some inheritances have no paperwork

Dear friends,

I woke up from a dream and stepped outside my tiny cottage, looking out over the landscape, softly lit by a waning crescent moon.

An animal was watching me, its face fierce and pointed, peeking out from a log. Nestled in a brown tuft of fur were its eyes, so black, I couldn’t see into them. I stared, anyway.

He rose onto his hind legs, impossibly small, balancing for a moment as though listening to something I couldn’t hear. His body unfurled behind him, long and narrow, all muscle and alertness. One paw lifted. His nose twitched.

Then he disappeared.

I blinked.

A moment later, he emerged from beneath a stand of yarrow several feet away, as if the mountain itself had moved him there. He studied me again, head tilted.

“Well, hello,” I said softly.

We regarded each other, then he folded himself into the grass and disappeared so completely that the mountain seemed to swallow him whole.

Like me, weasels slip between forms, moving fast and low, shapeshifting to survive.

I picked some yerba santa and I stood there on the hillside, remembering the sound of water tumbling down sheer rock, the colors of sunburned granite that had once been my whole horizon.

When my mother lay dying, I curled beside her as her body let go. Her breath was ragged, then gone, and I didn’t know what to do with the silence she left behind.

She was my first country, the first place I ever lived.

I was named after my father, who was named after his father, who was named after his father, one generation after another, a procession of men passing the same name down the line until it reached the body of a daughter. They stamped me with it, and I grew up thinking I was meant to be a man.

My mother spent the later years of her life researching genealogy, building a patrilineal list of he-begats, man issuing from man, while the women who carried them disappeared between the lines.

Although I wasn’t named after my mother, she gave me things more useful than a name. She showed me how to leave without flinching, how to close a door without turning around. I learned to speak to animals, to notice what plants were saying and to listen to everything I hear. I learned, too, that survival sometimes means refusing the shape you were given.

Nature bounces back when human systems go away.

After she died, I took some of her ashes to the mountains, carving a little moat in the dirt around a sapling, pouring water into the channel. The earth drank it all.

I watched the soil darken, watched the water vanish faster than I could feed it, and I noticed how the earth takes what it needs, refusing nothing, explaining nothing, abundant on what it receives.

The weasel disappears and emerges somewhere new.

For much of my life, I thought resilience meant learning how to endure the containers that gave me shape. But water wears down rock. And the living world is always changing form, shifting into new becomings.

Somewhere beneath me, water is still finding its way through.

let’s stay close to what’s alive,
m

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