Lock and Key

In my dream I open my mouth wide and reach the key inside. I find the metal lock and nestle the key into the crooked gate. Turn and click. Something is happening. I can pull it out now. I have passed the test even though I don't know what is being tested. 

But as I pull the lock becomes bigger, lodges in my throat, fills the cavern of my mouth and presses my tongue deep into my jaw. My teeth ache. I am unable to breathe. With the lock in place none of this was happening. Can I put the lock back deep within, click it closed, breathe around the obstruction? I mean, at least I’m breathing, right? 

But no, now that I know its there I can’t go on living with this barrier to my full breath (breadth), my voice. I cannot swallow the imposition away. And so I pull. The lock tears at my cheeks and my lungs ache without air to nourish them, me. 

I pull.

I wake. The heaviness in my chest is still there. I gasp for breath and savor the coolness of the morning air running down my throat.  

I make a cup of tea, meditate (breath in, breath out) go to my desk, flip open my laptop.

Click and release, the screen flashes to life. The keyboard unlocks under my fingers and my voice pours out, pushes that dream lock out, over, gone.

Almost. 

It waits in the wings (under my desk, under my bed) for another morning when I say I am too busy to write (busy with what?), an evening when I claim I am too tired to use my voice (knowing the fatigue will let more truth pour forth), too wrapped up in taxes or paperwork or scheduling more Busy-ness to feel some sort of purpose. 

Without even knowing it I place the lock back into my head with each excuse. I am my own jailer, my keeper, but in my hand I hold the master key. With consciousness, one day, I will be awake enough to raise this hand holding my self-fashioned prison and throw both lock and key into the river. I will simply let the words flow and rust that metal into the riverbed, back into the earth, shards of metal and words flowing to the sea. 

Why

 not

 today.

Lost in the Woods

The salal is thick and covers the contours of the land. Fallen trees decorated with moss and turkey tail mushrooms are ladders through this curvy bramble, this cemented puzzle of branches and leaves, but their bodies only reach so far before returning me to entanglement. The sky, barely visible through waves of trees, is slowly crumbling into darkness. 

Being lost in the woods in a park surrounded by roads and houses on an island surrounded by water isn’t as dangerous as being lost in true wilderness, but at the time my mind cannot differentiate between the two kinds of Lost. I’d hopped off the trail to avoid a puddle of slushy icy mud and reasoned if I just walked a bit this way and that I’d come to the trail again. With less than a half hour until sunset and temperatures dropping below freezing, all I can think is Walk Faster.

I navigate in stars, wheels, a splayed body of radial arms testing out trails that lead to tangles I must push through. My mind says “That will take too long! Try another way!” My heart creeps up into my throat, pounds in my ears so that I can barely hear the rip slip slide of branches against my down jacket. I know this feeling of panic and I know it won’t help me find the trail. I breathe into my belly and my belly responds with kicks and flutters. She is here with me and I say, “We will be OK.” I hope it to be true. 

I come to an opening in the dense forest. My eye is following the blackness creeping from the ground and up the trees. Lightening? I wonder. In the charred clearing I find a small fuel container, melted plastic bottles, a white shirt (unburned) hanging on the end of a downed trunk. Then I see the camp. The shelter is made of tree limbs and there is something inside, a green suitcase of somesort but being the polite (anxious) person that I am I do not investigate the contents of the dwelling. I don’t want to go anywhere near it. I feel like I’ve stumbled into someone’s living room and although I am pretty sure there is no one around I can’t help but feel like it was my fault I ended up here, as if I was being nosy. Am I being watched, tracked, lured somehow? I think I see a movement in the camp. 

I don’t turn back to see if it is a man, a fluttering cloth, a bird.

I scramble up the hill.

I want to find a trail, any trail, and go home. Just walk in a straight line, I tell myself. Stop doubling back, I chide. Asphalt roads on two sides, trails on the other two, I can break out of this box. Walk. Keep walking.

Kicks in the belly.

I need to keep us safe. 

I push through bushes and climb over nurse trees towards the remnants of sunset. There is a break in the bushes. The trail was less than a hundred feet away from the camp! I walk. My vision blurs in the dusk and I turn around quickly to find shadows hiding in the hollowed out curves of the trail. There is no one following me.

We are OK.

I let my mind wander and it soon outpaces me. My hands gravitate to my belly and the wanderer within. I think of all the women who are forced to walk on trails that were not loops in parks, to be forced off onto paths or through thickets they never imagined they’d face, through woods that were not leading them back to a warm home. Women whose bodies swell with the ocean inside as they cross the sea in leaky rafts and over-burdened fishing boats. I imagine them rubbing their bellies and telling the babies inside that they will be OK, we will be OK, and wanting to believe it is true as the water washes over the deck and pale, drawn faces search the horizon for shore. And once they are on shore they walk, they stumble, they rely on whatever they can find to nourish the life inside. They find camps and perhaps worry about their safety among a bramble of strangers. They search for a trail to lead them away from the camp in offices designated for refugees where they hope to find a country to take them in. Somewhere they can create a new home. Somewhere their baby can be born and thrive. Out of the woods, out of the danger of forced transience.

I walk faster as the forest gives way to a clearing I know means I am just a car ride from Home. I am tired and grateful and tell myself that next time I will pack a headlamp, food, water, one of those foil blankets, because who knows what can happen in the woods when you go off the path. Or stay on it. Nothing is certain. I am grateful for this life I have, this life I am holding within me. I am in awe of those women who hold chaos, grief, and loss with the other few possessions on their back as their bellies swell with life and hope in a bittersweet counterbalance.

Spider

He sits in the corner of the kitchen window and waits patiently. He’s been there for months and I feel like we have an understanding. When I come downstairs in the morning, ready for my cup of tea, my egg, an avocado perhaps, he is there and his threads span half the window and across the cupboard. I break an anchoring line to get to a plate. The web collapses up into its stronger half. Filaments float and flap in the drafty room of our old house. 

The spider stays huddled in the corner at first but soon ventures out to assess the situation. Is it a trapped fly or vandalism? Sometimes I feel bad and stick a slow moving fruit fly onto the web. I feed you, you help me, I say to him, mumbling at the end, just watch your boundaries sir; the dishes will not be bound in by your handiwork. 

He sits in the corner day after day and I wonder what he thinks of us. His many eyes watch us shuffle over the sloping floor in the dark of the morning, watch us wash and cook our vegetables, watch us dance to the music of our record player drifting in from the living room. What does he make of our conversations, our silence, our silly songs about bacon and bellies? Does he claim ownership as much as we do over this small plot of land, this mossy crumbling house, this fly-flecked window? 

The thing about Spider is that he never seems offended. He doesn’t take our pushing back at his expanding boundaries personally. He adapts to his newly shaped home and catches winged ones just the same. But every morning I come downstairs and find he has once again stretched out his territory and it hangs on the handle of a teacup or the husk of an ear of popcorn drying on the shelf. He doesn’t apologize like I do. Spider lives in the moment. In his corner in the house we share. He is the closest thing to an indoor pet I have had in ages but there is no cuddling or litter boxes to change. There is symbiosis and wonder, respect and patience. We both want flies dead, we both get what we want.

A Jar of Red and Heart of Gratitude

I hold the pot and wait to stir. 

My heart is stirring before the flow starts. She is laying on the dirt. We are holding her legs, holding her head. Feathery strokes of fingers on neck, she stops struggling. Nature whispers to her muscles to be still, to breathe deeply, to trust the end. Her eye is turned towards the tree, a rope newly hanging from a limb. Her eye is turned towards the weeping sky. Her eye is still and softly yellow, the pupil a slit into another world, the future. 

I wait to stir. I find myself whispering Thank you Thank you Thank you.

The knife is sharp and quick against her throat. The skin is thin under coarse fur the color of desert earth. Her neck opens up crimson blood and white cartilage. I stir as the red collects in the pot I hold, shaking I stir, still mumbling thank you thank you thank you I stir as her lifeforce is pumped into my pot. I catch the blood to be made into food. I admit it sounds grotesque but blood is edible and nutritious and now I see it as another way to honor the life of this goat that is presently somewhere between goat and food. GOAT/FOOD When is that line drawn? When she was born into the care of humans, as she lay dying at the hand of a kind man, as it is butchered into small pieces that will fit into a pan? Maybe there is not a line, was never a line or an order. FOODGOAT

I stir. The blood separates and coagulates and I scoop out the solid bits as her muscles twitch their last. I set the deep red aside to help with the hauling of the body into the air, the skinning, the evisceration, the blessing of making this muscled gift an edible feast.

(Do these words affect you? Is your stomach turning, your mouth watering, your mind squirming to picture something else than this image of a goat bleeding out into a pot, into the earth? This is where we are. This is why I’m here. This is uncomfortable. This is the reality of eating meat. This is what I believe in and I want you to believe in it, too. Its not that easy, I know. We do not want to know the details, do not want to think about pulling a knife against a living being’s throat and being with them as their heart beats them to death, as they take their last breath, as their legs stop kicking underneath our palms. I am choosing to feel the conflict between gratitude and horror. I want to see/know/feel how easily life can cease. I want to appreciate who my food has been as a living breathing being to appreciate it even more on my fork.)

We continue, blood on our hands, warm body against ours as we lift her off the ground. The skin slides along the torso over a stratum of fat and fascia. It comes off surprisingly easily with knife against fur skin almost muscle and bone. Tug out and down, slide hands in and separate the layers. So many layers. We tug and cut and pull until the body is naked and cooling.

After the udder is cut away, a slow slice down the middle from pelvis to sternum is all that is needed for the jewels of innards to fall into my hands. I hold the blue-tinged intestines and slatey gray stomach and purple green gallbladder. As the body is emptied out of stomach and spleen, heart and lung, kidney and liver the warmth and beauty astounds me. The architecture and soft simple curves of complex systems supporting life rests in my hands. We are all soft inside and I see the emptiness of the now carcass (goat/carcass/food) and am struck with the sudden knowing that this is me upside down in a tree. My body is a sharp blade away from a shell of meat and bone and fat. Hollow and mysterious and always seconds from no longer existing in the way that I live/write/eat/slaughter/survive presently.

Blood and fat and fur on my hands, I pour the pot of bright red liquid into a jar for the ride home where it will be made into sausage with apples and onions from the land. I thank the goat for all she has given, all I have learned, how she will nourish our community at the harvest celebration that weekend. I thank her for reminding me how fragile and dependent and connected we are as farmers and animals and humans and community. I thank her for the opportunity to be witness to all that sustains us as people, for the opportunity to take responsibility for how I nourish my body. 

Thank you for making me stir with discomfort and awe.

This is life and death, this is gratitude.

The Sea Within

I feel the details crunch, shift, sink under my bare feet. 

Along the water's edge the moments drift in and out on the incoming tide. 

I catch words in the waves, I let my voice tumble into the sand and bury itself like a crab. 

Here on the edge of the world, there is nothing but this step into the damp, this wrist catching the sun, these eyes searching for fish and mountains. 

I can breathe here. 

I scoop up mama ocean into my hands and kiss her elusiveness. 

I am unsteady and seasick, I am whole and more than whole. 

My bones are sandstone and my skin a glassy bay at dusk. 

My blood floods salty and bright as the polished rocks under my feet. 

Skin swells and lips burn and it is hard to see the horizon with all this light between here and there. 

Back to the wind, push me forward, push me home. 

I can feel the sea within. 

Flowing

Constellations in relief, black as night spinning and expanding in the void.
No clear edges on the individual, no clear boundaries on the bunch.
A universe creating itself beneath the sink.

I did not find the mold first. The water streaming down the kitchen floorboards was the countdown to exploring the space. I say ran down because the old house is slouching into the earth and in our lives carrots and cherry tomatoes and water runs east across the old growth grain. East towards the sloping garden, foraging turkeys, towards stretching trees and looming sunrise. The water seeped into the crack between the kitchen and porch taking an alternate route into the bowels of the house. This on a day when fall pranced into the room and shook its soaked body like a golden retriever returning from a glacial lake.

I am still in my pajamas as I tear the linoleum off the cupboard sole and twist open freeways of pipes warm and dripping. Bits of bloated food and indecipherable sludge coat the interior landscape. How much is hidden inside smooth white! How many indigestible, un-washable layers are represented here? I take each piece and soak it in vinegar (pipe pickles!) and scrub with an old toothbrush. I watch gunky enamel fall into the bowl.

I am disgusted and relieved. It feels good to clean this out.

Inside almost matches outside but the problem is not solved.

The water still tumbles over grain.

The problem is deeper. Underground.

I run a metal snake through the exposed arteries of the house and do not find a blockage. I find pig grease and human hair and an amalgamation of meals long forgotten but the snake’s mouth is hungry after a few grotesque pulls. A twist in a pipe, detritus accumulation, blockage I cannot reach.

I think about all that is flowing inside me. I think about the universe of love and dreams streaming through my life, mostly unobstructed. I think about the bends where half-digested ideas accumulate and block the passage out of all that is no longer needed. 

I am scrubbing, snaking, clearing. I am having trouble reaching the basement. This goes deep. 

How do I restore the flow without tearing the house down? 

Go outside.

My pajamas are soaked with grimy water. I go visit the turkeys in a dress over wet pants and wellies. I give the goats apples and collect eggs from the hens. I pluck cherry tomatoes from the matted green arms of the garden. Blackberries, plums, pears, apples fall onto the ground where I cannot catch my fill. Beets grow next to carrots and parsnips and turnips. Winter squash begs for space underneath popcorn eight feet to the sky. The flow of life and food is all around. Outside and in.

We will nurture the house back to life, heart in fiery coals, friends’ laughter beating strong, the stove's belly warm with plenty. The blockage is not permanent; it loosens with care and community

(and perhaps the healing of a plumber navigating the constellations and freeways and dark underground universe of the basement).

These pipes flow. The land absorbs. We all thrive.

Peeling memories

 

Skin peels like fish scales from my dry palms. Once water-soaked pruney, blistered and bloody they are disrobing their armor, pushing pink newness to the surface: a circus of circles where toughness once lay. 

Bits of torn skin catch on my clothing. 

There is the rub.

With time and without oars muscles once taut soften, recede, ebb. I am flooded with panic and want to re-seed my memory, want to hold onto to all the little motions and thoughts that have been left in the wake behind. I want to wrestle that feeling of Fuck Yeah back into my gut where it happily nested, made my heart chirp in appreciation and spring forward out of my (count the ribs) cage. 

The bird has fluttered and flown and I squint at the horizon searching for signs of feathers and sound.

My legs no longer wonder at the ground before them in weak anticipation of movement. It is I who am moving now, not the sole of the boat. There are no waves pushing plastic and vibrating through every fiber of my body, my soul. When I lie down there is no need to compensate to stay on the bunk. When I place a jar on the counter it stays exactly where I put it. 

This predictability makes me both relieved and unquestionably sad.

A few weeks ago I stood on a dock in Ketchikan in the middle of the night and I knew anything was possible. Not thought it. Knew it. As the days turn to weeks and now a month from leaving Victoria in a rush of horns and paddles, I am struggling not to grasp at memories and feelings of a three-week stretch of the unpredictable, of despair and magic. I find myself pulling at threads of images and trying to tuck them in around me like a Binkie. 

You know Binkie, that vomit-stained blanket you drooled on as a kid and wouldn’t leave home without. It was torn and faded and chewed. It smelled like pee and moldy broccoli with a hint of baby powder. It had seen you through the tough times of crawling and walking and sleeping on your very own for the first time in a dark room in a dark house with space space space all around. But with Binkie you knew all would be OK, that you were safe and courageous. So you held on and cried a lot (and died a little) when it was taken away. 

What now would remind you of your bravery?

My memories of adventures are like that: I don’t see the stains or smell the putridness as I wrap myself in the security of knowing I DID something. I survived. I can do anything. I want to hold on to all that made me come alive out there even if half the time I was out there I was distractedly thinking of back here. 

No matter, when I looked up from the spinning in my head I saw whales and porpoises and sunrises over glassy water. I saw mountains resting their heads on pillows of cloud. I saw double rainbows through whitecaps and stars through darkened shrouds. I felt salt and wind and somehow felt the sky, too. I heard the salmon jumping at sunset and humpbacks crashing ahead of us in the night. I was scared and electrified by joy. I was a spectrum of all I could be when I settled into the moment and enjoyed where I was.

The ocean was my blanket.

Now I see the sunflowers against a backdrop of pine and cedar. I hear the sparrows in the field and the chimes on my porch where I sit and type and breathe in evergreen. I feel the eternal wind that still blows around this earth, that took us from Port Townsend to Ketchikan and that I flew through home. 

As the muscles and memories from adventure fade, as the skin and images flake away, I remind myself that THIS is the adventure. Every minute of every day there is adventure if I can just stay present to it. Burn the Binkie! OK, maybe not burn but don’t be afraid to fold it neatly, place it on a shelf to occasionally pick up, shake out, breathe deeply into the weave but remind myself that I don’t necessarily need a trinket or image to remind me of who I am and what I can do. 

I am a composite of everything I have ever done and may not remember.

I wrap myself in the present moment, whale songs submerged (yet echoing) under the rustling of dry grass and fall asleep on solid shifting ground, safe and brave and sound.