At the full moon perigee, we expect earthquakes.  Instead, we get cold.  Winter has arrived late this year, a burr stuck to the hem of spring.  It's important, I suppose, to remind ourselves that burrs carry seeds, and the tenacity of those burrs allow plants at home in one valley to hop rivers, cross mountains, move to the next valley, settle down and grow again.

It's all in how you roll the dice.

_
On a grey day, a pink river, no current
We’re in the thick of it, this spring --
Blossoms falling as soon as they open.

No wind sweeps them away, no rain
washes them helter-skelter to the bay.

_

Understanding boundaries


Louder on full moon nights, the street
wakes up. Highway whine sharpens its axis.
Train whistles whip the wind to speed.
Dogs bark longer louder faster. The couple
on the corner argue more with words
and less with fists, finally. Unmuzzled,
a motorcycle wraps up the banging pile driver
breaking concrete beneath the overpass,
and inside all that clamor, the steady tick-tock
of a clock with a spring that needs daily winding
and rings as loud as a firetruck if the alarm is set.
For now, my alarm is the cherry tree, its pink bloom
washed white by the early February moon.
This spring, one spring, come too soon.

_ By early morning, the Great Storm of the winter season, scheduled to arrive several days ago, has finally produced a shift of heavy clouds that trap the glow of sunrise for more than an hour after it would have ordinarily faded from the sky. I snapped this photo just after 9am;  the sun rose at 7:22am.

  By mid-afternoon, when the rain finally arrives, I sit on the porch in the grey drizzle, tasting the outside of the storm and watching the street. Across the way, a young woman wearing a bright turquoise ball cap – _the brightest spot in all this grey – slouches down in a late model sports car, parked at the bus stop, talking on her phone. When the street sweeper rumbles up behind, she swings her car around to the other side of the street and then back again. When the bus slows and pulls to the curb, she flips on her headlamps and drives away. Her rhythm (or lack thereof) is emblematic of this rainy afternoon -- few cars, fewer people, and little sound other the rattle of the trains passing on the overpass at the end of the street. The rain -- gentle, breathless, and almost invisible -- has emptied the street. My dog has gone to sleep. Maybe I will, too.

_The last day. 2011 is whittling away, hour by hour. Last night, there were fog horns. This morning, sirens and sun, more sun than has been around in the last few weeks, so much sun that I can smell spring, feel summer rising before the New Year even arrives.

This is that time of year when we all resolve to live joyously and peaceably, and I so resolve. I list my resolutions, noting well the first that pop to mind. I shall do no harm to myself or others. I will walk daily to discover beauty, taste grace. I will write daily, read daily. I vow to eliminate sugar from my diet (is that even possible?), eat vegetables locally grown, rice and millet, only eat soy if it has been fermented. I will laugh more.

I leave my house before 9am, hoping to find flowers happy in the new sun, and I am not disappointed. I expect to find only tiny flowers, nestled in strong waxy green leaves, thus protected  from cold winds and icy night fogs, and I do. Small cheerful laurel flowers make me smile, but it's the flush of thousands of pink white bloom blanketing the ordinarily sedate jade plants that makes me laugh out loud. There is perhaps nothing more delicate, more hopeful, more joyful and ironically perhaps more robust than a jade plant blooming wildly in the dead of winter. It's a plant ready to dance.

I can imagine this great rounded bush, tossing its red-edged skirts of leaves, smoothing out the lace frock of flowers and calling out to seabirds Dance, dance dance! The great egrets I think would oblige.

Arriving home, I see that my Iceland poppy, stalled in bud stage for weeks, has sprung suddenly into spectacular bloom. I sit for a while on the steps, basking in the sun, thinking of nothing in particular, enjoying the flicker of sun as it settles into crumpled paper-like petals of the poppy, so exuberant, so brilliantly almost-fire-red. I hope the second bud unfolds tomorrow before noon; it's wonderful to have the sun so early and so close to the ground.

I think again how magnificent it is to live in a place where winter is so fragile that one morning of glorious sunshine can banish winter's sober mood, distill a damp grey morning to a fine aromatic liquor so lustrous that even the sharpest wind smiles and breathes. I am grateful for that.

If I glance to my right, I see my struggling rose, still damp with yesterday's rain and last night's fog, has also decided to bloom. A pale and perfect New Year bloom. If the poppy is the sun, this rose is my moon.

How pleasant to have day and night at my elbows.

How joyous to watch as seasons refuse the crisp divisions we humans have afforded them, instead join hands like cautious lovers, glancing shyly at one another. Spring poppies, summer roses, bare winter branches, happily at home with one another. There are even still the red leaves of autumn, made even more brilliant by empty spaces left between. Where once was green, now bare branches scratch up against blue sky. Winter cannot overcome the fall; spring is always pushing through and summer is never far behind. Our California seasons are a symphony.

_Happy New Year.

May the coming year be alive with marvels, wonder, joy, and peace.

When an almost-tropical-winter-storm roars through the Bay area before October 15, dumping sheets of rain that leave streets running like rivers and parklands sogging into swamps, I wonder if  this storm too is the result of climate change, a harbinger of things to come, or if the only climate changing is the one that settles heat sinks beneath my skin and ice crystals in my bones?

I, of course, have no answers. I know only how lovely it was to walk yesterday afternoon as the storm pushed south over the open waters of the bay, leaving the park at Lake Merritt flooded and oh-so-green beneath clearing skies. Little Earnest and I walked on sandy trails, raging torrents only moments before, now sculpted smooth. Ours were the first footprints, mine flat and evenly paced, his sharp-toed and dancing from side to side. I felt like an explorer, and with his zigs and zags, it certainly looked as if Earnest felt as if he too were prancing over new territory, looking for what had been richly redolent only yesterday, nosing about under masses of oak leaves jammed into sodden piles, poking into tangles of pine needles. Now that all familiar smells have gone away, washed in rivers down to the bay, he adds his own.

When the sky sinks and settles on the earth as it does when paths fill with puddles, my spirit soars. I suppose the doubling of dancing clouds, the reversal of the order of things, offers me some kind of ecstatic ridiculous hope that the-world-as-we-know-it -- smeared with prejudice, violence and greed, overrun with poverty and war -- can be washed clean, return to a state of grace where the operative word is love. I know such whimsy is only a foolish dream (I'm not a complete idiot), but I allow myself to entertain its sparkle for that  brief bit of time when rivers of rain run down the slopes of the land to settle as temporary lakes. My own private Fairyland.

Tomorrow, I know crowds will return, perhaps with eyes darting this way and that, women clutching bags as they walk, men with one hand thrust in a pocket, the other flat against the chest. Today, I'm standing in beauty, thinking about Martin Luther King, Jr., hearing his voice, echoing across the lake of me.

Well, I don't know what will happen now. We've got some difficult days ahead. But it doesn't matter with me now. Because I've been to the mountaintop. And I don't mind. Like anybody, I would like to live a long life. Longevity has its place. But I'm not concerned about that now.

Unlike King, I can't declare with conviction that I will go forward from this day on to do "God's will." I'm an atheist.  Any promised land  I have seen is this one, here and now, the rain, the puddles, the silence, the music of the wind. I know when I die, I'm not going to any promised land. My eyes will close, my heart will stop, my breath will cease, and that will be it. The only chance I have to make any kind of difference is here and now in this paradise on Earth. I don't know think  "He" led me up the mountain, and I don't think "He" will save the world now or in the future.

I used my own two two feet to tromp with my little dog up to the Kings' proverbial mountaintop. I stand there for a moment, gaze out on the vast beautiful sky sky, look over the edge, and what I see when I look down at my world where I live, I can't accept. Too many guns. Too much greed. Too many wars.  I know I can't leave solution up to some all-seeing heavenly eye. I know I can't fix it alone, and I also know the only god I understand is the vibrating space between all living things, the connecting breath. Any solution requires working together with kindness to fill that space with love instead of gumming it up with greed and war.

Earnest and I walk alone today on these paths, and, yes, tomorrow more people, more dogs, will walk beneath the trees. Perhaps, they will greet one another with a smile of a wave. Perhaps when the grass dries, some will spread out their mats, sit in company and laugh. This is our world. We create it. We can make it beautiful with our smiles. If we hope, we can dream. If we dream, we can create peace.

Bees and arctic ice are our canaries in the coalmine.

I was on Mandela Parkway today, walking in the central divide, and this extraordinary mural caught my eye. I always notice bees, and these bees are exquisitely painted, alive and humming beside a beautiful enigmatic signature, crowded with human faces that come and go. Sometimes, I find eyes staring out at me, mouths open and close. These, I think, are the human bees that have swarmed from the hive behind, a back-lit pyramid towards which fly the winged bees, allied insects of the Melliferous or honey gathering division of the Aculeate (or sting-bearing) Hymenoptera.  In the upper right and left hand corners of the painting, words are printed:

                                                     BEE AWARE                                          CONNECTED
                                                    Save the honey bees                                             WORLDS                          
                                                                                                                                   
I loved this bee-thronged lotus bloom, wished it had been a bee warm afternoon, but the day was grey and cool,  a wan afternoon fading into evening, dying into night. Nonetheless, standing in front of the painting, I feel as if I am flying to the light. I only hope my wings don't melt.

I thought of a poem I wrote a while back.

Listening

Before the end, bees disappear
and mosquitoes and love bugs
but gray-haired couples push
twins in three-wheeled strollers
with room to jog behind.
There are many sunny days.
No rain. But there is wind.
Then towns disappear and cows
lodge in trees stripped of leaves.
Small children dance nightly
in circles, palms locked on
naked thighs, mouse ears
pressed to crescent moons.
Birds sing past midnight.
At one a.m. meadowlarks, at three
anemic crows, by five sparrows.
Across the sea, a soldier fires his last bullet
into a bleached skull too large
to be human. The sound is immense,
greater than stars or sea waves.

Some years ago, I was driving across the country and decided to stop at Carlsbad Caverns.  As I had only been to one other cave – Onandaga Cave in Missouri – I had some idea what a spectacular cave might be like, but I was ill-prepared for the magnificence and holiness I discovered within the earth at Carlsbad, 750 ft. below cactus studded ground. Rather than take the elevator, I decided to walk into the caverns along the mile-long concrete pathway that wound slowly downward to the main cavern, and I was glad for that decision. As if acting as guards, cave swallows flew anxiously about the entrance, looking much like disoriented bees removed from their hive. Their backs flashed orange as they swooped up, then down, drawing invisible nets across the mouth of the cave. I acknowledged their greeting and ignored their warnings as I walked into the dim interior of the cave, feeling as if I were entering an abandoned hive, occupied by honeyed ghosts.  

The cavern was not brightly lit, but there was enough light to allow me to see both the delicate and the stalwart formations. In deep recesses, a lacework honeycomb of soda straws and tiny columns created miniature fairy kingdoms and in the great vast hall of the main cavern, huge stalagmites glowing honey gold rose majestically toward the ceiling hundreds of feet above. Along the walls cascades of “draperies,” rock folded gently as if it were fabric, and waterfalls of shiny frozen calcite acted as curtains, separating this magic world from the more mundane layers of sturdy mountain rock. I stood alone, hearing only the buzz of my own body, and felt again as if I had entered a hive, once pliable and free, now stolid and stone, yet the deeper I went into the cavern, the more protected I felt, wrapped in the embrace of a dimensional and palpable silence. I could feel the earth breathing, and every honeyed exhalation spread evenly on my skin, clearing pores and feeding bones; every inhalation pulled me to the heart of the hive. Several times, I was so overwhelmed that I could only sit and breathe.

When I finally came once again into the sun, late late in the afternoon, I was so disoriented  I checked into the motel at the entrance to the park—reasonable rates—and return to the edge of the cave, my frozen hive, to wait for sunset when 300,000 bats would spiral out of the cave and fly off in all directions in search of insects. When these tiny Mexican free-tail bats, so small  they  curl easily into a film canister, exit the cave, they swarm and spiral like bees, wings whirring in unison, slowly gaining altitude until they finally rise above the lip of the cliff and head in various directions toward the near-by rivers. At first, like bees, they form their own river, but as these are bats, that river soon breaks into islands, and the smaller bands of bats fly off in separate directions—some going south, others west, and a few adventurers flying north. None fly east towards the dry desert. Like bees, they search fecundity.

Connected worlds.

  Marketplace

On a dusty street, an agave blooms
with tiny clustered flowers, twenty feet
above sidewalks of ash brushed sand
littered with crumpled petals brown rosy
marked by black. Bumbles come and go.
I’m glad to see those bees. I’ve worried lately
about the absence of wasps and houseflies.
A white-ribbed sky turns and twists, a map
of delta flats at low tide where seabirds catch
the wind. Their flight and earth spin provide us rest
blue shade at the edge of empty beaches
near jungle terraces marked by restless jazz.
I sort photos of circuses and clowns.
In exchange for food, I give up speech.

Labor Day has come and gone, taking with it summer.  At least, that is the conceit.

Here, in the Bay Area, the weeks following Labor Day offer our best chance for summer weather, promising hotter days, brighter skies. Other beaches, other cities, other streets, experience traditional summer months head-on, feel summer heat  as desperate  and sharp, taste its steady beat, hear it as sturm und drang, but here we walk in summer's tinseled shadow, grateful for those moments in August when sun escapes the fog.

When September arrives, however, the skies open back to blue, fogs flee, and temperatures bloom. Summer arrives with welcome heat but also with the delicacy of autumnal light. The slanting sun lengthens shadows to purple and litters the sea with glistening gold. I am glad for the sunlit shade.

The sea leaves a shadow, a temporary shade, on the land as the higher tides of fall push great folds of water onto the shore during times of high tide and then draws back its waters, exposing vast mud flats, silver against the gold splashed waves. Crowds of migrating birds gather on those temporary sandy flats, enjoying the sun as much as I do.  I may have no wings to fly, but I can stand as still as the birds, listening to sea echos rise from sands and land on rocks, watching the welcome shadow of the sky skip across the bay.

The land leaves its own shadow on still pond waters as the heat encourages the bloom of algae as green as the last of summer grasses running up to the water's edge. The algae grows with the speed of yeast. As new blooms pushing old into the blue center of the water, the pond shrinks under the weight of its new land shadow. Suddenly it appears as if the field has suddenly grown larger. The algae eaters are happy; the migrating birds are happy, but if you or I were to step on this patch of shadowy field, we would sink into water settled over knee-deep mud.

Better to walk where grasses are drying yellow gold and the shadows of pine trees creeping flat on solid ground. If I lay my body against that black shadow trunk and stretch my arms into the lace tangle of  the shadow shade, I can feel embraced by the venerable pine soaring above me. I just lie there, happy to be sandwiched between the real and the imagined, the summer heat and soon-to-come shorter days of winter, crisp sea winds and overheated dusty air rising from the crushed grass below my thighs. I watch the geese  flying in wide vees above, listen to the caw-caw-cawing of the big beaked crows.

I close my eyes and imagine that there can be no greater happiness than being here on the shore, lying in new sun. When I rise to walk, I laugh at the geese arranged on the green grass in lines that seem like shadows of the tufted tall palms  on the blue sky beyond.

I love this land of truth and shadow. Sky becomes sea, sea becomes land, past becomes future, and the future decays to mulch. I may be a shadow of my former self but that shadow is itself an echo of  me unborn. Time mixes up as summer disappears and reappears again, a shadowed heat, rich with the aroma of salt and drying grass.

It's all okay. I say it again and again. It's all okay. Repetition makes it so.

Walking yesterday in the slant of late afternoon sun with the bay on my right  and the crowded parklands to my left, I found myself thinking about the power of water. The bay had pulled well away from the shore, leaving vast expanses of drying mud where some were walking with buckets in hand, collecting clams perhaps. Cormorants swam further out, diving with ease to find the fish swimming in shallower waters, but I knew that by midnight, the waters would return and lap over pathways, pushing once again against the rocks defining the shore, grabbing at the sandy bottom, sucking up what would be taken out to sea when they flowed away again. Such are tides, but what happens when the tides are great and storms arrive, bringing torrents of rain and bucket-loads of surf?

Hurricane Irene may have lost its strength as a hurricane before reaching NYC, its winds damaging little in the shuttered city, but the storm dumped copious amounts of rain across New England, which caused already swollen rivers in Vermont and New Hampshire to overflow their banks and wash angrily through town streets, flooding basements and carrying away anything that would float and much that would not. Although Irene’s winds did tear at trees and cast limbs to the ground, the breath of the storm was not as fearsome as were the torrents of rain released. Falling to already saturated ground, the rain caused as many damaging floods as did the storm surge that pushed ashore as winds propelled the rain inland. The power of water.

These are all simple facts, not very enlightening or earth-shattering, but in these days of climate change perhaps more important than they seem. As I walked along the shore, watching the seagulls tumble and dive, I wondered about the increased vulnerability not only of coastal regions to inundation but also of inland regions, such as Vermont and New Hampshire, because of rising sea waters due to melting arctic ice, which has been disappearing at unprecedented rates this summer and is now nearing record lows. That the melted ice is causing sea-level rise is a given, and that the sea-level rise affects the capacity of storm surges to flood coastal regions is obvious. I'm not a scientist but it seems to me that the increased moisture in the atmosphere can lead to greater snowfall and thus greater saturation of inland ground and the swelling of rivers as the snow melts. Certainly that was the case last winter. So perhaps it not so surprising that in this time of climate change a storm such as Irene would cause rivers to overflow their banks, and I wonder if such storms, such flooding, will become more frequent in the near and far future if we do not work assiduously to slow the melting of the ice. Human activity is causing that unprecedented loss of ice, and human beings can stop it, if they would change their habits.

What if we were all to use only of the earth what is absolutely necessary for life? What if we could learn to live more simply? I wonder if now, in these days of late capitalism at a time when many pundits still believe that our faltering economy can only be repaired by more consumption of manufactured goods – spend money to make money, buy, buy, buy – if the necessary changes will happen. I wonder if the many will ever ‘buy’ the notion of living simply, enjoying quiet pleasures rather than seeking exotic entertainments.

I watched as a white heron waded near shore, walking close to children splashing in the shallow waters. Neither bird nor children paid much mind to the other. The heron went about his business of looking for food; the children were enchanted by the peace of the day, enjoying the water and the sun. These are simple joys but satisfying. I enjoy the gentle winds and the laughter of the children, and when the heron takes to the sky, I catch my breath as wings expand to sails.

This morning the fog is dense enough to veil the last block of the street where it rises like thin smoke to the BART tracks above. As I walk, tiny drops settle on my body, each clinging to tiny separate hairs. What a great feeling! My arms, my face stay dry as these tiny drops tremble like universes on their individual hair stems. I am inside the clouds -- a flower, a plant, a tree being gilded with sky. The street is quiet; few walk before 8 a.m. and even fewer walk when the fog is out and about, but I like its gray tails slipping from block to block.

When I woke this morning, the radio blathering on about Hurricane Irene, but when I checked the NHC website,  the ‘historic’ hurricane had weakened . . . considerably, really as expected. . . still a hurricane but just barely. When it leaves the North Caroline shores, if it remains a hurricane, it will be even weaker than it is now. More than likely, it will bluster along as a tropical storm, no more threatening than many I recall from my NY childhood. In all my years living in and near NYC, I remember only one serious hurricane and that was Hurricane Donna in 1960. There were other storms and edges of hurricanes that came and went, but Donna left an impression on me because it arrived the same day my grandmother flew in from Europe where she had been studying with the painter Kokoschka. The storm was a wild one, with winds powerful enough to send power lines sparking to the street and to wrest a huge limb from the eighty-foot high weeping willow grew near the stream at the edge of our swampy west garden. The falling limb, larger in diameter than a fat man's waist, made a huge noise as it hit the ground and scared me, mostly because  our mother had gone to meet her mother at the airport, expecting us to stay quietly at home, diligently doing homework and beginning preparations for dinner. Ha, ha, you know how that goes, even on the best of days. It was, of course, very hard to concentrate with the wind howling through trees and rain beating on windows that began at floor level and traveled upward higher than my small arms could reach. I felt sure the storm would enter. Donna did wash over Long Island as a Category 2 storm, but my grandmother’s plane landed safely and the passengers all deplaned onto the tarmac – no moveable hallways in those days – and walked through the raging wind to the terminal. My grandmother later told me her umbrella turned inside out, but other than that, it was just a storm.

I was living in South Brooklyn when Hurricane Gloria approached NY with almost as much fanfare as is being offered Irene. No closing of subway systems or mandatory evacuations, but enough fear was generated to empty the city somewhat and streets quieted as folks left to stay with friends and relatives inland. We didn't leave; we stayed and waited for the storm. The skies deepened and greyed; there was some rain, not much, and it was hard to know when that hurricane – one that I call the Hurricane that Wasn’t – had arrived. As my husband walked through downtown Brooklyn, he saw a window blow out as a not-so-strong gust of wind flitted down the street. He puzzled over how that baby wind had forced the glass to break and decided that it must have been a sudden change in air pressure. He might have been right. Other than that, Gloria was a glorious storm in our part of town – just enough rain, not too much wind, and when the eye passed overhead, the clouds parted, revealing washed blue skies and brilliant sun.

In the years that intervened, we have become a society addicted to disaster. The eastern seaboard was declared a disaster zone before Irene made land-fall and as the storm weakened, media attention intensified, determined to see this storm as dangerous and deadly or at least potentially dangerous and deadly, as if by declaring the storm disastrous would make it so, prove the validity of all expensive precautions. When Irene reached Irene Cape Hatteras, sustained winds measured 59 mph with gusts to 84 mph, still a Category I storm but barely. Meanwhile, the NY subway is shuttered . . . why? As an experiment? See how the city functions without? In advance of the 9/11 anniversary? See if people will respond dutifully to commands?  Or is this just a way to get those millions of consumers into stores? Cry wolf! Buy plywood, batteries, water, and enough food to last at least a month.

If there’s no emergency, create it! Emergencies are good for business!

Damage reported so far in North Carolina? A few downed tree limbs, a damaged roof, some stormy seas, yet still the media reports that Irene is beginning its “potentially catastrophic run up the east coast.” More likely a run in the silk stockings worn by the emperor who is strutting about in his fine new ermine cape. See him? Look at his fine new clothes! Looks more like his skivvies, you say? You just might be right.

By early afternoon EDT, forecasters  suggest that Irene will “remain near hurricane strength” as she moves up the coast, and Mayor Bloomberg is saying that it's “unlikely” that subway service will be restored by Monday.  Here's something to consider . . . if the subway doesn't run, no one goes to work, and the financial markets stay shuttered. If the financial markets remain closed, the volatility of the past week stops, and when the markets finally reopen . . . well, we'll see.