The land and the people who informed, instructed and shaped me into the woman I am today

I am reflecting on seventy trips around the sun, the land and the people who raised me, and continue to inform, instruct and shape me. About how this young girl with Cherokee, Lenape, Seneca, German, Oklahoma-Colorado roots, granddaughter of sharecroppers, born in the early 1950s, grew up in Tongva Territory in Southern California. 

In my early twenties I moved to the Central California coast and spent four decades on Chumash land. I carry the land, people and lifeways. In those years my sister-auntie elder friends raised me and taught me how to walk the seven ways with gratitude, respect, caring, compassion, honesty. I'm carrying those years and lessons given, and how they prepared me to walk forward after they walked on. 

A while back we left the home where we raised our kids and lived for four decades, and now we're living on Ohlone land. I'm walking gently, with gratitude and respect, a guest upon this good land that shelters us. 

Roots and Wings. For over a decade my writing focused on a love story about a landscape carved deep within me, and the people who believed I could, and taught me how. This book was not only about me. It’s also about the elder women whose lives are braided with mine, defining it, and shaping me, and how they taught me to age from youth into beauty. In writing I felt a great debt of responsibility to tell a story we share with integrity, honoring their lives. After my book was published Poets & Writers invited me to take part in the Ten Questions interview. Those ten questions asked me to reach deep. 

Time to Sow. Ann, the last of my elder women friends teaching me to walk the seven ways, has walked on. I'm getting to know myself anew without her. Leaning forward with gratitude, respect, caring, compassion. Thankful for the generosity, honesty and wisdom and steadfast guidance she gave, mentoring, shepherding and guiding me.

Turning Seventy in the Year of the Rabbit

On April 10, 2023 I wandered through City Lights Bookstore in San Francisco, searching for home. Books are a home I carry within. I found many titles I wanted to read, later, on a different day, next week or next month. But I couldn't find anything I could read right now. I roamed the basement, taking in row after row of books, and then I found it, Year of the Monkey by Patti Smith. 

 

That night, the eve of my seventieth birthday I went to bed early, reading. On page 76 in the Year of the Monkey, I read. “Across America one light after another seemed to burn out. The oil lamps of another age flickered and died. The sign was silent, but the book on my night table beckoned. Marcus Aurelius. I opened his Meditations: Do not act as if you had ten thousand years to live…

This made terrible sense to me, climbing the chronological ladder, approaching my seventieth year. Get a grip, I told myself, just revel in the last seasons of being sixty-nine. Staring at my image on the mercurial surface of the toaster, I noticed I looked young and old simultaneously. Marcus Aurelius asks us to note the passing of time with open eyes. Ten thousand years or ten thousand days, nothing can stop time.

Seventy. Merely a number but one indicating the passing of a significant percentage of the allotted sand in an egg timer, with oneself the darn egg. I am no longer a fast runner and that my sense of time seems to be accelerating. I do what I can to augment this recurring image in my favor, even replacing the egg timer with a crystal hourglass passing the dust of ground marble, such as the type found in the small wooden study of St. Jerome or the workshop of Albrecht Dürer. Even as there is most likely some finite principle concerning the rate that sand passes through an hourglass, no advantage in having a stately glass or more perfect grains. Since contemplating Marcus, I try to be more aware of the passing hours, that I might see it happen, that cosmic shift from one digit to another.” Patti Smith, Year of the Monkey. 

 

I am aware of the passing hours, I feel them happening, and I feel happy. Content in my body, aging, living. What a great gift. I feel that cosmic shift from one digit to another. One morning I will drink my last cup of coffee after a night of dreaming my last dream. I feel the ocean tides as they answer the moon.

Long walks are my mediation and prayer. Gratitude. Center down. Mindful. Take care of yourself everyone says to me. I am. And I have the words from my good friends to remind me, the women with the grandmother faces walking the seven ways. How they made me laugh, and told me the truth even when it was hard for me to listen. The wise words of the women who over three decades, lifted me from grief, instructed me in living, and showed me how to age from youth into beauty. Sage down, prayer up. Like a river stone in the raging water, I feel those rough spots I’ve yet to shed, begin to soften.

Walking and Remembering

Our elders say that ceremonies are the way we “remember to remember” and my ancestors call trees the standing people. Breathing in the scent of this good mountain earth, while walking through redwoods this morning, I’m remembering things I didn’t know I’d forgotten.

Walking gently this good earth

The sky is doing high drama. There is a stiff wind, scudding clouds, pellets of rain that start and stop. My mind flirts with the idea of staying dry in the house and going for a walk before it gets dark. No, it’s going to rain. But it might not, go for a walk. Meanwhile, I made a big pot of vegetable soup yesterday, and it will taste even better tonight.

A high tide is rolling in. The ocean grows wild off-season, waves pound the shoreline, claim the sand, crash over the rocks. With sunlight fading, my thoughts turn to the moon, a waning crescent. On the mountain, a twenty-minute drive from here, where my family lives, and where I lived after we moved, it’s 38 degrees, with a high of 45. 

My thoughts turn to the mountain. My shoes, on the front porch, are caked with sand from the beach and with mud from the mountains, the landscapes I frequent, and carry within.

 

There is a way that nature speaks, that land speaks. Most of the time we are simply not patient enough, quiet enough, to pay attention to the story.―Linda Hogan

Colorado

The Landscape Will Teach You Who You Are

Walking this good earth for more than seventy years, I’ve found home. The girl, the woman, the writer, the grandmother I’ve searched for, questioned, challenged and shaped, comes into view. I see her a few steps ahead, looking back at me, smiling. Telling me an earth journey is meant to be watercolor on the pages of life. We can pencil in an outline, but water mixed with color will wash and blend and give richness greater than edges controlled. 

 

The landscape will teach you who you are. —Pikuni Elder Joe Crowshoe, Sr. 

Photo credit goes to John Simpkins my friend, and decades-long partner to my cousin Victor. 

The Alvord desert, the landscape I carry within.

Gratitude: July’s End

It’s one of those end-of-the-month days when the money runs out before payday arrives. And you take all of the nickels and pennies out of the change jar and load it into the coin counter at the grocery store—and it’s plenty enough to buy a big bag of pinto beans and two dozen corn tortillas. 

There are lots of tomatoes on the vine in the back garden, arugula is abundant and a big bowl of habaneros shared by kind friends. 

On the Chile trail and we will eat well for the next couple of days.

Yesterday

For many years I lived on the Mesa in Santa Barbara, 2 blocks from the beach. Then I moved to a canyon area near the foothills, less than 2 miles from the ocean. We can’t see the ocean from here. But we can smell it.  A wind from the sea lofts in the scent of seaweed and salt air. 

We have the best of both worlds; my kitchen faces the ocean, and my bedroom looks at the foothills, with wildlife in our backyard. Red Tail hawk nest in the trees. There is a fox den nearby. 

Yesterday, sitting at the picnic table at the far end of the yard, overlooking the dry creek bed, I looked down and saw a California King Snake slithering by. Beautiful snake, and it was a careful reminder that I need to pay attention because this dry, drought forsaken California weather also brings Rattle Snakes closer to the house. 

And king snakes prey on rattlers.