Sex By the Side of the Road

Yesterday brought a spattering of rain to our arid winter and for my oögamous neighbors, this incites a sexual frenzy. All along the roadside, as I took my walk last afternoon, there was the equivalent of heavy breathing. I tried to avert my eyes, but it’s such a lovely spectacle that I just couldn’t help sneaking a peek. I even took photos!

I’m referring, of course, to my neighbors the Bryophyta-Muscis, who are in a class by themselves when it comes to coupling. They are, you see, mosses, and their sperm is motile and can only swim to the large, non-motile eggs through the film of water that the heavens were kindly supplying. What’s more, the sperm are flagellated and are stimulated to wriggle in the direction of the female cells by secretions from the archegonium, or egg. One can but wonder what this mossy equivalent of Chanel #5 might smell like – or taste like, for that matter. Whatever its charms, it was working them by the roadside, yesterday evening. And consider how much moss there is  – on tree trunks, boulders, in sheets crawling along road banks; acres and acres of it!

The anatomy of the gonads of mosses reads like poetry: calyptra, operculum, peristome, columella, antheridia and archegonia, and could be mesmerizing set to a chant like We All Come From the Goddess. It would also be a great memory aid to botany students such as I once was at UC Santa Barbara, my freshman year. There, under the tutelage of brilliant Dr. Muller, who wrote the textbook I still cherish for its encyclopedic grasp of the plant world and its clear and well-labeled illustrations, I learned about a microscopic world that had fascinated me since childhood.

As a child, I was always wandering in the woods and packing home bits of this and that: a discarded deer antler; a bird nest; the seedpods of strange lilies, crystals or the feathers of birds. On my tenth birthday, my parents gave me a small magnifying glass with three different lenses that folded into a small, compact case and fit nicely into the pocket of my jeans. Now I could explore a still smaller and more diverse world that raised more questions than my amateur observations could answer. Why, for example, did the mosses suddenly erupt in fields of tiny, waving stalks with lantern-shaped ends? What was the meaning of the chalky cups that clustered, bluish and seductively moist, amidst the velvety green carpets?

 Now I know that from an early age I was voyeuristically present at the seasonal Bacchanalia of the mosses. Those tiny cups brimming with dewdrops were actually chalky with a powdery mass of spores. When the surroundings are moist, tiny teeth bend in and scoop out the spores; when the surroundings are dry, the teeth bend outwards, disseminating the spores to the winds. It’s the moss’s version of oral sex. Who knew? Certainly not my parents who, as good 1950s parents ought not, would never have mouthed the words oral sex in front of us kids even if threatened with the rack.

I fantasize that, to the mosses, the soughing of the storm wind through the pines is both a love song symphonic in its polyphonies and a clarion call to action. Sex happens fast on the side of the road and all those little velvet cushions of moss are whispering with pillow talk. 

As with the amorous dartings of birds in spring; the glad chorus of a summer frog pond; or the glistening fields of ripe grasses lying down beneath the autumn wind, winter has its procreative bonfire, too.  I lie in my monogamous bed, listening to the patter of the rain on the roof, thinking kindly thoughts of my oögamous neighbors, and I smile. It’s an orgy, out there!

Signs of Life:
Monty Python would clearly agree, as witness "Every Sperm Is Sacred," courtesy of my old friend Michael Mager: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pnAnhYtKjgo&feature=share

The Buzz On Buzzards

I’ve lived in Tuolumne County, on Big Hill, all the years of my life, minus a few years out for going off to the university for an education or to travel in Europe or Mexico. It’s a fine county, this, and a place that, no matter how many times I leave it -- or vow to leave it, on those days I’m perceiving it as a cultural ghetto – I’m always glad that I don’t, or that I do, but then return. And of the many fine things I could praise about Tuolumne County, one of the most poignant is the annual buzzard migration.

Not everyone maintains, as I do, a buzzard altar. It’s in a place up on the side of a mountain where buzzards go to roost and preen and where I go to gather their long, glossy, blue-black feathers. I gather a bunch of them in both hands, hold my arms out until the feathers catch the wind, and then swoop around in obvious buzzard envy, born of years of watching these huge birds loft themselves unflappingly over hills and valleys  on the merest puff of wind. A buzzard rising on a thermal to become a speck in the summer sky is a thing of wonder, to envy and emulate, if possible. I think Leonardo da Vinci may have had buzzard envy, too, when he drew up his first plans for manned flight.

Anyway, for years and years – as long as I can remember, really – the buzzards have been roosting in droves in this same spot. They gather, regurgitate, talk over their vacation plans, regurgitate some more, flap lazily up and look around for something dead to eat, eat, roost, regurgitate and preen. This is the buzzard’s life and it’s a good one. They are total pacifists. They don’t kill to eat. They don’t harm a soul. That’s got to be good for their karma.

Anyway, in the fall the buzzards begin to congregate in really impressive numbers, and they begin their training flights around the mountain in groups of 10 or 15, their huge black wings silently soaring, their wrinkled red necks stuck out, always on the lookout for roadkill. They are massing and practicing for the annual buzzard migration, that ultimately brings them out of the Sierra foothills and into Mexico, where they winter over, fornicating and drinking and regurgitating tequila. At least, that’s always been my fantasy about it.

Sooner or later, each fall, the day comes when the buzzards say adios and they all jump into the air and take flight. They pass over my house like a flight of bombers heading for the Normandy coast. They darken the sun like a huge, silent, black, glistening cloud.

I’m sad on this day. I’ll miss them while they’re gone for the several months of winter. So I go up on the mountain and collect the last feathers. With string, I hang bunches of these loose feathers in the trees, where they kite around crazily on the wind. Usually there’s a dead buzzard up there, too, who accommodatingly died before the big trip and is left for the ants to eat, all the major scavengers having left the area and buzzards, I assume, being too polite to eat their own. I drag these carcasses to the buzzard altar, an old stump now continually anointed by the flickering shadows of the pendant feathers. I say a little prayer that the flying feathers will remind their souls to fly again, to lift off and soar into whatever heaven buzzards pass over into.

Maybe that seems strange to you, but I feel that the natural world gets all too little attention from us humans, and the buzzards in particular get a bad rap. It’s my small way of saying thank you to creatures who do some of the dirty work for us, cleaning up the creatures that we, in our haste and carelessness, strike dead and leave in the road as if their little lives didn’t matter at all. In answering Hillman’s question, what does the soul want? I find that my soul, at least, wants to honor all of God’s creation; that this is part of the stewardship that was mandated to us, from the Beginniing.

So, to the unnamed woman who thinks I’m not a Christian: have you honored God’s buzzards lately?

Getting Smacked; Talking Smack

Okay. So I have to admit it: it disturbed me that some unknown person who clearly didn’t know me or my spiritual beliefs and practices at all, was talking smack about me in public, as reported in yesterday’s blog. While the soul loves gossip, it hates outright lies. So I started to wonder how this person came by this opinion of me, and to add up what I know about the weird things people have said and thought about me, over the years. As a writer, it’s always useful to keep track of things like this. You never know when some character might be called upon to carry my putative sins, like one of those goats in Biblical times who, laden with amulets depicting the sins of the community, was driven out into the desert to die.

So to start with, I had to admit to myself that there has been a persistent rumor over many decades that I am a witch. As I am not a witch, the persistence of this rumor, I surmise, is due to its juiciness. I mean, anyone can have an affair or borrow someone’s lawnmower and never return it or get a DUI. Gossip about things like that dies an early death. Apparently witchcraft still has roots deep in the primitive psyche, where fears of the uncanny and the powerful – especially if embodied in a female – still raise the guard hairs.

I may even have come by this reputation honestly, if undeservedly. It all stems from a morning when my first husband, he who shall be called The-Husband-From-Hell, had a particularly bad morning and was, even for him, unusually nasty-tempered and abusive. He left for work, and I sat down in a chair and imagined his route, every twist and turn of it, down into the river canyon, back up the other side, all the way to the Calaveras Cement plant where he was then working as a heavy equipment operator. I will not tell you what I was repeating, over and over, during my meditation, but I will report that, not more than an hour and a half after he had departed, my husband was home again. His shirt was half ripped off his back. He was covered in scuffs, scrapes and bruises. His hair was wiry with cement dust, his face was white with it, and he looked wild-eyed, like he’d seen the Devil himself.

“Dear me!” said I, with what was probably less than compassionate concern, “What happened to you?”

This is the story: he was in one of the huge, rotating cylinders where the cement was dried. Suddenly, a 100-pound hunk of dried cement broke from above him and smacked him right down to the floor. At the time, he had just bent forward to pick something up, and so the mass hit him right across the back and shoulders. If he’d been standing upright, it would have hit him on the head and even his thick skull would have been shattered like an egg.

He related all this to me from a wary distance. Then, after a significant pause, he said in what I can only describe as true awe, “You made this happen, didn’t you?”

Now, whether I did or did not is a matter for conjecture. I’m more inclined to think it was his Guardian Angel, giving him his morning dose of instant karma. Be that as it may, it was an object lesson for us both: I never again have used my imagination for anything but positive purposes and he gained a healthy respect for me that was much needed. And he also, I suspect, began the rumor that I was capable of such things that is still morphing its way through the populace.

The power of the human mind is great and I have, at times, tapped deeply into that power but, since that experience, only for purposes of healing, whether on the physical, mental or relational level. Does that make me a witch? Of course not. Does that set me up for rumors that I am? Of course! This is a small town. What else is there to talk about?

Well – maybe about my buzzard altar. More about that, tomorrow!

Soul Food: Sausage, Eggs and Gossip

I took a break from the morning blog posts yesterday and my husband and I went out to an early breakfast. We like to go to a little place in Columbia, a Gold Rush house transformed into a restaurant called Billy Whiskers. The house is owned by a old local family the matriarch of which was one of my mother’s best friends. My parents decorated the place for her when she decided to make the space commercial, so my father’s woodwork and my mother’s wallpaper and lace curtains are still there, despite the fact that all three are now gone. The business is owned by Karen, the daughter of one of the oldest families in Columbia, and her husband. He cooks, she waits tables and they both love to talk. And since she and I both grew up in Columbia, there’s plenty to talk about.

David and I were the sole customers that early in the morning, so while the coffee was being poured we all started right in chatting and we gossiped away, right through ordering, being served and eating. The delightful part of this gossip is that most of it is over 60 years old! Ancient scandals are resurrected, familial intermarriages and feuds reviewed and town characters remembered. It’s like working a jigsaw puzzle together – she fits in a piece, then I know another bit of the story and together, we sort out the Columbia of our mutual childhood.

Yesterday we reminisced about our dentist, the local version of Dr. Mengele, a portly man who, once he had us kids in the chair, would pin us there with his huge belly. Then he would bend over us, breathing like a bulldog in short gasps through his teeth, while he worked the ancient drill with a foot peddle. It would grind away with agonizing slowness and thoroughness and, since he believed that Novacaine was for sissies, we got to experience every turn of the drill bit maximally. This, he claimed, was to teach us to take better care of our teeth. I would go home with plum-colored and –sized bruises along my jaw, from the death grip he had had on me, and Karen swears that her teeth used to smoke from his ministrations! Both of us still suffer from the trauma and neither has ever been able to relax in a dental chair, since.

Other health notes included their former waitress whose femoral artery, after being pieced together for years with plastic tubing like an old water system, finally became so leaky that it had to be replaced. She called just before breakfast was served, to inform Karen that a cadaver artery is now in place and she’s recovering nicely. In an additional notes, I learned that my childhood mentor, Bill Taylor, ended his life in the county hospital in a room padded with old mattresses and that one of the boys pictured in a framed and faded newspaper photo of the elementary school baseball team of our youth had ended his life tragically in a fire.

Of course, the weather is always a topic, especially with the continued drought and the sighting of the first manzanitas already in bloom. Then we moved on to one of our elementary school bus drivers, a rough old cob who would doubtlessly be sued by irate parents, these days. I was able to add a new piece to his puzzle: my parents had heard rumors that he was a retired Mafia hit man. This lead to an hilarious stint by Karen’s husband, shouting in a perfect Tony Soprano voice, “Hey, you in the back! Sit down and shut up or I’ll break your legs.”

That’s small town breakfasting at its best: eggs and sausage served up with a salsa picante of tragedy, gore, salt and laughter. Hillman says that the soul loves gossip. It affirms our deep roots in community and keeps its web connected. It delights with interesting stories and reminds us that there is no such thing as privacy in a small town – or perhaps, on the planet. We know full well that, somewhere else in town, over some other breakfast table, we are the subject of the gossip. It’s a reminder, as my father used to say, to keep your nose clean.

For instance, my friend Pam just told me that she mentioned my name in her yoga class and some woman whose name she didn’t know exclaimed, “Suzan Still! Why, she’s not even a Christian!” What? Who says? Where did that puzzle piece come from? I think it’s from another jigsaw altogether and got into this box, by mistake! But there’s no rectifying it now. That rumor will go on and on and grow until, who knows, I’ll be accused of witchcraft or of using Communion wafers for casserole topping or who knows what. That’s life in a small town – everyone, willing or not, gives a piece of him- or herself to the salsa that anoints the soul.

A Brief Commercial Interruption

There will be a few more posts exploring Hillman’s crucial question, What does the soul want? But first, I want to offer another excerpt from my new novel, Fiesta of Smoke. In this snippet you are introduced to the first of three main protagonists, Calypso Searcy, the love interest of two fascinating men, Javier Carteña and an international newsman named Hill.

For those who might have missed them, a synopsis of Fiesta of Smoke can be found on the Thursday, January 5, 2012 post and the Prologue, on Sunday, January 8. I’m working hard on the final chapters of Fiesta of Smoke, which currently numbers 768 pages! I’ve just climbed out of the deep well in time that goes clear back to the Egypt of the pharaohs. Writing is always an act of discovery: the research for this portion has been very interesting and the characters, as is their wont, have been telling me that my ideas for the story weren’t nearly as fascinating as what they, themselves, experienced! So I’ve been listening very carefully to what they have to say, since they’re the ones who really know.

I hope you enjoy!

Paris: 1995

Calypso

Concentration keeps down the fear. She focuses on the tattoo of her orange snake pumps -- the heel striking minutely before the tap of the sole -- a rhythm difficult to maintain on the uneven cobbles of the quai. She manages it because she concentrates so fiercely. The full skirt of her yellow dress wraps into her legs and flows out behind her, as she faces into the afternoon river wind. Walking quickly and confidently, it is her intention to look both purposeful and carefree.

           

She can’t hear the following footfalls. In her peripheral vision she has seen the man as she hesitated, half-turned, before a shop window. He has dark hair under a fedora, a medium build, a gray, nondescript suit. She couldn’t make out features.

She first became aware of him when she turned away from the bustle of Rue Jacob into the tiny alleyway that cuts through toward the Seine. It is her habit when leaving the library at the Sorbonne to pass that way, coming out near Pont Neuf. She always enjoys standing in one of the rounded bays, mid-span, leaning on the ornate railing, seeing nothing after so many hours of reading but the glossy water flowing silently down toward the sea.

Because of the follower she has deviated from her accustomed route. She turns instead onto Quai des Augustins, with the Île de la Cité on her left, across the river channel. There are always police there, around the Palais de Justice, even this late in the day. She can cross by Pont St. Michel. . .

But she does not. She continues on down the quais, hyperalert to the presence of the stalker behind her. She has no plan, only the effortless calm she wears instinctually. She strides on, her yellow skirt billowing around her calves in the autumnal river wind, until she arrives at Pont Saint-Louis, finally having formulated a plan.

Calypso remembers the story of a friend who, while on safari in Africa, had been charged by a rhino while taking the morning air, completely unarmed. It is impossible to outrun a galloping rhino and there was no cover anywhere near. In desperation, he had defended himself with the unexpected -- he bent at the waist and observed his careening challenger upside-down, through his knees. This posture so confused the issue that the rhino had applied the brakes and bolted away in alarm. It is so improbable that she thinks it must have been true.         

She slows her stride as she steps onto Pont Saint-Louis, that homely old pedestrian bridge so startlingly banal here in the luscious heart of Paris, and strolls out to mid-span. Casually, she drops her bag onto the pavement by the railing and, slipping her fox jacket, afire in the late afternoon sun, from her shoulders, drops it onto her bag. Then, with studied calm and elegance born of many hours at the ballet barre, she turns to the railing and performs a perfect developpé.

. . . .

Web Light Symphonies

 . . . and yet, for those with eyes to see, her Web is everywhere, and she will offer wisdom with a still, small voice, carried in the breath of the wind.
--Threads of the SpiderWoman blog, 01.01.12

One of the things best-loved by the soul is beauty. Here is an example of a soul enraptured by it, written by my friend Gael Amend:

I was looking out the window at the sunlight along a single spider web strand. The web strand was in a tree connecting one branch to another. This web strand was swaying in the breeze and a bead of light was moving up and down it. This was seemingly random: some beads of light were wider, while others were a pinpoint. I was mesmerized and thought, "what if this web strand, sun light and breeze were like instruments, and these instruments all came together to play a beautiful melody?" I wondered for what ears was it playing and whose ears could hear is marvelous symphony? Maybe it can be heard, silently, into our souls, into our hearts and out into the universe.

May your soul be immersed in the beauty of the moment, today.

Trouble and the Soul's Purposes

Life is trouble! Only death is not. To be alive is to undo your belt and look for trouble!
--Zorba the Greek

How does trouble serve the purposes of the soul? How can it be that what the ego hates to endure is so often what feeds the soul? Is it possible that the most difficult people, the most straitened circumstances, the longest hauls are really our greatest teachers? (And how rarely we give them credit or show them gratitude!)

Just for today, consider your greatest trouble, past or present, from the soul's perspective. Did you go to war to kill or be killed, only to find your own humanity? Suffer a terrible loss only to find your heart opened more fully to love? Endure a difficult relationship in order to discover that it built in you a sound set of personal boundaries? Stand up for a principle or person (including yourself) even though it cost you a job or a friendship?

  In order that we do not feel ourselves victimized by life's pains, it's important to consider the growth into insight, compassion, ethical strength or moral character that trouble brings. Trouble serves the soul.