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 Inner Rhythms of Winter

Here in the lichen green house all nestled in fruit trees, here in the sky blue attic dormer where the winter stars are clear at night despite the city lights (Orion, the Pleiades), I have been doing my best to move to the quiet and slower rhythms of winter. I love this season. I love the long nights and the frost in the morning. I love the rain (oh god, how I love it) and I love the birds that visit at this time of year and fill the air with sweet notes—cedar waxwings, ruby-crowned kinglets, varied thrush, pine siskins.

I love the lemons, ripening all at once like a thousand yellow morning stars. 

(Says Neruda of the lemon: 

So, when you hold

the hemisphere
of a cut lemon
above your plate,
you spill
a universe of gold,
a
yellow goblet
of miracles.)

I love the way the persimmon leaves (which have now fallen) turn to embers, turn to flame. There is a stillness I find harder and harder to find in this loud and sad and chaotic and bright-screened world, but I have been seeking it nevertheless, as the days dwindle and the light feels more and more like a low and smoldering hearthfire.

There is a savoring of small things through the senses, letting them rest thus in the house of the body, that this season asks of me, and so I am doing my best to listen, and taste, and smell, and feel, and behold. Most of all, to behold. John O'Donohue talks about beholding—how each day we have the opportunity to behold great and simple beauty. It doesn't matter where you are, there is always some beauty to see; it's just a matter of taking the time to see it. I like the world behold, because it is tactile, because it is about holding things inside of ourselves with our eyes. In the Old English and Old Anglo Saxon sense, bihealdan means not only to "hold in view" but to "belong to." I love this—that we can belong to the beauty we take the time to behold. I find that having something belong to me matters far less than belonging to something bigger than me.

Like the winter sun rising low and iridescent across the ocean. 

Like the vulture under a changing sky, riding thermals of rising heat. 

Like the scarlet intoxication of the ancient and magical fly agaric mushroom, keeper of primordial and dangerous wisdom. 

Like the sanddunes under the hands of late afternoon light. 

Once, the vast expanse of western San Francisco looked like this: covered in vast and blowing dunes, some one hundred feet high, where rare blue butterflies lived on the fragrant yellow lupines. Now, the dunes are all a memory, save the brief spit of sand at Ocean Beach; they are entirely flattened and forgotten. This puts sorrow in my heart, to think of the sand and the unhatched chrysalises there under the cement blocks of that place; but it also gives me a bittersweet seed to hold close; that by learning, and remembering, we keep the sand under the city alive. 

Out at Abbott's Lagoon, where the sand dunes still thrive, the coyotes are courting, dancing across the vast expanses side by side, paw prints tripping close but never quite overlapping, one coyote sometimes veering off in a giddy loop, flirtatious and full of the joy of fresh autumnal air, the gentle light, a beautiful pair of canine eyes...

The bobcats, meanwhile, are hunting the edge of the lagoon for the hapless and plump black coots, a favorite wintertime meal.

Newts are out in merry droves, making their annual pilgrimages from their summer estivation burrows to the creeks of their birth to mate. They walk slow and steady, so deliberate, so unswayed, their bellies and feet flashing an orange warning (they are highly toxic to everyone save the garter snake) that is the same color as the satsuma oranges whose flavor is the flavor of this time of year (and my childhood), and same as the bright skin of persimmons, whose fruit I crave throughout the summer, anticipating their arrival in fall. 

Under my hands there is knitting for various little nieces and nephews. Between my teeth are the roasted nuts of the bay laurel tree, which taste of the land I gathered them from, and of cacao and coffee and popcorn all at once. They are oily, and rich, and bitter, and give you a little zing right to the brain, like you are out walking in a wet forest with cold hands and a bright heart. These, too, I wait all year to cure, and roast, and savor. When the days grow darker, I start to crave them, like the persimmons, as if my body knows just what minerals it needs. The minerals of the dark season, its sweet, its strong, its smolder. 

And in my soul (the food it craves) these days are the words of poets—Dylan Thomas and Robinson Jeffers, Alan Garner (poetry written in prose form) and Ursula Le Guin (the same). And also the brilliant words of hedge-speaking poet Tom Hirons in his poem Sometimes A Wild God, illustrated by the wonderful Rima Staines. 

I had the pleasure and honor of visiting them at the beginning of fall—and there are some very exciting things (in Book Form) afoot, and close to fruiting, but these I cannot share quite yet for reasons you will soon see. Suffice it to say that the story of my adventures on Dartmoor, and this Wonderful Surprise, will be coming to you soon, but not just now... like the very earliest trillium wildflowers of January, waiting to bloom when the time is right.

This darkest time of year is the time to court silence and candlelight. This, it seems to me, is its rhythm, and this is also the rhythm of poets, hence this hunger for their words, which are hospitable to silence, which are cloaked in silence and shadow, all that empty space on the page.

Near Samhain I made a pilgrimage with my aunt to Tor House, the hand-hewn granite home of the magnificent Californian poet Robinson Jeffers and his beloved wife Una. 

It was their hearths that struck me almost more than anything—one for each room in that low stone and ocean-blown home, places to gather when the dark was so great outside that it was its own wild being. Jeffers went out every night to read the stars, to watch their movements as the ocean pounded just beyond the back gate, while inside, Una tended the fire, and played the melodeon, and filled the vast dark with an embered sort of beauty. They made their dreams their own, reads a quote (in Latin) carved into one of their walls; they made their  life to the rhythms of their own souls, and their home too. They did it with their hands, and with their dreaming.

This, to me, seems the way to do it. In the gathering dark, as the solstice nears, truths like this stand out more clearly, like the flame of a candle, stark against the shadows. That which is truly bright shines only more fully when the world goes quiet, and dim. 

In my body, the rhythms of autumn and winter have drawn me closer to bedrock; to earth and mineral and stone. To clay, and the working of it, and the delight of watching animals unfurl beneath my hands, and the wonder of learning about glazes, and the transmutations which occur within the kiln. Really, it is pure alchemy. (As are the roses that bloom suddenly in the middle of December in my mother's garden.)

These dark evenings are good for sewing skirts, and burning frankincense, and peering at the tiny (in)consistencies of the moss stitch. (Not a stitch to knit by candlelight!)

And they are good for dreaming, for letting the mind roam to all manner of whimsical lands, where leverets are raised by Wild Folk in wheeled caravans (readers of the Leveret Letters, when I saw this caravan parked on the side of the road in Bolinas, it reminded me so much of the wagon of the Greentwins, or the Basket-witches!), where such wagons might carry a true wandering bard, or a woman who is part goose, or an old man who can mend anything brought to him, including a lost soul.  Or an even older woman with an apron-full of healing herbs, and eyes with the granite of moving fault lines in them.

Out in the hills and forests of beloved Point Reyes the land offers up a thousand cups of tea to heal both the body and the spirit. It seems to me that such cups of tea must be gathered spontaneously, without agenda, open to what offers itself, and just enough for one pot of tea to be shared between friends-- as my dear friend Nao and I did a fortnight past, while she was visiting from British Columbia (more about that beautiful time soon).  Pine needles and plantain, usnea, yerba santa and tiny new sprigs of yarrow, sipped at the hearth of good friendship-- now truly, what could be better? Beholding the forest and hills upon the tongue, inside the belly; an act of communion. (The pine trees dropped some chunks of resin as gifts for Nao to take back north, for muscle-warming oils and salves like the one below.)

Medicines are curing patiently in the apothecary's cabinet (including the first round of a Reishi tincture from the treasured Ganoderma tsugae I found in the Sierras in August), and hanging up through the house, both for the medicine of color and beauty, and to be used in tea when the mood strikes (the pine). 

Meanwhile, sweet Hawthorn is glorious in his full coat, a great satin cloud, lustrous but needing to be shorn. I feel bad, to leave him ragged and close-cut on the darkest days of the year, but a coat left unshorn is very dangerous for an angora (he can ingest too much, and starve), so I will have to snip away soon. Though a bit stressful when we reach the underparts, shearing Hawthorn has become its own rhythm of stillness and soft words and the sudden bounty of wool in my lap, to be spun, and spun, until I have enough for a shawl. How marvelous-- a shawl made by this kind and wise being, and therefore made in large part of the garden plants he eats copiously-- calendula and radish, nasturtium, borage, lavender, comfrey. What a world it is, that such things are possible! We do not need to look far for magic...

It is dark here now, and time, I say, to turn out the lights, shut the screens, and light the candles. May these darkest nights of the year be filled with tea, and time for reflection, and words that nourish your whole soul, that spark little fires in you made of embers the world has never before seen. I find that making time to cut the electric lights, and sit in the glow of fire or flame, is the surest way to hear the quiet but strong voice of the season, whispering its rhythms. 

May you be warmed, may you find the hearth that is always smoldering inside.

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)