The Wisdom of Cobwebby Thistles & the Young Brush Rabbits in the Canes

The young brush rabbits are about, darting through the lush salmonberry canes. Oh, oh, to be so small, so soft, and to fit inside those thickets! What a world it must be in there. A gateway to the Otherworld, I always thought as a girl (and, well, still do!).

It seems the summertime is already upon us here—the hills have gone dry gold already, except where the cows graze them, and the fog is thickening out along the coast, muting the land to gentle pastels, to a dream of sand and dune and lupine.

“In that first hardly noticed moment in which you wake,
coming back to this life from the other
more secret, moveable and frighteningly honest world
where everything began,
there is a small opening into the new day
which closes the moment you begin your plans.

What you can plan is too small for you to live.
What you can live wholeheartedly will make plans enough
for the vitality hidden in your sleep.

To be human is to become visible
while carrying what is hidden as a gift to others.
To remember the other world in this world
is to live in your true inheritance.

You are not a troubled guest on this earth,
you are not an accident amidst other accidents
you were invited from another and greater night
than the one from which you have just emerged.

Now, looking through the slanting light of the morning window
toward the mountain presence of everything that can be
what urgency calls you to your one love?
What shape waits in the seed of you
to grow and spread its branches
against a future sky?

Is it waiting in the fertile sea?
In the trees beyond the house?
In the life you can imagine for yourself?
In the open and lovely white page on the waiting desk?”

-David Whyte

Oh, what beautiful beautiful words. I've encountered them more than once these past weeks and so I thought I would share them here. "To remember the other world in this world"— here it is in the young brush rabbits loping across the dunes, the snakes napping in tall grass, the beach strawberries holding gently a network of roots over the sand, the lupines almost unbearably sweet to smell (somehow they smell sweeter than ever). Each one knowing perfectly the seed of itself.

Here, that other world, that opening into the new day: the heart of the wild dune strawberry, star-perfect, where the bee knows just how to land.

Each wild one, living its Way out on the land, is an opening to that Other World that is nested into this one. The blue and yellow lupines, seeking moisture, sloughing off salt winds, smelling intoxicating, turning this dune rambler completely away from the tracks she was following to touch their blossoms and bury her face in them—they wake daily to the bumble bees and the ocean, they move through time with all of their being Right There, no Plan except to open when it is time to open, to lose petals when it is time to lose petals, to start again.

I think we have much to learn from them, these plants with their roots down, ever opening their arms, time and again.

And my goodness, if this cobwebby thistle (cirisum occidentale) isn't himself a magnificent unfurling doorway into the magic of the everyday, and of the languid drying summer, I don't know what is!

Climb Up To the Rooftop & Look For the Spiderweb Stars

A morning recently, I watched this tiny spider at the creation of her beautiful, new web. It was an act of great careful order, with certain stages of the web already laid out, cornerstones, so she could weave back and forth between them with the heddle of her perfect body. I always get a bit overwhelmed, choked up with beauty, when I see spiders at their webs; it feels like watching the creation of a universe and its myriad stars. How, how, I always wonder desperately, full of some kind of unnameable longing (the kind Rumi is always speaking of), does that silk emerge, and how does she know the way?

"The stars come up spinning

every night, bewildered in love.

They’d grow tired

with that revolving, if they weren’t.

They’d say,

“How long do we have to do this!”

God picks up the reed-flute world and blows.

Each note is a need coming through one of us,

a passion, a longing-pain.

Remember the lips

where the wind-breath originated,

and let your note be clear.

Don’t try to end it.

Be your note.

I’ll show you how it’s enough.

Go up on the roof at night

in this city of the soul.

Let everyone climb on their roofs

and sing their notes!

Sing loud!"

- Rumi (trans. Coleman Barks), from Each Note

I've been returning to this poem recently, standing atop some ancient rooftop in my mind, the sort I imagine Rumi would have known, sandstone, the heat of summer evenings and big indigo blue skies above, whistling and singing out to the stars, the whole spin of galaxy, spider-made, each strand a bit of love-longing.

Old fort rooftop, Malta

Something about the idea of the rooftop, looking out over some old city, the supposed "pinnacle" of human progress, (which really seem to impede our view of the skies with all those tall structures and all that light pollution!) and singing until everybody else is on their roofs too, above the fray, praising with love the stars and the night and the moon and the wildness, the true life-source, in each heart—this really gets me. 

When I was younger I loved climbing to the roof of our house with my brother and my dad, making sure he always held the ladder tight for me because I didn't like going down backwards, or that lip as you clambered away from the rungs and onto the shingles. But once up there, with cups of tea balanced carefully, we all got swept up in the sky. The rooftops, the whole neighborhood, looked like a different landscape entirely, the shingles like scales, all the houses capable of suddenly turning into great beasts and lumbering off with lanterns for eyes and music playing from their stove-top hearts. It was like you'd walked up into a different part of the same place, a doorway through the everyday and into the sublime: back to shingles, nothing else between you and the stars.

May we all climb to the spider-web rooftops of ourselves and sing and get everybody else itching to clamber up there too, whistling for the things we love.

All of this rambling about spider-webs, about rooftops, about the sublime, reminded me of a piece of the book-project I've been working on with the truly wondrous Rima Staines. More on that later—in brief it is a novel in pieces based each on her paintings, which themselves each are Doorways into the Other just through the thicket, just atop your very roof. I am very excited about its soon-to-be finished state. One of the tales, based on the painting below, has much to do with spiders, magic, and otherness, so I leave you with an excerpt from the start of it to whet your appetite for the much more that is to come!

For indeed, "there is no excellent beauty that hath not strangeness in the proportion"—I believe it is through the strange edges of the world, the ragged rooftops where madwomen sing and the loose-stone cracks in our hearts, that our brightest souls dwell. 

Leg-Wheel and Jew Harp,  by Rima Staines

"In the alder wood, up hill from the creekbed, there was an open space in the trees and an encampment made of tarp, cob and old canvas tents. In a sunny patch, the women grew carrots and leeks. There, I danced and was called the Fool. They thought I was the product of nuclear power plant leakage, or pesticide waste, but my mother told me differently, and I knew that she was wise. She told me I was part spider, part wagon, and the rest of me girl. What else can explain the wheels that are my feet and how they collect dew, like spidersilk, at dawn?

There were three dusky-footed woodrat nests next to the camp. They looked like huts made of twigs, cone-shaped. I could curl up inside one of them and sleep. Sometimes I wanted to. Sometimes I didn’t feel like rolling for them on my tender and wheeled feet. Some nights, the people were bored, or restless or maybe they felt insecure, with the stars bright as new nails above us all. The children sang songs that mocked my curve-backed shape. They called my Quasimodo and they threw old plums. They made jokes, loud enough for me to hear. I could only keep on with my rolling dance. It wasn’t so much of a dance, really, just spirals and pirouettes on my wheels. The people liked to stare at something different, something freakish, and forget their own lives in their disgust, their fascination, even their pity. 

I learned to juggle, because that’s what they said Fools used to do, in the courts of kings all wrapped in colored velvet. I juggled buckeyes, polished and fallen, or old baseballs. I taught the woodrats to dance on the curve of my back. It was only because I wanted a friend that I sat at the entrances of their three tall nests, and I talked. I told them about my mother, who everyone called a gypsy, or a witch, or both words at once, strong and dangerous words that have stayed in our minds, under our tongues, since before the world broke, a hundred thousand telephone wires snipped and dead. They called her those things because she lived in an old hay cart pulled by six tule elk that was painted purple and yellow. She didn’t brush away spiderwebs when they were built between one of her tent poles and the side of the cart, between axle and wheel. If a spider spun a web between one of the wheels and the ground, as they often did on cold October mornings, we would stay, for two days or three weeks, until the web fell in of its own accord, until the lady in the middle had eaten her fill and decided to move on. 

There was a tent made all of felt over the bed of the cart. The elk who pulled it were female, so they didn’t fight or get their antlers tangled. My mother let them graze often, in the old grassy center divides on the empty freeways, in the pastures that were once for cows. She sold medicines. That’s why they called her a witch. Her medicines always worked. She also sold pretty scraps, hoarding them the way woodrats do. My mother liked pieces of glass jars, the kind once made for preserving blackberries or plums. She liked marbles and coiled bedsprings, coppery pennies which she polished at night when we stopped to make a fire under the stars. She collected tea tins, clear, orange plastic bottles used for pills, beautiful spiraling screws, spoons made from silver, old keys. Above all things, my mother loved to find the rectangular “brains,” as she called them, from inside computers and phones. They shone metallic, with a thousand strange lines and squares and geometric patterns, some ridged and some flat, like maps to the underworld. She kept all these things in neat baskets inside our moving home, and showed them to customers who came for elderberry syrup, for lemon balm and poppy petal tea, tinctures of coastal sage for menstrual cramps, datura and dark speckled mushrooms for visions.

I was only nine when she died. I should be forthright, I said to the woodrats, I should say it out loud. I was only nine when she was killed. I was only nine when they surrounded our little cart, when they shot the elk for food and took us here, to burn her the way witches have always burned, they said. I alone was proof of her dark power, they said, with my wheels for feet, the way I rolled, my body more curved than a raccoon’s. They burned her. They made me watch the fire take my mother piece by piece, screams that licked up toward the sky with the flames. Only I, listening to my mother scream, sick all the way through my bones and out my wheeled feet, could hear that in her screams she was also singing her curse. 

Afterward, they buried her black bones in a hole, and they had a feast. They ate the body of one of our elk. I was sick and the tears made my body sting with salt. They tied me up to keep me from running, though I never would have gotten far on my slow and glistening wheels.

So you see, I told the woodrats, sitting at the messy entrances of their dens, I don’t do this because I want to. I do this because I am afraid they will burn me too, if I try to escape. I am not as brave as my mother. I do not want to die. And where would I roll to? I asked them. I know what people do now, to us, to the ones who are strange. It is worse, sometimes, than burning. 

That was when they started to come out, to run up my arms and sleep on the hunched plateau of my back— when I told them the truth, that she was killed. I taught them to stand up and balance my mother’s golden marbles on their heads. I taught them to twirl, and to somersault. I don’t know why they listened to me. Maybe it was the folded-up scraps of aluminum I left at their twiggy entrances, like offerings. I folded them as I talked, into tiny crisp birds, balloons, stars. When I came back, they were always gone. Maybe it was just that I sat so often, talking to them like you do to friends. Or maybe it was my wheels, spoked and flesh and spidersilk. 

I say they are spidersilk, though of course I don’t remember my own conception. I never knew my father. But my mother told me, when I was young and barely understood, that my father was a man and also a spider, and I believed her. I still believe her. What else is there to do? It was on early, dark nights that she would tell me about him, when she was quieter than usual and had a sad, sorry look at the edges of her lips, at the corners of her dark eyes, tucked into the coils of her brown braids. She’d have already lit a fire from dry oak twigs in the narrow woodstove tucked into our tent. The elk would be unhitched and grazing. They never ran away. I don’t know why. Maybe because my mother loved them, and they knew it. She’d put me on her lap and let me have a sip of her brandy. [...]"

The Elk Mamas in the Wild Iris on Beltane Morn

Today, I rose early, made a thermos of tea, and drove north to sit among the tule elk cows on Beltane morning. I'm not sure why this need washed over me so fully, but I wanted to be near them, wise ladies with their growing calves. 

I found the world out there warm and languid, the irises a deep and luscious purple, the elk cows napping amidst them, chewing their cud. Not a wind, and the ocean thundering.

I wanted to heap blessings on these elk mamas in the growing spring. If you look closely on the right hand side of the photo, you will see two fuzzy lighter ears sticking up from the grass-- a very young calf! One of the cows watched me very closely as I sat down among the irises. I wanted to cry at the beauty of their tawny bodies, their dark eyes, their grazing big-eared grace. I remembered something David Abram wrote in his Becoming Animal, about easing the nervousness of wild ones with singing, or humming-- you can communicate so much more to another creature that way. Your intentions, the state of your body, they can all be detected in the vibrations of your voice. So I whistled as I sat by the side of the road at 8:00 am with the elk ladies, and then I sang a song, and they watched me very intently, very alert, ears big and pointed, but they did not move, though I was but 15 feet away. It felt so good, so natural, so enlivening, though it is not something I do often—to sit and sing to elk.

When I turned, I found more behind me, on the other side of the road, peering at my strange whistling. What an odd creature I must have been to them! 

Eventually I tried to sneak out my thermos of tea and my cup, but they would have none of my fiddling around, silly human, and the one who had been watching me most closely led the way, off to quieter dreaming-ground.

I can only say that the grace of their gazes upon me felt ancient, and holy. It went right into my bones. It went right into my womb. It felt like medicine: the gaze of the sacred elk (or deer, reindeer, moose, camel)—sustenance, wild god, source of life—when it rests gently upon you, stirs up some kind of ancient sacramental bond. We do not need to hunt elk or deer here now, for our survival. But maybe we still need, for the survival of our wild souls, to shimmy close to them, to eye each other, to remember one another's faces. To exchange a song.

Just up the road, I climbed a hill near an old watertank by the historic structures of Pierce Point Ranch (now home to barn swallows). I had my tea, I looked out at Tomales Bay (a big blue ribbon-scar marking the San Andreas Fault), I lay in the sun and I wondered at the dreams of Point Reyes, this land moving and moving along the North American plate, never truly at rest.

Everything felt dreamy, bursting, like these little lupine pods, with potential magic; Beltane, day of honoring the growth of plants, the good health of herds, the fertility of land and people & love, day when the veils are thin and wild ones wander in, translucent and horned—this day was a warm wind upon the land, a heady hot silence and stillness across hills normally blustering with ocean winds or fog. Together, we dreamed a little while.

May the irises, the cow parsnips and wild radishes of your dreams grow beautifully toward the sun and flower with all of their essential richness. May your wild elk soul wander truly, finding just the right grasses and sweet tubers, the perfect places to lay, to chew the cud, to dream whatever the land dreams beneath its hooves. 

Here's a poem, which I read this morning out on the back steps, to honor all the little nest-builders flying about us as the spring grows. It seems to suit the day....

may my heart always be open to little

birds who are the secrets of living

whatever they sing is better than to know

and if men should not hear them men are old

may my mind stroll about hungry

and fearless and thirsty and supple

and even if it’s sunday may i be wrong

for whenever men are right they are not young

and may myself do nothing usefully

and love yourself so more than truly

there’s never been quite such a fool who could fail

pulling all the sky over him with one smile

- e.e. cummings

A New Cabin in the Fir-Woods, a Little Mole, the Roses of April

I spent the end of March in the high desert—sweet juniper scrub land of pinyon, black bear, kangaroo rat and doe, marveling at the strong magic of plants. I've always been an "animal" person; my way into  the wild and my own self seems to be through the magic of animals. Since I was a girl I've been drawn to the shapeshifting powers (in tales) of women who speak to wolves, who turn into glossy brown chipmunks or robins or ravens.

 I also read many books about herbalist-witches, midwives of the medieval variety, who knew all the old arcane knowledge of plants, and I wanted to be like them too— like the Scottish witch-woman in the book Wise Child (a beauty of a novel, for all ages) who grew a tangled garden of herbs, who knew all the places in the woods and fields where the wild weeds grew, who knew how to sing out their medicine and honor them properly. But it has been a bit slower for me, in my life, to really get into the knowing of plants, the reverence, in the same way that I have been able to make the magic of animals, the language of their tracks, into a sort of spiritual questing, a deep salve, and also a very real and specific practice, full of research and sketching and exact measurements of metacarpal pads, claws, strides, scrapes. Full of the honoring of the animals on this land, in their own lives, not only for my sake but for theirs.

But my days in the desert of the Cuyama Valley shifted this. Something about the desert plants—juniper, sagebrush, pinyon, madrone, yerba santa—and their hardy quest for water just overwhelmed me. They were each like a flame growing out of the ground. I was so distracted, in the best of ways, by them that it became a sort of plant-tracking trip as much as an animal tracking one. 

I brought home with me the dry resin strength of juniper (what miraculous dusty blue berries, larder of so many wild ones out there in those washes), the memory of candlestick yucca glowing in the late afternoon sun, the bright green of scrubby oak mistletoe.

Home, in a new cabin in the fir forest, I have been completely overwhelmed by the green, the abundance of water, the thick tangles of plants every where I turn. The Douglas firs that flank our little home are just staggering to gaze upon, when you really slow, and crane upward, and imagine what it is to be that thick-barked body, first to touch the sun each morning.

I've been gathering yerba buena up the shady hillside, and the new fir tips, for tea. It seems a good way to start a relationship with a new place, and to open into the wonder of the plant world: bring them, literally, into your center.

Fires in the woodstove have been abundant. When your heat must be created nightly by the sorcery, the alchemy, of fire, it becomes warmth much more precious. I've always loved building fires, tending them, poking at the orange embers; it is a belly of magic right in the center of the home.

My runs to the post office this month for the April Gray Fox Epistle (a re-telling of Tsarevna Frog) were much more relaxed than previously. No  lines, and a brief walk up and down this hill. Delightful! Mugwort and lemon balm danced up their thick green leaves in the roadside ditches.

It is hard for me to describe what a joy it is to be tucked into these green woods. To throw open the windows and doors and have the shadows of bigleaf maples and bays fall in the openings, along with the calls of robins, the drums of woodpeckers. I feel much more peaceful than I have in quite a while. It makes me believe, more than ever, that our psyches are tied in with the psyche of the land; that time just watching the sun on trees, the juncos feeding, is literally medicine for the mind.

Here is the beloved mail-grocery-wood-whatever basket, full of April's Epistles, looking out into the greenery of our "yard," which is really the forest, and not ours at all. On that subject, it's time to sign up for May's Gray Fox Epistle! Gosh, the days fly. I've been working on a re-telling of the old British  tale, Tamlin, set right here in these woods, written entirely outside. It is a sort of love song to this place, a delight to write. So, do sign up (Paypal links in the left column right below the Indigo Vat banner) if you are so inclined!

The cabin is quite teeny, so I've been improvising new "office" space, the latest this patch of steep meadow, drenched in sun, just around the corner and up a fire road. The fir trees sway gently around the edges, and poppies and cream-cups are blooming, and I have come to recognize at least one resident raven by the missing feather in his right wing.

Right as we were heading to our loaded up car to leave Mill Valley and move here three weeks ago, we came across a just-dead mole in the path, perfect, velvet, being harassed by crows. I never do this sort of thing, being rather sensitive and tender of heart (and mildly squeamish, I'll just admit it), but I got out a plastic bag and scooped him in. He seemed to want to come along. I can't quite say why, but I just didn't want to leave him there to be pecked to pieces by crows, as much as they too deserve their lunch. The beauty of his little self overwhelmed me.

We brought him here, gorgeous sweet being, fur so soft and velvety my fingertips were too rough to even feel it, power of the fecund underground, and buried him in the new front garden, back in the deep tunnels from whence he came (and where, I have discovered, there is another mole, a live one, happily digging away but somehow (bless her) thus far avoiding the lettuces). A visiting friend, over a cup of tea, said that perhaps we should name the cabin Mole Hollow— because it is a snug, shady little den of a home— and perhaps we will! I feel blessed to have been able to come so near the perfect form of a mole, sacred tunneler, aerator and keeper of the magic of the underground (a place, in the mind and heart, quite important to the artist in all of us!)

And meanwhile, all around, the flowers are as rich in their opening as the green grasses and new leaves. In my mother's garden over the mountain, the poppies are just ridiculously lovely, and the roses are explosions of thorn and white.

Growing up, there were always dense, wild rose bushes in the garden. They were my favorite place to play, in their thorny caverns, making up worlds. To me, they still hold all that wonder of childhood, all the afternoons imagining speaking animals and fay folk in the brambles. And they do, of course, figure in quite centrally to the fairytale Tamlin, which you shall discover in this month's Epistle (or any version of it you happen to read), as they do to so many tales.

This morning, out on the back steps as a woodpecker explored a nearby stump, I came across Rumi's poem, Roses Underfoot. He writes:

"Going in search of the heart, I found
a huge rose, and roses under all our feet!

How to say this to someone who denies it?
The robe we wear is the sky's cloth.

Everything is soul and flowering."

Indeed, it does feel that way in the sun-bloom of April here nestled in the foothills of the Coast Range, a couple hour raven's flight from the ocean. May we all find the roses beneath our feet, and share them, petal by fragrant petal, share them with all the love we can muster for each other and this land, because what else are we here for?

The Seed Market

A few days ago I sowed handfuls of wildflower seeds in our new front garden. Midway through, hunched over the dark dirt, I stopped to look at the seeds themselves, and was just overwhelmed. What perfect planets of creation, each a different color, form, all holding the birth of a flower that is just itself: foxglove, forget me not, columbine, poppy.

The next day, I read Rumi's "The Seed Market" as my morning poem, out on the back steps watching the light come through the Douglas fir trunks, the bigleaf maple leaves, so sweet and green. Every one of them started as a seed. How can this be, this miracle of the seed? What wonders there are in the world.

The Seed Market

Can you find another market like this?

Where,
with your one rose
you can buy hundreds of rose gardens?

Where,
for one seed
you get a whole wilderness?

For one weak breath,
the divine wind?

You've been fearful
of being absorbed in the ground,
or drawn up by the air.

Now, your waterbead lets go
and drops into the ocean,
where it came from.

It no longer has the form it had,
but it's still water.
The essence is the same.

This giving up is not a repenting.
It's a deep honoring of yourself.

When the ocean comes to you as a lover,
marry, at once, quickly,
for God's sake!

Don't postpone it!
Existence has no better gift.

No amount of searching
will find this.

A perfect falcon, for no reason,
has landed on your shoulder,
and become yours.

-Rumi (translated by Coleman Barks)

The little seed of the self, all thistle-spiked or smooth and glossy, maybe soft as a fruit, maybe hard like an almond shell—it is good to let it release into the surrounding trees now and then, become the calls of raptors overhead, the red breasts of robins, the little candle-flame flickering in my lap as I read into the morning and remember that when I breathe in, I breathe in the exhalations of all these seeded trees and plants, and when I breathe out, I give them a bit of carbon dioxide to absorb. And of course I share air too with the juncos, the towhees, the raccoons, the does.

American kestrel, photo from Wikipedia

Whenever I read Rumi I feel full of gold honeyed light, and also wonder, and generally some confusion, a delightful sort of confusion. I'm not sure what precisely he means about the falcon landing on your shoulder, what this means in the great metaphysical scheme of his lyrical world, but to me, I see a little kestrel, perfect and small, the sort you see perched like some divine goddess on telephone wires, watching meadows, kohl-eyed, quick, with wings that look almost blue against the cream of their chests. The idea of such a being landing on my shoulder, and staying there, keeping me company-- well, this makes whole fields of wildflower seeds germinate and bloom in my heart, in my skin. To be so touched by the wild of the world, of one's own soul, kestrel-bright: that is grace, that is holiness.

May we all wander, in our mornings or evenings or whatever small sacred times we set aside for ourselves in our busy lives [which today, for me, involved a mildly hysterical madness of self-employment tax forms, which I've never filled out before and which I must say I was in a bit of denial about ACTUALLY having to do until this morning, when I overturned the house looking for the necessary documents which I of course had put nowhere useful whatsoever-- the trunk of the car, a basket in a box under papers, you get the idea....] through the seed markets of the wild soul. One forget-me-not seed, bristled, in the palm, is the miracle of the whole world, and we all do have a kestrel that will come to our shoulders, if we are ready to call her.

The Orange Poppy-Heart of Everyday

Columbine, Marin Headlands

I have been a bit scarce around here these last two weeks, because we have been moving house to a lovely little cabin in the Douglas firs of West Marin, with wild roses all over the hills out back, ferns, hazels and bigleaf maples abounding, and fires in the woodstove every night. Out the windows the world is green.

In the middle of all that I spent a long weekend in the sage scrub pinyon-juniper desert east of Santa Barbara, tracking deer through the thickets and falling in love with the silhouettes of candlestick yuccas high up on the bare orange ridge-tops. I will have photos of all of this soon to share; as soon as I retrieve my camera cord from its hiding place, as we are not totally all the way moved yet, and there are boxes between here and there that still need to be ferried over the roads, down the hill, into this green valley and up into the firs.

Douglas iris, Marin Headlands

Since my birthday a few weeks back, which my love and I celebrated by spending the night and day out in the beautiful coastal scrub and wide valleys of the Marin Headlands, under a tree he has been visiting for a decade, I made a resolution about being present in the wild beauty of the everyday. I know, it is not a very inventive resolution, but perhaps it feels so familiar because it is so very important, and also so very hard.

Here are a few photos from that lovely, peaceful jaunt. Nothing like a night on a bed of soft leaves and a morning waking up to thick fog and hermit thrush song to thrust you fully, beautifully, joyously, into the miraculous present. And, of course, one's mother (and the mothers of one's love and the mother of one's dear old friend, along with a beautiful friend who is not, as of yet, a mother) at the other end of a windswept hike with tea and cake and clotted cream.

Our cosy bed of grass and fallen leaves, safe like two foxes in a den.

The late afternoon view from the "Front Porch."

My beautiful mother in a grassy meadow, bearing tea, lemon-masa rosemary cake, cream, jam.

Steeped in fog and early spring-ish sun, the love of one's loved ones and the fullness of the wild land: a perfect way to start the next journey around our big star.

Lately I have been rising each morning and, before anything else, definitely before touching the white box of my computer, I have been lighting a candle, pulling out a book of poetry, and reading a poem for the morning out on the back steps as the robins sing and the wind moves the leaves.  I have been letting these poems, and that flickering flame, fill me up. Then I go off into the day. It is amazing how this resets your brain, how it provides a lodestone through the hours to touch now and then, and be full again of that wild peace.

So I thought perhaps I could every now and then share my morning poem with you, share a little bit of this journey that we are all on toward rootedness, like the Douglas firs, those noble lords and ladies who now reach their arms above my hearth, my home, who move in all the winds, who hold in their trunks great spires of light.

Happiness
Mary Oliver

In the afternoon I watched
the she-bear; she was looking
for the secret bin of sweetness—
honey, that the bees store
in the trees' soft caves.
Black block of gloom, she climbed down
tree after tree and shuffled on
through the woods. And then
she found it! The honey-house deep as
heartwood, and dipped into it
among the swarming bees—honey and comb
she lipped and tongued and scooped out
in her black nails until

maybe she grew full, or sleepy, or maybe
a little drunk, and sticky
down the rugs of her arms,
and began to hum and sway.
I saw her let go of the branches,
I saw her lift her honeyed muzzle
into the leaves, and her thick arms,
as though she would fly—
an enormous bee
all sweetness and wings—
down into the meadows, the perfection
of honeysuckle and roses and clover—
to float and sleep in the sheer nets
swaying from flower to flower
day after shining day.

May we all keep in our hearts the beautiful wild orange poppy heart of the everyday miracles: tea at sunrise, robin-song, new flowers, new rains, a chipmunk on the path, dinner and candles and wine with aunts, grandparents, parents, siblings, the kiss of one's love, stories told on long walks, bees, firelight.

Turning Our Fairytales Feral Again: at Dark Mountain

A new essay of mine called "Turning Our Fairytales Feral Again," is now up at Dark Mountain. Do come see! Here are the first two paragraphs...

"There are some stories that have weathered the ages. Weathered them, literally— from the mouth of an old man around a fire of peat, smoking until the story he is telling is black and tobacco-stained, to the girl who heard it and carried it with her out into the sheep fields, then into the city, working two jobs to feed her children, all the while touching on the strength of wild swans in her memory; from the ancient fire pit around which it was first told and shaped, maybe as far back as the making of bronze things, maybe just at the time the priests came and built churches, to the anthology of Irish Folktales in which some semblance of it was written down in the late 19^th century, and the subsequent re-printings, slightly changed re-writings, the battered pages, the dunks in bathtubs, the days left out on the porch in the rain. We may call many myths fairytales, now, as if to diminish their seriousness; whatever we call them, they are old and powerful, when we peel them back. They are full of the magic of animals, land, and people.

Humans are storytelling creatures. We need story, we need deep mythic happenings, as much as we need food and sun: to set us in our place in the family of things, in a world that lives and breathes and throws us wild tests, to show us the wildernesses and the lakes, the transforming swans, of our own minds. These minds of ours, after all, are themselves wild, shaped directly by our long legacy as hunters, as readers of wind, fir-tip, animal trail, paw-mark in mud. We are made for narrative, because narrative is what once led us to food, be it elk, salmonberry or hare; to that sacred communion of one body being eaten by another, literally transformed, and afterward sung to." 

Come to Dark Mountain to read more!

Look closely to find the outline of what I am almost certain is a mountain lion print, from a cat who wandered through the wild hills above Woodacre a few weeks back. We put hazel catkins in the toe prints as a little thank-you offering.