Birthday Walk

“And here I am, the center of all beauty!” Frank O’Hara

In my journal, this: “Writing from what I think is the highest point at Jacks Peak. I’ve only been here once before, at the southern most point of the park, back in January. But I hadn’t stood on the bench so I could see far enough through the trees: the Pacific Ocean, waving at me! There’s Pt. Lobos! And looking north, curving through the fog is the bay.”

My plan for my birthday was to walk the big circle solo, and I did. Starting at the west parking lot I began as I often do, by walking Skyline Trail and heading down Iris to the “This Way, Peggy,” as I call it, marker. Instead of turning left and walking up Rhus, to head home, I turned right. This part of the park is less traveled. I’ve never seen anyone here. The trail is a dirt road, really, until it isn’t. By that time I’m on Madrone Trail and when it begins to climb through denser forest and the trail really narrows, I’m on Earl Moser Trail.

The fear I’d had when walking Sunday had evaporated. I left both journal and camera in my backpack so nothing would distract me from the great joy of not being afraid. Where did the fear go?

When I’m teaching, and students feel afraid of writing, which is pretty much the same as going into the woods, only it’s a different forest, I’ll tell them they can give me their fear and I’ll hold it for them till they want it back, so they can do what they came to do, write, write freely as possible. Some people imagine they’re passing their fear off to me, and they give a pitying look, as if to say, “You really want that?”. Never has anyone asked for their fear back though!

I didn’t ask, but perhaps Robin didn’t need to be asked to hold some of my fear. Michael might have taken some too. He’s that kind of guy. Or had the fear run its course and drained from my body into an icy puddle that fed some thirsty plant, a dandelion, maybe?

For several minutes I stood on that bench after my climb. The wind was loud and nearly fierce. For the first time in my life I felt that if I died right then, it would be all right. Not my first choice, nor my millionth. But I’d be able live with it. There I was, at the center of all beauty!

The trail went through a grassy area. Then it went between some madrone, got really skinny and so near to the poison oak I had to walk my feet in single file. Fear tried to stare me down. I snapped my fingers at it, over and over again, and continued on my way.

Follow the Feet, Follow the Words

...the blue of summer and the dry spiced scent
of the summer woods...

Robert Hass

The first time I came to Jacks Peak I rode my bike up the big hill off Monhollan Road. When I arrived at the west parking lot, I looked around briefly, thinking the trail ahead of me was it and that it went only as far as a lookout above Monterey Bay. The next time I came, it was with Michael, and we walked past the lookout for a bit and turned back. Each time I came, alone or together, I went a bit further, till I discovered a perfect hilly one- hour circle walk. Though the spiral is my favorite shape, I like circle walks a very lot. The approach I took in discovering Jacks Peak was to keep adding a bit to knowledge, and in that way, I kept being surprised by the size of the park. Later, I found out it’s actually over 500 acres. In the middle of suburbia!

Having come here regularly for about three years, I’ve walked most of the trails and, finally, the map actually makes sense. By December 31 I want to have walked every trail. At this point, that should, my the grace of god and all the angels, be easy.

There are a few trails I often take; I may combine part of Pine Trail with Lower Ridge Road or take the circle walk which includes Skyline, some of Iris and some of Rhus. When I’m not certain which way to go, I’ve discovered I can follow my feet. My mind takes a back seat, puts its head on the arm rest and takes a snooze so my feet lead the way. It pleases my feet to be trusted with this job. In an unfamiliar place, I don’t think I could do this. At Jacks Peak I am as confident in my feet to take me home as I would be in a faithful dog.

Writing offers the same possibility. When working on my book, Writing and the Spiritual Life, on the days I was calm enough for this to work, I’d be writing a phrase, not knowing what ought to follow it, and a moment before needing them, I’d hear the next words. Someone whispered them. The coming words are passengers on the next car of a train chugging happily along the tracks.

When writing poems this can happen too. Either working on the computer or pen on paper. With these journal pieces, that’s how it’s been. These “free” words surprise me. They’re not the words I’d have chosen with the more logical side of my mind, and they’re just right.

Today I’m planning to walk through most of the park, to spend as many hours as it takes, to make a gift to myself of a day in the woods. I’ll bring lunch, two water bottles, my camera, and journal.

In Spanish the verb estrenar means to wear something for the first time. We don’t have such a word in English. In what language is there a word for feeling at home in a place where you don’t live? At Jacks Peak I feel a sense of returning to where I belong, where I once belonged. Perhaps a thousand years ago. (Even on the days I have to walk through fear before I can wholly arrive.) I put on my old self as if for the first time, and I follow my feet.

More Fear

The forest always leads to and from thought. Bev Kreps


The grass does not appear afraid... Emily Dickinson

My beloved friend Robin who lives on the eastern side of the Sierra, commented on yesterday’s entry, leading me into today’s writing.

At the beginning of Robin’s note she said, “I wondered how you managed fear while out on your walks.”

You need to know that Robin is a walker, a backpacker too. When I feel afraid walking in the woods alone at Jacks Peak, in the hills surrounding Wilbur Hot Springs, or elsewhere, she doesn’t know this, but I think about her. Robin walks alone, I tell myself. I can too.

At least in this country, and I’ll bet in most parts of the western world, at this time in history, fear is part of women’s DNA. We’re born and raised with the knowledge that we need to be afraid. Men aren’t reared this way; fear’s not lodged in their brains in the same way. Other than being able to pee standing up, freedom from the oppressive weight of fear is the only thing that makes me wish I’d been born male. Though I understand why women are raised with fear, I don’t feel kindly toward how it can dominate my life.

Robin writes, “I often do not know the difference between fear and intuition.” That’s awful. That’s more than awful. I know exactly what she means. In my play, A Woman’s Life in Pieces, there’s this about intuition, “Women generally have a lot of it because throughout history our lives have depended on how well we pay attention.” When our ears prick up, we can mistake fear for awareness. They can be the same thing but they’re not always. I want to become proficient at knowing the difference between fear and intuition. Intuition is my great friend, an inner ally. Fear isn’t always.

Robin’s twin fears when walking alone are the same as mine. She writes, “When I am out, which I am a lot now, by myself, I seem to fear 1/ being attacked by a man, 2/ being attacked by a mountain lion.”

I think it was the Buddhist teacher Reb Anderson who said something like, “What we’re afraid of is not what’s happening now but what might happen.”

Robin goes on to make a really important point. She feels her fears most “when I am dreading something else in my life.” What a smart gal Robin is! If I hadn’t already felt off-kilter and fearful on Sunday, would I have been scared when walking? Would I have even thought to be? Often I’ll spend over an hour in the park and not get scared once. On my first walks, back in January, that wasn’t so but, after awhile, I became calm down and entranced by the place. Delight took up the space fear had owned before.

What I didn’t mention in yesterday’s entry is that on Sunday I saw a young man sitting on the overlook bench, near the walk’s starting point. There’d been no other car in the parking lot. Feeling vulnerable already, his presence edged me closer to fear. No matter that he was a skinny waif of a boy. So I stopped, engaged him in conversation, looked him straight in the eye and loved him.

I have a friend who lives within walking distance of Jacks Peak but won’t walk there alone because she’s afraid of the mountain lions. I understand, but for me, walking alone is a primary reason for going to J. P., along with being in nature and getting exercise. I really like being by myself. I jot notes down in my journal, take pictures, and give my attention to the natural world, rather than to conversation, at least not to conversation with another person.

Sometimes I talk to the lions. “Kitty, kitty,” I say, to sweeten them up, in case we meet. “If I promise to write really well about you, will you not to eat me?” “You are queens and kings, I, a mere human, am grateful for the chance to be in your domain.” And occasionally, “You may be the top of the tree, but I can swing the branches too!”

Mountain lion attacks on humans are rare. From 1890 - 1900 only 53 were documented in the U.S. and Canada. In 1993 there was one nonfatal attack south of Jacks Peak, in the Los Padres National Forest.

Last fall I pulled into the parking lot and saw a man who looked a bit crazed. I almost turned around and went home. But got out of my car instead and he approached me, saying, “I can’t believe it, I’ve walked all over the Sierra and many other places and never once have I seen a mountain lion, but today, a few moments ago, on Lower Ridge Trail, there was an enormous lion sunning. When it saw me it gave me a casual glance, got up and slowly walked away.”

He was thrilled! I, however, got scared, asked him which way the lion went. I walked in the opposite direction. If I hadn’t gone on a walk that day, I’d have never come back to the park alone. Fear would have defined me, and that’s not how I want to live my life.

Because I am Afraid

- and so I sing
as the Boy does
at the Burying Ground -
because I am afraid.

Emily Dickinson

It’s not my habit to walk alone at Jacks Peak toward the end of day. Even though this is summer, it’s a foggy one. Fog masks what I think of as the actual day and provides another one instead. It’s like in Wallace Stevens’ poem, 13 Ways of Looking at a Blackbird, “It was evening all afternoon.” When I arrived a bit after 5:00, I could feel evening’s approach. The sky was low to the ground, fog visibly billowing in from the ocean. An uneasiness settled in my belly.

On a recent walk with Michael he said, “You must know these trails quite well by now.”

“Yes, in a sense,” I said, “A certain few paths have become my familiars like Skyline Trail. I know where the path will go up and that a little further on it will turn to the right. There’s a steep downhill where the soft dirt makes it slide-y; I need to watch my step.”

Though I may take the same trails day after day, my walk is never same. I’ll never wholly know this place. It is always changes, is always new.

Yesterday, discomfort tinged everything I saw. Especially on the switch back part where I came upon a recently killed dove.
(The squeamish among you might care to skip the next paragraph.)

Some of the bird’s pale gray feathers were scattered around its body. It lay belly up, a fresh, deep hole had been bored right in the belly’s center. The contrast of color between the gray feathers and the red blood was a sad and beautiful thing. Is this what disemboweled looks like? Its little face had been ground into the dirt.

Something’s come over me in the last while. It’s like I ate one too many empathy pills. Especially in regard to animals. I feel a kindredness with them I’ve never known before. Maybe it began when a feral cat we had been feeding outside brought her three, week-old kittens into my office.

Using the only standard for dignity, this human one, with the toe of my shoe, I gently nudged the dove off the path and turned it over, wound down.

Maybe my form of dignity isn’t so different from some of the animal world. Outside watering some seedlings, my neighbor tells me her pet rabbit died the other day. My cat, Cloud, who was friends with the rabbit came over, Tammy tells me, and sat for a long while right on top of the spot where she’d buried Presto.

The low-hanging fog and the dead dove started this walk out eerily. Fear has been biting me lately. One could say free-floating fear but this fear doesn’t float, it drags me down, nips at my heels. I can attach it to any number of a few things, and when I do, that thing gets really ugly and really big and it starts to smell bad.

Perhaps you know the story; it might be a Native American one, I’m not sure of its origin: A wise person says she has two wolves named Love and Fear. A child asks her which one is bigger and she answers, “The one I feed.”

That’s one of the best things about being at the cusp of 53. I know I can choose to feed the love wolf or the fear wolf. When I was younger, I didn’t know how to choose, and my fear was often enormous and terribly mean.

Walking helps me to choose love. Today, I am especially grateful.

This Way, Peggy

Yesterday, walking with Michael, he asked, “If the land surrounding the path wasn’t so full of poison oak, would you walk off into the woods?”

“You bet,” I replied, wishing I could be a bushwhacker.

From trail side I often look longingly into the dense forest, wonder where the barely visible animal trails go and, if I weren’t worried about getting the evil oak, what I might find there. Might those little paths lead me to sleeping mountain lions, to a cave of baby foxes?

Michael’s spent a lot of time backpacking in the Sierra where, if you walk a short distance off the trail, it’s really easy to lose your way. One tree looks pretty much like another. Ditto for slabs of granite. And if you don’t have a clear marker, say a mountain peak to your right, you can get confused. Less so here because the ocean tells us where we are.

I used to have a propensity for getting lost which is not such a good thing when it’s combined with a fear of not knowing where I am. Or is it? I’ve been lost in a number of places and don’t like feeling the ground slip out from under me. It makes my pulse into a rabbit’s heart and I sweat like a marathoner.

Traveling with Michael in Italy, more than a few times, I’d ask a stranger, “Dove...?” and not understand a word of the reply except that we needed to turn left...somewhere.

In the last few years, something’s shifted. I think feeling more secure comes from paying closer attention to where I am before thinking about where I might be going. “Paying” attention gives one purchasing power. In my case, the power of not getting lost, at least with less frequency than when I don’t pay.

Not that there can’t be great advantages to getting lost—oh, the places one can go! When I was 18, walking from my Ora’s house (the woman who cared for me when I was a young child) in Bedford Styuyvesant, Brooklyn to the subway station I got lost. A group of young men began following and taunting me. Though I wanted to face them and say, “Hey, guys, which way to the subway?” I thought it best to just keep walking.

The relief I felt at seeing the entrance to the subway station and walking down the dark steps into a long hallway and NOT being followed, is mine forever. (My stupidity at walking alone in a place where I didn’t belong, is another matter altogether.)

*
Last fall I spent a lot of time walking at Jacks Peak. It was a good way to learn the lines to my first play. Walking calms my nerves. There, too, I revised a bit of the play. Before I tell you the rest of this, you need to know my mother’s name was Peggy.

One morning I met a couple who were clearly lost. The man tried to hide the fact, looked off into the distance. The woman nearly gushed at seeing me, asked how to get back to the parking lot.

“Continue along this path,” I said, feeling pleased with my confidence, “till you come to a T. Turn left at the yellow fire hydrant and head up the hill.”

She looked at me dubiously and said, “Will there be a sign that says, ‘This way, Peggy’?”

If you’ve been reading these musings, you know by now that I look for signs (not street signs!) and that I believe in them.

The sign this stranger gave me was my mother’s approval, telling me I was on the right track. If she were alive my mother might not come see my play (Heaven help me!), but she’d not want to put the kibosh on it either.
*

Last week, walking along Pine Trail, I stopped at the bench I often stop at to get my water bottle from my pack. Not sure why, but I glanced beneath the bench, and there, wedged into a hole in the dirt, was a plastic container with a blue lid. Of course I pulled it out.

Inside was the treasure for a hunt I didn’t know I was on, including: one miniature bowling pin, a red bouncy ball, a penny and two slips of paper. This container was a prize of sorts, for a high-tech game called Geocaching. Players use a GPS device to locate the container and then hide it elsewhere and post those coordinates online so other players can go searching.

A note inside the box invited me to remove an object from the container, if I liked, and to leave something in exchange. I wasn’t in need of any of those things, but left a Band-Aid. Just in case the person looking for this got lost along the way and their feet hurt.

Dandelions

Recently The New York Botanical Garden turned its attention to poet Emily Dickinson, her garden. The Poetry of Flowers show was designed by Todd Forrest who said, "I know for a fact that this is the first time we've grown dandelions for a flower show." Dickinson welcomed them in her 1800’s Amherst, Massachusetts garden. So it would have been wrong to exclude the humble dandelion.

In my garden I make a face of disgust and pull the interlopers up, toss them in the weed pile. Don’t you? But really! How cold hearted of me to not honor these minute displays of light.

On January 1st, a cold day, for coastal central California, anyway, I began my year of walking at Jacks Peak. My husband, Michael, joined me. Not long into our hike, beside the path, we saw a large dandelion holding its yellow head up, undeterred by the chill air and the slanted winter sunlight. It was the only sign of brilliant color anywhere around (except for the red of my lipstick).

The garden designer went on to say, "[D]andelions were very important to her. In fact, she referred to herself more as a dandelion. She felt more comfortable and more natural in the fields with the dandelions than she would in the drawing rooms with the fancy folks around Amherst."

Is this what’s happening to me? Not that I hang out with “fancy folks” mind you. But much of the time I’d rather be in the park walking or staring at a dandelion than having dinner with a crowd, even a gathering of my best-beloveds.

When I am away from Jacks Peak I miss it like a friend. I feel a bereftness that in the past I’ve felt mostly for people who’ve left my life. Except, that is, when I was a child and we moved away from Manhattan. Setting up house in the tiny seaside town of Santa Cruz at age eleven, I missed everything New York—from Sunday dinner at my grandparents’ house to the Metropolitan Museum, standing on line there for hours to catch just the briefest peek at the Mona Lisa, the ballet and Bernstein’s concerts for young people. Oddly, I even missed the acrid combination of scents down in the subway stations. I’d associated that pungent odor with the idea of going somewhere exciting— to linger in front of Modigliani portraits, with their almond eyes at MOMA or lunch at the Automat. Go figure; I was an odd child.

In Santa Cruz, there was nothing to do, nowhere to go. My mother would insist, “Go outside and play!” “But Mommy,” I’d say, “there’s bugs out there!”

Now look at me. Yesterday, I bent down too-near the poison oak to take a picture of a bee nestled in a morning glory blossom, to fall into the better-than-butter yellow of the trail side dandelions.

Yerba Buena

Last March, local naturalist, Nikki Nedeff kindly went for a walk with me, which was like going into the woods with an encyclopedia! Everywhere she looked there was something to tell my friend Judy and me about. She bent down and picked a tiny leaf, crushed it and held it up for us to smell its minty-ness. “Yerba Buena,” Nikki said. “San Francisco’s original name.” Wikipedia calls it “a rambling herb.”

According to my wildflower book, Yerba Buena makes flowers. Throughout the spring and still, in summer, I get lovely flower surprises on my walks, from the very tiny flowers that appeared in clusters close to the ground whose buds were no bigger than the contracted pupil of an eye to the deceptively frail-looking Hemlock flowers. But never the one-quarter inch, double, white Yerba Buena flowers. Until recently its leaves have been a darkish green. Now they're getting pale. But the scent is just as sweet.

There aren’t many words in English to describe smell. Our sense of smell is not as developed as it is in many animals but I’d like to bring some Yerba Buena to your house.

So... it's mint with a hint of cinnamon and a pinch of black pepper. If a singer, Yerba Buena would be the voice of Rosa Lamoreaux. If a weather, coolness after heat. It's an air-kiss not a bear-hug. More feather than rock. Green and new, friendly not hostile, more gin than whiskey. Though it grows low to the ground it’s certainly not lowly. Rather it's elegant, never crass. Definitely lighthearted but not quite whimsical. Yerba Buena reveals its boldness only when crushed.

I’m going to keep looking for those twin white flowers. Maybe next spring.

The Hairy Honeysuckle

"Reality is something to which we must be returned at considerable cost."
— Flannery O'Connor


In the book Wildflowers of Monterey County the author, Vern Yadon, refers to the Hairy Honeysuckle as “exceedingly common.” The word “common” diminishes a thing’s perceived value. Add “exceedingly” to it and, well, why bother giving even a brief glance! I’m sure the author didn’t mean to belittle the Hairy Honeysuckle. He was just stating that it’s all prolific.

When I look at a honeysuckle cluster—some closed blossoms beside some open ones, it’s obvious there’s nothing ordinary about the flower. Even if it happens a million times a day all over the world, the act of flowering is extraordinary. The closed buds are a dark sort of fuschia color that borders on magenta with white at the center.

Though my nephew Mario is now a teenager, we keep a photograph of him when he was about a year old taped to a kitchen cabinet door. And I look at it or rather fall into it every now and then. Unfettered, unrestrained, unadulterated joy nearly explodes from his face. Much as it does on the faces of flowers and on my face, I imagine, when I look at them.

This must not be the reality O’Conner was referring. I’ll take it!

Cabinet of Curiosities or A List of Observations

I do not know which to prefer,
The beauty of inflections
Or the beauty of innuendoes,
The blackbird whistling
Or just after. — Wallace Stevens

A dark bird lands on a bough, flares its white-tipped tail, a woman’s fan.

When a plane taking off from the nearby airport I pretend its wind I hear.

A high-up branch quivers wildly. Nobody’s there.

The rust colored needles of the dead pine catch stand out amidst the wall of green.

In some future time, when I’m dying I like to imagine this is where I’ll go.

Here grasshoppers are elements of surprise and delight, not the scoundrels they are in my flower garden.

A chewing sound from up in a pine tree. Who’s enjoying Sunday dinner?

I’m not in a hurry, no hurry at all!

Last week that bush over there on the left side of the path caught my eye because of the magenta of its rasberries—like tiny puckered lips. Not a single berry now!

Heading downhill, I hear a sound behind me, imagine a ferocious beast on the rampage, turn around to see a pine cone rolling down.

More than light the poison oak bushes clustered near the top of the lookout hill, the sun graces its leaves, makes them shimmer and shine.

Knowing death approaches my father-in-law, and knowing he would love it here more than anyone I know other than his son, I think of him often, imagine he’s walking with me. There he is walking a few steps ahead of me up this damn (now, now, Patrice) hill!

Sometimes the cool breeze rushes up to me at just the right moment. Ah!

When walking my back barely hurts.

In the parking lot, a just-learning how to walk toddler wobbles, arms outstretched, after his mother, crying, “Mama! Mama!” Papa scoops him up.

Sparks in the Air

"It is so easy to exchange meaning; it is so easy to see the difference." –Gertrude Stein

From the big meadow where I enjoy my lunch but ignore my book, I can see all the way to Carmel Valley. At the mountaintop there’s the tower above Garland Park. Ten years ago and more, Michael and I often walked at Garland, and once or twice we made the challenging climb up to the tower. There I found what seemed to be a nest of hawk feathers and wondered at story I’d missed. Today I could no more climb to the tower than I could fly there. Must this make me sad? “Maybe someday” is my only consolation.

At the beginning of today’s walk a young couple came up the path behind me. I’d stopped to make notes for the above paragraph. We said hello and, as is not often the case, continued chatting.

“First time here?” I asked.

“Yep,” the man answered, “Beautiful!”

Mostly, when I come across people here, there’s a brief exchange of greetings. Many come here for the quiet. The other day I said hello to a woman who didn’t even turn her head in my direction to respond. That’s going a bit far, but okay.

Something about this couple held my attention. Their youth wasn’t it. I felt a fluttering. Sparks were lighting the air around them. That drew me close. They were in so love and stood so impossibly near each other, I blushed.

You know how you can meet someone but you don’t really notice them. It’s an offhand interaction. Quickly that person is forgotten. Other times, you meet someone and you both stop long enough to actually see each other. You hold each other’s eyes longer than is strictly necessary for politeness. Your eyes or his eyes or her eyes may dart away for an instant but when you look back the other person is waiting for you. The externals of who you are or aren’t and who they are or aren’t disappear.

That’s how it was with this couple. We were at the overlook on a day so free from fog the bay was at our feet. Our differences evaporated. We stood in a holy place together. Lucky me, a few of the sparks they made landed on my shirt, slipped inside.

Encounter with a Dusky-Footed Woodrat

Toward the beginning of my walk on Skyline Trail, where it switch backs through the Monterey Pines, before arriving at Iris Trail which proceeds downhill, I nearly stepped on a sugar cookie, bent to pick it up. No edible delight had fallen from a picnicker’s hand, but a rock shaped like a perfect heart. It was light as a cookie too. That was a good way for my walk to begin. I like finding signs along the way.

I thought I’d leave my notebook in my backpack today, but not make notes. I’d see what I see, let it slide through me. But once you retrieve a heart from the path, that’s kind of hard to do, so I noted, “cookie.” Not that, were you to open to that page in my notebook, would what I’d written be legible. But I knew. Often jotting a few words is all I need to remember what I want to write later.

A leaf fell from a tree’s high branch, making me think of William Stafford’s poem “Ways to Say Wind.” “Lets a leaf come down in style.” What a lucky girl I am that poetry fills my life and arrives on my tongue at the just right moments! The leaf came zigzagging to the ground stylishly, first a little jig left then a little jag right.

I walked for a nice while, going down as far as the down goes, till the choice was head up and home or go farther. Left or right? This day had more places to go so I turned up the hill, walked past the spot where when the ladybugs are flying they’re flying here, the spot there’s always a breeze, even on the stillest days. I yelped, startling myself, hadn’t realizing that I was yelping or why.

I had come a mere few inches from stepping on a rat. How quickly the mind knows what it sees before the mind knows what it sees. I tried to make sense of what I was seeing.

This rat was sweet to look at, about 6 inches long, its snout was rounded. It had a mouse-like demeanor.

“What’s a rat doing on the path in the middle of the day?”

“Why didn’t it run when it heard my yelp and saw my foot—too close?”

Backing away, giving berth to both the rat and me, I stopped, looked carefully. The fat little rat, I later found out was a dusky-footed woodrat, was shivering in the hot sun, swaying slightly, side to side. Its eyes were barely open. I thought I saw a cut on its side, looked closer. Yes, indeed, a wound, upon which flies were gathering. One fly touched the its nose but the rat didn’t flick it away.

I got down on my haunches a couple of feet away. Sunlight caught a glint in the rat’s now fully open eyes. We looked at each other, slowly. I saw no inclination on the rat’s part to flee, and was surprised to feel none myself. I began talking to the little creature, tried to make of my voice a lullaby.

“I’m sad that you’re hurt,” I said in a whisper.

“I’m so sorry.” At which point I began to cry.

Here’s what I took home with me: The image of light in the rat’s eyes, its look of sorrow, the slight sway of its body, and the knowledge that one being suffering is the same as any being suffering.

(with thanks to Nikki Nedeff)

Two Old Men I Love

Last week, after a sushi lunch with my father, which he calls “bait,” we stood beside my car. I had to go, seeing that fine back doctor in Redwood City. Neither of us was quite ready to say goodbye though, so we lingered. That’s what I do at Jack’s Peak sometimes. I tell myself I’m going for a walk, and I do walk and I climb hills and get to feel sweat drip between my breasts and down my back and my breath becomes like a strong animal who lives inside me. But sometimes why I really come to the park is to linger and be fed.

Standing there on Front Street, in Santa Cruz, in that space of abeyance, my father said, “No matter what you’re doing, it (death) sits there. No book, no words. No matter what you do, there it is. I hate to sleep sometimes. Ought to spend that time with someone while I can.”

My 89 year old father-in-law has an untreatable cancer. Visiting with him and my mother-in-law, it was as if death was another member of our party. Not a grim reaper figure, but not benign either. An attentive presence, an eavesdropper, an interloper that I wish would go to someone else’s house or to no one’s house at all.

When Roy, who I call Dad, as opposed to my own father whom I call Pop, casts his focused gaze at me, I feel a recognition I receive from few other people, like he sees only what matters. When he looks at me and we’re catching up, I feel flattered, but not in a fluffy sort of way, in a down to the earth at the base of a sturdy tree sort of way.

Before bed, Dad and I went for a walk down the street. He moves real slow these days, but he moves eagerly. He pointed to two redwoods across their small street, in a neighbor’s yard. The trees are the tallest beings I can see. In the Starks' backyard are some redwood trees too that they planted shortly after he built this house. They’re tall now too, but a mere 50 years ago, they were saplings. Dad wonders how these trees make the air in their neighborhood, the air his compromised lungs breath, better.

I want him to have all the fresh air he can get. I want my Pop to not be haunted by death as he is. When I walk in the forest, they come too. The father of a friend died recently. I'll invite him along too. Maybe that’s what praying really is, going for a walk with the spirit of those you love.

Fog and Sound

Fog against the window like milk.
E. Annie Proulx, The Shipping News

If there were windows in these wood, the fog would be thick against them. Instead it leans against the trees, weaves between the branches, kisses all the leaves.

A foggy day presents the landscape in its other self, its alter ego. This is the secret Jack’s Peak where nymphs and fairies reign. If a deer came trotting down the path wearing a feather boa and polka-dotted booties, I shouldn’t be surprised.

The place sounds differently too, even more quiet than on sunny days, as though every sound—fly, wind, small birds—had a hand over its mouth and is yet very close by. (But the number of birds singing on a day like this is greater than on a brilliant, sunny day.)

I feel muffled. The day feels muffled. One dictionary definition for muffle is “to comfort,” but I never think of it that way.

I wonder about the science of fog and sound. And in wondering realize how until recently I thought of myself as the opposite of science. It’s good to feel otherwise, to feel my world get bigger.

Searching for understanding, I find this: “As the molecules in a liquid are in intimate contact with each other, sound is transmitted well as the collisions between particles are near perfect as they almost touch.”

Don’t you love the layers of meaning there?

“In the case of mist or fog, particles in the air are not touching and have a significant mass. As sound waves move through the misty air, energy is absorbed by the particles of moisture as they move along with the compression waves in the air.

Absorption of the energy by the moving particles reduces the energy in the sound wave, hence reducing the volume and muffling the sound.” This comes from www.ukanswers.yahoo.com.

And to think I’d lived how many years with the idea that science was my enemy!

Dressing for Nature

When the poet Emily Dickinson gardened, and she was an avid gardener, she wore a long white dress. The picture I have in my head of Dickinson has her in this dress but it didn't occur to me that she wore it gardening too! Before I go to for a walk at Jack's Peak, I put on lipstick, most often dark red lipstick. Frida Kahlo spent hours dressing each morning—rings on all her fingers, her hair wound atop her head, those earrings that dangled nearly to her shoulders. Even when she was in great physical pain, as she often was, Kahlo dressed gorgeously. She said, "I'm dressing for paradise."

Holy Ground

My back hurts this morning. I don’t think it will keep me from walking but want to write now, should my body not allow the day to offer itself in the way I hope, should I not walk alone for an hour or so with notebook and pen. I’m a one-handed typist this morning. My cat Ace jumped onto my lap, tucked herself into the curve of my arm, pressed her face against my ribs just below my breast and began purring. After a bit of stroking she fell asleep and is now breathing that deep sleep breath. If I take my arm away, she’ll jump off. My lap would be bereft without her.

A poem just came to my e-mail inbox, from poets.org. In it was a line from the Hadith, an Islamic text, narratives from the prophet Mohammed, “At your mother’s feet there is paradise.” Moments after that, reading quotations by Van Gogh, I came upon this: “I felt like saying, “Take off your shoes, for the place where you are standing is Holy Ground.’” In the second scene of my play, A Woman’s Life in Pieces, I hear my mother’s voice as if from a dream, saying, “If you want her, you’d better go. Take whichever road you choose. They all end at her bare feet.”

Sadly, even years before my mother died in 1987, it had been a long time since I’d had the sense that paradise was in anyway related to my her. Though there was a time, when I was a girl, that I knew the truth.

My mother had my devotion. Her knees, how I worshipped their softness and one knee’s small raised mole. She was not a person who enjoyed being touched but would let me stroke her smooth knees with my head on her lap, her fingers in my hair. The stories she told were the best part of a day, next to her songs. Later, when I was a teenager, my father told me my mother couldn’t sing. Only for a brief and bitter moment did I hear her voice through his ears.

Though Ace continues to sleep and though the weight of her is blissfully heavy, the smell of my lunch—beets roasting in the oven—is about to get me up.

It is written, “At your mother’s feet there is paradise.” Perhaps I need to walk at Jack’s Peak without my shoes on.

Introduction: A Woman Befriends a Place

After breaking my elbow, I was unable to ride my bike. Well, before that, really. The elbow break just reinforced it for me that two-wheel travel was (temporarily) out. I began occasionally walking in a local forest, a suburban 500+ acre forest. It occurred to me that here was writing material, that if I gave myself an assignment, a form, I would take it most seriously. I also recognized I was beginning to fall in love. I wanted to fall farther (without landing on an elbow). I wanted to know Jack’s Peak the way I know a few people. I wanted to know it in feet or even inches. I wanted to know it in all weathers and through each season, to see not only the changes in the landscape but to see how making friends with a place might change me. What does it mean to become friends with a place? Having walked there least twice a week and often four - five times for just over six months, I’m still not sure I know. What I do know is that like when falling in love with a person, I think about the forest when I’m not there; I see it in my mind and carry it in my heart. Not a day goes by when I can’t for whatever reason go there that I don’t long for the paths and the trees and the wind and the squirrels and the possibility of seeing a deer and the feeling of walking up hills inside me and much more.

What I’ve learned, is no walk is ever the same as any other, no matter if I take the exact same route. Nature accepts us as we are. The quiet fills me. I am nourished by the solitude. I want to go there always, and I want to do more for the place than inhabit it. But I don’t know what that is yet.

So the idea behind this blog is to keep me writing about being there, to offer those of you who might care to read it a chance to know a place you may never see. For those of you whose lives don’t make natural places ones you can frequent, for those who want to read about the changes in one natural place and the changes in one woman over seasons, I hope my notes will serve you.

In addition to my own musings, I’ll include within my own entries and separate from them quotes from others about the earth. Eventually there will be photos too and article and book recommendations.

Please write me and let me know your thoughts. And should this please you, let others know about it.