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. 

The Apothecary's Cabinet

Since I was a little girl, I've loved collecting and gathering small and magical things—rose petals with strange red droplets on them in the garden, from the wings of metamorphosing butterflies (at the time I thought it was blood and was at once terrified and enthralled); owl pellets full of little gopher bones (to my parents' mild disgust, I believe); nasturtiums and velvety purple sage flowers and pebbles for garden potions; glass animals; rabbit fur-covered toy mice dressed in little dresses and coats, called "Mistress Mice"; and, upon entering my teenage years, rocks and stones from every imaginable beach and hill and special place; hundreds of shells and sand-dollars, bird's nests and mosses and sticks with labyrinths and pathways made by bark-eating beetles... Each thing gathered seemed at the time to have an almost palpable magic to it, as if gathering it was an act of consecration, a way to hold a piece of the immense mystery of a place or a period of time that was fleeting—the vast red solitude of Death Valley, a visit to Denmark, a hike on the Mountain with the young man I was busy falling very much in love with. 

Somewhere between childhood and young womanhood, somewhere in that strange middle-country in which the old cupboard my father had turned into an Abbey for all of my Mice (and the oven-baked clay companions I had made for them, moles and rabbits and such, along with a veritable cellar full of feastable clay foods) no longer held its deep enchantment, this Apothecary's Cabinet made its way into our home, and my life. 

It filled the space between childhood fantasy—those endless games in the garden, using baskets on strings in the rosebushes as elevators for said Mice, or adding just the right shiny rocks and odd little amulets to the sorceror's tower in the Abbey's "attic" (presided over by a Mouse with a very tall blue-velvet hat)—and adult competence. I wasn't ready then to actually use the Cabinet in a practical way—carefully storing separate medicinal herbs and roots and tinctures and elixirs. Instead, it was the bridge that carried the wild scampering magic of my childhood, in which I ached to be alternately a cheetah, a wolf, or a budding young medicine woman who could talk to said cheetahs and wolves— into the uncertain terrain of being a teenage girl, that time in which it is so easy to lose sight of the savage little nasturtium-potion brewer in each of us. It always felt to me, as I busily filled the drawers with shark egg pouches and wine-red manzanita sticks, masses of feathers, serpentine stones from the Mountain, necklaces, old notebooks, that each thing that went in was somehow changed by its place in the Cabinet. I think, in a way I didn't quite know how to articulate then, that I had this sense that all of those things held their own medicine, and that medicine needed to be treasured, and so in they went! 

Now, some thirteen years since the Cabinet first came into my life (from England, from the 19th century, and beyond that, oh, I ache to know its tale!), it has finally made its way into my adult home, as you see above, and it is finally being used to hold tinctures, and dried herbs, and elixirs of all varieties. My "woodrat" (read packrat) tendencies finally seem to have found some practical application; and perhaps that's where they came from all along, this age-old knowing inside our bones that Gathering things is a useful and good past-time, because Gathering once meant (and still does mean) food and medicine and objects of magical power, such as rare stones and bones and feathers. This is not to say that the items within these drawers, placed there from ages 12 to 19 or 20, were not valuable—only that they had become a great and tangled wilderness, with no sense of which rock came from where, which leaf-gone-to-dust had come from which place, or summer, or tree. And that it was time for a rebirth, a renewal, a letting-go. Because in the end we hold memories and places and times within us, our hearts the greatest of apothecary cabinets, and so there is no need to obsessively gather a rock or a feather from every single special moment!

I am still that gathering-girl in my heart, though, coming home often with random seeds and rocks and mugwort leaves in my pockets—which I daresay still often find their way onto all previously neat surfaces... Just not quite as often as before. And now the gathered items most often have some immediate use— lemon balm from the garden or, most recently, Hawthorn's beautiful wool (which was not, shall we say, a pleasure to gather—indeed it was more like a nightmare for both of us—but is a pleasure to have, and a great gift, of magical properties, in my opinion). It is such a satisfying thing to gather a garden bouquet...

...or the roots of the California (orange) and red poppies, which I dug up incidentally when thinning a garden patch, and found I couldn't part with, for they felt like strangely shaped, arcane beings, smelling as I imagine bear-musk and the inside of the earth to smell.

The lemon balm and the roots will find their places in the Cabinet when they are ready and dry. But below, I thought I'd share some recently made medicines now tucked safely away in the dark comfort of those drawers. For I believe that the gathering and making of medicines, the relationship forged during the picking and the crafting, the bottling and the storing-away, stirs something deep and old in the blood, and is just as useful a sort of "research" as reading about the lore of ancient physicians or the properties of strange and stubby roots in books.

In the spirit of what's alive and bursting in the garden right now, in the spirit of the Earth Constellation not of the wild hills and coastal valleys, but this very plot of fecund earth in this corner of the Temescal neighborhood, where the silt-rich Temescal creek once flowed, lined with the bark-houses of the Huichuin Ohlone people (and who knows  what bones and graves and bits of shell and antler exist in the storied strata beneath the nasturtium and lemon verbena roots, the plum and apple and lemon and rose), I've made lemon blossom and rose elixirs. These two smells and sights describe the heady beauty of late spring-early summer in the garden, beside this mediterranean-climate Bay, with its fogs as well as its gentle warm weathers, to perfection. I suppose they are also plants of classic and famed beauty—the lemon and the rose—unlike the feral nettles, the scrubby native coyote brush and lupine, coffeeberry and alder, who more regularly make an appearance here.  But each plant has stories hitched to it, a string thrown between my heart and the rose-bud, and the lemon-blossom; it is not their elegance or their almost painful beauty that matters so much as the relationships we form, the way the smell of a rose comes to conjure a whole caravan of memories that are thorned and untamed and full.

Abraham Darby

And so first, the rose. These misty roses—how the water seems turn them to the lushest of jewels!— are from my mother's garden, taken on a day last week when a sudden mist descended upon the world, especially in the North Bay. I felt it was only right to gather petals for my rose elixir from my mother's garden, because my mother seems to somehow encompass or embody a rambling rose garden in my mind, and always will.

The mystery rose! We can't figure out his name

In the house where I grew up, just around the corner from the one where these roses now grow, there were great white Madame Alfred Carriére roses making a completely wild cavern-tunnel over one whole side of the yard, between fence and rain-gutter-pipes. There was a Cecile Bruner (my favorite) so big it created a cave beneath itself, for hiding and clambering with the spiders and the fallen thorny leaves. There were Abraham Darby roses luscious and squat, created, it seemed to me, primarily for the purpose of burying your face entirely in their petals and getting lost for a moment in that sweet old calm.

The Prince

For the rose in all of her more wild and old-world iterations is a supreme nervine medicine; it's obvious just from the effect her smell has upon us. And of course since smell is so suggestive of memory, in some ways when I tuck my nose into a rose, I feel my childhood is contained there, the whole universe of it, that it is never far away, always existing inside of each fierce bloom.

Cecile Bruner beyond the apple tree

For as much as she is gorgeous, the rose is also strong. Like her cousins the blackberry and the hawthorn, she is toothed, and I love her all the more for it. She protects herself, or she creates thorny caverns of protection for those who would seek it—children, gray foxes, rabbits, hermits, and who knows what and whom else.

And so from seven different fragrant, old-world roses in my mother's garden, I made a rose elixir, modeled after the recipe from the brilliant Kiva Rose. I have named it The Eighth Rose Elixir, because at its heart, packed in amidst hundreds of lush garden petals, is a single wild rose, Rosa gymnocarpa, red thorns, pink blossom, fragrantly resinous leaves and all.

In the Douglas fir and redwood forests where I roam, our native wild wood rose is too small, too rare in terms of how many blossoms one is actually likely to find in a season, for me to ever feel comfortable making a wild rose elixir. That flower is hardly bigger than a penny, but oh my stars, it packs a punch. It may be the sweetest of all the roses I've ever smelled, as big a scent as the stately Abraham Darby or the even statelier Prince, and all emanating from a single, pollen-gold center. Beyond that intoxicating smell, what makes our wood rose exceptionally fascinating, in my mind, is that she blooms almost exclusively, so far as I've seen, in the shade of firs and redwoods, often at the edge of a steep slope near a creek. The base of her stem is often very willowy and covered in a fur of red-tinged thorns, and her leaves are slightly sticky, with their own incredibly herbaceous smell, sharper than the flower, but no less powerful.

In the past two weeks, in all the woods I've visited, our own Rosa gymnocarpa is in full and glorious bloom! What a special and deeply sylvan window it is, this time of the wild rose bloom, from now until sometime in July. Who knows what sorts of beneficent magics stir in the firwood at night around the rose blossoms and red thorns, but surely they do. For some reason, during my most recent wild rose encounter, I had this sudden vision of the grizzly bears of yore, and the black bears who no longer live here (though they do one county up), delicately snacking on the rosehips, come autumn. This seems slightly preposterous, given how tiny the hips are—about the size of my pinky-nail—and how big a grizzly's mouth! But in any event, there is a bear-like ferocity to this little plant: a rooty musk to her leaves, a toothed thorniness to her stems.

I have no doubt she will bring out the bear-fierce hearts of all the roses in that jar of rose elixir, and imbue some of the old medicine she once gave to the native peoples of this land, and in all the lands north of here where she grows, straight through British Columbia. Among the wonderful ethnobotanical notes I read (and perhaps too small for you to make out above) are these: wood rose stems were used to weave baby carriers; a wash of leaves and stems was used to soak nets and fishing lines for good luck; a tea was made as a protection from bad spirits; a poultice of the leaves was used on bee stings. Yes indeed: the rose, our protector. And however we have managed to deserve her good graces, may we stay in them, for the rose in all of her forms has given us so many gifts through the millennia, too many to number, first and foremost among them the medicine of herself for our bodies and spirits.

And now, from rose-caverns to lemon-caves. I must have a penchant for bushy plants that get overgrown to the point of creating little houses out of themselves, branches reaching straight to the ground. For I am in love with this lemon tree, growing from the rich ground of our Temescal garden. It is so heavy with fruit it resembles some kind of arcane citrus planetarium, numbering the strangest outer-stars of the balmiest universe. I know that the bewick's wrens love it too, because I often see them hopping about, chitting and chatting in their wood-on-wood voices, picking at spiders and smaller insects.

The origins of the wild lemon are mysterious—of course!— though it is believed to have been first domesticated in the Assam region of India some two thousand years ago. I can hardly imagine a wild lemon, or a wild citrus of any variety—what wonders the world holds, that once, long ago, some man or woman stumbled upon a smaller, lumpier and more sour version of the citrus tree growing wild, haloed with bees drunk on the blossom-nectar, and inhaled the scent of that leathery rind, those blooms.

There is something about the smell of lemon and orange blossoms that makes me feel almost sad. The smell is so sweet and strong at once, so heady, it almost immediately makes me feel a sense of yearning to hold all the things which can never be held. It is not a bad feeling, only a big one, sharp and unbearably sweet at once.

Four years ago now, I visited a dear friend of mine who was studying at an art school in Rome. I had been working on cold and wet Welsh sheep farms for the past two months, and so the sudden sweet warmth of Rome in spring was delicious. I remember one afternoon walking with her across the river, to the studio of a textile designer with whom she was apprenticing. While she attended to some matters inside, I sat out in the little side garden with my notebook, writing but mostly becoming infatuated with the blossoms of a certain sort of Sicilian lemon or orange tree. I still am not sure what, precisely, it was, only that this smell was so sweet and so sharp, so beautiful in that painful way, that I was nearly beside myself, desiring desperately to capture that scent, to be able to share it with my love across an ocean and a continent, to never have to stop smelling it. Typical human response.

Luckily I had enough peace of mind to also, after a few frantic moments, just be there, smelling those blossoms, hoping they would somehow seep right into my heart and never leave. In fact I think I spent most of that hour as I waited for Elsinore in smelling the citrus flowers. I was beguiled. It is the most distinct memory I have of falling completely under the power of a plant in that way, of realizing, nose-on, the full wisdom and meaning in the smell of a flower, how very ancient that beauty is, and made not for us alone but for all the insects and animals who in some way partake of the plant. In a dreamy way, I remember an older, hunched Italian man coming down from his nearby porch—for I think it was his citrus bush I was burying my face in—and in broken English he said something to the effect of: "this is the smell of the lovers," grinning and relishing that sweet smell just as much as I.

When I think about those words now—and I wonder if in fact he spoke in Italian, so all I can say for certain is it had something to do with Love— I imagine Rumi's Beloved, the Sufic sense of Lovers, the lemon blossom as the divine fragrance embodying the self in union with the deep beauty of the world, which resides somewhere in each thing, in the lemon blossom and rose as much as in the mangy stray cat with a single blind eye; in lemon fruit and rose hip and the sad longing found in people's eyes on subway cars.

In the end, all that inhaling of the Sicilian citrus flowers did, I think, mark my heart forever, because whenever I smell a lemon flower or an orange blossom (which are done with their bloom, by the way, as the bushtits are done with their nesting-- and now I wonder, did the bushtits time their nesting with the bloom of the orange flowers, for no other reason than their sweetness? Although of course songbirds hardly have any sense of smell, so perhaps I am taking this romantic notion a whit too far) I think of those blooms, and the old man's words, and I feel a mixture of yearning and melancholy and sweet joy, which is in some measure the feeling of what it means to be alive.

I gathered a jar-full of blossoms, though not too many, because each flower is a lemon! But it probably helped the tree out a bit, poor girl, as she's about ready to break under the weight of all those fruits. To be honest, I don't know what the medicine of lemon blossoms is in a Materia Medica sort of way. I'm not sure if their medicine presents in that fashion. I imagine it works more on the heart and spirit and nerves simply through its intense aromatic strength. We shall see. In the meanwhile, I am shaking the jar with some amount of impatience!

And so there it is, a drawer from the Apothecary's Cabinet, opened for your perusal, which in this span has become not just a drawer with jars of plant-matter within, but a drawer full of stories, and memories, and the magic that resides in all things. I suppose in a sense, little has changed—smooth Danish rocks and gull feathers for medicines with just as much storied importance, Gathered with wonder.

Elklines

"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."

-Rumi

Sometimes it feels to me that looking into the pollen-dusted center of a flower is just that--looking into its soul, which is not hidden away but boldly there for all the bees and hummingbirds and wandering humans to see.

In the past week, the season passed on light, poppy-pollen gold feet from the tender new flush of spring into the full bloom and coming dryness of our summer. I always feel that here, the beginning of summer is Beltane, May 1st, the old pagan holiday of fertility and bloom, and not June 21st. The hills are already tinged gold. The nettles are going to seed. The buckeye is in full intoxicating bloom.

In our own rambling yard, the kiwi is flowering, a perfect, moon-made flower for that furred and strange and delectable green-fleshed fruit that is to come.

And in the spirit of flowering, and the pathways of the seasons, this May Day, I had a very special visitor, a woman whose heart is full of blossom and seed and root, Asia Suler, the magic-maker and herbalist behind One Willow Apothecaries.



Asia is a medicine maker of great power and old, storied magic. I now have a little collection going of her seasonal medicines, each timed with the cycles of the plants and stones and our human hearts too, full with such ancient wonders as turmeric and tulsi, sassafras and moonstone, hawthorn berry and rose blossom, maple sap and crocus essence. I can attest first-hand that these are magnificent and powerful medicines; that they twine up from your soles to your crown like the blooming of May's flowers, clearing and opening and brightening all the shadowed or stiff or cobwebbed places that need it, just when they do.

We wandered the fog-held valleys and windy trails of Tomales Point, where the tule elk roam. It is a place of ancient and quiet strength, the matriarchal wisdom of elk-cows in their birthing herds, and the great, queenly bulb-patches of purple iris.


It was an honor and great fun to wander together through a thickness of pastel-sweet wild radish and cow parsnip, our soles tracing out some yet-unmade, yet-undreamed medicines across the paths, some yet untold stories made of mineralled stone and coiled root and purple iris petal.

For after all, it seems to me that stories are medicine, and medicine is made of story.

And the paths we walk, the act of walking, can bring us right back into that flowering, storied soul-- our own, and the world's, wearing the sky's robe, our feet gentle as rosebuds. 

I have been reading Robert MacFarlane's The Old Ways: A Journey on Foot, and it has caught my heart deeply; be sure you will see more of it here later this week. For now I want to share the following passage, which clicked open a little lock in my mind, as good writing often does-- an idea heard and known before, presented anew, that finally comes fully alive. 

"The best known connection between footfall, knowledge and memory is the Aboriginal Australian vision of the Songlines. According to this cosmogony, the world was created in an epoch known as the Dreamtime, when the Ancestors emerged to find the earth a black, flat, featureless terrain. They began to walk out across this non-place, and as they walked they broke through the crust of the earth and released the sleeping life beneath it, so that the landscape sprang up into being with each pace. As Bruce Chatwin explained in his flawed but influential account, 'each totemic ancestor while travelling through the country, was thought to have scattered a trail of words and musical notes along the line of his footprints.' Depending on where they fell, these foot-notes became linked with particular features of the landscape. thus the world was covered by 'Dreaming-tracks' that 'lay over the land as ways of communication,' each track having its corresponding Song." (page 30).

My Earth Constellation sketches for the week are also Songlines, Tracklines, Dreamlines. The red alder tree is also a great old wayfaring path, the bare human footprints have eyes in their soles, and each being is hitched to a set of lines... the traces of their literal tracks, coming and going; the lines they make through their own ecosystems, each being a thread in a great web; the lines they make with their hearts and their animal and plant dreams; the stories that unfold from all of these things.



Elklines, nettlelines, otterlines, ospreylines, hedge nettlelines. And also: the elk are calving, the osprey are here and hunting and maybe breeding, the stinging nettles are seeding, the hedgenettle is growing big, the buckeye spires are blooming, the river otters are pupping.

I imagine these "lines" unfurling before and after each being like narrow paths amidst the coastal scrub, amidst so many other stories, each utterly wild and its own. 

We can't forget all the lines made by the beings just under the skin-surface of the earth, like this magnificent, fresh, new moon entrance to an American badger dig. 

And then there are the histories of human places that leave their own pinwheel of storylines, like the old hay barn of Tomales Point's Pierce Point Ranch,  rising up through the fog and the drying fields of radish and cowparsnip like a ghost or a memory. In part of my imagination, it now holds within its peaked ceiling caverns the tallow-makers in last June's Epistle, Amelia and the Elk Tallow Moon.  But that is only one of many stories held in its lined beams, in its dust motes, beneath its foundation. I often wonder if it is lonely now, without people and cows to be its heart and its dreams, but maybe it prefers the fog, the ocean wind, the mice and foxes, the coyotes and barn swallows, the passing elk. Maybe that is more peaceful, as they leave their own tracklines through and under and over and around it.

It seems to me that animals and plants and stones and clouds always reside in that space of timeless creation that Aboriginal peoples have beautifully called Dreamtime. I wonder what it is like, Elktime. I wonder what it is like, walking the Elklines.

Elk create their own spidery footpaths through the land, as you can see here on the far hillside, while a small female herd rests among the cowparsnip, and is very difficult to discern from those big white umbels. They rest their bellies on the ground, and their growing calves, floating in that dreaming wombtime, can perhaps hear the songlines of the old earth of Point Reyes herself, moving north.

"Footfall as a way of seeing the landscape; touch as sight—these are notions to which I can hold." (Robert MacFarlane, The Old Ways, page 29). 

Here's to the footpaths of new friendship, of the new deepening summer season, of the old elk and all the beings their own elklines are hitched too, from oatgrass to vole to mountain lion to faraway hunter's star.