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.

Collecting Story-Pollen: of Cedars, of Mushrooms, of Bees

I went to Honey Grove to create the latest Gray Fox Epistle  (arriving in subscriber's post boxes the 4th or so of November!), set not in my native California, but there, in the boundary between the wild woods of Vancouver Island, and the haven of peace and cultivation and sacredness that is Honey Grove. I went there to be like the honeybee, gathering the pollen of a new place in my writer's hands, into my heart. I went, and I crossed my fingers that I would be able to write anything at all.

The experience was more beautiful than I could have possibly hoped. As I mentioned a few posts ago, the first morning Nao let me taste the honey from her holy bees, and then a bit of propolis (the antibacterial, antiviral, resinous material they make from ingesting tree sap-- mainly fir or cedar around here-- which they then use to seal up their hives), and finally a spoonful of pollen (like little beach pebbles). It felt like a baptism into the landscape, into the world known and loved (literally) by the Honey Grove Bees.

Below, my dear readers, is a little taste of the pollen I gathered, which indeed became an Epistle, currently out in the mail-webs, traveling to meet the hands of its subscribers! That Epistle was written early in the mornings, before light, when I was still drifting near dreams. I ate a little honey each morn to make sure I had the bee-magic in me as I wrote. When it got light, I shared breakfast with my new friends, and the magic of the day began.

I've learned, the more I write, the more deeply woven into that craft and art I become, that writing is as much about Being Present in the World as it is about sitting at the desk and doing it, pen to paper. You have to go out, penless and paperless, and Be, in order to have something to tell of. You (at least I) need to feel some deep wonder at the world, and deep curiosity, at its every particular, otherwise what is there to say?

Without further ado, the pollen:

Cold mists gathered low each morning, walking the ground with silver feet.

The sun came to burn them off, but the mist liked to stay a bit longer on the spider strings.

Emmett the duck took good care of his ladies in the duck-pen, and showed off his lovely wing feathers to us as we passed. In the Epistle, there is a woman with a goose foot, orange as Emmett's...

The autumn vegetables, the last raspberries, the richness of this land that Nao and Mark cultivate is truly profound. And when you are amidst it, you can feel it positively pulsing with the Love they have put into its tending. I've never been anywhere like it, so suffused with this kind of care and creativity. Honey Grove felt to me like a work of art, in the best possible sense-- a place created from the deep wellsprings of all sacred creativity and knowledge of the lives of Plants, a place also engaged in a deep and respectful conversation and relationship with the wild woods around it, with the soil, with the air. And Nao and Mark its gate-keepers, its edge-walkers, its parents and its friends and its students.

Nao planned a small Gray Fox Epistles reading with a handful of her friends. I pored over her collection of my Epistles with a morning cup of tea, trying to decide what to read, and having a bit of trouble!

I've never gotten to see all the Epistles at the Other End, when they reach their readers at far corners of the globe, mail-battered, lovingly read. A delight!

We made a spice cake for the reading-- after all, what is cosier than tea, and cake, and stories aloud? The three really must go together.

And yes, in case you were wondering, this cake was even better than it looks. Oh my heavens. The ideal tea-cake, in my opinion, wreathed in garden-picked calendula. 

Then we wandered off to gather beautiful bits of the forest for a small altar, the Land Around Us deserving a place at the reading too, as it is always the ultimate Pollen to me when I write-- the movings and livings of the wild world.

Gus the magical dog, of course, accompanied us with much aplomb, and the expectation of at least a few treats. He is just the sort of companion you hope for on a misty walk, snuffing and frisking about and making sure you remember to poke around in the bushes too.

I love that one of the only ways to really see the individual drops of mist is on a spiderweb. Two of the most delicate miracles in the world-- mist and spidersilk-- together. In the Epistle, there are misted threads of spider-line, and there are pearl necklaces scattered in moss just so...

Nao (above) and I both wore red coats, because it is hunting season. I'm not used to wearing red, and I realized as I walked what an invigorating color it is. A powerful color, as a woman, the red of menstrual blood, life-force. I associate red with mythic tales-- red coats and capes and vests and skirts and hats. Somehow it leant that essence to our walk, which felt like a walk out of Time, into the soft Magic of the Land, and back again (to eat our spice cake....)

I couldn't stop marveling at the red cedars, which we don't have in my part of coastal California. They feel like very feminine motherly trees to me, with the most delicious gentle smell to their scaly needles. Above, Nao gathers a few fronds. When I look at this photo now, as I thought at the time, the tree feels like a big wise old lady, leaning down in a maternal way to let Nao take a few bits of green.

For thousands of years, in First Nations cultures, the cedar has been one of the most important, and most holy trees, used to make a huge range of items, from canoes to longhouses, baskets and clothing and rope from the bark, medicine, capes, masks... Virtually every part of this powerful tree was used, to such a degree that the cedar is referred to as the Tree of Life to many Pacific Northwest native peoples. Meeting it here, I can see why.

I gathered some feathery fronds as well, to take home with me and to nibble at (they taste divine).

This silvery cedar bark seems to have been pecked by what looks to me to be some sort of sapsucker (they wood-peck in straight lines like that)-- perhaps a red-breasted sapsucker, which according to my research resides year-round on Vancouver Island. Amazing, to imagine a bird designed to drink the sap from trees-- I imagine cedar sap is delicious, and I wonder if the bees gather it for their propolis.

We gathered fern-moss when we entered the damp forest...

.... and marveled at the lacy edges of mushrooms, dark and wise underground beings who know of decay and of regeneration....

.... the red of the old amanita, dangerous mushroom of shamanic hallucination, of Viking beserker rages, of fairy-tale temptations.

Back in the cottage, we laid our altar, we drank tea, we ate spice cake, I read a quilted patchwork from two Epistles to the little gathering of women.

We were both aglow, when the guests left, with the magic of it all. 

And all of these things in one way or another were gathered in my red notebook, where all my story-writing occurs-- the hive where I put the honey, the pollen, the propolis. The story-Epistle that emerged, which is a retelling of the Grimm's Queen Bee, at once Is, and Is Not, of this place. It is not Merville (the township where Honey Grove resides), and yet it is. It is not exactly these fir and cedar woods, and yet it is... and so it goes with all tales.

But the Bees, well, they are always and only the Bees, nothing else. They are the true carriers of the tale, and of all the stories of this landscape. I am so grateful to have met them, and I am so grateful to Nao and to Mark and to Gus, and to all the beings of Honey Grove, for such a perfect visit.

Traveling North to Meet With Bees

A quick note to say I have travelled over the long Coast-Range mountains of the western edge of North America, from San Francisco to Vancouver Island, and am now in a beautiful place called Honey Grove, learning poetry and peace and sweetness from the bees of Nao and Mark Sims.

I left this dry gold-ridged dense landscape of the Bay Area, Mount Diablo rising holy and hot in the east...

.... passed over the Carquinez Straits where the Sacramento and San Joaquin Rivers drain more than half of the landmass of California into the old roiling Pacific, from the Sierra Nevadas through the big fertile Central Valley...

... gazed open-mouthed at the snowy peaks, rising from the great unfurling body of the land like the noses of mythic badgers, the breasts of snow-stone women, as the landscape grew more forested, more ridged through Oregon and Washington...

...until there, below, were the steep dramatic mountains of Vancouver Island, perched just at the boundary between the North American and Pacific Tectonic plates in the Cascadia Subduction Zone (of which the San Andreas Fault of the Bay Area is the southern extension), created jagged and green-blue by that endless earth-skin movement.

The only thing I like about flying is this cloud's-eye view of mountainscapes and river-valleys winding far below like a great circulatory system, the mountains these great snow-capped vertebrae, this gift of getting to see the earth's surface spreading out below.

But I am much happier and more at ease with my feet on the ground, amidst the familiar Douglas fir trees and the less familiar red cedars, on this blessed land in the Comox Valley that Nao and Mark tend with so much love and such firm wise-rooted soles and hands.

Yesterday I helped Nao tuck the bees in for winter with tar-paper and pillowcases stuffed with wool.

I have never been near so many bees at once, and I thought I'd be afraid, but their gentle buzzing, the sound of Om, as Nao said later, made me so peaceful I felt like I'd always been doing this, bending over hives to tuck the wool in, dusting away the bees with an eagle feather so we could seal up the top, watching their golden bodies, furred, some heavy with parcels of pollen, buzzing gently toward and away from their hives. I felt positively gleeful, and honored, to get to be near those hives.

Earlier that morning, Nao let me taste some of the Honey Grove honeys, very special ones steeped in rose petals under several moons, and a bit of propilis tincture, and a spoonful (oh heavens) of pollen, tiny glimmering grains like pebbles of chert that have been sea-smoothed, only these were bee made, the pollen of many different local flowers. Well, by the end of all that nectar-tasting, I felt like I was hovering, humming, slightly off the floor. I felt like I had eaten a tiny portion of the essence of this place, lovingly gathered by those so-tenderly cared-for bees.

And when I actually got to meet them, I felt a bit in the presence of a miracle, and I thought, how could we ever forget the profundity of that simple buzzing hum of the bee, making love one by one to so many of the flowering plants of this world, carefully carrying off the sweet essence of the sun that those flowers have made, and ensuring that they make fruits?

Blessings to these small furred souls who map the sweetness and the love-making (very literally) of each landscape.

And stay tuned, as an Epistle is being made, about the bees, and the Comox Valley, based upon several German-Swiss fairytales which I will leave as yet unnamed, but featuring, just to whet your appetites, the Mother Holde, or Mother Perchta, of old Germanic/Teutonic lore.... I will share more on this subject, and more of this beautiful place, soon.