To Lay Down in the Middle of the Forest When You’ve Lost Your Way

Earlier today a dear friend asked me about poems that have to do with the forest. And I remembered one I wrote a little over a year ago, part of my A Green Language poetry project (no longer up, but hopefully a printed book before too long!). 

It came to me almost entire in a single sitting one July morning last year, as if spoken by a kind and gentle old woman in a time when I very much needed such kind and gentle words. 

It seems we need words of gentleness now more than ever, so I share this with you here in the spirit of hope, and of another way which is not fighting, which is not part of the binary of good or evil, us or them, but something other, and older. 

To Lay Down in the Middle of the Forest When You’ve Lost Your Way

Never forget that it is all

the pilgrim’s path, that you are walking

a long, long way, that whatever

end you think you are seeking has

already changed its name, and is

not the end that’s seeking you.

On good days it will seem a romantic,

bright thing, this adventure, your boots

thick with mountain dust, a cane cut

from hazel in your hand, a rucksack full

of apples and oatcakes given to you by

someone who loves you on your back,

and on those good days you will think

the easy path goes on forever through

the open, that spring hills will always

be green and the kestrels always hovering

on amber wings.

Of course you know better:

that it’s only a spring stroll if you never

reach the forest, and no adventure at all.

It’s only a spring jaunt for wildflowers if you

don’t fall down on your knees and weep.

And nowhere is it spring forever.

You will find the pinewood inevitable.

The path will dissolve into a hundred paths,

each made by deer. There will be no waymarkers

and no stars. Your rucksack will feel empty,

and you will lose your hazel cane and

all the songs you ever learned

in the face of what scares you, in the face

of what is ugly in your own heart, in the face

of what is tearing the world to pieces.

Many will tell you to forge onward, to show courage,

to fight back, to look for signs on the duff, to not

stop moving for fear of cold, to not give in, to seek

the sunrise through the trees, to tell yourself

something stirring, something bright, to run away.

This is all well and good but most often the forest

isn’t done with you yet and fighting it is like netting

wind; all you will achieve is a tattered pair of boots,

an aching heart, a fresh strength of despair

and the sunrise no closer.

That’s just it, says the humus when you’ve

come at last to your knees.

Ah, say the pine needles when you begin to weep.

There, there, rest your head, as you cry out for help,

for guidance, for mercy, that the box opened long ago

might be closed, and as you lay down in the middle

of the pinewood in the depth of your sorrow,

whatever its name, the earth will swallow

you, and it, right up. Do not be afraid.

You are not dead yet.

All you must do is lay down just there

where you’ve lost the path, and

you will be taken into the heart of things

where three women tend an ancient pine tree

and a spring of hot water that bubbles up

from a vent in the earth. They will coo and fawn

over you like a little child, they will strip your

roadworn clothes, they will send you and all the

unwanted guests in your soul into the earth’s

hot water to be made beloved again.

After a long while, as long as it takes

(for they have been singing old lullabies

in a minor key and you may have been asleep)

they will help you out and dry you off

and rub you down and comb your hair

and braid it new and in that combing you will

hear a thousand blessings sung may you be

well may you be safe may your mind be gentle

may your way be bright may your thoughts go

gleaming may you measure your worth and

your days not by hours spent or money made

but by the quality of light in your soul and

how often you have asked yourself

what you might give away.

They will dress you in the dark skirts and aprons

and beads and leather slippers and long

embroidered vests of your ancestors and then

they will press a lantern in your hands and point

your way back up through roots and badger dens

to the surface again, to the forest where you lost your way.

Your rucksack will be full of strange new flatbreads,

a flask of mead, a pouch of tobacco,

a book of poems from very long ago.

You may still wander the forest a good deal

longer, but in a different manner, looking carefully at

the leaves of the many trees, trying to identify

birds by their songs, or where the bobcat walked.

You may gather the golden resin that falls

from the pines to ease your aches, or sit

quietly for long hours listening for the

voices inside the creaking limbs. You will have

stopped your striving, walked a hundred

figure eights without complaint, made a web of

your own footsteps, for once undesperate and slow.

And then all at once without warning you will

find the edge of it, a meadow beyond, and the

sun coming up. There it will be again, your path,

shining through the grass, gilt with dew, easy

as morning, unruined, unhurried, but just in time.

(c) Sylvia V. Linsteadt 2016

Burning Quail Woman

                         

                                  

Quail, the lady of bronze and smoke, she died midmorning. Neck snapped, not a mark.
The little sparrowhawk with red eyes must have dropped her in the long grass.

Mother found her. I carried her limp and warm in my hands, stroked her feet and her beak, laid her with yellow tidytips lupine, baby blue eyes, at the uproot of an old pine.
Her eyelids closed, peace on the dust-blue lids, full in elsewhere now.
A male called from the bough.

Once she danced for him, tail feathers swinging, a fan of desire: charcoal copper dun.
The sway of her plump body
in the leafmold
in the amber duff
in the thrushsung dusk
was the sway of all abundance, the promise of worlds.

A man with brown feet and brown hands helped to skin her. One cut at the breast, the rest with fingertips, like taking off a coat. I gave her juniper smoke and roses.
Cicadas clicked their wings in the dry oak hills, and called it summer.

Before Olympus there were the Titans. Big women and men of earth. Asteria, daughter of Phoibe, was mother of falling stars and dreams. She gave birth to Hekate. Her mother was the moon. When Zeus chased after her for sex, she became a quail to escape him.
She fled, leaping into the sea, and became the island Delos in the blue Aegean.
It had no bottom. It floated, and the quail flocked there on their journeys south. Later when Zeus chased after her sister Leto, the island sheltered her.

Asteria was aunt of Artemis who loved the woodbirds and the wood, who loved the ones she hunted, who was the deer she ate. Artemis wore quail feathers at her waist, and helped them birth their spotted eggs.

I placed the quail in the adobe brick kiln we built at dusk to fire earth-made pottery.
Skinless, plump, wet, she smelled of sweet flesh and comfort, an offering
to the clay to the fire to the night and stars, to her mother and her sisters
Asteria, Artemis, Leto: women of the quail, of instinct, wilderness, care

She burned with her tailfeathers still on so she could take them up there with her, dancing
Her fat glazed the pots, her fat popped and sparked, her bones turned to white dust, delicate as crabshells by morning.

Up there in the stars, quail women are dancing.
They are dancing with her spirit they are singing in the smoke
They are shaking their hips and lowering their blue-dusked lids to look upon their lovers

I was so sad at first for her beauty, lost to death. Her body was perfect in my hands.
I could not bear it. I thought of her mate, his loss. I did not want to erase his sorrow, the love that birds know. I felt so sorry for him, for her.
But she was far wiser than I, that quail, little woman.
She showed me her death, she let me see it
How her beautiful feathers were only a skin; no less precious for it, but a skin nonetheless.
That what was underneath was tender, that it could nourish me, a gift.
The body is a gift, but more than that the body is an offering on the fire
Borne on embers above the coiled pots she was transmuted
She became smoke and heat and air
She glowed, her bones molten. She became starmade again, the first sacrament

A woman offers a quail to the goddess, offers flesh to the earth and stars
In the face of what we perceive truly there is nothing else to be done
Learning to be fully human is learning to handle the dead this way
The old hunters say that animals offer themselves to the arrow because they want to come into the human camp to be sung, to be turned to fire, to be danced, to be part of that pathos, that beauty, that blaze.

I did not understand fully how to offer her, but she did. She went to my hands and the fire and taught me that we are not whole without this, without looking into the underworld, into the body of the quail, into the earth's hearth and there giving up what we know for the sweetness of a grief that is feathered, that is wise.

Down there quail woman is carrying an ember in her feathered hands. Through the underworld she is carrying it. Underground the dead are but sparks in the bellies of seeds. The spark does not go out, only leaves our view for a time. Quail woman is dancing there. Quail woman is dancing in the stars. As above, so below, and the kiln in the center where all is transformed.

Back home I buried her bones, half dust, in the bishop pine wood where she was born. With rose petals, red wine and a pot sherd from her fire I buried them. At dawn, two quail called, flapped, sang, right outside our door, nearer than I'd ever heard them. All through the daybreak they carried on. Mating maybe. Mourning, maybe. She lives everywhere now.

A Green Language

In the end—through all the struggle and strangeness and beauty and sorrow of the world we navigate today—I think we are each of us just trying to create the story we truly want to live in. Not the story we think we should live in—our souls know better, and maybe that's what causes so much endless inner strife, disconnect, depression. Our souls (or hearts, or spirits, or true selves, whatever you want to call it) know what story fits them best. What lilt or drum or ship of language carries you swiftly to rest, to comfort, to home. What kind of garden, what kind of ecosystem, what kind of lover, what kind of weather, makes you come blinking and staring awake, to rejoice at the doorstep of your own contentment. 

An oak branch grows through the blue bedroom

in the little house of dreams where the artist

lived. Outside a plum tree is bending with fruit

Some places hold on to elsewhere like a good coat

Fog is bright on the edges of the mountain

You can make your story with words; with paint and wood and color; with touches, with kisses, with songs, with gifts given to others, with the way you approach Time. You can make the story of your life like that of a beauty-gleaner, out in the fields after everyone else thinks the harvest is in, doing your best for the sake of what gleams. But gods above, does the culture we live in these days make it hard. Hard to even hear the voice that knows the story that will bring you home to the hearth of your life, let alone follow it. 

You all know I'm a firm—perhaps even reckless—believer in the following of that voice. I believe in a different story than the one we currently inhabit. I believe in trying to do what you love at all costs, and I believe in defending what is wild, what is other, what is wise, in all beings. I believe that our natural rhythms have nothing to do with clocks or screens, that we are all deeply creative creatures, that we all need that creativity in our lives, and that we are all connected to the natural world, on every level of our selves, though we may go our whole lives without ever knowing it nor even stopping to really see a flower. I believe that being human, before all violence and greed and short-sightedness, means making—a pot, a basket, a soup, a child, a net, a fire—and it means telling— the stories of humanness, of time,  of land, of love, and how they interweave. 

What incredible little animals we are! And also, no wonder we are having a bit of trouble these days...

Downtown what was once said over coffee is saved

inside the flickers of screens

We only know who we are and where we stand in relationship to the world based on the stories we are told, and then tell ourselves.

 I find myself writing this over and over again. Mostly I think I repeat it because I am in desperate need of remembering my own words. Because despite everything I believe in and stand for with my work, it is not an easy path in the world today to simply be human. And how absurd! As David Whyte says, there is no other creature that can choose to be anything other than itself. And yet here we are doing our very best to be anything but. It's amazing how easily and fully we internalize stories of productivity, of success, of what is good enough, of what is worthy. And it is doubly amazing how vehemently we can berate ourselves for any perceived lack. When in fact it wasn't even the story we wanted to be living inside of to begin with, and our souls have been trying to send us news alerts to that effect since last spring! 

The men are talking investments and mergers

the cars have gotten bigger and there

are days in winter when it is illegal to

burn a fire in the hearth

I am here to tell you that I struggle with all of this just as much as the next person. That the devotion to beauty and story and old magics that you find here, and in all of my work, is my best self, my best offering, my best attempt to tell and fully live the story that feels like home. But I am such a young, green creature on this path, and frequently I find myself very lost indeed in the forest.

At the end of May I found myself in one such forest of the mind—and literally, in a very unceremonious and undignified heap on the floor of my little studio, weeping my eyes out. I think we've all been there in some form or another—fed up, confused, uncertain where to turn or what to do or how to make ends meet next month, terrified we are doing it all wrong, we made a mistake, we are terrible fools, this was a dreadful idea and why didn't we listen to all the people who warned us about the life of a writer? 

In that moment there really was nothing to do but cry, as crying sometimes is the first and best medicine, but after a while you have to stop, and pick yourself up, and go do something else for a while. Which, eventually, I did—a walk, or a meal, or a sit on the steps, I can't recall which. 

And yet not far by foot up only a few hills

and a few streets that wind the artist

who made his own dream to live inside

But in the midst of it all, something very beautiful happened. Something very beautiful reached down a hand and pulled me up, and out. That something was Poetry. I'd been listening to David Whyte. I'd been reading Rilke and discussing his Sonnets with a dear friend. I'd been carrying about W.S. Merwin's The Vixen. I'd been keeping a big black notebook where I wrote down all of my favorite poems, memorizing bits and pieces that called especially strong. 

he is there again with a bucket and mud

on his hands, determined to mend what ten years

and raccoons and rain have almost ruined.

In that moment I recalled something that Martin Shaw wrote on his blog  after the Brussels attack about the myth of Sedna—Let no day pass - especially the shattering, scary and super busy ones - where you do not spend a little while combing the lice from [Sedna'] locks. When I am tired, I allow the great soul-criers to do it for me, I read aloud from Anna Akhmatova, Pablo Neruda, Virginia Woolf, Galway Kinnell, Shakespeare. And again, look to the old stories, they’ve turned up perfectly on time.  

And something else, more recent, that Terri Windling shared on hers, a quote from Jane Yolen, who writes, the bottomest of lines is this: if you are a writer, you write. And you turn all of life's hiccups into poetry or prose. How lucky are we -- accidents, incidents, handicaps, heartbreaks all become research, become prompts. So don't ignore them, but use them. Every day. Every single glorious, bloody day.

It had been uncertain. Did it matter anymore,
the baroque clay molding the faces of angels 
painted in the old way in corners 
the red cupboards full of blue and white china
the winding stair the shutters blue as skies, now that
so many people had moved elsewhere and the world
had changed? Now that the dream which had
moved over the mountain and through him like mist
had gone quiet for a time?

All of this together—the books, the poems, the words, the writings of contemporary mythic artists who I admire—along with the way the trees were moving outside in the wind and the thrushes were singing the summer, opened a little gateway in me. Poetry is what came through, and pulled me out of myself and my self-pity. I started writing poems every morning, something I hadn't done since I was a teenager. I took Jane Yolen's advice, and I turned all the hiccups and all the flights of intensity and emotion that I was experiencing into poems. I made a vow of poiesis in my heart, to enact poetry in and through my life, as best I could. It is, after all, a verb (from the Greek)—to do or to make; a doing and a making aligned with the doing and making of the wiser, older, beyond-human world. Of the way things are. Of alder trees making leaves. Of rain making pools. Of thrushes making eggs. Of time and tectonics making stones.

But then summer started to ripen and we all know
that beauty and dreams have their own lives
and that we cannot resist them when they call us

As the poet Robert Bringhurst writes in his essay Poetry and Thinking, “When words do what blossoming apple trees do, and what stars do, poetry is what you read and hear.” And in his The Silence That is Not Poetry, “In writing a poem, as in building a boat or fixing an engine or mapping a river or treating a broken heart, we give ourselves to something else, which is not us. To do so helps to make us whole.” Poetry is beyond language, but it uses words to allow the embers of being to kindle through us, that we might gather them in our pockets and warm ourselves with the remembrance that all things are in us, and we are in all things. 

So he is out in the garden again at last
healing one room at a time with new paint
and the new decade in a season full of plums

When I write poetry, I feel the language of my own true home stirring inside me. Poetry, I am learning, is something you really can live by. Maybe not financially (except for the very few and fortunate), but in spirit. 

In honor of this movement in my life, this path of poiesis, and also as a way to keep myself accountable, to keep my feet on the trail, I created a poetry website called A Green Language, a term used among Renaissance alchemists and mystics to refer to the Language of Birds, which was thought to be a divine and mystical tongue in which all true knowledge could be articulated. My poems are by no means written in the divine tongue of all true knowledge (ha! that one's quite a long way off yet, and thank goodness); the name, rather, is a nod and a bow toward the beings that already live the poetry of being every moment, that don't know how to choose to be other than what they are-- the birds, the plants, the stones, the stars. The whole living world that holds us. 

After some deliberation, I decided to make the website private, open only to those who sign up for a very small subscription fee ($3.00 per month). I considered creating a Patreon page—because the idea is, after all, that as an artist I am reliant on the support, the patronage, of readers, and what a blessed thing that is. But Patreon didn't feel quite right, so I decided to do it on my own, to create this little private space, this Green Language where every week a new poem is posted. 

I know that so many things are free to read on the internet these days—and that's a wonderful thing. So much free knowledge—the stories, essays, poems, songs, photographs! And yet this is not always easy for artists. With this project I've tried to strike a balance—only a handful of pennies for a poem (around sixty-five pennies per poem, at four to five poems per month, to be more precise :) ), and yet that monetary value makes a difference. Because whether I like it or not, sometimes putting a monetary value on something changes its own value in my mind; it makes me more committed to the time and energy that it takes to listen for, sit with, and write down the poems of my days. It reminds me that such things really do have value to other people too. And of course it helps me with the daily financial realities of a working artist (all that tea...)

So—it would be an honor and a delight and a gift to see you there, around the hearth of my Green Language. So far there are seven poems (the latest of which you will find in the captions of these photographs) and a growing number of subscribers making the halls feel all the warmer with their presence.  

These poems are a doorway, a porthole, into a story of daily living that makes me feel like I've come home. I hope that some of the poems can offer a little bit of that homecoming to you. Or at least bring flashes of beauty and quiet to your days. You can read more, and subscribe, through this handy green button!

*The photographs in this post are of the beautiful hand-built house of my friend Steve, a truly wonderful old soul who lives in the hills of Mill Valley, where I grew up. He is a couple generations older than I am, and has walked and painted in that town his whole life. To me Steve embodies what it means to cleave close to the story you believe in, no matter how hard the path, to make it everywhere around you with your very hands, so that your soul might not only stay alive, but thrive. The accompanying poem is in his honor.