At four a.m. I can see the dove-clustered Pleiades straight overhead if I go stand out in the sweet-smelling dark, and Venus low in the east. Brown pelicans are returning for the winter. The other day I watched a flock of them low over Tomales Bay, winging regal out toward the ocean. I love watching them ride the spray just inside a breaking wave. They never falter. Like the Brown pelicans, I too have returned home to Point Reyes this season after a final visit to my house in Devon that became a U-turn of undeniable clarity, a true letting go after four years of back-and-forth, and a very intense few weeks of packing, cleaning, giving a lot of stuff away, and shipping way too many boxes of books back to California.
It’s been a month since I returned and an old love for this wild Pacific peninsula has enveloped me, a love I haven’t felt this deeply for many many years, since I began my era of wandering back in 2018. My roots are sinking deep into the granite soil again. At night when all is still and I can see the Pleiades straight above and hear the ocean’s voice traveling up the valley and over the pine ridge to my house, I can sometimes also feel the peninsula like a dreaming animal all around me. I feel its length and breadth. I think of whales, and sleep again.
During this month I’ve also been almost hallucinatorily hard at work on a book deadline I’ve mentioned a few times now over the past six months but am not yet able to officially unveil to you! It is the full abundant harvest of what began as Mother Animal, but that’s all I can tell you for now. The first big draft, coming in at around 380 pages, is days away from being done (in fact I really should be working on that right now as I write here in bed with my tea, instead of this post!). My editor and I will then get it into its final shape, and I’ll be able to officially announce all of the details, and even do a cover reveal, in early 2026. So please stay tuned! I am so excited. I’ve never birthed a book like this one before. It is the culmination of many, many years of research journeys and of deep passion for the myths of the feminine.
In other news, now that I am back in Point Reyes for real, now that my roots are reaching and deepening at long last again alongside the bishop pines and the flocks of quail, I have a series of in-person workshops brewing, centered around a new office space I’m about to begin nesting into in town. To kick off this new era, I am going to be doing a midwinter storytelling event on December 20th at St. Columba’s here in Inverness. I will be sharing full details about this evening of midwinter story and song in the next couple of weeks, as well as an unveiling of my new mythic center here in Point Reyes. So do keep your ears perked, it would be so lovely to see you there!
For today, since I am deep in deadline land and must immediately return to my behemoth draft, I wanted to share with you a piece I wrote when I first returned from living in Crete in 2019. I was inspired by the pear trees and silver hands in the Handless Maiden fairytale. I knew I needed sanctuary, and that I needed my hands back. I can see now that it’s taken me all these years to fully regrow them. That maybe only now, maybe only in the last few months, can I feel my new fingers at long last. So this piece is in honor of the journey, in honor of the pear, in honor of girl who lost her hands and couldn’t have fathomed how long it would take to regrow them. (It turns out that the seven years in the forest sanctuary in the fairytale might, after all, have been literal…)
She Regrows Her Hands
At the threshold of the forest sanctuary, a woman in white said my name. It was my secret name. I did not know how she knew it.
“We who keep the forest sanctuary know the ways of what is above, my daughter,” she said.
I did not know what she meant. I was so weary and so cold. I had been walking in the trees and weather for so long. She put a dove-grey blanket around my shoulders and ushered me inside, into a warmth and a peace I could hardly bear. I asked her to explain.
“Your face has been on the undersides of the fallen pear leaves for months now,” she said. Her voice was soft, the dove’s voice. “Your hunger has been in the ripe hazelnuts by the river. Your voice has been in the little owls who call from the soft branches. Your hands have been in the hollows where rain changes the shape of stones, and we grind the barley from the little field into flour.
“We heard you coming, because the place where you were queen, and this place where I am mistress, are the roots and branches of one tree. But roots rot when there is no circulation from the outer tip. We needed you to bring the stars down here. And you need what comes unstoried from the ground. A queen isn’t a queen, until she grows her own hands.
“But you can’t grow a thing on light alone. You can’t grow a pear by celestial influences, by sunshine, only. A pear needs the wet and dark minerals. She drinks from the unseen. She flourishes on what has died and is dissolving into particles, into pure vitamin. And so we knew you were coming, because your hands had no roots, and were as silver caps on teeth, holding in place something that had died, no blood left, no circulation. In the pear leaves and in the hazels, the owl’s call and in the rain-holed stones of my forest, your real hands are reaching for you, bringing you to root.