Votives Hung at the Hour of Animals

What follows are three different pieces from the last weeks since I arrived home in California. They form a kind of triad, an animal-hoofed-circling around experiences of the holy, from different angles. There are lots of votives being lit, animals becoming votives, black bears making home in the pinewood, mountain lions walking about making the writer nervous, and a poem about a boat that slipped in sideways, whose meaning is honestly somewhat mysterious even to me, and yet feels like it is speaking to the others, a kind of riddle for me to carry forward.

(Photograph is of gold leaf jewelry from the House Tombs at Mochlos, circa 2500 BCE, Crete)

                                                                         
                                                                         
                                                                        Part One
                                                                           Votives

And I said to myself, if I have to light a hanging votive for every place you were sure you were dying, I will come with my matches and my little box of cloth wicks, and I will set the fresh wick in the cork and I will float it in oil as old as the oldest trees at Eleutherna where I first heard a voice call me daughter of God, daughter of Paradise, and I will burn sacred resins, and I will love you, there I will love you, and there by the oak tree where you were too terrified even to swallow, and there by the neighbor’s trash bins where you thought you could’t breathe, and there at the sound of the front door closing, the sound of two hundred days of being afraid of your own heartbeat, two hundred days of parts of you dying over and over again, of that one piece that never rose up out of the bed, the one piece of you that was too tired and too sad and too scared to remember how to live— there, there, even there I will love you.

For was it not where Demeter wept, and gave up hope, and became mortal, that the temple of Eleusis was built? A hanging light marking the place where she almost died of sorrow, but did not, where she asked that her sorrow be turned into sanctuary? What if this were true for every place where we too have been shattered, and thought we couldn't go on?

And so I am walking down the hill from the house— a small hill that leads to Shell Beach where once I saw a river otter playing in the tide in the middle of the night, and another time napped on the sand and heard the voices of men and women and children laughing and calling in a language as old and bright as the obsidian arrowhead tip I found in the shallows —but which nevertheless, though humble in size now and perfectly safe, paved all the way up and down, was for a winter and a spring my thrice-nine mountains, my threshing floor, my hell. And so at every turn I am lighting a votive in my mind and leaving it hanging there, like I did sometimes at night in the village on the island, finding the wicks in their plastic case tucked on a stone ledge in the chapel, finding the plastic bottle of olive oil, finding the lighter, so I could see Jesus and Mary glowing there in the Byzantine dark, so I could feel that measure of human longing and heart and faith and pain and trust. So I could feel that unending mercy, there in the chapels the grandmothers tend, making sure the flowers stay fresh and the embroidered cloths under the icons are clean, making sure the olive oil doesn’t run out. I see them like that, humble and earnest, absolutely faithful, and also able to transform anything, these votives I'm lighting.  

Later, when I am trying to sleep but sleep is hard to find, and I fear that who I've become won't be strong enough to face what I remember, I see in my mind's eye the hill glowing, dozens of lights dissolving, with mercy, my terror. Pouring and pouring their warm olive light upon everything. I’m not quite sure how the votives stay there in the air. Maybe birds are carrying their cords. Doves, or the strong thrushes, maybe coast live oak trees have shifted their orientation slightly in order to extend a branch (we will pretend that it isn't wildfire season for the sake of this vision), or the gentle deer who walk the hill nightly, maybe they are carrying them, keeping them afloat for me. 

It's then I realize, laying there in the Pacific dark, that the animals themselves are the votives. That they are fountains of original light. 

For many years now, when I can’t sleep, when the dark is swallowing and vast and all I seem able to think about is our mortality, I turn my thoughts to the animals around me on the land. They are close, warm and breathing inside that darkness too. I think of the thousand thousand songbirds, beaks under their wings, perched on their sleeping branches in the coyotebrush. I think of the snakes in the earth, moving slowly, all the snakes of Point Reyes at once, garter and rubber boa and king and the occasional shy rattlesnake, their sinuous movements over the ground, their tunnels. All of them right in this moment, moving gently. I think of all the bobcats and the soft pads on their feet, all of them at once this very second in their willow dens, their noses with that touch of pink, their unfathomable pale green eyes, the tufts of their ears, how quiet everything goes when one turns to look at you from the brush. I think of the owls, the specific tree branches that their claws are touching, the way the night is on their feathers. I think of gray whales in the tide, I think of gray whales in the tide, I think of gray whales in the tide, and somewhere, a dolphin. 

I feel them all shifting warmly and steadily about in the dark. Every single one of them a votive glowing, every heart with its oil and wick. I find the bigness of the night isn’t lonely at all, but furred, starred, and looking back at me tenderly. 

                                                                                                             

                                                                         Part Two
                                                                           Hours 

There are hours in the pinewood that belong wholly to the animals. Dawn hours, just before and after sunrise, when the forest has been prowled and hunted through the long movements of the stars — glimpse of Ursa Major through the eldritch trees, glimpse of bright Jupiter, glimpse of Milky Way— and the clawed hunters are going back to sleeping places to settle in for a rest, while the little passerines and quails, the brush rabbits and does are gingerly rising, out for stirring spiders and songs and leaves to eat still cool from dark and dew. 

There is another animal window, when the light gets longer and the sun is over the open west, going into the ocean where the whales are, sending rays over the dunes and pasture up into the pines. There are a couple hours until sunset still, but there are presences again, and I can feel that the forest is all theirs. It always is, day and night, but at midday there is a kind of stillness that is more relaxing to walk in. Mountain lion nap time. Maybe I have a bit of deer in me. Always have. I’m nervous of big cats at dusky hours, and obsessed by them. I find them terrifying, and devastatingly beautiful. Other folk walk in the changing-light times too, not just mountain lions but older, ancestral memories the land still bears— women with gathering baskets made of tule rushes that are filled with huckleberries. Men with obsidian arrows from Mt. St. Helena, then known by another name, beautiful in flicker-feather regalia, touching tracks of black-tailed deer.  

It’s a time thick with beings, inscrutable to the human mind but wholly known to the heart. 

I’m walking in one of those windows, taking my dog Runa on a quick stroll before dinner to stretch both of our legs after a long writing day. I’m coming to check on a little heap of offerings I’ve left for the black bears. An apple from my mother’s garden. Handfuls and handfuls of sweet dark huckleberries. Bright blue cornflowers. Other secret items I will not name, because gifts for bears are probably best not fully revealed. 

It’s a kind of miracle, at least to me, and surely to the pinewood too, that there are black bears here again. It’s unclear whether or not they are actually residents or on the move; whether there is just one male or a small family growing. But there’s no doubt that mounting numbers of bear scats — full of summer berries— have been sighted  on our familiar pinewood walking trail since June, and scrapes on trees, as well as the bear(s) themselves out on the dunes at nearby Kehoe Beach. 

Black bears were declared extinct in Marin County by 1901, and grizzly bears extinct throughout the state by 1925. Black bears have continued to thrive elsewhere in California (I’ve had my handful of Sierra Nevada bear encounters, formative and thrilling) and starting in the early 2000’s there’s been the odd sighting of a lone young male in the deep woods of Mt. Tamalpais, or the forests of Bear Valley in Point Reyes. None have ever seemed to stick around. Perhaps the young bears were scouts. Measuring distances with their paws. Pacing the old trackways over and around the mountains, at the bay edges, down the shores and up again, re-weaving memory lines between huckleberry and salmonberry places, thimbleberry and elder, acorn grove and old salmon haunt. Snuffling the sleeping places of hares and does, getting their scent. 

The sightings this summer seem different. Numerous, consistent, like more than one bear has come to stay. I’ve always felt their absence in the forest here. It’s a bear forest, thick with huckleberries, salal, wild currants, elderberries, toyon and manzanita. No amount of birds or foxes could ever make a dent in the purple-black abundance of August huckleberries. They seem to ripen themselves with bears in mind. They’ve been waiting a century, faithfully, for this return, for the ones made for them to remember the bear-lines back, to brave human settlements and highways and loneliness, all the way home. 
 
I reach the narrow animal trail where I left my gifts two days before, up next to a fallen branch. It's covered in drying yerba buena mint and little thorny brambles, and when I walk on it I can smell the mint. The apple and berries are neatly gone, but the cornflowers are still there, wilted and bright. 

This isn't so surprising—it's also an easy feast for raccoons, gray foxes, coyotes. I made sure to tell them who it was for when I left it, but all of them are cheeky. Still, I feel like I'm peering at a secret I shouldn't look at for long, and the light is strange and my neck-hairs are high. 

Then, right at my feet, right before the place I left the gifts, I see the marks of a very big cat. It's one of those borderline-sized scats that I once or twice saw as a student of wildlife tracking— either it's the biggest male bobcat you've yet to meet who just ate a whole fawn, or it's a mountain lion. Sometimes body instinct takes over for me in such moments. Deer-flight. (I guess I like to think about those votives from a little distance.) It didn't feel like the moment to crouch down and make measurements with my hands. One look, message received, and we are off quick down the woodland paths again, toward human places. 

My body's ringing though. Singing, bright. It's almost too much for me, this feeling of somehow being beheld, even through apple and berry, by whoever it is who walks the forest. I have to retreat, and dream a little, before I am ready for those eyes, ready for that landing. 

Huckleberries call the black bears home. Mountain lion walks on silent paws in the fog, in the old light, in the dark, a votive bright as daybreak even though I have been afraid. 
                                                                         
                                    

                                                                          Part Three
                                                                       Animal Landings

There is a harbor in me
dolphins swim there still
the water changes color
with the light
at its stillest, it is aquamarine
at daybreak it is gold
at midnight, it is midnight

When the ship comes at last
—it has been sailing long—
worn strong cedar 
and a broad prow that does not falter
that carries a figurehead
I have looked for my whole life
the water turns the color of roses

I come down from far away
—I have been so far away—
down to the shore of myself
(there are crenellated shells
and sea silk from the byssus clams
and soft pebbles) to meet it 

There are no amphorae of oil 
on this ship, no vessels heavy with grain
no tin, no copper ingots, no cases
of frankincense or nutmeg
only an apple tree bursting from its earthen pot
a dapple gray horse from the mountain
unending oil to keep every votive burning 
and you

* watercolor sketch from 2014 or 2015 of herbs and raptors and longings and tea kettles and star formations and indigenous baskets and dreams I had about herds of stampeding horses while sleeping by a fire in the coastal California mountains many years ago with a group of women*