Sunshine season

"Sing, heavenly muse"

It's the time of year when I'm left alone in my summer hermitage while Eric goes off to wildfire camp. I've learned to fill this space of longing and missing with other things that maybe I don't have as much room for when wrapped in the warm blanket of giving and receiving love, attention, time. This creates an annual sense of balance overall, I think, so I try not to get too melancholic or view him being gone as a lack.

Right now, it is half past 9 o'clock in the evening but the summer sun has only just recently rolled over the horizon, leaving a deep amber glow on the mountain over there, the darkening blue sky behind, while two deer rest under the lilac tree just feet from me, the walls of the house between us.

Here are the faces I've come to know so well, Charlie and Sara are the little twins in front, a bit bigger now, and they are the two who visit the most. 

Spare an apple, Miss?

That same lilac tree holds out branched arms for friends of a feathery kind, too. The Dark-eyed Junco...
 

The Downey Woodpecker...

The plump Quail with their regal topknots...

And, gazing upward, the European Starling, whose iridescence isn't coming through in this photo...

Last week we were with family and friends in Kentucky. Those hot, humid summer days carry a nectar and a certain memory for me, one that is sweet, full of passion, and young on all fronts. I enjoy going back to visit, I miss everyone so badly, but without fail, when I return here to my Okanogan Highlands, and am out on the land, most recently crouched down in the boreal-like forest with huckleberry-stained hands, listening to the pine-wind, the larch-wind, the distant loon, feeling the clean dry air gliding across my skin... that is home. I appreciate the reptile-ripe verdant vigor of the flora and the cacophony of cicadas in the South, the wonder of fireflies, but my place is the wolf woods, the moose woods, the hare-holed ground, where I swear angels flit from tree to tree, and there is space and quiet for my thoughts to swing all over- why do we have mosquitoes, how do we know the prophets are right?

“Of all the things I wondered about on this land, I wondered the hardest about the seduction of certain geographies that feel like home — not by story or blood but merely by their forms and colors. How our perceptions are our only internal map of the world, how there are places that claim you and places that warn you away. How you can fall in love with the light.”

- Ellen Meloy, The Anthropology of Turquoise

.:*:.


Earlier in the Spring, I took a sourdough class and finally got a handle on it after years of falling in and out. Now I can't be stopped! We have a fresh loaf each week- rose and cardamom, then cinnamon roll focaccia, then lemon lavender... and immodestly I must say: the tastiest bread ever, straight from the oven, and long-fermented in the old way. 

Date and cheddar

Folding in rose petals

A lavender lemon loaf

A focaccia garden

.:*:.

Now for some of the adventures we've been able to squeeze in so far this year!

 

In early April, we made our way over to the Channeled Scablands- a haunting, beautiful swath of Eastern Washington where the land tells a tale most only recently began to understand. For years, geologists insisted this bizarre landscape was slowly carved by the patient hand of erosion. But as it turns out, the truth is wilder: a sudden, cataclysmic deluge -likely from the bursting of a massive ice dam at glacial Lake Missoula- raced toward the Pacific, reshaping the land in its furious wake (maybe as part of the Younger Dryas events, which is a topic I find so fascinating and love to learn about- especially intrigued by how this period corresponds to flood myths from various religious traditions, and indigenous lore).

One of my favorite features here where we live is the glacial erratics that dot the landscape of Inland Washington- these huge boulders that just sit out in the middle of grassy highlands, or deep in forests that have since grown around them. What I once thought was a slow glacial retreat that left them scattered about here, I'm now seeing through the lens of a different sort of event altogether. Those huge stones hold such a presence, I've always felt, as though so many of the things we argue about, they know, they were there for it. I sometimes rest my ear against them, like the secrets are condensed down inside and maybe if I get close and quiet I'll hear.

We had a truly inspiring sunny day exploring the area and can't wait to go back. If you're interested in seeing more about the Channeled Scablands- there's a fun episode of Ancient Apocalypse (season 1 episode 1) that will take you there! And here's a video from a week later when we returned to the area to hike Northrup Canyon.

And then on a Saturday morning in mid-May, with thermoses full, we set out to Index WA, a little town nestled in the North Cascade Mountains, with a room at a Victorian hotel awaiting us. On the way, we stopped to get lunch in Leavenworth and were lucky to catch the annual MaiFest--a celebration of Spring--underway. 

  

Later, having arrived to Index, we hiked up to Bridal Veil Falls, and got back to the hotel just in time for our dinner reservation. After we frolicked around the little Twin Peaks-y feeling town for a bit, we went in and played a game of chess up until midnight. 

In the night, the train would come through several times, cutting a light through the darkness and sending whining echoes out from jagged peak to jagged peak.

And for my fourth of July birthday, we took an impromptu trip over to the coast, to our "second home" on the Olympic Peninsula. It was a wonderful weekend, and we left wanting to buy a trawler and live on it full-time, as usual- "the northern maritime life!"

.:*:.

With the return of the sunshine season, I've also taken my local women's hiking group out rambling a few times. We have sweated and named plants and laughed and talked and swam in cold mountain lakes together, and it is such a joy to be with these women from all different walks of life, different countries, varied beliefs, with decades separating some of us, sharing in this love of place. 

The summer wanes on, and I soak it up as much as possible. All of the flowers I started from seed are showing their faces and pleasing me to no end. The black tulip...

Gerry the Geranium...

  

The dahlias...

...the night-blooming Jasmine, the tomatoes greening on the vine. 

This summer I became certified as a death / end-of-life doula and Eric reestablished his massage therapy business, which is already thriving. It is always a balance of gazing toward the horizon, but digging our toes into the ground beneath us too, isn't it? 

And so the dance of life carries on- fleeting beauty, lingering terror, everything as it should be, and each of us figuring out what we should do with it from moment to moment. 

Now I'm off to squeeze the last drops from the night - a new embroidery to begin. And tea, some reading, then into the dreams of bears, which started as soon as Eric left. Tomorrow morning I'll sleep in a little, then meet friends on a mountain to pick huckleberries into the afternoon. Tonight, if the bear comes, I'm going to offer it a fish. 

The road to The Place Within

My career requires a lot of mental effort. So much gets packed into a single hour just to get all tasks completed by week's end, that I find I have to detach from who I am at my core a great deal to pull it off and do what needs to be done each day. So when the weekend, or any time away from work comes, I try to use the time to reacquaint with that woman who I am at my core- I stitch back together the spinal threads of what matters to me, collect the flashes of inspiration into a reel I glimpse as a spark to rekindle some inner flame, I draw the energy down out of my head and back into my body, my hands, hips, heart. 

I was thinking this morning, as we wound over a mountain pass and through dense snow-forests on our way to visit our favorite antique shop, how that pathway back to our own unique creative otherworld is crucial. When I feel that it's time to visit that place of my own mind-making, that place that restocks the inner coffers, I have certain imagery, certain poems, certain books and films and music that act as little waymarkers, lanterns to light the way back home. 

That otherworld-creative-home of mine is hard to describe- it can feel Celtic, but then Saami, medieval, then ancient Egyptian. It contains sun and storm, mossy oak and desert rose, quiet solitude and energized connection, sitting in a tobacco-smelling book-filled room in thoughtful conversation with Tolkien, then in ritual dance around a fire as part of a wild tribe, my feet stomping up clouds of dust under the starrier-than-ever sky. Serene and unbridled. Sacred to the core.

It is a feeling, of course, not an actual place, there is no specific time, no specific characters or location, but I feel when it is right, when it comes together just so, and when it is familiar, and it is this place I go to that connects me back to myself, and to the glorious pulse of life lived deeply. 

I heard an artist I love mention this route back to the creative place we must cobble together for ourselves, those of us who are maybe more short on time, and need a quick road in so that we can sit and feast for a moment in that nourishing ethereal space that we imagine into existence, that sustains us and is essential. I wondered, do most people have this? Do most people need this? Is it rare, or common? Do some drown out the deep impulse with drink and corruption? Then I thought, wouldn't it be just incredible if we could somehow bring another into this feeling-place of our own making, the imaginative landscape of our inner world? Just so they could feel our inspirations? Would it closen or estrange us?

Now I am off to visit that world for a while before the just-as-mysterious sleep world beckons. Today I found a vibrant green kantha quilt, a painted Mexican crock, and a medieval memoir at the antique store. Two weeks ago, I attended a workshop with the loveliest women and attained my birth doula certification. In a couple of months, my husband and I will take a boat to Alaska where he'll be getting recertified as a massage therapist, a craft that he truly excels at. Bit by bit, pieces are being moved into place, for a future on the horizon that comes more into view each day. The path really does go ever on and on.

“Nietzsche was the one who did the job for me. At a certain moment in his life, the idea came to him of what he called 'the love of your fate.' Whatever your fate is, whatever the hell happens, you say, 'This is what I need.' It may look like a wreck, but go at it as though it were an opportunity, a challenge. If you bring love to that moment--not discouragement--you will find the strength is there. Any disaster you can survive is an improvement in your character, your stature, and your life. What a privilege! This is when the spontaneity of your own nature will have a chance to flow.

Then, when looking back at your life, you will see that the moments which seemed to be great failures followed by wreckage were the incidents that shaped the life you have now. You’ll see that this is really true. Nothing can happen to you that is not positive. Even though it looks and feels at the moment like a negative crisis, it is not. The crisis throws you back, and when you are required to exhibit strength, it comes. “

~Joseph Campbell