She doesn’t know spring, summer or fall, drought or rain. She just knows the flow within twigs.
Her connection with the earth is that sure and self-contained.
Big Sage Doesn’t Know Autumn
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Grass Catching the Sun
This is how to walk through the face of the sun.
Pretty great, eh! NASA, sorry guys, but we’re already there.
One Sky or Another
Or two at once.
Hello from down at the bottom of the pool. Anyway you shake it, we are trout looking up.
Midsummer Autumn
Celebrate the season!
It’s a colour palette for rejoicing.
Art without four seasons. Life without four seasons. Life with dozens, often two at the same time, passing through each other like clouds!
What a beautiful dance.
The Centre of the Earth
The cinder cone is gone, but the bones of the land remain.
This is my city, Vernon, viewed from its northeast rim. In the center left of the image is the old cinder cone that anchored the ridge coming into the center of the image from the right. The high points on that ridge are broken chunks of old seabed, lifted in tilted slabs into the sky by a thrust of hot, or even molten, rock coming in from the direction of Terrace Mountain in the distance. The deep Okanagan Fault, and today’s Okanagan Lake, runs through the centre of the image, in front of the blue ridges. Crazy geology! Folds upon folds of the land are here, and in their centre, the volcano around which they pivoted. There, all this pressure of collision was released into energy, expressed as clinker and ash, which the glaciers took away. Want to stand in the middle of the earth? It’s an easy climb.
It’s right there. Up you go. Oh, but first, remember, this earth has many centres. The one below is only five kilometres away, and part of the Turtle Mountain story.
As you move from centre to centre, you are still there. That is one of the lessons the earth teaches.
Of Fur Coats and Google: Okanagan Style
Either this …
… or Google’s algorhythmic reductions.
Both are images of the human mind frozen in time.
California Quail in the Rainforest
The ancient salmon forests of the Pacific Coast were felled long ago. Well, most of them.
Hoh
Some of the lost ones went to houses in Vancouver and Seattle. People still live in their bones. Others, though, still stand.
Ozette
Others, with long grains of clear cedar, which might have been used for fine cabinets and ceremonial screens, were turned into fenceposts, to herd humans and cattle and to hold grapes up to the sun to create jug wines, but that’s all in the past now. Now, the quail come.
Hooo- HooOOOOoooo! Don’t our forests have new life now!
The Beautiful Angles of the Grassland, or Baby, We Love You for More than Your Curves
Those of us who talk about grasslands, talk about their rounded curves a lot.
Hey, Glaciers, thanks for that.
This is a land held in tension against wind and light, using opposition to it to create tension, which is then harvested in spring growth …
…or the dispersal of seeds.
But this is summer now. It’s the time for of the most beautiful angles. In this landscape of wind off the distant Pacific, mountain ranges away …
… ranges of glacially-cut, angular, uplifted-peaks of ancient, fractured continental collisions…
… arrow-leafed balsam root, swaying in the wind in spring…
…shifts in angles to the other plants nearby to catch the sun, and dries in place, like rain spread flat. This is rain lifted to a whole other plane of experience.
Move over, Picasso. You ain’t got nothing on this.
Okanagan Settlement Then and Now
Okanagan settlement, circa 1900. Nice.
Belgian Rubber Money goes a long way.
Okanagan settlement, circa 2010. Just as romantic.
Global Petro Dollars go a long way!
It is a pretty process only in ruin.
People of the Wind
One after another,the grassland opens further. Something is ripening here.
It’s easy to share space if you are thin, and working on rhythms of opening and closing that intersect at the point at which one species needs water and another needs to release it.
It is the way a trout holds still in a flowing pool.
It helps to signal your presence.
Even petals can rise and fall in the rhythms of this pattern. Look how they are falling out in the bloom below in the opposite sequence from which they came in.
Going to seed in sequence helps. There are no clear seasons here.
It’s all one-after-the-other here. For humans, it’s all-at-once. That’s how a migratory, predatory species thinks through individuals that come together into groups by releasing its defenses and including the other within the self. That’s profound, but so is the grassland that thinks together. Every space that is closed opens.
This is water’s journey. It falls from the wind, opens into life, and then, when the wind is a closed space, opens again into the wind: opening after opening after opening opening openings.
Only a grassland thinks like this. Only water thinks this way here.
This is the spirit of a grassland. Here, and this is the big secret, humans can let down their boundaries and live in the sky as well, by extending the social group to these ends.
We are not just a predatory species. These grasslands are our ancient homes. Much has been forgotten, but much has been remembered, too. We are remembering it now as we put a close to the closings below.
