Science describes accurately from outside, poetry describes accurately from inside. Science explicates, poetry implicates. Both celebrate what they describe. We need the languages of both science and poetry to save us from merely stockpiling endless ‘information’ that fails to inform our ignorance or our irresponsibility.
~Ursula K. Le Guin
Dear friends,
I’d like to share a love story with you.
This week I drove up north and stayed with a couple I’d not yet met. George was one of my “grandfather’s boys” at the Field from the early 1950s to the mid 1960’s. He left before I was born, but he knew my grandparents, my parents, all my uncles, and the entire community that raised me. When my family cult memoir came out three years ago, he read it five times. Then he wrote me a letter explaining how we come from the same strange world and carry some of the same scars.
George and Corinna have been married for over fifty years and live a deeply artful life, crafting and recrafting a home, a garden, and a relationship together. Like me, they understand belonging as a responsibility, not a form of ownership.
California is the land where I was born and the land to which I am in service. This includes 15 acres in the San Bernardino mountains that I am privileged to steward, a commitment to the wildlife still moving in this state, and the responsibility to keep earning my belonging here.
As I drove through the redwoods surrounding George and Corinna’s home, I thought about what survives.
After more than a century of logging, roughly 95% of California’s ancient coast redwood forest has been logged, taking with it entire communities of spotted owls, marbled murrelets wandering salamanders, and relationships among living things that took centuries to form.
You cannot cut down a 2,000-year-old ecosystem and replace it by planting rows of young trees.
Relationship is part of the organism.
George showed me burned-out hollow at the base of a living tree. Created when repeated fires slowly burn into the tree’s interior while its living tissue survives, these hollows can remain inside redwoods for centuries. The hollow is evidence of injury, but not necessarily of death.
He said its called a goosepen and he explained how early settlers used these redwood hollows as pens for geese and chickens.
I looked inside.
“That’s not what I see,” I told him. “I see a womb.”
The tree carries the fire inside its living body and the hollow becomes a refuge for bears, birds, bats, and other wild animals.
The organism does not erase the injury. It grows around it, the wound a habitat.
As much as I believe in anything, I believe in forests, in their vast interconnected ecosystems and in the wild networks through which they communicate.
Forests can help you find yourself.
George and Corinna reminded me that re-wilding doesn’t mean returning to what existed before the damage. It means tending what remains until something alive can grow there again.
In the land. In a relationship. In a body. In me.
let’s stay close to what’s alive,
m
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I’m Michelle, a writer, teacher, and lifelong forager shaped by the mountains of California. I grew up in an apocalyptic cult, where I learned to survive from the land, distrust the world beyond it, and listen closely for what lives beneath the surface.
Forager: Field Notes for Surviving a Family Cult, a Kirkus-starred memoir, tells the story of leaving one community and finding another.
Today, my work explores how attention, creative practice, embodiment, and the living world help us become more fully alive. Through this newsletter, retreats, workshops, and seasonal communities, I invite others into that practice.
For the Secret Garden cohort:
We are nearing the close of our 8 week experiment.
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We meet on Zoom next Saturday afternoon
The Art of Mindfulness - August 29 1:00 PT/4:00 ET
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