A Small Intimacy Between Strangers

At the intersection of Pine Trail, Lower Ridge Road and No Name Trail, I finally took No Name down through the woods, a narrow path, suitable only when wearing long pants—the poison oak is up-close-and-personal. It arrived at a group of water tanks and turned into a road. But—does a trail arrive or is that what I did?

Beside the tanks was a water company truck with an open door and a man sitting inside.

“Where am I?” I asked him.

He laughed, told me, “This road comes out down on Monhollan.”

I knew just where. The unfolded map in my mind got bigger, settled into its new shape. And the man, Mike, and I got talking. I’m not sure what it was about him that made me feel like I was fifteen again. Only fifteen with confidence.

It’s human nature to look for points of commonality. It’s a good day when one is found. Of all things, Susanville, was the shared thing between us.

At Jacks Peak on a fall afternoon, Mike and I returned to Honey Lake and Pyramid Lake, back to Milford and Highway #395, even Westwood, which made us both laugh; it’s a funny place. Best of all was returning to the pie shop on Main Street. When I was seventeen, living for the first time away from home, during a chilly winter, I’d hitch a ride on the highway from the unheated shack in Milford, a town of twenty-two, where I lived, to Susanville, and upon occasion, when there were enough dollars in my back pocket, I’d duck into the pie shop for a slice.

Less than an Hour on the Trail

Trail of departure,
of juncos and chickadees flying low,
little teasers, hoping,
of broken rock,
fallen oak leaves, mostly gone brown,
pine needles, mostly gone brown.

Trail of twists, turns, curves,
and bends,
of clumps of drying grass,
of horse manure,
of fallen twigs and broken branches.

Trail of squirrel eaten pine cones
and uneaten pine cones,
of holes to watch out for
and holes not to watch out for.

Trail of flies and bees
and other small wing-ed creatures,
of rabbits peeking out from behind bushes,
of wind touching down
and making itself visible.

Trail above which birds
make the sound of air kisses,
of running away
and running toward.

Trail of innumerable broken things,
of incline and decline,
of views to the ocean,
the airport, the highway,
mountains too far to walk to
from here.

Trail of one woman writing
in a small notebook,
of one small meadow,
of shadow and shade
and sun.

Trail of the bees’ destruction,
of sun hot against my back,
of traffic, but at a distance,
of fallen trees,
of wooden steps,
of squirrels chattering above.

Trail of arrival.

Sad Wrong

One is never alone in the woods. Some days it’s more evident than others. If I’m walking with another person, I feel farther away from the forest than when I’m by myself. I don’t so easily notice the flying bugs or the crawling ones. Whatever scuttles by in the brush, I don’t hear. Human conversation is louder than that. And I don’t much think about who might be sleeping a few trees away, dreaming or stretching awake as I stroll by.

Yesterday, I wanted another look at the ruined hive. Down onto the ground again, I leaned forward, got my face as close to the empty hive as I could, peered in. I took a stick, reached in to where I could not otherwise, pressed it against the walls of the hive. Curiosity had the best of me. That’s when wrong and sad happened. A few bees were there, alive! Rebuilding? I’d disturbed them, became a home wrecker. Just what they didn’t need. First their home gets destroyed and then somebody, with better sense, comes along to make matters worse. Quickly, I backed away, got up, felt ashamed, left. One bee lodged itself in my hair, came along for awhile, buzzed there.

Sting me, I thought. But, no. The bee untangled itself and turned back. I continued on, heavy stepped, forlorn. I don’t know why lately I feel for animals as I do but empathy undoes me. On my way home, the bee was there waiting just outside the hive. It came awfully close, but once again, it didn’t sting.

The Lost Compass

I was directed
by my grandfather...
To the earth,
so I might receive
her fruit;
To the sky,
so I might lead
a life of innocence.

Alonzo Lopez,
from Direction


The stars are beautiful,
So the eyes of my people.

Langston Hughes, from My People

My father gave me a compass the other day. It’s black-rimmed and palm-sized, would easily fit into a child’s palm. If you want something, chances are my father’s got it. All you have to do is ask. (Not money though; other things.) And I’d been wanting a compass for my walks for sometime. Not that I haven’t found my way just fine without one. But to confirm which way I’m going when I think I know and to inform me when I think I don’t. This continues to be true: the more I know about the park, the more I want to know.

Yesterday, when Roxane and I got to the T, she was in front and, even though we’ve walked this way several times, she wasn’t sure which way to turn. It’s embarrassing to admit, but I could feel a glimmer of gloat come over me. Thank goodness, it only glimmered and then crawled back, sheepishly, to where it belongs. I’ve walked these trails alone so many times, I know which way to go. Had I not, had I only walked here with someone who knew the park better, I’d have been Roxane. I have been her in many situations. Direction, as I may have mentioned, isn’t my strong point. That I know which way to go here is something just shy of wondrous.

“If the ocean’s on my right, I know where I am,” I told Roxane.

“And if it’s not?” she asked.

“Then it’s a bit more uncertain. If it weren’t for the trails, chances are I’d get lost very fast. The forest looks like the forest pretty much wherever you look.”

Lots of Monterey Pines, some oaks, many low-to-the-ground bushes and some not-so-low, most of whose names I don’t know. There’s the Coffeeberry bushes, now displaying plump red berries, approaching brown. Poison Oak galore, so much of it, this could be called, Poison Oak Park. There are lots of other bushes, I know only by recognition, not by name.

Once upon a time, my people knew which way to go in nature, without street signs, the McDonald’s on the corner, trail markers or even trails. They knew where they were going in a way I may never, though I’m trying. Not only did they recognize the places where they lived and walked, but I’m sure they had a far better sense of direction because it was necessary to their lives. No GPS!

When my great grandfather, Alphonse Aqualino, arrived from Italy at age 12, alone, and got off the boat, began walking from New Orleans to New York City, he was walking in the new world, for sure. But I’ll bet he had better sense about him about how to go.

My father’s father’s people are in olives, or were, and for a long time, not the owners but the workers. I’ll bet when my grandfather was a boy he knew an olive tree the way I knew a Nestle’s Crunch Bar. On my mother’s side, my people are from Ireland, so it was potatoes and then it was blighted potatoes and then, of course, it was likely death by starvation or get the hell out of here, which, lucky for me, some of them did. I didn’t know what a potato plant looked like till a few years ago, when I planted some in our garden.

Nowadays, too many kids see a pine tree and I think what they see is generic: “tree.” When they see an oak, they don’t see anything so different, though, of course, if they looked closely, they’d know. Trees are not what most kids look at carefully. They look at television which doesn’t require one to look very closely at all. Images are dumped on the viewer’s lap. Being from New York City, I thought “a tree is a tree is a tree,” too. But, alas, I always knew how to get to Bloomingdale’s and B. Altman’s. Plop me down blindfolded, spin me around a few times, in midtown and, though Altman’s is long gone, I’ll take you there.

Anthropologist, Wade Davis said, “Language is the old growth forest of the mind.” Which leads me to wonder about the words my people once knew, that I don’t. Words, though, that must be lodged in my d.n.a. Of course, the words from Italy, are in Italian, and those from old Ireland, in Irish. I love words so much. Maybe part of why I’m walking is, not only to learn to find my way, but to find the words for the natural world I once had but long ago lost.

P.S. Thanks to Joy Patman for leading me to write this, for the Wade Davis quote.

What I Learned About Darkness from the Students in My Poetry Workshop at the Monterey Pubic Library

That they didn’t seem happy about the subject. That maybe it’s a subject, that in and of itself, doesn’t lead to happiness, especially when you surprise a group of mostly strangers by giving them that as a writing topic. The collective look on their faces was, “How do I get out of here?”

For many writers and artists, the dark time of year is the richest, the most productive. When there’s less drawing us outdoors—less sunlight to frolic in, creativity says, “Well, here I am!” It can feel like a tunnel, inspiration can. Right around the middle of October, a faraway bell begins to chime, and I feel at home again. Even though I think I love spring and summer best, creativity knows otherwise.

When asked what he liked about darkness, Irwin, with his long white hair swept back, frowned and said, “Not much.” Darkness made Kathy think of quiet. Her voice was quiet when she told us. Carol associated the dark with softness. It never occurred to me that darkness would be soft, not that it ever occurred to me it wouldn’t be. Soft darkness is comforting. Alice described sitting under the shade of a pine tree. Alice has been writing with me for several years now, and that’s the lovely way she thinks.

Clark said, “3:00 a.m.” From the sound of his voice and from what he wrote and then read to everyone, it was clear that Clark’s 3:00 a.m. darkness is a pleasing thing. The one he likes is the one he’s written his way, all night, into. For me, 3:00 is the bewitching hour. When I wake then, ready to rise, that’s not a good thing. I need to make at least till 4:00 before getting up to make coffee and take the day into my arms, or that day’s going to wither long before the sun goes down.

Kalyn said, “Halloween,” which is her favorite holiday is also her favorite thing about darkness. For as much as I like the dark, except late at night in places where I’m afraid bad men and skunks might lurk, and for as much as I like dressing up, I don’t like Halloween. Never liked it as a kid either, felt ridiculous in some silly costume, walking around, knocking on doors, except for the year when I was 7 and dressed up as a beatnik. I was as dark as the dark outside, except for my nearly ghost-white face.

If it were up to me, for as much as I love children and, unfortunately, candy, I’d turn off all the lights each Halloween and wait in the dark for the revelers to pack up their costumes and and their candy buckets and go away.

I want to walk in the park at night and to spend a night out there, even though that’s against the rules. Both ventures will require my best beloved, at least for the first time. Perhaps one day I’ll know those trails as well by night as I do by light.

Disturbance on the Trail

The blackbird whirled in the autumn winds.
It was a small part of the pantomime.

Wallace Stevens,
from Thirteen Ways of Looking at a Blackbird


There must be a law of nature to fit this situation: Something that was lost gets found so long after you lost it that you’d given up finding it. Not that I forgot about what I’d lost. The missing object festered for awhile, losing it made me feel silly, but then I let it go. What else to do? Oh, to find the lost thing, not when looking but when not looking, when thought of it was about as far from mind as lost youth and other unretrievable things; that’s lovely.

This must happen to squirrels—a lost and forgotten cache of nuts is found in a tree’s hollow and, maybe, just when the animal’s despairing over her hunger. Once I found $100 dollars I’d slipped between the pages of a book. Though the money was far more useful than Saturday’s find, it didn’t get me to my knees.

The ground at the park was damp from rain, easy. The trail accepted my walking as if there were springs beneath the dirt to buoy the ground. The day was as rainy as it was snowy in “Thirteen Ways of Looking at a Blackbird,”:

“It was evening all afternoon.
It was snowing
And it was going to snow.”

There had been a disturbance. It was obvious but it wouldn’t have been if I’d been in hurry. I noticed it because walking in these woods is teaching me, none too quickly, how to walk in the woods—softly, when possible, and curiously, always. The ground had been messed with, pawed at. I don’t know by whom.

Perhaps you read the post from July, in which I’d walked by an in-the-ground, trail side beehive, saw bees milling around it and, after a few passing steps, I turned around to get a better look but the hive had disappeared. The-hole-in-the-ground hive and the bees were nowhere. As if the hive and the bees had been packed up in a suitcase and whisked away by all the queen’s drones. That day, the disturbance had been mine. I’d walked up and down the short stretch of trail several times before giving up.

Yesterday, an almost-blind man would have found the ruined hive. What had been a gopher-sized hole was now, by comparison, enormous. The area outside of the once upon a time home, a community, a factory, was littered with hive parts. I found dried bits of honeycomb, some of which appeared charred. Picking up a piece, I smelled burnt honey, sweetness gone wrong. Tasting it with the tip of my tongue didn’t give me honey, but cardboard.

Onto my knees I went, wondering out loud to Michael, “What happened to the girl who wouldn’t get mud on her hands?” “She’s gone,” he smiled, far happier with this one.

Only a few bees remained. They flew almost languorously, in and out of the old hive. I leaned in, could see the inner walls of it. They looked pressed like pale brown clay, imprinted with the potter’s fingertips.

From outside the hive, I picked a piece of hive material that weighs less than a bee does. It’s circular with a circular opening in the middle, just big enough for a bee to get through. It appears to have been constructed from bits of something like sawdust. I brought home that fleck of charred comb.

The lightness, the kept sun, the honey, the colony of bees and the hum of their buzz were gone. A few stragglers seemed confused, flying into the hive and back out over and over. Where had their honey gone? Who took their sweetness? Their flight?

Pace Maker

A heart will beat
three billion times
in an average life.
Three billion times for a woman,
a man, or a rat, or a cat.
A human embryo's heart
beats by the twenty-third
day of its life.

Marina Romani, from her poem Heartbeats

Sometimes, I want my very own pace maker. Not like the one my father had planted in his chest by good Dr. Potkin last week to keep his heart from trying to get to the finish line sooner than he wants to. My father’s heart had been, on and off, racing in his chest, occasionally causing him to lose consciousness, as he went about his business in his apartment and elsewhere like at Bookshop Santa Cruz which is one of his most favorite places to go.

I can hear it drumming
its song —da-thump-da-da-
thump-da-da-thump—
It’s a work song.
It’s a job that it does, without pay,
not pausing to protest,
never taking a break.

The kind of pace maker I’d like is one that would regulate my step, not my heart. Yesterday, a one-hour walk took me half again as long. Was I dragging my feet? Certainly not. I was indulging my senses. I was falling further in love with the forest.

When I was a child my mother accused me of “dawdling,” and she was right. It used to happen in front of candy shops and toy stores, inside museums, later, dress shops and shoe stores, but no longer.

I dawdle over leaves and sounds that are coming from the furthest reaches of the treetops and lean into the shrubbery to get a closer look at those dark-eyed juncos, who without trying or caring to have won my heart. I step past boundaries—inviting the poison oak to poison me. Even though Jacks Peak isn’t made of trees that lose their leaves, you can see the forest thinning, baring itself for winter. And that opens the view into the thicket of my woods. I can see farther than I used to.

But if I had a pace maker, I’d get a better cardio workout from my walks. I’d step it up, hightail it up and down and up again. It would be like a leash to pull me out of my reverie.

“...One life-sustaining muscle. And the valve
-its black and grey lips open, close, pucker,
open and pucker and close...”

Implements to Conjure Fearlessness

Perhaps find something else
to carry that you know how to use:
a gun or a frosting piping bag.

Robin Roberts

I regret that it takes a life
to learn how to live.

Jonathan Safran Foer

The idea of carrying mace on my walks doesn’t sit well. Nor would carrying a gun, a bow and arrow or a slingshot. It’s not only that I don’t know how to use those things, it’s that by carrying any of them, I feel I’d be inviting danger to come find me and, certainly, stirring up fear—carrying a weapon implies using a weapon.

In her note, Robin also said that police have found women carrying mace take greater risks. With or without mace, I’m not about to do some of the stupid things I did when I was young: I’m not going to walk in San Francisco’s tenderloin wearing a sheer dress at nightfall. I’m not going to stick out my thumb on highway #395, my long hair blowing in the cold breeze, hoping some kind soul will give me a ride to the Reno airport (though one did.) It took awhile, but I know better than I knew before.

What about carrying something else? Here’s a few possible implements with which to conjure fearlessness: an ink-laden pen to write the fear out and a book with plenty of blank pages, a laser flashlight that burns fright out of your cells and transforms them into love and kindness, a leash sans dog, a box of laughter that you open up when needed, a zip-up, immediately inflatable cocoon that rises and floats above all fear.

Or I could carry Robin’s frosting piping bag and wield that when something rustles especially loudly in the bushes and I get scared. And if it turns out to be a critter rummaging around for dinner, “I know I left those seeds somewhere around here,” or a creature collecting nest building material, “On guard,” I could say in my fiercest voice. That flock of black-eyed juncos or the pair of bushy-tailed gray squirrels would look at me like I was the silliest human seen yet.

In the novel that nearly everyone ought to read, Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close, Jonathan Safran Foer’s, hero, nine-year-old Oskar Schell, says he’s got “heavy boots” when he’s afraid. I know the feeling. Don’t you?

My boots got heavier yesterday, out of fear, but not when in the woods. I was in my father’s house when I noticed him listing to the right and we thought he might be having a stroke, so there he was, looking unfamiliar to me, his oldest daughter, a scared and pale little man, when the EMTs carried him to the waiting ambulance. Luckily, he didn’t have to stay in the hospital in one of their beds last night.

Maybe I ought to carry a special device—boot-lighteners. It would work like a can opener that you attach to the heel of the boot to crank the heaviness out. By the time I’d be finished using the contraption, chances are the fear would have given up and gone home. Maybe such a thing would have worked for my father too, but I don’t think so. He has a lot to be frightened of.

"I Hear You Knockng..."

Knock on a wall with your knuckle—
from the piece of oak
a cuckoo
will jump out...

Zbigniew Herbert, from A Box Called the Imagination

Tell all the truth but tell it slant...

Emily Dickinson

Yesterday, on my way down Iris Trail, I heard a woodpecker knocking on a tree somewhere far from me, in the deep part of the forest where there are no trails and the poison oak functions better than any fence.

“Let me in,” the woodpecker kept repeating. “Please, I love you, let me in!”

His voice carried a long way. Anybody could tell the poor guy was hurting. It’s not even spring. Mr. Woodpecker sounded like a beggar for love. I remember what that’s like, I thought, wishing I could grow feathers and assuage his longing.

Everybody in the forest knew what he was going through. Woodpeckers don’t suffer longing quietly. (Me either. And those who subscribe to a privacy of grief, are another animal entirely.)
A couple of scrub jays in the neighborhood, squawked at him, “Hey, man, give it a break, would you? If she welcomed your advances, she’d have opened the door to her cozy tree house days ago.”

Calvin Coolidge said, “Persistence and determination alone are omnipotent.” Perhaps Ms. Woodpecker relented; perhaps she saw Mr. Woodpecker’s fine qualities—his lovely array of feathers, his somewhat burly chest, his fine headdress, and has, by now, let the poor boy in. Perhaps, by now, they’re preening each other. Let’s hope so. It was chilly out last night.

The Path That Water Takes

Water needs
no feet
heals itself

Philippine saying


If someone smart, say, someone you trust, a doctor, suggests you do something, you might consider it. “Carry mace with you on your walks,” the doctor said. “Get the brightly colored container, so it’s evident what you’ve got,” she continued, “because you walk in the woods, alone, right?” Right. I walk in the woods alone. She warned me about the loner weirdoes. I’d forgotten about them.

It was too early for the store that sells mace to be open. What to do? You got it; I went to the park. And wouldn’t you know it, two men, one with a backpack, were kinda bushwhacking through the brush, laughing.

How I felt was exactly how I felt the day I met the guy nearly dancing around the parking lot, who came up to me to say, excitedly, “I can’t believe it! I’ve walked in many places, never saw one. But I just saw a MOUNTAIN LION!”

The mountain lion guy was extraordinarily happy. I got scared. Both that time and yesterday, my choice was to take a walk or turn around and go home. Going home would have meant I’d never walk at Jacks Peak alone again. Period. Punto. Finito. It would have meant invisible fear would have won—again. When I was younger fear won most of the time. I don’t wish to live my live at the mercy of fear.

Instead, I would take the path that water takes. Last Sunday’s rain made that way evident. From the moment I stepped on Skyline Trail, I saw the squiggly paths the rain water had taken. In some places, where the water had moved quickly there were miniature banks on either side of its path. Never did it proceed along a straight line for very long. The water trail twisted and curved, bent left, bent right. When the water came to an impasse, say a tree or a large rock or a fallen limb, it didn’t force itself against the obstacle. Water went around.

If I’d pushed against my fear, I might have taken my walk but I wouldn’t have enjoyed it. I’d have been jittery and on edge. I might have left the park with more than I wanted to take home: a migraine. Migraines hit me when I push against things that are immoveable—internally and externally.

Instead, I put my fear in my front pocket. (I didn’t want it biting my bum.) We walked together. Until the fear got tired or bored or decided to latch onto somebody else. Still I followed those water paths, past where the men were doing whatever they were doing in the bushes, past earshot of their voices and into the arms of my beloved woods.

How to Listen

My father could hear a little animal step,
or a moth in the dark against the screen,
and every far sound called the listening out
into places where the rest of us had never been.

William Stafford

Last night Michael called me into the bedroom, “Do you smell something?” By that he didn’t mean, did I smell something lovely, like roses blooming abundantly though there were no roses and maybe a sign that the Virgin Mary was appearing to offer us a miracle.

“Your smeller’s better than mine,” he said. It’s true, I’ve got a good nose. And he was right, there was a bad smell. Luckily it wasn’t that one of the cats had brought in a bird and it had died behind Michael’s shoes in the closet or worse, inside the pair I bought him in Italy that are beautiful even if they do pinch his feet. I’d just forgotten to change the water in the vase of sunflowers Roxane gave me that had lasted nearly two weeks, far longer than sunflowers ever do, but were done being miniature suns in our bedroom.

When Michael’s grandmother got old and couldn’t hear well, she told him, “I’ve heard enough.” It’s hard to imagine I’ll ever feel that way. If only I could hear as well as I can smell.

The day I was out walking and heard a rustily sound followed by a whizzzzzzz, coming from above but quickly approaching the ground and a pine cone landed at my feet, I learned right away, this is a sound to remember. The times I’ve heard that since, it’s been at a distance but it’s stopped me in my tracks, anyway. There’s no good time for a pine cone to land on my head, but if there were, this really wouldn’t be it.

I have no idea if it’s true, but sometimes, maybe, there’s a mountain lion watching me on my walks. It’s in the brush on one side of the trail or the other. First, maybe, it smells me. I hope I don’t smell to a mountain lion like those sunflowers did last night. If only it were possible to hear the cat, I’d stop, turn around real slow to see its sleek form. The thought of seeing one used to frighten me. Now I walk along calling, “Kitty, kitty” under my breath.

What’s the sound of the leaves sucking in the raindrops? The sound of grass growing? The sound gophers and moles make tunneling? I’d like to hear the soil turning over in its sleep. What about the sound of a dusky-footed woodrat giving itself a bath? When the clouds move over so the sun can reign, does that have even the smallest whisper?

The less I pay attention to my thoughts, the more I hear and see. It’s not often possible for me to ignore myself; I take up a lot of space inside my own head and heart. When walking especially lightly on the ground, instead of hearing myself, I can hear everybody else. Sometimes I forget it’s me walking in the forest, and listening happens.

Does the future approaching make a very quiet noise that I’m too dense to hear? And when the present gives up its hold on the day, does it let out one last sigh? You know the sound of bird wings, when a large bird or several smaller birds are taking to the air and gaining altitude quickly? Yesterday, that very sound startled me; it was so loud. Next time, I won’t be as surprised. There’s sort of an equation to listening—the more I listen, the more there is to hear.

Autumn's First Rain

Rain was a willow
with unpinned hair

Octavio Paz, from Fable

nobody,not even the rain,
has such small hands

E. E. Cummings

We went out Sunday morning, Michael and I, into the rain and walked down an unnamed trail to Lower Ridge and then came back along Pine Trail. At first, the rain was a woman knitting a long, gray shawl, her needles making that clickety-click—rain touching down on the oak leaves. And then it wasn’t knitting at all, and I was clouded from finding a metaphor. The only reason the rain was the sound of someone crying is because someone was. Not a metaphor anywhere there. My father’s back in the hospital. Michael’s dad sounds a bit weaker. My back, not to complain abundantly as rain fall, hurts like... No metaphor there either. (I’d like to not make this pain anymore familiar than it already is.)

Usually metaphors fall from my mouth like, well, metaphors falling from my mouth that hopefully taking flight. (Or like sweets falling into said mouth!) My college degree was in mixed-metaphors which is far better than had if it been, like some people I know, in mixed-drinks. Or perhaps that degree was actually in a series of non sequiturs that finally add up to something.

In elementary schools, around 4th grade, some high-up official in the education department of some reality decided that would be the perfect time to teach kids simile and metaphor, which is sort of like teaching dogs to bark. Thinking metaphorically is what the natives do; it’s one way we bring what we don’t grock into understanding. Kids start doing this when really little. We’re symbolic thinkers, us human beans. In fact, as if to make my point for me, and on cue, my friend Anna emailed me a note last night in which she quotes one of her two three-year-old daughters. Yesterday Julia said, “Maybe the clouds hold water so the sun can drink the rain!”

When the poet William Stafford was asked when he began writing poems, he said the better question would be to ask others when they stopped. When we’re kids we make things up. Thinking in pictures leads a person to metaphor. It’s just a sidestep to the left to get to poetry, which Carl Sandburg called, “an echo asking a shadow to dance.” Nowadays, sadly, creative thinking is a little less natural than it used to be (but don’t tell Anna and Stef’s girls that) due to kids spending too much time in front of you-know-what, not having enough stories poems read to them and not being out in the world, meaning even their neighborhoods.

Back to that rain, this first rain of the season... Michael kept his hat on, my head got drenched and we kept walking. The rain began to sound like a story being whispered. I leaned closer to the falling water, hoping to catch all the whole tale, its lilt and sway, each and every answer, all the nuanced questions. And the raindrops felt good against my face.

Sticks and Stones

When, as a kid, I came home from school, hurt by what another kid had said me, “Patty, Fatty,” or something equally mean, my mother used to chant, “Sticks and stones may break your bones, but words will never hurt you.” Boy, was she wrong! Hadn’t she been a child once? Did she have no idea of the power of her own harsh words? Did my father not know this too?

I’ve only twice encountered hurtful stones. Once when a group of boys threw stones at me beside the East River, just down the street from my grandparents’ home, in Astoria. The few stones that hit made a ping against my arms and back; nothing more than someone pinching me awake in a movie theatre. More recently, when I fell on a poorly maintained driveway because the pebbles hadn’t been cleared from the asphalt and I broke my elbow, well that was spot on, for stones doing damage, though the fault was never with the stones. With sticks, no problem. No one’s ever hit me with a stick though the nuns were threatening, slapping the rulers against their palms. Words, however, with far more accuracy and much greater intention, have hit their mark more times than I care, yet can’t help, but remember.

Praise to the sticks and stones! “...all the little stones, sitting alone in the moonlight...” as Mary Oliver writes, and “the wave-strike over unquiet stones,” as Pablo Neruda said. Is there a more perfect sound than waves striking beach stones? The first time I heard that was on the island of Lesbos, Greece, 1984. From up the hill in the little stone house in which I slept, the slap and pull of delicate waves went over and through the stones, begging them to come home to the sea.

A few weeks ago, at Jacks Peak, there in the path was a big, ocher colored rock that hadn’t been there the day before. (If you walk often enough in a place, you get to know it like your home. You notice the new things, like when Michael comes home and notices the new lilies on the living room cabinet.)

A beam of sunlight spotlighted it. The sun shone only in that exact place, making an announcement of that rock.—you couldn’t help but notice it. And the oddest thing is that the stone came from nowhere. There wasn’t an obvious source. Michael looked backwards and forwards—no rock walls anywhere around. It was too large for a child to have picked the rock up over there and set it down over here. I feel sorry for those who do not believe in mystery. Some days, the things I love most are the ones I can’t explain. Well, most days.

Once upon a time, when I was a child, someone gave me a stone. If you held it one way, it looked like a stone you might find along a riverbank. If you turned it over, and looked into where it had been broken from its other half, there was color inside, smooth blue and pale yellow, that if polished would have been called a gem.

The sticks have, apparently, left to their own devices, walked away.
But here’s another stone. In his poem Stone, Charles Simic wrote,

Go inside a stone
That would be my way...

From the outside the stone is a riddle:
No one knows how to answer it.
Yet within, it must be cool and quiet...

I have seen sparks fly out
When two stones are rubbed,
So perhaps it is not dark inside after all...

On Thursday, October 15, My Friend Diana Explains Me to Myself

Despite my better judgment, deciding to take my headache with me, for it wouldn’t remain at home, I went for a walk. Maybe my head needed to be outside in the clean air, feeling heat take over the day, like the rest of me did. It took me 1.5 hours to walk what would normally take me little more than half that. It was silly to hope that walking would lullaby my headache to sleep. The throb that began at my right eyebrow and traveled like sick electricity down my neck till it lodged itself in my right shoulder, scoffed at such a thought. So I held my headache’s hand and we moved very slowly, planning to go back to bed if such medicine didn’t work.

It didn’t. But there was no bed for me. My phone messages to Diana had not reached her. I’d need to keep our lunch date and bring my headache out with me once more. Maybe I could put a bow around it or some rouge on its cheeks. Something’s been happening to me over the last months. I think, headache or not, I’m becoming a hermit. Or I would become one, if life would allow that, which it absolutely will not. If I had my way, I’d go no farther from my home than the park and the farmer’s market, with occasional visits to see our folks. My love of travel has evaporated. If I never went out to dinner again, that would be fine. If I never got on another airplane, train or boat, ditto. If I could walk from my house to the park, that would be better. If I could crawl, that would be best.

My curiosity about out-there is heightened only in regards to nature. The lack of honesty in the political world has me exhausted. I could go a month without uttering a single word. (Michael would laugh at that idea, though and shout “Impossible!”) My greatest companions are my beloved and my two cats, Cloud and Ace.

I’ve become awful about returning phone calls. That’s rude; it’s unkind. Please, don’t misunderstand, it’s not that I don’t love everybody I love. It’s not that I don’t wish to teach or see my friends or grapple with the larger world or swoon over duck confit crepes with fresh huckleberries. Something very strong is pulling me in another direction—inward. It’s not a subtle yank on my skirt hem. A being bigger than me is dragging me by my long hair, wanting to lock me in the forest.

I wish for Yeats’ lakeside cabin:

“I will arise and go now, and go to Innisfree,
And a small cabin build there, of clay and wattles made:
Nine bean-rows will I have there, a hive for the honeybee,
And live alone in the bee-loud glade. “

But then there was Diana at Bicyclette, a tiny restaurant, not much bigger than a bicycle built for two. Diana whose had great sadness this last year. Her red hair was aflame. Diana is someone to whom I can tell anything. I spilled my headache and my whole messiness onto her lap and she didn’t even grab a napkin.

“Oh,” said Diana, “of course. You need to travel in. That’s what this time of your life is about; you’re remaking yourself, and the work is internal. Time for the cave!”

The frayed parts of my life gathered together and I was witnessed. And it was so good to be with my friend that I forgot about my headache and the other biting sorrows. That cave was big enough for the both of us.

The Moments in Between

Where can it be found again,
An elsewhere world, beyond

Maps and atlases...

Seamus Heaney, from The Human Chain


...I’ve chosen to concentrate upon those moments in a day or a life when one slips provisionally beneath the societal surge of forces, those occasions (often unverbalized and hence overlooked) when one comes more directly into felt reaction with the wider, more-than-human community of beings...

David Abram, from Becoming Animal

Here’s the moment-in-between that I can’t stop thinking of: each of the 33 Chilean miners as they came up from being in the mine for over two months, the longest time miners have been underground before being rescued. A man is returning from deep in the earth, suspended between two grounds, rising upward in the rescue capsule. Darkness slowly gives way to light. And then back into the world of land plus sky: And then air, space surrounding, all the sound—people singing, chanting, crying. What must that cacophony be like? How different sound is given room compared with being contained. Imagine the feeling of the air against his shoulders, on his face.

The distance between opposites—up and down, near and far, despair and hope—can be huge. I love the imperceptible moment before sleep takes me, the one when sleep gives me back, when I am of no world but between two, held in abeyance. It’s the swing having taken to the air after your feet stop pushing against the ground but before the sky owns you. How much time I have spent lost trying to find a way between yes and no. And you?

When I get past every other reason (and there are several good ones) that I walk in the park, it’s to be in, as Abrams puts it, “...those occasions... when one comes more directly into felt reaction...” when there is no filter between me and what I consider the truest reality. And such times have become, for many of us, if we capture them much at all, moments in between the this and the that, the before and the after.

Since I am not of nature (sadly), since I am of arrivals and departures, work, rush, assorted obligations (not sadly), little of my life is lead in abeyance of requirements and responsibilities though, in fact, most of it, in truth, is, spiritually speaking. I think that’s why I write and make art and teach poetry to children and adults, in order to bring to the fore of daily life, the moments in between, the moments underneath going to the store for a quart of milk, or as today will find me, going to pick up our taxes.

Nature always, as Michael reminds me, takes me as I am. And as I am is in need of a mirror made of sky and trees, of time filtered as light through branches, to dwell in the moments in between without anyone (me) saying, “Hurry” or “Don’t forget the...” and
“Make sure to...”

It’s 7:08 a.m. If all goes right, by 10:00 I’ll be back in

“An elsewhere world, beyond

Maps and atlases...”

Offerings

If you get yourself downtown early enough and walk up Webster Street toward Parker-Lusseau Bakery for a bichon or to the post office to get your mail, you might see the offering outside Siamese Bay Thai Restaurant. Beside the door there’ll be a glass jar filled with sand and a stick of incense, burnt or still burning. In front of that is a bowl with rice and what looks like curry sauce and a cup, that I’ll bet is for tea.

When I got to Jacks Peak yesterday, I had small change in my pocket and placed the money along Skyline Trail marker #6 which faces, through the young pines, Pt. Lobos. In the Skyline Self-Guided Nature Trail Guide I read that the Costanoan Indians of the Rumsen Tribe probably spent time at Jacks Peak, hunting and gathering food.

My coins are wedged into that marker, reminding me of my Catholic childhood and the coins I dropped into the basket that came around like clockwork during Mass. Or the coins I placed beside the altar for the privilege of a match with which to light a votive candle and say a prayer.

What will happen to those few coins? How long will they remain in place? They won’t buy the park sunshine on a foggy day. Even all my coins don’t equal enough money to purchase the still privately owned land surrounding the park in order to keep it safe from being built upon, to keep the rare Monterey Pines from the builder’s saws.

None of the forest’s animals has any use for my money. They can’t use it to buy nuts for the winter or as a down payment on a new fur coat, should theirs have gotten worn thin by age. It won’t buy the deer safety from the mountain lion. The snake can’t purchase a hole in which to spend tucked for winter.

But I offer my coins to the Gods of the Woods, small discs of silver, standing in for large discs of sparkling gratitude.

The Sky Is a Mirror

The whole arbor is contained in him.
Eunice Odio

In his book of poems, that includes brilliant photographs by David Garr, Who I Am, Julius Lester wrote:

...When I want to see my face,
I use the sky as a mirror...

That book’s been on my shelf wherever I’ve lived since I bought it at the Barnes & Noble in lower Manhattan, when I was a teenager, 1974. It was a hot July day, and when I walked out of the bookstore I knew I’d gotten a lot more than I’d paid for. I always know where to find the book’s orange cover, since its jacket ripped a long time ago and serves now as a book marker, and was on the very page I needed when I opened it last night, thinking about what I’d write this morning. (Though if you didn’t have a watch, you’d not easily know its morning; the dark’s pretty thick.)

The land of the place where I walk many times a week is doing something uncanny to me. I used to think I was contained by the forest, that when I’m out there, that it holds me. And, of course, it does. The fear that used to frequently bite at my heels rarely does anymore. Mostly being held is how I feel. And I couldn’t tell you if it’s the trees who are doing the holding or the sky or the trails I walk on or even the squirrels who chat with me.

When I’m inside my house, the house holds me. (Not a day goes by, or not much more than one, that I don’t feel gratitude for being thusly held.) When my husband comes home from work we hold each other.

Something’s shifting inside me. The forest seems to be coming inside, entering my pores and my breath and my dreams. It’s kind of like Eunice Odio wrote and this from Octavio Paz:

A tree grew in.
Its roots are veins,
its branches are nerves...

When I leave the forest, the forest is where I left it. (Praise the Lord!) But it’s also here, inside me. More than the dirt I carry away in the crevasses of my shoes, I feel myself holding the forest. Does sap now run through my veins? Has my hair become leaves and branches? Will my shoes no longer fit for the roots growing beneath my feet?

I don’t know where this is going. But I know I’m going without an ounce of hesitation. I may never live at Jacks Peak, well, probably, I really won’t, yet wherever I am when I am not there, I am still in those very woods, strolling along the winding paths.

Last night, having read Mr. Lester’s book, Who Am I, cover-to-cover again and having felt how that book’s been inside me all these years and, I’m guessing, has enabled me to feel the trees grow within me, I looked up Julius Lester. There was an e-mail address! I got up off of my “I’ll do it later,” and wrote him the thank you note I ought to have written years ago.

This morning, a response from Mr. Lester appeared in my in-box! He was glad for my note. When I go walking this morning, I’ll carry him and his poems along inside me. Here’s the thing about writing that I like best: how it shortens the distance between us. The forest does that too. We’re all just travelers out there. Mr. Lester, if you lived nearby, I’d ask you to come walking with me. Would you?

The Ground Beneath Her Feet

When Roxane and I last walked together in the woods and she was in front I got to watch her—how her feet took to the ground and, this being before she cut her hair, the long sway of her golden locks. What exactly is she, am I, walking on? That day we walked Skyline Trail, continuing onto Iris and Rhus, to Bob Moser and, lastly, to get back, we took Pine Trail—having walked most of the park’s circumference and then some.

This non-scientist was certain of this much: decomposed plant matter, animal scat, dissolved and dissolving rocks, gunk that comes in on the bottom of people's shoes, dead bugs, lost feathers. But what else?

Time, again, to call on naturalist, Nikki Nedeff, who told me I could ask her questions anytime. I try not to take advantage, don’t ask everything but this was a Nikki question for sure.

“Ah,” she replied, “this is a very good question!” It’s nice to find I’ve asked a good question, especially when I think I may have asked one too obvious to bother with.

Terms for nature delight me, like this one, “parent material,” that means what’s beneath our feet in the woods. This bedrock, Nikki said, “is entirely made of what is called the Monterey Formation...sedimenatry rock made of inter bedded sandstones and shales, and then glued together...by pressure.” How about the word “inter bedded,”—a dual-mattress system—one below you and one on top!

Nikki continued, “The shaley rock layers are the most prominent ones—whitish chalk rock... made by the accumulation of bizillions of diatoms—tiny, tiny creatures that floated around in a shallow sea—that died and just pile up on the ocean floor.”

People come to Jacks Peak looking for these fossilized creatures; I’ve seen such folks on Skyline Trail, foraging through the soft, fallen rock, and rudely (to me) banging at the rock wall. Nikki wrote, “I’ve seen crabs, leaves, clams and other mysterious things layered in the stones.” She told me that on the southern side, the Carmel Valley side, of the park there used to be a quarry and once workers found a dinosaur bone!

“The trails at Jacks Peak are basically cut into the bedrock and a top layer of soil. The soils have organic matter from the accumulation of decomposing leaves, roots and plant stuff. Hard rock is "weathered" into dirt by the action of roots, rodents, and the acids that occur naturally in our rain. Anyway, the whole soil-forming process on top of the bedrock takes a long time.”

Along the way, I pick up as many candy wrappers and bottle caps as I find. What I’d prefer some future scientists not know about us is all the garbage we leave behind.

Here’s what floats my boat in the-sea-that-once-was where I now walk today, anyway, on dry land: how entirely fascinating this all is. Every dust speck of knowledge about the natural world I gain, feels like another missing piece of the puzzle settling into place. It’s not so much that I feel smarter, though I do, it’s that the more I know and understand about where I am, the more I love it, the closer I feel to this place. And this is not how it’s always been, to say the least.

When I was a kid in school, I fell asleep during geography and geology classes. (The only classes that engaged me were art and English.) I never found an inroad to math and science. They were at such a distance from my life, that I couldn’t reach them, not that I tried very hard. This could be blamed this on any number of difficulties in my early life, and that might be true.

What caught my attention as a child were the things that soothed or met me emotionally. It’s also true that my parents had little interest in nature. They did love the arts though and I was captivated by dance and music, paintings, some of it created by long dead artists. But hey, I’m making up for lost time, enthralled by the ground beneath my feet.

Found, Lost, and Found, Again

It’s impossible to lose a tree, isn’t it? A tree stands in its ground no matter the season or the time of day. It doesn’t get to trade places with other trees, not that a tree would want to, but if I were a tree, I think I would. All a tree’s work, all a tree’s life happens in a single spot. Down go its roots and up go its branches. It lengthens and widens but without taking a step.

Unless someone comes with an ax or a huge wind blows in or there’s fire, a 20 plus foot tree is going to be today where it was yesterday. A tree is something you can depend on. That’s one reason I walk where I walk as often as I do. Though the park changes daily, I like the reliability of trees and trails. Rhus Trail will take me to the same place today as it did when I walked on Thursday.

So how did I lose tree #129? One day it was where it had always been. If you take Skyline Trail and turn right onto Iris Trail, you head down into the canyon but before arriving at the bottom, just before the trail curves to the left, there’s my tree. I’ve been watching it ever since the day I went walking with Michael and noticed he was seeing things that I wasn’t. His natural eye-level is higher than mine. At 6’2”, that’s understandable. I decided I needed to elevate a little. That’s when I found my tree.

#129 isn’t a name I came up with. If I were to name a tree, I’d call it something poetic. Even if it needed to be numbered for a scientific reason, I’d name it something like “#129 and Standing Tall” or “Catching the Wind Up High, #129.” About 6 feet up on this Monterey Pine, someone nailed a marker into its trunk, right about at belly level, if a tree had a belly. The marker is a round metal disc, the number 129 is impressed upon it. Must have been there awhile; the nail’s rusted.

Monterey Pines, Pinus Radiata, grow in very few places in the world, which is one of the important things about this park: they grow abundantly here! In land adjoining the park, they grow too, a piece of which was a recent bequeathed to Jacks Peak Park! The tree’s needles grow in groups of three. Its bark is a silvery-gray-brown. Its cones are large, shaped like a mouth saying “O.”

A Monterey Pine has an added vulnerability, a unique one. The root structure of these trees is particularly shallow. Naturalist, Nikki Nedeff, explained to me that Monterey Pines grow best near other Monterey Pines. They need each other to stay upright.

It’s not unusual to see a fallen Monterey Pine. In which case, you don’t see the tree as itself anymore, but a tree gone belly-up, with roots exposed to any passerby and all of nature. It’s true, I tend to anthropomorphize out in these woods. And that prevents me from being an objective observer. It’s just that I never wanted to be one.

I don’t know how a tree “feels” about losing its rightful place and having to know the ground with the whole of its body, instead of its roots, or how it feels to lose a familiar view of the world and the daily breeze through boughs and leaves. But I’ll tell you, it doesn’t look good, to see what we’re not supposed to. Makes me want to prop that tree up and submerge its roots in the ground again.

Lately, there’s a lot of work is being done to ready the park for winter: Clumps of gathered leaves, cleared areas, downed trees, evidence of chain saw activity. Had that been #129’s fate? On a few walks I’d not seen my tree so when I went walking last Thursday I was determined to get to the bottom of this, wore long pants should I need to go traipsing through the poison oak.

Call me crazy or call me what you like, but I heard a voice on Thursday and the voice said, “Here I am,” and there it was. Those previous walks, I’d missed the tree, thinking it was farther along the path than it is. Standing as tall and as elegantly as it had every other day of its long life, the breeze ruffling its leaves: my #129!

Nature’s Alphabet

I have learnt to write
my name:Ninon.
I’m sitting at the kitchen
table and I’m writing.
The letter N goes like
a dog’s tongue,
the letter I sprouts
like a seed,
the letter N goes
like I said, O is a bow
and N is N. Now I can write
my name: Ninon.

John Berger, from To the Wedding

On my way to the park, I’m listening to the radio. Usually I shut it off once I turn off Monhollan and head up the hill. As if to begin walking before I actually do. But yesterday, my walk’s focus came from what I heard.

Kitty Burns Florey, the author of Why Handwriting Still Matters in a Digital Age, was being interviewed on NPR. Some schools want teachers to skip teaching kids handwriting and move directly to keyboarding. Yikes! Not only does science prove that writing by hand helps children to learn to read, it facilitates learning how to think. The act of writing, for both children and adults, creates advanced neural activity in the brain. Writing slows children down, helps them to focus on what they’re doing. Handwriting isn’t only a mechanical skill but a creative one.

Having taught poetry writing to children for a long time, one of my favorite parts of this work is when I observe a child in the act of writing a poem. Some kids lean over the paper as if it were a pet they were telling secrets to. I love the look on a child’s face when he’s waiting for the next words, how he’ll stare out into the middle distance, as though the words were coming from over a hill and he’s waiting to scoop them up and press them neatly down.

An idea hits with lightning speed and, with pencil, the child races to catch her words. A look of calm often appears once the words have been secured or she looks utterly surprised, as if to say, “Who wrote that?”

Writing by hand is a way to pay attention to detail. When you write you not only see the words on paper but you hear them. And it’s different from watching words show up on the screen. When writing poems, I begin on paper. An essay I can initiate via computer. Most all the entries in my Jacks Peak Journal have begun in a small notebook, in what one couldn’t rightly call handwriting, chicken scratch is closer to it. When I’ve got a pen in hand and the ink is being absorbed by the paper, I become absorbed by the transformation from empty to full, feel myself held by the page.

I tell kids, “You don’t have to know what you’re going to write to begin a poem. You just need the seed of an idea.” Through the act of writing, words come. Sometimes I can feel them lining up at the ready in my head, eating sunflower seeds or singing baseball songs until I’ve caught up and can place them where they’re longing to be—on my paper. But while they’re waiting, sometimes they trade places and find a better order.

The author, Florey, went on to discuss the history of handwriting which begins with a man named Platt Rogers Spencer, born in 1800. Spencer used to go walking along the shores of Lake Eire. He loved the arch of tree branches, the ripple of water. Nature inspired him to create the handwriting style that he did.

Yesterday, I went into the woods looking for nature’s alphabet. The dots of the “i” and the “j” and the exclamation point were everywhere. As were the straight-backed, lowercase, letters “l” and “i,” though there are no truly straight lines in nature. “C” could best be found if out on a small boat, heading south, looking east at the curve of the Monterey Peninsula. And small “c’s” were scattered on the ground most everywhere—the curled leaves of poison oak gone red. Fallen pine cones make the shape of an elongated “O.” “V” is a bird’s beak opening; “Y” a tree with two main branches rising from the trunk. “W’s” were everywhere in the bushed small bare twigs. “X” did indeed mark a spot—one limb had fallen across another.

I found other letters too, that don’t exist in the English language alphabet, anyway. In nature, symbols abound! My favorite was the gathered fringe of pine needles the wind had shaken to the ground. A word in and of itself like “A” and “I.” It means: the first time a girl wears a wide skirt, twirls in front the mirror and dares to know she’s beautiful. What sound should that letter make? Is it the sound of the skirt’s rustling or the imperceptible sound of the girl’s smile?

The Lost Art of Conversation

Though startled out of my reverie, this time I knew. That long and complex almost-bark, close to a chirp sound—but loud, coming from up in one of the pines was neither a large bird whose reverie I’d disturbed nor a fiercesome mammal to be frightened of. And this time, I didn’t take it as a reproach but as an invitation.

The call lasted many seconds, ran across a scale of sound, lilted, played bass. At first it sounded angry, then dubious about said anger. Lastly, before going quiet, I’m sure I heard the rise of a question in its voice. So I answered, “Good afternoon, squirrel. What’s up?”

After a mere fragment of silence, I received an answer, no measly, single-syllable reply either, but an elaborate response, ending again with what I swear was a question. Having politely answered my question and having good manners, the squirrel knew to ask me another.

We went on like this for some time. Each of us saying something, though exactly what the squirrel said, or even inexactly, I can’t tell you. For my part, I expressed my joy in our meeting, hoped the squirrel was gathering enough food for winter. Each of us ended our portion of the conversation with a question, waiting politely for what had become a promised reply. Not wanting to wear out my welcome, if, in fact, that’s what I’d received, I continued, slowly, on my way. Distance didn’t stop our conversation, until it did.

Once, too many years ago, I went to the home an old friend in New York City. At the end of our visit, he started me on my way and we walked arm in arm past the toll-free Queensboro Bridge along 59th Street. At 5th Avenue, we hugged goodbye and I went on my way—but walking backwards—waving and blowing kisses, till he shouted, “Go now, so I can go.” I turned in the direction of departure, headed downtown.

Maybe this morning, when my feet find the familiar path, that squirrel will call down to me from a high branch and we can take up again, right where we left off.

Recognition: Roach Canyon

When my once-upon-a-time friend Jim and I used to go out walking in the woods, not that we went very far, just enough to find food for supper, he’d say, “Keep an eye on the manmade things you see. They’re best to use as markers, should you get lost on the way back.” That was good advice at the time. But if you walk where the only signs of humans are two yellow fire hydrants—near together, a bunch of fences—one looking pretty much the same as the other, and the rare bench, once you’re past the most traveled areas of the Jacks Peak Park, relying on human design isn’t going to help. You’ve got to rely on nature herself or itself, if you’d prefer to leave gender out of it.

Carmel artist Paola Berthoin lives nearly in the middle of nowhere herself. It’s a good thing my friend Rosy and I were going together to see her work as I might have given up before arriving. But once we entered her nest, for her lovely home is nest-like, and I set my eyes on one picture, an oil painting, maybe 8 x 10, I gasped: “Roach Canyon!” Then, of course, being one for whom having unfettered confidence in her own perceptions is a few decades away, I doubted myself and whispered something, for absolution, should I, in fact, have been wrong.
A braver person would have trampled on her hesitation because, if Roach Canyon were anywhere, in addition to on the earth itself, it was here! In this room in front of me. Paola had brought Roach Canyon into her house!

If you are from a city, as I am, I think you learn a particular kind of recognition. Blindfold me, set me down somewhere in Manhattan and I could get to the Metropolitan Museum of Art. If the fountain of my childhood were still there, blindfolded I could take a seat, should the maitre d’ let me, and order tea. You could say that one street looks pretty much the same as any other. You could say one tree does too.

Someday, I’ll be able to take you to Roach Canyon blindfolded. Not yet; I’ve only been there once. The way down is steep, the trail narrow and circuitous, trees knotted and close together, the poison oak abundant. Before arriving at the canyon, you can see it from above. First a hint of openness. Then a wider vista. But watch your step! The path is slippery, made of soft dirt and oak leaves.

Once on flat ground in the tall grass, I stood looking for a long time, taken in by the wide tree-bordered canyon—an enormous stage of land. The surrounding trees and bushes were an audience of nature, for nature—dark-eyed juncos, scrub jays, flitting finches, a chorus line of grasshoppers. I took my seat, happy for a ticket to the show.

Weeks later, without the long walk down and the steep, sweaty climb up, I returned to Roach Canyon. I went to Paola’s house.

***

p.s. For more on Paola: http://paolafiorelleberthoin.com/

One Late Afternoon, Twenty-Three Sounds

Not silence but not noise either. Shortly after beginning my walk in the forest, I heard myself say out loud, “There.” I tend to speak my mind without thinking, but this was not that. My “there” was like a parent who says to a hurt child, “There, there,” the sound of relief, the sound of my own congruency returning as though I’d been kicking the air, floundering, and now my feet had found their ground. They had. Cars, trucks and freeways dropped away; thoughts of “Will I be late?” fled; my worry about this person and that person fell to the wayside; what’s for dinner didn’t matter; the low lying anxiety that bites at my heels gave up its grip.

Not silence but not noise either. Out here, when I’m deep in these woods, alone (this only happens alone), past where I can see or sense the park’s boundaries, the importance of the city drops away, and the details of my life stop jostling to be front and center. Here each thing has its place, each sound has ample space around it.

Though I tilt too far in the direction of romancing nature, I’m not ignorant of its realties, its perils. This place may offer me respite but not so for the bee peddling on its back, the dueling hawks or the badly wounded dusky-footed woodrat. And what about tree #129 that I can’t seem to find though I’ve looked in the right spot the last few times I’ve come this way?

One late afternoon, twenty-three sounds: scrub jays in the brush; mourning doves at a distance; something like a cricket, only not a cricket; a bird whose song starts low and rises; another bird who sounds like blowing bubbles at the bottom of a near-empty glass; wind in a hurry to get somewhere; a bird whose voice is the sound of washing windows with diluted vinegar and newspaper; another bird whose voice is a blown kiss; traffic on some road I’d forgotten; a small someone hopping in the bushes; woodpecker’s beak trying to open the door to his tree; my own footsteps in sturdy shoes; an airplane taking off—poor travelers moving at unnatural speeds; twigs falling; the drop of a pine cone from up high and then its rolling down the path; a high-pitched cry, but I don’t know whose; more wind traveling through the Monterey Pines; loud chorus of jays when I interrupt their meeting; my car door opening, shutting, responsive engine; tires on gravel.

For the Love of Bees

...lay to your heart
my rough gift,
this unlovely dry necklace
of dead bees
that once made a sun
out of honey.

Osip Mandelstam, 1922

It’s wrong to paraphrase a poem, even a prose poem; I know this. It’s like giving someone the lock but neglecting to provide the key, or in this case, the buzz but not the bee. However, an exception please, because when I think of bees I think of Robert Hass’s poem, “A Story About the Body,” in which a woman and a man are at a artist’s colony where romance tends to progress quickly. He’s young; she’s not. The woman says, “I think you would like to have me. I would like that too...” Then she tells him that she’s had a double mastectomy. Politely, he declines: “I’m sorry. I don’t think I could.” Except, there is no politely, here.

The next morning the man opens the door of his cabin to find a bowl on his doorstep that appears to be full of rose petals. Quickly, he discovers beneath the top layer of flowers, the bowl is full of dead bees. A kind of sting. This poem didn’t undo my love of bees; it strengthened it.

When did this affection for bees begin, and where? Did it start with Jim, who I loved but not, ultimately, in the way of romance? Jim was my walk in the woods to gather food for dinner. For which I loved him. He held the oars to a canoe. For which I loved him. Jim kept bees. For which I loved him.

Our first outing was a long drive to an almond orchard outside Los Baños. We set down the white boxes on the ground between the trees and, using the smoker, heated the bees into honey-making. Though I didn’t fall in love with Jim, I fell in love with bees. Jim’s gone now, and so, must be, his bees. It’s been long enough, that there’s no way his bees could have pollinated the honey on my table. (In fact, this honey’s from Lynn. But that’s another story.)

And let’s not forget the honey! I pay homage to the fruit of the bees’ labor; sunlight in a jar, languorous gold on my breakfast bread; ultimate sweetness that reaches the most sensitive taste buds located as far back as the tongue goes; honey’s good medicine when you take it on a spoon, especially because of its uncanny ability to dissolve sadness, even for a short while. Honey’s my turn-to when Michael’s got a cough or I do and we’ve both been woken in middle of the let-me-sleep-it’s-awfully-late night. Who can turn down the tawny thickness of honey? Even the name alone reverberates with tenderness and protection, “There, there, my Honey.”

Roxane’s daughter, Ella, says it’s okay to pet bees but, “They don’t like being held.” She found that out the hard way. Now she knows, and won’t forget.

I hadn’t intended to go out bee-petting Saturday morning. I intended to pick cherry tomatoes for lunch, and had a clutch of fruit in hand, when I felt something furry move against my palm. I shook my hand, scattering the tomatoes like pinballs. A bee tumbled onto the dirt of my lettuce bed—I’d startled him awake. Poor bee, bicycling his legs in the air, his back wriggling in the soil, till I righted him, got him back onto the tomato vine, watched him walk from there onto the rim of the planter box. The bee moved at a snail’s pace, damp from the morning’s surprise—autumn’s first rain. It took me a moment to notice the other cause of his slowness—his back legs were laden with pollen—making him appear to be sporting a pair of pouffy yellow bloomers!

Sunday, the rest of the day’s callings took first place, so I didn’t get my feet on the path till nearly 5:00. The sun felt faraway and night felt near. The more you notice, the more there is to notice. I think someone famous said that, but I can’t remember who. A golden rule of nature.

Coming up the last series of hills a speck of pink beside dark purple on the ground caught my eye—not colors I usually see on the path at Jacks Peak. Leaning over, I caught a fringe of movement, so went to my knees for a closer look. Another bee on its back, grasping at the air furiously, and for naught! If I did nothing else of value yesterday, but getting the bee back on its feet and over to the trail side brush, that one good thing made my day worth its while. I watched the bee teeter under a leaf; don’t know what happened next.

There are other bees are out yet in the Jacks Peaks woods, on their feet and flying kind of slowly, when I see them, anyway. Are they getting the last pollen nature has to offer from her final burst of blooming before winter takes over? Will they arrive home laden, bringing succulence and sustenance to their queen?

“Take from my palms, to soothe your heart,
a little honey, a little sun...

For us, all that’s left is kisses
tattered as the little bees...”

Osip Mandelstam

Dappled

“Glory be to God for dappled things”

Gerard Manley Hopkins

If you walk slowly, you see what can’t be seen quickly. You also see nature’s quick changes, but even they require a slow attention. Yesterday, I said to my feet, “Take me,” and they did. We went up a little, turned right down the road the man who, in the 1930s, when he was was a boy, drove here in a truck with father for firewood, and the dog rode on the cab’s hood. No cars now, thanks to a sturdy fence. A second turn took me up overlooking the city were I know people were late to appointments, harried and rushing. I could, more easily than not, have been one of them. But no, I was in the land of holy things, of slowness, of the dappled, with “ skies of couple-colour as a brinded cow...” And knotted tree roots and dried pine needles on the path. Sand stone dug in, peering out. Path side some crawly creatures coming in and out, going about their day too.

Even the trees’ conversation above me was slow. Oh, for the kindness of breeze, to keep pace! It was impossible to get very far. My noticing and the not-a-shuffle-but-not-a-lope my feet chose were honey on a hot day. Though, thank goodness, it wasn’t hot. It was just right. Stopping for sweater on. Stopping for sweater off. Slower that way. Good sweater, worn black cashmere with moth holes in it. Luckily, the moths ate slow.

Which came first the line from Hopkins or noticing the shadows on the forest floor? Were they mated? There I was stopping again, looking down: “Glory be to God for dappled things.” I was in the forest praying. The lingering headache dissipated more. Dappling shadow, mimicking the trees—only down below, giving me two sets of trees to write home about! Or was I home and am I writing away about it now?

In the time it took me to say that line of Hopkins, “Glory be to God for dappled things,” a few times real softly and to reach for my camera and to find the picture, the dappling had fled. I saw that through the lens, thought I’d looked in the wrong spot, looked again, but no more dappling. Time for that sweater again. So I can’t give you a picture to look at. But like a brinded cow or a tabby cat, but mostly two-toned—the dark of shadow patterning down on the lighter ground.

Yesterday I was slow enough to notice the speed at which nature changes! And slow enough to walk the headache out.

***

P. S. Sometimes you can read something, a poem, a hundred times, but not know it, not have a way in, not more than a small foothold. The foothold though keeps one coming back. Thank you, Mr. Hopkins, for giving me a place to stand.


Pied Beauty

Gory be to God for dappled things—
For skies of couple-colour as a brinded cow;
For rose-moles all in stipple upon trout that swim;
Fresh-firecoal chestnut-falls; finches’ wings;
Landscape plotted and pieced—fold, fallow, and plough;
And áll trádes, their gear and tackle and trim.

All things counter, original, spare, strange;
Whatever is fickle, freckled (who knows how?)
With swift, slow; sweet, sour; adazzle, dim;
He fathers-forth whose beauty is past change:
Praise him.

The Impulse Toward Making Art

Be ardent in your work,
and you will find God
in your cooking pots.”

St. Teresa of Avila

Last night I saw the film Séraphine. People, even those I don’t know well, kept saying, “You’ve got to see this movie.” A blistering migraine yesterday. Walking wasn’t possible. By evening, I thought sedentary entertainment was in order. Ha! Though I sat in my Grandmother’s chair, there was nothing sedentary about the film or my experience of it.

Here’s a painter in rural France at the beginning of the 20th century who’s directed by her angel to paint. Séraphine is devoted to the Virgin Mary. Early in the film we see the altar to Mary in her room, lit abundantly with votives. She works as a maid, cobbles together enough money not to live well, but to paint. You can see the wear and tear of her effort on her face and body. It’s her calling that we become privy to. Her impulse, determination and love.

Only this morning do I find out she was an actual person, that the movie isn’t fiction! Her fantastical flowers, the vines that look about to reach off the canvas are the work of Séraphine de Senlis, Séraphine Louis, who worked as a maid, had barely any money, made her own paints from wax and blood and mud, who gained a wee bit of recognition during her lifetime, was, like Henri Rousseau one of the Modern Primitives! (Why do I know the work of Rousseau and not Louis?)

Séraphine making art seemed as necessary and certain, as true as the growth of trees and the sway of wind through them. I know that feeling. It gets me here to write even when yesterday’s migraine made me think I’d be better off in bed. It’s true, I would have been physically better off in bed. When my father was at his sickest, I kept writing. Over twenty years ago, when my mother was dying, I wrote my way through my loss of her.

Art is a kind of river. Either I’m on the river or I’m off it. When I’m on it, in it, the water takes me someplace every day that I’d have never known otherwise, often carrying me at dazzling speeds, where opposites become friends. Light filters down through the trees onto my face. When I’m off the river, often I can’t find that source through the knot of tall grasses, no matter how hard I try.

Below my computer screen I pasted a Mass card of the Holy Mother. She’s there every day. Each morning she greets me just like the morning before: kindly, accepting. Light pours from her open hands. She keeps sending it to me. I keep making collages and writing.

In a class I taught this week, I talked about this impulse toward making art. How many professions are there in which you can work and work and never get anywhere in the external world? If I’d trained to be a plumber, I’d be under the sink by now.

I don’t understand this impulse. The poet Marge Piercy said, “You have to like it more than being loved.” What she missed, or maybe it’s implicit, is this is being loved. This is loving. The making of art, the witnessing of art, is one of the greatest expression of love and gratitude I know of. Migraine or not.