Feel Better Farmer’s Winter Rest and Recovery Program

I was in middle school when I started helping out my family with shopping.  It was a great time- a chance to walk a few blocks alone with my sister.  We could talk about our days and let the air blow through our hair, we could let the sun shine on our faces and help our family out at the same time.  It wasn’t long after we started shopping that we learned there were two sections of produce at the market.  We looked for Shelley to ask him why?  That’s when we learned the difference between organic and conventional produce.  Without hesitation, we went on over to the organic section knowing we didn’t want chemicals in our food.  We observed the prices and we brought home heavy bags of groceries.

I feel proud to now be one of those adults who can make “Your Mom is So Berkeley…” jokes and sometimes I realize, as a parent, “I’m so Berkeley!” I’m so Berkeley that I have never given candy out for Halloween even when I lived in a rockin’ neighborhood with fair foot traffic!  Or especially because I lived in a rockin’ neighborhood.  I’m so Berkeley that I took advantage of the whole Harry Potter popularity and told children I was giving out “scrolls from Hogworts” in 2003/4.  Really, the little rolled up sheets included a list of the Top Ten Frankenfoods published by Organic Consumer’s Association.  I figured, in a story that contains the themes of good and evil, magic and muggles, it was fair to attempt to wake up families to GMO’s as so many children go out there naively collecting “treats” that trick us out of health.  To Summarize, “YMISB that she gives children lists of Frankenfoods in lieu of Candy on Halloween.”  Yes, that would be me.  #proudtothinkoutsidethebox

Moving right along, this post is not about Halloween or Berkeley, even if the Bowl served as the foundation of my early food experiences.  Rather, I’m writing this post for farmers.  The letter below is to invite you into my office.

Dear West County Farmer in need of body care,

I’m writing to introduce myself and my special FEEL BETTER FARMER’S WINTER REST & RECOVERY PROGRAM! I’m a Sonoma County community member of twenty years since moving from Berkeley to attend SSU. There, I studied Chi Gung meditation through movement, developed myself along my spiritual path, and got a degree. Much of my life work has involved teaching and my loves in life include service, healing, and gardening. After both of my children were born, and having worked in a nursery, tourism, and in floral design, I started myself back in school to study the Feldenkrais Method, a dynamic approach to movement education.

In 2011, I completed my four year course of study and I’ve slowly been building my practice while pursuing my passion for garden education. I’ve facilitated children ages 3-11 in camps and schools and last spring, I founded my own program, “Earth Girls Empowerment Camp” where we learn through the themes of love, friendship & dirt! Through working outdoors and as an avid gardener, I have a great understanding of how much the body gets used in the field, pulling weeds, squatting, digging, pruning, etc.

With awareness of the hard work you do, and with the loving dedication I feel to help people heal, I invite you to schedule an appointment now.

Here are the deals I’m offering in the FEEL BETTER FARMER’S WINTER REST & RECOVERY PROGRAM:

• FEEL BETTER FARMER’S Introductory Offer: $30 for your first appointment
• FEEL BETTER FARMER’S Recovery from Repetitive Strain: $100 for 3 appointments in two weeks. (Excellent Value to help you address pain from an injury.)
• FEEL BETTER FARMER’S Let’s Do This! Winter Rest & Recovery: 4-6 appointments in 6-8 weeks for $40 each (Economy Value addressing pain and habits through Movement Re-learning; regularly $70.)

I’ve chosen to make my prices as affordable as possible in an effort to get my name out there. (Best of all, I am open to some trade  so do not let money be an issue if you’re desperate!) I hope you’ll join me for practice in listening to your body and learning how to move with greater awareness and ease of motion.

Sincerely,

Celosia Arcadia

(707) 327-7056

Learn more at:    http://www.celosiamae.wordpress.com

*Please note, I am not a massage therapist. Appointments do not include oils and clients remain clothed. Generally, appointments run one hour. If you desire reiki or foot baths and foot rubs, you can request an extra 15 or 30 minutes for a customized healing ritual to balance and rejuvenate your life!  

 

 

November 2016 Sebastopol, California

I remember now the words of my grandfather near the last years of his life, “My life has been a series of marvelous coincides!” he said with a jovial smile.  And then he went on to tell me the story of being stuck on the bridge in traffic after eating Mexican food and how he realized while the traffic was stopped that he had a toilet on the boat that he was hauling home.  When he finished his business, he was the one stopping traffic in the right lane!  And there was an officer taking down all the necessary info.  But would you know, once he told the officer what had happened, the cop laughed and “tore up the ticket.” So the story goes.

I am not so much the person that has his kind of luck.  Marvelous hardships more like it. The truly wonderful thing is that my life has not remained a series of marvelous hardships. When I was a child, it was just that.  Into early adulthood, it remained painful and difficult but over time, life has changed and improved.  I’ve still met my share of hardships as an adult.  In fact, I tend to become suspicious of when life moves towards ease.  I ask myself, is this okay?  Am I allowed to have this much joy?  I even get the feeling I should look over my shoulder for some trap set by Wiley coyote but my beloved 75 year old neighbor tells me,”Yes!  You’re allowed!  Of course you are!”  So going off the logic of her having years of experience, I try to fully take in what I am so thrilled with in life.

Mostly, I am filled with gratitude.  I told someone a month ago, I feel I live so many dreams come true.  His reply was,”Well then you must have attainable dreams.”  But it’s less like that and more like being in a heavenly cloud.  I mean, I’ll have awareness of what’s going on around me and sometimes, I will just at that same time find myself in this place of my heart that feels good and pure and delighted.  To me, that is a dream come true- to be delighted, in my heart, in my body and aware, realizing some aspect of life, of beauty, of experience and fully embracing it.  It’s like painting a song, with flowers…

One dream I realized this year was the sound of songbirds in the morning.  I often listen to the birds and say I need them.  I’m aware of their effort to live and how naturally, without our invocations, birds just sing!  And so as the autumn sun began its descent toward the south, I found myself awakening in the day, slowly sometimes, lingering with my eyes closed as those songs took hold in my mind, my emotions, in my heart; my consciousness. It was as if I could take little hops with them outside my window and I would feel myself smiling.

Did I ever consciously dream that my happiness would be in connection to birdsong?  Did I ever say to myself, someday I want to live beside a bird sanctuary?  I did not.  But I do. And the funny thing is, to the average Joe, he might not notice he lives beside a bird sanctuary.  I do not think myself an average American.  I have strong opinions of who those people are and maybe there are none but I suggest they grow up in economic comfort and that they don’t like to be uncomfortable and so they cling to the places in life where it’s safe and when they decide they don’t like something, they embrace their sense of entitlement and use their money to change their life.  Is this so bad?  Who knows if it’s even true, just my theory- I made up now.  The point is, I suspect the entitled, privileged, average one doesn’t hear the song.  Is an average Joe graced with a nest outside their front door this year?  In the Spring, we all watched the making of the nest, the count of days the eggs sat in the nest and the development of how the house sparrows come to life!

I’m blessed to be able to look out of the window over my kitchen sink to see horses.  Talk about privileged!  Unfortunately for me, I think my children are growing up too privileged to realized how rare this is- how truly and deeply fortunate we are.  All the time I think “Bless Mary” and thank God for Mary.  She feeds those horses with loving commitment and the poop piles draw the turkey’s over and then there are the doves.  I’m not much of a birder but I’ll tell you, I was there when a murder of crows cawed and yelled and filled the sky with black.  I was there with my children and they looked for the Hawk and we saw it strike with success.  We saw the crow lose, talons against his neck on the post in the field of the Laguna.  It was life, death, and beauty.  I never dreamed I’d see such a thing.  But I photographed the moment and recognized it a great sight.  And a few days later, you better believe I was happy when my son brought home 8 crow feathers.  I claimed this gift. Thank you Crow.  Thank you Hawk.

My life is currently less about survival, less about planting seeds and harvesting and tasting and identifying plants with children and more on a spiritual level now.  Teaching Yoga at the University has been a profound experience for me.  I take very seriously my responsibility and privilege of having so many young adults in my life.  I have been generously throwing gemstones to them right and left.  They seem to catch every one and grasp it as the gem it is.  I know what I wanted at that age, I know what I hungered for and I think it is part of normal human development, relative to culture.  When you’re a young adult, you don’t have enough experience to really know how many different walks of life there can be. Whether you’re sheltered or not, your experience is limited to the fact that you’ve largely spent half of your life playing.  Even when you’re wise for a young person, twenty years is not a very long time.  My students demonstrate a hunger in that feeling of wanting to know what more there is and they eat up the fact their inner knowing already knows.  Over the course of the semester, I have seen students change so they embrace themselves and embody their inner knowing and self confidence.  I get to teach self confidence through somatic education.  What a dream!

Now ask me, did I dream this?  Well, it wasn’t exactly this that I dreamed.  Early dreams are embryonic, are not largely formed- they are more like fluff or star dust.  They need breath and cultivation.  I dreamed of teaching college students to breathe.  I dreamed of teaching people of all ages to meditate through movement.  Basically, when my most important mentor entered into my life and I began to understand what it was she was doing and that I could do it too, I felt the irresistible urge to continue her work and the only way to do that is to make it my own.  So yes, this was a dream but I did not know who would be part of my dream come true, or when that time would come or how or where.  Leave that to the Divine!  What’s ever so marvelous about a dream is the realization.

From what I understand about the spiritual path, self-realization is the purpose.  When I was twenty, I didn’t realize that I wanted to embrace the sound of birdsong outside my open window while waking in the morning light but in feeling that intense and very simple joy, was realization itself.  To embrace whatever it is that is sacred and beautiful and inspiring (or those things that challenge us), is the path of self-realization.  While we can choose any path for ourselves and carve a life, while there are infinite possibilities, it is impossible to foresee what the future will hold.

When I was younger, I did not think I had very many choices, or that there were very many possibilities for me.  I am still affected some by this limited idea from my youth but as an adult, my experiences and education have opened me to know I do have many, many choices.  Though that idea of traveling is so appealing, I really just love home.  I love having a home, home cooked meals and a clothes line to pull the sheets from.  And though too much stuff drives me crazy and creates more disorder than I think I can handle, I go about most days, tidying up, keeping up with laundry, dishes, vacuuming, dusting, and sweeping, allowing little messes here and there.  I like keeping a house and I think the role of a home maker is really important.  I only have two children who directly benefit from this love but I tell myself, it is quality not quantity!  (I have to resist that temptation to know a third child.) This is the age where my eggs have tugged at me with question marks.  I keep saying no, I don’t want to re-set the clock!  It’s hard to remember now just how much child-rearing I’ve already done in my life.  It goes against my habit as a nurturer to have few children to worry about.  It’s unfamiliar territory and I tell myself, that’s good!  Get new experiences! But when I hug my son at bedtime or upon waking in the morning, I breathe in the moment, his smell, the feel of his hair and his skinny little body and it is bittersweet- he’s already nine.

It’s hard to believe that I would pass up more motherhood.  It feels selfish.  The pro-life examples of my parents having ten children had such a strong bearing on how I learned to so deeply embrace the miracle of life.  To hold a baby pure and new and to talk to him or her as an aware and capable human, is a marvelous thing.  Wait for grandmotherhood…

But actually, I gave up my desire to be a grandmother this year.  I won’t cling to it because the world is terribly polluted.  I wonder what the new life expectancy is for humans.  In my lifetime and in less than twenty years, humans were one, living longer lives than ever, and two, not living as long.  Who is to say how long we really have on the planet?  We can never know.  What if it’s not that long anymore?  With a great-grandmother who lived to the ripe old age of 103, I used to think the nineties are reasonable.  But my grandmother only made it to 87.  Still a long time… but now there’s Fukishima, totally suppressed and played down, there are tons and tons of chemical contaminants all around us every day and it’s a lot to navigate through.  It’s hard for one person to navigate let alone a mother with child.  Which reminds me, I dreamed I was carrying a heavy pack and a big comforter last night in a chase.  I felt like my legs were like iron- so heavy, I could barely lift.  I had left my old family house in Tahoe, though not the real house, there is an alternate house that I dream, and I needed to get away from my mother who had imposed herself into my vacation time.  I went to the field nearby where children were playing and next thing I knew, I felt like I was being tracked, or like I had to make some strategic choices.  Two twin girls from my old school were on my tail and I was trying to shake them.  I finally got away after dropping the comforter in a wooded area and then running across a big wide road.

My husband’s alarm went off and we woke.  After that I couldn’t go back to sleep.  I stayed resting for a long time but I never fell back to sleep.  We often make zombie apocalypse jokes and this dream had that feeling only without the zombies.

One thing about having a child- you have to be convinced it is one of the greatest things you can do with your life.  If you’re not convinced that your purpose in parenting a child is great, it’s a waste.  You miss the fun, the relevance.  Each and every moment important. I don’t choose that path now because I am not convinced.  Without any additional child, I am doing great things in my life and my impact is largely different.  Truly, I love to feel like that free bird, I love to shake my head and my hair, to be like a mare and be wild.  I claim my autonomy and I love it!

Overall, this year has been a good year.  I still hunger for a consistent women’s circle but but I cannot complain.  I have horses outside my window, and birdsong.  Plus some pretty amazing snugglers whom I call family!  Now, I’ll dream more about dying in September or October, but not November.  Please Lord, not November!