Letters from the Outside, #58

 A lovely night. Beneath a rainbow haloed waxing Moon in Libra I watch the most marvelous heat lightning in the south through the trees. And the crickets and the peepers and the watersong of the creek and 

All is Well.

 Were in for a stretch of fine weather so I planted out the pumpkins and moved the Tomato seedlings to bigger cribs, setting them down deep to grow a strong root system, after which I rewarded myself with a walk up the creek, and found a fallen Robins egg somehow unbroken between two branches lodged between rocks. Made it all the way to the house before it fell, revealing its perfect little yolk, a lifetime set aside.

 An afternoon in true sunlight benefits all the others also, the leggy Parsley begins to stand, miraculous, and Marigold emits her heady scent and the Calendula straighten, and rise. One brave pea seedling sprouts from the ground. The strawberries thrive from warmth and weeding.

  I hear the thunder now, as the rain moves toward us, the night rain that brings thick morning mist to Cloud Valley and driving to work along the highroad detour (the old road wont be open until about the time you come home) we see it from above, and it is a pure expanse of white that could be land, or lowered sky or water. It is also lovely and marvelous to see. The sun on all that concentrated vapor, slowly thinning into ragged banners through the branches of the trees that crest the ridgelines, now sprouting their little leaves.

The lightning is magick and electricity, and it infuses me with a happiness only the honest heart of nature can bring. I am grateful to witness these phenomena. So I trundle the flats in to shelter on the back porch for the evening, as they would certainly drown were they left to the elements. Even the dogs seem to stop and wonder at the sudden flash of light that plays beyond a bank of clouds. I remember sitting with the priest with our feet up on the railing, watching heat lightning move along the mountains, smoking cigarettes, and not saying anything, a lifetime ago.

  The Moon is this close to full, and I am wide awake in this miraculous, magickal world. All the cats want to be out mousing now, but im sure theyll caterwaul and call at some small, inconvenient hour to be let in, escaping the mad toms and the rain. I had forgotten how lightning travels around the rim of the bowl of the valley, from the south to the east toward the lakes in the north, the hot front chasing all the cold away. T. and I were baptized by raindrops the size of silver thimbles, but it was brief. And now to bed, to dream of Horses in high water, and labor pains, and Manatees.

 Cold grey changeable days follow, one ear cocked for rain to hurry haul the flats down from the picnic table back under the porch roof, and today, not even clearing fifty with brief, teasing flashes of sunlight between long, bereft stretches of damp grey, I set them out just outside the door, to harden them a little against all the variables this northern weather holds. The weekend may prove more pleasant and amenable to my gardening objectives. A few solid days of sunlight would dry out the ground enough for me to till once more before the corn goes in, and in a few weeks, the tomatoes.

 

 

  The peas come up in fits and starts, few and far apart (definitely should have found that rhizome powder) but everything else seems to have found its footing, the broad, prickly radish, the wee filaments of carrot, the slender, ruby-veined beet seedlings. Ill transplant some garden-wandering Rudbeckia into the open spaces in front of the house, and the persistent Comfrey from the center of the vegetable patch to along the outside, a dense hedge of broad leaves and pendant purple flowers.

  Over the weekend I sowed four rows of corn and set out the lettuce, planted another Dicentra, some strange pink Siberian Iris (the flowers of which I may not see for some years, who knows?) and some snapdragons for T. Unceremoniously pushed some more pea seeds into the ground between the apparent seedlings. Next year inoculant, without fail. Planted onion whips around the new rosebushes Cowboy got from his kids for his birthday. Leaving the perennial garden bed alone for the season, but thinking about the north facing patch, what small changes I can make to fill the awkward spaces.

  The Lemon Balm is invasive, and at the height of summer looks like a weed by the roadside to anyone who doesnt know better, so I may pull some out where I can and set down something, dare I say, prettier in its place. Hell, more Dicentra. Columbines would be nice, but they never seem to self-sow, like the Hollyhocks, around here, and it all gets smothered by the Balm anyway. But its been wonderful to see the world slowly fill in with flowers and leaves and grass, this nothing-short-of-miraculous awakening. Dead coyote by the side of the four-lane. Mountain lions spotted south of here. That april snow killed all the Lilac flowers. Blackberries begin.

 We love you.

Letters from the Outside, #57

 The enormous housecat darted off into the night, upending several flats of my already reluctant adolescent lettuce I left on the ground in the more benign late-afternoon light. They had weathered my negligence at having been forgotten outside under penalty of frost, but moped in their beds; the wet, withered limbs of tender leaves dragging in the dirt, a shame of transparencies. The Apples are leafing out, and the Strawberry blooming.

 I dig more dandelions from the perennial bed, pull tall grass and Maple tree nymphs from the edge of the garden, discovering hearty, self-seeded Sunflowers and a forked filament of Dill. The Lupine is grand, Ive stopped believing the wild garlic is a hollyhock, and the Dicentra begin the evocation of their arching, suspended hearts, each with its pale, pendulous, seed-bearing tear.

  I wash the bone armor of my soul in the thought of water, bathe it in some Akashic memory of golden, beveled sunlight, and wait, watching from the corner of my eye for a rustling of life. Very much like watching an egg, its perfect calcium galaxy broken open from the divine force inside.

 I did get around to getting seeds in the ground, carrots and radish and beets and peas; set the crucifers free, however prematurely. The afternoons are beatific, and the Sun and the Air are healthy and lift the weight. I am excited to see how this years garden evolves, and how much farther I can sustain it, and myself, before the waning light that heralds the anniversary of my arrival oppresses more than I can oppose. The other seedlings, moved up to small, biodegradable pots, have transitioned splendidly despite my clumsy, artless maneuvering, and the Tomatoes are still in their original flats, but alive and green and growing.

  I think I may have started the pumpkins too soon, as their ebullient life-force fills the repurposed plastic spinach crate like a kiddie-pool full of puppies. They may have to go into ground soon, and ill shelter them with an old sheet if theres breath of a frost. I think ill have to start the hardening-off of my tender seedlings, as ive done now with the hardy ones. I am surprised that last frost didnt completely decimate my lettuce. Render what is frost's, to the frost, what is the cat's to the cat. And the rest is still hopeful, and lovely.

  Glad to have had my Parsley started, they used to explain its protracted germination rate by saying that the seed went three times down to the devil (the Parsley germination rate is around twenty-one days). The Tomatoes could certainly use some air. Glad also to have started my Cosmos early, as most non-vegetal, direct-sown seeds invariably get kicked and dug and dumped on in my lumbering. Saw flowers today on my walk so charming they made me forget I was picking up litter, but gifted with a Turtle Stone along the way, the sense of a Scarab to it, its perimeter elliptical and its bisecting lines. Im thinking the last frost date will be two weeks ahead of schedule, the way things have gone, but that might be wishful thinking, as theyre now forecasting the possibility of snow. I dont mind letting my tomato plants grow through another re-potting, though. Those wont go in until the very last moment of May and I have every intention to give them all a generous berth (I tend to underestimate how indeterminately magnificent they can become).

  I sit there under the Maple and think about the rows of corn, the keen scent of Tomato, of picking beans in the noon sun and sealing them into mason jars for winter suppers. Last year I bought the wrong kind and I didnt know how to wrangle them; im a bush bean woman. Keep it simple, try and learn how to maintain the space, keep it mulched with straw and harvest what grows. A golden row of Calendula, the cheerful green of sweet peas eaten like a bear in the late morning. My grand saffron Tithonia, and of course the Sunflowers. I want it to be simple and successful. I want to feel as if im learning something, evolving.

  Another night flies over Cloud Valley, I bring the tender seedlings into the house, the hardier ones onto the enclosed porch, let the dogs out one last time before we all take our places in the quiet house and rest our bodies for another morning of navigating obligations and trying our best to be human, and alive. Splendid friday, seventy and a breeze coursing through the new green leaves. Everything rises, rejoicing. Your Apple trees have blossomed out, and the Plum. Impromptu Willow windfall fire, quick to burn but full of sparks, little blazing evanescent ships of sugarwater lovely against the black moonless sky, answering with stars. T. tells a story, the goddess-woman shut herself in the hall, mad with power and grief, and when they came for her she had gone, a sudden self-exile from the mountain cathedral, and all that sought after her were made to navigate some vast, shifting maze of the mortal world.

 Forget about the windows. Entirely insignificant. 

We love you.

Letters from the Outside, #56

 Love comes into Being and passes away through countless forms, chapters or pages or words in book written in Light. What you hear when you put that shell up to your ear – what youre really hearing is the rush of your own blood, the salt water tide of your very life merging with the sound of waves on the sea.

  Spring, and grape hyacinth along the roadside, the pastures green and glowing in the gilded light. Light on the bywater where the Crows call out omens and the Geese enact their generative rites. Some wonderful smell of loam and rain and smoke from a fruitwood fire riding down the hill and up the valley comes the unmistakable scent of snow.

  I try my hand at hairsticks, branches of Apple and Lilac and Willow. ill sand down and seal them, now on the lookout for other wee branches, Chestnut, Sycamore, Oak, Evergreen. The seedlings could use a little heat and true sunlight, but its been precariously cold. I cant get my Peacevine seeds to sprout it seems, which is disheartening. Repotted some Jade and the Monstera, propped that up with a long dry Willow branch. Did I tell you how we lost the Oak bridge between us but gained another, a Willow from your side that took out the playset and a stack of what were to be greenhouse windows. Theres campwood now, and im grateful it spared the little line of Spruce I planted years ago. The playset can at least be extricated, but the windows are pinned, bent and smashed, like an ill-fated axe man.

 With the impervious optimism of perennial growth, I spied the new Artemisia leaves in the twigs and the mould, and what may be a far-flung Hollyhock in the front bed. These prove big developments in this little life of mine. An unusually social saturday evening, and a sunday spent in front of the woodstove, rain ticking against the chimney and the window panes, devouring the last pages of A Game of Thrones, the first in a series I am late to the reading of, but entirely engrossed in, proving to be the Good Read I always am waiting for. The second book waits on the table as it begins, again, to snow – thick, heavy, wet clusters of snow, enough to settle on the green green grass after the Earth had had her fill, but disappeared just as suddenly, and over Cloud Valley an dense, icy mist that settles into a crust over everything insentient until morning.

  Started Tithonia and Cosmos, pumpkin and squash. Would love to get some cold weather crops in the ground in the next few weeks, beets, spinach, radishes, transplant my lettuce seedlings starting to gangle in their tiny cribs. Ruby-kissed House Finches grace the feeder, along with the Chickadee, Titmouse, Goldfinch and Nuthatch hosts. Peacevine seedlings at last, coaxed to grow in prime window real estate under plastic and I confess I wondered as to whether or not it would be Summer without them. Like the Hummingbirds, who ill need to start cooking for soon, and the first Bluebird of spring I spied heading south down the valley, who is also a source of interconnectedness and joy.

  Bonfire calling up a full Libra moon from under the East Hill treeline, and a dream of deep, silent snow leads into bright spring morning and a loose Hereford charging around by the creek that runs under the bridge, and then over the bridge and I call Sister Mama to tell her theres cattle coming her way and I get invited to go see the Blue Heron nests down the road.

 Tilled the garden again, steeling myself for the task of pulling thatch and weed away from the Lavender and Rose bushes. Next week I may brave a few seeds in the ground. Went down to see the Blue Heron nursery along the old right-of-way. The light was fantastic, shining off the fresh water of the fen, illuminating filaments and veins, the broad green gowns of Skunk Cabbage with their dusky reliquaries holding the curious spadix, another clue that we are approaching the gentle and welcoming heart of Spring. I boiled eggs in onion skins until they were mahogany red.

  And there was a sweatlodge and deaths and birthday parties. I wake up one morning knowing its time to plant out the lettuce and sow the beets. Were past the Ides of April, rolling down the fresh green hill into May. Moving the Marigold, Zinnias, Parsley and the Hopi Tobacco into bigger pots, the air not as balmy as id like it, but im sure these little lives enjoy the pure nourishment of the Sun, and the air moving between their leaves will strengthen them. I make the questionable decision to bring all the seedlings (except for the tomatoes and peppers) out into the sunlight to get them started hardening-off. The cool, overcast days prove a perfect segue into life rooted in the Earth. I need to wash floors and pull dandelions, re-pot more houseplants, rake the winters leaves from the Ivy. The big felted Hoya clusters appear, the first wave of Geranium flowers stretch their faces toward the glass. Its a matter of months now, counted on one hand. We love you.

the friday song.

april, come she will.

 the friday song.

 Letters from the Outside, #55

The crazy sound of starlings in a stand of trees along the high road down to the lake.

The welcome, persistent reduction of fear, making space for active optimism and intuition.

The Orchid buds continue to split, alien o'keefe hatches, and the pink Geranium produces its

lovely cone manifolds.  I wrestle the poor hobbled Monstera away from the window, 

hoping to exercise its green bones toward the light.

Even the Hoya begins to bloom again, surely a sign that we turn toward Equinox.

  

And again the miraculous little birds, the feathers so well set they seem made of some 

smooth thing, not a billion barbed filaments.  Everything is the Universe writ small.

The finches begin to fill with gold at the throats.  Late february day stolen from early may

and the next a firm reminder of winter.  We move into march, south wind

roaring up the valley and the changing light hitting a harder note on the tall grass

and branches.  Someone moved into the hobby farm, open-faced and a friendly hand raised.

Two off-beat but entirely anonymous vehicles and a chunky wooden lakehouse replica

porch ornament of the american flag.

 The black dog stands on point as we come up the rise toward the 

widows chestnut trees, and i think about the Great Ladies i aspire to serve and

how each rules an element, Air of unscathed liberation, Fire of joyful incarnation,

Water of compassionate service, and the dark, silent Earth 

from which all Mystery springs.  

The seeds are ordered, and the germinating stand pulled out from under 

a winters worth of rubble.  Regaining balance, "as an attribute of intiation,"

is the theme this month, incorporating into the refuge of Inter-Being.

As tom wolfe said, "I had gotten it backward all along.

Not 'seeing is believing,' you ninny, but 'believing is seeing.'

Spring is rising, the Divine Energy driving the green shoot from the ground also calls

from me the offering of my authenticity; the Universe in cahoots for evolution.

And everywhere signs of resistance to the juggernaut of soul-death and exploitation.

Myself, im seeing the Equinox as some kind of Beginning, prefaced by 

the rainy Virgo moon.  Good things are happening, 

drove south to see a man in a floppy brown hat sweat through his vest

and play a battered black guitar with duct tape over the sound hole

sing the ragged anthems of my happy heart.

Started seeds, tomatoes and peppers, crucifers, lettuce and Marigolds,

Zinnia, Mugwort, Parsley, onion, Calendula.

Birdsong in the early morning and the delay-loop Peeper chorus bead clear, gentle nights.

Venus and Jupiter in rare conjunction, Strawberry Alarm-Clock sunrises and

rainbow afternoons, the Pleiades.

Taking inventory around the grounds, i see that, out of the three Lilac i planted 

two years ago, the big black dog watered one successfully to death,

and anothers been browsed clean of buds by the deer, who have

also helped themselves to the lower branches of the Apple trees.

The Wolfsbane is a happy mound of broad green leaves,

and it looks to be a good year for the Foxglove.

Squill and Daffodils sending good vibes up from the ground to indigo and lemon chrysalides

while my beloved Dicentra makes its humble entrance, pale, unremarkable,

pointed thumbs like some overfed, light-deprived asparagus.

The early mornings still as starry as the late nights, and the dew and chill

give way to this glorious heat that strums our atoms like the strings of light they are.

Lilac leafs-out and Forsythia bloom in their great golden transfixing thickets. 

Wee fragrant patches of Violet on the lawn.  

The Bergamot will prove a formidable swath by the looks of it, and

i fear the Bramble has its sights on my rich expanse of fertile, freshly-turned earth.

 Jupiter shines over a lovely taurus cheshire moon.

Cold enough today to start a fire in the hearth, and the seedlings havent seen sunlight

for days, but thriving nonetheless, especially the tomatoes, who require longer light during

this time in their growing cycle.  It looks to be cold for at least a little while,

cold and rainy as it should be here and now.

 Great and gentle change in my life in the direction I suppose some

strong and long-unattended part of myself orchestrated in conjuction with 

Love and Source and Fate, whatever one would call it.

Knowing i have to grow deeper down into the Gentle Path, 

accept and acknowledge myself, and return from past travails wiser and ready to 

take on the work ahead of me.  

So much around us needs healing, needs to recognize itself as an integral part of this

miraculous whole.  No sentient being is insignificant, no living thing expendable.

 As horror stacks upon horror in this sad, distracted culture, it is literally

vital to remain a being of Peace.  

And thats what ive dedicated myself to in this time of great change and Becoming;

integrating dualities by dissolving false boundaries.

I dont know if these letters have afforded you some small veil of forgetfulness, 

stepping stones across a creek with no bridge of suspended disbelief,

but they have led me, after a lifetime of ink, to the realization that it is time 

i craft a life worth the having lived it.  

i dont yet know where im going, but i know im getting there.

 So thank you. 

marion morrison at the zen center

(for zuzu)

the fabric is on fire

against the skin

and rising 

toward clouds spun

of cardigan

in the barricaded

meditation hall.

from under the rubble 

all is quiet.

jesus calling

each barb into place

along the hollow axis.

the Masters

tangerine keisaku

broken open in an offering

of volatiles.

the hall expands

to hold the prairies and canyonlands

in which you are

always all one.

the sparrow flies

over a palimpsest of mud kanjis
the dogs have written
in sacred ink of
earth and rainwater.

the cracker

transubstantiates

to sugar

for the body

to burn.

hallelujah.

Letters from the Outside, #54

I love the blue nights of a late second quarter Moon. The days fluctuate wildly from mud to several below. The tree has been unornamented and waits a proper Viking funeral between the shed and the wheelbarrow. The calendar ticked imperceptibly into a new solar year, one gifted with an extra day to help even the odds. I have always been fascinated with the idea of being born on The Leap Day, aging technically one year for everyone elses four. The tide reaching its flood to full and drawing me along with increased fervor and industry, a welcome friction from what seemed some interminable desert of entirely barren and mesmerizing dunes.

A dry, balmy day sees me down the road in one less layer than I probably should be, ignorantly exuberant in the alien weather. Its when im walking that I feel what it must feel like to be human, as when im dancing I feel a spirit coalesced into flesh. The sunlight changes everything; when it runs to earth unencumbered everything is bathed and unified, and when the wind veils it in dense parades of vapor each piece into self-focus recedes, moving through the aperture of our awareness from the Source. Miracles are germinated likewise in the great plains of Soul and rise through us, true phenomena, channeled Light.

The wind roars on the far side of the valley and the Sun runs a golden crust along ours. The cells dilate, the heart buoyant momentarily. A vertebra from the deer whose bones I wrote were turning into road offered itself to me today, spared somehow from the mower and general decay, transverse processes elegant and intact, the body an evident valentine heart shape and the arches especially long, fine and curved, as to resemble wings. Its a fine sign after shattering the inherited crystal bowl, whos loss was so deep I didnt realize it for a few days afterward, and I havent yet released myself from the regret. There is snow at last to last to spring, cold as cold can be around here but it cuts down on the mud, which has its own devoted season, or used to.

Im writing this bit on the day we've set aside in celebration of a man reviled while alive (better him than palefaced slave-holders and white perpetrators of genocide) and I was writing to a friend about a frank o'hara poem going on about “...the idea of an undercurrent, real, true, meaningful things happening just beneath our distracted reality facsimulation...the quotidian struggles, the titanic, original forces. how the meta and the physical overlap to create the shifting, shitting spectre of man...

...i tend to view the physical world, its denizens, as transubstantiated symbols. blood and body, bread and wine. you, i, the ocean rising into clouds, the cornfields with their countless sweet embryos. its all something else, something greater,” and I remembered a quote by the good reverend himself: “Everything that we see is a shadow cast by that which we do not see.” Heavy on the aldo leopold and william james lately.

Already half-way through january, four months to see through til the last frost date, but even that is receding toward the equinox. Tuesday night the wind is roaring and I cannot sleep. These, the kind of nights my soul craves a-roaming, wrapped in the brown cloak and shod in the seven-league boots, standing and striding by turns through copses and meadows, mingling in the powerful magic of heavy weather. There is much to learn on a night like this.

In my dream I dreamed it was my birthday, and I was loved. A ways from shore a little rowboat made its way along to land and the people disembarking, once estranged, again opened their hearts to me. And a channel and a sweatlodge and im ready to turn my lead box into a hollow bone. The more it opens, I feel the creature-fear rising, and this fear assures me im on the right track. The fear calls for a great flood of Light to clear the space, to dissolve the fear into love, a vital transubstantiation. But rebirth is no less a struggle than the first.

Well, the snow didnt stay, and the damp desolation seems unnatural and grim. Ill take hard -going in the deep duvet of the late-january snow over the cold mud and colorless skies of some weak nuclear winter.

I was blessed to be in some woods when there was a good cover of snow and I followed the soft arrowheads of rabbit tracks and they led me down the hole. Hawks and crows crying out over and in among the high bare branches sketching out old Raven in a Navajo blanket, facing west. Unclosed just that little bit, and my whole center of gravity rolls like a raindrop to the tip of a long lanceolate leaf and pauses there and offers the view from a telescope the other way around, small and far away until its returned to the Earth, blending with everything. Only the roads retain enough cold to keep the snow on them. Everything is pale and frozen and exposed, the hard wind funnels through the valley and roars across the highground.

We love you.

TRANSPORT from Noah Kalina on Vimeo.

for golden boy, at seventeen.



(birthday, michael stipe).