XXXXX [DRAFT IN PROGRESS]

16 January 2026

Things are broken, I know.


Nestled among dry grasses, a rock rent by a crack


Also among dry grasses, a tall dry plant—possibly the leafless remnant of a thistle—with one of its two heads drooping all the way over

Things are hollow.


The burned-out center of a nevertheless thriving giant redwood, with a cloud of green branches high above a portico of healthy bark framing the charred cathedral interior

In my case, I find out friends went to a beach party thrown by a guy I thought I’d reconciled old wounds with. It wouldn’t have hurt—at least not as much—except that when I invited them out on the same night, they kept their plans a secret. I learn by chance the next day that I’d been shut out. Whatever their intent was or wasn’t—revenge or neglect—the message is clear: I don’t belong in their confidences. Some of them are fond of me, sure, but for whatever reason it stops at the surface. (Deep down, I already know: most groups of humans, with all the trappings and abandonments, are no place for me.)


So they rode together through the lights and shadows down into the valley, the only creatures in all the free life of the forest who were not free.

—Harold Bell Wright, The Shepherd of the Hills

Good information. So be it.

What’s more, new spots of what at first I thought were spider bites keep appearing on my legs, two or three each time a previous batch begins to heal—when I don’t see any spiders in my bed or cushions or clothes. Could they be an infectious disease? I look up all the skin diseases I think they might possibly be, none of which they look like. Might it be fleas from chipmunks? I’ve seen them scratching. Or maybe chiggers/noseeums?

Why am I beset with this? Is it because I’m some kind of leper? Is it a sign to refrain from baring my vulnerability to those who cannot be vulnerable with me?

As my thoughts slide toward a rut again, a chickadee whirs to the birdbath and flings sparkles everywhere. Sometimes I could swear they sense my mood and and are drawn to help.

When night falls, though, chickadees go wherever they go. In my sleeping bag, wave after wave of tears wash my insides out.


My battery is low, and it’s getting dark.

—Science reporter Jacob Margolis’s representation of the Mars Opportunity rover’s final data communications to mission control


A star-shaped spot of light—from Moon or candle reflection—on the ceiling of a big tent open to the night

I dream of a black jaguar, a lot of skunks, and a fox or coyote, the latter possibly because Skunk and Fox sniff around the tent and/or because the white streak in my hair brings me into synch with Skunk. Black Jaguar reminds me of John Perkins, who fell deathly ill from strange-to-him Amazonian jungle food and learned that he must “touch the Jaguar”: face fears, implanted by his mother, of eating harmful food. Maybe these disorders of mind and body reflect my fear of abandonment and can reinforce for me that I am in fact never alone and am in fact surrounded by love, including Skunk’s.

Maybe Skunk is why I repel so many people—all but my kind. Maybe Skunk keeps me safe from human machinations.


Long after his daughter had gone to her room and to her bed, the mountaineer sat in the doorway, looking into the dark. He heard the short bark of a fox in the brush back of the stable; and the wild cry of a catamount from a cliff farther down the mountain was answered by another from the timber below the spring. He saw the great hills heaving their dark forms into the sky, and in his soul he felt the spirit of the wilderness and the mystery of the hour.

—Harold Bell Wright, The Shepherd of the Hills

In the morning, after a tiny patter of rain in the gloom, the idea of absorbing the start of the day from Pa’s Chair pulls me out of bed. I didn’t think I’d feel like making a Phoenix flame (in my can-style campstove), but once I’m up, it feels worth it for a hot cuppa or two, as well as for my morning oatmeal. The sky brightens in the West-That-Feels-Like-East.


In a wide-open blue sky over dry grassy scrub hills with a couple of trees, an airplane’s thin streak of white like a shooting star over the small dark shape of a raven-size bird in flight

In such a hallowed land, birds and cats exist in discordant harmony.



With ocean ethereally aglow in sunlight beyond the same type of landscape as in the previous photo, a small faded Bobcat excavator streaked with rust and parked tilted on a slope strewn with a few decaying pieces of drywall

On the trail to the East-That-Feels-Like-West, I hand-saw a couple of small fallen trees that might eventually have settled onto the water line. Then, in Pa’s Chair, I fill out my ballot, which exhausts me; they don’t make it easy to find the information I need to make these decisions. When done, I move to the ground, splay my body in a trickle of sunlight, and soak in the warmth and soil’s solid support until I feel moved to shower.

The big spider who had spun a web across the shower entrance, causing me to climb around to access the shower, is gone. I suspect someone ate her, which is convenient for me although I appreciated her presence.


The negative space of a spider’s silhouette like an arachnid ghost against pale tent-canvas

No—there she is: alive and well, wisely having moved up higher in the trees, above the toilet bucket.

Fortunately, mending is one of my Things. Sewing up holes and sewing on patches by hand, with whatever color of thread comes to hand first, does this Spider-woman good—as do the weavings of ways and words.

With skin and inner wounds cleansed, I venture out for a lovely laundry morning—including, as my clothes and sleeping bag go through their own cleaning cycles, familiar jaunts to a favorite café, a free library, and a walking path—and then for a visit to another favorite café to write and to hear a solo friend’s significant dream. She gives me a yellow, wooden-shoe-shaped keychain from Holland.


Healing is a funny little hot-dog–shaped road that you’re traveling down in your very best mustard clogs

—Heather Buchanan, Horror Scoops from October 2024


Next to a tangle of cords, a pale avocado-green mug of café latte with nested hearts drawn in the foam, beyond which is a little standee with the number 19 on it, by an empty mustard-colored saucer that you can tell held something yummy

Upon wrapping up there, to keep from stewing in my own juices I embark on a hike in search of a great tree rumored to be at the end of a hidden trail. I don’t know how much of a chance I have of finding it but figure it’s worth a try.

As I set out on the trail network, I call out from within to the tree, introducing myself and conveying, I am here, near you. I’ve heard rumor of your grandeur. Please direct me to you, that I might admire you.

A moment later, on a maintenance road, a ranger pickup approaches. I wave the man down. He provides detailed directions.

Even then, I miss the hidden trailhead on two passes. Then there it is.

I follow it—and then there she is.


A redwood with unusually low massive twisting limbs and an undulating trunk among much younger, second-growth trees

Despite being empty (like me), she’s still healthy.


Held out over the stick-littered bottom of a hollow a few feet deep, a human foot with an ant tattoo, scuffed with flipflop-shaped dirt

“. . . Look, Grant! See how soft the moonlight falls on that patch of grass this side of the old tree yonder, and how black the shadow is under that bush, like the mouth of a cave, a witch’s cave. I am sure there are ghosts and goblins in there, with fairies and gnomes, and perhaps a dragon or two. And see, lad, how the great hills rise into the sky. How grand, how beautiful the world is! It is good to live, Matt, though life be sometimes hard, still—still it is good to live.”

—Harold Bell Wright, The Shepherd of the Hills

Seemingly empty spaces are often guarded by dragons.


One of the redwood’s unusually twisted limbs, looking like the lowered head of a watchful dragon

I give them some of my water.



Down a brown grassy hillside, a dry channel that in wetter times directs a flow into a small corrugated-metal culvert that disappears into the earth

Dragons’ jagged mouths can channel love’s flow.


The other end of the culvert, opening toward the wide-open ocean, with “AMOR” written in black marker on the side of every metal ridge

A few months ago I spoke with a shaman from Ecuador who described how an oil prospecting company was set to move into his tribe’s territory. The bulldozers and everything were ready to go. So he communicated with the spirit of the petroleum and asked it to intercede. “OK, give me three days,” it said. Three days later the contract was canceled and the machines were removed. The company had run into sudden unexpected legal issues. . . .

If these people are so powerful, you may ask, then why is the Amazon burning right now? Why haven’t they put a stop to all this? It is because there aren’t enough of them to perform the ceremonies necessary to keep earth in balance. It is because modern education, money, and ways of life have eroded the world-story from which those ceremonies can operate. It is because the whole corpus of political-financial power is itself a system of magic, that lays waste to the world through the power of symbol. (Money, law, government, corporations . . . all are agreements mediated by symbols. The chief magicians, for example central bankers, utter some magic words or type some digits into a computer, and the world changes.)

Underneath the symbolic magic we call money, government, and law lies the mythology from which it draws power—the foundation of the modern worldview, the metaphysics of objectivity and force, the religion of science and its elaboration we call technology. Other loci of power draw on different mythologies, new and ancient. . . .

I’ll just name a few of each, leaving out many: the hidden yogis, invisible acts of kindness and generosity, the shepherds of the dead, the musicians who add new threads into the weave of consciousness, the storytellers, and all those who endure hardship and still hold on to the will to live.

—Charles Eisenstein, “On Political Bypassing”

Where insides have been hollowed out—stripped bare—tender friends can safely make their homes.


A mole poking their head out of a hole in an old stump, between a paper bag and a water bottle that’s patterned in oceanic blue-and-white


A tiny jumping-spider crouched among dead scraggles of grass on a flat expanse of dry dirt and pebbles that is apparently otherwise devoid of life

From hollow throats comes song.


Atop a dry grassy hillside, a bare bush hosting a speck of a bird, with a couple of dark redwoods beyond

The song of one draws many.


The same bush closer up, now with at least four birds in it

And oh, how they speak to the broken-open heart.


The same bush, now with at least six birds in it, as well as someone in air nearby, either another bird at a greater distance or an insect closer up

Remember that humans are mostly good and kind and that we are a family of folks just doing our best.

—Amanita Dreamer, “It’s Terribly Mid-October Time”


A foamy wave with wind blowing spray back, such that the magically minded might see a herd of horned equines plunging toward the rocky shore

Where things break, unicorns can come through, as has been foretold in many places and many ways.



Drawn in dirt of the rear window of an SUV that has a surfboard on the roof rack: a dark wave in a circle (perhaps indicating a reality separate from what comes after), followed by a pale spike and a pale wave, followed by intriguingly less-distinguishable shapes in dark and light mottled by a reflection of tree branches, at least one of which looks like another wave—beyond all of which (including the SUV) is a tractor with a farm implement attached

Wherever unicorns are, all heaven breaks loose!


A great foamy burst of a wave exploding across most of the frame

We pieces—when well rooted, with good grips on solid ground—can dance in the chaos without being carried away.


Clusters of seaweed that look like a dance party of miniature palm trees rooted to a flat outcropping of rock, having just been doused by whitewater now draining away in little falls

O wind on the waterfall, and leaves of laughter

—The flap on a package of Sea Witch Botanicals’ Goldberry incense

Not that there’s anything wrong with being carried away.


At the wet edge of a rock outcropping that itself looks like a stony splash, a man in a spray-splattered brown T-shirt watching a bird flying from left to right over ocean froth


The very next moment, with the bird carrying the gaze onward

Being carried away is how seeds are planted.


A swirl of dry scrub grass topped with cottony blobs like splatters of seafoam

There are countless kinds of beautiful, after all.


The bottom of a sign on a weathered wooden wall, on which reads: “Behold The Beauty Association: IT’S FREE!”

Unruly beauty can prove too much trouble for the lumberjack’s saw.


The underside of a couple of the redwood’s aberrant limbs, their chaotic formation anathema to board-foot conformity

Of course many beauties can draw you to your death.


On a dead stalk of grass culminating in an empty seedhead, a large, brilliant-green mantis (potentially fatally alluring if you’re an enamored male mantis and she’s hungry)

When you stop and think about it, what painfully exquisite joy it is to know beauty worth dying for.


At a stop sign, a big white industrial truck, across the back of which, painted in fading red, is the word “SMILE”

What’s on the other side beckons, too.


A gnarled dead snag among grasses and living trees, with one branch pointing or reaching like an arm toward a ray of sunlight

“O Matt! Ain’t it fine? Look there!” She pointed to the view ahead. “Makes me feel like I could keep on a goin’, and goin’, and never stop.”

—Harold Bell Wright, The Shepherd of the Hills

Out there, somewhere, is the Lake with Everything Good in It.



Beyond a dry grassy hillside lit with low rays of sunlight so that the grasses look like sparkles, at the edge of which are a few bare bushes dotted with a couple of bird silhouettes, the wide-open ocean illuminated with a Sun-path leading toward the horizon, which is also aglow

The Bluebird of Happiness and the Yellow Bird of Freedom-and-Understanding are good guides.


A bluebird plushie on a dashboard scattered with large feathers, beyond which is a lifelike goldfinch affixed to the back of a wiper blade

Angels can fly because they can take themselves lightly.

—G. K. Chesterton, Orthodoxy


With the Sun peeking around one side, the redwood seen before, close up: a strange angel appearing even more massive but with feathered fingertips brushing the sky

These avians say, Find safe nourishment wherever you blend in.

A nuthatch flits near.

I ask, May I hold up this device and make an image of your likeness so that others might admire you and receive you message?

The bird pauses in foraging to come out and pose for a couple of photos.


A glimpse of what at first simply appears to be conifer branches but upon closer inspection reveals a nuthatch like an encapsulation of shadow and light pausing briefly in foraging to regard the viewer

Thank you. Tears spilling in gratitude that such a small pure spirit would show themself to me, I tuck away the phone and don a hoodie, ready to rustle up more food for my soul.



A bright view—from under the shade of dark branches—of a picnic table on a dry cropped-grass hill looking out over an ocean aglow under the unseen Sun and a dark edge of forest

Next, as I move among grasses, comes a tiny golden spider, who dances around my arm—followed by a buck, who meets me eye to eye, staving off his fear for a moment before bolting, remarkable in that he shows himself to me at all.


Barely distiguishable from rocks in the foreground, a distant buck trotting away down a dry grassy hillside toward a dark redwood draw, on the other side of which the landscape opens toward the ocean, from which a large rock formation rises

Along with the birds who congregated rather than dispersed as I drew near, these creatures seem to be saying, We’re here for you as you are for us. This is how it can be.


Our modern celebrations are all about spending money. But the old practices of following the year and cycles are about how it feels to be here now. The practices are made to help us cope with those emotions and move them. . . . It helps us let go of the distractions of fall, and helps us pantomime outwardly the slow march toward the things we cannot always control or see in the dark, both figuratively and literally.

—Amanita Dreamer, “It’s Terribly Mid-October Time”


A closeup of a bird in a bush, who appears to be looking out over the ocean

Coming to the clump of cedars just above the Old Trail where it turns the shoulder of the hill from the west, he stopped for a last look. Beyond this point, he would turn his back upon the scene that interested him so deeply.

The young man could not remember when he had not loved Sammy Lane. She seemed to have been always a part of his life. It was the season of the year when all the wild things of the forest choose their mates, and as the big fellow stood there looking down upon the home of the girl he loved, all the splendid passion of his manhood called for her. It seemed to him that the whole world was slipping away to leave him alone in a measureless universe. He almost cried aloud. It is the same instinct that prompts the panther to send his mating call ringing over the hills and through the forest, and leads the moose to issue his loud challenge.

—Harold Bell Wright, The Shepherd of the Hills

Through peristent melancholy about disconnection from humans—my own people, after all—I feel intrinsically and increasingly loved by everyone else. Then I remember an adventure dream with my mom.


I dreamed about an adventure with you, too! That does sound like bites. As long as you feel fine and they recede and aren’t open or oozing, I think it’s fine. Whatever caused them will probably go away just like it came, maybe when the weather changes.

—My mom, a retired nurse


A slug making a slow S on the way up the toe of an old boot, which rests with its mate on a carpet of redwood fronds in front of an old stump

Sammy Lane rode very slowly on her way home from the Matthews place that morning after the stranger had arrived.

—Harold Bell Wright, The Shepherd of the Hills

After the hike, as the Sun is setting, I stop by the riverside wine bar as it’s closing. An egret glides in low over the water and perches on the usual low branch sticking out of the water by a high riverbank. A desperate guy hitting on me sends me on my way, which is just as well, so I can haul the laundry up the slope while there are still vestiges of daylight.

Back home, with laundry sorted, the urge to cry arises again—but Raven, a penpal, and Mastodon friends swoop in to offer support. It’s all right. Humans gonna human; at least there are trees. I put in earbuds and dance with my shadow and a moth, making magic.

I examine my bed and cushions and clothes again and still don’t see any biters. Maybe the bites are a mystical initiation.

Raven calls again. In The Raven’s Gift by Jon Turk, Kutcha the Raven, via a medicine woman, helps heal the author’s injured hip. Making an appeal, I bring walnuts up to the Raven Log three times and show the bites to the ravens.

Please help, if you can and if it would be good for me to heal now rather than later.

As the evening air chills, two ravens chat. I deliver a fourth batch of walnuts to thank them in advance.

A faint breeze blows in the tiptops of the trees. The neighbors’ wolfdogs howl at a siren, and I light Timberworlf incense at my ancestor altar.



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