Green Girl

Tent tethered among jackpine and blue-
bells. Lacewings rise from rock
incubators. Wild geese flying north.
And I can’t remember who I am supposed to be.

I want to learn how to purr. Abandon
myself, have mistresses in maidenhair
fern, own no tomorrow nor yesterday:
a blank shimmering space forward and
back. I want to think with my belly.
I want to name all the stars animals
flowers birds rocks in order to forget
them, start over again. I want to
wear the seasons, harlequin, become
ancient and etched by weather. I
want to snow pulse, ruminating
ungulating, pebble at the bottom of the
abyss, candle burning darkness rather
than flame. I want to peer at things,
shameless, observe the unfastening,
that stripping of shape by dusk.
I want to sit in the meadow a rotten
stump pungent with slimemold, home
for pupae and grubs, concentric rings
collapsing into the passacaglia of
time. I want to crawl inside someone
and hibernate one entire night with
no clocks to wake me, thighs fragrant
loam. I want to melt. I want to swim
naked with an otter. I want to turn
inside out, exchange nuclei with the
Sun. Toward the mythic kingdom of
summer I want to make blind motion,
using my ribs as a raft, following
the spiders as they set sail on their
tasseled shining silk. Sometimes
even a single feather’s enough
to fly.

~ by Robert MacLean

— from Patisotagamy.

(third in a repost from Crashingly Beautiful)

BEING STILL

She’s a quiet clapper in the bell of the prairie,
a girl who likes to be alone.
Today, she’s hiked four miles down
ravine’s low cool blueness.
Bending under a barbed wire, she’s in grass fields.
She’s at the edge of the great plains.
Wise to openness, she finds it a familiar place.
Her clothes swell like wheat bread.

When she returns to her parents’ house,
the foxtails and burrs have come home, too.
The plants seem intent on living in the new ground.
She’s the carrier. “Carrier” is a precision
learned in summer’s biology class.
She likes to think of ripening seeds,
a cargo inside the bellies of flying birds.
Birds like red-winged blackbirds who skim the air
and land, alert on their cattail stalks.

They allow her a silent manner.
They go about their red-winged business
of crying to each other, dipping their beaks
into the swampy stand of green.
The stiller she is, the more everything moves
in the immense vocabulary of being.

- Margaret Hasse

— Henri Cartier-Bresson

Benedicto: May your trails be crooked, winding, lonesome,
dangerous, leading to the most amazing view.
May your mountains rise into and above the clouds. May your rivers flow without end,
meandering through pastoral valleys tinkling with bells,
past temples and castles and poets towers
into a dark primeval forest where tigers belch and monkeys howl,
through miasmal and mysterious swamps and down into a desert of red rock,
blue mesas, domes and pinnacles and grottos of endless stone,
and down again into a deep vast ancient unknown chasm
where bars of sunlight blaze on profiled cliffs,
where deer walk across the white sand beaches,
where storms come and go
as lightning clangs upon the high crags,
where something strange and more beautiful
and more full of wonder than your deepest dreams
waits for you –
beyond that next turning of the canyon walls.

— Edward Abbey

Both my folks are Scorpios. They were both born on November 2nd, two years apart.

For my dad’s birthday he and Kath came down and we feasted over at Zach and Mara’s house with Gus helping manage a tired Manu and Dona coming by and enchanting us all with her pregnant loveliness.

For mom’s celebration I headed to Stockton for the weekend.  We had a sunny summery Saturday, with lunch outdoors at House of Shaw cafe, then a breeze through a gallery of local artisans (her new scene), then home and off to the park with the kids wrestling soccering and monkey-barring.  Back to mom’s for dinner (menu recommendation by Charlie - Pesto Pah-stees) and birthday cake fun.

After chocolate cake and hot tubbing and right before leaving Charlie and Ben called us into the living room for “a meeting”. They had set up a circle of cushions and had a blanket covering a cushion in the middle as a little stage. Charlie (age 5) informed us they were conducting the survey and he was the Survey Master.
Ben directed who was to speak and we each took our turn standing on the center cushion, giving our responses. We also helped Charlie with sounding out the letters so he could write down the survey results on a piece of art paper and he is already awesome with his letters.

The survey question? “What changes do we want in the world?”; The Answers; J: More Equality (More Fair in Charlie’s notes), D: more Kindness (More Kind),  Auntie KK [that's me]: for the world to not be going so fast (Slower), Ben: food (Good Food), Betty: (had to think a moment because Ben had spoken the answer she had been thinking of) everyone would feel safe (Safer). The notes were pretty much done, but D finally convinced Charlie to stand up on the cushion. He stood there for a few moments while she softly asked him again “what would you like to be different in the world Charlie?”;  A long quiet, finger pursed over he lips, looking thoughtfully and shyly away…then…. “More Love“, then he ran off to jump on the couch.

After they left (Diedra teary eyed about her wonderful kids) I played guitar while mom looked through her mail and we shared the evening in the den.  Later, out of the full blue sky day the rain and fall cold came in heavy.  Mom and I slept in late to the song on the metal window awnings, ate lunch, then drove through the rainbow liquid ambered streets to  photograph and sketch at her UOP art studio before I headed home.

Over the course of the week, I got my whole family fully, it felt like it was MY birthday.

Full pic here.

Four Lakes Loop of Long Canyon Trail, off trail hike to Lake Anna.

September 2010

Solo hike out of the foggy rainy summer into the warming weather of a sunshiny fall.

Trail to myself mostly, met Sage and Leif of the trail crew scouting next year’s projects around Siligo Meadows - shared a fire and drink with them the first night -

then no one ’til my hike out where I saw someone  - a strong hiker, two shoe sizes bigger then mine -

had come up the drainage while I was Anna, then two fellas pullin in late from the trailhead as I made my last few miles out.

Epic still warm full moon night weather.

Wonderful walk up Siligo Peak and around to visit the lakes.

Epic trip in many ways, also lonely.   Big owl flyover midnight on Summit Lake.

Full set of pics here.

‎

— Mark Strand (b. 1934), Pulitzer Prize-winning American poet, essayist, and translator. Courtesy of The Fernwood Zen Centre.

Pico Blanco from Botcher’s Gap and back - October 30, 2010.

Twenty plus of us ages teens to 60s meandered down and up the Little Sur River valley, then off-trailed it up a steep ass hill, clambering along a knife edge ridge weaving between oak scrub branches toward a peak layered in clouds. Everything was saturated from the night’s rain, and the coolness of the fall settling in all the drainages.

As we rose, so did the clouds, revealing delicious nappish warm sunshiny vistas.

Perfect for all Hallow’s eve, we saw a tarantula and yuccas, as well as decadent fern and majestic redwoods - so many different ecotones on the hike!

Well worth the 15 miles and 5,000 feet of elevation gain we earned that day.  My pics here and Meetup’s pics here.

“If you need to visualize the soul, think of it as a cross between a wolf howl, a photon, and a dribble of dark molasses. But what it really is, as near as I can tell, is a packet of information. It’s a program, a piece of hyperspatial software designed explicitly to interface with the Mystery. Not a mystery, mind you, the Mystery. The one that can never be solved.

To one degree or another, everybody is connected to the Mystery, and everybody secretly yearns to expand the connection. That requires expanding the soul. These things can enlarge the soul: laughter, danger, imagination, meditation, wild nature, passion, compassion, psychedelics, beauty, iconoclasm, and driving around in the rain with the top down. These things can diminish it: fear, bitterness, blandness, trendiness, egotism, violence, corruption, ignorance, grasping, shining, and eating ketchup on cottage cheese.

Data in our psychic program is often nonlinear, nonhierarchical, archaic, alive, and teeming with paradox. Simply booting up is a challenge, if not for no other reason than that most of us find acknowledging the unknowable and monitoring its intrusions upon the familiar and mundane more than a little embarrassing.

But say you’ve inflated your soul to the size of a beach ball and it’s soaking into the Mystery like wine into a mattress. What have you accomplished? Well, long term, you may have prepared yourself for a successful metamorphosis, an almost inconceivable transformation to be precipitated by your death or by some great worldwide eschatological whoopjamboreehoo. You may have. No one can say for sure.

More immediately, by waxing soulful you will have granted yourself the possibility of ecstatic participation in what the ancients considered a divinely animated universe. And on a day to day basis, folks, it doesn’t get any better than that.”

–Tom Robbins, from “You gotta have soul”, Esquire, October 1993

Awesome post comes courtesy of one of my favorite blogs on the web: Crashingly Beautiful

We do not come into this world; we come out of it, as leaves from a tree. As the ocean “waves,” the universe “peoples.” Every individual is an expression of the whole realm of nature, a unique action of the total universe. This fact is rarely, if ever, experienced by most individuals. Even those who know it to be true in theory do not sense or feel it, but continue to be aware of themselves as isolated egos inside bags of skin.

~ Alan Watts, from Whiskey River