Certified: Chapters 18 & 19: Fini

Here are the last chapters for Certified: Learning to Repair Myself and the World in the Emerald City. My year of school is over! Because it's the conclusion it is very long. I did proof it, but it's been a long day and I'm sure I goofed up in my places. In any case: I hope you enjoy.

Chapter Eighteen: Top of the World, Ma!

The second residency came and went uneventfully. For the third residency and for the final project I would do for school, I was supposed to create a seven minute podcast about a particular resource. I told the class I would probably do something about plants. I wanted to talk about listening to plants intuitively, but I wasn't sure how that would go over.

I had been spending more and more time with the plants. It was spring, after all, even though we could hardly tell. It had been cold and rainy ever since we had come home from Arizona. Some of us wondered if this had anything to do with the meltdown of the Japanese reactors after the earthquake and tsunami. Something felt off in our neck of the woods. The weather was awful, and people kept getting sick and not getting better for a long time.

The rivers were flooding, and I often went to the Doetsch Ranch at Beacon State Park to walk and watch the river rise. Nettle grew up and around the old cottonwoods until they were nearly my height with tiny blossoms hanging from the leaves like necklaces that had come undone. Bright green lemon balm grew close to the ground, just off the trail under the cottonwood. In shaded hollows here and there, tiny bleeding hearts grew up amongst wild geraniums and miner's lettuce. And the grass grew higher and higher, hiding tall luscious and elegant looking comfrey plants--so deep green they were almost blue--and coltsfoot with their large multi-lobed leaves and odd-looking flower-head growing up on a stalk that looked separate from the plant, its blossoms reminding me of an explored fireworks display frozen in the sky of green.

I began talking to the plants again, especially those at the Ranch. And then I began talking with the plants. Or listening to the plants. I would stand next to a plant I didn't know and meditate with it, keeping my awareness open for images and thoughts. For one plant I "heard" that it was good for chest ailments. I also saw (in my mind's eye) that a lot was going on underneath--that the plants were actually a community of plants linked by what was underneath: a community.

I went home and didn't try to find out what the plant was. But the next day I happened upon a drawing of the plant that looked just like the one I'd found I the field, and I saw it was Western coltsfoot. I did some research and found Western coltsfoot was used for coughs and lung ailments. And it grew from rhizomes, so many stems (and flowers) grew up from creeping rhizomes: like a community.

This happened again and again. I would meditate or hang out with the flower or plant and then go home and do research and find out that what I "heard" was correct.

In the midst of this, I made a podcast about the wonders of plants and how we should try to communicate with them. I didn't want to come off as some kind of flake, so I quoted lots of experts: Stephen Harrod Buhner, Tim Scott (Invasive Plant Medicine), Matthew Wood, and others. I spent the day making this seven minute podcast, and then I put it out of my mind.

Only I kept thinking about the podcast. It had been a long and arduous year. Was I going to end it with this dull podcast about how cool plants were? It wasn't me. And it wasn't interesting.

So I made another podcast.

I still didn't like it.

Mario thought they were both great.

"But it's not me," I said.

Wasn't this last year all about changing me? All about me trying to find a more productive way to be in the world?

I kept thinking about the podcast.

Who was I? What did I enjoy doing?

I saw my life as a series of illnesses, at least my adult-life. Yuck. That was no way to think about my life.

That was what had happened to me.

That wasn't who I was.

I was the person who wrote Ruby's Imagine. I was the one who opened my mind and imagination so that Ruby could tell me her beautiful story.

I was the person who wrote Church of the Old Mermaids. I was the one who sat in a little shack in the foothills of the foothills of the Rincon Mountains in Tucson and let Old Mermaids come up out of the wash and tell me their stories.

I was the person who made up a story about a magical carrot cake and told it to my food systems class as they sat (seemingly) spellbound through the whole tale.

I was the person who asked friends to bring found objects to a gathering of women, and then I held each object, one at a time, and told an Old Mermaids tales based on the object.

I was a storyteller.

That was who I was.

A friend of mine told me once he was afraid what would happen to me if I couldn't write or tell stories. He was afraid for my safety and sanity.

And then it happened to me. My mind went haywire for a time. The docs said I had multiple chemical sensitivities. I was allergic to the world. I was not allergic to the world--I refuse to believe that's even possible. But something did happen and for a while, I couldn't read or write. Even after I got better, my writing wasn't the same. I wasn't the same.

But that was then. See? I get caught looking backward and seeing only these islands of illness and distress.

I was talking about me being a storyteller.

So I made another podcast for my class. This time I told a story about a man called Thomas who was apprenticing to Old Mrs. Kelly to be a faery doctor. He learned what was written in books, but he wasn't very good with the living plants. He couldn't hear them. After a series of events, he finally goes out to the plants and is truly still. And then he whispers, "Deep peace to you," and they whisper back to him. Soon he becomes the best apprentice Old Mrs. Kelly ever had, and he turns out to be a pretty good faery doctor.

I liked this podcast. It was perfect, but it was me.

Soon it was time to go to my final residency of my final class.

Before I left I talked on the phone with the Family Member who had been having trouble with prescription drugs. I couldn't tell if she was using or not, but she was having some health problems. She told me about them and I offered advice. Then she said she didn't want to be lectured, and she started to cry. I didn't think I was lecturing her, but I knew she often thought she was doing everything wrong and everyone thought she was doing everything wrong. To be fair, I did think that many of her decisions lately seemed self-destructive, and I didn't understand her thinking about many things.

And I just felt furious that she was accusing me of lecturing her. (It felt like an accusation.) I felt like I had spent part of my life trying to save her from oncoming traffic. It only worked once, when she was an infant and she went out into the road when I was supposed to watching her. I found her walking down the middle of the road, barefoot, in a diaper, while a truck barreled down on her. I swooped her up in my arms and saved her.

If I'd been watching her in the first place, she never would have needed saving.

Now she was her own person on her own journey. Now instead of saving her, I constantly felt like I was the one standing in traffic. And yet I wanted to save her. Or rather, I wanted her to be saved. I wanted her to be safe. If anything happened to her, it would be too difficult for our family to bear.

But now I wanted to scream at her as she told me not to lecture her. I wanted to scream at her to get her shit together because she was fucking up her life. Instead, I apologized. I knew it was foolish to argue with her if she was using. If she wasn't using, she was obviously feeling vulnerable and me screaming at her wasn't going to help. I told her I was just trying to help by giving her advice based on my experience.

Hah!

I got off the phone and talked to Mario about what had happened. He said most of the time people wanted to talk; they wanted someone to listen to them. I rolled my eyes. "I hate talking on the phone," I said, "so I'm not going to just sit there and be held captive while someone dumps their crap on me."

He shrugged. Clearly he understood her point of view and not mine.

"Why would they call me if they didn't want my advice?" I asked.

"Because you're family," he said.

I didn't get it. If I wasn't willing to hear my family's opinion about my life, I didn't tell them about my life. I kept most of my business private. My family knew less about my life than people who read my blog knew.

Even though I didn't get it, I told myself I would try to be better at just listening to family members when they called me. Our conversations were going to be short, however, because I certainly wasn't going to talk about my life.

Before Mario and I left for Seattle, I suggested to Mario that we look at our relationship and see if there were some things we needed to change. We were celebrating our thirtieth wedding anniversary this month (June), so I thought it was a good idea to take stock.

Sometimes I am a complete and utter idiot.

If it ain't broke so why fix it?

Almost immediately we stopped getting along. We were suddenly out of sync--or as if we were speaking two different languages. Then we were stuck in a car together for four hours. Fortunately we gave a friend of ours a ride to Tacoma. That took the burden off of us having to talk to one another for part of the trip.

I hadn't been able to get us a room at the place we usually stayed, so I rented the Quaker House rooms again. Mario and I were going to be stuck in a tiny bedroom about the size of our bathroom for three days. Three days. I was not looking forward to this weekend.

After we dropped our stuff off at the Quaker House, we decided to walk to the Medicinal Herb Gardens. The city seemed especially noisy on this Friday afternoon. As each car roared by us, I felt like I was being slapped. My nervous system started to overload. The wind blew dust up all around us as we walked. We got to the garden, but it seemed noisy, too. We didn't stay long. On the way back to the Quaker House, I held tightly to Mario's hand and tried to shield myself from all the noise and activity. I kept my head down and trusted him to lead me back to safety.

Finally, gratefully, we arrived back at the cool quiet Quaker House. It was such a relief. I sat quietly on my bed, wondering how I was ever going to survive in this world. My school year was almost over. I thought I'd be all cured this year. That had been my goal. It had been my goal for many years.

This line of thinking usually got me spiraling down into depression.

Not this time.

I looked up at Mario and said, "You know, I think it's normal to feel overwhelmed when there's too much noise and pollution and activity. I'm not odd. I'm not sick. I am experiencing a natural reaction to an unnatural state."

That's right.

It wasn't me.

I was natural.

Still, this natural person curled up into a fetal position on the bed. I didn't want to go anywhere. Mario found a menu for Araya's Place, a vegan Thai restaurant that had gluten-free food. It was only a few blocks away, so he left to go get us take-out.

I put the movie Under the Tuscan Sun in my computer and watched it until I was feeling better. Then I got up and walked to meet him. I grinned when I caught a glimpse of him walking down the sidewalk in the near distance, holding a takeout bag. We met and walked back to the Quaker House. We set up plates in our tiny room. Then we had some of the best food I could ever remember eating: delicious rice noodles and spicy vegetables, and rice brown and white rice and tofu and vegetables.

Later that night as Mario and I lay in our separate twin beds, I said, "OK, in permaculture we try to take problems and make them the solution. What could we do about the freeway that's above this whole neighborhood?"

It felt better to think about solutions than to focus on what wasn't working.

We began talking about what was possible, and then we decided to think about what was supposedly impossible. In Portland, they had removed a freeway (Harbor Drive) to build Tom McCall Park and this had helped transform the city. Together, Mario and I imagined the freeway disappearing. We imagined the stress lifting from the bodies of those who lived in these neighborhoods where they were bombarded with the constant sound of tires over pavement, an unpleasant white noise that never seemed to abate. In our imaginations, the noise disappeared. The city was more livable, the people more resilient.

In our imagination is where better worlds always begin.

Mario and I were beginning to get into step with one another again.

Mario fell to sleep, and the light came on outside and brightened the room. I could hear someone talking, too. Normally, I would have felt like this was an intrusion. How dare "they" turn on the light? How dare they disturb my rest? Then I thought about all the times I had traveled in Europe. If something happened there to disturb my sleep, I just felt like it was part of the adventure of traveling. If I heard people talking, it was part of the charm of the place.

Why couldn't I do that here? Why did I always take things so personally?

So I became charmed by the light and the sound of voices.

Eventually the light went off, and the voices went away.

Quiet ensued. I was charmed by the quiet.

I fell to sleep smiling.

The next day, I went to class at school for the first half of the day. For the second half, we all met at the teacher's house, just as we had a year ago. We listened to two community activists talk for a while, and then we listened to each other's podcasts. Everyone was clever and inventive: They talked resources like hugs, playing in nature, coffee, trash, dandelions. And then he played mine.

It seemed as though you could hear a pin drop as they listened. I couldn't tell if they liked it. It was so different from when I'm LIVE reading or telling a story or talking to a group. When it was over, I got lots of kudos. The teacher asked what I learned from the experience. I got choked up. I said, "I learned I am a storyteller. I haven't been able to make a living from my stories yet, but that's who I am."

I was glad I had done it my way.

Cue Frank Sinatra.

After class, the teacher invited us to stay for potluck. I remembered the potluck from a year ago. No one had talked to me. Not even the teacher. The teacher's parents had talked with me, and that had been kind. Sadly, the father--the one who had lent me his triple AAA card so that I could get a locksmith to come out and unlock my car (since I'd locked my keys in the trunk)--had died unexpectedly only a month earlier.

I hadn't brought anything for the potluck, plus I didn't actually want to stay, so I hugged a few of the people I had had classes with all year. And then I left.

I got into the car and drove out of west Seattle toward the University district. My year of schooling was almost over. I just had to write a final reflection. Then fini.

I got to the Quaker House where we met up with a friend and then we walked to Araya's for dinner. Somehow the onslaught of traffic and noise didn't seem to bother me as much today. Perhaps it was because I was in the company of my friend. We had a good dinner and conversation.

The next morning Mario and I got up very early and walked a couple of blocks to the Portage Bay Cafe for breakfast. I had scrambled tofu and potatoes. After, we drove north from Seattle toward Bastyr University. Once we got off the expressway, we drove down shaded windy streets and then down a long drive until we came out of the wood and onto the open sunny campus of this small university.

It was about 9:00 a.m. on a Sunday morning, so hardly anyone was around. We parked by the main building. To the left of this building, a short distance away, was what looked like student housing. In-between the student housing and the main building was the medicinal herb garden.

I got out of the car and took a deep breath. I felt instantly relieved, as though I had just come home. It was so quiet and peaceful after the city. I loved it instantly. I wanted to teach here. Or live here. Or maybe I should have gone to school at Bastyr! All sorts of thoughts went through my head when I first got out of the car. My acupuncturist, Jasmine, had told me about Bastyr some months earlier, but the time and the weather had never been right. Today was perfect.

We left the car behind and walked across the campus to the Medicinal Herb Garden. At first it looked smaller than the one at University of Washington. But as I walked around these circles of medicinal herbs, I began to feel as though I was in the middle of an enormous garden.

They had planted different beds of medicinal herbs according to what system they healed: brain, nervous system, respiratory system, etc. They had an elemental garden with four beds, each one based on a particular element. They had Ayurvedic herbs in one bed and Chinese medicinal herbs in another. They had a "shade garden" and inside it were "at risk" plants they were nurturing.

I was in awe. Now this was a medicinal herb garden. I first heard about "plague gardens" outside hospitals and clinics when I read a biography of 17th century scientific illustrator Maria Sibylla Merian (Chrysalis: Maria Sibylla Merian and the Secrets of Metamorphosis). When I read the words "plague garden" a chill went up my spine; I knew that one day I would write a book called the Plague Garden. Walking around this medicinal herb garden I got a true feeling of healing that I would like to emulate in my book. This was what my plague garden would be like.

We stayed at the gardens for a long time. The longer I was there, the longer I wanted to stay. I took off my shoes and socks and walked along the "reflexology path." (Gingerly, I might add.) When I was a kid, I had spent most of my life barefoot and outside. Now my soles were soft and vulnerable.

Eventually we headed home. We stopped in Tacoma to pick up our friend. Thankfully the long drive home was uneventful and we arrived back safely.

I wrote my final reflection the next day. A day or two later, I got sick again. I wondered why. Maybe I hadn't honored the Dragon of Seattle enough? Or maybe I had eaten too much. I didn't know. I was frustrated.

I wasn't going to give up, though. I went back on an anti-inflammatory diet. Since my mother died, I had been eating more sweets than I usually did. Now I cut out sweets completely. Ate more protein and less carbos. I started meditating more regularly and doing breathing exercises. I turned off the TV. No more crime shows. No more murders.

A few days later, the weekend after we got back from Seattle, I attended a workshop on Celtic Shamanism and Druid Wisdom Tales taught by Tom Cowan. It was a small group, and several people from my two-year Celtic Shamanism program attended, too. Even though I was practically hacking up a lung half the time, I enjoyed myself immensely.

A friend once told me that I needed to find my tribe. When that happened, all would be well. I felt as though I was with my peers--with my tribe.

As I wandered the grassy labyrinth in the meadow with several of my friends, I thought about my classmates up in Seattle. Were they part of my tribe? They were certainly people who believed in being active members of their communities. They were working toward a sustainable and resilient world. I liked that. That was my plan as well. I didn't know any of them well enough to know whether they were part of my tribe.

This meadow, the birds overhead, the cottonwoods along the shore of the creek, the angelica growing in another field, the deer that grazed, hidden, in the tall grass, and the people walking with me in the labyrinth were part of my tribe. They were committed to their relationships with the unseen--and with nature.

I listened to stories all weekend. And I drummed and rattled. Told stories. Tom quoted Thomas Berry who said "we are the place the Earth dreams." I liked that.

I came into the main meeting room one morning and found an antler rattle on my chair. It was a gift from one of my Celtic brothers. The gesture brought me to tears, especially after I learned he had found the antler in the woods while hiking barefoot; then he had made it into a rattle himself.

The rattle held significance for me for another reason, too. For some odd reason, despite being under great stress and not feeling very well at the time, two months earlier I had decided to take a 20-week Sound Healing course. Before I had started back to school, I had clients and did healing work. I had put all of this on hold since I started school.

I didn't stop doing the healing work just because I went back to school. It was also because I doubted what I was doing. I could see that I helped some people, but I didn't help others. Primarily, I didn't help myself. To me, if I couldn't heal myself, what good were any of my healing abilities? How real or efficacious were these techniques if I was still ill?

When this sound healing class came up, I thought maybe it was just what I needed to get well. I was always desperately looking for an answer. I was desperately looking for wellness. I already did some sound healing with my clients, but once again, I thought an "expert" could give me clues so I could do it better.

So I signed up.

We were supposed to make our own instrument during the course of the class, so the teacher had us go on a journey (or meditation) to find out about the sound instrument we were supposed to make, one of my helpers told me someone would give me an antler. I remember thinking, "No one I know is going to give me an antler." One night I dreamed someone gave me a rattle. When I awakened from the dream I decided to make the rattle I was given in the dream, so that's what I did. I used a rosemary branch for the handle, a friend gave me rabbit fur for the handle, and I bought some elk hide for the head of the rattle. (I put in black beans and yellow corn for the rattle part.) It was beautiful, the sound was lovely, and I took it around Doetsch Ranch and let all the plants bless it.

Now, three days before our final class sound healing class and our public community healing, my Celtic brother gave me an antler. Not only an antler but an antler rattle. I knew I would use it in the community healing.

It was a beautiful weekend. I slept well. I felt nourished by the place and the people. I went home quite happy and content.

The following day, I had an urge to go to the Grotto, a 62-acre Catholic shrine and botanical garden in Portland. I wasn't sure why I wanted to go. I missed my dad, and I had taken my mom and dad to the Grotto years earlier. I took my camera and Mario and I went up to the garden, situated above the church. The rhododendrons were in bloom, and I took lots of photos. We wandered around the trails of this semi-wild, semi-manicured acreage and suddenly we saw labyrinth sign. We had never seen a labyrinth at the Grotto before.

We turned down the trail and walked to a labyrinth. It was off away from the rest of the gardens, tucked beneath tall old Doug firs. The area was semi-dark, secluded, faery-like. It was a Chartres labyrinth, unlike the more classical labyrinth at Still Meadow where the workshop had been. It was made from stones or bricks that looked like they had each been fashioned by hand.

I took a deep breath and stepped onto the path. I walked around each bend and curve, walked down each straightaway. How many years ago had I gotten sick and dizzy and thought of myself as the Minotaur trying to find my way out of a labyrinth that felt more like a maze than a path in and out? I had walked an outdoor labyrinth at Grace Cathedral in San Francisco. I had walked on the indoor labyrinth at the Trinity Episcopal Cathedral in Portland. Mario and I had made a labyrinth on the Oregon beach once and walked it until the tide washed it away. In Santa Fe, we had gone to the labyrinth by the folk museum in the dead of night and walked it. (That was so much fun!) I had walked the labyrinth at Still Meadow many times over the years and whenever I reached the center of it, I felt as though I were home.

Now I walked this new labyrinth with Mario. A couple of other people joined us. I liked that. I liked being with other people on the labyrinth. But none of them finished it. As I followed the curves, I saw a snail also "walking" the labyrinth. She who carried her house on her back. I looked down at her beautiful spiral and thought, "Yes, yes, yes. Everything is the same." When I began walking, she was going one way and then eventually she went the other way, out of the labyrinth.

When I got to the center, I felt the presence of all my guides. I grinned into the forest. Then I walked out again.

I took off my shoes and socks, and I walked it again.

I was giddy by the time I left.

The next night, I was in the center of a large room with seven other people. We were surrounded by a circle of thirty or more people. Our teacher had honored the directions and told the community how we would proceed. Now we were preparing to do a sound healing on a client who was on the massage table.

We began by making sound. We used our voices. We use the instruments we had made: rattles, bells, whistles, feathers and bells. We used drums, cymbals, bells (big and tiny) singing bowls (crystal and metal). We made pleasing sounds at first, then cacophonous noise, then soothing sounds. We worked in concert, in harmony and disharmony.

We did this for three hours, for one client after another. It felt otherworldly. It felt profound and communal. This surprised me because I had not connected very well with this group of people. They all belonged to a particular shamanic school in Portland, everyone except me and another friend of mine who had recommended the course. They all knew one other and I was, once again, a stranger. In the end, that didn't matter. Somehow we all came together and did the work.

Maybe that was what community was: Doing the work whether you liked or connected with the people or not. That wasn't my idea of community, but maybe that was all we got some of the time. Other times, we got our soul brothers and sisters, like at the Druid Wisdom Tales workshop, where I was with people who touched my soul, tickled it, embraced it, loved on it.

I used my deer rattle during this community sound healing. As I held it in my hand, I thought of my brother who had gifted it to me. I felt ancient and wise and connected to the spine and bloodstream of the world.

A couple of days later, I drove to Portland by myself and went to the grotto again. This time I took with me the rattle I had made and the antler rattle that my brother had been gifted to me. I walked the labyrinth first with the rattle I had made. Then I walked the labyrinth with bare feet, gently holding and shaking the antler rattle. Then I walked it a third time, silent.

Each time I felt as though I were on the back of a serpent, not just on stones on the ground.

I felt blessed by these experiences.

At home again I felt as though something was coming to a head. Something was changing. My breathing seemed worse rather than better. What was going on? I thought of my year in school. What had I accomplished?

I had survived it.

I had survived a very difficult year with my family.

I looked at almost everything a little differently than I had before. I knew more change happened in the world when people were inspired, not when they were bludgeoned with depressing facts. I knew more about the food system than I had known before--and I thought I'd known a lot. I knew a lot about permaculture. I could probably even design gardens and like doing it, as long as my gardens told stories. They had to nourish body and soul.

Beauty had to be a part of the equation.

If there even was an equation.

I sat at my desk one day and looked at all my certificates; I thought about all of my degrees. I was an educated woman in the liberal arts and in the healing arts.

And yet, I was still so un-easy. I still gasped for breath.

Something else was going on with me. With the world. Would I ever know what? I had spent twenty-five years trying to get healthy.

Was my life a wasted life?

I wanted more.

The cough held on. My breathing was ragged.

This was ridiculous.

I stopped using my inhaler. I gasped for breath, but I continued doing breathing exercises. I told myself I could breathe, I could breathe.

I kept hearing this small voice in my head getting louder, "You've learned all these things, now use them on YOURSELF."

I began giving myself pep talks. I listened to the plants and took remedies. I asked my dreams for answers.

Another voice said, "You've done all this before. It didn't work then and it won't work now."

Another voice said, "That was the past. Quit getting stuck in the past."

One day, I walked partway up Wind Mountain on my own. It's a steep elevation. I talked to the poison oak at the beginning of the trail and asked for safe passage. I asked the Spirits and Beings of the place for safe passage. It was difficult, but I went to the first plateau without using my inhaler. And I got a healing. The Spirit said, "There, now go home and forget about it."

I slipped and fell once going down, but I wasn't hurt.

Five days later, Mario and I decided to walk to the top of Wind Mountain.

We passed by the poison oak with a whispered blessing. Then up we went. Mario went ahead of me. I had to stop a lot. My chest was tight, but I didn't want to take any medication. So I went slow. Up we went. I felt like I was climbing Everest. Where was my oxygen?

Up we went. Then rested. Drank water. Walked.

I whispered to the mountain and the Beings of the Mountain every step of the way.

I wondered if I would drop dead of a heart attack. Or maybe my lungs would close down.

At least I was out of doors. At least I had my feet on Mother Earth.

I missed my own mother. I missed my dad.

My mom used to run. She had asthma, too. She wanted to be well more than anything. She never got well.

But maybe I could.

That would be all right, wouldn't it? If I got well.

Up.

I didn't know if I could make it.

It was so hard.

One time I was bent over gasping for breath, and I noticed a purple flower. Its leaves looked like it was in the lupine family. I talked to it for a bit. I knew "lupine" meant wolf, and I suddenly got a vision of a mother wolf, close to the ground. She could breathe.

She could breathe.

Yes, I could be like that wolf.

I could breathe.

I caught my breath and I walked.

Up the mountain I went.

Over three talus fields.

I was a wolf.

A flower.

A breeze.

I was me.

Around the corner.

I was at the top.

Almost. I was surrounded by bright green ferns overgrowing the path. All around me trees rose. Doug firs? I didn't notice. In the distance, 1,200 feet below, the Columbia River ran swollen and brown, near flood stage from our above average rainfall. The river curved west, past Beacon Rock, heading toward the ocean.

We heard sticks breaking, like how bears do in the woods to let you know where they are. So Mario broke sticks, too. And then a woman emerged from the green. She smiled and said hello and walked by us. We walked a few feet more and saw a man coming down from the top. He was grinning. Happy.

He stopped to talk. He had never been before. They had left an offering. He was so excited. I listened to him talk about his life. He asked us our names and then I asked him his. "Benny," he said.

I smiled. I had a character named Benjamin in all of my novels (or nearly all). I wasn't sure how it had started, but now the name was a kind of good luck charm.

We said our good-byes, and the man started to walk away. I said, "Is your wife's totem a bear by any chance?"

"It's mine," he said, "and we're pretty much joined at the hip."

"So it was your bearness we sense," I said.

He smiled and then said goodbye.

Mario went and stood by one of the old trees on the west side of the mountain. I continued through the brush up to the top of the mountain, where no trees or brush grew. I stood at the top of a large talus field.

I had made it.

I had walked to the top of Wind Mountain without using any medication.

It was probably the first time in twenty-some years that I hadn't had to use medication to walk so far and so high.

It was one of the highlights of my life so far. And it had been one of the most difficult things I had ever done. Nearly every step of the way I wondered if I was going to die.

Now I was ecstatic.

And a little out of breath.

I was at the top of a mountain where the indigenous people of this area used to come for their vision quests.

I wondered if they still came.

I held my arms up to the east and thanked the Spirits and Beings of the East. The river curved away to the East. Then I held my arms up to the south, where most of my view was blocked by the tops of the trees, but I could see the blue sky. I thanked the Spirits and Beings of the South.

I turned to the west and looked into the tangle of trees and brush, and I thanked the Spirited and Beings of the West. Finally I turned to the north. In the distance the hillsides were dark green with Doug firs. And further in the distance, I could see a mountaintop. I couldn't see enough to tell which mountain it was, but we figured it was Mount Adams. I thanked the Spirits and Beings of the North.

And I thanked what is above, below, and all around. I thanked the Mountain and all who lived in this Place.

Alone on this mountaintop--well, free of human companionship at least--I held my arms up, took a deep full breath, and cried out, "Top of the world, Ma!"

I left an offering of salmon. Mario came and stood with me for a while. Then another couple arrived. They sat and talked on a cellphone.

Mario and I said our goodbyes to the mountain, and then we began a mindful descent.



Chapter Nineteen: Healing

I thought I went back to school for noble reasons. I wanted to figure out ways to save the world because my ways weren't working.

It had been one of the worst years of my life.

It had also been one of the most amazing years of my life. Not only had I completed my certificate, but Mario and I had moved onto a new road in our writing. Instead of bemoaning the demise of publishing as we had known it, we embraced the new world. We started our publishing company, Green Snake Publishing, and we were working hard (and having great fun) reprinting previously published novels and publishing brand new novels we wrote, using covers we designed. I was in the midst of writing two non-fiction books when I decided I really wanted to finish writing Butch. In fact, I wanted to write several Butch novels. I was going to use my new community building skills to try and get backing to finish writing Butch. So I started a kickstarter project for the book.

I thought I had returned to school to acquire new skills. Maybe I had gone back to school because I had always excelled in school. Maybe I had wanted to do something I was good at again. I was so tired of failing.

Maybe I thought it would be comfortable. I could get back into the mainstream of life after years of illness. After years of being an edge dweller, where I talked to trees, plants, clouds, the wind, the air. Where I drummed and rattled and asked the plants for answers.

Only this time I hadn't excelled at school. Or maybe I did. They didn't give out grades, so even if I had excelled I wouldn't know it! I did well in my classes, but it didn't change anything. It didn't mean anything. No one was praising me. No one was telling me how great I was.

Did that mean I craved attention and approval?

Probably.

Oh my.

In the end, I didn't feel any better about myself because of my year in school. I knew so much already. That was one of the things I learned. About certain topics--like sustainability, green living, etc.--I was a font of knowledge. A font of wisdom, even, maybe.

I went to school looking for a way to heal the world because then I would be healed. Fixed. Put back together again like Humpty Dumpty after his great fall.

I thought it would direct me back into the world again. Propel me into the world.

Instead I began talking in earnest to plants again.

For so many years I had been fearful of being labeled New Age. (Still makes me shudder.) I didn't want to be considered some kind of flake who didn't understand science or logic. Because I did understand science and logic. I didn't want to be one of those people. I might be different, but I was good different.

But I had to face it. Essentially I was one of those people. Something had happened to our culture, or our human world, when we turned away from nature. Things got lopsided. Things got very dangerous. Things got sick.

When we stopped listening to the trees, we lost our ancient wisdom. When we stopped hearing the plants, we lost our Earth medicine. When we stopped thinking like a mountain, we lost our ability to be still and grounded. When we began ignoring the unseen, our world began unraveling. When we stopped listening to our dreams, the world became a nightmare.

We stopped hearing and telling stories.

Muriel Rukeyser said, "The universe is made of stories, not of atoms."

I had been trying to save the world and my family since I was a young girl.

Can we save the world if we can't save ourselves?

I've been in for repairs for too much of my life.

I ain't broken no more. At least not this moment.

Yesterday a lupine flower who turned into a wolf helped me climb a mountain.

That's the truth.

As I know it.

When I took a deep breath on top of the mountain yesterday, I felt as though I was breathing in myself.

I was becoming full of my one true self.

I am full of myself.

At least that's what I'm hoping I'm full of.

It's all an adventure, isn't it?

I wish you blessings on all your adventures.

May it be so.

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Old Blue Truck & Crow Girls

Charles de Lint and MaryAnn Harris each have out fabulous brand new CDs (which are also available for downloading). I think right this minute The Lost Highway and Crow Girls are my faves, but that could change tomorrow. Enjoy!

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Gaian Tarot

Joanna Powell Colbert's amazing Gaian Tarot is now available for pre-order at Amazon. I love this deck—it's beautiful, thoughtful and inspiring—and that's just the major arcana, which I have, from an earlier edition. Can't wait to get the whole deck this fall!

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Deathmark is Out!

It all happened more quickly than I thought: My new paranormal teen novel, Deathmark, is now making its way in the world. It's now available as an ebook from smashwords, on kindle and on nook. To celebrate this publications, we're selling the ebook for the reduced price of $2.99 for the first month and the print version will be only $9.99 for the first month. Here's where you can get it in print. Have fun!

(By the way, even though this is ostensibly a young adult novel, adults will enjoy it too.)

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Deathmark Just a Few Weeks Away!

My paranormal young adult novel, Deathmark, is almost ready for its coming out party. I just finished proofing it (after my proofreader proofed it). We have to make some changes on the cover. Rewrite the blurb and make it by Kim, not K.M. But this gives you a good idea about what it'll look like.

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From the Sixth Continent

There are five continents. This is a story from the sixth...

Outside my window, clouds cover a blue sky. I know the blue is there even though I can't see it. I hear the geese in the school soccer field across the way and my husband's chair squeaking in the room above as he leans back and forth while he writes. A bird I have never seen before--a bird the color of the sun before it realizes it is the sun--has come to be with me in the blackberry bramble I have refused to cut and that now pushes up against my window.

I've been thinking this morning about how I got to where I am. How do we all get to where we are?

I was thinking about Stephen Harrod Buhner, the herbalist, writer, provocateur, who spent a couple days in Portland recently speaking about herbalism. Mario and I went, Friday night and all day Saturday. I loved listening to him talk about the Invisibles. Enjoyed his stories about plants and people. Mario liked it, too. He said listening to Buhner was like listening to a male me. No wonder I enjoyed him!

Buhner held up a piece of sheet music and said, "Does anyone think this is the song? No. This is a map of the song." Botanical materia is not plant medicine, he said, it is only the map.

He said, "Science and medicine are impoverished. They've abandoned the invisible. They're dealing with the sheet music...without the song. We are meant to sing. To become a healer you must learn to sing."

Perhaps to be human we all must learn to sing.

Buhner told us that the most important thing about healing was what was invisible. We were all colonized long ago. We need to reclaim perception. We need to leave the map and follow the path of the heart. "Reclaim your body as your friend. It was made especially for you.

"There are holes in all of us that have nothing to do with parents or the culture or anything," he said, "and they are in the shape of plants, rocks, bears."

He spoke of the schism in our world, in our lives. We no longer listen to the Invisibles. It was only after science convinced us that the world was dead that they began their autopsy in earnest, he said.

Assume everything is intelligent.

Two hundred of us, more or less, sat listening in rapt attention to this poetic talk. He spoke to us about listening to plants and finding out what they had to say.

"It's not a technique," he said. "It's a communication."

How strange this talk would seem to most people.

For me, it felt like an affirmation.

I have been talking to plants since I was a girl. Talked to the rocks, too. The birds. The clouds. The wind.

For a long time, I forgot to listen. I just talked. Do you suppose after a while, the daisies would put their blossoms together as I neared to commiserate about the woman who just talked and talked and didn't let them get a word in edgewise?

Lately, I had given into my propensity to communicate with the inhuman.

The plants have many things to tell me.

Not that I share these experiences with many people. I don't relish watching their eyes glaze over as they think, "Oh, she's one of those. She doesn't understand science. She doesn't understand the facts of the world."

Oh but she does. She understands science. She understands facts. But life is not a technique; it's a communication.

Today I was wondering how I had gotten here. I had been one of those smart people. I was going to be someone, go places. Make my mark on the world.

Yet I couldn't follow the path set before me.

How does that happen? Why do some of us do exactly what was expected of us--for good or ill--and others don't?

Was I always an odd child?

Aren't we all?

I spent most of my childhood outside and barefoot, living in a world that included the woods surrounding my house and my imaginary world. The rest of the time I spent crying over some dead animal or some thing that had frightened me in the night. Sometimes the room spun at night. Once or twice I saw a strange white glowing woman walking around our house. Sometimes I awoke from nearly nightly nightmares paralyzed, unable to move or cry out when I saw the white lady. Once I heard a screech owl in the middle of the night and I was certain someone was being murdered. I ran into my father's room, jumped on him and said, "Someone's dying! You've got to get help!"

I had a name for the woods by my house near the marsh: The Lullaby Forest (because of the way the wind sounded coming through the trees). I had names for most of the trees, and each had their own personality.

Then I became a teenager and a couple things happened. I read the book You Never Promised Me a Rose Garden, about a schizophrenic girl who heard voices, and I was terrified that I had the same disease because I had an imaginary world and I talked to the people in it all the time. I went to my mother, sobbing, and begged her to tell me I wasn't insane.

Around the same time, my uncle sold the land next to our house, the land where my trees lived. I hadn't known the land didn't belong to us. My uncle offered to sell it to my father, but he couldn't afford it. (Back then Livingston County, where we lived, was the fastest growing county in the country, so a lot could go for $20,000.) The new owners came in and cut down most of the trees and dug out the marsh and made a pond.

It was so traumatic for me that I haven't a single memory of that time. There is before they cut the trees and then some time later.

I hated the new neighbors and my uncle for a long, long time.

I had planned on staying on that land--because much of it had been my grandparents' land--for my whole life.

Now I just wanted to get away.

I stopped talking to trees and to the people and beings who inhabited my imaginary world. I began high school, got a boyfriend, made plans for college.

Had a little breakdown the last year of high school. Spent the summer backpacking around Europe with a friend. Came back and started college. Quit within days. Ran away from home and was homeless for a while. (Never had to sleep in the streets, always found a couch with co-workers or friends.)

Where is this all going? My essay got hijacked by a trip down memory lane. Does any of this answer how did I get where I am?

And where am I?

I'm talking to plants.

I'm deciding once again, after a year of school, that what I want to do is write. I want to tell stories. I want to write about the bird who came to call on me today.

I want to write about my communication with that bird. Or that cloud. Or the wind in the willows...

It's not a technique; it's a communication.

Sometimes I don't want to write at all.

Often words get in the way.

I don't have words to articulate how I feel when my husband puts his arms around me.

Or when a hummingbird looks at me.

Or when I see a California poppy for the first time each spring. Or every time.

How can I describe the different greens pressing up against my window. The green of the blackberry vines. The shiny green of the rhodie bush. And then the green of that other plant, whose name I don't know. (I think I know her best of all...)

How do I describe the color of the red rhododendrons blooming across the street at the Methodist Church? It's a velvety red, like lush velvet. Not a bright red. Almost blood red. But that doesn't tell you much about this bush. How the most magnificent flowers are near the ground, and there's something decadent and wonderful about how close they are to the dirt. They remind me of ruby-lipped harlots leaning against the church, not so much interested in going inside but in luring the rhodie bush next to them to blossom just the same.

Ahhhh, ruby kisses.

Writing is not a technique; it's a communication.

When I started writing this, I thought I would tell you about my family and how they influenced me. How my parents didn't like me, but they loved me. How my mother seemed to believe I could save her. (I couldn't.) How illness had bitch-punched me off any and every path I had been on.

But now, none of that seems to matter.

Buhner talked about changing our perceptions. He mentioned how in times gone, Persian storytellers would begin a tale with: "Long ago there were stories but no people to hear them, and this is one of those stories." Or, "There are five continents; this story is from the sixth."

I love that. For whatever reason, long ago, I decided to live on that sixth continent. (Or seventh, let's not get bogged down in that argument.)

I didn't become a lawyer (or a psychologist, research biologist, or journalist--all careers I had contemplated). I didn't marry my high school sweetheart or any other man who worked 9-5. I didn't get a house in the suburbs and have 2.5 children.

For whatever reason--because I had holes in me that needed to be filled with plants, rocks, and bears--I wandered into the wilderness.

I could blame or thank my parents, the land I grew up on, the neighbor who cut down the trees, the illnesses that laid me low.

I wandered into the wilderness and found me a man who tinkers with words. I had a hole in me in the shape of his laugh.

I wandered into the wilderness and found stories in the shapes of other holes that would fill other people.

I wandered into the wilderness until I found the sixth continent. I wasn't sure it was home. I mean, almost everyone I loved was on another continent. I stayed a good long time.

I kept going back to the other continents. I wanted my loved ones to understand me. I wanted to find success. Safety. Security. I wanted to find that star that had been me.

I wondered if I had followed the wrong star home and missed my god? (To wrongly paraphrase Mr. Stafford.)

Look, life is a communication, not a technique.

A wind is shaking the green outside my window. I shiver.

In this moment, in this precious second, I realize I am finally home. On the sixth continent. Telling you this story.

Ahhhh.

And now, I'm going to step out into the green, and maybe I'll cross the street to see what those harlots by the church have to say.

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Stories, Stories, Stories

I'm putting up new stories all of the time. OK, not all of the time. But I'm trying to get better about putting up a couple a month at least. We'll see if I can keep it up! I've got dozens more to go. They're not available in print, but you can download them onto just about anything! Here's the list of what is available so far.

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Coyote Cowgirl: New Edition

I'm so pleased that the new Coyote Cowgirl is out. What's new about it? Well, for one, you can get it now. It was out of print. Second, there's an afterword (written by me) and a new cover. Third, you can get it in a print edition or for your e-reader or computer. All the links are here. You can also just go to Amazon, Amazon Kindle, B&N, or Smashwords and find it there. Enjoy!

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Eating Off the Map

I'm listening to Robbie Robertson's Contact From the Underworld of Redboy and looking out at another rainy day. I see snow on the gorge cliffs across the river from me. Blackberry vines are growing up along my window, pushing away the rhododendrons. Suddenly I feel like Briar Rose asleep in my castle after being pricked by...what? Or am I coming awake? Like Thelma and Louise out in the desert, at dawn, looking around at the wild. Thelma said, "I don't ever remember feeling this awake." I'm almost there with you, Thelma.

I'm cooking up a storm this morning. I'm making aduki bean and butternut squash soup and luscious lima bean soup. I've made the aduki bean soup many times. This is a first for the lima bean soup. My friend Tara brought it to a workshop I attended last weekend. Usually I can't eat anything anyone else brings, but I gobbled up three bowls of this soup. Tara tweaked the original recipe and I tweaked it even more.

First, I soaked my lima beans for forty-eight hours. (Overnight would have been fine.) Then I boiled the beans for a couple of hours, with a bit of kombu. Meanwhile, I cut up the carrots, celery, shallots, and leek and I sweated them in a pan. I added garlic, too.

(My friend Michelle taught me this method of cooking when I told her I didn't want to fry anything. It doesn't necessarily have as rich a flavor as when you saute, but that's all right with me: Fried food does not agree with me. To sweat, you put all the veggies in a pot, turn the heat up low, cover it, and the veggies will begin to "sweat" and cook.)

When the veggies were cooked through and the beans were done, I poured the veggies into the beans. I let them cook for a while longer and added salt and pepper. Then I ripped up some rainbow chard and added it.

I didn't use bouillon, as the original recipe suggested. I don't have any, but even if I did, that's too much sodium. I just tasted the broth and seasoned it with salt and pepper as needed. This soup is so creamy and delicious, just perfect for this wintry day. (Yes, I know technically it is spring.)

Besides the soups, I also roasted grated sweet potatoes. While that was finishing up, I had saved the pan that I'd sweated the veggies in. I added a little water to it so there was a nice little broth in the bottom of the pan. Then I steamed some ripped chard in it. When the chard was done, I took it out and put it on a plate. Then I cooked an egg in the remaining veggie "broth." The texture of the egg was exquisite. The white was firm and the yellow was just slightly runny. The white had taken on some of the golden color of the broth. It was the best egg I've ever eaten!

With all this wonderful food under my belt (and now in the fridge and the freezer), I'm ready to start my final paper for my final class for my graduate certificate on Sustainable Food Systems and Permaculture. I need to wander off the map a bit and see what answers will come to help me envision a sustainable and resilient culture and community. With all this wonderful grounding food this morning, I feel as though I can take this journey. Wish me luck!

Lima Bean Soup

2 cups dried lima beans (soak 24-48 hours)
1 4-6 inch strip of kombu
4-6 carrots, sliced
4-6 celery stalks, sliced
1 leek, chopped
3 garlic cloves, diced or put through the garlic press
1 small shallot or 1 small onion, diced
2 stalks rainbow chard, ripped

Drain and rinse soaked beans. Put in a pot with water an inch or more above the beans. (If you have your own stock, use it instead of water.) Add kombu strip. Boil and then simmer, watching the water level, until tender. More cooking won't hurt; that'll just make it creamier. Combine all the vegetables in a separate pan or pot. Cover and turn up heat to medium and then immediately to low. Let the vegetables slowly "sweat." They will produce enough water to cook as long as you let keep the heat low. Stir every once in a while. When the veggies are done and the beans are soft, combine. Check the flavor and season. Cook for a while. Rip the chard leaves into bite sized pieces and stir them into the soup. Check the seasoning again. Serve. It gets better each time you reheat!

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Envisioning

This was so beautiful. I wept as I read it. I wish we lived in that world now.

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New Stuff

One of my essays was excerpted in the new Sky Alliance Newsletter, and Mario has a story in Bewere the Night. Don't forget to check out Green Snake Publishing. We're always putting up new stories. Mario's are under Conditional Reality and mine are in Entanglements. I'm a little behind, but I'll try to get a new story up soon. I'm off facebook for now and hope to get more work done.

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Certified: Chapter Seventeen: Audacious

Soon enough it was time for the first residency for my final class: Theories and Practices of Socio-Environmental Change. I wasn't exactly chomping at the bit for this course, but I was glad to get away to Seattle. It had been raining where we lived almost every day since we returned from Tucson in early February. Then Mario had gotten sick, and not long after, I was ill, too.

I was hoping a change of scenery would do us both good, and the class was merely the excuse for going to Seattle.

It didn't rain for our trip to Seattle, and we encountered no crazy drivers. We drove into town around 9:30 p.m. The city was dark and lit up all at the same time: Some floors of the skyscrapers were black, on other floors fluorescent lights created an eerie glow.

As we drove by the tall downtown buildings, I wondered how many fish were dying in some dam to light this city. The salmon were already on their last legs (proverbially speaking, of course) in large part to the dams that sluiced through our rivers in the Pacific Northwest.

Ah well, nothing I could do about dams this night.

We found our way to our little hotel and went right to bed. I had asked for a larger room this time, and my request got us a room with two twin beds instead of one queen. The room wasn't any bigger, as far as I could tell. At first I was grumpy about Mario and me having to sleep apart, but then I realized that I might be able to sleep better if I didn't have to worry about waking Mario up with my tossing and turning. And that was exactly what happened. I got the best sleep I'd had on any of my trips to Seattle.

The next morning, Mario dropped me off at school. I had no expectations for this class. How different I felt from the first class last summer, taught by this same teacher. I had been certain that that class, the permaculture class, would change my life. I was going to make lifelong connections and alliances. I was going to learn how to be more self-reliant (in a communal way).

I had not connected with anyone. In particular I had not connected with the teacher. (Not because he was a bad teacher or an unkind person. It was more that I felt invisible in the class. Probably didn't have anything to do with him.) And during every class, if you'll remember, something went wrong. We went on field trips every residency and I got lost every time. On the last class, I never did find where everyone was, even after driving around for an hour and a half. During one of the residencies, I locked my keys in the car--at my teacher's house. His parents had to lend me their AAA card to get a locksmith to come in.

It had been appallingly embarrassing.

I almost hoped the teacher would not remember that he had ever met me.

Anyway, I went to the first class with no expectations. I had already read through one of the assigned texts, How to Re-imagine the World: a pocket guide for practical Visionaries by Anthony Weston, and I loved it. His first sentence is "This book is a guide to creative thinking in service of radical social transformation."

Before he begins his first chapter, he writes, "Radical imagination begins with a move beyond compliance and resistance, beyond reactive tinkering or hunkering down or cynical accommodation. The first big move is to an alternative picture of how things could be instead." Yes, yes, and yes. He writes about vision. For me this was so important. I sometimes got lost and dragged down by all that I knew: or thought I knew. By all the impossibilities. So I was ready for some visionary thinking in this class, but I was not expecting it.

I probably knew about half of the students in this class of twelve. Two of the other students I had had in nearly all of my classes, and I gave them each a big hug. It was nice to see two friendly faces, and I was happy they were in class with me.

After we all checked in, we watched part of a video with the artist Andy Goldsworthy. Mario told me later we had seen the film, but I didn't remember it. This time I was entranced. We watched him try to build a huge cone (or egg) out of stone at the beach. He got partway done four different times and each time the stones collapsed.

He decided he didn't understand the stone enough. He needed to learn more. Instead of doing the same thing over and over, with the same results, he listened to feedback from his environment. For some reason, this reminded me of all the politicians who seem so proud of never changing their minds and always sticking to their dogma as though that was something to be proud of. Instead, wasn't that a little insane? Goldsworthy observed and listened to feedback and he changed what he was doing and ultimately he created his new cone.

The tide came in and covered the cone. Goldsworthy said he was giving it to the sea as a gift and he knew the sea would make more of it than he could ever hope for.

It was fascinating watching his process. He was incorporating some of the principles of permaculture we had learned: To observe and interact; to catch and store energy. And he had a vision that he didn't try to control.

We broke into groups and discussed the film, from a permaculture viewpoint.

Then it was lunch. Mario picked me up, and we went back to the hotel where I ate. The rest of the class was walking to downtown Seattle for our field trip that afternoon. Since I was just getting over the flu and I was still trying to hack up a lung every few minutes, I decided I wasn't going to walk on such a cold day. After lunch, Mario dropped me off at Pioneer Square near the Pergola, where we had all agreed to meet.

I stood in the cold and in the welcome sunlight and waited for the class. How interesting that once again I was alone and separated from the class. Briefly, I wondered if it would turn out like the time we went to the Medicinal Herb Garden. I ended up in the wrong place and waited for everyone else for about an hour. More or less. I had felt stupid and alone.

Today I felt none of those things. I knew if I somehow missed the class, I could just keep walking to the building where we were going to be for part of the afternoon.

I watched several tour groups gather at various spots around the square. This was the place where the underground tours began and ended. I pulled my scarf up closer to my mouth and huddled down into my jacket as I listened to the indistinguishable murmuring all around me. I felt strangely comfortable standing in middle of this bustling city.

I was no longer a stranger in a strange land.

At least not completely.

At the International Sustainability Institute, Todd Vogel talked to us about greening Seattle's alleyways. Alleys were always supposed to be a vital part of the cityscape, yet so many of them were now used only for service vehicles, criminal activities, and as dumping grounds for garbage and drug paraphernalia.

ISI cleaned up their own alley and collaborated in creating a city wide "green alley" design contest. During the World Cup, they showed the games in the alley and got huge crowds.

I enjoyed the tour of the green alley immensely. It looked like any other alleyway, only it was clean, and no windows or doors were boarded up. A wrought iron table and chairs were situated near one door. A hanging garden was in medias res (the metal container had just recently been added to the side of the building).

After we looked over the green alley, we all headed back toward school. I only got about half way. I was having trouble breathing, so I called Mario and he drove me the rest of the way.

For most of the afternoon, we discussed the big project for this class. We were supposed to "identify and design a collaborative connection involving two organizations which, to your knowledge and/or intuition, do not interact, collaborate or consider one another as allied resources toward social and environmental change."

I had been thinking about this project for over a month, since I had first heard about it, and I hadn't come up with anything. I kept thinking of connections that had already been made: Having the hops from the brew pub be used as compost for a mushroom grower, using grease from restaurants for biofuel. Things like that. I knew so many of the players in my little part of the world, and I knew (or thought I knew) that they would never collaborate or help one another.

My brain hurt from trying to figure it out.

The teacher told us that this project should be fun. If it wasn't fun, we were doing it wrong. He encouraged us to be audacious. Come up with an audacious idea where two entities would cooperate for the benefit of all.

I loved the idea of being audacious.

I loved that word.

I had to be visionary.

I always said I was a visionary!

I had to be audacious.

I had to have fun!

I was on board with all of that.

By the end of the day, I was flagging and didn't feel well. I was glad when it was time to to quit for the day. Apparently I wasn't completely over the flu. Mario and I had planned on having dinner with a friend, but we weren't able to get a hold of her so we decided to skip it; besides, I wasn't feeling well.

Mario got take-out from an Indian restaurant next door instead. It was not very good. We ate it all.

By the end of the evening, Mario had developed a cough, usually a sign that he was coming down with something.

The next morning it was cold and rainy. We didn't go anywhere to eat. We didn't even stop at the Medicinal Herb Garden. We left town about 8:00 a.m. and headed south.

On the four and a half hour drive home, I kept trying to think of a project. I couldn't. Every idea I came up with provoked only exhaustion. That was how I could usually tell something wasn't for me. If I had a novel idea and then I got tired, that was a clue that I shouldn't write the book.

Our teacher had suggested that we think about our project as though we were designing a job for ourselves. I tried to think about what kind of job I wanted.

I didn't want a job. I wanted to write.

Beyond that: What?

I didn't want to manage a library or an organization any more. I wondered out loud if that was a sign of depression. I didn't get excited about working for an organization and making change on a local level. Why not? Was I giving up?

I was interested in writing.

But I had gone back to school so that I could get a job. I had spent all this money and gone through all this stress to decide I didn't want a job?

No. I always knew I didn't want a job. I always knew I wanted to make my living by writing.

But absent that: What?

Maybe it wasn't depression. Maybe I wasn't giving up. Maybe I had just changed. I couldn't get excited about running a business or a nonprofit. I no longer looked at famous activists and thought of myself as a failure because I wasn't one. I didn't want fame and never had (but I wanted to be useful). I didn't want to be a speaker on a circuit. I didn't want to be a teacher.

Yes, those were all the things I didn't want to be.

What did I want to do?

I wanted to write.

I loved writing novels. That was my passion. I enjoyed nonfiction, too, although it was much more difficult for me. When I was working on the Carrot Cake book, I enjoyed the research. It was an amazing amount of work, doing the research, tracking down leads, getting people to talk to me. It was especially difficult for me because I didn't like talking on the phone. But still I enjoyed the research. I was good at it.

Recently the local food network had sent me their research on food security in our area, and they told me they were always looking for researchers and writers. My heart had done a little jump when I read that. I felt excited by the prospect of delving into all that data. Page after page after page.

I thought of myself as a wild child, out wandering the forest or getting down and dirty in my community making change. Yet in true life, I didn't actually enjoy community building processes. I wanted to. I wanted to be a part of a vibrant community. But I wasn't particularly good at building relationships--or I wasn't comfortable doing it. I was always pushing myself to go beyond my comfort level. Hell, that was why I was in school.

But I was tired of being uncomfortable. Maybe it was acceptable--maybe even thrilling--to work at something that didn't make me uncomfortable all the time. Maybe I would end up doing research on food systems and then writing about them.

I didn't know.

As we drove down Highway 5 discussing what I would do for a project, I realized I was being too parochial. Who said I had to work with one of the organizations in the gorge where I lived?

I thought about my vision of a sustainable community: It was a place where the people were connected to each other and the environment. We didn't hurt Nature or each other. We had meaningful ceremonies and celebrations. We didn't waste. We didn't want. We had meaningful livelihoods. We grew, harvested, and cooked local foods. Our buildings were livable, beautiful, nontoxic...

I could see all of this in my mind's eye. So how could I walk backward from that to see how my vision could come into being? What kind of organizations would have to collaborate to make my vision a reality?

Now this way of thinking I liked. I was sure I could come up with something now.

In the first chapter of Weston's book, he writes, "Affirmative vision is crucial. Be emphatically, visibly, clear-headedly for something, and something that is worked out, widely compelling, and beautiful--not just against the problems or the powers-that-be of the moment."

It was so much more liberating thinking about what was possible instead of being weighed down by what felt impossible. It felt audacious to contemplate what kind of work I actually enjoyed now, at this time in my life, instead of trying to find something I thought I should do.

The word audacious comes from a Latin word meaning "to dare," to be bold. I was ready to be audacious again.

Or maybe for the first time?

Read more here...

Certified: Chapter Sixteen: My Wound is Food, or The Secret Life of Me

(It's been a few months since my last Certified. So I'll remind you that this is first draft from Certified: Learning to Repair Myself and the World in the Emerald City, about what happens when I decide to go back to school. I purposely try not to talk much about my classmates or teachers so that I'm not violating their privacy. I don't name the school. I talk about my misgivings, my problems, in the hope that these missives will have some universal truths that will help others--and myself. I haven't posted all the chapters. But here's where you can read the others.)

By the way, I am a terrible proofreader, and I'm particularly bad on the computer. I just don't read well online. So if you find mistakes it's not that I don't know better, it's just that I don't see them. My brain doesn't process them. Be kind and enjoy!

I spent much of the month during the second and third residency doing research on agave for my sustainable food systems class. After a while, I figured I knew more about agave than most people and less than some experts.

As far as I could determine, tequila was not a sustainable product as it is grown and processed now. In the wild, the agave plant is quite hardy. After years of monoculture farming, however, blue agave was now more susceptible to disease and pests. Many growers use lots of fertilizers and pesticides. This exacerbates erosion in the area, plus the run-off makes its way into the water systems.

Even if a grower farms organically, the processing for tequila uses a great deal of water, discharges this hot water into nearby streams, and discards large quantities of acidic agave pulp into landfills. Mexican laws against these practices are generally not enforced. Recently, (this month) an American environmental company was awarded a contract to build a plant in Jalisco to help alleviate some of these problems.

I learned so much about agave and tequila that I won't summarize here. Books can and have been written about tequila and mezcals. Ana G. Valenzuela-Zapata and Gary Paul Nabhan talk about the history of tequila and sustainability issues with it Tequila! And Dr. Sarah Bowen has written extensively on the subject in many articles and in her thesis.

The more research I did, the more I wondered if it was possible to have sustainability if there was a huge demand for a product or service or if there wasn't enough demand for a product or service. Something in the middle might be just right: The Goldilocks approach to sustainability.

During this month I also finished the novel I had almost completed in Tucson, Desert Siren. I continued research on my jaguar project, and I did my library work. I had no time for our new publishing venture, Green Snake Publishing, or for any social life.

The weather was monstrous. We had snow and rain and more snow. A friend and former coworker died rather unexpectedly, and we were unable to attend her memorial because of the weather. It was so cold that every time I went outside, I had an asthma attack.

All this time indoors got me to thinking about the last year. In July I went back to school because I felt helpless over the Gulf Oil catastrophe. I felt like everyone needed to step up and do something. Even though I had been doing "something" all of my life, it felt like the wrong something. Otherwise, things would be better.

Right?

In the few months before the Gulf oil catastrophe, my personal life was chaotic. My dad was recovering from major heart surgery (which took place on Christmas Eve) even as we all were still trying to process the sudden death of my mother two years earlier. One of my family members was struggling with an addiction. I started a business and then closed it. The family member went to rehab. Then I went back to school. The family member came home from rehab and two weeks later, her partner had a brain bleed and nearly died. For a while, they didn't know if he would have any brain function or whether he would be paralyzed or not.

It had been a stressful and busy year.

Plus I did not feel as though I was getting any better. I had this fantasy that if I went back to school, I would get well. I would be normal again. I would be able to work as hard as everyone else. I could be brilliant again, with something to say.

Illness had knocked me off my feet and then took nearly everything else away from me: self-esteem, a career, financial stability, a place in this world. I kept trying to get up and start again. Get up and start again.

Get up and start again.

And nearly always, I would start to feel better again, I would work too hard, and I would fall to the ground again.

Breathe deep the gathering humus.

Was going back to school just one more event in a long line of events in my life where I tried and failed to be the person I once was, or thought I once was? Capable, healthy, a valuable asset to the planet.

A valuable asset to the planet.

Yuck. That makes me sound like an item on a financial report.

The original meaning of the word "value" was to satisfy a debt.

It meant "enough" to satisfy the debt.

Not like the word "basta!"

Enough, already.

It is enough. Why did I want to be considered "valuable" by the culture? By society? So I could survive, thrive, be a part of the pack?

It is enough.

I am enough?

I used to be confident, pretty, capable. An asset.

There we go again.

School was not making me any healthier. I wasn't eating any better. I supposed I ate better than the average bear. But something happened after my mom died. Maybe before.

Maybe it was when my best friend, Linda Ford, was dying. I had a knot in the pit of my stomach for months. During that time, I had two surgeries to cut out the massive polyps in my sinuses. A week before the first surgery, one of my best friends (who had lived with a brain tumor for about fifteen years) dropped dead. A few months later, another friend died in her sleep. And then my friend Linda was in the last stages of her illness, at home, and I had to protect her and her daughter from all comers.

That was her mandate to me. She wanted to die at home without pain medication. And her daughter didn't want any other people around, except Linda's closest friends. I arranged shifts so that Linda's daughter and I weren't the only ones there all the time. During one shift change, one of our mutual friends told me I needed to force Linda to go to a hospital. If I didn't I was being abusive to her; I shouldn't let her suffer so.

That was quite a gut punch.

I told her my job was to carry out Linda's wishes. It didn't matter what would be easier for me or for her daughter or for anyone else. This was Linda's death. I would do what she asked me to do.

Sometimes when it wasn't my shift, I would drive out to Linda's house--but not all the way. She lived out in the country. I would drive down her windy road, stop somewhere, and just sit in the car.

I couldn't be too far from her, even though it felt awful being near and listening to her death rattle.

Once I was at a workshop in Portland. Mario and I stayed the night at a hotel there. I got up in the middle of the night, unable to sleep, and I went out to the car and drove back into the gorge, back into the wilds. Didn't even tell Mario I was leaving. I drove along the river, under the stars, drove until I was home. It was better being ten miles away from Linda, rather than sixty. I fell to sleep on the couch for a couple of hours. Then I drove back to the city and slipped back into bed before Mario awoke.

When Linda died, I didn't cry. I organized her memorial.

People brought food, tons of food.

I don't think I ate a thing.

But what does this trip down memory lane have to do with food or healing? Did I start eating more that year? Or a couple years later, when my mom died?

One day in December, one of my sisters called and said my mother was in the hospital, probably with pneumonia. She called a short time later to say they didn't think Mom would make it.

I was alone in the house, 2,000 miles away. I felt a knot in my stomach. I walked around the house. Then I sat on the floor and did a journey to the hospital room. I sat with my mom and held her hand from afar.

It wasn't the same as being there.

But maybe it was something.

In the journey, she let go of my hand and drifted away, out of her body.

My dad called and told me she was dead.

Since then, nothing felt the same or normal or settled.

But that wasn't the beginning of the food stuff.

My mother used to be an amazing cook. When I was a kid, I loved her soups. I loved everything she made.

I remembered sitting at the kitchen table when my parents had company one day. Was I five? Ten? My mother was telling the company that I was such a good girl. I hardly ever put any sugar in my tea. Not like other kids.

I felt proud. Wasn't sure why.

My mother had that nervous breakdown I mentioned earlier. She stopped cooking. When my grandfather killed himself a year or more after my mother's breakdown, we got a good meal when all the neighbors brought over food.

This incessant navel-gazing was getting me nowhere.

I was still the same person with the same seemingly immovable unchangeable faults, crevices, problems.

Would it ever be so if I couldn't eat healthy--in a healthy non-obsessive way? Doesn't food connect us to...everything?

The Earth is our mother. Food comes from her. I had food sensitivities and food cravings.

Did this mean I had a mother-complex?

Oh, man. I did not want to go down that road.

I did go down the road to Seattle for the last residency of this semester. Mario came with me. We left while it was still light. It rained, but the traffic wasn't bad. Since traveling back and forth to Seattle--or maybe because of it--I had developed a new anxiety: I didn't like driving in the rain.

This was not a good development for a Pacific Northwesterner.

My nervous system just didn't seem suited for modern life. Or something. This reality sometimes made me feel weak and neurotic, even though I knew I wasn't weak. I was just wired differently from a lot of other people. I overloaded easily. Think of me like a house. And inside and outside of this house, a lot of stuff is going on. So my breakers are constantly being tripped. Then they have to be reset again.

In any case, Mario and I stayed in the right-hand lane, didn't go much over 65 mph, and made our way toward Seattle. We got caught in one traffic jam near the air force base for an hour and a half.

Eventually we got to Seattle. We stayed in the same hotel I'd stayed in the last three trips. Didn't sleep well, but morning came soon enough. Mario dropped me off at my teacher's house, and our day began.

We had five presentations of various food commodities: gelatin, agave, oysters, seaweed, and hops. Everyone brought food to share. One person brought ice cream AND ice "cream" made from coconut milk so that I could have something to eat. Another person made certain she didn't put gluten products or cheese in her salad. Everyone was so sweet and kind to me.

We spent the day talking, eating, presenting. I learned that gelatin was in just about everything: including sugar and white wine. This made me angry. I didn't eat pigs and cows on purpose. (Freaking mad cow disease, for one.) But I had most likely consumed gelatin inadvertently over the years. I might rarely use sugar and never drink white wine, but I do eat fruit. Gelatin is one of the ingredients on the stickers they put on fruit. Companies should not be able to put ANYTHING on or in a food product without labeling it.

Apparently the reason some male beer drinkers have "man boobs" was because of phytoestrogens in hops.

And oysters in the the Pacific Northwest are sustainably grown and harvested, for the most part.

Some of the many things I learned over the course of the day.

I hadn't been able to master how to make an imovie, so I used prezi as I talked about the use of agave in tequila and mezcal. After my talk, we taste-tested tequila and two Del Maguey mezcals.

Then it was on to the next presentation.

I enjoyed being with these people, talking about food systems, trying to figure out ways that food systems could be more sustainable. When I first started back to school I had felt so alienated from my classmates. Now I felt like I was one of them.

As the day went on, I noticed something peculiar. When someone came up to talk with me, I would answer their question and then walk away. What the heck was that? Had I always done this? I was always craving conversation and community but when I got it, I walked away?

I enjoyed speaking to large groups of people. But one on one, I wasn't always comfortable. I had come into this world shy and still was, although no one who knew me believed this. I wondered if I had always done this: Walked away when someone was trying to have a conversation with me.

Wow. How disengaging was that?

I would have to work on that little quirk.

After the discussion of hops, there was a taste test. Since beer is not gluten-free, I wasn't going to try any. I went into the kitchen and did the dishes while the group taste-tested. I could hear them in the other room laughing and talking. I felt disengaged from it all but not completely separate. It was meditative doing the dishes while listening to all the commotion coming from another part of the room.

The day was over too quickly. We said our goodbyes. I gave out copies of Coyote Cowgirl. Mario came in and helped me take stuff out to the car. Then we left.

After I rested at the hotel, we had dinner, wandered around Whole Foods, and brought some chocolate Coconut Bliss back to the hotel and ate it.

When it was time to sleep, I couldn't.

I didn't feel well. I had twitches. And I couldn't sleep.

I tossed and turned and wondered why the hell I had eaten chocolate before going to bed. I kept doing stuff like this over and over.

I was exhausted. I had hardly slept all week.

I finally got out of bed, fumbled around for my computer, and went into the bathroom and closed the door so I wouldn't wake up Mario. I put towels on the floor and then sat on the towels with my computer. I began to write my final paper for my food systems class. It's called a "learning reflection." I was supposed to look at what I thought I knew about food systems at the beginning of the course and what I thought I knew now.

At the beginning of the semester, I wrote, in part: "The more I learn, the less I know. I used to be certain if people had the facts they would change. I've realized that most of the time that does not work. Our food system feeds a great deal of the population, yet one in four children is food insecure in this country. If we could figure out how to change that reality--so that everyone had good, clean, fair food--then it seems we would have a key to changing our food systems."

As I sat there on the bathroom floor feeling miserable, I started thinking about my grandfather, my father's father, who had killed himself when I was a girl. His suicide has haunted our family. It was one of many on both sides of my family.

I suddenly remembered there was a suicide in the movie The Real Dirt On Farmer John. His uncle, who had worked the farm with Farmer John's father, had also killed himself.

I googled "farmer suicides." I was shocked. Farmer suicides were quite common worldwide. I knew that many farmers were in dire financial straits. Of course it would make sense that they were in trouble emotionally, too, although I had never thought about it.

They were doing a job the world didn't seem to respect or value financially. Small farmers who were connected to the cycles of nature, to their craft, were the ones least respected and least rewarded.

I began writing my paper:

"My favorite first line of any book is in Pat Conroy's Prince of Tides: 'My wound is geography. It is also my anchor, my port of call.' The first time I read this book, I wept at the opening line. He articulated so well what I had felt since I was eleven and my grandfather, who was a farmer, stepped off his land, went across the road, and ended his life with a shotgun. The land that had been my anchor, my port of call, was now my wound, and the wound of my family. This farm down the road from our house which brought so much sustenance to others could not heal my grandfather.

"My grandfather was one of many farmer suicides over the years. Although he killed himself in the sixties, suicide rates for farmers is (and has been for some time) higher than the general population. Suicide rates for male farmers in the Midwest are twice that of the general population. In England, one farmer a week commits suicide. In India, between 1997 and 2005, a farmer committed suicide every 32 minutes.

"When I read these statistics, I was astonished. I hadn't ever thought about my grandfather's suicide in terms of anything beyond a family tragedy. Yet now I wondered if Pat Conroy's line could be rewritten to articulate the plight of all farmers: 'Our wound is geography. It is also our anchor, our port of call.'

"The high suicide rate for farmers seemed to say something about the problems of our planetary food system, too."

And then I wrote several more pages. I finished with this,

"In the beginning of this course, I said the more I learned the less I knew. Now the more I learn, the more I realize I've been on the right track all these years. Place, stories, connection, community: These have all been my life's work. I have so often felt like a stranger in a strange land. I couldn't understand why other people didn't hear the varying dialects of each stream and river. Why didn't others wave to the crows who called out each time someone passed by them? Why couldn't others see the 'value' in a tree just because it was a tree? Nobody else I knew whispered sweet nothings to passing clouds. I started to feel like I was a crazy woman.

"But I'm wasn't.

"I was right.

"We need to be connected to our place and to our food. We need to resacralize our world, but not in a religious sense. The word sacred means 'holy,' and holy means to be 'whole.'

"It needs to be acceptable to talk about place and food and community as something meaningful. As something that makes us holy: i.e., whole.

"It has to be acceptable to discuss the importance of a meaningful life in relationship to our food, work, and food policies.

"Perhaps when we understand that our world is sacred, we will know that the work farmers, growers, and farm workers do is holy: Their work makes us hale, holy, whole.

"Maybe then no farmer will end his or her life in a barn or a cornfield--or across a dirt road in the garage of an old mission house, like my grandfather did.

"Then geography (and food) will no longer be anyone's wound. It will be our anchor and our port of call."

I closed my computer. It was about 4:30 a.m. I crawled back into bed and finally fell to sleep.

I awoke three hours later. Mario made breakfast. I was in a daze. We stopped at the Medicinal Herb Garden on the way out.

Most of the garden was still in winter mode. But I was drawn to a spots of color here and there. Near the fig tree was a nearly black maroon-colored flower dropping toward its dark shiny green leaves. It was called Lenten Rose, Helleborus orientalis. I knew nothing about it. Not far from it, the small green serrated leaves of Monkshood/wolfbane pushed up through winter detritus.

I pressed my face against the huge cedar tree that always made me think of Yggdrasil. And then I walked to the far end of the garden where I hadn't been before. A few wrinkled dark green leaves of the Motherwort had drawn me over. Mario and I stood near each other and looked down at the plant. I knew that Motherwort was considered a "woman's herb." Lionhearted. It was good for the heart. Whenever I saw Motherwort in the woods, I always felt strengthened, as though I could carry on.

Now I stood next to this plant and hoped she would imbue me with some of her strength. I looked around at the dozens of raised beds. I couldn't see all of the two and half acres that made up the garden, but I could feel the liveliness of it all.

Mario and I continued walking. We looked at the identifying cards above each patch of earth. Plants from all over the world grew in these beds. When the garden was in full-bloom, I told Mario, it felt a little bit like being in that bar in the first Star Wars movie, where beings from all over the galaxy came for a drink and a good time.

Oh the information these plants must share with each other through their roots, their pollen, through the air. I loved being in their company, even when all I could see was the bones left after the plants had fallen to the ground when they died or went into dormancy.

Come spring, most would rise again.

Mario and I left Seattle. It felt like a long drive home. I was exhausted. I felt somewhat defeated by my self. By patterns I seemed powerless to change. By an illness I seemed powerless to change.

Yet I carried with me the lovely day spent with my classmates. I carried with me the thesis of the paper I had written on the bathroom floor: I am right. Community, connection, crows, trees, clouds: They're all sacred, they all matter.

I carried with me the lionhearted motherwort.

When I got home, I looked up the plants I had seen at the Medicinal Herb Garden. Motherwort also helped with anxiety. Hellebore was a witch's herb that helped with invisibility, among other things. Only the most adept witch, medicine person, or poisoner could use it in healing. And Wolfsbane--aconite--was also a witch's herb. It was a poison used to kill wolves--and maybe werewolves. Painted on a witch's broom, it helped them fly through the night unobserved. (My guess is that it was used to help the shamans, the medicine women, "fly" shamanically.) One of these plants was supposed to cure madness.

All three of these plants had alkaloids, two at more poisonous concentrations than motherwort. I wondered why I had been drawn to these particular three plants. Two of the plants were used to help with invisibility. I didn't want to be invisible. At least, not generally. I did want to be lionhearted.

My friend Linda knew the names of most every plant. I have never been good at taxonomy or with scientific names. You call something a particular name, then you stop seeing it as the individual being it is: You just see it as a chair, a window, an oak tree, a boy, a girl. But for healing purposes, it is good to know which plant is which. Before Linda died, she said I needed to be the plant person once she was gone.

She gave me her copy of the Secret Life of Plants just before she died. She made me promise to read it. I haven't yet. I heard so many unflattering stories about Peter Tompkins that I wasn't sure anything he wrote could have any truth to it.

(Sometimes I am very black and white in my thinking.)

I have always been a tree person. A plant person. I didn't know the names, necessarily. I just knew the plant. Their personalities. I did name the trees in the woods around my house when I was a girl. It wasn't oak tree, or pine tree. They had names like the Lullaby Tree, the Witch's Tree, the Mother Tree.

Plants have helped, soothed, sheltered, and fed me all my life.

I have dreamed of them.

Plants come from the earth. Are they messengers from the Earth?

It doesn't matter what they are and aren't.

They are amazing. I started out last summer being amazed by plants once again during my permaculture class. I have kept coming back to them again and again during these past nine months.

I keep coming back to them again and again over the course of my life.

I just went to my closet and pulled out the copy of the Secret Life of Plants that Linda gave me. I opened it and saw her handwriting inside. She underlined her favorite quotes. She wrote notes in the margins. She left several pages of handwritten notes about the book inside the back cover. She wrote, quoting Tompkins quoting Gustav Fechner, "It is a dark and cold world we sit in if we will not open the inward eyes of the spirit to the inward flame of nature."

And she wrote down a quote from George washington Carver: "I learn what I know by watching and loving everything."

What a great way of being in the world.

I think it's time I read Linda's copy of The Secret Life of Plants.

Geography might be my wound. Food might be my wound. But plants are my anchor, my port of call, to paraphrase Pat Conroy once again.

Perhaps I can learn from them by watching and loving everything along the way.

Read more here...

Photos from Arizona

More photos of our stay in Arizona this winter.

Read more here...

The Wild Keeper

What if we each pledged to care for a plot of land? It could be a square foot, the footprint of the place where we live, a piece of property we own, or a park we love. We would care for these pieces, these plots, these Earthly parcels, like we would care for our fingers or our arms or our legs: We would recognize that it is all a part of us, and as the land is cared for, so are we.

Sometimes I close my eyes and I can see all these pieces of land like pieces of a quilt. We could link them all up, put them all together, and then we would have one beautiful quilt of the world. It's already there, this quilt, so perhaps our jobs--as caretakers--is to repair the torn pieces, re-stitch those places where the thread has come out, and clear away the debris.

Because I'm a writer, I often see the world in metaphor--the land is like our body, the land is a quilt, the land is our mother. But I feel the world in my bones, too. I breathe the world in and out. I take off my shoes and I step on the grass, on the dirt, on the earth, and feel my soles against the soul of the world. I feel the Earth--Nature--beneath my feet like an ocean wave and I know I should grab a surf board and enjoy the wild ride.

Sometimes I feel the Wild pulsing in my own soul and I know it is Nature speaking to me, through me. I feel as though my creative force and my passion for the world is Nature working her art through me: I am her art piece.

I like finding others who are not like-minded but like-souled. Is that a word? I crave the wild. I don't do extreme sports. I'm not a good camper. I don't climb mountains. I have a need to be out of doors, but it's not to prove anything to myself or anyone else. It is like drinking water or eating food or breathing air. It is as necessary as all those things. I feel myself shrinking and changing when I cannot be in a place where the wild things roam.

Years ago, I heard that jaguars were coming back into the American Southwest. Two of them had been photographed. The hairs stood up on the back of neck at this news. My heartbeat quickened. I began to dream of jaguars. They were always powerful, frightening, and alluring. I felt as though this cat was speaking to me, as though these jaguars meant something to me, personally, as well as to the world. I wanted to write about them. I began talking to people about jaguars.

I wanted to find people who understood about the wild.

And so I found Sergio Avila, a biologist who was working for Sky Island Alliance. One year we talked about how to protect and conserve the jaguars in the United States. One year we talked about the death of one of the jaguars after it was captured and collared. Sergio and I spoke a common language about nature. I found other people who lived on the land and understood the ways of the wild. I talked to ranchers and hunters and biologists and conservationists. Many of them were trying to save and protect their lands and their livelihoods. All of them wanted to make certain the land was viable for the wild creatures, in one way of another. They didn't all agree with one another. Some felt sad, angry, and betrayed by what happened after the collared jaguar died.

But that is another story for another day. I will piece together that story soon. Now I want to think about the wild.

One day when Sergio and I talked about the wild world, he told me about Carlos Robles Elías, a rancher in Sonora, Mexico. He had 10,000 acres and he was dedicating it to wildlife conservation. A wild jaguar and several ocelots had been photographed on the ranch. You must speak with him, Sergio suggested; he could be the hero of the book you are writing. I felt the hair stand up on the back of my neck again, just as it had when I first learned about the jaguar.

And so one day, I was in a truck with Carlos and my husband, and we were driving down windy Sonoran roads. The truck shook from a bad tire, but we drove toward El Aribabi Conservation Ranch and we talked about conservation. I scribbled in my notebook while Carlos talked, and I looked up occasionally at the landscape around us. It looked familiar. Had I been here before?

Carlos spoke passionately about conservation. He wasn't certain how he had come to his views, but he thought it had a great deal to do with his older brother who would talk to him about nature. Carlos had moved the cattle off his ranch. He wanted to do make his ranch a paradise for wildlife and show his neighbors how it worked. They were waiting to see if he would be successful at it. Could it be economically feasible?

I told Carlos in my country if someone owned 10,000 they were rich. He said he was not rich. He was struggling. He wanted to make enough money to have a normal life with his wife Martha and their three children. "I don't want a Hummer," he said. "Or anything like that. I want a normal life."

And on his piece of land, his parcel of Earth, he wanted to make a home for the wild. He wanted to make his conservation ranch viable so that "wildlife would have a home forever." He believed the most important thing was a massive education program, about trash, about conservation, about wildlife. Now people throw trash on the ground and don't even think about it, he said. When someone sees a snake, they think they have to kill it.

"If we educate the children about the snake," he said. "Then they won't feel they have to kill it and they will keep it alive."

He has school children come out to the ranch and play in the stream. He wants them to know what it is like to be in nature.

I nodded and wrote as he talked. It always surprises me that people need to be taught about nature, that they don't feel an innate connection with the environment. It was, I supposed, like teaching people they had a heart. They couldn't see it, but it kept them alive.

As we drove, Carlos spoke about his ranch. He had over thirty protected, threatened, and endangered species on the land, including a jaguar and several ocelots. He had over 180 bird species. He told me the jaguar came up to his land to live because it was a quiet place, a protected place.

Carlos pointed out places along the route where the land had been overgrazed. It wasn't just that too many cattle were bad for nature, he said; it was that the cowboys would kill anything. They saw something wild, and they'd shoot it, especially mountain lions.

Soon we arrived at the ranch. We went through the gate and passed by huge old cottonwood trees. They looked like old naked dancers, reaching up to the sky or off to the side to stretch. They looked like guardians, too, and I waved. I'd like to talk with them. What had they seen over the years?

Below the ranch house a stream wove its way through a copse of cottonwood trees. Or maybe it was the other way around. The cottonwood were drawn to the water. Something profound and glorious about water in the desert, always.

Carlos took us out onto the ranch. He drove slowly through a mesquite forest. Several of the mesquite trees were huge and hundreds of years old. Mesquite roots go very deep--they know how many secrets are buried in the dirt--and I wondered how far down the roots of these ancient trees went. Some of the trees were much younger and had several small trunks instead of one large one. They had come up after his grandfather had bulldozed the area 40 years earlier and planted grass for the cattle.

We drove on the ridge tops, following the line of the hills, looking down at the grasslands. I thought for certain we would see mountain lion in these blond grasses. I could feel them all around us. This place was more wild than any African savannah. More desolate. And beautiful.

Eventually we stopped on one of the ridges to wait for Sergio, who had just arrived at the ranch house. Below us were the hilly grasslands, dotted with yucca. Around us in all directions were the ancient mountains, slouching into the earth, their jaggedness rounded off from age or experience. On many of the nearby slopes, we could see wildlife tracks going through the tall grass. Carlos pointed to a peak just beyond, where they had photographed the jaguar.

We were in jaguar country.

I loved listening to Carlos. He knew every inch of these wild lands. And they were wild lands, make no mistake about that. It was a harsh landscape filled with wild life: rattlesnakes, mountain lions, bears, bobcats, foxes, ocelots, and a least one jaguar. This wasn't the prairie where you'd take a snooze on the soft grass. This wasn't a temperate forest fairy land. This was harsh dry country. It made the hairs on the back of my neck stand up. It made my soles sweat. It was so silent and majestic; I felt my soul settle into my body and relax.

Take a deep breath. This is the wild. This is where you are most at home.

And this man Carlos was protecting this wild place. He was restoring the land so that it was a good home--so that wild life and people could thrive. People need wild places. Children need to play in wild streams. Men and women need to hear wolves howl and coyotes yip. People need to be connected to the wild. The soul's true nature is unleashed when it hears, senses, sees, dances the song of the wild.

I'm sure of it.

I knew Carlos only a few hours and I knew this: He felt the beat of the land in his heart. In his soul. Later, Carlos would say of Sergio (or Sergio would say of Carlos) that they understood each other because their common language was nature.

That is my language too.

Later Mario told me we had been on the windy road to the ranch before. That was why it had seemed familiar to me. Several years earlier, I had felt the need to go to Mexico, to go out into the countryside, into the desert. I knew something awaited me there. I thought it was a home, a parcel of land that was calling to me. I wasn't sure. We drove down the road for a long while. We stopped the car and I stood in the middle of the road and listened to the silence. I breathed deeply and wondered what had drawn me to this place. Now all these years later I was back; only this time, I had someone who opened the gate for me, who invited me in.

Invited me to this wild place.

When Sergio arrived, we continued on the road, this time going down into the canyon. We saw a huge buck running up one ridge. The buck stopped and watched us for a time and then continued on his journey and we continued on ours. We drove to the canyon floor and stopped by two buildings in progress, one made from adobe, the other from local rocks. Carlos planned on using four energy sources for these buildings once they were completed: solar, wind, hydropower, and pedal power.

We walked past the houses, through the tall grass, and into the empty stream bed. Small leaves crunched beneath our feet. This was a dry place. The boy scouts had been out last summer doing restoration work in the stream. They put large rocks at various places in the stream to slow down the water that came cascading down the canyon during the rainy season. This would help prevent erosion, plus it would slow down the water long enough to help it soak into the ground and raise the water table. As we stood in the peaceful stream bed, we could feel the difference in temperature even though the creek was empty now. It was noticeably cooler. Since the scouts had done this work, the level of the water in Carlos' well had risen.

Carlos wanted to show everyone that many of these kinds of changes could be made quite simply. The boy scouts had done this restoration work in one day. Actions = results.

We talked about many things. Sometimes Carlos spoke in Spanish and Sergio translated. I often understood the gist of what he was saying, and always I understood the passion. He wanted his ranch to be a working model for sustainability. He wanted scientific research done here. He wanted a conservation school to be built here.

But right now, it was difficult for him to make a living off the ranch. Something had to change. They needed to get some kind of income so they could keep the land wild, and so they could keep doing research and restoration work.

I understood this dilemma. How to live in this world and do the right work.

Why did keeping the wild wild always come down to economics? Why was so much of life like that? Some old European towns used to keep a portion of their towns and communities wild. No one owned this land. Everyone cared for this land. It was where the ancient trees grew and the wild animals lived. When the conquerors came, they always decimated these commons and cut down the ancestor trees in an effort to destroy what the community held most dear.

Who are the conquerors now? We are decimating our own commons. Is it because we can't feel the wild beating in our own hearts?

The four of us drove back to the ranch and had lunch under the portico along with several researchers from a Sonoran university. As I sat at the table eating, I wondered how Carlos could keep this land wild. I imagined desert gardens all around the ranch house--permaculture gardens. I imagined tables and chairs under the portico and people visiting from all over and paying for the privilege of being there. I imagined trails leading from the ranch house to other places in the ranch. If gardens and trails were created near the ranch house, all kinds of workshops could happen here. Writers and artists would want to stay at the ranch house or go further out to be alone.

Or people could come who wanted to research or explore. Archaeological teams did that all the time: They charged volunteers to come and work for them. Couldn't something like that happen at the ranch?

It seemed like this place could become a sanctuary for people as well as other wild life. A place to connect with the outer wild life and one's own inner wild life.

Carlos was trying to keep the wild wild. Sergio was doing that too.

That was what I tried to do, in my way. With my wild words?

Not long ago, Carlos told us, someone caught an ocelot on their land and brought it to him to put on his land. He said no. When he told us this story, I said, "That's because you don't want this to be a zoo. You want this ranch to be a kind of template so that others can do that same thing on their own land." He wasn't a zoo keeper. He was a wild keeper. He wanted to make his land wild and demonstrate how others could do that same.

Later, Mario and I wandered around the house and then went down to the stream while Carlos and Jose changed a bulging tire on the truck. I liked being on the land. I liked my soles against this earth. Mario and I watched the sunlight hit the tops of the cottonwoods as the sun began to set. It was so quiet here. I felt peace in this wild place.

Still later, Carlos drove us back to the border. We talked of many things on the drive. When he stopped to drop us off, I shook his hand and thanked him for a wonderful day. Then Mario and I got out of the truck and walked across the border to our car. We drove for an hour or so to Tucson and stopped into a restaurant for a late dinner. We ordered too much food. I ate too much. I missed the land already. I missed the easy wild day.

I had to remember that the wild was always in me. I didn't have a parcel of land to care for. I had me. I had my words. Maybe in some way, that was a help to the world. I hoped Carlos could keep his land wild, for his sake but also for the sake of the world. We will always need wild places and wild keepers.


For more information on the El Aribabi Conservation Ranch you can visit their Facebook page here. We took photos when we were there, you can go here for those. We also did a very short video here.

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