The Gold-Blue Winds of the Chileno Valley

Last week my love and I house-sat for a few dreamy days in the Chileno Valley, beautiful rolling dairy-cow land that is as gold as desert sand at this drought time of year. The little ranch house was close enough to the ocean (over a few ridges) that a soft hot wind blew almost constantly, moving the willows and the pear trees and bringing peace beyond words to our limbs.  I felt a little drunk on that sun!

Pennyroyal is growing like made right now in all the pasture-land, sun-glowing and fragrant little balls of nectar for the happy bees.

And the long sun seemed to turn each simple thing into its essence.

The silken scarlet of pomegranate blossoms in that late summer light had stories of Persephone tucked under their thick skins, stories of summer sun brought through into the winter.

At night the stars were thick and falling, and the Milky Way was clear. We live in the trees now so it was a great treat to lay out under that bowl of sky and be in the presence of so many stars. It would be a lovely thing to make a nightly practice of, turning your body up to the firmament. It humbles immensely, it fills me with joy.

In the morning ocean fogs lay down over the cows in the Valleys and dissipated as the sun rose.

The vegetables went crazy with glee at all that sun in their small planter boxes.

And there was a perfect bench for afternoon sits with knitting, or books, and cups of tea, or glasses of wine.

And chairs under the olive tree for more tea (a great staple in my life...), and more reading.

Calendula blossoms in the garden held perfectly the big sun of that land.

And the blue of the sky was total Blueness.

Lizards sunned themselves like we did and their tiny babies darted out regularly near our feet, small summer dragons. 

Living in the forest and the shade a lot of the time, it is amazing how a good dose of sun and open blue sky can fill you up, make you feel just like the calendula flowers and pomegranate blossoms and squash blossoms and olive trees: open and fruitful and all aglow. Sometimes at this time of summer when all the hills are so dry and easily catch fire and many trees and bushes are dormant (such as the chaparral plants), I start to get impatient for autumn, for the fertile forces of rain and the coming cold, which I love. However, I am so grateful for those few days in the Chileno Valley, for they steeped me fully in the slow glory of the drought season, which has its own pace, its own poetry, its own precious smells and hot winds and blue blue sky.

The Wisdom of Cobwebby Thistles & the Young Brush Rabbits in the Canes

The young brush rabbits are about, darting through the lush salmonberry canes. Oh, oh, to be so small, so soft, and to fit inside those thickets! What a world it must be in there. A gateway to the Otherworld, I always thought as a girl (and, well, still do!).

It seems the summertime is already upon us here—the hills have gone dry gold already, except where the cows graze them, and the fog is thickening out along the coast, muting the land to gentle pastels, to a dream of sand and dune and lupine.

“In that first hardly noticed moment in which you wake,
coming back to this life from the other
more secret, moveable and frighteningly honest world
where everything began,
there is a small opening into the new day
which closes the moment you begin your plans.

What you can plan is too small for you to live.
What you can live wholeheartedly will make plans enough
for the vitality hidden in your sleep.

To be human is to become visible
while carrying what is hidden as a gift to others.
To remember the other world in this world
is to live in your true inheritance.

You are not a troubled guest on this earth,
you are not an accident amidst other accidents
you were invited from another and greater night
than the one from which you have just emerged.

Now, looking through the slanting light of the morning window
toward the mountain presence of everything that can be
what urgency calls you to your one love?
What shape waits in the seed of you
to grow and spread its branches
against a future sky?

Is it waiting in the fertile sea?
In the trees beyond the house?
In the life you can imagine for yourself?
In the open and lovely white page on the waiting desk?”

-David Whyte

Oh, what beautiful beautiful words. I've encountered them more than once these past weeks and so I thought I would share them here. "To remember the other world in this world"— here it is in the young brush rabbits loping across the dunes, the snakes napping in tall grass, the beach strawberries holding gently a network of roots over the sand, the lupines almost unbearably sweet to smell (somehow they smell sweeter than ever). Each one knowing perfectly the seed of itself.

Here, that other world, that opening into the new day: the heart of the wild dune strawberry, star-perfect, where the bee knows just how to land.

Each wild one, living its Way out on the land, is an opening to that Other World that is nested into this one. The blue and yellow lupines, seeking moisture, sloughing off salt winds, smelling intoxicating, turning this dune rambler completely away from the tracks she was following to touch their blossoms and bury her face in them—they wake daily to the bumble bees and the ocean, they move through time with all of their being Right There, no Plan except to open when it is time to open, to lose petals when it is time to lose petals, to start again.

I think we have much to learn from them, these plants with their roots down, ever opening their arms, time and again.

And my goodness, if this cobwebby thistle (cirisum occidentale) isn't himself a magnificent unfurling doorway into the magic of the everyday, and of the languid drying summer, I don't know what is!