What Wildness Is This

Poem from a Stone

There's something about the Southwest that touches me, and not just with a caress. It's more like a strong arm pulling me in, and I have to surrender. Maybe it's the metal in the rocks that magnetizes me to this place. Maybe it's the way the land lays itself out nakedly, not afraid to show its bones. When I'm there, I don't need to speak, because the stones speak so eloquently. The last time I was deep in Capitol Reef National Park, a remote part of Utah that is not to be missed, a poem came to me from the rocks as they always do. (I seem to be taking dictation when I am there, even though poems do not regularly make themselves known in my daily life). 

My husband and I did a recommitment ceremony under our own special arch, the kind of place where I would have preferred to get married in the first place, and I wrote a poem for the occasion. Somehow love and nature always seem merged to me in the Southwest, but this can be any kind of love: romantic, love for the self, or even a love affair with the land.

The truth is revealed here,
the spine of the land
laid out in divine plan.
Honest rocks share their stories
in sunset stone, and
sacred sage blesses our being.

Though we go through narrows
of tear-stained walls,
we always emerge
to wren-song and water.

An arch of stone
protects our marriage,
layers of memory
made solid by years,
beautiful by wind.

As we leave this place
to walk through the world,
let us remember this
bridge of safety
always above us,
an angel of knowing stone.

Copyright 2007 by Laura Girardeau

Fragile Soul

 

Early in the morning, a few days ago, my mother, very old, blind and always independent, died.

     Soon after, early on another morning, I walked the desert, thinking of her life, so intertwined with mine. Down the road, in the sloping ditch I stopped by a blooming Jimson Weed. This flower has been forever immortalized to me as belonging to Georgia O’Keeffe. I use images of her Jimson Weeds in one of my writing workshops and give bookmarks commemorating this painting to participants. It should be realized though, that for all its delicate appearance, this is a flower of mystery and power. 

     Also called Sacred Datura, it is used by Southwestern Native Americans for ceremony. Poisonous and dangerous, the shamans carefully mix the seeds for a tea that produces sleep, induces dreams and protects against evil. Centuries of knowledge go into their ceremonial product. The celebrants know at which growing stage to pick and it is definitely not advised for use by others. Another nickname for this sweet blossom is locoweed, toxic to cattle, horses and other animals. Beware its beauty. 

   But this day I gathered strength from the pureness of a simple dawn offering of Jimson Weed. Soon the Tucson sun would close the flower against the intense light of day. Back home, I told my photographer husband, Bob, and later, he showed me this image he’d taken of the Sacred Datura. And I wrote memorial words for my mother, as writers feel the need to do.

Fragile Soul

So close to sleep, so near to dreams,

Surrounded by life’s deep shadows,

You too, become translucent in the morning light.

The sun shows bright through your thin petals,

Shines and burns through your thin skin,

Cuts through a mind uneasy

Until prayer transforms to angel wing.

Like graceful feathers reaching up.

Soon it will be time to close.

An ending stretches out through pale, white tips,

As another frail, old soul

                                    Escapes toward the sky.

Turtle carries the world on her shell

Last week, my husband, Richard, and I returned from a 3,300-mile road trip across the Southern Great Plains. Our odyssey took us across Colorado and New Mexico, the length of Oklahoma - panhandle and all, and into Arkansas, where we spent a day atop the state’s tallest peak, 2,753-foot-high Mount Magazine. We drove south to the Texas Hill Country with its limestone caves, bat flights, spreading live oaks and the Land Full of Stories Conference, and then still farther south to sub-tropical Eagle Pass on the border between the U.S. and Mexico. On our way home, we crossed the Chihuahuan Desert in west Texas and New Mexico.

We saw spectacular swaths of wildflowers and exotic birds; we eyed landscapes we’d never seen; we looked at noteworthy art, met interesting people, and ate great and not-so-great food.

But it’s the turtles that stick in my mind from the trip. We spotted them everywhere: in roadside ditches, bayous, springs, in the blue flow of Hill-Country rivers. And on the roads too. Sometimes moving slowly on leathery legs, sometimes dead, shells cracked and innards gaping.

We stopped to move the first one off the road in Arkansas. It was a big painted turtle, its shell a calligraphy of markings that turtles apparently read to identify each other. In far south Texas, we stopped for a slider whose shell grew a mossy garden of algae, perched on the centerline of a highway nowhere near a stream. After Richard toted it to safety, we sped on, hoping the turtle knew where it was going.

One morning in San Marcos, we passed a huge red-eared slider struggling to climb a curb at the edge of a four-lane street. I hopped out, darted over and picked it up, my hands slipping on the turtle’s dinner-plate-sized shell.

It kicked, twisting hard. I dropped it, and my heart thudded as carapace hit concrete.

I picked the big turtle up again, gripping the slick shell firmly, and lifted it carefully over the highway fence. Then I waited, heart in hand, until its head emerged.

The last turtle we met on the trip was in an inner courtyard of a famous sculptor’s home in Marfa. The tour guide opened a wood door to let us look into a spare space enclosed by nine-foot-high adobe walls. A small, three-sided green “room” delineated by living bamboo walls punctuated an empty expanse of gravel and brick.

“There’s a tortoise with a cracked shell in here,” she said. “It’s been here for years,” she added, “probably rescued from the highway.”

A high-domed desert box turtle with a split creasing its shell hunkered in a patch of shade, watching us with unblinking eyes.

As we drove away, I thought about that box turtle: it had all the bamboo it could eat, water from a sunken pool in the courtyard floor, sunny spots to bask in and shade for rest. But it could not get out, and no other turtle could get in. So it would live out its life alone, sentenced by its injury to a courtyard prison instead of free to roam the desert grasslands.

And I wondered - I still do - if the person who hit that turtle even noticed the thump. Or if they drove on, unaware.

A Native American origin story tells how the world began as a watery place, with no land at all until toad dove deep beneath the surface and emerged with a bit of mud in his mouth. After the other animals plastered that mouthful of mud to turtle’s shell, the earth grew and grew until it became enough land for everyone.

Turtle, says the tale, still carries the world with room for us all on her shell.

Susan J. Tweit
susanjtweit.com
http://communityoftheland.blogspot.com/

Women in Wild Places

The Land Full of Stories Conference was off to a great start for me last week as I stood at the base of a limestone trail in Wild Basin Wilderness Park with my field session co-host Anne Beckner and seven women interested in experiencing and writing about the 227-acre preserve in the heart of Austin, Texas. I was struck by the irony of the event. Sponsored by Story Circle Network (an organization of women encouraging women to share and preserve their own histories and philosophies), our group was exploring a place protected for posterity through the determined efforts of seven other women three decades earlier.

I had read about the park program called Wild Afternoons—educational tours for scouts or other children’s groups concentrating on subjects like birding, forestry, insects and Indian lore. Though we no longer were eligible for merit badges or class fieldtrips, there we were… A few wild women who had spent much of their daily lives, like Wild Basin, surrounded by the chaos of a city and the spiritual or ecological pollution that accompanies it. Seeking solace, escape or adventure in this wild place on this steamy, wild afternoon.

The temperature soared to 98 degrees as we hiked the trails, swallowing and sweating the humidity, inhaling the scent of juniper. With the help of a sun-bronzed guide, we learned about the survival instincts of cypress, live oak and other indigenous trees as well as their foes. The cynapid wasp, for instance, is particularly fond of oaks. A pregnant female will land on a branch and sting it once, boring a hole in which to lay her egg once the sap begins to rise. As the branch continues to leak sap, a gall develops in response to the infection. The hard shell of the gall protects the egg from harm and preserves the sap for the larva to feed upon from the time it hatches a week later until it matures and bores its way out as a newborn wasp. Gotta love that good old ecological balance!

As the trail begins to climb and my knees and energy wobble, I recognize the heart-shaped leaves of an old friend, a redbud. I am refreshed by memories of cooler days. One of Texas’ most pleasant surprises in late winter is the sight of the first blooms of a redbud tree. Delicate but daring, the bare branches of this fairly small tree will begin unrolling their rosy, ruffled sleeves as early as January in some areas. The clustering blooms in various shades of pink or even purple will become the first flowers of the year. Dogwoods, daffodils and plum blossoms won’t be far behind, but they must wait their turn.

Like a woman, a redbud tree must do more than simply look pretty. Native Americans realized the benefits of the redbud early on. They boiled its inner bark and roots for a tea used to treat fevers, vomiting and whooping cough. During winters, the plants were used for firewood. In the spring, the blooming branches were brought inside a home to drive winter away. Indian children were said to be fond of eating the blossoms.

The redbud is sometimes called the Judas Tree because of the ancient lore that Judas hung himself from such a tree. But that’s another story.

Our leather-skinned guide notices that I’ve stopped walking. Following my gaze, he lifts a small limb of the redbud and asks our group, “Do you have any idea where the redbud finds the energy and strength in winter to produce blooms while other trees are still sleeping?”

“The sap!” I pipe up.

“No, not exactly.” Smiling at my surprise, he explains that the redbud’s massive root system beneath the earth is strong enough to supply and transport this important energy to the branches, jump-starting the blooming process even before one leaf is formed.

His words start me thinking. Across Central and East Texas over the years, I probably have spotted hundreds of redbud trees growing wild at woods’ edges and in shady meadows with no one to cultivate them. I am reminded of a quote by Helen Keller: “Many people know so little about what is beyond their short range of experience. They look within themselves and find nothing. Therefore, they conclude that there is nothing outside themselves either.” What if we looked inside ourselves, I wonder, and found a redbud-like root system? The inner power that transmits strength, beauty and life itself from the tips of the tree’s roots to the highest of its branches. Finding this strength within itself, the redbud is free to bloom and grow and give of itself to the outside world.

I’ve watched at times as women found that inner strength and beauty, discovering the freedom to revel in their own blossoming, gaining and sharing newfound wisdom. I look around me at the women gathered at this spot on this trail in this moment and am happy in the knowledge that they share my insight, each in her own distinctive way.

What wonderful companionship I’ve enjoyed and lessons I’ve learned here in this wild place on this wild afternoon.