Welcome to Wildfrolics

Magical meanderings of forest, desert, and shore,
with Superball the Storyteller


A sunlit, wooden bridge over a creek, with an open gateway at each end—the distant one also arched over by green foliage—leading to open, wild-looking land of mixed vegetation and trees

Adventures begin below. . . .


BUT FIRST:

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The Frolics

The healing of this planet is not a matter of humanity stepping out, creating a separate human realm, and leaving nature untouched. It will not come through minimizing our impact; it will come through changing the nature of our impact. It will come through a different kind of participation with nature, one where humanity returns to being an extension of, and not an exception to, ecology.

—Charles Eisenstein, Climate: A New Story

Lion in the Garden

12 December 2024

The season’s upon us.


A large dead black wasp, with a human pointer-finger included for scale, wedged among dead leaves and redwood fronds in a corner of some construct of gray metal and plastic

Gardens come with you, and also wait for you on your return. But they are different when you arrive, and so are you. They teach you that growth will always mean change, and that death will always mean life in other forms.

—Rhyd Wildermuth, “Gardens Come with You”


A panther cap among grasses and mosses

They teach you not to hold too tightly to what was, and not to fear what comes next, . . .

—Rhyd Wildermuth, “Gardens Come with You”


A forest spirit in the form of a huge boulder covered with mosses and ferns like fur and hair, beyond a mossy fallen trunk with a relatively small, bare rock on it

The spirits dwelling in a garden do not lie, but they do not tell the truth in ways that humans tell. They whisper voiceless to the body, and to the sleeping soul. They do not push, nor do they argue, but they also will not stay silent against what they see.

—Rhyd Wildermuth, “Gardens Come with You”


A village of mushrooms among scraggly clumps of grass

Most of all, and I cannot explain this well, the plants knew. They knew I was not in a good place, and nor were they. They lived, but with no more vigor or joy than mine. And there was not much joy in me, nor much vigor. I watered them, and tended them, but they never did any better than I did.

They were telling me what I already knew but couldn’t yet hear.

—Rhyd Wildermuth, “Gardens Come with You”


A firepit of cinderblocks, bricks, and stones, surrounded by greenery, empty of all but black and bluish-white ash

Then, “negotiation,” a phase where the suspended interregnum of place and identity causes reality to clamp down and cultural barriers to arise, is described well by the Spanish language term zozobra, an anxious inability to be at home in the world. . . . This phase also produces demoralisation, a psycho-spiritual crisis associated with the breakdown of one’s cognitive map, where the assumptions that grounded you before lose all credibility, leaving you utterly confused.

—Jessica Buchleitner, “Return of the Descendants”

A sense of gloom weighs even upon beautiful surroundings.



In tepid light, a sprig of whitish-blue forget-me-nots peeking around the corner of an outdoor easy-chair, from the perspective of a human whose bare foot rests on the chair’s bare-foam cushion

What else is there to do? So slowly, one handful of dirt at a time, we plant, we feebly attempt to heal our own little broken worlds.

The things that happen in our lives, my friends, may be horrific. Unimaginably dark. But then, things settle; there is compost.

—Amanda Palmer, “Happy Friday Night, All. Say Hello, and Grow, Grow, Grow.”


On a small outdoor table, in a brown bottle that’s in front of a green bottle and among six smooth round stones and two kerosene candles, a tall balm-of-Gilead cutting culminating in green, flowerlike bursts, casting a shadow on dark-gray siding, under the round shadow—like a dark moon—of a windchime’s clapper

What do we know of flowers? Of their wiliness and brilliance born of a ferocious will to live? Of their ability to extract what they need to survive over their fleeting lives, only so it can be given away?

—Richard J. Nevle, The Paradise Notebooks


A native blackberry vine arcing in sunlight above a rusted old woodstove on which sits a clay pot containing sticks, a tiny old cobwebbed birdhouse, and a metal rod topped with a metal bee—beyond all of which, in shadow, is a Door to the Underland, leading into a hillside

But since I’ve never had a taste for unhappiness, I decided it wouldn’t last. Unhappiness has to stop someday.

—Valérie Perrin, Fresh Water for Flowers


The same scene, with the bee now reflecting sunlight like an apian moon and with the Door to the Underland seeming to have a slight blue-white glow

“Life is like a relay race, Violette. You pass the baton to someone, who takes it and passes it to someone else. I passed it to you, and one day you will pass it on.”

“But I’m alone in the world.”

“No, I’m here, and there will be someone else after me. . . .”

—Valérie Perrin, Fresh Water for Flowers


The Gibbous Moon at dusk, centered in a dip among redwood branches

A garden is a gathering of spirits, of old friends and new, of allies and companions.

—Rhyd Wildermuth, “Gardens Come with You”


A columbine flower like a red star among big, mossy stones on the bank of a pristine mountain creek

They are great, thronging crowds of voices whispering, cajoling, and summoning you to the life you summon for them.

—Rhyd Wildermuth, “Gardens Come with You”


A swordfern with five predominant fronds spread like an open right hand, which has a constellation of columbine blooms beside and beyond it, like pinkish-red sparkles of magic emitting from the fingers

This garden is my fifth, but the more I tend this one, the more I see it not as a new one, but merely a continuation of all the others.

—Rhyd Wildermuth, “Gardens Come with You”


A bleeding-heart with pale lavender flowers, peeking around a mossy trunk toward a host of other bleeding-hearts in a sea of green leaves

They continue like we continue, they—like we—die back and live again.

—Rhyd Wildermuth, “Gardens Come with You”


A joyous clear, pale blue, and white creek cavorting among mossy boulders and a rock wall, framed by greenery in a riot of shades and sizes

And when you leave a garden, they come with you, long trains of spirits singing and laughing as you lead them across the earth to their new home.

—Rhyd Wildermuth, “Gardens Come with You”


Just when you thought someone was dead: a branch of brilliant green Solomon’s seal with a row of dangling green-white flowers, arching from a pot over a folding lawn chair in a forest clearing

This was the dream that Wally told me:
I was in the tunnel, he said,

and there really was a light at the end,
and a great being standing in the light.

—Mark Doty, “Atlantis”

Then a caterpillar comes out of my sleeve.


Tiny, emerging from the loose cuff of a sweatshirt into sunlight

November watches as Sei reaches into her kimono and draws out an enormous, waterlogged book. She opens it at a seaweed bookmark and begins to read.

—Catherynne M. Valente, Palimpsest

Make a wish.


An eyebrow hair—the thick end dark, the tapered end light, in a similar orientation to the Solomon’s seal in the photo above—held up on a fingertip over a page of a book with the following words showing: me, fitted stone, below stretched, sea, rest that drew, and olive, the green, shook, my life, shore, and I felt the sudden, a pond

“. . . I read a book, and I think it had my future written in it. But I am afraid. And I am so tired. . . .”

—Catherynne M. Valente, Palimpsest

I thought I would have things figured out by now, but flashes of clarity come when they come.



A potted rock rose with a single, paper-thin white bloom at the end of one of two long stalks, straining over a profusion of greenery toward sunlight

Gardens soak up sadness like rain, shine back joy in their blooming. They remind that life is more than what you have, and much, much less than what you fear.

—Rhyd Wildermuth, “Gardens Come with You”


The bloom seen from just to one side, shining as if with its own inner light, a yellow sun with five magenta rays within a white moon

. . . You have to learn sometime, and gardens are very patient teachers.

—Rhyd Wildermuth, “Gardens Come with You”


The bloom face on, very close up, filling most of the frame

Under my care it grew fast and happy, and under its care I learned to see past all the misery around us.

—Rhyd Wildermuth, “Gardens Come with You”


With grass growing in cracks, a paved path on a steep green hillside, terminating at an open, rectangular chunk of fence that appears to have nothing beyond but wide-open, sunlit sea

“. . . We will come and get you, if you cannot come to us, and carry you into the sun. I promise.”

—Catherynne M. Valente, Palimpsest


A trail leading through green grass to a square opening—similar to the one above—in a weathered gray picket fence, beyond which is a constellation of calla lilies and a weathered building almost out of frame and obscured by a hydrangea bush

Raven calls for our attention (and in fact is also calling to the me who writes this).



Two ravens in blue sky in the distance, over assorted trees and other greenery, with one tall, many-trunked tree particularly prominent

Although stunned and hungry, many sang, because it would have been pointless to aggravate misfortune by complaining.

—Isabel Allende, Eva Luna

Let’s go for a walk, shall we?



A raven—who you could swear has a demeanor of invitation—perched on a wooden fencepost by a wooden gate on a grassy green hillside, with the roof of a house showing just beyond


The raven appearing to lead the way up the trail beyond the gate


The raven a little farther along but closer, as we have gone through the gate and are following

. . . The inviolability of one soul can keep the whole of hell outside the gates of the city she chooses as her own.

—Catherynne M. Valente, Palimpsest


A city of flowers like pink puffballs on the tops of long, bare stalks, partially obscuring a natural, squarish shape beyond, with one flower very close and out of focus in the foreground, like an inquiring representative

I have things to show you.



The cracked asphalt path shown before, curving like a river toward the sea, with a vertical ray of sunlight pointing at it

Lock 19, where the Albumen dips downstream, following a course toward the center of the city, is normally staffed by a bored old mariner, picking his teeth with baleen and writing secret shanties about the beauty of land, the tilling of soil, the baking of bread.

—Catherynne M. Valente, Palimpsest


The the calla lilies from before, closer to the structure, which is revealed to be an empty, dilapidated seaside shack with grasses growing on it

Having lived and worked in New York City for half a century—a city “sometimes made bearable . . . only by its gardens”—Sacks recounts witnessing nature’s tonic effects on his neurologically impaired patients: A man with Tourette’s syndrome, afflicted by severe verbal and gestural tics in the urban environment, grows completely symptom-free while hiking in the desert; an elderly woman with Parkinson’s disease, who often finds herself frozen elsewhere, can not only easily initiate movement in the garden but takes to climbing up and down the rocks unaided; several people with advanced dementia and Alzheimer’s disease, who can’t recall how to perform basic operations of civilization like tying their shoes, suddenly know exactly what to do when handed seedlings and placed before a flower bed.

—Maria Popova, “The Healing Power of Gardens: Oliver Sacks on the Psychological and Physiological Consolations of Nature”


An avenue of young redwood trunks like pillars lining the way to an older oak, as to a monarch in a throne room


A closeup of the oak, whose branches stream out like a multitude of arms offering benediction or a hug, and who has a small spray of green leaves, lit by a single ray of sunlight, in the high center of the trunk


A raven on a bare, treetop branch against blue sky, seen through an opening in the tree’s foliage, as though watching over the situation

There’s a redwood grove I know, where Natives will be dancing.



The trunk of a massive redwood with limbs radiating from it as from the body of a whirling dancer or a thousand-legged spider

Of course we proceed—or I do, at least.

We usually have a choice.


I shook his hand with the vague sensation of having met him before.

—Isabel Allende, Eva Luna

Soon, with not even a hint of a breeze, a big branch crashes down in the middle distance.


Not this one, but it gives you the idea: a huge, freshly fallen bay laurel branch, with a smaller branch bent from it like a crumpled arm

(In fact a big branch fell—without a breeze, right after a raven’s call—from a redwood before I sat down to write just now.)


The gaping hole in the colossal tree from which the branch fell

As we near the Forest Theater, a stick falls right next to us.


A luminous dead bluish-white moth on a wide dusty woodland trail near deer hoofprints and a stick, with the dust color echoing that of the chair cushion in the photo above, and the moth reminiscent of the white foot and the forget-me-nots

At last, I felt the shade close over me, and I curled up on the moss. It had rained a little, and the damp earth was sweet against me. So many times I had imagined lying there with Glaucos, but whatever tears might have been in me for that lost dream had been parched away.

—Madeline Miller, Circe

Just before the dance, a little piece of redwood frond alights in the center of my hairline. As the dance is underway, a tiny flake of a bud’s coating settles in the center of my chest.

So it’s a progression from distant and alarming to intimate and gentle.



In a shallow woodland pool through which rays of sunlight filter to the quiet silt bottom, a reflection of tall trees in a sky the blue of forget-me-nots and of white moths in shadow

The quality of attention we pay something or someone is the measure of our love. . . . We are learning that all around and within this world there is another, numinous and resinous with wonder, shimmering with a sense of the miraculous.

—Maria Popova, “The Paradise Notebooks: A Poet and a Geologist’s Love Letter to Life Lensed Through a Mountain”

Raven magic, though tricksy, can be affectionate.



A raven flying over a river by a little open-air bar where a two-person band is playing


The raven closer up, high in the center of nothing but blue sky


Two ravens cavorting high above green treetops

He scanned the sea, however, with such determination that he plumbed the depths of his sadness and finally depleted it.

—Isabel Allende, Eva Luna


A speck of raven in an open blue sky over deep blue ocean and wide green hills

. . . Trust in our luck that we are here on earth at all, that we have this moment at all. . . . In the long run, the revelation of beauty is not a matter of chance: it is the centermost surety in life.

. . . We might, for a brief spell of years, have the luck to find a home here by following the beauty that beckons us.

—Steven Nightingale, The Paradise Notebooks


A lucky green grasshopper on the dust of a pebbly trail, ready to jump


A narrow, forking fairytale trail past a thistle through an expanse of beautiful but invasive ice plant with white flowers, toward a rock formation like a miniature gray mountain


With the ocean to the left in the distance, a raven flying over huge, rock-dotted green hills as if leading toward a snaking road up the farthest hill


A couple of distant white-and-black human-shaped specks trekking one after the other up a steep green hillside

Externally he was stone, but as the months went by something elemental inside him softened, opened, and something budded. The first symptom was compassion, an emotion unknown to him, something he had never received or had occasion to practice. Something was growing beneath the hardness and silence, something akin to a boundless affection for others, something that surprised him more than any of the changes he had undergone.

—Isabel Allende, Eva Luna


A large, egglike stone in the sunlit sand of a cave mouth

. . . I liked it, as if his words were a secret. A thing that looked like a stone, but inside was a seed.

—Madeline Miller, Circe


In late-afternoon sunlight, a square, solid, four-story stone or brick building of the sort favored by government offices, with a drooping United States flag on top, above which are large and small bubbles flying through the air (about to pop), and with an unlit streetlamp below, which has another bubble under it

Sound of volleyballs thrashing against nets. Laughter. Watching the tar balls tremble as he walks home. The oil harmless if left in the ground but poison up here, if you put something where it doesn’t belong it dies or it kills or both. Not its fault.

—Maryse Meijer, The Seventh Mansion


A wobbly bubble rising alongside tall dark conifers


A broken-open eggshell on a scatter of smooth rocks, sand, sticks, and leaves


The ashen firepit from before, now shown with the Sun beaming rays down through the trees as if in blessing or as if having hatched from a bubble or the egg or the ashes, casting a faint rainbow lens-flare


A cluster of redwoods whose hundreds of arms reach with rays of sunlight toward a sapling and a human, the latter of whom is the same height as the sapling and is gazing upward, as if toward a cathedral’s stained-glass window


On a beach, a small fort of stones and twisted driftwood sticks, with the human beyond, leaning over to examine something in the sand

“And what is in that shell? A snail?”

“Nothing,” I said. “Air.”

“Those are not the same,” he said. “Nothing is empty void, while air is what fills all else. It is breath and life and spirit, the words we speak.”

—Madeline Miller, Circe


In a green meadow, a tiny cabin with a rusting tin roof, seen between two of multiple trunks of a small, bushlike tree—as if the stone fort in the previous photo has become the cabin, and the driftwood sticks have become the tree

Also the orange orchidlike creatures are beginning to bloom after sudden precipitation and the greening, so sudden. Almost instantaneous.

—Facet 44, in a text to me (shared with permission, as are all quotes from Facet)


An orange-red paintbrush flower and a whitish-blue pussy-ear flower soaking in the sun next to each other at the edge of a rock in an open, grassy area with a conifer beyond


On a big rock in a blue-gray sea under a blue-gray sky, sea lions with heads curved around—looking in all directions as if not sure where the Sun is—and other sea lions out in the water, practicing thermoregulation, with heads poking up like blades of grass or shark fins

And the people said, Come with us,

we’re going dancing. And they seemed so glad
to be going, and so glad to have me

join them, but I said,
I’m not ready yet. I didn’t know what to do,

—Mark Doty, “Atlantis”


One sea lion swimming close to the base of the rock, perhaps wanting to join the ones on the rock but unsure how


A little girl in a fuzzy pink jacket, standing enrapt in a spot of sunlight, watching middle-aged women gyrate at the edge of a small crowd gathered at a stage where a band is playing


The sea lions at the edge of the rock, still looking around as if trying to figure something out

The wind picks up too much—rushes. A snag says, Turn back. It’s not time yet. Old parts of you must die a little more, if you’re to know that dragon’s flame.


At a headland over an oceanscape, a three-armed snag with the main arm pointing left

Look at me, beloved. You are not imagining it. It is imagining you. . . . Whatever you see when you turn will ravish you, destroy you.

—Maryse Meijer, The Seventh Mansion


At the same general location, a fallen, twisted dead tree—similar in color and curves to the sea lions—who looks like a dragon

It could be a wild ride.



The handknit strap of a shoulder bag half-obscuring the cover of an early edition of the children’s book Serendipity (by Stephen Cosgrove), so that the cute, fuchsia-colored water-dragon on the cover appears to be peeking shyly around the strap, in the opposite orientation of the dragon above


Across the expanse of ice plant shown before, a single red-hot-poker flower peeking from behind a low rock formation into the sky above a blue-ocean horizon line

For now, we go back.


A thin trail snaking across a green hilltop among native wildflowers, with a river beyond, and the ocean to the right beyond that

To everything there is a fucking season.

A time to feel, a time to process, and a time to tell the truth. A time to rage about injustice, a time to take care of your kid, a time to take care of yourself, a time to go out and protest, a time to take a nap.

. . . To remember that the stories will unfold as they need to. . . . To remember that living in—and savoring—the moment is more important than telling the story of that moment.

—Amanda Palmer, “The State of All Things, Birthday Edition: April 2024”

Some people get fed along the way.


In a green pasture with the ocean beyond, two paint horses looking curiously over a flimsy barbed-wire fence with thicker green grass on this side—which has been disturbed as if by a human feeding grass to the horses

Time overlaps itself.



On a table in darkness, a lit candle-lantern casting shadows from a small unicorn-head in silhouette, a deer antler, a tobacco pipe, an abalone shell, a walnut shell, a white bobble, a dark feather, and a rock with “Love” etched into it

Dedicated to yesterday, today, and tomorrow . . . what you were, what you are, and what you will be.

—Stephen Cosgrove, Leo the Lop (Tail Two)


A one-lane, cracked, and patched asphalt road with a columbine-red line painted horizontally across it and with two painted arrows, one on either side of the line, pointing left and right, to indicate the fault line of California’s massive 1906 earthquake

You go wherever you go and do whatever you do in your own space and time.

I go home to my Tenterraces and the tent called Der Wilderbunker.


A tarp-style carport enclosure nestled among trees and undergrowth, the front rolled up but hung with two blankets (one blue and mottled white, one white and printed with cats), in front of which, seen from the back—gazing downslope—is a scarecat made, in hopes of deterring mountain lions, from a ladder and a big dark blue-and-white plaid hoodie

Once I’m settled into Der Wilderbunker with a cup of tea, a little bird flies in, perches on a stick in a bucket of twigs (slated to feed the little camp stove I call the Phoenix), flies to the rear peak of Der Wilderbunker—twittering away, perhaps eating spiders—and then flies to the front peak before circling my ancestor altar and flying out.


They lived on the periphery of current events. All ages of history co-exist in this immoderate geography. While in the capital entrepreneurs conduct business affairs by telephone with associates in other cities on the globe, there are regions in the Andes where standards of human behavior are those introduced five centures earlier by the Spanish conquistadors, and in some jungle villages men roam naked through the jungle, like their ancestors in the Stone Age. It was a decade that had witnessed great upheavals and marvelous discoveries, but for many it was no different from previous times.

. . . Visitors came from nearby towns, and when someone with a portable radio interrupted, shouting that the General had fled and mobs were breaking into the prisons and butchering secret agents, people yelled at him to shut up, he was upsetting the gamecocks. The only person to give up his place was the chief of police, who left reluctantly to go to his office to communicate with his superiors in the capital and receive instructions. He returned a couple of hours later, saying that the whole damn thing was a tempest in a teapot; the government had fallen, but nothing had changed. So start up the music and dancing, and give me another beer . . . .

—Isabel Allende, Eva Luna

I take to eating redwood tips, having learned that they’re edible. Those who are fed by what comes out of me, in turn feed me.



Bright-green tips growing from the older, dark-green part of a redwood branch, cradled in the palm of a human right hand

“. . . The man took five gold coins from his pocket and placed them in her hand. . . . She could not refuse him, because she feared that there before her in the plaza the stranger would shrivel into a little pile of dust—which is what happens to those who are not blessed with good memories. She motioned for him to sit beside her, and when she could look into his eyes, she was once again overcome with pity, and was moved by a desire to take him in her arms. She began to speak. All that afternoon and all that night she spun her tale, inventing a worthy past for the warrior, putting into the task all her vast experience and the passion the stranger had evoked. She spoke for a very long time . . . .”

—Isabel Allende, Eva Luna


Plucked redwood tips in the palm of a human left hand

I have heard it said, by herbalists or plant spirit sages, that the medicine you most need always grows somewhere near you.

—Imelda Almqvist, “Swimming with Swans”

When rays of sunlight emerge from clouds to shine into the redwood faerie ring where the gravity-fed, propane-heated shower is, I avail myself of the opportunity—after stepping on a slug, who is unhappy but I think will be okay.



A different one, but same species: a huge, spotted banana slug—eyestalks pulled in as if feeling threatened—bunched over the lip of a cat-food tray, head in, tail out

None of this has been anyone’s fault. Please remember that for your own sweet self. We are all innocent we don’t have to prove anything to anyone.

—Facet 44

Steam rises through slants of sunlight toward high branches. As the water falls over me, I close my eyes and find myself, soul-weary, at my future cottage by the sea, where I sink into the earth of the garden out back and curl up to rest there. My old cat Diego comes and puts his paw on my hand.


I had no right to claim him, I knew it. But in a solitary life, there are rare moments when another soul dips near yours, as stars once a year brush the earth. Such a constellation was he to me.

—Madeline Miller, Circe


A plant with some branches terminating in little yellow flowers and some in green-centered explosions like dandelion seedheads or 360-degree showerheads—one of the latter dipping in striking focus over a pale stone


A brilliant orange seastar among wet, colorful beach-pebbles

So I am refreshed.


After the shower, though, as I sit in the sun, integrating That with This, I’m still in a questioning space with no answers forthcoming.


We just try to blend the cultures. I’m not trying to sit here and say, “Oh, you have to pay attention to Native people, and we matter more than you.” Just know a Native. Let’s start with that.

—Joe San Diego, quoted in “Native Arts Fest Debuts in Windsor,” The Press Democrat, May 12, 2024

Whenever I eat at the Upper Terrace, where my shrine to the ancestors of the land is, I leave food offerings for the ancestors. They come in the forms of different critters. Juncos fly closer to me as they pass, I like to think as a thank-you. One tries to nab a bite of pizza.

Raven sits with me a while. Other people come through, too: Spider, Ant, and Crane Fly; the occasional gnat who lands on my hand.



Among leaf litter, a large ant with a black head and abdomen and a very dark red—almost black—thorax

I feel subdued but all right.


Often a WND (weapon of nature destruction, like a woodchipper, a chainsaw, a leafblower, or a truck’s incessant backup beeping) shatters the peace. After reading Robin Wall Kimmerer’s Braiding Sweetgrass, I feel these cries as screams and moans of the Windigo: shrieks of agony and ancestral loss.



The remnants of two felled cypresses who once flanked the head of a trail that descends to the seashore

It was just a pine, not necessarily old or beautiful, but that didn’t matter to my father, who loves trees and admires them the way playboys admire women. “Will you look at that!” he’ll say, pulling to a stop at a busy intersection.

“Look at what?”

“What do you mean, ‘Look at what?’ The maple, idiot. She’s a knockout.”

When told what Lance had done, my father retreated to his bedroom, staring at the oaks outside the window. “Trimming is one thing,” he said. “But to cut something down? To actually end its life? What kind of an animal is this guy?”

—David Sedaris, Dress Your Family in Corduroy and Denim

My aggravation, sorrow, and resistance carry messages—all emotions do. Perhaps bitterness keeps me safe, when I can see beyond the triggers and discern between love and neglect. What’s worth the risk, and what isn’t? What is kindness to myself, and what is isolating?


“I admit, I always kind of keep my eyes open for a girl with tigers, but even if it were true, it would’ve happened so long ago that I suppose that’s pretty stupid.” . . .

—Catherynne M. Valente, Palimpsest

Once, while banging down the composting toilet bucket to settle it, I encounter the first scorpion I’ve ever seen at the Tenterraces. The poor creature, stunned, had been nestled up to the bucket—and eventually departs for more scorpion-friendly terrain. To the scorpion, I am a WND.


I return to the circling I’ve always done.


I walked the hills, the buzzing meadows of thyme and lilac, and set my footprints across the yellow beaches. I searched out every cove and grotto, found the gentle bays, the harbor safe for ships. I heard the wolves howl, and the frogs cry from their mud. I stroked the glossy brown scorpions who braved me with their tails. Their poison was barely a pinch. I was drunk, as the wine and nectar in my father’s halls had never made me.

. . . A thousand thousand times, I had crossed Aiaia’s slopes. The poplars, black and white, lacing their bare arms. The cornels and apple trees with fallen fruits still shriveling on the ground. The fennel tall as my waist, the sea rocks white with drying salt.

—Madeline Miller, Circe


Luxuriant green leaves growing from a crevice in gray coastal rock, with dead, whitened umbrels like little galaxies on stalks above them

Overhead, the skimming cormorants called to the waves. Mortals like to name such natural wonders changeless, eternal, but the island was always changing, that was the truth, flowing endlessly through its generations.

—Madeline Miller, Circe


On small ledges of a gray rock seacliff, two cormorant nests above cascades of white droppings, one nest with a cormorant sitting on it and one with apparently two cormorants, one standing tall and one or more others readjusting jags of black feathers—all looking a little nervous to be observed

Jewelry, tides, language:

things that shine.
What is description, after all,
but encoded desire?

And if we say
the marsh, if we forge
terms for it, then isn’t it

contained in us
a little,
the brightness?

—Mark Doty, “Description”


Held by a left hand, at the end of a broken silver chain, a cameo pendant with a black background and the side profile of a skull with elegantly coiffed hair

Not sure if you went that way, you would have had to go around one of those angled and grounded strands of snarl. I try not to judge. Just really hard when I see that stuff. You know. It won’t always be there.

—Facet 44


A mostly submerged, rusted green metal boat at the shore of a wide, sparkling blue sea with peaceful white waves

When you invent the ship, you also invent the shipwreck; when you invent the plane, you also invent the plane crash; and when you invent electricity, you invent electrocution . . . .

—Paul Virilio, Politics of the Very Worst


As seen from farther up the beach—with the ocean to the right—the boat, more exposed now, beyond which is an upright driftwood stump like a fat white spider on the sand, pointing with one of its root “legs” toward the boat and toward a line of footprints that continues out of frame, close to the waves

This boat’s pickled in salt,
but preserved, I think,
by sheer persistence;
some things have such a will
to be themselves
they don’t take to decay,
even wave-beaten and scoured
by seekers of salvage
and souvenir. I love this evidence.
Ghost, it is more stubborn
than live things. Ruin,
it lasts, though the bay’s
huge indifference laves what might,
should, at any moment, cave in,
dissolve—what must, in any tempest,
scatter the shore in unrecognizable
fragments. It doesn’t, hasn’t,
I want to say won’t:
something must hold,
some chambered wreck
must fill and empty daily,
seawater pouring like the future
—I need this evidence—
into the hulk which admits
and releases and keeps
its grip on the shore.
—Mark Doty, “Wreck”

What has gone before is getting processed.


Fox droppings with dead grasses in them, on a weathered wooden deck

🐵❤️✨

That’s some brown monkey magic right there in the form of ferrous deterioration. ;-)

—Facet 44

Painful emotions let me know what’s real and usually tell me to flee to hiking trails or other places of respite; then I understand that therein—herein—lies the solution.


Reflect on ways to harness your hunger and longing for collective good . . . .

—Ancestral Medicine


The long shadow of a human wearing a short sarong, with ambient light touching on a line of beach detritus on sand over which the shadow falls, such that the shadow looks like a being whose insides are lit with sparkles of blue-white light

And so I go on to become the me writing to you now from the deck of her absent friend’s off-grid tiny home, where I entertain and am entertained by chickadees eating from a pile of sunflower seeds. Raven sings what is, to my ears, their most beautiful song. Then Stellar Jay sings their own most beautiful song, too.


It was a soft and slightly rainy Wednesday, not very different from others in my life, but I treasure that Wednesday as a special day, one that belonged only to me. . . . I poured a cup of black coffee and sat down at the typewriter. I took a clean white piece of paper—like a sheet freshly ironed for making love—and rolled it into the carriage. Then I felt something odd, like a pleasant tickling in my bones, a breeze blowing through the network of veins beneath my skin. I believed that that page had been waiting for me for more than twenty years, that I had lived only for that instant . . . . I could see an order to the stories stored in my genetic memory since before my birth, and the many others I had been writing for years in my notebooks.

. . . I followed my own rhythm, ignoring the recommendations I had received: scripts are organized into two columns; each episode has twenty-five scenes; be careful, because scene changes are very expensive and the actors get confused if the speeches are too long; every key sentence must be repeated three times, and keep the plot simple; begin from the premise that your audience is composed of morons. A stack of pages grew on the table, spattered with notes, corrections, hieroglyphics, and coffee stains: but as soon as I had begun dusting off memories and weaving destinies, I saw that I did not know where I was going, or what the resolution would be—if there was one.

—Isabel Allende, Eva Luna

—What good amid these, O me, O life?
Answer.

That you are here—that life exists, and identity,
That the poweful play goes on, and you may contribute a verse.

—Walt Whitman, “Oh Me! Oh Life!”

What do the little birds tell us?


In the silence between the notes, there is infinite possibility.

—Alice Coltrane

What do the bigger birds tell us?


A flock of pelicans flying past the city of sea lions basking on rocks


A flock of brown pelicans in a rough V formation in a deep blue sky with white Sun rays and the white double-arc of a lens flare


A rock wall overhanging a clear and frothy creek

The work we do can be scary, it can be hard, but it doesn’t have to be lonely and it doesn’t have to be about despair.

—Maryse Meijer, The Seventh Mansion


The human seen before, propping himself on rocks at the edge of the sea, dunking his head into the water as if listening

Listen to the waves, to the leaves, to the wind, to the insects in the sink and on the walls. They know.

—Amanda Palmer, “ ‘Whakenewha’ with Aurelia Torkington @ Waiheke Musical Museum, May 2022”


A pair of dragonflies, with the tip of the male’s tail attached to the back of the female’s head as he guards her process of tapping eggs into the green surface vegetation of a pond

Once you have experienced secure attachment, the idea of being “replaced” becomes absurdly laughable.

—Clementine Morrigan, “Loving with Open Hands: On Polyamory”


A pink snail with a glistening brown-and-amber shell, probing between the bark and inner wood at the end of a sawed-off log

An expectant, open patience flows through everything.


Allan thought it sounded unnecessary for the people in the seventeenth century to kill each other. If they had only been a little patient they would all have died in the end anyway. Julius said that you could say the same of all epochs.

—Jonas Jonasson, The Hundred-Year-Old Man Who Climbed Out the Window and Disappeared


An alert lizard on a sunlit sidewalk, just this side of a straight line of shadow, with a hint of greenery spilling over from one side

The trees and plants whisper loudly.


Perhaps in fifty years, an old woman, bald and tired, leaning on a cane, will pass my shop and ask herself what strange old man is looking for his glasses in the display window, and we shall have a great deal to talk about. We will have coffees. I will save a chair for her. I am capable of that. Of waiting, of faithfulness.

—Catherynne M. Valente, Palimpsest


Draped with a fuchsia scarf and forest-green hoodie, the beat-up old easy chair at the firepit, the latter of which now has cozy flames flowing upward from a pile of sticks, with green undergrowth and trees all around

Every time I lose a loved one . . . I feel like someone has mainlined me with an injection of life, of gratitude. I find myself staring at the pinkness of my own hands, with the blood that courses through them, some miracle I do not understand. I feel my own life force, my own mother-force, so much more strongly. I look at ordinary moments and objects: the ability to do a dish, the act of making toast, the sheer possibility of socks on my feet, wind on my skin, the ability to hear the chirping spring birds, as unbelievable fucking privileges.

—Amanda Palmer, “The State of All Things, Birthday Edition: April 2024”


A big burst of fuchsia-colored flowers in a pot on a weathered wooden deck

An array of possibilities, including ones I haven’t conceived of yet, spreads before me.


“Well, there’s a book, like an encyclopedia. It’s called the Etymologiae. And it’s full of impossible things, really impossible, like griffins and phoenixes, right alongside ants and turtles and cities in Christendom. And I think this is like that. Palimpsest and the real world. An impossible beast sitting next to a possum. Or something like that.”

—Catherynne M. Valente, Palimpsest


A sandy coastal trail curving among fuchsia-colored ice plants and California poppies toward the sea

What these salt distances were

is also where they’re going:
from blankly silvered span

toward specificity: the curve
of certain brave islands of grass,

temporary shoulder-wide rivers
where herons ply their twin trades

of study and desire. . . .

—Mark Doty, “Atlantis”


A closer view of the sea lions, with a poppy-studded grassy headland in the foreground and with one sea lion tall in the center, as if saying, I see you

I’m not scared.


Much.


A vertiginous gaze down over an ice-plant-and-poppy-studded cliff at a wave crashing in a headland chasm

Your big story is hunting you. You don’t have to go looking for it. Put yourself out there in the dark, and it will come for you.

—Robert Moss


In dim light, perhaps getting toward twilight, a low, dark, mossy tree spread over a green carpet of swordfern and other undergrowth along a trail curving steeply downward


A similar trail, flat, winding among mossy trees, swordferns, and a blue-gray creek, as though an awareness has come down the trail and is nearing a destination somewhere around the bend

Someone’s gently knocking on my door. I’m not expecting anyone; indeed, I stopped expecting anyone long ago.

—Valérie Perrin, Fresh Water for Flowers

A mountain lion—or perhaps a fox pretending to be one—lurks around my campsite at night, padding and pausing like a curious, 150-pound housecat, chirping occasionally (mother to child?), undeterred by my phone’s flashlight, by the most vicious growls I can utter, by cacophonous stomping on Der Wilderbunker’s plywood-and-pallet floor, or by my great-grandmother’s sheep bell, which I rig with a rope from my cot to the entrance.



A large, rusty bell (much bigger than a sheep bell) mounted on a post among coastal wildflowers, positioned as if to summon a ship, with a seagull flying in the distance, over the ocean

In the evening, love returns,
Like a wand’rer ’cross the sea;
In the evening, love returns
With a violet for me;
In the evening, life’s a song,
And the fields are full of green;
—Fenton Johnson, “In the Evening”

Every adrenaline-soaked night, I barely sleep, with pepper spray and a large knife at my side. Perhaps the cat is attracted to the critters who live in the floor: possums and wood rats, who, on the bright side, have been much quieter.

I attempt telepathic communication and encounter effervescent amusement, as though the mountain lion is having a delightful time, perhaps finding it funny that I’m scared . . . ? If so, is it because I have reason to be, or because I have no reason to be? I remind myself that a human is more likely to win the lottery than to get attacked by a mountain lion.



The scarecat, Shiba la Tigre, in all her glory: face of a white-tiger pillowcase in the hoodie’s hood, arms spread between a sapling branch and a wall of Der Wilderbunker, skirt of a fuchsia scarf under an apron of a dingy white towel, and fluffy red slipper-socks with white bobbles on her feet

When I do sleep, dreams tell me I’m safe and on a good adventure.



The caterpillar who was up the sleeve before—now seen as being yellow with a grayish stripe down the side and a bulbous, tan head—adventuring along the upholstery of the chair’s arm

At least I can nap during the day.



The caterpillar entering a shadow on the rough, pale trunk of a young but cracked and mossy tree, with bracken below and a thorny blackberry stem above


Finally, having had enough, I ritually sit out overnight to meet the mountain lion.



A gap of starlit sky between towering, firelit conifers

This was how it was done: you bare your belly to a great beast and endure trials and it all works itself out. There is a treasure or a sword. Or a woman. And that thing is yours not because you defeated anything, or because your flesh was hard and unyielding, but because you were worthy of it, worthy all along. The trials and the beast were just a way of telling the world you wanted it, and the world asking in her hard way, hard as bones and hollow mountains, if you really and truly did.

—Catherynne M. Valente, Palimpsest


A hole of daylight in the center of deep green undergrowth, admitting a trail

The lion arrives in an unexpected way, not in person but, at long last, from beneath my fearful heart.



The face of a pussy-ear flower alongside a half-opened sibling and lots of dark purple buds, in a forest of green grass

It was a tiger-striped farmyard cat, a male, who was given the name Molotov, not after the minister but after the cocktail. Molotov didn’t say very much, but he was extremely intelligent and fantastic at listening. If Allan had something to say, he had only to call the cat; he always came skipping along, unless he was occupied with catching mice (Molotov knew what was important). The cat jumped up into Allan’s lap, made himself comfortable, and made a sign with his ears to show that Allan could now say what he had to say. If Allan simultaneously scratched Molotov on the back of his head, and on his neck, there was no limit to how long the chat could last.

And when Allan got some hens, it was enough to tell Molotov one single time that he shouldn’t go running after them, for the cat to nod to understand. The fact that he ignored what Allan said and ran after the hens till he didn’t find it fun anymore, that was another matter. What could you expect? He was a cat after all.

—Jonas Jonasson, The Hundred-Year-Old Man Who Climbed Out the Window and Disappeared


Two chickens, one dark and one light, wandering on well-trodden dust beside close-cropped grass

. . . The meaning of life—its joy, boundless beauty and love—emerges out of our most devastating losses. I learned that without the savagery of life, love has no true domain, and the relational quality of joy and beauty has no natural way to express itself. I came to understand that although the world’s energising principle is love, joy ultimately declares itself most intensely through our heartbreaks.

—Nick Cave, “The Red Hand Files #285”


A cluster of red-tipped green succulents growing from gray coastal rock, like a triple sun emerging from gray clouds


The brilliant Sun over a small and a large rock formation and a bank of white clouds

“Finally it was dawn, and with the first light of day she could tell that the odor of melancholy had faded from the air.”

—Isabel Allende, Eva Luna


A sweet-smelling wild pea flower of rich magenta and violet

Wherever the lion steps, worlds rise within worlds, and crushes spring uncrushed into love.



A world of color—greens and flowerings—among pebbles in the sand of a tawny crevice like a miniature sandstone canyon, or like the backyard garden of a cottage by the sea


The silhouettes of three kids frolicking at the edge of the waves along a beach, under a lowering Sun


A branch like a dragon deposited by ocean waves, facing the opposite way of the dead-tree dragon seen before—toward the kids (out of frame) and the setting Sun





More frolics





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