Praying for Peace and Healing

"Creator, open our hearts to peace and healing between all people.

Creator, open our hearts to provide and protect for all children of the earth.

Creator, open our hearts to respect for the earth, and all the gifts of the earth.

Creator, open our hearts to end exclusion, violence, and fear among all.

Thank-you for the gifts of this day and every day."

(Native American Micmac Tribe, Alycia Longriver 1995)



Alycia Longriver was a participant in the "Sunbow 5 Walk" in which a small coalition of Native Americans walked from Cape Cod, Massachusetts to California on a journey that covered more than 3,000 miles and took more than seven months to complete."

Ms. Longriver states, "In 1995 I walked with a group across the US, speaking to other groups, and praying all the way (15 million steps) for the healing of people and the earth."

I prayed asking Creator 'to bring', but after the walk realized we already have these things. It is a matter of opening our hearts to the gifts within."



Oh such wisdom from these words. Truth and wisdom.

And I, always straddled between one world and the next, have done it with multitudes of challenges, changes, and losses.

Such is hope. And such also, is the endless lessons and understanding as I let good and let goodness in - cleaning out of the grief and pains of loss and sadness and even darkness as I grieve the unkindness of others in this world, and all of the dark they carry within.

I seek to bring back into myself - the light, the love, the caring mindfulness of wishing for the other what I wish for myself.



I remember so many openings of my heart after many periods of sadness. I am thinking of losing my sister in law who tried so hard to survive end stage kidney failure. Then I lost another sister-in-law who had battled cancer. Every chemo treatment required she and my brother flying from Juneau to Seattle ever 3 to 4 week. She went through a lot as did my brother who was with her in her last trip to Seattle when he had to call paramedics but she was already gone. So many other losses from my parents, to my aunts and uncles in both Alaska and Louisiana where  my French mother was from..

So many beloved pets. I grieved their losses just as I grieved each of our dozen chicken pets.  Four of my precious chickens I lost to to a neighbor's dog and two to pair of raccoons that are most likely the pair I saved from starvation when their mother was killed last winter.

Such are the cycles of nature and of life.





I have opened my heart to never giving up by getting even more baby chickens to raise and then because I just loved them so, a few more. On and on my chicken stories supplied me with fun and blog posts. 

Then my pig stories! Oh my! Now those are some of our wildest stories. Again...good times...sad times...and crazy crazy "I can't believe it times!"

Michele Bilyeu Creates *With Heart and Hands*:

 Search results for my Chicken stories

https://www.with-heart-and-hands.com/search?q=Chickens

And all those visiting pigs!

https://www.with-heart-and-hands.com/search?q=Pigs

Thank you Creator for this life and these opportunities to grow and to learn so very much by being and doing.



Michele Bilyeu Creates With Heart and Hands sharing an imaginative, magical, and healing journey from Alaska to Oregon and back again. 

Creating, designing, sewing, quilting, and wildcrafting "from my heart and with my hands."

After Apple Picking: Apple Cider

After Apple-Picking

By Robert Frost 

"My long two-pointed ladder's sticking through a tree

Toward heaven still,

And there's a barrel that I didn't fill

Beside it, and there may be two or three

Apples I didn't pick upon some bough.

But I am done with apple-picking now.

Essence of winter sleep is on the night,

The scent of apples: I am drowsing off.

I cannot rub the strangeness from my sight

I got from looking through a pane of glass

I skimmed this morning from the drinking trough

And held against the world of hoary grass.

It melted, and I let it fall and break.

But I was well

Upon my way to sleep before it fell,

And I could tell

What form my dreaming was about to take.

Magnified apples appear and disappear,

Stem end and blossom end,

And every fleck of russet showing clear.

My instep arch not only keeps the ache,

It keeps the pressure of a ladder-round.

I feel the ladder sway as the boughs bend.

And I keep hearing from the cellar bin

The rumbling sound

Of load on load of apples coming in.

For I have had too much

Of apple-picking: I am overtired

Of the great harvest I myself desired.

There were ten thousand thousand fruit to touch,

Cherish in hand, lift down, and not let fall.

For all

That struck the earth,

No matter if not bruised or spiked with stubble,

Went surely to the cider-apple heap

As of no worth.

One can see what will trouble

This sleep of mine, whatever sleep it is.

Were he not gone,

The woodchuck could say whether it's like his

Long sleep, as I describe its coming on,

Or just some human sleep.

Phew!  Eight adults. Four grandkids ages 2 to 7 and several granddogs all helping with our continued apple harvesting!

We picked many wheelbarrows of apples from our orchard. Washed them, chunk sliced with knives and cutting boards to make the pieces small enough to fit through the apple grinder one chunk at a time, then pressed them through an apple press to get the juice forced out and reject the mash below.

The juice was funneled into two giant carboys (bottles) with thermal canisters besides for each family to enjoy at home fresh squeezed now. The giant carboy bottles are off with family members to undergo the process of fermentation that will result in home made hard apple cider. 

What a lot of work each year but great, great fun to work together with our 3 grown kids and their partners, 4 little grandkids and all of our apple antics and laughter! 

Another "Autumnal Harvest" family gathering of nature's continuing bounty!

Happy September!

Did you know that September 1st is the official start of our

"Meteorological Autumn"? 

Why Meteorological Fall Starts Before Astronomical Fall | AccuWeather

https://www.accuweather.com/en/weather-news/why-meteorological-fall-starts-before-astronomical-fall/344058

Michele Bilyeu Creates With Heart and Hands as she shares her imaginative, magical, and healing journey from Alaska to Oregon. Creating, designing, sewing, quilting, and wildcrafting, from my heart and with my hands

Sleeping in the Forest

"I thought the earth remembered me, she
took me back so tenderly, arranging her dark skirts, her pockets full of lichens and seeds. 

I slept as never before, a stone on the riverbed, nothing between me and the white fire of the stars but my thoughts, and they floated light as moths among the branches of the perfect trees. 

All night I heard the small kingdoms breathing
around me, the insects, and the birds who do their work in the darkness. 

All night I rose and fell, as if in water, grappling with a luminous doom. By morning I had vanished at least a dozen times into something better."

"Sleeping In The Forest"

Mary Oliver

Poet extraordinaire

Snippets and Thread Tales 

With Heart and Hands from Michele:

And so we all return to life as we know it. We take deep breaths to center and ground ourself to the earth, we walk among the green things, under a canopy of trees.

We bid a final goodbye to someone we loved, now gone, and return our focus to the living, our families, and all that we yet need to do in this world before we too depart to sleeping in our own forests of our own beliefs, our own making.

I hold my young and very young grandchildren close, I read to them, make puzzles, draw and color, we play with toys their parents once played with.

I've learned to merge the past, present, and prepare them for the future. Just as all their parents do.

We have lots and lots of love and joy among life's challenges and sadnesses.

I look for and still can find peace.

And for that I am so truly grateful.  

Michele Bilyeu Creates *With Heart and Hands

Making Peace any Prayer Flags

Michele Bilyeu Creates With Heart and Hands as she shares her imaginative, magical, and healing journey from Alaska to Oregon. Creating, designing, sewing, quilting, and wildcrafting, from my heart and with my hands

Metamorphosis

I do not know whether I was then a man dreaming I was a butterfly, or

whether I am now a butterfly dreaming I am a man.

~Chuang Tzu

We delight in the beauty of the butterfly, but rarely admit the changes

it has gone through to achieve that beauty.

~Maya Angelou

"Consider what happens to a bottle of water when it is left in the freezer. As it cools down, there is a steady, continuous change in its temperature.


The water won’t change much

in appearance until it begins to get near the critical threshold of its freezing point. Then, as it passes this, an extraordinary process happens.


Tiny crystals form, and when they do, other crystals form around those crystals, until there is a mass movement of crystallization in the water that rapidly changes state from liquid to solid.


This is discontinuous change.
With discontinuous change, a threshold is crossed where rather than just more of the same happening, something different occurs. There’s a jump to a new level, an opening to a new set of possibilities.


We might think it impossible that a small amount of water could crack something as hard as glass, but as the ice expands, it breaks the bottle."


Joanna Macy

“All life on Earth was created by tiny changes in molecules. An inestimable number of changes. Our bodies are miracles of transformation.”

"To find a fossil in a galaxy of rocks, you have to see in a different way. It’s called having a search image, a biological term. A search image is simply a picture an animal has in its mind as it looks for food or habitat. 

When an animal finds something that helps it survive, it fixes the visual characteristics of that thing in its mind. 

If it finds it again, the sharpness of the image improves, as does the animal’s chance of survival. Humans got where they are today with the help of search images, and we still use them every day.

 It’s how we quickly find our favorite cereal in a vast landscape of boxes.

Discontinuous change and phase shifts are the things of cocoons—metamorphosis. Most of us are familiar with the general concept of how a caterpillar will form a chrysalis then emerge weeks later transfigured into a butterfly. 

Less well known is how the caterpillar resists change. As it dissolves in its own digestive acids, the immune system of the cocooned pupa will attack the imaginal cells that are trying to transform it. In turn, a nascent imago will fall again and again into the soup of its former self. But this seemingly counterproductive immune response serves to strengthen the imaginal cells so that they can finally give rise to a winged, visually stunning creature.

Daniel Pinchbeck

How Soon is Now: From Personal Initiation to Global Transformation

"I have come into this world to see this: all creatures hold hands as we pass through this miraculous existence we share on the way to even a greater being of soul, a being of just ecstatic light, forever entwined and at play with Him."

Hafiz 

We must remain as close to the flowers, the grass, and the butterflies

as the child is who is not yet so much taller than they are.  

We adults,

on the other hand, have outgrown them and have to lower ourselves to

stoop down to them.  It seems to me that the grass hates us when we

confess our love for it.  Whoever would partake of all good things must

understand how to be small at times.

~Friedrich Nietzsche

Grown-ups love figures.  When you tell them that you have made a new

friend, they never ask you any questions about essential matters.  They

never say to you, “What does his voice sound like?  What games does he

love best?  Does he collect butterflies?”

 Instead, they demand:  “How

old is he?  How many brothers has he?  How much does he weigh?  How much

money does his father make?”  Only from these figures do they think they

have learned anything about him.

~Antoine de Saint-Exupéry, 

From "The Little

Prince"

It is necessary to write, if the days are not to slip emptily by.  How

else, indeed, to clap the net over the butterfly of the moment?  For the

moment passes, it is forgotten; the mood is gone; life itself is gone.

That is where the writer scores over his fellows:  he catches the

changes of his mind on the hop.

~Vita Sackville-West

Bees sip honey from flowers and hum their thanks when they leave.

The gaudy butterfly is sure that the flowers owe thanks to him.

~Rabindranath Tagore

"Stray Birds"

I blog on a Galaxy Note 9 mobile phone using only mobile data signal in a no wifi home.  Not easy but I am a determined woman who doesn't give up easily!

Michele Bilyeu Creates With Heart and Hands sharing an imaginative, magical, and healing journey from Alaska to Oregon. Creating, designing, sewing, quilting, and wildcrafting "from my heart and with my hands".

For Courage

When the light around lessens
And your thoughts darken until
Your body feels fear turn 

Cold as a stone inside,

When you find yourself bereft
Of any belief in yourself And all you unknowingly
Leaned on has fallen,

When one voice commands
Your whole heart,
And it is raven dark,

Steady yourself and see
That it is your own thinking
That darkens your world.

Search and you will find
A diamond-thought of light,

Know that you are not alone,
And that this darkness has purpose;
Gradually it will school your eyes,
To find the one gift your life requires
Hidden within this night-corner.

Invoke the learning
Of every suffering
You have suffered.

Close your eyes.
Gather all the kindling
About your heart
To create one spark
That is all you need
To nourish the flame
That will cleanse the dark
Of its weight of festered fear.

A new confidence will come alive
To urge you towards higher ground
Where your imagination
will learn to engage difficulty
As its most rewarding threshold!

“For Courage,” by John O’Donohue

With Prayers and Blessings for Ukraine (with-heart-and-hands.com

https://www.with-heart-and-hands.com/2022/03/for-courage.html

https://www.with-heart-and-hands.com/2022/02/go-to-limits-of-your-longing-and-pray.html

Happy National Quilting Day
March 19, 2022

Michele Bilyeu Creates With Heart and Hands as she shares her imaginative, magical, and healing journey from Alaska to Oregon. Creating, designing, sewing, quilting, and wildcrafting, from my heart and with my hands

Our Bee Keeping Fun

May 20th is National Bee Day as decreed by the United Nations and supported by many, many nations.

Bees are not only fascinating and beautiful little meaningful beings but serve an essential role in the propagation and continuation of flowering plants, trees, shrubs and crops. 

Without them many of our food sources would not be able to thrive and in fact survive. Crucial for the pollination of many vegetable,  fruit and berry crops, without them we would eventually be reduced to the most basic of diets not healthy or sustainable for our own future.

Due to climate change and pesticides the numbers of all bee varieties and other critical insects such as butterflies  are dramatically decreasing and already affecting gardens and farms. Our backyards and gardens were once filled with the abundance of these frequently misunderstood and often feared and even deliberately swatted at little creatures.

Coincidentally with this international recognition and celebration of bees in both the dedication of a special day of recognition, my own family was  actively involved that very week in the saving and caring for a bee colony in our own little world. 

Our oldest daughter, Terin  has always been interested in beekeeping and involved in making a bee home in her backyard in hopes that she and her partner might invite in a wild bee swarm looking for an inviting home. Unfortunately it never happened naturally and their attempts to purchase an established hive was unsuccessful due to overwhelming demand in their area.

So when a wild swarm flew in and began to bunch into formation my husband, son and I rushed into action and our desire to finally give her that wish of a bee colony of her own.

Not having a beekeepers suit, we created one out of an old tyvek "suit" used in applying insulation materials in our home building business. My new and never used very thick "Mr. Clean" rubber gloves, my husband's super building tape to close gaps between gloves and suit and a quickly cut wire mesh face protector to fit in the suit's hood plus plastic goggles completed our son Blake's ensemble. 

With the use of a ladder, a lawn mowing grass receptacle bag to "catch" the swarm into, he had them collected then within minutes 

 

We had borrowed a neighbors discarded wooden bee box to hopefully get the queen and her workers a temporary home. 

It was so great to be able to transport the swarm in its container safely and thoroughly further contained in a super taped and sealed large cardboard box. 

Our daughter was thrilled to finally have a colony of her own and quickly ordered a prefabricated bee hive kit online to be pieced together over the next few days to provide the much needed space for this wonderful hive. 

It was in-credibly exciting and rewarding for all of us!

The basic building pieces shown here as they arrived in kit and units as she put the box layers into a suitable arrangement. 

Making bee syrup for food.

Piecing kit pieces together bit by bit using pre-cut pieces.

Finishing it day by day then-sealing it and then

Transferring our initial bee box into her own larger hive structure.  

This allowed the queen and all her worker bees to transfer on their own from the "super" we initially provided not realizing it should have been a much later extra section. But the wise little bees made do with what they had which was a tiny small for an immediately bursting at the seams colony.

She soon ordered an other kit and later a 3rd section as she realizes she had one queen to many.

Through ups and downs and many marauder bees challenges they continue to flourish with honey literally coming out of the seams they are so happy and productive.

They've been an immense blessing and joy in her life through a lot of challenging times and remind us all how the precious sentient creatures of this earth add so very much more to mother earth and all of her creatures but teach us all about the importance of working together and humming in harmony for the good and betterment of all.

Michele Bilyeu Creates With Heart and Hands as she shares her imaginative, magical, and healing journey from Alaska to Oregon. Creating, designing, sewing, quilting, and wildcrafting... from my heart and with my hands