Lyndsey Scott (she/her)
share your spiritual biography in 10 words, or less:
brainwashed….
/ then Body-freed! /
Earth caught me.
Now ~ ~ ~ I surf Song
where are you turning for soul nourishment / joy / aliveness?
My garden! I just moved and have a “zone zero” to tend again. My elder mama decided this was the year to say goodbye to her shade garden and sod it over, so i dug it all up to transfer it here. With my hands in soil and first morning light kissing me, I am weeding and watering with my lineage, I am tickling the roots of mothers across the ocean ~ here is where i most practice interbeing. I adore this physical prayer. I love creating soothing Beauty for my neighbors, flowers giving rainbow all day long. I love the little bee that sleeps in the giant yellow marigold.
what is a text you hold sacred?
The most tattered book I own is Love Poems from God, edited by Daniel Ladinsky — with especial dog-ears on Tukaram and St. John of the Cross. And Mira and Teresa de Avila . . . . This book found me when I had run away from spiritual practice after religious trauma, and it wooed me back to the steady heart-beat bosom of the mystics as my home fire.
what is a spiritual practice currently sustaining you?
Singing! All ways and ever. I belong to a tradition of catching and sharing simple songs intended to be sung in a circle. And even when I’m alone I live my life in song — humming to my plants as I water, walking in Hickory Hill to sing to the moon as she rises over the prairie, anchoring at my altar the energies I want to live today. Letting the song coax the tears when my heart is overwhelmed. “Who sings prays twice….” ~St. Augustine
how would you describe the work you feel called to do in this world (even if it is not the work you get paid for)?
I love to co-create participatory experiences that transmit trust in and ecstatic surrender to Love. Sometimes this arrives as a song I record (as in Over/Under – a prayer for abolition I wrote with incarcerated musician Tony Rhodd). Sometimes it comes as a ritual I get to doula (as in our work with A Year in Ceremony at Earthkeeper Wisdom School). When something we are creating changes us, and we broadcast this transmission — emergent discovery, Life as ceremony.
knowing that none of us “has it all together,” what is one question you are wrestling with, or bit of wisdom you are struggling to enflesh in your daily life?
How do I live Village here now? Many of my beloveds are geographically distant, and increasingly my soul desires the intimacy of bringing soup over and weeping in each others arms and cozied up laughing at game night — not zooming, texting, calling. Indeed the increasingly exigent requirements of grieving ourselves awake in this time seem to demand this in-person holding and tending. As I root in a new home community, I seek to align my habit patterns to this dream.
who is one elder / ancestor / mentor whose guidance you draw from? what is one piece of wisdom they have offered?
Patricia Allison taught (lived!) permaculture at Earthhaven Ecovillage in NC; I was blessed to study with her. She imparted many things ~ adoration for plants as kin, the path of singing our souls alive. Advice of hers that still echoes in me: “when the grief gets to be too much, go dig a hole in the earth and scream in it.” She opened a door for me that Earth body can literally hold me, and that this is a path for accessing more resource when we desire to witness and metabolize suffering and keep showing up for the marathon of justice.
what’s one oppressive untruth you are practicing unlearning / divesting from?
The invisible tilt forward toward ‘arrival’ — in the future — when I’m “better” — All the ways my body and mind have been scripted with urgency and progress. Only this. Only Now.
what is one thing you wish were required listening / viewing? (please link to the song, poem, art piece, podcast, etc.)
hmmmm ~ changes daily! What I’ve got on repeat today is my homie Ahlay Blakely’s new album, “Anthems for an Apocalypse.” I introduced her to my producer Micheal Linder and they collaborated on this body of songs — I am in awe of the magic they made! If I had to take one prayer to a desert island, it might be the first track: “may all the places that have yet to know Love – may they know Love.”
any of your website and/or social media handles you’d like us to include / highlight?