field notes:

4.30.2003

Sunrise beckons with orange brushstrokes on a white sky. I walk to the beach and watch the bald sun enter the misty firmament above the far shore. The horizon is shrouded by whiteness that extends out towards me on the unmoving, reflective waters. A blue rowboat sits offshore. It holds all the promise of a planet dancing around its brightest star.

posted by Lisa on 7:37 AM link |

4.29.2003

Inverness

For me, it is an example of those places which we come across by chance and rather reluctantly, but which gradually begin to inhabit us and later take on meaning.
-- Czeslaw Milosz in Milosz's ABC's

I've lived in Inverness for close to two years now, and I understand these words of Milosz's more now than I did when I arrived. A couple I met in Bolinas a few weeks ago asked me where the center of Inverness is. I know of two answers. The post office and the Inverness Store are town centers of a sort--you run into people you know there. And it could also be said that there isn't a town center, and that would be more accurate. Point Reyes Station is a town like that, with a downtown and the Dance Palace, a community center that serves Inverness as well.

But Inverness has no center, or if it does it remains hidden, and like much else here only reveals itself over time. On a first visit, you would think that not many people live here, and that there aren't too many houses. But as you walk the roads homes appear amongst the trees as if in a fairy tale. Glimpses between rose bushes and through garden gates reveal cedar-shingled cottages nestled in the valleys, on the mountainsides, on the mesa, and in the hills and bowls of Inverness. A friend who lives here tells me that people, too, appear even after many years, whom she's never seen before.

In Bolinas, they call Inverness "Inwardness". They're onto something. This place encourages reflection, it's paths beckon the lone walker. We are not only priveleged by proximity to this park where animal and human lives overlap, but protectors of its sanctity, interpreters of its isolation and beauty, gatekeepers. It is our job to stay hidden and quiet. Nature doesn't reveal her secrets all at once, she reveals them slowly, like Inverness.

posted by Lisa on 7:43 AM link |

4.26.2003

In tribute to thousands of beautiful deaths like wildflowers that dot the spring hills and our own variegated human landscape:

Rush Naked
--rumi

A lover looks at creek water and wants to be that quick
to fall, to kneel, then all
the way down in full prostration. A lover wants to die of
his love like a man with
dropsy who knows that water will kill him, but he can't deny
his thirst. A lover loves
death, which is God's way of helping us evolve from mineral
to vegetable to animal, the one
incorporating the others. Then animal becomes Adam, and the
next will take us beyond what
we can imagine, into the mystery of we are all returning.
Don't fear death. Spill your
jug in the river! Your attributes disappear, but the essence
moves on. Your shame and fear
are like felt layers covering coldness. Throw them off, and
rush naked into the joy of death.

posted by Lisa on 8:38 AM link |

4.23.2003

It wants to be spring, but winter won't quietly fade. We've had a week of on-and-off-again rain. Big, blustery days of wind and fat, white clouds bounding through the blue followed by sudden darkness and heavy raindrops. It reminds me of something I've only known in literature, a midwestern spring.

More than half of what I know I've only read, and most of the rest I've dreamed. Weather is dreamlike anyway. It calls from the edges of consiousness like a remembered kiss.

Most of my life in Mexico comes back to me as weather. Hot days and nights, reliable north wind on the beach every winter afternoon, biblical rain and mud and lightning just outside the summer tent, sleepless nights and days of ocean relief.

I'll look back on winter in this sunless bowl and remember all the fires, so many fires it makes me weary to think of lighting another one tomorrow morning. I can now just begin to recall last summer--open doors and windows, wearing shorts, and hands warm for writing.

posted by Lisa on 7:35 AM link |

4.22.2003

Over meals, my friend's father has recommended 3 books and 1 film to me. The books are 'A March of Folly' by Barbara Tuchman, 'The Seven Sisters' a history of the big oil companies, and a California history called something like The Big Four. The film was Indochine, a '92 academy award winner for best foreign language film with Catherine Deneuve.

My friend's father has brought this film up during political conversations, because it takes place while Indochina was a french colony, before it was called Vietnam. I watched it this weekend and was struck by some of the film's other themes. The opening voice-over is Deneuve telling us that her friends have died and left her with their Indochinese daughter to raise. She and her two friends thought they were inseparable, just like they thought that Indochina and France were inseparable. The story continues to explore the issues of separateness and togetherness through a love story where the mother and daughter both love the same man; the harsh, parental relationship of Deneuve's plantation owner with her "coolies"; and the eventual political uprising of the people against their colonizers. Everything that can be broken apart, is, except the two things that everybody tries to keep separate but cannot: love and suffering, life and suffering.

In the world of this film, every move--political and personal--has consequences and no one escapes the devastation. Everybody is ruined at the heart.

The world of The Quiet American seems less harsh when it comes to rules of cause and error. Or maybe the cynicism and opium just make it seem so. The young CIA agent doesn't survive his ideals, and his policies take innocent lives. The jaded English journalist manages to hang onto his Vietnamese girlfriend, but to survive he must finally take sides and causes a life to be taken.

What the films have in common is quite stunning and singular, though. Western ideas aren't neatly imposed on that culture, and the more rigid and idealistic those ideas are, the more damage they do.

This mirrors the problem I see with our idealistic president. Brash heroes only succeed in blockbuster films, where John Wayne and Bruce Willis conquer evil with a wink, a wise crack, and an unflinching bravado. In more difficult genres, the world is a more complicated place. In that world, wisecracks and slogans are shallow, evil is in our own hearts, right next to good, and "doing what's right" kills innocent people and could have consequences that reach generations into the future.

Maybe instead of asking presidential candidates what their favorite book is, we should ask about their favorite film.

posted by Lisa on 8:19 PM link |

4.20.2003

Our path doubles as a road so that folks who now find the walk too long or too steep can still visit the beach, but it's seldom used by cars. Yesterday, while walking down it, I noticed a baby opossum who must have been dropped by its mother, lying face up, four legs splayed like a misshapen star, punctuated by a bright pink nose. I didn't think to move it, didn't think that an Easter weekend might find my neighbor's out-of-town relatives using the beach road--which it had. Later, I tried to find the opossum's body but couldn't. Today I stumbled upon the body. It was run over and was ten or twenty feet from where it had been. The tire had found only the lower half of its body, and because the cushion of redwood needles is so deep, its skin was still intact--it looked strangely unperturbed by its flatness.

I moved it off the path to the foot of a redwood on the creekbank, and covered it with a mound of needles and sticks.

This creature hadn't been killed by a human (as far as I can tell), but still, it had been run over by one of us, and so it made me think about Barry Lopez' essay Apologia which I've just read in About This Life. His dreamlike narrative describes a drive where Mr. Lopez becomes anguished--remorseful and sorrowed--about the carnage of animal corpses on the roads he's traveling. Even the insect bodies on the grill of his car torment him. On this journey he begins a practice of moving these bodies off the roads as a simple act of respect.

At the end of his journey, a friend's house, he remembers the beauty of the Wind River Range and the Snake River, but the sheer numbers of corpses he's touched won't leave him:

The transformation of the heart such beauty engenders is not enough tonight to let me shed the heavier memory, a catalog too morbid to write out, too vivid to ignore.

I stand in the driveway now, listening to the cicadas whirring in the dark tree. My hands grip the sill of the open window at the driver's side, and I lean down as if to speak to someone still sitting there. The weight I wish to fall I cannot fathom, a sorrow over the world's dark hunger.

...The words of atonement I pronounce are too inept to offer me release. Or forgiveness. My friend is floating across the tree-shadowed lawn. What is to be done with the desire for exculpation?

He concludes:

I anticipate, in the powerful antidote of our conversation, the reassurance of a human enterprise, the forgiving embrace of the rational. It waits within, beyond the slow tail-wagging of two dogs standing at the screen door.

It strikes me that he's saying that nature won't give redemption, won't forgive our damage, or cleanse us of the guilt of human enterprise and its uncontained power. It's within culture that we make sense of our deeds and find reasons for our progress.

posted by Lisa on 9:02 PM link |

4.19.2003

I've just begun to read it today, so I won't write a thing til I've done that, but will point to it so that you may begin to read it too,and we can contemplate it together. H.R.2459 To establish a Department of Peace. Introduced in the House by Dennis Kucinich to establish a Department of Peace as well as a cabinet-level position titled Secretary of Peace. And you thought there wasn't any good news.

posted by Lisa on 4:58 PM link |

4.17.2003

I got my first good look at a bobcat last week. It was late afternoon on Bear Valley Road and it crossed the road in front of me as I headed towards a Bolinas fundraiser. I pulled over and watched it saunter around in a field, giving me slow, defiant sidelong glances from time to time. I didn't scare it, not in the least, even as I got out of my truck and stood roadside. Prior to this encounter I'd only had bobcat glances. I am priveledged.

T saw a gray fox the other day, and reported how different in size the gray fox is from the red fox. Another friend says we don't have red foxes out here, only gray, but that the gray has lots of red on its flanks and is often mistaken for the red fox. I turned to The Natural History of the Point Reyes Peninsula by Jules Evens for clarification. He says that we do have a few red foxes, probably introduced by human release. They are larger than the gray fox, and more aggressive. The gray has an unmistakable black-tipped tail. From these pictures the red fox appears to have a white-tipped tail.

We walked the trail from Pierce Point Road to Heart's Desire, doglegged to Pebble Beach and back up to the parking lot yesterday in light rain. There is lots and lots of poison oak at the top end of these trails--my clothes went directly into the washing machine when I got home--as well as lots of huckleberry just beginning to blossom. There are some sweet views of the bay at a couple of points along this walk, and the overlook from the Heart's Desire group picnic area is beautiful. Our voices surprised a blanketed couple below us on the beach as we conversed about a loon off the next point. Most of the birds were heard but seldom seen. However we were able to see both a wilson's and an orange-crested warbler. We certainly heard hummingbird and raven wings, and my friend thought he heard a warbling vireo and the rhythmic tapping of a pileated woodpecker. We saw a beautiful frog: small and green with dark markings on the sides of its rear legs. (I tried briefly to id it but I couldn't find one on a brief journey through my books and bookmarked websites.)

We rested on the sand at Pebble beach for a while. I remembered having a picnic on that same shore with a kayaking aquaintance a couple of years back. He told me that he didn't like to know the names of things in nature because it spoiled his ability to just enjoy unencumbered nature as a whole. I knew then that we probably wouldn't be sharing too many more picnics.

T tells a story of taking some Japanese friends with limited English skills around the Bay area. Every time they would disembark in some new beautiful locale, they'd say, "Nice scene. Nice scene."

Nature as scenery has gotten us into the trouble we're in with the environment. Without understanding the intricate web of complex relationships between species we've made hasty decisions in the name of progress, industry and commerce that have compromised our future in ways we're just beginning to fathom.

Peel back the beautiful scenery, layer by layer, there are truths to be revealed to the watchful eye, the careful heart.

posted by Lisa on 10:41 AM link |

4.16.2003

Saturday, I walked in the San Francisco anti-war demonstration from Civic Center plaza to the rallying point at Delores Park. Once the rally began with its joyless chanting and strident exhortations I sloshed through the wet grass and wandered off into the Mission for a dry place to sit and a coffee.

During the march and my short stay at the rally I had some brief conversations, and overheard bits of talk that shaped my view of the day, but the most striking encounter I had came on Bart. In Berkeley I looked up at a group of young men coming onto the train and one of them made eye contact with me. It turned out he was alone, not part of the group, and he sat next to me. He was wet, like all of us, and he smelled of tobacco and damp peacoat. His eyes were red-streaked and he felt wild like a dog that you weren't sure you should touch, but not sure you could ignore either.

'Where you been? You gettin' off work?,' he asked. No, I told him, I'd been at a demonstration in the city. 'About what?' he asked. You know, against the war. 'Why?' he asked with a smile. Well, I don't think it's right to go into somebody elses country and take it over and kill people. 'Shoot, don't you know that people in power gotta flex their muscles sometimes? You know that they'd be doin' the same thing to us if they could. You know there's thirty-some homicides in Oakland already this year." I said, Yeah, shouldn't the government put their money into fixing things like that here at home before they go spending all that money on a war. He just smiled.

'You think your little group is gonna stop the power? They don't care what you think.' Yeah, I said, you may be right. But I feel like I've gotta stand up and say what I think is right. What should I do, just let them do what they want? 'No' he said, 'but you can't change it. They got power and they gonna use it, and theys nothin' you can do about it.

I said, What about the Civil Rights movement? He stood up then and grinned, 'That didn't change too much, did it?'

He got off the train there. Just two stops. Looking back on the conversation I'm struck by two things. It was the most intimate of talks. We spoke in low voices, our heads canted together. I'm almost certain that he touched my sleeve, and I felt his wet coat. It was as if we were misplaced friends momentarily reunited, for just two stops. Though our paths, our skins, and lives were completely different, we recognized each other on the train and had a heartfelt dialogue. There was no arguing, no defensiveness and no attempt at persuasion. We just told our thoughts to each other.

The other thing that struck me was his matter-of-fact view of power and its methods. I'm making assumptions about his life, but he almost certainly deals with oppression and power daily in ways that I can't fathom. The power he knows has a will, and the struggle against it is a futile pastime. Might as well just get used to it, even forget about it and go on about your business. With in-your-face street power, thats probably wise policy: if power can shoot you for a wrong move, then it's best to avoid walking that block, offending that power.

If you have to spend your days dealing with neighborhood threat of force you're not going to have time nor will to examine or resist the abstract powers of government.

I can see now that I missed his point. He brought up the homicide rate to demonstrate that people kill each other. Murders in Oakland and death in Iraq, they're all part of the same thing. From his point of view, violence is the natural expression of power. He's the only person I've talked to about the war who didn't argue whether it was justified or not; legal or illegal; right or wrong; a war for oil, or a necessity to defend national security--just power being power, like a river runs to the sea.

Unchecked power does that. That's why it's vital that people who can recognize injustice and abuse of power speak out, spend words like currency, to keep it in check.

Because there is another power. The power that people have when they speak up together for that which moves them greatly. In apartheid South Africa they call it Amandla, that's Zulu for power.

posted by Lisa on 8:08 AM link |

4.13.2003

As you may be able to see, I'm attempting to add a Comments feature. So far, it's kind of a mess....bear with me please.

Later: So far, if you use the 'comments' link it will email me, but won't register as a comment on the page, and nobody else will be able to see it.

posted by Lisa on 3:25 PM link |

4.11.2003

When my dog climbs out of the bay, she shakes that water from her coat onto me. It's pack behavior. She wants me to "know" where she's been--in the most visceral way--by sharing wetness with me. I had a similar urge today after I took my first swim of the spring, first swim of the year. I came out wet and wanted to shake my hair onto somebody, only nobody was there.

Instead, I've let the salt dry in my hair. I can smell it now and I'll smell it through the night while I dream. My dreams will carry the knowledge of penetration, of diving through one of earth's fragile surfaces.

My neighbor told me that swimming is seasonal, that many things in life are seasonal. That's wise. Tomatoes are seasonal too, if you want flavor. More and more I find that the best things are worth waiting for, and require waiting. People and tomatoes ripen over time, water warms and the clouds part, and certain dreams will only come true in the spring.

posted by Lisa on 5:19 PM link |

4.07.2003

There's a trail at the top of the Inverness Mesa that winds above First Valley and this time of year overlooks an Osprey nest. With even a mediocre pair of bins one can watch the entire process of nesting. The nest has been constructed now, and there's a pair of Osprey attached to it. Each time I've gone to look, one of them is sitting in the empty nest while the other hunts or perches nearby. I'm fairly confident it's been the female nest-sitting because of her more-prominent "necklace".

Just before the trail overlooks that nest, there's another nest on the left this year. It's awfully close to the trail, and I worry that its occupants won't be able to handle the stress of being disturbed regularly. This trail is used by locals daily.

We've found three other nests in the vicinity, all visible from the trail. Could it be that the Osprey are hunting together in some cases? I've seen them return from the hunt at the same time more than once. I suppose that could be coincidental with such a large concentration of Osprey in one area. If I've seen 5 nests in a single watershed, how many are there really? And how many along the ridge, and in other watersheds?

We're excited about the main viewing nest because we saw an Acorn Woodpecker peeking out of a hole in the snag just below the Osprey. If that is to be a nest then we're in for a real treat. Acorn Woodpeckers are cooperative breeders. Paternity is shared, and sometimes maternity as well. Early in the season, there is some "egg tossing" practiced by the females, but eventually the raising of the brood becomes cooperative.

It would be fun to watch some of that taking place. I'd especially welcome the sight of a newly hatched woodpecker--I wonder if they start out with that bright red head plumage. I wonder about their gestation period. Could we have Osprey and Acorn nestlings at the same time. That would be scopeful!

posted by Lisa on 9:08 AM link |

4.04.2003

I've been distracted. But even now with the world full of strife and turmoil, even when the gut wrenches from it, life goes on outside my window. The tides still ebb and flow, and I've neglected to write about the life that passes between those waters. Savannah sparrows madly sing: a songbird's way of fending off extinction. A spring protest.

And so it will be with me. I'll write and sing (to myself) and cook and laugh--my small way of keeping soul from being extinguished by the damping forces of despair and neglect.

one of his last poems...

Something to Declare
--William Stafford

They have never had a war big enough
to slow that pulse in the earth under
our path near that old river.

Even as a swallow swims through the air
a certain day skips and returns, hungry for
the feel and lift of the time passed by.

That was the place where I lived awhile
dragging a wing, and the spin of the world
started its tilt into where it is now.

They say that history is going on somewhere.
They say it won't stop. I have held
one picture still for a long time and waited.

This is only a little report floated
into the slow current so the wind will know
which way to come if it wants to find me.

from Passwords

posted by Lisa on 7:38 AM link |

4.03.2003

So far, April has been winter revisited: the air finger-numbing, the mood of the sky changeable, and my neighbor's woodpile shrinking as quickly as if it were January. She has generously allowed me to plunder this old pile, and I'm grateful for the fuel. It's bay cut down years ago: stacked and tarped and set to wait...for me, I guess. I'm certain to be displacing lots of local creatures. Some, the spiders and centipedes and pillbugs, I've seen in my wheelbarrow, but I'm sorry to the mice, who may have to relocate: "Take heart...it's really spring and by Sunday the sun is rumored to be coming out again".

We went to Chimney Rock yesterday to check back with the elephant seals but were diverted by glorious, copious, riotous flowers. I'll post a couple of the 45 pictures I took thereof, but along with a friend I'm going to create a special section of field-notes.net for Point Reyes flowers. Maybe some more knowledgable folks can help us with identifying some of the more esoteric varieties.

By the way, the juvenile elephant seals are still hanging around. They're sharing the beaches with harbor seals and sea lions. If they wait for a fortuitous weather sign to cue them that it's time to migrate back north, I'm guessing they won't be leaving til after this next storm. I would love to be there when they all pull themselves into the waves and head out--innately knowing where to go, and when.

posted by Lisa on 5:00 PM link |