The Little Mouse That Lived

This pile of Elk Lines and Tinderbundles is the swiftest way to convey to you the reason I've been silent on the Vat the past few weeks. 

Meanwhile, the rain has been falling, turning the gutters to creeks and the creeks to rivers, and this yellow-rumped warbler, with his flashing yellow crown has, all the while, been feasting on the last persimmons out the window. Alas, he is blurry in this photograph, taken through glass. But he and I, we've been watching each other while each of us works. I wonder what he thinks of me, spotted through the window, murmuring hello to him when he comes and chirps and gorges himself and indignantly pesters the occasion jay. That strange being sitting at a big table with many things flashing about in her fingers. 

But what I really would like to share with you today is the story of a Mouse. 

You may remember him from October (A Heart of Acorn and Mouse) when I found him under an oak tree, trembling in a little ball, where I was about to dump out the dregs of my tea leaves, in the midst of learning to make buttons and beads with primitive hand-tools with a gathering of wild women in the hills of Occidental. 

With the help of another woman whose heart couldn't quite bear to leave him for the foxes or the bobcats or the owls, despite the natural way of things (for there he was, right in our path, as if begging to be saved, motherless and tiny and cold) he was scooped into an old coconut milk tin which we lined with wool (and how he curled, nose to paws, delighted, was the final straw for me; I almost cried at the sight, and became determined to save him, for all beings crave the pleasure of life, and deserve a chance at it). I tried to get him to Wild Care that evening but they were closed. I called their Emergency line about fifty times (and felt quite foolish) until I finally spoke to a woman who told me to keep him warm through the night and bring him in straightaway in the morning. I wrote of how I woke up every few hours to change the water in the bottle so he stayed warm, how I rushed him back over the bridge the next morning and nearly wept at the front desk when I gave him to the excellent people of Wild Care, certain he hadn't lasted the night, afraid to disturb him in his little nest and scare his remaining energy away.

I heard from them a week or two later saying that he was doing well, though his appetite wasn't quite what it should be, and that he was living with another deermouse. It's best for animals that have any hope of rehabilitation to be housed with another of their kind, especially young ones who have no parents to demonstrate to them the Ways of Wild Mice. It seems that together, they teach each other what it means to be a deermouse; they speak together in the language of deermice, whatever mysterious tongue that might be. 

I didn't hear from them again for a while. I was afraid he hadn't made it, and couldn't bear to call and ask. At least he got to be warm and full for a while, and speak with another mouse, I thought to myself. Then, about two weeks ago, I got a message on my phone saying that he was ready to be re-released into the wild, and since I had expressed interest, would I like to do it? And would I mind releasing both little mice together, as they needed to have each other nearby for a while to relearn the Big Wild?

Oh my. I couldn't imagine anything more magical. 

The woman informed me that the little mouse I had found was actually a rather rare subspecies of deermouse, possibly a pinyon mouse, who needed to be released right back where he was found. So, off I went on a rain-free Saturday with a cardboard box full of two terrified mice and a big bag of acorns and seeds. 

I took the back roads to Occidental. Everywhere, the world was turning green. Winter, our fecund season. The clouds were their own great landscapes on the horizon, come from over the ocean, wrung out of rain for the time being.

Smaller deermouse

When I found a safe place, full of thickets and near running water, close to the hilltop where I originally found the little deermouse, I opened the box. At first, the mouse I found wouldn't come out from under his shredded bedding at all, unlike his friend, who was very bold, and ran around the box a few times before literally leaping up over the side and into a very dense thicket where I had left a pile of seeds.

Smaller deermouse

As for "my" mouse, when he finally emerged, shy fellow, he was about twice as big as the other, with enormous ears and a little chestnut streak down each side. He climbed up to the edge of the box and was about to jump, when he looked back at me and fixed me with the most peculiar stare. We looked at each other for a good long moment. I could see his whiskers quivering, and the dark moisture of his great black eyes. I don't know if he regarded me with panic only, or some measure of recognition. I like to think it was recognition. Certainly the other mouse didn't pause to look at me at all. For some reason, the pinyon mouse fixed me with his liquid stare, and in it I saw the brief intense beauty of what it is to be a Mouse, the intense sensitivity, the quick fear. Maybe he was smelling at the air, and reading in it the resonance of Home, the place of his people.

"My" pinyon mouse

Whatever the case, he leapt from the edge too, and ran deep into the thicket I had chosen to hide them in, overhung with a very ripe toyon bush (a good feast for mice), and was gone. I stayed for a while and sang a small mouse song, hoping that their lives would be sweet and good, no matter how short or long. That they would be free, and content.

I kept thinking of the great gaze of that small mouse all the long drive home. The ancient intelligence in his eyes. How dark they were, how knowing, how perceptive. And how my heart, so easily moved already, was rather bowled over by the circle of this little mouse story--how he had huddled there, cold and alone and motherless, refusing to let me leave him; how, a month and a half later, he gazed long at me before he, a full grown healthy young mouse-man, leapt off into the thick greenery and began his wild life anew.

How, for all the lives I have unintentionally poisoned and ruined by living as a modern human woman in California in the 21st century, this one life, this tiny life, got to keep on living a little longer because I happened to be in his path, and my heart would not let me pass him by. It is a small thing in the great scheme, in the big story of loss and ecological destruction that we all carry and balk in the face of and do not know how to handle our sorrow over. But I think this experience reminded me that it hurts to become involved--to suddenly love a small mouse who is food for more creatures than I can count, to love him in my heart in a way that was literally painful, as I doted on him through that long night, and that is painful now, when I think of him out there in the scrub, and pray that he is alive, though it would be just as well to an owl if he were a meal—and yet, without loving and therefore mourning the beings of the more-than-human world, they are already lost to us.

He may not have made it past the following morning, or even that night, though I do so hope that he did; but whatever the case, for even an hour, his little mouse paws and his bright mouse eyes and his sharp mouse nose were again in the place of his fathers and mothers, and he was again wild and free.

For this, I am moved beyond human words.

And you never know, as in the old fairy tales, what may come of it all. When the foolish third brother spares the lives of the small ones-- ants, ducks, rabbits-- they always come back to save him in the end. This may be a matter of saving our hearts, of healing a small portion of a great divide, and not rescuing a princess from a sorcerer, but perhaps in this world of ours they are more similar than we might at first believe...

Tinderbundle

Just like a newborn ember needs dry grass, usnea lichen, mugwort leaves, cattail down, a good long breath of air, to light, so too does the creative ember (la chispa) in each of our spirits need its own nest of bundled fuel. Tinderbundle is just such a figurative nest of twigs and moss and down, to tuck the embers of your own dreams inside. 

Tinderbundle is my newest Wild Tales by Mail project. It has been crackling away in my imagination since early autumn, fueled by an embered conversation with my dear friend Nao Sims, of Honey Grove, my own love of the crafts and magics that come not just through the pen but also the making hands (medicine, dye, watercolor), and my experiences over the last year learning to make fire by friction. The first time I attempted to do so, I was very taken by the tinderbundle that I and the women I was with were instructed to make out of dry grass. I was moved by the idea that an ember is a newborn being that needs to be caught in the gentlest of beds before it can be blown into flame. That it is not just the act of producing a coal with spindle and hearthboard that is important, but also the act of caring for the ember so that it may reach the age of fire. 

All of this feels deeply resonant to me with the process of creativity. 

And so I give you... Tinderbundle. A firestarter for the wild soul. Each bundle is a nest of inspiration and small kindling for your own creative fires, for the path you are walking in your own place, slowly learning its wild songs. They arrive on the new moon-- so the first Tinderbundle is set to arrive December 21st! A wonderful yule gift...

Each Tinderbundle is wrapped in a vintage or naturally dyed piece of cloth and tied with my own handspun, naturally dyed wool (each dye relevant to the month's theme, and wildcrafted nearby). Once unrolled, you will find a short story vignette (of roughly 1500 words), two hand-painted divinatory cards (4 by 6 measurements, on watercolor stock), and an herbal salve (1/2 oz.)

Because these bundles contain such lovingly made items, I will only create 45 each month. So it is best to sign up early! Right now, I only have 14 Tinderbundles left for December's new moon.

Nettle, madder and black walnut dyes

Each Tinderbundle is woven around a single word, like a lone ember in the hand, a word whose roots stretch far back in the mothertree of the English language, to its roots in Old Norse, Old Dutch and Old Germanic. For example, the first month's word is Mast, from the Old English Maest: the fruit of forest trees, such as acorns, beechnuts, chestnuts and hazelnuts, as well as the pole on a ship that supports the sail.

The word is the organizing principle for all materials within the bundle. 

A note on the cards: I describe these cards as divinatory not because they particularly resemble what we think of as tarot cards, nor because they in any way predict the future, but rather in the sense of the word divination at its roots, and the old spirit behind the tarot. Divination comes from the Latin divinare, "to be inspired by a god," and the concept of seeing into the unknown. Regarding the tarot, I've heard it said that the "original" tarot was a set of playing cards in which the magic keepers (witches) of medieval Europe hid their knowledge, so that it might live on and not be entirely destroyed throughout the era of the Inquisition and beyond. These cards are about looking deeply into the wisdom of the natural world and the stories of the land, and so in that sense, they are divinatory--looking into the unknown, inspired by the gods and goddesses which dwell everywhere: in the coyote, the candle, the hazelnut, the Fool. 

One of the cards contains the word (Maest, for example), a related painting, and a set of questions and tidbits to create points of departure for your own creativity. The other card contains an animal associated with the monthly word-theme. (So for Maest it might be a bear, it might be a deer, a squirrel, a woodpecker...) The animal card will not, however, resemble a "medicine" card, but rather will provide you with some basics of the creature's natural history, track and sign, so that you might go out on the land near your home and forge a relationship of your own. 

A note on the salve: All herbal salves will be both practically useful (for bruises, for wounds, for sore muscles, for chapped lips, etc), but they will also carry a magical component (as all herbal medicine does), as they are doorways into a conversation with whatever plant they are made of. I will provide a little scroll of information with each small salve. They will be made in a base of happily harvested beeswax and olive oil, and created with the moon. Salve is from the Old Germanic/Gothic root salben, "to anoint," which holds to me both the meaning of healing, and of magic. 

A note on the yarn: in the old Gaelic tradition of knot-magic and witch's ladders, the string wound around your Tinderbundle will carry sacred knots tied with blessings upon you, the recipient, and the four-leggeds, two-leggeds, waters, winds, stones, plants, and fire embers that surround you—the family of things in which you reside, and are inextricably connected to.

Follow any of the links above to purchase, or right here.