welcome.

ancestral land of the Coast Salish & Nisqually people

2002~ I was drinking my first beer in public at the Stone Lion with an old teammate from my high school basketball days. She had always been a mentor and asked big questions of me and my future. I remember how I felt when I shared with her my dream.

I wanted to bring the forest to kids in schools. I wanted to bring the smell and the dirt, the shade and active quiet, the filtered light and air and hiding spots to rooms full of rules and grades for kids who lived in concrete and walls.

I didn’t know I meant freedom. I didn’t know I meant belonging. I didn’t know I meant practices for emotional, mental, physical and spiritual health. I didn’t know the words food justice, food desert, or cultural appropriation. I didn’t understand climate change or carbon footprints. It took me planting trees on multiple continents, in multiple languages, with families grieving and friendships healing, busting up concrete and planting windbreaks, with drummers keeping our rhythm and elders listening to the trees tell their stories for me to gather the meaning of my dream.

From childhood to present, it is the living on my path, one step at a time, that reveals the meaning. In the sharing of story-lines and shoveling compost I see why it takes years to grow roots strong enough to withstand the passing of storms. Cutting scion, grafting rare varieties, pulling out dead limbs and planting orchards cultivated reverence for legacy and letting go. The living practice of adjusting, attuning, and participating in the changing circumstances of life calls us all into deep communion with this meaning. The same source and momentum that opens flowers and unfurls leaves opens my eyes and heart in each moment. This living practice pulses with a vitality that tethers each cycle to the next and animates all of nature. I dream of us all embodying that power with a shared language and felt sense of deep connection. Wherein the simple experience of inhale and exhale is our truest welcome home.

Thanks for being here. There’s always more to come~

peace and love from within, maggie

Ancient Language by Hannah Stephenson

If you stand at the edge of the forest
and stare into it
every tree at the edge will blow a little extra
oxygen toward you

It has been proven
Leaves have admitted it

The pines I have known
have been especially candid

One said
that all breath in this world
is roped together

that breathing is
the most ancient language.