Tidal Runes

There is a language the world speaks, and I think I have been listening for it my whole life. For a long time I thought it was only something that existed in the fantasy novels so beloved to me as a girl, where women spoke with birds and knew the whisperings of plants and the medicine they carried. But I know it for something real now, of this world, the one I live in, the one my body moves through every day and every starry night, the one that feeds and sustains me in every way. I know it for something we humans once knew how to understand, and still can. I know that the books I read as a girl preserved, under the guise of magic, what all of our ancestors knew, if you follow the rivers of your blood back far enough. 

Now, the voice of the thrush in the hazel tree, the spotted towhee rooting in the huckleberry, the patterns left by kelp on the shore, have started to become deeply familiar. Kin, and beloved. I do not know what they are saying, but I know that what they are speaking, and that their meaning is one of the most precious things in this world. 

One day last month while on the Mendocino coast for a family reunion, where my father's family is from back to the 1860's, I stopped in my tracks on the seashore. The tide had washed up a collection of words. In wave-wracked kelp and mussel and crab and bone I saw them. Ocean runes whose meaning I did not know, but whose shape I recognized for something oracular, something spoken by the sea.  

Looking around I began to see words everywhere. In lines cut by time and pressure in sedimentary rock. In the tide-cast of driftwood, like the yarrow stalks of the ancient I Ching.

Every time the waves rushed up the shore, indigo and bracing with the summertime California Current, they cast the runes anew. Battered kelp stalks crissed and crossed with the skull of a gull into fresh patterns. I was transfixed. In me an old woman stirred; the old woman who knows the reading of such things, and always has.

So often we humans think of the idea of divination as a communication that only concerns our own lives. A question about health, a relationship, a career choice.

But as I watched the tide move in and out I was struck by a wholly different possibility. That originally, oracles like those who prophesied by the rustling leaves of the oaks of Dodona, were translating a non-human language into human terms; that what it said was not about our affairs at all, but rather about our relationship to the oak, to the wooddove, to the mountain or the sea, and theirs to earth herself.

I began to suspect that those old sibyls were attuned to what the ocean or the oak said, on their own terms. Kings might come and ask about the fates of wars, and the sibyls did their best to prophecy them, but what the tidal runes speak of is not the destiny of men but the destiny of oceans, and the lives of kelp and sea snail, seal, oystercatcher, bladderwrack and loon. 

That a word written in driftwood, shell and kelp-stalk is as old as time, and alive; a saltmade rune that is a doorway into other worlds, the ones that live mostly deeply within this world, just beyond our normal sight. 

Gutted sandcrab, moonbead of jellyfish, cross of saltgrass, stone and dulse, green moss marbles and coiled calligraphy of rotting kelp; what word does the solstice tide spell through you, cast upon the shore? 

I think it is a lifetime's work, to understand the first word of such incantations. 

But simply to be on the lookout for them is its own pleasure and beginning; to rest your eyes on patterns made by wave and time and wind, and know that they are slow and ancient words spoken in the many tongues of the living world, more unhindered and alive than any words we have ever known.

Words that abalones carry under their pink-bound shells; words that urchins chant over and again from their secret orange navels; words that carry all the holy strangeness of this earth, where looking into the low tide pools of the summer solstice while gathering seaweed is to scry another world, where all of precious life on earth began. 

It is no secret. All power is one in source and end, I think. Years and distances, stars and candles, water and wind and wizardry, the craft in a man's hand and the wisdom in a tree's root: they all arise together. My name, and yours, and the true name of the sun, or a spring of water, or an unborn child, all are syllables of the great word that is very slowly spoken by the shining of the stars. There is no other power. No other name.

- Ursula K. Le Guin, from A Wizard of Earthsea

Cast out, little brindled snail, upon the slicklands of the tidal kombu; may your way be well and fathomless. May we bend our heads to watch the words you leave behind in your iridescent wake, and in that bending, pray.

Off the Train, into the Gooseberry Patch

Well, I had meant to share with you my long, slow train journey down through the heart of California to visit a dear friend in Santa Barbara--photographs of burnished gold hills and lone oaks, thick riparian corridors full of cottonwoods, strawberry fields green contrasting dust dry ridges, oil rigs off the coast, oil being pumped on the coast, old train shacks and herons in drainage canals amid the subdivisions, accompanied by my train scribbled musings from my notebook, my rambling thoughts about the stories of an older California to be glimpsed between drought-gold grasses and leaning oaks, sloughs and fog banks and ranch houses out in the open without cover for miles. About the soothing pace of trains, as compared to planes or cars. But alas, I've just lost everything off my computer since last December, due to a mysterious software failure and my own carelessness at having not looked into why my external hard-drive wasn't backing things up properly... So my photographs out train windows of blue sea and kelp beds, graffiti at the train stops and the sudden hills of San Luis Obispo--well, they are all gone, poof! Which is all a very good reminder of the strange unreality of all the things that exist here, on the internet, inside our computers, and how we relate to them. How we can get sucked very deeply into this odd dream-machine, which does the dreaming for us; how things lost here don't feel like things lost in physical reality--a photo album, say, or a collection of vinyls. It reminds me of the general attitude of disposability we have in our world, which informs how we relate to so many things. 

The blue kelp filled sea, the drought-dead cliffs of Santa Barbara (photograph courtesy of Elsinore Smidth Carabetta)

Luckily, of course, all of my stories and the three novels I've written to date were safely stored in emails. Those lost would have been devastating; but it reminds me that much of what I do on this computer is somewhat disposable, and shouldn't that be a lesson? I know I can take dozens of photographs, hundreds, and so each individual image becomes less precious. When we can read snippets of ten wonderfully written articles or stories at once, and a hundred more just beyond the click of a mouse, their value shifts. I don't know what to do about all of this; I'm only noticing, and pondering, and sulkily wishing I could share that photo of the train snaking around a long curve through the mountains with you, or the hellish beauty of an oil field north of San Luis Obispo as the sun set, illuminating the pumpjacks ceaselessly hauling oil from their wells like terrible chained creatures desperately doing their duty, and desperately hating it. What it is that oil means in our culture and world (speaking of disposability) and how that one field knew the whole story. 

I've been listening voraciously to a series of podcasts called Unlearn and Rewild, and in one interview, the eloquent Zen Master Dr. Susan Murphy Roshi says something to the effect of—"we are addicted to the absolutely extraordinary energy of oil, all the many, many things that oil can produce for us." This struck me very deeply; how powerful, how seductive, oil is, this ancient, deep-buried, condensed energy straight from sun in the dead bodies of primordial plants and animals--how much its power thrills us, even as it destroys us, like staring too long at that great sun. How can we treat such a thing as disposable? My god, it's the blood of time, and yet look how we treat it! Perhaps this is because, like many of the things stored on our computers or found on the internet, we don't interact with any of it directly, with our bodily senses; all of it is somehow abstracted. Even when I pump gas into my car, and a little spills, that toxic smell; still I can't feel in my body what oil really is—dug up refined primordial sunshine. It's too far gone for me to know it, and my lungs reject the scent.

Well. Instead of these things, what I am left with is a handful of photographs my dear old friend Elsinore took. How we scrambled down a dry creekbed and found a patch of wild mint, growing with more vigor and health than the mint in my garden has ever managed. How we gathered pocket-loads of black sage, which smells of sun and peace. 

How in that creekbed we found the most beautiful, robust wild gooseberries I've ever seen, striped like hard candies from another time. How we popped one, just one, out of its spiny skin and sucked the flesh and seeds like the squirrels. How tart-sweet, how utterly delightful.

Ribes amarum (bitter gooseberry)

How the ocean was warmer down south, and calmer, and when the sun came out, a dark lapis blue, heady with kelp beds, so different from the paler green-gray-blue of the ocean up here.

Perhaps all of this is to say that it is the small, sweet and slow things that keep us sane. Feet in the tide, hands full of sage and mint, tongue tart with gooseberries from the creekbed. How we value and love the things we can take in directly with our bodies and hearts. These, we will not toss aside. In the end, it is the things we make roots for that we will stand to save. We cannot save the world, but we can each strive to save home, and after all, together a hundred hundred million homes (of human, of seal, of fox, of spider) make a world.

Mendocino Town of Occult Nasturtiums and Kindly Ghosts

My great grandmother Edith Irene DeVilbiss grew up on this Mendocino coastline, outside a little town now called Rockport (then called Cotineva). She grew up on a sheep ranch that ran down to the edge of the ocean, and rode through those coastal prairie bluffs with her long black hair flying.  Highway 1 went right through the ranch, with orchards on one side and a way down to the ocean for surf-fishing on the other. At my yearly family reunions, which are held about 15 miles south of Rockport outside the old town of Fort Bragg, where my father's mother grew up (and my grandfather just a little ways inland, in the redwood-rimmed town of Willits), it's always repeated that Edith was the best bareback horse-rider in Mendocino county, and the prettiest, too. I've always felt a special love for this wild coastline, and for sheep, and riding bareback, which I haven't done in many years... so maybe it gets passed on in the blood! As well as the obsession, from an early age, with Irish-Celtic music, story, animistic lore. Black-haired Edith came from a thoroughly Irish mother (both of her mother's parents were from County Cork Ireland), and a French-Swiss-rooted dairy farming father... perhaps it makes sense!

I have been reading a most brilliant novel by Brian Doyle called Mink River, set in a small coastal town in Oregon. It is pure magic, something like Dylan Thomas's Under Milkwood, which is one of my favorite things, period, but in a landscape very similar to the wild northern coasts of California (all except for the redwoods, which are only through the very southern tip of Oregon. But the alders, the Douglas firs, the thimbleberries, the salmon, the black bears, the bobcats, the salmonberries, yes). And as I've been reading it in big delicious inhaling bites out on the back porch in the firshade with my morning tea, I've been thinking about the beautiful old town of Mendocino, up on the coast near where my great-grandmother is from. I was just there a few weeks back, around the solstice-full moon, for the annual family gathering, and spent an afternoon wandering the summer-misted town.

It has always felt so deliciously full of story to me, all these old structures preserved and nurtured into the 21st century, a thing that does not happen generally in this country. My grandma Teresa (daughter of Edith) has seen the town of Fort Bragg transform dramatically since she was a girl— a Chevron station in the place she lived as a child. The "old town" of Mendocino has been historically preserved on purpose, and thank heavens for that... When old buildings are allowed to stand, old stories stand with them, and places keep their layers, their many ragged skirts, their wild berry bushes. In any season Mendocino is full of vibrant blooming plants, because of the year-round ocean fog.

This is the kind of place I think of when I read Mink River, when I imagine the community in Under Milkwood. Everybody held together by the seasalt fog, the gray foxes nesting out in the wild mustard grass, the ghosts of old covered-wagon pioneers and Pomo medicine ladies roaming the cemetery at dawn.

I imagine little girls making stews of nasturtiums in the side-garden and playing make-believe: that heart-hole in the fence, if you look through it you'll see a fortune teller wearing a dress made of ocean waves; no you'll see a knight but he's also a coyote like that one we saw last week and his sword is made out of rat bones; ew that's gross, no I think there's a lady wearing a big fushcia for a dress and she has a pet bumblebee who flies next to her and knows all the gossip of the whole town. Mm, says the other girl, that's nice.

And here, at the bakery, the owner has put up sheets instead of curtains because she likes how crisp and  sturdy old cotton bedsheets are, the kinds made by hand half a century or more ago. And really behind those curtains though it appears she is only making croissants and morning buns and scones she is in fact also, in the wee hours when only a baker is awake and the whole town dark and quiet so that the sound of the ocean is very big, she is also making little dolls out of dough for each person in the town, piece by piece finding the right scraps and berries and thorns to make them with. Not to poke with pins and cause pain, no, but to heal them, to keep people from getting sick. And so for a whole generation, nobody does, not a even a cold...

In the peaked tower above the health food store, which is housed in the red chapel, lives a family of mourning doves and the ghost of a little orphan boy named Samuel whose father was a logger. Samuel has a ghost-pet, a marten, from the big old growth forest where his dad worked and took him out one day, the day of the Accident. Samuel is a nice ghost, though his marten sometimes goes out at night and steals pieces of people's slumber, so for a moment their dreams are full of the sharp crack-snap endlessness of an ancient redwood, falling and falling. Samuel likes the sad cooing of the doves, and the doves like how gentle his hand is when he touches their feathers, just like fog.

There's a boy in the highschool, his name is David, and he won over the prettiest girl, the quiet one always down at the ocean at lunchtime, who none of the other boys could figure out, though they thought she was quite nice on the eyes, and made jokes about her, because one day he stole a whole bowl full of these delicate white fuschias from outside the fancy jewelers where only tourists went, and strung them into a crown clumsily with his mom's thread and a needle, and gave it to her. Well, they called him a sissy after that, the boys did, during gym class, but David knew he was the luckiest out of all of them.

Of course those boys are the same ones who make jokes about the wooden lady's round breasts. Little do they know, as they smoke cigarettes and share a bottle of whisky in a paper bag roaming the empty streets at 3 am, while the baker, unbeknownst to anyone, is baking little perfect dolls of every last person, that the wooden lady can actually hear them, and is laughing to herself. Little do they know that she could consume each one of them with a single kiss, if she were only human. Instead, she busies herself eavesdropping on the guests who come to stay below her perch in the remnant watertower. She has picked up a lot of stories by now, and even more arguments, but if you stopped to ask her, she would only tell you of the very bawdiest or the most tragic.

Meanwhile, the matilija poppies are opening into the heat, the fog, the heat again, flanked by the blue islands of borage flowers. These poppies have much medicine in their bodies for sunburns, for rashes, for soothing any irritation in the inner and the outer skin...They are languishing under the feet of bumblebees. They are carrying on the honey of the world. They are trading old recipes and secrets with the foxgloves, whose knowings are sharp with poison, and vast as the orbits of planets.

The blue house at the edge of the town sits quiet and patient. Nightly he is lapped by ocean fog, and is often re-painted because of the salt-damage. Personally he prefers to be peeling and crystalline. That way little insects come to live under the peeling paint and then small birds follow to eat them, chipping, talking to him. He enjoys when the woodstove is lit in winter, and when the little feet of children run across the wood floors, or when they leave nose-smudges on the windows, or drawings made with fingers when steam from the kitchen has fogged up the glass. 

And finally, the ocean beyond the wild radish and hemlock, she sings nightly, she sings daily, her big waves full of foam and driftwood and kelp and the cosmological theories of sea lions, who have quite a lot of knowledge about the deepest depths. She holds the town in her fog, she gets into everybody's minds when they are falling asleep, her salty ancient tunes, her old crab-riddle heart.

*   *   *

It is good fun to wend and weave and sing my imagination through this old town I've visited so often since I was a little girl. Perhaps my great-grandmother Edith is singing there too, in my blood. When we start to imagine each thing as somehow living, even houses and streets and pieces of wood, each thing with its own stories, the whole landscape around us becomes so very magical, and very enlivening to the heart and mind, because I think we long to be in conversation with the whole world around us, and not just with ourselves, in our heads!

The Ocean's Dreams

In the strange, staged, black and white, red and blue, increasingly 1984-esque theater that is our presidential race, it is hard for me not to feel a deep sort of rage, hopelessness, fear. True, serious fear. For the rights of my gender most obviously, but also for the rights of all the things so beyond our societal gaze at this point that it is "ok" for men to say things like "the United States is the hope of the world" or "the United States is the best country on earth." I don't even want to get into this. I don't want to start slipping my angry typing fingertips down that pathway, beginning with-- how can a claim like that possibly be made, when our way of life is destroying the whole wild (and wide) world, human and animal and tree and seed and atmosphere, as we know it? I mean, seriously, there is some dark, devilish, poisoned blindness at work here. We are the land we inhabit, the land we are eating up and killing from all angles. There is no way around this. There is no way to talk about this without rage.

Instead: the ocean at North Beach, along the 10-mile strip of shore at Point Reyes, just shy of that perched lighthouse hundreds of steps down the quartzite cliffs, it has its own language and its own dreams. We are very small, compared to them.

But somebody built a sculpture of driftwood and kelp anyway, all silvery and smooth, with stains where the sea foam, algae-green, had dyed old bark. They left it, an offering, facing the wide white thrashing tide, a tide so strong it would take any of us down and in so fast we would barely have time to struggle. To me, it looked like words, the oldest kind, runic, sung back to the ocean, saying: here, I am honoring you. I am seeing you. You are worth my songs, my written words, my art, my attention-- you are the salty cold-tossed source of all life, you are the hush in all of our ears when we sleep at night. We have filled you with gyre-islands of trash. We are pushing you to flood at all your edges. I am so sorry. I don't know what to do.

In the center, this somebody-- there is such beauty in the anonymity of wild, found art, the ego-less-ness of it—arched and tied sea-pale sticks with bits of bull kelp and gull feather into a shape like a series of interlocking eyes, like an odd driftwood dreamcatcher, a net for the ocean's dreams to drift through, rest within, peer out of.

Why do we so like to stand driftwood upright in sand and make odd-shaped, wind-curved, sea-tossed sculptures or huts at the lip of all that thrash and wildness? There must be something in us that can't help but leave these edge-walking offerings, this sad longing for connection, for conversations we don't think we are supposed to want to have, with things like pelicans and plovers, bits of kelp, foam coming in, whole tidelines, whole cliffsides.

What does the ocean dream?

Our words and our art and our actions must leave room for this, for such questions. Of course they are already considered hopelessly romantic, poetic, fantastical, dreamy, irrational, downright dangerously ignorant and childish, the list goes on. But in desperate seriousness, in true earnest, what does the ocean dream? 

I don't know if this has much to do with politics, presidents, Iranian nuclear weapons, oil, the economy, but it does have to do with what it means, in the very bone and blood and soul, to be human-- to be part of the conversation with a more than human world. When I was sixteen, I wrote the first poem I was proud of, called "The Order of the Machine," while sitting on the steps of the back porch, near the old tangles of Cecil Bruner roses I grew up playing inside of. It ends like this:

"Even as our future buckles straight
I will not let the woods
relinquish my heart
nor the fog my soul.
I will not let the Order of the Machine
steal the waves, crush the wildflowers
starve the river stones.
There is yet hope
in the foam of the full moon
in the careless green of apple leaves
in the light between two palms."

I have no idea how to go about following my own sixteen year old advice, but I believe it even more now than I did then. It seems to be that it must begin, at least, by staying in the conversation. As an artist, that means the words I use, the pen and keypad I write with-- occult, magical things, remember they have their own sorcery in the creation myths of old--- they are also offerings to the wild things around me. The hermit thrush on the fence, the stag I came face to face with this morning in the rain, the ocean, the soil still under the busy avenues and shoulder to shoulder houses of Berkeley, the dandelions poking out of every spare crack, the hawks hunting from streetlamp poles above highway 580, the bits in each of us that call out to the ocean-thrash and the crow that swoops on black wings. This is the Mother Tongue.

A witch-woman in the green foam line.

Insect and maybe bird-scrawled, this is a truly wild text, a constellation, maze, set of runes. A word, sung back to the ocean.