A Song of Inverness

We spent the last week perched on the Inverness ridge, at eye level with the aerie of two courting osprey, the incoming fog, a sliver of Tomales Bay below. It is astounding, how much the human heart can love a place; an old ache, bigger than might seem possible. Some places, some journeys, are best kept close to the bone. Not everything needs be shared in this quick-to-share world. But I'd like to share with you a few notes from those precious days with nothing to do but sink into a kind of human baseline (for a bobcat baseline is an overstep walk...), with nothing to do but love the nettles, love the bay, love the fog, love the pine peaks and salt, love each other and this world. 

Taking the land into the body is a way of greeting, of saying thank you. These tea things were gathered from alder shade and coastal scrub, and a bouquet of wild radish as well (because beauty is medicine too).

The osprey, making a home, moving sticks and filling the air with kee kee kee. 

 Gold flecks in the sand at the shore of Tomales Bay. Maybe mica, maybe something else, chipped off old granite. They are a whirl of stars under bare toes.

A whole day drifting and paddling through the benevolent waters of Tomales Bay, that old mother fault zone, another world—an old kind of magic. To be, for a day, as buoyant as any loon.



From the view of osprey and hawk, Tomales Bay is a great blue ribbon, the boundary between two tectonic plates.

On secret shores, the dogwood was a red fire, the marsh grasses long and green, moving under the hands of the wind.

And the ceanothus hung down cliffs toward the bay, a blue hum of honey scent and bees.

On the Inverness ridge, the old granite spine of Point Reyes, made of the same granite as the Sierras long ago, the Douglas firs were constellations of new green tips. (So many cups of tea!)

Just before blooming, the cow parsnips were like the heads of medieval ladies, gleaming and wise, with many secrets and love poems tucked in their headdresses.

The starry solomon's plume opened on the day of the spring equinox, quiet and true.

And a morning walk to the bay shore, with tea and notebook,  a quick secret swim, is my idea of true bliss.

The great blue heron had the same idea for a peaceful morning as I. He flew away at my coming, but left his enormous prints, the size of my hands.

To sit with an iris, and learn some of her secrets: this to me is the same thing as prayer.

I'll leave you with a piece of a poem from my journal, iris inspired—

Meanwhile, in the meadows, on the ridges
the irises stand under the sun. Their bulbs
are ancient,  older than dairies, older than barns.
That's why they will tell you easily
vociferously, demanding you listen—
stand down out of your  own way,
so the purple gleam of Always,
that old ecstasy, may turn you
lush as this ridge, this bay, this matriarchy
of bulbs, all gleaming.

Kee kee, call the osprey.
Time for tea.

What is it About Grace

A little poem, written a moon ago, about grace, about life, about the land I love, Point Reyes. 

What is it about grace—

how it comes down upon you

in the form of a sunrise

over the green knuckles

of Black Mountain, a lick of peach

across the bay, then all at once

the whole star, balanced there

at the edge and rising, how in

that moment you know 
that you are watching the earth 

move.

Yes. That should be enough to bring

you to your knees, but then there are

the woodpeckers, laughing, and

the robins, calling, and the light coming in

on the wooden walls, on the man you love,

sleeping—

 

but what is it about grace

which is also the silver body of a gray

squirrel at the bottom of the hill,

one leg crushed in the middle of

the road called Sir Francis Drake,

how she is staring from great black

eyes and writhing to get up

but you know she will never get up again,

and what is grace if not also mercy?

How can you leave her there in the road

to be flattened a dozen more times

before lunch? What is this world,

with the bodies of animals crushed

into its roads like old shoes?

It doesn’t feel like grace

when you, shaking, turn the car

around and come back

knowing it will be her swiftest death

knowing you have no knife, no hammer

to finish her fast. It doesn’t feel like grace,

the small thump under the wheel, how dying

her whole silver tail waves like a banner

three times before it’s still.

You roll her out of the road with two sticks.

Her body is perfect and limp, save the

red bloom of her head. She is silver and clean

as a moon, setting behind Black Mountain

in the daylight. You cover her in hanging moss

and wild vetch and say words

for her squirrel soul and it feels like grace

her final peace, that she suffered less

than she might have

and yet she stays there in you

later when, at the edge of the world

with the man you love, at the edge of the world

where you can see the gray whales

swimming south to Baja, there is a tiny beach

far below where mother elephant seals have come

and given birth to wrinkled babies, dark as

silt, with velvet skins that bunch up around their

necks, just like big coats.

They are lounging;

no other word for it

babies nosing their mother’s bellies for milk,

sweeping sand up on their bodies with their flippers

to cool down the sun which rose over

Black Mountain and will set in the sea.

Nothing can touch them here, only

the sun, and the edges of the

lace long tide, coming and going.

In all of this grace, and the whole impossible

span of the ocean, and the cliffs of Point Reyes

a great curving bowl, a great long arm,

the great journeys of elephant seal, and whale

there is also the gray squirrel,

who didn’t make it across the street

this morning

and how impossibly lustrous

her silver tail.

-Inverness, February 2015

Buried in Quilts of Pine Pollen Dreaming

In the places where ghosts might be sleeping, it is good to bring gifts. We brought bishop pine pollen and shook it, yellow veils that could turn anything to joy. 

I want to show you the pathway into my March Tinderbundle. The word is BURY. The word came out of a place, a day, a walk into a sleeping world protected in its dreams, in its brambles and tall grass, a day shared with a very special kindred spirit, whose artwork will grace this bundle instead of my watercolors this month— Catherine Sieck. This Tinderbundle is the secret alchemy between two adventuring wild-hearts (mine and Catherine's, bearing picnic foods and notebooks and one cup of chai between us) and a sleeping place with bones buried in its earth and benevolent spirits at its gables.

Catherine Sieck's incredible paper cut work! 

This is a sacred place. A place half-forgotten, protected in its forgottenness. I will keep its name in the earth for now.  I don't know the real one any way, the true one named thousands of years ago. The bishop pines dusted it all in pollen. Each one of these towers, these strange ladders of catkin, unfurled quilts of pollen when touched, silken. Initiating us into this descent into a brambled dream in a cove on the edge of Tomales Bay.

Quiet your eyes, and your mind. Pluck a hair from your head and leave it as a gift for the wind. You are entering a place out of time, pollen dusted, buried in vine. 

Step in through the world-round window, step in through the tin rippled door. 

A great bishop pine not giant fifty years ago watches over the ruined redwood cottages, veiling them in silken exhalations of pollen. For thousands of years Coast Miwok people lived in this cove. Without a doubt their bodies are buried here. There is a sense in the air of benevolent eyes, benevolent hands who love this land very, very dearly, who found joy here, despite all hardship. A sense that you must come here bearing love, or be chased away. In the late 1800's, a Coast Miwok family built the cottages here, working on ranches and as fishermen to stay afloat in a world utterly changed. It was no doubt a hard life, and yet unlike so many of their people, they were able to stay on their ancestral land. This land. They were not taken away. 

Later, in the 1960's, an artist of great and whimsical heart bought the abandoned cottages just before Point Reyes became National Seashore. He painted and built and dreamed here until 1996, when he died. His name was Clayton Lewis, and his was a happy place, and the ghosts who lived here before him liked him, I think; he saw beauty like they did. He honored it, his whole life here. You can feel it everywhere; how people have loved this place. 

I say these facts and names because it is good to honor the dead, those who came before; but also this is a place of no names, a place out of  time. The glass is blown out of the windows. The houses are drifting back into the arms of the land--ivy and eucalyptus and pine. Daffodils from some long ago garden bloom and so do calla lilies but the grass and hedgenettle are taller, fiercer. 

Birds fly down chimney pipes, and die, and make piles of bones.

Buried in green. It will all soon be buried in green. Asleep inside the thickets. And I am reminded of the Sleeping Beauty tale. Not the girl, nor the prince, nor the spindle, but the sleeping realm overgrown in thorns. The way the land heaves upward to protect, to bury, to hold, something precious. I find I agree with Ursula Le Guin, and Sylvia Townsend Warner, who lament that wakening kiss, who cry out that the heart of the story is this "still center," as Le Guin writes, "the silent house, the birdsong wilderness" (Sylvia Townsend Warner). (From Le Guin's essay "The Wilderness Within: The Sleeping Beauty and 'The Poacher'")

Asleep; Arthur is asleep on Avalon, his bones in earth; Mother Holle sleeps in the ground, in some great barrow; Snow White and Brynhild and Oisin sleep too. There are so many stories of sleeping queens and heroes whose bones protect a place, who will rise up at last when the land which sleeps with them is in need of their protection.

Asleep, this place dreams in green ladders and windows opened with vine.

It dreams in tiny sacred towers whose windows are air and eucalyptus naves, where the light ghosts through, blue.

It dreams in bobcat prints along the sandy bay shore, walking slow in the shading cypress trees, in the slip slap lap of salt water, the peering faces of harbor seals and mergansers in the rippling blue. 

To wake such a place-- this would mean tearing down or fixing up, bulldozers or tins of paint and hammers and a neatened pathway down, a sign marking the way. This is a thought almost physically painful for me to bear. There are too few places left in this world to the rhythms of simultaneous collapse and rebirth; too few places left in the quiet of kinglet and raven calls to dream. Too many places ripped out of their ancient sleep. I can only say--let it fall, let it fall, let it fall at the pace of this dreaming, no faster, no slower.

Catherine and I, we dreamed with it for a while, touching the wooden doorframes gently, with love, spilling out offerings of chai and strands of hair and soft words, because it is always good to give something in exchange. We spoke quietly, like we were in the homes of dreamers. We sat barefoot in sun like two cats and the word BURY came out of it all, a word whose root is bhergh, related to barrow and burrow, borough and burg and borrow, and, amazingly, the name of the goddess Brigid, the root meaning to protect, to defend, to preserve, as well as a dwelling, a hilltop place, defensible (barrows are also hills, after all...). Buried treasure. Buried seeds. Buried bones. Deep burrows, protecting moles from snakes. The ground the body of the mother, the earth, the goddess, protecting. Things buried rise again, when they are ready. 

What an enormous honor and joy it is to work with the wonderful Catherine

We gathered yarrow, green feathers standing up from the earth. I took them home and cut them up, poured oil over them, and buried the jar in my garden. An old world way to keep your medicine temperature controlled, dark, cool, but also, I think, to infuse it with the great old electric earth, protected entirely in her hands. 

And we gathered leaves and sticks and seedpods from the sleeping place itself. I laid them on raw silk and wrapped them to make an ecoprint, in the tradition of the incredible India Flint, then buried both bundles in the earth too.

The yarrow, the bundled fabric, they are dreaming now in the ground, treasure to be unearthed anew, and given to you. Along with a story, the story that this sheltered cove of  cottage and raven and kind spirits wants to tell. This is a secret, yet. A secret that will fly to your doorstep by the darkness of the moon, March 20th, when it is buried in the sun's shadow, if you so desire.... 

Tinderbundles, here!