Two Dot: another initiation

She appeared in the left hand lane. She was young and beautiful like so many deer we have passed safely. I didn’t try to swerve; there really is nowhere to swerve to on these narrow roads. I did have time to slow down, but not enough time. She cleared the left bumper, but then there was the thud. I felt the impact. It was not enough to stop us, so I drove to the next  turnout, glancing once in the rearview mirror. I saw a little cloud of dust rise from the ditch where I am sure she fell. I can only hope she died quickly.

In 1971, John and I drove a visiting meditation master from Olympia to Seattle. We weren’t very good meditators, but we had a car and were making the trip anyway to deliver a mattress to… I don’t remember where.  The car was a 1947 Dodge sedan with suicide doors and a hippie paint job. The mattress was strapped to the roof. He was waiting for us to pick him up at the side of the road. His robes were dark red, he was small, his English complete but heavily accented. He took his place in the vehicle without mentioning its uniqueness. John drove and I chattered. Somewhere between Tumwater and Fort Lewis, I asked him about deer. Why are deer the only creatures that are ok to eat? He patiently tried to explain the nature of deer and how ingesting that nature could not hurt you. I don’t remember the whole doctrine nor did I really understand it at the time. It was something about deer being gentle and good. What I do remember is him being quick to add that no matter the uniqueness of deer and their inability to hurt us by eating them, of course we would never do it. And now, in 2016, forty-five years later, I have killed a deer and not bothered to eat it. 

Two Dot: two songs

In Wallace Stegner’s essay, Why I Like the West, he professes his love of meadowlarks with their “purest sweetest birdsong.” Meadowlarks are singing as I write these words. I can’t see them just now, but their songs permeate the area.  Stegner declared “ anywhere meadowlarks sing… that will be a satisfactory place for this evangelist.” He claimed to be a self appointed evangelist to rescue “…unfortunate eastern heathens from climate, topography, theology, prejudice, literature, railroads, traditions, narrowness, and geographical ignorance…”, but I am sure he did it modestly. 

Driving alone is the best place for solitude. As I drove into town today, an old Drive-by-Truckers tune came on the radio. I sang along, sliding into the nearly discordant harmony. I found the note and held it with them, feeling the buzz of its complexity. Stories are layered all around me just now: a new baby, a friend in prison, a wedding, a troubled relationship, a sickness, an eminent death, a new job, a lost job. One thing will always be on the edge of another thing, pleasure and pain a hairbreadth apart. Is it possible to feel each part of the cord and hear the entire cord at the same time? 

Two Dot: match made in the heavens

Just now at this moment the sun is aligned at its most northern point making our longest day of the year. I keep the sun to my back, protecting myself from its direct gaze. I glance over my shoulder now and again, just for a second. There are wispy wing-like clouds below the sun as if to launch it on what seems to be its journey back south. But of course it is us who move. We are at our summer destination, the point closest to our own star. From this moment we begin our return trip, backing away from long days and dwindling nights. I need to take this moment in fully in order to hold it through the winter with its brief days and extended nights. I will remember the heat on the back of my neck reaching over my shoulders to fall on the backs of my hands as I write. And I will remember each seed head warmed to bursting and the clarity of all the green fields surrounding me, the river trees in the background and distant hills rolling to mountains; everything clear and present. So just for a moment, I turn fully toward the sun with my eyes closed and feel it hitting my nose first, then my eyelids, and down my cheeks to my chest, my bent knees warmer than my shins, my toes warmer than my heels. I will remember this. 

A full strawberry moon rose over the hill outside my backdoor around 9 o’clock last night. It hovered on the horizon luminous and poised like the bouncing ball we used to follow through a song in elementary school. I wasn’t aware of this phenomenon, full moon coinciding with summer solstice, when it last happened. It was 1967, the summer of love. I wasn’t aware of the summer of love either for that matter. But that summer and all of its radical love would affect who I was to become, even as the love began to fade. And now this phenomenon has come again, not be repeated in my lifetime. This strawberry moon will have to carry me. 

Two Dot: solitude

The wind blew all day with some quieter moments, but always picking up again. Just now it sounds like one continues ocean wave, like a steady waterfall, like dry water. 

Wind rattles glass in window frames and can open closed doors. Last night was not the biggest wind, but enough to inspire latching the windows and locking the doors. It blew all night, invading my sleep. There was nothing concrete in my dreams, but in the morning I felt both exhilarated and exhausted. Solitude does not always mean silence and stillness. Though bedding down with an active wind does not feel solitary. 

Two Dot: for birds

A meadowlark sang from the top of one of the poplars we planted in the yard. They usually restrict themselves to the height of power poles, but there he was until he flew down to the play equipment and strutted beak lunging forward under the six swings, the hanging ladder, and rings, and bar, and under the slide. I quietly called him a beauty… I didn’t want to disturb him, but had to say it out loud. He flew up to perch on the top bar and oh so quietly I asked for a song which he delivered to the back drop of woodpeckers, magpies, mourning doves, finches and nighthawks. 

A blackbird, I fear it may have been a starling, made regular trips to the tree with building material… back and forth, back and forth. I saw it carry a beak full of a huge clump of grass… big intentions. My studio is full of materials too… more big intentions. 

Two Dot: solitude

It has been an inside day with rain and wind and cold. I even turned on the furnace. I am alone now except for the company of the cat and the weather. It is a time of solitude. I read an article today about spending time on a remote island in Sweden in the spring when things are closed and no one is around. The author described solitude as an illusion, a fantasy… nice for a while but always leading us to acknowledge others and how they make us who we are. Perhaps….but I wonder if times of solitude when we have no one else to define us might have more impact on making us who we are?

looking at death

John and I drove to Bozeman this afternoon. As we pulled into town, I noticed all the flags were at half staff. We have chosen to separate form the news in Two Dot… to giver ourselves a reprieve from what is generally depressing. So, we didn’t know. I assumed someone of power had died, but of course it was more than that… another shooting slaughter by another mad man. And now, at least 50 people have met death without warning, without cause, without justification…just because they were in a gay bar. I am without words. But maybe this question - is there a way to find power in tragedy… the power to stand together for humanity?

Thinking about death in terms other than death is an occupation of aging. How much longer can I camp and sleep on the ground? Can I still maintain a house? Will I stay awake at a late night show? Is this or that ailment chronic? What will happen to all my possessions? Why am I still buying possessions? What happened to my face? I’ve heard it said that you begin dying when you are born. Certainly you get closer everyday. But it is when you are older that things begin to look irreversible. I suspect most young people look at death differently, if they look at all.  The young people slaughtered in Orlando never got the chance for the process. 

Two Dot: blood, bones, territory

Expose a child to a particular environment at his susceptible time and he will perceive in the shapes of that environment until he dies…immerse me in the old sun and space, return me to the big geometry of the prairie and the tension of that prairie wind…they lie in me like underground water; every well I put down taps them.  Wallace Stegner in Marking the Sparrow's Fall

Is this place where the Great Plains butt up to the Rockies my underground water? Was I marked by this landscape as a young child? Is that why I am here now?   I came here rarely and briefly as a kid, but the “shape and geometry” of this place seems to be in my blood. 

What happens when your childhood territory has been lost to development, or appropriation, or decline, or any change? Wallace Stegner’s Cypress Hills, the place he claimed to have shaped his perception, are now a provincial Park with “recreation opportunities.” When the particulars of a place that has marked us change, the impulse is to not return. We want to hold the memory. But I don’t think Stegner was talking about preservation. Being marked by place is not so much about memory, as it is about recognition. 

Like the sensuous images persistent from childhood, like the ineradicable attitudes and prejudices, the history of one’s truly native place may be comprehended in the bone and the blood, and one may build a life forward from it as surely as if his past had been learned under savants and memorialized in monuments. Wallace Stegner

I do comprehend this place through blood and bones, but am also driven to history to bring understanding to what I know.

Two Dot: words or no words

Terry Tempest Williams When Women Were Birds is an effort to understand a code her mother left behind. In 54 variations and 208 pages she deciphers and does not decipher her mother’s journals… journals that were blank. I have finished the book just as I begin a summer with my own mother’s diaries and photographs and dresses and spoons. It is all a code, whether there are words or no words, whether I am looking at my mother or the myth of my mother, either way. 

I have my mother’s last journal here with me in Two Dot. It contains mostly blank pages. Diane Dixon Tempest left her journals to her daughter Terry Tempest Williams; they were all blank. It is not exactly the same. My mother’s empty pages mark her ending after making note of each day on nearly every day of her life since she was able to hold a pencil and form letters. I have wondered if I might dare to write on those pages… to continue her story. 

My mother’s photo sits on my writing desk in Two Dot. It is a photo of her as a young girl, unknowing of what is to come but fresh and ready. It was surely a vital time for her, though she may have seen it as a time of waiting. She was the youngest of six, most of the others already off on their own.

My mother’s journals are a white blouse, not yet worn. Terry Tempest Williams

The blouse not yet worn is clearly evident in my mother’s photo… everything was to come. But isn’t there always something more for each of us, something not yet known, even for me at sixty-two. When my mother was sixty-two, she had not yet entered her best marriage… it was still an unworn white blouse ready to slip into. 

Two Dot: there becomes here

We are there and it has become here. This morning, sitting in my bed, I looked out the middle window toward the east. It was divided, half green and half soft blue nearly white. Now I am back in bed and it is getting dark. The same window is still divided, but now half grayed yellow and half deepening blue. It reminds me of the little paintings I made in high school on scraps of wood… half yellow and half blue. Were they a foreshadow of this place and my love for it?

...expose a child to a particular environment at his susceptible time…. he will perceive in the shapes of that environment until he dies. Wallace Stegner

With sunrise, the color of everything is changing. But, I have very few words, or no new words for this place and season, for the three squares of light that trace across the wall when the sun comes up. Just now, the middle square is illuminating a photo of my grandmother Sadie and her sister Vina when they were girls. I will find my way back into their story while I am here. But, just now I am re-acquainting myself with each thing I’ve known before: the wind, the light, the sky, the bird songs and the way a day unrolls. 

Exactly one year ago, the day was stormy and culminated in fifteen minutes of hail and havoc. The schoolhouse has been mostly repaired, the car left pocked to tell the tale, and today I can see where the plants have recovered and where they have not. This June first is entirely different, bucolic with bird sightings. But I know enough not to be fooled. It could change in a minute. 

I spotted new birds in the yard today. Four of them flit around with one or the other momentarily perching on the flagpole. I have consulted 2 books and think they are possibly tree swallows. I have become, not so much a bird watcher as watcher in general. Last week in Seattle, I met with a writing teacher to review my essay on transition. She was asking for more detail as to what I do when I am here. She thought my writing suggested that I just sit outside and look. And just now, my pen not moving for more than 5 minutes while I watch a horse eating grass, I think she might be right. 

My plan was to read while eating breakfast outside, but I left the magazine fluttering on the sidewalk beside my chair and just felt the wind. I won’t say the wind was howling, its voice being much more sophisticated and complex. It was more of an orchestration, leaf rattling against leaf, chains ringing against a pole, and something inexplicable that may just be air moving quickly around a corner. I have made peace… even friends with the wind. Years ago, visiting Ellensburg, another place of wind, I vowed I could never live in such a place. I was unnerved by the constancy of moving air. But my view has changed and I live here now with the wind as companion; its force refreshing me, sometimes scaring me, but welcome all the same. 

Seattle: peripheral glimpse

I was up in the night, driven from my bed by a need for water. I went all the way upstairs to the kitchen in search of a tall glass for drinking and a cool cloth. It seemed that if I laid the cloth over my forehead it would help to quench my thirst. Through the kitchen window I noticed a star in the sky and when I looked closer I saw another. Standing very still and squinting my eyes just enough, I found I could see more. It takes a reasoned faith to believe we sleep under nearly the same sky in Seattle and in Two Dot where the stars are so bright they penetrate our eyelids. But here in the city, with empty water glass in hand and before the cool cloth touched my forehead I’d seen them, ten bright stars shinning through a haze of urban lights. I counted those ten stars twice before going back downstairs to bed where I held their memory in place with the coolness of a cloth to the eyes.