by Amy Minato
So in place of our usual ragtag assortment of phone messages and chore lists on the chalkboard I write the following and leave it up for him to find. For many years, he will not be convinced I was kidding.
Daily Schedule
7:00 a.m. Sun chant/ ritual cleansing with Guru
7:30 a.m. MWF Mantra TTH Colonics
8:30 a.m. Macrobiotic breakfast
9:00 to Work for capitalist
5:00 p.m. pig-dogs
6:00 p.m. Vegan dinner
7:30 p.m. Sunset drumming circle
8:30 p.m. Tarot reading (optional)
9:30 p.m. Aromatherapy massage
11:00 p.m. Group howl
Everyone: Amy’s brother will be here this weekend. Please wear clothes.
Writing
In my loft on Siesta Lane I lie on my back in a cliché of laziness, watching a dense cloud through the skylight drift steadily west over oak and red pine, sponging up the sunset. My cloud chart, with pictures and interpretations of various cirrus, stratus, and cumulus clouds, tells me this means rain soon. I am relieved there is some practical purpose for my vigil.
What is lost when I deny myself cloud-gazing? When my life trots with assignments, my mind hones to production and profit and forgets about rosehips blushing above their green collars, the creak of passing squirrels, hawk feathers disintegrating into mud. What if I can learn to turn off the monkey mind and tune this swagger of bones to insect frenzy and cloud swirl and the secret stretch of xylem and phloem?
What I hope to excavate from here, on my knoll in Rainbow Valley, cradled in wood heat, is what in my nature has been atrophied by modern culture, what qualities weakened, and to exercise those forgotten sinews. To stumble toward a health of the soul, and tell about it.
I go out to play with Ceres, an old, limping, half-blind, mottled grey, white, and black Australian Shepherd who belongs to the owner and gets to live on the property. One of Ceres’s ears flops to the side, as if she is listening to sounds outside of herself with one ear, inside with the other.
She sees me search the brush, knows I am looking for a stick. Her bump of a tail wags furiously, her ears peak, her whole body quivers and snakes. I find a thick, sturdy stick, and whizz it across the grass. Ceres is off before it leaves my hand, bounds through fescue and poison oak, finds the stick, and waddles back.
Pretty soon the stick is a crumble of wood chips in her jaw. Only then does she remember me. I throw a second stick, this one part of a gnarly oak branch. Ceres returns with it, closer this time, a yard away. Hesitates. What is that look she gives me? Wariness? Apology? She chomps the stick, not seeing me anymore. This one will take longer to destroy, and it’s clear the game is over. I trundle back to my writing, to my own twisted stick, which I gnaw and gnaw.
The Garden
The geeks and mystics are feuding over the garden. Those with a practical bent are into maximum yields of veggies, using rows and measurements to achieve them. Those with an inclination toward spiritualism want to plant flowers and medicinal herbs in circles by the light of the moon.
I am sitting on the fence, good middle child that I am, trying to mediate: “What about curved rows? Maybe the new moon is this weekend. Should we split the garden?”
That’s what we do. One half becomes a spiral of sunflowers and rosemary, the other a veggie factory, a conveyor belt of beans, corn, potatoes. Together they nourish body and soul. Our yin-yang garden.
Impulsive people are, it seems, more likely to be outcasts—shadows lurking around the edges of society—crazy artists. Western culture values, requires order, efficiency, organization. But it is nonlinear folk who keep the spirit alive, honor mystery and the irrefutable bent of everything in the universe toward chaos.
It’s a daily struggle for artists to survive in the modern world. We forget stuff, change plans, get places late, fall in love. We are called flakey, spacey, irrational, and unreliable.
The differences among Siestans surface every once in awhile—with cooking, fire-building, and cleaning styles. Some work from the heart and others from the head, with the more spontaneous among us grating on the organizers. “Can’t you leave the cleaning supplies in the order you found them?”
“I like variety.”
“The schedule says you’re supposed to take out the garbage on Fridays, not when you feel like it.”
“Chill out, it’s not full yet.”
Clearly our community needs this diversity—those who follow directions, and others who improvise. If equally valued, these approaches complement. If disrespected, they polarize. I’m beginning to wonder if these styles represent profound attitudes toward the earth. Do we work in unpredictable harmony with it? Or introduce our own structures and timelines? Is it possible to do a little of both, like a musical score that deviates from its baseline rhythm, a blueprint fleshed out with surprising details, or a story, receptive to its audience, that changes in the telling?
In the meantime, steadied and enlivened by the forces of both sun and moon and surrounded by agents of each, we tug and give and surrender to the influence of both order and magic on the fabric we make of our lives.
Gratitude
Yoko’s at it again. Hoisting a camera the size of a mailbox in delicate hands, squatting beside pea blossoms, hovering at the utensil drawer, angling the camera along rain-streaked windows. Her face these days is a big lens surrounded by hair. You might be furrowing your brow over the newspaper and hear a click. Immortalized.
At first it’s disconcerting; then we join in. Scavenging for plant pots in the barn, Mick and I notice Yoko with camera poised. We huddle behind her and peer down onto the shadow-striated floor. “That is kind of cool,” Mick admits. We keep looking at whip marks of light on dusty planks long after Yoko has moved on to dented buckets, wondering that we never noticed them before.
The plethora of “goods” in our society can sometimes dull me to nuances of sky, hues in an apple, a friend’s handwriting. For presents these days, I give handmade gifts, services, or experiences—a knit hat, a massage, a nature walk.
At an eighth birthday party I watch my friend Gloria, a political refugee from Guatemala, wince as her daughter Maya tears the wrapping off gift after gift, discarding each as soon as it is open.
“When I was a girl,” Gloria says softly, “I would carefully unwrap my presents so not to tear the beautiful paper. I would keep it in a drawer to look at. How happy it made me!
“My daughter is never that happy.” Gloria flutters her hands like small ducks rising off a pond and resettling. “She is never satisfied! She always wants something newer, better, something she saw on TV. ...
“Yes, we are safer here, and healthier even, but we did lose something coming to this country. We lost contentment.
“Here, we are guaranteed the ‘pursuit’ of happiness. And you know what? I am tired of chasing it.”
August Beetle climbing the phone cord, waving long antennae in that comic bug look. Those faces that never change expression, cartoon eyes, and bodies too big for their legs. Then the frenetic buzz of a fly against the windows, zippering the glass to get out. Nothing in her genetic memory has prepared her for her inability to go there, to the place she sees before her, that branch, that bark.
Mortality
Yellowjackets crazed with appetite gorge on Raul’s half-eaten chicken leg, meticulously chaw off pieces bigger than themselves with their front mandibles, hover, and stagger off.
Maybe we fear insects because there are so many of them, because they will outlast us, because we can hardly see them, because we blithely do the most dastardly things to them, and because they are finally, in this feast of life and death, what eats us. A box elder bug struts across the picnic table like a bored buyer at a furniture sale.
Specimens
We study
the geometric messages
encoded on the back
of the box elder bug.
Hieroglyphics
carried on a cara
pace
black as a flake
of obsidian.
Like a magician
or a buddha, it holds
its big toenail of a body up
on a trivet of legs
thin as lashes.
And in absolute silence
on the maple leaf
one antenna
strokes the air, conducting
a private symphony or tuning
into our vibrations
listening back.
Insects here become a different presence—especially the hypnotic buzz of crickets. They sing by rubbing wings together, which is a bit like singing and clapping in the same motion, and listen to the vibrations through tympanums on their legs. Their chant reflects a collective soul, I believe, different from the individual chortles of birds, as if they are in a trance state ready to elevate into a higher incarnation.
Still, we are experiencing an outbreak of yellow jackets and I have yet to make peace with them. I’ve grown accustomed to poison oak, red leaves flagging the grass, how it clusters in constellations across my skin, stinging me to life—ferocious, unrelenting. Cause of the most common, and perhaps most ancient, allergy on earth, a quarter ounce of its urushiol oil is enough to give everyone on the planet a rash. Poison oak says, “See me if you want. My hands are red. Go on, ignore me. I’ll talk to you later.” I’m learning to accept the seeming inanity of its outbursts, as bail for my wanton wanderings. Those small itches and rashes needle me awake, remind me that I have skin, that I live in flesh. Anyway, it can’t chase me.
But the yellowjackets! Maybe it’s the sound they make, disturbing me in my meditations. They say, “Here, here, now here, turn, swat, worry, mind, be wary.” Late summer is yellowjacket time. The hotter and drier, the meaner they get. They’re dying and they’re pissed. Yellowjackets crawl over my food, into my mug of tea. They are invasive, pervasive, swirling in a frenzy of appetite, especially aggressive if they smell meat. It’s weird to think of insects as carnivorous, but these are, and if you kill one, it gives off an alarm scent that harkens the swarm.
All reason and Buddhist leanings aside, I roll up a newspaper. Aim and swat, aim and swat, aim and swat, circling, stalking, wondering at my own ferocity, the terrible match we make.
Carpenter ants inhabit Sara’s cabin, which Quin decides is no big deal. “Live and let live,” he says. “The carpenter ants have been gnawing on that cabin off and on for years. I’ve seen a lot of carpenter ants, and I’ve never seen a structure fall down because of them.”
Sara’s cabin is lovely and she doesn’t want to move. Her room hosts weavings and photos, quilts and candles, bright clothes and books, and windows to the surrounding woods.
Yet the ants chomp her roof and peek through the cracks, wings glistening in the moonlight, antennae curved and waving. On a bad night, she fears they will drop into her eyes and hair. She dreams of bones and dirt. In the brood chamber of her ceiling, ant larvae fatten in silken pupal cases, fed on grubs brought by infertile female workers. While she sleeps, as many as two thousand worker ants cooperatively chew up beams over her head and spit sawdust into their inscribed galleries. Sometimes, she can’t sleep. When Sara knocks on the ceiling, the ants reply with a rustling sound like cellophane crinkling.
I observe a roadkill raccoon along the road to Siesta Lane. One day it is suddenly there, whole and seemingly unharmed. In the next few weeks I follow its slow decay. A skeleton emerges from the grizzled fur, blood congeals, grubs set up house. At first I walk on the other side of the road, looking off into the trees or anywhere. But at last I kneel beside it, honoring its life, curious about its anatomy, sorry for its death.
This raccoon may have been the one that I saw “washing its hands” at a nearby pond. Later I learned that it was actually feeling its prey under the murky water, to sense what it was about to eat. Water increases the sensitivity of their paws. Paws that can lift lids, unscrew hinges, remove container seals. Now they were curled up and stiff, still eerily human.
On this homestead we have but a few illusions to string like tinsel onto the ramshackle scene. We can caulk the cracks and dress in silk, but the carpenter ants gnaw all night in the beams and yellowjackets pinch us awake. At least we are relieved of the effort to pretend that our skin is not sloughing off, that insects are not feasting on us and our houses, and that decay will not eventually chaw into pulp this home, our bodies, these fictions.
Circulation
I don’t remember owning anything as a child, or thinking that was a possibility. Sharing was right up there with eating and breathing. My parents had a modest income, seven kids, and huge school payments. A Catholic education, in their opinion, came before stuff. And Catholic training reinforced the idea that people are connected, that what happens to a prisoner across the world is our business. Later, I expanded the web to include nature. Eroded soil anywhere, I concluded, concerns me.
We shared rooms, baths, beds, and our parents’ laps. There were no names written on things. Games were kept in a closet, books on the shelf. All toys and clothes were passed along in one great communal river. In some ways we were one being, like those quaking aspen tree stands with identical DNA that share the same roots, considered to be one of the largest organisms in the world. To this day my mother can’t keep our names straight.
Although I moaned sometimes about wearing hats and coats that looked like Halloween costumes, and drinking powdered skim milk, I survived to tell about it. We were rarely sick and never cold or hungry. And for our fashion-deficient household, school uniforms were a godsend. The fifteen-year span between eldest and youngest wasn’t enough for things to come back in style. We finished everything on our plates and leftovers were efficiently wrapped in reusable containers.
Last year, when our parents finally ripped out the thirty-year-old shag carpet, it was an archaeology dig of our youth—crayons, marbles, buttons, rings. Vacuums, it seemed, hadn’t penetrated the depth of this neon green lawn on which we’d crawled, played cards, wrestled, and shed myriad skin cells. In every holiday photo, this acrylic foundation had underscored the pyramid of enlarging children in new combinations of the same old clothes. And though we’d groaned for years about how ugly it was, it had acquired what the Japanese call “the patina of human use,” and in a way we hated to see it go.
Not owning anything usurped power struggles over “stuff.” “Mine” may as well have been a foreign word in my family. Our identities weren’t wrapped up in what we had but who we were, what we did. Like cedar waxwings that line up along a mountain ash branch and carefully pass berries down the row, we took care of something for the next youngest, because it had been taken care of for us.
As nothing was discarded, there was a sense of abundance, and anyway, things gained significance as hand-me-downs. I remember being on tiptoe, eyes wide with worship, my tilted chin barely resting on the ping-pong table on which blue fabric was laid to cut, watching my older sister sew a dress for a dance. Later when I wore it, although too short and too loose in the chest, it was tangible proof that I had arrived somewhere. And passing it on meant I was still moving.
The times when I’ve felt more possessive and acquisitive have coincided with my periods of insecurity and struggle. We need, once in awhile, to cling to objects, infuse them with meaning and let them reflect us. But such a focus can become a quicksand and a stagnation. When life changes or natural disaster clears our lives, it is freeing to emerge, even unwillingly, from the clutch of possessions. To be more motion than material.
I’ve come to feel this way about the earth as well. To celebrate the fact that each atom in my body exploded from a star, that some molecule in every gulp of water has circulated through a dinosaur, watered a palm tree, evaporated off Sappho. It seems clear and even freeing that I am to borrow only what I need and caretake the rest for future people, bromes, and arthropods.
Altar
I wander the earthways near my cabin and instinctively gather mementos to
borrow: a heart-shaped stone, red fungal lips on a mossy twig, a swath of fox fur. I place these in my pockets and empty them onto a low wooden table at home beside shells and cones, seeds and dried flowers. People bring the outside in, it seems, to keep connected. Plants. Shells. Rocks. Flowers. Natural items decorate our homes, and windows provide living pictures. Many of us have not grown fully accustomed to the sterility of life indoors.
Such collections predate science, and were crucial to our survival. Early humans must have gathered plants and experimented with their use for food and medicine, finding that chewing on willow bark helped with pain, juniper berries staved off colds, rose hips cured scurvy. Although curious about practical applications, I’m prompted more by poetic possibilities, spiritual nourishment, and a naturalist’s curiosity.
Throughout the week I pause over my collection, appreciating the new arrangements of color and texture. Small tokens feed me intimately, in a way landscape can’t. As if nature is too much, sometimes, to be in. Here I absorb a bit at a time, giving clear attention to a flicker feather or wasp gall, without distraction from a passing hawk.
Some nights I turn off the lights, sit on the floor, and meditate. Candle glow sweeps fiddleheads and dragonfly casings. In the night’s trough of silence, my “found” tarot suggests nuances of the human experience: transience, hope, vitality, death. Breath slows. Spirit fills.
In a past era I might have been killed for this activity. Women and nature, especially, add up to a powerful combination. Female knowledge of and connection to the earth have threatened male authority for centuries. Maybe men were jealous and frightened of women’s ability to pop human beings right out of our bodies. Whatever the seeming threat, during the European witch hunts of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, thousands of women were burned at the stake for less. For providing an herbal remedy to a laboring woman, maybe (who was expected to suffer in payment for Eve’s sin), or for daring to walk alone at night. Burned. At the stake.
