A Calendar of Willows & of Waves

In the beginning of December, my dear friend Nao Sims (of Honey Grove) came to visit from British Columbia. You know that feeling with a friend who is kin—how you step into another kind of time. How you go to a place that is an eternal hearthside, an endless seat by the fire with a cup of wild tea and a conversation that you've been having always. 

Nao and I did a lot of literal sitting by the fire with tea and talking, taking up that old and eternal dialogue. We did a lot of wandering too, and gathering plants for said tea (usnea, bishop pine, fresh yarrow sprigs, plantains, yerba buena).

We visited the old growth redwoods of Muir Woods, a place I haven't been since I was a girl, though I grew up right next to it, because it is always overrun with tourists. But ancient redwoods are too important to miss when visiting California, and we found that their immense size and age absorbed all of us human visitors like a great benediction. They are a cathedral, and everyone, no matter how perfumed, how carefully groomed, lowers their voice, and cranes up. 

There is nothing like an old growth redwood tree, after all, to set you straight about eternity. 

Such a tree (born probably around 900 or 1000 AD) is Time, as far as I'm concerned. As far as any of us, and the sword ferns, and the northern spotted owls, and the moles, are concerned. Such a tree is all the air and the water and the wind and the nourishment of stones for a thousand years, in one column of fibrous and silent bark, in one column of smoldering light. And it is this Time that we touch with dear friends, with beloveds, in the dark heart of winter. It is this Time that we are always swimming in, if we slow down and reach our hands out to living things, to remember.

When Nao left, I felt disoriented for at least a day. Time, which was the vast silence of a redwood tree, which had been moving in circles, or not moving at all, bent straight again. Things To Do loomed. The tea kettle and the eternal hearth had to be again gathered up inside, to be tended there. 

This was in the dark dip of winter just before the solstice, when, to me, the world and the night and the solace of silence seemed to gather the thickest, rain in the air, soothing me to the very quick. 

Then, suddenly, the days turned into January, and the nettles began to press up through the muddy earth, and I find myself resisting, wanting to dig under ground with the roots of trees, not ready for the movement, the way the days on the calendar seem to fly by again (the 21st, how did it become the 21st?).  In part my resistance has to do with the long drought these past years, and a terror that summer will come again too fast, too soon, too long; that the winter will be over before I blink an eye, that I will not have properly beheld the Rain. But it also has to do with our cultural conception of time, the ticking off of days and weeks as numbers in a long line that seems to be eaten up behind us. 

And then, recently, something occurred to me about Time. It was born out of my days with Nao, and my days embracing midwinter, and the low, low voices of the redwood trees. It is not a new idea, but as with all useful ideas, I had to come to it on my own, through my own body, in order to really understand it. It's a thought I've had before, but this year, it has really taken root. 

Only in the human mind is time a line. And only some human minds in certain cultures, for some spans of human history. Everywhere else—for the deer, for the dunes, for the bishop pine, for the toyon, for the Coast Miwok, the first people of this place—it is Always, and also right now. Everywhere else besides the modern calendar, there are circles, and inside those circles is an ease, because circles are the shape of the planet, and our star, our moon, and everything in our solar system. Circles are the shape of solace.

I think our bodies and minds actually resist the Straight and Narrow, resist moving in a clear line, because they understand what everything else understands—that we are right here where we are, with the fruiting toyon and the cold earth and the long nights, and we are also made of the eternal, every edge and seam touching Myth Time, the time of Creation, the beginning of the world. It's just that our minds are very strong, and like to make rules; they have the capacity to accept lines, and even like lines, and they mold themselves easily to dominant narratives (by no fault of their own-- we are made to absorb story and we do it by default from the moment we are born). 

What occurred to me more specifically about Time had to do with experiencing the world not as a series of boxes and numbers, as our calendars subtly imprint upon our minds, but rather reaching out to the land around me and allowing Foam Time, Ocean Time, Toyon Time, Newt Time, Rain Time, more fully in. What does this turning of the moon right now mean for the tides, and what does it mean for the rain, and how do they interact? What are the newts doing right now? What is the weather up to, the great oceanic currents and atmospheric rivers? What does Right Now mean to the toyon, the river otter, the great blue heron? How can I wrap myself up in the this rhythm of Time, stand within it, instead of the numbers and the boxes?

For me, really allowing these many layers of Time in has begun as a practice of observation, of journaling, of documentation. And it has started not with the name of a month (January, after the Roman god Janus, with one head in the new year and the other into the old year, god of thresholds), but with the moon. One new moon to the next, a circle of days divided into four quarters—(new, waxing quarter, full, waning quarter)—with frogs and bobcat tracks, migrating newts and swollen creeks threaded with pencil & watercolor around the wheel. Literally documenting for myself, based on my personal experience, the lives of plants and animals and waters as they change through the changing of the moon feels to me like making a basket. A basket made of moon, and of the many threads of more-than-human time, each different, calibrated to a different inner life-rhythm, but also the same, aligned with everything, as they have been since the beginning of Creation. 

In the middle of that basket, I feel at ease. I feel at home. I feel like this measuring of time makes sense to me. 

from the Winter Solstice & surrounding weeks, 2014 (copyright Sylvia Linsteadt)

Last year, from 2014 through 2015, I created eight of these hands, one every six weeks, charting a "feral palm reading" of the land during those weeks. They accompanied the eight installments of Elk Lines. It is a similar idea to the calendar of moons I am describing above, only a little bit less of a documentation tool, and more a synthesis of weeks and moments. When my first moon to moon calendar is finished, I will certainly share it with all of you-- as I think this is a wonderful tool for each and every one of us to explore if we feel so called. For now, imagine this palm and its beings turned into a circle marked by moons, woven in a basket-round of the many threads of Time....

There's Elk Time, in which the great antlers of summer and fall (some longer than my arms, six tined and shining). grown heavy for the rut and the time of mating, are dropping. The calves born in April and May are almost full grown, but still keep close to their mothers.

The mother elk, lounging in the grass, are pregnant, their babies still tiny, gestating through the long nights of winter, waiting to be born when the grass is tall and the irises in full purple bloom.

In Bobcat Time, the days are made of the plump bodies of overwintering coots, the little black birds who carpet the lagoons and bays at this time of year.

This bobcat scat is marking an obvious crossroads, & a trail down through the pines

In Bobcat time, courting is well underway, the males tracing paths deeper and deeper into the territories of females, each feeling out the other. These are great mysteries though, and such evidence seldom seen...

In Coyote Time, courtship is a dance of paws across the sand; it is heady midnights trotting the open strands, paws flicking sidelong with joy, with flirtation. I like to imagine them, trotting far, panting in great grins, nipping and yelping and whirling under a dark sky. 

In Moss Time, well, it is the time of green glory. Of drinking. Of utter saturated delight.

In Bracken Time, it is the time of dying, of rust-colored old leaves, and the promise of new ones waiting underground.

In Hemlock Time, it's the time of barrenness, of seeds sodden with raindrops, of utter quiet. 

In Hill Time it's the time of new green, bright and close as cut velvet.

In Willow Time, it's the time of bare branches like a gentle fire across the marsh. And it's the time of the very first new velveteen buds, like the tiny soft ears of voles.

Leaves are still a long way off, but in Willow Time, the day the silver buds first emerge is exactly the right and only day for them to emerge, because it simply Is. Willows don't fret about how long they got to be quiet in their roots, because during that time they were all the way there, in the roots, no worries about past or future. Now, when the buds come, it is because it is time for the buds to come. Resisting any of it would only cause struggle, and strife. Resisting any of it would be, well-- very much like a human, and not very much like a willow tree.

It's so easy to understand this on the land, through the eyes of our wiser animal & plant kin. It is so much harder to remember it ourselves. But the thing is, we don't need to remember any of this ourselves, all alone. We were never meant to be alone. We were always meant to look outward from ourselves and touch the things of the world— the elk, the rain, the nettles, the mud, the tracks of bobcats, the new willow buds—and through them understand where we are in the cycle of days, where we stand in the basket of time, how to navigate the tides of transformation.

"We have been put into life as into the element we most accord with," writes Rilke in his Letters to a Young Poet,  "and we have, moreover, through thousands of years of adaptation, come to resemble this life so greatly that when we hold still, through a fortunate mimicry we can hardly be differentiated from everything around us." 

Dancing in the Moss-Fetlocked North

This hammered-tin witch on her bicycle with her tender wings, her flaming hair, the little person hitch-hiking the back of her wheels— she is a proper gate keeper for the Honey Grove shed, where she stands guard. She is a proper gate-keeper for Honey Grove itself, for the process of transformation that occurs when you step up the deceptively simple, alder-lined road and into the world Nao and Mark and Gus (faithful hound) have created here, on some six acres in the middle of fir forest on the eastern edge of Vancouver Island, British Columbia.

I visited Honey Grove for the first time in October of 2013, where I wrote the Gray Fox Epistle The Honey Mill , inspired by Honey Grove, and met Nao, a beekeeper, dancer, green thumb farm-garden tender, (and an early Gray Fox Epistle subscriber) for the first time. She has since become a very dear, very close friend (a gift from the internet web of connections indeed). This time around, my visit was centered around two of Nao's sacred dance offerings, but above all things it was a slipping out of time, and into slowness. 

(Let me just add here that any of you longing for a quiet and deeply restorative escape, look no further than Nao and Mark's Honey Grove cottage, here)

This is what Honey Grove will do to you. These firs, and cedars, and the bees, and some alchemy between all of this and the man and woman and dog who keep this land, who tend it, and who it tends in turn. The tin-witch should be a sign. You are entering territory Out of Time. You are entering Bee Time, Fir Time, Raspberry Time, Hen Time. Where all things are allowed to proceed at precisely their own internal pace. No faster, no slower either. 

And so, before telling you about dancing up mountain lions; before telling you about fields full of the hands of light, and how the sky is all eagles, I want to show you a small glimpse of the good magic of Honey Grove. 

How the crocuses came up one morning, where they hadn't been before. Gold filagreed. Grails rising from the ground, cupping spring. How this is a thing to bow down before, up north. In some ways the landscape of British Columbia, with its firs and spotted towhees, feels familiar to the California I know. And yet the winters are darker, and colder, and when a crocus comes up you drop what you're doing. At home, the yellow faces of calendula bloom all year. There are lemons on the trees. The bees don't stop flying. This is its own gift, but there is something in the still cold dark, and then that cup of gold, that crocus. 

While meanwhile, the dead raspberry caps hang, holding raindrops, holding ghosts, holding moons. 

In the little alder wood that lines the driveway, there is a quiet bewitchment afoot. I mean it. This mushroom is glowing. 

There are beings at work here that cannot be seen, who ask, who receive--this is the dance Nao and Mark and Gus dance, here. This is what it means, to have the land working you, creating you, as much as you work and create it. (This is what Nao tells me, and what I see when I look and listen and sit, here.) Maybe it's just the mycelium, down there netting trees together like neural synapses, whispering. Just. Mycelium; magic; little folk—they are nearly the same, in my mind. Maybe all the way the same. So many words for the same stories. The sun is a burning star, eating gas. The sun is a god riding a chariot, afire. The sun is in love with the field of grass, and feeds it. The chlorophyll in green blades and leaves photosynthesize sun into sugar. 

So. The mushroom is glowing, and in its glowing it is saying something mysterious and deeply important, something it might take a lifetime to understand.

There are worlds caught in the cobwebs. 

The trees have great feathers of moss at their fetlocks, some old horses from the beginning of time, now slowed down to trees, but always listening, and grazing at sun. 

This is the world of Honey Grove, the space I stepped into for a week which felt like one long breakfast, one long afternoon tea, one long evening by the woodstove, in which my body-time took over my mind-time. And good grief, what a relief that was!

 The first morning, Nao and I sat down with ample cups of tea and discussed that evening's dance class, where I was going to present a little bit about the natural history of the mountain lion before she led us into the kind of sacred embodied dance experience that only Nao can hold space for, in the way that she does. I will get to this in a moment. 

Photo taken in California in spring 2013 in California of what I am almost sure is a mountain lion track, filled here with hazel catkin in honor of her passing through

We talked, Nao and I, about the way of mountain lions--how they are pure meat eaters, their entire being centered around the hunt; how the rest of their days, they spend napping as cats do, in sun patches, in shadows; how when they travel they take the paths of least resistance, moving as water does, gathering and gathering energy until the moment of the hunt, that great focused pounce; how their canine teeth have nerves that run to the very tips, which can feel out the spaces between vertebrae in order to snap the spinal cord fast and merciful; how they cut open their prey with surgical precision, going for the heart, literally; female mountain lions can't synthesize vitamin A, which is vital for their reproductive health—they get it only from the organs of other animals. How the mountain lion is all languor, all energy conservation, until the moment of attack and consumption; how she goes right for the heart, knowing precisely what she is hungry for, and with no remorse. 

Have you ever seen such beauty? I can hardly bear those eyes. Photo credit here. 

And so when we danced, under Nao's guidance, we danced not only our hungers, letting mountain lion lead us there, unashamed to know what we might want in this life, but also the dance of water, which does not try to split a rock in two but rather smoothly flows around it, like the lioness on ridgetops, in dry creekbeds, going the easeful way.  

I learned something very profound (to me) in all of this—how much energy gets shot off like twanging rubberbands from unnecessary fretting and stress; how the mountain lion takes the path of least resistance and naps long in the sun because she knows exactly how much she's going to need for that pounce. How the term "the path of least resistance" itself makes me cringe; and yet to the mountain lion it doesn't mean laziness, or not trying hard enough—it means wise conservation of energy. It means appreciation of energy, of body, of spirit, of when a lot is needed, and when a little, and how both are good. 

We, as humans, as artists, as makers, as dreamers, might have to pounce every day on one thing or another, but how might our paths between each pounce be languid? Why not enjoy that triangle of sun, coming through? This life is short; why is it we are taught to treat the whole thing like a fight or a flight? Why not savor between each act of precision and focus; why not stretch in the sun, and follow the smooth way, like the cougar? Really, why ever not? I have no idea. It seems glaringly obvious that yes if at all possible, we should bathe in sun beams, even if for a minute; and we should close our eyes to the taste of good tea, and to the lives of birds, singing, and all the other small things which can spell languor in our human lives. 

This is what came out of Nao's dance class in the woodfire-warm yurt of a rainy evening in February, as she gently guided each song and we women danced the round floor, finding the old animal wisdom in our bones. In Nao's words, from her website, this class, and the others in its series...

... is dedicated to uncovering our wild intelligence, what British Storyteller Martin Shaw calls the “primordial root relationship between ourselves and the living world.”

Together, we will journey to the place of instinct and wild uncivilized knowing. Each class will be dedicated to exploring the nature of a particular animal through the living ritual of dance.

The invitation is to come into connection with the wisdom of our own animal bodies and then to follow the cellular intelligence there into the landscape of psyche/soul, into the indigenous territory of self.

She writes also --

To dance freely is to begin to release material that cannot be accessed through the vehicle of the intellect. If we let our minds rest for a while and let the wisdom body lead us, something profound can happen. What occurs is a kind of healing that has to do with connecting the heart with the head, and the body with the soul.

Dance is something that human beings have been doing since the beginning of time. Honest expression in the form of dance is deeply rooted in the nature of who we are. Creative movement can be a transformative experience that can lead to upsurges of emotion, and these feelings are doorways to deeper understanding. Our task is to help ourselves and each other to listen and be, without the obstructions of a judging mind and the paralyzing effects of self-consciousness. From here, an awareness opens and the territory of transformation is realized.

Gus the Wise Man hound, who knows all of this inherently and would likely wonder why I am spending so long writing about it, when I should just be savoring the smell of the night and not worrying about precise language....

I see what Nao does as storytelling through the body. It is very old stuff, this. How dance is the body's way of expressing its own mythos, its own understanding of the world. How the mind might learn much from this, and from being quiet. For a long time I had a hangup around the idea of dancing--that it had to be performative, and choreographed, but now I see that dance might be the oldest art of all—the body, reveling in its animal nature; the body, telling stories of what it has seen, and felt. Nao is a very special, very powerful gatekeeper in this regard, letting the strands of inspiration she has gathered from old tales and mystics and poems come down from somewhere through her, into her dancers, and then, I imagine, onward into the great big ground. 

It was an honor and quite a joy to share this round space up north with Nao and her dancing women. My visit also overlapped with a workshop Nao and her friend Jessie Turner, a wonderful jewelry-smith and creative visioner, created together, called Conceiving the Muse. We explored the mother of the muses, Mnemosyne, who embodies what Nao called "Divine Remembrance," that very important act of really assimilating something-- a place, a bird, a conversation--in the remembrance of it, the burying of it in the body and then unearthing it again as some reflection which reminds you that all things are divinely connected, and Zeus, the Sky, the spark, the ignition. We explored how the act of creating is this combination of remembrance and activation, a constant dance—the field, the sun; the field, the sun. 

The field cannot grow without the focused light of the sun. Nor can it grow without the remembrance of all life held in the wet earth. We live, it feels to me, in a world obsessed with activation and ignition. I myself am a bit obsessed with activation and ignition. I'm almost constantly in activation mode, I'll admit it. But when we danced the field and the sun of the poem below (by the Persian mystic-poet-prostitute Rabia) and I was assigned the field—let me tell you, I've known few things as glorious as dancing myself a blade of grass, and then savoring the many hands of the sun. 

This is what the mountain lion does in between the great ignition of her pounce: she savors. 

The Way the Forest Shelters

Rabia

I know about love the way

the field knows about light

the way the forest shelters

the way an animal's divine raw desire

seeks to unite with whatever

might please its soul--without a

single strange thought of remorse.

There is a peaceful delegation in us 

that lobbies every moment

for contentment.

How will you ever find peace

unless you yield to love

the way the gracious earth does

to our hand's

impulse.