Pothos

Outside the night is still and dark, with Venus visible again in the evening sky, and fog horns echoing from the bay, which is never too far away on this skinny island I inhabit now.

 

Here, life is very easy: the temperature lingers right around 70 most of these summer days, there is a salty brackishness in the air that feels soothing to the respiratory system, the eyes consume a constant feast of mountain, cerulean sea, and fertile fields, the shops are interesting, the food is diverse and healthy, magenta foxgloves grow wild along the roadsides, speckled fawns nibble on blackberry bushes, I swim under the moonlight in Mystery Bay in a sea of neon-blue bioluminescence... there is just so much storybook goodness.

One recent afternoon, in the local theatre, which was originally a vaudeville house opened in 1907, I sat in a velvet chair in the very back row, with a bowl of organic buttery popcorn, as thick black curtains were drawn over the big windows looking out over the sea, a projector slowly descended in front of the room, and the show about to begin.

Earlier that afternoon, I had stopped into a favorite tea shop to grab a proper scone with clotted cream (they were out) and some fennel tea while I read a chapter of my book, a maritime book of course, which is the only right thing to read when you're living on a little island just off the Olympic Peninsula in the far northwest reaches of the contiguous United States, and "town" is a Victorian seaport village.

Then, last week I took a sailing class, and while I love old wooden boats and tales of sea voyages and shipwreck, I found it to be complicated and not something I care to put effort into learning at this point in life. Shame because a nice man at the general store down the road offered me his 29-foot sailboat, in good condition, for $1.00 (!).

What’s happening in this video is called heeling, where the boat is tilting. As you can see here, the other students were not too happy about it, but I thought it was the funnest part of the whole class!

So you see how idyllic life is here on this small bucolic island, and yet...I miss my home. I ache for my husband, and our beloved Okanogan Highlands.

As beautiful as it is here, so explicitly, so obviously beautiful... the spirit, the essence, is lacking somehow. I miss the rugged wild, the vast expanses, the untouched natural order, the toughness, the warmth. It is certainly the strangest and one of the deepest relationships I've known in this life- being so tethered to a place, to the point that I almost feel I have no say in the matter, I have to be there, even though it is often difficult, even though no houses ever come on the market for sale, even though the summer wildfires come, then winter snowpack, nature always striking fiercely, and life lived right to the bone, it is so truly my home, and I knew it when I first arrived there in 2012 on a weekend exploratory drive. I remember driving from Portland, where I lived at the time, through what seemed like hours of scablands, finally arriving in Omak for the evening. I wasn't impressed, but a serendipitous conversation with a hotel worker that night led me toward Republic the next day. I remember climbing up from Tonasket that morning, driving a while, the forests returning to the landscape, and some feeling I had never experienced beginning to permeate the air. We rose into Wauconda and it felt like a dizziness, like how a wave of deja vu feels destabilizing for a moment, and I felt so enamored by what I was seeing and feeling, like I knew it and had been waiting for it. We drove further, exploring the area all weekend, and the feelings deepened, the land beckoned, I felt in my blood that this was home.

The American West, the interior high dry mountainous areas, are a world away from the bustling west coastal towns. Every single thing is different, in fact: the people, the climate, the landscape, the lifestyles, and certainly the spirit.

We've hatched a plan to reorganize the reasons why we came over to the coast this summer to begin with, and soon enough I'll be back home. Eric is away at fire camp now, living in a tent beside a lake at night, a lake that he bathes and swims in each evening to get the smoky dusty residue off. I miss him so deeply. Having grown up an only child, I'm quite proficient at being alone and keeping myself contented, but despite being together for almost nine years, we long to be close, as lovers, and as best friends, I miss his warmth, his love, his very essence.

So, it's turned into a summer of longing. I planned for a summer of swims in the freshwater lakes I know so well, and picking gallons of huckleberries for the freezer, harvesting fireweed and fermenting the leaves into Ivan Chai, hiking with the womens hiking group I just formed this Spring, nurturing the connections that get forged more and more with my community each year... just enjoying the cycles as usual. But, things have gone differently.

Now, we wait. The right timing and circumstances need to be aligned before we reconvene. So, I'm left to my longing for home and for husband, and like the ancient Greeks I too believe there to be an intrinsic value in the unfulfilled longing, which they called pothos. Longings put us into relationship with the beyond and add another dimension to our days, even though the chest can feel heavy and the world one is in more grayscale than the one longed for... there is still something important in it, and I have the good fortune of knowing this particular longing will be fulfilled soon.

"The steed upon which to journey through this valley is Patience."

.::*::.

Before I sign off, I realized I never showed my most recent embroidery here. This is "The Sacred Marriage"...

...Rebis, the individual containing lunar and solar principles in perfect balance...

the Great Work, realized and embodied. Wholeness remembered and regained, while corporeal.

~

I hope your summer is going well, and less scattered than mine! Now it's off to bed with a hot mug of nettles, to read a little then doze off into that mysterious world that sleep returns us to each night. I'll no doubt get woken by distant fog horns a time or two, a hazy reminder in the dark that we're all out here, just trying to illuminate the path ahead, moment to moment.

x

Honoring the Longing

Something that happens to me every so often is I get stricken by an intense desire and nostalgia for what I simply refer to as "The Old World." The sight of modern anything--cars, wires, sports shirts, tennis shoes, neon signs, tupperware, styles and lingo of the day, memes, speech patterns, all of it--dulls my mind even moreso than usual and I long for somewhere or somewhen that I really have a hard time putting my finger on, or putting words around. But the essence of it is captured here, here, here, here, here, and on a more philosophical level here and here. As quick examples.

When this whirlwind comes over me, I fall quiet and inward, and all I know to do is to make my own world resemble this imaginative place as much as possible. I mind my thoughts, my words, my quickness and try to sink into the headspace of that time (though I still don't know if linear time is the right way of thinking about it). 

So this morning, we woke, he a little before I, and the former meditated and the latter showered. Then I told him how I'm feeling- and wondered out loud if maybe going to the Scottish Highlands for a few months would be feasible. I think you can stay for 6 months at a time, maybe then heading up to the north of Sweden or over to the west of Ireland... then switching back again when the 6 month visa ran out. Repeat. Just to be immersed in that world where the tales, rituals, and mythologies of my own kin and blood are buried in the soil and carved into stone. Would I feel a familiarity? Would I experience deja vu unexpectedly like the Barra boy? I idealize a life there, assuming, perhaps quite unrealistically, constant enchantment, where the doors of my creativity are swung open and a convocation of eagles thunders out, relieved to be released, their spirits soaring across that landscape, brushing shoulders with the ghosts of my forefathers who still require bread and water offerings. 

When I feel this way, the best thing I know to do is either go out to some mythical and inspiring landscape and to meander and sit there, or to stay home with my teas and coffees and steep my mind in appropriate documentaries, books, or my own creative projects. If honed correctly, I've learned that this terrible longing, like a lost love, can be a source of inspiration. 

Anywho- this morning after our talk, we decided to meander into town, grab some hot breakfast from the local market to-go, refill our thermos' with hot coffee, and go sit by the lighthouse with it all. On the way, we listened to Dylan Thomas' Under Milkwood, the 1954 radio drama of the innermost thoughts and feelings of the inhabitants of a small Welsh fishing village. It helped kindle and hold onto this atmosphere I was hoping to sink into for the day.

As we wound through the streets of our own seaside town, headed for the lighthouse, the air smelled of seaweed and breakfast, and the pedestrians began turning into characters themselves, just like in the story we were listening to. Amazing what a shift in perspective can do.

We perched on a large rock and sat quietly as the churning sea tide rolled in, actually out, a few feet beneath us. I chewed the buttermilk biscuit dipped in gravy, and let my gaze free to do as it pleased out across the sea, sometimes focused, sometimes blurred and wide and dreaming. A speckled body broke the milky blue surface, her deep black eyes looking into ours, and we gasped- a harbor seal, or maybe a Selkie woman. Who knows in this time when we've made everything mundane with our categorized folders of so-called facts, which we all feel we have an authority over, a monopoly on truth. But maybe the harbor seal was a Selkie. Let's live in the question.

Back home now, I'm curled at my desk with the heater on, about to start on a new embroidery, and through the wall I can tell that Eric is singing songs I've never heard before, of his own making I do believe, and strumming guitar. I'm glad the creative feeling is permeating and we have, for a bit, gotten our minds off the ol' to-do list which can distract you for a lifetime if you don't watch it.

I'm going to go fill the coffee cup and thread the needle, with a picture in my mind involving a dharmachakra-wheeled chariot, a druid charioteer, with a black and white horse pulling them both. In the druids hand will be either a torch or the branch of a Holly tree. Do you know the ancient relationship with druids and modern rulers (who program the masses) with Holly wood?