kinds of bivouacking

these days we are mostly living outside. partially because we have been blessed with a rare coolness, and partially because when we are not blessed, the house inhales deeply of the hot air and doesn't let it out till the stars have long been out. this is, i think, an important part of being a human who seeks to identify with their animal insides. for while we can, of course, be sustained by the tiny altars everywhere inside our nests...

it is good to feel the wind move our hair, to smell what is bloom (here we have flax flowers, yarrow, chamomile, mint, indian paintbrush and burdock,) and to seek out a translation of what the magpies are always talking about when they take up a mighty racket in the groves. 

it is good also, i think, to share company with other things that spend only part of their days outside and to feel out how a living space is different than a loitering space. not a curbside, not a parking lot, not a food truck, not even parade-side bivouac. a living space outside demands that personal dimensions be honed and lined up. it seems like it is mostly a great dragging of shares and resettling of pots. but in the end, and it is a late end because August is almost here, it feels right. and then coming inside starts to feel wonky and slanted. and somehow that feels triumphant! if only for a short while.

true

shakti and the midges

As I mentioned, I had the good fortune to be taken to a migratory bird refuge north of Salt Lake City- literally an 80,000 acre of asylum in the middle of the desert. The birds there make the air breathe and they are brave and ravenous. Every one of these birds comes to be nourished before they're gone; some stay on for a while, others just blow through, but no one stays permanently. So I thought it was a perfect setting to give up and be nourished. There happened to be a midge hatch- a lunacy of bugs so heavy it bent the grass. These bugs do not bite do not even have jaws. But they serve as a kind of living energetic scrub- you move through the clouds of them and emerge feeling more awake and aware (and a little put off.) I made myself stand near them. Uncomfortable at first (the way I feel with any act of receiving,) and then more at peace and finally completely stilled. It was rocky and disorienting at first. Like that idea of inhaling and exhaling equally: when I make my inhale equal to the exhale it has always been somewhat unpleasant. A strange thing to be so thrown off by one's own breath... But I'm sipping a little at a time, readying myself to let It in. Whatever It might be.


 

asylum

 

 

The big canyon empties into the valley, blushing green and delirious in blossoming trees. The valley's confetti of glass and steel gives way to the refineries: endless loops and arcs of enamel and steam. Then the parched and decimated towns that have sprung from the leachwater and finally the stillness of another valley; this one less peopled and wrangled. 

Here the northeastern arm of the Great Salt Lake swings into the mouth of the Bear River and lays bare its throat of alkali fields, marshes, wetlands and grasses. There are 80,000 acres of carefully controlled wilderness here. Dikes and jetties corral the water up and down. In and out. It is marked asylum, safe haven, packaged respite.

In May, despite the broad heat, everything is still gold and dry from winter kill. Only the most slender green feet of the cattails have emerged, fresh and delicate and lost among the dead standing reeds from last summer. 

Leaving the highway is like shedding a rigid husk. Nebulous and stunned we move out of the car. A split second of aching and slamming silence and stillness. And then. Sound. Whirring and palpable sound. First from one broad streak of river and then everywhere, behind our foreheads, in our clothes. Sounds like gravel being shaken in a brass bell, electric sounds split open with water, shorting and roaring. Sweet musical sounds snagged on the nodding grass, fringed sound and hoops of sound. Mostly it is from unseen life. To stand in one place and move only your eyes you'd think it was the marsh plants themselves singing. Faeries among discarded plastic cups, shotgun shells, plastic cutlery. 

Birds abound- on purpose. With purpose. For this place lost among many thousand arid miles is an oasis for birds who live elsewhere. These birds stop through, eat, rest, surrender and move on. Sometimes they leave feathers and bones. Footprints. Mud cobbling. A few birds will stay on to breed and raise chicks, but eventually the magnet fibers thrill through their hollow bones and they move on with greater Purpose to wherever it is they Belong.

The names are beautiful, foreign. For desert dwellers all this water and taxonomy is otherwordly. Cinnamon teals. Yellow headed blackbirds. Cliff swallows. Great blue herons. White faced ibises. Canada geese. Plovers. Red necked stilts. American avocets.Great white pelicans.  Even the more familiar birds seem exotic here: magpies, common finches, gulls. Terns and sea birds rent the air and, like falling spades, part the water and dredge up carp like bread loaves. Scales shock against the sun.

The air is alive with birds and midges. Squinting into the horizon flocks and swoops of birds will tip into view, throw wide beams of light off their blinding plumage, then tip back, dissolve. Disappear. We arrived in the midst of a midge hatch. Cyclones and lunatic masses of mosquito-like insects rising from the cupped faces of clover.  These flies do not bite and tear. Not because they do not desire, but because they are made without jaws. The weight of them bends grass. Shivering and arcing columns of the bugs fringe the road like smoke signals. The noise, like warm hysteria, can be heard with the windows rolled up. Such a microcosm exploded.

Where the road spreads and stops a pavilion has been erected. Octagonal, fit with those plastic coated benches for addressing the marsh. But cliff swallows have taken over. Tiny birds, capable of lfying 46 miles per hour who spend eighty five percent of their furious lives in the air. The little mud gourds of nests have crept along the entire underside of the pavilion. Like soaring barnacles the swallows move in and out, calling and shifting, completely unafraid. The loudest sound we hard was the tap-tap of wings beating as we went to sit under the nests, not song, just air being shoved along. A moment of stillness, then the birds were back, bringing mouthfuls of mud and song to tack their nests together. The air was outrageous, disorienting, truly alive.

A sweep of dirt road clutches a central disc of wetlands in the center of the refuge. The rest cannot be entered by foot or on wheels. Twelve and a half miles is as much as you get to drive. It took us four and a half hours. We stopped every so often to let the midges alight on our elbows, to see pelicans knocks and bob against one another, to see herons spread wings wide as station wagons and heave themselves across still glass. The sun hit the water. Many little skies winked up from the ground. We rode a fine line of horizon, doubted how solid it was. Moved slowly so as not to slip out of time and place. We clutched each other every so often but didn't know why. We perched on the back of the car with a small sandwich in each hand and forgot to chew for long periods.

And then we re-entered the world. Returned to our clumsy bodies, moving hugely, anchored to the ground. We turned on the air conditioning, scanned the radio and then peered at each other with our brows drawn. Turned the radio off. Pointed our faces and our compass due north, tried to melt back into more familiar living world, the one bound to stillness, with decided gaping hole where bird song should be.

bread crumbs

It's important to be moved by the small miracles and the big ones. The small ones seem more profound- if only because they flash and blow for only a moment. And then, well, you're lucky you saw them at all. This book has changed my life. Tosha Silver came to me unexpectedly, from a friend, with regards to facebook (which I don't DO.) And somehow, I found myself reading the exact words I needed for the exact moment in my life. I guess if you read Outrageous Openness it's not surprising that it manifested itself with such ease and profundity. Anyway, she's very sweet and silly and both of those things are what make 'aligning with the Divine,' as she says, completely palatable. Seriously.

There are small problems and snags here. Nothing like rips and holes, but decisions and snarls. Things that you wish someone had already done and could assure you with a pat on the cheek, "totally no big deal," in an offhanded way while tossing salad maybe. But alas. And so here are some words of Outrageous wisdom:

"Hold the questions in your heart. Ask with complete focus and conviction for the Universe's guidance. Then let go and see what bread crumbs come for you to follow. If you don't get an answer, just keep asking for a while until you do."

Right?! Almost too easy. But truly, the question isn't "why would the Divine put in a hand and help me steer," it's more like "what else does the Divine have to do but offer me support and love?" And then, hand city. The deep slow water of peace and surrender. The steering isn't important, the vehicle doesn't need to be pushed at all. 

So we'll see.

In the meantime, spring has at least graced others with flowers who can bestow them on me, in large commercial mustard tins, to prop and wedge into small vessels as I see fit. Which makes the house magnificent.

 

 

Additionally, today, I was given something rather important by someone at school. It was me, as a puppet. A good thing to have, perspective-wise.

And even though it's still bleak and barren out there (with some promises if you look closely enough,) it's enough to line the nest with feathers and feel safe looking out, until the Bread Crumbs materialize. I am so ready.

did you ever know about birthdays?

Did you ever know about birthday dread?

It feels like that a little. When you turn 30 I mean. Which I did, recently. No big deal right? Except that it did feel like a big deal, and that made me feel silly. I'm not usually a person who plays into things like existential angst, or aging phobias. But I did feel like a door closed a little harder than usual (with a little gust to follow, which came in the form of a two day snow storm....) It was more like leaving the husk of a soul-shaped skin behind and wriggling forth into raw and silvery newness. Not particularly pleasant, but bracing at least. 

So I decided I shouldn't invest in that new german eye serum or go get grown up looking lipstick. Instead I endeavored to surround myself with profundity, potency and power. Light, too, and laughter. 

These things have made all the difference:

Outrageous Openness by Tosha Silver (An actual life changer. The kind that comes when the Virgin Mary shows up in your yogurt.)

Honey From A Weed  by Patience Gray (It has been so long since I have read something so beautiful.)

Vegetable Literacy the newest by Deborah Madison. (Divided into family?! For example: the Knotweed Family and The Former Lily Family, in case you need to shriek with joy when you peruse a cookbook.)

The Round House and The Last Report on the Miracles at Little No Horse: A Novel  both by Louise Erdrich.  (Bone strippingly powerful writing. Yeesh.)

Light on Yoga  by B.K Iyengar. (In case you haven't recently been floored by a need to reform in the direction of humbleness.)

And I've been carrying around my squat little notebook and watching happily as it gets thicker and more bent and more tattered. 

So these have been blessings. The key being, I think, to relinquish the tar pits of the surface and plumb clearer, cleaner depths. Spring struggles here (as it always does,) and I am reminded that the effort to be drawn up and out of our closed-circuit cycles of self-criticism and the angst To Do Something With Ourselves is neither surefooted nor swift. Rather it is mucking about and accepting the mire as part of a larger plan, even if we don't have the right maps and scale weights. Thanks goodness.

On the blades of cold

Deep cold, narrow days. Frost alive on all the trees as the mercury fails and shudders at the bottom of the thermometer. -9, -11, -12. The cold is alive and dynamic instead of passive and heavy. Going out and all the skin on your face lays tight and your eyes smart. How articulated all the planes feel as the cold primes and hums across them. And we? Head out into it. When we can tolerate (some of us better than others!)

We will sometimes bundle and arm ourselves and head into the trembling light. Getting to the top is no colder than being down low, only leaner and fiercer.

Sometimes this relentless cold and dark time makes me feel smothered. I am lucky to have been guided by serendipity to the deep thinking and light-oriented writings of May Sarton. From her 1973 Journal of a Solitude, she wonders about the nature of this closing-up as well...

     "I think of the trees and how simply they let go, let all the riches of a season, how without grief (it  seems) they can let go and go deep into their roots for renewal and sleep.....Does anything in nature despair except man? An animal caught in a trap does not seem to despair. It is too busy trying to survive. It is all closed in, to a kind of still, intense waiting. Is this a key? Keep busy with survival. Imitate the trees. Learn to lose in order to recover, and remember that nothing stays the same for long, not even pain, psychic pain. Sit it out. Let it all pass. Let is go."

                         -October 6th entry.

Such a mimicry, we could be so honored to get it even close to right. Those trees.

the gates

The last day of the year today. Wide open and blue, enameled, light blowing and all the snow crystals sitting up into the sun.

 

Being at once a person who likes to document, label, and record...

...as well as someone who does not care very much for convention, formal goals, or Plans, the last day of the year always makes me a little sad and a little tired. The light seems too soft and too folding, like dying flower petals,  or old flannel.

 

Perhaps it's because I know that a large door is closing. (True, these doors are always closing, but the bigger doors making more resounding thumps.) But maybe also because I always want to look back and have a smug, folded-arms-feeling of satisfaction with regards to the way I've used all three hundred and sixty five of the preceding days.

But I never do.

Not because I don't feel many beautiful and immaculate things have happened, nor that I've gone without revelation, but more because who can say with surety that "yes, that year was a good year. we got many things done, ticked many tasks off the lists with a sharp and cedar-y smelling pencil, are taller, cleaner and more fiercely practical folks than we were last year this time." And from there, a winding downwards staircase can be traveled until you end up in a mildewy basement of forlorn flatness wishing you had thought to buy, perhaps, some shining, steel, red-enameled, steel, German-manufactured, hand-held, single-barreled pencil sharpener. Perhaps that was what was missing, perhaps it was only a small oversight.

And if one lets oneself sink into the basement of despair one gets sidetracked in peeking into old cartons, unlatching boxes, listening to wailing voices that have been set aside for later and one fritters away the whole day.

Maybe this is why there is this universal urge to Resolve things in the New Year. To try and make promises and bargain with oneself, so next year it wasn't all the fault of the mystical pencil-sharpener-that-got away.

Whether or not Resolutions are really the answer, though, isn't relevant. The act and the urge to kindle dynamism and light and to blow around in the fierce winter wrapped in feathers and bravery is the point. And while getting there often lacks grace, if we can even begin the heave of effort we can make it. Usually by appreciating the very small until we are so overwhelmed with little miracles the daunting task of Doing Life can seem a little sweeter.

like life blown into life indoors

or the details of something profound and powerful of whom you know only the leftover

or a newly illuminated site you've seen a thousand times...

...over.

and of course, sharing meals

made slowly and deliberately by hand

and of the love that knocks and whistles, all around us.

let the gates open into the year, welcome, greetings and farewell.