writing to stay alive. i have been there. i understand so much of what you’ve written, just sitting here, nodding and grinning like a fool. i am so proud of you, sophie. so, so, so proud. just ordered. keep writing. the strand is infinite. ♥️
Reading this just now, while drinking my morning coffee, after having spoken to the man I deeply love but who is 1500 miles away and likely will stay there rather than experience our colder winters and high population density - despite the intensity of feelings we have (at such an old age - who knew?), I am moved to tears and also my own inspiration. You have filled in the time line since I first became aware of your amazing, magical, intuitive writing. And more than writing, just knowing you are in the world, alive, offering your gifts, touching me and so many others, waking people up, taking us farther than we had gone before, and (in my case anyway), confirmation that indeed we are not insane, the world (Earth, Gaia) needs us and our strange, feral loving. However it manifests.
Reading the part where you just lay on your floor, waiting to die - or live, the feelings you expressed, reminded me of how I felt after my oldest son, Jason, died. There was no hope for me either. I just wanted the pain to stop. I wanted to see and hold my son again. I did not want to be in such a world that Jason couldn’t take anymore, his pain, his fears, his longings, his Love. (He died of an opioid overdose - but he hadn’t been sold heroin which he thought, he had been sold fentanyl and it killed him. If he had lived, he might still be alive, but who really knows? Not me.) It was Earth, roots, worms, dragonflies, plants that struggled and. . . . lived . . . perhaps given life by my own tears as I shed buckets of them into the soil that grew my herbs and flowers. I know I would not have survived, would not be the woman I am right now without the beings who called my garden home. And the landscape of my heart surrounding me, the mountains I grew up with visible every day (except for when they were hidden by clouds, but their presence still strongly felt) from my garden, from my bedroom windows, from the kitchen window where I stood looking out so often. My sickness was different and people generally don’t die from it, but they often times do not recover. Losing a child is indescribable except to someone who knows. Yet, one day I woke up and the grief was IN me in a different way. I realized that, like a new part of my DNA, it was a part of me and would be going forward. But it also had cracked my heart open so wide that it would never heal, would forever remain cracked open and therefore touched, always, leading to such feelings and intuitions and unknown directions.
As I read this essay this morning, I realized, though I do not yet have the words for it, a different way for me to fuse my writing and intuition with my love of fragrance and my “work” with natural perfumes. I cannot, realistically “justify” buying and working with such incredible, rare, exquisite, expensive ingredients, blending and musing with them to create what I hope are beautiful, sensuous offerings most people I know cannot afford. And as you know these ingredients are resource intensive in the sense that so much of a flower or herb or plant are needed to make just a tiny milliliter of essence. Or the sustainability issue, the exploitation of land and people . . . I am grateful that I have met and discovered small-scale distillers, amazing people who trek Earth to meet with and experience the places and materials first hand - so they support rather than destroy the land and cultures from which these rare materials, often woods and resins, are harvested. I feel so blessed and honored to be able to do this work, and I know it is my purpose to integrate it into a story of connection and permeability and cellular connection and allowing our natural, sensuous natures the freedom to dance and experience and participate - and fall even more deeply in love - an erotic love, a gentle love, a love that digs us deeply into the soil and roots and pith and heart of the rooted beings and the places they create, nurture, and evolve with.
So thank YOU, Sophie - for your perseverance, for following your intuition, for trusting it above others’, for daring to LIVE as you are a gift to the world, your work is so needed, your words yes, and also your SELF - your physical being, the energy from your body and mind - You and your work are the future - perhaps even essential so there can BE a future. I know I have a role, as I have over these many past decades. But I am old now (will be 70 this month and who knows how much more time I have - or any of us really of course), and you are young and this is your time.
Oh, Sophie - my heart opened. Again. My mind blown. Again. My soul seen and recognized - by me, through your words. Again. I don’t know if you have any clue of the power of your writing, the way it nudges and prods and awakens those of us in your orbit. I see so much of myself in you, so many common interests and passions, as well as wounds and pains and fears. The difference is how you’ve molded healing and understanding from the clay of your words, made meaning of your lived life through partnership with the seen and unseen super/natural worlds. I’m still kinda on the floor thinking some part of me is dying, but today’s essay has shown me a path out and forward. I feel I now have permission (???) to write whatever is bubbling up in me. I’m excited and terrified to see what it is. So grateful to have found you and your exquisite writing. Thank you. A million times thank you. xoxo 💛
Mar 6, 2022·edited Mar 6, 2022Liked by Sophie Strand
Sophie, I just stumbled across your work a few months ago, I don't even remember who shared one of your posts on Facebook and found myself completely immersed in your stories, just as when you are walking through the forest and a mushroom takes your eye and then you start seeing them everywhere. I found myself reflected on your words I guess I just want to say thank you for sharing and inspiring me to keep writing, dreaming and healing.
Mar 6, 2022·edited Mar 6, 2022Liked by Sophie Strand
I love you Sophie. I have tears of joy with you. I have uncertainty and pain and celebration and gladness with you. I trust in you because of your vulnerability and the ‘kingly armour’ you put off in order to wear your exquisite nakedness, that calls forth the fox pelt, the seal skin, a wild extension of the senses that makes feeling even more deeply possible, instead of armour, ‘gating out’. To be seen and to see; to be known and to know; to be touched and to touch; to be beheld and to behold; to be collaborated with and to be a collaborator; to experience all of this with all your senses… feeling the full extent of that great holding, that great intimacy with life and its many strands, connections, tendrils reaching out, on your bare skin. To be so alive and awake inside such a magnitude of magic, hair standing on end, telling frission, is a gift.
And - side note - love stories have a way of resisting us. Of seeming (perhaps purposely), out of reach, far fetched, maybe even naive or self indulgent to desire so fervently. Great loves feel to me like expressions of high magic. A great spell (or spell breaking that opens a path for love) conjured by two. A journey both have been on for many moons, often arduous, often exhausting, in which you meet ‘as if by accident’ at the well you have taken rest at, the place in which you seek to quench your thirst, honoring yourself, your needs, your body, your animality. It can come as a surprise, just how readily the treasure appears in plain sight, in a moment when we aren’t seeking after it, but just tending to our most basic, ‘mundane’ needs. We learn later of course that great love of ours was always on our way to us - specifically, uniquely, every-eccentricity-included us - all along. Without knowing it. Without being able to picture each other fully. Without knowing much of anything about each other other than this person is a person I will be able to melt into, a person who will love regeneratively with me. I think Rumi was offering a kindness to the human heart with the reminder ‘what you seek is seeking you’. We need this reminder practically- a poetic kind of practical. In the meantime just keep resting when needing, quenching your thirst at the wells along the way. Drinking in a million love stories. Seek and you will be found.
This was such a beautiful read, you are a special human, and its so strange because when I read your words I always imagine a crescendo of nature, and violins playing and the sky sparkling. I think you make magic, I definitely aspire to this. 🌻
Years ago I visited a monastery in Pine Bush and had an experience I never quite made sense of, until your work contextualized it. I walked along the road and saw a lot of trash. It confused me: why would this road, which I had seen so many monks and visitors walk up and down be so filthy? I prayed on it, and I was feeling an "off"ness that I couldn't put my finger on, but it seemed at the heart of a lot of the "spiritual" pursuits I'd experienced. I started to think of a dragonfly and had no idea why. I went to the meditation hall for another somewhat forced spiritual exercise. When I exited the hall, a dragonfly darted across my path, and THAT was the unforced spiritual moment that taught me something I couldn't put into words. Your words have grounded my understanding of this moment. During the pandemic, my partner and I wrote this song while displaced from the land we usually called home. It includes the seagulls who taught us that they soar high above a hard surface to crack the quahog shell (and that sometimes, we're the flesh inside). It includes a regatta of swans we encountered on our anniversary, at a beach we hadn't been to since our wedding, who reminded us that love can find you where you are. Sometimes when I read your words about longing for love and then falling in love with everything, I think of this regatta of swans who answered my own prayer. Your words have been such a gift in my life (and your mother's book with Susan/Fiona, and your dad's book about the dark...both of which helped me make sense of other things I didn't have words for), so...thank you, Sophie. (Here is the song, if you'd like: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BekkaMByWhU )
What a cleansing Tsunami of bracing tears, warning shouts, relieving sighs, piercing screams, primal belches, and magical melodies you have erupted into the today's cuneiform cosmos. It will take time to take it in deeply.
Bless you and every cell of your being, every spore that moves from your writing into all of us witnessing it, breathing it, drinking it... may you bring about so many more fruiting bodies Sophie.. so grateful for your words and where they continually take me in exploration...
Thank YOU, Sophie, for inviting us into your process and opening yourself up to seed other people's wild creativity. I know that your words about the nature of story have activated parts of my brain I never knew and inspired me to approach my own storytelling in a much more vulnerable, anarchic, and embodied way. As a Quaker, I have spent my life well acquainted with the experience of channeling something through you that is not entirely of you. But whatever comes is affected by you as it passes through the filter of your beingness. It uses all that you are in unexpected, transformative ways. I see that so much in the way The Flowering Wand seems to have synthesized all of your disparate curiosities and passions, weaving them together into a previously unimagined, whole cloth.
I don't want to make any misguided predictions of the future: "Of course you will write all the books!", "Of course you will find the great love you yearn for and bear the son you imagine and are preparing your heart for!". None of us knows that, and the reality is you may not. Or you may in some ways and not others. And other, unanticipated things will come as well, to stir the wild pot. What I can say with complete clarity is that I am grateful for how exquisitely you are allowing yourself to be used, for how gorgeously you are living your "one wild, precious life." Even at a distance I am electrified by you, like one of those high-speed films of seeds blowing in the wind, landing, and then erupting into vibrant, fecund life seemingly in an instant.
Sophie I have only just found you. My heart is blown open by your words. You have stitched together myth, the wild, pain, abuse, and made the invisible underworld journey visible. Thank you. Inspirational woman carved deep.
Thank you for this! Wept my way through. While a felt-sense of many bodied-ness is a common experience when I read your work, this catalyzed a diaphanous dissolution/connection reconfiguration into and with wider and deeper kin contexts and relations. Thank you, Sister! Sending gratitude and love to and for you!
Amazing, Sophie! Clearly the creative spirit is moving through you...you are the vessel for a vital message that our world so needs now. I too have loved the transformational magic of TH White's vision of Merlin's teachings--to understand the world, we have to deeply realize that we ARE the world, change our relationship to the world from subject-object to subject-subject. Dream a new dream of interdependence and mutual reverence. I also share your intuition that the Divine Feminine needs her Sacred Masculine to fully bring to birth the changes we need now, in consciousness, in the way we live on Earth. Against the horrible backdrop of Putin's aggression, the worst of masculinity on violent parade once again, your vision of "a flowering wand" is a wonderful balm. Thank you, and may the Light continue to pour through you!
writing to stay alive. i have been there. i understand so much of what you’ve written, just sitting here, nodding and grinning like a fool. i am so proud of you, sophie. so, so, so proud. just ordered. keep writing. the strand is infinite. ♥️
Breathing in every word. Beyond grateful to be walking through this life with you x
Reading this just now, while drinking my morning coffee, after having spoken to the man I deeply love but who is 1500 miles away and likely will stay there rather than experience our colder winters and high population density - despite the intensity of feelings we have (at such an old age - who knew?), I am moved to tears and also my own inspiration. You have filled in the time line since I first became aware of your amazing, magical, intuitive writing. And more than writing, just knowing you are in the world, alive, offering your gifts, touching me and so many others, waking people up, taking us farther than we had gone before, and (in my case anyway), confirmation that indeed we are not insane, the world (Earth, Gaia) needs us and our strange, feral loving. However it manifests.
Reading the part where you just lay on your floor, waiting to die - or live, the feelings you expressed, reminded me of how I felt after my oldest son, Jason, died. There was no hope for me either. I just wanted the pain to stop. I wanted to see and hold my son again. I did not want to be in such a world that Jason couldn’t take anymore, his pain, his fears, his longings, his Love. (He died of an opioid overdose - but he hadn’t been sold heroin which he thought, he had been sold fentanyl and it killed him. If he had lived, he might still be alive, but who really knows? Not me.) It was Earth, roots, worms, dragonflies, plants that struggled and. . . . lived . . . perhaps given life by my own tears as I shed buckets of them into the soil that grew my herbs and flowers. I know I would not have survived, would not be the woman I am right now without the beings who called my garden home. And the landscape of my heart surrounding me, the mountains I grew up with visible every day (except for when they were hidden by clouds, but their presence still strongly felt) from my garden, from my bedroom windows, from the kitchen window where I stood looking out so often. My sickness was different and people generally don’t die from it, but they often times do not recover. Losing a child is indescribable except to someone who knows. Yet, one day I woke up and the grief was IN me in a different way. I realized that, like a new part of my DNA, it was a part of me and would be going forward. But it also had cracked my heart open so wide that it would never heal, would forever remain cracked open and therefore touched, always, leading to such feelings and intuitions and unknown directions.
As I read this essay this morning, I realized, though I do not yet have the words for it, a different way for me to fuse my writing and intuition with my love of fragrance and my “work” with natural perfumes. I cannot, realistically “justify” buying and working with such incredible, rare, exquisite, expensive ingredients, blending and musing with them to create what I hope are beautiful, sensuous offerings most people I know cannot afford. And as you know these ingredients are resource intensive in the sense that so much of a flower or herb or plant are needed to make just a tiny milliliter of essence. Or the sustainability issue, the exploitation of land and people . . . I am grateful that I have met and discovered small-scale distillers, amazing people who trek Earth to meet with and experience the places and materials first hand - so they support rather than destroy the land and cultures from which these rare materials, often woods and resins, are harvested. I feel so blessed and honored to be able to do this work, and I know it is my purpose to integrate it into a story of connection and permeability and cellular connection and allowing our natural, sensuous natures the freedom to dance and experience and participate - and fall even more deeply in love - an erotic love, a gentle love, a love that digs us deeply into the soil and roots and pith and heart of the rooted beings and the places they create, nurture, and evolve with.
So thank YOU, Sophie - for your perseverance, for following your intuition, for trusting it above others’, for daring to LIVE as you are a gift to the world, your work is so needed, your words yes, and also your SELF - your physical being, the energy from your body and mind - You and your work are the future - perhaps even essential so there can BE a future. I know I have a role, as I have over these many past decades. But I am old now (will be 70 this month and who knows how much more time I have - or any of us really of course), and you are young and this is your time.
So much love to you!
Oh, Sophie - my heart opened. Again. My mind blown. Again. My soul seen and recognized - by me, through your words. Again. I don’t know if you have any clue of the power of your writing, the way it nudges and prods and awakens those of us in your orbit. I see so much of myself in you, so many common interests and passions, as well as wounds and pains and fears. The difference is how you’ve molded healing and understanding from the clay of your words, made meaning of your lived life through partnership with the seen and unseen super/natural worlds. I’m still kinda on the floor thinking some part of me is dying, but today’s essay has shown me a path out and forward. I feel I now have permission (???) to write whatever is bubbling up in me. I’m excited and terrified to see what it is. So grateful to have found you and your exquisite writing. Thank you. A million times thank you. xoxo 💛
Sophie, I just stumbled across your work a few months ago, I don't even remember who shared one of your posts on Facebook and found myself completely immersed in your stories, just as when you are walking through the forest and a mushroom takes your eye and then you start seeing them everywhere. I found myself reflected on your words I guess I just want to say thank you for sharing and inspiring me to keep writing, dreaming and healing.
I love you Sophie. I have tears of joy with you. I have uncertainty and pain and celebration and gladness with you. I trust in you because of your vulnerability and the ‘kingly armour’ you put off in order to wear your exquisite nakedness, that calls forth the fox pelt, the seal skin, a wild extension of the senses that makes feeling even more deeply possible, instead of armour, ‘gating out’. To be seen and to see; to be known and to know; to be touched and to touch; to be beheld and to behold; to be collaborated with and to be a collaborator; to experience all of this with all your senses… feeling the full extent of that great holding, that great intimacy with life and its many strands, connections, tendrils reaching out, on your bare skin. To be so alive and awake inside such a magnitude of magic, hair standing on end, telling frission, is a gift.
And - side note - love stories have a way of resisting us. Of seeming (perhaps purposely), out of reach, far fetched, maybe even naive or self indulgent to desire so fervently. Great loves feel to me like expressions of high magic. A great spell (or spell breaking that opens a path for love) conjured by two. A journey both have been on for many moons, often arduous, often exhausting, in which you meet ‘as if by accident’ at the well you have taken rest at, the place in which you seek to quench your thirst, honoring yourself, your needs, your body, your animality. It can come as a surprise, just how readily the treasure appears in plain sight, in a moment when we aren’t seeking after it, but just tending to our most basic, ‘mundane’ needs. We learn later of course that great love of ours was always on our way to us - specifically, uniquely, every-eccentricity-included us - all along. Without knowing it. Without being able to picture each other fully. Without knowing much of anything about each other other than this person is a person I will be able to melt into, a person who will love regeneratively with me. I think Rumi was offering a kindness to the human heart with the reminder ‘what you seek is seeking you’. We need this reminder practically- a poetic kind of practical. In the meantime just keep resting when needing, quenching your thirst at the wells along the way. Drinking in a million love stories. Seek and you will be found.
This was such a beautiful read, you are a special human, and its so strange because when I read your words I always imagine a crescendo of nature, and violins playing and the sky sparkling. I think you make magic, I definitely aspire to this. 🌻
Years ago I visited a monastery in Pine Bush and had an experience I never quite made sense of, until your work contextualized it. I walked along the road and saw a lot of trash. It confused me: why would this road, which I had seen so many monks and visitors walk up and down be so filthy? I prayed on it, and I was feeling an "off"ness that I couldn't put my finger on, but it seemed at the heart of a lot of the "spiritual" pursuits I'd experienced. I started to think of a dragonfly and had no idea why. I went to the meditation hall for another somewhat forced spiritual exercise. When I exited the hall, a dragonfly darted across my path, and THAT was the unforced spiritual moment that taught me something I couldn't put into words. Your words have grounded my understanding of this moment. During the pandemic, my partner and I wrote this song while displaced from the land we usually called home. It includes the seagulls who taught us that they soar high above a hard surface to crack the quahog shell (and that sometimes, we're the flesh inside). It includes a regatta of swans we encountered on our anniversary, at a beach we hadn't been to since our wedding, who reminded us that love can find you where you are. Sometimes when I read your words about longing for love and then falling in love with everything, I think of this regatta of swans who answered my own prayer. Your words have been such a gift in my life (and your mother's book with Susan/Fiona, and your dad's book about the dark...both of which helped me make sense of other things I didn't have words for), so...thank you, Sophie. (Here is the song, if you'd like: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BekkaMByWhU )
What a cleansing Tsunami of bracing tears, warning shouts, relieving sighs, piercing screams, primal belches, and magical melodies you have erupted into the today's cuneiform cosmos. It will take time to take it in deeply.
Bless you and every cell of your being, every spore that moves from your writing into all of us witnessing it, breathing it, drinking it... may you bring about so many more fruiting bodies Sophie.. so grateful for your words and where they continually take me in exploration...
Thank you, thank you, thank you
As a lover - of nature, creativity & my darling baby boy - and as a feminist. I wept. I'm so excited for your book.
Mind blown!! An amzing piece Sophie.
Thank YOU, Sophie, for inviting us into your process and opening yourself up to seed other people's wild creativity. I know that your words about the nature of story have activated parts of my brain I never knew and inspired me to approach my own storytelling in a much more vulnerable, anarchic, and embodied way. As a Quaker, I have spent my life well acquainted with the experience of channeling something through you that is not entirely of you. But whatever comes is affected by you as it passes through the filter of your beingness. It uses all that you are in unexpected, transformative ways. I see that so much in the way The Flowering Wand seems to have synthesized all of your disparate curiosities and passions, weaving them together into a previously unimagined, whole cloth.
I don't want to make any misguided predictions of the future: "Of course you will write all the books!", "Of course you will find the great love you yearn for and bear the son you imagine and are preparing your heart for!". None of us knows that, and the reality is you may not. Or you may in some ways and not others. And other, unanticipated things will come as well, to stir the wild pot. What I can say with complete clarity is that I am grateful for how exquisitely you are allowing yourself to be used, for how gorgeously you are living your "one wild, precious life." Even at a distance I am electrified by you, like one of those high-speed films of seeds blowing in the wind, landing, and then erupting into vibrant, fecund life seemingly in an instant.
Sophie I have only just found you. My heart is blown open by your words. You have stitched together myth, the wild, pain, abuse, and made the invisible underworld journey visible. Thank you. Inspirational woman carved deep.
Thank you for this! Wept my way through. While a felt-sense of many bodied-ness is a common experience when I read your work, this catalyzed a diaphanous dissolution/connection reconfiguration into and with wider and deeper kin contexts and relations. Thank you, Sister! Sending gratitude and love to and for you!
Amazing, Sophie! Clearly the creative spirit is moving through you...you are the vessel for a vital message that our world so needs now. I too have loved the transformational magic of TH White's vision of Merlin's teachings--to understand the world, we have to deeply realize that we ARE the world, change our relationship to the world from subject-object to subject-subject. Dream a new dream of interdependence and mutual reverence. I also share your intuition that the Divine Feminine needs her Sacred Masculine to fully bring to birth the changes we need now, in consciousness, in the way we live on Earth. Against the horrible backdrop of Putin's aggression, the worst of masculinity on violent parade once again, your vision of "a flowering wand" is a wonderful balm. Thank you, and may the Light continue to pour through you!