The perfect weather made pro photographers out of everyone on the beach that day!
This is about five minutes worth of a sunny day at the Oregon last weekend. You have to be in the head space for it–not rushing off to the next thing. The music only goes one round, and the rest is blessedly silent.
Dzonoqua (Giantess) by Derald Scholar (Coast Salish)
You can see examples: a poem here; a piece of flash fiction here.
I seem not to have written any in 2011, but Peter and I visited Haida G’waii (Queen Charlotte Islands), and I learned in a dream that is where she lives: at K’uuna Llnagaay, which we call Skedans.
Aeriel view of K'uuna Llnagaay, which we call Skedans
This morning I woke up from another dream and wrote this poem:
Out of the Cave
I followed the Giantess to Haida G’waii,
and it was there among the ruins
of old Skedans
she stepped out of the shadows
into the light of a leaning
mortuary pole–carved Raven
wings extended over the dead, his
head lifted in a frozen cry–
even the Giantess looked small
under the spread
of World Ender’s wings.
But she beckoned to me
and let me stand with my back
against her sun–warmed fur,
both of us gazing that
empty, time-has-stopped
gaze across that famous cove
where so many had paused to ask
permission to come ashore,
paddles raised, voices
calling and answering in a rhythm
tendered by the wind.
Now that I’m older,
now that I know how to find her
in the great dreams of Haida G’waii
that visit me,
I lean into her more,
I am less afraid of her animal face.
More and more often when I turn
to see my shadow on the bridge,
I see her hulking shape, like a bear
or an old dark–faced mountain gorilla,
her rounded back, her strong legs.
She is near now. Sometimes,
when I awake early,
I realize that my last exhale
before waking
was in her breath.
Eagle Pole at Skedans
Haida Raven Pole in Ketchikan, Alaska
Raven Shaman by Peter's teacher, Tsunguni, Chief, Lelooska Tribe Kwakwakawak
I am she who has known glory–
I have walked into the late autumn woods
and known the color of the yellow larch
as it burned my turned-up face to cadmium fire.
Wenatchee State Forest, autumn larch in full autumnal glory (Image: justinreznickblog.wordpress.com)
If you want to know glory, follow me down the wayside seep,
springfed stream, hidden caves,
secret shrine, and there dwarf monkeyflowers
murmur their improvisations
in scarlet freckles and gold.
The brilliant yellow blossoms of Monkey Flower are a striking contrast to the steam and colors of a hot spring in Midway Geyser Basin, Yellowstone (Image: http://naturalsciences.org/microsites/education/Yellowstone/2008/pages/021C_Monkey%20flowers%20near%20hot%20spring.html)
I have followed the path of glory
down the steep black beach
crazy loud with storm surged surf
back-lit by a bloody sun setting hard
as a purie agate into the green-flushed sea.
I have followed the path of glory...
down steep black beach crazy loud with storm surged surf at Bob Beach
High surf at Bob Beach
All my life I’ve sought out glory,
confounded by the flights of common birds:
sparrow and robin, kingfisher and crow–
Last week, I saw it in the flock of rising
blackbirds, doubled and redoubled
in the silver flashing mirror of the wetlands.
Blackbirds flock up to make messages in the sunset sky (Image: http://www.insightintonature.com/pages/blog.html?y=2010&m=12)
Glory among the caramel scented Ponderosa pines
Glory among the million little brown bats generating heat beneath the bridge ...(Image: moonbattery.com)
Glory among the captive koi... (Image: aero-garden.us)
and the fish ladder journeys of Chinook-- (Image:peculiarvacation.blogspot.com)
glory pours out worlds from the tiny yellow spider on my arm trailing its parachute of airy gauze–(Image: krisgironella.wordpress.com)
your quick whisper
behind me on the trail
that makes me turn around
with a secret smile.
July 19, 2011
I once saw a goshawk flashing quick, dark and silent as a shark through the branches.
When I was a child, I used to ride in my dad’s backpack. That’s how I first learned the rhythms of walking. As he walked under the old-growth red cedar canopy, I’d hang onto my Dad’s shirt collar, then lean my head way back, so I could see up into the great treetops swimming and swaying like a kelp forest. I once saw a goshawk flashing quick, dark and silent as a shark through the branches.
In the evening, Mom would stand me up in her metal washbasin for a little bath by firelight. By the time she had towelled me off and gotten me into my pajamas, I was too sleepy to stand up. Daddy slung me over his shoulder and carried me to the big green family-sized tent. I was awake briefly, but the sound of nearby creek water talking to itself and the stars soon pulled me under. In those days, I was a child and always dreamed.
Map of the Remembered World
These sounds were so terrifying that I flew out of my body and perched like a sparrow on the gable of our house.
When I was a child, I was often confronted and confounded by the mysterious other world of adults. When I was about three years old, we lived way north of Seattle in a little shingle-sided house at the edge of the swamp. One day, I heard a terrible noise and ran out onto the stoop to listen. I could hear dogs down in the swamp below the house. I could hear men shouting as they chased after the dogs. I could hear an additional sound–a human scream. These sounds were so terrifying that I flew out of my body and perched like a sparrow on the gable of our house. I could see my frozen body below me in a red dress, long dark ringlets standing out from my head in fear.
Self Portrait as Owl Woman: "long dark ringlets standing out from my head in fear."
When I was a child in the same house, I first became aware my father had lived another life before me and my siblings. Under the gable was an attic that was accessed by set of pulldown stairs. The string hung in the hallway next to another string that turned on the hall light.
One day, Mom pulled the string and the stairs magically unfolded from the ceiling. She went about her business, and I was allowed to explore the attic. I first looked out the tiny dusty gable window down into the swamp, then I squatted on my heels to investigate a metal box. It took me a moment to navigate the latch, but then I opened the lid. I found inside metal pins and colorful ribbons, things for which I had no name but I know now were two Purple Hearts, a Bronze Star, a Sharpshooters Medal and other relics of a soldier’s life.
I carefully closed the box and hugged it to me as I negotiated the wobbly stairs. Mom was ironing in the living room. I ran in, holding out the box of medals, shouting, “Look what I found!”
Mom snatched the box out of my hands saying, “Don’t ever mention these to your father!” She hustled the box back up into the attic then snapped the string to flip the stairs back up out of sight.
I never mentioned the medals to my father, and he never mentioned them to me. World War II is long over, my father long gone, the medals destroyed when my brother’s house burned down, and all this happened long ago when I was a child.
Once when I was a young girl, I rode my horse Lance far up into the foothills above our home in the wide curve of the Wenatchee River. I rode so high up and so far away that the trees became a dense forest and snow still drifted thick on north slopes. I entered sunny clearings where spring beauty and avalanche lilies bloomed, then the dark branches would close in around me and Lance and snow dropped down on his haunches.
Although I became disoriented in this confusing landscape of trees and snow, Lance knew where we were, and he finally took his head. He found a logging road that led to another road that led down through the Barnhill’s property to the three miles of switchbacks down to river level. It was late. The night was dark, the Milky Way rich and creamy with stars.
Home After Dark: Original Watercolor by Cheryl Renee Long
Far below, I saw a car begin the slow crawl up the switchbacks toward us, headlights appearing and disappearing around the steep curves. Lance and I plodded on, finally coming down that stretch of road to what we called The Lookout. The car was parked there, and I could see my dad looking out over the silvery thread of river below. As we appeared, he came out and patted Lance on the shoulder, letting the big horse snuffle his shirt.
When I Was a Child: Mandala of River, Cliff, Orchard, Mountains
“Good ride?” was all he said, with never a word of worry or a hint, as I learned later, that he was out looking for me. No shame, no blame, the best lesson in the world, and I learned it long ago from my father when I was a young girl.
Ever since I was a young woman, I have dreamed of my father over and over and over–I’ve written all the dreams down, but still they come. In these dreams, Daddy never speaks to me–I see him across a piazza in Florence; entering a museum; ahead of me on a mountain trail; in a crowd watching me perform.
Dreams of my Father: From my Illustrated Journal
Sometimes I dream he has returned home to Mom, pale and weak as the ghost of a soldier killed in war, and only she can tend to him. I stand outside death’s door, looking in at my beautiful father.
A flotilla of Mallard ducklings sets forth on Delta Ponds in search of life's little lessons
Mallard Mom sees the glowing red orb from a distance and heads toward it, long before its neon pulse pulls my binoculars to scan the beach beneath me.
She is paddling intently across the dark pond toward it/me. She is mottled brown with a dark brown stripe through her eye. Her wings flash a violet-blue speculum bordered front and behind by a pronounced white stripe.
Then I see her little ones–six fuzzy dark balls of billed fluff swimming furiously with their tiny legs to stay in a tight formation behind her. She’s headed for the bright red object on the beach at her own adult speed and doesn’t slow down for her ducklings–it’s up to them to keep up.
They are brand-new to the world of Delta Ponds, born yesterday after 26 days of incubation. Six tiny heads are packed in so tightly behind Mom that they can’t possibly see over her to the beckoning beacon of ruby promise.
When the flotilla hauls up on shore, I turn my binoculars on the seductive item of Mom’s desire. It looks like a fisherman’s red bobber or a giant marble cleary, but I see now it is really an enormous red strawberry, dead ripe, its flesh unbroken. Some picnicker has spread a lunch here where I’m standing and lost a precious jewel of a fruit.
Somehow, Mom knew all about the strawberry the second she spotted it and towed her raft of struggling youngsters across the width of the pond.
But she doesn’t eat it herself. She nudges it with her bill, then wanders off and acts disinterested. The kids have gotten the idea, though, and one by one they stagger across the gravel to give it a nudge with their bills. This takes a while because walking is obviously a fairly new concept. There are frequent falls and tumblings-together as they take turns investigating the strawberry, which is as big as one of their heads.
Duckling's eye view of a strawberry--a challenging wall of red
Finally, one of them–male or female–who knows? seems to stop and think the physics through. As a teacher, I know that the quality of curiosity is going to make one of the flock suddenly become an interesting individual.
One of the flock is about become an interesting individual.
Sure enough, that anonymous but singular duckling gives the strawberry a longer look than any one of them has so far. He or she wedges a bill between the ground and the wall of imposing red and gives the berry a flip.
The berry rolls over, revealing a sliced facet of fruit oozing red drops of juice. “Oh-ho!” I say to myself, “I see that is a local strawberry, not one of those imported white-centered robo-berries!” My clever duckling dives into the feast and has it half-eaten before anyone else catches on.
Mom just watches. She laid before the ducklings a shiny red problem complete with difficulty level, promise, and reward. She gave one hint, that first nudge, and one hint only.
Sometimes I take a bright red thought and put it in front of my students. I nudge it a bit, then step back to see who will be the first to solve the puzzle.
I like thinking I’m as smart as a duck.
Sometimes I wonder if I'm smart as a duck?
May 1, 2011
Getaway getaway getaway!
Spring sun/clouds/shadows/smiles
gotta gotta gotta getaway!
Jensens split Eugene for Sweet Creek.
Your Guest Blogger is Peter Jensen with photography and a sonnet slideshow from our May 1, 2011 trip to Sweet Creek, Oregon.
“(about William Blake)
As for Blake’s happiness–a man who knew him said: “If asked whether I ever knew among the intellectual, a happy man, Blake would be the only one who would immediately occur to me.”
And yet this creative power in Blake did not come from ambition. …He burned most of his own work. Because he said, “I should be sorry if I had any earthly fame, for whatever natural glory a man has is so much detracted from his spiritual glory. I wish to do nothing for profit. I wish to live for art. I want nothing whatever. I am quite happy.”
…He did not mind death in the least. He said that to him it was just like going into another room. On the day of his death he composed songs to his Maker and sang them for his wife to hear. Just before he died his countenance became fair, his eyes brightened and he burst into singing of the things he saw in heaven. ”
— Brenda Ueland (If You Want to Write: A Book about Art, Independence and Spirit)
March 21, 2011
I love stories about serendipity because it forces me to “think out of the box.” Here’s another one I stumbled across for my collection!
Emilio Estevez got writer’s block while writing the script for Bobby (2006), so his brother, Charlie Sheen suggested he change his surroundings. Estevez drove about 150 miles north of Los Angeles and randomly chose a motel to spend the night. While talking about his project with the woman working the front desk, she revealed she was actually in the ballroom the night Robert Kennedy was shot.
Source: http://www.imdb.com/name/nm0000389/bio
Check out this quick, well-made, 90 second video documenting an insane case of serendipity, the weird way the world “likes to rhyme,” as Robert Moss likes to put it!
http://web.unbc.ca/~gpotter/?p=596
In her wonderful book, Strange Piece of Paradise, Terri Jentz comes to Eastern Oregon to investigate her own attempted murder. Back in the 70s, she and a friend were bicycling across America and had camped at Cline Falls State Park outside Redmond. That night, they were violently attacked by a man with an axe.
Read an extended review of Strange Piece of Paradise in The New York Times here.
Access the website for the book here.
Years later, Jentz reconstructs not only the crime scene, but the social structure of Redmond, the changing and unchanging attitudes toward women, and oh by the way, fingers her would-be assassin. She documents as well what I would call the more shamanic signs of a shadow world that seems to be listening in and perhaps even guiding her determined quest, which relies so much upon happenstance and quirky connections.
She notes the axeman on top of Oregon’s State Capitol building (The Golden Pioneer), follows a random license plate that says “Axeman” to a clue. Jenz gathers dozens of ways the dream life of the investigation speaks to her. What I love is that these details flow in and around the quest narrative, supporting and strengthening it in a web of shadowy allusion. Yet she is never overt; Jentz understands that synchronicity is not to be looked directly in the eye: the shamanic world speaks from the margins.
Damn, I love that book! I think I’ll read it again for the sixth time. (Guilty Admission: I’m a re-reader–are you?)
Where I was going with this–I have been wondering in a creative sort of way what writing project to turn my attention to next. I have an unfinished manuscript of mixed poetry and prose called Giantess. In it, I search for, find, and accompany a figure who is very familiar to us here in the Northwest. She has various tribal names, such as Wild Woman of the Woods and Timber Giant and Dzonoquah (variant spellings).
Her myths underlie the local legends as Sasquatch, a word that is derived from some variant of Dzonoquah. She is the source of the Chief’s wealth in cedar, fur, and coppers. She watches over young women’s puberty rites. She is used to scare kids into not wandering into the forest; the Old Ones say she pops errant children into her burden basket and takes them to her forest home for dinner. Only resourceful and brave children discover ways to outwit her.
Giants, Cannibals & Monsters: Bigfoot in Native Culture
Dzonoquah has always fascinated me, and so we “write together.”
But not for a long time. The past has intervened as a theme, and her project receded. I forgot about it for long periods of time.
So. Anyway. Where I am going is…
On Monday in my Poetry Writing class, I handed out Haikubes
JOURNEY
GRACE
GIANT
Freaked me out. I consider this gratuitous commentary from the peanut gallery of some parallel universe. Jentz would say to me, “My point, exactly!”
We poetry students fed our Haikube words like dry leaves to the bonfire of the blazing moment and wrote our poems in smoke on the sky. The Giantess stepped forward and spoke to me about the journey toward grace I have embarked upon:
My journey into grace began
while the Giantess slept.
Vines tangles by moonlight
as I followed the old plank steps
into the green spiral vortex.
I had thought to follow this path blindfolded,
arms outstretched to either side, face
tuned to the turning breath.
I am surprised by vision,
the way rain
washes out the path.
When I came to the suspension bridge,
the river roared like a waking bear
between gorge walls.
Broken vines and swinging slats
spider-webbed the catwalk away.
This is lost
this hovering in cataract mist
sunshot with broken rainbows
seeking my next slippery
handhold, knowing
there is a Giantess
waking in the far North, slowly
remembering my name.
–Sandy Brown Jensen
A special thanks to everyone who has stopped by to read this blog and to comment on it with insight and compassion. There is no other reason to do it!
