Ripping down the house walls.

I’m living between worlds right now—between the world of my rental house and the world of our new house. Contractors have laid claim to our new house, and every room is full of construction tools, or construction detritus. Our rental house is a mess, because I spend most of my time in the yard of our new house cleaning up for spring. The previous owner, I’ll call her Polly, lived there for the past 45 years. In her final years, she tended the house alone, and the yard—a glorious flower-filled garden—got neglected along the way.

As I rake, I find tiny plants poking up through the expanse of dandelions: A yellow tulip here, a star-shaped white jewel there, occasional bursts of purple popping out from under the leaves of grass. Gardening helps settle me, and I can use all the grounding energy I can conjure. Moving is hard, but living in limbo between moves is no picnic, either. In the garden, I find it easier to live in the moment, to breathe, to find some focus.

Putting my hands in the garden dirt, my ears are free to listen, my eyes free to wonder. Already I have learned things about my new home: There is a chatty osprey who flies over many times a day. The Columbia river is only a mile away or two as the crow flies, and I’m sure this osprey has a nest nearby with some good fishing on the river. I’ve begun anticipating her fly-bys with anticipation. Her call carries far, yet the notes are gentle and musical…

Beneath a shallow layer of garden soil, most of the yard has been buried under many layers of plastic weed cover and weed cloth. Everywhere I dig, I find the stuff, and everywhere I find the stuff, I pull it out. I am surprised at the lack of worms in the yard, and, in fact, the scarcity any bugs. I’m used to gardening with spiders racing across my hands, pollinating bugs swishing in front of my face, and the occasional toad leaping out from nowhere. My yard is full of plants, but not so full of other life. I’ve put out bird seed, and we’ll see how long the birds take to find it. I have seen one very busy squirrel race by on the fence on rare occasions, and I hope I can convince him to stop and enjoy the birdseed and nuts I’m leaving for him.

The yard that time forgot…

When I am away from the garden, I fret. I fret about spending all day at the “new” house, and finding time to get dinner on the table at our rental. I fret about the construction process and all the things I have to keep track of while it is happening, and I fret about scheduling the coming move. When? Who to do it? How much will it cost? Oh, yes, I do fret about costs, too. Old, tired houses can really eat up the bank account.

When I start to fret too much, I think about the bees. The bees in the church roof in Washougal.

A couple of weeks ago, I went along to help with my very first bee removal. I belong to a group of people who are students of a remarkable woman named Jacqueline Freeman. Her life’s work is to speak and teach on behalf of bees. Go visit her at spiritbee.com. She is amazing. That’s all I can say. Amazing.

One of the things she does is to help “rehome” bees that people need removed from their properties. Sometimes, it is a swarm that has shown up in someone’s tree or on their porch. Sometimes, a hive must be cut out of an existing building for safety sake, or because people are simply unwilling to share their space with bees. Two weeks ago, I helped to cut out a hive that had been residing twenty feet up in the eves of an old church for at least four years. A beekeeper named Wes was coming to the church with a big top-bar hive to load the displaced bees, and Jacqueline said they could use some extra hands.

The week before, I’d attended an all-day workshop at her farm to learn all about moving bees from one place to another. The videos and stories were fascinating, and I was psyched up for the event. Jacqueline loaned me a white bee hat and veil, and told all of us that the main thing we needed to remember was to just stay calm. She said the bees would need our calm reassurance that all would be well. I love that woman.

On a beautiful sunny morning with the spring flowers popping, four of us gathered to remove and rehome the bees. From the parking lot, I craned my neck up to see a steady, relaxed stream of bees coming and going from the front eve of the church. The moving process seemed brutal to me, but it had to be done. First, Tel would rip off the facing board on the eve to see inside and determine how extensive the hive was. Then, Tel and Wes and Eric would begin slicing out wafers of comb. The comb itself would be filled with either honey or brooding babies or pollen. Some might be fresh comb and still empty.

That’s not me, but it’s the closest photo I could find. My hat was cuter…

Those wafers or sheets of comb would be handed down in a bucket or a cardboard box to me. I would take the comb and tie it carefully onto small dowel-like bars of wood, which would then be lined up like coat hangers across the length of the hive box. Simple, right?

Not so simple for the bees, who would be in full attendance and full confusion as we set to work. Jacqueline says a hive can contain 50,000 or more bees. That is, 50,000 creatures being ripped from their home by hulking, stinking (the bees think so…), clumsy humans doing their best in a tough situation.

When I was very young, maybe six or so, I was stung by a honey bee, and I blew up like a balloon. I’d not be stung since but my desire to be in the presence of the bees completely squashed my concern about stings and bee venom. I sensed I would be okay no matter what happened, and I chose to listen to my intuition.

Above me on the scaffolding, Tel was prying off the eve board with a crowbar. Suddenly, I could hear a different tone in the droning of the bees. The humming went to a slightly higher pitch, and I could feel the bees’ growing concern. “Do you want to see this—see the inside of the hive?” Wes called down to me. He waited for me to climb the scaffolding while bees circled his head and clambered down his shoulders. All of us were wearing hats and face veils, but little else in protective gear. I had on a pair of light-colored pants and one of Carter’s old dress shirts.

“Were you nervous?” a friend asked me later, and I told her no. Ascending to the hive, hearing the bees humming about my head, seeing them move like transluscent amber waves all around me, and then seeing the remarkable beauty and sensual, organic symmetry of their honey-colored comb—their city, if you will—I was suddenly overtaken by a sense of utter, deep peace and calm. A sundance song came to my mind and I began singing it softly to the bees. I sang what is called “The Healing Song.” The sundance ceremony songs are ancient and powerful, and I thought that perhaps the cadence or the tones might help the bees in some way. I don’t know if it did, but what astounded me in those first moments in close communion with the bees, and extended through the next six hours as we worked to move them, was the incredible gentleness and acceptance of the bees. They could not know what our intentions were, and yet they did. I’m certain they did.

I descended the scaffold, still humming The Healing Song. I hummed it as the first pieces of comb were passed down to me in the bucket tied to a long string, and I was still humming it when our work was complete hours later.

Now, I have to take a moment to try and explain to you the process involved in tying the honeycomb onto the top bars of the new hive: Living comb is not stiff. It’s not like taking a wedge-shaped piece of cardboard and tying it to a small stick of wood. The comb came to me in slabs the consistency and size of a large slice of fresh pizza. You know how when you try and fold a slice and get it to your mouth, it flops like Dali’s watches? Well, that is how it was with the comb, except that instead of being covered with cheese and olives, the honeycomb was covered in several thicknesses of very active, working bees—hundreds, perhaps thousands of bees.

I had asked Jacqueline what kind of a sound bees made when they got angry. She said, “Oh, you’ll know it. It’s a sharp, high, ‘bztt!’” The only time I heard that sound all day was when I would inadvertently smoosh a bee beneath my fingers while trying to string-tie the comb onto the wooden bar. That’s also the only time I got stung. Considering that I was handling thousands of bees for six hours nonstop, with nothing but a thin pair of laytex painting gloves on my hands, I consider it a miracle of bee grace that I was only stung four times the entire day, each time on the pad of a finger that was pressing just a little to firmly on some poor, indignant bee’s butt.

Not me either, but that’s what the comb looked like. And those hands are knarly enough to be mine…

The hours went by timelessly. The comb came into my hands, I fumbled with the strings and the wooden bars, I hummed and hummed, the bees hummed along with me, and I never once noticed my sore feet or tired back or stung fingertips. All of that was background noise and I never let it come into my conscious mind. All I had mental space for was those bees, those suddenly uprooted, chopped, dropped, mangled, gentle bees.

Hundreds of them died in the move and my heart hurt for them. Some, we stepped on. Others got soaked in honey. I’m certain I smashed some beneath my clumsy fingers. Still, thousands found their way into the new hive box where their comb was hung and waiting for them like the contents of a messy coat closet.

At the end of the day when all the comb had been removed, Wes and Tel swept up the remaining bees in the eves with feathers and deposited them into pails, which they lowered down for me. By that time, I was working barehanded, the thin gloves too much of a bother. I would use the side of my hand to gently slide the bees into their new hive. Sometimes, I would gather up handfuls of them, like you would cup your hands for a drink of cold water, and shake them softly into the hive.

I will never forget the feel of their warm, furry, vibrating bodies in my hands. I will never forget how kind they were, and how brave they were, and how strong and resilient the gods and goddesses had made them. Later that week, still hearing their vibrant thrumming in my head, I emailed Wes and asked how the bees were doing. They were settling into their new home with surprising determination. New comb was being constructed. New foraging pathways were being formed. The bees were doing just great.

When I sit and whine softly to myself about the rigors of my upcoming move, I try to quickly bring up the memory of my day with the bees. Sometimes, my whining gets the better of me, but in the moments when I let my bee memories take hold, I am awed all over again, and humbled to my very core. I ask Spirit for just a tiny bit of the courageousness and dignity of the bees as I struggle with the challenges of my own uprooting. For I am only a human being, and lacking so many of the gifts and strengths of my relatives, the bees. I like to pretend that in those few, painless stings on my fingertips, the bees left me some of their magic in their wondrous potion, and I am grateful.

Sweetness and Strength

The Boston bombing brought a flood of memories cascading over me last night and into this morning. Suddenly, I was right back in the belly of 911, and deep into the mystery of that unforgettable day. I’ve told this story before, and I’ll tell it again, because stories are meant to be shared again, growing in power in each telling.

On the morning of the 911 bombings, I was hosting a gathering of Kindred Spirits—14 good folk who had come from all over the country for a workshop with a small group of gifted teachers and friends of mine. My little cabin had no radio nor television. I heard of the towers coming down from the participants who were arriving—shocked and numbed—to begin a sacred time together with like-minded lovers of animals, nature, and the Earth.

For awhile, as people continued to arrive, we were all in a state of suspended animation and confusion: What in the world do we do NOW? Some participants wondered how and when they would get home, as the airports had all closed down. Others wondered about friends and relatives back east. Do we continue a workshop in the face of this horrible calamity? Would it be disrespectful? Would it even be possible to focus on our topics?

Somehow, the idea came up to pass the sacred pipe around our circle. A pipe ceremony seemed appropriate. After all, the least we could do was to pray quietly together in the smoke and silence. And so I took out my pipe and moved through the ritual steps of the sacred ceremony and stillness settled around us. My pipe tends to smoke very long, and it made many, many trips around the circle. Above our heads in the cottonwood grove around us, birds sang in full glory. A breath of a warm morning breeze tickled our shoulders. In the background, the towering peaks of the Grand Tetons watched over us like a trio of grey-clad nuns.

When all the tobacco had been smoked, I put the pipe down and waited quietly. Very slowly, we began to speak our hearts around the circle. It became very clear to each and every one of us that praying was not only the least we could do. It was the MOST we could do. It was an intensely powerful thing to do, and it was a healing thing to do. Unanimously, we decided to carry on with our workshop, pausing at breaks to fill ourselves  in on any updates in New York.

The pipe had guided us and centered us and calmed us, but the real wonder of that day came late that night as the stars lit up a night sky in Jackson Hole, free for the first time in memory of plane congestion. Our group was gathered at White Grass Ranch to hear the yearly pageant of the bugling elk, all deep in rut that time of year. The night was dry and clear as glass. The air so sweet, you could taste it.

As we walked, these words spilled out of my lips, coming from somewhere outside of myself: “Out here, nothing happened today. No tragedy happened today. Not out here.”

This morning, I sit looking as I write out my bedroom window to the blooming pear tree where the bees gather and sing. Here, on this plot of grass, no tragedy happened. And what I want to say is that for every plot of scarred and blood-spilled ground, there is another plot somewhere of silence and peace and beauty. For every darkness, another place of light and sweetness. These sweet places hold the energy to heal the broken bits of ground. They are medicine centers, from the tiny lawns with carefully planted pansies, to the mountain meadows. And I believe that if we are blessed to be in such a place, to be in a safe place at a time when horror strikes somewhere else, our task is to remain beautiful inside  of ourselves, so that our beauty and balance can be medicine energy for all those afflicted.

I believe we weaken ourselves with grief that is not ours to claim. Those of us who have lost loved ones, it is our task to grieve. For the rest of us, our task is to walk and speak and pray in beauty, so that others may draw from our soil of soundness.

If you are hooked to the horror of the TV today, turn it off, now.

If you are plugged into the news stations on your computer, unplug now.

If you are crying for people you did not know, stop crying now.

If you are sick inside with hopelessness, stop it now.

Go outside. Sit on the grass. Listen to a bird sing.Hum a song of healing for those who need it. Tend your gardens. Walk your dogs and hug them. Do whatever it is you need to do to make yourself smile and be strong. That strength is medicine that will find its way through the power of mystery to all those suffering in Boston. If you are very lucky and grace has fallen over you, you are in a place where “Nothing happened here today,” so show your gratitude with prayer, softness in your heart, and lightness in your step. These gifts will find their way to where they are needed.

They came by the thousands

I noticed them at first thumping softly against my bedroom window this afternoon when the sun unexpectedly arrived. First one, then five. Curious, I walked very slowly to the part of the yard where the old pear, apple, and plum trees grow. My heart stood still at the sight of them. I haven’t seen so many honeybees gathered anywhere in years. Certainly not in any yard of mine.

Trying to be as quiet and as welcoming as I could, I moved from one tree to the other, head tilted up, tears on my face. Was I walking in a pageant? In a parade? In a shamanic dream? As I write this, they are moving back and forth in golden waves past my window, resting now and then on the glass panes and the window sills. The trees are rejoicing. I am rejoicing. They skim across the green lawn, kissing the dandelion blossoms, the violet blossoms. They kiss each dreaming pear and plum and cherry flower and they sing and sing and sing. I look inside my heart for the words to describe this feeling, and the feeling is wanting. I just want them. I want them to stay and to make hives in all my walls so I can be in the middle of them day and night, and my walls can drip honey until my dying day…

From the bedroom window. You can’t see ‘em, but they are there in the blooms.

Earlier this day, before the pageant of the bees, Carter and I went walking by the river and found our favorite path under water. Part of the riverwalk is through a “transitional zone,” which sometimes floods and acts like a marsh, and sometimes acts like a dry meadow. There were wrens last week where today there are great blue herons and signs of beaver.

Of course, Carter and I are in an acute transition ourselves: We close escrow on our new home next Wednesday! Only a couple weeks ago, I was planting my container pots with new seeds and sprouts. Next week, I’ll be emptying those containers into the many garden beds around our new home! How quickly the process is moving along, after a full year of searching for the right place. I have no doubt, not one scrap of a doubt, that all your prayers and good wishes for us helped the perfect place to find us at last.

Our soon-to-be new/old home. Whoopee!

Since the God Plop of my last blog post, the spirits have been generous in showing themselves to me and reassuring me that they are, indeed, there. Walking by Coyote Woods last week, we were surprised to find a lovely coyote hunting in the field mid-day. She faced us when she saw us and stood quietly for many moments, allowing us the privilege of seeing her, before turning away and jogging slowly back toward her tunnels in the berry bushes. We have heard these coyotes since the first night we moved here a full year ago. This was the first time we were ever blessed to see one. Was she telling us goodbye?

A few scant days later, heading out to the pasture with Mazel for our morning stroll, I saw something spinning in the wind, suspended right by the place where I’ve cut a path through the bushes to the pasture. Looking closer, I saw it was two barn owl feathers, joined by down fluff, and wrapped around a low-hanging cedar branch. Years ago, in my early days of cancer, my life was saved by a barn owl. I have no trouble instantly recognizing their distinct and beautiful feathers. I am one of the lucky ones who are easily awed, and the moment with the barn owl feathers brought me swiftly to my knees in gratitude. They hang now on the beaded shade of my small bedroom reading lamp.

Today, there are the bees. I feel as though grace herself has descended upon my home and family with the visitation of these mystical golden beings.  Last summer, after attending a two-day workshop on the sacredness of bees, I came away knowing it is bee-mind that brings the essence of loving unity consciousness to the Earth.

This past winter, as I wrote to you all, I’ve been feeling alone and faithless far to often. On this sunny day, the bees hover over our rental home in a golden cloud, humming the energy of unity to me. My heart breaks open in thankfulness, and the sound rushes in and vibrates each of my wanting, longing, oft-hopeless cells into a swift, brief symphony of oneness and compassion. God bless these bees, and all bees. May they thrive, so that we can all find a felt-knowing of what loving unity can be. May the spring bees find  you and sing to you, and bring you the hope, peace, and oneness that is their birthright and—hopefully someday—ours.

Yesterday, something astonishing

I’ve been praying for help these past few weeks with two things. First, I’ve been sick for weeks, weak sick, with no seeming end in sight. And because I was feeling so sick, I’ve been scared. I get scared when I get sick because I reach a place in my head where I just stop believing I’ll ever get better.

Second, our little yellow house contract began going south. It seemed for a couple of months that this little home was really moving along toward a calm and secure escrow closing—and then we had the home inspection. Yikes! Everything seemed to be wrong. We turned to contractors to help us make sense of all the bad news, and were told that it really was not THAT bad. After, all, it was an older home and we could expect problems with an older home. Then, we were told to suspect that it was, indeed, that bad. The last two weeks have been a quagmire of phone calls, inspections that could not get scheduled, emails, and hair pulling.

The bank, meanwhile, was hurrying us to counter our previous offer with a solid commitment based on the problems we knew about in the house. Remember, if you will, that I have been sick as the mythical dog and my mind is as clear as pea soup. I have been terrified of making a wrong choice either way: What if we passed on this sweet little house? What if we didn’t? What if the problems really were not that bad, and we let the deal go because we could not make a choice like this fast and uneducated? What if we said, yes, let’s buy it—and we lost everything we had in home repairs and had to eat Bisquick and canned spaghetti everyday for the rest of our lives?

My fog brain and house woes collided together and got me ruminating about making choices, and does the universe give a damn anyhow, and boy, have I made some real doozies of bad choices in my life, and where the hell was God anyhow? I turn to the heavens regularly and fervently and earnestly and sincerely and sometimes desperately and say “Please, just let me know what you want me to do.” And mostly, I hear nothing back. Send me a sign, I ask, and then I’m afraid that I just imagine I got a sign, and will make some stupid choice based on something that was not a sign but simple indigestion or a sonic boom.

So, yesterday, still knowing nothing of what we needed to know to respond to the bank, which needed our answer that day, we went one last time to the yellow house to meet with our realtor and yet another foundation specialist. I slumped on the red concrete steps of the front porch and sighed. I’d gotten attached to the house, to the rhododendrons gracing its perimeter fencing (great dog fencing, by the way…), to the look of the small house standing straight and happy and facing the street with such hope and promise. We had not found, in this past year of looking for a house, anything that came close to this yellow bungalow.

I had completely given up on listening for Spirit when the communication finally came. I had quit asking God for a damn thing when she suddenly delivered. In that hour, we got—coincidently, with one unexpected call after another—every answer we needed. We got what I needed to let go of the yellow house completely and peacefully. The little place turned out to be a teardown, needing far, far more in repairs than the structure was worth. And I I could clamber back into our car knowing that we would not risk our finances, and that there was no question but that we would walk away.

There is a common theme in mythology, about the misguided and bumbling heroine of a story finally sitting down and weeping over her hands at her utter helplessness. In the stories, it is at these times that suddenly something as astonishing as a line of ants comes to bring her golden grains of sand, or the breeze carries a soft cloak of eiderdown and settles it upon her shivering shoulders. I had told my friend about this mythology, and told her that while I believed this universal storyline to be true for human life, I also was humbled to realize that in real life, sometimes the maiden weeps for years. Perhaps even decades. It can be a long time waiting for those ants. And so I have not expected anymore that the gods would intervene on behalf of my time table, ever.

But this time, they did. My author and friend Jody Seay calls these kinds of events “God Plops,” times when grace just sort of plops down utterly unexpectedly. The ants took the form of a cell phone and a engineering meter, but I think they were just masquerading. I think under the metal and plastic, it was ants—a short line of very determined ants. And I am reborn, stunned, in my fractured, ragged faith.

Otis in his new digs.

I am sick today, for the fourth time this winter. My granddaughter and I seem to be passing these germs back and forth between us. It has been years since I’ve been slammed with upper respiratory things. Years. I usually get one of these snotty things once every few years now, so this recent turn of events in which I seem to be sicker more than I am healthy is really getting me down.

My doctor agreed that the stress on my body from our cross country move is one that can make the first year in a new place hard on the immune system. So I keep doing the good things I know to take care of myself, and taking anti-biotics when the stuff on my Kleenex starts looking truly scary. Still, I was not prepared for the utter emotional slump I found myself in this morning. Six days into this most recent bad booger affair—during which I have been cranky, angry, and then more cranky—I awoke to a feeling of total despair.

My situation certainly did not warrant such a reaction as despair, but there it was, strong, and black, and bottomless. Numbly, I took my morning pills, ate a few bites of oatmeal, and stepped into a hot shower hoping the rush of water like a creek coursing over my body would revive me. It didn’t. Nothing inside the house offered any enticement, not even the small piece of chocolate cake left on the kitchen counter. Outside my windows, the day was—as usual—murky and uninviting. I sighed. Every few minutes, I sighed.

Carter needed to make a run to the store for some groceries and asked me if I wanted him to take Mazel Tov along for the ride. I told him no, that I would take Mazel out to the Coyote Woods on a VERY slow stroll. While the outdoors offered no invitation to me and I was not enchanted at all with the idea of strolling along in damp gloomy pastures, I knew that the only thing I could count on to even begin to lift such a mood as I was in was to get myself outside for awhile.

Coyote Woods under dark skies.

Carter drove off after giving me a tender hug and telling me I’d feel better soon. I shrugged into my favorite flannel jacket and stepped out the door with yet another sigh. Mazel’s purple plastic ball flinger hangs right by our back door, and when I picked it up, my sweet-faced dog began his happy dance, hopping back and forth on his feet like a rocking horse. I grabbed the handle on my small garden cart and headed for the pastures out back. A large mound of old hay was piled up out beside the path we usually walked and I had been wanting to collect some for mulch for my front yard daffodil and periwinkle bed. No time like the present, I said to myself trudging along at a pace that would make a snail look like Parnelli Jones.

With each step, I said to myself, “Just look no further than this moment. Smell the air. What’s there? Listen. Breathe. If the world were to blow up in the next second, you would have had perfection in this last moment.” I feel pretty silly giving myself such pep talks, but sometimes, they are necessary.

More ball please? More? Please?

Of course, I stayed out far longer than I would have expected. First, there was the hay to pile into the cart. Then, Mazel needed to have lots of balls thrown to make up for the lack of balls tossed the day before. I think he counts them, daily, and makes up for lost tosses the day after. To watch him run is a joy. He puts his entire, big heart into each dash. His young muscles ripple even in the low light of a gloomy day.

Sad looking daffodils under hay mulch.

I had to sit down for a bit and watch all the bird activity in the branches above Coyote Woods. So many different feathered friends flying every which way! Then, on the way back to our yard, just at the edge where the pasture meets the line of deep, brown fir needles that marks the entrance to our property, a delicate garter snake the width of a pencil and painted as pretty as an Easter egg slipped past my feet. Behind the gray veil blanketing my mood I could feel my heart shiver in wonder.

Back in the yard, there was a decision to be made. Otis the frog has not been doing well. In his small pond, the water temperatures have remained too cold, and he as remained mostly comatose. He eats nothing. Somedays, he can swim a bit. Others, he sits like a small pond stone when I touch him. He is skinny and frail. There is a look to him that says “Uh-oh.” How many times can you thaw and refreeze? Late yesterday, I brought a glass bowl of pond water into the house and put it on a heating pad. It had not quite warmed by last night. This morning, it was finally tepid.

For days, I’ve had Otis on my mind, wondering whether to interfere with his small life anymore than I already have. This morning, I decided yes. I’d warm him up and see if it would help revive him and encourage him to eat. He’s currently sitting where my pipe usually rests, on the trunk by my bedside in a bowl of warmish water. He looks more alert already. Or perhaps I’m imagining things. Still, I feel more hopeful for him.

When I came back into the house to rest, Mazel was tired out, and I was feeling that I could survive the rest of the day. Sometimes, I can find myself in a mental place so crappy that I  barely have the resources to do what needs to be done. Especially at these dark times, I need to remember that when all else fails, the “green treatment” always works.

Carter and Coyote Woods

Permaculturists—folks who believe in permanent, sustainable cultures from the soil on up—speak often and with passion about edges. The edges of a space are where the action happens, they teach, where the most possibility exists, and where life experiments with itself. Our rental house sits nestled in a world of edges. There is the edge between the driveway and the house, between the driveway and the pasture, between the pasture and the douglas fir grove, between the fir grove and the blackberry borders, between the blackberry borders and more pasture.

Then, out back, there is Coyote Woods—a long stretch of trees, brush, and berries that snakes along the edge of hundreds of acres of grass pastures. We call this place Coyote Woods because we know that coyotes sing from back there, and most likely den back there. I often walk Mazel Tov back along the border of Coyote Woods in the very early spring long before the grass gets waist high, and Mazel runs fast and free there in every direction, far as my eyes can see…

Recently, I walked far enough to find where the coyotes have made entrances into the brush and thickets. In the entrance to two of their makeshift tunnels, I found old, gnawed cattle bones, most likely from some dead animal left to decay. Mazel approached the bones with caution, and had no interest in investigating any further. I peered into one dark, thorn-lined tunnel, then turned and looked into the face of the sun shining across the endless green fields, and let myself simply feel the different emotions of tunnel and open space, of dark thorn and sparkling green.

To my human heart, the dark tunnel seemed mildly ominous and the bright pastures inviting. I’ll bet the coyotes feel differently about those edges. Their tunnels offer them safety, while the pastures require them to expose themselves to anything and everything. I wonder if they smile as they weave their supple bodies through those dark places, and crouch when they come into the light of the great wide open.

At several spots along the edge of Coyote Woods, the ground has not decided whether it wants to be a marsh or a pasture or a thicket. For many yards, I walk on boggy ground studded with small patches of reeds that are clearly hoping they’ve made a good call, and this piece of real estate will soon be waterfront property. There are a few dried up cattails from last summer, and a slinking berry vine that has grabbed hold. There is also pasture grass, brown and flattened, from last summer in this mish-mash.

The permie folks clearly have it right: There is a lot going on at the edges. Craft your yard and garden, they say, to have as many edges as possible. No straight lines, when you can have curves and spirals that make more feet of edge. There is possibility, calamity, competition, hope, determination, and wildness there on the edges of things. I think of all the buzz phrases about living on the edge, or pushing oneself to the edge, walking the edge, or going over the edge, and as I throw the ball over and over again for Mazel Tov, I let myself simply feel those ideas about edges. To be honest, all of them make me a little anxious.

Flinging Mazel’s ball at the sun, I think about the edges in my own life. Right now, I live at the borderline of being a renter and being a homeowner. It is a nail-biter of an edge. My writing life has a curling edge to it, weaving between publishing, self-publishing, e-publishing, or not bothering to publish anything at all. I live between house and yard, with one foot in each, and each beckoning for the larger bulk of my time. I live at the borderland that separates me from everyone and everything else out there, and puzzle over how much of my life to give to others and how much to give to myself.

LIfe lived at the edge offers many possibilities. LIfe lived at many edges at once can make one a bit nuts. I think it was Victor Frankel who said that true freedom is fewer choices. Stand close to the edge all the time, and you certainly keep all your choices open. But for me, such a life is no longer appealing. I don’t want to keep balancing on that fine line, deciding whether I will be a marsh or a thicket or a pasture. I want—in as many areas of my life as I can—to choose and to take a step away from one edge and then another. The idea of moving away from edges right now fills me with a feeling of relief, a sense of exhale. I’ll leave the dynamic tension of the edge for another day.

The edges of my fairy garden and pond, and the rest of the property are felt rather than seen.

This morning before dawn, Mazel Tov went outside for his morning yard tour and pee. He does this on his own, and this is the only time we don’t go outside with him. I’m not certain where he went in his few moments of alone time, but suddenly, the morning silence was shattered by the sounds of snarling and shrieking. Carter opened the door, and Mazel hurried inside, his hackles standing up like  spikes. Suddenly, from the back of the yard, at the edge between a small fern glade and our grassy yard, a coyote began yip-howling in earnest. Minutes passed and she did not let up.

From the edge of the glen, she shouted and yiked and howled and yipped while Mazel paced nervously in the kitchen. Finally, when she felt her message had been soundly delivered, she melted into the woods. Mazel is keeping away from the fern glen now. He eyes it suspiciously, and his hackles rise when I call him closer to its edge, where all the commotion took place. Mazel has stepped back from that edge. He is leaving the glen and the woods to the coyote, and marking with pee all the big trees in the fir grove.

And how about you, cherished reader? Do you relish life at the edge? Do you know where your edges are? Would you like more of them? Or perhaps a few less?

In my little blue rental house, I dedicated on of my large plastic planter pots to a pond of sorts. Nothing moved in, but has been a pretty little thing, and a nice spot for mossy pieces of wood. So, today, while it pours bucket outside and the day is as cold as can be, while the sourdough starter bubbles on my counter and a pan of sweet peppers roasts in the oven, I’m dreaming of little waters. My plan for our new house is another bathtub pond (courtesy of my friend, Leslie, who has an old claw foot tub she’s donating to my pond dreams). I also plan to work in a wine barrel into this pond configuration. The house’s previous owners left behind a big lavender plant in a half wine barrel, and I’ll transplant the lavender and have my way with the barrel. I’m wanting to set this up so that somehow, the barrel “pours” into the bathtub.

Making small water features takes absolutely no special training. You just need to like to play with water. You can purchase tiny fountain pumps in a variety of sizes in any hardware store if you want your water garden to bubble or trickle or do a fountain-style spray. If you go on Craisglist and put in the word “pond,” you will find all sorts of pond statuary, plants, critters, buckets, pumps, you name it. I’ve added some photos I grabbed around the internet to get you dreaming…

When I lived in Idaho and the humidity was super-low, I put one of those garden fountains that you would mount on an outside wall (Home Depot and Lowes carry a bunch of these), and put it on a living room wall instead. I poured in about a gallon of water, Turned on the pump, and as soon as it sat a few hours to off-gas the chlorine, I added a small spider plant—these like to get their feet wet—and a pretty fan-tailed guppy.  Some plants, I put in right in their plastic pot. Some plants like to float right in the water. The fish poop feeds the plants, and the fish nibble on the plant roots. I’ve never had to add any extra food for any of the critters who find their way into my water inventions. The plants feed them. Water, plants, fish, and voila! Indoor pond and extra humidity all in one!

Here in Washougal, I won’t need extra humidity. So I’ll keep my water gardens and ponds outside. There will be no end to things to put into this bathtub/barrel pond. I muck about creek shores and marshes all the time collecting stones, wood, tiny minnows, snails, and frogs and baby newts when I find them. And I will be no stranger to Craigslist. Just about everything I’ve ever brought home to a home-made pond has thrived there, and I’ve thrived by enjoying my ever-changing, living creations. It’s a win-win!

Spring is rolling out previews

Amidst all this enchantment, Winter is working hard to keep me in her wraps as long as she can. She is wanting me to remain still, reflective, and inside myself, so she handed me a whopper of a head-cold-allergy thing, which–owing to the pounds of mucous drainage from my sinuses—does manage to keep me from launching my energy outward where it longs to be. Too stuffy, much too stuffy, to get all worked up and excited and active. So I’ve been watching the spring previews primarily from my bedroom window. And it is a tantalizing view: birds winging and singing and dancing in the yard, the first sprigs of yummy chickweed sprouting beneath my window (already in flower!), the operatic bellows of the peeper frogs at night. Heaven!

Yesterday morning, the seductive enticement of that girlish tease, Spring, finally lured me away from my Kleenex box and out into the yard. She had to work hard to get me past the front door, as it was a cold, gray morning, but once I took those first steps onto the porch, she seduced me entirely.

The first thing that caught my eye was the collection of old birdhouses Carter found at a garage sale weeks ago. They will need to be hung, but not here, not at a rental house. Too impermanent. Next, I caught sight of my garden tower standing out by the driveway. It was a little barren and sorry-looking with winter wear, but the white dome of the worm bin in the center called me over. I’d been wondering all winter if my little hard-working, compost-crazy red worms had survived the deep freezes of January. Curiosity finally got the better of me. I hurried back in the house and pulled on my girlie-girl pink muck boots. Making a quick stop in the bathroom, I yanked a few squares of toilet paper off the roll and jammed them up my nose. When Carter looked at me curiously, I told him the white blobs sticking out my nose were snow blossoms, and I was hoping to start a new fad. Who needs the pain of nose rings when you can sport attractive sprouts of paper out your nose?

I hurried back out of the house, before my momentum could fade, and grabbed a car mat to lay on the ground beneath the garden tower. At the bottom of the tower is a screw and a plug, which allows you to pull down all the contents of the interior kitchen-scrap tube. After much crawling (not a good design, let me tell you) and groaning and grunting, the plug fell away, and a long coil of last-year’s gunk spilled out. In the midst of all that gunk, which was surprisingly odorless and much drier than I expected, squirmed a mass of red worms. I squealed in delight and dug my fingers gently into the dark-brown, moist pile of root threads, egg shells, and mostly munched-up kitchen scraps. There were big worms and tiny worms, all sliding and writhing in that lovely dark worm compost. This discovery was cause for celebration, and I rushed into the workshop to tell Carter. I showed him the mass of wigglers in my hand and said, “Look! Look! They made it! And look at all the babies!”

Quickly replacing the white wads of tissue in my nose with a fresh batch from my back pocket, I got back onto my back to replace the plug in the bottom of the tube. There are no words to explain why a handful of worms would bring me such a blessed flush of energy, nor why what happened next would coax me into spending the next four or five hours outside. I was on my back when I caught a small flash of movement to my left. From the corner of my eye, I saw a nose protrude from beneath the corner of the car mat. I pulled the mat aside to reveal a full-sized brown salamander, blinking slowly in the morning mist. When I gathered her into my hands, she didn’t move much. Cold weather will do that to a salamander. Of course, I had to rush into the shop to show her to Carter.

I placed the salamander next to my planting containers and stones, changed my nose “blossoms” once again, and was then lured to the side of Mazel Tov’s small kiddie wading pool. I was hoping to find frog eggs in it, but it was empty.

In the background, my ears caught the sounds of birds, many birds, all singing a particularly joyful song, and although my hands were freezing cold, something spurred me into crafting the very beginnings of a temporary pond in the wading pool. A few old branches, a chunk of cinderblock, some river stones collected last summer, a large slab of mossy bark, the curly reed that seems to have made it through the winter—all these things made it into the wading pool. Had I been back in Indiana, I would have soon been putting together my yearly bath tub pond. I believe the spirit of that pond reached out and enfolded me and inspired this one.

Back in my container garden, I found the budding head of a columbine poking up through the cold soil, and the grass-like spears of some unknown bulb I’d planted last fall. Suddenly I was wanting very much to see what else was happening in the natural world. Yes, my nose was a problem, but I had been seduced by Spring, and was wanting to let her have her way with me. So Carter and I bundled up in jackets and headed off to the marshlands and swift currents of the Washougal River, just a mile or two down the road. Carter brought a fishing pole. I brought a bucket, a net, and a back pack. Mazel brought his ball. While Carter fished at the rocky edge of the river, I explored the sodden banks of the marsh pools, looking for life. Looking for signs of Spring. Looking just for the joy of looking. I bent down and turned over submerged rocks and old bits of wood. My eyes scanned the reeds for signs of frog eggs, or tiny fish, or maybe a crawdad.

My hands were cold, the water even colder, and the stones beneath my fingers slippery with marsh slime, but I could not keep my hands from seeking, turning, touching. There was an urgency in my hands, a longing, and behind all of that my old familiar sense of wonder. I pulled a small handful of some green floating pond plant and put it into my bucket. A few intriguing pieces of driftwood went into the bucket next. Then, a handful of small stones. In the next handful of greens, I found a small, gray frog, the size of the tip of my thumb. Whatever sort of frog he is, he is a stranger to me. He doesn’t bear the markings of any of the frogs I am familiar with, and all I know about him is that he is a youngster. He was near-catatonic from the cold, and he settled into my bucket without protest.

I said that there were no words for what pulled me out into the day and back into the world that waited outside the depressing confinement of my room, but there is a word, and it is “enticement.” Enchantment is the word I always fall back upon when describing my relationship with nature, and it is a fine word, but it does not evoke action. Enticement does. It is a word a bit like “beckon” or “impel” or “compel.” With enchantment, you can just sit there and groove in the bliss. When you are enticed, you are moved forward in a most mysterious sort of way. Enticement is a seductive word, a sensual word that carries within it the assumption of relationship. Something or someone does the enticing. And something or someone is enticed at the call.

Enticement is not a demanding sort of word. Lovers entice. Governments don’t. You are not pushed or forced or thrown into or yanked along when you are enticed. It is, rather, an invitation to something. Enticement is not a call to duty, or to responsibility. It is an earthy, wild call that reaches out to the soul, and it is only with the soul that we can respond to this muse, this siren.

I returned from the river yesterday afternoon and with no small sense of reverence, added the driftwood, the sand, the greenery, and the little frog to my temporary pond. Why temporary, you ask? Two weeks ago, we had an offer accepted on a little yellow house in the next-door town of Washougal. It is the first house within city limits that I will ever own. I’ll have neighbors all around me, and downtown Washougal is just a few blocks away. But the house is also just a few blocks away from the Washougal River. So we’ll be settling in-between both wild and human-centered worlds.

The little house has a surprisingly big yard with plenty of room for a garden, a small forest glen, and—of course—a pond of some sort. I find the house and the lovely yard quite enticing, to say the least. It has beckoned us gently and quietly. There is an aura of mystery to the place and its unknown history, and of possibility. And I’m so happy to have found a new nest. While I’m a gypsy at heart, my soul always craves the grounding of home.

This morning, I have Kleenex up my nose again and the day is cold and very dreary, but my beloved Spring is just outside the window, hooking her tempting green finger in a “come hither” kind of way. I can almost—almost—hear the red worms whistling as they work on the fresh garden scraps in the garden tower. Perhaps the frog in the wading pool is humming a favorite tune. And that salamander, that seductress, who knows where she has gone to now?

Believers in spring, wherever you are, may you succumb to Enticement. May you hear her soft call, and feel her welcoming arms around you. May you follow her down crooked paths and narrow paths wherever she leads. And may she bring you into Wonder.

Me, mouse, and Mazel

Rain is the constant feature of my NorthWest winter. So constant, in fact, that on the very rare days the sun peaks out, I am stunned by its forgotten brilliance, and rush outside to stand facing it, eyes closed. That precious red glow behind my eyelids makes me suddenly warm all over. It seems to me that the birds rejoice in that rare light, as well, and I can hear a rousing chorus of them singing to the sunlight across the big pasture.

Then the cloud quilt pulls back up across the sky and I marvel again at how instantly the mood of a landscape is transformed by the spirits of light and dark.

Like me, the animals of winter seem to hunker down and go invisible during the cold rains. While I sit inside with tea and warm toast, I imagine skunks curled in dens with their lovely tails draped over their cold noses. Squirrels dream in tree hollows and leaf nests, and opossums crawl into any dry space they can squeeze. I have a great photo of an opossum—all fifty teeth bared in a crocodile “smile”—lurching up from the depths of a massive straw nest built in the engine compartment of a truck. I like to think of that guy trying to start his truck with no luck at all, saying to himself, “Hmmm, I wonder why it won’t turn over…Let me check…Agggghhhhh!”

The rains also wash away any signs I might normally see of animals traveling through the yard. I’m no Tom Brown Junior when it comes to tracking, so it sometimes feels to me like all the animals have left town. I am grateful to the flock of juncos that come to the seeds I scatter in the driveway, and for the three squirrels that show up for sunflower seeds and stale bread just before dark each afternoon. They help me feel less lonely in winter.

I miss seeing the deer tracks and the footprints of the raccoons and the crows down near the creek where we walk. That creek is currently a torrent, and it gave up any and all of its mudbanks weeks ago. The shore rises now all the way up to the grass line on the hill. No one seems to be nibbling the berry bushes or the Oregon grape along the edge of the property where I sometimes saw the doe of last summer. Even the coyotes have stopped singing.

I miss them all. Sometimes—like right now—I remember just how many invisible visitors leave their seasonal calling cards of poop, tracks, songs, and nibbles where I live, and I feel their absence deeply in my days. So you can imagine how excited I was to find an owl pellet last week beneath the huge douglas firs by the house, and then another just a couple days ago. When I broke the sodden mass open with my fingers—yes, I know it is horribly unsanitary—I found the teeth and leg bones of mice and shrews. It warms my winter heart now when I go to bed at night and imagine that large great horned owl perched up in the same tree that shades our house all summer long. His unseen company makes my days just a little richer.

We have another invisible guest living in our car these days. Tiny droppings like thistle seeds have begun to appear in the console cup holder of our car. A few days ago, when Carter turned on the defroster, there was a flurry of white tissue flecks like snow spouting out from the window edge of the dashboard. And I could smell that unmistakable odor of mouse pee. We keep a plastic bag of doggie treats in the glove compartment for Mazel Tov, and those are all gone, replaced by shreds nibbled from the carpet liner in the back seat.

So yesterday afternoon, I stopped  by our local hardware store to look at their mousetraps. They had a slew of them, from the snapping kind to the feet-stick-em kind, and lots of boxes of poison. I chose a pack of two plastic live traps from China that looked like squared-off toilet paper rolls and figured I’d give them a try. Last night, I baited the two traps with peanut butter and chocolate chips, and crossed my fingers.

This morning, both traps were sprung, and I could “feel” a mouse fearfully shivering in one of them. Now, there is nothing pleasant about having a mouse pee in your air vents and eat your carpeting, but I have to admit to you that I was just tickled as a kid at Christmas holding that little trap in my hands. I talked baby talk to the mouse inside, telling “her” that we’d be taking her down by the creek when we walked Mazel Tov later that morning. And we did. I carried her small trap in my jacket pocket, and could not resist opening the trap and tapping its contents into my cupped hand. All my life, I have been captivated by the feel of the wild, cupping small birds, injured chipmunks, newly-hatched snakes, anything and everything I could put my hands on if only for the briefest of moments. In such instances, I feel the vibrant electricity of mystery race powerfully up my wrists and arms and into my racing, thankful heart.

This morning, The Wild was a young and shaking mouse with shining eyes and a white chin. She sat looking up at me, not daring to move, and I was caught up again—as I always am—by a wave of absolute wonder that the gods could make such a perfect little being and that I could be blessed to share space on this earth with such furred perfection. Carter caught the moment on camera, and I share it with you so that you might be reminded of all those moments in your own life when you have come face-to-face with a moment of winter magic.

For those moments, I had all the company I craved: Husband, dog, and wildling. Who could want for more?

In Indiana, when Cookie the possum was my baking partner.

I have decided that Fridays will be baking days and writing days. When you bake with sourdough starter, you have many hours of rising time in which to write, so I thought these two activities would complement each other nicely.

My starter is from Indiana, and was initially conceived and concocted by a sweet housemate of ours. She moved on, leaving her infant starter behind. The baby starter had a long way to go before it could be called “mature,” so I figured what better than an old lady to escort a maiden starter into cronehood.

I’ve been baking with that starter for going on three years now, and we’ve had some great successes and great flops in our bread partnership. The starter brings along the yeasts, the bacteria, and the ambrosiac tang. It is my job to coax these lovely qualities into a loaf of bread… I have to admit that the starter has never failed me, but I’ve certainly failed her more times than I care to admit. Of course, the birds and squirrels outside would hardly call the door-stop loaves failures. They eat them up in nothing flat. They never see those light, slightly-sour loaves the color of vanilla, soft as a baby bottom, high as the toaster. Nope, those loaves get eaten down to the last chewy crust by those of us indoors.

Before I left Indiana, I offered to give a jar of starter to everyone in our gift circle who wanted one. There were many takers, so I also supplied them with instructions on how to feed and care for their starter, and how to start baking bread with her. The first recipient, Brian, said, “This starter is really just like a pet, isn’t it? You have to feed it, grow it, and be careful of how you keep it!” I wish I would have made that  connection myself. My starter IS just like a pet. And like any animal companion or wild visitor, she has life lessons to impart. This is what she has told me these past three years:

Every Good Relationship is unique.

My little jar of flour and water is unlike any other such jar in the world. She is crafted out of the unique wild yeasts that happened to be floating around my house and yard on the day we began the long process of birthing her. She is an amalgam of the flours we used, the particular waters in our pipes, the invisible creatures we needed to simply trust were actually living in the air we were breathing each day. As such, she has her quirks, her talents, her angers, her stubborn streak, and her delights.

A Good Relationship Requires Time and Attention

Half of the success or failure in my baking is dependent on my starter. I need to know—by watching and sniffing—how she is feeling. Is she hungry? For what? Is she tired? Sleepy? When will she be ready to work with me? If the only attention I give her is on baking day, well, we’ll both starve. I have learned how she acts in the refrigerator (sleepy), and on the kitchen counter (perky), and when the day is cold, or hot, or wet, or dry. She has something to say about all of these things, and woe be to me if I don’t listen.

A Good Relationship Requires Both Heat and Cold

If I only keep my starter in the cold, she remains mostly in hibernation. We can’t converse much. She stays quiet and stiff. But if I only keep her toasty warm, well, she is happy to bubble and giggle and foam up all over the place. And she is also likely to collapse if she runs out of energy, which for her is flour and water. You’d be surprised how quickly she can exhaust herself in the summer heat. Now, if I apply too much heat, she simply dies. Yet, it is in the application of the heat of baking that she really surpasses herself.  She goes out with a heavenly rise, transformed into something that tastes just this side of heaven.  My task as her partner is never to let all of her fire up at the same time. I let her throw herself into the phoenix fire, being certain I’ve kept just enough aside in the fridge so that we can play the cold-warm-hot game over and over and over.

Patience, Or Lack Of It, Can Sour or Sweeten Any Relationship

Do you want your bread sweet? Or do you want it so tangy sour your teeth tingle when you bite into it? Sweet and sour is all a matter of patience and impatience. I love my sourdough loaves really tangy and the only way I can achieve that is to take a very long time to craft a dough. These days, a loaf takes me three days to complete. I can hurry the process along adding more heat to the rise times, and perhaps more flour to the dough, but I will end up with a sweet little loaf that a just doesn’t give me the complexity of taste that I really like . No, if I want a deeply satisfying loaf of bread—not just a shallow little puff of dough—I have to be willing to wait, and to tenderly coax the dough along the whole time. Trust me, it’s worth it in the end.

I have applied all these lessons to my marriage, and I can tell you that they work. Time, attention, temperature or passion, appreciation of our uniqueness, respect for the ancientness of the process, and just being willing to keep on “baking” is a recipe for a good loaf or a good relationship.

And to think—you can learn all this from a bundle of bacteria!