Dancing in the Moss-Fetlocked North

This hammered-tin witch on her bicycle with her tender wings, her flaming hair, the little person hitch-hiking the back of her wheels— she is a proper gate keeper for the Honey Grove shed, where she stands guard. She is a proper gate-keeper for Honey Grove itself, for the process of transformation that occurs when you step up the deceptively simple, alder-lined road and into the world Nao and Mark and Gus (faithful hound) have created here, on some six acres in the middle of fir forest on the eastern edge of Vancouver Island, British Columbia.

I visited Honey Grove for the first time in October of 2013, where I wrote the Gray Fox Epistle The Honey Mill , inspired by Honey Grove, and met Nao, a beekeeper, dancer, green thumb farm-garden tender, (and an early Gray Fox Epistle subscriber) for the first time. She has since become a very dear, very close friend (a gift from the internet web of connections indeed). This time around, my visit was centered around two of Nao's sacred dance offerings, but above all things it was a slipping out of time, and into slowness. 

(Let me just add here that any of you longing for a quiet and deeply restorative escape, look no further than Nao and Mark's Honey Grove cottage, here)

This is what Honey Grove will do to you. These firs, and cedars, and the bees, and some alchemy between all of this and the man and woman and dog who keep this land, who tend it, and who it tends in turn. The tin-witch should be a sign. You are entering territory Out of Time. You are entering Bee Time, Fir Time, Raspberry Time, Hen Time. Where all things are allowed to proceed at precisely their own internal pace. No faster, no slower either. 

And so, before telling you about dancing up mountain lions; before telling you about fields full of the hands of light, and how the sky is all eagles, I want to show you a small glimpse of the good magic of Honey Grove. 

How the crocuses came up one morning, where they hadn't been before. Gold filagreed. Grails rising from the ground, cupping spring. How this is a thing to bow down before, up north. In some ways the landscape of British Columbia, with its firs and spotted towhees, feels familiar to the California I know. And yet the winters are darker, and colder, and when a crocus comes up you drop what you're doing. At home, the yellow faces of calendula bloom all year. There are lemons on the trees. The bees don't stop flying. This is its own gift, but there is something in the still cold dark, and then that cup of gold, that crocus. 

While meanwhile, the dead raspberry caps hang, holding raindrops, holding ghosts, holding moons. 

In the little alder wood that lines the driveway, there is a quiet bewitchment afoot. I mean it. This mushroom is glowing. 

There are beings at work here that cannot be seen, who ask, who receive--this is the dance Nao and Mark and Gus dance, here. This is what it means, to have the land working you, creating you, as much as you work and create it. (This is what Nao tells me, and what I see when I look and listen and sit, here.) Maybe it's just the mycelium, down there netting trees together like neural synapses, whispering. Just. Mycelium; magic; little folk—they are nearly the same, in my mind. Maybe all the way the same. So many words for the same stories. The sun is a burning star, eating gas. The sun is a god riding a chariot, afire. The sun is in love with the field of grass, and feeds it. The chlorophyll in green blades and leaves photosynthesize sun into sugar. 

So. The mushroom is glowing, and in its glowing it is saying something mysterious and deeply important, something it might take a lifetime to understand.

There are worlds caught in the cobwebs. 

The trees have great feathers of moss at their fetlocks, some old horses from the beginning of time, now slowed down to trees, but always listening, and grazing at sun. 

This is the world of Honey Grove, the space I stepped into for a week which felt like one long breakfast, one long afternoon tea, one long evening by the woodstove, in which my body-time took over my mind-time. And good grief, what a relief that was!

 The first morning, Nao and I sat down with ample cups of tea and discussed that evening's dance class, where I was going to present a little bit about the natural history of the mountain lion before she led us into the kind of sacred embodied dance experience that only Nao can hold space for, in the way that she does. I will get to this in a moment. 

Photo taken in California in spring 2013 in California of what I am almost sure is a mountain lion track, filled here with hazel catkin in honor of her passing through

We talked, Nao and I, about the way of mountain lions--how they are pure meat eaters, their entire being centered around the hunt; how the rest of their days, they spend napping as cats do, in sun patches, in shadows; how when they travel they take the paths of least resistance, moving as water does, gathering and gathering energy until the moment of the hunt, that great focused pounce; how their canine teeth have nerves that run to the very tips, which can feel out the spaces between vertebrae in order to snap the spinal cord fast and merciful; how they cut open their prey with surgical precision, going for the heart, literally; female mountain lions can't synthesize vitamin A, which is vital for their reproductive health—they get it only from the organs of other animals. How the mountain lion is all languor, all energy conservation, until the moment of attack and consumption; how she goes right for the heart, knowing precisely what she is hungry for, and with no remorse. 

Have you ever seen such beauty? I can hardly bear those eyes. Photo credit here. 

And so when we danced, under Nao's guidance, we danced not only our hungers, letting mountain lion lead us there, unashamed to know what we might want in this life, but also the dance of water, which does not try to split a rock in two but rather smoothly flows around it, like the lioness on ridgetops, in dry creekbeds, going the easeful way.  

I learned something very profound (to me) in all of this—how much energy gets shot off like twanging rubberbands from unnecessary fretting and stress; how the mountain lion takes the path of least resistance and naps long in the sun because she knows exactly how much she's going to need for that pounce. How the term "the path of least resistance" itself makes me cringe; and yet to the mountain lion it doesn't mean laziness, or not trying hard enough—it means wise conservation of energy. It means appreciation of energy, of body, of spirit, of when a lot is needed, and when a little, and how both are good. 

We, as humans, as artists, as makers, as dreamers, might have to pounce every day on one thing or another, but how might our paths between each pounce be languid? Why not enjoy that triangle of sun, coming through? This life is short; why is it we are taught to treat the whole thing like a fight or a flight? Why not savor between each act of precision and focus; why not stretch in the sun, and follow the smooth way, like the cougar? Really, why ever not? I have no idea. It seems glaringly obvious that yes if at all possible, we should bathe in sun beams, even if for a minute; and we should close our eyes to the taste of good tea, and to the lives of birds, singing, and all the other small things which can spell languor in our human lives. 

This is what came out of Nao's dance class in the woodfire-warm yurt of a rainy evening in February, as she gently guided each song and we women danced the round floor, finding the old animal wisdom in our bones. In Nao's words, from her website, this class, and the others in its series...

... is dedicated to uncovering our wild intelligence, what British Storyteller Martin Shaw calls the “primordial root relationship between ourselves and the living world.”

Together, we will journey to the place of instinct and wild uncivilized knowing. Each class will be dedicated to exploring the nature of a particular animal through the living ritual of dance.

The invitation is to come into connection with the wisdom of our own animal bodies and then to follow the cellular intelligence there into the landscape of psyche/soul, into the indigenous territory of self.

She writes also --

To dance freely is to begin to release material that cannot be accessed through the vehicle of the intellect. If we let our minds rest for a while and let the wisdom body lead us, something profound can happen. What occurs is a kind of healing that has to do with connecting the heart with the head, and the body with the soul.

Dance is something that human beings have been doing since the beginning of time. Honest expression in the form of dance is deeply rooted in the nature of who we are. Creative movement can be a transformative experience that can lead to upsurges of emotion, and these feelings are doorways to deeper understanding. Our task is to help ourselves and each other to listen and be, without the obstructions of a judging mind and the paralyzing effects of self-consciousness. From here, an awareness opens and the territory of transformation is realized.

Gus the Wise Man hound, who knows all of this inherently and would likely wonder why I am spending so long writing about it, when I should just be savoring the smell of the night and not worrying about precise language....

I see what Nao does as storytelling through the body. It is very old stuff, this. How dance is the body's way of expressing its own mythos, its own understanding of the world. How the mind might learn much from this, and from being quiet. For a long time I had a hangup around the idea of dancing--that it had to be performative, and choreographed, but now I see that dance might be the oldest art of all—the body, reveling in its animal nature; the body, telling stories of what it has seen, and felt. Nao is a very special, very powerful gatekeeper in this regard, letting the strands of inspiration she has gathered from old tales and mystics and poems come down from somewhere through her, into her dancers, and then, I imagine, onward into the great big ground. 

It was an honor and quite a joy to share this round space up north with Nao and her dancing women. My visit also overlapped with a workshop Nao and her friend Jessie Turner, a wonderful jewelry-smith and creative visioner, created together, called Conceiving the Muse. We explored the mother of the muses, Mnemosyne, who embodies what Nao called "Divine Remembrance," that very important act of really assimilating something-- a place, a bird, a conversation--in the remembrance of it, the burying of it in the body and then unearthing it again as some reflection which reminds you that all things are divinely connected, and Zeus, the Sky, the spark, the ignition. We explored how the act of creating is this combination of remembrance and activation, a constant dance—the field, the sun; the field, the sun. 

The field cannot grow without the focused light of the sun. Nor can it grow without the remembrance of all life held in the wet earth. We live, it feels to me, in a world obsessed with activation and ignition. I myself am a bit obsessed with activation and ignition. I'm almost constantly in activation mode, I'll admit it. But when we danced the field and the sun of the poem below (by the Persian mystic-poet-prostitute Rabia) and I was assigned the field—let me tell you, I've known few things as glorious as dancing myself a blade of grass, and then savoring the many hands of the sun. 

This is what the mountain lion does in between the great ignition of her pounce: she savors. 

The Way the Forest Shelters

Rabia

I know about love the way

the field knows about light

the way the forest shelters

the way an animal's divine raw desire

seeks to unite with whatever

might please its soul--without a

single strange thought of remorse.

There is a peaceful delegation in us 

that lobbies every moment

for contentment.

How will you ever find peace

unless you yield to love

the way the gracious earth does

to our hand's

impulse.

Candelabras of Bishop Pine

There really is something about a brown paper package, tied up with string. Just wrapping up these Tinderbundles in mid-January, with an audiobook crackling away, gave me all the pleasure of receiving such a parcel, crisp and plain, carefully protecting something tender and bright and strange within. 

Making a Tinderbundle is a journey into the threads of the season for me, a different kind of spark kindled—of questioning, and looking. What word (last month's was Wick/Weoce) feels like an old-fashioned candy on my tongue, just right? (I think of the rhubarb candies my wonderful Danish  friend would bring back from Denmark after summer vacations when we were children, red and glossy on the outside, yellow and honeycomb-pocked within.) And more important, what word has a story hitched to it, glinting, that won't leave me alone? How does that word relate to what's blooming and growing on the land right now, that I might use for salves and dye?

I picked the word Wick/Weoce for January's Tinderbundle because this is the time of year that the light returns, the time of year Imbolc, or Candlemas, is celebrated (today!), to note the tipping again toward spring. And I picked it because the bishop pines are growing candles, and the manzanitas the first belled blooms, like tiny lanterns, and because the whales, once hunted near to extinction for their blubber, to be used in oil lamps, are migrating south right now off the coast, from Alaska to Baja, with calves in their bellies waiting to be born. 

In the beginning of January, when I created the Wick Tinderbundles, the Bishop pine trees, gentle conifers that grow only along the coastal edges of California and Baja, were sending up bluish, waxen pollen cones like clustered candles. They smelled of every sweet resin you can fathom. 

Bishop pine trees flourish best when wildfire regenerates their populations once every 50 to 100 years; as I wrote in a recent chapter of Elk Lines:

Fire lives here, in the ground, just the same as earthquakes do, and stone. The forests of bishop pine grow old and weak without a fire to make them new. Their cones are sealed shut with resin, and though a hot day may pop a few of them open, it’s only through wildfire that they may truly be renewed. They burn like torches when the flames reach their tight-closed cones. They blossom, all ember, and shower their seeds down into the charred ash.

 Much of California is fire adapted, even fire reliant. There are whole libraries of seeds in the soil, which will only sprout from the taste of ash, or the extreme heat of wildfire. They've been there since the last conflagration--seeds of rare lupines and manzanitas and rush roses that recolonize burned landscapes. The whole span of a hillside one great wick. 

I gathered a small amount of pollen tapers for a salve. On some of the trunks, tule elk had thrashed their antlers. Resin ribboned through, healing the bark. This, I did not gather; taking resin right off a tree wound is like peeling off a scab before a cut is healed. But wherever drops had crystallized and fallen into the needles, I gathered these. They are like bits of fallen flame, brewed inside a trunk.

The willows and alders were mostly bare of their leaves, the willow branches the color of little flames. All that fresh new growth.

During the last storms, in December, a red alder fell across the trail where I walked, searching for the tinder of this bundle..Alders are one of my favorite trees, partly because their trunks are like the legs of great beasts, with eyes, and because the tule elk love to rub their antlers on them and expose their red flesh, and because nettles grow at their feet, but a lot of this love comes also from their incredible healing properties. 

Alder is one of the first plants that I gathered, tinctured, and used-- and it really, really worked! It healed up (with the help of usnea), an infected blister which was previously bright red and as painful as glass, in a matter of two days; the sort of thing I was considering, with great trepidation (I have been known to panic at the sight of white coats) visiting a doctor for. There's something about having really taken something into your body that forms a level of relationship not easily reached otherwise. To me, sitting and listening with great focus to the subtle net of bird language, to the call of a wrentit, the song of a golden crowned sparrow--this is a "taking into the body" too. All of the senses are doorways into the wise body, not just taste.

Now, when I smell the musk of alders, and lean up against those white trunks, my body remembers that red-barked medicine, and is always amazed. Walking among alders is like walking among friends. And so the sight of a fallen alder is both a magnificent gift-- normally I only gather catkins and cones and twigs to tincture, not wanting to harm the tree by taking bark—and a moment of sorrow.

We sat, my wildcrafting friend and I, and gave our thanks for a while to that beautiful tree. Sang a song, patted her great trunk. It seemed to me as we sat, and listened, that the alder had no sorrow in her falling. That a fallen tree is a whole new life— shelter for new animals, food for bugs, the slow nourishment of bark decomposing into the ground.

I gathered great scales of bark for my dye bath because, despite alder's affinity for water, and for the lymphatic system of the body (waterways!), in old European lore alders also have a reputation for creating the hottest, best fires in which to forge magical swords, (or just heat up a long cold night); they are trees of fire and of water both, great pale candles rising up from the creekbeds, clearing heat from the body, always smoldering red just under that white skin. 

In a great vat in my kitchen I steeped the bark and dyed the many petals of these little crocheted "candle-carpets," as I called them, each a sun-wheel and a square. Their making was a long and careful affair. I think I may have listened to an entire audiobook, with countless cups of tea, as well as numerous garden birdsongs, before all fifty were done!

Every month, the Tinderbundle is just as much a surprise for me as it is for you. What plants call out to be used, what stories coming knocking at the edges of my mind with strange and red-dyed hands. This month, I am following a strange and wild word-- NET. 

I'll leave you with an excerpt from January's tale--of lanterns, of lights, of whales....

<< Old Iris was eating fresh clams from a net on a rock beside her tule hut when she saw a figure out on the marsh. Two dancing blue-flamed lamps were lit, hanging from willow branches, to illuminate her front porch. There appeared to be a mist rolling in behind the figure, though it was coming from a most unusual direction—east. It always came from the ocean to the west. Her eyes were not as sharp as they had once been—hence her love of lanterns—but her other senses were keen. She heard the ghosts of whales and seals before she could make out the phantom gauze of their forms. A high and lonesome melody that rattled the stars above and below the marsh, in the hot muck of the fault zone. She could hear them rattling, like great bells. 

She stood abruptly. Clam shells clattered and then fell from her muddy apron. She took one step, then two, on her broad heron feet, in the way of the hunt, one foot paused long above the mud before silently entering it again. The air carried the smell of boy, and city, and tweed. She wrinkled her nose, then smiled a small smile. At last, a visitor. At last, the blue marshlights had caught someone’s eye, or soul. The world seemed to have become full of skeptics. She had resigned herself to it; almost. Superstition buried in science. But here was one. She could see his heart now, through the dark. The color of will-o’-the-wisps. The color of fallen stars. She could see that he did not know it, how hot it glowed, how bright. 

“Hello?” the boy called, seeing her form now by the light of those fish oil lamps. The humpback whales dove and danced in the air, very high up, having caught sight of the ocean beyond the Inverness Ridge. The elephant seals circled and barked terrible grinding barks of pleasure at the smell of fish oil burning in Old Iris’ lamp. A gray whale with the ghost of a baby in her belly sang a single long note at the sight of the whale roads far out over the ocean, where her family had once travelled. 

“Young man,” Old Iris called back in her rough and croaking voice. It was just like the rough calls of herons. “You are trailing the ghosts of whales. You are tangled in the ghosts of seals. Are you a braggart or a rogue, following my blue lights to find your own fortune? Or are you simply lost?” >>

The Four Elk of Old Cotineva Ranch

At the end of June, I spent a long weekend up the coast in Fort Bragg for a family reunion, from which area (the Mendocino coast) my father's side of the family hails, all the way back to my grandmother's great grandmother, Mary DeVilbiss Lowell, who arrived here in the 1860's in a covered wagon train, recently widowed by the Civil War. 

This year, I got to walk the songlines of some of my ancestors along the Mendocino Coast. My grandmother drew me a family tree (which she'd written about to me several times, but which I still couldn't keep straight!), and with my parents and my brother, I set off to find in particular the old Cotineva Ranch, 1,000 acres that reached right up to the Pacific tideline somewhere north of Westport, which was originally owned by Mary Devilbiss Lowell, then her younger son George and his Irish wife, Ellen Roach, parents of my great-grandmother Edith, who was known as the best bareback horse-rider in Mendocino County, and who grew up on that ranch full of fruit trees, sheep pasture, cows. It was a place so beautiful and beloved to her that after her father died when she was still a teenager, and the land passed on to a less agriculturally inclined brother (I believe!), she couldn't bear to go back and see it un-tended. 

First, we stopped in Westport, and admired an old white house right along Highway One that looked out down the coastal bluffs to the ocean. Later, my grandmother said—why yes, that's the Phee's old place, my cousins! Naturally. I soon realized that there were family houses all over Westport, a town which was once a thriving lumber port, and which now is a very lonesome haunting place, made more ghostly by the pall of illegal marijuana plantations deeper in beyond the hills.

It is a beautiful place all the same, and human history a complicated, layered thing: at once I long for the past of my great-grandmother riding bareback on the coastal ranch of her childhood, and her mother, grandmother Mary, and on down the branches of the family line, before Westport became a haunting husk, and yet I know that their lives here were predicated on the abuse, the destruction, of the native people who loved and tended this land before them with more grace and dignity than any of us can hope to replicate.

And even so, to see the grave of my great great grandfather Patrick Roach, buried right beside his wife Kitty Purcell, in a sweet little graveyard overlooking the ocean, California poppies blooming above them—this moved me deeply, as did all of my encounters with family places that day.

Down the street from where my great-Aunt Teresa (really my great great Aunt), the youngest sister of Edith (who was one of fifteen!) lived, bluff and beach (up to the tideline) that were once owned by Edith's husband, Buster Stanley (are you lost now?), are now protected wild-land. Thank goodness. Nobody should own a beach; and yet that was how the world worked then, and it is that said Buster loved this land with all of his heart.

My brother and I stood on the bluffs, looking out over this great maze of rock and foam, as cormorants and oystercatchers wheeled and called, and laughing, said, well of course, it's no wonder this is my favorite sort of landscape. Both of us, the same love for a wild coastal California shore, that particular slant of bluff, the grass gone gold, the firs dark green against the hills to the east. We both felt it stirring in our blood, a shiver up the back of the neck. Maybe land stays with us, somewhere, especially land that was loved.

We kept driving a good fifteen miles or so up the windy One, until it headed inland, east, where there is a great break in the ridges. That's where the Cottoneva Creek meets the ocean. The creek was also called "Cottonwood" by early settlers, of whom A.J. Lowell, Mary DeVilbiss' second husband (and therefore not a blood ancestor of mine) was the first. This fact of course gives me some unease, because naturally there were other people there, the people who named the creek Cotineva, which in their language meant "low gap." I take this to be a reference to the low-point between the ridges created by the creek-valley. And what a nourishing place it must have been for those First people; a lush, alder-lined creek thick with fish, that lead right to the prodigiously bountiful ocean.



In any case, we drove along, beyond that "low gap," looking for a sign for Rockport, which was to be our indication that we were nearing the old Cotineva Ranch. Suddenly, out the window, I spotted this:

Of course, dear readers, you can imagine my excitement, given my general love of elk, and my current project, Elk Lines. In fact I made some sort of bellow from the back seat and yelled to stop the car! There was nowhere to stop, and though I was in something of a froth in the back, we kept going, until we reached a very big bend in the road which my grandmother had said would be the sign we'd gone too far; the ranch was all the land south of the bend in highway One, where it goes inland to meet highway 101 (the old Camino Real). So we turned around, and then I remembered the satellite image my grandmother and I had looked at on google-maps (yes, this song-line travel involved not only oral history but satellite technology)—a long, thin patch of land beside the road that was the old pasture.

We returned to the place of the four roosevelt elk, because they were grazing at the fenceline of the Old Cotineva Ranch. Yes indeed. I could hardly believe it; I was downright shaking when I got out of the car and went toward the elk. In fact I could hardly bear their beauty, and the beauty of the land they grazed. I could imagine my great-grandma Edith, who I never met, riding between pastures, and I wanted to cry. The elk grazed just beyond the beautiful alder forest lining the Cottoneva Creek (not cottonwoods at all— this must have been a misinterpretation of the native word on the part of the settlers). I have a particular love of alders. In my favorite patch of them nearer home, at Muddy Hollow in Point Reyes, elk abound, rubbing them red with their incisors and antlers, leaving their enormous hoof-prints along the muddy creek. I felt a dizzy mirroring, standing at the shore of this land, guarded by alder and elk. 

An old house still stood, and several sheds, just where my grandmother said they would, all looking as though they were about to collapse into the earth. My brother went up to investigate while I stood gaping at the elk, and returned rather shaken, having walked right up to the windows because he was certain the place was abandoned, only to see a mattress, a blanket, chairs. I had to be dragged away from the elk, and the alders, and the sweep of meadow, before anybody noticed us parked right by the house—and me bouncing about giddily after the elk with my camera no less!

Across the road, the property extended beyond a "No Trespassing"-signed gate. I suspect that the pathway you see below is the one my grandmother spoke of, which led to the little family graveyard and then down the ridge to the ocean, where her mother's family, and her father's before them, sea-fished, gathered abalone, sent boatloads of sheep down the coast to market. I wasn't quite brave enough to jump the fence without being sure it was the right one (family have rights of passage to the graveyard), knowing this to be the sort of place where people really don't appreciate trespassing, but I hung over the rungs for a while, dreaming.

Elk and alders, fir forest, ocean and coastal meadow, old families, old ranches, the native stories held deeper and older within the land; well, it turns out all of these things are woven deep into my Elk Lines too, and not on purpose! Though perhaps it is not an accident either, but rather by some need in the heart and blood, some path the body and the mind follow along with the writing hand. So if you haven't yet subscribed, and would like to, click on that handsome fellow above (who is part of a wee surprise for Elk Lines subscribers upon receipt of their first installment!), or this link here.  Subscriptions are open until July 21st for the first installment, which will arrive by Lammas, August 2nd. 

I suppose I didn't know it, but in walking the family songlines that day, I was also walking the elk lines. And whatever the case, I stood so very close to those elk with their antlers all in velvet that I could hear them chew and snuff the air at one another. They looked me in the eye, wild and gorgeous beyond all words, and I will not be the same again, for that beauty, and how they regarded me with gentle, ungulate unconcern, breathing softly, utterly confident in their velvet strength.