Chelsea Steinauer-Scudder | pull up a chair

Tag: Chelsea Steinauer-Scudder

etched on a map, you might not notice; its tucked-away nature is but the flint of its charm: a treasure in almost plain sight. i might have zipped by a thousand times. it only took once for curiosity’s lure to draw me into its fold. and now it won’t let me go.

i’m coming to think of it as my footpath to the wellspring where the sacred stirs me, a nowhere-else-like-it sanctuary under the arbors, carved into the banks of a slow-flowing channel, a serpentine zig and a zag, through patches of woodland and birdsong.

as far back as i can remember, the woods behold wonder to me. my biography would be laced with a trail through woodlands and ponds and gurgling creeks. the never-ending acres of lily of the valley where my papa once drove me as a wee girl of three. the woods across from the house where i grew up, a copse that came to life in my imagination, one day a pioneer’s outpost, the next day a place to pretend i’m laura ingalls wilder in the big woods.

trailheads beckon. the barely-noticed aperture into the brush, where suddenly suburbia is leagues and leagues away. maybe it’s my imaginative overdrive, or my storybook tendencies. but give me a path, and a parting of trees leaning this way and that, and my feet cannot but go forward.

so it was on mother’s day morn when at last i found myself at the trailhead i’d vaguely noticed in the making. trees had been felled, and buckthorn burned by the wheelbarrow full. logs were yanked from where they’d fallen, and laid in a line, woodchips carpeted the paths in between. a woodland trail that meanders along and through a woods both ancient and newly imagined.

enchanted at first footfall, the only way to describe it. the ups and the downs, the dappling of light, and the peek-a-boo shadow. i walked with my eyes and my mouth wide open. over and over i marveled.

it’s a woods best described as delicate, at least in the moment—a petit point of vernal ephemerals stitched into the hillsides. springtime at its tenderest, springtime in may when it’s no longer tenuous.

it’s a place that suddenly holds inexplicable pull on me. enough to lurch me out of my wintry posture, curled over a book or an alphabet keyboard, snug in the nook by the wall-to-wall windows. it’s a place that lured the prayer right out of me. a place to dwell in my quietest stillness.

it’s my axis mundi, you see.

my friend chelsea steinauer-scudder, a breathtaking writer and author of the new book, mother, creature, kin: what we learn from nature’s mothers in a time of unraveling (broadleaf), explains: “i’ve heard countless stories of what i’ve come to think of as axis mundi experiences: encounters that have pulled someone into a deep experience of felt belonging upon the tiny bit of Earth that they find themselves upon.

“…within the study of religion, an axis mundi is a sacred pole, literal or figurative, which is fixed in a particular place, connecting Earth to the realms of heaven, underworld, and divine. “

these holy places might be a mountain (the Mauna Kea on Hawaii’s Big Island, known by the Indigenous peoples to be the umbilical cord, “the place from which the world emerged”), a cosmic tree (Norse mythology), the Ka’aba in Mecca (which pilgrims encircle seven times, as within it is the stone believed to have been handed to Adam as he was banished from Eden, so his sins would thus be forgiven).

or, in my case, an undulating woodland path along what in fact is a sanitation canal, though i pretend for the life of me that it’s an idyllic stream or a creek. one that just happens to shimmer an odd shade of aqua, a phosphoresence that might signal toxins astir.

my friend chelsea goes on to write that “we are a species in need of centers,” and within us there is encoded “an inherent capacity for place-based awe.”

those are the places with gravitational pull. a pull from the deepest well. the sacred well.

or, as chelsea distinguishes between the capital-A Axes Mundi (the most sacred of places so recognized by cultures or religions), and the small-a axes mundi (the ones you and i might call our own), the ones i know best are the quotidian, intimate ones, defined as “small, daily irruptions of majesty, those any-place encounters with the sacred.”

no surprise then that i can’t stay away. it’s an itch that can’t be scratched till i double-knot my sneakers, and try to remember sunscreen (i never do).

and it’s walking through a poem, quite literally. the soundscape a montage of birdsong and trill, punctuated with quarter notes and a screech that scares off the feeble.

these are the verses i walked among on just one of my mornings traipsing along the trail: common yellowthroat; red-bellied woodpecker; swainson’s thrush; red-winged blackbird; northern cardinal; blue jay; goldfinch; baltimore oriole; rose-breasted grosbeak; gray catbird; and a hairy woodpecker to boot. it’s as if the crayola crayon box was suddenly feathered in flight.

and in the flora department, a whole other poem: bloodroot, bluebells, celandine poppy, and columbine. lily of the valley, trout lily, spring beauty, wood anemone, and blue cohosh. jack-in-the-pulpit, shooting star, mayapples, and dutchman’s breeches.

all these names, which whirl in me thanks to the Original Mother Nature who schooled me, got me to wondering who in the world gave the names to the winged flocks and the leafy ones too. the stories behind names are their own wonders. the ones from folklore and legend are the ones that charm me most: jack-in-the-pulpit is said, of course, to resemble a preacher spreading the Good Word; the trout lilies’ mottled leaves resemble the markings of the freshwater fish; and dutchman’s breeches clearly resemble the pantaloons of one who’d also wear wooden shoes.

those, though, are merely the preamble curiosities, the ones that loosen my soul, open me up to the prayer that burbles up whilst sauntering deeper and deeper, per God’s gravitational pull, unwilling to pause till i get there. to the place where i go to feel as saturated with the sacred as i do of the sun when at last i plop onto the stump of a log, and consecrate the most blessed moment of being.

where is your axis mundi?

and before we part, a poem worth pondering, from the late, great polish poet and nobel prize-winner, wislawa szymborska

Life While-You-Wait

Life While-You-Wait.
Performance without rehearsal.
Body without alterations.
Head without premeditation.

I know nothing of the role I play.
I only know it’s mine. I can’t exchange it.

I have to guess on the spot
just what this play’s all about.
|Ill-prepared for the privilege of living,
I can barely keep up with the pace that the action demands.
I improvise, although I loathe improvisation.
I trip at every step over my own ignorance.
I can’t conceal my hayseed manners.
My instincts are for happy histrionics.
Stage fright makes excuses for me, which humiliate me more.
Extenuating circumstances strike me as cruel.

Words and impulses you can’t take back,
stars you’ll never get counted,
your character like a raincoat you button on the run?
the pitiful results of all this unexpectedness.

If only I could just rehearse one Wednesday in advance,
or repeat a single Thursday that has passed!
But here comes Friday with a script I haven’t seen.
Is it fair, I ask
(my voice a little hoarse,
since I couldn’t even clear my throat offstage).

You’d be wrong to think that it’s just a slapdash quiz
taken in makeshift accommodations. Oh no.
I’m standing on the set and I see how strong it is.
The props are surprisingly precise.
The machine rotating the stage has been around even longer.
The farthest galaxies have been turned on.
Oh no, there’s no question, this must be the premiere.
And whatever I do
will become forever what I’ve done.
~ Wislawa Szymborska ~

(Poems New and Collected 1957-1997, trans. S. Baranczak and C. Cavanagh)

not all gravitational pulls are without hazard

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March 21, 2025

spring might be sprung, but i’m not springing

they say it’s spring out there. celestial lines were crossed in the wee, wee hours of yesterday, and, for a flash there, light and shadow fell in equal measure.

i don’t feel the light though. not in sync with springtime’s beckoning. i’m inclined still to hunker down in winter’s shadow.

for reasons i can’t quite fathom, i’m not ready this time ’round for the seasonal advance. i still feel wintry in my bones. the light change is too abrupt for me, too ice-white for me. my inner metronome is far too slow for the prestissimo that’s rising. i don’t mind the cardinal’s vernal song, though, rung out from treetops high, and piercing through still-frigid air. but i’m not seasonally adjusted. i’m lagging at least two lopes behind.

i can’t tell if it’s that my winter felt circumvented. or that i’m wishing for all of time to freeze in place. since the world is rather dire these days, that cannot be a wise solution. in that regard, i’ll take time in double measure. may we all wake up on the morning of eight november, 2028, with a whole new glimmer in our eyes. and the present firmly in the past.

i’m feeling somewhat stuck. hardly welcoming of burgeoning to come. and that’s a most peculiar state for me.

might the whole universe be toppled on its head, upside down and inside out?

the one sure sign that spring is here is that when i awoke, just hours after equinox, the world i saw was dumped with snow. which in these parts is something of a rite of spring. tulips rise, and snowflakes fall. my mother swears she knows it’s spring when she slides on her winter boots and brushes all the glops of snow off her daffydills.

no wonder we of the four-quarter year take spring in slow, uncertain sips. there is no fine delineation, as if the calendar and earth set their clocks in synchronous coordination.

on a day when snows fell in glops, and then proceeded to melt in same-sized gloppings, and on the day when headlines kept insisting the springtime was upon us, i heard a thump at my door, and therein found prescriptive for my seasonal laggings.

there, in a plain brown box, lay a book i’d been awaiting. my friend chelsea steinauer-scudder, as intelligent and beautiful a writer as could be, became a mother back when she and i were reading books and writing in the zoom rooms that covid carved. i’d first read chelsea in the pages of emergence magazine, a wunder site (online and print magazine, as well as creative production studio) that probes the depths of ecology, culture, and spirituality, and where she was a writer and editor for five years. when i saw she’d be leading reading circles (braiding sweetgrass, among them) and ones for the craft of nature writing, i signed up, and cemented myself to what would otherwise have been a front-row seat.

chelsea grew up on the great plains of oklahoma and the sandhills prairie of nebraska, where for a time her papa researched bison, fire, and native plant communities, so she comes to her native landscape––language enfolding the sanctity of earth––with what seems an effortless fluency, as if she grew up breathing it. which, of course, she did. and then she went on to harvard divinity school, where she earned a masters in theological studies, and ever since she’s been writing sumptuously, focusing her work, in her words, “on the confluence of relationship to place with experiences of the sacred.”

her first book, Mother, Creature, Kin: What We Learn from Nature’s Mothers in a Time of Unraveling (Broadleaf Books), is what brought the thud to my front stoop. it’s due out april 8, but my copy landed yesterday. and it might be the cure i needed to lull me into spring.

a.) it gives me excuse to curl under a blanket for a day or two, and b.) here’s what i’m about to bathe in, passages such as this:

“I wish to invite you into a kind of mothering that is wild and porous. The kind that draws blood, that loves and fears, rejoices and doubts, that exposes where we are most deeply vulnerable and from there stretches us into what is beyond us. I mean the kind of mothering that works within uncertainty and mystery. The kind that leaves soil beneath our fingernails and seeds in our hair.”

she writes about mothering and being mothered by places. ecological mothering. she defines ecological motherhood as: a shared, place-based responsibility to nurture and support human and more-than-human life. she writes of the karmic cycle of rebirth, a subject aptly plucked from the vernal syllabus. she writes of the silent flight of barn owls, of nursing and endangered right whales, of real and imagined forests, eroding salt marshes, and newly planted gardens.

she writes that the protagonists of these stories have been teaching her facets of mothering (a verb that she, like me, insists is not tied to gender nor obstetrics). those facets belong to us all, no matter our life’s work: “language, belonging, entanglement, community, edge work, homemaking, and how to think about the future.”

my friend chelsea just might nudge me over my springtime bump, and land me softly on the vernal side….

as i await the vernal skip in my own heart, i scan the literary landscape for those others who, along with chelsea, might nudge me there. and no surprise, i turn to two favorites, the great naturalist and writer, aldo leopold, and the poet mary oliver, who drew the sacred from her every path and passage.

“One swallow does not make a summer, but one skein of geese, cleaving the murk of a March thaw, is the spring.”
aldo leopold

North Country

In the north country now it is spring and there
   is a certain celebration. The thrush
has come home. He is shy and likes the
   evening best, also the hour just before
morning; in that blue and gritty light he
   climbs to his branch, or smoothly
sails there. It is okay to know only
   one song if it is this one. Hear it
rise and fall; the very elements of your soul
   shiver nicely. What would spring be
without it? Mostly frogs. But don’t worry, he

arrives, year after year, humble and obedient
   and gorgeous. You listen and you know
you could live a better life than you do, be
   softer, kinder. And maybe this year you will
be able to do it. Hear how his voice
   rises and falls. There is no way to be
sufficiently grateful for the gifts we are
   given, no way to speak the Lord’s name
often enough, though we do try, and

especially now, as that dappled breast
breathes in the pines and heaven’s
windows in the north country, now spring has come,
are opened wide.

––Mary Oliver

a little peek at what a few other authors have to say of *Mother, Creature, Kin.* may i call your attention to the one who writes that this beautiful book belongs in the company of works by Ursula LeGuin, Rachel Carson, Terry Tempest Williams, and Robin Kimmerer, to name a constellation of the highest-reaching lights…

are you finding yourself in springlike mode, and what sights and sounds and scents are stirring you there?

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pull up a chair

Tag: Chelsea Steinauer-Scudder

May 16, 2025

gravitational pull

March 21, 2025

spring might be sprung, but i’m not springing