The Texture & Specificity of Life

 Just do it.  Get it out, get it done.  Fifteen minutes, and, go. There is a very specific smell in the Sierra Nevada in the summertime.  It stirs my deepest memory centers.  I've know that smell my entire life, but I just learned what plant actually makes the smell, what it is called.  Like most things, it has many names.  Chamaebatia foliosa. Bearclover. Mountain Misery. And, my personal favorite, the Miwok work Kit Kit Dizze.  It has small white flowers in the spring, delicately shaped foliage, almost fern-like, and grows in dense mats and shrub-stands in the understory of the mixed conifer forest starting at about 2000' elevation and continues up into at least the the lower alpine, about 6500'.  It fills-in over erratic glacial boulder formations & fills the hot, dry, steep, exposed canyon walls on the Western Slopes with it's aroma in the summer months.  There are many other amazing smells in the forest in the summer--Douglas Fi...

 July 2nd, 2023 I wanted to write.  When I was thirteen.  Thirty years ago.  I wanted to be one who was mad for life.  Whose ghosts haunt the teenage mind, part of the pantheon of culture heros who burn bright and light the connections of the past with the present, who transcend that terrible limitation, and ultimate gift, human mortality. I want to write, now.  I want to write and do yoga and walk in the wild places and make pictures and shine my light on the curiously complex net of being that is in and around me.   Movement heals.   My brother who has dealt with terrible pain and injuries told me that.   Does anything ever really heal?  Is that an illusion on the chopping block, as well?   Like the synchrony of artistic merit and some ultimate value as an existing thing?  The counselor said that when we do deep healing work, we heal seven generations back, and seven generations forward. It's hard to even ...