The cruelest month: April immanent and no fooling

Something's hatching in this time of mixed memory and desire. I think it might be spring rain stirring those dull roots.

I might not have lilacs, but a little walk this morning in the chill wasteland garden surrounding Skunk House reveals some hints of colour pushing through winter's dead land.Violets are early suffragettes, brave in purple and green, my first miniature blooms in this new life.

Just when I thought I had left the damp fungus-on-everything zone of the Pacific Northwest, I discover a brilliant mushroom colony, huddled in a sheltered corner .
And to my delight: rhubarb. Yes! There's food on this land! I see pies in my future.Reading much of the night might just have got me through The Winter of Going South.

That and Looking into the heart of light, the silence

If you are up to it's 434 lines enjoy the full text of The Wasteland

On a roll: the significent shard:

While I am in the parallel universe of the Church of the Old Mermaids, signs and portents, I might as well produce the aloha shard. No, I am not seeing Jesus faces in sandwiches. Yet. But close, via the Sandwich Islands, you could say. Cigars to the FTE.

Anyhoo: found this shard of broken china in the backyard lockup of Skunk House one morning recently. Had been feeling very down and blue, desolate and torn apart, grieving at having left everything I loved behind. I slept and had a truly horrible dream of conflict, betrayal, abandonment and sundering between two people who had loved. Once. Unwisely.

I woke to realise I was in a freezing cold-to-the-marrow, skunky, funky smelling house full of boxes of weighty baggage demanding to be unpacked, too bone-weary tired in my heart to do a thing about it.

Walked out into the backyard lockup to try to clear my head that I might overrule the heart's paralysis, and found on the ground, ground I had walked maybe 25 times previously, this shard.
Now convince me, if you can, that this didn't once spell "aloha".

Feel the luuuuuurve. Da kine. Da kine. Know what I mean?

A literary life: mermaids speak again

I am reading Church of the Old Mermaids by Kim Antieau (2009). The novel opens with Myra walking a wash in the Sonora desert, picking up trash and occasional treasures. Some of her finds are destined for her street market table where it turns out Myra is really selling the stories embedded in each object. These stories are of the Old Mermaids who were left stranded in the desert when the sea dried up.

I have known about mermaids and deserts for a while now. There was that strange seascape painted on the T-room wall of one of those little karro towns: Dordrecht was it? where I stopped for Eet-Sum-More shortbread once in the eighties, on a cloth marketing trip to Johannesburg. Of course, Helen Martins, the Owl House, and my mermaid phase was way back then before the rinderpest of immigration changed my world so utterly. I did, however, curtain Haleikeokekai in mermaid print and give the occasional la sirena gift cloth.

Ben even remarked once, when I gave him a very naieve clay mermaid made in Gilly M's evening pottery class at the tech, circa early nineties, that he knew why I liked mermaids. (Hmmm...the jury is still out on that one, Ben.)

Today, walking to the post office in this new old Western town of mine, I find a perfume bottle in the gutter, washed there from who knows where after yesterday's big rains. A tiny faceted glass globe no bigger really than my thumb in height. In the wash of this new desert, this new place of old mermaids for me.

Now don't go getting chickenskin when you think about the truth of how this geography I apparently currently inhabit was formed: glacial retreat and a flood washing across the continent shelf...receeding waters....it is all in there according to geologists.

Where does story end and life begin? The boundaries of the pages have blurred.

But what is really really clear is the little faceted glass perfume bottle on the Skunk House kitchen window sill. Right there next to the bottle of salt water from Doe Kag Wats, my favourite house of the holy the other side of the mountains.

Oh, did I mention that Myra, in the book, finds a little bottle in the wash, tells a story of how it held salt water saved from the receeding sea....

Big sky makes big rain

This new life of mine is a cloudwatcher's life, a moon gazer's life, a big sky life, unbarred by the trunks of the tallest trees in the world, which I left behind me when I crossed the Cascade Mountain range a few weeks ago.

Ah! the magical, mysterious, drippy, mossy, temperate rainforests of the Pacific Northwest. They suffocated and blinded me when first I set foot on this continent 8 years ago. Subtly seduced, I learned to love them. My eyes adjusted to the gloom. I forgot what dark glasses are for.

Now I have left them.

Ironically, all those 8 years in the rainforests, I never acquired a raincoat. The constant drippy tap drizzle of living at cloud level didn't warrant it. One was always a bit damp, everything was green tinged after a while. Slime, moss and mould colonized every possible surface.

Here, however, in the dry foothills of the northern reaches of the Rocky mountain range, this big sky produces big rain occasionally - when it isn't making snow - in my very limited two weeks experience of it.

I fear the Pendleton hat to keep the rain off my glasses isn't going to suffice. Big puddles reflecting an upside down little Skunk House form in no time at all.I just might need to acquire a raincoat. The secret of success lies in adaptability. Darwin again. HMS Beagle where are you? I need a boat to navigate the instant rainwater ocean outside my house.

The history of geography: Hansville a hui hou

My last Sunday sunset in Kitsap county I was returning from Foulweather Buff via Hansville, at the tip of peninsula where the Point-no-Point lighthouse crouches and the store makes possibly the worst coffee around.
Cormorants lined up on the derelict dock. I lucked out with the lighting. As so often happens in these parts, the last rays of the sun sneaked out from under the clouds to shine brilliant on the magnificence of snowy peaked mountains.During my Kitsap years I have often sought comfort and perspective on my own sense of the great "l"s of the life of an exile: loneliness, loss and longing, here at the place where the 1855 treaty of Point-No-Point was signed (where a whole group of local tribes relinquished title their lands) .

Before I donated it to more valued service with the young Yaqui Indian twins, I used to load my bicycle onto the first white Ford Ranger and drive out here to learn to ride that frustrating metal horse which had no life of its own.

I have walked these beaches alone, with the fav tribal elder and Lionheart variously. My meditative Skunk Bay kayak paddles were mostly launched from Norwegian State park. Day 1 of Paddle Kitsap '08 was famously aborted at the same park, due to wind and waves of serious fury, baying for sacrifice. Our organizers, decided they were not up to meeting the challenge pf the salt water deities and called the whole thing off, much to the Fav Tribal Elder's chagrin. But on day 2 he did offer good only somewhat dilute Hawaiian blood to the waves with his sliced finger. The waters were (coincidentally?) so much calmer.

Yup. I have had history in this geography. A hui hou.

A hui hou: Foulweather bluff: looking near, looking far

During my bivouac in Kitsap County I have come to treasure Foulweather Bluff nature conservancy as a place of refuge where the sharp edges of loneliness are softened, blurred by incredible natural beauty.On my last Sunday on the shores of the Salish Sea, I took time out from the mad packing of possessions to spend some quiet hours taking leave at this beautiful piece of earth, water and sky. The afternoon had that special smudged quality of light so typical of the area: not quite sunny but not leaden skies neither.

Birds courted vociferously in the brush. The marshland was as reflective as ever I have seen it, creating a whole mirror image world of possibility to lose myself in.
A hui hou

Blue virgo full moon sunrise

With the sand running at speed through the timer, I knew there woud not be another Kitsap full moon.

So this was a poignant dawn. Very blue. With loons on silver and indigo satin above and below.

Moving day: the baggage edition

In just over eight years it has come to this: a room full of baggage, boxes piled up layers deep, and a sorry disarray of thrift store and side of the road furniture finds. One kayak on the porch. Not much of an inventory for professional relocation experts but for this nomad quite a load.
How did the two suitcases which arrived at SeaTac in October 2001 grow to this?

It is really easy to acquire baggage in the land of plenty. Surveying my worldlies in the final countdown hours I realise that much of it comes from loving people, from those beloved thugs who keep me from meditation and contemplation, weigh me down, pinion my winged life.

For example I am moving with two sewing machines. There's the one I bought immediately on arrival. Sears Kenmore. Plastic but has costumed me through the Kitsap years. I feel a loyalty.

Then there is the 1970's metal Kenmore, an older edition complete with table. This belonged to a dear friend's mother. No, she herself did not sew - "They exposed me to all that when a child. It didn't take." she says. I knew it was a beauty the first time I saw it. The solidity of construction, the craftsmanship still inherent in the days before all the world's appliance construction was outsourced to China. Not to mention the link with dear friend.

But decide between the two: my first or quality and craftsmanship? Why should I, when a whole van is at my disposal? One day I might teach sewing, then two machines would be useful. Ah, baggage and the excuses we make for it!

Even to the end, my most beloved thug, the fav tribal elder, is bringing things, sundries too numerous to mention. Flares (do I know how to use them?). Guitar. Pen. Jackets. Chair. Side table. Strange little grave-side vases.

"But you are a writer. This pen says write! " He says about the gold nibbed fountain pen, when I object saying that I do not use pens much these days and anyway where does one get ink? Ink? What's that? I see no place on my computer to pour ink.

Well yes I also see his game: he has a lifetime's accumulation of treasures and is at an age when he thinks of heirs and distributing an estate. Or sometimes I get the feeling that he just runs his fingers through this hoard, stirring the collection. Objects which swirl to the outer rim get disposed of. I, and my nearest and dearest, have been recipients of his generosity aka binding with baggage.

Don't even start me on that guitar, apparently with no strings attached which I, who plays no musical instrument beyond the rhythm of my dancing feet, am taking over the mountains. Seems there are some strings there, where once were none. Isn't this the whole purpose of beloved thugdom? Attach as many strings as possible in as short a space of time and you are winner! Keep her in the world a while longer.

Whilst spinning my wheels, wrestling with these illusions in the final hours before departure, I also realise too that, in spite of what the Church maintains, last things are not really important things. They are just stuff which is lying around, stuff which proved too awkward to pack earlier or was forgotten in a corner, or turned up behind a piece of furniture.

Yet it seems there is also another kind authority behind all this.

My third roll of packing tape runs out on the Real Last Things box. How complete is that!

And then it is just me and the crazy geometry of a house packed up for a move. All the pathways for qi have been altered. Forget feng shui for these times.

I am kinda fragile like the label on the boxes.
I really feel for ants in an overturned or broken nest.

Abundant thanks must go in heaps to my (secret) Box Faerie who kept the supply going, bringing me the priceless gift of containment for my sprawl of treasures. Boxes which once held new books are the perfect size for moving boxes. Funny how, in the end, empty boxes are perhaps the most useful thing I got from that place.

[Of course the friendship of people met there is a flow and not a thing at all and is unobstructed always by time and space.]

To everything its purpose.

The rent-a-house trip

Trying to rent a house online proved just too much of a difficult one for me so I took a quick 36 hour trip across the mountains to find a new home.Some images from the journey, some of them, like the metal work gate with longhorn and dog, I have been meaning to photograph every time I pass.
Really I am falling in love with this highway. The snow is just beginning to melt and there's a sense of movement again, though the temperatures are still pretty chilly out.

One hanau/one hanai: the tearing

There is a term in Hawaiian one hanau which translates as the sands of one's birth. If one has been adopted into a new homeland, then the term become one hanai. Relocation to another geography has had me thinking a lot about the meaning of place recently, whilst simultaneously wrestling with the tyranny of material possessions.

In the past few days, worldly goods despatched so competently by the self-identified best relocation specialists, (they must be the best, after all they move the US military) on a big orange moving van, I had to tear myself away from a vacated house.

It was so hard, more difficult than I had imagined when I consented to this path. When the time came, the reality of leaving Haleikeokekai and the place of clear salt water became one of the hardest things I have done in a long time.Released, momentarily, of possessions, all I wanted to do was watch light streaming into its empty spaces, listen forever to the sound of its ringing emptiness.

There are compensations: falling in love with a road is one of them. Hwy 2 over the Cascades. Three trips in five weeks. Almost 24 hours of contemplative wheel time on that road.
Enough for a certain intimacy. My eyes measure the passing of the season in the recession of snow and emergence of a green tinge in certain places. The soft golden undulations of wheat or hay fields of Lincoln County around Reardon and Davenport soothe in early morning sunlight.
Yes. Compensations.

Why is it that I hear and see the ghost of Don Maclennan pronouncing the word "grim"? It is hardly even springtime, certainly not harvest yet.

Losing the wind horses

There were a few housekeeping items on my agenda before I closed the door for the last time on Haleikeokekai.

All of them were either sad or tedious or both. Vacuuming and washing floors, sweeping generations of leaves from the front porch got done.

One of the most difficult tasks for me, though, and one I left until the very end was taking down the prayer flags.It had to be done. Realtor was there in my chaotic last packing. With the same sniff whth which she accompanied her original "It is house" disdain of my expressing emotional connection to the piece of real estate , she stood on the front porch and said: "Lose the prayer flags will you."

Yes, m'am.

No more do these wind horses ride out across the place of clear salt water.

I had thought to consecrate them by fire, but rain at the end prevented that. They ended up in one of the 47 (or was it 53?) boxes despatched by orange van over the mountains.
Interested in knowing more about Tibetan prayer flags: this website has good information.

Taking flight

The big orange Allied Vans moving truck has been and gone. A last brief post from Haleikeokekai, the little house on the rez, the house made of dawn, the house of many names.

Took the last load to the rubbish dump and recycle centre yesterday with light snow falling. Today the wind is bitter with that razor sharp chill off fresh snow. The pic above, whilst showing the mountains I am going to cross on this journey was not taken today - no sun rose with any visibility this morning.

The current webcam shows snow in Steven's pass. But only 1-3 inches accumulation predicted for tomorrow. My next hurdle: getting over that pass.

For now: so long and thanks for all the fish. (Thanks, Douglas Adams)

See you the other side of the mountains.

Last rites: otter unction in a sacramental morning

Sunday morning saw a beautiful gentle sunrise with loons and eagles. I took the kayak out on a little paddle, in spite of the oppression of the pre-departure to-do list. I had neither intention nor time to go far, just wanted to be on the water one last time. The half moon was heading west trailing her reflected fragments in the satiny water. The House of Awakened Culture, our local temple, radiated peace as I launched in pre-dawn twilight.As I paddled across the Agate passage, two eagles flew overhead, whistling and calling, doing that special mid-air dance above me: circling, dropping in free fall, coming together in a flutter of feathers.I moored myself at the floating end of the long deepwater dock to watch the eagles and also catch the sun's slide up over the Cascade Mountain range horizon.

While I was fastened, bobbing gently in the swell against the dock, an otter climbed up, groomed herself fully, rolled, scratched, shook, investigated who else had been in the area, pooped and then, completely indifferent to my presence and camera shutter, comfortably waddled back into the water.

It looked to me like she could be pregnant. What a blessing on what is probably my last Suquamish sunrise: otter healing feminine energy. If the weather forecast of the mackerel sky is right, we are due for rain and some late season snow on higher ground from now to departure day.

I feel a bit like a condemned man on death row going through my last things as I prepare for my dying in the place of clear salt water, before the rebirth east, over the mountains. I am grateful recipient of extreme unction, administered by otter and eagle, presided over by sun and moon, witnessed by Haleakala, the house of the rising sun.

Destination Chinatown: welcoming the Tiger, a little late report

One of the things I have come to hugely appreciate about living in the Pacific Northwest, has been the exposure to Asian cultures. This intimacy has not just been through the Chinese-Hawaiian mix in the ancestry of the Fav Tribal Elder. Chinese people settled very early in the Seattle area and a vibrant community still remains. The International District is easily accessible by means of a short, free bus ride from the ferry dock.

Some of my best experiences of crossing the water have been Destination Chinatown. Wing Luke Asian museum, Owajamaya Asian Market for the food hall, its noisy jostle and crowded long tables for communal consumption of whatever choice delacicies we have chosen from the vendors, the Piece of Cake Bakery for those yum! sweet bean paste filled buns, and what has become a personal annual tradition: the Lion Dance, firecrackers and general street party mayhem of Chinese New Year.The day set aside for the community festival celebrating the Year of the Tiger was pouring buckets of rain: a buckets of tears, got all them buckets comin' out of my ears kind of day. The pain of my imminent departure hung heavy and wounding between us, but nevertheless the Fav Tribal Elder and I made it to the festivities. Whether we survived unscathed is another story.But we were there. Most notably, we witnessed the Lion Dance at the Wing Luke Asian Museum. We were a little early. FTE disappeared who knows where. I hung around in the damp and rain and watched the local Lieu Quan Kung Fu and cultural society setting up, tying the firecrackers and lettuce with red packets of money high above the entrance door. The excited anticipation of the dancers was tangible as they pulled their costumes together, texted friends, ate American junk food and milled around in the gathering crowd comparing costumes with those of other Lion Dance groups they saw passing on the streets en route to ensure peace and prosperity for the entire neighbourhood. There's money for the clubs in the red packets of this traditional activity even if the other aspect - protection - isn't necessarily quite so much to the forefront in modern America.The firecrackers almost wouldn't light because of the rain, friendly volunteers wandered the crowd with bright purple, orange and yellow earplugs for which I was truly grateful. When the fuse finally took in explosive mayhem, I discovered I was standing way too close and had to turn my shoulder to deflect the stinging shrapnel from my face and camera. My Pendleton hat and velvet coat are still speckled with little red pieces of exploded firecracker.Like errant puppies, the two lions dashed inside the museum, the crowd surging after them, bountiful Buddha dancing in attendance, up the stairs, down the stairs, to finally sleep briefly, bringing peace and contentment, in the museum foyer. The lions woke hungry. Luckily the lettuce and red packets (of protection money) were hanging high outside. They two lions vied for the lettuce. White won the first and gobbled it up. Yellow lion got the lower lettuce package.
All over but for the mush of exploded firecracker and discarded lettuce leaves underfoot in the wet street and the acrid smell of firecracker in nostrils. Gung Hay Fat Choy