Animal Nature

Dense fog has settled upon the moku. "Ah, Spider is splendid in her work, capturing for a time the sweet dew and brings it close to our canopy.  Thank you Spider" Our night of sleep has been filled with the images of unlikely company and situations. They trail like wisps of fog. I cannot capture them as well as Spider, but there is a faint remembering. Sleeping unplugged--without electrical currents running through the vardo, we are refreshed and available to other streams of awareness and pela (perhaps) it is the chaos of non-human awareness that makes dreams such a different world. Outside I hear the squeak of the wringer from the Au Hale (the wash house) Pete is washing and wringing out clothes. Hopeful that the fog will burn off by noon I note the squeak has stopped, his foot-fall replaces the sounds as I finish the sentence and swallow the last of a freshly sliced, fresh picked peach.

The paths around our tiny home spaces are littered with the work of Squirrel harvesting and eating pine cones. Pitch is every where: under foot, under sock, on JOTS tail and paws, and if we are unprepared on pants bottoms pretty much permanently. Yesterday while Pete disassembled our Quonset kitchen preparing us for our winter look, we had time in between tasks to reflect upon the nature of our life here. "I think we are being prepared to become more animal than human," Pete said as we sat together. The statement was simple and unembellished; it felt right and I simply nodded. Kolonahe, the gentle breeze played with the wind chime dangling not far from the bench upon which we sat. The Tall Ones were quiet as the sun moved lower in the sky. They watch us as we are busy with our work, perhaps they watch us just as they watch and feel Squirrel move up and down their skin and talk between them remembering stories of other Squirrels or some Two Legs who lived before us.

My Scorpio nature enjoys the deeply private times that allow me to tell stories that make sense of inexplicable circumstances. I make them up, write them down, and sometimes they tatau my emotions holding on to a memory for too long. Fortunately, I believe this is fortune at any rate, I fuel my animal nature with astres (the stars, planets, the moon and sun and the heavens) and the inexplicable becomes more navigable. Right now, over at my astrologer's blog she writes about a Scorpio.

..."So many people are socialized to think they won’t have to raise a hand in life. It’s fine, until some bastard comes along who wants to kill your for sport.
With Uranus in Aries squaring Pluto, don’t be surprised if this storyline pops up in your life."

"Raising a hand in life." Just what does this mean in my life? Many things have forced me to raise my hand, make a move and take action to save my life. All around me I watch Squirrel and the Tall Ones maintain their lives, above me the Osprey Women dive and catch as their babies imitate. The Heron has come to our man-made pond because the season has dried out other fishing spots; only three planted goldfish remain. While I walked the beach with a new friend earlier this week she noticed things I hadn't: a sound behind us, the murky streak across the sky. The sluff of bank behind us was her signal for moving on. The evidence of forest fires on the other side of the Cascades, no rain for months, a message of interconnectedness.


This weekend Pete and I joined an intimate Story Circle at our local library. Five of us shared stories and began to know one another. I cut and fabricate simple props made from recycled cardboard cartons and paper; and netting we use to protect (with some success) our blueberries from the hungry birds. The props help me learn the story of "How 'Iole Saved Hawaii." As I cut the shapes each prop touched the stream of heart that takes a story deeper than memorization. The often maligned 'Iole -- The Rat, and his role in a time of famine was rendered into written form and offered to me as a gift for telling. Terri Windling writes of the magic and the responsibility of listening for language that is the domain of ALL. Not at all singular as a human activity, Windling has a blog post here that ties things together for me with inspiration from David Abram:

... "Entranced by the denotative power of words to define, to order, to represent the things around us, we've overlooked the songful dimension of language so obvious to our oral [storytelling] ancestors...

The gift and the responsibility of a writer, and a Scorpio like myself, is to hear the song in every thing around me. When I tell of 'Iole, "a skinny rat who has been surviving by eating the dried pitch on the stones ..." I hear and see how the pitch that sticks to every where here in the paths beside my Gypsy wagon is no less the pitch that sustained a rat in Hawaii a very long, long, long time ago.