We walk outside to the top of the hill to watch the stars. They are plenty and numerous and active. We talk about the scientists and how much they know about the planets. Why don’t we send a poet into space? Down below the house blinks blue. Tom is watching the TV, and it’s the only light in the big old house. It illuminates the room with rhythmic pulses of blue and shocks of red. In the serious blanket of darkness, it looks like the lantern of one of those ugly horror fish that dwell in the deepest part of the sea, where there aren’t even whales or sharks. Just a quiet lonely light, waving in the distance behind many curtains of dusky water. The house an the organism and the TV its awful beating heart.

sun day, scale and reckless

Powerfully rowdy day in the field today. After three or four glum fall days, the sun finally showed and it sends me into a fervor of energy. I take off layer after layer. I feel stronger today than I have at any other day of the trip, including the first two weeks when I still had my virgin farm energy. I am jumping around, swinging the shovel and wrecking stick around my head and neck. Adam and I do some amateur landscaping. Carving terraced plots into a hillside of hard packed clay. The first part of the task is pure catharsis. Slamming anything metal as hard as possible into the ground, over and over to remove the clay. I try to make a little dance out of it, but I end up almost whacking Adam in the head a few times. We engineer little passages in the stone walls of the terracing for drainage, so the pots do not become lakes. Once we’re finished, it seems like a science fair representation of a Utah desert. Burnt red clay valleys, with little canyons poking and winding around sheer cliffs of granite. I imagine all the fun the ants will have in this new terrain. Tiny troops and intrigues played out on a smaller scale. Scale is such a crucial phenomenon in the experience of the world. We have these great looming land figures on earth – the pyramids, the grand canyon, the Nile river, the Amazon. But the entire Pacific must look like a puddle to the angels above. And our human progress and immigration, our wars and leavings and romantic returns, seen instead as lines of frenzied but quite literate beetles, milling back and forth between dense hives. Our population growth has more akin with the gnats and mosquitoes than it does with angels, that’s for sure.

The sun makes all the work tolerable, even enjoyable. Just a powerfully rowdy day, slinging dirt around. Making a mixture of dirt, saw dust, fertilizer and this white powder Tom calls lime. I am wary of any white powdered substance, except salt, but it does not burn. (yet). We mix the ingredients in a wheelbarrow like a big earth cake. Tossing buckets around our heads and down hills. Rolling and working always but still injecting some chaos and energy into the mixture. We young must seem like antelopes to the man in the window watching us, sprinting crazy with energy out the front door, jumping down steps and off rocks to the valley below. Lifting and tossing and bending with no grimaces. Tom the farmer lumbers behind us, moving with the progress of the old, which is less like the motion of an animal and more like the motion of a tree, or a block of earth, sighing slowly once, over the patient course of decades . We must seem like hummingbirds, like cheap shafts of light in a cup. Expending our precious and diminishing energy in profligate fashion, spending and spending on the most menial things. Going to bars. Running for the sake of looks. Lifting and pulling and squeezing. Cracking your back and calling it exercise. Using and rushing and lifting and yearning with all of the spastic dendrites in your body, roaring and winding their arms in unison like a crowd of drunken soccer fans. Anybody who has been in the center of a college campus will recognize this energy. It is like an airborne intoxicant. Not the motion exactly, but all that pent up juice, roaring at the various dams of young adult bodies, searching for some release. A cloud of youth infects us all with energy and, of course, with mischief.

You’re like a Sunrise

I rise early this morning. 5:50. I roll back frustrated, and somehow time progresses nearly an hour. 6:40. Still very early, yet I am up, and will be happy to have some time to breath in my coffee before work begins. I walk upstairs and surprise Tom. He is an early riser. Up every day at least by 5:45, if not earlier. In the mountains here in Mendocino, that’s far before the sun. He tells me I am waking up earlier and earlier, and asks me if this is a good sign.

In response, I walk onto the porch to watch the sunrise. I am rarely awake for this event. The last time I saw the sunrise was almost three years ago, on top of the Great Wall of China. Huddled with a group of American students on an ancient crenellated rook, watching the sun rise and make shadows of all else form. Watching the famous stone architecture turn from stone, to black teeth, to nothing at all as I shielded my eyes. Watching the sunrise in earnest is a sort of paradox. Where else do you pursue the vision of something you cannot truly look at? Upon climax, at the very apex of reaching your goal of sun worship, you must look away. Suddenly the phenomena has showed its true, royal face, and we are all reminded of our common blood.

I stand on the porch. Above me to the right the moon still twinkles as an ever lighter scythe. The color of milk diluted with water. Over the lowest reaches of the Cascades, there is an amber glow. First, in complete darkness, a single point of muffled red signals the onset of dawn. That gesture in the endless black is the womb of hope in every man. Just as a spring bud is the womb of hope to every farmer, lest he forget to fall on his knees in thanks. Ere the sun rises.

Indeed, that is where poetry begins, in this shift from night to dawn, from black to less than that. The single point of red emerges quietly. A ghost glimpsed in your periphery. At first, you are not sure the point is even tied to the Great Star, but soon those doubts are allayed. The red burgeons and flattens like a thin plate. A soft yellow light chases along after, rising, still flat and disc like. This light is the light of a lamp in the evening, of linen sheets next to a fireplace. There is an unmistakable warmth that can be rejoiced in, even though we stand light years away. It indicates that the unreal reappearance of light will be a friendly event and not a damaging one. After that, there is a calm lull. The birds and animals are as active as ever in these in-between moments. Darting, thin and black and free, lost eyelashes in the wind.

Finally, the first persuasive syllables of gold appear upon the ridge. It is first a fuzzy coin, so brilliant its edges cannot be reckoned. Growing solely, it becomes a crown, then a lake, then a great vertical valley, and then it is the whole entire world. It is impossible to lose focus when faced with such a magical event. My thoughts are drawn away from the future. My back unclenches automatically. My entire figure shifts from worry to worship, and I am glad. The tiny trees on the far ridge become elephants instead, joyfully progressing in an infinite line, raising their trumpets to the first whimsical steps of the guardian of their eyeballs. I think of the others I know who watch the sunrise daily. The beautiful women who are people and yet also, with infinite stillness, listening with a gentle ear to the softest and wisest tune. Like my stepmom, who is summoned with an almost primal horn every morning in the hour between five and six. Who is always tired from work by the time I have eaten breakfast. This event must be a church for her, a touchstone. That which banishes all of the ills of consciousness, and extends instead a guiding hand of perspective. Of humility, and joyful gratitude that leaks out of your eardrums. Of course the sun was the first object worshiped back in the deep rowdy annals of monkey man history. It is the most obvious God. What a shame that I have visited with him seldom. I take his daily bread without thanks. I squander days that I will miss when I am old and gray. Thunderous and brilliant is this event, dashing the senses, returning us to a kindness we can seldom generate on our own.

Remix

I have almost no energy left to be excited in our final farm. The land is on top of a mountain in Mendocino county. Like Big Bend, it takes an hour on sketchy dirt road to reach the house. Chestnut orchards rise from a deer gate. The road straddles the very top bony ridge of the mountain. I feel as though we are walking on a network of spinal columns. After the cultivated trees directly next to the path, steep slopes drop off in every direction. To the East, all of Mendocino opens in a beautiful valley. The Pacific can just be glimpsed at the very edge of the landscape. It is a commanding view. A ruler’s view. Sitting up here on his wooden bench of a throne, gazing out over his lands, which lie in a bouquet of many colors at the valley floor. There is an unreal amount of fruit trees in this area. Driving down on I-5, we passed commercially planted rows of pear and apples that seemed to stretch to infinity. Each one pruned mechanically, in the exact same shape. Sort of like looking at an army of clones in Star Wars. I remember how greatly I prized the one or two fruit trees on the farms Adam and I have visited. The amount of production here is unfathomable in comparison. And I hear that about half of every pile of fruit is tossed because of cosmetic blemishes. We could feed Africa with these cast offs, which lack nothing in sweetness or texture. The Napa Valley resides in the greens and oranges and crimson of its grape vines. In every other direction, similar ridges poke their backs up into the sky. We are at a high point in the county. Indeed, the stars are more numerous and more incandescent than I have seen in years. The only other time they’ve been in this much spectacle was on the James River in the Shenandoah Valley of Virginia.

We are given individual tasks this morning. I remove mint from a bed that will be planted with garlic. I am impressed with the depth and complexity of the mint roots. For such a sweet smelling plant, it takes quite a bit of energy to get at the base of its roots. Not so different from blackberries or dandelions in that. Collect the remnants of chestnut bulbs for two hours. The bending and picking becomes monstrously boring. I try to remix the motions, passing the bulb behind my back into the trash can. Between the legs. Behind the back like a baboon. Balanced on one forearm like a goblin. Lithe and low like a tiger. Jump shot. Quarterback pass. Dancing and shuffling to the music in my ears. It takes all of these performances, in addition to three very dance-y and active albums, to keep me conscious. I think of the elderly farmer watching me from the window. He wouldn’t like me shuffling and strutting around the orchard. But I’m picking up burrs faster than I would ordinarily, and faster than my associate, so he doesn’t have a leg to stand on. If you can have fun and also get the work done than no one can say anything except to look at you bug eyed, like you just solved a particularly tricky riddle. It is actually because dancing is so out of context in this task that it happens to makes the hours bearable. The absurdity of it pleasures the languid mind. It is a return to youth, when as a young boy with nothing on your mind you chose to pass the time in the field, where with only sticks and stones you displayed an indefatigable aptitude for play. For taking something completely neutral, and drawing a smile out of it.

Something Finally Shasta

Before we leave, I walk with Adam again into the Walk of Giants. I am tired and hungry, but he wants to say goodbye. I am happy when he only walks a few feet into the pines and then stops. I sit on a fallen pine, still damp from the rain a few nights before. He stands still, quiet for a while. Then he bends backwards and forth like a blade of grass. He says thank you in every direction, but I can sense some uncertainty.

I look up at the magical roof of needles, this one particular slope that first delighted me at sunset on Monday. Giants around us, ever holding their ballerina’s stance. How can you thank them for the show? How can you thank a forest for its beauty?

Nothing comes to mind that is worth doing or saying. If the spirit of plants can receive our wishes in song, they can peer into our thoughts too, and they will find my appreciation there. The woods knows how much it means to me. But I can’t think of any words for the moment. The trees are timeless kings, centurions, and we merely momentary fireflies by their feet. What could they want or enjoy from us?

I allow Adam to walk ahead of me. While he is not looking, I kiss my index finger and push it against a trunk. No logic or meaning behind it. Just popped into my mind as a random impulse. That’s how I know it’s a good prayer. Its also how I know that its enough.

It strikes me once people arrive at a beautiful location, they immediately begin the mournful task of memorizing the landscape. Documenting their visit, that sunlight on that log, because it is all fading. It is for themselves first, so that they can be remembered of some solitude I’m sure. But there is also a sort of panic of mindfulness that falls upon me in the beautiful wilderness. You get the urge to give something back to the landscape. To thank it for its existence. To let it know that you know that it worked for the view. Some people perform this ritual with photographs. Others with song. Others with earnest clean thoughts. And all are enough, I think.

We see several wonders of the forest as we walk on Saturday. The first is that the paths are all littered with these huge leaves, vine maples. They look like pancake dough that has been tossed in their air and then left to drop, one after another. The size is ridiculous. The size of a human face. I lift one to gaze at its wingspan, but it is floppy and formless with water.

At another point in the trail, we spot two trees that grew in such close proximity that they eventually fused into one. Was there a marriage? Never mind that. Was there even a noise when the great unity of form occurred? At another point we spot two saplings growing out of the top side of a felled oak tree. The base tree is tangled amidst brush and branches, and hangs a full three or four feet above the forest floor. Yet somehow, defying the basic requirements of plant growth, the saplings continue to grow, suspended. Where are their roots I wonder? Winding like snakes down the trunk of their father, searching in vain for a haven of chocolate earth that lies in multitudes only two feet lower.

Some Song Titles

Just had a sequence of song titles pop into my head. This sort of aimless thinking is what blogs were made for, no?

1. Chocolate Strawberries Under The Mediterranean Sea
2. Something Made Out of Pink Coral
3. The Emergency Room Doctor Has a Secret Stash of Lollipops
4. The Cat Knows Too Much
5. The Magesterial Toenail
6. The Things That Are Happening When No One Is Watching
7. A Rapid Sequence of Brown and Beige
8. The Taciturn Toddler is a Product of his Times
9. Lonely Sharks Swimming Away From Each Other
10. The Cherry Filling Bears No Relation To Fruit
11. The Dissapointing Comparison of Postcards and Places
12. An Intersection of Eagles High Above A Continental Land Mass
13. The Explorer Forgets To Leave Himself a Way Back
14. A Commotion of Youthful Energy
15. The Questions a Grandmother Wields
16. Factory Oil In Your Fingertips
17. The Things That Do Not Sleep When You Sleep

Bird Slaughter Part 2 – Ducks

Today Adam and I are involved in a bird slaughter once again. We thought we were through with this original carnage, but Collette told us one day one that we’d be “finishing” her ducks on the weekend. She said it like it was a special treat shortcake she had prepared for us. I didn’t have the heart to tell her it was a shit job that made you stink in a way showers can’t help. Collette’s kid and her husband come up from Redding. The girl, a chatty baker with glasses. The fellow, a big lug, Hispanic fellow with kind, smiling black eyes. He stumbles on his words as he says his hellos. Word soup falling from his mouth, twenty, thirty minutes straight while we eat crepes. I think to myself, is this what I sound like when I’m on a roll? Probably. Rocky, the fellow, goes out finally and starts to kill his ducks. They use the same killing column as we used in Rogue River, the aluminum cylinder that looks like a frozen yogurt dispenser. Lops off his bird’s heads with garden sheers. I don’t need to look this time, and am thankful that the killing blow is the responsibility of another. Once its over, and the six corpses are loaded on top of each other like a multi colored quilt, I come over to look at the killing area. Just like Rogue Valley, an insanely bright crimson stains the trees and the ground. Compared to the calm orange of the decaying leaves, the muted brown of the black walnut, and the glum gray of the killing column, the blood spilled looks like it comes from another planet, where everything is bright as a neon stoplight. So, so rich. All of the gift of life is explained in its incomparably pretty stream. How can you look at that brilliant flow, and not be struck by the power contained therein. The promise, the machinery, the system, the individual and the survival. The blood paints the stump and ground in an awful line. Collette tries to wash it off so it won’t stain, but some remains, burning incandescently red in the deeper grooves of the tree’s trunk. It looks as if the tree itself is the victim of this crime.

In the field, we pluck the feathers. Only six birds this time, as compared to 120 last weekend, so the time flits by in an instant. I barely have time to disassociate my mind away from the gruesome tearing and plucking. Ducks have an additional plumage of pure white down underneath their regular oily feathers. It feels like tearing up a pillow. Scraps of white tangle in the tall dandelion weeds. By the end, it all looks like the setting of a middle school kid’s slumber party. Only this is the most awful slumber night ever for little Sally. As she watches the quacking ducks face down the loping blade of the garden shears, she begins to reckon with the enormous ocean of death we casually underwrite every single day. I still cannot reckon with it. After spending several hours tearing at the fragile undercarriage of a bird, the drive for hamburgers in my gut remains unabated. Does this make me a monster? Is this sin? The absence of repentance, faced with the ugly grist of meat. My dry cheek, my untroubled mind.

A walk in the woods

Yesterday afternoon, faced with an afternoon of almost no human contact, I decided to talk a walk out into the woods. There is something menacing about the truly spacious and unchecked wilderness. I complain about the false destinations of tourism, but here, faced with a truly sincere wild setting, I have a completely different fear, at the opposite end of the spectrum. I know that this forest is all too real and genuine, and real forests have dangerous animals, the large sort who are too big to disguise their presence in more human areas. Bears, cougars, bobcats, rattlesnakes. Any of them could cross paths with me out in the woods. Perhaps a hungry and tired bear wanders down to take a drink from the pond, only to find a tasty looking twenty two year old sitting there in the water, gazing dumbly at the overwhelming splendor of the forest floor. He would almost be obliged to eat me, if only to maintain the integrity of both the forest and his species. Same thing could happen at ankle level with a rattler, stirred by my clomping boots. Or a cougar with her child, ethereal creatures who wait until dusk to move like half-seen hay-colored shadows, slinking around the crevices of ancient trees. Any of these things could occur out in these woods. There are no monitors, no safety net. Its dumb luck not to meet any bears on the path, that’s all. And if you did, well that’s just the sort of meaningless, random death that always seems to happen in the world these days. I saw in a Norwegian paper that a woman was crushed to death under a huge spear that seemed dropped from the clouds. Upon inspection, the shaft turned out to be the crystallized fossil of an airplane supply of urine. Imagine it, trickling out of the air shaft, only to form in that instant into a spear set down upon the fields of an unlucky soul. Just as that woman’s family cannot appeal death because of how silly and meaningless and awful the chance occurrence was, neither could I blame the bear if he were to stumble upon my noisy and coarse path.

Yet in spite of that concern, and the additional unmentioned concern of becoming lost, I set out into the woods on two consecutive days. On the first day, I walked down the northern hill, across the bridge, and back up a further hill. In that pasture were surprisingly feral cattle, who scattered like antelope upon my approach. At the head of the hill was a well cleared trail that poked further still into the slope of Ponderossa Pines. I walked forward hesitantly, unsure whether I wanted to actually take a walk alone or not. I would take a step, then look back. Another, then another look back. I made it past a fork where the trail divided, choosing to stick close the creek. That way, if I got turned around, at least I’d have a natural marker to guide me back. At this point the gap through which I entered the forest looked like the tiniest doorway of sunlight. The rest of the huge ceilinged forest closed over me. Pine trees hundreds of years old reaching their arms to grasp those of their neighbors. It seemed an effort to create a boundary. Just as the sturdy bark of the forest kept the horizontal world out, so do their leaves block out adversaries from the sky. And below, underneath the pines, a suddenly silent realm of sacred and ancient energy. Although I wore boots, the carpet of thick moss reduced the sound of my movement to almost nothing. With the pace that I walked through Tibetan monasteries, so too did I move in this space, walking slowly, gazing around me for protection and reverence, breathing slowly and steadily. My initial fear was gone. Although I was most certainly the nosiest game in the woods, I felt something larger protecting me. There was such a peaceful spell upon the path that it seemed impossible to imagine violence here, the eating of flesh, profane drives that men seek to overcome the most: sex, food, territory. None of it seemed appropriate. And somehow, I knew that it was the great pine trees that created this protection.

On the following day, I returned with Collette’s dog, a black and white collie with light brown eyes that look as old and fecund as a forest floor. She runs ahead of me, checking for predators, sniffing the packets of wet, blackened moss that lie unearthed by the footprints of an animal too large for me to guess at. Perhaps the antelope cows from the day before. Perhaps a stealthy bear, biding his time in the grove to my immediate right. We walk along the path until it dead ends at a creek. Everything seemed right for a postcard. The steady, crystal bells of the fresh, clear mountain water, chiming merrily against the old and smoothed granite. The moss that extended its long, furry, green fingers across the path. Down the side of a tree. From beneath a wild mushroom. It seemed as if they all reached towards the interior of the path, though for what purpose I do not know. At the creek I turned right, and climbed upwards into an even less certain path. On the map Collette had given us on the first day, she had marked a trail “the Walk of Giants.” Naturally, as the boys that Adam and I are, this perked our interest more than any of the others. I imagine a trail called “laser lane” or “traipse of sea pirates” would have received similar interest. In any case, Collette told us the giants were these great, old pines, about as wide around as one of the famous redwoods that stand guard on the Pacific. She also told us the trail was hard to follow, and that we should wait until she could chaperone us. I was unsatisfied with this response.

The trickiest part was finding the secret path near the pond, identified not with signs but with tiny orange dots on the underbellies of certain trees. On day two, I found it almost immediately, and did a little fist pump in the woods. The collie was unimpressed. “I knew where it was in the pitch black of night,” she said. I stuck my tongue out at her.

I climbed up onto a small ridge and back down into a gully. Suddenly, all around me, I recognized trees of amazing girth. The aura of peace and silence was stronger here than anywhere else on the trail. The three largest and widest trees stood like old castles. They formed a small looming triangle over a small creek. I gazed up at their tippy top branches, and it was so high up I almost got something I could only describe as “reverse vertigo”. Easily the size of skyscrapers. But wise in a way that buildings could never be. Composed of a patchwork of patient and silent years. Centuries upon centuries of growth. A long slow pilgrimage from mossy ground to the stars above. When my grandparents were children, they at least had cars, elections. Imagine these ancient beasts. What was the world like when they were young? Certainly no white folks. Maybe a few scattered clumps of Indians, moving through the forest as quickly and quietly as deer. Camp fires on the horizon, once or twice a year. Everything has changed around them, but it is a calming thought to think that these ancient kings will be spared the knowledge of the fall of the world. Their great forms will never gaze upon the strip malls of the new American lust. They will never bear witness to the great acres of Brazilian rain forest, cleared and raped of its sentinels, flat as a desert yet wet and moist as spring clay. Theirs is still a territory of natural forces, protected from our own designs, and they still hold command of the energy of this place. It is still their priority to filter the light that enters from the outside. The woods seem to throb with the peaceful stewardship. Imagine, at one point of the distant past, such an expansive and solemn woods would have been the norm for any forested part of the world. Now spaces like these have become a sort of endangered animal, hiding away in the corners of states where no industry is interested. Dwelling and persisting in the cast off places, the Siberians, the Canadian taiga, the desert; either that or persisting in the places that remain as temples to the sentimental populations: the national forests that shrink even as I type this line.

This is a church unto itself, and its spell is stronger than my own spirit. I can feel it, slowly, yet implacably, addressing the wants and needs I carried with me into the woods. The giant tree lords look down on me with a father’s pity. These do not belong here, they say. Unable to refuse them, I can only close my eyes, and listen to the silence. It rushes over me like an oncoming army, searching all the cracks and folds in my own identity. Silence. Strange how something can be nothing and yet throb with a perceived form. My ears hear the contours of invisible shapes, the sort that if grasped completely would dash the regular human perception. That would dash anything human about me at all. The trees stops speaking. The collie is long gone on a trail. Even the volume of the stream seems muted. The moss creeps in silent centimeters. If I could understand this space I would understand everything.

New Farm

Aging French woman. Seems like she has lived a full and exotic life. French mother, American father who sailed the Atlantic like an old businessman. Spent half her time growing up in Europe. The other half in New Jersey stockyards. Siberia, Italy, Peru – she lists them off casually, as if they were ingredients in a common soup. This woman speaks her exotic, robust life slowly, and I sense that this could not be a more fitting or genuine way to express it. Up here, way, way off the map in the Shasta wilderness, she has the option of complete solace and clean thought. Where one could simply sit outside and do nothing for forty minutes. Not thinking, not even that yet. Just cleaning the room so that thinking could occur. And during that empty and aloof time, nothing here will disturb the peace. It is a lake, undisturbed, simply biding its time. She gathers and releases in gestures that are far too slow and thoughtful for Adam and I to perceive. I think of how the Ents speak in the Lord of the Rings. Allowing their minds to move at the creeping pace of a redwood. Allowing the spirit of tree to command their identity. Yet both the shepherd and this woman know something that any young man could take to heart. As slow and careful as the tree moves, such is it necessary so that the heart of its power is located in a place that flitting fireflies like us cannot reach, not even with a tripling explosion of syllables. Like this paragraph right here. It is still miles off, undisturbed, and at finally, I think, at rest.

A turnaround from the last spot. A bed for the first time in almost two months brings Adam and I to the brink of tears. A table to write at. Personal space that was not hoarded or controlled by maternal units. A list of hikes and enjoyable pastimes. Electricity, blankets. Regular use of a bathroom. A dinner cooked for us! At some of the farms we are welcomed into their homes, and in some we are denied that space. This is the make or break quality to the entire relationship. If we are treated like help, so dissimilar as to be unacceptable in polite company after work, then we will gestate unhappiness. If we are trusted and respected as individuals who like tables and reading and nice cushions, then we will love and follow your commands like the most gentle dog.

Eating with this woman is an exercise in savoring food. We talk almost not at all, and the first evening I finish my dinner a whole fifteen minutes before she finishes hers. She has been eating slow, small bites, the sort of dining expected and extolled as French. Today I sit with her and Adam on the porch in the hazy, sleepy afternoon sunlight. For the duration f the meal, neither of us speaks a single word. I focus on the grains in the crust of the bread I chew. The fabric of the turkey meat, the dense nuggets of cheese. The tang of condiments. I relish my snapped bites of pickle, calculating when to indulge versus when to stick to the sandwich. Even though the portion is ample, it is small compared to the amount of relentless food Adam and I ate at other spots. Here, the refrigerator is completely off limits, and whatever lands on our plates is all the food we will have access to. With this knowledge, the act of eating becomes instead almost a church service. Slow, methodical bites. Nothing hurried. Following the food as it makes it slow progress inwards. Thanking it for nourishing at all. Afterward, I feel more full than I have in a long time.

Mount Shasta sunshine

Drive out of Oregon and into Beautiful Northern California.

 

Golden hay so thin and bright yellow, the thinnest strands of the thinnest rope, made entirely of light, it looks like it is bursting into thin air right before our eyes. Mt. Shasta, giant creviced brownie with big icing dollop. We raced along the circumference of your skirt, and you were glorious. I spent a while gazing at the enormity of it. Totally separate from the mountains around it, the Cascades and the Siskiyous. A giant island of soil towering over an empty plain. How did mountains get the jagged tops that they have? It was as if their was a giant underneath an enormous linen bed sheet, tucked into the cylinder of a volcano shaft, pushing and raging with many arms, looking for some way to break through to his mother sky. Sometimes his raging arms rise high, and these are peaks. Other times he strikes out to horizontally, and we have rock slides, avalanches. The linen holds though, and it is a glorious uneven gestalt.
Saw a face in the trees at one point in the deep rural redwoods, and I think it was smiling. This is a land that defies words with its beauty. Everywhere, there is a glimmering light of natural peace. Ponderosa Pines stacked tall and many, creating a roof over the forest floor in the afternoon, where the light, if it is so lucky to break through the leaves, can rest and bake and recycle upon itself in a golden haze. The entirety of the woods is so dry and full and hot that a fire seems logical. In fact it seems like it is happening right as we drive. Only this fire does not alarm. This fire is like the fire that you have in a stove, the kind where you put your winter toes up next to, and then you drift of to a contented sleep. I can barely keep my eyes open, so sleepy and bright is the fire in this forest. Bobcats sitting on nests of dry and cracking brush. Hawks chasing air currents over state highways. I stopped the car by the side of a particularly endless stretch of road, and the woods in that instant were so beautiful and empty and peaceful it gave me vertigo. I could imagine a race of elves, with the lean faces of black bears, walking out towards me. Columns of them hand in hand, all the way down until the trees got ugly again.

 

There is a peace here. It does not enter my eyes so to say so, but I feel its presence. Like a monk striking a bell at a set rhythm, over and over, forever.