god and sandwiches

i got a present

 

profundity in the woods in the late part of a Sunday afternoon. not many leaves left here, and not many aspens in a conifer forest, and not many sunbeams in a mostly east-facing canyon and yet! one tree with the lights in it. right in front of me.

we are not always this lucky - to have something so close to a blessing ring and shine at us. but, when the conditions are right: solitude is certain, quietness abounds, light blows and bends in the sky, stillness  radiates from the walking body (however that seems to happen), the mind is unfurled, reaching and open, well, you can be struck like a bell if you put yourself out there.

and so often such profundity is a flash and a retina burn. but for me, on this walk, it wasn't. it was long and drawn out and dreamlike. and i wavered like the autumn grasses myself, rooted to the spot but also surging away from myself, squinting into the blown beacon of one lit and gilt aspen tree as if the only thing in the world that mattered was my standing there, in muddy clogs, with a snarled braid zipped partially into my jacket, with numb fingers and a dry mouth wondering if Divinity could be so powerful and also so mundanely present in the regular world. 

i should say i am not usually moved by a thing so electric and huge as some people call God. but i do, absolutely and surely, believe in the large and complex plans of the Universe. i like that the Universe lets you in to those plans sometimes, and sometimes shocks you to your marrow, and then lets you carry on and maybe get startled by not one, not two but three pairs of moose later on the walk that force you to run back to the car for fear of being flattened. i like that, because i feel at once small and immensely relevant (though still weak and inconsequential.)

after the present i felt i should give back and so, because we had a nice heap of eggs, and some lovely growing things and (importantly) a nice velvety square of cheese i made a magical and lit up sandwich in honor of the Golden Tree.

mostly the stain of these beets is what revved me up. like egg yolks. steamed them in their paper thin jackets, a few drops of water and some salt in a warm oven.

 

caramelized some onions with fennel, thyme and himalayan salt 

 

scarped out the onions, added a thick slice of butter and this mountain of spinach and beet greens

 

meanwhile charring some poblano peppers from the market on a spare burner (the crackling smoke was green, how strange.) tipped in 5 eggs whisked with a little cream and some salt and pepper and cooked it over low until it pulled away form the skillet and rose high at the edges 

 

rubbed some sourdough bread with garlic and toasted under the broiler 

 

dotted the frittata with a few nuggets of saint andre, and finely chopped up one last, and very soft, yellow tomato and...

   

voila! add a tangle of parsley and there is a sandwich fit to honor a glowing tree.

hair raising

"I read once about a mysterious event of the night that is never far from my mind. Edwin Way Teale described an occurrence so absurd that it vaults out of the world of strange facts and into that startling realm where power and beauty hold sovereign sway.

     The sentence in Teale is simple: 'On cool autumn nights, eels hurrying to the sea sometimes crawl for a mile or more across dewy meadows to reach streams that will carry them to salt water.' These are adults eels, silver eels, and this decent that slid down my mind is the fall from a long spring ascent the eels made years ago. As one-inch elvers they wriggled and heaved their way from the salt sea up the coastal rivers of America and Europe, upstream always, into "the quiet upper reaches of rivers and brooks, in lakes and ponds- sometimes as high as 8,00 feet above sea level." There they had lived without breeding "for at least eight years." In the late summer of the year they reached maturity, they stopped eating, and their dark color vanished. They turned silver; now they they are heading to the sea. Down streams to rivers, down rivers to the sea, south in the North Atlantic where they meet and pass billions of north-bound elvers, they are returning to the Sargasso Sea, where, in floating sargassum weed in the deepest waters of the Atlantic, they will mate, release their eggs, and die. This, the whole story of eels at which I have only just hinted, is extravagant in the extreme, and food for another kind of thought, a thought about the meaning of such wild, incomprehensible gestures. Bust I it was feeling with which I was concerned under the walnut tree by the side of the Lucas cottage and dam. My mind was on that meadow.'

     Imagine a chilly night and a meadow; balls of dew droop from the curved blades of grass. All right; the grass at the edge of the meadow beings to tremble and sway. Here come the eels. They largest are five feet long. All are silver. They stream into the meadow, sift between grasses and clover, veer from your path. There are too many to count. All you see is a silver slither, like twisted ropes of water falling roughly, a one-way milling and mingling over the meadow and the slide to the creek. Silver eels in the night: a barely-made-out seething as far as you can squint, a squirming, jostling torrent of silver eels in the grass. If I saw that sight, would I live? If I stumbled across it, would I ever set foot from my door again? Or would I be seized to join that compelling rush, would I cease eating, and pale, and abandon all to start walking?"

-Nightwatch, Annie Dillard

oh. glory. all my hairs stood up when i read it.

decrees

 

courtesy of school, forty six students and four adults were funneled into the salt lake valley to visit this gem. such a maniacal collection of fussy cataloguing, bone chips, various bits of easily-overlook-able debris labeled with the neat proclamations of age and worth make me giddy at any rate. but this. this floored me.

thanks to thoughtful grant writing and a turn out of chad punching Salt Lake Locals (who do, as it turns out, have opinions about the health of local museums) the natural history museum was moved from a stuffy mausoleum of a place to a new beautiful location that was built to blend in almost perfectly with the sand stone bluffs of the foothills.

the above photograph is an aerial view of a simulated sandstorm. it whirls, day in and day out, the sand below changing and drifting in a tiny mimicry of the real and roaring thing. the plexiglass window, perfect for squashing a nose against, is roughly three feet across and lit from above. of all the muddy, slimy, tactile, shiny and speaking exhibits the small ones visited (they are at the oldest six) the blowing sand enthralled them the very most.

to try to assign any mouthful to the visual order and impact of a natural history museum -- that of sandwiching eons of time into neatly labeled glass cubes-- and this natural history museum in particular, is somewhat bootless. but to try to reign in the gesture of such a place is more manageable.

there is, i think, a reason humans of all ages ogle and become giddy in these buildings that house physical records of dirt, slime, bones, rocks and mud. perhaps it is the relief of knowing that some white-coated and sagely collection of scientists have made visual order of our natural world when that task is otherwise so hugely daunting. or maybe it is our preoccupation with condensation and distillation; that the novelty of such a compression of time and space thrill the pleasure nerves we are such slaves to.

for me it is, as usual, the exaltation of the mundane. for only very infrequently does a case containing neatly numbered and labeled rocks of all the same size, shape and color lift the hair on anyone's neck. but somehow, a museum demands that we evaluate the placement of the exhibit. it is the age old question asked of artists and art critics- Duchamp most famously- why does an object become suddenly important when it is on stage? the exhibition space and the object have a babbling silent dialogue with one another as to who bolsters the existence of the other and it is over this dialogue that we, the viewers, float to ask ourselves why we are looking at a case of rocks with anything other than a flitting gaze. this is the magic of museums! and surely clenching a fist around any cupful of dirt in the outside world should kindle a similar luminous light if only we knew where the pullstrings were.

this kind of ranting make one hungry to go load up arms in the library with the opinions of various people on the subject

Edwin Teale (any, all) on the intimate lives of quiet things (mainly insects, trees and rocks)

Annie Dillard (Pilgrim at Tinker Creek and An American Childhood) on the epiphanies of the wild (silver eels migrations across meadows, the new found sight of previously blind cataract patients, etc.)

James Putnam (Art and Artifact) on the question of museum and display as art object

Candy Jernigan (Evidence) on showcasing the every day

France Morin (Heavenly Visions: Shaker Gift Drawings and Songs) on the economy of the visual in the metaphorical and literal sense

Anne Carson (Nox, Plainwater, Autobiography of Red, Decreation,)  on the saintliness of any and all things

Gregory Blackstock (any collections) the autistic visual cataloguer who draws, from memory, collections of various kinds

i could go on and on. but it is important to be steeped in these variations on the plain. it is this kind of ritual for the sacred that has sustained humanity since the beginning. we could be so lucky to learn to fine tune our eyes to the every day, even in the smallest ways.

 

comforts

feeling a little flat today, admittedly. i think it is because of the anti climax that always follows the hectic surge of energy to make deadlines happen for Big Deal Things. i've kept myself busy, but such busy-ness lacking Consequential Outcome has really taken a toll on me. it's a good thing, though, for these kind of low things to lull one into a stupor because then one can take stock of proper coping. my mum, professional grade therapist calls this self-soothing, which i love! we are the most fit individuals to nourish and soothe our own savage breasts so why are we so bad at it sometimes?

because there is nothing serious at stake besides a blue kind of dullness, i made it a point to be vigilant in understanding what i craved and why.

firstly, being surrounded by growing things. cacti especially.

this because their kind of quiet ferocity is something i wish i could kindle for myself. if they can forge on, barbed to the teeth in spines but filled, nevertheless, with a luminous soft green pulp what's to stop anyone else from doing the same?

also, always on the list serious comfort food. not in the traditional sense- rib sticking, butter laden crazy richness, or sweet and indulgent things fished discretely from the refrigerator. but comfort food in the literal sense- food that physically nourishes and so is a balm to the senses. my backward comfort food is the kind that does not necessarily taste indulgent. but i'm certain that it makes my insides ring, scrubs out the backed up places and makes all my cells sigh contentedly. (sick, right?)

so there was

and

a green smoothie made with: one bunch spinach, one banana, handful of chia and hemp seeds, a small cup of whole milk plain yogurt and a clutch of frozen raspberries. and a fillet of wild alaskan sockeye with green cabbage, red kale and fried onions over buckwheat groats. (oh heyyyy buckwheat, you lookin' so good.)

stoic and stodgy and absolutely perfect.

also reading the lovely The Living Annie Dillard's novel (eep!) about battling shreds of fog, log jams and berry tangles during the frontier days on Puget Sound. lovely and bracing. 

tack on a few extra eyefuls of light today, the days are only stretching further and further out. 

blindered, blinkered

"...although new studies have shown that some insects can on occasion strike out into new territory, leaving instinct behind, still a blindered and blinkered enslavement to instinct is the rule, as the pine processionaries show. Pine processionaries are moth caterpillars with shiny black heads, who travel about at night in pine trees along silken roads of their own making. They straddle the road in a tight file, head to rear touching, and each caterpillar adds its thread to the original track first laid by the one who happens to lead the procession. Fabre interferes; he catches them on a daytime exploration approaching a circular track, the rim of a wide palm vase in his greenhouse. When the leader of the insect train completes a full circle, Fabre removes the caterpillars still climbing the case and brushes away all extraneous tracks. Now he has a closed circuit of caterpillars, leaderless, trudging around his vase on a never-ending track. He wants to see how long it will take them to catch on. To his horror, they march not just an hour or so, but all day. When Fabre leaves the greenhouse at night, they are still tracing that wearying circle, although night is the time they usually feed..."

{--Annie Dillard's A Pilgrim at Tinker Creek}

that scientist goes on to discover that the caterpillars continued this trek for a week, battling heaves and swoons of temperature, lacking food or rest. he concludes,

     "...the caterpillars in distress....starved, shelterless, chilled with cold at night, cling obstinately to the silk ribbon covered hundreds of times, because they lack the rudimentary glimmers of reason which would advice them to abandon it..."

and today,  effectively snowed in (!) i am wondering just how apt that scientific nomenclature is, not just to describe the weary caterpillars but my own state as well. (or, collectively, the state festooned on us all.) it is not uncommon to feel my peripheries have begun to narrow, malleable but firm, as brass. as time lurches on it seems technology and its ability to daze and strand us before glowing lights, screens and rectangles of all kind, has a tighter grip than ever before. only, so immaculately engineered is it that one does not even realize until they squirm, just slightly, in their chair.

a few things were stirred in me as i read Annie Dillard and her showcase of J. Henri Fabre. mainly, was Fabre's conclusion, that the caterpillars are denied "any gleam of intelligence in their be night minds." were the caterpillars truly experiencing a deficit of intellect? or was it merely that they could not perform their intrinsic life work when wrested from their 'silken roads' and set to perform on the vase of the palm plant? and so with humans, while we are embroidering, knitting, baking, running, feeling, opining and creating with less tenacity than ever, we are spurred by a Faceless Many to type, text, message, display, project and worry more. (excuse the irony of this, while i put these words into virtual space but virtue of a kind of tool i am rebuking.) at times i feel i am one of those shiny-headed caterpillars, responding to what is before me without leaning away and looking down and all-around.

what empowering tools can we wield? are all honest creative gestures remedy for this? does laying one's face in the snow and tasting the ground nullify that terrible Wanting feeling we often experience when we scroll through the internet? it seems my own intellect lacks any rudimentary glimmer in my wider and more complicated version of mr  Fabre's vase.

an actual epiphany.

we went walking early yesterday. it was a proper desert sunrise- heavy clouds with the crimped white edges, like molten metal, that promised soporific afternoon thunderstorms. red sand rolled everywhere with the tracks of birds, snakes, moose, rabbits, marmots...there was a buoyant coolness, one that was certain to sink and cloak the ground as soon as the sun razed the horizon. often these walks happen after a pot of coffee and stoop breakfast, so in some ways, this familiar winding trail felt new if only because the light was unfamiliar.

we were flanked with debris as we mounted the first rise. strangely localized, it littered only our immediate way, didn't flake like confetti in the fields or groves. here and there neatly shorn boughs off young aspen saplings, a fringe of crushed sage fronds, heady with scent, and the chunky paws off conifers. its precision was disarming until, of course, it registered that the trail maintenance crews must have forged ahead in the dimmer hours and neatened the scraggle and scruff of these manicured wild places. my heart fell a little- somehow a dimension of wholesomeness always present in these expeditions had been pared off; to think that everything was kept up with shear or blade and not because of the eager traveling of sandaled ladies or beasts.

but one thing the clipping crew had unlocked with their well intentioned savagery proved to be somewhat of a revelation: in the wake of the cuttings was an undeniably transcendent fragrance. its force and pungency stalled me to the very lobes of my heart. it rose and hovered, almost viscous in its presence and filled every of my eager cells with an electric snap. my hair stood on end, light rang behind my eyes. i reeled.  later i learned the tree was a subalpine fir.abies lasiocarpa. a common conifer after all, prevalent on all our walks, abutting neighborhood streets, lined up in the dull polished cultivated yards of most everyone here. and so it was not that the tree itself leached all common sense momentarily from me, but its intimate inner workings. all its blood vessels, secrets, histories, sleep, dreams and essences utterly exposed. what kind of dreams do trees have?

it is useless to try to fasten words to the smell. clumsy, foolhardy. it was yes, as you can likely imagine, wincingly piney. but also unlike the smell of other pines or firs. lemony, or like the smell of wet terra cotta. it was a smell i had no right to Name, no right even to smell. when trees die and topple, or when lightning sears the the water into steamy departure, a tree's death has a familiar smell. sweet, like rot. one to which we are accustomed as we walk through any place with shade and water. and when a tree is cut down and the pulsing coin of its stump throbs, that smell too, is different. a defeat smell, a cauterized smell, heated over by the friction of a blade. this smell was different, it was the exact, tangible smell of secrets which will forever crackle in the foreparts of my brain when i summon the word. this tree's very living sluices seeped into the air and poured. even the dogs lifted their noses, froze, arched their necks hungrily. i picked up a piece of the neatening that laid in the path. kept it. felt a kind of green spread of gravelly pins and needles echo in my bones. i looked up at the tree, as one might look into the eyes of a lover, searching for an answer as to why, exactly, those eyes made one's heart leap and gallop so fiercely. and the tree. sighed. it sighed upwards. it arched back and filled the spaces between its branches. it most certainly sighed, took in air (or is it the other way around?) and, as if on some sort of hugely rolling cosmic cue, a breeze was stirred from the lowlands. the trees boughs shuffled and straightened. if i had ears enough to tip forward, tip they would. the tree sighed. i looked up in a swoon, and the tree sighed at me. a kind of resinous romance.

the walk home is absent for me. a block of something white. i spent some time admiring the appendage of the tree i had laid among the little nesting trinkets i have recently been reassembling. it is a kind of reliquary, i suppose. something profound but utterly recognizable. that windowsill hums.

after recovering i tried to line up my thoughts like paperclips in a saucer. after all it was a matter of the optics, probably. the swimming light, the moving wind, the height and spread of the tree. not so mysteriously it only water and hydraulics that hold up plants. even the diminutive among their species excel at drawing water tightly into their cells so they might hold their heads high. conifers drink an especially astounding amount of water, even for their slightly smaller stature. it is because their growth is so slow, so dense. Annie Dillard seems to have pinpointed the awesome quantitative data on the exceptional strengths of plants:

"There's real power here. It is amazing that trees can turn gravel and bitter salts into these soft-lipped lobes, as if I were to bite down on granite slab and start to swell, bud, and flower. Trees seem to do their feats so effortlessly. Ever year a given tree creates absolutely from scratch ninety-nine percent of its living parts. Water lifting up tree trunks can climb one hundred and fifty feet an hour; in full summer a tree can, and does, heave a ton of water every day." --Pilgrim at Tinker Crink.

Every day! Unabashedly and for the benefit of no admiring audience. The sighing tree and I in a kind of camaraderie, in agreement about undertaking to live like that weasel. With quiet and ferocious purpose. To do potently for the sake of the task. I undertook to lapse tree-like into the most regal silence I could muster. Cloaked myself in it like crimson and ermine. Moved little, listened and watched openly, took every opportunity to sigh upward, straining with all my electrified cells to adhere to whatever daunting mechanism moved the wind through the pine's needles and changed everything with the smallest effort.

weasels, waning, widening

"...Time and events are merely poured, unremarked, and ingested directly, like blood pulsed into my gut through a jugular vein. Could two live that way? Could two live under the wild rose, and explore by the pond, so that the smooth mind of each is as everywhere present to the other, and as received and as unchallenged, as falling snow? We could, you know. We can live any way we want. People take vows of poverty, chastity, and obedience- even of silence- boy choice. The thing is to stalk your calling in a certain skilled and supple way, to locate the most tender and live spot and plug into that pulse. This is yielding, not fighting. A weasel doesn't "attack" anything; a weasel lives as he's mean to, yielding at every moment to the perfect freedom of single necessity."

 

Today the fog rolled back. Earlier, we spent days drifting through suspended water, fighting our own dumbly spinning compasses. We failed at questions of any kind.

Breakfast? Waffles? Highways? Back roads? Maps? Atlases? Destiny?

We drank terrible coffee, we made due with microwaved eggs, we were sorely disappointed by donuts. We tried to hide our anxious mists as they packed up into our sleeps and receded, saltily. And then. We parted ways and stuck our thumbs out to catch the correct current. Nevermind our fear of open water or waves. My own especially.  Calling voices can take on any timbre, any species, any shade. Greens where I am, and birds, and lakes that are easy to call across. Grays over There, slants, windows, elevators, stunted refrigerators. Love is a hard thing, tongues can be stones.

But! 

Light.

Startled.

Everyting!

     ....today.

 

All kinds of calcified water marks. Things left behind, discarded. New selves on this end! Smooth knees, beeswax lips, combed hair, verbena cream rinse. Cream rinse! Things have to look up because I went on a boat ride and ate raspberries and stewed beet greens into a sludge that wasn't even terrible. Right?

Faith in something Bigger is here, with sunburns to distribute.

(...the above quoted text is by Annie Dillard in her amazing essay Living Like Weasels, published in Teaching a Stone to Talk.)