The Naming of a Stillness

This particular tree has been struck by lightning
fifteen times.  It's where my Grandfather was born
and where I will be buried.  Now, I am crawling
towards the moon, to give thanks.

Writings from Walleye Vol. 2

How long does it take the Earth to give birth to a mountain?  The rumbling and grinding of rock upon rock, pushing in a skyward direction, while at the same time pushing back towards the center.  The way that each mountain grows uniquely and slowly, all so that the Earth may again find contact with the Sun and the Moon, other heavenly bodies.  All so the Sun and Moon can rise and then fall.  A returning.


From the moment we come into the world it is good to find the space to be cradled.  Held as our bodies give motion to our oldest feelings.  The oceans and rivers that flow inside of each of us and sing us to sleep with the gentle sound of air curling into a seashell.  Maybe our hearts are the shells that know how to sing our truest songs?


Following the voices backwards through time.  Weaving a story that travels through and with your bodies.  The voices of the past and mostly of shared blood carry you forward, out of the deep sleep of the forest and towards the night sky.  Let yourself be cradled, as you were in birth, one tiny but important piece of the love and hurt, that is the birthright of us all.  These will provide you a line, so that wherever you are, you will always know the way home.


The anticipation leads the way or takes the backseat.  You will go this way or you will not.  Your hands will rise over your head or remain by your sides.  What is that tugging at your sleeve and spinning you around?  Do you know where you are, who I am?  Who are you?

The Goshawk by John Haines

 I will not walk on that road again,
it is like a story one hesitates to begin.

I found myself alone,
the fur close around my face, my feet
soft and quiet in the frost.

Then, with a cold, rushing sound,
came a shadow like the death-angel
with buffeting wings,
his talons gripping my shoulder,
the bright beak tearing and sinking...

Then, then I was falling, swept
into the deepening red sack of a voice:

"Little rabbit, you are bleeding again;
with his old fire-born passion
the Goshawk feeds on your timid heart."

The antelope are strange people ... they are beautiful to look at, and yet they are tricky. We do not trust them. They appear and disappear; they are like shadows on the plains. Because of their great beauty, young men sometimes follow the antelope and are lost forever. Even if those foolish ones find themselves and return, they are never again right in their heads.

—Pretty Shield,
Medicine Woman of the Crows
transcribed and edited by
Frank Linderman (1932)

All night I am the doe, breathing   

his name in a frozen field,
the small mist of the word
drifting always before me.

And again he has heard it  
and I have gone burning  
to meet him, the jacklight  
fills my eyes with blue fire;  
the heart in my chest
explodes like a hot stone.

Then slung like a sack
in the back of his pickup,
I wipe the death scum
from my mouth, sit up laughing  
and shriek in my speeding grave.

Safely shut in the garage,
when he sharpens his knife
and thinks to have me, like that,
I come toward him,
a lean gray witch
through the bullets that enter and dissolve.

I sit in his house
drinking coffee till dawn
and leave as frost reddens on hubcaps,
crawling back into my shadowy body.
All day, asleep in clean grasses,
I dream of the one who could really wound me.  
Not with weapons, not with a kiss, not with a look.  
Not even with his goodness.

If a man was never to lie to me. Never lie me.
I swear I would never leave him.

Louise Erdrich

Writings from Walleye Vol.1

For the last two Sundays I have been attending a really amazing writing/movement class called Walleye.  I thought today I would post my writings from this mornings Walleye.  They may not make a ton of sense out of context.  We usually do a few minutes of movement, followed by some writing, so here are my writings from today, without the movements that accompany them.

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The animal scent of my freshly washed body drifts to my nose as I follow my breath.  Rolling like a wave, swaying like a tree and then back again.  It is all there in the inhale and the exhale.  The intake and release, the push and the pull.  The intimacy of shared breath, that joins us all, plant and animal alike.
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Moving in such a way brings to mind the connectedness of my single body, the way others attributed movement and postures to ancient statues.  A solid piece of carved stone, with a story to tell.  I feel my body want to bend and pull away from the physical confines that hold it.  To bend and transform as if in metamorphosis, to become something more open, perhaps able to fly.
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Sometimes the space between the dark and the light create a wall.  On one side things are clear and from this side, nothing can be found on the other.  Crossing over this threshold brings to life other ways of seeing.  This is where the gentle monsters live.  They are monsters but they will cradle you if you let them.  You can feel warm breath down the back of your neck and fur brush against your legs.  There is a throbbing in the air here.  The frogs and the crickets sing in unison and this singing cocoons your heart.  In the dark you become animal again.  You can feel the antlers taking shape as they push through the flesh of your forehead, feel the feathers thread their way through the pores of your arms.  Here you are whole and you are held.  A nest, a den, a dwelling.  The not so gentle love of predator and prey.
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The eyes of the observer and the observed.  The two meet in flashes.  The way lightning shows bits of the terrain never before noticed.  Always followed by a calming rumble.   The body is a storm breaking open the landscape with breath and motion.  It is the dream of a place, which we never wake from
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Manifesto: The Mad Farmer Liberation Front by Wendell Berry

 Manifesto:
The Mad Farmer Liberation Front

by Wendell Berry

Love the quick profit, the annual raise,
vacation with pay. Want more
of everything ready-made. Be afraid
to know your neighbors and to die.

And you will have a window in your head.
Not even your future will be a mystery
any more. Your mind will be punched in a card
and shut away in a little drawer.

When they want you to buy something
they will call you. When they want you
to die for profit they will let you know.
So, friends, every day do something
that won't compute. Love the Lord.
Love the world. Work for nothing.
Take all that you have and be poor.
Love someone who does not deserve it.

Denounce the government and embrace
the flag. Hope to live in that free
republic for which it stands.
Give your approval to all you cannot
understand. Praise ignorance, for what man
has not encountered he has not destroyed.

Ask the questions that have no answers.
Invest in the millenium. Plant sequoias.
Say that your main crop is the forest
that you did not plant,
that you will not live to harvest.

Say that the leaves are harvested
when they have rotted into the mold.
Call that profit. Prophesy such returns.
Put your faith in the two inches of humus
that will build under the trees
every thousand years.

Listen to carrion -- put your ear
close, and hear the faint chattering
of the songs that are to come.
Expect the end of the world. Laugh.
Laughter is immeasurable. Be joyful
though you have considered all the facts.
So long as women do not go cheap
for power, please women more than men.

Ask yourself: Will this satisfy
a woman satisfied to bear a child?
Will this disturb the sleep
of a woman near to giving birth?

Go with your love to the fields.
Lie down in the shade. Rest your head
in her lap. Swear allegiance
to what is nighest your thoughts.

As soon as the generals and the politicos
can predict the motions of your mind,
lose it. Leave it as a sign
to mark the false trail, the way
you didn't go.

Be like the fox
who makes more tracks than necessary,
some in the wrong direction.
Practice resurrection.

"When the last Red Man shall have perished, and the memory of my tribe shall have become a myth among the white men, these shores will swarm with the invisible dead of my tribe, and when your children's children think themselves alone in the field, the store, the shop, upon the highway, or in the

silence of the pathless woods, they will not be alone...At night when the streets of your cities are silent and you think them deserted, they will throng with the returning ghosts that once filled them and still love this beautiful land.  The White Man will never be alone."

                                         -Chief Sealth of the Duwamish

The above might serve as an extreme example but it ties into something I think about often.  Rather than writing about my feelings, I have a question to ask of whoever might read this, when you are walking around in this or any other city or town, do you ever feel the presence of the ones who came before?  Not only the people but the winged creatures, the antlered creatures, the creatures who walked on four legs?  The world we have created has been around such a short time in the grand scheme of things.  The land that we stand on was for thousands of years the wild home to many creatures, some of whom no longer even exist.  Do you ever feel them hiding from you or hunting you?  If you have any belief at all in ghosts, then we must be surrounded and the ghosts surrounding us must be quite confused by what they are seeing.

Hawk....Eagle....elgaE....kwaH

Today, within a span of about an hour, I saw a giant red tailed hawk and a bald eagle flying over our house.  Initially, they were both being bombed by crows but once the crows gave up, I watched both for about ten minutes and in that time, neither of them flapped.  They were simply riding the currents of the air, as if it were the most natural thing in the world and for them it was. 

It's hard not to place importance on such sightings.  Last year, I hosted a 24 hour fire in our backyard to celebrate the Summer Solstice.  A little over an hour after I started the fire, a huge bald eagle flew very low over our house.  I took this as an omen of some import much like I took today's sightings.

It makes so much sense to me that for the majority of human existence, we have approached animals as spiritual guides and teachers.  The embodiment of the holy, made visible.  It's only recently, in the span of human existence, that we have begun to place our faith in an unseeable presence that exists to place judgement on us. 

The spirit is all around us and in everything, you just have to know how to look, listen, taste, touch and feel.

After the long letters

have been written, read,

abandoned, after

distances grow absolute

and speech, too, 

is distance,

only listening is left.

I have heard the dark hearts

of the stones

that beat once in a lifetime.

William Pitt Root

(Just for the record, the picture above was not taken by me.  The two birds I saw were not visible at the same time.)