Sitting with the Compost

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I scratch away at the straw and leaves and burrow my hand into the heap, just like the squirrels did last night. My fingers slide into damp heat, my wrist itchy with dirt and coffee grounds. I hold my arm steady as long as I can as warm seeps into hot climbs into burning scarred skin. 

But now I know it is cooking. 
This decay is squirming with life, microbes devouring their fill of what we could not. Devour. 
What we let go we pour onto a heap, cover it with earth, feed the fire with water, and nourish it until it happily crumbles into compost for the next thing. 
The next seed. 
The next bloom and fruit.

But it is too hot for me right now. My fingers burn with reactions. I need to sit with this pile, be patient with its process, wait for the natural decline in temperature and activity. I will sit under the pepper tree and write. I will cook vegetables I picked from the fields yesterday in cast iron pans and pickle the rest in cloudy mason jars. I will sing and dance and cry and giggle giggle giggle until we cry again in tents, at picnic tables, held in branches. I will talk with the foxes and the deer as they cross the hollow dip in the mountain where the oaks shade and whisper. I will sit through the ecstasy of my hair being brushed, oiled, braided. I will leave love notes in scavenged mailboxes hanging from trees and squish clay from the rock pile between my fingers and onto my face and feel it crack in the heat.

I will wait for the work to do itself before sinking my pitchfork deep into the crumbling result.

My hands bring earth up to my nose. I inhale the depth and life. I scoop and sift and sniff. I know that even this finished pile of nourishment is not broken all the way down. So I sift out the readiest of the sticks and eggshell strewn bunch and toss the rest back in to cook some more. 

The process unfolds. The breakdown continues to nourish. The decay is the point; without it there is no life, no sweet smelling earth, no stone fruit dripping juices onto chin, chest, toes from a smiling mouth.

I have piled, watered, nourished. Now we decay. Now we delight.


Patterns Alive




Oak leaves and clumps of dirt cling to her old patterns, old memories of baby blankets and calico dresses and tweed slacks. Books, a journal, a mason jars of herby water, a yoga mat, a headlamp compete for space on her calming flat body.

She found me in Oregon. In the back of a house in a front-yard-garden kind of neighborhood. A basement full of porcelain cherubs and yellowing prairie-themed books, the back patio adrift in broken toys and bulbless lamps and penguin ashtrays. 
She lay folded on a table underneath other folded warmth and effort. A pile of blankets and quilts, stained and torn and perfect for picnics and roadtrips and campfires under tall trees. I scooped up the pale pinks and violets  and once whites and promised an extended life, if not an easy one. 
She cradled me back, soft against my belly, and promised she’d seen her share of love and loss and adventure and was ready for more. 

The quilt is the storyteller of blanket world.

Last night,  the ants created more lines and circles and marched spatters of red and black on her back. They found my bare arms, flung out of the too warm sleeping bag and resting above tangled hair. I woke to feathers of touch on my hands, forehead, on bare legs covered by covered down. I brushed little bodies from my sunburnt face, I picked them off my mud flecked chest. I tried not to crush, squish, maul. I just wanted to sleep in my bag on my quilt on the ground underneath the oaks with the sliver of a moon coming over the mountains. 

Maybe they were just a few and would go away, grow tired of this game.

Then I noticed the smell. 
Strong. 
Sweet and spicy. 
Strangely minty. 

Was it the sage growing into the valley? Or that these little mouths ate that sage to give off this dusky incense? Without flicking on a light I knew they surrounded me. I could almost hear them. What by day was an ant-free domain, by night was the I-5 of this acorn antdom. 

And I was the center divide. On a lawless highway.

Have you ever noticed how ants seem to bump into one another as they pass? Like a small town where crossing to the other side of the street isn’t a true avoidance technique, these ants forgo the cowardice and simply body check one another as they move down the way. I’m sure there is information being passed, but I like to imagine all their little ant arms meeting in microsecond Namastes before moving on. Or even high fiving. The things you think of at three oclock in the morning when you discover you are covered with ants and after enough swatting you finally surrender, yes this is happening I need to move back to my hammock. But not before staring at the ants who pay no mind to your squirming body or blinding headlamp and continue with their Very Urgent chores. 

You are slightly miffed to be woken up from intriguing dreams and you dread the fatigue of the morning, but you soon laugh as your days consist of moving rocks from here to there, of sweeping leaves from ancient rugs under more ancient trees, of finding shade to nap under, of talking and laughing and (gratefully) grieving at picnic tables and in tiny kitchens that remind you of boats. 

And you are excited: that you have time to notice the ants’ customs, to see this nocturnal commotion, and most stunningly, to recognize that you (I) were able to SMELL ANTS and know that that is what you (I) were smelling!

I know in my sun strengthened bones that the wild is returning not only to this campsite but to my body and heart night after night, day after day, breath after breath. That sleeping outside is not a punishment, it is an honor; to hear the coyotes scream their prayers into the canyons at dusk, to breathe in the midnight breeze as it flutters past my face and into the trees above, to feel the vibrations from roosters crowing as Venus skims the mountaintops, to step onto the leaves and dirt and feel the earth on my skin first thing after sunrise. 

Primal is not a derogatory term here. It is welcomed, nourished, bathed in sun and starlight.

Here I can howl with the wild. 

Here I can hold the earth in dirty fingernailed (happy) hands.

Here I can SMELL ANTS.

At the Edge



Islands of life in this watery decomposition

Shards of light penetrating the layers of death

I stand in the flowing water
My feet sinking into memories of mountains, the remainders of forests, the ideas of rocks

I stumble though the brush and brambles and saplings to escape 
the wet wonder of my soul

I stumble right to the water's edge
where the darkness sings me in


Fiction: Drowned



In case you have been wondering I drowned last week. 

I sunk up to my knees in the muck I created and decided that once it reached my thighs (which it shortly did) that I would dive the rest of the way in. 

So here I am at the bottom of the pond, at the bottom of my world, at the bottom of my understandings and accomplishments and misses. 

I swim through the darkness slowly and carefully, hands outstretched to sift through the mud and sticks, the decomposing squirrel bodies full of decomposing nuts. 
My toes dig into the dense fabric of the water, lines of swaying algae and dots of fish stretching to the surface I can’t see. 

The sharks are tiny and sharp in this pond. They nip at my ears and whisper secrets into the holes they create. They imagine themselves into my belly and flutter as underwater butterflies in an unknowing cage. They squish themselves between my ribs and dance in my heart, their fins swirling in the blue ocean of my blood. 

The pond isn’t deep enough for me to disappear into the wonder so I wriggle myself deeper and deeper through the thickness. My body breaks down, breaks through to the night sky below. My eyes become stars, my fingernails planets, my mouth open and hot, the sun.

Change Due


 

I drive. The fields are more than yellow reaching up the coast, up oak studded hillsides, up to Pacific colored sky, reflections of clouds on the ocean far below. 

I drive and let the thoughts come and go as I pass adobe missions and forgotten towns and catch glimpses of cloth wrapped heads, strong hands, bodies twisted picking and sorting and loading in vast fields. 

I drive and keep driving and keep driving. Away and into the tears. Away and into the joy. The past, the future, the now.

I drive and listen to the wind buffeting the car as it gusts off mountains and over pale brown soil, the whispering of trees in its breath. I poke at my phone and blast overly played playlists reminding me of people and places far behind. I listen to the whir of internal mechanics, the car’s and my own, reverberating against the sticky asphalt and billboards proclaiming Garlic Wine! and I wonder where the ability to steer between us starts and ends.

I drive and in driving I sit with myself for hours. I sing and think and listen and see. 

I drive. 

I am drive and motion and blurring lines. The journey is now. The destination is (already) here.

Fiction: Storied rocks



In case you have been wondering, the whistle I carved out of a willow branch has yellowed and dried into a stiff carcass of what was the notion of a tree. I keep it on the mantle next to the heart rocks and autumn leaves and smooth river stones that you I we collected on this journey. 

I am weighed down with the heaviness of hearts broken out of granite and shale. 

You are my heart and I hold your weight in my hand, craggy and cold, warming to my touch. 

If I could skip these stones over water, over the bay where we sat, feet in the sand, faces shining up to the full moon overhead, would the rocks sink to the bottom? 
Would they find a firm place in the muck and seagrass or would they toss along with the broken beer bottles and baby shoes and lost wedding rings? 
Would they become sand? 

The stories they could tell of warm pockets and well lined hands, of being witness to lovemaking in tents under the stars, of hawks screeching overhead and tiny ants crawling over imagined backbones.

All these stories crumbling into fragments, each grain a word, a sigh, the flip of a hand as you walked away. At the bottom of the ocean, all our stories mix and mingle, our worn heart rocks become a shifting solid ground. 

A home for Others in the darkness. 
Finally home.

What We See


Brown eyes squinting, head cocked, she scanned the desk. 
She picked up and placed down pens, a pad of paper, various notebooks for scheduling. 
"Hmmmm," she sighed.

Her fingernails clicked against the hollow plastic keys, numbers responding, popping up on the small rectangular screen in concert with the tapping. 

“Where is my calculator?” she mused, once again searching the desk. 
“I guess I’ll have to just do the tax in my head,” she said as she tapped one then five then the X symbol then period zero eight five. 
“I mean,” she said, “it’s like this big.” 
She lifted her hands a foot above the desk and made a square shape, framing the exact same shape and size of the calculator she had just released from her left hand, the one sitting on the desk. 

I was confused. 
Maybe she meant “credit card machine.” To swipe my card. But no, she had said calculator several times, usually while punching the numbers into the calculator. Maybe she had another one that was her favorite and this was just a crappy old one that would have to do for now. And really, if she hated it so much she could’ve used her Iphone; it was right there next to the chunky grey calculator. 

She turned the device so that the numbers faced me, so that I wouldn’t have to read them upside down like one of those old school kid tricks of spelling out “boobs” 58008. 
Made you look. 

She said, “This is so weird, where is it?” as the 126.275 flashed on the screen. 
My total charge, calculated “in her head.”

“Oh wait,” she blushed. “It’s this, isn’t it?” 
She grabbed the calculator, held it up to the light, doubting its authenticity. 
“That is so weird. Wow. And I got sleep last night.”

She was embarrassed, I was embarrassed. 
I was also more than slightly distraught that I was her new patient. She stuck the needles in just fine this time, but what if next time she couldn’t “see” the needles? Ouch. 
Yet I was also fascinated by this temporary lack of recognition, this momentary blindness that prevented her from seeing the object in her hand. The object she was using as though it was an extension of her brain, watching the numbers change with symbols and clicks. 

How many times does this happen to us in a day? Maybe not on such a noticeable scale, but in smaller ways: our glasses on our head, keys in our hands, toast burning in the oven when we do not remember making toast. 
Or in larger ones: how many objects, animals, people do we simply NOT SEE in our every day lives?
Maybe this world is a whole hell of a lot more crowded than we think it is.

It also made me wonder where the line between Me and Other Than Me is drawn. When I have a calculator or phone or sewing needle in hand, does it become part of my anatomy for that time? Is that why when I leave me phone at home these days I feel like I’ve forgotten a vital piece of my being? Or is that just addiction? 

Perhaps objects simply exist when we think them hard enough into being. Like how European ships on the horizon were said to be invisible to Native Americans at first. We don't see things until there is a want or need or context. That goes for people too. I've had people look right through me enough to feel this reality. I am at times someone's invisible calculator, but I am holding plates of food instead of a screen of numbers. And how many times have I walked past a homeless person without looking into his eyes in fear of connection, in fear of making him human to me?

She apologized again, nervously laughing off the bizarre misunderstanding between her hands, eyes, and brain. 

I walked out in the office, disturbed. She might be crazy. I mean, did she really think she was going to be able to multiply 15 by .085 in her head? God knows only a 5th grader could do shit like that. 

Bat. Shit. Crazy. I thought as I walked across the street, hoping I would dodge the cars- seen and unseen (both them and me).