field notes:

7.31.2003

Keep me away from boxes of old, free National Geographics. Last night on a stroll through Point Reyes Station after dinner, we found a box of them. I only went through half, and had to stop myself from even looking at the rest. The selections I kept range from 1968 through 1994. The cover articles which caught my eye:

Animals at Play, and America's Poet: Walt Whitman, december 1994; Irish Ways Live on in Dingle, and Robert Frost, The Poet and His Beloved Land, april 1976; The England of Charles Dickens, april, 1974; 1491, America before Columbus, october 1991; Preserving the Nation's Wild Rivers, july, 1977; A Teen-ager Sails the World Alone, october 1968; Our Ecological Crisis, december 1970; and Ireland, It's Long Travail, april 1981.

Add this to another stack I've got secreted under a bookshelf in my bedroom, and to the stack of current and partially unread magazines on my table: Utne Reader, The Economist, Wired, Orion, Bay Nature, Harper's, and a pamphlet about Swedenborg. Don't even mention the books piled next to me in bed: The March of Folly by Barbara
Tuchman, Yoga for People Who Can't Be Bothered to Do It, by Geoff Dyer, The Witness of Poetry, Czeslaw Milosz, and the books waiting patiently on shelves waiting for their turn as book of the moment, book in bed, or even book in the bathroom ( Myth and Reality by Mercea Eliade, and The Essential Haiku, edited by Robert Hass.

It's okay, I tell myself, and the patient books and magazines waiting all around me, and all the writers they represent. I'll get to you all. I'll never throw you away unread. All of your words matter to me. I tell myself, one or two books per week, perhaps another 40 years of reading, if I'm lucky, and my eyes hold out, that's 2,000 to 4,000 more books. Yikes! That's not enough. Maybe I should pick up the pace.

don't even talk to me about blogs...

posted by Lisa on 9:24 AM link |

7.30.2003

Lately, I'm trying to swim for twenty minutes. Instead of swimming straight out from shore towards the middle, towards the open water where I can see Hog Island to the north, and the Inverness Yacht Club to the south on clear days, I'm following the shoreline, 3/4 of the way to the Whitney's pier, then swimming back. Some days I do it alone, other days with one or another of my swimming buddies. Dog stays put, and is always waiting at the end of our pier for me to come back, watching for signs of me, or perhaps watching the entire way. Two of my friends want to try the northern swimming route, to the Shell Beach swimming platform and back. The beauty of that swim will be the reward. Hauling out on the platform, lying prone in the sun on those warm wooden planks, rocked by the bay, recovering our strength. It's a longer swim, maybe by half.

It's been unusually calm this summer. The days mostly warm or hot, the water soft and gentle, the wind turned to breeze. Even foggy mornings mostly burn off to sunny afternoons, to shorts and hats and bare feet. But two days ago the wind came up, running down the bay gathering waves as it came, so that we were swimming against large swells. I stayed with breast stroke, and picked up my pace ...stroke, breath, wave crash, stroke, breath, wave crash. Breast stroke is hardest on my back, but I prefer it to all the other strokes for bay swimming. I love the view from there. I'm mostly eyes level with the water surface, or just underwater then poking my head up like a harbor seal, or like a duck. Backstroke is my next preference. I move much faster, and can watch the sky. But I make more noise, and feel less in harmony with the other animals that swim, who rarely cause such disturbance.

My own invention is the back-breast stroke. I lie on my back, and use the same arm and leg strokes of the breast stroke. It's fast and quiet. But freestroke is best for utility swimming. When you need to make progress, workmanlike, not too interested in where you are, just wanting to get there, go freestroke. Head down, you see little, but can absorb yourself in the swimming, in the movement, in the act itself.

Swimming is the yoga I've done since childhood. I earned my swimming certificate for making my way an entire pool length at 2 years old. There was a famous school where LA parents took their babies to learn swimming called Crystal Scarborough. I can remember my first race there, before swim teams became commonplace in my life. They put me in the pool with another little girl, another toddler, really, and told us that whomever reached the end of the pool faster would get a ribbon. Already, at that age, I cared nothing for the girly, for dolls or baubles, and a ribbon didn't mean anything to me but something to put in my hair. When I realized later what they meant, I wished I'd tried to win. Already, at that age, recognition was important, and from there came my competetive spirit.

I don't compete anymore. Now I swim for the way it makes me feel. But, I like marrying the ideas of swimming and destination. This kind of swimming is like taking a walk around the neighborhood. Someday I could swim to the Inverness Store, or out to dinner at Priscilla's, or across the bay to Tomasini Point to identify a bird, or something washed ashore that I can't make out. When I take these long swims I'll take my time, looking around, swimming as quietly as I can. No ribbon in mind.

posted by Lisa on 8:11 AM link |

7.28.2003

The Swainson's Thrush song that filled this woody canyon stopped while I was away last weekend. It called me outside in the evenings to curl in a chair and feel that winding song carry my spirit at the end of the day. Now I long for those evenings, those spiral melodies, and for summer which slips away.

Each summer day spins a long tale of endlessness. But I'm not fooled. Each barefoot day, each sunny moment, each succulent cherry and strawberry whisper to me the regret of beauty, the razor edge of desire. I listen just enough. I don't want to be caught unready, but am unwilling to spoil the bounty of being unclothed in July. I surrender to the summer mistress. When she goes, she goes gracefully, gently turning the hot red beauty of summer over to fall's light. So as strawberries make way for tomatoes and huckleberries give way to blackberries, I will hang on to what I can of summer's gifts. I will miss the Swainson's Thrush song, but soon these trees will sing with a returned chorus, and for now I curl up in a chair in the evening and enjoy the warmth, and the silence of this still wood.

posted by Lisa on 7:29 AM link |

7.26.2003

I've really travelled this week. I've driven down and then up again between here and Laguna Beach, below Los Angeles. I've been to the city, San Francisco, and on Thursday, I drove to Pescadero, below Half Moon Bay. Is that considered the central coast? The coastline, the ocean here is so beautiful. Every time I see it I'm reminded of seeing it for the first time.

I'd spent my entire life close to the oceans of southern California, beaches that stretched like sandy extensions of the flat towns, pacific coast highway and the beach parking lots which line the coast. The walk across sand to the water could be endless, feet burning on the hot sand, trudging with laden arms the day's luggage of snacks and lunches and changes of clothing, books and boards and Coppertone. We'd find a choice spot not too close to others and construct our own shanty-town of blankets, towels, chairs, parents and kids. We spent entire summers in Newport Beach in what I now know to have been extreme good fortune. A summer rental with our best friends, with two moms whose presence I remember only vaguely: tan young women, extremely good-looking, chatting about something, applying sunscreen and giving permission for ice cream. On weekends, our fathers arrived, arriving Friday nights tall with rules.

Later, I spent my summers at Lifeguard Tower 3 on Big Corona, in Corona del Mar. I hung out in a loose-fitted group of teens and young adults, vaguely troubled and unparented. I took pride in my tan, and occupied myself with pre-sexual loves and scandals. I bodysurfed and one summer I stood up on a surfboard, once.

The most exotic and compelling beach I'd seen was in the movie 'Julia'. Dashiel Hammet and Lilian Hellman lived in a cottage on the beach in, where? the Hamptons, somewhere on the east coast. That beach too was long and flat and sandy, but was relieved by dunes. They wore sweaters and trousers rolled up to the calf, and ate clams around beach fires, they drank and loved and fought like the mythic word-slingers and drunks that they were. I remember wanting to live, not only on that beach, but like that.

My first adult trip up the coast of California came as a shock then. Beaches hardly existed. The ocean crashed on rocks and sometimes a sandy outlet far below the same coast highway of my youth. The ocean was forbidding, the air cold and wet with spray, the horizon lost in white. Around Jenner we had a picnic one evening, a cold affair huddled in rocks protected from weather that beat at the shore.

Could this difference be what divides the cultures of southern and northern California so heartily? Could it all come from weather and sand? If the weather here in the bay area turned tropical, how would it change us? Would we begin wearing capris and halters, and high-heeled flip-flops? Would we spend more time primping in mirrors, given all that lying around in the sun, checking out the bodies around us on the beach, each tan bod glimmering with mild oils? Would we stop putting political bumper stickers on our cars, so as not to break the line of the bumper? Hmmm.

I ate my eggplant sandwhich on a bluff overlooking a beach near Half Moon Bay. Below me, fully dressed families played on the beach. The sky was clear, and the cooled air by the water was a great relief from the hot inland temperature. The waves curled nicely. It would have been a great day to surf, but nobody was in the water.

Now I prefer the beaches of northern and central california. They require character...or perhaps they shape it. Either way, they're not easy and unending, but harsh and fortunate. The sand, each grain's hard-won hold on land a victory of geology, a scrap of land that all waves require.

posted by Lisa on 10:20 AM link |

7.25.2003

The Delights of the Door
by Francis Ponge

Kings don't touch doors.
They don't know this joy: to push affectionately or fiercely before us one of those huge panels we know so well, then to turn back in order to replace it--holding a door in our arms.
The pleasure of grabbing one of those tall barriers to a room abdominally, by its porcelain knot; of this swift fighting, body-to-body, when, the forward motion for an instant halted, the eye opens and the whole body adjusts to its new surroundings.
But it still keeps one friendly hand on the door, holding it open, then decisively pushes it away, closing itself in--which the click of the powerful but well-oiled spring pleasantly confirms.

translated by Robert Bly

posted by Lisa on 10:18 AM link |

7.23.2003

I had an appointment in San Francisco yesterday and afterwards wandered over to Ocean Beach to see the Baird's Beaked Whale that had washed ashore the day before. I'd heard it was over 41 feet long, and that white and blue sharks had been feeding off its carcass in the surf.

As I rounded the corner by the Cliffhouse (stripped edifice tugging at my heart), I could see intrepid surfers in the water despite the shark warnings. But just offshore from the whale the waves were unmanned, probably due to enforcement and smell more than fear. Ocean Beach surfers are known for their fearlessness: cold waters, tough waves, and the constant threat of white sharks here requiring a tough northern california breed of surfer, part artist/athlete, part street racer.

I drove down the Great Highway until I saw the TV trucks, beach lined with cars, and dunes filled with people in the middle of an overcast day. I didn't have to leave my car to verify that I was in the right place. The stench was powerful, and went straight to my empty stomach. Driving from Crissy Field to Ocean Beach I'd heard that bioligists had hacked the beast's skull from its body the day before, but I was shocked to see the it nonetheless. Not only was it headless, the body had been covered by taggers.

Thanks KGO

The media is calling this "vandalism" and "devastation", but I had a different feeling about it. Taggers aren't pure vandals like window smashers, they're kids without a voice finding voice. Each tag saying, "I am here", "I lived". As they move through their neighborhoods tagging structures, they touch the city and claim its form as their home: it belongs to them and they to it. On Monday night, they came to the beach instead and tagged the whale. Nature, bloated and bitten, now beheaded, lay stinking on the shore of the city, and the taggers saw it for what it was -- it no longer belonged to the sea, it belonged to us now. We came to photograph it, to document its stink and compare its girth to our own. We came to catalog it and gut it and study the manner of its life and its death. We came to pay homage to its powerful form, each in our own way. In the end, we marked it with the strange writings of our youth's private language, and yesterday we buried it. A wholly human tribute.

Yes, it's shocking. They carved their names into the whale. Shocking also to hack at the whale's skull and use trucks to pull the cartilage and bones apart from the rest of its body. And I can't know who of those many hands that touched the whale did so out of what respect or what anger or what fear. But those hands will certainly never forget that whale, nor forget how it washed ashore and reminded us that it too had lived.

posted by Lisa on 8:23 AM link |

7.19.2003

My trip down I-5, through the belly of California yesterday, was ecstatic. I hit the Central Valley at 4:30am. Have you ever stuck your head down under the hood, into the heart of an overheating engine? That's how the air hit me when I got out for gas. It curdled an unopened box of soy milk that rode down in the camper shell of my truck. If Dinah-dog hadn't been in the air conditioned cab with me, I'm afraid it would have curdled her as well. The chocolate, needless to say, rode up front.

After I lost KQED, I roamed around a bit and finally gave up on radio, popped in a tape that a friend loaned me for the road: Poets of the World (reading their own work). I'm not sure I've got the name right, but it was a great companion. Frost leads off with A Road Less Travelled, and from there the poetry continues, from Edna St. Vincent Millay to William Stafford, Dylan Thomas to Ogden Nash. I don't have the track list with me, it's back on the CD cover at home. I'll try to be more accurate later. For now, all that matters is that I let the poetic language play on and on, not caring where one poem began and another ended, or who was speaking, just letting it all flow over me like hot air. That language infected me, the beauty of the language infected my blood with ecstacy, the metaphoric ideation tumbled the world of "shoulds" and "what ifs" into a mosaic of color and grace where every single thing fell into its place, like the click of a kaleidoscope, and I knew my place, and I had no questions.

I drove fast and hard and nothing could catch me. At the top of the Grapevine, last barrier to Los Angeles, rain formed, cooling and misting the air. A revelry. I love coming down the Grapevine into LA, there's still a promise that carries me down. It's the heat, the speed, the descent. The road is free of concerns, mountainous. The Los Angeles of Chinatown beckons, an open land of convertibles and space and opportunity and lust, and I love this place I'm entering for all that it has been, for the dreams it's held and the hearts it's broken. I love it for the stories that live here, and that it contains my past.

posted by Lisa on 7:04 PM link |

7.18.2003

The sun must love these yellow daisies,
they line I-5 standing tall as children,
the only unpale color in the central valley.
The grasses of yellow, brown and green have
been stretched to the edge of whiteness by the heat.
Even the sky opens to white here--not the white of painted lines
--but the white that remains when all color has gone.

Sunrise somewhere in the Central Valley this morning

posted by Lisa on 5:59 PM link |

7.16.2003

Down the path, under oak and redwood canopy, I stopped to watch swallowtail butterflies over the creek in dappled light. A wrentit began to sing, and I glanced down to a spot below me on the bank where the wrentit sat on a live oak branch out in the open. In some tangled branches of a fallen tree nearby a butterfly stretched outward parallel to the ground as its wings fluttered rapidly, an impossible hovering. I stood, the wrentit sang, and the butterfly danced. If I could have stayed forever, would we all still be there? I had to break the spell, my dog was impatient and a friend waited on the beach at the end of the path.

posted by Lisa on 7:49 AM link |

7.15.2003

I've never known any place the way I knew Lubec Street. I knew it as the center of the world, before I found out that the center was someplace below, and that I was alone on the earth's spinning surface. I knew that street from the ground up.

My memories are still there, tethered to the house, to the front lawn. To find them I need only go back to Lubec Street. We played baseball in that yard, climbed avocado trees, played games, hide-and-seek. I remember taking my first solo bike ride across that patch of grass, but that might be my brother I see riding unsteadily across the grass, triumphant and vulnerable. The outdoors was our own domain, theater for neighborhood alliances and the small betrayals of early friendship, and the easy-flung daggers of brother and sister. We didn't consider the exposure, didn't need walls to hide our games, not then. Later, back yards were better.

But early the front yard spilled easily into the street and onto other patches of grass, some not as well kept as ours. But I only notice that looking back now. In that neighborhood time, the only distinctions we made were between parenting styles. Our friends across the street, exotic and Greek, had stricter parents than the rest of us. Their home was more mysterious, dark inside, and we never played there. But their backyard had frogs, and it led through childhood corridors to the backyard of Billy and Jon's house. Billy and I were going to marry and live at Big Bear. I can still feel him whispering in my ear, then see him dive down into the otherworldly blue green waters of his backyard pool. Their Mom taught them the song 'Billy Boy' but inserted "Bill and Jon" instead. So it went like this, "Can she bake a cherry pie, Bill and Jon, Bill and Jon?", and I could never convince Billy that it went any other way.

Lubec Street was an almost parentless place as I remember it. The parents were in the background, feeding us, arranging overnights, buying our toys and tucking us in. The pools were cleaned, meals cooked, mortgages paid and birthday parties thrown. I remember one pool party though: a little kid was in the middle of the pool being held under by a struggling toddler. For long moments, we watched. Then my mom, glamour queen, threw off her wig and sunglasses, dove in and saved them. I remember her rigid determination, the set of her mouth. Life had prepared her for a moment like that. Ocassionally a parent would star in our world for a moment, but they always sat back down with their magazines and their drinks and their chatter so we could get on with the important commerce of neighborhoods: occupying the small spaces, the hollows under hedges, the shaded places between houses, the underwater Marco Polo worlds, places where adults didn't ever go, didn't want to know.

All that was before. Before Dad left. Before we moved to the city away from the swimming pool and the shiny new cars in the driveway; away from the neighborhood where every porch, every lawn and shrub and tree, every hiding space was ours, and where the constellations of childhood were unbroken and steady, watching children run across the lawns of Lubec Street as a small girl counted out to one hundred with her eyes closed, hands pressed into the bark of an avocado tree.

Read more posts about Suburbs at the Ecotone: Writing about Place today, and join the discussion.

posted by Lisa on 6:54 AM link |

7.14.2003

Yesterday, bloggers Numenius and Pica from Feathers of Hope spent the afternoon with me here. We'd gotten to know each other a bit through our readings and writings and our discussions at the Ecotone: writing about place. This was my first experience with embodying online friends. I just can't tell you how wonderful it was to do that.

We hiked simply from Pierce Point Road down to Heart's Desire for a picnic. We talked about the bear, of course, and then happened upon this tree

Click the image for a better view (200+k)

Could this be the work of the bear? I don't know what else might have wreaked this particular havoc on a tree. I just wonder that the strippings of wood are still extant on the ferns, I imagine a bear would have knocked them all to the ground with his thrashing about.

Both Numenius and Pica are astute birders. Pica found four feathers on the ground and identified them as young Spotted Owl feathers. I confirmed with a friend later in the evening that he had seen a pair near that spot. At that point, we had veered off the main trail and followed the trail hacked into the terrain by firefighters. This trail winds through the acre or so that burned and meets back up with the Heart's Desire trail. I hope that the park will keep this area accessible because it's fascinating to walk through a recently burned wood. Amazingly, young green ferns have already poked through the charred understory in green defiance.

We lingered at one spot on the path and watched wrentits, a wilson's warbler, pacific-sloped flycatchers and a young rufous-backed chickadee. The fog held back and we were treated to a rare hot day and incredible blue skies. The conversation was varied and fun and scored by the constant song of hidden swainson's thrushes.

posted by Lisa on 8:39 AM link |

7.12.2003

It is sometimes difficult to hold all of the contradictory shades of thought and flavors of the heart that go on inside, especially in trying times. Being me, I want to sort it all out, get to the bottom line. I want answers. But life isn't like that, is it? Life is messy, there are few clean starts and fewer clear endings. It's rare, at least for me, when the choice between two paths is illuminated by truth. My friend J and I talked about this yesterday.

Poetry, art and music help us to carry the mad emotional maelstrom of being alive. On the days when I don't write in this space, but post a poem, it isn't because I'm not engaged. Rather, it's because I am fully engaged, it's because I'm working something out that the poem gets at in a way that nothing else can. If I could post drumming, there are many mornings when I would do that. Sometimes I'd just like to sit you down with me and drum together, and share the things that go on.

I used to be a tennis player. There were times when I played that I fell into a kind of thoughtless grace. I felt at once that I was my best self, and also that I was out of my self. Every movement of my body had my full awareness, my very cells were charged with purpose, and I could do little wrong. But in a way, these states had nothing to do with me. They weren't about trying harder, in fact effort was their enemy. That state was a marriage of two things: playing the game to win with everything I had, and at the same time not caring about winning, only caring about the visceral: the yellow fuzz on the ball as it hit the strings, the spring of my legs as I bent to a volley, the idea that carried the ball to its destination.

I don't play anymore. But a good poem can take me to the same places. A poem like this can carry the full range of emotions from the depths of mud to the watery reflected sky and back again:

Spirit of Place: Great Blue Heron
--William Stafford

Out of their loneliness for each other
two reeds, or maybe two shadows, lurch
forward and become suddenly a life
lifted from dawn or the rain. It is
the wilderness come back again, a lagoon
with our city reflected in its eye.
We live by faith in such presences.

It is a test for us, that thin
but real, undulating figure that promises,
"If you keep faith I will exist
at the edge, where your vision joins
the sunlight and the rain: heads in the light,
feet that go down in the mud where the truth is."

from The Way It Is

posted by Lisa on 8:37 AM link |

7.08.2003

Her Longing
Theodore Roethke

Before this longing,
I lived serene as a fish,
At one with the plants in the pond,
The mare's tail, the floating frogbit,
Among my eight-legged friends,
Open like a pool, a lesser parsnip,
Like a leech, looping myself along,
A bug-eyed edible one,
A mouth like a stickleback, --
A thing quiescent!

But now--
The wild stream, the sea itself cannot contain me:
I dive with the black hag, the cormorant,
Or walk the pebbly shore with the humpbacked heron,
Shaking out my catch in the morning sunlight,
Or rise with the gar-eagle, the great-winged condor,
Floating over the mountains,
Pitting my breast against the rushing air,
A phoenix, sure of my body,
Perpetually rising out of myself,
My wings hovering over the shorebirds,
Or beating against the black clouds of the storm,
Protecting the sea-cliffs.

posted by Lisa on 6:59 AM link |

7.06.2003

It's not simplicity I seek in the rise and fall of tides on this slivered shore.
In the heave and breath of the water's breast,
in the salty bath I share with creatures seemingly gentle or fierce
but really only recognizing the fact of themselves,
it's an equally clear path I hope to glimpse.
Nobody knows why the thrush sings, and I suspect that he doesn't know himself, beyond the singing.
I swim because I swim, because
once I give way to the waters' soft form the body wants more than any other thing to keep moving through it.
I don't know my destination, but trust the movement, and take comfort from the moon's constant care.

posted by Lisa on 9:15 AM link |

7.04.2003

Territory is but the body of a nation. The people who inhabit its hills and valleys are its soul, its spirit, its life.

--James A. Garfield

The preservation of the sacred fire of liberty and the destiny of the republican model of government are justly
considered, perhaps as deeply, as finally, staked on the experiment intrusted to the hands of the American people.

--George Washington
First Inaugural Address

To the States or any one of them, or any city
of the States, Resist much, obey little.
Once unquestioning obedience, once fully
enslaved,
Once fully enslaved, no nation, state, city
of this earth, ever afterward resumes its liberty.

--Walt Whitman

We go forth all to seek America.
And in the seeking we create her.
In the quality of our search shall be the
nature of the America that we created.

--Waldo Frank

A little rebellion now and then is a good thing, and as necessary in the political world as storms in the physical.

--Thomas Jefferson

The inner peace of a well-integrated life is something that must be continually achieved; the outer peace of a world in which nations live together in a spirit of brotherhood is something that must be continually earned.

--Dwight D. Eisenhower

posted by Lisa on 9:38 AM link |

7.03.2003

Five Brooks Pond

[Bay Area Hiker]

Featuring the wood drake

[Canadian Wildlife Service]

and the common moorhen

[E Nature]

posted by Lisa on 9:58 AM link |

7.02.2003

Yesterday I said that it's the job of elders to become weird. This idea comes from the Celtic wyrrd, which means to have one foot in the other world. The English weird has several meanings that are tied up with fate or destiny, and still other meanings in the supernatural realm.

Being wyrrd as you can be doesn't mean wearing cowboy boots and shorts downtown, wearing face paint of local red clay, and reading from remembered bits of your own bad poetry. Unless, of course, that's your particular thread to pull.

I've found my threads here in the lovely isolated town of Inverness, just far enough off the beaten path to allow me the freedom and the time to find them. A part of me has always known that I needed to get away from the pressures of conformity to blossom into my better self. Southern California was never the right place for me. There, like most places, there's a big rush on to be just like the next gal, only a funnier, sexier, hipper, richer version of her. I've tried playing that game, but eventually always found emptiness and lack of meaning which I attempted to fill with elements from my own shadow side. That still represents a foot in the other world, but the nature of the connection could be enough to drag a person out of this one.

These days, I follow my strong interests and impulses towards water, place in nature and ecology, poetry and myth, writing, the djembe, and certain political and social activism. Sometimes I talk to myself walking down a tree-lined path; and while throwing the ball into the water again and again each day for my dog, I recite out loud as I memorize poems; often, I prefer my own company to that of anybody else's; and lately, I've taken to adding almond butter to my chocoloate ice cream.

I'm not an elder yet, but I think I've got a pretty good start on being weird. I hope my weirdness will be an inspiration to my neices and nephews, and any other young people that happen to be watching. Getting older hasn't turned out to be so bad. I'm much more comfortable in my 42 year old skin than I was in my 20's or 30's. I don't question or second-guess myself quite so much. It's not that I'm more confident--I got tired of waiting for confidence. I'm just being me.

posted by Lisa on 8:38 AM link |

7.01.2003

Sometimes I think of this as the edge of the world. I live in one of the last homes in Inverness before homes give way to parkland and beyond that to the Pacific. We're only an hour and a half from San Francisco or Berkeley, so bookstores, restaurants and the shows of the city are easily gotten to. But the thing is, I don't want to leave. Many days, I never leave the enclave of Teacher's Beach, and mostly when I do, I only go so far as the town of Inverness: a market, post office, gift shop and an eatery. Driving to Point Reyes Station, fifteen minutes away, where the stores are slightly bigger and the produce is organic, becomes an event I work myself up to.

This feeling of isolation is helped by the setting of my home. Even the neighborhoods here feel rural, but within the neighborhood I'm in, my home is apart. To find us you have to travel a private road, and my cabin isn't to be found until the road turns downward. From here I look out my high windows over a sea of trees, and know that beyond them lies the sea itself. I rarely hear cars, or any of the sounds of man leave the quiet hum of my computer. When I walk down the path from my house to the beach, I am alone with the trees, the creek, the birds and the knowledge that only a few of us ever walk this path. As it slopes downward I see the water lying before me as I approach, and I know what the tide is. Prints in the sand are more often deer or raccoon than human. And I know by sight most of the humans who walk on this beach, even those who cross at low tide: I know their shoeprints.

I don't begrudge them their passage.

The people who share Inverness, Point Reyes Station, and all of west Marin, share this bond with the land. Walking with any of my neighbors and friends always includes a moment when we say, My god we're lucky to be here, or, It's just so beautiful, isn't it? I feel that every day. Every day I'm informed by gratefulness. It's a love for place that grows: it includes a fierce protective sense, a duty to preserve.

The people who live here include ranchers, artists, buddhists, naturalists, writers, craftspeople, and various professionals and workers. Each town has its unique flavor. In Bolinas, some folks I met said they refer to Inverness as Inwardness. It's quite accurate. They wondered where people gather, asked me where the center of town lies. You see people at the Inverness Store, but the gathering place would have to be over in Point Reyes, at the Dance Palace, or the Bovine Bakery. We have to leave Inverness to seek a gathering place, except for the most intimate of gatherings. That suits us. If you walk the roads of Inverness, much is hidden, kept inside. You see glimpses through blackberry brambles and viney garden gates of people's lives, but much remains private, solitary.

I haven't spent my whole life here like many have. There are long-lasting friendships and neighborhood links all around me. But informing those relationships is a tendency to the solitary. It's palpable. In Ireland, they say that it's the job of elders to be weird, to stretch your being out into the furthest reaches of your most particular self, in order to show the young that it's okay to explore the eccentricities of the soul. Well, you see a lot of that here. Even the flyers on the post office bulletin board reflect a rich, weird inner life.

For myself, I say that here I've found my voice. I'm listening hard to the songs around me, the rush of the northwest wind through the trees, and the rhythmic tapping of woodpeckers as they store acorns in my cabin walls; to my footfalls on a redwood path and the gentle parting of water around me as I swim. I'm following those voices that call my heart to sing, or that break it open into tears. I'm listening for ways to become weirder.

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Please visit us at Ecotone today as we write about How We've been Informed by the Place We Live

posted by Lisa on 8:42 AM link |