Hands & Hearth: Shorn

Every two to three moons, the venerable Hawthorn must stand to have his fur shorn. I know it is not nearly so great a thing to shear a rabbit as it is to shear a sheep—and I've at least gotten as far as flipping a ram and holding him still with my knees, his horns to one side, which was so difficult it made my legs almost give out—but I am still getting used to the process, and so is Hawthorn. With an angora, it is very important not to delay when the wool starts coming out all over the hutch, because they are prone to "wool block" (essentially an enormous fur ball in the gut which they cannot cough up like a cat, and which will cause them to starve to death if not noticed soon enough—and rabbits like to hide any discomfort until the last moments, likely a survival tactic from those days, still close to the surface of their skin, when they were wild). So although he isn't very keen once I reach his chest or his belly, and I haven't yet managed to flip him on his back—apparently rabbits will go "tharn," to use a word from Watership Down (a state of paralyzed fear) when held down on their backs, which makes me feel awfully bad, and between that and Hawthorn's fierce claws, so far it can't be done—I can report that I am getting better at it. And so is he.

This past new moon, I sheared his wool for the third time, managing to cut it much closer, and preserve longer hanks of the lustrous stuff. I didn't actually mean to align the shearing with the phase of the moon, but I do hope the serendipity of it will encourage his wool to grow back thick and strong, as it does our own, and the seeds we sow. It took me until this round of shearing to really relax, and of course, once I am calm, so is Hawthorn. 

Hawthorn came into our lives because I was enamored of the idea of keeping a small creature whose wool I could shear to spin yarn. I did not anticipate quite how much I would fall in love with him, so that the act of shearing has become also an act of reverence—that this little being, fed nasturtiums and comfrey and raspberry leaves, and let loose to have adventures through the yard, creates upon his back every season a crop of the most silken thick fur imaginable. What a gift, what bounty! I'm sure those who keep animals feel the same—that there is something miraculous about the generosity of this exchange, no matter the histories of domestication. That the bees produce honey and the goats milk, the chickens eggs, and though some may argue coercion and domination in this pact, at our best I think these relationships humble us and remind us that we can't do this thing, this human thing, alone. Whether we are hunters or farmers, we take from the land and the animals in order to live; we need them, desperately. And we also need to be in right relation to them. But that's a story for another day, a deep and tangled one.

As for angoras, the harvest of their wool (which of course has some very negative sides in commercial settings) has more the ring of a strange, far northern, mountainous fairy tale about it. Hawthorn's is so soft and thick it lifts away from my fingers in the slightest wind. According to what seems to me a mildly legendary piece of history (for nobody is quite certain), angoras originated in the Carpathian mountains, probably in a slightly less furry state, and were tended there by mountain tribes who found their wool to be very warm and softer than that of the goats they also kept. Much later, in the 1700's, angoras found their way to France and England aboard Turkish ships bound from the port of Ankara, hence the name.

I don't know if this is true, but I do know that angora wool is so hot spun and knitted up into a sweater on its own that such a garment is unwearable, except in literally arctic or high mountain winters. Angora is better blended with wool, or made into smaller items, such as hats and scarves and gloves.

In any case, here it is, part of the Hawthorn harvest, his wool a tri-color, silken gift with the echoes of mountain bells and snowy peaks within it. What gratitude I feel, for the fur of animals.

And here he is, looking like a raggedy hare, except for his back end, which still needs one more trim. I think he's pleased, because now he can romp through the deep bushes and emerge with slightly fewer burrs and bits of leaves stuck all over the place. 

Walk With Me Past the Fennel Tree

You've probably guessed that my longer than usual silence here has to do with Elk Lines, and the rhythm this big beautiful new writing project brings to my days, filling them up to the brim. Well, the good news is--the first installment is finished, and has been sent out to its faraway subscribers beyond the oceans (and northern borders)! Eda, the Elk People and I have had a wonderfully intense month getting to know each other, and it feels a fresh and tender thing, like a birth, to send out the first pages of their tale through the air and over the water, to the hands of faraway readers. 

I was struck today, eyeing the first pile of these wild Lines (pictured here in my summer Felting Studio...) by how grateful I feel to all my readers and subscribers; that this is what I fill my days with (including all the frantic printer escapades, post office debacles and late-night wax-sealing meltdowns)...Thank you & bless you all; I put my whole heart into these tales, and into each little brown-paper parcel too. This week I feel like a dandelion seed-head sending the little ships of her seeds far out into the world, giving a little dance in the wind. 

Besides the long days of hand writing pieces of Elk Lines, typing them up, editing, drawing the Feral Palm Reading that accompanies it, I share my daytimes with this darling fellow, my beloved Hawthorn, who has grown up into such a handsome and rambunctious young buck, always escaping his pen to have adventures in the fennel bush, or to steal bites of other people's kale, or make himself a bedchamber in the sage. Long stints hunched over my little writing table (a lovely old Victorian letter-box my aunt gave me several years ago, tilted upright and so at a perfect angle for pen and paper) are broken by rambles in the yard with Hawthorn, who does indeed bring light and infectious happiness to the heart whenever one is near him. 

He leads the way, and I wander. Right now, the garden is a jungle, well and truly.  Those bean poles stand a good eight or so feet high, and I think the fennel is almost there with them. A fennel tree. This beautiful fecund vegetable plot (below) is tended by our landlords, who live through the main entrance of our big old Victorian home with their four sweet children. Regularly the little ones are sent on missions for string beans and tomatoes, to feed the chickens or collect the eggs, and I am privy to all sorts of strange and wondrous child-conversations as I sit in the shade with my notebook, or a needle and thread. Of course when Hawthorn is about, I may sometimes be seen with a small caravan of children behind me as we follow his hopping through the garden.

The amaranth grows in rich magenta spires, and puts me in mind of some great trunked being.

Old grandmother Comfrey has grown her leaves nearly as big as my torso.

The fennel seems to live in the sky, a gathering of yellow stars.

And the dark and elegant poppies have turned from lustrous purple silk to the old magic of seedpods.

The apricots and peaches are all but done on the garden trees, and the apples are starting to ripen. Nothing quite like a warm apple right off the tree, and ever-so-slightly under-ripe, so that it's tartness puckers the tongue.

In our own garden plot, the tulsi (holy basil) is vibrant and near to seeding.

Both the tulsi and the motherwort, harvested above, I grew from seed this year; I'd never grown either of them at all to begin with, and to have known them since they were tiny unfurlings, to their full medicinal splendor--what a treat! The motherwort is away in tincture form now. She is one of my greatest plant-friends, working wonders for moon-cycle related tension, anxiety, hysteria, and cramps. Hawthorn isn't especially fond of the taste of motherwort, as it is very, very bitter. I've gotten used to it, perhaps because I associate the flavor with an almost immediate sense of calm and grounded-ness, as if my mother has just given me a hug. But otherwise, this rabbit truly is a small herbalist. His diet is entirely medicinal, not on purpose but simply because rabbits adore herbs! Nasturtium, raspberry leaf, comfrey, plantain, dandelion, sorrel, basil, lemon balm, rose, borage, mallow—the main cuisine.

And speaking of Hawthorn, he is also the inspiration for a new piece of writing—a column, possibly for the rest of the year (though this is not certain yet) in the Plant Healer Magazine! As it stands now, this column will be for children and adults, and it will be the tale of a rabbit and his young herbalist companion, and all the thing she learns from him and from the Rabbit-witches who live in the brush. And by way of a small hint—the tale, which will include some plant illustrations, and which will be filled with herbal learnings, will also be set in the world of the Leveret Letters, in Wild Folk Land and Country, in the early days of the Holy Fool's Inn. Some of you will know what I'm talking about...In any event, I'm quite excited and honored to be sharing these writings in Plant Healer! 

Otherwise, I've been trying to balance the work of the head with the work of the hands. While writing with pen and paper does come from the hands, there is something different that seems to happen in the heart and body when other tasks are undertaken, such as the preparation of herbal medicine, or textile-making. Near the full moon, a dear friend and I gathered rosemary, yarrow and comfrey from the garden and made a salve with beeswax and coconut oil.



We named it "Wise Wound Salve," because the triad of herbs all have an old, strong crone feeling about them, the wisdom of the ancient grandmothers. And standing over the stove, stirring a pot of strained oil with shavings of beeswax—this feels an old, old, task, one that lives in the blood. Shortly thereafter, my lovely six-year-old downstairs neighbor came up to see if I had anything for burns, and she went away again with a little cap full of Wise Wound Salve! It rather made my day to actually have something useful to give her (though of course I would rather she hadn't burned her finger on a pot!). Both comfrey and yarrow in particular are excellent for burns, though probably best made into a cold compress/poultice rather than a salve. Still, one uses what is on hand, eh?

My busy fingers have also been at work sewing and embroidering and felting in my outdoor "textile studio," where the haystacks are my side-table.

These are soon to be up for sale at Wild Talewort--new story cases, embroidered with antlers, to hold Elk Lines! 

Something so nourishing happens in the mind when the hands are the ones literally telling the story against cloth, or wool, or chopped herbs, and the narrating brain can have a little rest. As I know I have already written many times, there certainly is a reason for the saying, "to spin a yarn"— as the hands make thread, the mind is free to roam and to wander.

Decembering: Touching Winter With My Hands

Sometimes, all it takes to bring a small seed of calm into my heart is to lay down my pen and paper and do something simple and tangible with my hands— chop rosehips from the garden and pack them into a jar with brandy, knit, run outside and lay my fingers and my palms against the dirt, sit by the peach tree with my hands against the ground until the first star twinkles out at dusk. This winter-time is stirring up an especially strong and old yearning in my soul for the humble, but deeply vital, sensual pleasures of hand and needle, hand and herb, foot and path, foot and frost, eye and moss, eye and rose-thorn branch, nose and winter air, nose and smell-of- damp-coast-live-oak, heart and living land. These things seem to feed the rooting and hibernating animal part of my body and mind.

I think what I mean is, we live in a highly cerebral, analytical, "rational" world, in a culture that does not recognize that when the cold and dark come, even in coastal California, our bodies and our minds long for quiet, for the restfulness of hands-to-wool, hands-to-root, hands-to-watercolors (regardless of whether one is any good with them, ahem). It is time to take shelter in the hearth of home, to make warmth, to make healing remedies in whatever way suits you—soups, tinctures, songs, baths—to let your hands create while your mind, for a little while, can dream into the dark rootings of the winter world, the winter land.

We've had some record-breaking cold here, frost everywhere in the hills so thick in places it resembles snow. The cold invigorates me, it stirs something old in my heart, it makes me long for rain and for the solace of the hearth after a long outdoor ramble all at once.

And so I have been doing my very best, despite the business of the holiday season, and the business of this wonderful writing life I tend and cultivate around myself like an ever-growing forest of alders all tangled at their bases with nettles and native blackberry, marvelous and blessed and utterly unruly, to keep my feet often against the wild earth, and my hands often tangled in wool, or touching the glass of my tincture bottles, or placing one finger-print in the foot-pad of the coyote.

So here is a little bit of a (patchwork) taste of some of my hand-and-foot-made Winterings...

Out in the hills, the manzanitas, marvels of geometry, of water-preservation, of wine-dark barked strength, are getting ready to flourish with the first big storms. I sat recently for some time, trying to draw and paint these shapes, with frustrating results. But as I grew frustrated over my pencil, and set it down, and lay back against the ground instead, staring at the cold blue sky, I remembered that a large part of painting and drawing (for me) is the act of seeing more clearly what is in front of me (and not necessarily rendering anything of great accuracy on paper...). Hence the photo here of the manzanita leaves, instead of my scratchy painting...

The thorns of the wild California rose are as thick as fur, protecting the tiny wild rosehips, those rubies of the fir and bay wood; the poetry of thorns and the sweetness of those hips together sing out into the dark canyons.

I went out on a recent ramble to see if I might find the artist conk mushroom, which I very recently learned is in the same family as the venerated Reishi mushroom of immortality-herb-fame. Ours is called Ganoderma appalatum, and doesn't look a whole lot like the glossy red Asian Reishi. It is a bit more humbly rough around the edges, and, as I realized, is the mushroom I've called, my whole life, the fairy-ledge, not knowing any other name for it.

Although it is not considered as potent as the "official" Reishi, (Ganoderma lucidum), I believe very strongly in the magic of the plants who we share our homes with, our wild ecosystems. We of the Bay Area, and of California, share the air, we share the wind and rain and sun and specifically storied climate, slope, creek, of this place with the artist conk mushroom; we share the stories of gray fox and winter wren and red-shouldered hawk and mountain lion; we share, somewhere, even our dreams. I like to imagine dreams drifting down through our floors, through our house foundations, into the earth, trailed behind tunneling moles, passed off between earthworms, swallowed by hermit thrushes and robins, shat out again at the base of some bay tree, seeped into the soil by rain, taken up into the hard gills of the conk mushrooms...

I didn't gather any at our first meeting; I wanted to just sit, and take the hardy conks in with my senses, and my hands— the fleshy underside is as soft as the finest creamy velvet. This is potent immune medicine, medicine for the nervous system too, grounding and healing on many, many levels; next time, I will come with a little gift to leave the mushroom-folk and the bay-tree sisters from which they seem to enjoy growing... And then I will report back about the making of medicine!

Satsuma tangerine time is upon us here. The orange and lemon trees on the streets are heavy with fruit. Breaking the skin of a tangerine with my nail, peeling it in one S-shape, eating the fruit in one sweet bite, is one of the old childhood smells of winter to me. I've eaten copious amounts of these jewel-sweet planets of citrus in the past few weeks, while feverishly writing out the latest Chapters of the Leveret Letters....

I am reminded of one of my very favorite Pablo Neruda poems, Ode to the Lemon, and the very last stanza:

So when your hand
Squeezes the hemisphere
Of the cut
Lemon onto your plate,
A universe of gold,
You have poured out
One
Yellow cup
Full of miracles
One of the sweet-smelling nipples
Of the breast of the earth,
A ray of light that became a fruit,
The diminutive fire of a planet

On another of these wintering-rambles, squeezed in between tale-writing, when I intended to be looking for the tracks and signs of animals, I got quite waylaid by the beauty of bay laurel bows, eucalyptus and bracken fern, monterey cypress, sword fern, coyote brush, and went a bit overboard gathering bits for a wreath for the door, woven through with a few madrone berries, a few hawthorn berries to bring protection to our home, and clusters of the red berries you see above, whose name I don't know (anybody know? They look like our native toyon, but are not! I think perhaps an exotic plant?).

I love that every time I come home now, this moon-shaped wreath of clippings from the wild hills, where the coyotes roam at dawn, is there to hitch my thoughts and my heart back into the forest.

I've finally gotten around to labeling many jars and bottles of medicines made in the summertime. These jars of alder-bark and usnea lichen fill me up to the brim with joy—just looking at them, giving them a shake, thinking of the places they were gathered from. I think this must be part of the healing of plants—the relationships you form with them, the places they come to occupy in your heart, growing forth from there as well as the ground.

(And for you herbalists out there-- I know, my alder isn't quite all the way covered... some of those sticks won't go under! But I shake it frequently, never fear!)

Here are a few samples of the tinctures made over the last six months-- my very first batch of medicines, a delightful harvest on the shelf this wintertime!

And the Bavarian Cough syrup I mentioned some six months ago (!), in this post , has also finally gotten its proper label. Good heavens, it is so delicious I am often tempted to eat it for dessert...

I believe that our hands have an intelligence all their own. How else is it that the hands remember a piece of music on the violin when the mind does not? May your hands make small winter magic this cold and quiet time of year. May your hands, stitching or stirring or sketching or stroking plant leaves or strumming instruments or scattering seeds (if you live in California...) or stalking deer through the thickets (that would be your feet, I suppose) bring just a little bit of solace, and rest, to your busy mind this wintertime, so that it may have a moment, or two, or twenty, to drift and to dream.

P.S. For some more thoughts on the need for quiet and gentleness and dreaming through the winter, read this by wondrous herbalist and owner of One Willow Apothecaries, Asia Suler.

Shedding the Velvet: A Wreath of Felt and Steel

 On this weekend of torrential rains, which swelled up Wildcat Creek to a foamy froth and knocked the bays and alders over at their roots, I've been inside, working on a felted wreath-commission.

We have no fireplace, alas, only this blocked-up hearth. But I lit the candles anyhow, as the winds whipped the redwoods in a wet gale outside, drank quite a lot of black tea, and teased out this wild and organic wreath design.

The metal spiraling behind it was made by Ferrous Studios. It is a meeting of steel and wool. A dark star, a nest, antlered felt-branches, all at once. I'm not sure quite what to call it—dreamcatcher, woodland star of David. It is a ragged wreath at the heart of a winter forest. The brown tendrils along the edges make me think of shedding antler velvet. There is another great image of this here.  (I don't want to risk any copyright issues by putting them here, otherwise I would! Beautiful photos.)

Whitetail shedding velvet

I'm fascinated by the lifecycle of antlers, how they are grown anew each year, how the velvet is there, a skin, to supply oxygen and nutrients to the rapidly growing bone, and then is rubbed off when the antler has finished its year's growth. Velvet antler, in fact, is of high importance in the world of Chinese medicine—the whole young antler is ground up, velvet and bone together, to treat a range of ailments, including cancer. I wonder, when that velvet is shed, if small creatures use it in their nests? If birds or shrews nibble at it, for nutrients, for healing.

The spirograph-star-web design was Simon's idea, drawn up from childhood sketching memories. I love the meeting of geometry and tapered pelt-shape. There's something alchemical about it.

Alchemical symbols in Kitab al-Aqalim by Abu’l-Qasim al-‘Iraqi

The strands, ropes and "antler-velvet" of this wreath were all wet-felted with merino wool from Jean Near's Utopia Ranch, in Mendocino County, Mrs. Meyer's basil-scented dish soap, and hot water. And the friction of my two palms, of course! All colors are wildcrafted—the brown is black walnut, from a tree down the road, the pale green of the big star is coyote brush from Tilden Park, the other green and the yellow strands are Japanese Maple from the tree right out of view in this photo, and the thin strand of grey-purple is elderberry, from a harvest last year in Marin County.

It is a web-wild woodland thing, what emerged! As the gale spun the trees outside, I listened to a Chirgilchin disc on repeat—Tuvan throat-singing, from Mongolia, where much of what we know about the traditions of wet-felting originated. I didn't think about this connection as I was felting, it just put me in a bit of a trance, and I couldn't stop listening as I rubbed and dipped and soaped the wool.

This is truly incredible music, from deep in the heart of the body and the heart of the earth. It blows me away. And yes, that whistling is coming from the throat. Miraculous!

By the end of all this mad felting, as you can imagine, I was just a little bit batty, picking away at the sweet seeds of a pomegranate for sustenance, and so took a quick walk with my father by Wildcat Creek and Jewel Lake as the sun came out. So much water!

The branches of the alders look like strands of felt. Or, really, the other way around. I love this blending, this correspondence between the wilderness and the creations of our hands.