field notes:

8.28.2003

EVERY MORNING ALL OVER AGAIN
--William Stafford

Only the world guides me.
Weather pushes, or when it entices
I follow. Some kind of magnetism
turns me when I am walking
in the woods with no intentions.

There are leadings without any
reason, but they attract;
if I find there is nothing to gain
from them, I still follow---their power
is the power of the surrounding world.

But things that promise, or those
that will serve my purposes---they
interfere with the pure wind
from nowhere that sustains a kite,
or a gull, or a free spirit.

So, afloat again every morning,
I find the current: all the best
rivers have secret channels that
you have to find by whispering
like this, and then hear them and follow.

Old William Stafford awoke each morning, and even on the day of his death, wrote a poem. This morning, when I was blasted out of possibly the best dream ever--since I can't remember a slip of it but the feeling that something more important than here is calling me--by an alarm clock pulsing out of the darkness, I wanted to see what Bill had to say about mornings.

I ache for mornings like rivers, like thermals.

posted by Lisa Thompson on 6:13 AM link | comments []

8.26.2003

An osprey cried again and again last night. As I walked from here to the beach I craned my neck but couldn't find the bird through the trees. I took the path above the sand, above the small retaining wall and looked up once more. The osprey was high, high above, still calling mournfully. Held in place by fanning wings, golden against the evening sky, lit from below by last day's light, reflecting all remembrance of the passing summer day.

I lay down on the hard-packed earth. Snowy egrets flew over my head, then descended into the trees.

At the end of the pier I took off my clothes, climbed down the ladder and onto the raft. I dove sharply into the green water, the green world of salt and life. As I dove, there was no sense of parting those waters--they enclosed me. The water held both the warmth of the day and the coolness of the coming night, and gave me exactly what measure of each I sought.

The water will hold you. You need only lean back your head, heart exposed to the sky. Bring your head up and you begin to sink. Let the water cradle you. It's been a long day, there is comfort in being held.
posted by Lisa Thompson on 7:05 AM link | comments []

8.25.2003

I swam twice yesterday. Yup, still here in Inverness, the baby hasn't come yet. I was introduced to a doctor yesterday, he said babies are more likely to come on the outgoing tide. That leaves plenty of time each day, but so far, this baby is staying put.

So I wait, and swim. Today promises to be another day that needs swimming. The leafy canopy above me is illuminated with golden light and I can tell that today will be hot. Yesterday, I swam. I took most of the day off after a manic several weeks of constant work. I had several long conversations with friends, family and neighbors. I read some. I drank a few sips of wine, and I ate chocolate peanut butter Dryers after dinner. An indulgent late summer day, if ever.

In the late morning swim I dove for the first time off the restored float at the end of our dock. A shallow dive to the southeast through pleasant chop, swimming with the wind and against the tide. In the evening, the water was calm and a deep emerald green. I couldn't see my hands in front of me. That second swim was pure pleasure. I didn't go anywhere but out, didn't need anything but the feeling of the water, the salty cup of her hand.

posted by Lisa Thompson on 8:16 AM link | comments []

8.24.2003

We had a localized blackout this morning. One neighbor knocked on my door early, waking me up, with a non-electrical phone in hand, knowing that I was waiting for my brother's call about the coming birth. So, in turn, I called another neighbor and we shared coffee and tea cooked on my propane camp stove. She brought Il Fornaio raisin bread and orange juice. She told me stories about sugar rationing during World War 2, and that she learned then to take her tea straight. She left college during the war in order to work at an oil refinery, helping out. One of her favorite jobs was folling the welders as they worked on tanks. She'd stand nearby holding the warm firehose, and talk to them--"small brown men from Oklahoma"--Indians.

She told me about the great floods here in the 80's, when residents were cut off from water, power and the outside world for five days. One of our nieghbors had a gas stove, and allowed all the neighbors to come over and cook on it each evening, and to have one flush each day as well. St. Columbia's church allowed folks to come in and help themselves to any food in their freezers, and to use their self-generated power to get warm and get dry. The "hippies" and the "old guard" came together during that time, digging ditches, clearing trees side by side, and helping each other out in neighborly ways.

That's part of the beauty of this area--it is a community--it's not just beautiful. People here work to help each other and that what makes it work. That sense of community is threatened by the trend toward weekenders here, and from other trends as well.

This excerpt from a letter to the editor in this week's Point Reyes Light says it well. It's an open letter to Mrs. Pritzker, part of the Hyatt family trying to get permitted to build a family compound here with more than 35,000 square feet of buildings, from a local rancher and director of the Marin Resource Conservation District:

...One can drive through West Marin and admire ranches and dairies nestled among rolling hills, in almost all cases the same ranches and dairies that have been there for more than 100 years. Perhaps this is part of your reason for buying property here.

But an agricultural community is more than that beautiful scenery and charming buildings. It is a community of people engaged in the business of providing food for the rest of the community. It is a collection of people who are connected to the land in ways that reflect their long family histories here. It is an interlocking network of people who embrace the wider community as service providers and customers.

...It is a collection of people who see and relate to each other regularly, in ways that join their lives together to make a working community.

This is what you imperil with your desire to build a corporate retreat or family retreat to enable your people to get away from it all. You take a big bite out of the heart of our community. You leave a space that could be filled by someone else who would enhance our community rather than diminish it. You pave the way for other wealthy people to move in and make us into a collection of over-sized houses and exclusive trophy ranches.

Beacause you are from Chicago and very wealthy is not something that bothers us...What does bother us is your belief that it is OK to build a lot of very large houses for you and your children and friends to breeze in and out of. That you have no intention of being part of us, despite your concession to having beef cows on the property.

...Your face in the paper looked open and decent, your sweater comfy and rural. You are the first to propose a large development right in the middle of ranch lands. But you can also be the first to do the right thing. You could build a real ranch and be part of us.

--Sally Gale

I think about all of this while I eat my tomato and cheese and bread for lunch today. I know who grew the tomato, who baked the bread, and who made the cheese. And if I should run out, a neighbor will surely give me more. Now that's community.

posted by Lisa Thompson on 12:45 PM link | comments []