BATH TIME (ON PARTINGTON RIDGE)

Band-tailed pigeons coo smoothly in the west,

Like a mirror, great horned owl hoots to the east –

Dusky ridge role call.

Then coyotes unseen, cut through the gentle, familiar songspell,

A chilling chorus of barks, howls, and snarls rising up from the canyon.

And a lone coyote further out toward the ocean.

Even some pups join in with squeaky songs,

All hidden in fog and steep scrub.

I forgot my towel, so I run naked from the bath to the house

To make sure you don’t miss the ferocious twilight hymn.

You’re already outside listening,

Looking just as wild as the music,

Upright,

Strong.

You ask if I’m scared.

Back in the bath,

Woodpeckers scuffle in the live oak tops.

And a furry black caterpillar inches silently around the tub,

Walks on the rim,

Climbs halfway up the faucet.

I consider picking him up and placing him on the rose bush,

But I don’t know if he likes roses,

Either for eating or living on.

Besides, this trip around the tub might be an important journey in his differently scaled life,

Could be a hero’s quest.

Best just to keep my hands to myself,

Better still to also wish him well.

THINGS TO EAT IN BIG SUR

California quail, bay nuts, gray squirrels, ground squirrels, and raccoons. Acorns from black, tan and live oaks. Fiddleheads of ferns, stinging nettle, miner’s lettuce, coyote mint, yerba santa, and yerba buena. Rattlesnakes, and gopher snakes. Lizards: whip-tails, blue bellies and western fence. Yucca roots and yucca fruit. Blackberries, huckleberries, elderberries, and elderflowers. Abalone: red and black. Purple sea urchins, limpits, green-lipped muscles, turban snails, and gull eggs. Sea palm and chia seeds. Robins, great blue herons, egrets, fresh green pine-tips, and rattlesnake grass. Sea lions, harbor seals, eel, steelhead trout, crayfish, and purple crabs. Chantrelle and morel mushrooms. Termites, grasshoppers, crickets, and cicadas. Black-tailed deer and wild boar. Larval insects, bumble bee honey, and sea salt. Manzanita berries, pocket gophers, and redwood sorrel. 

PAPAYAS ARE WOMEN by KELSEY BARRETT

Papayas are women
Breasts and eggs on trees
Ripe when putrid yellow
We follow the Fijians
Hit them down in October with sticks
Upon Earth impact the innards reveal an ovarian sack of black
Papayas are women 

A Song for the High Sierras

My song will be lungs going empty & being filled

My boots slapping granite steps

Panting as we climb

I ask permission from the coniferous citizens to tread the trail – towering lodge-pole pine, stunted lupine & deadly Indian corn.

I seek a blessing from the sub-alpine congregation to ascend through rusty Sierra juniper, abundant heather & chubby white barked pine.

I am honored to sit with the guardians of the alpine – rugged arctic willow, innocuous lichens & mighty little grasses.

And I venerate the wild gods of this place – the coursing waters & roaring wind; the mycelium, the thunderstorm, the glacier.

I have come for a reunion with the black bear & pica, the osprey & the martin, the beaver & the dragonfly.

I have come to gather with the clouds & mountains, stands of trees & piles of stones.

And I have come to remember the wildness in my body & the glory of my home.

My song will be putting down my pack to swim

My calves pulled tight

And a sunburned smile on ancient peaks

photo by Hall Newbegin

New Year Prayer

May this world be blessed with peace.

May we be blessed with peace.

Inhabitation

Our footsteps on the trail scare up a ground squirrel.

He dashes through the hedge nettle to his burrow.

An astringent, citrus smell lingers in his wake.

What a joy it is to know the names of all the players in this simple story.

That wild mint and her distinctive smell have often been nearby,

but now we are that much closer.

The trail of inhabitation, of knowledge of place, is long and lovely.

A Song for the Sierras

Sugar cones & ponderosa pines stand here. They run down the hill to the river, up another hill and along the ridge forever. More ridges with more conifers rise and fall, distant, purple, hazy.

Ravens tumble through the air in quiet play. When they quork from tree tops it echoes out until another raven in the distance takes up the call.

The trees grow straight and tall, with eccentric branches thrust out pell-mell. Many wear staghorn lichen – florescent green.

When the river swells small stones spin in place, wearing holes in the granite embankments. In summer they fill with warm, dirty water away from the flow. Eventually they dry out leaving yellow pollen rings around the smooth sloping edges.

The night is thick with chirruping bats and silent stars. A few meteors seem to fall each hour of darkness.

A fine congregation of beings gather here. Life manifests as pine martin, rainbow trout, and spotted owl: prowling endlessly on down muffled wings – as cicada, yellow jacket, and wolf spider who spins a three-dimensional dome web between low branches – as incense cedar, thimble berry, and manzanita whose seeds only germinate when touched by fire, or when cooked by the inner heat of bear’s belly.

Beings rise in a 100,000 more combinations of sunlight, soil, water, and consciousness, whose names and habits are yet unknown to me – in these mountains and foothills they do dwell. Truly, The Song of the Sierras is sung by a beautiful choir of citizens.

Neighbors

Last week a colony of sea lions moved in next door. A bull and his harem of five females reside on the small rock island off shore of our cliffside home. They fish all day and fuck all night. The females bark and bark, and the male grunts, snorts, and chuckles like a self satisfied halfwit. They keep me up much of the night, since the tent walls of our yurt admit sounds in and out freely. At times it even seems quieter outside.

This is the first time in my life that I find myself so close to wilderness that I am actually annoyed by it. It is curiously comforting because the annoyance seems to me a mile-stone in a relationship with the wild growing fuller. The mists of romance have cleared, or are clearing, and though my love of sea lion, stellar jay, and adolescent crow remain unconditional, I am not so smitten as to ignore their faults, follies, and intrusive calls.

We are a family after all, a family of animals, a family of living beings, and family members often wear upon each other’s last nerve. I pray nightly for a high tide to come and put the pinnipeds off their love-play, and sometimes other members of our family join in the exhausted campaign for peace and quiet. I’ve heard an otter mewing from the kelp bed over and over, perhaps saying: “I’m trying to sleep, I’m trying to sleep!” And even a bobcat shrieking from the cliffs: “I hunt with my ears, shut up, shut up!” It seems I am not the only fussy little brother in the clan.

Within Reasons

In the river small, unnamed fish gather in little shoals at either side of me. Maybe they’ve come to sup a little salt from my sweaty body, or to eat flecks of dead skin, or to enjoy some radiant heat emanating from me. Or perhaps it is for some unnamed reason that these unnamed fish assemble, some explanation far out and hard to imagine – the chemical compounds of my B.O. compose a euphoric fish drug – these fish are necromancers and have come to commune with the many ghost fish that have haunted me since their consumption – or perhaps the presence of a human being is utterly terrifying and they are forced to swim near me as punishment for previous misdeeds.

When the sun sets, bats begin aerial maneuvers over the water. Again and again they swoop down and fly around me in a hundred clockwise circles. No doubt they are feasting on the mosquitoes intent on feasting on me. The warm blood in my head is a homing beacon for the skeeters and the bats find them easily with echolocation, or so it would seem… on the other hand, perhaps human blood has healing properties according to mosquito legend, a cure for impotency or an aphrodisiac well worth the risk of bat death. Maybe the electro magnetic frequencies of my nervous system compose an attractive tune within the advanced range of bat hearing, and they circle round and round to enjoy the song, uninterested in the insects.

At nightfall I head to the Zendo for a Dharma talk attended by sixty people. We have come to hear “The Abiding Teacher” discuss things as far out and hard to imagine as: non-duality, non-attachment, and enlightenment – or perhaps it is for another reason… perhaps we gather just to gather, and acknowledge together that these lives are sometimes hard and also very simple, and that the world is both beautiful and strange.

A Bat In The Zendo

A bat in the Zendo

Flaps around in circles

And chants in inaudible frequencies

He takes his meditation on the wing

And I prefer mine afoot

On some trail, dusty or damp

By the river or on the ridge

So many sutras mention mountains

Countless metaphors have described their nature

But all the wisdom regarding The Dharma

Would fit so easily in any mountain's shadow

Blacking out the pages

With its teaching

Exhale (Whaling pt. 2)

First we have to climb a chain-link fence, then creep under the structure of a bath-house, tie a long rope to its foundation and repel 100 feet down a steep cliff face to the rock beach. It feels like a prison break, or a James Bond movie… if James Bond was ever racing communists to reach the rotting carcass of a grey whale.

This cinematic opening marks my 3^rd attempt to see the whale body up-close, it is Noël and Kelsey’s 2^nd try. We strategically plan our assault for low tide, and unstrategically set out during the new moon, so there is actually very little difference between high and low tides. Halfway there the ocean stops us. Kelsey and I decide to swim past a barrier of rock and wave. Noël elects to stay behind so she can go for help if we become marooned or injured. She waits in a cove with bright green, mossy walls, thick like the pelt of a cold weather creature.

I’m so focused on the waves, and avoiding being battered by them, I actually don’t register the freezing temperature of the water until I am on the next stretch of shore. Now we start a steady trot over the rocks, with no time to waste. The human sense of smell is a running joke in the animal kingdom, but despite my handicap the odor of the dead whale comes into focus well before the image. We stripped down for the swim of course, but I kept my underwear on so they could be converted into a bandanna as we approached the putrescent threshold.

We chant in Sanskrit seed-syllables, and clap as we walk closer and closer. “Sa ta na ma, sa ta na ma:” birth, life, death, and rebirth.

Other than the smell, the first thing I notice are the birds, thirty or forty gulls rest on the whale, and a turkey vulture actually sits in its mouth, tearing strips from the tongue. Turkey vultures have the most powerful olfactory sense of any animal, ever; they can pinpoint small carrion from many miles away, and from high in the air. Comparatively I might as well not have nostrils, yet every cell in my body fights to keep its distance from the carcass, and the world’s greatest smeller is literally sitting inside the whale.

Of course the difference is: what smells disgusting and dangerous to me, smells delicious and vital to the vulture… a bakery is to me, as a dead whale is to it. Eventually our presence inspires flight, and I marvel at the inherent poetry of wild cycles: that whale spent its whole life (50 or 60 years) swimming in the ocean, and now it’s flying.

The whale’s penis is draped over several large rocks, it would normally be internal, like most mammals, but apparently the muscular release or tension that accompanied death forced it out into the open. It is about the same size as my entire body. Yes indeed, this was a male whale.

Huge vertebrae stick out of the rot-widened blowhole. The internal decay is creating a lot of heat, as microorganisms do their good work, and steam billows out of the blowhole continuously, giving the impression that the whale is perpetually exhaling. And in a sense, he is, as he releases all of the minerals, molecules, and atoms that he has been holding onto, back into the world. Complete decomposition is the final breath, and the moment of absolute rebirth… when every cell is free to roam in the belly of a vulture, the primitive body of a microbe, or in particles through the air and sea.

Majik Landscape (Whaling pt. 1)

We start walking on a narrow trail full of coffee berry and poison oak, and we stop short only a few yards in. The swollen innards of some small mammal lies in the middle of the path, next to them a clean picked, blood tinged skull, and a very small distance away the lower jaw. Everything else is gone. No hair, no bones, no flesh, no blood; just the lonely intestine of a recently eviscerated rabbit, and its empty skull.

It smells quite pungent, and our thoughts turn immediately to the huge whale corpse we are on our way to see. If this handful of carrion can smell so badly, surely we are in danger of asphyxiation if we can actually reach the whale.

Roughly a month ago a dead grey whale washed up on the rocky, isolated beach, a few miles south of my home. Everyday it grows tanner and tanner sitting stone still next to an old shipwreck. White water breaks nearby but misses the carcass entirely, it was deposited high on the beach during strong winds and Tsunami reinforced waves, truly, the whale body appeared dramatically right after an earthquake in Japan.

It could be a good or bad omen, these rabbit guts, either way it is remarkable. Kelsey sprinkles tobacco: a small offering. Sticky monkey flower, tall grass, lupin, and giant horsetail join us on the trail. After the tall grass and horsetail our pant legs are populated with ticks, five or ten species, some enormous. What a strange life, living on the end of a grass blade, waiting and waiting for some hot-blooded somebody to walk by. Once their dream is fulfilled, and they hitch a ride on three soft skinned apes, we just flick them off our pants in disgust. It is hard not to hate them, creepy little sanguinavores.

The trail washed out and was never rebuilt, so we repel the last forty feet. Our timing is not ideal, the tide is somewhere between high and low and will be getting higher soon. The steep wall to the east overflows with tiny mossy waterfalls, creating fresh water pools full of tadpoles, and (honest to God) a little patch of quicksand. We are forced by the encroaching ocean to climb over boulders and up crumbling rock faces past stinky cormorant nests. Two dead cormorants lie between rocks on our walk. One moldering right next to her nest, possibly not built far enough away from the pounding surf, a grim reminder that we must leave enough time for a return journey, lest we be battered in a narrow passage by the incoming tide.

This hike is full of crystals. Great bands of quartz run through the igneous rocks, so loose that big chunks can be removed by hand. Solid sulfur lies in little clumps, recently fallen out of the hillside, waiting for an alchemist’s invocation. And crystalline mineral deposits grow like a fungus on some of the boulders, tan and fleshy on the surface and then broken open in places to reveal shimmering cross-sections of pink and white.

Eventually we reach an impasse, two dangerous options: deep water and rough waves, or a steep and crumbling climb, which might not even get us over the ridge. Thwarted. The tide is really coming in now, so we’ve got to hustle. Running on slippery rocks that were dry on the approach. Occasionally we brace ourselves for potential wave death, but are mercifully spared. The salt spray in my face seems to say: “you might not be so lucky next time.” Thankfully the beach widens and the ocean is at bay, so to speak. The adrenaline drains away, and Noël spots an otter diving in the breakwater, body surfing, and smashing mollusks to smithereens on an anvil stone.

Before the long hike back we conduct spontaneous ceremony. First a little, gentle movement, improv Tai Chi, Kelsey chants at a distance. A raft of pelicans soar in from the south, they coast through the curl of a wave. I am moved to sing, exclaim in fact, to greet my soaring cousins with my power voice, my loudest and most resonant tones. A song takes shape, call and response between Noël and me, and then uncontrolled free-form shamanic verse. The tide surges in and a magic landscape is reveled, always there, just waiting for us to take a little time to tune in. The rocks and cliffs, the endless water, distant clouds, my friends and me, and all the beings: together again in a song.

Myself as Imagined

At 126 years old I am very tiny. Once I rounded 111, I started to drop a few inches every year. I currently stand about 2 feet tall, but am somehow stronger than ever… and, thankfully, I remain lucid and productive. My life has become as simple as I am diminutive – I need only a meager portion of food, and a little nook of a home. Long ago I asked to meet the Gnomes, instead I have become one.

My wife (125) insists that I continue to live clean-shaven, but at 99 my spectral aura started to be plainly visible, curiously it glows brightest around the chin. I suppose non-corporeal facial hair is better than none at all.

I’ve made a record every year since I was 22, number 102 just came out on wax cylinder and collective consciousness brain stream. When The Veil began thinning I started to collaborate a little with Robbie Basho, and Harry Nilsson, somehow they’ve become even better whistlers since they stopped breathing. Our new vibrational reality has really been a boon for the creative class – there’s a lot less urgency to produce when death is no longer an obstacle… but that also might be why I’m still working on my 2^nd novel.

The Singularity came and went with a real Y2K shoulder shrug. Oh some people Borged up obviously, but I decided to remain organic sapien, choosing to put my faith in a long life through an ever-curious mind; and true to my path, I’ve never known a moment’s boredom.

You Are Free (2 old poems)

I found some poems from several years ago in an old notebook. There is a certain comfort in knowing that time is passing in a spiral, but my thoughts have a clear trajectory, as these poems are as concerned with liberation and a sincere life as I am now. It is with humility that my past and present self presents them, just our little reminder, you are free!

Ironies Passing
Who does an ironic life serve?
What chance do critics have to be quiet, to say grace?
Can you grow grain ironically,
Or for that matter cook a meal?
What chance do cynics have?

Just Let Out
Shuck your husk,
Shed that old carapace.
You are not a pupating insect.
You are a wizard,
A landscape,
The ocean,
The sky!
You are a genie just let out,
Expanding beyond all horizons.
That voice that recites your story,
Is small and annoying like a mosquito.
Ditch that little vampire,
Leave it behind,
Now and forever.
Be born into color.
Your old life was not living.

A Prayer for Poison Oak

Food to countless animals, poisonous to only one: man, Rhus diversiloba (Poison Oak) is the gatekeeper and guardian of the sacred wild lands of the North American West. In my region, the Central Coast, Rhus reigns supreme – climbing trees and fences, crawling low like a vine, filling drainage ditches, and rising up proudly at the borderland of every highway, road, and trail. Rhus the Cartographer draws deep lines in the sand, making property rights plain. He seems to say “this land is our land: plant land, bird and beast land, spirit land; and this land is your land: people land… for now.” Indeed Rhus is ready to take back what we leave.

First to arrive when the soil is turned over and plants are uprooted – populating old clear-cut grazing land, reclaiming it and holding fast. Rhus appears, nearly overnight, in the scarred landscape as if to say: “never again”. Poison Oak grows on the fringes of nearly every trail, and makes his presence known at the trailhead too, fair warning right from the start – the wild land is fiercely protected, it would be unwise to stray from the trail.

In the past I have suffered greatly from Poison Oak. Twice a rash has consumed my face, swelling my eyes shut. Once the tenacious oil even managed to enter my blood stream, and the rash spread over my entire body (save the palms of my hands and bottoms of my feet), my skin was so dry that it cracked and bled. Two shots of amphetamine and a month long course of steroids were needed to overcome The Oak. It is safe to say I am intimately familiar with the power of this plant. It is said that a pin-head of Rhus oil could cover the entire surface of a swimming pool, and effect everyone in it. Anthropologists have actually acquired rashes from handling Native American artifacts that sat in the ground for several hundred years – the oil can wait, Rhus is a patient sentinel.

One can hardly blame Poison Oak for taking a hard line, some of us are kind stewards of the land, but for the most part a weaponized plant community seems like a really reasonable reaction to our trampling and greedy species. Rhus keeps people out, he holds space for other beings, and he is powerful enough to do so. I honor him for his vigilance, and for his checks and balances. I have looked many times beyond a sea of red and green leaves to find, with an ache in my heart, a pristine beach, a deep swimming hole, or an unspoiled grove beyond my reach – blocked by Poison Oak. I honor Rhus still, acknowledging that it is okay, even good, that some places are out-of-bounds. By keeping people at an arms length from certain wild spaces Rhus teaches us that we don’t need to conquer, colonize, or even physically touch a beautiful place to appreciate it, commune with it, or inhabit it. In this way the Poison is very effective medicine.

So despite my own longing for untrammeled places, and painful physical history with this plant, I offer the following prayer for Poison Oak, this grace for Rhus, a veneration of his power, his medicine, and tireless work…

I venerate you Shapeshifter, in all your forms: red, golden, green, and dormant stick manifestations. I honor you Sentry at the trail mouth, Shrewd Witness from the fringes. I honor you Foot Soldier in the field – you Warrior in the high and low lands, in the wood, in the valley, on the mountain, by the river, the lake, the ocean – you Guardian, Gatekeeper, Watchman – you Squatter, Undeveloper, Restorationist, Preservationist. I honor you Offering, giving to many what was given first to you by the sun, you Merchant of Energy. I honor you Freedom Fighter, you Activist, defending the equal right of all beings to sacred lands. I give thanks to you Poison Oak, Rhus diversiloba, for the places I will never tread, for the blank spaces on the map that remain blank, for the mystery you maintain. May your magic garden be forever beautiful, and may the Leaves of Three always be. Amen, or (if you prefer) Aplants.

World Literature

A muddy hoof print, coyote scat filled with bones, a blood tinged feather. The world speaks with signs.

Crooked calligraphy in a mossy branch, a Stonehenge ring of toadstools, tall thistles bending into an archway. The world speaks in symbols.

A bumblebee rolling in a flower, bull sea lions slapping fat necks in combat, a rattlesnake shedding its first skin. The world speaks in moments.

New growth on a charcoaly redwood; the full swing of the seasons; evaporation, clouds, rain, rivers, creeks, and oceans: the complete water-table. The world speaks in circles.

A wave rolling in, hail on gravel, a boulder rumbling down stream, a rockslide, thunder. Wind: through dry grass, among eucalyptus branches, whistling past a cliff face. Ice cracking, brush under foot, wingbeats. The world speaks.

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This World Literature is the subject of much writing and contemplation, by myself and countless others, stretching back long before a crude wall divided the world of man and the world of nature. Indeed many of us write and think about the wild because its presence in our lives is like a phantom limb, long gone, but still felt – and, of course, the stump is obvious.

The Wild is a vast physical place, and it is a habitat for mind as much as body. I see Wilderness as a knowledge system, not to be deconstructed, rather to be experienced in its completeness. Each being, thing, or event in the wild, is the wild. Every anything is a sentence in a chapter in a story, and each sentence stands alone, a complete tale told perhaps with a single syllable. In this wild library books are nested within books within words within letters. The headwaters of creation flow infinitely in all directions. The present moment is experienced in all places simultaneously. The axis of the Universe turns on every point in the Universe. Aha!

It goes without saying, the library is full of adventure and wisdom – cost of admission is careful attention, a peaceful mind, respect, and playfulness. And you have to leave human chatter at the threshold, like all libraries, it’s best to be quiet.

"Down to Earth – Reflections on Humanity in the Esalen Farm and Garden" by Noël Vietor

Recently a President of an enormous corporation based in South Korea joined the Esalen Farm and Garden morning harvest as a volunteer. As I set him up to harvest kale, he said, “I know this is simple work but I imagine there must be more to it. How do you do this? How do you connect with this land and these plants?”

I picked up a handful of the garden soil and encouraged him to do the same. I gave him my rap: “After winter rain, our soil appears in high contrast between black humus resulting from forty years of tender stewardship, and glimmering shards of abalone, remnants of the native Essalen people who dwelled here up to 5,000 years ago. The Esalen land has a powerful ancestry, and farming is appropriately ancient work. We Farmers and Gardeners feel a deep sense of honor continuing this sacred practice of cultivating soil, plants and spirit.”

As a businessman in Seoul with a 4-hour daily commute, he could not remember having touched soil in decades. “This is very special for me,” he said, eyes twinkling.

I love facilitating a visitor’s reconnection of body, mind and spirit to the earth through this work. In our modern societies and cultures, we are “richer” and longer living than ever before — yet a feeling of emptiness or disconnection persists en masse. We meet our basic needs through the purchase of goods or services, curating rather than creating the material of our existence. Is it possible that the self-sufficient acts of our ancestors — growing food; weaving clothes; concocting soap; building houses — were fundamentally creative, expressive aspects of humanity, which we unknowingly ache and long for now?

As Brother David Steindl-Rast reminded me recently, “humus”, the dark decomposed material in soil, reveals its sacred power through its etymologic connection to “human”, “humor” and “humility”. This supports my belief that growing beautiful food humbly expresses my creativity, connects me to my body, the universe and the present moment, and reforms my conditioned conception of “richness”. My mentor and Farm and Garden Manager Shirley Ward regularly rejoices “We’re rich!” as hearty beets or neon pink chard emerge gloriously in the morning hours.

We plant the seeds of our wild ideas now, and as former Farm and Garden Manager Steve Beck once wrote, “look forward with the hope that arrives every spring” to see what germinates in the coming years.

Noël Vietor serves as Coordinator of the Esalen Farm and Garden – Esalen is an educational retreat center in Big Sur California

On the Long Trail with Raven & Crow

I was riding my bike along 16^th Street, scowling as I passed my least favorite yoga studio in the universe. Upon turning onto Dolores I heard two ravens calling in alternating rhythm from the tall steeple of a church. Dark clouds loomed in the distance and rain began to fall. I thought to myself, a bit sadly, this is the most metal moment of my life.

Setting aside my longing for a more metal-mythic experience, I actually wish to discuss our cousins the crows and ravens, and their whole stately named family: Animalia Chordata Aves Passerformes Corvidae. Our relationship stretches back into time immemorial; in fact, the Corvidae tribe enters the fossil record about 17 million years back, we appear in our earliest form just 4 million years ago.

Crows and ravens are primarily scavengers, although I have seen a crow snatch a still squeaking mouse out of the tall grass. There is an assumption among many people (lay and scientifically minded alike) that predators possess the greatest intelligence among animals. We marvel, and rightly so, at the way a lion pride mounts its attack on a zebra herd – they carefully control and study the herd’s movement, identify the weakest member, and then isolate and overpower them.

The need to track prey, interpret signs, remain inconspicuous, and (in some species) organize hunting parties, surely requires a thinking brain. Some scavengers, however, seem to posses a cunning that far outstrips that of a predator, able, as they are, to thrive in the world with considerably less effort. “Work smarter, not harder” said Scrooge McDuck, world’s richest duck, and coincidentally a distant relative of this essay’s subjects.

Ravens will sometimes lead a wolf pack to prey, knowing that they can pick at the carcass when the dogs are done. Indeed Raven would do the same for our ancestors, leading indigenous hunters to herbivores unawares. This action may seem simple, so permit me to break it down for you: the raven finds a still living, large animal that he would like to eat, he knows he is incapable of killing it, so he sets off to locate a suitably intelligent and strong predator, or group of predators, somehow he communicates his intention and leads the way to the prey, the predators kill it for him, and he waits his turn to eat.

This behavior denotes a level of awareness present in the animal kingdom that I seldom hear dialog about, and even less so in regards to birds specifically. Raven seems to know the animals and their roles. He knows who eats whom, and where to find both. He can dream of an outcome and bring it into being, devise a plan and act upon it. He not only participates in the (eco) system, but also observes it, spectates from above, and arranges the players to his best advantage.

Crow and Raven loom quite large in the mythos of many primary cultures, often taking on the archetype of Guide, or Watchman; their ontological role reflecting their keen awareness and “real world” habits. Additionally many members of the Corvidae family possess an ability to mimic. Certain African and European raven species can repeat human words. A Norwegian acquaintance of mine had a pet raven that called him Pappa in a croaky voice (making him the most metal dude I’ve ever met, by a wide margin). The stellar jays (also Corvidae) of my watershed do pitch perfect imitations of redtailed hawks. It follows that in many majik traditions Crow is given to shape shifting. Some sorcerers are allied with these birds and can transform into crows themselves. Don Juan, Carlos Castaneda’s mentor, was a famous Crow Magician.

So, do the roles, behaviors, and abilities of beings in this world shape our myths? Or does the Subtle World of Spirit inform this Solid Place? I prefer to sit on the fence here. Not because I am afraid to commit to an opinion, but because I think it is entirely possible, even likely, that both are true. The World, spirit or otherwise, is created and discovered in the same moment. Which is to say an act of discovery is an act of creation, which is to say an act of creation is an act of discovery… now that’s a long and winding path! May Raven lead the way.

(paintings by John James Audubon)

"Mushroom Haiku" & "At the Middle" – John Cage

Listen, if you will, to the gentle voice of John Cage – Rinpoche of the west, Lllama to the avante guard.

Necromancy & Fossil Fuels

Long have I dwelt on the cosmic irony of our Fossil Fuel Culture. Our plant ancestors once lay at peace in their immeasurably old burial grounds, the most sacred grounds of our greatest grandparents; the ancient sustainers of the atmosphere, prodigium of consciousness.

We drag them up, wake them from their long deserved rest, and drive them like an endless zombie army. Enslave the plants of old, drink greedily of their untold power, and make them do great and menial things for our “advancement”.

We borrow from the dead, awaken our fossil family, but in our arrogance and drive, we did not take the time to learn the art of Necromancy. We disturb the spirits, but do not speak to them, and cannot listen either. It seems they may have offered some warning, perhaps a few choice words to throw our hubris into relief. The old mystics knew that you cannot live with the dead, and go on living; eventually the world of the dead becomes your world.

You were not honored Plant People, Great Ancestors, and this hard-handed lesson, is no less than we deserve. But I do ask for forgiveness, so that the Council of Beings might not all pay for our single species foolishness, and so we might have a chance to open a new age of reverence and love beyond “progress”.