About Magpies, Ravens and Border Collies

By Dana Stovern
Written April 21, 2021
Pitkin Mesa, Paonia, Colorado

At the first-year anniversary mark of living with COVID-19, I was experiencing one of the most powerful and profound voids of my life. My existing business platform for The Magic of Somatic Money was dying a long death. Bob, my then-husband, and I were continuing to practice our quarantine, creating a continued deep lack of community connection. My Spirit Team (the lighted Divine counsel I work with), who usually gave me regular guiding updates, had gone MIA shortly after the January 6, 2021 insurrectionist attack on our nation’s Capitol and was giving me very little informational guidance to work with. I had launched my book “Are You Present in Your Body with Your Money?” on sheer faith. It did not help that I was living through another financial low in my life. I was experiencing the least amount of income in over a decade. By spring of 2021, it was clear to me that I was being required to live through one of the greatest voids of my life and do nothing. It was one of the hardest realities to which I’ve ever had to surrender. This piece was one of my saving graces.

About a year ago at this time, COVID-19 let air into the network of humanity’s water pipes woven throughout the global house, and a new rhythm sounded, kunk-kunk-kunk-kunk-kunk. Our homes shook with air in the pipes, echoing the change.

Border Collie

As this rattling looseness happened in the greater world, our little neighborhood churned with its own spring changes of wildlife. Deep in one of the ravines leading up to our mesa, the birds made new decisions about pecking orders. Who knows why the congress of neighborhood ravens rumbled with the gang of magpies, but they did. Who knows why the vote tipped in favor of the ravens, but it did. And the ravens ousted the magpies from their hidden tangled mess of wild fruit trees, Virginia creeper, elm, wild sweet pea, and tamarisk. In one shell-shocked swoop, with black plumage shimmering iridescent emeralds in the sun, the ravens kicked out the tuxedo birds. The magpies, insulted by the takeover, exploded out of the ravine and raged into the neighborhood, looking for new homes.

Of course, the humans were clueless to this fowl drama because, you know, COVID was playing its air-pocketed jam session in humanity’s water lines, kunk-kunk-kunk-kunk-kunk.

It was a ripe day when the magpies arrived. The tonal quality of eerie light filtering from the sun tipped toward a different sky. This light change with a subtle new cliff edge was like a twilighted eclipse at noon. It leaned in, even though the sun, moon, and earth were not collectively hi-jinxed in light and shadow.

The magpies hovered in the air above our yard, a roiling tuxedo-plumaged bird gang, pillaging nests from other birds that homed in our great pine trees and the other nearly forty trees in our yard. They attacked, dumped, and cleared the nests of an entire generation of eggs and fledglings from the trees to the ground. They raucously exclaimed their horrid triumph, wreathed in beautiful plumage, as only magpies do. My husband, Bob, and I watched in horror, unable to do anything to stop the destruction.

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Deer and Groceries

By Dana Stovern
December 5, 2018
Paonia, Colorado

A chance encounter that could have gone so wrong but didn’t.

I was lucky tonight as the light waned on the western horizon behind me, the earth of the Uncompahgre rise heaving up to meet the night sky. I was lucky for my dog companions, Peanut and Jasmine, securely tucked in beside me in the car. I was lucky, so grateful for a gracious Universe to give us good food, good groceries in such a remote valley — that singular tractor-trailer from Denver, Colorado, crossing mountain passes several times a week to fill our grocery shelves.

In that luck, I sometimes drove the rolling road between Hotchkiss and Paonia, Colorado, in dangerous twilight, like tumblers in a lock, unfolding the gentle secret of a treasure in its curves and hills. I was almost lured by the ease of darkness enfolding my car like a friend, yet I was alert for the sometimes night creatures that freeze in the headlights. And tonight, I was lucky. The doe deer who danced on the middle yellow line in a fast tango with my car’s headlights did not leave any blood or hair on my bumper, thank God. Others haven’t been so lucky this season — drivers or deer.

Tonight, I was lucky and took the deer totem as a signal of the gentle lure to adventure. The luck of soft beginnings. The luck of connection. Her lithe body streamed through my lights unscathed, her hooves barely kissing the steep grassy embankment as she tilted into the night dream of the river not far off below. She left us with luck. The luck of tide. The luck of rhythm. The luck of being in the breath of the moment.

Dana Stovern is founder and coach of The Magic of Somatic Money, and author of the blog Along the Learning Curve of Life. Even though her profession is body-based money relationship coaching, her first love is words, writing and exploring the depths of the human conscious (or unconscious) condition in body and soul development.

Glisandro

By Dana Stovern
October 18, 2018
Paonia, Colorado

About my memories of the San Luis Valley, Colorado.

The starling murmurations of autumn
sway in the skyward jazz waltz of their own self-thought,
letting us in on their artful movements if we listen,
if we breathe, if we sway with them.
They are the skyward swirls
dancing the valley depth
much like the dust devils do
between here and the glisandro
of the Sangre Cristo Mountains
sharply tumbling down the valley.
It’s the highest ground
where birds are schools of fish in the desert sky
moving as memento to summer moonshine
and verga memories where water should be.
They remind me
every element in high desert
is an edge of pleasure or promised pain
dissolving through one another.
This lifting of pulse renders ready hearts
for an arroyo whispering shoulder love
or shooting arrows.
For those who love the desert,
It’s all welcome.
This place
where murmurations and glisandros remind
that every note of life, all counts.
Every sherd, shred, line, granule.
Hairline feathers and fractures in the skies,
voluptuous starkness where our boots touch the earth.

Dana Stovern is founder and coach of The Magic of Somatic Money, and author of the blog Along the Learning Curve of Life. Even though her profession is body-based money relationship coaching, her first love is words, writing and exploring the depths of the human conscious (or unconscious) condition in body and soul development.

Toning for Solstice

By Dana Stovern
December 29, 2017
Paonia, Colorado

It was springtime on the high rolling prairie south of the Weminuche Wilderness in Colorado’s southwest. It was that time of year when the Colorado blue sky could not be bluer. The white of the snow-capped mountains with triangular jags that met the blue could not cut the sky any sharper. The slate bluish-gray of the mountains below the white could not have given way more beautifully to the soft bud of green on the prairie — which could not be richer with the promise of summer, of growth ahead. The air, so cuttingly fresh without the bite of winter, gave life to this memory that I now write to you.

I was driving my red Chevy truck from our cabin on Florida Mesa, above the Animas River Valley, over the high rolling prairie to Ignacio, Colorado, the home of the Southern Ute Native American Indian Tribe. It was one of the richest, most brilliant springs I’ve ever experienced, and it was on the first-year anniversary of my near-death and the loss of our son. Maybe that’s why the pungent air moved through me and left such a memory because I was beginning to resurface from the numbness, the shock, and the forced movement of life one lives through during thick grief. The drive across the high rolling prairie that morning felt more like a promise and love of life than a forced burden of living after death and endings, of having to carry promises heartbreakingly unfulfilled.

I was on my way to meet with a fellow practitioner in Ignacio who was interested in selling her reiki table to me. At the time, I think I was interested in purchasing the table from her, but I wasn’t sure. The continued journey of my non-traditional career was unexpected, especially in the midst of the disaster of my life. It moved me like the subtle force of a wandering river, from psychic reader to spiritual coach and now to the unfathomable energy worker and potential healer.

It was something like a dandelion forcing itself between the cracks of rubble and taking root, leafing out, and singing its yellow goodness to the sun — not giving a care to anything else.

That’s what was happening inside of me. The will of whatever the flow of gift that wanted to come through me, at a most inopportune time, was merely taking its course of action — taking no notice of what I thought or felt. The impulses of the Universe did not care about my opinion. I was along for the ride. Literally.

I pulled my truck into a parking spot at the gleaming new casino that the Southern Ute Tribe had rebuilt in the last several years. My friend Mary Alyce and her business partner, Lisa, had a studio in the casino spa, housed just off the magnificent entryway of lodgepole columns, a bronze statue, a modern hotel, and the flashing lights of the casino. In stark contrast, on the other side of the parking lot was the also recently built Native American Indian Southern Ute Museum, housing an incredible iconic collection of tribal historical pieces.

Although I always felt the mystery and honor of driving into Ignacio, even that day, I had no way of knowing how the incredible gifts and spirit of the Southern Ute legacy would play in my life in the coming months and now years. I sense that what I write to you now is only a thread of a larger weave of fabric that I am helping to create. (And yes, I was given spiritual guidance and permission to share this sacred information that normally, I would keep in private protection.)

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Oregano

By Dana Stovern
October 23, 2017
Delta, Colorado

This chance experience happened in one of our local grocery stores as the United States was heaving with the changes that waves of #MeToo justifiably brought during the autumn of 2017. I felt so removed from the storm of the movement while living in the remote North Fork of the Gunnison River on Colorado’s Western Slope. Yet, I felt so connected, so affected by this wave of uprising that held deep meaning to me given my family history of incest and all the minor and major experiences of workplace misogyny in my life. Finally, women had a clear platform, a clear way to speak up and say #MeToo! Finally, a conversation was taking place, even if that conversation was raging. At the peak of this national conversation, my life was interrupted with “Oregano.” I shared my perspective of this comical experience with my Facebook audience.

Last week was a long and intense week. I’m sure you can relate. Astrological intensity. Personal life intensity. Professional intensity. National news intensity. It was a bit much.

By Friday, my emotional bandwidth was shot. That means my ability to respond to my fellow human beings in a patient and compassionate way was on a short leash.

That’s about when a bearded, booted, jean-clad elderly gentleman wearing a beat up cowboy hat in the local Delta, Colorado, City Market seemed to suddenly spot me on his radar from across the vegetable section and gyrate, off-kilter, directly toward me in a scarecrow windmill style. It seemed all his appendages gyrated in a radical swirling motion. Somehow, I didn’t seem to be able to move — I was like a bug on a windshield as his windmilling moved rapidly across the store to me.

Nearly instantly, my typical compassionate bandwidth went out the window, and my antenna-like radar shot through the roof while the hairs on the back of my neck stood on end. When he arrived mere feet from me, the first words out of his mouth were, “You look smarter than me!” The first thoughts that rolled through my head echoed in shades of the #MeToo movement that had been raging through headlines on my computer and my social media accounts. Even so, I simultaneously reminded myself that this person, from rustic cowboy appearances, probably wasn’t on social media. His social media was probably horses or fields or cattle. His shorthand was probably noting how much feed was left for grazing in a field, how to crack enough ice open on a water trough so animals could drink in January, how to gauge preparing for a storm on the horizon to secure feed and animals.

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