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A glimmer of fear returned on Thanksgiving Day, when I drove up Monhollan, and pulled off the road where the little, gated road goes up to the water tanks. A tattered looking man carrying a large plastic bag, dragging it, more accurately, was trudging up the Monhollan, and I played out a scary scenario in my mind. It had been a doctor who’d warned me about outcasts living in the woods...
At least, I put the reigns on the horrifically scary stuff before I had my body parts entirely scattered throughout the woods, buried under and behind my favorite nooks and crannies. Turn back? I asked myself. Hell no. I answered.
It took all of about ten minutes to wrest the fear from my body, to wring its neck with reality, to overpower it with beauty. And then it was no more remembered than what I’d had for breakfast two weeks ago last Monday.
For the first almost six months of walking at Jacks Peak, on the days I went alone, I wasn’t entirely alone, not for much more than occasional breathers. Fear was my frequent companion. If I turned left, it did too. When I sat down on a bench, not that I often did, fear sat beside me, looked into my eyes with its beady ones.
Fear would say, “Look out!” or “Over there!” And after taking the bait so many times, feeling terror clamp my throat shut, only to see a squirrel jumping from one branch to another or to see nothing at all, I had enough. My system couldn’t take it. My adrenaline needed a break. Frankly, it wasn’t all that much fun walking holding fear’s hand. The treadmill at the gym was sounding a lot better.
And then. Fear barked. Even at first, when I had to swallow the bile back down and wipe the sweat from my forehead, I yawned. Fear said, “Run, idiot!” and I continued strolling along, humming a little tune.
Poor fear! It got frustrated when it would grab my shoulders, hold them tightly, shake real hard, only to have me lift its spindly fingers off, and walk away. Fear got bored with me, once I stopped playing along.
I may have really hurt my fear’s ego, but I haven’t destroyed it. Nor will I ever try to. Dear fear, who has saved me more than once, will, I expect, do so again. On that day, I will be grateful; its feet will have my lips’ kisses.
I am too alone in the world, and not alone enough
to make every moment holy...
Rainer Maria Rilke
It should have been obvious because of the recent photographs. I’ve been getting down on my knees and nearly falling into young pine trees and leaning precariously close to poison oak bushes, attempting to catch the one leaf the sun has chosen, at just this moment, to illuminate. I inched along a meadow on my belly for an autumn colored moth. I get up so near to things, that if they could bite, they might. If they could kiss, would they?
Or the way, on walks, lately, I’ll take a few steps and stop, as if someone called my name from faraway and long ago, as if there was a small churning of leaves, the sound of a deer getting up. Perhaps there was. But I didn’t notice that stopping still for longer than a moment as being anything symptomatic of anything either.
Neither my choice of photographic subjects nor the pacing of my walks and my particular desire to go out alone indicated anything, not even Michael’s saying, “And you’re the girl who didn’t like to get mud on her hands? Now look at you.”
Rilke though, he did it, once again. The poet rescued me from my own oblivion. First autumn and grief at all the edges brought me to my knees, then Rilke brought me home to the depth of being which is so damn nuanced and weighted, at times, as to be annoying.
He’s the one who wrote, “I want to be with those who know secret things or else alone.” Um, humm. Me too.
Donald Hall said, “Poetry is the unsayable said.” Poetry takes language and urges it to form into that which, previously, hadn’t language touched. That’s how poetry is. This could also be said, “Nature is the unsayable said.” What a leaf says, I could say no other way. What the wind whispers, could be sung by no one else. (Though I try.)
Nature and poetry speak my language. They know me best, not that either set out to know me at all. Both voice aspects of what it means to be alive that nothing else does, and without them I would be far more than bereft than I already am. More than that though, I’d be less wholly alive.
Do you know these lines?
“What we choose to fight is so tiny!
What fights with us is so great!”
And these?
“I love the dark hours of my being
in which my senses drop into the deep.”
The beauty and the grief of the world close up and the world at large yank at me. Sometimes, I find it hard to acknowledge the depth of my own being, find it difficult to regard my own nuance and complexity. How do I hold it all? Even though when I do, I have more to offer all I love, more abundance from which to give.
“My life is not this steeply sloping hour,
in which you see me hurrying.”
And most of all this:
”I want to unfold.
I don’t want to stay folded anywhere,
because where I am folded, there I am a lie.
And I want my grasp of things
to be true before you.”
Small birds, I could tell, but not because I saw them. Only my ears knew. Their voices disappeared every other sound. Call and response. Twitter and tweet. Almost one sound, the reply was so rapid, as though an echo or reverberation. They were the sound of something being untwisted, of a doll’s umbrella being opened. If the sun, upon returning after rain, could sing, it would sound like a million of these tiny birds. Or the twinkling laughter a small girl makes when dancing alone in a room full of people. The birds’ voices—the feeling of knowing it will be okay after being sure it won’t be, no matter what it is. Jacks dropping two-by-two on asphalt. Laughing and then putting your hand to your mouth to keep the laughter from spilling out. Catching something by surprise—a ball, a strawberry, a song. Happiness up in a tree. The happiness your mother tells you about when she remembers her childhood. Recalling something you were sure you’d forgotten.
Up in the hills above Wilbur Hot Springs one late December, it was verifiable—I was in two places at once.
“Along the ridge top, after a hard climb, I walked
to where the rainstorm began, stood for awhile
with one foot on either side, straddling
the boundary of weather, proving, that in fact
you can be in two places at the same time.”
Though it’s early morning yet, and I’m sitting alone in our living room in front of the fire, where I’d be no matter the direction in which this day would take us, I know I’ll be in more than one place at at time all day long.
Often, as I think I’ve mentioned, at least a dozen times, no matter where I am, I’m also at Jacks Peak. The forest has taken up residence inside me. After I’ve gotten the turkey securely in the oven, but before the cranberry sauce has been placed in my mother’s crystal bowl and before folding the napkins, I’ll be out in the forest, for sure.
Today, there’s another place where I will also be, with great longing: the home of Michael’s parents, the place where we won’t be, the place we’ve celebrated Thanksgiving each year, either on the actual day or a couple of days later, every year since Michael and I fell in love. But not this time. Michael’s father is too ill for a house full of guests. The forest lives inside me and, lately, today, most greatly, sadness has taken up house, too.
Lucky us, my dear friend, Roxane, her husband, Manny and their two daughters, Margo and Ella, and our neighbor, Tammy will sit down in our sunroom with us.
But if Michael and I look out into some vague middle distance, we’ll be remembering last year and the year before that, and so on and on, standing, not the boundary of weather, but the boundary of time and place.
Yesterday, Margo and Ella came over to write a Thanksgiving Poem-Prayer for our meal, which Ella titled, “Ready for the Sparkling Ground: The Margo, Ella, Patrice Thank You Poem.”
The final two stanzas go like this:
"Thank you for my weaving and roses
and daisies and dandelions,
a horse and a house and a tree,
stars and sunlight.
Thank you for everything
and all of us together."
The scent of sage conjures up turkey stuffing, Thanksgiving dinner, the feeling of anticipation. There is that. But for me, those nostalgic, seasonal associations that, sadly, come with a bite, get overridden by this one, when I get a whiff of sage out in the woods or anywhere:
When I left home for the first time, at the age of seventeen, it wasn’t to go off to college as perhaps it ought to have been. It was to move to the middle of nowhere California with my high school boyfriend, Joe. We rented an old Victorian in the middle of nowhere’s snow, and while freezing, I came to the conclusion that I didn’t love Joe anymore. Even though he was a really good guy, who loved me well, and whenever I think of him now, it’s only with fondness.
Everything I owned, I’d moved up there—from all my books to my girlhood, oversized baby doll—to Milford, a townlet of 22 people, outside of Susanville, and though I’d fallen out of love with Joe, I wasn’t ready to move all of it and me back home to temperate Santa Cruz after only two weeks, and prove my mother right, that seventeen was too young to leave somewhere for nowhere, even if somewhere included her drunk before six each evening.
Instead, I found a place on a large sagebrush laden plot of land for $50 a month. Home was a miniscule red cabin, that had previously been home to hens, not humans. For that price, it came without heat, bathroom, or kitchen. My waterbed took care of the heat problem, though never once did I wake in the morning and not see my breath threatening to freeze in the air. Use of the big house took care of kitchen and bathroom. Except for the crippling anxiety attacks that plagued and frequently paralyzed me, I had a grand time living there. I’d stick out my thumb on Hwy. #395 and catch a ride to occasionally attend classes at the junior college and get to my housecleaning job.
One day the guy who owned the place elicited my help in clearing the sage brush that inch-by-inch covered his lower 40, in order to make room for what, I don’t remember. There was one hell of a lot of sage he wanted gone, and I was young and, though less than enthusiastic, something compelled me to help—a reduction in rent, maybe? It took all day. Never having worked half this hard, I was miserable. I may have been young, but, the following day, every single part of me ached.
In the summer, Jacks Peak was lush with sage, second only to poison oak. On hot days, I loved brushing up against the sage, rubbing its leaves between my fingers and bringing them to my nose to inhale deeply the day before me and one I’m not sad is long gone.
On this cold, damp, and still dark morning, remembering summer in the woods and how heat can force the smell of sage into the air, I look forward to tomorrow when my oven will do much the same thing, and later when sage is something on our tongues, along with turkey and the tart-sweet cranberry, and bounty is just one of many things we give thanks for.
my face is grass...
Maurice Kenny, from Legacy
...the fresh green grass emerging
through last year’s dead.
Rachel McKay
Maurice Kenny’s poem, Legacy, I loved long before having a personal relationship with a natural place. It was a poem of prescience. “my thoughts are winds which blow... my word, my word, loaned legacy...”
Rachel’s words, written in a blog comment, got me out the door right away though. One a relationship’s begun, it’s easy to build upon it.
At this time of year, I hadn’t been expecting grass. New grass equals spring in my mind. Had it not been for Rachel’s words, I’d have seen new shoots on the paths, sure, I would have, but not in November. If not for her words, if not for Rachel’s looking down at the earth, I’d have missed the grass’s determination, the undeniable burst of green there at my feet. There’s the legacy of grass sprouting at my feet.
Not like it was dawn or near dawn. More like late morning, by the time Michael and I got our shoelaces tied. To expect more than that from a Sunday, if one doesn’t have to, would be wrong. Not that I missed the dawn—that I greeted with both eyes open.
The same can’t be said for this trail side flower. On most days, the lemon yellow, white-centered beauty spreads its arms, faces up and outward, as if to say, “I am lovely, and the day is mine.” Yesterday was not most days. The delicate flower was turned in on itself and closed up lock-tight. Who could blame it? Who could say to a flower that outdoes itself day after day by shining and making the passersby look down and smile, that it ought not take a break on such a morning?
The storm that reigned for two nights running had subsided but neither the wet nor the cold had. Felt like snow might fall momentarily at a slightly higher elevation. There weren’t many people “rustling their stumps,” as my father used to say. The ones who were out, were moving quickly. Not a day for sauntering lazily through the woods, except for when my eye got caught by a small, yellow flower.
I approached slowly. If a fleck of sunshine on a gray day can’t induce reverence, what can? I knelt down next to its fringed petals, wrapped scarf-close against the chill air. Winter’s here.
You can walk along a path many times and never see the whole of the place—not the trail, the trees and bramble, not the close up view nor the one that’s faraway. That delights me. It’s up near the top of my tree-of-favorite-things about the natural world.
Nature changes moment by moment. Though you walk on the same path, you never visit the same path twice. Today a branch is closer to the trail because the rain has weighed it down, so that it’s at eye level. You get to see raindrops clinging to the pine needles till they can’t hold on a second longer. Careful! They may pling onto your face. There, at the side of the path is a crop of miniature mushrooms that weren’t there just the day before.
Then again, just because something was on the trail yesterday, and for decades before yesterday, doesn’t mean you noticed it or that you will tomorrow. But next year, that very object will float into your consciousness as though, whatever it is—tree, bush, boulder, fence—were placed there a moment ago.
This happens to me again and again at Jacks Peak. My imagination loves to be surprised. Yesterday, I saw that crop of miniature mushrooms that grew while I turned over in my sleep. And I got to witness Michael see something for the first time, that was, in fact, quite old. The quality of light—light between rains—changed everything, so that Michael was seeing as for the first time. “Oh, there’s a fence there.”
The fence he saw, on Lower Ridge Trail, is a hanging-on-for-dear-life fence. It’s teetering at the edge of... what to call it? Cliff? I think that’s the best word because slope is far too subtle and hillside too meager. It’s a silly fence. Only an idiot would venture past the border that nature created on its own, where man put the fence. I guess, that’s the point—to prevent such a person from venturing forth. That barbed wire would keep even a person wholly drunk on these woods from regrettably rolling down the steepest of hills through thick poison oak.
To get to stand beside someone when he sees something for the first time is a kind of intimacy I take particular pleasure in, especially when that someone is my husband and the place of his seeing is these woods.
If you want to be found by nature, you’ll be found. The ends to which nature must to go find one are, sometimes, a bit extreme.
Despite a headache, the drive was easy; parking was easy; the line to the Post-Impressionist Exhibit was easy. The crowds in front of the paintings...not so easy.
One painting, isn’t it often this way, made the headache and the crowds worthwhile. Or it nearly did. In a few days, the crowds and the headache will diminish in size but the painting will grow, and its presence in my life will linger.
The Little Peasant in Blue, by George Seurat. And more so because he painted it toward the end of his life, in 1882. The picture of a young man, a boy really, is not done in his pointalist style. The strokes are wide, more like leaves or blades of grass. So perfect—he’s standing in a field of green, far more ground than sky in the painting. It’s his face that held me close. Since it’s a small picture, placed in a corner, not too many others pushed to get in front of it. I stood there for a long time. His eyes were soil brown, pensive and tender. His mouth was barely there. Just a rough series of thick lines, nearly the color of his cheeks and chin. What did Seurat mean to say? What do I not understand?
What I do: nature found me here, too, in the sky of the boy’s shirt, int the earth of his eyes, in the painting’s strokes of grass.
The largest black widow spider I’ve ever seen was living in our sunroom between a heavy cabinet full of garden tools and a wall. I caught a glimpse of her in the four inch space between wall and cabinet. Her belly was the size of a marble, and she was shiny like a girl’s hair. And, oh, those legs!
Ace Kitty (my tomboy) keeps bringing gophers home. She hasn’t adjusted to the time change. No matter what I say, she remains convinced that 4:00 is 5:00—supper time. In other words, “If you won’t feed me, I’ll have to feed myself.”
The most recent gopher that she brought home for dinner fled her mouth in our sunroom, stood up, authoritatively, on its hind legs like a prairie dog, raised its front lip, stuck it yellow front teeth out and hissed like a snake. Sure convinced Ace and me—we both backed away. That’s when the gopher took off for the widow’s hideaway.
What a commingling that must have been! I thought the spider would sharpened her stinger and begun an enormous dinner—a month of dinners. Michael had to explain, not the birds and the bees, but the spiders and the gophers.
The reason I’m writing this, though it hasn’t a thing to do, directly, with Jacks Peak, nor is it a mediation on life’s complexity that’s been brought to mind while walking in the park, is this: being in nature is causing me to be in nature wherever I am.
My awareness of the presence of the natural world has been woken up—nuance, detail, vigor, intensity. Is everything alive? Where have I been all my life?
Last Saturday it was like the best of summer here, making it perfect for a walk in the woods with families and their notebooks. The Monterey Peninsula Regional Park District sponsors all kinds of outdoor activities, my walking and writing family workshop included. The youngest person was six and the oldest over seventy.
I put wedding tablecloths on a couple tables, people arrived, some carrying their pencils in their mouths—of all places! “How do you know the world?” The children were quick to list all five of their five senses. We read Wendell Berry, Robert Frost, Robert Louis Stevenson, and this from Byrd Baylor’s Guess Who My Favorite Is,
“She said, ‘Tell your favorite color.’ I said, ‘Blue.’ But she said, ‘See, you’ve already done it wrong.... You have to say what kind of blue.’
So I said, ‘All right. You know the blue on a lizard’s belly? That sudden kind of blue you see just for a second sometime—so blue that afterward you always think you made it up?’
‘Sure,’ she said. ‘I know that kind of blue.’”
It took us an hour to walk what usually takes me about fifteen minutes. We walked. We looked. We saw and listened and touched and smelled and tilted our heads and breathed a little more deeply and wrote and wrote and well, wrote. Nearly lost Alice because she stayed behind, having fallen in love with a clump of translucent berries—and she’s not seven years old!
But her good friend Marina waited up, and we all walked on together.
Here are some snippets of what got written that gorgeous day, a day made for lingering in.
Jacks Peak is beautiful
because the wind
is whispering to me.
It’s also sunny, soundless,
rocky, steep, and curvy.
There were names on a bench
when we stopped.
The trees were lushy green,
and the ocean was blue
like my daddy’s eyes.
Francesca Taurke
This morning
My son snuggles up to me in bed
and asks me to flex my muscles.
9-years-old, he tells me he hopes to have
muscles as big as mine someday.
I can't help imagining my strength
waning as his grows.
Alex Taurke
I hear the silent feet of the earth.
I smell the fresh air that the winds
of the earth give us.
It says: blow silently, blow Loudly.
Elijah Taurke
Walk on the edge, get entangled in the oak.
Tiptoe on the unstable path.
Feel the roots beneath you souls
the flutter inside...
You do not need a compass.
Shannon Carnazzo
The nature is not only outside of your body
it’s inside your body, in your heart.
Madalena Taurke
Midway on our life's journey,
I found myself
In dark woods...
Dante,
John Hollander, translator
I want to be there for
whatever available joy
the day has to offer.
Barbara Stark
At the University of Chicago, where my father was a guidance counselor during a few years of my childhood, there was a swath of grass that was always perfectly green. Unless it was perfectly white or pretty well perfectly so, covered in snow. I loved moving through the blanket of it. The word “midway” would play in my mouth like candy. Always attracted to the idea of being in two places at once, I’d hold the first syllable first, tease out the second real slow, make a song out of the wa-ay-ay-ay.
Perhaps I’m midway on my life’s journey. The woods are surely dark. And then, and then... Arriving early for an early Monday morning dreaded dental appointment, miffed to have to miss a day of walking in the park, I shake out the drive with a walk along the levy before it’s time to sidle up to the dental chair and put that silly, blouse-saving bib on.
Every step I take, I’m about bowled over by beauty. Not studded in one corner of the morning but flailing, flashing from every place my eye touches, every sound that my ear brings in. Beauty shouts in my ear: “All that sad, all that has you scrunching up your eyes and the handkerchief, take a look at this, baby, wouldja?” Of course, I would. Of course, I do.
Two look-alike cats peek out from shiny chartreuse bushes, simultaneously turn their heads in my direction, make their whiskers shake, step onto the path and hesitantly sit down. Until I make my kitty, kitty voice, take two steps forward, and the twins think better of me, scamper away in unison. Not so fast! They wa peer through fence posts, watching for me, step onto the path briefly again. I can barely stand the joy that burbles and bubbles within me.
There’s a planter with a jade plant inside. Not many people walk this way. Not many, in the course of a day, are likely to see the planter outside the backyard fence with the peek-a-boo cutaway. Yet there it is! And farther on, nearly hidden, an oh-so round Buddha blessing the day. Blessing my day. Is that what buddhas do? Well, this one did. He blessed my day. And the dentist, my dear dentist, treated me tenderly. (When I leave Dr. Rasmussen’s chair and when I wake Tuesday morning I’m in next-to-no pain.)
Every single day some beauty or other rings a bell in my ear, calls my name, and my feet relinquish their cement-hold on the the ground. I dance out loud! Nothing, it seems, no matter the force of my sorrow, can hold me back.
Along the new trail—the one that we get to by skirting the official park entrance, via the the water company road—there’s a downed tree. Actually, it’s a half-downed tree. Though no longer alive, one part touches the forest floor and the other rests in the open arms of a healthy, upright tree. The metaphor is startling.
Lucky me: Michael is both ever the realist and ever the romantic. Looking at the base of the tree, where termites have set up house and gotten right to work, right to dinner, he says, “Defeat and tragedy for one is fair gain for another.” He voice is as balanced as his statement, and he doesn’t say this as a defeatist, but as a realist. The romantic part of him isn’t showing just then. That he saves for later.
When I die, I hope termites don’t move in to dine upon my bones. I hope someone will love and wear my grandmother’s pearl earrings as much as I have and the ruby Michael slipped on my finger the day he took me as his wife. I hope a few people might still read the book I wrote and love Writing and the Spiritual Life, that my grandmother’s recipe for lasagna, the one I learned to make from my mother, might be made and served at a next generation of tables. I hope, I think most of all, that my love of poetry gets carried along in others, and when someone recites Roethke’s “Dirty Dinky,” little children crack up like crazy at “What’s the weather in a beard? It’s windy there, and rather weird,” and settle down for Stevenson’s “How do you like to go up in a swing, up in the air so blue?”
In a comment on Sunday’s blog post, my friend Nancy wrote this: “Indeed, there is no end to the depth of suffering, or terror.... Likewise the joy and bliss go on forever. Holding the hand of the Beloved really helps....”
“Take my hand. There are two of us in this cave.” Lisel Mueller, from The Blind Leading the Blind
Nearby is a country they call life.
You will know it by its seriousness.
Give me your hand.
Rainer Maria Rilke
When the gophers dig in my garden and I watch my beautiful flowers and vegetables shrink like some macabre cartoon, the villain laughing underground, sans dark shades and slanty hat, I hate them. Once, I’d had just about enough of it, got out the pickax, aimed, swung and came down hard. There was an awfully human yelp. I recoiled.
The next day, my neighbor told me an injured gopher had wandered into her yard, had come right up to her, extended its hurt paw. She applied medicine and bandage. “Oh,” I said, guilelessly, “that’s the gopher whose head I missed. He’d eaten one too many flower, one too many zucchini plants. Next time, I’ll aim better. When he’s well, please release him elsewhere.” The look she gave me! The look, I suppose, I deserved.
The way I love my two cats may be out of proportion with how one ought to love her pets. (There we go with proportion and appropriateness, again!) I won’t quibble with you, if you think so. But I won’t put much stock in what you say, either. Mary Olive put it this way, “You only have to let the soft animal of your body love what it loves....”
The soft animal of my body loves the soft animal of two furry feline bodies who go by the names of Cloud and Ace. They are my companions. I’m fond of them. They’re fond of Michael and me. Together we have a little family. When Ace didn’t eat for a several days, of course, I worried. A phone call to the vet informed me that my kitty may have eaten one too many gopher.
Friday, I was late feeding my girls. Their tummies run like Swiss clocks. Ace took things into her own paws and came inside, rather proudly, with a gopher. Damn. I had someplace to go. With a long stick, I followed her to the garden, got the gopher away, began pushing it under the fallen leaves when the little animal whimpered. It whimpered like a small baby does. That was when I looked at it. The gopher was looking at me with its oh-so-brown eyes. And I kid you not, it was pleading with me to get the cat away and let it go free. Its eyes said, “I’ll never eat another one of your flowers again!” But I was heartless. I flung that gopher into the bushes, grabbed my kitty and went inside.
Except the gopher hasn’t let me go. It wrestled with me in my sleep; its brown eyes and the soft weight of its body did. It’s wedged itself into my morning. Those damn eyes. That cry.
When I walk in the woods it’s easy to get all pastorale, to swoon. Compared to lunch with my father, Michael’s father’s illness, the world’s unfair affairs, the sadness of close friends, the woman I know going into the hospital on Monday for brain surgery, and I won’t go on, my experience of the woods is benevolent. It’s restorative and kind. I get to exercise in paradise. The wind sings me arias. My feet go pitter-pat. Birds whistle down from high branches. Leaves flutter like so many lashes. Then I remember the dusky-footed woodrat and my backyard gopher and the woods becomes something else altogether. I give praise for my human experience. I kiss the ground that takes my feet, that holds my sorrow, no questions asked. And I’m sorry about the gopher. And I’m sorry, sometimes, for life’s complexity and for change and for good things not going on forever like I wish they would. You can call me simpleminded, if you like. I won’t mind. To hell with logic and life cycles and the practical and how it is. Bet you want all your good things to continue just as goodly too.
When I was a child everyone, particularly, my mother, always told me to stop taking things “out of proportion.” “You take things too seriously,” they’d say. “What a child,” I’d hear the grown-ups whisper in frustration behind my back. Those things were never out of my proportion, just theirs. I cried and angered easily. I was disturbed by things others ignored.
The time I saw my first silverfish, at the doorstep to our Manhattan apartment, and refused, for hours, to cross the threshold, my mother was certain I’d lost it. I was certain I’d seen a dragon, and that once I walked inside, it would assume its true size and cook me with its fire.
The day a neighbor boy I didn’t like because he was gross came to play and wanted to use my crayons, I refused. Those were my mechanisms for telling the truth. I wouldn’t allow that creep to sully them—I knew where his hands had been! What a ruckus I made. My poor mother!
Though I’ve gotten quiet, or at least more diplomatic about it (except at Whole Foods the other day, when the manager was cold and inhumane) my sense of proportion has stayed pretty much the same as it was when I wore black patent leather shoes and bobby socks (no lace, thank you).
Yesterday, along Lower Ridge Trail, a fragment of red, near to the ground, caught my eye. I got down on the ground. The world righted itself. Proportions regained their proper perspective. There was a small red bug—red like something bittersweet, a hot pepper left a bit too long on the vine. It became the world’s beautiful center. A lanky red bug, no bigger than a sunflower seed, with twitching antenna stood at attention on a length of grass.
Wanting to know the insect’s name, I turned to the internet, only to find the world out of whack, once again. You try it: type in insects Monterey, CA.
The first items on the list, a rather long, sad series: pest control companies, exterminators! One calls itself an “insectary.” Please. How about this one? “Wild West Pest Control!” Pathetic. My eye had to travel a long way down. I had to scroll to come to what I was looking for: insect identification. Once there, I still couldn’t with any ease, whatsoever, find this one’s name. A beetle, I think. I’m going to ask my human reference, naturalist, Nikki Nedeff. Unless you know and will, kindly, tell me...
Before yesterday, I never wanted to know a bug’s name. But now that I do, the world not only spins better, but it’s gotten even more beautifully enormous!
If you stop and wait and barely breathe and don’t move more than your smallest muscles (which means you don’t reach for your camera) and persuade your heart to steady its beat, the deer that startled you (the one you startled first) will stop running away through the oak forest and look slowly (very slowly) over its shoulder at you. You may see its tail flick (if you’re close enough). You may hear and then see, to the left, its companion who has also stopped. And the deer may (if you’re lucky) allow you to witness their world, offering you momentary grace, no matter who you are.
Somewhere is better than anywhere.
Flannery O’Connor
My father is not happy about anywhere. Which is really, nowhere.
Yesterday, over lunch, at a restaurant, he raged (and raged) about it. “When you’re dead, you have no memory!” he screamed. Had he been a bit less loud, a bit less vehement, he’d have elicited my empathy. Even the ice in our water glasses moved away and quivered. Luckily, that favorite restaurant of ours has awful acoustics, is always loud. We were in a not so crowded section; I’d asked for a quiet table! The two-top nearest us was occupied by a couple of either deaf or very understanding women.
My father’s anger is nothing new. His voluminous voice puncturing the dawn was my first alarm clock as a little kid. Even when I knew his rage had nothing to do with me, I hated it, put the pillow over my head, pressed my hands to my ears, when I could. Yesterday, I could do neither.
“When you’re dead, you have no memory, God damn it!” he shouted again. Foolishly, I dumped fuel on his fire—tried arguing with a devout atheist. “Pop, you don’t know. Nobody does.” His tirade continued. The ice shuddered. The fish slid off the rice.
But no longer do I cower at my father’s anger.
Instead, I threw my napkin onto the floor, pushed my chair away, knocking it over, and left the room. I went back to where I’d been a slight few hours earlier. You got it: Jacks Peak. I walked to Lower Ridge Trail and stood next to the only acacia tree I’ve seen in the park and listened to it for awhile. The wind through that tree sounds like no other wind I’ve ever heard. It’s a small, rough whisper, tinsel slapping against metal sheeting, bells a fairy might wear around her neck, little children screeching, small animals peeking ‘round the corner, rubbing their whiskers against the tree trunk. It’s anything but my father yelling. That tree has a view through its long, delicate leaves. I calmly watched the ocean and collected myself.
Only my father didn’t see that. Because, truth is, my body remained exactly where it was, pressed away from him, my back becoming imprinted with the chair's metal frame. He saw his daughter sitting there, listening, and feeling terribly sad. Who am I kidding? My father didn't see me, not the blink of my eyes, not an escaped tear. He saw himself not remembering. No, not even this.
Into this Universe, and Why not knowing,
Nor Whence, like Water willy-nilly flowing:
And out of it, as Wind along the Waste,
I know not Whither, willy-nilly blowing.
Omar Khayyam, from The Rubaiyat, Edward Fitzgerald, translation
Often the best knowledge, the exact thing I’m looking for, gets found in the least likely location. I was stretching on the floor, doing my best to make my back happy, listening to The Splendid Table on the Radio, when Terry Theise, the author of a book about wine, Reading Between the Vines, said this, “We tend to think of mysticism as something very remote and ethereal, inaccessible, but I think mysticism is a rather ordinary, everyday experience once we recognize it.” And “One of the common moments of mysticism is when we feel this is as good as it gets.”
Ah. There they are, the words I have been looking under rocks for. Sometimes I can’t see the forest for the trees! This is one of the primary reasons I go walking in the woods, for “the as good as it gets,” and for some ordinary mysticism, something I don’t have to sit in an uncomfortable position for, something that’s there at my doorstep, waiting for me to take the first step. And I do!
For a long time I rode my bike for exercise, lots of long distance rides. Mostly by street, sometimes paved bike path. I wouldn’t have come to near-daily walks in the woods had this body allowed me to remain on the bicycle. Alas. The mystical experience of biking had to do with exhilaration, climbing hills, feeling strong, the rush of endorphins. Yes, the wind in my face, too, but that wasn’t the main thing. I was moving too quickly to notice God in every leaf and stone.
On the days I go into the forest, I get to put myself in perspective and then I don’t necessarily have to feel like I’m even the center of my own life. That tree, the one on the hill over there, is. It’s easy to believe that the mortgage is the most important thing, that dinner on the table is. Because they are. However, the mistake is to think they’re the only most important things. The external, daily life that’s such a deal to maintain nowadays, is only part of the picture of what makes us human. I need a peak at the divine. Wind moving through the grass gives me just that. The deer with one rack of antlers who peered at me before running off gave me that too. The woods make my life whole. I tell you, God is out there. God is out there and takes me frayed as I am. No questions asked; no finger pointing. The preaching that comes from on high are Northern Flickers and Scrub Jays, Red Tailed Hawks.
When I don’t go out among the trees, I can get convinced that life, my life, the world, is a very small, contrived place. I may, in fact, believe it has four walls and a roof, occasionally windows that open, but not often, not wide enough.
I once had a sparrow
alight upon my shoulder
for a moment,
while I was hoeing
in a village garden,
and I felt that I was more
distinguished by that circumstance
that I should have been by
any epaulet I could have worn.
Henry David Thoreau
There’s nothing like the threat of rain and the weight of gray sky hanging low, to change the mood at Jacks Peak. It’s not just an ethereal difference but a physical one. Silence gets louder and it hangs more heavily, unmasking my presence. My most quiet footfalls sound like those of a giant’s. Funny how sunlight can be a form of camouflage, but it can. And Friday, the sun was vacationing elsewhere and my presence sounded loud, even to me.
The belly of the park is always the place I want to be. On days when a migraine threatens and I think the hills will only make its arrival more likely, I avoid going where I most want to go and stick to the park’s flatter perimeter. On Friday, I felt, if not hardy, well enough, so towards the park’s center I went. It’s up at first, then down and down, with a few more hills along the way, but more down than up, till there I was.
The whole way my footsteps were the loudest things I heard. The fallen oak leaves and pine needles and bits of rock they kicked up was bullhorn-loud in my quiet ears. More than that though, the farther into the park I got, the more of an alarm I tripped, over and over again, no matter how gently I tried to walk. The assorted, many birds heard me coming and made sure to tell all their feathered friends about it.
“Here she comes,” the Chickadees announced. The shy Northern Flicker, whose beak is spear-pointed and whose white bottom signals its hurried departure, altered the others of my intrusion. One bird passed the information directly to the next and the next to the next till everybody knew and a chorus surrounded me. I’d have liked it, a lot, actually, except for feeling like an interloper, an unwelcomed invader.
On my favorite radio program, Radiloab, (http://www.radiolab.org/), I heard a show recently about the scientist, Klaus Zuberbuhler’s work in the Tai Forest of Africa. He was studying the language of the forest’s Diana Monkeys and discovered that not all calls are equal. If an eagle’s flying toward them, they rush down the tree and make one sound. If it’s a leopard running through the jungle in their direction, thinking, “Monkey for dinner!” the Dianas climb to the highest branches and make a different cry of alarm.
One day when Zuberbuhler had been in the jungle a bit too near evening and yet had a long walk back to camp, he heard the monkeys making the “Leopard up ahead!” warning cry. For quite sometime along his way, the call continued, causing him to conclude that he was being stalked by the leopard! (Not that the monkeys were warning him, but others of their own kind.) Zuberbuher made it safely back to camp, armed with new monkey knowledge.
Having a few birds telling everyone, “It’s the girl with the notebook and camera who likes to catch glimpses of us,” isn’t too bad. Their proclaiming my presence doesn’t induce fear. It’s nothing like monkeys announcing, “Mr. Leopard wants to eat you!” However, though I love the birds’ voices, I wish my presence weren’t viewed as an intrusion. I’d like to be accepted, if not welcomed by the forest’s birds. Silly me.
One in eight birds are in danger
of being extinct in the near future. Craig Hilton-Taylor
Every present moment that moves us
deeply connects in our psyches
with something (or things) in our past.
Donald Hall
At my physical therapist’s office, I picked up a copy of National Geographic Magazine from a couple years ago. Without my glasses on, I flipped through the pages and came to a double-page spread with small photos of animals and one plant. I began to read their names, written in print I had to squint to see: Yellow-Blotched Map Turtle, Palos Verdes Blue Butterfly.
It took only a couple of names before I began reading them aloud: Pyne’s Ground Plum, Wolverine, Chiricahua Leopard Frog. I read with a soft voice. With each name my voice got a tiny bit louder. But nobody came in to check on the patient talking to herself. Now I wish I’d read louder, that they’d come running for the sound of the creatures’ names. I wish I could have barked with the Santa Catalina Island Fox’s voice or chirped like a Mount Graham Red Squirrel, animals whose voices are fading, are all but gone from the earth. It was the names of the beings, the beauty of their human-given names, that made me turn the page to see what was up. Their demise was.
The poet Robert Pinsky said, “The longer I live, the more I see there’s something physical about reciting rhythmical words aloud —it’s almost biological—that comforts and enlivens human beings.”
I’m enlivened by nature’s names, wish my chant of them were enough to keep them alive. I feel broken by their loss. Anytime an animal or plant is lost to the earth, we each lose something of ourselves, a vital shade of brown fur, the nuanced call of an owl’s voice, a part of the whole of our inheritance and responsibility.
My father, who seems, at times, to be a species in-and-of-himself, but is just a single human being, is on the verge of extinction. We don’t know how long he’s got left but not as long as he’s lived—not by a long shot. The same is true of Michael’s parents, and of Michael and me too. I feel my father’s leaving in every one of my days.
Sometimes it’s a clot of tears stationed at the back of my throat. Other days, it’s in the drag of my feet, a reluctance, even early in the morning, and even when I’m awfully frustrated by him. His loss will be a small extinction, a sure fire gone out, but such a part of life’s course, and a just one. As the ancient Mexican poets said, “Not forever on this earth. Only a little while here.”
What about the daughters and sons of the Yellowfin Madtom or the Hawaiian Goose, the Masked Bobwhite, the Boulder Darter? Must we lose them too?
Over and over in my head I repeat my father to myself. I name and claim him. I smell his shirts, hear his not-so-often laughter, his voice, the one time he said to me: “Brilliant!” I have his words for safekeeping. And the names of the animals too: Red-Cockaded Woodpecker, Fringed Campion, Puerto Rican Crested Toad, Polar Bear...
The more I walk, the more I recognize and reestablish a relationship between myself and the natural world. The more time I spend at the park, the less differences I see between the plants and animals and myself, and the more I find in nature what I’d previously turned to other people for: solace, friendship, answers, faith.
Yesterday, in the dentist’s chair, I endured the root canal while remembering breeze from the other day on Lower Ridge Road. In Dr. Rasmussen’s chair, as he kindly and expertly did what needed to be done, I suppressed my nausea and my desire to bolt by thinking about one tree.
When my jaw began to ache and I felt a migraine coming on, while I heard and smelled the doctor’s work, I went back to the park and saw the elongated leaves of the only acacia I’ve seen there tremble in the breeze. The first indication of wind in that tree hadn’t been visual though, it had been auditory. The rubbing of leaf against leaf on this tree, now this is really weird, sounded different from wind I’d heard in the park before. Why? Because this was not wind through pines or oaks, not wind moving between and against bushes and grass, but wind through acacia.
Come on out with me sometime, if you’re free or if you’re not, and we’ll walk to the acacia and maybe catch some wind.
People do not die for us immediately, but... continue to occupy our thoughts in the same way as when they were alive.
It is as though they were traveling abroad.
-Marcel Proust
In which case, my Grandmother has been on quite the holiday—it began in 1989. I hope she put enough hot peppers in her bag for the duration.
Last night, I dreamed a chef had bought her house in Astoria, New York and was turning it into a restaurant. I came by to see how the work was going. My Grandmother’s kitchen smelled as it always did—of pasta and gravy, of Sunday’s roast, and garlic. Everything was just where it had been—her flour sifter and pasta maker were in their places. In the living room, the hulking television was at its angle near the picture window she spent hours beside, watching the day go by. In her room, the bed, with its chenille spread, was neatly made.
The chef walked along with me. There was only a slight confusion about ownership—my reluctance to relinquish it. That was when my Grandparents returned, confusing matters further. Though they made themselves barely known and the chef was undisturbed. Had they joined her before? Or was she oblivious to their presence?
We weren’t close, my Grandmother and I, but we did love each other. One of my last memories of her was when she was quite old and I’d made her chicken soup for lunch. She chastised me for using breast meat, instead of thighs and wings. “Whata you doing, you,” she said, “using good meat for soup?” At least she remained herself all her life; she didn’t diminish an iota in that way.
What about trees? What about the ground wrapping around their roots and the birds who were born in their branches? What about birds, their sisters and brothers, their fledglings, now grown? What about snakes, like the striped one I saw indulging in a last bit of warm sunlight the other day? How about the skinny blades of grass that sleep nestled together?
When they depart, do their spirits go too? And do they return to dream, in some primitive, earthly way, at this time of the year when the veil between worlds is thinnest?
My voice will never be anything
to sing about
but that doesn’t stop me.
There are three tunes
it carries well enough:
a lullaby, a lament
and a baseball song.
One for every occasion.
Not that I like ball games.
It’s the “Take me out,”
that makes me sing.
There’s always something
to lament,
if you think about it.
Well, even if you don’t.
The lullaby has a boat.
And, sometimes,
a boat is the only way
to get back home.
True confession: Until last evening, I’d never watched even a single inning of a baseball game on television or on a field. Though from the time I was little I knew and, with delight, sang the baseball song, even had a little Yankee’s ceramic doll. The thing I liked about the doll was how its head bobbed up and down on a spring.
In grade school, when teams were chosen for P.E. I was always the last one picked. Which ever team ended up with me on it, let out a collective groan as I, reluctantly, walked to that camp. When the ball came—whatever ball—I’d cover my face with my hands and cringe, hoping this would all be over soon. In high school, I simply refused to play sports, sat down on the middle of the volleyball court, created an alternative P.E. program, got credit for ballet.
When it’s dark out or nearing dark and you’ve already walked in the park and dinner is cooking and you’re too tired to walk, anyway, what to do?
No, that’s not true. I admit, I got caught up in the fever— Giants’ fever. Not that I sat still through the entire game; I came in and out. Michael explained everything. It began to make sense. The skinny pitcher was cute. I didn’t understand the catcher’s crotch-front sign language. Nor the language of hand-symbols by their hats. I didn’t need to. What I liked what that the game includes a secret language.
Given a choice between two parks though, you know which one I’d choose.
Not that life’s not always uncertain. A sense of suspension—as in hovering between this and that, here and later, yes and maybe. But some times have more of that than others. How we manage at those times matters. My tendency is to want to sink my claws into the nearest tree and hang on to something certain, even the delightful illusion of something certain.
Knowing there was a name for this state and knowing the name had been coined not by a president or scientist or priest, but by the poet, John Keats, but having forgotten the name for it, I went searching: “What poetic term describes living your life while accepting that it is filled with uncertainty?”
In December, 1817, Keats wrote a letter to his brother articulating this quality—the ability to recognize life’s instability, lack of predictability and yet to live with happiness. Keats wrote, “Negative Capability, that is when man is capable of being in uncertainties, Mysteries, doubts without any irritable reaching after fact & reason.” Oh, my irritable reach! This from a poet who died at twenty-five, living in obscurity, impoverished, in love but far away from his love.
Life’s big questions are just that, silly, questions, I tell myself. But I seem bent and determined, at times, to go crawling through the dirt for answers. Nimble ones would be nice. It was the poet Rainer Maria Rilke, who said, “Be patient toward all that is unsolved in your heart and try to love the questions themselves.”
The trail curves left but it’s unknown what will be around that curve. The hovering clouds may stay heavy or lift so Point Lobos appears to be only a few steps away. The kitty in my lap may, for awhile, give up her purr in favor of sleep. This also, the woods will be there when I come up the hill and they will take me, tearstained, lush with uncertainty. You too.
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