Soliphilia (or, Finding the Light-Green Heart): A Workshop

My sweet brother

Recently, there have been days when the only solace is to be near the edge of myself, reaching out to touch the ceanothus with more than just my hands. When the only way to be a sane human being in this world is to remember that my identity rests not in my mind alone, but in the place where I end and the world begins. In that interface, that frontier, that edge-country where the astonishing blue and pollen and the buzzing of a thousand dizzy bees is enough to quench any sadness that had been stalking my soul. David Whyte says something to this effect. So, I think, does anyone who loves, and is loved by, a place in this world. Who doesn't want to be alone any more. Who knows what it means to come home. 

Blooming ceanothus, Johnstone Trail Tomales Bay

Because coming home—even just for a moment—to the smell of ceanothus arching over a path through the pines, the sound of bees shaking loose every thought for just long enough to finally breathe, is the only hope that I believe we have left in this world. Coming home to the land that nourishes us. Coming home to the people who love and support us. Coming home to the people in our communities who have been forgotten and forsaken by us and the world. Coming home—god, and isn't it the hardest thing?—to the places inside of ourselves that scare us so badly we would run for a thousand miles across deserts instead of letting them wash over us, for fear they'd pull us under. When in fact this is the only remedy— to turn and face the wind, the wave, the undertow. To trust that, as Rilke writes, that wave, that wind, will part for you, and close again behind you, and will carry on its way, leaving you in peace.

O you tender ones, walk now and then
into the breath that blows coldly past. 
Upon your cheeks let it tremble and part;
behind you it will tremble together again. 

Part I, Sonnet IV, from The Sonnets to Orpheus*

Ground lupine, sheep sorrel, Tomales Point

It's the way any planet or humble seed is made; each layer whole in itself, from core to skin, and also together in union more than the sum of parts. This is coming home—to the darkest center; to our families and loved ones; to the communities of humans and plants and animals and stones right where we are, who have missed us.

Yes, the springtime needed you, writes Rilke in his first of the Duino Elegies. Often a star 
was waiting for you to notice it. The line between self and world is very thin. Perhaps it is almost non-existent. And yet we are taught to stay far from that edge—for isn't it insanity to believe yourself fluid with columbine flowers? We are taught to bury ourselves in ourselves instead. When in fact in here, and not out there, is where madness prowls. And all along the stars and the columbine flowers have been reaching out to catch our eyes, to receive our praise, to give us the almost unsayable gift of their Presence. The reminder that we are walking always a hair's-breadth from what is numinous, from what will heal us.

Trust me, this is not something I've mastered. I've only gotten so far as to know how much I need to be engaged in such conversations with the world around me. Harder for me are the inner places. Bringing the same attention and care and curiosity and spirit of homecoming to the places in myself that are afraid to settle, to land, to home. That have, since I was a small girl, been skittish horses running from their own tails. (I wrote tales first by accident, and maybe the slip was telling. There is always a dark side to the coin of being a tale-teller.)

On the last new moon, I set out for the moor-hills of Tomales Point where the tule elk and granite outcrops live, a place very special to my heart. I knew I needed to kneel down with the quail tracks. To pay attention to small things. To delight in the discovery of a trail of snail shells, robbed of their snails all among the quail tracks-- proof of the quail's meals!

Many quail tracks among the yellow bush lupine, coyote brush, and other human, elk and coyote tracks

To notice and note the state of bloom or seed among the plants. The cowparsnip, making seeds. 

The salmonberries, ripe. The song of a returned Swainson's thrush in a wet canyon bringing them, and summer, into ripeness. Letting myself go for a time in favor of Other selves. Giving attention to them for their own sake, not just mine. 

What I mean is, instead of going up to a salmonberry and saying, in my head, hello, how can you heal me?—which would make for a rather awkward introduction between human beings—going up to a salmonberry and saying, oh my, look at you, look at your berries and your flowers, how is it here today, you are just lovely, has the gray fox whose scat full of seeds I saw on the trail been visiting you? Invariably, going out of yourself in order to attend to the lives of other beings feels so much better than seeing them always through the lens of one's own need.

A hill of wild radish, invasive but beautiful

There is a wonderful word for all of this— Soliphilia— which I discovered while in collaboration with the ecopsychologist and naturalist, Mary Good. It means the love of and responsibility for a place, bioregion, planet and the unity of interrelated interests within it, as defined by the Australian professor of sustainability Glenn Albrecht, in contrast to another term he coined, Solastalgia, used to describe the feelings of grief, dislocation and loss we experience when the environment where we live is damaged, changed or taken from us. Soliphilia is about coming home to the wholeness of a place and all the pieces that make it so. About finding belonging. About finding belonging together; a community of homecoming; a sense of solidarity in the face of great change and sorrow. About loving all of those pieces in their own right.  About finding that homecoming in a shifting world, a world beset by climate change, by unknowns. Even so, we can come home to it. We must.

Mary and I went for a walk back in January at Abbott's Lagoon to talk about all of these things, and about the vision of a workshop taught together that was brewing between us. A threading together of animal tracking and inner somatic exploration and homecoming. If you don't know Mary's work already, drop everything and go have a look.  It's really a joy to be in collaboration with her, and through that work get to know her as a friend too. She is a compassionate, devoted, skillful naturalist, grounded in observation and fact and her own senses; and at the same time she has an incredible understanding of the unseen, of our inner worlds, of how the inner and the outer meet. Not to mention the fact that she has a wonderful, warm sense of humor and is just a joy to be around. I feel very lucky to get to offer something with her to all of you.

That day in January, we knelt over otter and bobcat tracks; we watched white-crowned sparrows in the brush; we drank reishi hot-chocolate provided by the wonderful Mary; we talked about the human history of Abbott's Lagoon; we ate a picnic on a sand dune as mist turned to rain and we found we were eating raindrops along with our cheese-toasts and lettuce. We rejoiced in that rain. We talked about the feelings of anxiety that arose around the current drought in California; I expressed my own sense of fear and panic around the rain ending this year. Around not knowing if it will return. Wanting to hold the new green, the winter, forever, like a little girl resisting being left alone at preschool.

Now, after a spring full of wildflowers I hadn't seen in such numbers in years, wildflowers so abundant and beautiful that being in their presence made me at once ecstatic and anxious-- that they, too, would go so quickly—the hills are just beginning to tinge with brown. The buckeyes are blooming, full-spire, full intoxication. The antlers on the elk and deer are starting to branch, nubbed with velvet. The days are long. Summer is near, and with it the memory of drought, the sorrow of changing lands.

And, as if in perfect time and perfect grace, the date that we at last settled upon for our workshop comes just at the right moment. We are offering Soliphilia: Tracking the Wildscapes of Land and Soul in Uncertain Times just at the cusp of summer, on Sunday June 12th, a full day affair at Abbott's Lagoon in Point Reyes. This is the point of the year at which I begin to get uneasy again-- at least for the past three years, with the increasing changes in climate. Talking on the phone with Mary recently about our lesson plan, I had to laugh, saying, I think I need to take this workshop. Oh wait, I get to go for free! This is the joy of collaboration. That as teachers, Mary and I get to learn from each other as well as share with all of you.

We will spend the morning getting deep into the details of animal tracking— honing our senses, our curiosity, our empathy. After broadening these capacities in the morning on the sanddunes, and finding the expansiveness and quiet kindle of joy that comes from just looking with an open mind and heart, Mary will lead us in several afternoon exercises and wanders that will bring these new skills home to our inner ecologies.



Throughout the day, we will be exploring what it means to come home to a place, and to ourselves. What stands in the way of such returns, and how we might begin to transform, or surrender, or arrive, or all three, or nothing at all except bask in the flight of a heron and the shape of skunk tracks. Discovering that our hearts, as Rilke writes in his Third Elegy, are light-green.

All at once now, trembling, how he was caught up
and entangled in the spreading tendrils of inner event
already twined into patterns, into strangling undergrowth, prowling
bestial shapes. How he submitted—. Loved.
Loved his interior world, his interior wilderness,
that primal forest inside him, where among decayed treetrunks
his heart stood, light-green. 

That despite the chaos, the decay, the struggle, the tangles, our hearts are light-green by nature, without our effort, and always have been. We only have to look, and remember.

If you'd like to join us—and we would love to have you!— you can read more details, and sign up, here! Note that at the bottom of the page, where the sign-up button resides, there are three payment options, based on financial need.

* All Rilke translations are from the Stephen Mitchell edition  of Duino Elegies & The Sonnets to Orpheus

A Song of Inverness

We spent the last week perched on the Inverness ridge, at eye level with the aerie of two courting osprey, the incoming fog, a sliver of Tomales Bay below. It is astounding, how much the human heart can love a place; an old ache, bigger than might seem possible. Some places, some journeys, are best kept close to the bone. Not everything needs be shared in this quick-to-share world. But I'd like to share with you a few notes from those precious days with nothing to do but sink into a kind of human baseline (for a bobcat baseline is an overstep walk...), with nothing to do but love the nettles, love the bay, love the fog, love the pine peaks and salt, love each other and this world. 

Taking the land into the body is a way of greeting, of saying thank you. These tea things were gathered from alder shade and coastal scrub, and a bouquet of wild radish as well (because beauty is medicine too).

The osprey, making a home, moving sticks and filling the air with kee kee kee. 

 Gold flecks in the sand at the shore of Tomales Bay. Maybe mica, maybe something else, chipped off old granite. They are a whirl of stars under bare toes.

A whole day drifting and paddling through the benevolent waters of Tomales Bay, that old mother fault zone, another world—an old kind of magic. To be, for a day, as buoyant as any loon.



From the view of osprey and hawk, Tomales Bay is a great blue ribbon, the boundary between two tectonic plates.

On secret shores, the dogwood was a red fire, the marsh grasses long and green, moving under the hands of the wind.

And the ceanothus hung down cliffs toward the bay, a blue hum of honey scent and bees.

On the Inverness ridge, the old granite spine of Point Reyes, made of the same granite as the Sierras long ago, the Douglas firs were constellations of new green tips. (So many cups of tea!)

Just before blooming, the cow parsnips were like the heads of medieval ladies, gleaming and wise, with many secrets and love poems tucked in their headdresses.

The starry solomon's plume opened on the day of the spring equinox, quiet and true.

And a morning walk to the bay shore, with tea and notebook,  a quick secret swim, is my idea of true bliss.

The great blue heron had the same idea for a peaceful morning as I. He flew away at my coming, but left his enormous prints, the size of my hands.

To sit with an iris, and learn some of her secrets: this to me is the same thing as prayer.

I'll leave you with a piece of a poem from my journal, iris inspired—

Meanwhile, in the meadows, on the ridges
the irises stand under the sun. Their bulbs
are ancient,  older than dairies, older than barns.
That's why they will tell you easily
vociferously, demanding you listen—
stand down out of your  own way,
so the purple gleam of Always,
that old ecstasy, may turn you
lush as this ridge, this bay, this matriarchy
of bulbs, all gleaming.

Kee kee, call the osprey.
Time for tea.

Eating Of the Land, Feeding Of the Soul

Some landscapes are so full of light, of wind, of motion and vastness, they seem to lift your soul right out of your body, or maybe, better put, right into your body, deep into your bones and into the chambers of your heart. Like these tawny hills, so dry gold right now, so green in winter, that look steep one thousand or more feet down to the Pacific Ocean. Really, this place feels like the definition of sublime to me. The fog is often in over the water like this, so it feels like you are above the clouds, looking out over their endlessness. And the hills are so steep that you can watch red-tailed hawks soaring from above, and when you look down, vertigo, sweet and heady, fills you up— the plunge, down all that gold to the ocean.

Here and there are patches of douglas firs or bay laurels, all wind-stunted. They provide shade, and nuts and seeds for birds, for squirrels, but for the most part, in my humble imagination at least, and my humble physical experience of these hills, this is a place that feeds the soul, the fog, and the sun. It is fed upon and fed by the big sun and the moving of the fog, the salt winds, the open edge-dive into the Pacific horizon, grey-whale and great white shark travelled, pelican-woven, seal-sung.

It is steep and vast and spins the body into an ecstatic sense of smallness, and often inspires the reading of books of myth in shady places, where those myths can wing out like red tailed hawks over the fog and gold.

I have memories of deep wonder of reading aloud from the Kalevala here with my love, at sunset, with the fog beginning to actually rush over us and turn the world to spirits.

The life I lead here on the edge of fir forest, the edge of ocean, north of the San Francisco Bay, here in the 21st century, is not one of dependence upon the literal wild foods of this land. Most of you reading this are probably in a similar boat. I have lots of conflicting and complicated and dead-end-leading feelings upon that subject that lead me often to great distress. However, one thing I can say for certain is that our souls certainly need wild relation to vast as well as to brambly weedy places where foxes and blue bellied lizards and thrushes live, in order to maintain our own sanity. They need to be fed by wide open spaces, by views of the place the sun goes down and the curve of the earth and the sense that we will always be small and full of wonder at the fact that a STAR, (a bloody star, people!) touches us with its beneficent light every day. And equally (more literally, once), we are fed by thickets of berries which thrill the body to eat and to savor, even if we don't rely on them for our entire sustenance, patches of nettle for tea, and glimpses of young bucks, brush rabbits and hawks, to remind us of our bigger family.

This past weekend my love and I made a Sunday journey to the western edge of Tomales Bay, fifteen or so miles north of those golden sublime hills facing the ocean. We found ourselves, in a gentle mist, in one of the richest food-filled habitats I've ever seen here. Not just soul-feeding, in that more abstract sense, but really full of food for the tum. Truly, we were astounded. Thimbleberries abounded in tangles with hazel trees, growing with a heaviness of fruit and nut neither of us is used to seeing at all. These thickets grew right down to the beach of Tomales Bay, right down to the edges of the salt marsh and creeks that wound through the alders out into the water.

This place, near Heart's Desire Beach, was once home to many small Coast Miwok villages. Below are two reconstructed redwood bark houses.

I couldn't help but laugh at the absurdity of this sign! I know, I know, it wouldn't be any good to have all sorts of random folks lighting haphazard fires inside, it's more the sadness of such a scene that makes me call it absurd. It fills me up with wistfulness, with melancholy, with downright anger and with heartbreak too. The bones of a world forever gone (in that pure form it once had), and what strange ways we deal with that truth now! Quite mad, if you ask me.

Anyhow, knowing that this place had been deeply used for up to 6,000 or 7,000 (or even 9,000) years by Coast Miwok peoples, we began to wonder at the food-thickets anew, as anthropogenic, as having been tended over millenia, now forgotten and let to go leggy, but still utterly abundant.

What rich tangles of food and medicine, reaching out along this path just at arm's and eye's level! I imagine this road, whatever its subsequent history, was once tromped down by hundreds of years of Coast Miwok travel. It skirts the edge of the marsh all tule-fringed and full of fish and shellfish.

Past the cow parsnip and horsetail above is a thicket of salmonberry canes that looked positively planted, pruned neatly at the edges (once), covered in little red-orange berries.

Even yerba buena, one of my favorite herbs, lemon-mint sweet, was present, all along the sides of the trails, across from stands of healing nettles, under coffeeberry bushes (a medicinal favorite of the gray fox and Coast Miwok alike) and hazels.

And salal (below), a relative of the abundant huckleberry (which I forgot to photograph, perhaps because it was everywhere, growing in neat leggy stands and abundant with unripe berries—they taste like smaller, slightly tarter blueberries), was also a common sight. I'm not very used to seeing salal around here (might just be because I'm not always looking), but it was robust and happy here, and only along the path, in easy reach. 

It felt so good, deep down in the bones, to wander through this immense productivity, to imagine how in a few weeks the salmon berries will be ripe, and in a little longer the hazelnuts. And it also felt sad, in that way so much about our relation to the wild makes me feel sad, to look out into this place of such richness, and imagine the way it had been tended for centuries with fire, coppicing, pruning, harvest that always respected the life of each plant and its right to flourish. It made me feel sad to confront the reality that to pick fruit and nuts from the wild is now actually illegal in this place (a state park). I know of course that without proper respect, knowledge and reverence, letting people come harvest right and left would be devastating. But this place was once abundant beyond imagining (and still is in certain areas), and people once saw the plants as their kin. Now, it is even difficult for tribal California Indian peoples to be granted "Gathering Permits," let alone anybody else. What fences we've put up between ourselves and the land, not just the physical ones, but worse even, the ones in our minds!

Signs along part of the path detailed some of the indigenous uses of plants such as thimbleberry, bay laurel, acorn. They read like part of a museum, not a living landscape, not a placed storied deeply with human tending. 

"A cookbook of ancient California cuisine would have hundreds of recipes, utilizing perhaps a thousand of California's native plant species (in contrast, modern Western diets rely on only about thirty plant species out of the many thousands with food potential). The Yurok prepared a dish of smelt with a sauce of raw salal berries. (...) The Concow Maidu sprinkled salmon fillets with a flour of deer brush seeds and pulverized laurel leaves (similar to store bought bay leaves) before baking them in an earth oven. Manzanita cider was sometimes employed as an appetizer to stimulate appetite; the Sierra Miwok sucked their cider through straws made of hawk tail feathers. [....] California Indians had an intimate knowledge of how food could be procured from the landscape. John Muir, who spent long periods alone in the wilderness, recognized this as a great advantage over the cultural knowledge of Westerners. 'Strange that in so fertile a wilderness we should suffer distress for want of a cracker or a slice of bread,' he wrote in his diary, 'while the Indians of the neighborhood sustained their merry, free life on clover, pine bark, lupines, fern roots, etcetera.'" (pages 243-245, Tending the Wild: Native American Knowledge and the Management of California's Natural Resources, by M. Kat Anderson)

Anderson also goes on to write: " The plants that provided Calfiornia Indians with food were integrated into tribal cultures in a variety of ways. That these plants were valued by tribal members is reflected in the naming of people and locations. Whole towns, portions of creeks, and other sites often were named after edible plants; examples include that Wappo names Unutsa wa-holma-homa, meaning 'toyon-berry-grove town,' and Oso' yuk-eju, meaning ' meaning 'going-to-make-buckeye-mush-creek.' Gathering sites were also named for the edible plant harvested there. A foothill Yokuts man told Frank Latta, 'We called Eshom Valley Chetutu, or Clover Place. There was always a nice field of sweet clover there in the spring.' [...] Humans were named after food plants too. Examples include Cheso, a  Sinkyone female name meaning 'tarweed blue,' and Kusetu, a Miwok female name meaning 'wild potato sprouting.' [...] A recurring motif in hundreds of Indian myths is that a food plant actually has a human face or origin. For instance, the Cahuilla believe that all food was once human and could speak. The god Mukat chose particular people in the beginning who were to become plants and be converted into food for human use. The opposite transformation also occurs. Many creation myths tell of humans springing forth from seeds. Cattail seeds, in a Washoe legend, were turned into people; some became Miwok, others became Paiute, and still others became Washoe. These myths instruct humans that plants and people are from the same source and are related." (248-9, Tending the Wild).

Imagine if daily, your world were predicated on the assumption that you and the plants around you were kin. Come from the same source (oh, wait— isn't that what our whole scientific Darwinian explanation of evolution really states? All of us branching and evolving from each other?). But really, if such notions were embodied in us, how differently we would treat all of our places...

On the ground all around the edge of the marsh was a layer, like snow, of crushed shells-- the remnants of old shellmounds, of great ancient feasting, over many many many generations.

I think our hills and meadows and shores and bluffs miss us. Or more specifically, they miss the humans who would tend them respectfully, peacefully, reverently, who would speak their names and reach out their hands in friendship, in sisterhood, in brotherhood. I think a part of us lays down sick and lonely without the friendship of the wild, the edible, the medicinal, ones of the local ecosystems in which we live (not to mention the animals of course). I think that starting by just learning their names, their properties, their textures, and saying them when you pass, saying hello, I think that this feeds the soul, the body, even the soul of the land.

This feeding of the soul isn't just about gorgeous wide holy misted vistas, golden hills, feelings of profound awe and smallness. It is also about the humble, the thickets and the weeds and the shores full of kelp, whose tastes and medicines our bodies were made for. If the soul/mind, as David Abram would argue, and I would agree, is really just located in the wildness of the fully alive body, alive in its senses in the world, then eating of the wild thimbleberry is perhaps the best nourishment for the health of the whole body-- mind, heart, spirit, flesh, bone.