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?” >>

Making Indigo Dye Out of Words

Welcome to The Indigo Vat, where words and tales and dreams are fermented and transformed into sturdy creations that are green as they emerge and turn blue as they hit the air. 

A colorfast blue dye made from plant matter has always been very rare and therefore very precious. Indigo cakes, wrapped up in string and cloth, a condensed and processed form of the plant genus indigofera were traded along the Silk Road. There’s a reason blue was considered royal, for pharaohs, for kings.

The most mysterious and unfathomable things in the world to us are blue: the sea and the sky. These are places of magic, of power, or of something terrifying: the home of Rilke’s Angels, perched between beauty and terror.

The process of making and writing a story, a poem, a novel, an essay, is like dyeing with indigo. You start with a seed.  You tend it like your own blood. You harvest leaves in the heat of summer. You ferment them in a big vat, mixed up with such things as wheat bran, madder root and wood ash. The lid is on, so nothing else can get in or out. The magic of yeast takes over. The whole mass bubbles and rots and melds, letting the blue pigment out. This is the only way to let out the blue. It starts to stink. That’s when you open it up, stir in your skeins of yarn, your silks, your old white pillowcases. You leave them in as long as you want, letting them get bluer and bluer. Then you lift them out with a stick. When they hit the air, they are green. Then the oxygen begins to act. Breathe. The green turns to blue in front of your eyes. Blue for magic, for the deep mystery of the world, for the source of all creation, for stories told in the dark of night. For our blood, before it hits air.

Stories ferment, oxidize and come alive like this.

I’m growing nine starts from seed of polygonum tinctorium, Japanese Indigo. They began by the heater, then moved to the window, and finally outside, where the sun filled them up and they grew sturdy stems and big leaves. They are still young, only in one-gallon pots. I tend them like babies. The first tiny seedling popped its head above the soil on my birthday. I was taken by surprise at the depth of my excitement. It felt like a holy experience. I’d never tended seeds so closely, with such purpose. The sudden miracle of life itself was upon me, how a seed might become a perfect green leaf and a neck pushing up through dirt, completely and utterly new. The only constant on earth is creation.

So, this is a long way of saying that here on The Indigo Vat I will post my newly “dyed“ stories, as it were, for others to read. They need air to turn from green to blue. Stories and poems need eyes and hearts to consume them before they come alive, before they turn rich and blue as indigo robes.

You may also find here, from time to time, forays into the literal fiber arts— my adventures with natural dyeing, felting and spinning. I believe in a deep and creative reclamation of these traditionally female crafts. So, expect both literal and figurative yarns being spun, cloth woven and dyed with local materials.

Finally, I believe that all writing is rooted in place, like indigo roots in soil. Like the indigo plants growing in my Berkeley backyard, I am not native to this land, but it is my home, and has been since I was born (save a few years on the east coast for college). I think that as writers, as creators, we have a duty to the land we live on, its wild creatures, its redwoods, oak trees, thistles. We have a duty to their stories and languages as well as our own—after all, our earliest letters were based up the tracks made by animals in sand and snow.

These are the Indigo-Seedlings, my magical and mysterious charges. I'll show you more photos as they grow and are processed into dye.