

Take a deep breath and let yourself exhale. Dig deep. Question logic. Look twice, or even three times. It’s easy to fool yourself, and to sound oh-so-reasonable as you tell yourself not now or I’m too busy or this is a bad time.

And then imagine where we would all be if Ruth had said those same things.

Big hugs—

The post Off the Beaten Path appeared first on Maia Toll.

A few weeks ago, a friend sent me a picture of her son’s hand.

His index finger was swollen, angry, and bruised; painful even through the small screen of my iPhone. Her note said he’d been up most of the night, pained tears running down his little face.

This particular friend is a naturopathic physician. Over the course of the day she used soaks and poultices to begin to pull the invisible infection from his finger. She had no clear idea what had caused it: a spider bite? a splinter? Young boys get into all sorts of things playing in the woods.

Throughout the morning she sent me photos as the inflammation and irritation centralized. Later that day, my friend took her son to a doctor who sent a sample to the lab. They learned it was a staph infection and antibiotics were prescribed. Still, the doctor was impressed with the progress, so poulticing and soaking continued. The knuckle got huge and ugly as the infection surfaced and localized. To the untrained eye, everything looked so much worse.

But there is a secret that healers know: as infections become less diffuse and rise to the surface, they often look worse. Much worse. And, yet, we know this is the path to healing.

Our American culture has been suppressing an infection of prejudice and racism. It’s rising to the surface now, blooming bruised and ugly. In the initial stages, it will seem to be getting worse. The wound will ooze and pus, the anger palpable. It might be hard to see the good in it. It might be difficult to remember that, for healing to happen, the infection needs to be drawn to the surface.

It’s hard to witness an infection drawing to a head. It’s hard not to panic, to instead calmly soak and poultice as my friend did, drawing the infection ever outward.

It’s hard to remember that once things are pulled up, they can be drawn out, and then healing can truly begin.

That’s the work right now: to allow and encourage this horrible infection to come to the surface. It’s not fun or pretty. But, if you look closely, you will see the social body begin the path to healing.

Big Hugs—

The post This is How We Heal appeared first on Maia Toll.

Spring brings wind…

…and wind brings change.

I’ve been thinking about the wind. I’ve even re-watched a little bit of Chocolat (remember the voice-over in the beginning? About the North Wind? Yum.).

There’s a romance to knowing the names of the wind. Each name feels like a secret, sweet on your tongue. When you whisper those secrets, they open a portal to a millennia of stories and histories so that when the wind comes, and its name is spoken, unused doors creak open and the world changes just a little.

When the Sharav blew in bringing unseasonably warm weather, as well as sand from the Negev desert, I was secretly delighted. My heart lifted despite squinting to keep the grit from my contact lenses. My soul thrilled even as I agreed with my sister that the dust was unbearable. It was on the day of the Purim Carnival in Zichron Yaakhov, Israel. Fathers pushed strollers and mothers chased toddlers. But the teenagers were too busy to notice the pesky wind, because the yearly Purim Carnival was in full swing and the whole shebang, from the themes to the rides, was created and built solely by the town’s high school students.

For months before the festival, teams of teenagers learned to design and build carnival rides. The fair’s contraptions are always made out of wood, but this particular year’s theme—the Middle Ages—led to designs that felt brutal-esque and massive. Long boards were lashed together with rope, and somehow these primitive, and rather hefty, parts were crafted into flying swings and Ferris wheels and other strange contrivances.

Each ride was planned on paper and then built into models to be approved by (adult!) engineers. Then the building began. My sister told me that in the final weeks, it’s hard to get the kids to sleep at home. They eat and breathe with their team, fully engaged in the building process, as their creations begin to rise around them, some topping over three stories high.

The day before the Carnival, the engineers do a final check and then the town comes to see what their children have built. I wandered through the festival in awe, thinking over and over again, they’d never allow this in America. Can you imagine the conversation between your local school board and their insurance company? “Hi! We want to let a bunch of teenagers build rides from wood and rope and let the whole town come play on them. Can you give me the cost for a rider on our insurance policy?” Yeah, this is sooo not happening in America.

But even if your town is not about to let the teenagers come together to build a carnival, we can still all learn from the teenagers in Zichron. They start from scratch, learning and experimenting. They work out of their comfort zone or area of expertise. They test the rides, facing real danger and the fear that danger ignites within. And they do this as a team, kids who may not have even said hi to each other before come together to make something marvelous.

My last visit to Israel was four years ago. I was scrolling through my photos the other day and once again found these pictures. As I pondered the images, my meandering thoughts led me to Aspen Medicine, my favorite reminder of community and also a remedy for fear. Aspens shake in the wind, their leaves making a chittering sound which has always reminded me of the jumpy feeling I get when I’m afraid, the feeling of being on constant high alert. But Aspen also teaches us that we don’t have to handle our fear alone: Aspens live in colonies which grow from a single seed and spread by suckering roots. While an individual tree—the part we see above ground—will live up to 150 years, the colonies are thousands of years old… meaning that the continual life of the root system far exceeds the life expressed by one tree.

Aspen teaches that when we are rooted in community, we can overcome our individual shakiness and find strength together.

So as I try to learn the names of these strange new winds that are blowing through our lives, I’m thinking about what communities I want to be a part of and how to choose communities that feel purpose-filled and peaceful. I want to spend my time with people who remind me that I am part of a strong and ancient root system. That is the true lesson of the Purim Carnival. The teenagers in Zichron are really no different from teenagers everywhere: individually, they goof off in school, make bad decisions, and are generally a pain in the rear-end. But something magical happens when they come together with an aligned purpose.

What small thing can you do right now to gift yourself a sense of purpose? How can that purpose touch your community so that you’re constantly reminded of a sense of belonging?

If your mind is chittering like Aspen leaves in the wind, start by centering and stilling:

– be outside (however that feels possible for you right now)

– tune into some Binaural Beats

– Oprah and Deepak have revived their meditation challenge

– watch an episode of Ground Your Shit

– download Kate O’Hara’s Herbiary coloring pages

– laugh, read, stretch, breathe

– we’ve put together some stress support at Herbiary

Sending so much love through the internets—

The post Finding Strength in Our Root System appeared first on Maia Toll.

Do you remember the first time you saw a picture of a unicorn?

Maybe it was one of those pre-Raphaelite remakes with a lovely woman cradling a unicorn’s head in her lap (no layered symbolism there!) or a cartoon in which the unicorn shoots rainbow hearts out of it’s horn. While part of you said “not real,” another part of you said, “hmmmm… wonder if they eat apples?”

There are many kinds of belief. There’s the belief of your mind, a form of believing which wants to be rational and absolute (the brain refuses to remember that it can be faulty or manipulated). The mind wants it’s truths clear, precise, known.

Then there are the beliefs of the heart, soul, or body, none of which are tied to the mind’s rationality. Dreams, shamanic journeys, intuitions, and our spiritual beliefs fall into this second category.

This dichotomy is the difference between what I think of as your daylight mind, which logically navigates the complexities of the modern world, and your nighttime self, which knows life is softer and that shadows are multi-layered. Neither form of belief is “right” and both are valid.To live wholly we must find balance between the two in the same way we balance light and dark, inhale and exhale.

Thus, I believe in astrology… and I don’t believe in astrology.

I’ve been indulging an astrology addiction forever. It started when I was a kid, secretly eyeballing the newspaper’s horoscopes while pretending to look at the comics. Then it was a small obsession: a weekly dose of Rob Brezsny‘s Free Will Astrology downed like a shot to get me through long hours building models and drawing elevations during architecture school. Years later, I’d feed my astrology fix in the subway, thumbing through The Village Voice as I waited for the F train to take me home from my rambles in the East Village.

Astrology is a great big cosmic metaphor and one of many doors into the collective unconscious.

The collective unconscious has long been one of my favorite hangouts. The term “collective unconscious” was coined by psychoanalyst Carl Jung. It describes a place of wild wisdom that you can only find with your eyes closed. It’s a place that all people have equal access to. It holds itself to the penultimate non-discrimination policy so you can enter regardless of color, creed, race, religion, gender, sexual preference, and anything else you (or anyone else!) can dream up, because to the collective unconscious, we are all one.

So if you’re not a person who remembers your dreams or wants to analyze your Freudian slips but still wants to access the collective unconscious, astrology might just be a fun door to stroll through. As a bonus, the movings of the cosmos have been used in conjunction with plant medicine for thousands of years: the moon pulls the tides and the water table, which directly affects plant growth. This simple fact links earth and everything which grows upon her with the stars and the night sky. As above so below.

When I think of myself as living between earth and sky, the context for my life broadens. My troubles seem a little smaller and the world around me is a mystery I get to unwrap.

So each new moon, I pause, check what’s going on astrologically, and reflect on what’s going on my life and how it syncs up with what’s going on in the larger world. Lately, I see this same pause happening on social media accounts that I follow and with the women in my own communities. The serendipitous synchronicity of different peoples’ observations is always astounding. Even while our rational minds may refuse to fully believe in astrology, we find ourselves in-sync and responding to a collective energy. 

When I think of myself as living between earth and sky, the context for my life broadens.
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Astrologically, we’re currently in Pisces, the final sign of the zodiac before the astrological year begins again. Soon the sun will cross into the sign of Aries, a sign associated with fire and new beginning.

How do you want to emerge from the cocoon of winter and begin again? When you come to fiery life, will you be like a candle or a bonfire? What images and symbols will you call on to guide your heart (a unicorn maybe?), even as your rational mind lays its plans for the coming spring?

Big Hugs—

The post The Dance of Duality and Why I (Sort of) Believe in Unicorns appeared first on Maia Toll.

Australia is burning, Puerto Rico is quaking, the polar icecaps are melting, and koala bears are reportedly headed toward extinction.

What can we do when the madness of the modern world overwhelms its magic?

We can seek kinship.

Rewind to a cafe in Ireland. There’s a pot of tea on the table, three of us are deep in our mugs…

…. and I’m bemoaning the lack of goddesses in the Old Testament.

All my Celtic friends had goddesses they could use as archetypal role models: they had Brigid for healing (and oddly also for blacksmithing), Danu for communing with nature, and The Morrigan for when they needed to tweak fate and alter destiny. All I had was a smitey god who occasionally parted seas and burned bushes (and you better bet I was reading “burning bush” as a metaphor for what happened to any feminine-style role models who might have dared appear in this male-centric tome).

“The Old Testament is stunningly bereft of goddesses,” one of my Irish friends agreed. “But have you heard the story of the Jewish people bringing the ark of the covenant to Ireland?”

She launched into what was possibly a completely fabricated tale, a story never confirmed by archaeologists, in which the high priests of Israel brought the ark of the covenant of the Hill of Tara after the destruction of the second temple in Jerusalem. She ended her expose with “so your people are our people and our goddesses can be your goddesses!” and innocently crunched a bite of shortbread.

Years later, this stunning bit of cultural generosity was repeated when I mentioned to a Native American man that I didn’t know how to relate to the land I was living on because I didn’t have actual roots there. He said, “some of my people say that we descend from the lost tribe of Israel, which would make you my cousin…”

It doesn’t matter whether the Torah ever made it to Ireland or a lost tribe ever landed on the shores of Turtle Island. It doesn’t even matter if I happened to meet the only two people on the planet who would say such kind and possibly outrageous things.

What matters is that both of these people chose to seek kinship. Their impulse was to find a way, despite our differences, to create connection between us.

Even as computers make it easier to communicate across oceans and linguistic divides, we’re finding a myriad of ways to create a modern day Babel. In our search for individual identity and purpose, we draw lines between ourselves and others. This affinity for categorization is built into our biology: our brains are designed to catalog differences and to trust those most like ourselves. At one point in human history this brain tic was probably life saving, but in the present tense, where we live in multi-cultural, multi-racial, multi-gendered, multi-sexual, and multi-abled societies, we need to bring to consciousness to this lizard-brain desire to divide “like” from “not like.”

Categorizing is also how we build our individual identity. We say “I’m this, I’m not that.” The zeitgeist of our times further encourages categorization and separation in very public ways: social media profiles highlight our differences, turning what makes us unique into a social statement, and then demanding that everyone around us stop what they’re doing to honor our special selves. As a person who had to announce to her family of origin that she wasn’t going to follow their sexual mores and social codes, and then demanded that they accept her anyway, I do get it. Ironically, even as I stepped away from the rules and realities of my family of origin, my lizard-brain continued to divide “like” from “not like.” Ultimately, I found myself once again feeling like an outsider within my new community.

The most ancient part of our brain never realizes that to feel acceptance we stop have to stop dividing.

When people ask me “what can I do to help the Earth?” My answer is seemingly simple and perhaps sideways from what they had in mind:

Stop drawing lines between yourself and those around you. Stop seeing yourself as separate from the trees and the birds and the rocks. Seek kinship.

It’s the divisions that will be our undoing. We’re in an age of environmental upheavals of a type we have not experienced in generations. We’re already seeing catastrophic environmental destruction and mass migration. What we need are humans who are balanced, grounded, rooted, thoughtful, and kind. What we need are people who look out at the world around them and see the living, breathing organism of which we are only a small part. What we need is for every person to have their basic needs met so they can engage their creativity to help solve the problems we’ll all be facing now and in the near future.

What the Earth needs is for us to begin to recognize the lines we’re drawing between not only us and our fellow humans, but between ourselves and the rest of the (non-human) world.

Sometimes these lines are obvious and easily identifiable like the lines drawn by border walls or refugee camps. It’s easy to see that these are divides (and the question becomes whether or not you support the division, but the fact of the division is unconvertible). Sometimes these lines are more subtle: they’re the boxes we draw around our gender and sexual preferences, they’re the lines around spiritual and wellness practices which could help us all to heal.

The most ancient part of our brain never realizes that to feel acceptance we stop have to stop dividing.
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Keeping others from stepping into practices which speak to their soul will not help us reclaim lost knowledge or repair broken lineage. What if, as my Irish friend suggested, there are enough goddesses to go around? What if we begin to look at the universal energies and archetypes from which specific spiritual and wellness practices emerged? What if we see kinship and common roots?

Additionally, when we forget that many of our spiritual and wellness practices are not rooted in human agency but in connection with the collective unconscious and the natural world, we dishonor the very roots of those practices. Elderberry wants to share her medicine not only with those of European descent but with any who need it. White Sage has taught me more than any other plant despite the fact that our roots grew in different soils. Kinship is also acknowledging the agency of the natural world as separate from our human culture and desires.

How can we support the Earth? We can start envisioning a new future. What would it be like to look at another human being and begin, in your mind, to list the ways in which they are just like you? Our primitive brain wants us to divide, our modern brain must be taught to unite.

Our primitive brain wants us to divide, our modern brain must be taught to unite.
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At the height of wildfire season in Australia, a social media post went viral. It was true in the way that the ark of the Torah being buried on the Hill of Tara is true, in a “perhaps” kind of way. This viral social media post claimed that traditionally territorial wombats were herding other animals to the safety of their underground wombat-burrows.

We are all looking for a safe place to be our individual selves. And while there’s little evidence that wombats were willingly providing safe haven, it’s incredibly reassuring that so many of us humans wanted to believe it.

“To our eyes Aspen trees are individuals, but in their roots and hearts they’re one.” Turn to page 128 in The Illustrated Herbiary to see how joining roots can heal the whole.

Big Hugs—

The post What to Do When the Madness Overwhelms the Magic appeared first on Maia Toll.

“Rule number one: Don’t be an asshole,” I announced.

Two hundred people tittered and my teaching assistant hopped up to write Don’t Be An Asshole in big letters on the white board.

In the past few years, the conference I taught at had become a force for social justice issues. The inadvertent side effect was that leading a class there had become a bit like walking through the Fire Swamp in The Princess Bride: one wrong word could erupt a deadly geyser of virulence, and once there was an eruption, it was tough to get the class’s focus back on topic. “Don’t be an asshole” was meant to give me something to point to if I misstepped, a tool to help me get the class’s attention back: “Oops! I broke the first rule. I’m so sorry,” or “hey, remember the first rule?” It was a way to get eyes back on me. What I didn’t realize was that it would quickly become a mantra for the weekend, with people leaving my class reminding each other “Don’t be an asshole!”

We all have assholic moments (even if you meditate, do yoga three times a week, and center and ground daily). The more stressed we are, the greater the chance we’re going to erupt.

So as we head into the Fire Swamp of holiday season, replete with relatives who rub us raw, supermarkets that can’t keep sage in stock, and people who think it’s okay to swoop in and snag the parking space you’ve been patiently waiting for, it’s important to layer on the mantras: on top of don’t be an asshole, let’s add this is (probably!) not about me.

As I move through the world, this would look something like this:

Someone cuts me off at the grocery store parking lots. Don’t be an asshole, I remind myself as my hands itch to lay on the horn. I take a deep breath and remember this is not about me: they may have a kid in the back throwing a temper tantrum or their mind is on some bit of work that needs doing before the weekend.

Inhale. Don’t be an asshole. Exhale. This is not about me.

A few holiday season’s back, Herbiary got an anonymous email from a customer. It simply said: the woman helping me seemed annoyed.

This is such a great case study for how yuck-o energy gets passed along. Usually the staff at Herbiary are warm and wonderful: the shop is a haven, especially during the holiday season. But even members of our lovely and gracious staff can have a bad day. Someone cuts them off in traffic, they spill coffee on their favorite shirt, or a customer walks in already aggravated being less then kind.

When we remember that the person on the other side of the counter (or the serving tray, or the phone line) is another human who’s had stuff going on all day that has nothing to do with us, we can keep from getting sucked into the quicksand of their emotions. We can instead reach out and turn these moments into points of connection. I’ve had lovely conversations after inserting a simple “Bad day?” into an otherwise grumpy interaction.

What I’ve noticed: the world around me is far more interesting when I ignite my empathy.

I’ve been watching my assumptions, the dialogue that happens in my mind, and how my brain translates the moods and actions of people around me. And I’ve noticed how many of the little frictions in my life disappear when I hit pause on the part of me that wants to react like an asshole and instead, take a moment to remember that it’s probably not about me after all.

Give it a try: it’s the best holiday gift you can give to both yourself and those around you.

Big Hugs—

The post Two Simple Steps to a Sane Holiday Season appeared first on Maia Toll.

It’s the time of letting go, the season of releasing.

No longer held tight to branches, leaves swirl and twist with new found freedom. At night, the owls whisper of winter; the earth sighs and exhales after a season of productivity…

As the year winds down, we face both forward and back, like the Roman god, Janus. We gather the harvest of the year that’s been—seeing to fruition the things we’ve put into motion—while simultaneously peering into our own becoming, beginning to plan what will be.

This time is in-between, balanced between past and future.

In Ireland, we celebrated the close of the year on October 31, called Samhain in the Celtic tongue. While ending the year now makes little sense to the modern mind, the farmers of old had just brought in their crops and laid in their stores for the winter. The time of life and growth was ending, and winter, the time of death and incubation, was coming.

Death opens the gates to the spirit realm and the death of a year is no different.

The old year’s death throes were thought to pull the the realms of spirit close and open the veil to the Other World. So as we leave one year and journey toward the next, we still step into this interstitial place where spirit is close and so are the timeless realms of possibility. At this crossroads, our future, while still shrouded in mist, begins to form a misty and fathomless path stretching before us.

My time in Ireland was a one of those paths I could never have fathomed before my feet found themselves walking it. My way was often shrouded in mist, both metaphorically and actually. My long-term navigation stretching no further than the next step, the next moment.

A thick fog had settled into the valley where my teacher’s house stood. I could barely make out the hawthorn hedge four feet from my hand, let alone the herd of Ayrshire cows grazing somewhere in the mist. The herd’s bull had taken a dislike to my presence and was known to charge me with little warning, making my blind walk feel particularly treacherous.

I was picking my way toward the cattle-gate when I spotted a bottle, black glass, its color blending with the churned earth. In the morning’s dense mist, everything felt magical and a bit surreal, so pulling that bottle intact from the mud had the emotional impact of finding an unbroken pre-Columbian urn on an archaeological dig.

I called it my Medicine Bottle. Soon after, I found two more: one brown, one clear. For years after my return from Ireland, while I worked with the toughest clients—those with cancer and Lyme, interstitial cystitis and psoriasis—those three bottles sat on my desk or my office windowsill, reminding me of my training and the Medicine I’d been gifted. It was an intense time: doctors phoned for my opinion, universities and hospitals asked me to speak.

When we moved to Asheville, I was emotionally exhausted. And then I got the call. “Hi Maia? Hi. This is XXXXXX. I’m friends with J and T. You saved their lives; now I need you to save mine.”

And that was it: I was done.

I wasn’t in the life-saving business. I was in the business of helping people reconnect with the natural world, and through that connection, rediscover their path to healing.

The dissonance between what I saw as my role and what my clients saw as my role was suddenly glaring, the source of my exhaustion stunningly revealed. So when I unpacked my Medicine Bottles from the moving boxes that summer I did something I would have sworn up and down was on my list of nevers: I recycled them. There was no declaration or ceremony. I simply walked out to the recycling bin, dumped them in, and walked away.

This spur of the moment symbolic move shifted my energy dramatically and quickly. My client work finished up within 2 weeks. Something deep in my subconscious was already recycling the energy and making it into something new… but what?

In those first weeks in this new place I could feel the spacious emptiness beginning to fill me, the feeling of letting go, of opening, of releasing.

Life became full of the serendipity and wildly broken plans that happen when your energy truly shifts and new things become possible.

That is the energy of this time of year. Not only the letting go but the opening that happens when we no longer know exactly who we are; the playfulness  that can inspire us to try on the masks of “other,” seeing which one might fit and allow us to grow.

One of my autumn rituals is to re-read November first’s entry from my Ireland journal. It reminds me of the magic of Samhain:

By morning the gods and goddesses had fled and we mere mortals were left to sweep up the chips crushed into the grooves between the floorboards. Samhain, the end of the old year and the beginning of the new; the day the dead drop in for a visit and the faeries piss on any crops remaining in the fields. Our celebration seemed almost American—costumes and candy and way too much wine—until midnight when the bodhrans were brought out and poems and ballads and ancient stories were offered to the night sky. It was then I remembered that behind the innocuous make-up and masks were different kinds of souls.

On the night the spirit world comes close, you, too, get to become “a different kind of soul.”​

At this time, you get to step into the divine, into the yearly moment of endings and beginnings when spirit and matter mingle. You get to let die what is done and step into the mists of what is yet to be.

It’s these small yearly deaths that allow us to reincarnate our selves, to recycle our past and make ourselves anew. Like Janus, we need to see forward and back—not in a straight line, but around corners. And sometimes, we need to trust ourselves to walk forward though our eyes are blind.

This is a magical time of year, but also a scary one.

What personal ghosts and demons do you need to release so you can become the person you are meant to be? What are you willing to leave behind to become the person who can navigate life’s hairpin turns?

And so we wind into the season of darkness.

Death opens the gates to the spirit realm and the death of a year is no different.
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May you find peace in these lengthening nights and in the glory of letting go.

Hugs—

The post How to Become a Different Kind of Soul appeared first on Maia Toll.

I’ve been thinking about hope… and believe it or not, plastic straws!

“Optimism is a strategy for making a better future. Because unless you believe that the future can be better, you are unlikely to step up and take responsibility for making it so. If you assume there is no hope, you guarantee there will be no hope.” — Noam Chomsky

I was friggin’ furious.

The floorboards shook as I stomped around the kitchen making my morning cup of tea.

“He’s selling what???!!!” I seethed. “That is the most ridiculously irresponsible…” I stuttered to a wordless stop. I was practically panting with rage.

What, you might wonder, was causing me, pre-caffeine at eight in the morning, to froth like a venti cappuccino?

Plastic straws. Specifically, ten packs of plastic straws laser engraved with the word TRUMP and being sold as a fund raiser for the fall presidential race.

Now let’s be clear: plastic straws account for less than 1% (less than 1/2%, actually) of the plastic in our oceans. But they’ve become an important environmental touch stone for a couple of reasons:

First there was a video of a sea turtle (an endangered sea turtle) with a straw stuck up his nose. That video went viral and quickly raised public awareness.
Straws are small and sharp, so while they aren’t the biggest problem in terms of ocean trash, they present an over-sized issue for the sea animals who get speared by them.
While most people have no clue what to do about The Great Pacific Garbage Patch (yup, that’s really is a thing), they can pretty quickly figure out how to begin to resolve the straw issue.

This last point is the reason for my morning rage against the TRUMP re-election machine. In the years since the sea-turtle-snorting-straw video, non-plastic straws have slowly become an option in restaurants and cafes. People are empowered to just say no when offered the ubiquitous plastic tube, and many of us who enjoy the sensation of sucking (sorry, I couldn’t resist!) have invested in stainless steel or bamboo reusable straws.

Nope, it isn’t solving the whole problem, but it’s a very do-able way to make a small dent in a large problem.

More than that, there’s a snowball effect as more and more businesses (who are also looking for a way to approach the large and difficult conundrum of everything coming wrapped in plastic) begin to provide plastic straw alternatives. And here’s the important part: when we see that a small change is multiplying, we begin to have hope that solutions can be found for the larger, almost incomprehensible, issues we are facing.

So when I learned that the Trump campaign is selling 10 packs of plastic straws laser engraved with Trump’s name, I kind of lost my mind. Not because of the straws (although that pissed me off too), but because the Trump campaign is trying to steal our hope. Those 10 packs of straws which sell for $15 each say “That no-plastic-straw thing you’re so proud of doing? It doesn’t matter. You can’t make a difference.”

When we see that a small change is multiplying, we begin to have hope that solutions can be found for the larger, almost incomprehensible, issues we are facing.
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It’s pretty easy to convince us of this on a subliminal level, because even as we’re sorting our recycling, we’re wondering if all the sorting and making special trips to the recycling center is making any difference at all. As individuals or small business owners, it’s hard to push the needle on environmental issues in a way that feels significant. And some of the ways in which we can help can take huge amounts of effort that are hard to sustain without seeing a result.

Andrew and I drove a grease car for a while, straining used vegetable oil to fill the tank of our converted diesel Mercedes. Removing food bits from used fryer oil and keeping an older model car on the road was a tremendous amount of work. And our efforts felt like it was making little difference. Let’s face it: very few people are going to strain used cooking oil to fuel their cars. Plus, everything we brought into the car, including us, always smelled vaguely like french fries.

Driving diesel cars converted to run on used fryer fuel is simply not a highly replicable change. People didn’t see us belching along in our french fry mobile and suddenly think “I wanna do that too!” There was no multiplication of the effect we were making; it was a one off, a dead end.

Switching from plastic straws, on the other hand, is easy and replicable. If you own a restaurant on the east side of town and you walk into a cafe on the west side where they’re using cardboard straws you might think, “you know, this is a small change I can make that will let my customers know that I care about the environment.” When you multiply the effect, you begin to see an impact that can be created at the grass roots level. And while it’s true that straws are a mere drop in the plastic bucket, we begin to think “we were able to take care of plastic straws. I wonder what else we can take care of?”

This is hope in action.

When I got done raging round the kitchen, I asked Andrew to source stainless steel straws. Because hope? It’s vital to our personal power and our national welfare.

Herbiary is selling metal straws and donating the profits to The Plastic Ocean Project. Buy a pack of straws. Use them to remind you— each time you use one— that we create change, together, one small step at a time.

Let’s not let politics erode our faith in our own actions and in the power of community to get things done. Let’s take back hope.

Hugs—

The post Taking Back Hope appeared first on Maia Toll.

It’s all about to change.

The crows are congregating in the side-yard spruce, screeching and cawing after a summer of stillness. The echinacea is drooping in the front garden, vibrant pink petals tatty and tired. Early autumn is a time in-between: the days are still warm but the night breeze begins to whisper of winter, smelling a bit like a promise and a lot like freedom.

I sync my steps with the outer world, harnessing the power of the shifting light and the changing leaves. Take me with you into whatever’s next, I whisper, as I lay out my own transitions like the first-day-of-school outfit, smoothing the wrinkles and adding a dash of unexpected color. Through the hot days of summer, I’ve planned these evolutions so I could be ready for my own migrations when the first V of geese crossed the evening sky.

After a decade of weekly blogging, I’m ready for a change of season, a next phase, an end, a new beginning. I’ve been nurturing these seismic shifts all summer. (It’s been kind of fun to secretly hold a mini-earthquake in my pocket, deciding what will remain stable and what will get shaken lose.) I’ll get to that, and the fabulous possibilities change has created for you, in a just a moment. But, first, a quick story (cause that’s what our Sundays together have been for):

A teacher is much like early autumn: a bridge between two ways of being, a portal, a cross-roads guardian pointing out pathways and pitfalls.

During the autumn of this particular story, I was teaching my first Foundations in Herbalism class. My outline was done, supplies were on hand, handouts were ready… but I still had no opening gambit, no hook to draw everyone in and turn eight strangers into a team that would learn and explore together during the nine months to come. What doorway could I offer into this amazing world where flowers had names and trees whispered their musings in dream-time? How could I open a gateway big enough for this entire class to step through?

I thought back to my classes in Ireland, my time at Sage Mountain, to festivals and gatherings and celebrations…

… And it came to me: I would lead an opening drum circle!

(Stop groaning! From the distance of time, I’m well aware that this was an incredibly horrible, and even horrifying, idea. I had only recently learned to clap. Yes, as in “clap your hands.” That thing that every three year old does naturally but I did like a rhythm-less juvenile elephant. But at the time it never occurred to me that going from Baby Clapper to Master Drummer was a huge leap.)

On the morning of the first class, I set the chairs in a circle and a blanket in the circle’s center. I laid out herbs, flowers, rocks, crystals, and, of course, a basket of rattles and tambourines I’d purchased just for this moment. By my seat sat a huge drum, also a recent purchase. (HINT: if you have to buy the drum, leading a drum circle is most likely a heinous idea!)

I surveyed the set-up feeling a rising sense of panic. It was like I suddenly woke up in the wrong bed… or the wrong house… or maybe even the wrong planet. It wasn’t until that moment that I realized I didn’t actually know how to drum.

What the hell was I doing?

Luckily, I was saved from disaster by a student who regularly led drum circles and was kind enough to take my self-inflicted predicament seriously. Opening circle achieved, the class went on to have a fabulous year.

It took me a while to give away the tambourines and the rattles and to admit that banging the mother-drum just wasn’t my thing. There was a deep longing in me to connect in the way that my teachers had connected, to plug in through the vibration of stomping feet and rattling gourds. But that wasn’t my doorway.

I connect through the vibration of voice, through story and sharing the words of the soul.

We can only open the door to which we ourselves, by our nature and being, are the key. This has been my biggest lesson as a teacher: to simply show up, as myself, and open the door.

We can only open the door to which we ourselves, by our nature and being, are the key.
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But like any gatekeeper or guardian, I’m also aware that there are many ways in. And sometimes I want a new perspective, a new way of seeing our world.

So at this time of new beginnings, I’m opening a new door (and to do this I need to close some others).

This will be the last of the weekly Sunday Tea emails. This particular offering will move to a monthly format; I’ll pop back into your inbox on the last Sunday of the month.

AND…

You are cordially invited to join me in my newest venture! It’s called The Night School: a (FREE) solo study program that delivers tasty morsels of magic one email at a time.

If you want to continue to get the now-monthly Sunday Tea email, do nothing and I will see you in a month.

But if you think you might want to come play with me at The Night School, click here for more info.

Big Hugs—

The post Going Dark: Closing Doors to Open New Ones appeared first on Maia Toll.

Before there were plants, there were animals.

Okay, that statement is totally false in the cosmic sense, but ridiculously true in my personal experience.

Family myth has it that the first word out of my mouth was “horsey.” For years I thought my love of horses was a weird genetic anomaly, maybe harkening back to some long lost ancestor who rode with the Mongolian horde (my mother’s side of the family immigrated from the Russian side of the Mongolian border, which was close enough to Mongolia for my teenage imagination).

But it turned out that our horse-loving lineage was closer than any of us thought: as a girl, my grandmother would steal her dad’s work horse which pulled the ice cart he used to deliver blocks of ice (back when ice boxes really were boxes that held a huge chunk of ice to keep your food cool). When great-granddad came home for lunch, my grandmother would unhitch the horse, hop up bareback, and ride unhindered through the streets of Philadelphia. When lunch break was over, my grandmother’s brothers would run through the streets calling her name; she’d give the horse back, and with it, give up her few moments of freedom.

Horse for me was never about freedom. Horse was power and love and fear… bone deep fear (yes, I also told myself that I probably died falling off a horse in a past life. Then I’d have a whole long dialogue with myself about whether I believed in reincarnation… which, for a few minutes, distracted me from the nausea building in my gut as we drove to the barn). My trainers asked my parents why they were making me ride; it was obviously torturous for me and I had little talent for it. My mother, over the years, had to explain to countless people— trainers, school teachers, and concerned parents of other riders— that she’d love nothing more than for me to stop riding and take up violin or ballet (if you’ve met me, you probably just snorted your tea. My ballet teachers were quite possibly more aggrieved than my riding coaches). But despite both my nausea and my mother’s…

Horse was my first life lesson; it was the Medicine my spirit needed to learn how to do this human thing.

In ancient days there were three medicine kingdoms: animal, vegetable, and mineral. The medicine of plants is fairly easy for us to understand: plants provide the basic building blocks of nutrition and health. Some part of us subconsciously comprehends their symbolic language, translating scent and taste into meaning and magic.

It’s much the same with the animal kingdom. If you eat meat, you take this medicine in physically (which is part of why it’s important to be mindful of what you’re ingesting!),  but we also take it in spiritually and emotionally when we pause and listen to what the animal kingdom is telling us. Working with animal medicine is about opening your mind and heart and then gently asking what that animal has to teach you. We share this world with so many creatures, each holding a place not only in the physical world but also in the ecosystem of spirit.

Working on The Illustrated Bestiary gave me space for that pause and that ask. What’s the difference between the medicine of Snake and Butterfly? Butterfly and Frog? They’re all about evolution and change and leaving the old behind to become something new. But what are the nuances? Writing these entries side by side helped me understand the subtleties, helped me see how Butterfly teaches us to let go of everything and create ourselves anew from our component parts, while Frog shows us how to evolve and shift our form. Snake is a surface shedding while the core remains the same. These patterns are related to each other but each is nuanced and needed at different times in our own lives. Each animal has its own energy in the world and a specific Medicine to deliver.

Working with animal medicine is about opening your mind and heart and then gently asking what that animal has to teach you.
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This new book is being birthed in Autumn, my favorite time of year. I can’t wait to curl up on the couch with a cup of tea and ogle the evocative illustrations by Kate O’Hara (who also did The Illustrated Herbiary). I love picturing you getting your book in the mail, grabbing a cuppa and your favorite wrap, and sitting down to drink it in.

Pre-ordering helps baby books like this one make their way into the world.

Your pre-order convinces reporters that the book is worth reviewing and book stores that the book is worth carrying.

Plus you get a sneak peek when you pre-order, so grab an iced tea and click below!

 

 

The illustrator, Kate, has generously agreed to do a full sized print of an animal of your choice for ONE lucky winner (you’ll be entered to win when you register your pre-order receipt on my website). Can’t chose which animal is speaking the loudest? No worries! You and I will hop on a call and figure it out!

Thanks so much for being a supportive member of my little tribe. I couldn’t do the work I do in the world without you.

Big hugs—

The post What the Animals Tell Us appeared first on Maia Toll.