Ain't nothing to it but to do it.

 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 Fir, which has a sweet citrus small almost like lime, is another of my favorites, but Kit Kit Dizze permeates and dominates the silken air and water in the summer and, to my nose-mind, is a delicious combination of artichoke, pine, strawberry and chamomile.

When we were small, my mother's side of the family would organize a family camping trip, at least once a summer, to either Pinecrest campground on Strawberry Lake high on the Sonora pass, or to Yosemite National Park.  When I look back on it, it seems to me to be one of the finest gifts I have ever received.  Not only were there twelve (!) other 1st cousins to run wild with, but being in direct relationship to the mountain, pure nature, in the summer taught me how to judge and confidently swim in moving water, which would, eventually, give me access to surfing the wild reef passes of Central California.  

I learned how to really give a landscape my full attention, which fueled a budding sense of needing to celebrate and honor creation by making pictures, writing words, singing songs, dancing.  My mother loved to dance.  There was always music.  My family showed me how to make camp and create dignified and simple systems of sustenance, which I still carry with me into the studio each and every time I begin to design someone's home.  One of the most deeply etched lessons I was given was how my Grandpa Jim, a Chickasaw Native from Indian Territory, Veteran, Dust Bowl Cowboy, very sternly but lovingly corrected my behavior when I became a little too enthusiastic in adding fuel to our campfire.

"C'mear boy."  

His eyes flashed in the firelight, set deep into his long, dark, lined face stearn, shadows dancing around his prominent cheekbones in the firelight, with just the slightest trace of a smile in the corners of his eyes.  I remember his face framed by white hair, neatly combed, almost glowing in the moonlight, a different kind of brightness than the orange firelight, flickering in his dark eyes.

"I don't need you getting too excited and burning up all our fuel, it's late and we aren't going out for more.  Now, I don't mind settin here with you watching a fire, but you need to set these things up right.  What you do is, is you take your sticks and logs and you set them down here in the flames, like this."

He laid out a wheel of stick-and-log spokes, laid on top of each other in neat spiraling order.  I noticed how this created air-space underneath them, which I already had learned is essential for a flame to catch.

"And now you set back and rest for a bit.  As the fuels get burned up, you just scooch the unburnt ends closer into the center.  That way, you don't waste anything, and you can control how big or little of a fire you have, and you don't waste your fuel.  You might be caught in wet weather sometime and only have what is laying about in a dry cave you find.  Everything that we have has value, and you need to respect that, and take good care to use it wisely."

Now, my life is half spent, and that lesson rings out, with boiling oceans and global war, and I've found a small, happy life on the sacred slopes with the rich smell of Kit-kit-dizze almost stinging my nose as I take my pup and my babe to slide into the silken green waters of our local swimming hole, and I think it just loops back around to our first date, where babe yelled out at the volcanic rock formations--"Wow, ancestors!"--and I said you want to smoke a joint and go out to talk with some special ancestor I know?..and to those long ago camping trips, all the ancestors, Ma, Grampa Jim, the snowpack and Owl and Beaver and Rattlesnake and Hawk; if I'm going to hallucinate from brain self-electrocution, I might as well remember those words, that lesson: "Everything that we have has value, and you need to respect that, and take good care to use it wisely."

Ok.  That was closer to 45 minutes.  So it goes.