Soliphilia (or, Finding the Light-Green Heart): A Workshop

My sweet brother

Recently, there have been days when the only solace is to be near the edge of myself, reaching out to touch the ceanothus with more than just my hands. When the only way to be a sane human being in this world is to remember that my identity rests not in my mind alone, but in the place where I end and the world begins. In that interface, that frontier, that edge-country where the astonishing blue and pollen and the buzzing of a thousand dizzy bees is enough to quench any sadness that had been stalking my soul. David Whyte says something to this effect. So, I think, does anyone who loves, and is loved by, a place in this world. Who doesn't want to be alone any more. Who knows what it means to come home. 

Blooming ceanothus, Johnstone Trail Tomales Bay

Because coming home—even just for a moment—to the smell of ceanothus arching over a path through the pines, the sound of bees shaking loose every thought for just long enough to finally breathe, is the only hope that I believe we have left in this world. Coming home to the land that nourishes us. Coming home to the people who love and support us. Coming home to the people in our communities who have been forgotten and forsaken by us and the world. Coming home—god, and isn't it the hardest thing?—to the places inside of ourselves that scare us so badly we would run for a thousand miles across deserts instead of letting them wash over us, for fear they'd pull us under. When in fact this is the only remedy— to turn and face the wind, the wave, the undertow. To trust that, as Rilke writes, that wave, that wind, will part for you, and close again behind you, and will carry on its way, leaving you in peace.

O you tender ones, walk now and then
into the breath that blows coldly past. 
Upon your cheeks let it tremble and part;
behind you it will tremble together again. 

Part I, Sonnet IV, from The Sonnets to Orpheus*

Ground lupine, sheep sorrel, Tomales Point

It's the way any planet or humble seed is made; each layer whole in itself, from core to skin, and also together in union more than the sum of parts. This is coming home—to the darkest center; to our families and loved ones; to the communities of humans and plants and animals and stones right where we are, who have missed us.

Yes, the springtime needed you, writes Rilke in his first of the Duino Elegies. Often a star 
was waiting for you to notice it. The line between self and world is very thin. Perhaps it is almost non-existent. And yet we are taught to stay far from that edge—for isn't it insanity to believe yourself fluid with columbine flowers? We are taught to bury ourselves in ourselves instead. When in fact in here, and not out there, is where madness prowls. And all along the stars and the columbine flowers have been reaching out to catch our eyes, to receive our praise, to give us the almost unsayable gift of their Presence. The reminder that we are walking always a hair's-breadth from what is numinous, from what will heal us.

Trust me, this is not something I've mastered. I've only gotten so far as to know how much I need to be engaged in such conversations with the world around me. Harder for me are the inner places. Bringing the same attention and care and curiosity and spirit of homecoming to the places in myself that are afraid to settle, to land, to home. That have, since I was a small girl, been skittish horses running from their own tails. (I wrote tales first by accident, and maybe the slip was telling. There is always a dark side to the coin of being a tale-teller.)

On the last new moon, I set out for the moor-hills of Tomales Point where the tule elk and granite outcrops live, a place very special to my heart. I knew I needed to kneel down with the quail tracks. To pay attention to small things. To delight in the discovery of a trail of snail shells, robbed of their snails all among the quail tracks-- proof of the quail's meals!

Many quail tracks among the yellow bush lupine, coyote brush, and other human, elk and coyote tracks

To notice and note the state of bloom or seed among the plants. The cowparsnip, making seeds. 

The salmonberries, ripe. The song of a returned Swainson's thrush in a wet canyon bringing them, and summer, into ripeness. Letting myself go for a time in favor of Other selves. Giving attention to them for their own sake, not just mine. 

What I mean is, instead of going up to a salmonberry and saying, in my head, hello, how can you heal me?—which would make for a rather awkward introduction between human beings—going up to a salmonberry and saying, oh my, look at you, look at your berries and your flowers, how is it here today, you are just lovely, has the gray fox whose scat full of seeds I saw on the trail been visiting you? Invariably, going out of yourself in order to attend to the lives of other beings feels so much better than seeing them always through the lens of one's own need.

A hill of wild radish, invasive but beautiful

There is a wonderful word for all of this— Soliphilia— which I discovered while in collaboration with the ecopsychologist and naturalist, Mary Good. It means the love of and responsibility for a place, bioregion, planet and the unity of interrelated interests within it, as defined by the Australian professor of sustainability Glenn Albrecht, in contrast to another term he coined, Solastalgia, used to describe the feelings of grief, dislocation and loss we experience when the environment where we live is damaged, changed or taken from us. Soliphilia is about coming home to the wholeness of a place and all the pieces that make it so. About finding belonging. About finding belonging together; a community of homecoming; a sense of solidarity in the face of great change and sorrow. About loving all of those pieces in their own right.  About finding that homecoming in a shifting world, a world beset by climate change, by unknowns. Even so, we can come home to it. We must.

Mary and I went for a walk back in January at Abbott's Lagoon to talk about all of these things, and about the vision of a workshop taught together that was brewing between us. A threading together of animal tracking and inner somatic exploration and homecoming. If you don't know Mary's work already, drop everything and go have a look.  It's really a joy to be in collaboration with her, and through that work get to know her as a friend too. She is a compassionate, devoted, skillful naturalist, grounded in observation and fact and her own senses; and at the same time she has an incredible understanding of the unseen, of our inner worlds, of how the inner and the outer meet. Not to mention the fact that she has a wonderful, warm sense of humor and is just a joy to be around. I feel very lucky to get to offer something with her to all of you.

That day in January, we knelt over otter and bobcat tracks; we watched white-crowned sparrows in the brush; we drank reishi hot-chocolate provided by the wonderful Mary; we talked about the human history of Abbott's Lagoon; we ate a picnic on a sand dune as mist turned to rain and we found we were eating raindrops along with our cheese-toasts and lettuce. We rejoiced in that rain. We talked about the feelings of anxiety that arose around the current drought in California; I expressed my own sense of fear and panic around the rain ending this year. Around not knowing if it will return. Wanting to hold the new green, the winter, forever, like a little girl resisting being left alone at preschool.

Now, after a spring full of wildflowers I hadn't seen in such numbers in years, wildflowers so abundant and beautiful that being in their presence made me at once ecstatic and anxious-- that they, too, would go so quickly—the hills are just beginning to tinge with brown. The buckeyes are blooming, full-spire, full intoxication. The antlers on the elk and deer are starting to branch, nubbed with velvet. The days are long. Summer is near, and with it the memory of drought, the sorrow of changing lands.

And, as if in perfect time and perfect grace, the date that we at last settled upon for our workshop comes just at the right moment. We are offering Soliphilia: Tracking the Wildscapes of Land and Soul in Uncertain Times just at the cusp of summer, on Sunday June 12th, a full day affair at Abbott's Lagoon in Point Reyes. This is the point of the year at which I begin to get uneasy again-- at least for the past three years, with the increasing changes in climate. Talking on the phone with Mary recently about our lesson plan, I had to laugh, saying, I think I need to take this workshop. Oh wait, I get to go for free! This is the joy of collaboration. That as teachers, Mary and I get to learn from each other as well as share with all of you.

We will spend the morning getting deep into the details of animal tracking— honing our senses, our curiosity, our empathy. After broadening these capacities in the morning on the sanddunes, and finding the expansiveness and quiet kindle of joy that comes from just looking with an open mind and heart, Mary will lead us in several afternoon exercises and wanders that will bring these new skills home to our inner ecologies.



Throughout the day, we will be exploring what it means to come home to a place, and to ourselves. What stands in the way of such returns, and how we might begin to transform, or surrender, or arrive, or all three, or nothing at all except bask in the flight of a heron and the shape of skunk tracks. Discovering that our hearts, as Rilke writes in his Third Elegy, are light-green.

All at once now, trembling, how he was caught up
and entangled in the spreading tendrils of inner event
already twined into patterns, into strangling undergrowth, prowling
bestial shapes. How he submitted—. Loved.
Loved his interior world, his interior wilderness,
that primal forest inside him, where among decayed treetrunks
his heart stood, light-green. 

That despite the chaos, the decay, the struggle, the tangles, our hearts are light-green by nature, without our effort, and always have been. We only have to look, and remember.

If you'd like to join us—and we would love to have you!— you can read more details, and sign up, here! Note that at the bottom of the page, where the sign-up button resides, there are three payment options, based on financial need.

* All Rilke translations are from the Stephen Mitchell edition  of Duino Elegies & The Sonnets to Orpheus

The Outer Net

Pine tree tops

By Gary Snyder

In the blue night

frost haze, the sky glows

with the moon

pine tree tops

bend snow-blue, fade

into sky, frost, starlight.

The creak of boots.

Rabbit tracks, deer tracks,

what do we know.

A few weeks back, my dear friend Rachel Economy and I taught a workshop called "Re-Belonging: Walking the Wild Land, Writing the Wild Words," in which we twined poetry writing and animal tracking into a day long exploration of inner and outer wilds. Beloved Point Reyes, specifically Abbott's Lagoon, was our teacher and classroom. It was fabulous beyond all of my dreaming. I am a writer by trade, as you all know, and yet teaching the animal tracking portion of the day, while Rachel, a magnificent poet, held the poetry-writing, brought me alive in a new way, in a different way, in a way that teaching writing workshops alone has never quite done for me. This was a new alchemy, made so by Rachel's partnership. Isn't it such a relief, sometimes, to realize we are better together than we are trying to steer every boat all by ourselves?

Here's how we described the workshop:

"We believe that the crafts of poetry, story-making, and wildlife tracking share the same roots. In this workshop, we will re-engage a sense of our “place in space,” as poet Gary Snyder says, weaving animal tracking and poetry-writing practices, prompts and skills together to connect our inner and outer worlds. We see this as a tangible, hands-on way to meet and meld inner and outer landscapes, and to find joyful and visceral ways to open back up to our ecological relationships and ecosystem hearts.

Especially in a time of great upheaval and deep grief in the world, many of us can start to shut down our connection with the natural world and with our inner animal, in an attempt at self preservation. Moving back into relationship with ecology is essential to tending to the world. In order to do this in the face of overwhelming global trauma, we need tools and practices that let us into the joy, play, wonder and deep sense of home that is built into our bodies and relationship to the animals, plants, and land where we walk and dwell, a well as the heart that dwells within us. Writing, tracking, reading the land and our place in it- these are some of the most potent and joyful tools we have found to walk with.

As mythologist, wilderness rites of passage guide and storyteller Martin Shaw writes, the psyche does not dwell within us but rather is the land itself, and we dwell within it. Through poetry writing and animal tracking we will begin (or deepen) our journeys to re-root in the bigger community of the more-than-human world."

Needless to say, for you local readers, we will be offering more workshops in the future! For now, I'd like to give you a few knotted strands from the day.

                   

The sand dunes at Abbott's Lagoon are a great, wind-written doorway into a perceptual relationship with the lives of animals—skunk and river otter, bobcat, heron, coyote, deer mouse and centipede. Perhaps more important than this though, they are a doorway into the heart of curiosity. Questions can take on divine weight, and power, when they are born of what I like to call "ecstatic curiosity." Ecstatic curiosity is what happens when you see a bird for a moment, singing in the brush, a bird whose song you don't recognize, a bird whose name you don't know, and the question—who is that?--burns in you. In the lineage of animal tracking in which I was schooled, questions are teaching tools. I might say to a teacher—what bird was that? And he will most often reply--hm, interesting, what bird was that? What patterns did you notice on its wings? What was the shape of the beak? How would you replicate the song? 

                 

You have to take the question home with you, inside, like a fresh secret, like a seed you can hardly wait to try to germinate. There's nothing like a good question to get you to learn the answer, and never forget it. A varied thrush!--you will realize one day, in a flash of joy, when you see the bird again, and take better note of the markings, and grab your Birds of the West field guide. It was a varied thrush! You will always know a varied thrush, after this, like seeing a friend. 

I like the image of ecstatic curiosity--it makes me think of Sufi mystics, whirling in dervishes through the sand, leaving their own trails, their own spinning signs, of Oneness. Because after all, in my mind, animal tracking is about stepping into the net of Oneness. 

Questions are the first doorway. Then, the sand. 

Tracks are the words, the answers, the poems, written there.

A river otter left beautiful tracks along the very lip of the lagoon, showing how it slid down the sand between two gentle blues. 

                   

Threaded between the river otter tracks was the trail of a bobcat, passing through in her usual (baseline) overstep walk, traveling between the willows on the far side of the lagoon and the trail that leads to the sanddunes and skirts the eastern edge of the lagoon, which we walked in on. There, on that human trail, the brush rabbits are always feeding and dashing about the edges. Earlier that morning, Rachel and I saw bobcat tracks heading the same direction as these along the footpath--her morning hunt? Did she find a rabbit for breakfast, or a songbird?

I say she but I'm not certain that this is a female bobcat; a guess only, based on the relative daintiness of the prints, the modest size of the front metacarpal (heel) pad. Sometimes, guesses are the voice of intuition, of gut feeling, the voice that transcends species, that speaks when you lay a fingertip to the inner landscape of a track and close your eyes, and for a moment the body and life of that individual animal heaves through you, a cord of connection, umbilical, twisted there, between you. Then, after a breath, it's gone.

And then sometimes, guesses are completely and utterly wrong. This is one of the wonderful lessons of animal tracking—your ecstatic curiosity is based not on right answers but on engagement with all of your senses as well as the details of the track and sign before you. Of course, right answers are useful and important at some point, because without them you can't really step into the narrative-net of the land around you, not wholly, not with the kind of rigorous specificity that all dedicated arts, and practices of mindfulness (of which tracking, to me, is both) require.

But as a doorway in, as this day was meant to provide, right answers are not as important as questions, as the act of twisting little cords between your heart and the hearts of the bobcats and herons, dunegrasses, sands and centipedes, around you.

Which brings me to a very simple, but very profound thought that knitted itself together in me as we all wandered the dunes, following the weaving trails of skunks, and discussing the gaits of deer--this is the net of connection we all long for, somewhere far deep down, old as our strange big brains, our quick hands.

As some of you know, I've been thinking a lot about the internet recently, and our relationship to it; I said goodbye to my Facebook for this reason. Well, it occurred to me that part of what we crave when we turn to that invisible digital net is not only connection, but also the stimulation of newness, of new content, fresh shiny photographs of things from a perspective that is new to us. And that this desire in many ways seems to come from the same impulse as the place in us that is suddenly overcome with that "ecstatic curiosity" to understand each thread of connection in the natural world around us. This desire for newness is deeply satisfied by every new track--heron, otter, bobcat---no matter how many times those individual animals may have been observed. Every day the tracks are new, the story is new, the world is new. This is the net of connection we have snipped ourselves out of, that we long to step back into; our animal bodies do, anyway, even if our big brains don't know it. This kind of newness, this kind of stimulation, and attention to little details, and ability to hold them all--this is what our brains were made for, not the constant newsfeed updates. This is the original net.

My dad calls it "the outer net," tongue in cheek. The real net. Which of course includes our relationships with each other too, in real live physical time-- for when woven and knotted properly, we are all part of this one big "family of things," as Mary Oliver says. We are not separate; this myth of separateness is what has poisoned us apart.

  Net became the theme for my most recent Tinderbundle

None of this is to completely disparage the internet; not at all. There is a democratized freedom and wealth of information shared here that is truly miraculous, not to mention the freedom afforded so many artists and makers and thinkers, like myself; I can make a living doing what I love because of this. I have made beautiful connections with other people because of it, and with all of you wonderful readers. For all of this, I am really astoundingly grateful. So please don't misunderstand me. What does disturb me is its addictive quality, the way our attentions, our impulses, are increasingly sucked into this space. I am very aware of this allure as a working writer, when those moments of uncomfortable creative block or boredom or restlessness occur, as they always do, and on the regular—the internet is a very dangerous place for the creative mind during these moments. 

What I am afraid of is hard to articulate better than the wonderful Rima Staines did a year or so ago, in her magnificent essay-post, "The Book of Faces and the Web of the World" :

"I have a theory that using the internet occupies a very particular place in us. I think it takes the place of dreaming. Not night-dreaming, but that very shamanic soul-travelling that we all do to a greater or lesser extent when our mind wanders, when we create art, when we day-dream, imagine, journey in our minds and spirits to elsewhere, elsewhen. Internet-travelling uses the same metaphorical muscle I think, but is utterly hollow in comparison because it is not creative in that same sense. It is not magical. And worst of all it replaces the dreaming."

Yes. This is what I fear. That we are letting the internet replace, instead of supplement. That while we busily share and update and take in more beautiful stimulating tidbits than the human mind can possibly contain in a month, let alone fifteen minutes, we are actually taking more and more steps psychologically and physically away from real, sensuous (as in, of the senses) experiences with each other and the net of the more-than-human world that are, in my opinion, the true joy and purpose of the body and soul in this world.

But enough harping. I think I've made my point, and there are better strings to be played. Namely, the soundless music of a group of eight people sitting in the wind and sun and passing of ravens, writing poems sieved through their senses after a morning touching the cords and knots of the net of animal lives on the land of Abbott's Lagoon.

What beautiful poems emerged, I can hardly tell you! Rachel and I sat awed by the words shared around our circle; how this place and its beings had gotten under their skins, and how they had gotten under its skin too. How it is that poems live everywhere, even hidden in the eyes of skunks...

Valentine for Ernest Mann

By Naomi Shihab Nye

You can’t order a poem like you order a taco.

Walk up to the counter, say, “I’ll take two”

and expect it to be handed back to you

on a shiny plate.

Still, I like your spirit.

Anyone who says, “Here’s my address,

write me a poem,” deserves something in reply.

So I’ll tell a secret instead:

poems hide. In the bottoms of our shoes,

they are sleeping. They are the shadows

drifting across our ceilings the moment

before we wake up. What we have to do

is live in a way that lets us find them.

Once I knew a man who gave his wife

two skunks for a valentine.

He couldn’t understand why she was crying.

“I thought they had such beautiful eyes.”

And he was serious. He was a serious man

who lived in a serious way. Nothing was ugly

just because the world said so. He really

liked those skunks. So, he re-invented them

as valentines and they became beautiful.

At least, to him. And the poems that had been hiding

in the eyes of skunks for centuries

crawled out and curled up at his feet.

Maybe if we re-invent whatever our lives give us

we find poems. Check your garage, the off sock

in your drawer, the person you almost like, but not quite.

And let me know.

To close this netted ramble of words, I will leave you with those of poet and translator Robert Bringhurst (his translations of Haida myths are stunning). He explains that the English word for poetry comes from the Greek verb poiéo, "to do" or "to make." He writes:

"Does that imply that poetry is made by human beings? That it only exists because of us? I think, myself, that making and doing are activities we share with all the other animals and plants and with plenty of other things besides. The wind on the water makes waves, the interaction of the earth and sun and moon makes tides, sun coming and going on the water and the air makes clouds, and clouds make rain, and the rain makes rivers, and the rivers feed the lakes and other rivers and the sea from which the sun keeps making clouds, and there is plenty of poetry in that, whether or not there are any human beings here to say in iambic pentameter or rhyming alexandrines that they see it and approve {...}

When words do what blossoming apple trees do, and what stars do, poetry is what you read or hear {...}

Poetry is what I start to hear when I concede the world's ability to manage and to understand itself. It is the language of the world; something humans overhear if they are willing to pay attention, and something that the world will teach us to speak, if we allow the world to do so." 

-(pages 140 and 145, The Tree of Meaning)

Notes from the Wild Folk: Coyote, Her Fur, and the Flowers of the Dunes

Out at Abbott's Lagoon, where the summer fogs hang thick and a family of river otters splashes through the fresh blue water, there is a narrow path at the base of a great sand dune, flanked on the other side by cattails and lagoon, where not so long ago a bobcat patrolled up and down on the regular, presumably from a resting place in the willows, catching marsh birds, the mice who run the dunes, the rabbits out in the scrub.

Recently, I heard tell from other trackers that there seemed to have been a change of guard—the bobcat seemed to have gone elsewhere. Yesterday, a tracking friend and I went rambling along the lagoon edge and through the dunes. We followed the trail where once the bobcat(s) walked. The tracks in the sand were loose and indistinct, and we could not determine whether they were bobcat or coyote. The tiny footprints of deer mice skittered everywhere. 

Then, we began to find small clumps of fur. 

Above is the largest clump we found. All of them contained some combination of coarse, sturdy, long guard hairs banded black, white, golden or rust, and a rough, wavier undercoat. Guard hairs are generally the hairs that lend an animal's coat its characteristic color, while also wicking away moisture and retaining body heat.

Whoever was scratching herself, snagging on bushes, or shedding, she left an excellent trail! I've never tracked by bits of fur before, but when we crawled into a thicket of willows that comprised the entrance to some sort of resting place, or den, or hideaway, we found several more matching guard hairs caught on the bark or in the humus below our hands and knees.



Guardian oak (or poison oak) characteristically guarded the thicket about seven feet in, so we didn't make it very far, but the stiff guard hairs in our fingers were like little treasures, with the story of a recent creature's passage in them.

We didn't want to linger long, because we felt we were trespassing on someone's secret and guarded front doorstep. (And what a doorstep! You can see the willows below to the left, and the beginning of the lagoon to the far right.)

While it is always a good idea to keep the mind and heart full of questions and myriad possibilities when tracking, and while I am no expert in the identification of small scraps of fur, we were very much reminded of the pelage of the coyote as we examined the hairs, and felt their coarseness. That banded black-cream-rust color very much matches the general coloration of these clever, quick beings. 

Coyote portrait, by Christopher Bruno

Out on the great sand-dune above the willow-den, where the coyotes sidetrot, the bobcats prowl, the deer wander, the deer mice skitter, the raccoons amble, all leaving the stories of their passage in lettered trails, we sat for a time amidst this netted skein of wild lives. At our feet, the dune strawberries made their own constellated nets, somehow surviving on sand, in salty air.

Tiny dune primroses (a fraction of the size (probably 1/10th!) of the evening primroses so similar in appearance that are flourishing in the garden) reached out through the sand and bloomed their bright primrose yellow. They must be drinking the salty fog alone, for there is no other water here at this time of year. 

Together, it seems to me that the dune strawberries and dune primroses must know the secret stories and lives of the animals who pass through the sand at dusk and dawn and the middle of the night; they probably know if it is a coyote or a bobcat who, for a little while, rules over the willow patch with its magnificent front porch. 

And we wondered, all along—was there a coyote watching us from just beyond, in the thick scrub of the hills, bemused that we would crawl on all fours into her hideaway, and take a few of her hairs like pieces of an old enchantment?

For Coyote is a wise old Creator, and knows well the ways of humans...

There is an old story says the world was made by Coyote, who got stranded at the top of Mt. Diablo when the ocean waters were high and right up around its craggy neck. He threw down mats of tule. These became land. He blew feathers from his paws, different kinds, and these became people. His wife, little Frog Woman, helped him, swimming. The world, born right out of Mt. Diablo, a womb of schist and granite, silica, sandstone and coal. The world, held up in the paws of Coyote, nudged gently by Frog.

There is an old story says once there was no death in the world, but Coyote brought it, saying yes you will hate me for this, but how else will there be renewal? How else can we all fit?

There is an old story says Coyote lost his daughter, and went to the Land of the Dead to bring her home again, alive, but in the last moment, carrying her up a mountain, he slipped, he looked back at her, he lost her truly, forever. Then, he cursed the laws he had made, but it was too late to change them, and so he howled long, knowing now the sorrow of humans.

- excerpt from my The Seven Dwarves of Mt. Diablo

An Atlas of the Rambled Songline

At Abbott's Lagoon, on the edge of the Point Reyes Peninsula, the brush rabbits are growing up. In a single walk west to the ocean, four showed themselves along the path, decreasing in size as if moving backward through time. The fourth rabbit was positively tiny; the span of her tracks would have fit in my cupped palm. Each had a quick and perfect getaway in the salmonberry or lupine or coyotebrush thickets; they used well-kept tunnels as beloved as human footpaths, carefully maintained by tooth and claw.

The California bumblebees were out with heavy pollen baskets at their legs, tipping and delightedly dancing through the poppies, the pollen at their legs precisely the color of the heart of a poppy. I love that we call this little polished cavity ringed with fur on the back legs of bees a basket. In technical terms it is a corbicula, but that word means nothing to me, whereas pollen-basket, metaphoric, animate, immediately turns the worker-bees into beings whose devoted gathering I can comprehend with my heart. Pollen-basket is an embodied term; it places our own bodies in sisterhood with the bodies of bees, for we all know the delight of gathering food into a basket—and oh, can you imagine, if you were so small it could be pollen?

In the past week, I've read the second half of Robert MacFarlane's The Old Ways, and the entirety of Jay Griffiths' Wild. Both were utterly, beautifully brilliant—in ways that bled right into each other, so that as I read Wild, and felt inspirations and ideas stirring, I sometimes wasn't sure from which book they had come, and also in their own very unique, very different fashions. The Old Ways stirred me up into a foot-loose fever of walking-joy, my imagination spinning with songlines and pathways and the stories we pass through as we walk, the way a landscape stories us. Wild broke my heart into a dozen pieces and re-stitched it into a patchwork of nettle leaves and bee-pollen baskets, fertile brush rabbit-love and salmonberry petals and also rage; rage that our way of life has set the great wildness of the world, our salvation, our mother, our holy fool, under the direst of attacks. This is an old rage, smoldering somewhere deep but Wild set it to flaming again. 

From The Old Ways, after reading about Miguel Angel Blanco's wild library, I set out to fuse Earth Constellations with Songlines, so that the taking of a walk could also be a gathering of moments and lives on the land, which made that particular amble, on that particular day, storied, sung.

"The library of Miguel Angel Blanco is no ordinary library. It is not arranged according to topic and subject, nor is it navigated by means of the Dewey Decimal system. Its full name is the Library of the Forest, La Biblioteca del Bosque. It has so far been a quarter of a century in the making, and at last count it consisted of more than 1,100 books—though its books are not only books, but also reliquaries. Each book contains a journey made by walking, and each contains the natural objects and substances gathered along that particular path: seaweed, snakeskin, mica flakes, crystals of quartz, sea beans, lightning-scorched pine timber, the wing of a grey partridge, pillows of moss, worked flint, cubes of pyrite, pollen, resin, acorn cups, the leaves of holm oak, beech, elm. Over the many years of its making, the library has increased in volume and spread in space. It now occupies the entire ground floor and basement of an apartment building in the north of Madrid. Entering the rooms in which it exists feels like stepping into the pages of a Jorge Luis Borges story: 'The Library of Babel' crossed with 'The Garden of Forking Paths,' perhaps" (239).

What's more, Miguel makes his visitors, including MacFarlane, draw books from the shelves as one might draw tarot cards—for the past, for the present, for the future, the walks and the constellation of earthen beings along the way taking on a sort of divinatory power. Naturally, I love this.

My ramble to Abbott's Lagoon (with my wonderful twelve-year-old poetry student!) has gathered in the lines of its pages & paths: the poppy-pollen baskets of bumble bees; salmonberries from flower to fruit; four baby brush rabbits; a hunting northern harrier hawk swooping like cut pieces of moon; the sheep sorrel red against the yarrow white; the cattails at the edge of the lagoon full of marsh wrens singing their raucous love songs; the damselflies mating, their color the only word capable of describing that blue lagoon.

Imagine, what it would mean to weekly mark and map rambles through land not in path and topographical features, but the way your body, heart and mind hitch to the plants and animals around you as you walk—for a whole year! Imagine, atlases of place made thus by each of us, and the Strange Library they would together create! Maybe not navigationally useful for others, but for all the inner mapping, and the place where self and wild land meet--oh yes, oh yes indeed. 

These maps become circular, like baskets (have become obsessed with twining whatever I can get my hands on--oatgrass below), that lead us out and in at once, making our own songlines of place until it has seeped, singing, right up our soles. 

The second Songline Map I have to share comes from another beach, just north of Abbott's, called Kehoe, where my love and I ambled some four days later.

The path was yellow with lupine and wild radish and afternoon sun. 

Sand holds the tracks of humans and animals alike. It is a great book of trails and wild tales, where Simon and I have rambled together so many times, where the coyotes hunt the brush rabbits and the ravens criss cross along the sand for carrion and who knows what other mysterious purposes.



As you all know by now, I have a particular love of, and delight in, animal tracking, in the sense of story-trailing and shape-shifting it imparts, as well as the true and particular wonder that comes of devoting all of your senses for a time to the animals who are living their lives within a place. Not just any coyote, but a Coyote and her fledgling pups nosing the dunes for baby rabbits. Not just any raven but a family of Ravens who scout the beach in a particular order every day for food, and know these sands and winds better than you or I could ever dream.

Tracking is a form of storytelling and the deepest kind of reading. Each line of coyote tracks the songline of moment in a life. As Robert MacFarlane writes, "The relationship between thinking and walking is also grained deep into language history, illuminated by perhaps the most wonderful etymology I know. The trail begins with our verb to learn, meaning 'to acquire knowledge.' Moving backwards in language time, we reach the Old English leornain, 'to get knowledge, to be cultivated.' From leornian the path leads further back, into the fricative thickets of Proto-Germanic, and to the word liznojan, which has a base sense of 'to follow or to find a track' (from the Proto-Indo-European prefix leis-, meaning 'track'). 'To learn' therefore means at root—at route—'to follow a track' " (The Old Ways, 31).

Now what could be better news than that?

"Wildness is the universal songline, sung in green gold, which we recognize the moment we hear it. What is wild is what drives the honeysuckle, what wills the dragonfly, shoves the wind and compels the poem" (Wild, 85). 

For this ramble's Wild Songline, my map became the constellation of the speckled harbor seal pelt, at its center a woven vortex of eelgrass and dunegrass, whiskered like the crescent moon whiskers still attached to a dead seal's nose where we found it in the tide. Each set of whiskers is a pathway pointing to a different star in the constellation of the walk. For after all, an amble on the beach hardly ever follows a path, but rather is a back and forth up to dune and down to tideline, over to strange-shaped buoy and up to a new dune for a new cup of tea.

At the top of the Map (North) is a single blue whisker. The whisker of a harbor seal is as good at tracking fish as the echolocation of dolphins; it is a holy tracking-wand, capable of sensing the most minute changes in water pressure, current and movement. Each whisker "learning" the stories of the water as the seal swins.

It is harbor seal pupping season (March 1st through June 30th), and this beautiful seal, her pelt so lovely and intact I couldn't help but shiver and think of selkies, seemed small, perhaps a young one who didn't make it through her first spring, or maybe a small mother-seal.



Bulrush tules clacked in the wind on the walk past the marsh to the beach (West). A marbled godwit lay in the tideline, legs and neck and beak so delicate, her soul gone to the land of all shorebirds (East).



Tiny trails of brush rabbits hopped everywhere through the dunes, and were often bisected with coyote trails—the wheel of life wheeling on (South).

And speaking of weaving, of strings and strands coming together to create something, I've at last finished the knitting and sewing together of a coat I've been making for quite a long while. It is lanolin-rich Jacob sheep's wool, and a simple hardy pattern; a coat I've been longing for on walks and scrambles, beach-roams (for it is often brisk and windy on the coast here!), nights by campfires and under stars. For, at their best, the things we wear against our bodies can be magic, can be talismans, can be precious protection and invigoration on all the roads we walk, themselves stranded with the moons we pass under, the marsh wrens we stop to listen to, the harbor seal-skins we meet. 

I've been known to have special "Adventuring-Skirts" worn to rags (and stained with mud, berry, avocado), particular airplane-outfits for good luck worn until they are so patchworked the security folk almost invariably pull me aside. Cloth holds story, same as good walking shoes; we only have to let the stories live there, in the weave. I am so happy to have a Wandering Coat now. It already smells of the smoke from one fire, the ocean wind and sand from one day, the marsh breeze and red-winged blackbird cries of another. Each fiber a pathway.

As Jay Griffiths writes, "The lure of wild and nomadic freedom has never left us, any of us. It is in our lungs, breathing in freedom, in our eyes, hungry for horizons, and in our feet, itching for the open road. Put your boots on. Old boots are thought to bring good luck, but old boots are good luck of themselves, as all walkers know. Boots that have folded and softened and bent to your foot: boot and foot in a cosy, comfortable marriage. (Old boots were traditionally tied to the wedding car of newlyweds, to suggest that on the long walk of life, it's good to have that easy familiar necessity.) Boots keep their history, but even more so do the feet of nomads, skin cracked like claypans in the deserts, journeys ground into the soles, feet cross-hatched with the tracks they have followed on the ground; the land has written itself into people's feet as the feet in turn have written pathways and tracks on the land" (Wild, 257). 

With good coat, good boots, good hat, we trod laughing on, following Foolish maps made of marsh wren-song, harbor-seal whisker, salmonberry juice.