Blankets & Seats

recieved a gift from my friend and mother-in-law today: seats made from our 'grandfather pine' that fell in the snow storm last april. he was the companion pine to our grandmother pine, falling a year before her. i like that part of him will be staying with us, and in such a useful way. they are very simple: batting, covered by upholstery cloth that is tacked down onto the wood. they're the perfect height to sit comfortably, and they make our house more the kind of house i want it to be.


dusk sit. boy wrapped again in the sling and his nana's blanket, sleeping soundly. dog decided to sit by me almost the whole time. he grew chilly during the sit, shivering. cool night.

focused on listening and seeing during my sit tonight. doves cooed and whistled their wings a couple of times in a tree behind me. a couple of diminutive birds flew from the pine in the center of our yard to our apple. the smoke rose steadily and lustily from the pile of burnt branches. the cars went by. the dog snuffed about, and the grass he trod on sprang back up. the grass, grown thicker and bedecked in dandelions, gil-over-the-ground, and bluets since yesterday's rain, was pleasingly scraggly, like a horse's winter coat. peaceful sit.

before we got up to bring the dog to warm in the house, a peeper called out from our now-full frog pond. others immediately chimed in, as though they all had been sitting in readiness, wanting to chirp, but without quite enough confidence to start. how we keep our passions silent, when we may be surrounded by a chorus.

tonight i am having one of those times when i feel as though things are rather pointless. i'm living my life, going on, earning some money, paying bills, getting up in the morning and going to bed at night, interacting with my husband and our son, just going on and on. i have been in this place emotionally in the past, and a common thread is that in this state, i lack appreciation for what i have. it feels as though my life will go on exactly like this for eternity, so i have nothing to pay attention to or to be thankful for. i don't know what gets me into this state. but i do believe that prayer, giving thanks for and attending to all of the things and people around me, will nudge me back into awareness......my dog just threw up on the rug, reminding me of his near-attack of pancreatitis this weekend (he managed to eat a third of a stick of butter out of a grocery bag, and i managed to get him to throw most of it up). i'm now alert.

Smoke

rain today, so they burned the trees. all day, great plumes of smoke rose from the pile, enveloping both of the houses to our south throughout the day, but the wind kept it from ours. flames only appeared now and then. it burned in sections, and was never the mound of flames i had envisioned.

night sit.

rain. dark. put the boy in his sling and covered him with the blanket my mother made for him, resting it over his head like a hood, tucked down under his feet, all around him. intended to go to my sit spot, but strolled over to the brush pile on the way and stayed there. came as close as we could to the fire without stepping into the mud of the new road. the boy gazed at the smoke and the flames, transfixed, silent, for almost fifteen minutes.

it was so rich, standing there in the dark and the wind and the rain, hearing the pelt of raindrops on the earth, on the ribbon-edge of his blanket, the fire echoing the sound in its crackle, the smoke billowing out, forming infinite patterns as the wind caught and played with it, twisting and turning, making it rise and then spill down upon the living trees near it. sometimes is would turn back upon itself, then dissipate into clear darkness. dark pile of broken branches and roots, dark trees beyond, glowing orange flames, smoke, gray and white, dancing around it all.

from where we stood, i could only see one small area in flame. another burned on the far side of the pile; when the smoke danced down around it, it silhouetted the outline of the pile so that i could see how the branches protruded from the top, how the pile itself appeared woven of branches. it came to me suddenly that the burning brush pile was a sweat lodge: the area in flame was the low, arched entry. the smoke rising up, swirling around it, dancing up to the sky, was the prayers. the small flames that flickered here and there were the songs swelling from inside. the sparks rising were the laughter of the women, the joy and glee of the sacred space. i talked to my son about it, told him of the sacredness of the fire, the smoke, how they teach us.

Rivers

dusk sit alone.

cool, cloudy day. rain in evening.

several tiny waterfalls of rain fell from my pine, dripping from the low points of branches. i put my hand up to the trunk, and the water running down it was diverted into my sleeve, along my arm, my chest. it just kept pouring in, a river of cold rain under my clothing, like an underground stream running silently in the darkness.

the grass was that dusky-pale green it gets in a spring rain, drunk on water and covered in tiny droplets.

the needles of the pine clung to each other in the rain, the five-needled groups bound together, thick needles themselves, tree shaggy like a wet dog.

sound of rain crackling down on last year's blackberry stalks, spring peepers calling from a distance, robin shouting, doves - grandmother pine's doves? - cooing from a tree.

tomorrow they will burn the branches from our trees, piled so high. i've learned that the pine smoke isn't dangerous to us, just bad for chimneys because the creosote builds up. the woman at poison control center said that the oil burner in our basement is more dangerous to us than the burn will be, the fumes we breath every day more toxic.

Company

company this weekend, didn't set time aside to sit or write.

evening walk through the land tonight. haven't taken the time to sink into all of my senses in a while. thinking back over my past writings, i can see how it affects the quality of my observations.

still air, very moist, cool.

grass is growing long and green. walking out back tonight, the grass swishing under my feet, i was reminded of the sound horses make as they graze, the distinct and satisfying tear.

many birds singing tonight in the remaining trees.

as i was going outside tonight, a purple finch was perched in the top of the apple bough on our porch, singing and twittering away, happy as a clam. i've never heard a purple finch sing before. they used to visit our birdfeeder for a few minutes at a time, then retreat to the trees to sing.

my husband and i have recognized that because we have to look harder to see the birds at our feeder now, hidden as they are in the boughs on our porch, our eyes will probably be more able to pick them out in trees as we walk in the forest.

Branches

day sit.

a strong wind came through from the north.

the excavators arrived today. they tore the stumps out of the ground, pushed the topsoil into piles, mounded the branches up into an even higher pile that apparently will be burned next week, when it rains. none of us have ever heard of such a massive bonfire. i plan to be away with the little one during those days, to protect him from pine's toxic smoke.

walked about the land today, saw that amidst all the disturbed soil and roots, there remains, uncannily, a little island of green grass, where the daffodils i planted two years ago are standing.

we pulled some of the pruned branches from our apple up to our porch, along with two little saplings that were cut down, and began the process of fixing them to the corners for the birds to perch in when they come to our feeders, which now hang in the apple boughs. after we'd gotten two up, we went in the house to see how it looked, and watched the wind move through the branches. it was eerie; the branches, so fresh, moved just like living trees in the wind.

the pruned apple bough has buds on it. how long will they grow?

i was delighted to see little red squirrel visiting our porch today. i wonder when we will see our three-legged gray.

it was freeing to have all the destruction done, and to finally be able to start moving forward and healing all of us from it. like putting the branches up for the birds, a little space for them, new.

Stumps

afternoon sit.

the excavator came today and dug up most of the stumps of our trees. he also made piles of the remaining small branches along our yard. the land looks grotesque, mangled limbs with gauges in it and strips of bark peeled back, all heaped in messy mounds where before a forest stood. as he started to work down by the street, i pulled out some of the grandmother pine's branches to use for a debris hut later this summer. my husband and i also pulled out of the mess some saplings we'll attach to our porch, for the finches and chickadees to perch in when they come to our house for food.

the loss of the trees has offered the wind a playground, and the new, lusty presence of the wind here, combined with the windows being open today, helped me to hold, for a moment, an overhead image in my mind of the movements of air in our area. the cool little enclaves holding still down by the river, the warm areas of wind in motion over our yard, the hot little pockets within each of our rooms, with only the windows offering entrance and exit for the stuffy air.

more daffodils are out, and tonight there is a chirring frog chorus coming in through our open windows. only one or two peepers calling now.

last night, i saw somebody flittering about in the twilight and went outside, vainly hoping to hear the peeping of the woodcock's wings, but it was just a bat out for food.

we have had three swallows disputing control over our nesting box this year; i believe it's a pair versus one on its own - a male hoping to gain courtship offerings?

More Trees

morning sit.

woke up to the saws this morning. watched from our bedroom window as the birch that holds the bohemian and cedar waxwings every spring fell to the ground. went out with the boy and gave tobacco to the few trees remaining to be cut beside our house, thanking them for giving up their lives and their places on the earth so that our brother and sister can make their home and road. sat at my sit spot with the little boy and watched.

the pine that the fox slept under was already down, and the tall, dead pine that little red squirrel perched his apple on, eating it now and then on that low branch, was already down. i watched as they made their way towards our grandmother pine, the great big one who gave me an owl pellet when i first moved here and showed me that there is wildness all around. the one that the doves sleep in. the one that holds wildness about her, with trees and bushes growing all around her, the most inaccessible place in our yard for humans, so one of the most valuable places for the birds. they cut away, with quick, efficient swipes of the chainsaw, her lower, dead branches - the ones that make it so difficult to get up close to her trunk to touch her. they sawed off a thin trunk on one side. then the man spent some time working away at her trunk - the saw just buzzed and buzzed, and i knew he was sawing through her middle. his partner, working the machine that drags the trees away, came over after a few minutes, angled the tractor straight toward her trunk, and drove into her. her whole body, all of her massive trunks pointing up to the sky, all of her lovely branches open wide toward the sun - the ones that i wrote about back when i was first starting to sit, the explosion of life that they seemed to be - all of her just tipped slowly to the side, falling, falling, until she landed on the earth. the moment she fell, the man drove the tractor, chains rattling and struggling, up her trunks and onto the top of her. i couldn't see what he was accomplishing - perhaps cracking her trunks apart with the weight of the tractor - but it seemed such an insult, this beast of a machine to be scrambling up onto her body, with not even a moment of respect.

they continued on down toward the road, taking down saplings, tall pines, everything, everything. they cut down the little apple down by the road, and last was the pine with the chickadees' favorite branches for seed-cracking, the one that held our bird feeders.

the lumber truck made three runs today, stacked high with the bare bodies of the trees. on the second run, the trunks were all brown but for the long white trunk of the waxwings' birch, piled on the side closest to us. this is where our lumber comes from. this is how the wood for our hardwood floors, the studs in our walls, the casings around our windows was treated. we live in a shelter built of this cruelty, this disrespect. like prine: "they tortured the timber and stripped all the land. they dug for their coal 'till the land was forsaken, then they wrote it all down as 'the progress of man.'" we cry for the trees, but then we build houses of them, buy lumber without a second thought. i look at the little maple table beside me - how many trees are in it? how many birds perched in those trees? how many little plants depended on the ecosystem under those trees? how many squirrels included them in their arboreal highways? how many deer peered past them in the forest?

the land looks like a wasteland. so much character torn away. so many stories and histories obliterated. generations of plants and creatures who've found their homes on this land, destroyed or sent elsewhere, to make room for a road and a house.

it makes me reflect on natives watching the rainforests getting destroyed, people watching hopelessly as the basis of their cultures and livelihoods, the land they love, is altered forever. i know that people on the earth have lost far more than i did yesterday and today. i've only lived on this land for two and a half years, and my people are not from this land. how do people survive when it's their ancestral lands that are destroyed? how do native people continue on as their prayer grounds are desecrated, their people's gravesites looted or plowed under by developments? how do people in iraq, tibet, afghanistan keep going when their cultures and societies - the most fundamental things in life - are threatened? how do humans survive such horrors?

we planted a peach tree today with our son's placenta beneath it, a little prayer and thanksgiving to the earth. and yesterday i put our new little cherry tree in the ground, just three feet tall.

our first daffodils bloomed today, and the forsythia is in flower.

tonight, the peepers and other frogs call in neighbors' yards, asserting their place, their continuation on this land.