Talking About The Weather

Fog walking on light feet across Abbott's Lagoon, Point Reyes 

Yesterday just before dusk, the fog came in. The fog came galloping, a herd of ghost elk with the wet western ocean in their hooves. It came pouring down the valley between two bishop pine ridges, straight from the sea. It marched east, brisk with salt and damp. And it was a greater balm to lung and heart than it had ever been before, though I have always loved the fog. I nearly shouted my gladness when I saw and smelled it, I nearly got down on my knees.

It has been a harrowing ten days in Northern California. Fires turned the gentle, beautiful agricultural counties and communities of Sonoma, Napa and Mendocino into the closest vision of hell I've yet seen in my life. I am lucky to say that I only saw these visions second-hand, in photographs and videos online. We live one county away, on a ridge between Tomales Bay and the ocean, in dense, dry pinewood, and have been on high alert every night, our hearts sick with sorrow and fear for the thousands who have lost homes, the dozens that have died, and the possibility of more fires starting. Stories from friends at the edges of evacuation zones, watching a black sky; stories from friends who fled at 1 am and drove past walls of flame, who lost everything; the air has been thick with the smoke of their loss for hundreds of miles. The air has been sick with the immolation of thousands of houses, cars, hotels, wineries, shopping malls, forests, hillsides, pastures, fields. In traditional Chinese Medicine, it is our lungs that hold and process grief. Our lungs are breathing wings, sifting the sorrow of thousands, and the voice of the screaming earth.

Native California grassland on a serpentine-rock hillside at the Oak Granary in Potter Valley, one of the areas in Mendocino affected by the fires (the Oak Granary land did not burn, but the fire came very close)

We have always been at the whim of the weather. Fire, wind, water, moving earth; these are the first deities we ever named. I believe the time is upon us when we are being called to name them again.  I do not think we have a choice, now. It is clear that no matter how safe we thought we made ourselves behind the trappings of industrial civilization, we are as vulnerable as we ever were. More so, because we have forgotten that these elements, they comprise our home. We are given everything we ever had by the selfsame soils, waters, winds, fires, and this remembrance is a balm and a strengthening gift that can nourish and buoy us every day.

We are so small in the face of such titans, these old earth deities, these weathers. And they are everywhere growing more erratic, more intense, more unpredictable, and more dangerous to us, because they are the earth's own voice, describing a total systemic imbalance. We are animals dependent on a living planet, a fact we've been trying to hide from ourselves in the West for centuries.  We can't hide from it anymore, and it is frightening and sad to see so suddenly and so clearly the truth that all the scientists and all the predictive models have been saying for years: this is only the beginning.

The old god called Mt. Tallac (in modern parlance), and the other, called Fallen Leaf Lake

In Homer's Odyssey, no king or sailor or soldier would dream of setting out on a journey of any length without first propitiating the gods of water and weather, pouring wine upon the earth and offering a fine flank of beef to the fire. (I know for a fact that the women were doing it too, in their hearths and homes, to their spindles and baskets of wool, to their fires and flocks and gardens, only the ancient Mycenean epics are male-oriented, so it's mostly the men we see.) In fact I think this is my favorite part of the whole tale-- the sheer preponderance of passages in which men offer wine and meat to the gods. Because it mattered; not necessarily in the sense that those propitiations bought their givers much protection (though they may have now and then), but because they demonstrated a worldview in which human beings understood that they must bow down to Thunder, to Wind, to Rain, to the Ones Who Walked the Mountains. When you pour wine to the earth and pray for safe passage to the deities of storm and tide, it's not that you think you can control them; it's that you know you are small before them, and that your respect toward them is a thing of value. To them, and to you. Because it repositions you within a network of living influences and beings, and feeds  you in turn, in ways both seen and unseen.

Don't get me wrong. I'm not in any way saying that these wildfires, fueled by years of intense drought and heat in California, and 80 mph hot Diablo winds from the Valley, could have been stopped by wine poured out on the earth and meat given to the gods, or by any other kind of prayer. Or that any of the other natural disasters we've seen this year could have been. Hurricanes, earthquakes, heat waves, floods. These are the weather of the world responding to biosphere-wide, human-made climate imbalance. They are enormous and terribly powerful and impersonal in their scope Welcome to climate chaos. Or so a voice has been ringing in my head all week. And another voice, a far-down-in-the-center-of-the-earth kind of voice, saying the supremacy of humans has ended. Not that we are all going to be swept off the face of the planet, or die en masse (I pray nothing of the sort ever happens), but more that we are being asked again to acknowledge the old gods. For real. Fire. Wind. Water. Earth. They are walking again. They are here to tell us something.

That weather, seasons, the elements, the circle that is earth-time, the web that is the living biosphere—these are not peripheral to our existence as a human species, though we have behaved as though they were for at least the last 200 years in the industrial West. Treating them with the reverence and mythic-thinking that the words "god," "deity," or "goddess" confer is not spiritual hogwash. It's not New Age woo. It's a thing that science can't do for us, but which we desperately need—to address the unseen dimensions of our planet's forces, the vast and mysterious powers that we can never hope to control. We should never have hoped to control them, but we did. Now, it seems to me that one of our only hopes for long term survival as a species, is to acknowledge what we don't understand, what we can't control, not with fear but with respect, awe, and humility. Storms, fires, floods, earthquakes; if we began to approach each in this spirit, acknowledging that we will have to change our ways of building, transporting ourselves, feeding ourselves, healing ourselves, in order to survive them in the coming century, would we find ourselves within a culture of reverence again, and the names of old gods surfacing on our tongues? 

The old pines and native grasses of the eastern edge of Fallen Leaf Lake, northern Sierra Nevadas

I don't know. I've been feeling helpless, and heartsick, and so sad for what has been lost in the communities across Sonoma and Napa and Mendocino that have been burned in these fires. So sad for the homes and lives ruined, for the thousands of undocumented people so deeply integral to our communities who have no insurance to protect them and no guarantee whatsoever for their own safety in this present political climate to begin with. So sad for the untold number of animals dead among the ashes. So sad for the continued barrage of storms and shootings and bad news of every stripe. I have been feeling, to be honest, a bit hopeless.

 Last week in the smoky air, I wrote the following poem-chant-cry in a state of deep grief. I wept the whole way through, but when the words were out, and the crying ceased, I found I had come to the threshold of hope after all. I wasn't expecting to, but I had.

So, I share these words with you here that you may grieve and then hope in turn.

Ashfall: a rain of white from other houses, other hills

Ashfall, it is a language of too-late, of sorrow.

Today I cannot find it in me to hope for utopias to spring up from the ashes,

for seeds we had forgotten to grow where everything has been destroyed

Today I don't know any longer how to tell a story that is that kind of seed

how to be honest and still say:

it will be better, my unborn daughters

it will be fine, my someday sons

Today what I see is a dark smoke across the ridges, the settling ash, a red sun

and what I smell is a sorrow five thousand years old

burning heavenhigh in a language of smoke that only Earth knows, keening to Sky

All week we have together breathed the ash of these five thousand sorrows

All week the great old bay and her lands have lain gasping under

the smoke of a scream that is still tearing across the dry hills from a throat of fire

Earth's dragons are searching for something we took from them and then forgot we took

Oh Goddess, Oh Earth, we took your children, we took your daughters, we took your sons:

the hills, the stones, the soil, the water, the air where the snowy geese go flying a thousand leagues to get back home; we took them but we didn't know we did because we had forgotten your name, and the names of your children, and we thought there was no cost, and we needed them badly because our own children were hungry and we were hungry and so afraid and lonely because we had forgotten that

we

are your children too.

White ash is falling

Dragons are awake, and walking.

No one is going to take us home now; we must take ourselves. 

That is not a mountain, but a god of granite and earth

This is not a fire, but a dragon of loss who will burn the world to hold her children again. 

Listen, the atmosphere speaks in stories made of weather, of wind, of drought, of flood. 

The earth speaks by moving, by fire, when we have forgotten how to hear the subtler words 

We are so small. The air is full of ashes. Our lungs are full of each other's houses, and sorrows, and the hills that know no ending but the seeds. 

Weep for me my children, says a voice. 

Weep for me, tears on ash. Then dry your eyes. 

In the garden, the ruby-crowned kinglets 
have returned for the winter from somewhere far away
Ring the bell of greeting
Kiss your husband 
Praise what flies and what carries and what holds forever
For we are home among the stars

* * * To raise money to donate to fire relief funds, and specifically to support undocumented families who have lost homes and livelihoods and will not be able to apply for any kind of federal aid, I am offering my novella The Dark Country for sale again for a short time. ALL PROCEEDS (besides shipping & printing costs which are about $4.00 per book), will be donated to the Graton Day Labor Center (Centro Laboral de Graton). LINK HERE * * *

Burning Quail Woman

                         

                                  

Quail, the lady of bronze and smoke, she died midmorning. Neck snapped, not a mark.
The little sparrowhawk with red eyes must have dropped her in the long grass.

Mother found her. I carried her limp and warm in my hands, stroked her feet and her beak, laid her with yellow tidytips lupine, baby blue eyes, at the uproot of an old pine.
Her eyelids closed, peace on the dust-blue lids, full in elsewhere now.
A male called from the bough.

Once she danced for him, tail feathers swinging, a fan of desire: charcoal copper dun.
The sway of her plump body
in the leafmold
in the amber duff
in the thrushsung dusk
was the sway of all abundance, the promise of worlds.

A man with brown feet and brown hands helped to skin her. One cut at the breast, the rest with fingertips, like taking off a coat. I gave her juniper smoke and roses.
Cicadas clicked their wings in the dry oak hills, and called it summer.

Before Olympus there were the Titans. Big women and men of earth. Asteria, daughter of Phoibe, was mother of falling stars and dreams. She gave birth to Hekate. Her mother was the moon. When Zeus chased after her for sex, she became a quail to escape him.
She fled, leaping into the sea, and became the island Delos in the blue Aegean.
It had no bottom. It floated, and the quail flocked there on their journeys south. Later when Zeus chased after her sister Leto, the island sheltered her.

Asteria was aunt of Artemis who loved the woodbirds and the wood, who loved the ones she hunted, who was the deer she ate. Artemis wore quail feathers at her waist, and helped them birth their spotted eggs.

I placed the quail in the adobe brick kiln we built at dusk to fire earth-made pottery.
Skinless, plump, wet, she smelled of sweet flesh and comfort, an offering
to the clay to the fire to the night and stars, to her mother and her sisters
Asteria, Artemis, Leto: women of the quail, of instinct, wilderness, care

She burned with her tailfeathers still on so she could take them up there with her, dancing
Her fat glazed the pots, her fat popped and sparked, her bones turned to white dust, delicate as crabshells by morning.

Up there in the stars, quail women are dancing.
They are dancing with her spirit they are singing in the smoke
They are shaking their hips and lowering their blue-dusked lids to look upon their lovers

I was so sad at first for her beauty, lost to death. Her body was perfect in my hands.
I could not bear it. I thought of her mate, his loss. I did not want to erase his sorrow, the love that birds know. I felt so sorry for him, for her.
But she was far wiser than I, that quail, little woman.
She showed me her death, she let me see it
How her beautiful feathers were only a skin; no less precious for it, but a skin nonetheless.
That what was underneath was tender, that it could nourish me, a gift.
The body is a gift, but more than that the body is an offering on the fire
Borne on embers above the coiled pots she was transmuted
She became smoke and heat and air
She glowed, her bones molten. She became starmade again, the first sacrament

A woman offers a quail to the goddess, offers flesh to the earth and stars
In the face of what we perceive truly there is nothing else to be done
Learning to be fully human is learning to handle the dead this way
The old hunters say that animals offer themselves to the arrow because they want to come into the human camp to be sung, to be turned to fire, to be danced, to be part of that pathos, that beauty, that blaze.

I did not understand fully how to offer her, but she did. She went to my hands and the fire and taught me that we are not whole without this, without looking into the underworld, into the body of the quail, into the earth's hearth and there giving up what we know for the sweetness of a grief that is feathered, that is wise.

Down there quail woman is carrying an ember in her feathered hands. Through the underworld she is carrying it. Underground the dead are but sparks in the bellies of seeds. The spark does not go out, only leaves our view for a time. Quail woman is dancing there. Quail woman is dancing in the stars. As above, so below, and the kiln in the center where all is transformed.

Back home I buried her bones, half dust, in the bishop pine wood where she was born. With rose petals, red wine and a pot sherd from her fire I buried them. At dawn, two quail called, flapped, sang, right outside our door, nearer than I'd ever heard them. All through the daybreak they carried on. Mating maybe. Mourning, maybe. She lives everywhere now.

The Embered Eye of the Buck

It is an old, old tradition the world over, that when the nights grow long and dark, the hearth becomes the sun, to carry the seed of light through the winter and on into spring. The fire becomes the axis around which stories are shared. Through the dark nights of the year, people held (and hold) vigil for the sun on its journey through the darkness, in all of his/her manifestations—Lugh, or Ra, or Sunna, or Cernunnos (the Stag, the Green Man, the Horned God)— as it travels through the underworld of the Cailleach, of Hel, and back out again into spring.  

Out over the ocean, as the sun sets and turns the sky all to fire, the Farallon Islands rise like a dream of the Otherworld in the distance. There, it was said by the Coast Miwok people, the spirits of the dead traveled. There, the sun sets, and for a moment turns the world to flame. 

In autumn, the fire from the sun is made manifest in the acorns abundant on all the trees, in the madrone berries, the manzanitas, the black walnuts, the golden chinquapin nuts, the buckeyes. All year long, the trees have been drinking up the heat from that great star to turn it to sugar. An acorn, in your hand, is transmuted sun. My hands have been full of acorns these past weeks, and the fallen flames of leaves; of roots and the bones of stags and what it means to honor the coming of winter on this land. So here are some threads of my days for you to warm your own hands by...

There is a beautiful Coast Miwok story about the origin of fire. It begins something like this: "In the early days, the only fire anyone knew about was kept by Starwoman, who lived near an elderberry brake to the east, in the mountains beyond the Great Valley. She kept her bright treasure in a box that she had carved from the burl of a buckeye tree. In those days it was cold and dreary here on the coast. Coyote decided to remedy that situation, so one day he sent little hummingbird out to steal the fire from Starwoman." (from Natural History of the Point Reyes Peninsula, by Jules Evens) 

Hummingbird, being so quick and tiny, managed to steal a piece of ember from Starwoman's immaculate buckeye box. He carried it all the way back to the coast, where Coyote, naturally, had already lost interest and wandered off in search of some amusement or other. Hummingbird, desperate to keep the ember safe, hid it in a buckeye tree. To this day, the throats of the hummingbirds in my garden are flashes of magenta flame, as bright as any fire. 

To this day, the buckeye holds fire inside. Make a hearth board from a split branch, and a spindle from a thin straight one, and if you have a good amount of hand-drill fire-spinning skill, you will make an ember right there, between the alchemy of hand and buckeye wood.  

Buckeyes are beautiful trees. They drop their leaves in late August, long before anyone else, in order to cope with the long dry season. Now, their silvery limbs are bent down with the planets of their buckeye nuts. If you've ever come eye to eye with a male deer before, and shared that long moment of surprise, and then timelessness, as you stared into his very large, very dark eyes, you will see why the nuts are called buckeyes! 

It is no easy feat, let me tell you, to coax fire from buckeye wood with your hands. It took a circle of nine women to make these flames by hand, but my goodness, when an ember is birthed before your eyes, and blown to life in a cradle of grass, the fire thus made becomes a being in a way that no lighter or match can approximate, a deity you have welcomed to share your meal, your stories, your hottest wood. 

We roasted bay nuts and chestnuts over the flames, and cooked ash cakes, and simmered madrone berries, red as drops of blood, over those hard-earned flames. (All of them fruits of the year's sun-turned-to-sugar, turned to seed). 

Madrone berries

I am whittling away at my own buckeye hearthboard, and a spindle of elder, to coax an ember all on my own from the wood. This is a hard task for my shoulders, but I do believe that there is something besides strength which helps to birth an ember by hand; I believe we all carry an ember in our gut, in our womb, the spark of creation, and that it is not so much strength, but breath and focus, which brings a literal ember into the world. Anyway, I'm not there yet, but these dark nights have me dreaming. Perhaps by the Yule...

In my mother's garden, the persimmons (great pockets of sun-sweetness) and their leaves are all fire. These fruits are one of my favorites in all the world. They taste of autumn to me, crisp and sweet and cinnamon. There are half a dozen persimmon trees within a five minute walk of my home; this climate suits them well!

And out in the woods, the black oaks, new friends of mine, are leaving beautiful gifts, each an ember in its own way, amidst the leaves. I have been on an acorn-gathering high. Though my yield is rather pitiful, the pleasure I have derived from the slow search amidst leaf litter for the gift of an acorn, velveteen and luminous as amber, is impossible for me to quite put into words. 

Having my hands or my pockets heavy and clacking with acorns gives me a deep old satisfaction. I can hardly imagine anything more beautiful than these perfect parcels.  I can hardly imagine an activity more grounding than crouching down, sifting the bounty of sun-gold leaves, like any bear or deer.

Black oak acorns

We brought some of the leaves and acorns and oak galls from the woods into our home for Samhain, and feasted, letting the wild and our ancestors sit at the table and feast too, bringing the fire inside with candles and the dying leaves.  

About a week ago, with that same group of fire spinning women, I had the great privilege of listening to a Northern Pomo woman named Corinne Pierce speak about her relationship (and her people's relationship) with the plants of this landscape. This is a kinship that stretches back thousands and thousands of years on this very land. When she spoke, I ached, and cried. I looked around and saw many other women crying too. Corinne herself wept when she spoke about a new Caltrans bypass being built through Willits, the territory of her people and an area where she has gathered plants for her entire life. Those plants, she said, are her family. My elders tell me not to tell anything to white people, she said to us. But the plants--the oak trees, the madrones--they tell me to share all that I can with those who will use it. Because the plants long to be used. They long to be loved again by people, to be in communication, in kinship.

Black oak

 I ached when she spoke of her rootedness in this place, how she was literally made of its acorns, because she had eaten them as a child, as had her mother, as had her grandmother, and on and on back into an ancient time far beyond my imagining. I ached because it was a gift to be in the presence of a human being who still carries such a story; I ached because it is so rare; I ached because my ancestors were the reason she is one of only a handful remaining of her people. I ached because I, too, want to belong to this place. 

Coast live oak

Then she, extraordinary woman, told us something so simple and so wise. She said: let the plants tell you what they need. Devote yourself to your place. Learn the plants and animals so that they are your family. Take care of your place. This is how you belong. Taking care, she said, means staying in communication. 

When you gather acorns, bring gifts for the oaks. Her people once left leather, shells, ash, baskets at the bases of their oaks. Much later, when archaeologists discovered these "middens" around the roots of trees, they called them garbage piles. They did not realize that the people who left these gifts were leaving not only beautiful presents for their tree-kin; they were leaving nourishment. All of these things (leather, ash, plant matter) balance out the pH in the soil, lowering acidity. Those "middens" were ancient conversations, held over millennia between humans and trees.

When we don't gather their acorns, the oaks know it. They know it in the language of tannins. Without the presence of human beings and grizzly bears (who we killed off), two of the biggest acorn eaters, most of an oaks acorns stay where they fall (remember, a tree may drop a thousand pounds of nuts in a season). When it rains, the tannins in the acorns leach back down to the roots of the trees, sending them a message—you are not needed. Do not make as many acorns next year. Some trees will begin to produce less, and less, and less...

As I wrote in the essay I helped Jolie Egert Elan of Go Wild craft for her Oak Ceremony last month, before the advent of agriculture, acorns were the staple food for people all around the temperate belt of the world. The word Druid means "oak-seer," or "one who knows the oak." Their rituals were originally held only in oak groves. And of course, before Druids, they were Dryads, women-priestesses who knew the oaks like they were kin, who each had a tree they called sister. My name, Sylvia, means "one who comes from the forest," or forest spirit, or wood nymph. I feel a strange familial thrum in my bones at the thought of women dancing long ago in oak groves. I think I carry them in me still. I think many of us do. When I stand under oaks, with my hands full of acorns, I feel at home in my blood, no matter that my ancestral roots are far away. 

Anyone know the species of this glorious oak? Looks like a coast live oak, but not quite...

All of this—the fire in the heart of winter, and buckeyes, and food made in its heat, and the gathering of acorns—I think the gift beneath the surface of it all, the reason that acorns in the pocket feel like medicine, is because these things make us feel very human. In all of our senses. Fire making. Gathering. Cooking. As Corinne said, we can learn all we need to learn about living in balance on this earth from the plants. They will tell us. If it becomes hard to hear them, we can watch the animals, and learn from them too. 

Yesterday morning, Cernunnos, the Stag Lord of the Woods, eater of acorns, visited my life. A friend had called late the night before to see if I would help her process a young buck she'd found on the road on the edge of one of our regional parks. She had to get to class by eleven, so we rose at dawn. In the early morning light, I found myself with a knife, another woman, and a young buck whose back leg was shattered, whose body was bruised from its impact with a car. There were shards of headlights in his skin. 

I have only done this once before, but it seems that something comes over the body and mind, so that the process itself is somehow natural—no big deal, I am pulling the skin off a buck's body, I am cutting through tendons; I am separating the leg at the joint over my knee, as I might break a stick; etc. We said our prayers over him, of course; we left him offerings of acorns and cornmeal and sage, but the processing itself was efficient, practical, somehow familiar.

It is only later that the true, bone-level impact of the thing comes to you; how much pain he must have been in, and how afraid, battered to death by a car. How his little antler-nubs were just growing for the first time. How beautiful his delicate hooves. What places they must have roamed. Who his mother was. Where he was born. 

I did not take any photos of the process. Somehow it didn't feel right. But I took home the cannon bone from his back leg, the one that was broken. I remembered that bone awls (tools used to pierce leather when sewing it) have been made for thousands of years from the knuckle bones of deer. I found that the break in his leg was shaped just so, like the beginning of an awl. And that the skin around it would make the perfect pouch. 

It is all still in process--the skin scraped to removed the membrane before tanning, the bone left out for the yellow jackets and the ants to clean for me. But there is something in this, some healing I hope—that the terror of this breaking might become something beautiful, a sewing tool, to sew him back together on his spirit's journey with Cernunnos, Lord of Stags, to the Otherworld of Deer. That his body, tossed sidelong by a car, was been honored by being used, not left ignobly to be further battered on the roadside.

It is said that once, animals gave themselves willingly to the bows of hunters, just to hear their stories and songs around their fires as they ate. Like the acorns, relationship comes through use, through need. Relationship comes through recognizing the personhood of all beings, the ember that sparks in the spirit of all things and then, deeper yet, seeing that we are situated within a web of consumption, a web of eating and being eaten one day in return. 

For the rest of that day, I felt like I was in a dream. I couldn't focus on writing, or reading. I needed to move, to use my body. I dug up the garden and put it to bed for the winter, covered in hay. I pulled the roots of my motherwort, and held them for a long time, seeing in them the branches of trees, the antlers of stags, the rivers in the wombs of women, the wisdom of winter, all there in the roots underground. The roots that reach back in my blood, in  your blood, through time, to women and men long ago who crouched under trees, and gathered acorns, and knew what it was to worship and to eat the Lord of the Forest, the old hart. 

A Summer Warp, A Weft of Horse and Firelight

Summer is coming in on the wings of the furred Umber Skipper butterflies...

It is coming in the flowering of the olive trees, which burst into bloom during last week's heat wave, and which also plunged our hills over the edge of green and headlong into their usual gold, and sent me running to the alder-lined Lagunitas creek to plunge my own feet into the water. I am a child of fog and breeze and our Bay's gentle cooling breath. When the air reaches 90 degrees, dry as a bone and as still, I feel like our chaparral plants, wanting to send all my energy down to my roots and go dormant, right then and there.



Though our summers are not wet and green and fecund like the summers we model our cultural conception of seasons upon—the East Coast or Northern European four-season round of orange leafed autumn : snowy winter : gentle spring bloom : green humid wet summer— our dry, gold-grassed summer season (in which rain occurs only in the dreams of the drought tolerant buckeyes as they drop all their leaves in August) was once the time of the great seed harvest. Native women up and down the state would wade out into the mature grassy hills with seed beaters and baskets. A lot of the wildflowers that feed our eyes and hearts with their colorful summer beauty provided literal sustenance for the First People of this land—the clarkias, the blue-eyed grasses, the buttercups, the poppies, the tarweed. And the very act of seed-beating was a dispersal mechanism, as was the burning of grasslands to promote healthier, thicker growth. When European settlers first arrived here, the grasslands were veritable carpets of beauty and food.


In 1850, California argonaut William Perkins wrote—“The plains at this season (the middle of April) are literally  covered with flowers. No garden can compare in beauty to the banks of the Estanislao [Stanislaus]. I think I never witnessed such a profusion of colors, and such brilliancy of hues; and this, not confined to small and isolated spots, but the whole country is one immense flower bed. The hills look like gigantic bouquets, and the llanos like a huge Persian carpet” (quote found in this fantastic document on The Edible Seeds and Grains of California).

In the spirit of the seed-gathering summer season, I have been drawn recently to the round form of the woven basket, both in the weaving of little wild-mandalas and, this past weekend, when I learned the traditional twining technique of soft basket-weaving, used by the Bedouin people for flat saddle rugs and tents, and by the Pomo people of northern California for ceremonial items such as hats.

So below are a few baskets for you, real and metaphoric, and the seeds they have gathered into their folds.

This creek-rock, worn-glass, alder-leaf, mugwort, cow-parsnip flower circle around a dead cabbage white butterfly, was made in the heart of last week's heat wave, by the Lagunitas creek, with my wonderful 12-year-old poetry student. It feels now like a basket holding the first flush of summer, the holiness of our perennial creeks (which are few compared to the now-dry annual streams!) and all that they provide us in the midst of the dry and the heat.

Fibers used are leftover clippings from Pendelton wool blankets. I love that this style of soft-basket twining allows for such a diversity of materials, from jute and dogbane cordage to strips of old cloth, bailing twine, and  even plastic bags otherwise sent to the landfill.

I spent this past long weekend with the beautiful group of women with whom I am taking part in a nine-month Wilderness Skills Immersion, under the big coast live oaks of Sonoma County, weaving soft-fiber baskets in the Bedouin style (taught by the lovely Shira Netanya). It is amazing how, after hours of staring at warp and weft, hours of twining over under over, round and round, the eyes find the woven round everywhere, the basket's locked center, its endless spin.

The fir-branch tripod over our fire, for boiling tea water and roasting vegetables, looks like the inverted beginning of a basket, and the fire herself, of course—a finished one! An embered basket.

Inside the basket of my weekend are the many stars, scattered like so many silver seeds through the night; the big waning face of the moon shining on my own face through the live oak branches where I slept; the herd of feral horses who came to visit the little area of forest where I and a few other women slept, snuffing and whinnying, stomping and munching and otherwise making sleep impossible for a little while. In the deep dark, a gathering of six horses tromping their hooves near your bed is a wee bit unnerving, as much as I love horses, and at one point I had to leave my bed because one of them came right up to it and proceeded to nose about at my pillow. Then he lowered his head in the way of horses and took a nap with his nose inches above my sleeping bag. Now, in the daylight, I wish I'd stayed and felt the sweet warmth of his breath upon me, but in the middle of a dark and starry night, in the middle of an oak wood, a horse is a dark and shadowed shape, the mind is dream-strung—and it is easier said than done to remain flat on the ground while horses prance around...

Needless to say, it was a night whose warp was woven with sacred horse-hair. When they left, I dreamt of them. In the morning, you could see the weft of their tracks through the tall grass.



Over the basket-round fire, I brewed up a pot of very special tea to be shared through the morning, as the robins sang, the kestrel hunted, the quail called out to one another, the black phoebes hawked for insects in the gentle shade. I like to call it the Rose & Smoke Caravan Tea, perfect for a weekend of beds under the stars with horses circling round, of nomadic basket-weaving and firesmoke. It's recipe was created by the beautiful Nao Sims of Honey Grove. It is full of garden rose petals and cardamom pods, chaga mushroom, Earl Grey tea, a smattering of the smoky Russian Caravan. What better way to greet the morning?

The basket of the weekend was full of the sweet strength of circled women, wandering together with weaving in hand. It was full too of the new wildflowers of early summer.

The Mariposa Lily...



... her sister in the Lily family, the Golden Fairy Lantern, whose three petals never fully open, but rather hang down toward the earth, closed like hands. (Both of these wild lilies were prized for their edible bulbs, as opposed to seeds).

The creekside western azalea, who was blooming last month, continued to open, queenly and intoxicating, toward the sky. The western azalea has a special affinity for magnesium high serpentine soils, often presenting a stunning contrast between heady blooms and a barren, rocky substrate.

Yet another little butterfly came to visit, resting on my back for a time, while we gathered for lunch down at the waterfall, swam, learned to finger-weave. Women weaving together by the water. What could be sweeter?

One of my tiny creations from the weekend (and a first attempt, hence the bumps!)... It is a gathering basket for the red alder shade, the dry flush of early summer, the scent of azalea, the whuffing breath of nighttime, moonlit-nomad horses, the embered heart of the campfire, singing to the wanderer and the weaver in all of our souls.

And as a nod to the true artists of the Basket, the First People of the land in Sonoma where most of these photos came from, the Kashaya Pomo...

Pomo Cooking basket, from the Phoebe Hearst Museum

Such baskets need no words, for they are already the story of the whole wild land in one circular metaphor.