Messengers of the moon

Tiny flecks of opalescent green glitter persisting at the edges of my writing desk, shyly twinkling at me, were the first messenger from memory.

A glow-in-the-dark star that fell from the heavens of my writing room to floor, with none to witness its imagined fiery glory, was the second messenger.

I glance at the ceiling with its slowly eroding constellations, carefully placed by me years ago (Big Dipper, Little Dipper, Scorpius, Orion, Cassiopeia), and I wonder.

Regard the star-like blue of the twinkle lights around the windows. Magical periwinkle walls that enfold me in a dreaming blue bower. Dried oak leaves everywhere. Braids of sweetgrass, images of birds, autumn forests, spirals, stars and more stars...

I remember: The great-great grandmother in the tale read long ago, when I was small.

The grandmother was an enchantress, it seemed to me; a being of great feminine power, a healing power, gentle yet terrible. She was tall, with long white hair, like moonlight. (That's how I remember her.)

I remembered most of all her magical light, like the moon. It dwelled in her tower room and shone silverbright or soft-as-snow, following upon her merest thought.

It was a companion to her, in her solitary tower, I thought. A friend.

How did the idea of that light entrance me so, that I still recall the power of that image painted in words?

That it spoke to my child's mind as powerfully and strangely as a rare dream tells me it filtered deeply into my unconscious, as a mythic symbol. The grandmother. The moon. The enchantress. The tower. The child. The night.

I have not read this story for many decades. (Far too long.)

But how all suddenly makes sense, when we recognize our path, as we trace silver threads of memory and arrive somewhere...we may discover how we treasure and hold wonder close and deep for a lifetime, even when we didn't remember that we were doing so.

How the thought, the language, the imagery, the power of this tale was one of a thousand-million powers that shaped a girl who fell in love with the moon and the stars and tales of magic...so that many years later she writes her own sorts of tales in an upstairs room cascading with echoes of stars, windows wide to the light of the moon she cannot lure inside.

The beautiful illustrations above are by Madalina Andronic, created for The Folio Society 2013 edition of The Princess and the Goblin by George MacDonald, a book first published in 1872.

An edition with the original pen-and-ink illustrations by Jessie Wilcox Smith.

A free audiobook download from LibriVox, as this book is in the public domain in the U.S. 

When we stand together

Black wings of crows against a dimensionless gray sky. Long chains of Canada geese flying wing to wing, navigating south now in earnest by sun, stars and internal compass.

Making we wonder: what and where is home? Do we think of home as our city, our nation or our planet? How much of our sense of home is rooted in the people around us, and our shared humanity?

Do we think of our fellow citizens as only the people like us—the same ethnic make-up, beliefs and politics? Or do we think of all humans as our fellow citizens of this one planet?

Now as the darkness of November has descended, courage has been at its ebb in my heart. In the dark hours it feels absolutely crushing—after a spring so full of hope, promise and progressive energy for real reform to address the huge economic and social injustices in America—that this is the winter of our reality:

A society systematically reshaped over decades to benefit the ultra-wealthy and to disenfranchise 99 percent of the people.

Militarized police forces who kill our black and brown brothers and sisters, and who do the bidding of corporations in attacking peaceful protestors as criminals.

An authoritarian demagogue and his kleptocracy, wrong-headedly elected by people fed up with a government that is not working, who are soon to be dismantling protections and selling off our beloved land for parts while enriching themselves and their cronies.

These represent the blindest segment of humanity—the one bent on racing as quickly as possible toward the destruction of planet and our species. For gain.

We have met the enemy, and he is us.

Humanity's shadow is on full display right now in America, and it is frightening. It seems about to swallow us whole.

It has always been there, but we do have to look at it and see it now, in all its wounded-ness and brokenness. I do not know what our chance of healing humanity's brokenness is. But without seeing it, we surely cannot heal it. So we have been given a clear choice, a chance to do something other than despise it, repress it and turn our eyes away.

We have an opportunity at this moment, all people of goodwill and open heart, of compassion and kindness, to stand together. To speak loudly for and protect what is right. To organize and mobilize and to spread peace and beauty in every way we can.

It is clear that pushing back against humanity's shadow with compassion is the only hope we have to survive as a species, and that NOW is the time we need to act.

This has been a year of great highs and sickening lows, a year of revelations. A year of stripping bare the illusions we've harbored, peeling back our comforting surface narratives to reveal that which is bleeding, wounded, neglected and ugliest about humanity. A year of challenge to ourselves to become more than we may have thought we needed to become.

It is a time when all feels upended, a time when I especially envy those with strong extended families, and close networks of friends to sustain them. Because in spring, summer and fall I am mostly content to wander in community with no one other than the trees, birds, grasses and sky.

But in winter, all ease and illusions are gone, along with nature's reassuring sense of becoming that I can pretend is my own. Winter strips it all away, and exposes how frail and important for our well-being are the human connections that hold us together.

.

All is far from lost. We (I) must take heart and take action. Here is what is encouraging: The progressives are mobilizing all across our country, galvanized by the stark challenges before us. What Bernie Sanders said before the primaries is as true now as it was then:

Our job is not to divide, our job is to bring people together. If we do not allow them to divide us up by race, by sexual orientation, by gender...by not allowing them to divide us up by whether or not we were born in America or whether we're immigrants...when we stand together, as white and black and hispanic and gay and straight, woman and man...when we stand together, and demand that this country work for all of us, rather than the few...we will transform America.

The challenge for a quiet, introverted homebody is to make a conscious and sustained effort (and it is a real effort) to reach out and connect with others, instead of retreating even further into books. Books are important for reaffirming what is best about humanity, for reminding us of what is wise, beautiful and true. Books are even community, of a kind. But even books (and I speak as a lifelong bookworm) cannot always take the place of connecting with real live humans.

Those of us who usually choose to go our own way—often disappointed idealists masquerading as misanthropes—do actually need a community made up of people...especially during times when despair threatens to sap our energy and spirits. Let's draw heart from each other.

Reading by lantern light

I read The Hour of Land by Terry Tempest Williams during our late September stay amid the dark, burnished glory of Jay Cooke State Park.

It was drizzling and gray the three days we were there, but we were well tucked away into a snug cabin next to a wall made of jutting faces of dark slate, flanked by pines and quaking aspens.

I read into the dark by the light of the lantern.

The wind shivered the aspen leaves, and their soft, silvery clamor sounded like rain, too...even when it wasn't raining.

While we built a couple of soggy campfires and took a long, damp hike, we spent as many lovely, quiet hours reading.

St. Louis River

I've been reading books by women who are living and creating in dialogue with the landscape. Especially wise, powerful, authentic and flawed women who raise pointed questions, who challenge the status quo, who are willing to speak truth and take action for what they believe in.

I revere women like these. Their path-blazing inspires me in the best way. I am always seeking guru sisters and guru mothers and guru aunts, I think. Not of the same blood (though we are all related, really) but of like spirit and mind.

Which brings me back to The Hour of Land, which I recommend for lovers of wilderness and wildness and wild women. TTW's subject is Americans' relationship with our national parks. But her relationships, knowledge, curiosity and mind range wide as the continent, and The Hour of Land  is about far more than national parks.

It is about love, sacred rage, politics, right action and self knowledge.

It is about grief and beauty (are they always intertwined?). The sensate world. Wonder.

Terry Tempest Williams is a protector and a warrior. She, like many of us, is angry about destruction of the land, of our heritage, of beauty and quietude, of the rights of the people, the animals, the water and the earth itself.

"Our species is committing suicide—that is a choice—and in the process, we are causing others pain. Who cares? Who cares about this wilderness? This glorious indifference?"

"I keep thinking the essential gesture is to act, to respond, to remain true to our core beliefs, and not to be afraid to give voice to our anger. For me, the danger is silence and it multiplies into complacency and consent. My question remains, how do we take our anger and transform it into sacred rage?"

"Our institutions and agencies are no longer working for us. It is time to reimagine our public lands as sanctuaries, refuges, and sacred lands. Time to rethink what is acceptable and what is not."

Toad

"Wilderness is not my leisure or my recreation. It is my sanity." 

 "We believe in more, more possessions, more power, more war. Anywhere, everywhere our advance of aggression continues. My aggression toward myself is the first war...Wilderness is an antidote to the war within ourselves."

"The time has come for acts of reverence and restraint on behalf of the Earth. We have arrived at the Hour of Land." 

This quote from Darnell Davis, a Blackfeet elder, brought tears: "The last best place is our first place."

The land of the first Americans was, and is, their everything. And they have always understood this in a way that far, far too many other Americans do not.

They know this land as a deeply loved and intimately known Home. As the source of nurturing Food. Powerful Medicine. Meaningful Work. Sacred refuge and source of Spirit. As a Place of ritual and worship. A Place of Story and Wonder. A Place of memory, birth, death, ancestors. A Place of Blessing, also Home to All Our Relations: Bison, deer, wolf, moose, salmon, fox, raven, eagle.

A Place to tend to and shape, renew and care for. A Place to love and honor like a father, a mother, a child, a beloved. A Place to hold the People forever in the cup of its hand.

This land is a place worth protecting, worth our love, worth fighting for. Even if who we are fighting are our own institutions, our own agencies, our own police and military, our own government who is not listening to our voices.

There is no one and nothing more important than this planet on which we dwell. We ARE the land, and the land is us. The people are right to say Water Is Life. The Land Is Life. It is that simple, and that enormous.

Frosts are slain and flowers begotten

This morning, the cottontails didn't want to leave the backyard. Two of them nosed among the dead leaves that I never raked last fall. One stayed, nibbling at the young dandelions, until mid-morning, while resting in the branch-shadows of the silver maple. A visit from the Easter bunny, and at my age!

And while I wasn't blogging, the spring happened. 

Of course, she's been happening for weeks behind a very convincing facade of winter...getting dressed in early green behind the standing screen of unrelenting grayness, trying the patience of even the most philosophical among us. (Except the Robins--rolls right off their feathery backs.)

Right now, the cardinals whistle many and madly, the goldfinch sings its long, busy song brimming with questions, buzzes and peeps, a nuthatch grunts at my unwelcome presence and between games of chase the squirrels eye my newly planted pansies. 

Far, far up in the sky over the river today I saw a Great Blue Heron flying to some secret wetland home. I spotted red-winged blackbirds perched atop winter-bleached marsh grass, trilling to brown-speckled females of their kind to witness their splendor. I saw a hawk speed by burdened with a stick for nest building. 

Now Lady Cardinal flutters in the lilac bush at my back, sometimes sounding the alarm and other times just alighting on a branch then flying off in disgust, as if to say, Still here, are you? Right then, I'm off. (Unaccountably, she's got a British-bird accent.)

It's a rare Easter Sunday here that children's floppy-brimmed hats don't get traded for woolen ones after setting foot outside the front door, but here it is. A gift. Finally we have our second nice-nice day of the spring. Nice-nice meaning 60+ degrees + blue sky + mild zephyrs + NO SNOW. 

And oh, how much sweeter it is for being so long in coming, so wistfully anticipated. This is something the folks in California will never, ever know. (We tell ourselves, in consolation.)

Trying to buy off the squirrel with nuts. It worked.

Our old desktop PC gave up the ghost of Internet access, so I write to you with gratitude from the first laptop of my very own, fresh out of the box and smelling of Appley goodness. The keys feel silky to the touch, the softly-silvered metal caresses the undersides of my wrists...to paraphrase one of my favorite bloggers, it's Sunday and I'm in love. 

Now I see from my chair in the backyard that Ms. Cardinal has landed in the wild-leaved Witch Hazel shrub I brought home from the garden store yesterday, an impulse purchase after reading a chapter about this November-blooming native full of medicine in Robin Wall Kimmerer's amazing book, Braiding Sweetgrass. 

More on the wonders of this book in another post, but suffice it to say if you feel any glimmer of interest in 1. plants 2. women's ways of experiencing the world 3. indigenous peoples in relation to the land 4. taking personal care of the earth 5. the relationship between human people and the rest of the natural world's peoples 6. poetic, luminous prose (an overused phrase but so well-deserved in this case) 7. motherhood in the broad sense, then YOU MUST READ IT.

How blessed we are by spring. The soft and humid air feels as if it is healing us of winter inside and out, and all the world gets busy again, going about its important work of building a home, finding a mate, raising a family...bursting from the seed, sharing one's gifts with the air and the earth and all that move upon it. Inspiring even for this woman, who has somehow made it through to many, many Blossom Moons in her life. 

For winter's rains and ruins are over,

And all the season of snows and sins;

The days dividing lover and lover,

The light that loses, the night that wins;

And time remembered is grief forgotten,

And frosts are slain and flowers begotten,

And in green underwood and cover

Blossom by blossom the spring begins.

—Algernon Charles Swinburne

Running stitches across snow

Winter is a time for tracks. 

Journeys that in other seasons leave no record are imprinted beneath our feet merely by the act of walking. Boot prints and rabbit bounds, ski-slides and bird-whispers...all visible stories that catch the chilly light and long blue shadows of January.

“Stories, like paths, relate in two senses: they recount and they connect,” writes Robert Macfarlane in The Old Ways: A Journey on Foot.

“Our verb ‘to write’ at one point in its history referred specifically to track-making: the Old English writan meant ‘to incise runic letters in stone’; thus one would ‘write’ a line by drawing a sharp point over and into a surface—by harrowing a track.

As the pen rises from the page between words, so the walker’s feet rise and fall between paces, and as the deer continues to run as it bounds from the earth, and the dolphin continues to swim even as it leaps again and again from the sea, so writing and wayfaring are continuous activities, a running stitch, a persistence of the same seam or stream.”

“Paths and their markers have long worked on me like lures: drawing my sight up and on and over. The eye is enticed by a path, and the mind’s eye, also. The imagination cannot help but pursue a line in the land—onwards in space, but also backwards in time to the histories of a route and its previous followers. 

“As I walk paths I often wonder about their origins, the impulses that have led to their creation, the records they yield of customary journeys, and the secrets they keep of adventures, meetings and departures.”

Macfarlane is an exceptional prose stylist, master of a deep vocabulary with which to describe the landscape and its forms. While reading this wide-ranging book, I kept a pen at the ready to record (i.e., map) all the unfamiliar words I encountered. Schooled! 

(If these quotes entice you to read the book, note that there is a glossary at the end that defines most of these terms...discovered upon finishing the book.)

The Old Ways: An Idiosyncratic Map of Geographical Mystifcation:

Lochan, rinky, trods, desire lines, hodology, sublunary, biogeography, foil [track], corpse roads, leys, drongs, sarns, snickets, shieling, bison roads, grey wethers, sarsens, hoarstones, bostles, shutes, driftways, lichways, ridings, carneys, herepaths, bindle-skiffs, kist, scarp, gneiss, esculent, weald, corry, ortholith, cromack, alterity, geans, batholith, ling, schists, boustrophedon, massif, sintering, bathyspheric, hominin, panjandrum, stravaiger, frails [leaf], marly, corbelled, scurfed off, pachinko, chert, skip (noun), dabbing cloth, sedulous, lenticuler, albedo, chiasmic, hierophany, cursus, xenotopia, chrism, exigesis, vertex, oneiric, blebs, conduplicate, involute, dupel, glaucous, candle-blacking, coombe/combe, beech ahngers, atavism, phragmites, bodging, fissile, Lob, infaunal, marram, seracs.

Photos: Lake Nokomis, Minneapolis, MN

There are no small adventures

Lately, I've been reading about ambitious adventures into the wild (Wild by Cheryl Strayed, Wild: An Elemental Journey by Jay Griffiths and The Wild Places by Robert Macfarlane).

As well as vicarious experiences, I'm looking for insights. How do others connect with the wild? How do I channel grief at the loss of wild places into healing for the land and for myself? How can I belong to the immensity of nature? Is it possible to penetrate that frustrating barrier between myself and what is outside of myself?

Albert Einstein wrote: “A human being is a part of the whole called by us universe, a part limited in time and space. He experiences himself, his thoughts and feeling as something separated from the rest, a kind of optical delusion of his consciousness. This delusion is a kind of prison for us, restricting us to our personal desires and to affection for a few persons nearest to us. Our task must be to free ourselves from this prison by widening our circle of compassion to embrace all living creatures and the whole of nature in its beauty.”
             
David Abram said, "the deepest impulse in my work...is to renew the experience of being immersed, embedded, in the depths of a living world."

The writers whose work I've been reading seem in their various ways to be seeking a relationship with the wild, in order to find the wild within themselves. (At least, that is one lens through which I read their work.)

Unlike these seekers, I do not climb mountains, drink ayahuasca brewed by Amazonian shamans, or skinnydip in glacial lakes. My adventures are of the micro sort: A red fox or a deer by the river. An indigo bunting foraging in a flash of blue on the edge of a field. A chipmunk zipping between my bicycle wheels. The scent of decaying leaves or oncoming rain or sun-dried sweet grass lifting on a breeze.

Must I journey to the mountain? Is the wild "out there," or hidden in plain sight all around us?

Toward the end of The Wild Places, Robert Macfarlane writes,“But I had learned to see another type of wildness, to which I had once been blind: the wildness of natural life, the sheer force of ongoing organic existence, vigorous and chaotic. This wildness was not about asperity, but about luxuriance, vitality, fun. The weed thrusting through a crack in a pavement, the tree root impudently cracking a carapace of tarmac: these were wild signs, as much as the storm wave and the snowflake.”

I find myself questing for the same things that these writers quest for, seeking some of the same answers. I welcome them as mentors, guides and companions. Their words, and the words of many of you, keep me company as I wander.

And yet, even the most beautifully written words are only words. Words can revive our longing, articulate our grief, link us back to the landscape with power and magic; but they cannot take the place of immersing our physical selves in that landscape. Just as even the most evocative photograph can offer us one dimension of experience--bereft of sound, or scent, or the touch of the wind on our faces--only an echo of a living, breathing, depthful place.

So, I walk. With appreciation, in gratitude.

This is the adventure outside my door, and I find myself, as N.D. Wilson writes, like an ant trying to assess the cathedrals of Europe. It is more than I am able to encompass.

“We are not exiled from the garden of Eden but living in it still. Paradise is not in the past or future but only in the present, this Earth an untamed heaven, a wild paradise garden.” --Jay Griffiths, Wild: An Elemental Journey

“I imagined the wind moving through all these places, and many more like them: places that were separated from one another by roads and housing, fences and shopping-centres, street-lights and cities, but that were joined across space at that time by their wildness in the wind. We are fallen in mostly broken pieces, I thought, but the wild can still return us to ourselves.” --Robert Macfarlane, The Wild Places

Photos taken on the Mississippi River bluffs along West River Parkway.

Sweet season

“We are coming to the sweet season of the year, when the air is mild and the leaves pale, and lemon cakes are flavoured with lavender: egg custards, barely set, infused with a sprig of basil; elderflowers simmered in a sugar syrup and poured over halved strawberries.” 

—Hilary Mantel, Bring Up the Bodies

Our front steps, earlier this summer....

“These days are perfect. The clear untroubled light picks out each berry shimmering in a hedge. Each leaf of a tree, the sun behind it, hangs like a golden pear.”  

—Hilary Mantel, Bring Up the Bodies

Yesterday, the fading ginger-ale sun rested for a few moments in the cradle of an elm tree. Stazi Lu and I watched it from the backyard. We listened to a twilight robin sing it down, down, down into the dark center of the earth, where it would dream all night, until dawn. In that suspended moment, all else was quiet, waiting for and welcoming the darkness, the blessing of coolness. Last night and again tonight, there is a fine, fat moon waxing in the southwestern sky, glowy-gold as a nightlight. 

Today, another sticky day in a July of sticky days, I uncoiled the green garden hose and screwed on the spray nozzle with the seven different spray settings (JetSoakerMistShowerConeFullFlat), yanking it after me as I made a sweaty progress around all the gardens in our corner lot. 

I watered the perennial garden. (Shower!) The annual garden. (Shower!) Sprayed out the debris in the stone St. Francis basin and the rusted iron birdbath (Jet!) and refilled them (Full!) with clean, cool, clear water.

Even at 7:30pm, the sun still had enough flame power to make my skin prickle, so I watered myself now and again, as if I were a kind of lungwort in flip-flops. Shock of cold water, momentary balm, biting insects, followed by renewed prickliness. Spraying and scratching my collection of gnat and mosquito and fly welts. Ah, summer. 

Photos from Lyndale Open Street festival in Lyn-Lake, Minneapolis: Sun painting in a store window; street scenes from Lyndale Avenue and Lake Street; Midtown Greenway.