As learned from Tom Phelps at Camp Wakapominee, Early 1960’s, Adirondack Mountains
ONCE THERE WERE TWO BABY SKUNKS. ONE WAS NAMED IN, AND ONE WAS NAMED OUT. SOMETIMES, OUT WAS IN AND IN WAS OUT. OTHER TIMES, IN WAS IN AND OUT WAS OUT.
WELL, ONE DAY, IN WAS OUT, AND OUT WAS IN, SO, THE MOTHER SKUNK SENT OUT OUT TO BRING IN IN. OUT WENT OUT AND BROUGHT IN IN RIGHT AWAY!
THEN, THE MOTHER SKUNK ASKED OUT: “HOW DID YOU DO THAT SO QUICKLY?” AND OUT SAID, “SIMPLE – INSTINCT!”
Yesterday was cool with showers. I dressed warm and draped some regalia over my heart. Our yearly round dance, centered on the Pine Tree, was in the greater mind of all-of-us, the community of dancers, spread out across the Pacific Northwest. We were unable to be together during this plague, but our hearts reached out to each other.
We had agreed to dance in place. All on an afternoon. We had this time to think of the circle, center our breath, and align with spirit, to find what spirit has, as a way for us. Our prayers were thus released and offered through the communal practice of dancing around the memory of the Pine.
I decided to keep my presence focused, without the help of the usual crowd gathering, by doing art. I thought of how the heart of art is finding what the materials want to be. The artist comes into alignment with the world at hand. My chosen material is White Oak. I live in an Oak/Pine savannah. I make pendants and ear cuffs from lower branches that were cut off Oaks to prepare to bring fire back into the grove. No harm meant and great thanks given for the gifts that are revealed by the pruning saw.
At the work bench, the Oak branch is sliced cross-grain, with a fine-toothed saw, to find figures and patterns. The compelling pieces are then poked, sanded, filed, and polished, revealing the complexity of the end-grain growth rings, the colors of fungal stains, the perforations of Beetle larva mining, and black tyloses deposits. The Oak moves minerals to vessels near heart rot, to contain the hyphal spread, while the limb is alive. Thus we find black-hard heartwood that polishes wonderfully. The beetles drill in after the limb dies, or as it sits on my stockpile. The blue stain of the Fomes shelf fungus shows the progress of decomposition, as wood returns to earth.
I clear the Beetle holes of sawdust, left behind by the mining of the larvae, with pins stuck in twig ends. This reveals the tunnels to let light through. The bark is carefully removed and the reticulation, laid down by the inner bark in a network of raised complexity, emerges. The pendant thus, step by step, is revealed, with great beauty and meaning, in my hand. Lots of careful attention with small files and probes. Much smoothing through four grades of sandpaper. Polishing Oak end-grain is a lot of work, as one smooths over the edges of open tubes, the water vessels, in the growth rings.
The Oak guides me. I am patient for clarity. The beauty emerges from the dance. We, the remote dancers everywhere, are standing with our prayerful intentions, shuffling from foot to foot. The weather surrounds us with its music and the wildlife comes by to see what is going on. Prayer is a matter of clearing, to be open to wonder. The dance distracts our busy thoughts and allows presence. This is how we walk with spirit.
My bench is on the west porch of my cabin overlooking the gulch bottom. I have breezes and bird song, feet on ground, eyes on the Oak in hand, and moments of looking up into the Pine to carry my attention into wholeness. After four hours of this dancing artwork, I am filled with love for my community of dancers and for spirit. I feel fulfilled and connected. Burdens are lifted.
Eventually, when the Bees wax and Orange oil have soaked into the end-grain tubes of the shiny Oak pendant, the colors come out strong. The pattern of the wood is revealed with all its elaboration. Beauty blossoms. We see meaning in the image. We have come into appreciation, through alignment with our work, by dancing.
I am filled with gratitude and wonder for the strength of our remote dancing. I feel the heart strings that connect us to each other and to the wonder of creation. Nature blesses us if we pay attention and let ourselves be transported into the wonder of life and spirit.
All things have spirit. We are all part of the great wonder. Our intention is to join in the compassion of that immense love. Blessings flow with all of this. I am humbled by the deep and wide inclusiveness of dancing. “The spirit of the people is equal to the power of the land.”
More observation recommended. And we are writing in English, an authoritarian mess.
Let’s do our best to condition our discussions.
We can make tentative observations about what we are experiencing but we should offer those as gifts to our community. Political and systems observations are appropriate as long as we place them in the context of discussion. Can we do this politely? The poem we chant before lighting fires in Social Forestry is this:
We are idiots!
We do not know what we are doing!
Please forgive us. We are doing the best we can.
I am finding that if I do not send out a frantic e-mail and let it compost, it transforms quickly and is not recognizable in two days. We are experiencing a storm of useless information. And when we want to blame someone, or want to demand that someone else does something to fix it, we should be careful.
We need to change our selves. The big overly complex systems are failing in so many ways. This we should not be surprised by. They were over extended and false and rigged all along. We might want to study David Flemming’ s Lean Logic? I am feeling and experiencing a phase change and by systems thinking that means we cannot predict the future, especially from our position in this fast changing now.
None the less I want to predict RELOCALIZATION. This is serious stuff.. The most important work we can do right now is local and social. Let us find ways to support each other. And plant big gardens..
I am surmising that spending a lot of time complaining about big systems and political positions will not get us very far unless we are really lacking entertainment. This is the crazy time. We are living in a psychic storm.. We do not have the science about this pandemic that we need to make plans.
And we are isolated and confused. At least I am willing to readily admit such. But we do, as crazy permies, have the systems training and design practice to pay attention and not jump to conclusions. Let us be kind to one another.
Compassion is a good perspective. Sympathy and empathy is real and very natural. But keeping our own center and staying in open observation is key to being useful to our communities.
I trust this homily will be helpful. I am hopeful that we are all prepared to assess reality carefully. Take a deep breath and go for a walk if you can. The spring flowers are lovely and we are still getting some rain. All the best to you and yours!
(A short play with Raconteur in Raven costume, two potted shrubs, Buckbrush and Manzanita, an Owl masked banjo player, a jaw harp twanger, painted cardboard cutouts of Salmon, River, Hills, Big Tree, and Fox held and waved in background. Players wear dark clothes and hoodies.
During the whole play, Raven-the-Raconteur fiddles with notes and pretends to be confused, leaving pauses for effect and applause.)
(Raven wanders on stage and checks in with shrubs, looks out into the audience and asks: “Where are the critters?”
“Coming” says a voice from the side “we didn’t think we were on so soon!”.
Four critters file on quickly from back stage and start drone noises. Props up and waving.)
Raven:
Good Evening! We are Confessor Black and the Critters. We came to crash this party and say a few words. First, please meet our colleagues Buck Musk Red and L’il Apple.
Ceanothus cuneatus
Arctostaphylos patula
(Raven tickles the small shrubs, still wet with rain from outside. Raven leans forward and pronounces:)
We have been watching you! The first Humans who came here a long time ago, we got along with well enough. But the second wave, who came so little ago but with such impact, shot a lot at us and treated us harsh.
You-all are the third wave and we thank you for shooting less. We are especially appreciative of all the eggs that we have enjoyed. We think you-all sloppy farmers, leaving the coop so open and allowing pasture nests. But we really like those eggs! Thanks!
(Raven holds out the left hand and cradles a big imaginary egg and squeezes it provocatively.)
We have noticed that you-all stress a bit about sex. We think Humans are slackers. Let me fill you-all in about Sneaky Sex at a Distance and Polymorphous Perversity.
We collaborated many of your centuries ago with Carlos Linnaeus, a dirty old Swede for sure. He doted on the perceived polymorphous perversity that he found everywhere in Nature.
Here for example is Buck Musk Red. They like to build complicated towers with divicarate branching interlocking to support penthouse condominiums with multiple bedrooms in every sky-view wing.
Each wing contains five bedrooms with five beds and the blankets are all green and the sheets all white. In the middle of each bed, up on a pedestal, sit Three Queens with sticky bonnets. The Queens are always on top!
Arrayed around the Three Queens are what we may call the Consorts. Although they might better be called Supplicants. The five Supplicants hover out in the blankets and the Queens pretend to accept their offerings but the Queens are waiting.
At last, Package Delivery arrives and crashes the bed wiggling in between the Supplicants and the Queens. The Supplicants give up their gifts to the Great Hairy-ness and the Queens indulge the intrusion to participate in SNEAKY SEX AT A DISTANCE.
Sort of like Quantum Mechanics!
The condo plumbing provides each bed with sweet drinks and perfume. The Hairy Horde flies in, lapping up the neighborhood. When the three babies under each of the Three Queens are ripe, the nine are catapulted explosively from the beds. The Queens have had enough of them and they fly up to ten meters arching up and over adjacent brush. When you-all up in the bushes to peruse your porn, the packets landing in your lap are thrown there by exuberant Queens glad to be rid of them. You-all might notice some small seeds pocking and clicking on the paper and sliding into your crack. And next let us turn to L’il Apple here. A fine lovely shrub with a hot temper.
(Raven bows respectfully to the potted shrub.)
As her associate Buck Musk Red has done, L’il Apple builds towers with rafts of condos perched on the view wings. She has red carpets and green coins as decor and is emblazoned with pink way earlier than the other brush species. Her sheets are pulled up over her head and the Supplicants are tucked into the plumbing, down below the one perched Queen,. She is also patiently waiting for visitors, always on top of the bed, gazing longingly out the skylight. Package delivery shows up as expected and she has her longed-for SNEAKY SEX AT A DISTANCE. When her three babies are ripe and cloaked in carbs, she feeds them to the Bears.
(Raven pauses to allow disgust at such mothering.)
As our condo developers grow old, they still like to party. They have been saving up senescent carbon for a big blow out. When the time comes, They BURN DOWN THE HOUSE. Out of the ashes, the next generation rises, turgid and well nourished, fungals waiting to interpenetrate.
Stiff and erect, Buck Musk Red and L’il Apple reincarnate, then endeavor to rebuild the ramifications of sky-view estate condos.
(Raven straighten up and pronounces:)
We, the critters, are not surprised with your Human attempts at Polymorphous Perversity. Nice try. We are always watching you-all, from multitudinous perspectives!
We are Confessor Black and the Critters, THERE ARE NO SECRETS!!! Show us what you-all got.
(Raven steps directly and erectly to the exit, waddling just a bit. The critters scatter. The Cabaret line-up continues, salaciously as usual.)
Tommy’s dad was an electrician. Tommy was small and wiry so his dad sent him
up old chimneys and into tight crawl spaces with wires to pull through. His wall tent on it’s wooden platform stood
next to the Nature Lodge, where he, at fifteen, was Assistant Director at Camp
Wakapominee.
The lightning storm and downpour was tremendous. This was the cloud burst that triggered the
slide on Giant Mountain and sent a wall of debris down the Ausable River up in
the Adirondack High Peaks. Tommy had one
student in the lodge as the storm approached.
With snaps of the fingers the lights came on or went off ten times
seemingly at command. Toying with
Nature.
The single bulb porcelain light fixture in the wall tent that Tommy had wired up was not grounded. The blue ball with yellow rods surrounding burst out of the bulb socket and threw Tommy hard back against the far tent pole. Kaboom! Humility arrives. Stay grounded or you will be tossed into oblivion. Tommy woke up dazed but unharmed.
This log cabin lodge with its fieldstone fireplace was the
first building raised at the Boy Scout Camp.
During the Depression, Dad and Troop 4 perched it on a shelf of granite,
overlooking the north end of Sly Pond.
Wakapominee translates as “place where the ghost walks”. The story told to Tommy and Troop 9 in the
fifties was scary. The smallest boy in
Troop 4 in the first winter’s use of the lodge, was left the sleeping spot
closest to the door. The bitter cold
Adirondack winter night was let into the lodge with bright moonlight, when the
door mysteriously opened a crack, throwing a moonbeam on the tiny lad, who was
said to have screamed and fainted. He
died exactly a year later. He had seen
the ghost.
Twenty five years later, the eleven year old Tommy and Troop
9 hiked through the snow to the Nature Lodge and built a fire on the
hearth. Dry wood had been stashed under
the lodge for winter use. All the boys
knew this story. Tommy was the smallest
but managed to wrangle a mid-floor sleeping pad.
Except he needed to pee in the middle of the night. The full moon shone brilliantly on the snow covered,
thickly frozen, pond. Tommy slipped on
the rubber pacs and ventured down the steep stairs to let it all out at the
cement and field stone pillar holding up the lodge corner.
Then he heard the creaking foot steps. Crunch.
Crunch. Crunch. Without wanting
to, he glanced at the pond. Light and
shadow shifted and moved across the snow drifts. Tommy rushed back up the stairs. They found Tommy huddled in the bottom half
of his sleeping bag the next morning. He
lived past the next year.
There are practical observations that one can make living
through very cold winters. It was ten
below zero that night. The ice was
buckling as it expanded and tried to crawl up the shore. The bright moonlight on white snow contrasts
with dark shadows. Black and white edges
shimmer with parallax.
The ghost walked but did not curse the small scout. At eleven years old, a child is vulnerable to
stories. Places can feed emotional depth
when a fireside story enfolds the shape and taste. A cautionary tale stays with the memory when
hung on a memorable Place. We cannot
revisit without recalling the imagination’s imprint.
A ghost story has legs when it is reinforced by
experience. It walks in the cold winter
night across the ice and through the wide-eyed dreams of children.
As we grow older, we may think we become more rational and
can explain natural phenomena, but Place has a way with us, it can strike
back. We pass by that shadowy cliff and
there is movement in our periphery. Our
heart jumps. We look fast sideways; our
eyes widen.
The
surprise gifts us with a sense of Spirit in Place. It does not want a name.
The dirigible floats quietly up the river on the canyon effect day-wind. The big thermal towers that draw us up canyon rose on the south facing slopes as the morning sun heated the grassy meadows. Hawks and Eagles spiral up over the mountain range, flying into the rotating gyres.
Dakubetede is Athabaskan for “People of the Beautiful Valley. This tribe of long deep inhabitation was completely removed from the Little Applegate Valley during the gold rush of the mid-nineteenth century by imperial reckoning. We have very few stories to tell of them and only recently even learned to pronounce the name correctly: da ku BAY tay day.
When we manage to actually arrive as a real culture of place everything will be different. This may take a long time. As newly arrived settlers, here less than a couple of centuries, we have a lot to learn. The place itself will teach us how to be “people of the beautiful valley.”
A small gondola hangs under the cucumber shaped and hemp skinned airship. The charcoal retort fuels a small propeller and heats the air bags. With lift from hot air in the outer sack, and buoyancy in the hydrogen/carbon monoxide bladders, the dirigible is floating and moving along nicely. The tail rudder and the stabilizing fins allow us to steer our way up the canyon and into the next big valley east through Wagner Pass.
We can still see remnants of the Dakubetede horticulture along the gulches on Wolf Gulch Ranch. Clumps of Hazel growing under riparian shade trees and patches of Grey Dogwood remain. The Oak-Pine savannah is buried in brush since regular burning ceased, but can be restored.
Our new life is being built on this degraded landscape. The damage of colonial commodity extraction has reduced the carrying capacity of this complex canyon land. Water tables have fallen. Perennial grasses have been replaced with shallow rooted annuals. The balance of predators, prey, and humans, mediated by thousands of years of controlled burning and observant stewardship has been broken.
Although the gulches have been down-cut by mining activity and the water table has dropped since the removal of Beaver, traces of extensive horticulture can still be found. There are fiber plants and Modoc Plum and patches of geophytes, the edible bulbs so important to good nutrition.
The sustainable options for continued inhabitation will be constrained by the actualized potential of restoration. Our skimming of these damaged ecosystems needs to be sensitive. What can we take without further damage?
The Dakubetede fought bravely after their village was overrun by the Jacksonville miners’ militia. They routed the militia in the battle of Williams but were ultimately defeated and the survivors removed to the Siletz reservation on the coast. A reputation for fine Hazel basketry has persisted.
As the dirigible is being winched down the mooring mast in Talent-on-Wagner-Creek to the anchor pad, the fire is quenched and we prepare to unload our lovely Hazel and Dogwood baskets and Manzanita charcoal. We are looking forward to the barn dance.
An essay by Tomi Hazel Vaarde, September 2019, Little Wolf Gulch.
In The White Goddess by Robert Graves (1948, especially pages 65, 66, 70, 387) the author unwraps layers and layers of stories to reveal the essential triple-ness of the Oak associated goddesses. As acorns were the staple of early Humans, and the open (regularly burned) savanna was the comfortable and familiar landscape, the earliest understandings were ecological and pertinent to thrivance. As the White Oak group world-wide is known to have a very high number of ecological associates, the Oak tree is referred to as “highly implicate”. She has more relationships with more entities than any other tree. One could say that “she rents out rooms”.
The species of the White Oaks group are found all across the temperate zones of the northern hemisphere. In Oregon it is represented by the Garry Oak or Oregon White Oak (Quercus garryana), in Europe it is Quercus alba. In Japan a species of White Oak is used to make the ceremonial tea charcoal. The White Oak is consistently associated with a vengeful protective goddess. The Gaelic and classic traditions of Europe call her the White Goddess (Diana), and the Triple Goddess. The Pacific slope tribes refer to her as Acorn Woman.
The megalithic or chthonic meanings of Triple Goddess have to do with the stages of women’s lives. The girl, the woman, and the hag. As farming replaced tending the wild, the names and references shifted to the elements of farming, but the ecological imports remain. As the White Oak holds together the ecosystems that supported and inspired Human cultures for thousands of years, so our poetic memory reminds us of our real work. Humans can facilitate fertility, resilience and abundance through cooperating with All Sentient Beings. How we acknowledge and reciprocate that work-together or cooperation-with-complexity bears on how we treat each other as Humans, too.
Within many cultures, through many periods of ecocide and genocide, the stories of the White Oak persist and enlighten. She is the White Goddess in triple form, do not mess with her or you will suffer. She is brutally honest and quick to punish; some stories of Diana say that she is merciful in killing. She does not mess around. Holding any remnant of this ascription-story should keep us tied to deep-time truths. This continuity is a central player in our time on the planet and White Oak is so tied up in all our stories and survivals that we need to keep telling the stories and preserving the savanna.
The images that associate with the White Oak include the Horse or Pony, the goddess Epona. The Mulberry is the triple goddess’ tree of abundant food. The changes of the Moon are as central as the three stages of womanhood, she is new, then full, then waning, and all over again. The colors are white, red, and black (or deep blue). The trees are Willow, Oak and Hazel. Some archeology finds those charcoals under ceremonial sites. The early agricultural goddesses are Ceres, Venus, and Phoebus (or Persephone): grain, love and herbs. Our experienced world is seen as triple: underworld, earth, and sky.
The modern poetic tradition, led by this primer from Robert Graves, and reinforced by subsequent research and cross-cultural conversation, talks of Diana, the Huntress; Aphrodite, Beauty and Abundance; Hecate, the Herbalist (among this one’s jobs is taking things down). As women say “we bring them in, raise them up, and take them out”. This is our Human chore, mostly carried by women over all the millennia of our stories. Round and round. Like an acorn, or the curved lobes of the White Oak leaf, or the hollow dark cavity, or the fat white sun-lit bole of a very old Oak.
The July sun was bright as we crouched down and reached deep into the belly of the Fire Pig. Our tight gloves blackened as we gently pulled out the treasures. The charcoalized White Oak twigs were coherent. The bark still held on tight and star bursts of shrink cracks adorned the end grains. Success.
This load was cooked last February and has sat dry in the sealed drum of the Fire Pig. One of the advantages of a double retort kiln is that one does not have to open it up any time soon after the pyrolization has ended. Yah, I know, that just raises endless questions but that is how I go fishing. Imagine a big bonfire with twenty foot flames, burning clean. Perhaps you had to be there. We were laying bundles of Buckbrush alongside the Fire Pig , cut from the fire lane on the ridge. The Fire Pig loaded with White Oak and sealed with clay before we lit the side pile fires. The week had been wet and we carefully lit fires on both sides of the drum kiln.
Ah, and yes, I was born in the Chinese year of the Fire Pig. Fire is a lot of my work and Fire, the sacred entity, has been companion and ally for ten thousand years, at least, in this canyon.
The best twigs and small limbs will go to Tea Ceremony. The rest to cooking charcoal. We cut fuel for restoration. We burn clean to burden the atmosphere the least. The third charcoal is the fine pieces shoveled into waiting drums from the Buckbrush side burns. This is two thirds of our production and goes to the farm compost for near permanent carbon sequestration and enhanced soil resilience.
