A Natural Connection

I'm walking very consciously out onto a mud flat. The low tide has pulled back and what remains is a half mile of muddy sediment touched by eel grass and millions of batalaria snail shells. The kids around me - a mixed age group of home schoolers out of Bellingham - run out ahead, their lighter weight and quick steps keeping them from being sucked down into the mud that pulls at my every step. Still, I keep going and when I find slightly firmer ground, I stop and look around to check on what's going on around me.

I'm out on Padilla Bay, tray in hand waiting for the kids to bring me their wonderful finds dug up from the mud. I have a shore crab and a couple worms as well as a broken shell that a four year old little girl really wanted me to have on my tray. The sun is shining, I'm listening to laughter and watching kids get covered in mud while their moms sit back on the beach chatting.  I'm torn between being irked at them for not being out here with their kids and sympathetic to the pleasure they must feel relaxing for a few moments while their kids play where they can see them. I remember how those rare moments felt.

 I've been out here off and on all spring and I'm still learning the ropes - and the names of the different critters. I'm recognizing the stories that are told and how the estuary is explained to different age groups but most of all I see the common excitement that happens when someone shouts out a special critter sighting under a nearby rock. There's always the kid that brought the wrong shoes and doesn't care. I smile because my daughter Jess never cared either. As a matter of fact, it wouldn't matter what shoes she had on - they'd be off and she'd be running around barefoot.

I'm trying to walk toe first and pick up my foot heel first. The boys have gone out farther than I think is necessary and the mud is getting deeper. I think I'm managing okay until my boot sticks - and my foot doesn't. I still have to go out farther where one of the boys has gotten himself very purposefully stuck and is delightfully surprised to find that he can't move. I'm tempted to leave him out there for a bit until he starts to understand why the teachers gave such clear warnings about the mud; instead, I sigh and send the rest heading to shore. After about five minutes of pulling every which way, his boot comes loose with a wet suction sound and off he goes, running towards shore and his friends with an adventure to share. I plod slowly behind, my clothes now spattered with mud.

It's never far from my mind why I am out here. I've had this hankering to help people connect in with incredible natural world of ours. The more time I spend getting to know how miraculous these ecosystems truly are, the more engaged I feel in protecting what I am intricately connected to. I believe that this is true for most people - but sometimes we all need a little help figuring out why it matters to our well being that there are forage fish breeding out in the sea.

The younger kids are easy. Put a shore crab in their hand and they connect. With squeals or shouts, sure, but the moment is marked as out of the ordinary - and will be remembered. The teachers here give the children a strong framework for future beach-combing. How to pick up plastic, how not to damage the animals and - the most important - how to see beyond the surface mud to the vibrant and complex system in front of them.

It's the best of days to watch children discover a new world that is so intricately connected to their own homes and communities here in the Salish Sea watershed. Helping them explore the wonder of the estuary helps me hold on to my own wonder.

If even one child walks away thinking that their individual actions can ripple out and impact other people around them - than I've had a really good day out on the beach.

I just carry extra towels and shoes in the car.

Standing on the deck

I am enthralled with the water.

Standing on the deck, I can look out over Burrows Bay to the Olympic mountains, Burrows Island, a marina, a state park with a peekaboo view of Lopez Island. But my eyes are drawn downward to the water itself, this ever moving, fluid body that can go from glass to white caps in what seems like a blink of an eye. One day it is a lake, the next I have waves crashing to shore. Shorebirds are scattered across the surface, diving, flying, fishing. A heron likes to stand on a lone rock that emerges as the tide withdraws.

It is at night right now, when the lowest tide of the day happens, that a completely different world is revealed. A long spit of beach appears. The water retreats back towards the channel and I can see just how shallow this part of the bay is. The light of the moon reflects off the dark masses of exposed tidal land and I feel impatient to see this in the day, when I can put on my mud boots and go wander down among the rocks.

I leave the window open at night just to hear the waves coming to shore. Depending on the weather, it is either a cacophony of stormy confusion or a rhythmic lullaby.

Logs came ashore yesterday. Today they are gone. The tidal difference is close to 9 feet in a given day.

I feel enchanted, mesmerized. I find myself standing at windows, tasks left where I dropped them.
As this new house fills with our belongings, I am almost startled to keep realizing that this is my new home.

What does it mean to live somewhere that captures your imagination everywhere you look?

I don't quite know what this new world means in relationship to my old world. That might sound a little over the top but I'm beginning to realize that Andy and I have put in motion a transition that will change so many different aspects of our lives. I suspected before, now I know.

We have so many dear friends and family who have moved all over the world in pursuit of careers, adventure, better housing options. They visit family across the country, build new networks wherever they are living, and keep in contact with old communities via Skype, Facebook and email. We haven't moved all that far from the communities of family, friends, and profession that have been ours for the past 20 years - and it still feels like a major step away to move 90 miles north. I'm coming to realize that this step has more to do with leaving behind the suburbs of Seattle - a life we chose to raise our family.

That's the difference I feel as I lean on the railing of the deck, once again contemplating the swells coming up from the Strait of Juan de Fuca. I've moved to a small town that is not a bedroom community for a major metropolitan area. There is one Starbucks coffee shop. For anyone who lives in Washington, you know that means small town. There aren't any big box retail stores within the city limits - that's a half hour drive to Burlington. I've left the suburbs where access meant everything - schools, soccer fields, 24/7 grocery stores and strip malls. Great restaurants, theater, shows.

But not this beach.

I don't know what new opportunities wait for me here. Is there work here? Projects that will entice me off this deck? I hope so...in a few months. Right now, I'm content to keep unpacking all the physical and psychic baggage that I've brought with me. A friend had the perfect metaphor - I'm walking into a new room (literally and figuratively) and the old decor doesn't work anymore. Some of it will find a way onto walls and shelves but it won't be used in the same way. I don't quite know what the new decor will be but whatever begins to align with this transition will have to include the rhythms of the sea.

Walk With Me

I wish you could have come with me on this walk. Stepping on to the trail, swallowed up by the forest of pine, cedar, fern and moss, the road traffic disappears. We would have shared our wonder at the blanket of brittle fire-hued leaves covering the path.  I stopped and smiled – and wished you were with me.

Because it truly was a magical morning in the watershed. The forest floor, tucked within the folds of the hills, was still filled with the deep shadows of morning while the tree canopies glowed with sun-kissed warmth. The trail turns, dips and climbs. Around the corner it reveals a deep ravine where the ferns and moss are dense, impenetrable. I think of my children when they were little and how if I had them with me we would wonder if that was the doorway to fairyland. Perhaps we would shudder slightly, trying to see into the darkness to what lay beyond. We would share a smile, enjoying our fanciful flight into imagination and slip our hands together as we continued to wander.

The youngest child sits in her high school class right now. I remember her little hand in mine while I walk on. Three little hands of three little children that always tugged at my own.

Over the uneven ground, my steps rarely falter. Walking in the woods is all about peripheral vision and keeping the knees soft. If you were here, I would point up the bank of ferns towards the huge, illuminated yellow leaves of the young maple standing out against the dense, dark green backdrop.

You and I, we would probably hold hands for a moment and release and later, again, brush our fingers together. We would notice how low the water is and talk about the coming of winter, the rain and whether or not the long-term forecast predicts snow.

There is one place on the trail - our voices would have grown quiet as we listen. The chirping surrounds me as the birds noisily greet the day. The sun, now bright and streaming through the trees, makes it hard to see what kind of small bird is making such a racket. I don’t care, I’m just enjoying their chatter – it stills my own internal voices. 

And in that moment, it doesn’t matter what work comes with the day. Everything is simple – my appreciation is enough. A warm breeze tickles my nose, a soft goodbye from summer.

My steps are slower as I make my way back towards the sounds of traffic and barking dogs – where everything feels so very complex.

Ghost Town

I drove out to one of the more infamous ghost towns in California named Bodie.

Bodie is not necessarily empty – not with the large numbers of tourists that drive out to experience this piece of American culture.  It is a ghost town straight out of the gold rush stories that tell the tale of why so many people came to California close to 150 years ago. All that is left are weathered buildings, rusted mining equipment and a graveyard that sits on the western hill.

I’ve seen a number of ghost towns in the west – those forgotten communities that left walls standing where once dreams and life existed. Bodie is particularly sad because it is hard to look at the abandoned mines and not think about all the mercury that was used to extract the gold out of the ore.  Hydraulic mining techniques washed millions of tons of soil out of the Sierras.  The wood used for the buildings and mining structures were Jeffrey and Lodge pole pines stripped from the south side of Mono Lake. Bodie creek still has elevated levels of mercury and arsenic present. That’s one place you don’t want to drink the water.

What remains of Bodie sits in silent testimony to a dream of wealth that had no idea as to the long term consequences that it was creating. The eastern Sierras are filled with the remnants of other mining camps. Lost among the scrabble of the high peaks – it’s hard to hike a trail and not find yourself passing along old outposts or roads or collapsed mines.

And yet, here is what struck me the most: the graveyard. I always end up there when I come to Bodie. The old buildings have no pull for me – not like that graveyard. Out of all the tourists who were wandering around the old streets and peering through windows, I had the graveyard to myself for over an hour. I read every tombstone and realized that most of the people buried there had died under the age of thirty. Many never saw their tenth birthday.  Around half of the graves no longer carry any markers at all. Weathered wood cribs – some completely falling apart – mark  ground that sags gently with what lies beneath.

A mother who died in childbirth – and the child who died a year later.
The young man from Ireland who never lived to see his thirty-third birthday
The stalwart pioneer who lived well into the 20th century and had his remains brought back to his family plot on that windswept hill in 1956.

These people weren’t trying to damage the earth or streams or forests. They were eking out an existence in the wilderness with the hope that they would be part of something amazing. Wealth beyond their wildest dreams seemed right around the corner. They came from around the world seeking an elusive and fickle dream.

I have ancestors who came from Cornwall, England for just those reasons. Miners in Cornwall – they came to the western Sierras and joined the thousands of men who sought gold in California. My great, great grandfather Richard Moore.  Richard married Bessie Bray, daughter of another gold rush pioneer from Cornwall - William Bray, born in 1815. They were men who knew their business and brought families to this country; traveling across the United States in the 1860’s and yet never struck it rich. They built communities and had children who wandered into their own fates – which included the eventual birth of my father and so it goes.

This is part of why I spend time in the graveyard at Bodie. I see my ancestors in that wild land; in those sun beaten headstones. I can’t find fault for what led them west. I can’t be mad at them for what they didn’t know at the time.

I can, however, learn from their mistakes. It’s not enough anymore to say that we don’t know what the consequences are for all the damage that is constantly done to our fragile ecosystems.  It isn’t okay for us to ignore behavior that looks at the earth as a commodity to be consumed without regard to health and sustainability.

“We abuse land because we regard it as a commodity belonging to us. When we see land as a community to which we belong, we may begin to use it with love and respect.” – Aldo Leopold

Our buffer of ignorance is gone.

Back Down to Utah

This is where I've been.
Just outside of Capitol Reef National Park in southern Utah
With friends and guides; coyotes and a blanket of stars.
Watching the sun come up over distant mesas
Walking through cool canyon creeks
Arm in arm, singing new songs,
Sharing gifts and gratitude.

Fasting and Granola Bars

It is a month now since I headed down to southern Utah for a week long session with Animas Valley Institute.  It’s been over three weeks since I fasted for four days and camped solo out on a bluff overlooking a red rock canyon.

It was one of the most amazing experiences of my life.

And like all good experiences, my time in Utah is nuanced and still simmering.

I’m happy to talk to anyone about my trip – in person.  Written words are too limited and tend to bind emotions and actions into categories, labels and definitions. That wouldn’t help anyone understand what it was like to fast in isolated splendor.

Before I left, I wrote about paradigms and shifts in perception.  On my way down to Utah I listened to On Being with Krista Tippett. She was interviewing Barbara Kingsolver on The Ethics of Eating. It is an older broadcast from 2010 but beautiful and thought provoking. Interestingly enough, she talked about – you guessed it – paradigm shifts in regards to how she and her family chose to drastically change how they were living their lives.  “It's just a shift. You know, momentum in our habits can be enormous. And sometimes, it's just takes some sort of a formal vow to get us from one kind of thinking into another.” Barbara Kingsolver goes on to say that any paradigm shift takes discipline at first, but then – “I understood that sometimes you have to push yourself into a new way of thinking to get to a place where you want to be that's very comfortable, that doesn't even feel like work.”

I’ll say it again - it is very hard to evaluate one’s life when one is not only immersed in it but pulled by the currents and tides that govern it. Yes, another metaphor for all those influences of culture, family, community, work and ego.  Maybe better people then I can somehow tread water and take a 360 aerial view of their current lifestyle and circumstances. For me, sitting out in the wilderness and feeling those currents go slack gave me the space to think about what shifts I want to make happen in my life.  The literal act of fasting is ‘pushing yourself into a new way of thinking’ in the most visceral of terms. 

One of the outcomes I am sitting with is that I actually took control of all those voices that kept telling me to eat the granola bars I had in my backpack.  Talk about plowing headlong into the most basic of learned behaviors: Eating.  This is, however, strikingly significant. I now know that I have the discipline and perseverance to put my Self in the driver’s seat.  I now know that I can shift my thinking – and live into whatever growth and change I want to tend within myself.

Those granola bars are still in my backpack.

Have I known this before? Of course.  And I forget. I would hazard a guess that many of us evolve and dissolve through this process of clarity and wisdom all the time.  There are times that we need to fight the currents and we may think we’ve forgotten how to swim.

It takes an effort to strike out in the direction we want to go. Maybe we flounder a bit, getting our arms and legs to sync up. Perhaps we swallow some sea water as we begin to move.

And then… we remember…

that we’ve known how to swim all along.

Fasting in the Wilderness

I’m not exactly sure if I can tell you why I am on my way to southern Utah for a weeklong workshop that includes four days of fasting. This is something I signed up for as a four part program that – oh yeah – included a fast out on some butte in the wilderness.

What takes a 47 year old woman on an 800 mile trip to go starve herself out in the desert? I’d really like to put more profound, intellectual or new age language around this but really at the heart of this trip is a four day sojourn out in the wilderness with a tent, sleeping bag and water bottle(s).

I haven’t tried to explain this trip to anyone who doesn’t have the first clue as to what a fast in the wilderness is about. A vision fast is what it is called in this particular time and place.  Have I lost you yet?

I feel a little lost myself.

Do you know what a paradigm is? I bring this up because I think this is part of what has brought me to this particular adventure. One definition states a paradigm is: A set of forms all of which contain a particular element, especially the set of all inflected forms based on a single stem or theme. We each look at the world through our own paradigm – a framework built upon commonly accepted views on the subject. Science, perhaps, or religious faith. Eastern or western medicinal practices; christian or islamic faiths. We have a particular lens created out of culture, family dynamics and how the world impacts us. I look at paradigms as those underlying assumptions that we don't even question.

A popular paradigm that existed while I was growing up was that our world was filled with infinite resources. Everything built off of that particular paradigm is now being questioned.

A paradigm today might be that you can actually have real relationships over Facebook and that life wouldn’t exist without the internet. Technology now being that ‘particular element’or framework that weaves through how you relate to the world.

I think I’m having my very own paradigm shift because I've been asking myself some very hard questions about how I live my life. It’s very hard to deepen into what that means when I am immersed in “it” every day. “It” has something to do with our consumer driven, ‘the ends justifies the means,’ careening at 80 mph hour - society.

Four days out in the wilderness, allowing my body to quiet and then feel the quiet, makes me really curious about what will emerge – beyond the withdrawals from caffeine, anyway.  The art of slowing down draws me like a sunflower to the sun.

Perhaps the act of heading here in the first place is evidence that the shift started happening a while ago.

Desert musings

Valley of Fire is described in the following way:
The Valley of Fire derives its name from red sandstone formations, formed from great shifting sand dunes during the age of dinosaurs, 150 million years ago. Complex uplifting and faulting of the region, followed by extensive erosion, have created the present landscape.

Picture yourself standing at the base of one of these sandstone formations. Touch the sandstone, feel how soft it is. Perhaps it is warm from the sun or maybe the stone is cool, the shadow offering a respite from the desert heat. What you are touching is the sand of an ancient ocean that became a great expanse of sand dunes over 150 million years ago.  Millennia passed and those shifting, blowing sands solidified into a solid, cement like surface.  Cracks from tectonic movement, faults in the earth’s skin opened and allowed water and erosion to begin a new process. We see the current sandstone formations as what so far has been created by nature’s hands.

It feels permanent, ageless. And yet, our appreciation of its timelessness is less than a blink of an eye up against the artistic handiwork of wind and rain. On a geographical time scale the transformation of shifting sands to these formations of red rock rising like bones under the skin of the earth is perhaps no more than a sigh.

On a hot day, follow one of the many washes down through the valley. Find the shadowed curve of sandstone and sink down into the soft bed of the dry creek now shaded and cool.  Run your hands through the silky sand, so soft and becoming softer still as you dig lightly with the tips of your fingers. More coolness lies beneath.  With the sand that is now stone at your back, think about all the millions of life forms that once belonged to that ancient sea; life forms that died and became part of the sand that makes up these stones. Minerals and organic material – it towers above the blanket of soil that has settled loosely over the old sand dunes, it shelters you now as you gaze out over creosote and sage.

This substance, hard and unyielding is the same stuff that you and I are made of. Stardust, as I heard one astronomer say, we are all made up of stardust – just like the wall of rock at your back.

The sandstone is just a little farther along in its transformative journey.

Cold Frames

I have a fantasy that I just can’t shake. And yes, it has to do with cold frames.

A cold frame is a small, sometimes portable gardening structure that acts as a mini-greenhouse for the winter garden. It keeps the ice, snow and pelting rain out while maintaining a slightly warmer temperature for wonderful over-wintering crops like Mache, Italian Dandelion, arugula and parsley.

A cold frame also allows the excited gardener (that’s me) to start seedlings earlier, harden off seed starts and – this is especially exciting – plant some heat loving vegetables in the spring that will love getting that extra heat provided by the glass enclosure. Peppers, eggplant and um, more peppers. I’ve never grown peppers here in the northwest. I get a little giddy thinking about Capsicum annuums. Here at this house where the microclimate is colder than many of my other northwestern gardener friends, I gave up that fantasy years ago.

To be honest, only one reason for not indulging in my gardening desires had to do with my cold, wet location. Before this year, I never had the time to even consider what a four season harvest might look like. It wasn’t until the last few weeks of 2011 that I started letting myself dream.

An organic garden that sustains me through the year. How amazing would that be? A garden filled with heirloom varieties of carrots, tomatoes and peppers. Herbs, fruit and old damask roses – I hear the distant song of summer just writing about this.

As fantasies go, this isn’t perhaps what someone else might have in mind; however, for me it is perfect and I’m looking at cold frame designs as a starting place. I can’t think of a better way to manifest a dream and watch it grow.

Late Bloomers

The sunflowers bloomed a little late this year.

Cold End to the Year

This morning is a bit frosty. 20 degrees and rising. After the snow we had, the cold air helped create the crystals that covered everything that wasn't already covered in snow.
But then we get a sunrise like this -

Happy New Year!

May we all continue to enjoy the everyday miracles that surround us.

Morning Hike

Juniper Berries

Juniper tree

Smith Rock Canyon

Hiking Patterson Ridge

It is about 3 miles into my hike when the rain stops. Moving through the open chaparral interspersed with juniper and pine trees is heavenly, the air perfumed with the sweet scent of sage. There are 28 miles of trails that make up the Patterson Ridge /Sisters trail system and I am only planning on tackling about 8 of those miles. My goal is a place on the map called Spirit Circle Viewpoint. How can I resist?
Hiking alone in any wilderness is something I love to do – and I do it with a healthy respect for my safety. I am in Oregon and less familiar with the critters that inhabit these woods and my thoughts keep coming back to bears and big cats. It doesn't help that I keep finding bones along the trail. A mandible here, a femur there – clean and stark against the gray pumice trail. I also think about what I am reading right now – about the journeys that we make into spirit and how fretful and vulnerable we can feel. As I continue to put one foot before the other, taking myself further away from civilization, I begin to wonder about the metaphor that is buried in what I am doing. Moving out of the known and into the unknown. Projecting my fears onto wildlife that I have not seen is easy even as I wonder what "lurks" in my own psyche.
This is why I like hiking alone. I end up pushing myself through the challenge of facing my fears. I keep going until I begin to feel myself surrendering to the wild world around me, becoming a part of it instead of an intruder.
As the sky lightens, I pull the hood of my raincoat off and can hear once again the silence of the wilderness around me instead of the rustle of plastic protecting my head from what has just been a steady downpour. I hear a sound then – an odd sound – and stop to listen more fully. Voices rise and fall, echoing across the still landscape. At first I think: kids yelling and listening for their echoes. There is that resonating quality – far but not too far away, echoing up what I realize is a valley to the east of my position. No. Wait. Not kids. Coyotes.
Howling, yipping with that soulful quality that fills the silence. I know this sound. Usually I am in the safety of my bedroom, listening from my window. Not miles from the closest town, alone on a trail. I feel alert and energized even as I consider turning back. The howling is close but invisible behind the landscape of trees and brush. I feel the thrill of fear and this time it is different than the gnawing worries of a mile ago. Many howls, more than one. A pack. This isn't my imagination that I am listening to, no, it is the real thing.
And then I smile. Coyote – the trickster – is often associated with journeys into the mystery. The trickster is not just the causal agent of chaos and strife, he is also seen as the essence of 'shaking things up'; of straddling the paradoxes that are in life and act as go-betweens for what is spirit and what is earthly. I had just been reading about him this morning in Jean Shinoda Bolen's Crossing to Avalon. Besides, we are not strangers, this creature and I. The animal I know is not interested in lone human beings hiking – especially ones with hiking poles and big flapping jackets. And so I listen as I walk and I wonder why they are being so noisy this late in the morning. Until I hear a new voice rise from the valley and it wipes the smile from my face. It is the scream of another animal, long and agonized, that abruptly stops. A sheep, I will later surmise, when I spot a shaggy haired herd running through the trees. The coyotes are silent and I realize that I have been listening to a hunt. I have also heard the last terrified screams of an animal that is now feeding the pack of coyotes that ran it down.
This shakes me – this witnessing of survival and death. It also defies my efforts to continue the foray into the metaphoric world. I have nothing clever to tell myself beyond a sincere and deep appreciation for the breath that fills my lungs. For life. For survival. For not being a sheep.