Food in our footsteps, in our hearts, in our woven-ness, the folds of the dirt and wind and sun.
Datura, a death guardian. A sharp protectress of riversides, and open deserts and cow patties, fencelines. One who shows us her fertile glow in the moonlight backdrop of dripping black night.
My woodstove fire cracks on this rainy day in western Colorado, warm for what I would think to expect in this area, this time of year. January. The birds are active and flock around a tangled vast rose thicket, hips fat and lipstick red from the days of cold and dormancy.
They go dance around the skeletal foreboding Datura plants that rise up out of mud and snow with spiked seed pods just next to the rose thicket, and the birds jump on their limbs causing them to gently sway. It appears as though they are eating the Datura seeds, a brave feat for a tiny little bird. They pick at the pods, dried and dead leaves, and the snow around the plants where tiny seeds rest on the surface. As soon as I make a quick move in my sit spot, they all jutt away as if one organism.
Datura, a death guardian. A sharp protectress of riversides, and open deserts and cow patties, fencelines. One who shows us her fertile glow in the moonlight backdrop of dripping black night.
It’s one of those days where somatic memory churns through my body like a movie playing over and over, and yet each time a different scene emerges, a vision I had not noticed before, or a detail in the scene I had forgotten about leans forth larger into the immediacy of the reliving. My inner imaginary world, and the world of memory and sensing, is so vivid. It is how I am able to do art for hours, or remember far remote and distant plant locations and exactly the feeling and color of the rock where the plant grew. The older one gets, the more that experiences pile on top of one another, making us beings getting this chance at life and love and living in the current state of the world an opportunity at figuring the whole dance out. I close my eyes, and the Datura spikes remain, in inverse, black and white.
And those experiences make us, form us like clay is pressed and shaped, fired and painted. A little bit of pressure here, or there. Some waiting, a little bit of moving gently this way or that, or perhaps, some broad sweeps end up reshaping the whole thing. Or it shatters, is ground up mortar and pestle, and wet with water, reformed and fired again.
My nervous system fires off many directions one after another.
Warmth fills my chest at one fleeting memory, the deep trust in discovering the spirit of another who gets the inner weavings of this wild live world, and then being held tightly and enthusiastically, and receiving of my tenderness, touch and care. Here we are alive with the earth and it feels so good to love it together. Authentically loved, and then sharing the awe of a tiny plant freshly bloomed. The body is imprinted and shaped like clay with the tears that came from the joy of such a moment of awe, discovery, heart utterly open, smelling it and touching it. The palpable character of joy makes you, when you find spirit kin and one of your people and you just love them in a way your heart never thought possible except for plants or rocks or the wind itself. So much that the memory in the body, the momentary firing of feeling, is of a heart about to explode with just sheer care and a sense of connection to all things through loving another and loving the living world together. The world seemed gentler somehow.
Horror fills my body the next firing as I remember biking up to a forest spot I liked to wander into as a child and wanted to show an ex-partner at 21 years old so we could explore it together on our nature curiosity, and to our surprise, finding it totally clear cut as we slow our bikes to the end of the pavement where the forest was supposed to begin. Our excited hearts, crumble and break and break and we give our tears to the earth who was unseen and exploited for money.
We went out into the clearcut and did a ritual, a death honoring, as if we were burying our own kin.
We put our raw hearts in that hole, along with a sturdy wooden rough-hewn dagger, covered in hand etched Druidic Runes. Odes to the nature spirits. We reminded ourselves in this devastation that we were married to the earth and to one another in this. Our shattered hearts were a gift, just as the tears that pour onto the fresh roadkill deer, soft and cute and innocent, over its broken legs and hip, from the unfortunate collision with our fast paced and busy lives. The world seemed exceptionally harsh.