Natural Harmony

As the fog lifts, I come to a bench on the promontory, sit down and listen. I hear waves crashing below on the rocky beach. A raspy bird call startles me out of my reverie. Another bird calls--cheep cheep, cheep--betraying an urgency of life longing to make more life. I hear insects making a sound like a child's New Year's noisemaker. Insects are food for so many of my feathered friends.

Smells hang in the heavy still air. Smoke tells me my kind are not far away. A musty smell alerts me that fungi are silently transforming dead things into nutrients so new life can rise up.

Looking overwhelms me. I stare at the sea hoping to identify migrating gray whales. The sea is colorful: dark blue; gray and brown; turquoise and green and white. Changing trails of color appear then disappear on its surface. I remember from last night the shimmering paths of moonbeams dancing on the water.

What is so appealing about this place where I sit? The trees here are large and old, creating their own environment. Alder, birch and Douglas Fir. Their lichen covered branches bend to touch the grass as if bowed in prayer. It is a holy place. I feel the mystery. My indigenous brothers and sisters came here in the past. Their spirits dance here still. If I am very quiet, I feel their presence as the dew rises to praise creation.

They made the land into a park. We crouch along the path, nestling palm-sized buckeye seeds into the dirt and marking them with white flags. We nurture saplings and refuse to let them surrender, guarding them from trampling boots. We drench the seeds in buckets of water in a gentle trickle to imitate the fall of a currently nonexistent rain. The flags grow dirty and ragged, worn by time and elements, but the buckeyes flourish.

Beside them, the California fuchsia thrives. We reach between its branches to tug away weeds while preserving newly emerging shoots. Feathery, dandelion-like seeds cling to our sleeves, our pants, our hair. With any luck, they’ll sprout and creep across the ground to reclaim their land. One day we find the fiddlenecks hidden among a patch of invasive grasses. Their curling violin stalks are a stunning representation of the golden ratio—the perfection of nature in all her glory.

Who would’ve thought topsoil-growing wildflowers would creep through bulldozed dirt, stubbornly unfurling their heads? We’re here, they tell us. We aren’t going anywhere. When I meditate, I visualize a tree with deep roots. The tree shades me. The tree is me. When I dance, grounded steps are the most intuitive. With each stamp of my feet, I send reverberations of energy in all directions. It’s primal, signaling to the earth that I’m here, the same as when I wave pruned branches, dispersing seeds on the wind.

He’s dying and I just turned seventeen.
Wrapped up in wires like an octopus caught in a net,
He smiles, asks if I’ve had a boyfriend yet. Well, I had a girlfriend.
We broke up. It wasn’t safe for her to come out to her family.
After a year, her parents had caught on. I knew it when they looked at me
Like I was going to dig through their silverware drawer and take home
The life they had planned for her.

That’s how my first love was, too. There were no words for it back then,
Just summer nights, the cabin in the woods, the cicadas’ song.
He couldn’t fall asleep next to the boy he loved.
He heard the dog barking, followed it outside
Where it had crept all the way under the porch.

He called out and the forest called back.
It was a woman’s voice ringing in his ears.
The voice of the forest; guilt, that buried itself in his abdomen.
The tumor had been growing for ten years,
But he recognized it as the feeling he carried with him his whole life.
In the hospital, the voice softened to provide him comfort,
As everything returns to the earth from which it came.

H o w   a   s t r i n g   o f   h o u r s
makes a day,
                   a n d   t h e   d a y s
          crowd into months,
                   m o n t h s   d o m i n o  
    to years
            y e a r s   c o l l i d e
                    into decades—
                     it’s more 
                                     than I can fathom.
         But if you’ll sit close to me 
         by this cliff
                          and watch just one 
sunset
                                   over the 
                      Tiffany 
                                    ocean
        as the cirrus clouds
turn a powdery orange
                            against a sky 
                                                            tincturing
to violet
then I’ll welcome 
    another day 
           y i e l d i n g 
    its colors 
to the night.