Evacuation? Willits, October 9, 2017

White flakes fall from the sky, inviting a sense of wonder. Looking more closely, I see these would-be snow crystals are more like torn pieces of paper. I shudder as one lands on my hand. They are ash from the fires burning too close to my town, to the haven of my home.

 I can feel a rising tightness squeeze my stomach. I swallow the sour bile, gurgling at the base of my esophagus. 

 With a deep breath, I try to keep myself practical and start to pack because there could be an evacuation. Instead, I am drawn to sew small gift bags out of Japanese silk someone has given me. I find myself raking out the dead fruit beneath the trees alongside my driveway, then collecting them in a pile before dumping into the compost bin.

 My hands shake. I can't seem to make any decision about what I want to take with me. I vacillate between grabbing my purse and personal/business folders for myself and my mom or packing mementoes and valuables as if I will never see my home again. If I proceed with choosing items I want with me forever then I face the possible devastating reality about leaving my home. So many have lost everything already! How do I know I may not be one of them?

With fear hounding my heart, I fall into a well-practiced pattern of self-soothing behavior by putting things in my mouth: a peanut, bite of Apple, chocolate square, water, coffee, tea. I can at least be proud I’m not chewing my fingernails to their quicks as I did when I was a youngster. I’m not stuffing a cigarette into my mouth as I did when I was a young adult, or sneaking a drink like when I was a teenager or pouring milk over my straight shot of bourbon when I was a divorcee.

The fires have come on us fast. So rapidly, in fact, there is a level of energetic hysteria vibrating through the streets. Motor homes and RVs, trailers and campers, are parked behind their matching trucks and sit in parking lots. We are readying ourselves for a mass exodus that no one really wants. Our lives are on hold, freezing our fear of impending doom into tears or anger or restlessness. We are here, ‘ready alert’ until there is no more danger and we can ‘stand down.’ When that will happen, we have no clue. The firefighters, over 400 strong, are stretched across four counties and 14 or more fires rapidly merging their mighty flames into blackening destruction across world-renown vineyards and gardens, ranches and towns.

 I pack all day and turn to see so much of myself still on the walls. The newly-made couch pillows that are color-coded to satisfy a Feng Shui design, my re-arranged art hangings of my many friends and late husband who will create no more.

Mementoes and keep sakes, family heirlooms and thrift store buys. Everything that says ‘me’ right now. There is no time for my son to come pick them up. The legacy of our family could be lost just as many others have had theirs go up in flames or destroyed recently by flooding, hurricanes, and earthquakes.

 Maybe we're supposed to give up our past thoughts, identities, and prejudices, our dreams and burdens, and step forward into something new. A new attitude, a new regime, a new way of civilization. I want to cling to all of my past, but there is no room in the car.

 So, I wait to see what is my future, a little perplexed at my choices: the training manuals for Reiki classes, the three ring binders with all the details to finish writing The Sacred Bundle Series, warm clothes, the new propane camp stove, bag of my mom's bills and investments, mine too, water, a knitting project. A few pictures, my computer, and the special suitcases with sacred items for prayer and ceremony sit by the door to grab on my way out. 

 I feel as if I’m standing on a bridge between yesterday and tomorrow, waiting for the cosmos to decide if I’m either to cross into a new life or return to my old one with a different perspective.

The Chicken Lesson

Separating the bones from the meat of a grilled chicken after I’d eaten my fill, I thought of a student of mine. In fact, I always think of her as I do this project and prepare to make a soup or bone broth.

She was/is Vietnamese and had survived during the war with her family, eating what they could find and trading goods for clean water and grain, etc. She always told her history matter-of-factly, with little emotion. It was mostly memories of silly stories, and her quick laughter stood often as punctuation marks.

Being short did not make her weak or subservient. When her father had encouraged her to run away, she already had a plan and went directly to a French nunnery in the country side. Her mind was a quick one too. She learned French and English and math. How she came to America I don’t recall, but she had determined that she would never be poor again.

When we met, she was 40ish, stylish, had her own company with five employees. She had taught herself to be a head hunter and matched high-powered people into high powered jobs. Her take-home pay was never below $40,000/month.

When she stayed with my late husband and I, she was taking her Second-Degree Reiki class. She was thrilled to be out of the city and experiencing our Northern California mountain home with its solar electricity and well water. She loved the quiet. Laying on the deck considering the night sky gave her a thrill. She admitted she slept more soundly with us than she had in months.

After I thought I’d completed the task of deboning the chicken and saving the meat, she smiled when she asked if she could help finish the job. After 10 minutes, she had found another two cups of chicken meat. I have never seen such stripped ribs, neck, and back bones. “That is what it took to survive,” she said simply, then added, “That and patience.”

In the middle of all the catastrophes these days, her remembered words are growing more and more meaningful.

I have to travel once every four to six weeks, through the Bay Area traffic along any one of five options: #880, #1, #20, #580, or #680. I need to go from Willits to Pacific Grove where my 98-year-old mother sleeps in her hospital bed in a skilled nursing facility.

These highways used to have a pattern. I could navigate and miss the bumper to bumper cars between 10AM and 1PM during the week. This is no longer a truth. Traffic is horrendous for this rural driver. I must settle into patience and awareness if I am to survive this challenge.

Bombs are not dropping on me nor are guerrilla troops taking pot shots at me. I have enough food and can get clean water. There is a cloud sometimes that lives to the left or the right of my vision. The cloud is fear and worry that some decision at some level of government or some dark patch in my karma will change my current comfort level.

I make myself put that away and concentrate every day, every moment of every day, on what is (not what could be but isn’t) right now.

Salvaging edible food from a partially-eaten chicken carcass tonight took my attention. The concentration gave me a memory of a woman who had survived by her wits and determination. Whether she suffered from a painful trigger of a memory or PTSD from her childhood trauma, I never saw it. I saw her as I think she wanted to be seen and how she saw herself, simply as a survivor.

May we all see ourselves in that light with a quick laugh and the determination to make the best of what we have.

Tomorrow: Relationships in the Sky

The eclipse will be available for viewing around 11:30 tomorrow morning in my area, give or take 15 minutes on either side of this time. I had a picture in my mind of sitting outside and just experiencing it; the Moon coming between the Earth and the Sun. Just my sitting there and waiting for the sensations of being in the day and having the light dimmed.

Will the birds stop singing? Will all of us and the plants and the trees and the animals be disoriented for a time? Will the dogs bark … cats hide? Will there be a sense of peace or chaos?

Then I read details from the Navaho Nation, the Hindus, and the Yaqui. They honor this as a sacred event. “Do nothing,” they say, “during the passage of this time. Be inside. Do not look at the phenomena out of respect of their coming relationship.” Almost as if it’s an intimate connection between our three solar objects.

Our Earth is on an oval trajectory, I think, around our Sun. We are held there by a mysterious pull due to our size, weight, magnetic field of the Sun and of our own. Around us circles Moon in much the same way. I’m sure scientists have a more detailed account of cause and effect. The point is, we and our Earth and Moon hang around this Sun and have been doing so for billions of years or more. Without that Sun, we wouldn’t be who we are, what we are, and what we are capable of doing. We, all of us, no matter what skin color or religion or political leaning, are dependent on this fact of rotation. We have good reason to be sun-worshippers. There is no life as we know it without this Sun and how we circumvent it.

Another thought is that the tilt of our axis determines a lot of how our world responds to this relationship. I used to think the Earth had a metal pin through it just like the models of Earth in the school library that could be turned to locate continents and oceans. I would get dizzy and almost sick, when a student played with the globe and spun it rapidly like a top.

There is no real pin. There is a center around which we are oriented.

The entire set-up is dauntingly awesome, and unsettling. I can’t help but feel ungrounded if I’m not careful.

It all being a mystery is just not as worthy a phrase as I would like to impart.

I can only imagine in the earliest years how animals responded to serious darkness in the middle of the day. Would the First Peoples have been fearful that their world was finished. I wonder if they ran and hid, bowed deeply in supplication, or sacrificed someone or anything to appease whomever they believed responsible for this phenomenon.

This coming Monday seems as if the current society will be making a party out of it, well, maybe not everyone, but many. There appears to be a much more sophisticated attitude toward nature and natural spectacles now. A bit narcissistic in a way, as if this event was staged as an excuse to get out of town, gather with coffee and doughnuts, or ‘tokes’ and snacks, or any other manner of refreshments.

Am I strange that I don’t want to see it? That I want to feel it? Because I can’t help but consider this eclipse is more like the daily ‘tween-times’ or those precious moments when light transitions between day and night and night and day. Like a crack where the magic can get in. I want to sense the strangeness on my skin, the variation in the quality of the air, the changes in the temperature. I want to believe that the Sun, being covered by the Moon, is perhaps a metaphor of the Sacred Feminine offering herself to heal the searing heat of the Masculine with her caress. Perhaps in these brief moments, these two can be united in the vision of yin and yang. I want to feel the power of the Moon as she performs her so infrequent ministrations of being on top of himself the Sun. I want to pretend I understand the feeling of their grief at having to pull away because each must move on to perform their singular roles and duties as a brilliant light and a reflective orb.

And I want to pray that, if this is a sacrifice, on either of their parts, that it is for something to come into our world that is good and peaceful and promising.