The Autumnhouse

A field vole (c) Barrie H. Kelly

Vole, who lives at the root of an old fallen pine, knows the way in.

Her doorway is humble and easy to miss, but if you leave marigolds, or the last gold leaves of the buckeye, or the first acorn, at the root of a snag, she will most likely appear, plump with the last of summer's seeds, black-eyed, and kind. She will show you that the doorway is just here, through the hole in the rootplace of the tree which she uses regularly but which is also suddenly a smooth-carved, rounded door made of pine, with a bronze knob made of the bronze of ancient women who long ago tempered it among the embers of your blood, and now Vole is a plump, kind-eyed woman in a great tawny-furred shawl, opening that door for you, holding out a hand of welcome, gesturing you through. 

Inside, you are in a root, hollowed and smoothed and snug, a house that smells of ancient resins and fresh humus, nuts roasting, woodsmoke. There are windows, odd and random, glimpses of the afternoon's long gold light, the slantwise shade of rich sky blue, a buckeye heavy with shining nuts. The fire is new in the round-bellied hearth. Hazelnuts roast on top, and an earthenware bowl within, bubbling scents of corn and bean and sage and a hundred savory roots, a thousand. Only a Vole-woman knows how many. In the center of the round root room is a cushion woven thick of green and brown and yellow wool, and beside it a table made of a polished branch where all manner of wooden birds are perched. The woman settles back onto that cushion, taking a thin, sharp knife and a bit of wood from her belt. She begins to whittle and carve, singing high whistled vole songs that are almost too strange for your ears to follow. 

Varied thrush are coming, coming, coming through the night. Varied thrush are winging, winging, winging with the light. She chants as she carves. Pleiades are rising, varied thrush are flying, Scorpion has gone, Scorpion has gone. As she carves and sings, the root is no longer a snug house but a deep rush of sky and star and feathers. It is the inside of a thrush-breast, speckled as night, pulsing with a compass magnet and a map so old the stars sing to it like the singing vole. There the earth calls south, south. The stars have changed to gloaming. There is a place the thrush knows and flies toward, right into the window of the autumn house, guided by a thousand thousand ancestors. For the briefest moment the thrush flies right into your hands—a big songbird, orange and bluegray in painted swathes, with a song of two tones in one note that opens you up sidelong and brings the acorns swelling everywhere in the trees, and every ghost in your blood released to feast at last among them, welcomed home. 

The  Enclosed Garden, by Meinrad Craighead

Vole-woman stops singing. The house is only a root again, warm and safe. The hazelnuts have roasted. She places the wooden thrush she's carved in a window that peeks out onto a different forest where the stags are wild-antlered, big-chested, weaving after the long-necked and prancing does. Then she hands you a nut, hot and crisp and oily, the papery husk of it flaking into your hands. As you eat it, there is a sound around you like the rustle of falling leaves—buckeye, bigleaf maple, curls of madrone bark, old pine needles. It's a skin, vaguely shaped like you but also like a snake. Vole-woman scoops it up in a deft hand and throws it into the fire as you eat more nuts and listen to the thrushes as they arrive, singing autumn in to roost. 

A Samhain of Coyote, Deer and Mist

On this old, dark, deep holiday—called Samhain in the ancient Gaelic traditions— which is a celebration of the dead, the ancestors, the harvest brought in, and also of a new year, I wish upon you all the blessings of coyote and deer, the kind of heavy mist that brings the colors of the land out, spiderwebs hung with rain, the tangled bare branches of buckeyes, the new bodies of mushrooms, springing up like perfect cities.

I find it beautiful, and instructive too, that in older, land-rooted traditions, the new year was celebrated at this time of gathering darkness, when all the buckeyes and the grasses and the apple trees are putting their energy down in their roots, for the dark sleep of winter. By the time our western New Year rolls around in January, new grass is already poking up its green hair, flowers are starting to open up again. We forget that all the work has already been going on, down there where the dead go—leaf mulch and fox and worm, the bones and flesh of all things. In the darkest time, new seeds are gathering up their tiny hearts to grow. What a different mindset this forces one into! To acknowledge that all growing things need first to root in the humus, the dark soil, to germinate beneath the ground, in the underworld.

Today I drove out to Point Reyes to look for bobcat tracks (it's beginning, to me, to feel like hunting for treasure, for little metacarpal pad grails). It was misty and damp and dark, and all the creatures showed themselves.

Let me just say, this was almost a car-accident in the making. I saw him dart off the road ahead of me, and, well, I just stopped the car and got out! Good thing no one was behind me (it is a narrow country road after all)— I was downright quivering with the joy of seeing this beautiful coyote so close. (This is a problem I sometimes have--driving slightly off the road to peer out at hawks, etc.)

He was no more than ten feet from me, and we held one another's gaze for quite some time before he began to slink away, glancing back several times over his shoulder. Myself, I was in a state of mild euphoria, staring after, wishing so badly to be able to hear him truly, to speak back. He is a trickster, a seducer too, that cream and gold and grey coyote with his almond-elegant eyes, watching with a tiny smile.

The bobcat of Abbott's Lagoon, padding past misted marsh rosemary. He (or she-- or perhaps a mother with adolescents?) uses the edge of the lagoon, it's marshy border, daily, hunting the waterfowl.

Quite a busy lady! These tracks are probably from this morning, between rain and mist.

And we surprised this doe while she was eating her afternoon meal. She only blinked at us with perfectly black eyes, those lashes delicate and tapered.

The spiderwebs held onto the mist, making their own small universes, places for chaparral-imps to lay down for a rest.

And the cows, far away between the hills, grazed gently, with black calves bounding between them.

In this dark turning toward winter, in this time of wild storms and the remembrance of the dead, the animals are beside us, always just over the fence, watching. Samhain is thought to be the day when the veil between worlds is thinnest, when ghosts and old spirits and magical creatures pass through the mist. I don't know if there were spirits out today as I walked the Abbott's Lagoon fog, but the wild things were certainly wandering, with that rich dark animal otherworld in their eyes. That is a deep magic, and we all walk amidst it every day-- past the pigeons on city streets, the hawks hunting over freeways, the mountain lions way up in the hills.

A deep dark delightful pagan new year to you all!