GRATITUDE

I go back to my office and thank the people working there. I sign some checks and borrow money from my son’s college savings account because I’m broke and overdrawn and still spending because there’s no stopping me now, or the work I am doing, I must finish what I have started so I can live this new life, and I am still going on the assumption that this is the right decision and the right moment and things will work out if I don’t flinch or falter, so on I go.

I drive home and there is a crew with a cherry picker and a chain saw cutting down the neighbor’s tall tree, the one that shields my bedroom window from the streetlight, and the shiny leaves on the half they haven’t cut yet are calling to me, “Help!” I remember that the night before when I walked the dogs I noticed something about that tree in particular and felt blessed that it was there and grateful to it, and now I wish I had stopped and thanked it and asked myself why I had felt that particular something toward that tree at that moment, but I didn’t, and now they’re cutting it down. I go to my studio and burn some sage and cry some more and quickly tell the tree to send its remaining life force into its roots, into the ground, quick as it can. I apologize that it is being destroyed, that it wasn’t warned. I tell it I love it and am grateful to it, and so sad, and the doorbell rings and it’s G. with fabric samples for new pillows on the bench along my dining room table, and the seamstress is coming and I am totally disoriented and not at all in the mood to talk about pillows. I come red-eyed to answer the door and tell her about the tree, the chain saw is still going in the background and we are shouting over it, and right away she tells me two tree cutting stories: The young couple that moved in next door to her cut down the huge old persimmon tree full of persimmons, then the old plum and peach trees as well.

The seamstress arrives and G. says, “Fran here has a tree-cutting story”. And indeed she has, about a tree at her apartment almost as big as the Moreton Bay Fig tree. (A Santa Barbara landmark, planted in 1877, and officially designated as a historic landmark in 1970. It is believed to be the largest of its kind in the United States with a branch spread of more than167 feet, a total height of more than 76 feet and a trunk diameter above the buttress roots of nearly 13 feet.) Fran tells us, “The landlord cut the fig tree as soon as his wife died. She wasn’t there anymore to protect it. It took them a whole week to cut through the thick trunk and get that tree down. It is true that the tree blocked a lot of light and dropped a lot of leaves and nothing grew underneath it, but still…”

My boyfriend arrives and tells me his neighbors have cut down the huge Eucalyptus between their yards because a giant branch is leaning on their electrical wires and into his yard. That night a flock of birds flew around and around, circling and circling, trying to find the tree they had slept in.

I speak with a friend who is writing her story of being fetched in her dreams to become a healer. I am writing about how everything that seems so wildly separate is in fact connected back through time. I am writing about ancestors. Another friend describes how the Wholly Law is written in her body and her life is to live it so that it can be seen. Our friend and teacher, Deena Metzger, is surely chuckling because this is the lived Hypertext she has been coaxing us into and we must write it, we are writing it, as we live it.1

So much of human expression about loving a place is about the human-to-land love. This is outlandish enough for some, but it, too, misses the point. Isn’t it possible that the relationship can be mutual, that the land can and does love us back, and the trees and the ancestors and the spirits, too…? Isn’t it obvious? Ungrateful as we are, the land and the Mystery continue to show us how to love.

1 For information on Deena’s writing, blog, and teaching schedule go to www.deenametzger.net.

OSPREY

The beach in front of the house I am living in has wide, powdery sand, and piles of driftwood – whole trees with their long, sodden trunks and intact root balls. The side branches are gone, broken off along the river bottom and in the churning waves. On rainy days, the dog and I get wet. On sunny days we walk to where the river empties into the sea, just north of the astonishing McKerricher State Park, an anomalous, sudden, undulating stretch of sand dunes along the beach. There is a spot just below the bridge where the river empties into the sea. At low tide, you can walk up the river, picking your way along exposed water-rippled sand and slippery moss-covered stones. Sometimes there are sea lions that look like stumps when they bask in the sun. Sometimes you see their noses break the surface, sending tiny wavelets toward the river’s edge that merge with the pull of a rising or falling tide.

Ospreys are teaching their young to hunt. Before they dive, they hover, usually at the mouth of the river, motionless in the brisk wind, flicking the edges of their wings, tilting their fan-shaped tail, then plunging into the shallowest water, into the thin white foam, lifting out a tiny, squirming silver fish. Salmon fry? Not yet, though conservationists are working to restore the spawning habitat of this estuary. There are tufts of native grasses and sedges along the briny tidal zone, and gravel beaches farther up where fallen alders and willows create protected pools for eggs. There is a taciturn, old male osprey that often sits on the railing of the 10 Mile Bridge, surveying up river and down. Sometimes a kingfisher joins him.

Even at high tide, the beach is walkable. I have fallen in love, and the conversation is deepening into intimacy. Love takes many forms, I think, including the love of rivers, beaches and Ospreys. When I see the birds, I say, “I love you!” in response to their high, shrill, staccato cries. I watch their slow, leisurely circling overhead, their outstretched wings backlit and finely etched in white and dark brown. Love is seeing a beach littered with sand dollars. It is seeing my feet in the clear, icy water, the water so clean that I know how seldom I’ve been in water this clear, or known its smell. I think of the radiation from Fukushima that is surely in it. I greet the ocean, saying, “I love you! Hello! I love you!”

Sometimes I must step away and into the relief of being indoors, or I must close my eyes and be grateful for silence – again silence - because sometimes these trees and this ocean are too massive. The trees especially seem too green, too complex with too much life in and beneath and among them, and there are too many trees and at the same time never enough, because so many, many have already been cut and it’s unbearable, like losing all the lovers of all the lifetimes. The past two days there have been thunderstorms with howling wind and lashing rain, and only the dog and the leaking skylights keep my pounding heart from getting up and running away to join everything that is rampaging.

One day, after one of those spring storms, with everything washed clean, I drive from town to the beach with the dog. As I come down the grade after the bridge, the Sentry Osprey suddenly swoops across the road and comes to land on a nearby post, his outstretched wings suddenly looming huge in front of my windshield and in my peripheral view, the enormous, fleeting shadow momentarily eclipsing the road and the sun. At that moment, a beat up car pulls over across the road and a disheveled man hurriedly gets out. Waving his arms, he shouts to me, “Did you see that osprey, the way he swooped down and landed on that post?” The man flaps his arms again and makes the sound of a man imitating the sound of a bird’s wings flapping. “Yes,” I say. “Yes, I saw it!” My own heart is still pounding with the thrill and shock of it, so close. The man shakes his head in wonderment, and says, in a loud, ringing voice, “I’ve driven this road for 20 years!” He gets back in his car and drives away. He just had to pull over and stop his car to say to a stranger, “Did you see that bird?”

BITS AND PIECES #1

It is significant, startling, that animals, plants, stones, water, birds and even micro-organisms remain friendly, neutral, even overtly benign and inviting of (re)relationship in spite of our unrelenting brutality. This inexplicable open-ness is less a charming quirk than a simple fact of character: it is in the nature of most beings (humans included) to seek relationship, to express love and receive it. Remarkably, this has not evolved out of the non-humans. One wonders whether Nature is curious to see whether humans will remember or even recognize this connectedness and choose it.