Following is a new post from the Blueberry Moon by Rose, a seeker at Waabanong. A few more stories from this moon are at her website, metraylor.com.

Not-Doing

“How can my suns be so full of meaning, and yet I feel so purposeless?” I asked Chris as we watched children cavorting in the water, bathed in the intense golden light before evening. I didn’t expect an answer. It was the question I’d been asking myself the past few suns as in the still spaces –between gathering firewood, milkweed, boughs, playing with children, cooking, getting to know the people around me– I would suddenly wonder, But what does it all mean?

Squinting at me against the glare cutting across the tree line on the western shore of the lake, Chris listened to me seriously through the splashing and screams of laughter. With his wavy, graying hair down, the shape of his beard and the fine, aristocratic features of his face have always led me to imagine him serving some Spanish court. Or as a big cat, calmly watching, relaxed and always a predator.

Later in our conversation he told me, “Energy conservation. That’s really important for you. Every time you ask yourself, ‘Okay, what do I do next,’ don’t. The Toltecs called it literally ‘not-doing.’ It’s important that we stay engaged, and it’s also important that we have those spaces of rest to rejuvinate ourselves so we can give to our circle.”

The moon has died and her belly swelled with life again, and after three suns of closely packed meetings and relaxing in between, I’m ready to do. The sun is setting, yet I feel like I’ve done so little, I think, I still haven’t gotten my fishing gear together, or I could work on my tomahawk handle… or I could watch the sunset.

Meeting Joanna, our resident master of hook and line, I get a kit together under her supervision. The colors in the sky have faded and I wonder if there will be anything left to see as I pad down the trail to the swim area through a tunnel of fragrant zhingob saplings.

Settling down on the rock-shored beach, I prop my feet on the wave-worn log. My few framed by the sweeping branches of cedar and pine, I wonder how I could have possibly thought that these faded colors would somehow be less than their earlier glory.

Silhouetted conifer spires line the western sky along the shore of the lake, tipped with a warm rose that fades to beige. I’ve never thought of beige as a sensual color, the shade of prefab middle class housing developments and the pants of young urban professionals. But here, a swathe of color that fades to a shade I can only describe as dust, then to a powdery blue, all mirrored in the rippled canvas of the lake, it has a delicious richness I’ve never seen before.

I notice the globes of sturdy needles of the red pine bowing over the water, each spine etched against the sky. A fat-bellied spider wends her way from one puff to the next, as if walking on air. I feel myself drawn into the flow of photosynthesis, imagining for the first time in conscious memory drinking in the sunlight from such a narrow, tough surface, feeling the bloodstream of the tree flushing from needle to trunk, then breathing out again, releasing oxygen, which I drink into my lungs.