Stormy Weather

Trees shift and claw and heave down their bark, leave traces of wet on the sill. The wind screams up the valley, shaking the house, ruffling this heart. Branches break outside my window. I can hear and feel but cannot see where the destruction is coming from, I just see the chaos of movement. I am moving within. I scrape my limbs on the window, sigh at the storm raging inside, batter my mind with conflicting thoughts echoing of something I cannot name or touch. 

The rain begins. The surface of the pond is a million stars exploding, a million oceans created, a million exhalations of snakes and birds and me. I cannot see my reflection or the reflection of trees or sky. I cannot see anything but a disturbance of the surface, a lack of clarity, a texture of additions that cannot be subtracted. Is this seeing? Or not seeing?

The remaining branches bend and shake and lodge themselves under the eaves of the roof. I lay in bed all night listening to them scraping against glass, scraping the dreams out of my head. Dreams of sobbing myself to choking, dreams of anger and accusations and fear. Scrape and scrape awake. I can’t breathe, the pond goes dry. The branches give and break and fall to a ground far below. Crack and burst. I can’t see anything but the darkness and it blinds me to the possibility of light, of stars, of birds. 

This is what there is: a pile of branches and broken windows. A pond of unknown depth. My head and my heart and the hurricane within.

Chalk and doves

I created worlds out of white chalk and the dark shadows of summer’s time. 

Steering bike handles over pavement, sun on my shoulders, hair wet with chlorine and sweat.

Circling round the trees and mourning doves high in the branches, suitcases full of crumbling letters in shrubs, rusty tin boxes holding the treasures of an eight year old. 

Jaguar skateboard, flips and falls, the bump of the driveway terror to my wrists. 

Slender leaves of eucalyptus tearing delicately under wheel, under flip flops then casually tossed aside before jumping back into the pool. 

The days long and languid, Goonies in the afternoon, air conditioned and stale indoors, 4pm light strips through dusty blinds, dusky minds. 

Wrapped in towels and nostalgia, pouring forward into the time of scents and scenes. 

What is different now? 

How has time accelerated into this flow of words and not actions? 

I want the pool and chalk lines constructing a world of solid and fluid, swim and stand, tag not it. 

The light changes, my skin reddens, my eyes close again and again, season after season. 

This is the how and the why, the circle and the shadow. 

The now and the past kicking past, Marco Polo, tag, we’re all it. 

Summer

is
time. 

Gratitude

Summer. I am watching sun filter through old planks of a barn, prayer flags faded and torn, old couches softly decaying in still light. My desk is an old board nailed to sawed off two by fours, light green paint chipping and floating to join the pine needles and crunchy leaves on the dusty floor. Mosquitoes fill the evening-lit air with motion; a thousand specks of life and movement, no reason, no destination.

I am full of gratitude for this past week (and for this year, this life, but I will be specific in an effort to name my joy). This is how:

I am grateful for home-made, home-picked blackberry pie bubbling over and through buttery crust pressed into a cast iron skillet and the smell that fills the house as it bakes.

For the voices of a dozen men and women gathering on the front porch last night to do nothing but sing melodies and harmonies, sing for singing’s sake, sing for the pleasure of listening.

For a discussion at a potluck on that same porch nights before that ended with a promise to think about shooting deer in her backyard to dress, store, and eat for the winter. And how many island gatherings have had conversations centering around self-sufficiency and efficiently and sustainably maintaining an omnivorous diet in non-conventional (but really traditional) ways.

For a swing in the trees that makes my stomach drop every time as my body flies out of the forest and over the road far below.

For telling fantastical stories after the candles are blown out, the darkness ringing with bright laughter. And singing softly to sleepy ears upon waking.

For a house full of lovely people who grow vegetables and make food and call for community in so many different ways.

For the opportunity to open myself ever more deeply to love and connection in all of its various forms.

For bone broth soup made with beef from cows raised less than a mile away and veggies from the garden I help to grow.

For dolphins (porpoises?) surfacing in the sound as my kayak paddles touch glassy cold water. 

For dancing and running and leaping on the beach reminding me that all we are meant to do in this life is have fun and that fun comes in many different forms as does love and pain and growth.

For a tree rotting from within shepherded reverently from sky to ground.

For sleeping outside underneath the stars, underneath a bright moon, circled by a quiet army of trees, circled by quiet arms.

For sipping dream tea in the evenings, laps covered in quilts, bullfrogs shouting stories across the pond, owls questioning everything.

Wings

When they cut me open, the wings will appear. The fledglings will gulp in the blue red air, stretch feathered hollowness, flutter past ebb and flow and find the world. 

Gulp and stretch and flutter and flap. And gone? 

Or circle round and come back.

Or circle round and bring more thread. 

Or circle round this sacred dam, crumble the stones around it, 

release

all 

this 

love.

There is a nest opposite my heart. With jagged edges it is a raft floating in a sea of weedy capillaries, it is a speck in a night sky of electric nerve-endings, it is a woven home lodged above branches of ribs. The nest holds seeds from which mystery will burst through hardened shell, hatch into a creature that will take its own breath, fall at its own pace, make its own flight. 

Through. 

Up. 

Out.

My fingertips wander over smooth skin and seek it out. I press into a tangle of fibers, a tangle of Other, a tangle of me. What is this nest saying? I listen closely, the waves of my fingerprints ebbing on bruises, a rivulet of red flooding Out the pathway in.

Something has been taken. Out. Something of me.

This exchange so clear in its procedure: guiding needle in, click click, flecks of flesh deposited into a tiny jar of sterile water, spindly cells like jellyfish arms trailing below. Little boats of pale pink and streaming red: questions floating beneath a label bearing my full name and birthdate thank you.

This came Out of me. How did it get In, this unclear, non-procedural Other of murky ancestry?

It doesn’t look diseased.

How would I know? A blackness, a rot, a searing stench? Or is it disguised in normalness? 

That is why I am here. 

That is why the questions are being asked. 

That is why I am feeling into my own ideas of what is life, what is death. 

The flapping numbed, my hand held, the chatter relentless. 

Do not distract me! I want to scream. 

I need to listen for the wings! I hold my breath to hear. 

They ask me if I am OK. They ask me if I am in pain. They tell me to have fun on vacation and to have a good day. They cannot feel the birds, they do not know about the nest. All they see is an image on a screen with irregular edges, a nodule to poke and test and monitor. To press into stagnation, to cover with plastic, to wrap up and be done. 

To numb some more.

I do not want to live a numb, bandaged life.

The wings arch against my ribcage, against the elastic holding my Outsides In. Feathers burst through fabric and the fluttering doesn’t stop. Will not stop. My heart dances to the drum of this motion, this outward movement. 

I close my eyes to feel the pain and expansion. 

I can feel the bursting of the past, of hope, of now.

I can feel.

It all.

My wings are free.

Summer

My hands forage for edible leaves in the thick forest of kale. I salvage what I can, leaving the rest for aphids and rabbits and worms (the worms always get something in the end, don’t they, whether it is the tender flesh of bunny or ribs of a browning leaf?). I encircle the stalk with my calloused palms and pull. The sound of separation, of cleaving, the arms of the plant reaching deeper and finally giving as I pull and pull and pull those exploratory veins from the earth. Roots ripped from soil lay in a tangle of delicate threads, moist bits of sand and clay and billions of bacteria falling onto flowers, onto plucked stems, onto the same ground below. Ashes to ashes, dirt to dirt. 

It is time to play Shiva.

As the sun seemingly stalls overhead, summer begins with destruction and life. It is time for the new. I clear beds of green and yellow and brown. I feed the compost with what we didn’t consume. I heap the beds with manure and work it into the hungry ground. Smoothing the bed, I untuck seeds from colorful packets promising bounty and from my fingers nestle each one into its new home. 

This is the business of life. 

This is the virtue of death. 

The work never ends, thankfully. My mind on nurturing the radicle, the shoots and leaves, the fruits of the vegetables' sun-fueled labor, the harvest, the flower and the disintegration. I am here to witness it all as equinox becomes solstice and we begin to fall again towards that equal time of light and dark. I walk through a sea of pale daisies that were once shorn fields of bright yellow dandelions and I wonder what will come next. There is wonder and surprise as I ease raspberries from prickly branches that were once covered with blooms. I marvel as the carrots push at their dirty blankets of protection and show proud shoulders beneath a wispy sky of deep green. I consider the immensity of the universe, what we think we know, what we think we truly are, as each seed becomes something entirely different from what it once was and has always been. 

I tear away the old rotting parts, I plant the new. I farm, I write, I cook, I sit on the porch and let the sun coax out the freckles on my nose. 

This is summer. This is a seed for what is to come. This is the nourishment of now.

The Cliff

Sun stained hair dangles over the edge of the cliff, brushes against jagged rock and flowering grasses rooted into the sea-salted promontory. Chin on the ledge, eyes just over peering down at white foam crashing and dissolving at the base of the vertical drop. 

I hear voices to my right, “That must be at least a hundred feet. Wouldn’t want to time that jump wrong.” A nervous laugh and a shuffle of feet away from the jutting lip of earth. There are tourists here at this “Hazardous Zone.” I am one too, a visitor in this place of soft curves and sharp edges and ants crawling over it all, which includes my body prone on shifting pebbles. 

I look down. 

I feel the distance and the depth of the sea. I imagine whales nesting in kelp gardens and sea stars stretching spiny arms just below the surface. I can feel the myths of this place: tribes of sea people under the waves creating the ebb and flow with their exultant dancing and watery breath, providing shelter for the fish, tending gardens of sea snails, smiling up into the distant sky with bubbles escaping between coral teeth.

A woman lies down on the top of the cliff to my left. She scoots her face past the edge and peers over. She is not me but suddenly I am dizzy, my body tense and drifting over the stone with her motion. I close my eyes and swallow hard. I feel as though the earth will tilt, slide me off this solid rock and sift me into the sea. My body acts independently of my mind, my legs tumble over my head, I am somersaulting through space, torn by rocks as I fall, torn by waves as the plank of me collides with the surface. Rejected by the water, I float lifeless, eyes still closed.

All this movement in the mind, a waterfall of images because of another body that could possibly fall, a woman that could possibly tumble to her death, someone I could not possibly save. What is this? This responsibility for strangers (myself), the fear of others (myself) plunging off very tall things: cliffs, masts, rooftops, bows, bridges. What part of me is terrified of the uncontrolled descent? From where have I fallen? What jagged wall has torn me apart?
Who am I trying to save?

I challenge myself to jump. 

I curl back from the edge, unfold myself to standing and stare out at the vast expanse of undulating gray. Hills of motion and wind rippled valleys around evergreen islands. I breathe in salty air, watch the tour boats create arrows in their wakes pointing to shore. I breathe out the fear and rear back, winding myself up for the step-step-nothing. 

I am in the air, free from gravity for a moment before arcing towards the deep water. My arms open wide, the fluttering of my clothes my feathers, I am flight and forgetful of what earth feels like under talon and hollow wing. The moment comes when my body finds molecules different from the air I’m holding, holding me, and I shatter into a million brilliant shards of sunlight. I dissolve in the white foam and become a billion blinding stars overhead, a thousand flitting fireflies in a golden field, a bioluminescent spume of whale’s breath in the night.

I open my eyes and the woman is gone. My equilibrium restored, I am alone on the edge of this world with the dandelions and ants and pebbles. The ocean has consumed me right here on top of this cliff.
I am no longer dizzy and scared.

I am flight and I am falling,
I am shattered and I am whole,
I am dissolved and I am complete.

I stretch my arms over the cliff then curl back into the world, away from the edge, resting on rock-tattooed knees. The sunlight is glittering on the turbulent water as I stand and walk away. There is a splash. I don't turn around. The tribes below the surface dance on.

Following the Lambs

I pull a thick blade of grass from the field and step over the mesh fence pulled taut along the top of the hill. Patches of stone are calloused white islands in the waves of sun-warmed pasture, outcroppings shorn of vibrant greenery over years of hooves and snow. Or perhaps the opposite? Maybe the sea of grass overtook the bare spots (not really bare but a jagged beauty all their own) and they are the hold-outs, the fighters, the free.

I feel the strength of millennia under my booted feet and turn west, towards the river, towards the next pasture, towards the horizon. The clouds look different here: they are distant and voluminous with pencil-etched grey hulls. All this water in different forms, even this grass in my fingers. The sliver of green fits between my thumbs, I raise my hands prayer-like to my lips and breathe deep beneath the empty spaces filled with blue sky. The chlorophyll-laced intermediary vibrates and screams a song of enclosure originating in my lungs.

A cloud-like body of fluffy white rubs up against my leg, one of his own legs bent and unused. An X on his back, bleating for milk, the lamb calls for nourishment that will soon disappear when the bag of formula is emptied, the last bottle of sugary powder measured and shaken and served. But I pretend that he wants something more, that he likes the actual me of me instead of my potential for surrogate mothering. He looks up and bleats again, my grass blade songs ignored. I drop to my knees, drop the grass to rub his soft wooly body. I learn quickly from him that I can give and receive affection even if it means something entirely different to each of us.

The shepherds move to the fence and the flock of sheep begins to crowd in, eying the lushness of the grass just behind the (usually electrified) mesh. The grass on this side has been chomped and chewed, a full day of jaw work and foamy cud-soaked lips. The flock could probably last another few days here, it seems to me (the uninitiated one), it is not devoid of all life yet. They could eat it down to the bare earth, the bugs, the stone.

But how is that healthy for anything? There are pastures yet untrod and unfertilized. It is work to get them there, to set up boundaries and take them down and set up more, to consider the future of movement, to balance the exchange of nutrients instead of utilizing a system anchored in a depletion of resources and excess of waste. It is work to keep these relationships healthy. It is work that is worth every thought and motion.

Is the grass greener on the other side of the fence? It certainly is longer, lusher, more tender than the clumps in this field. How are the sheep attracted? By sight, by smell, by knowing from where nourishment comes next? Or is it just because it is there? Would they conserve if they knew this was their home for weeks or would they eat just as much and expect something more? Are they content in the movement or is it a constant flow of anxiety?

The sheep are restless, the momentum of unfurling green strands of life pulling them forward. The shepherds unearth poles, gather mesh and metal to reveal an opening. A mass of bleats and strong legs rush in a white stream between the men, a delta of moving bodies fanning out on a half acre of new growth. Heads down, bodies finding their way, the sheep eat. They don’t see another open pasture before them, the one adjacent that they will soon devour, but they don’t need to. 

In this moment, they are content.

I wonder if I will ever be content. I wonder if I will ever be able to focus on the blade of grass in front of me instead of gazing through a cross-hatched mesh of restrictive energy, hungering for what I can’t have, what I think must be better, what I reason will fill my belly in a different way. This kind of life that has kept me running from one pasture to the next, nibbling for a moment but never truly satiated; not due to lack of resources but inability to put my head down and nourish myself with what is offered. Or sometimes lingering too long in a field well past its capacity to feed, a field in need of fallow time to recover, absorb, regrow.

Out of balance.

The limpy lamb stays by my side for a moment and I wonder if he will hold out, wait for a bottle that is not coming instead of taking advantage of the open field in front of him. But he bleats one last time and scampers off with surprising agility after the rest of the flock. Why linger in an old field when a new one is offered? He doesn’t look back.

I walk towards the uneven line in the grass where the fence once bisected the hill. I turn and look to the bare stone island surrounded by nibbled grass where I had stood. And I turn back around. The sheep don’t think to stay where there has been lushness in the past because it seems the safer, more logical option. They don’t stand, wait, long for what they don’t have out of fear. 

They move as they listen to their gut.

A body is close to mine. Not a white fluffy one but a furry faced one just the same. I smile up at the shepherd who takes my hand and walks with me into the next pasture, the greener one, where there is growth and movement and life. And suddenly I realize that like the sheep (and the shepherds) all I need to do is manage the boundaries, listen to my gut to know when it is time to move forward, and let myself cross into that nourishing wilderness when the opportunity arises.

(And, maybe most importantly, that I don’t always have to cross those boundaries alone)