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.
In 1847, it was the Cayuse on the ridgeline, with the lightning flaring from their appaloosa’s eyes and their water monsters painted on their bodies, and early American settlers on the flats below.
These grazing patterns continue today in the Walla Walla Valley, where my country stepped into history with a rifle shot.
How do we save the planet? By planting rocks in our gardens to “prevent global warming?” Isn’t that murder?
Or by planting rhubarb?
The second garden is mine, across the road from the firs, which is the global warming it is trying to invent. It is amazing what a country addicted to oil will think of next. Actually, we don’t save the planet. We ask it to save us. Then we listen. I planted this salad one day between snow storms a month ago.
How do we save the planet? By planting rocks in our gardens to “prevent global warming?” Isn’t that murder?
Or by planting rhubarb?
The second garden is mine, across the road from the firs, which is the global warming it is trying to invent. It is amazing what a country addicted to oil will think of next. Actually, we don’t save the planet. We ask it to save us. Then we listen. I planted this salad one day between snow storms a month ago.
Some things are sobering. Here’s a cold frame (a glassed-in seedbed, for early growing) from 1978, updated for the new Okanagan in the age of vineyardization. Before 1978, this was an orchard, that supported a family and grew apples, peaches, cherries and plums. After 1978, it became a place where people could raise that food for their families themselves. As people turn away from the land today, hire Mexicans on special temporary permits to do “their” agricultural labour (actually, the produce is for export, a series of capital-intensive cash crops; the produce locally eaten comes from California and Mexico), and pressure the water system with overpopulation (yet blame the water deficit on global warming) while continuing to extol the fruitfulness of the land (heavily-taxed wine, affordable only to tourists and the wealthy), gardens transform into a new image of society. 
A couple things to notice: the black cloth is intended to allow water through but to prevent weeds (or life of any kind). It has been augmented by some rocks, likely formerly a decorative garden wall, to keep it down, and has been growing some cheatgrass (like the green stuff in the foreground) in the fir needles (the tree is an important local hawk perch) that the stones have gathered. The yard is decorated with a pre-fabricated aluminum garden shed. The yard next door, which has replaced its garden with a small, decorative patch of lawn amidst a vast swath of rocks and gravel (because of that global warming, but also because yards are now large barbecue entertainment areas, not spaces for gardens, i.e. they are now interior spaces), has collected un-needed garden equipment behind its new (large) garden shed, which mustn’t be for garden tools. It’s likely for general storage. Welcome to Canada in 2017. It took us some work to create this, but we managed in the end.
Here in the depressurized zone east of the Coast Mountains, they will soon be absorbed back into the air.
They have only alighted for a moment on these cottonwoods, like birds.
It is commonly said that water reflects light. It’s a great observation.
However, water also gives light a place to reveal itself. That is an older observation, but no less lucid.
During this process, water reveals itself as the hidden body behind the light. This organic twinning is what is called nature.
It is the earth speaking. Human bodies fit into it in the same way.
Every red osier dogwood is a placenta.
It streams with blood into the sky …
… or it catches the sky, and brings it to you.
Traditionally in this country it was used to control pregnancy and to stop bleeding after childbirth. That’s quite likely because it catches the seeds from these cattails, which are male (top) and female (below) flowers in one.
It holds them in the air for a later time, or dries them out, rather than allowing them to enter water …
… and carry the sun into it.
It stands apart from the two worlds.
It is at balance with earth and sky.
It is a screen of nerves, or blood, in the Earth’s mind, or body.
They are the same thing, and so are you: the one that is two, and still one, and still many.
This is the blood.
The red sea in your veins is no different. Rather than a metaphor, like this…
“The red of the dogwood is like the red of my blood, and the patterns of it are like the arteries in my eye.”
… there is this instead:
The complexities of the world are written here. We may read them, with minds built out of this same blood. If put in words, they might be reducible to something like this:
Blood flows through the dogwood and my eye, my heart, and my hand.
Ah, the heart, dear thing. Sure, it’s in the chest, but it’s also here, simultaneously:
Red Hill, John Day
It’s good to remember, of course, that this blood is also the screen of nerves in the mind. Perhaps you can see the thoughts collecting on neural points of gravity and tension below?
That is also blood. This is sacred medicine. It is not a metaphor, and it is not a unity broken apart into body and mind, earth and sky, thought and feeling, or anything else. It is as unified as light. Our ancestors didn’t learn to read the world by trial and error. They lived it.
Perhaps you see how words direct our thoughts away from our knowledge? It’s not that
it’s as unified as light.
Rather, dogwood and light are one.
More clearly: dogwood, light, blood, mind, water, heart, birth, water, conception and life are one.
In this form, in this holding up, the sun speaks. It becomes offering. Well, it was all along, but we reach out to it, we respond to the sun’s hand with our own.
There is no end to the listening, which is the mirror of the speech. Yes, the hand listens.
Yes, the hand teaches, and speaks. Yes, the mind is a hand.
Yes, the hand is a mind.
Road shoulders are for living.
Watch where you park that Ford!
