Let Me Out!

I’m a bit claustrophobic, I know that now. -David Hockney

And the world will freely offer itself to you unmasked. It has no choice, it will roll in ecstasy at your feet.
-Franz Kafka

The kindest thing my friend Robin has ever said to me is, “Patrice, you are not normal.”

I knew there was something, but never heard it so perfectly put! Robin paid me this compliment in the context of telling about experience of being in the Sierra, in a place quite faraway, with her son who said, “This is how I know I'm not normal, because if I were normal there'd be other people here too."

In this context, how glad I am for my lack of normalcy! If being at Jacks Peak were like being at the mall—if it were glutted with peopIe—I wouldn’t come. (Though if the crowds were in the park, I’d still not choose the mall.) I come to get away. Not mostly, even, from people though...from people.

It’s easy enough to stay away from the multitudes if I’m alone or with Michael in our own cozy, 900 sq. ft. home or out in the garden. Our life safety net against the world’s tumult meets my needs perfectly, but it’s not the forest. It has walls, windows, yes, but walls and a tall back fence.

When I’m in the forest, I feel free. Plain and simple. What’s most free is my imagination. In his book, The Poetics of Space, Gaston Bachelard wrote, “Immensity is within ourselves.” He goes on to discuss how forests give the imagination room. We don’t have to be out there long to have “the impression of ‘going deeper and deeper’ into a limitless world.” The wood’s expansiveness, its nooks and crannies, its twisty trails and dappling shadows, the darkness all give way to daydreaming. The largess and the largeness of the forest allow my own imagination to spread out and deepen, to feel unconstrained, except for occasional tinges of fear which, actually, stimulate it.

By late Sunday afternoon, having not walked for days, I was suddenly overcome, noticed anxiety, bitter at the back of my throat. I felt pinned like a butterfly. Grabbing keys, water, notebook, pen, camera and lipstick, I got myself out the door, after a quick “Gotta go,” to Michael. (He understands.)

Maybe one day I’ll get a manicure. But it won’t be soon. I’m a practicing nail bitter. Have been since I was a kid. I wasn’t stopped by the foul tasting stuff my mother spread on my fingers. There are moments in some days when I feel my blood about to boil over and I rip off the edge of a fingernail. The tiniest bite returns my blood to a nice simmer. If I hadn’t gotten into the woods Sunday, my hands would have looked like hell by Monday.

After less than ten minutes of having my feet on the Mother, my pulse steadied, my throat relaxed, breathing deepened, sadness flushed through me. Step by step calm arrived. Like a friend, the forest welcomed me.

The outside air filled my lungs. That walls of my house had disappeared, unclenching their hold. Views dazzled everywhere I turned—both the close-up kind and the vistas that gave my eyes more than my mind could grasp. My feet got to travel supported by my strong legs and softening belly, relaxing shoulders and frown-free head.

Being outside I celebrate being in the presence of mystery. I’m beyond the expectation and capacity of cognitive understanding and limited thinking. To understand, to decipher, isn’t my job. As John Berger said, “Today’s culture, instead of facing mysteries, persistently tries to outflank them.” I’m drawn to face them. From the mystery of leaves with their spindly veins to the mystery of fog billowing in—yesterday at an unhurried pace. From all the little creatures audible but invisible to me and everything else hidden under layers and layers, as well as all else that I couldn’t grasp enough even to list here.

I love how the sense of time shifts in nature. It’s difficult for me to rush when there. And since I find myself rushing all too often, it’s a huge relief not to. Time doesn’t stand still in the woods. It just doesn’t have its coat and hat on.

A Clattering Cacophony: Squirrel in the Pines

Shortly after starting up Skyline Trail, a loud noise noise coming from above startled me. It was sort of a bunch of angry yaps. Or a series of fierce chirps. The racket came from high above my head in the Monterey Pines. Who was being scolded? And who was doing the scolding? Couldn’t be a dog up so high. Too guttural a sound for any bird I’ve encountered here.

Debris came falling down at my feet—pine cones, small branches, full of dirt. Nothing falling down to my left, nothing to my right. I looked up, and there, bounding, bouncing, really, from limb to limb, keeping pace with me but many feet above was a large gray squirrel with an enormous furry tail shaped like a backwards question mark. Hell, that squirrel was shouting at me! If I’d known my crime I’d have done by best to pay retribution. Just stop that racket—too loud out for the midday forest!

Was that squirrel cataloging my faults and shortcomings—each and every one? What did it know about me that I ought to make amends for? Am I more an intruder here than I’d like to believe? Or with x-ray vision had it seen the state of my office, the towers of paper that unbecomingly line each horizontal surface? Did it know of my stash of chocolates and how often I dip in for a bite (or two) of sweetness? My impatient nature, was that reason to throw things in my path? Or might this not be a display of anger, after all?

Many years ago, my girlfriend Nathalie and I visited Italy. Down near the ankle of the boot we went in search of my heritage. Rather I went searching, and Nathalie was good about it and willing to serve as translator. In the village, the comune, of San Paolo Belsito, we reached my family. A policeman walked us to the narrow house on the narrow street, knocked on the door. Nathalie explained who we were to a young woman who called upstairs, “Mama! Mama!” The robust woman who rushed down the stairs looked like a female version of my grandfather. Without an iota of hesitation, she took me in her arms, held me to her bosom. We stood in the middle of the street holding each other close and weeping.

Once inside, I saw, on the mantle, a photograph of my father as a little boy with my grandparents, when they returned to Italy for a visit in 1924. A photo of my parents’ wedding was there too!

“You must stay a week,” my relative said. Nathalie translated and then added, in English only, “Like hell.”

“We have nothing to feed you,” my grandfather’s niece said apologetically, “but let’s have a coffee.”

Slowly, the entire family gathered at the table, coming home early from school and work for this surprise visit. And then the nothing of “We have nothing to feed you” began: steak from the grill, mushrooms from the forest, bread rushed in from the bakery, tomatoes from the garden, followed by sweets and demitasse after demitasse of pungent bitter coffee

Nathalie did her best, though growing impatient from translating back and forth. I should have told her to stop. Everything I most needed to understand came through without her help. (Not that I wasn’t grateful! Not that, without her, I’d have understood most of the conversation.)

That afternoon was my one chance in this life to return to something I could never have relived without having traveled thousands of miles. Effortlessly, I slipped back in time to my grandparents’ table in Astoria. There we were all sharing Sunday dinner again. My parents were still married. My aunt, Veronica, who died too young, was alive. My grandfather too.

The volume and verbal intensity with which my Italians express their love isn’t doting or calm. I’ve never heard a lullaby there. Why bother waiting for one person to stop talking before you begin? A whisper? Non capisco.

Maybe that squirrel shouting down at me from the topmost branches wasn’t angry at my intrusion in his home, but offering a welcome, a squirrelly kind of love?

“Bless Me Now with Your Fierce Tears”

Old age should burn and rave at close of day;
Rage, rage against the dying of the light.
Dylan Thomas

I’d no more yell in the forest than I would in a cathedral. Even though I’ve got one of those tempers that might surprise me like that, erupting in the wrong place. Or I used to. But over the years it’s, well, become tempered.

When walking in the forest, I keep my voice down. Voices really carry out there. In the woods, I’m respectful of being in somebody else’s house. After years and years might I come to feel this place is my home too? I’d like that. But I’m dubious. This is the trees’ home. The birds live here. Bugs and butterflies do. Cougars and squirrels. If ever I did feel this place were my home too, it would be such a shared one that I don’t think my voice would reach its higher octaves at full volume or half-full.

Yesterday my Pop came down to Monterey. We went to see a film about his favorite animals: whales. He was moving more slowly than the last time I’d seen him, only about a week ago. That disturbed me more than maybe it should have; he’s 88, after all.

The last place I ever anticipated being with my Pop is Jacks Peak. My father is a bit of a Woody Allen character when it comes to the natural world. “A picnic, Pop?” His answer, unequivocal: “Thanks, but I don’t want to sit on the ground or share my lunch with ants when I can sit on a chair at a table. We left the caves long ago, remember?”

Yet there I was driving him up the hills, onto the small, twisty roads and into the trees. Despite no longer being a child, I want my father to know what matters most to me.

More than once he said, uncomfortably, “It’s so remote up here!” I’ve never thought of Jacks Peak as being remote. Away, yes. But a cup of coffee and a gas station are much too close for me to call the park remote. And then there’s: remote from what? The more time I spend in nature, the more the city seems remote.

My father’s from Brooklyn. Several years ago he and I went back to New York, drove to all the addresses—the houses and apartments—he lived in as a boy. Some of the places were no longer there but more than a few were. Our last stop was what I knew of as my Grandparents’ home, a corner lot and a two-story brick walkup in Astoria, Queens, a block from the East River. After that, we ducked out of the heat into La Guli’s Pastry Shop for a lemon ice, just like we did every summer Sunday when I was a kid.

City life is what my father’s childhood was made of. Mine too. But especially his. When I was eleven we left the city behind and moved to what was a seaside village: Santa Cruz. My Pop didn’t leave the City till he was middle-aged. From that vantage, a small forest up on a hill above a small city could seem remote.

We walked around just a bit. Here too he saw things I never would: “They’re careful to pick up the debris,” noticing a pile of sticks and leaves. Bending for a rock, “It’s chalk,” he said and drew a line on a tree stump.

We walked a bit more, talked about his surgery next week, a new shoulder coming his way! And my fear of his undergoing an operation at his age.

In the shelter of the trees, my father’s temper flared for a bit. Not at me. At what life comes down to toward the end. He raged at being old. I made myself pay attention. He was telling me something I’ll one day need to know.

My father has never been an easy man. He’s intense and vigorous, more alive than many people a fraction of his age. Yesterday afternoon, his temper wasn’t old. It was bright as a star in the darkness. His voice wasn’t old. It boomed like a young man’s. His thinking was clear, determined, and disturbing. It wasn’t easy to stand beside him. What else was could I do?



P.S.
When my Pop got up yesterday morning before his cup of green tea, I gave him a printed copy of this post. Would he feel good about what I wrote? Had I written about him with integrity, as I’d tried to do? He stood right where I’d handed him the pages—in the doorway—and read. Then looked up at me, misty-eyed, “Correct,” he said, “You got it.”

He told me about going to hear Dylan Thomas read in New York! What a big man he’d been with an awfully big voice. Though he’s a voracious reader, it’s not poetry my father picks up so he’d never read Thomas himself. Till yesterday.

What One Might Buy if One Could but One Can't

On an afternoon, after walking far in the hot sun and getting dusty, I’d buy a breeze if I could, but no matter the number of my pennies, I can’t.That’s the first thing that comes to mind, not because it’s been that warm out but the sun did give us a nice warming up for a couple of days, at last shining and dazzling and reminding me of the kind of heat that makes a breeze the most valuable thing.

If I could I’d buy no-hunger for anybody beyond the hunger one can feel if dinner’s especially late. This is, in fact, something that could be bought but the collective “we” hasn’t put our collective muscle and and our collective pennies in the right place. I’d also like to purchase not feeling so sad about it. No, I wouldn’t. Beyond doubt and doubt’s shadow though, if I could, I’d buy a collective transformation of intelligence in this regard.

How about even a glass of cool, clean water for everyone who’s thirsty?

For myself, when especially tired, on busy days or restless days, I’d like to purchase one nap on a comfortable bed and one cup of black tea afterward. How about a short nap? Some days, even when I’ve got the time and the tea for later, I can’t turn my mind and body off long enough to rest.

There are some people whose love I’d really like and I’ve tried almost everything to get it from standing on my head while juggling strawberries with my bare feet to sending little notes and big books in the mail to phone calls on their birthdays but that love ain’t ever going to be mine, I can tell, because those people don’t love me. They think I’m somebody else. And I wouldn’t love the person they think I am either. The Beetles said it best.

If I could buy a tighter chin, I’d do it. But not the kind you get with knives and needles. I wish I could buy the kind of chin that would have been mine had I learned to hold my head high sooner.

Patience, how much does that cost?

The return of both my pop’s hearing and the hearing that once dad had. Though better than nothing, hearing aids just don’t do it. My father doesn’t particularly appreciate the sound of wind through trees or birds taking to the sky. He never has. Nature’s not his thing. But Bach is.

I’d buy my mother’s return, but I think I’ve already said that—once or 100 times.

How much would it cost to have lunch with Maude again? Every day she blows me a kiss from afar but her photograph displayed on my bookshelf’s not the same as the afternoon we enjoyed on her 86th birthday and shared a single glass of chardonnay, even though she said, nearly bubbling over, not meaning it at all, “Really, I shouldn’t have.”

My father bends down (still), never too proud (or, apparently, old) to pick up a penny. He’s collected a lot of money that way and put it to many good uses (the down payment on a home, even). Except when he buys books, I wonder if any of the purchased things are what the bending and the retrieving are truly about?

If I could purchase a second last sip of coffee when I bring only emptiness to my lips, I would.

I’d like to buy you a walk in the woods alone, in my woods, Jacks Peak’s woods. But I can’t. You gotta get there yourself. When you do, I’ll be waiting to hear all about it. And that won’t cost either of us a penny, let alone a dime.

Mountainous Migraine and Much More

“I woke in bits, like all children, piecemeal over the years. I discovered myself and the world, and forgot them, and discovered them again.” Annie Dillard


If a migraine were a mountain, yesterday’s, the second in three days, would have been Mount Vesuvius. In the moments that I had the wherewithal, when I didn’t feel as though my head were about to erupt then and there, that my brains were hot lava about to spew, the one thing I found to ease me was this:

I’m at the top of the Earl Moser Trail at Jacks Peak, the place where if you stand on the bench and lean forward you can see Point Lobos, where the breeze catches each pine bough and flicks it just a bit, gently, not rough, and the scent of the earth fills not just nose but pores, where I felt the earth spin on its axis or I felt my axis join with the earth’s or something equally impossible but true.

In the many hours I lay in my bed feeling sorry for myself or being too sick to feel sorry for myself, I wished I were either on that trail or here, writing to you.

I don’t know exactly who “you” all are but I do know that more than a handful of people read my missives on a regular basis and I can’t tell you how pleased that makes me. But I can try.

Happier than not having had the headaches at all. Oh, geez, could that really be true? Well, it is.

You see, for as much as I live anywhere, I live here, in this writing. I live in your reading it.

After I published Writing and the Spiritual Life more than a handful of years ago, I turned back to poetry and wrote a novel, which became, much to my surprise, a successful play and will get rewritten as a novel once again. But over these years, my nonfiction writing languished. It sat in a corner feeling sorry for itself much as I did yesterday. I kept giving it freshly laundered handkerchiefs but beyond that pretty much left it alone to stew.

Those years ago, when I got the contract to write my book, I was out on a limb, a wee, fragile, tossed by the wind limb. I’d kind of dared myself to write the proposal and, though she didn’t know it, dared my agent to sell it. When she did I was T-E-R-R-I-F-I-E-D! She said, “But I thought you wanted to write this book?” “Oh, no,” was my reply, “I only wanted to WANT to write the book!”

You see, I wrote poems, not paragraphs, not chapters, not PROSE! And then, by golly, I did! Annie Dillard said, “You've got to jump off cliffs all the time and build your wings on the way down.” That’s exactly what I did, made my wings from spit and paper and words and fear, determination, and a small knotted belief in my own possibility. That is, I did that, but only with the guidance of a terrific agent, an incredible editor and a few smart, supportive friends: Ali, Don, Janet and Marion, to say nothing of my best beloved husband who had to live with me and who offered respite and love.

In the process of writing that book I fell in LOVE with prose and think I actually found my métier. But then for reasons too numerous and not pertinent to this, prose fell away from me like so much confetti, was swept up by a guy in a white suit and tossed into the trash.

Through walking at Jacks Peak and thinking and dreaming and praying and mulling and WRITING, I have come back home. This is to thank YOU for reading my home.

I go out into the forest and I listen to things: squirrels, stones, sky, the Sticky Monkey Flowers, the Monterey Pines, a woodrat, the ground beneath my size 7.5 feet, as best I can. I listen to the world and to you and to my own heart.

When I sit these (very) early mornings and spend several hours on most posts, I am writing to YOU (and to myself). And it’s an amazing experience, how the stories come (as if from nowhere!) and the words line up at the ready somewhat patiently waiting for me to retrieve them and give them a place to stand. Sometimes I actually get up and dance with my words and kiss their little feet! Never has writing felt so write (right!).

I do my best to write with integrity and honesty and heart. I write about the people in my life because they, you, are who I know, who, along with events and occurrences, make up the details of this one life. Somebody I wrote about here wasn’t happy with me for doing so. Even though I wrote with kindness and deep regard. For that, I am awfully sorry. I never meant to cause injury.

Writers need to write. If you have stories forming inside you, they need to be told. That’s how stories are, that’s the life they are meant for. If we don’t tell the truth, why bother? Writing and reading shortens the divide between people. Both bring the world close, especially what we don’t know, haven’t lived, and even more especially what we have. Through reading we get to see life’s particularities from another perspective and we get to see it given form, given story.

The responses I’ve received from so many people via e-mails, blog comments, words said out loud in the library, at the Farmers’ Market, have made me want to kiss YOUR feet (but don’t worry, I won’t!).

At this moment, my girl cat Ace, in her stripy coat, is sitting right IN FRONT of my computer screen. She appears to be reading as I write! Might she be? (Which reminds me that my friend Marion’s kitty who didn’t come home needs us to urge him in that exact direction, please.)

(I apologize to the god-of-exclamation-points, as I know I have used up my quotient in this post alone. Mea culpa but I’m just that kind of girl; can’t help myself.)

May I ask you something, you who find these words and this nature worthwhile, if it suits you, means a little something and you haven’t yet, would you, let me know? And would you, if you haven’t, tell others? Please send them over to my blog-house.

I think there’s a book writing itself in these pages. I’d like to know if others feel that way too. (There’s the whole first half of the year that hasn’t been posted.) And that means I need people to read and talk back to me.

I like bringing us close through the intimate details of what it’s like to be alive for this one woman recalling her life at this particular time, inclusive of others who make up that life, walking in this particular park, celebrating the word and the natural world. I’ve fallen in love with Jacks Peak much as I fell and remain in love with Michael. I have fallen in love with gratitude. I am drawn to make stories. I am drawn to give my love. What else could I do with it, anyway?

My headache, the one that was still hanging on when I began writing this early morning, must have found its wings. I can only feel its shadow now.

Tears in the Forest

Though I don’t often cry in the forest, when I do, the trees never judge my sadness, nor does the breeze. The ground doesn’t rise up at my feet and ask, “What on earth is the matter?” The trees stay strong and steady; the breeze brings in new air; the ground takes my feet, no matter how I feel.

Michael and I drove up to Jacks Peak on Sunday, and I was sad. He is the kindest of beings, the most understanding of men. Sometimes, when I cry though he does want to repair my sadness which is a nice idea yet impossible. Sometimes I am bothered by the fact that often women’s traits remain in women’s domain and men’s traits in men’s. Other times I relish the differences and the predictability. Not Sunday though. Sunday I wanted Michael to be a girl! Well, not really, but my sadness did. It wasn’t a problem in need of solving by a sleuth of any kind. If it had been, Michael would have been the perfect detective in his baseball hat and the shorts that show off his handsome legs.

In his book Here Is Where We Meet, John Berger writes of lesson he learned when he was a teenager about men and crying. He was in a bar with a close friend, a mentor, when he had an altercation with a drinker at the bar and broke into tears. His friend took him outside: “If you have to cry, he said, and sometimes you can’t help it, if you have to cry, cry afterwards, never during!” Such is the learning boys get on their way to being the men we love, giving me one more reason I am glad to belong to the clan of women.

Many years ago, after my mother died, my mother who I’d not seen for five years before she got deathly ill, I cried for an entire year. Not every day, but pretty much. Sometimes for entire days. It was whispered that I being indulgent, that I was pampering my sadness, as if it were a naughty child.

I wish I’d known Michael then. He’d have taken me in his big arms and held me close to his big chest. No matter what he might have thought about my sadness, he’d have loved me all the way through it.

Just yesterday, (such timeliness!) there was a piece on NPR’s Morning Edition about crying. Other animals cry out in pain, but humans are the only one who cry because they’re sad. I had a cat once, not too long ago, named Nora. She may not have produced tears herself, but when I cried and she was nearby, she’d catch the tears that ran down my cheeks with her little paw.

Shouldn’t sadness be sheltered and loved and given plenty of room, the way we hold joy up to the light? I love my tears. Since I was a little girl I’ve loved my sadness. Because it’s true. Tears don’t lie. One “reason evolution kept humans crying: tears help reveal the truth,” says NPR reporter, Allison Aubrey.

Apparently babies who cry the loudest get the most attention and have been favored by natural selection. “Crying seems to elicit compassion and guilt, and that itself may be an evolved mechanism to save relationships in distress,” says Jesse Bering, an Irish scientist.

It’s not only sadness that makes us cry, many strong feelings do. The main character in the novel Child of All Nations, by Irmgard Keun, is a precocious little girl who says, “All the purpose in my grandmother’s eyes was quenched...Her tears were pale and yellow; before she had always cried good healthy pink tears when she said goodbye to us.”

On my wedding day, I began crying fat, pink tears at “I do.” They were the pink of lemonade—sweet, laced with a bit of melancholy. My tears continued through the first dance and the dance with my father in his top hat and on through all the lovely toasts. I cried till it got dark and Michael drove us home, on that, the happiest day of my life!

My Goddaughter got married on Saturday. She looked radiant is the long-beaded dress. She and I aren’t close like we were when she was a little girl and we took boat rides together and read books for hours and drank hot chocolate on winter afternoons and Italian soda on summer ones.

When someone whose birth you coached gets married, you feel the years add up and then it’s as if those year quiver in the sunlight and you wonder, cliché as it sounds, how time undoes itself. At least I did. I felt the years between Kyle’s birth and now quiver and time did not stand still, it roared past me. And as a child is supposed to, so did Kyle.

In his poem, Crying, Galway Kinnell, writes: “Crying only a little bit is no use.” I couldn’t agree more. Near the end of the poem Kinnell says, “’Happiness hiding in the last tear!...” I just haven’t gotten there yet. Maybe when next I go to the park, the trees will stand by and the chickadees will sing as I cry a little more.

About a Fox

(Disclaimer: The following story did not take place at Jacks Peak. I hope you’ll like it anyway.)

June, two years ago, I was scheduled to teach a collage and poetry workshop in Big Sur at Esalen Institute. (I love teaching there.) But forest fires came to the coast and made that impossible and made a lot of people’s lives extremely difficult.

Instead of teaching I decided to make art and play with my kittens who were only two months old. It was an eerie time. The evening sky lasted all day and the air smelled strongly of smoke. In Big Sur it was a whole lot worse. My kittens didn’t know there was trouble though.

They romped around the backyard like nobody’s business while I cut and pasted in our sun room. I was sad about the fires; I was lucky to be where I was doing what I was. The kittens were exploring the world for the first time, jumping for butterflies, and missing. They hid behind bushes and leaped out at me and each other.

One day, the paste drying on my fingers, I sat watching the cats and the garden, mesmerized by the small beauty out my window, when I heard a rustling by the back fence, looked over in time to see a creature peer over the fence, a pointy reddish nose. Must be a dog. I said, “Hello, there.” The animal took that as an invitation, and jumped came over the fence, stood still, looking at my kittens and at me and approached the little ones causing my breath to stop, stuck in my throat.

That was NO dog. That was a FOX! What the hell? I stood watching. It came up slowly to the kitties and they hissed as if their hisses could snuff out fire. The fox backed away. The glue on my fingers dried. The fox came closer and the kittens got closer. I got closer. We were all moving in slow motion. The fox didn’t snap up one of my babies in its mouth and take off to have a luscious lunch. It came nearer to me, looked me in the eye. I spoke in my calmest voice and it cocked its head and didn’t run away and nor did the kitties. I sat down. The fox sat down for a bit. The kittens scampered. Then the fox got up, walked to the fence, jumped over.

I went back inside to pry my fingers apart. A few minutes later I went back to the yard, having safely deposited the cats in the house, shutting the door behind me, I went back to the garden, called, “Fox!” Andover the fence came the fox, walking up near to me. We could have touched each other. It was enough of a visit without that. A few times more the fox left and a few times more I came out to the fence and called, “Fox!” Each time it came.

Just about the time I began falling in love I did what I know you’re not supposed to do with wild animals, but what you are supposed to do with guests: I gave it something to eat. And the snack it left. A while later I called again and the fox came again, only with this time my kittens were outside too and the three of them approached each other and then retreated. By then it was evident the fox was playing!

By then it was evident this might not be the best thing for the fox or me. I wanted to invite the fox in, offer it a bed next to our bed, when it came up to the back door. But I knew better or I knew otherwise, anyway.

I came back to the yard and said to the fox to explain, “I’m sorry. I am falling in love with you in a way that makes me want to offer you some of all that I have. But I can’t do that because that kind of arrangement is against your nature. It wouldn’t be right. It’s time for you go to.”

At that moment the fox looked at me, turned on its heel, went back over the fence, never to be seen in my yard again.

"The Stars Make Me Dream"

“I know nothing with any certainty, but the sight of the stars makes me dream.” Van Gogh

How many things can you count that you know for certain? One handful? Two? Enough known things to fill the kitchen sink or your bathtub?

It took me too long to trust almost anything I thought I knew. Let’s just say that when I was a little girl I got thrown off the track of my knowing. It cost me more than I wish it had. When we believe something about ourselves because somebody else tells us that it’s so we might have put our belief in a bunch of hooey.

I believed I had a lousy sense of direction for long that I’m not sure I can believe otherwise. But maybe. The more I walk at Jacks Peak not only do I know better where I am because of spending time there but I’m also realizing I actually have a good sense of well, direction!

One time Michael and I were in San Francisco, looking for Cafe Milano. He was certain we needed to go left; I was certain we needed to right. You know which way we turned, don’t you? However, by the time we actually got to the restaurant my vindication had soothed my hunger!

It’s not just about direction though, it’s about everything. And I’m not complaining, either. Ultimately, having been thrown off my own track has served me.

My dear friend Marion is the Queen of Dreams. She regards and loves her dreams; each morning she writes them down; she spends waking time visiting with them. And you know what? Dreams come to her. It’s like they trust her so they show up and sit down and make stories for her all night long. Maybe not always the stories she’d wish for, but stories, nevertheless. I don’t know that Marion would go so far as to say she knows her dreams, but she knows dreaming. And what the dreams tell her, influences her life.

There are the so-many ways we know what we know. Our ears have their knowledge which is different from what our feet know. What our minds tell us they know may be different from the what heart does. Even this: what your left hand knows is not what your right does. What we don’t know informs us too.

In writing knowing and not know matter a lot. As much as the famous writers have said, “Write what you know,” others such as Lucille Clifton have reminded us of the value of writing what we don’t. There’s a lot of curiosity to compel writing when we go into our own uncharted territory.

When I write using less familiar ways of knowing the world, what I write is different from when I employ my more familiar ways. There are so many!

Blindfolded, mothers can recognize their own baby by how the little one smells! My flesh knows the mosquito that at this moment is buzzing quite differently from how my ears know it. Has that blood-feeder become suddenly silent because it’s sipping on me?

I just walked out to the kitchen, noticed that the hibiscus that my student Mackenzie and her mother Greta gave me was in need of water. But how did I know? I didn’t stop, look at it closely and determine the plant’s thirst. My mind fired the information to me pronto: the dark green leaves had gone limp.

One of my concerns about knowing and not knowing is this: to know the world we have to experience it in its infinity first hand. These days children are getting fewer chances at firsthand knowing. (More on this another day.)

A few years ago a inquisitive elementary school student of mine wrote a poem about knowing. From the handwriting I’m pretty sure the child was in 4th or maybe 5th grade but I can’t tell you the author’s name because I don’t know it. As children often do, this author put no name on the binder paper, quickly joining the famous infamous! Here is the poem:

I know that the world
is round.
I know that it is big,
blue and beautiful.
It is filled with humans
who have blood splashing
everywhere in them.

There are somethings
I do not know
like how the water
in the ocean flows smoothly.

No name, but at the top of the child’s paper the date is written this way: “02/06/06.” Below that “Poetry” (capitalized!). You wouldn’t need that word to know, now would you?

I’m grateful to have arrived at a point in my life where not knowing doesn’t feel like an impediment; it doesn’t feel like I failed a test and will be demoted. It just feels like a trail I’ve not walked on yet. One maybe I never will and, most days, that’s okay.

What We Carry

“My dream is to walk around the world. A smallish backpack, all essentials neatly in place. a camera. A notebook. A traveling paint set. A hat. Good shoes. A nice pleated (green?) skirt for the occasional seaside hotel afternoon dance.” Maira Kalman

Never would it occur to me, not in any dream—wild or otherwise—to not come equipped for a Jacks Peak walk. I always have one bag or another slung over my shoulder or hoisted onto my back.

When Michael and I come together, he has four perfectly functional pockets, yet they’re nearly empty. What a waste! From what I can tell, he carries change and keys; sometimes a handkerchief, which is particularly useful when we’re together and I don’t have tissues and I get sad; wallet, keys and a tape measure. (Michael is a cabinet maker, even when he’s not at work. And that tool comes in very handy. You never know when a thing’s dimensions need to be known.)

Here’s what he doesn’t have and what I always do: water, lipstick; a little snack; Advil and vitamins; usually, my wallet; most times, a cell phone; notebook and camera (and tucked inside that camera case is a little feather that once belonged to the dove that got killed and whose body was left on Skyline Trail); at least one pen, if not three or four; and a hair clip. (Not that Michael has need for a hair clip, nor lipstick, for that matter.) My wallet may get left behind but not the lipstick and absolutely never is the snack forgotten. Walking hard can make a person hungry.

(By now, you may have noticed that I have a thing about food and hunger. I get a little crazy when I’m too hungry. Even though I’ve worked on controlling this, an unflattering not-niceness can overtake me. Maybe in one of my previous lives I actually didn’t have enough to eat.)

Here’s what I don’t carry but maybe I should: binoculars, Handiwipes, a ladder, a pretty hat, a hairbrush, toilet paper, a first aid kit, rope, matches, pictures of my kitties or a change of clothes. I rarely carry a map though I’m getting better at that. I don’t carry something to read anymore though I used to—I’d rather read tree leaves or the map of the sky. My mind is forever with me. (May it always be so.) Despite how hard I try, I’m never without my past or concerns about the future.

My favorite carrying case is not one I take with me. The one I once loved best is gone. It was the cobalt blue, round overnight case that was my mother’s first and then mine. When I was little and took the train by myself to visit my aunt and grandmother in West Springfield, Massachusetts, I would be comforted by that round, blue case at my feet though not as comforted as I was by the friendly porter. My favorite case now is the one I bought for a dollar at Goodwill.

It has elasticized pockets inside made out of gray satin. I bring it into the classroom with me when the kids and I are preparing to write poems. We pretend Winter left his suitcase behind the day he got butted out by spring and all her flowers. The suitcase has snowflakes inside and rainwater and even hail. I don’t carry it on the trail because it’s quite heavy and I’d look silly lugging that big thing.

Your turn. What do you bring along when you go for a walk? What have I forgotten?

The Shape of It

"Nothing less than the infinite and the miraculous is necessary..."

Vincent Van Gogh

If I don’t know the shape of something—either it’s too big or too unknown, my mind comes to the rescue and gives whatever that thing is is a particular shape. Of course, my given shape may not correspond whatsoever with the actual shape. My mind does this with things that actually have a shape as well as with those that don’t like my love for someone, which is always round.

Round is the shape of wholeness, the form of most integrity and what pizza dough becomes when it rises in the bowl dusted with flour, after the dish towel is removed and my father smiles. That dough is on its way to becoming dinner. And on the days my Pop made pizza we were a happy family, after the pizza came out of the oven, anyway. (He was never the happiest of men after the dough rose and he punched it down and spread it out thinly, southern Italian style, though the sweat-beads of frustration that dropped into the dough only made it better.) My father always baked enough pizza for the next day’s breakfast. That “enough” had its own shape: the smile on my face covered with sauce as far as my cheeks or maybe my eyebrows when I stood at the kitchen counter the next morning enjoying breakfast. A little pepperoni, a lot of mozzarella.

Hunger has one shape—long, dank and hollow. I’m sure for the too-many people who know hunger intimately every day, its shape is entirely different. Large, and not attractive in the slightest, far worse than dank. Maybe if you’re really hungry your mind hasn’t the energy to give a shape to that feeling. Or could giving shape to things just be what some children do?

When I first came to Jacks Peak I rode my bike up the monster hill to the west parking lot without any idea that what I was doing would later be beyond doing. Briefly, I looked around, noticed the clarity of the air up there, came to an absurd conclusion—that the trail ahead went a short way up, made a tight little turn, and arrived neatly back at the parking lot. I could see a rough outline of trees extending beyond the trail and imagined a vague square that quickly petered out into nothing.

I wrote the park off as being no bigger than a ham sandwich. A ham sandwich with the best mustard, but just a ham sandwich. (I don’t care for ham, no matter the mustard, no matter the rye bread. Even in the days when I purchased apples one at a time, I’ve had the luxury to never be so hungry that I had to.)

I think I convert things in mind to a size and shape it can manage. I’m from New York City and though that town may be chock-a-block with everybody and her sister, it’s a pretty small place, really—13.4 miles long. At its widest point it’s a mere 2.3 miles and at its narrowest a wee 0.8 miles. Which, of course, doesn’t count the vertical space rising up and up that is also densely populated. Jacks Peak is over 500 acres and that isn’t inclusive of its verticality either. Not the treetops, not the daring hawks, not the hovering, tree-kissing, whether foggy or clear, sky.

When I was little we had a small one bedroom apartment in upper Manhattan, near Ft. Tryon Park, until my sister came along and then we moved upstairs and had two. I feel best in small spaces. The house where Michael and I live has just 900 square feet. That’s a closet to some but to us it’s home.

This all brings me, circuitously as a wooded trail, to the walk Roxane and I took the other day. That walk is causing me trouble. My brain hurts. I can’t hold the park in my head anymore. It’s gotten really big. Especially having walked three times past its actual boundary and onto private land, past the sign that says my very own walking privileges could be revoked according to the civil code.

Said code reads, “No use by any person or persons, no matter how long continued, of any land, shall ever ripen into an easement by prescription, if the owner of such property posts at each entrance to the property or at intervals of not more than 200 feet along the boundary a sign reading substantially as follows: ‘Right to pass by permission, and subject to control, of owner: Section 1008, Civil Code.’"

For whatever I may ripen into, it shall not, apparently, be into “an easement by prescription.” Not that I’ve ever wished my easement to come about that way. In other words, the owners can kick my sweet ass off their land any ole time they choose. I walk assentingly. And gratefully.

Roxane and I went down a skinny trail for such a long way I began biting my fingernails in trepidation over the return climb, in bafflement over the size of the place that once I thought was too small to bother getting off my bike for.

At long last, after slipping more than once on strewn oak leaves and dried pine needles, we got to the very bottom of the trail. Like magic, nature spread her skirts wide, transformed herself from a long, canopied tunnel, into a meadow. Then one meadow narrowed, the bushes coming close, just in time to open onto another meadow and the earth did the same thing one more time until the trail zipped itself back up into a thin line again and the clock said we’d better quickly enjoy our lunch on the one bench provided for us by who-knows-who and then hightail it home.

I was too happy to bite my fingernails. I didn’t give a hoot about the awaiting difficulty of the return walk. Open sky was above, shedding its fog and becoming the bluest blue. Birds were everywhere. Each one calling our names.

Again and for Always, My Mother: A Jacks Peak Musing

Just because the person whose opinion mattered most and to whom my opinion did too is gone is no reason to cease asking each other what we think, is it?

*

How small writing this down makes it seem—no bigger than a couple of oak leaves, a wisp of lichen, the sound of a tiny bird. Inside though it's really big.

*

There she goes in her best black pumps and that pale raincoat that is nearly no color cinched at what was once a very pretty waist. No matter the quickness of my step along the path, she out-walks me.

Winter in July

“The coldest winter I ever spent was a summer in San Francisco.”

Mark Twain


There’s usually a smell in the late afternoon baked forest that I can only describe as sexual. It’s delicious to my nose. This summer, I’ve not smelled it once.

If any doubting Thomas (or Penelope) needed proof that the climate is not itself these days, just come to the Monterey Peninsula and take an afternoon walk with me. Or don’t come here. Try Chicago, New York City, Pakistan. This is not Mark Twain’s summer in San Francisco. This is a chill of another factor. The sky is the color of milk and as heavy. It weighs on my head almost all the time. This a dampness meant for rain forests. Or Siberia. By nature, I’ve got the sunniest of dispositions but some days, I dissolve into Ms. Gloom-and-Doom.

We’re used to summer fog in these parts. After more than thirty years on the central California coast, I've become accustomed to it. It’s so much better than mid day in Manhattan where even my sweat sweats. The pattern here is for the fog to clear bringing an unabashed sun out, turning the day into something to write home about—warm and beautiful—around 11:00 or a little after. Around 6:00 or a bit before the fog tiptoes back before we can bemoan the day’s heat. Its return makes us long for the next day’s afternoon. That’s a Monterey summer, a Santa Cruz or San Francisco summer. And, as I said, this is not that. That is tolerable. My tomatoes ripen absolutely deliciously in that. This is not that, as I believe, I’ve mentioned.

This is: Where the hell are my tomatoes? Peaches taste like yellow fleshed, sweetened cardboard. And must I wear a wool dress in August? This chill has spread to my bones. They are cold. My hair is cold. It is 2:00 in the afternoon and I have wool blended socks on. They’re a bright turquoise blue to remind me of the sea in the Mediterranean where, I hope, it’s warm, the sun tickling the water, the sunbathers turn over like so much meat on the grill. What’s worst though is this weather makes me fearful for the future. Not my future, but the future for the ones on their way up.

Here’s the few good things that I know of, resulting from winter in July and now August: the gardens are not demanding inordinate amounts of water; my cats aren’t burdened with fleas, making their hind legs work overtime; when walking up hill at Jacks Peak I’m not bathing in my own sweat.

My Monday afternoon writing students would like to contribute the following additions: Roberta says, “Taking a hot tub is more fun.” Laura reminds me, “The hills are not ablaze with fire as they were the two preceding years.” “For once, it’s 90 in Seattle,” says Margaret. Her son lives there and he’s enjoying the heat. Lorraine says, “It makes us travel elsewhere for warmth.” In mind anyway. Richard suggests visiting his home town of Syracuse—just kidding! And lastly, from Alisa, “More pleasure can be derived from cup after cup of hot tea!” Better not leave Persis out, the one comment I can wholeheartedly take comfort in. “It’s better weather for writing!”

And you, out there, what good foggy things have you come up with?

The Man from Budapest or The Deeper Woods

“The woods are lovely,
dark and deep.”

Robert Frost

On Saturday, Michael and I went out on the trail with a packed lunch—a box of guacamole, some cucumber sticks, the blackest olives and a bit of chicken. We had a plan or rather, I had a plan—to repeat my birthday walk, only together. My step is easiest when walking with Michael, and when the trail gets wide we go side by side which is one of life’s finest pleasures.

I asked if one day he’d walk the barely-trails that the animals have made not for us but for themselves. We’d need to wear long pants to save us from the poison oak.

“Here’s one,” I said pointing off to the right shoulder of Iris Trail. But it was changed, wider than it had been a few days before and clearly not made by animals but by a human’s machine. We left our plan behind and turned right, going down, down, down. The trail narrowed; we continued.

Do you know the scene in C. S. Lewis’s book The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe, where the children reach into a coat closet, step inside and begin walking, past where the back of the closet was, till snow is beneath their feet and the scratching against their faces is no longer from coats but tree branches?

That’s how I felt. What I thought was the back tree-wall of the park was not a boundary at all, but a gateway to the deeper woods. To hold that awareness, I had to kind of turn my head around—my world had just grown larger. This finding made me immoderately happy. Nothing other than sudden honesty in our political system; a return of my dead mother, only sober; or maybe a book deal, could have been as good.

The path climbed a bit, came to a clearing and where a low-to-the-ground, homemade trail marker gave us choices. The left-hand trail was unidentified, but later I found it goes to a place called Roach Canyon. (I can only imagine what I’ll find there!) Going forward would take us to Pacific Meadow and Del Mesa or we could turn around and go back to Jacks Peak. Michael left it up to me, and, unsurprisingly, I was compelled forward.

Michael and I may walk together but we’re never really on the same path.

“We’re much lower now. Not too many people take this trail,” said Michael.

“How do you know?” I asked.

“There are oaks and not pines here,” he said. “The layers of oak leaves wouldn’t be so thick if the path were well-traveled.”

God bless my boy scout! See why I feel safe walking with him? My attention had been taken by the pattern of the fallen, pale oak leaves. The crunching sound they made under our feet took me a long way back to another walk. But I hadn’t come to a conclusion about it. I’d been too entranced by color, shape, texture and the nearness of the oak tree branches to think beyond my senses and memory. Michael sees the large picture while I’m focused on the small one.

We kept going and going, walking south and west till we could almost see the mouth of Carmel Valley. That the ocean was nearby we could feel on our faces. I was determined to know where the trail ended, didn’t concern myself with the fact that the return would be one long hill home.

A cyclone fence, as if dropped down by aliens in front of us, seemed to bar our way till we looked more closely and found a path to the left, caught sight of a water tank below. Mr. Observation whispered, “Shhh.” I looked down to see a man in one of those fancy sun-protection hats walking up the trail.

He was friendly, most people on the trail are, said we were at the edge of a retirement community that comes out, yes, onto Carmel Valley Road. When asked, he told us he was originally from Budapest, that he walked here often. Clearly he knew the park far better than I do. He claimed to be 86, but based on the way he loped up the hill ahead of us, I doubt it.

“Home Is Where the Tart Is”

"I've always thought the least I could do with every novel is to give people something useful, ideally a recipe." Barbara Kingsolver

My sister and I aren’t the best of friends—we lead very different lives. One place where we connect is over our father. These days, it isn’t always the easiest of connections—at 88, he’s getting old and that presents his daughters with certain challenges. Our kitchen connection is less fraught. If you ever get the chance to taste Beth’s cheesecake, you’ll never forget it.

The other day I needed to make something for my Wednesday evening writing workshop. Some people come to write, some to eat. And though I wanted to make something lovely with the fresh nectarines and peaches I’d gotten from Tuesday’s Farmer’s Market, I had other things to do with my day such as desk work and a long Jacks Peak walk. I couldn’t spend hours in the kitchen. Beth gave me her recipe for a fresh fruit tart.

First I walked and then I baked, so when my students came over there might be a lingering scent of baking tart crust in the air. On the trail I noticed fallen pine cones everywhere, the result of this summer’s unusual winds caused by the challenged relationship between fog and sun, remembered the pine cone that fell at my feet instead of on my head, and felt grateful much of my life has been just like that.

I love the pine cone patterns. Their called Fibonacci Spirals—two sets of spirals occur in each pine cone. One spiral turns one direction and the other goes the opposite way. These spirals get wider by a particular factor for every quarter turn. I’m no scientist, far from it, but am fascinated by pattern—in poetry, nature, human relationships and daily life. It gives me pause and comfort to know that these spiraling patterns occur in much of terra firma—from a single cell to pine cones to bee hives. Might I design my tart thusly? I don’t think so, but I could make it pretty to look at and good to eat.

In an interview about her book The Lacuna, novelist Barbara Kingsolver said, “Food speaks directly through the back of our brains to our hearts....The best way to relay experience is through all the senses....”

When I walk at Jacks Peak, I always bring my nose along though rarely my tongue. I love best the scent of sage on a hot day, not that we’ve had more than a handful of those this summer. I rub the sage between my fingers and that way bring it home with me.

But back to my kitchen. I’ve never been one to take a recipe on face value, I made a few revisions.

“Home Is Where the Tart Is”

Crust: Almost 1 cup flour, fill the balance of the measuring cup with corn meal
1/2 cup butter (There’s no getting around this; I’m sorry)
1/2 cup powdered sugar

Soften butter and combine with sugar and flour till course crumbs form or a ball forms (depends on the weather). Use your hands for this; it’s the only way! Press dough into tart pan and bake at 325 for 15-25 minutes until golden brown. Cool.

Topping: 4 ounces cream cheese
4 ounces ricotta cheese
1/4 cup sugar
2 tsp vanilla
zest of one lemon
Cream together until all lumps are gone, well, almost all, anyway.

Spread cream cheese mixture evenly on tart crust. Cover with sliced fruit. A mix of peaches and nectarines works really well in summer. If I’d made this tart in July, apricots would have been best.

Lastly, melt some dark chocolate in a double boiler (one pot inside another with a bit of boiling water in the bigger one is my d.b.), stir in a wee bit of honey. Drizzle on top of the tart. Chill, serve.

Beth’s métier is the sweet kitchen, mine the savory one. So I appreciated the recipe’s last words: “Good luck.” And, whether you need it in the kitchen or elsewhere, I wish you some too.

Sticky Monkey Flower

Once upon a time I had a friend named W. Of all the people who have ever given me their attention, who’ve ever lent me their ear, and I’ve received great attention from more than a few, no one’s ever quite listened the way W., with her x-ray ears, did. She held nothing back. Not only were her ears upon me but her eyes and, most especially, a divinity that coursed through her. She listened like a nun prays. (And I’m certain she still does.) Even in my despair, she held me up to the light and honored the particular qualities—truth and beauty—of that sorrow. W. had known more than a little sorrow herself.

Once upon a time we were going on a holiday together, a few days at Tassajara, the Zen hot springs eat-your-vegetarian-heart-out retreat center together nestled deep down in a valley at the base of the Santa Lucia Mountains, a few miles and whole worlds away from Carmel. And then we were there.

It was late spring, the flowers must have thought a gala ball was about to begin—everyone was out in their best—bonnets tied, shoes polished. At that point in my life, the mid-90’s, I’d begun to wholly and unforgivably fall in love with flowers. I wanted to know everybody’s name, their birth dates, the intimate details of their lives. W. knew it all. I remember her teaching me about two beauties. Whenever I see these flowers, and these days, at Jacks Peak one of the two is out in profusion, I think of her.

I think of her and feel lingering sadness over the loss of our friendship. It went so far away that it’s become dust, though dust rich and loamy, laced with many things like the names of flowers and W.’s husband and daughter. When I look back—though I’d come to wits’ end—I don’t feel so good about my part of our breakup. If we’d been a couple, we’d have gone to marriage counseling. Or maybe not. Maybe the friendship had done its work and it was time to let it go, the way summer eventually relinquishes its hold on flowers.

To teach me the names of the beauties growing into their summer fullness at Tassajara, so that I would remember, W. held nothing back.

When I asked, “What’s this one?” Instead of ticking off the words of its name, W. pressed her thumb and forefinger together, pursed her lips and made like she couldn’t pull her fingers apart. Then she made that ee ooo ooo unmistakable animal noise, her face gesturing right along with her voice. W. made me bend over laughing with this charade—my sides were splitting and joy-tears were falling fast but I hadn’t the vaguest idea of the name of the orange tubular flower growing aplenty on bushes everywhere. Finally she relented. “Sticky Monkey Flower,” said W.

Standing before another flower—tall stalked, a series off pale, bell-like fringed blossoms climbing the stalk, it was the same thing all over again, only different. First W. put her palms together, narrowing her fingers as if they were a pointed beak opening and shutting. It looked like an animal, indeed. I just had no idea which one. Next she pretended to cover one hand and arm with something delicate and, I imagined, lacy. But I’m thick headed, didn’t get it. Once again she gave up though, not on that day, did she wash her hands of me. “Foxglove,” she said. Never have I forgotten the names of those two flowers.

Once upon a time I had a friend named W. I am a very fortunate women. I have other friends—a few great ones who nourish me, who I do my best to nourish. But I don’t have W.

Divinity and Gratitude

Love echoes love.

John Ciardi

Though it was couched between a pair of parentheses, there was a line in Nancy’s blog comment the other day that wouldn’t let me go. It’s been like a small and not unpleasant pebble in my shoe. Only more pleasant. For the second night, her words pulled me up and out of sleep. Last night I was glad. Though the nightmare had concluded, and not badly, it was a relief to be distanced from it by her affirmative thought.

Nancy was remembering the birth of her child. When Selena was born, Nancy wanted to name her Grace but was reluctant, as if doing so would tempt the fates. “I wondered if it was flaunting to declare the awe I felt at my life in having a beautiful daughter at my breast.”

Don’t you know that feeling? I’ve never had a daughter, but I well know my own tendency to keep certain things close for fear of inviting trouble, of tampering with my good fortune. My father took this caution a bit far. The Italians call it mal occhio, the evil eye. You should never celebrate too loudly and in front of others that which you love best because the Gods will see you as being boastful and take that beloved thing from you. I wish I hadn’t had to wait till so recently for my father to explain this? If it had come sooner. I’d have jumped through fewer hoops, been singed by less fire.

The line of Nancy’s that’s been my companion, a refrain in my head, isn’t about a fear of flaunting goodness, but this one: “(I have no struggle with acknowledging the divine.)”

A no-holds barred confidence in the divine has never been mine. I’ve struggled, used to be a bit mezzo mezzo about the whole thing. And yet even at my most faithless times, there’s been a niggling something that’s saved me. Sooner or sometimes horribly later, faith pulls me back. Back where?

To God. Alas, I’ve never found a better word. It’s not to the God of my Catholic childhood, not to the God of the fundamentalist Christian right, not Sunday school version. Not my mother’s God. Or it’s all of them rolled into billowy clouds and a bluest sky. In my times of greatest despair, in my most joyous moments, my belief has eventually been reaffirmed up there in the blue heights, in all that domed glory, in the cornflower, nearly cobalt, cerulean sky.

It seems that, after all, my Catholic upbringing has stayed with me. God was up in the sky when I was five; that’s where God remains. But no longer do I associate God with a glorified human being up there, sitting on a gilded throne. It’s the clouds and the sky themselves where God is, that God is. Sky God. Cloud God. More than that though. When I look up at the great dumbfounding blue and the cotton-does-no-justice-to clouds I am reminded that the human neither the beginning nor the end-all. We’re only a small part and, as the Aztec poem says, “Only a little while here.”

When Michael was a boy, on some Sundays, instead of going to Mass, his father would announce that they’d have church out in the backyard that morning. Some would have called Roy a heretic. They’d celebrate the mass of trees and sky and flowers. Of course, the alignment between nature and God is the oldest one. It’s been a long, sordid journey that’s caused and cemented the rift between the two.

Nature holds God for me. But the other place where I found faith and God was so unexpected and so true that when I first recognized the alliance I wished I could respond appropriately by doing somersaults or climbing to the highest peaks or shouting my gratitude as far as Heaven.

When I began writing—a thousand years ago—back in high school, when to put a handful of words down on paper left me rattle—sweating, shaken and breathless, I wanted one single, little thing: to be able to write, to be able to tell the truth (my truth) without nearly throwing up. My goal was that simple and that monumental. I didn’t think then so much about making poems or stories, let alone publishing. What I thought about was salvation, the salvation of paper and pen.

I needed a way to take what was a messy, noisy, smelly jumble inside me and hold it at arm’s length so it could cool down, so it wouldn’t eat me up and spit my innards out.

When the publishing world disappoints me, when rejection letters come or when what I think are good book ideas isn’t shared by those who hold the purse strings, etc., etc., it’s good to remember how pure my goal once was and how gloriously far I’ve come. When I crouched behind the high school music building in tattered jeans with a brown felt hat pushed down to my eyebrows, writing on postage stamp sized pads of paper, all I wanted was for writing to save my life. And it did.

Rarely do I shiver out of fear of what might happen if I write my words down. Not that writing is always smooth. The Gods are fickle, after all. But often the sensation of words lining up at the ready, waiting till I need them is how it goes. I forget who it was that said something like, “Writing is easy, you just open a vein...” It’s not a blood vein for me though, more like the vein of root or a river’s tributary. I just have to stand aside and let the water go, let the root tangle its way through the dirt.

These days when I walk in the woods with a handmade journal and the ground rises up to meet my feet and the words come running home to me, it’s gratitude that courses through me. Gratitude and faith in God, faith in the holy, holy ground.

Off and On, and One Marvelous Disappearing Act

...If you're lucky after a number of revolutions, you'll feel something catch.

Mattea Harvey, from Introduction to the World

Shortly after the day began, after a strong cup of coffee and other good things, I felt off. You know off? Like when you try putting the lid of a jar back on but can’t get the grooves to groove and, finally, you have to put jar and lid away near each in the cupboard but not mated. Or when you step down from the curb and the asphalt’s farther away than you expected and your foot dangles aimlessly for a mere millisecond but long enough for your heart to lurch? Or like your jacket’s off—truly—and it’s suddenly cold and you’d like that jacket on but don’t recall where you left it off.

Off, as my friend Roxane may feel this morning after she drops her younger daughter Ella off for her first day of kindergarten and gets an in-your-face confirmation that both Ella and Margo are truly growing up, the kind of confirmation that’s exciting but is also tinged with sadness, enough to cause any loving and attentive mom or dad to feel, well, off.

Not off in a life-shattering way, not like the every day of some people—of too many. Not off like you can’t pay the rent or your job has been taken away to a country you’ve never even visited or one of your best beloved’s is really sick. No, I thank God and all the Angels and every pine cone, leaf and star, that’s not the kind of off I’m talking about but something much tinier, more brush- under-the-rug variety, more wait awhile and it this too will shift. It’s only that my humor’s mute button got pushed and even a forced chuckle isn’t enough to get the jar’s lid fitting neatly again.

And then... after awhile of having Jacks Peak under my clad feet and its air pumping through my lungs, the oaks and the Monterey Pines sheltering me like so many friends, I began to groove. The scales of my being bean to tip in my favor. My step touched more lightly on the earth. I felt compelled forward and deeper down, way past, strata past, feeling off.

Even took a different and unplanned route, walked a section of Rhus Trail I’d never been on before. It was really steep. (My calves still feel the hill in them.) Walking up my heart was unequivocal. It became excited by the hill’s incline and sent enough oxygen through to me to dazzle. There was one thing and one thing alone for it to do: pump, baby, pump!

At the top of Rhus was the road, but I didn’t panic; I knew where I was and hung a left, crossed the road, got onto the skinny section of Pine Trail, a flat trail, which crosses the kiosk and keeps going. I kept going.

A bit further along, I checked to see if the Geo-Cache was still hidden, and it was. (The people playing that game are kinda slow, it seems to me.)

Just beyond that I noticed a hole in the ground to the left of the trail, stopped, trying to figure out: whose home? Snake perhaps? No kicked-up dirt—not a gopher. Aha, bees. A down-in-the-ground beehive! I’d never seen such a house before, stood close, watching them come and go like workers with their ties fastened, clutching briefcases. Guess I out stayed my welcome, if I’d had a welcome. Bees were speeding my way, so I hightailed it. A bit later thought, hey, I’d a like a photo of that habitat. So I turned around, walked back.

Back and forth three times, each time slower than before. What on earth? I could find neither bees nor the entrance to their house. All had evaporated. Had they miraculously covered up their door, quickly and fearfully fled? Frustration threatened to set me off. But enough of that! Let’s call it a visitation by Houdini, a marvelous disappearing act. Later, when I sheepishly told Michael, thinking he’d find me silly for losing a bees’ nest, he just said, “Nature’s like that.”

eARTh journals

Well, talk about sweetness? Not that I was but I would have been if I’d know the response that would come following the large group e-mailer I sent out yesterday, asking folks to comment on my blog and become followers. The response has been, is being, truly affirming! Thank you, my dears! I said I’d send the first 15 people who both commented and became followers a homemade journal. And I will. Have been working on them since this morning’s wee hours... A photo of one cover appears above.

The comments that you’ve sent, making blogging a conversation, have made me love this form even more. One person who I don’t know well made a comment and now I know her better. I love how writing can shorten the divide between people—I’m not the only one who likes to look at art alone. Claire wrote: “I realized a couple of years ago—at a Museum in Toulouse during a reception for an academic conference—that appreciating art feels like a very private, intimate thing to me. To share my reaction to art with someone I don't know intimately feels uncomfortably exhibitionist...”

Here are more comments I thought anyone reading this blog might enjoy:

Tamara wrote: “Someone else has my same questions...”

Virginia Lee: “When I was living in Ukraine, I noticed how the Ukrainians revered their sojourns in the park...it's where parents would stroll with their children, lovers would steal an intimate kiss on a park bench, friends would meet for a spontaneous picnic & where lonely pensioners would walk their dogs — all escaping the confines of their small, crowded apartments.”

From Lesley, who was my poetry student when she was in high school and now teaches poetry herself: “I live in a part of the city that is sandwiched between the ocean and my most favorite park. I couldn't live anywhere else in San Francisco. And, it is nature that makes me happiest about this city. Coffee on a foggy morning, a workout from the De Young to Ocean Beach, a rare sunny summer evening overlooking the water.”

From Bruce, someone who walks where I do: “When I walk on Jacks Peak, I often feel that I have steeped into a time machine, and I am gazing on the Monterey area as looked 100 years ago... “ From a few vantage points, the view seems eons old.

And from Nanda about a beloved mutual friend who died a couple years ago at not quite 55 came this:” I think often of Alie's eyes, a certain way you can swim in them and see how bright her response would be way before she even said anything.”

By the glue on my fingers (and in my hair)! I promise to have those 15 journals finished within a week’s time. And to those of you who haven’t become followers and posted your comments yet and to those who came into the fold after I hit 15 new people mark, if you want a journal, just let me know, we’ll work out something. Maybe you can send a few folks my way and together we can make the circle of people who love listening to the breeze call them a little wider.

Questions Answered and Otherwise

How many bees are there
in a day?

Which yellow bird
fills its nest with lemons?

Why do trees conceal
the splendor of their roots??

Pablo Neruda


When the Chilean poet Pablo Neruda died in 1973, just shy of his 70th birthday, on his desk were eight manuscripts he was preparing for publication. Though Neruda was ill at the time, he was not at death’s doorstep. Many Chileans (and others) believe the cause of his death was heartbreak. His beloved country had been taken over by a U. S. backed coup d'etat. His friend, Chile’s president, Salvador Allende and many, many others were murdered or disappeared.

One of the manuscript’s Neruda left behind was El libro de preguntas, The Book of Questions. The volume is comprised of playful poem-questions, imaginative queries, such as the ones above, in which the answer isn’t the point. It’s the questions that matter. Copper Canyon Press brought out a beautiful translation by William O’Daly. This book has thrilled me for a long time.

*

Walking Questions

Are the birds happier on cloudy days? Is that the reason they sing more loudly? Why do some of the most gruff looking people become soft-faced and sweet-voiced when approached? Why, knowing this, do I still hesitate to say hello? How long will it take for time and wind to scatter the dead dove’s feathers from the path? How about its tears? How did my nephew Josh, when he was a little boy, learn to walk in the woods and see every tiny thing? Now that he is a becoming a man, does he still? What if my feet had never found their way? How come, when I’m out walking I don’t feel any age—neither old nor young nor anywhere in between? How does the cricket know to stop chirping the moment before I get close? When there’s a will there’s usually a way, so how come when there’s a way there’s not always a will? Bird with the tiny silver bell voice, I’ve never heard before, what’s your name? And what will you eat for dinner? Out in the woods alone, I hear my name called over and over. Who’s calling me? Why do I never find you? Are you the one who brings me back over and over to this place?

The Size of Happiness

My happiness, I’m afraid, is shrinking—not its depth, nor its height, but its range, its breadth, its sweep. Has my happiness become the size of walking into Michael’s arms when we see each other Sunday afternoon after being apart for the weekend? Perhaps it’s small as cats rubbing up against my legs or the slow way morning’s light comes, one breath then another.

Happiness: the look on the homeless woman’s face when I gave her some food on Friday but more, her face on Saturday, when she recognized me and offered me God’s blessing. Happiness—though I couldn’t see it, only feel it, was the look on my face when she accepted the food. Her slight smile had some happiness in it that I could see but it had a lot of not so happy too. She’s been sitting on the same bench in front of the Ferry Building every time I’ve walked by since arriving in San Francisco on Friday. She’s a heavyset woman but I don’t think her happiness is, the little bit of it I got to see, anyway. But what do I know about her, really?

Arriving in the City, on a terribly gray morning, my first stop, after getting rather lost, was the Palace of the Legion of Honor, where my happiness became quite small. It distilled down to the size of the red umbrella in the impressionist painting of two women sitting close together reading in the shade the umbrella made. I’d never heard of the artist, an American, Charles Courtney Curran. The picture, Afternoon in the Cluny Gardens, Paris, 1889, was no more than a foot long, its height less than that. So the red umbrella could fit easily in the palm of your hand. Ah, but to have happiness by the hand!

When I go to a museum show, I quickly walk through the exhibit, see the pictures that call to me, and come back, sometimes many times, to my chosen few to linger. Seeing the Matisse exhibit in Chicago last spring with my best friend, Gina, I kept returning to the bronze sculpture of a woman’s back. There are 4 of them, actually. Back I11 drew me in, nearly the least figurative one. In that bas relief sculpture you see the woman’s figure from behind, her long braid loose down her back. She’s leaning her head on her raised and bend arm. Is it the war that’s pushed her into this position, her sorrow?

I’m not such a great friend or wife or daughter at a museum. (Though perhaps I learned this method of museum-going from my father. We’ve spent more time together in art museums than nearly anywhere else.) I don’t like to talk about what I’m seeing and I don’t like to look together. It feels adulterous because for the brief moment I belong to nothing and no one other than the painting before which I’m standing. I’m happiest when I go to a museum alone (or with my father).

After a while at the Legion I left for the big Impressionist exhibit at the De Young, got lost again, (no happiness there), parked on the street since the lot was full. This should have been a sign. Well, it was; I just didn’t heed it. The long lines inside the museum were the next signs I ignored. My desire to bolt was strong; I had to hold myself there with the strength of my persistence, if that’s what it was. Idiocy might be a better word.

Though I got to see Caillbotte’s Floor Scrapers again, a most favorite painting, sadly, even that wasn’t enough. My shoulders were always pressed against two others. My hips got to know hips I never wanted to know—too many strangers, too much shared air and thought space. It set my breathing to fast and shallow and my pulse kept skipping important beats.

The whole day was blaring car horns, cars racing to red lights and all the world’s used car lots worth of traffic, a missed street here, another one there. Even the gorgeous dahlia exhibit at Golden Gate Park undid me in its profusion. But also, one perfect parking place in front of one of the world’s tiniest and most perfect shops—Belle Ochio—beautifully arranged with delicate things and ribbons fit for a queen, enough money for a nice hotel room to which I possessed the only key and hot soba noodle soup for dinner. The day made my eyes feel as if they weighed a thousand pounds each from all the looking I had done. My ears were flooded and begging for silence. And by day’s end, I felt as though my head were facing one way and my feet the other.

After checking into the hotel, there was only one place to be—outside in an open spot, as away as I could get. For a long time I sat at water’s edge, the Bay Bridge in the middle distance, watching wavelet upon wavelet, feeling sun on my droopy shoulders, now that the day had brightened.

Despite my gratitude for a weekend away that I could kind of afford, better face it; I’m not the girl I once was. Give me the forest crowded with trees, multitudes of leaves in every green shade, the camaraderie of scurrying squirrels and snakes, the breath of coming autumn wind. That’s the size my happiness is.

Sturdy, Brown Shoes

Go inside a stone.
That would be my way.

Charles Simic, from “Stone”

One of my favorite children’s picture book authors is Byrd Baylor. Her stories take place in nature, often in rural places. They’re not overly peopled, often just a single child and a grown-up being together outside. Her books are deeply spiritual; illustrated poems, really. When I turn the last page, it’s best to close the front door behind me, to get outside, where I too belong.

In The Other Way to Listen, a wise man who’s been listening to the natural world his whole life, tells an enthusiastic child who really wants to hear nature sing, “[G]et to know one thing as well as you can. It should be something small. Don’t start with a mountain. Don’t start with the whole Pacific Ocean....”

I hope I haven’t chosen too big. As I’ve mentioned before, I do tend to over-fill my plate. Jacks Peak’s 500 plus acres is certainly not on par with the whole Pacific. Pretty big though for one smallish woman with two size 7.5 feet. But I’m in no hurry; I’ll take my time. (Funny, isn’t it, how time can be “taken” and time can be “spent”?) Baylor writes, “It takes a lot of practice. You can’t be in a hurry.”

When first looking at the map of the park, before me I saw a bundle of lines; the outward ones formed an oval-ish perimeter. It was like looking at a map of the night sky’s constellations which, for me, has always been like trying to read a very foreign language—one in which the speaker’s tongue turns completely upside down. If I’d used the Jacks Peak map to find my way, I’d not have gotten far. Map reading isn’t one of my strengths.

Once, in Italy, Michael and I were trying to find Milan’s Stazione Centrale, that fortress of a building. (Luckily we weren’t planning to actually catch a train, just to break free of the rental car.) The same gorgeous stone buildings kept mysteriously appearing and disappearing—over and over again. We’d slow down, I’d lean my head out the window, ask a stranger how to find the train station, recognize the word, “sinistra,” bring my head back inside and say, “We’ve got to turn left—somewhere.” We were stuck in a bad sci-fi movie.

Maps cause my pulse to race unpleasantly. That’s not where I want to go. The places I want have trees and birds and, if in Italy, chianti and pasta al pomodoro. Long before we cut the engine at the station, the Milan map had become confetti on my lap.

At Jacks Peak I’m not getting to know black lines on paper, flat zig-zagging lines—pretty to look at but without meaning. I want to know the spot where I met the woodrat; the one where a falling pine cone landed at my feet, not on my head; the moment the trail gets narrow and just where it widens. I’m pretty sure I’ve found the park’s best view of Pt. Lobos. I’m getting to know Jacks Peak by spending time in precise locations, not theoretical ones. I’m learning where I am through experience.

Now, however, that map is a thing of beauty. I can identify which trails I’ve walked and which I’ve yet to become acquainted with before the new year. In just the last week I’ve found two nameless, unmapped trails I hadn’t noticed before. (They’re not new!) When out walking, I can sense where I am in relation to the map, well, actually, in relation to the rest of the park. But the map has helped me to get the big picture.

When I fell in love with Michael, his sturdy, brown shoes got my attention first—shoes capable of going places. How straight and tall he stood is what I noticed next. He’d arrived at the dinner party with a gift for the hostess—a carved wooden feather. Then came those eyes that he says aren’t blue but he doesn’t see them like I do. And deep blue they are, with a touch of green. A color that, before meeting him, and never elsewhere, have I seen.

In my discovery of Jacks Peak, in this new friendship, I’ve relied on curiosity, love and my feet to get to know the place, with more than a tinge of fear and hesitation. I trust them, though not always the fear, and together, they’re doing a fine job of leading the way.

Poison Oak

“[T]he poison ivy plant of, say, 1901, can grow up to 50 to 60 percent larger as of 2010 just from the change in Co2 alone...”

Dr. Lewis Ziska, from NPR interview, 7/20/10

A list inspired by looking at Poison Oak which grows abundantly and is in its fully red glory now:

The color I become when embarrassing myself.

The first time I saw an excited male dog, if you know what I mean. His name was Wilbur—our family dog, a hyper miniature shepherd I never cared for much before this and even less afterward.

The red ribbon in the song about Johnny being gone too long at the fair. In the actual song, the ribbon is blue. Even though her favorite color was blue, my mother got it wrong. But actually, in this instance, as far as I’m concerned, she got it right. What about Johnny?

The color of the sun’s au revoir in a too-smoggy place.

My lips sometimes. Most times.

Mind mind when, all too often, I’m rushing.

My hands after eating a pomegranate and thinking of Persephone and Demeter.

The friendship between a boy and his balloon.

The opposite of this dense, wet fog.

A snake’s rattling in the tall grass.

Color a thing said turns after one regrets saying it but it’s too late to pluck the words back from the air, back from the beloved’s ear.

The not just-painted, red fire hydrants of my Manhattan childhood.

A glass too full to pick up without spilling, so you have to bend your head to the table for the first sip.

It’s almost the color of the inside of the dove’s body. Something better covered with flesh and feathers.

The day I’ve been waiting for all my life that I’m sure will come at last like someone I said goodbye to once and wish I never had.

The bees’ ambition.

My ambition.

Inside the mouth of the squawking blue jay on that tree over there.

The velvet Christmas dress with a white lace collar that Gram made me. In my dreams, I keep opening that box for the first time.

Sweet smell of fresh horse manure.

The color of anger that comes after feeling bereft in certain kinds of grief.

The kid who’s full of herself (as opposed to being empty). Everyone who loves her best is glad she is.

All that glitters. Everything that shines.

Ella, Who, at Least for the Time Being, Doesn’t Like Licorice or Give Me a Break, Tricie

Not for the first and certainly not for the last time, I put my foot (not candy) in my mouth and, inadvertently, taught a young child one of the last things I’d ever like to. 

Roxane and Ella are my friends, along with the rest of their family, Manny and Margo. Yesterday, Ella, who’s almost five, and her mom, whose birthday is today, walked over to my house. Ella knows where the candy’s kept. She’ll stand smiling, a bit coyly, in front of that particular cupboard and I’ll tease her about what she thinks is up there and she’ll give me a look that would make a pirate relinquish his entire treasure.

Yesterday she wanted to take all the candies out of the Spanish bowl and line them up on the kitchen table so she could get a close look at her choices. We agreed she could choose from any of the soft candies. (No choking, please!)

She narrowed it down to four. But really she’d chosen, upon first glance, the large, black licorice jelly bean that both her mom and I thought she’d not like. Of course!

Trying to move her away from that one and wanting to teach her something ridiculous about thrift and believing the grown-ups who "know best" and the importance of standing by one’s decisions (blah, blah, blah), I said, “You get only one.”

A few minutes later, just as Roxane and I expected, Ella came into my office, wearing a mildly sour face, asking where the trash can was...

I’ve spent a lot of time with children and what I really want to encourage in them is curiosity, taking a chance, and exploration—at Jacks Peak or in a candy bowl. Let’s not go only for the tried-and-true; let’s not staying safe when safe's not a big deal.

If I’d approached my walks in that pinched and conservative manner, I’d still be at the tip of the park, walking back and forth, leaning toward the dark forest, waving to the new and unfamiliar. I’d have never gotten a sweat going, never felt the wind or the downward drifting leaves, never really gotten much farther from home than the end of my driveway!

Hey, Ella, come on over; I owe you a piece of candy! More than one.

Writing in My Sleep

What’s happening to me? Last night I was awake on and off. That’s not the weird part; it’s often how I spend my nights, always have. I’m calm and resting when not asleep. The middle of the night is a very quiet time to day to be still and let dream and thought and whatever else filter through my mind. The phone doesn’t ring; the cats aren’t waiting on dinner.

But last night was different. Each time I woke up, I was writing. Years ago, when working on my book about writing, I often composed by best ideas while out climbing hills on my bicycle. Writing without paper and pen is nothing new. All night long, that’s new. My subject was no surprise though: Jacks Peak. Two different pieces. The more I’m away from the park, the more it expands in my psyche.

Yesterday morning, before going off to teach, I was making lists in my head. Nothing fancy, just what I need for my trip this weekend to San Francisco, which bills have got to be paid— soon, considering writing workshop plans, etc. This while washing dishes, taking a shower, doing the immediately necessary things for the day to officially begin, when I forgot the next thing on my list. It had been clearly in mind, till it was gone like a day goes.

My inability to hold everything in the fore irked me. Once I stopped plowing ahead in my thinking, the missing item returned, with a shy glimmer. Sheesh! In retrospect, I see the folly of my ways.

Last night, it was kind of more of the same. During the day two ideas had come to me for this journal but only while driving did I get to hang out with them. In the night, I was trying to hold onto both and progress forward with them. Not that writing all night is bad. But sleeping has a lot in its favor too.

There’s so much I want in my life, so many things I want to know intimately—writing and making art, teaching, loving Michael, giving myself to what I can, loving the old folks, the not so old folks and my kitties, being a good friend, and walking in the woods. Sometimes I feel like a chipmunk filling my cheeks near to bursting!