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.