A Heart of Acorn and Mouse

This autumn has felt every bit as abundant as the fall of acorns from the oak trees, and only this year have I finally learned to turn these sacred nuts to food; only this year have I come to realize in my body and not just my mind that acorns are food scattered all over the ground, given by the arms of the oak trees. They are more precious than any gold.

It has been a ridiculously long while since I wrote here, due to said abundance; I have felt a bit like the acorn woodpeckers who rush cackling between snags, stuffing all their careful holes with acorns, in a frenzy to make sure they get enough in before the squirrels and the deer and the woodrats do. The days grow shorter. I just looked out the window to find it fully dark and only just seven. The stars and moon hold us longer now than the sun. I feel things slowing. I feel the earth below saying--now, to the roots...

So, I feel I can catch my breath and share some of this harvest with you here... a harvest of the sweet moments and rambles that feed all of my words, and all of my spirit.

I learned to process acorns because, in a last minute sort of way, I ended up helping the wonderful Jolie Elan, of Go Wild, to put on her Oak Ceremony on Mt. Tamalpais, the sacred mountain I wandered so often as a girl. I sat in her backyard for many hours, cracking tanoak acorns, and eventually turning them to cake. I wrote about the whole process, and some of the lore of oak trees for her here (and painted a few acorns too).

We held the ceremony under big hearty tanoaks, the likes of which I have hardly seen. I am used to tanoaks that are small and scraggly, dying or already dead, covered in the black fungus known as Sudden Oak Death. Jolie decided to hold the Oak Ceremony for the tanoaks in particular. They were once the favored, and most sacred, of oak trees among the native people of this land. Their acorns are far and away the tastiest--the flavor is all butterscotch.(Perhaps this had something to do with the esteem in which they are held.) Now, as Jolie said, their kind is leaving this world, all but forgotten, alone, untended, unloved.

Unloved in the sense that, even if we admire and appreciate them, we do not gather their acorns any longer. We do not depend upon them for food, and thus we don't feel that more entwined, interdependent love for them that comes from necessity, from being humbled before our own hunger. We do not feel love for them as we would to a mother, and yet the oak trees are mothering in their abundance.

As Julia Parker, a wonderful California Indian basket-weaver and elder (and beautiful woman) says: “They told me when it comes, get out there and gather even if it’s one basketful so the acorn spirit will know you are happy for the acorn and next year the acorn will come.”

The Oak Ceremony was an attempt to remedy this neglect, to sit and sing and pray in conversation with the oaks, treating them as fellow beings.

We built altars to the land, expressing our reverence, our grief, our sense of loss and of wonder. We marched in a parade of singing through the trees. We held a Council of All Beings.

Some scientists believe that Sudden Oak Death has taken such voracious hold due to a lack of healthy wildfire and controlled burns on the land, as the native people used to practice. Others believe it is connected with a lack of phosphorus in the food chain, which was once provided by the abundant bodies of spawning salmon as they ran in silver ribbons up every creek, their bodies returning to the soil via the bellies of other animals--bear, hawk, raccoon. The web of things is so very delicate, and the trees teach us that when you pull one string, you really do find that the whole universe is attached.

 Even if our sorrow and our singing and our acorn gathering do nothing in the face of the tanoak's possible extinction; even if no abundance of ceremony and story will save the life of this beautiful being, and so many others, it seems to me that we can never stop our singing, our praise, our expressions of grief and awe both; we have to keep talking to the trees, to the salmon, to the acorns, telling them that we appreciate their beauty and their lives. Because when we all stop doing this--well, I think then we shall be well and truly lost.

Sometimes, such sadness weighs on my heart very heavily. Sometimes there are so many things that fill me with grief, that make me weep, that I don't know how a heart can manage to hold the beauty and the great sadness of this world at once. Sometimes it seems to me that as a culture we have collectively turned away from our grief at the destruction of so much of this wild world because it hurts far too much. And it's true; it does. But inside of grief is love, and no matter how fraught our world can some days seem, no matter how frightening too... then there is the doe who comes suddenly wading through the marsh grass, stopping to watch you with black eyes and enormous velvet ears.

Then there is the sky, and the fog, and the marsh dotted with a dozen white egrets.

Really, I don't think I can articulate it as well as Mary Oliver can, so I shall let her do the talking:

“I tell you this
to break your heart,
by which I mean only
that it break open and never close again
to the rest of the world.” 

Yes. Your heart must be broken open first, in order for the great old sacred world to come in, all bird-sung and root-thick and miraculous. In order for any of it to matter at all.

On the same afternoon walk with an old dear friend through the marsh at Limantour toward the strand, we saw first a doe, and then a stag, wading through the marshgrass. It is their courting time. Perhaps the stag was looking for her. They are vessels of pure longing at this time of year; they are so addled they are often hit by cars because they spend so much of their time wandering about in an erotic stupor. Seeing a stag surveying the marsh felt like a glimpse of the Green Man of old lore; the horned one of the woods, taking a last sweet roaming through his land before the fall into winter.

On the trail on our way back, we saw yet another doe with her adolescent child, who peered at us with great curiosity from amidst the brush. The mother did not seem very perturbed by our presence. She let me come very near, watching me. Our eyes locked for a long moment. I could hardly bear the beauty of her black eyes, her dark lashes. I felt entirely, calmly, reckoned by her gaze. It felt like some soft and hoofed benediction, or blessing, though I know it was just a doe, ascertaining whether I was going to leap after her child, perhaps distracting me from him.

Sometimes, the best thing is to be humbled before the eyes of another creature, before the dark mystery of them; we can be too quick to assume an animal crossing our path has some symbolism for our lives. The truth is, the world does not revolve around me (!)... The world is a web and the life of a doe and her almost-grown fawn is much more meaningful in its own right than it is symbolically, in relation to mine. The deepest gift from the eyes of a doe, touching mine, seems to me to be the gift of connection; that we are two beings sharing this world, and that of the two of us, her kind is far older and wiser than mine, and therefore above all things I should learn what I can about her life, her world, her ways.

That's what animal tracking has always been about for me. This is the oldest medicine: to kneel on the sand and learn the landscape of a bobcat track. 

That it looks like it belongs to a female (if I were Tom Brown Jr. I would know for certain; as Sylvia Linsteadt I am not going to bet my life on it, but it feels like a solid educated guess); that she is in a direct register trot, which is a slightly quick gait for a bobcat. "Baseline" for a bobcat is a quick (overstep) walk; a trot means something pushed her slightly out of a comfortable dawn ramble—a sudden sound? Or maybe just the downhill slope?

Up the dunes and around the corner, the trails of brush rabbits were everywhere, and coyote too. These prints show a brush rabbit in a fast bound—out of baseline, hopping quick, perhaps between dunegrass cover.

Every track is a country and a doorway into the real lives of the animals on the land; every track brings me back into the great broken-open landscape of the heart. 

Serpentine (stone) outcrop on the top ridge

This autumn has had a certain serendipitous magic to it, all acorn-strewn and bobcat-pawed. Around the corner from my house, a magical little shop opened up for the months of September and October, and I met its two very extraordinary creatrixes, Catherine Sieck and Rachel Blodgett, through a dear old friend. I am astounded by the beauty of their work, the old earthen wisdom of it-- Rachel's plant-dyed, batik printed garments (including indigo moon underpants!), Catherine's exquisite shadow puppets and cut paper snakes and wreaths and hands. I was very honored to give a reading at their shop, called Serpentine, on the evening of October's full moon, along with a wonderful performance artist, Quenby Dolgushkin, who performed masked monologues of the feminine archetype. 

It felt so good to share my own wild-pawed stories aloud and candle-lit. Sometimes it does feel as though the words enjoy ringing and winging out loud through the air, and off into the starry night...

Serpentine, a metamorphic stone formed at ocean and tectonic plate boundaries

Catherine and I have some magic up our sleeves... it involves cut paper and shadow puppets and tents and tales and tanoaks and who knows what else... for that you shall have to wait and see (and so shall I! Sometimes the harvest of new creations takes a while; though you can see the acorns up there in the branches, you must wait for them to fall!)



Meanwhile, mysterious small beings make immaculate tunnel-towers amidst the stones, all spiked with pine needles...

and the firs, growing tall amidst the manzanita, glow and sway in the glowing autumn light.

I spent this past weekend up in the hills of West Sonoma, carving buttons and bone and stone beads with a group of women. I processed nettle cordage for the first time, from a beautiful harvest of nettle stalks from the Sierras so tall I made about my own height in string from a single plant. To sit under the shade of oaks, twisting and twisting nettle fiber in my fingers; sanding manzanita buttons over and again, rubbing sheep fat on to shine them, with a group of women and the horses passing by at dawn in the mist, and the varied thrush singing for the first time I've heard this season; and a fire lit... this is peace. 

But of all the gifts of autumn, fallen down from the trees, the one that has flung my heart open widest I found shivering beneath an oak during my time with that group of women, carving buttons and beads. I was about to dump the dregs of my tea onto the ground when something gave me pause. I looked down and saw a tiny silver creature hunched on a leaf, shivering and shaking. I crouched near, and found it to be a baby mouse. My dear readers, I have never seen anything so dear in my entire life. I could hardly bear it. 

It was very clear that this wee one had been abandoned, or orphaned, and while I know that baby mice are a tasty treat for many a creature, this mouse lay in my path so pitiful and sweet, and my heart would not let me leave him to die slowly of cold, or starvation. Predation was unlikely until all of us had cleared out. So another woman and I scooped him up in some wool and moss and tucked him into an empty can. Immediately, he curled into a little ball, paws to nose, and stopped shivering. I nearly wept at the sight of the small pleasure he found in wool and curling nose-to-paws. I nearly wept, at the zest for life which all creatures have. 

I couldn't reach WildCare that evening, so I took him home with me. He squeaked expectantly and robustly when I opened his box, and his little chirrups nearly undid me with their sweetness. I got up in the middle of the night like a fretful new mother to change the hot water bottle for a fresh one, so he stayed toasty warm. The next morning, I was beside myself with worry the whole drive across the Bay to the wildlife shelter. I didn't dare peek in his box, for fear the little one had died; after all, he had taken no water or nourishment in at least 18 hours, and was so small his eyes were still closed. But when I arrived, he was still breathing. I rushed him in, all shaken up and teary. The kind people behind the desk indulged me, though of course they see a thousand baby mice a year! They are very good at what they do, and they whisked him off to be cared for. They will re-release him into the wild when he is old enough. Even if it is only for a week, the little deer mouse will be able to enjoy the pleasures of what it means to be a wild deer mouse, bounding and burrowing in the grass and soil and eating all manner of nuts and seeds. 

This little mouse did something to my heart. I stood there, outside Wildcare, for a good ten minutes, idly looking at the beautiful birds of prey they keep, birds that can no longer hunt or fly in the wild. Really, I was trying not to cry. Really, I was thinking of the tenderness for that single baby mouse which had seized me like a prayer; I was thinking of the love all mother animals have for their children, and the utter helplessness of a baby mouse without his mother, and all the tenderness there is in this world. Every creature is born into tenderness, though it may last only an hour. This baby mouse, he was a tiny silver miracle, and we were blessed to meet him for an evening, and see him on his autumn way. 

The Witch-Dance of Lupine

The coast bush lupine is blooming in strange dancing spires that sway in the sea breeze, little lupine-witches, reaching for the salted sun. Their purple-pale petals, their soft smell of berries, their dip and sway in the wind, spell stories of the ocean-side to me, the beaches of West Marin in the springtime, when the lupines bloom and the spring wind picks up, foaming the waves, turning the sand to ghost-ribbons across the shore. Lupines and wind and osprey hunting and the warmer coastal waters of spring; these are all one poem, one story, one being, in my heart, in my experience of this landscape.

When the lupines are blooming, the osprey have returned and the sunny days are often full of wind, the water is warm enough to swim in. Warm is a relative term, of course-- warm meaning you can plunge without feeling as though you might have a heart attack from the shock. Warm meaning you stumble out of the foam feeling like you've been given a new skin made of ocean-breeze, lupine petals, the flight of osprey. And so it was this past week, at Limantour Beach with my brother, paying homage to osprey and lupine, wind and an ocean warm enough to shed a skin or two inside of.

I came out of the water feeling a great gratitude for this land, from which all of the thirteen Gray Fox Epistles sprung, from which the Leveret Letters continues to unfurl, from which my beloved novel-project with the beautiful Rima Staines, Tatterdemalion, was born. I had this sudden realization that these tales really have grown from this ground here, from salt-tide, alder-wood, lupine scrubbrush, just the same as any sown seed. It occurred to me that maybe sometimes the best way to gather inspiration is to stop lunging about for new tidbits, new scraps, and to water the ground with thanks, with great awe and gratitude at the roots down below and all the tales they've made and fed. To unfurl pieces of those tales and hang them as if on a clothesline to bathe in the wind and sun; to take pages from those stories and lay them down for the nettle-roots to suck nutrients, for the osprey to fish up out of the waves, for the woodrats to secret away to their lodges and turn into bedding.

And so below I have included three excerpts from the three mentioned projects— the first from Tatterdemalion (we are in the process of finding it a publishing home!), the second from the Leveret Letters, and the third from "Our Lady of Nettles," the twelfth Epistle, as flags of my gratitude to the wild places and animals and plants from which they were born, as markers along the Road of Story to inspire me as I carry on, mulching the land from which they came.

They were born from the jagged doorways in crab-shells, like the ragged-edged waxing moon, at once rough and delicate as embroidery.

They were born from the seal-people, the bugling elk and sledding children, the long-nosed court fools and blooming roses and racing sleek greyhound dogs that live inside the ever-shifting shapes of seafoam... and that place where the sole touches the cold salty water, and suddenly the foot becomes the bridge between the body and the story rising up from a scrap of foam to the heart, and then the beloved right-hand clutching its fountain pen.

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Bells, Perches & Boots 

(excerpt from Tatterdemalion, a novel-in-progress collaboration with Rima Staines)

        No one knew where they had come from, how far or how long they had been walking, when they arrived at the edge of the ocean called the Pacific and unloaded their blue and gold cart in the center of a meadow-bluff of purple needlgrass and iris, just at the edge of a village. The one called Perches stuck his tongue out to taste the air, while the one called Boots sifted a handful of dirt and the one called Bells closed his eyes, plugged his nose, and listened. They reached their conclusion in unison—“it is good”— and got to building a fire. Boots hung a cast iron pot over the flames. In it cooked a quail and wild onion bulbs. Perches set loose the four tawny jersey cows who pulled the cart, and they began to graze.
The children of that village by the meadow-bluff of iris bulb and seed were the first to investigate. They came in pants of pigskin and nettle, here and there a special patch cut in the shape of a star, clamshell, wheel, from an old velvet or corduroy. They hung at the edges of the field, daring each other to creep one step closer, and one more, until a boy named Henrymoss had touched the blue and gold stripes on the cart, bringing back news to the others that it was real, sturdy and wooden, that it smelled like oiled leather and rust, with the faint sweetness of blackberries, that inside he had seen piles of bells, neat shelves full of boots, a bucket full of sticks, branches, wires, each with a leather tag and letters etched on it. That around the corner four cows were grazing, and their eyes were dark brown.
“We are connoisseurs,” a voice called out to the children where they huddled behind the cart, whispering. “We are pilgrims.” The voice had a lilt and a roughness that made several children, the younger ones, run off to the pine trees, to the huts where their mothers sat gossiping and spinning nettle fibers while sipping shots of dark mead.
  Bells hung along the edge of the cart roof, and a pair of fine calf-skin boots was affixed to the front, above the door, like a figurehead. The boots were dyed red, laced with grommets, and embroidered with small crosses like stars. Ontop of the boots perched a kestrel, smaller than the shoes, cream and charcoal and pink-orange feathered, with the most beautiful, kohl-dark eyes the children had ever seen. She made a shrill call when she saw them.
  Henrymoss, having been the one to touch the cart, felt he should maintain his reputation, particularly because the girl Jay, hair tousled and so black it seemed blue, was there with the others, watching and twisting her fingers in the tufts of her dark feathered hair. He wanted to run when he heard the kestrel but instead he walked around the cart, right to the fire where Bells, Perches and Boots sat stirring their quail stew and fiddling with a cowbell, a eucalyptus limb carved with crows, and a rubber rain boot, respectively.
  “I thought pilgrims did it for religion,” Henrymoss managed through a dry mouth, after a moment’s staring at the blue tattoos all over the men’s hands, corresponding with their names; their beards like nests, their clothes which were simple robes like monks once wore, very rough-spun and sturdy, all mottled shades of brown and red.
Perches looked up at him solemnly. He had big brown eyes and a skinny, hawkish face.
“Oh yes, indeed. We have each chosen our worship, our path to perfection. You see.” He held out the carved eucalyptus stick. The crows etched into it were glossy, impossibly detailed. “This,” said Perches, “is where they are at ease, in a perfect balance with the wind, the light, the bark. They know exactly the branch. Is it not what all men and women seek?”
  Boots stood then and slapped a broad hand on Henrymoss’s back, laughing. The boy jumped.
“This fellow is full of shit.” He winked. “It is my way that is holy. The Boot. How is it we tramp through the world? The Perfect Boot is the perfect union of foot, earth and path, weathering all mudslides, all asphalts, all heartbreaks. Come my boy, have a drink with us.” Boots was the biggest of the three, blonde and freckled, with a flushed, round face and nimble leatherworking fingers. Henrymoss noticed that he was barefoot, his soles and toes so callused and battered they looked like rocks. He sat down on a wooden folding stool next to the third man, Bells, who polished a coppery cow-bell in his lap, and poured Henrymoss a glass jar full of wine. Bells looked up at the boy, grinned, showing three missing teeth like black doorways, and rang the cowbell.
  “Listen,” he said. “The bells toll in and out the ends of the world. Did you know that? Have you heard that they carried Bells, all those players, and their Lyoobov?” He ladled soup into a ceramic bowl and offered it to Henrymoss.
  “Hey kids!” Bells yelled, whistling two tones through his three missing teeth. “Come out from behind the cart, come sit and have a bite and a tale.” Henrymoss took a big gulp of his wine, hoping it would make him look at ease and adult when they came. It was sour and strong in his mouth and made his temples pulse. The girl Jay was the first to pop her head around the side of the cart, hair making a spiked blue silhouette with the late sun behind it. She darted, taking leaps through the meadow. Two boys, Jeremiah and Samfir, followed her, and then slowly another girl, the small one called Mouse, though her real name was Mara, who could climb a tree faster than anyone, who always stuck her hands in holes in the ground first, just to prove she was tough, and did not deserve to be called Mouse. Still, her hair never grew longer than a thick fur, her ears were rounder than normal, and she was short; it stuck.
  No one else followed. They’d crept back to the trees, to tell their brothers and their aunts—something new has happened, something strange. Throw dimes and old wires into the fire, leave out the wishbones for the old women with bobcat tails who live in the brush. Come see, come see!
  And so the children Henrymoss, Jay, Jeremiah, Samfir and Mouse sat around the fire of those ramble-palmed tellers, those wheeling seekers of the True Path, all walking it together though their grails were myriad. A pipe full of strong tobacco was produced, and a set of fine china plates wrapped up in a child-sized quilt, tied with gut string. Perches fetched silver forks and knives from the inside of the cart, kept in a box lined with velvet full of slots and bands to keep the cutlery separate.
  “Like corralling horses, ducks and pigs,” said Boots, handing each child a fine white napkin, a porcelain saucer-plate painted with fading bucolic scenes from a long distant rural past—neat brick farmhouses, maids in gowns, gentlemen on horseback—and a set of silver, buffed to a bright shine. Amidst the ragged simplicity of the three travellers, this supperware felt bewitched, molten in its fineness to the children. Like holding the stolen wares of a king from a story they thought was made up, but had turned out to be real, there amidst a rough whispering meadow, beside a blackened pot of stew and a cart all hung with bells and leathers and scratched by the talons of raptors.

*     *     *

These tales were born like the unfurling umbel of the stately and strange cow parsnip, that magnificent-stalked, human-sized flower of riparian corridor and scrub-hill. She always reminds me of the wiliest, kindest, wandering lady escaped from some mad-house, now running about with her white parasol stamped with the true love stories of the clouds.

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The Leveret Letters, Chapter 9: The Cabinet of Wonders, excerpt

     “The story goes that, after the Fall, at the beginning of the Camps, twins were born, conjoined at the hand. But the midwife, when told by the leader of the Camp to take the babies up and leave them for the coyotes, she couldn’t leave them alone. She stayed up the hill, under an oak tree, all night, praying. At dawn, a strange being emerged from the far edge of the oak forest. It was a Hill Saint. It was the spirit, you see, of that hill where the midwife sat. It looked like a very broad woman with a skirt of thick dirt and grass, with the big dark eyes of a vole. Her arms were twined with so many tiny rootlets they looked like they were covered in lace. She took the little twins in her arms and nursed them, not with milk, but with the sweet nectar that all hills have inside their veins.
     “The next time another such child was born this side of the Bay, seven years had passed. The midwife of its Camp brought the baby up to the edge of Wild Folk terrain, as she was told. But she knew, from the stories passed between midwives, to call upon a Hill Saint, to raise that baby as its own. Instead of a Hill Saint, the twins conjoined at the hand emerged from the shadows at dusk and took the baby in their three hands, cradling.
     “They were only seven years old, but it is said that those twins had become part Wild Folk, since they were nursed by such a one as a Hill Saint. They knew all the languages of all the animals and plants and stones, and all the Wild Folk who tended to their well-being. For a while, they took up residence here in the Inn, which was then very ramshackle, and healed sick animals. One by one, they raised little Strangelings. That’s what we like to say, instead of Poisoned Ones. The babies are Strangelings, and we, Holy Fools.
      “Eventually, after a few of them grew old enough to take over the running of this creaking Inn, teenagers only, but that was old enough, and the twins had taught them about living, about tending bees and plants and birds, about playing, and never giving up on Joy, because nobody else in the world has that job, the twins built a green cart. They charmed a small herd of elk, and set off to rove, to roam. Sometimes, in those early days, they returned with books and linens and teacups from abandoned houses far, far North, miles beyond Point Reyes.
      “That was four hundred years ago. Now, they are called the Greentwins, and while they look human, they are as immortal as Hills. They are mostly wild, a little bit angel.”

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To all of the Holy Fools, and the ragged nettle who is their Queen, I give thanks. I give thanks to the ragged Nettle-Queen whose stinging language I've felt in my fingers so often as I gather and gather her leaves for my tea, the tea that sustains me as I write... the tea that thus is inside each word, the tea made from the body of that fierce and beloved weed so dear to my heart, Lady Nettle, friend of the Greentwins. 

There's nothing like tromping through the hedge nettle with his rank scent filling the air from underfoot while gathering green nettles bare-handed to make one feel humble, feel overwhelmed with the sensory intensity of life—fingers buzzing, nose wide as an elk's, heart flung open. I imagine the hedge-nettle (Stachys chamissonis)  somehow like the vegetable version of the old edge-walking jongleurs of the medieval troubadour era, the bards who played and juggled and sang for the common people, around campfires, not in court halls, the singers who had the hearts of coyotes. Something about the hedge nettle, always cooling his feet by the alder-creeks, smelling rank as a wild fox and sweet as lemon balm at once, puts me in mind of such wayfaring players who keep to the borderlines and the shadows, who are difficult to befriend but then suddenly, like the hedge nettle, you realize you love, for the feral rasp of that smell and all the memories and songs it holds—like Bells, Perches and Boots, like the Holy Fools and the little Strangelings. I imagine they line their shoes with hedge-nettle, they perfume their armpits and temples with it, to smell of animal and plant at once, rambling and fierce.

These green beings of the alderwood hold a deep dear place in my heart (as comes out in these story-scraps--so many nettles, so many alders!), both their physical medicines (what a triad-- red alder, stinging nettle, hedge nettle!) and the medicine that comes from being near them, the story-medicine of their lives.

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Our Lady of Nettles, excerpt

Offer

      For the first year you may not pick the nettles with your own hands. Every morning for a year, when the dew is still touching the nettle leaves in glinting speckles, you will brush your fingertips to the stalks in order to be stung like she was stung, in order to bring life and blood to your hands for the day’s work. The spines shine with dew, delicate as glass, and your fingertips will become strong. You will choose a patch of nettles to touch, to pray beside, to sit with daily. You will learn about more than nettles, this way. You may touch the tops of their leaves, and their seeds when they come pale-green and hanging in soft coils, but you may not pick. You may ask the nettles for the story of Nain, but only once you have given them your own story.
      Every morning you will touch the nettle-needles with a fingertip, and you will leave white goose feathers at their ankles. You will bring water from the creek cupped in your hands. You will watch every new leaf begin and end at the patch of nettles where you sit, and every small bushtit who comes to eat the aphids from the stems, every red admiral butterfly who lays her eggs there. How, after all, can you cut and kill a thing, before you know who it is, before you do it the honor of your love?
      You will walk the dirt path of offering every day. You will carry alderwood trays of nettle tea into the spinning room when it rains, tonics of nettle seed and the roots of dandelions for your sisters in the weaving room. When the Sisters of the Harvest cut the nettles in autumn, you will watch, and you will mimic how they offer handfuls of nettle seeds, a dab of comfrey oil to that open wound.
      You will learn to leave the new pollen of hazel catkins in the fresh pawprints of bobcats, alder-catkin pollen in the pawprints of the two mountain lions whose territories cross here, when they come to drink from the creek where the nettles are retted, swinging the black tips of their enormous tails.
Leave the scarlet juice of the thimbleberries in the pawprints of the gray foxes. Leave shiny pieces of glass from the Bayshore at the entrances of woodrat nests. Leave handfuls of spiderweb on tree branches for the winter wrens to make their nests. Leave soaproot stalks wherever the deer have walked. In rain puddles, float the petals of the winter-blooming calendula flowers, from long ago gardens. Where the newts with orange bellies cross the paths from the hills down to the creek to mate after the winter storms, leave tiny red stream stones, one in the wake of each newt, so that the next walker might pause, and know the newts are out, shimmying each toward their own love, and step gingerly.
      There is an ancient garden rose gone wild at the front door of the Convent of Our Lady of Nettles. It is as big as the whole wall, as big as an alder tree, branching and twining everywhere. The wall faces the southeast and the rose-light of the summer sunrise. At night, pick a rosebud and put it under your pillow. It is an offering for your own heart, to keep it open, despite everything, despite each day of your life before now which may have taught you that to close off the heart was the only way to survive. It is not easy to learn to soften, to touch each small creek stone and bare dirt where a skunk has nosed, with love, when it has been the safest thing to close, to hate, to use fear like a net around the body.
      Ask the nettles, and they will tell you.

*    *    *

And so I carry on down the Road of Story, pausing to get on all fours, put my forehead to the dirt, and give thanks for where I've come from, and to where I am going, following sole and hand and heart, following the murmurings of the wily hedge-nettle, the irreverent dancing cow parsnip, the soft-skinned lupine-witches who poison the bodies of deer and rabbit and human but shoot the earth full of nitrogen-nourishment, walking the Road of Story to see where the next one will appear, quick as a bobcat darting down the path ahead, graceful as an osprey flying the shoreline. What a joy it is for a moment to dash as fast through the sand as the osprey flies, feeling like you are all wings too.

I think this feeling of gratitude rose up in me because I spent time this past week specially packaging up five back issues of the Gray Fox Epistles to be sold in Molly of Ambatalia's beautiful store in the old Mill Valley lumber yard.

I made a set of small cards, to be drawn like a tarot from a litte basket by customers, so that they might get a sense of the spirit and origin of each tale, and also a hint of the wild-ones who inspired them, from whose claws and umbels, talons and stinging leaves they were ferried and born.

I think pausing to create these cards, and then plunging into the salty ocean as an osprey wheeled overhead and the blooming lupine danced their witch-dances in the spring wind, hitched my heart open and knocked me sidelong with a kind of stunned gratitude for each and every wild encounter that has dusted pollen upon the story-embers in me and sparked them to light. Sometimes you stop, and look at a collection of things you've made, and shake your head, grinning, thinking-- where on earth did this come from in me? I can only say that I think it has something to do with the conviction of both Martin Shaw, David Abram, and many others I'm sure—that, in Shaw's words: "the psyche is far larger than the body. We dwell within the story, not the other way around. Telling the stories is a triadic engagement between the velocity of story, the intelligence of the tongue, and the imagination of whatever is listening in-- and something is always listening in." (xvi, from Snowy Tower: Parzival and the Wet, Black Branch of Language). That something is the big old wild land (in Shaw's perspective); the psyche within which we and all our stories dwell is the psyche of the earth herself.

And so the great blue heron, the blue elderberry, the sea lion, grizzly bear and stinging nettle, somehow they are listening in, they are part of each of us— and isn't it a relief to imagine that perhaps the things we make don't need to come from inside of us in this intensely personal way, but rather are galloping through the landscape, looking for a hand to be written (or sung, or painted, or spoken) through?

This puts me in mind of the reflections of the poet Ruth Stone, as described by Elizabeth Gilbert in her wonderful TED talk. Gilbert says that growing up in Virginia, "[Stone] would be out working in the fields, and she said she would feel and hear a poem coming at her from over the landscape. And she said it was like a thunderous train of air. And it would come barreling down at her over the landscape. And she felt it coming, because it would shake the earth under her feet. She knew that she had only one thing to do at that point, and that was to, in her words, 'run like hell.' And she would run like hell to the house and she would be getting chased by this poem, and the whole deal was that she had to get to a piece of paper and a pencil fast enough so that when it thundered through her, she could collect it and grab it on the page. And other times she wouldn’t be fast enough, so she’d be running and running and running, and she wouldn’t get to the house and the poem would barrel through her and she would miss it and she said it would continue on across the landscape, looking, as she put it 'for another poet.'"

I love this image, that stories and poems are these great romping beasts migrating through the land outside of us, not some divine "genius" within, as we are taught to think about creativity. What a relief!

These cards hold reflections of the beings who sang inspiration into my heart for each tale. I imagine them like pieces of an old tarot deck, pulled out of the dusty recesses of the cart of Bells, Perches and Boots, kept at the Holy Fool's Inn, read by the women in the Cloister of Our Lady of Nettles.  And at once they are my lupine seeds of thanks, scattered across the edge of the sand dune to root and fill the ground with nitrogen again, fecund and fierce.

Singing in the Rains of California

Oh my dear, sweet readers! Some brave, sturdy clouds have at last made it through that great Ridge of High Pressure, and over the past two weeks they have brought us small rain (and then a big rain, of which I shall tell!) like a thousand little glinting jewels strewn through the nasturtium leaves. 

The first morning of wetness—only a couple days after I wrote here of the Drought, in a fit of despair!— barely coaxed the dust to settle, but it coated the clovers and the dead raspberry canes with a silvery glow, it seduced the smells held too long in the leaves and grasses and dirt and tree trunks and even the asphalt roads out again, so that as I road my bike through the morning to my dance class, I kept inhaling, inhaling, until I thought I might pass out with the sweetness of it (and a tad too much air!). 

And as if they had been on the edges of their loamy seats all this time, seemingly overnight, the tiny green ones began to pop, beginning at the edges of the paths and lanes. The sky looked cleaned, somehow.

I had been afraid, deep down in my heart, that maybe nothing would grow this year, that no new leaves would come out— no elderberries! I was half weeping already at the thought, though I know, I know, it is not the worst of the concerns brought by a drought—but the dear fecund cleavers, the fierce nettles, the hardy blackberries, they positively danced, even with their scant half inch of water.

I went walking in Point Reyes, along the Muddy Hollow trail, to visit with the red alders, and the new nettles—I had feared there would be none!—and a special grove of alders that grow close and pale, where the tule elk pass, rubbing their antlers on the bark, where the bobcat moves, out of sight of human trails, coming down from the scrubby hills where she hunts the voles, the gophers, the small birds, like this darling fox-sparrow above, of whom I've been seeing much recently—it is a subspecies known as the Sooty Fox Sparrow that winters in the Bay Area from farther north, and what a sweet gift it is to get to meet them! (For beautiful photos of this bird, see here. I can't seem to quite get over the sweetness of those speckles.) Once, last winter, a wildlife camera (which I helped set up with Felidae and a tracking group called Catscapes, since we tracked bobcats and cougars) near this special grove of alders caught a shot of a lone mountain lion, passing gracefully at dawn. This is a special place, a place of old magic. When I visited it last, it was so brown and gray and dead I felt tight and a little sick in my stomach, a panic beginning to rise in the back of my throat at the hot sky, only blue, empty of clouds, desert dry. But after even two days of scattered rain—so little, in fact, that I heard people joking that the poor clouds were trying hard, but they'd quite forgotten what it meant, to rain— the land began to move, like my own spirit did, and throw its whole heart up toward that water.

I tell you, those weeks of stark blue skies were so unsettling to me (downright awful, though everyone kept saying the weather was so gorgeous—and it was, in its way, in the way any jewel-bright thing is beautiful, but somehow too bright) that after that first speckling of rain, just enough to wet the streets, when the skies finally changed, I positively drooled over the clouds. I've never appreciated them so much as that first day when I noticed them again, big sculpted creatures migrating the skies, nomads from far over the ocean, far over the mountains, changing form as they travel but also somehow always themselves. 

I spent half an afternoon gaping at their shapes, up in our attic windowseat, which I've since renamed the Cloud Window in their honor.

I brought my knitting, and my tea, and my watercolors, and basked in the cloud-light.

They are a gentle relief, clouds. Sometimes the sky is too big and too blue and too bright, and we need clouds to wrap us, to darken our days so that we may slow, and quiet.

At long last, just a week ago, a bigger cloud mass moved in. It came all the way from Hawaii— I shall never think of clouds the same again, after all of my slightly obsessive weather-researching, the clouds great intrepid travelers of our seas and skies, coming thousands of miles, trying to keep the rain held in their bellies—and, dear readers, it was a downpour.

I'd been so grateful for any wet at all, even the tiny gentle drops; any is better than none, I said, but those small tastes of rain wer making me long for the thrash of storms, the release of those clouds, breaking open upon us, torrential. I was filled with memories of big childhood storms, or storms when I was sixteen, and newly in love, and wandering out in the torrents.

Last weekend, that great creature, a Storm, finally visited us.

The radish seeds in our garden burst up through the mud.

The new raspberry leaves gathered, and pushed out.

The cleavers went rampant.

The birds came out in droves, shaking their feathers with what I can only call glee in all the wet, puffed and gloating like this towhee, and like I was, sitting out in it with the raindrops falling down my nose, a mad wet laughing sight, I have no doubt, to my neighbors, holding my hands up to it all.

I went for a walk to the lovely apothecary around the corner from our home, just to have an excuse to walk in it, and came back with the new-blooming violets which I discovered grow in patches right across from the beautiful hawthorn tree I found some time ago growing boldly from a sidewalk.

I tell you, the first true rain got me into a quite a flurry of joy. I put the milk on the stove, I melted chocolate, I filled up the silver chocolate pot, I ascended the ladder to the Cloud Window, I reveled. Really, there is no other word for it. I was meant to be working at the same time, and I did (a little) but mostly I drank a whole pot of chocolate and opened all the windows and grinned.

I anointed my chocolate-shot teacup with a beautiful elixir purchased from my friend, the lovely Asia Suler of One Willow Apothecaries, called White Sleigh, made to stir up all the magics of winter. It was the perfect thing, as this rain, I think, was a magic of the highest degree.

Raising a cup to the rain!

The next day, my love and I set out for Mt. Tamalpais, the beautiful Bay mountain where we both grew up. On that day, Mt. Tam received ten inches of rain— much more than Oakland's 2 inches (the mysteries of microclimates!)— and we were out beneath them, drenched to the bone within about 30 minutes, and laughing wildly. I did not bring my camera—if I had, it would have been ruined! And it was the sort of day no camera should touch, because the heart holds it all. It was a day of frothing rushing creeks, spontaneous waterfalls, getting down on hands and knees in the mud to exclaim over new pedicularis blooms, the trilliums nodding under the weight of raindrops, their white petals going transparent, the foam coming out of the redwood trunks from so much water (sacred stuff, it must be, redwood foam!) Simon has a keen eye for oyster mushrooms-- I never seem to see them until I am three feet away-- and so we came home with several large ones from logs fallen over rushing creeks, from the front porch of a woodrat nest... jewels made from rain and dead wood.



The only photo I captured was the aftermath, as we dried off at Simon's family home up the redwood canyons—and somehow, it turned out like this, capturing the feeling of that gushing rain better than any straight image could have.

I visited the creeks of Mill Valley later on with my father, and while I have no photographs, let me tell you, they were rivers, muddy and flooding and higher than I ever remember them. We stood behind the park where we all used to come and skip rocks when I was small, and crooned at that rushing muscular ribbon of water.

In the East Bay hills, the soaproots are now positively bursting, and the deer know it too. They seem to have munched almost every bunch I've seen!

At long last, not just the sides of trails but whole hillsides are starting to shudder and glow with green grass.

What a blessed sight it is.

New wild cucumber vines have appeared, as if out of nowhere, as they are wont to do.

And last years wooly blooms are at last put to rest.

Everywhere the raindrops look to me like the most precious of pearls, more beloved to my heart than any gem could be, because they coax each seed open once more, and my own heart too.

And bless her, my old friend Nettle, she seemed to laugh at me, and then stung all of my hands in scolding, saying—how could you ever doubt me? I will always return.

I know that California is still in a severe drought. Our rainfall is minimal compared to previous years. I know, the ever cynical News Folk tell us to not celebrate too soon, we still need another ten inches or so to be "normal,"but only two weeks ago, they also said that the High Pressure Ridge wasn't going to budge— and then, this, this miracle of flooding creeks.

So I am hoping, and I am bowing down to the rain, and I am bowing down to the cloud caravans that brought it from far over the ocean. We love you,  I want to say to them, we raise our hands to you and kiss each raindrop-world that lands, a gift, in our palms.