not native fruit

artichoke

 

lughnasa 2009

today is lughnasa, the celtic holiday celebrating the Descent of the Sun.  Summer turns the corner today and the Sun begins its yearly trek back toward its Nadir. 

for me, August has always had a particularly golden-hue, moving towards the colors of Autumn.  Enjoy the sweet melancholy of the mellow End of Summer season.  What's not to love?

flag of flame

California, good-night. 

backpacking trips

G. is going on two backpacking trips this month.  He just returned from the first one this evening, and he has some beautiful photos, which I will share in the coming weeks.

He went on this first trip with an old hiking buddy who is starting with Alzheimer's - he seems pretty much the same as before, perhaps a bit dispirited - and the buddy's 30-year old son. That was the young man's first time backpacking.  The three had a good time. 

primordial fourth of july

my partner, g, and I went for a hike this morning in wildcat canyon park.  i won't name the trail, because i don't want it to be swarmed.  it was pure magic.  the trail was embedded in a tangle of eucalyptus, flowering buckeye, live oak and bay trees, many of them slithering across the ground like mossy snakes.  their ancient boles were twisted, gnarled, buckled, gapped and crazed.  We came upon a large hole in a tree with a shelf of scalloped white tree lichen inside the size of a cake-dish, and the shiny sap-sided hole was abuzz with busy honey-bees. 

As we hiked along the trail with blue sky visible in a thin path directly above our heads, we occasionally noticed brightness in the distances beyond the trees - sunshine on the grassy hills around us, dry in july and brilliant with the sheen of sun on straw.  Under our feet we turned up ocean-rolled black stones and the layer directly below the surface of the trail was pure sand. 

Later on our stroll we came upon a sort of natural amphitheatre on a miniature scale.  The lower half of the terraces were papered in large deep green ferns and black rocks.  The upper layer was dark with criss-crossed and roiling boles and boughs of trees with heavy canopies of leaves.  Through the ferns and boles of the thick tree cover roamed unfettered cows, eight of them, some of them with young.  We never think of cows as primordial, but of course they are - sacred in many cultures - and these beautiful bovine presences, gigantic and rounded, surrounded by forest, ferns and vines, seemed ancient and majestic in my eyes.  Black, chestnut brown with white, golden and pale, they were slowly, gracefully making their way along a narrow switchbacked trail down the arboreal slope to the creek below for water.  A community, yet each one clearly individual in its motion and consciousness.

In the warm air above us, buteos hovered for many minutes before flapping briefly to move on in their hunt.  We saw a group of five wild turkeys, two adults and what looked like three teenagers, in the brush.  On our return walk we sniffed the sweetly fragrant blossoms of the buckeye tree standing near the short overgrown bridge across the tiny creek near the trailhead.  Our noses pressed on either side of the blossom, it only made sense to kiss beneath the blooms.  What a sweetness~!  You should definitely try this sometime.  I recommend it. 

the five elements and the sweatlodge

Reading Christal Quintasket's - Mourning Dove's - memoir of her life as a Salishan Indian in the late 19th century.  She describes the children's traditional spiritual training - which was carried on simultaneously with their Catholic upbringing - in detail, especially how they went out at night to find their spirit-guides, beginning at age 5 or 6.  She says the most powerful Spirit Guide to connect with was the spirit of the Sweat-lodge.  It had a 'ribbed, conical shape' and was composed of the same Five Elements we find in Chinese Daoist cosmology. 

Mourning Dove writes, "No other guiding spirit could ever overcome this power because 'it' had five special strengths: wood for ribs, fire for heat, stones (chinese: metal) for stamina, earth for support, and water for cleansing.  In all, it was a symbol of combined strengths, much more than the abode of any animal or spirit."

All of these elements are 'interpreted' basically in the same way as the chinese interpretation.  Metal means 'minerals' and is good for structure, organization and upright posture.  Wood is often symbolized as beams, columns or posts, because it is the element of 'manifestation,' ie birth, growth and development.  The other elements seem self-evident and don't need explanation.  In comparison with European and also with East Indian cosmologies, Wood is equivalent to Aether (the space that allows things to happen, allows movement to occur, etc), and Metal/Mineral is equivalent with Air.

The Five Elements are a picture of 'wholeness,' they represent archaic science's understanding of the composition of Creation.  None of these words are really adequate, however.  'Archaic' is not quite right, rather what is meant is the kind of science that preceded what we now call 'modern science.'  String theory may relate to this former scientific theory when viewed from a creative standpoint.  *smile*  Also, Creation is probably not the correct term either, but I don't think we really have an adequate term for 'this experience' we all concur that we are having, both in its consensual forms and its non-consensual aspects.

Anyway, I find the Five Elements 'poetic' and enriching in the way that poetry is: sensually, imaginatively, insightfully.  Therefore, I like to dabble with them.  See my other website for more info on one of the ways I am doing that.

 

lenape nation of pennsylvania/writings of Mabel Dodge Luhan

Reading essays from "At Home on the Earth."  Discovered Meridel Le Sueur, whose essay "The Ancient Peoples and the Newly Come" was very moving to me.  I haven't read much about the mid-west.  It's always amazing to me that people often think I'm from the mid-west - and it's true my father was Scandinavian, but not a farmer, rather a seaman from Denmark, and he wanted to keep as close to the sea as possible! - was not a land-lubber at heart by a long-shot.  So he settled along the Delaware River, near its mouth in Delaware Bay.  He liked the semi-indigenous people of that region.  By the way, if you'd like to see a wonderful video produced by the University of Pennsylvania about the Lenape people, called the Prophecy of the Fourth Crow, click here.  It's a YouTube kind of thing and lasts about six minutes.

The people pictured would be the native people of our area.  I cannot become a tribal member because I can't prove my ancestral relationship to the tribe, but that is all right.  There are many of us who can't make the paper trail connections, but we know what our heritage is.  Even if I didn't have ancestors from the local native american mix (Nanticoke, Powhatan, Lenape, Shawnee, Mohawk, Seneca, Susquehannah, etc) I could still be a 'Friend' of the Natives because it was the culture I grew up in.  I could not agree more with the motto of the Lenape Nation of Pennsylvania, "Lenape Culture - The Root of Pennsylvania."  For me, this is true.  For me this is the root of the culture I was brought up in, although we labored to assimilate into what we thought was white culture.  We had a sort of 'dual' culture, but the root culture was Indian.

Yesterday, I remembered a doll that came briefly into my hands.  Let me tell a little story here: in our neighborhood a number of my friends had cloth dolls that were black girls on  one side and white girls on the other.  Or dolls that you could turn upside down to make black or white, each with a different pretty skirt.  My husband says he's never seen a doll like that, but he didn't have sisters.  I'm just assuming these dolls were all over, but maybe not.  Who knows? Did you have a doll like that?  Do you still have it?  Anyway, I told my mother I wanted a doll like that, and she said she thought she might have something like that on hand - not exactly the same, but similar - and she produced a small, poorly made cloth doll that frightened me.  On the back of the doll's head, if you pushed the hair aside, there was a small brown face.  It really scared me!  I didn't like the doll, and after not too long a time, it disappeared from my stash.  Don't know what happened to it, but my mother seemed keen on 'getting rid' of things that related to the other cultures we were part of. 

Anyway, can you imagine my surprise when I read about the first doll pictured at the University of Pennsylvania exhibit on the Lenni Lenape?

Anyway, the realizations, etc, keep coming although at a slower pace.  I've begun studying the Lenape Language - also a feature offered by the Lenape Nation of Penna website.I think I've mentioned before how much my mother loved the various native words that were part of our street names, etc, in Philadelphia, and I have found that the sound of spoken Lenape resonates inside me very deeply.  I'm thrilled to have found a venue to study it more.

I've been thinking of my father, and how he fell in love with the people of our area, and married my mother and produced me, when I just happened to read another essay in "At Home on this Earth," this one by Mabel Dodge Luhan who was a wealthy back-Easterner - she felt great discontentment with her own 'native' culture and went through three marriages before she discovered New Mexico, fell in love with a Pueblo Indian named Tony Luhan, married him and lived with him there for forty years until her death.  I love some of the things she writes about the Pueblo, because this is exactly what I found in so many of the people I grew up around: "The Indians all fell into their own soft speech together, a language that was a blending of outdoor sounds, like running water and the wind in the trees, but that was particularly musical from the kindness in it, often falling into tenderness that was very caressing to the ear.  There always seemed to be this loving kindness in them, not sentimental at all but the expression of the smooth concord of their lives."

Mabel Dodge Luhan struggles in this scene to experience the world 'directly,' not through the mediation of the 'great works of art' that she felt sepated her from her own experience of nature.  She writes, "It had begun to appear to me that there had always been a barrier between oneself and direct experience; the barrier of other people's awarenesses and perceptions translated into words or paint or music, and forever confronting one, never leaving one free to know anything for oneself, or to discover the true essence in anything.

"This landscape made me think of a painting by Constable with its thick, soft, faraway clumps of trees, and then I was impatient because I did not want to connect this new world with the old.  I wanted it to be itself alone and not a part of any past I had ever known.  I did not want to be reminded of old familiar things.

"The grassy banks of the ice-cold pale water were as untouched as though no one had ever been there before; no footprints, no vestige of humankind, marred that empty hermitage.  Tall trees stood with their trunks plunging deep into the grass and white violets and wild strawberries were thick in the cool shade.  Everything in this garden was composed like poetry, and romantic like poetry may be.  'Shakespearian,' I thought, and then quickly dismissed the analogy.  Was one to be forever reminded of something else and never to experience anything in itself at first hand?  My mind seemed to me a waste-basket of the world, full of scraps that I wanted to throw away and couldn't.  I longed for an immersion in some strong solution that would wipe out forever the world I had known so I could savor, as though it were all there was to savor, this life of natural beauty and clarity that has never been strained into Art or Literature.  No - everything in the world outside had been distilled into art, defined by ruthless, restless, wordmongers, or other artists in transformation, and they had used it all up.  I did not want that old world any more.  I knew unless I found a new fare I would admit 'actum est' and give up."

Interesting to me, because I went through this exact same phase when I was younger and discovered the wastes of the California desert east of the Sierra, and of Nevada.  I associated this 'awakening to what is' with a spiritual change in myself, less as an aesthetic change, and also interestingly, I associated this change with my husband, whom we had reason to believe was part-Indian (Lenape, like me), and with the natural environment of California with its empty miles of seacoast, its grassy hills, granite mountains and its high desert terrain.  His consciousness seemed already capable of appreciating an environment that to my mind, distorted as it was, was nothing but empty desert or wilderness.  (My mind was 'distorted' by the stereotypes of the mainstream culture of my time, which had no appreciation for desert-terrain, thought it was okay to blow up atomic bombs in it, even though there were people living nearby, not to mention animals and plant eco-systems.  During this period, I lived a kind of 'double life' - what I really felt inside, and what I felt obliged to express and engage in in the outside world.)  I'm finding that as I embrace my innate Lenape cultural-consciousness - and flesh it out by familiarizing myself with the culture as it has been preserved by those who never forgot their true identity - I feel more 'oneness' within myself. 

Well, I hope you can see how the flow of this post holds together.  Wanishi! :-)

singing birds

   Our neighborhood is full of warblers this Spring.  Besides our usual Mourning Doves, California Jays, Crows and Seagulls (with their raucous cries), we've had a very active woodpecker, and a number of true warblers.  To the best of my birding ability, I found out from my neighbor that I am identifying an Oak Titmouse, and a Black Phoebe among them.  I've also spotted American Goldfinch and the beautiful, elegant Cedar Wax-Wing, as well.  We are also being treated to the song of the mockingbird (day and night!)

To identify bird-songs, visit Cornell University's excellent site.  Another good one is www.whatbird.com.  And also www.enature.com/fieldguides is a great source too.

The picture is taken from a greeting card out of Germany: Scissor-tailed Flycatcher by Charley Harper, 2006.  Available from Te Neues Publishing Company.

songbird

I need to hear you sing,
Songbird.
Your note cuts through
To the other world,
Where I live inside,
The green world,
O songbird.
Your green rind sound
Pierces
My upper heart
To remind me
Of the echo of rain-storms
On the moon.
That’s how far I have to go,
To find home.
Your note travels to me
Over a great distance,
Through the loneliness
Of the missing world,
The absence of relatives,
The disappearance of kin,
Other than you
And all the green world
Which holds me,
Lovingly.
Within myself,
The modern world
Of cars, and people and houses,
Falls away
And I am on the hillside
Of bracken
All the way to Grizzly Peak.
I am isolated
In the loneliness
Of the secret half-breed.
The values of
My grandmother
Speak to me
Fluently
Within,
But these words
Cannot be heard
By outsiders.
And that’s almost everyone.
Songbird, sing your green song,
please.

california

i am so moved by the beauty and texture of our environment.  i grew up in philadelphia and i think when i first came to california with my partner in the early '70's and saw my first redwood trees, i must have felt as if i were living in 30,000 b.c.  it seemed like a completely new and different world.

i sense that many people come here to live in berkeley because they want something different, but it ends up being about eating at certain places, getting a good latte down on fourth street or something.  but really all we need is to tune in to the land here - the land, water and sky.  it is pure magic.

The colors, the shapes of the land - the contours of the coastline and of the hills - the shapes and textures of the trees and shrubs - camphor, manzanita, madrone, buckeye, live-oak - the presence of wildlife, birds, foxes, coyotes, deer, raccoon, possums, skunks and squirrels - the clarity of the sky, bright stars at night, clean mineral blue in the daytime, or crystal silver-gray with rain, white with fog.  Rock outcroppings, granite mountains, obsidian chunks, lakes, rivers, the blessed ocean. 

This land reaches out to touch you, it enters into you with its fragrant breath, it makes its home inside you, and all its textures become yours.