Water + Carbon + Air + Sun, tensed like a bow against the wind, waiting to be knocked loose by the deer of the sky.
Water + Carbon + Air + Sun, lying like wind on the face of the water.
Water + Carbon + Air + Sun, waiting to be carried on the face of the wind.
Water + Carbon + Air + Sun, aka Poplar Cotton, catching in splashing waves of green.
Out of a few simple elements, untold complexity and immeasurable delight. The word for that? Why, life.
We are the children of the sun.
I left the garden today, and all its lettuces, kale, spinach and dill, and went up to the water, where the birches rise out of the cedars and the wild roses.
The ducks were feeding on the blue damselflies and shrimp as clear and white as clouds.
The water showed the directionality of the sun, the coloured space that was blue from one angle, green from another, and from another all gravity and tension.
To my ancestors, there were languages: the language of birch, the language of cedar and the language of water, and sometimes they joined together and then there was song, or consciousness. My ancestors began there in that offering.
Being together with these languages, at the point of their meeting, was like reading cloud or reading the sea room for the weather coming from the north.
I am learning this language again. Poetry was once the tool for speaking it in human form. I learned this art in an old age of the world from a man who had gone to the old ages of the north of the world to find it.
It still is this art. It still is this age of the world. It is still this old earth. It is still this new.
It should not, however, be confused with literature or “communication,” as beautiful as they are. It can be spoken of alongside beauty, if by beauty we mean balance or organic or earthly form.
Speaking it as a garden is not a confusion. From high lakes like this, water leaves the sky and enters the streams and pipes that take it to my red orach, my oregano and my egyptian onions. They drink this. I feed on this, and not just physically.
From high lakes like this, light leaves the sky and enters my garden, too, in a form fitting of these heights. As I am this land, I am this water. It is not, you can see, what is normally called human. Of course it isn’t. This is the old knowledge. It is not humanism. That is a beautiful but far different thing.
To my ancestors, the cupped hands, or the skull, were raised in thanks and blessing. Skold! they said. They didn’t mean the skull, but the bowl it made that held the mind. They didn’t mean the hands, but the bowl — the old world was scale, or Schale, as they said (and say) in German — that held, that was the power of holding, lifting up and offering and that created them through this offering or lifting up.
This is the holding up and the offering, this language of birch and cedar and water. This is where mind becomes.
This is the garden.
Between eye and eye, and mind and mind, there is no distance. Hundreds of millions of years vanish.
No-one’s. The question is absurd. It’s not land.
It’s earth. One can ask for room, not ownership.
You can’t own Earth. She gives everyone room. 
A request for land is a request for social rights. These requests occur within societies that divide social respectability and power by dividing earth into rooms of social power called land. If your goal is to escape the constraints of such a society, claiming or buying land won’t do it. You will only continue the constraints in another form.
We do it, at best, in the hope of protecting the flow of life between earthly and human spheres in that place, so we can be a part of its flow. This is called life and all creatures need it. When that flow is capitalized, it becomes part of the system of privatization. It’s a tricky balance.
Surely, we can protect that flow together.
When you live on the earth, in the earth and with the earth, culture is shared between creatures, their spirits and their energies, in a relationship built of balancing energy flows, always to bring forces and creatures together into a mutually interactive patterns. In short, the cat tails below create a human culture …
… and humans who live with them and through them cultivate cat tails, in spirit, in ponds, lakes, marshes, rivers and ditches, and in words and concepts. When they don’t, you know they are not living in the earth, on the earth or with the earth but in one of the other layers of spirit built out of the complex environment of energies radiating from this planet.
Raven Thief
These relationships are universal. We are all on the path of the earth, as she seeks to find her way out of oppression and to flow, and to do so through us.
Earth is neither disprespected nor abandoned by those of her children who give themselves to her.
It is time to welcome all her children home. Only the cult of property stands in the way. Its dissolution is her claim on us. It is the claim we will learn to return.
She gives energy away, always. We must give it away, too.
We are not alone in this work.
Here where the glaciers ground each other to a halt and ate down into the earth instead, the Apex volcanic complex meets the North Cascades.
After so many millions of years, they’re still talking it out.
A male and three female American goldfinches stopped by the other day. The females had a go at the red orach, this lovely salad amaranth.
But who am I to complain? They seeded them by eating off the two metre-tall stalks in the fall as they passed south!
Those are for the bees, More important, is the ovary within its frilly, protective leaf, and the stamens attached to it. As you can see, they’re very much alive.
It’s not the petals that make a flower!
… is an apricot blossom. Look at the invisible sun cupped within those petals!
Too bad it was opium traders who brought them to England from China and sold them as “fruit” trees instead of sun lenses! But that’s the English for you. Practical, right. Even when jam is beside the point!
She’s a lovely one, Apricot.
She lures me. I have a body that is eager to be lured.
The blossoms are so pretty and smell so sweet. Finding fruit, and caring for it, is a task not done all at once.
It’s not that I am the domesticated one, or that Apricot is. We are in this together.
Well, plus Mme. Robin.
Yes.
