Winter Solstice 2021
Dear two legged friends,
Can you feel it? Ahhh winter has finally arrived here in the southwest… I submersed myself in the icy cold San Miguel River yesterday as a ceremony to wash away any negative energy and start fresh as we celebrate gradually longer days during this transition in the Northern hemisphere. This year was especially powerful for me personally and professionally.
I’d like to start with a deep gratitude to everyone who has contributed to the evolution of these projects — many people working hard, using our backs and hands to create more abundance in all forms of life. Thank you…
Starting the year off still in COVID-19 quarantine (gosh I can’t Believe how old that sounds now with all the variants…) I was staying busy to say the least. In the midst of a small business development grant competition with my Alma mater Regis University, I had started my biggest most dreamy project yet, what I called a “Holistic Site Analysis and Development plan” for a ~37 acre property (I liked to say 40 acres, my client joked that all us guys tend to round up, ha!) which was essentially a ~100 page book I spent 6 months writing and designing to inform the long term ecological development of their farm and ranch. Much of this book was informed by the remote graduate program I was working on at The Conway School of Ecological Design and Sustainable land use planning based in western Massachusetts.
I learned some hard lessons while finishing up that book and competing for the small business innovation grant. I took on too many clients as I was excited about all of the interest. I ultimately needed to let two clients go after some tough communication issues… valuable lessons learned in evaluating “fit” and clear communication with clients.
I ended up winning second place in the grant competition for $5,000! I was struggling in my decision of how to invest the money but decided to invest in more education.
A dear friend Lily Russo reached out to share about her 200 hour yoga teacher training program and offered me a scholarship. With my chronic pain and on and off disciplined yoga practice, I decided that would be a great personal investment for my whole being understanding that self care overflows to all those we meet. In April I began training with Lily, which flourished into a beautiful and powerful experience I couldn’t more highly recommend… Those several months in that safe community of yogis and yoginis was deeply transformative for me. I’ve found so many parallels in self-care, ayurvedic medicine, and studying ecological patterns of succession, restoration, healing, systems actualizing and evolution.
For the first project of the year, we started in Cortez on a ~5 acre parcel (more like 4.34). This project involved moving tons (literally) of gravel, loosening up biologically inert and severely compacted topsoil. This wonderful client contracted me earlier that fall and had the chance to order tree seedlings from the forestry service which we’ll plant out along the borders of her land for edible windbreak and hedgerows.
Those include gamble oak, nan king cherry, Austrian pine, apricot, alder, choke cherry, aronia, and I think there are some willows in there. We established around a 200’ long contour swale on the high east side of the land and seeded it with the pollinator mix from southwest seed. We made a winding path and diverse layered forest garden with apple trees (honey crisp) under planted with lupine, mint, thyme, asparagus, strawberries, sage, lavender, raspberry patches, elderberry, lilac… the list goes on. It should be a colorful and fruitful evolution.
The next project led down the canyon…
I was most excited about starting work at Rough Draft Ranch in McElmo Canyon. It’s simply an incredibly stunning place to work. I began the relationship with this place over a year ago now. Through observation and deep listening, a practice of tuning into the consciousness of the land and learning more about the new owners of the land, a vision for evolution began to emerge. While working through the class I was in at the Conway School, “A Story of Place” and studying with a great cohort of budding ecologists and designers from around the country, I steadily put together a book for this land, an offering of an emergent vision, always open to edits and revisions from nature…
This Holistic Site Analysis and Development Plan will guide us over the years to care for the land and develop out concepts for unique spaces on the ranch. We started with the small orchard or “Food Forest Encampment” as I like to call it. I was fortunate to be invited to live on site, a long-time dream to live so near to my beloved garden to care for it with ease and watch it grow and evolve over the course of the season.
I awoke each day to the songs and cries from a nest of finches calling to their mother high up in the cherry tree behind my wall tent. We removed all the “weeds” from the orchard area, cultivated the soil, planted perennials, seeded diverse wildflower mixes along with a soil-building and edible cover crop mixes mostly from Southwest Seed, then amended the soil with compost and covered the exposed ground with wood chip mulch. I then inoculated with Stropharia and Oyster mycelium (mushroom cultures). We dutifully weeded every day for the first six weeks taking out mostly field bindweed, pigweed, and puncture vine. The wildflowers and cover crops had a fighting chance to get establish before the highly competitive “weeds”. The emerging of the garden was a transformational experience for everyone involved… none of us are the same beings we were - having exchanged significant energy, nourishment, songs, sweat, blood, and tears…
Praise be to God, the Universe, divine grace, Great Spirit, whatever you want to call it for the monsoons that arrived in July… All of us, plants, fungi and animal kingdom were on the verge of heat exhaustion and I felt like giving up, tired of irrigating, tired of the inescapable and extreme canyon heat, just damn worn out! Then those blessed rains came. I learned a deeper appreciation and understanding for a rain dance, what joy! A much welcomed rest for the intense high desert sun…
Meanwhile I was working on another design and land plan book for another ranch in Sage Canyon on an adjacent ~40 acres.
I also enrolled in an intensive course call The Regenerative Practitioner Series — a 5-month series of classes and practicing systems thinking frameworks with a group of other design professionals. This course was incredibly potent for me. In our southwest cohort, there were 27 students from as far north as Vancouver Island and as far south as Bogota, Colombia. Architects, city planners, real estate development consultants, ecologists, eco-village designers, regenerative agriculture consultants, film producers, connected with other communities of practitioners from around the globe.
This course transformed my approach to my work and process. I became inspired by this concept of “materializing spirit”, and allowing myself to connect on a spiritual level with my clients — I started with helping my parents build a garden at their home in Richmond, Virginia.
Being raised Catholic, my Mom and I did a blessing calling on Saint Francis and blessing the ground with holy oils blessed by the Priest from their church. We co-created a truly wonderful space, and set that little bit of land on a faster trajectory of evolution and soil-building capacity.
I’ve come to understand that the most important part of my work is about collectively developing our consciousness and conscientiousness and continually extending our consideration to others, including the more than human community. When we care about others, our plant and animal relatives, and the land itself that WE belong to, there is medicine and healing to be experienced by all…
In the process of creating sacred spaces, it has the potential to transform our quality of being as well. Being in a space we understand as “sacred” changes how we move. Have you ever been in an immaculate temple, old growth forest, natural wonder, or masterfully crafted home? I’ve found that it fundamentally changes how I feel and move throughout that space. I am extra careful and conscious not to pollute that place, because to do so would be sacrilege! And I think it is important to reflect on what that means… Sacred places cannot exist in a vacuum, they are made sacred by people and culture. We have to the power to change the way we perceive places and to make any place a “sacred place” simply by how we treat it and relate to to the living beings and “non-living” beings of that place. The stories we tell ourselves about who we are, where we come from, and how we relate to the living planet has resounding effects on how we move through the world and make decisions in our lives.
I’m accepting my role as an eternal student in this wild cosmos we inhabit, an ever emerging chaos and order. I’ve made time to investigate my ancestry and come to identify and be proud of my Scottish Heritage. I say McMillan differently now. Just as with plants, names hold power and meaning, telling a story inherent in their sounds, each unique and evolved from a specific place on our planet. I’m learning more how to be careful with my words because they do hold so much power to create or destroy, and shape the narratives we subscribe to.
I see deep importance in white folks looking into their heritage and ancestry, and relationship to those stories, the privileges that comes with having access to that information, or if you even have a relationship with your ancestry. I don’t want to identify with “white”, its a homogenization of culture that comes with spiritual impoverishment. There are hidden layers underneath “white” that are full of color and authentic earth grown culture. The impacts of colonialism are deep and far reaching. Scottish tribes too, were colonized by the Roman Catholics long ago… a steady and slow reshaping of culture through changing stories and myths and how people understand their relationship to the earth, each other, and themselves…
I feel this is an essential part of the work ahead of me and those who feel a vocation to engage more deeply with the world and to come more alive. I crave a deeper understanding of ecological time, broadening my perspective from the shallow milieu of colonial capitalism and the western reductionist philosophy prevalent through most of the mainstream culture. The structures and systems we operate within are relatively young yet have had an incredibly destructive impact on the more than human community. Why don’t we start telling a new story? I’ll be building community with those already writing that new story and cultivating a deep and intimate partnership with living systems and our Mother Earth…
There is depth complexity to this, so I want to state that this should be a dialogue and this medium does not lend itself to that. However, I feel that the healing and evolution of our environment is intimately an inherently connected to the culture, stories of ancestry and heritage, and connection to place… a powerful book I highly recommend from this year that is supporting a deeper understanding for me is called Sand Talk by Tyson Yunkaporta:
“Most lasting cultural innovations occur through the demotic — the practices and forms that evolve through the daily lives and interactions of people and place in an organic sequence of adaptation. When these processes are unimpeded by the arbitrary controls and designs of elevated individuals, they emerge in ways that mirror the patterns of creation… So I am careful about the Indigenous Knowledge I choose to present in this book, because I know how ideas can get tangles up and twisted in the marketplace of this civilization, embraced and repackaged and marketed in forms that are often the opposite of the original concept or intent.”
There is so much to learn and I feel that seeking wisdom and teachers makes me come more alive and fall more deeply in love with this wild existence… This solstice I’m setting off on a spiritual quest and adventure to Central America. My path is leading me to connect with specific people and teachers in Costa Rica and Mexico this winter to learn from them and support their work. I’ll look forward to sharing stories from my travels come this spring equinox.
Sincere thanks and solstice blessings to all of you,
In gratitude,
Michael
“Working with the natural world is a relationship — needing balance in give and take, space to evolve, curiosity, and commitment.”
