Tree-Hugger
Clarified, from a distance, the massive ponderosa watches me approach. Calmly she stands, focused on the love-song I sing into her giant open heart. She’s a massive pier connected to a seed in the earths’ center, and she guards the solitude of a meadow where a young aspen grove reaches upward, connected as grass is downward. My sentinel lover, bark of my flesh, roots singing in my dreams, holding the circle in an endless enmeshed and romantic resonance.
My pockets filled with heart rocks keep me anchored to earth. I arrive to touch her, say my tree name. I breathe into her sun-warmed trunk and press my body into her body. My breasts part like wings, and I offer her my heart, extend and deepen my breathing. I lower my head, eventually, and touch her rough skin with my forehead, grateful to be dented. Feeling her great presence, the temple between my temples, I stand touching her like this, gently vibrating. Yes, I’m in love with her—she is my teacher.
The teacher is wounded, multiply. Barbed wire pierces her, wrapped round where she has enfolded it over time. Sovereign. Once, five big spikes were driven into her; she wears them like proud jewelry piercings. Exalted. An axe once bashed a shelf-like wedge at man-height, or what once was man height, for she’s grown on and he is dead and forgotten elsewhere. Transcendent. My teacher, wounded, offers lessons of forgiveness and indomitability.
Yesterday I licked her bark, let her taste me. I rub sweat from my armpits into her golden, sap-coated shelf, mark her with my small gift of recognition. I honor her for her quiet work of perseverance, of beauty, that inspires my own. I shelter her spirit, as she shelters mine.
The climb up here is slow and glorious. I am growing old beneath her shade and shelter. It’s 50 degrees in January. The early stages of global warming, I tell folks, are so lovely. he seductive, easy allure of sun and a warm wind. Even the word, “warming”, such a soothing word. They should call it “wake the fuck up! change or die!,” something more honest and urgent. I heard that this year the bears never even went into hibernation.
My boots massage the sparkling trail, sending, in stepping-language, the message—I come. I come. Treaded soles leaning into the brilliant enamel blue skybowl, climbing higher through moraines and meadows of aspens and willows, I follow the trickling creek below. The earth invites my next step, unrolls before me like it’s been waiting to welcome this hairless upright body striding with 4 bounding dogs. Breaking through space like a paddle in water, the skin of perfect peace permits my sliding through.
Leaning back against a cone of light, into her patient waiting arms, denim against bark, warm blood against still wood, enfolded by roots and my own intention, she holds my bony shoulders and I let go of the first forward edge of separation. It’s a practice, spiritual and political. It’s a way to be intimate, submissive, present, and copulate with nature. Coupling, nesting inside the world, I listen to the wisdom of more-than-human voices. I dream of how easy it might have been for us once, before the great disconnection convinced us we were better than our ancestors who loved the earth without thoughts of hierarchy or exploitation. Consorting with trees who were gods and they knew us by our real names and we were blessed to be known this way.
I sing her my day’s walking song, and my thin voice grows to flow over wheat colored meadows, under jet trails, through shining evergreens, braiding with softest banners of birdsong. This is the best part of my day. Last night, I walked up my mountain in starlight and stopped, facing her, feeling the specific placement of roots and trunk, two mountain valleys away. Faced her image in my heart and felt myself connecting like a thunk into flesh by some spirit-arrow. Like this, sending and receiving love.
How to be human-being and not human-doing? It’s impossible to be reciprocal with something as great as the world. How to be unstained by this consciousness of my unslakable hunger for resources, the heat of my need to understand the transcendence? Practice just holding the form I write poetry about, and not the terrible weight of this longing and this guilt. I try to just Be with her, not to be human following human thoughts off the cliff edge. Try not to follow associations as pulse follows breath. Maybe, she says to me, you can stop trying to deny that you’re human. Because that would be like me denying being tree. And that would be a shame I think in my human head.
In the woods, going home, there are robins winging from tree to tree. Robins in January! Surely the end of the world. Stop thinking! I stand in my melting tracks, trying, until a Western Red Flicker blesses me, and then I move down the trail, fire and coal feathers blazing just behind my eyes. At the first heavy steel gate I push through rusty hinges built to last centuries in defense of private property’s immortality. Intent on dissolution, I’m still impressed with the arrogant weight and certainty of steel. Humanity marks the forest. The forest waits for time’s eraser. In the big meadow, the gang of ravens flies thru the sky, a black robe tossed over the sun. Their wings beat the air like an inky carpet snapped out a window. They call in hoarse hollars to each other, changing shapes overhead as one full-voiced raucous star field. Pearl runs full tilt up and down, hunting, while the wolf dogs stay closer, wagging and grinning.
Observations and thoughts plan me, pinch me all the way down as I try and lose them for pure awareness of the now. Step. Arrive. Step. Feel the wind touching me, and then try to lose that thought too. Just arrive, like they tried to teach me at the Buddhist University down the mountain.Three years of that, and I’m still dodging student loans like bullets after 12 years of the rest of my life. Two masters degrees follow me up the hill, judging my counter-productivity in solemn monotones. Paper trails of words tighten round my ankles, pulling me down. On the run, I’m on the run, in hot pursuit of dissolution. I want to disappear and reappear on the other side, the animal side of higher education and other human habits.
“Spaciousness! Spaciousness!” I call to spirits of air. “Open up and let me in!” Chasing such desires is a mockery, and it’s my life. To let go of control is hard work and of course, it’s all about control. The irony follows me on the inside of my ears, shouts laughter into my bootprints, melting nothing. Two masters’ degrees. The print on my cards says M.A.M.A., it’s like a PhD and a half but who fucking cares? My mind is bent in the ways of the destroyers, and I can’t stop taking notes. Maybe that’s the best part. It’s all mythic. What I want now is the utter disintegration of subject and object, that’s something they don’t teach in schools in my country. Want to ablate the coupling, to burn it all off, to follow the sheer cliff calling me to fly away from nouns, to soar free of all the names. Want a purely metaphoric language, psychic and psychedelic, the language of trees and birds and river, that will free me to stand like a ponderosa in a high desert watershed landcape. To step into that tapestry and hold the form and never write another word.
“I’ll pray for you”—I told the ponderosa goddess, teacher, queen—early on in our romance. “Pray TO me”, she whispered, and so I do. Up there, at my beloveds’ feet, I stuff love notes into lichen-lined letter-slots, fill the holes in with spruce cones and heart rocks, and collapse from the effort of being moved this deeply.
West-Bound Road-trip Journal
1999
Rockefeller Grove is ten thousand acres of unlogged Goddess trees. The largest contiguous trail of old growth redwoods on the planet. And the catedral of Holy Holy Mothersong.
We walk on duff and decaying ancestors, spirit arms raised like the sword-ferns in salutations to the canopy way up there. These trees—embodiments of earth’s longing for sky—climb to rocket upward towards clouds where fog lingers, called here and held here by their slow breathing. There is no ground, no bottom to the earth, said the woman in the hot tub last night, There are only fallen redwood trees.
Under the duff, more duff. Happy graveyards of crumbling bodies nurse the living, reaching giants. Descendants nourished by ancestors—the font and template of our deepest human longings. Fill our emptiness with this feast, our questions with this surety. All the discontinuous points of pain, all the gaps we stagger across or stare across leaking blood and vapor uselessly. Heal us. Here is integrity and peace that could mend a world shattered by human greed and separation. Here is the massive antidote to our tremendous terror.
We slide through nine miles, effortless l, and think of the Sinkyone Tribe who lived here for thousands of years without destroying anything. Salmon and tan oak acorns and berries were their food; beauty and sacred metaphor was enough. Light pours through us, over deer and owl cry, and the trees creaking high in winds, rubbing, moaning in the light. I lie on my back. Redwoods bloom above me like luminous, sun-drenched flowers. Illuminated by a green spell of grace draped like hanging moss over our human heads. Anointed by light, vast and intimate, blown out of celestial trumpets, the sun like love raining down and through us, nourishing our roots. This light is warm honey, minted green—time is green, life is green, and forgiveness like honey drizzles down the giant stems of the flower trees.
There’s a calm that pulses a circuit from the heartwood of these enormous trees, standing here like this since before Christianity was born. Ten million ancient trees filled with angels, holding hands underground, chanting like dolphins do for the healing of the World. Rubbing and creaking they sigh, holding each other in love through storms and the fires of time. They’re a Zen koan for effortless achievement. As if they’ve been standing here forever like this and the sky fell down and landed in between their spaces.
Imperturbable. Auburn trunks stand pumping memory and sustenance up from the heaps of sweet decaying logs. Felled by time and wind, their girth twice as tall as my head, I walk past their lengths singing my favorite walking song. I sing one and a half full rounds before I reach the crown of roots. Here are two that fell after a millennia of holding hands beneath the duff. Fell like twin walls. We, passing between them still feel the magnetic longing that flickers here— eternal, erotic. Their shallow root systems spread like two vertical rooms, like palms raised in peace, form are our gateways through. Even mosquitoes can’t pop this bubble of peace bequeathed to my fevered brain, my raging activist spirit, my puny, guilt-laden humanness by these beings of fire and air, earth and water.
Green voices humming through spongy sapwood tell tales of long, slow, vertical centuries. Under the distance of their chorus I vibrate slowly, unwinding in the seamless story of their singular song—a journey of interconnection. We breathe it in like air and are enmeshed as we’re taken up. In this calm sea of green light, we are ant-like, tiny beings crawling through the giant realm of ancient trees.
Trees growing on trees growing on trees, a million years deep. On a hill of long-decomposing tree, seven giants sprout, a thousand years tall, a cathedral. Caves carved beneath their feet tell the story of fire’s devouring hunger. Gnawed by flames and covered in moss, the soot-smoothed sides of filigreed caverns beckon from darkness. Above, they shine in the light. There are no edges here and green is the fire that doesn’t consume. Green just burns and collapses in ever deepening fables of green. We’re walking through this dense and mythic hush under the liquid calls of birdsong. With each ascending note, the atmosphere opens in ever expanding circles, pushing aside the vastness of space, as if my consciousness, dialing through long-distance circuits, connects suddenly in stillness to the limitlessness that is the depth of world.
This forest is the counterweight to all the concrete of Manhattan towering on the opposite end of the continent. These very trees are what keeps us from capsizing in space to sink beneath the intensity of the grey death cult of a civilization we keep creating. Oh, to be a Sinkyone Indian a thousand years before the idea of concrete. To have this green wisdom to cradle me always. To live inside enough-ness.
Forget Buddhist notions of non-attachment. I want to be attached like this! Goddess, attach me like a woven thing—cord me to creation. My heart pierced forever with this verdancy, break open my separateness like this and fuse me back into patterns of reaching limbs. Let my mind wander from my high-desert home back towards memories of this green palace, this honeyed light. I drink it in against the droughts that will come. Shamrock carpet. Lowest boughs glowing. Bright-leafed maple gorging on this sun. Long, cool shadows behind me. Me on my knees, be-ing here. Stunned simple, kneeling in fallen needles, decomposing with duff to feed the world well. Chanting goodness, chimes of clarity, the voice of this light. Sending life and light like health and wealth where inside and outside become one single surface.
Imagine being abducted by trees. Imagine being taken suddenly from your life, flung up by the redwoods into highest tree consciousness. Julia Butterfly was surely abducted like that. And we, in our own way, seized, snatched by the scruff of our souls beyond puny imaginings. Captured hearts, held in the pockets of forest. Before leaving, we re-visit the baby trees. Tender and bright with new growth, I touch their heads and marvel at the height these heads will reach. Think about the decorated feather Kate tied to a tree our size. Imagine it someday, impossibly 300 feet up in the sky. I can taste it in my mind. I’ve been seized and taken up like that.
Patrick’s Point
Sticks and stones, redwood driftwood, seaweed and sea-polished agates. We walk slowly, stoop to sift, selecting through wet, salty piles as the light selects us, as events select us, as time trips and travels along that haze of crashing waves. A cantering roar that thrashes us all down to our smooth, adamantine centers. An then even those dissolve. The connected centers circle here, sifting sorted sea gifts in paradise.
The ocean shivers, stands up on her flukes to peer at the beach, deciding. With a great breath she rises, sun lit and shining like green glass, poses there in her clarity, seafoam sliding off, and then she roars, folding to roll her great weight up the hill of this seashore. Lifted inside that wall of light, building the energy for the crest, she exhales before slamming shut like my heart after your brief and final visit. The vulva of the wave enfolded hollers, released with a gasp or a yodel in primal drama.
The sea and the trees, so close here in Northern California, and so different. I’m missing the trees as soon as we hit the open arena of all this sky. The beach is too big, my pulse’s beats too spaced between metaphors and nothing to hold me. The business of the sea is Dispersal. She lives to break things down, crush them up to a pounded separateness. To sand, that irritates my softness and sticks to everything with its sea-salty glue.
The energy of the forest is about weaving tiny, disparate things together, it holds me with the All as one in a basket of tiny living proofs. The sea annihilates all proof, destroys the evidence. The gulls hunt, the dead wash up, thoroughly ended to linger and bite your feet as carcass shells. In the forest, nothing dies.
From Patrick’s Point, the skirt of growling surf makes a fine, wide crescent against the headlands. Ruffled and rough voiced, she refines everything that’s ever found. Finding it all. Dissolution squats heavy in the light, and the crashing waves hold us back.
Thrasher Mother—you Dark Lilith—I love you too. Nowhere to hide from your fierce winds of change and chaos. The sea is a shapeshifter of all, swimming in chains of her restlessness. She recognizes me way up here, clinging to the last green fringe of rooted vegetable life. On the beach before the enigmatic engine I sort handfuls on tiny colored agates searching for a green from the heart of the final ocean’s heavy story. A green that can carry me Home.
Heading south now, the redwoods shrink from millennia to mere centuries old and wave their lazy branched goodbyes to us. Leaving the wild womyn hills of the North, leaving the softest silence of the Mother forest, leaving that singular womb-iness, cellular happiness. Leaving the colors—that specific matte to the bark in the dark, her gleam in the always- shade that somehow conveys red in all that deep darkness. That ineffable something attached to being inside that ancient-grove groove where I root down, hold on, spin webs and call the fog to come.
Burls bloom in 500 years to hold the packed promise to the next hundred centuries of wild wind. The lungs of the future, if there will be a future, wait, dreaming more redwoods. They recite reassurances to be patient, chant ritual invocations that fly into the now in envelopes of fog. While underfoot, a zillion roots hold hands, praying in circles like womyn on land, for Life. Life.
Flung below the bright green canopy rocks the floor of the world. Soothed like that in a cradle of shamrocks and ferns and massive trunks the size of apartment houses in The Bronx. Wood stood straight as spears, impaling such a silence, like angels dreaming in my ears. At the speed of a redwood, trees charge off into adventures, vertically directed, sinking, soaring, accomplishing their thickening in spiral rings, singing creation myths back to the tree gods.
In the forest that was saved for us, the four percent of old growth redwood still standing on earth, spared, for now, from the chainsaws, just a charnel depth of ancestors, a deep bloom-booming digeridoo. Dig straight down through the duff with a spoon, through ten thousand redwood bodies fallen across the thatched centuries defying death, life lingers sprouting endless salads of clover that snap shut in sunshine. And the ground that we walk on and kiss nursed by fallen giants, composting giants fallen from the sky in the slanting sun rays of god’s eye.
On the road again, passing semi-truck after truck full of redwood bodies— shingles, decking, hot tubs, redwood junk mail, trucks-full of sacred ancient ancestor future plywood. We’re leaving the forest primeval that’s leaving the planet, so much poorer without her. Leaving us all alone with our grief at the endless parade of trucks, rage popping like hot oil, feeling my heart go up in smoke.
Southern California.
Pelicans so close to us in slow motion wind, I see the white marks above their bills, their ancient dinosaur eyes; they touch their shadows to the sea. Pelicans against the long white curl of the wave, and none looking back. Seal as big as a cow swims lazily into sight, plays slowly between the giant rocks, the sound from the other that floats beside is a growl-heavy roar— the lion in sea-lion. There’s a tide in the forest. There are plants in the sea. Headlands of Big Sur looming in lupines, gorse, fennel, iceplants. Huge oaks almost to the cliff edge, happy in the salt apron. Driftwood. Kelp. Wind.
Zion, Utah
Edges everywhere are softening. Ridges, ledges, gardens wedged above the river, leaching mineral stripes, struck by sudden sunlight and swallows. Rooted rock, uprooting river, all the spirits of place in The Mamarock pushing the inner edges like an eardrum as we’re blown down the sweet tunnel towards home.
Oh, Utah! Unbuild the tabernacles! God is here. God, the crison arch against the cobalt sky. God the raven sailing through the arch. Only flood the minds of the righteous with nature, simple ecstasy, stone-framed below the windy blue. Slickrock, rimrock, river rock, capstone. Veils of water tumbling, long caresses of another god, shaving the rock thinner. Stone and water coupled to un-couple, molecules unclench, time eats itself up.
Define time: Mesozoic, Jurassic, Paleolithic. The weight of these ages presses this place into Right Now, and all the verbs are present tense. Muscles tense, leaves rattle in the wind, stone breathes and steps away. Stars fill the spaces, and satellites join them. Great heaving journeys of curves, blocks, oceanic layerings emptying permanence. Ocean floor, now valley floor, splayed like a red footprint, the vermillion wash absobs all the ghosts of whales and pikas and humans into this one psychedelic drama the tourists try to get on film. “Didja get it? Didja get it?” Chuckling ghosts thin their vibrations, listening to the silliness of the 2-leggeds and spinning off the scarlet stones.
When the last chunk of rock pops off into timeless space, will the walruses return to sway, weightless and sunless in the repetition of salty seas? Eels and sturgeon, shining scales, all the fluid energy still swims across these stones. The sea’s in the curl of the juniper, the swallows’ swirling flight, the swell of the arches, a redstone wave. It curls to break, bearing down, bearing it—the weight of millennia, the great O of the wave. Bearing busloads of Germans and Texans, bearing the heavy stars, the satellite, all our human insecurities, wanting to capture this miracle on film, did you get it?
Arches open like god mouths, laughing the rainclouds, seeding mesas with fishes for later. A school of chittering grackles pass overhead. In their shadows, fins replace wings and leave trackless ripples in the air of the just-dried-out sea. We leave food for the spirits and float on under flukes of clouds.
Red rock under bare feet, shredding twist of cedars and raven voices split the stones further. Scrub oak scratches her messages into red shredding parchment, ageless spirits of wind and rain watch over us, waiting. Our cultures will crumble long before these ever flinch and look away.
Somewhere out there, men are planning for war. Nuclear bombs detonated under the earth. Jets scream over the skies. These rocks can wait forever. These men, shut-down so tightly to life. They are shutting us all into their minds. Locks turn, holding on. These rocks slide open. Spinning their tumblers, they let go. What flies out? Fall out of time—fallen arches, busted windows, loosening frames. Space dances between elaborate densities. Going up like smoke. Like extravagant needles. Exhale our exotic crumbs. Shake it all off. Freedom.
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