The Feral Palmist

These days the sun comes in long and bright through the morning windows, and the house is full of flowers. What, truly, is better than armloads of summer blooms?

For the time-being, my office has moved outside, to a rusty chair surrounded by thickets of nasturtium, because I can hardly bear to stay inside when I could be out here...

...in this beloved garden where everything seems to grow twice as big as I've seen it elsewhere (ancient Temescal Creek silt is my guess), where the meaning of a "Wild Garden" truly comes to life. Right now, one must positively wade through the borage and calendula, the reaching arms of wild radish and rose and sage and red poppy. It is a refuge for bird and bee and woman alike.

One family of bewick's wrens has made its nest in this hanging gourd, and throughout the day mother and father dart back and forth, beaks full of insects, going hither and yon throughout the yard to quiet those endlessly cheeping babes within. 

In this riot of raspberry and Queen Anne's lace, lemon verbena and squash vine, bewick's wren domestic life, the crows overhead endlessly harassing the Cooper's hawk who lives in a redwood tree a few blocks away, I've been positively plowing through books. I feel like I'm in college again, only better; I've made the syllabus! And how good it feels, to be guided by creative hunger and the New Project (still a secret, but more on it in a few moments) from book to book. I feel like I'm following a footpath between them, each ending a cross-roads. When I finish one, that creative hunger, that fire to which I've been throwing sticks, tells me where to go next.



And then in I dive, head and hands and heart. Sometimes reading feels more like what I imagine the digging of this American badger hole (big thermos there to show you the size) to be like—handful by handful of soil taking you deeper into the storied language of the book until it is all around you, in your nose and eyes and mouth; until you've fully and wholly entered a new world.



That's how reading has always been for me, since I was very young. I tunnel right in to a tale and, while I'm there, I give it my heart. I think this is why, at around the age I learned to read, I decided I wanted to write stories. Even at that age (seven?) I reasoned that if through a book I could, within the wild landscape of my mind, go on long adventures as a female knight; heal animals with herbs and live with wolves; take tea in rickety cosy cottages with kindly witches; talk to birds and lizards and rabbits—well, as the maker of the tale, wouldn't it be even better? Wouldn't it be even closer to a true act of shape-shifting? Suffice it to say, pen in hand, I've been writing ever since.

Which brings me to the most recent book I read out in the garden with the bewick's wrens scolding and soothing and lullabying all around—The Hand, by Frank R. Wilson. I am writing an essay more in depth on this subject for Dark Mountain, because I am deeply fascinated by the ways our hands have shaped our storytelling brains, by the ways in which are hands are also paws like the pawprints of wild ones out on the sanddunes which bring me so much joy to follow and to read. Hands are the literal and figurative Gatherers of this Gathering Time, and, as fate would have it (for the un-covering of a story often feels more mystical than logical, in the ways that ideas suddenly come upon you around the corner), they will also play a great role in the next Epistolary Writings. On that note, and before I continue further, for those of you who have been wondering—I will unveil the new project on the summer solstice, June 21st, to new and old subscribers alike, and start taking sign-ups then. The first letter, however, will arrive on August 1st, Lughnasadh, the old Celtic harvest festival, and the time of the ripe blackberries on this land. This timing feels more in sync with the seasonal round to me—for the beginning should be a harvest, rather than a zenith, in my opinion!

Back to hands. The most stunning thing I learned in Wilson's The Hand was his assertion that as our hands developed the greater and greater dexterity, muscle control and fine motor skills needed to wield stones, then blades, bows, arrows, adzes, awls, our nervous systems and our brains changed in order to keep up. And as we surpassed everybody else in the animal kindgom with the increasing complexity of our tools (not in any way indicating our superior intelligence—this complexity was more like a very odd quirk or even a desperate attempt to survive in a savannah-landscape which our monkey arms and legs were not adapted to) and the increasing danger and power of our hands, something very peculiar started to happen in our minds.

Just as the making of a tool, particularly a complex one that requires carving and lashing and polishing, has steps— a beginning, middle and end and then the anticipated use that has nothing to do with the present moment but with an imagined future, or even an imagined array of futures—our minds likewise took form around this new sense of sequentiality. In other words, as our hands became unusually skilled and deft at making tools, clothes, then objects of ritual beauty and adornment, our minds started making things too—stories. They started making narratives, sequences of events that made us who we were, that attempted to explain the inexplicable all around us, and especially that most inexplicable thing of all at the far end of the sequence of carve, lash, polish, aim and throw into the heart of a deer: death. Our making hands made our making minds, not the other way around, and our knowledge of the workings (think tools) of the world all around us, our own bodies and lives and deaths, made us the beautiful and terrible creatures that we are.

A wee baby brush rabbit, terrified and spotted through the railing of a bridge

And so naturally, as I've recently been writing about Earth-Constellations and Songlines and whatnot,  I got to thinking about maps, and palmistry, and story-making, and Miguel Angel Blanco's divinatory Library of the Forest from my last post, and how all of this intersects when one is out roving on the wild land. I've always been slightly repelled by the idea of palm-reading. It seems so final, so uninteresting to me, to say--this is your heart line, your life line, your head line. This finger represents Venus, and this one Jupiter (as in the properties of the Greco-Roman deities). I mean, says who? I have absolutely nothing to do with Jupiter. He is one story of many about a planet in the sky, or a force in nature. (I should add here that within its ancient-rooted cultural context, palm-reading is a very different—and fascinating—thing). In my own life and place and context, it raises the same issues that constellations sometimes do to me—the native people of this land had very different tales about those stars, tales that had to do with this place where my feet walk, and my lungs breathe, and my heart loves. If we all have different stories about these forces and these beings in the wild sky or on the wild earth, how can we say that only one is right, and tells the tale of your fate? I'm much more interested in the idea of palms as maps in a more mysterious way. Their lines have always reminded me of river deltas and sand-dunes, the bark of trees and magical cross-roads.

A western fence lizard digging--perhaps a little cavern to lay her eggs?

So as I was out walking the coast this past week, eyes and mind and, as it were, hands open to who was blooming and bustling and mating on the land, I wove all these pieces together (so many metaphors for thinking come from the actions we use when making with our hands!) into my own kind of palmistry. Not the Mount (mound) of Jupiter at the base of the index finger, but the Mount of Osprey. Not Saturn for the middle, but Fence Lizard! Not Apollo but Brush Rabbit, not Mercury but Skunk! In other words, what about a palmistry of place? What if our hands hold the stories of our days and our interactions, just like our minds do?

The Brush Rabbit roads winding through dune grass and scrub

If the hands are the root-source, the seed, for all the story-making in our minds, then what would it mean if those stories actually started in our hands?

And so for this week, the songlines became palm-lines. The stories of a walk on the coastal strand on a fog-to-sun day, the fourth of June, became storied into my hands. 

I imagined some feral palmist living out in the mist at the edge of the estuary, between lupine and monkey-flower, snatching the palm of an unsuspecting passersby and saying—ah yes, I see you've passed through the territory of such-and-such song sparrows, who are just in the process of building their nest in the third lupine bush east of that bishop pine. Oh my, and I see you've been gathering seaweed, and yarrow too, and just when the three osprey passed overhead, winging straight east, with fish in their talons. And the monkey-flowers, how they sing out into the summer sun, voices of brush-rabbit-leaping delight! They have a lesson for us all. 

The osprey flew overhead, literally directing in the sight-lines between those two white yarrow umbels

Such palm-reading wouldn't be about your fate, your future, you, but about the storied lives you had touched in a day, which will be different tomorrow. It would be about the hinge between you and the rest of creation, and the webs of connection sewn there—like the tiny bit of webbing between our fingers, reminding us our hands are animal like the river otter's, like the raccoon's, like the osprey's. Our hands the bridge between these strange heavy-duty brains we're saddled with and the riotous dance of the more-than-human world.

I've always had this hunch, while writing stories, that they might be coming from my hand as much as my head. I've found that I am incapable of starting a good piece of fiction of any sort on the computer (or with any pen other than MY fountain pen). But with my fingers around said fountain pen, and the ink on the paper, something starts to happen which is not wholly me. There is a head-hand connection indeed, but more than that, maybe the hand is a wild map, holding stories in its lines and grooves and mounts and veins, and they come out through the living ink of the pen, or the voice of the storyteller when she speaks, and her hands gesture up down, back, forth, like the tale is unfurling right from her fingertips. Maybe it is our hands that initiate the shape-shifting that storytelling can become, our hands that weave us deep into the weft of the wild world. 

An Atlas of the Rambled Songline

At Abbott's Lagoon, on the edge of the Point Reyes Peninsula, the brush rabbits are growing up. In a single walk west to the ocean, four showed themselves along the path, decreasing in size as if moving backward through time. The fourth rabbit was positively tiny; the span of her tracks would have fit in my cupped palm. Each had a quick and perfect getaway in the salmonberry or lupine or coyotebrush thickets; they used well-kept tunnels as beloved as human footpaths, carefully maintained by tooth and claw.

The California bumblebees were out with heavy pollen baskets at their legs, tipping and delightedly dancing through the poppies, the pollen at their legs precisely the color of the heart of a poppy. I love that we call this little polished cavity ringed with fur on the back legs of bees a basket. In technical terms it is a corbicula, but that word means nothing to me, whereas pollen-basket, metaphoric, animate, immediately turns the worker-bees into beings whose devoted gathering I can comprehend with my heart. Pollen-basket is an embodied term; it places our own bodies in sisterhood with the bodies of bees, for we all know the delight of gathering food into a basket—and oh, can you imagine, if you were so small it could be pollen?

In the past week, I've read the second half of Robert MacFarlane's The Old Ways, and the entirety of Jay Griffiths' Wild. Both were utterly, beautifully brilliant—in ways that bled right into each other, so that as I read Wild, and felt inspirations and ideas stirring, I sometimes wasn't sure from which book they had come, and also in their own very unique, very different fashions. The Old Ways stirred me up into a foot-loose fever of walking-joy, my imagination spinning with songlines and pathways and the stories we pass through as we walk, the way a landscape stories us. Wild broke my heart into a dozen pieces and re-stitched it into a patchwork of nettle leaves and bee-pollen baskets, fertile brush rabbit-love and salmonberry petals and also rage; rage that our way of life has set the great wildness of the world, our salvation, our mother, our holy fool, under the direst of attacks. This is an old rage, smoldering somewhere deep but Wild set it to flaming again. 

From The Old Ways, after reading about Miguel Angel Blanco's wild library, I set out to fuse Earth Constellations with Songlines, so that the taking of a walk could also be a gathering of moments and lives on the land, which made that particular amble, on that particular day, storied, sung.

"The library of Miguel Angel Blanco is no ordinary library. It is not arranged according to topic and subject, nor is it navigated by means of the Dewey Decimal system. Its full name is the Library of the Forest, La Biblioteca del Bosque. It has so far been a quarter of a century in the making, and at last count it consisted of more than 1,100 books—though its books are not only books, but also reliquaries. Each book contains a journey made by walking, and each contains the natural objects and substances gathered along that particular path: seaweed, snakeskin, mica flakes, crystals of quartz, sea beans, lightning-scorched pine timber, the wing of a grey partridge, pillows of moss, worked flint, cubes of pyrite, pollen, resin, acorn cups, the leaves of holm oak, beech, elm. Over the many years of its making, the library has increased in volume and spread in space. It now occupies the entire ground floor and basement of an apartment building in the north of Madrid. Entering the rooms in which it exists feels like stepping into the pages of a Jorge Luis Borges story: 'The Library of Babel' crossed with 'The Garden of Forking Paths,' perhaps" (239).

What's more, Miguel makes his visitors, including MacFarlane, draw books from the shelves as one might draw tarot cards—for the past, for the present, for the future, the walks and the constellation of earthen beings along the way taking on a sort of divinatory power. Naturally, I love this.

My ramble to Abbott's Lagoon (with my wonderful twelve-year-old poetry student!) has gathered in the lines of its pages & paths: the poppy-pollen baskets of bumble bees; salmonberries from flower to fruit; four baby brush rabbits; a hunting northern harrier hawk swooping like cut pieces of moon; the sheep sorrel red against the yarrow white; the cattails at the edge of the lagoon full of marsh wrens singing their raucous love songs; the damselflies mating, their color the only word capable of describing that blue lagoon.

Imagine, what it would mean to weekly mark and map rambles through land not in path and topographical features, but the way your body, heart and mind hitch to the plants and animals around you as you walk—for a whole year! Imagine, atlases of place made thus by each of us, and the Strange Library they would together create! Maybe not navigationally useful for others, but for all the inner mapping, and the place where self and wild land meet--oh yes, oh yes indeed. 

These maps become circular, like baskets (have become obsessed with twining whatever I can get my hands on--oatgrass below), that lead us out and in at once, making our own songlines of place until it has seeped, singing, right up our soles. 

The second Songline Map I have to share comes from another beach, just north of Abbott's, called Kehoe, where my love and I ambled some four days later.

The path was yellow with lupine and wild radish and afternoon sun. 

Sand holds the tracks of humans and animals alike. It is a great book of trails and wild tales, where Simon and I have rambled together so many times, where the coyotes hunt the brush rabbits and the ravens criss cross along the sand for carrion and who knows what other mysterious purposes.



As you all know by now, I have a particular love of, and delight in, animal tracking, in the sense of story-trailing and shape-shifting it imparts, as well as the true and particular wonder that comes of devoting all of your senses for a time to the animals who are living their lives within a place. Not just any coyote, but a Coyote and her fledgling pups nosing the dunes for baby rabbits. Not just any raven but a family of Ravens who scout the beach in a particular order every day for food, and know these sands and winds better than you or I could ever dream.

Tracking is a form of storytelling and the deepest kind of reading. Each line of coyote tracks the songline of moment in a life. As Robert MacFarlane writes, "The relationship between thinking and walking is also grained deep into language history, illuminated by perhaps the most wonderful etymology I know. The trail begins with our verb to learn, meaning 'to acquire knowledge.' Moving backwards in language time, we reach the Old English leornain, 'to get knowledge, to be cultivated.' From leornian the path leads further back, into the fricative thickets of Proto-Germanic, and to the word liznojan, which has a base sense of 'to follow or to find a track' (from the Proto-Indo-European prefix leis-, meaning 'track'). 'To learn' therefore means at root—at route—'to follow a track' " (The Old Ways, 31).

Now what could be better news than that?

"Wildness is the universal songline, sung in green gold, which we recognize the moment we hear it. What is wild is what drives the honeysuckle, what wills the dragonfly, shoves the wind and compels the poem" (Wild, 85). 

For this ramble's Wild Songline, my map became the constellation of the speckled harbor seal pelt, at its center a woven vortex of eelgrass and dunegrass, whiskered like the crescent moon whiskers still attached to a dead seal's nose where we found it in the tide. Each set of whiskers is a pathway pointing to a different star in the constellation of the walk. For after all, an amble on the beach hardly ever follows a path, but rather is a back and forth up to dune and down to tideline, over to strange-shaped buoy and up to a new dune for a new cup of tea.

At the top of the Map (North) is a single blue whisker. The whisker of a harbor seal is as good at tracking fish as the echolocation of dolphins; it is a holy tracking-wand, capable of sensing the most minute changes in water pressure, current and movement. Each whisker "learning" the stories of the water as the seal swins.

It is harbor seal pupping season (March 1st through June 30th), and this beautiful seal, her pelt so lovely and intact I couldn't help but shiver and think of selkies, seemed small, perhaps a young one who didn't make it through her first spring, or maybe a small mother-seal.



Bulrush tules clacked in the wind on the walk past the marsh to the beach (West). A marbled godwit lay in the tideline, legs and neck and beak so delicate, her soul gone to the land of all shorebirds (East).



Tiny trails of brush rabbits hopped everywhere through the dunes, and were often bisected with coyote trails—the wheel of life wheeling on (South).

And speaking of weaving, of strings and strands coming together to create something, I've at last finished the knitting and sewing together of a coat I've been making for quite a long while. It is lanolin-rich Jacob sheep's wool, and a simple hardy pattern; a coat I've been longing for on walks and scrambles, beach-roams (for it is often brisk and windy on the coast here!), nights by campfires and under stars. For, at their best, the things we wear against our bodies can be magic, can be talismans, can be precious protection and invigoration on all the roads we walk, themselves stranded with the moons we pass under, the marsh wrens we stop to listen to, the harbor seal-skins we meet. 

I've been known to have special "Adventuring-Skirts" worn to rags (and stained with mud, berry, avocado), particular airplane-outfits for good luck worn until they are so patchworked the security folk almost invariably pull me aside. Cloth holds story, same as good walking shoes; we only have to let the stories live there, in the weave. I am so happy to have a Wandering Coat now. It already smells of the smoke from one fire, the ocean wind and sand from one day, the marsh breeze and red-winged blackbird cries of another. Each fiber a pathway.

As Jay Griffiths writes, "The lure of wild and nomadic freedom has never left us, any of us. It is in our lungs, breathing in freedom, in our eyes, hungry for horizons, and in our feet, itching for the open road. Put your boots on. Old boots are thought to bring good luck, but old boots are good luck of themselves, as all walkers know. Boots that have folded and softened and bent to your foot: boot and foot in a cosy, comfortable marriage. (Old boots were traditionally tied to the wedding car of newlyweds, to suggest that on the long walk of life, it's good to have that easy familiar necessity.) Boots keep their history, but even more so do the feet of nomads, skin cracked like claypans in the deserts, journeys ground into the soles, feet cross-hatched with the tracks they have followed on the ground; the land has written itself into people's feet as the feet in turn have written pathways and tracks on the land" (Wild, 257). 

With good coat, good boots, good hat, we trod laughing on, following Foolish maps made of marsh wren-song, harbor-seal whisker, salmonberry juice.