Patricia Damery's Blog, page 3

Writing Group, July 23

We—this group of women I have written with for 39 years— start writing at 2:47 pm, when I usually nap. Not sure how this will go! This morning I read a journal entry from 30 years ago.. 30 years ago today, the writers’ group met at my Valley View Court condo. Cincinnati, my standard poodle pup, was 11 months old. I had barricaded the open French doors to the west so he couldn’t get out. I mentioned in that freewrite that Ben, Jan’s youngest, was the age of my oldest son Jesse had been nine years before when I first joined the writing group.

I was deeply tired 30 years ago. How much of my adulthood did I spend pushing myself? It’s shocking to read, really. That fall I would be heading back into training seminars at the Institute and beginning to see Donald, wondering if I should still see other men as well. I thought so but didn’t.

In the freewrite, I anticipated a vacation, and 3 1/2 weeks off work. Just reading the description of the next weeks wears me down: camping with the boys and their friends at Hende Woods, hiking with Donald in Annadel State Park (where he first told me about what would become our ranch). Noticing the remarkable difference in Chardonnay and zinfandel grapes as we tasted them while walking through the vines of the upper ranch. Traveling to Illinois for at least a week to visit my parents and siblings and Six Flags Over America, theme parks being something that I have always dreaded, but this time wasn’t so bad. Going to the stagecoach stop of Jonesville in the Sierra for four days with the candidate group who had traveled to the Southwest together the year before, then camping in the high country of Yosemite with Inya: all that within the space of 3 1/2 weeks.

The writers’ group has almost always been a space of spaciousness for me. Today Jimalee suggested that we bring items to add to the bed of lettuces from her garden. I brought steamed green beans from my CSA box and a potato salad with the seasoned rice vinegar-soaked Walla Walla onions from the same, along with one of the cucumbers growing in the new planter box in the garden. Jimalee added artichokes and Kalamati olives. She also found a year-old salmon in her freezer which she baked. Most ate it. I did not.

Jan brought Gorgonzola cheese, water crackers and olives; Elizabeth, three cheese ravioli, and Norma, a kind of hard, Trader Joe pastry filled with hazelnut cream. This was our lunch.

As we ate, we listened to Elizabeth’s raucous recount of training her foster 100-pound lab to use a crate by getting in it with him and getting a black eye.  We all laughed hysterically again as she described losing her scissors in the recycling bin and then again as she told of another incident when she fell into the bin as she tried to retrieve a section of the New York Times. She needs smaller bins.

Finally, we got to writing. Somewhere far off in the kitchen, I hear a refrigerator running. A crow far off. A clock ticking. If anything, I can tell you this: Time goes by fast. During the 39 years that I have been in this group of women, we have witnessed our children growing from toddlers to parents, supporting each other through divorces, deaths, affairs, law suites, and the birth and growth of grandchildren. We have written our way from being young adults to crones. This group of women has matured me as a writer.

We five sit here today. Jimalee, Elizabeth, and I write on paper. Jan is on her computer. Norma dozes. Within the hour, I have to get my dog Brambleberry from Fit and Furry doggy daycare before it closes, shortening the day too soon.

Thirty years ago, I was also single, then from divorce, now from being recently widowed. Then I wondered what to do with my poodle pup Cincinnati when I was not with him. Now it’s Brambleberry. Amazing how similar and yet how different my life is. The things I worried about then I don’t worry about now: supporting a young family, my training at the Institute, and considerations of starting a relationship with a man almost 17 years my senior. And although I am sleepy at the moment, I am not deep down exhausted.

Elizabeth is entering a new chapter of her life, making room for Brendan. She is also becoming Poet Laureate of Sonoma County. Next week we will witness her induction, celebrating this well-deserved honor. Jan is a grandmother, again, still sequestered, probably more than the rest of us. Norma works on her trust, facing the realities of being 90 years old. Jimalee’s new diet gives her energy, yet she grieves another close friend.

We have a core. We drop into the familiar patterns as if the pandemic didn’t happen– as if we had another 39 years, and time was eternal. Holding hands around the table before we eat, we celebrate abundance, including Jimalee’s hospitality. The familiar scratching of pens and tapping of computer keys, then the announcement by one of us: time’s up. Time to read.

The teapot purrs loudly with warming water, soothing.  We will drink more tea. One by one, we will read our lives to each other. We have done this for many years, and we know how to do this now, again. For the moment, we are together in this familiar coterie, resting in the knowledge that life is only in the present.

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Napa County: “Another Beautiful Violence?”

Last week I returned from a rafting trip on the San Juan River in the Four Corners area of Utah. We floated through steep canyons on thick brown water for seven days, immersed in beauty. From the sunrise to sunset, the kaleidoscope of golden to deep pink-red cliffs guided us, their petroglyphs and pictograms offering mysterious stories of ancient peoples. The Bureau of Land Management and Glenwood Canyon National Recreation Area manage the land to the right side of the river; the left side is part of the Navajo Nation. Our two river guides came from historically contentious groups: Kevin, of Mormon descent, and Beni, Navajo.

There are many paradoxes in Utah. Like Napa County, the beauty of the Utah landscape is a troubled one, poisoned and controlled, in Utah’s case, by the mining, oil, and water industries. Utah native Terry Tempest Williams, author of Erosion: Essays of Undoing, quotes Representative Raul Grijalva (D) from Arizona. “The Republicans are pushing bills to divert protective funding, prioritize corporate land development, and sidestep science. These are blatant efforts to place corporate interest over species survival. (p. 50).” Williams calls this economic predation. Sound familiar?

My group was composed of my psychological colleagues. Each morning after coffee and breakfast, we gathered to report dreams, imagining together inner landscapes. “The outer wilderness mirrors our inner wilderness,” Tempest Williams writes. “ If we destroy what is outside us, we will destroy what is inside us. Something precious and original is lost. (p. 40)”  

As we discussed the previous night’s dreams, we often experienced the grief of personal losses and our changing climate and future. Our world indeed is eroding. The fragile, fractured beauty of the San Juan canyons amplifies what is at risk.  In some areas, the low vibrations of a helicopter can shake loose deep verticle fissures in the clifts, sending huge boulders tumbling. Acid rain from coal-burning has sped up erosion. The Southwest is in the worse megadrought in 1200 years. Climate change and the associated non-linear warming ensure that our future will not be like anything we have known. And scientists say this is only the beginning.

We talked of children and grandchildren and our future generations. How will we humans survive? For me, traveling through these canyons inhabited long ago by peoples who knew how to live in harsh conditions oddly brought some hope. Humans have done it before. But will our entitled population also be able to meet the challenges and make the sacrifices necessary in the coming years?

As paradox will have it, shared grief in our group brought openheartedness and care about each other in ways that surpassed self-interest. Can openheartedness save us? Beyond the polarization in our country that paralyzes action, can we amplify care that encompasses the disadvantaged, the environment, and the consideration of our future generations?

So I returned more motivated than ever to witness and address these same issues, Napa County style: drought, fire, water security, and carbon sequestration. When I opened my computer, the digital version of The Napa Valley Register appeared, reporting that the Board of Supervisors had just unanimously tentatively approved mitigation for cutting 14,000 mature trees on Walt Ranch by preserving 268 acres on the same ranch. This mitigation boggles the mind of anyone who thinks about it very much.

The 2300-acre Walt Ranch is a pristine area of our county and includes a watershed for the Milliken Reservoir, a water source for the City of Napa. Although the planning commission approved Walt Ranch in 2016, the project has been appealed to the Board of Supervisors (BOS) and the courts. Data supporting the Environmental Impact Report has been questioned. The latest appeal challenged only the mitigation of greenhouse gas emissions.   BOS Chair Ryan Gregory stated, “This very narrow question we’re asked today, I still can’t find a way to say ‘no’ to it.” Earlier, Supervisor Diane Dillon implied this project would not be approved in 2022, given what we know now about water security and carbon. “We can’t undo what we did in 2016,” she said. “Things are so different now than they were then. We didn’t know what we didn’t know then.” (NVR)

Really? If you had listened to the scientists we brought before you, you would have known. Who are you looking out for, anyway? The county can’t afford to lose more carbon-rich environments like Walt Ranch if a climate catastrophe is to be averted or delayed. Why can’t you change your minds on something this dire?

“Utah is beautiful violence,” Tempest Williams writes. I include Napa County in this assessment. Economic predation is rampant. Our precious Ag Preserve and Ag Watershed lands are preyed upon by the wine and tourism industries and real estate developers. We need a Board of Supervisors who can take bold action to protect our watersheds, our environment, and the common good.

I remember the mornings on the San Juan River and the sharing of dreams, a  ritual and ceremony that wove us together and opened our hearts to each other, to the birds singing around us, and the troubled cliffs carved by the river we navigated each day.  “What is ceremony but a reminder of the power we can summon together?” Williams writes.  “A sense of harmony is remembered and comes to us in the way of dreams that present themselves outside the normal parameters of time and space (p. 249-250).” 

Our power in meeting the challenges of climate may rest in gathering with each other and caring for what happens to all: the environment and all inhabitants of Earth. Our silence, our denial, could be the death of us.

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Sweet Fruits

Fruits of Eden: Field Notes: Napa Valley 1991-2021, to be published by Dancing Raven Press, an imprint of Analytical Psychology Press, includes photographs bearing witness to my daily walks these last 30 years on our ranch.  I have walked our trails almost every day with our small herd of goats and dogs. In the early years, my late husband Donald joined us.  I take a camera. The photos record the oak savanna in February and late July and again after the first rains green the grasses in the fall. They log the increasing tree mortality among the oaks and madrone and also chronicle local citizens’ efforts on behalf of trees and watersheds and Earth.

Publisher Dyane Sherwood suggested including the photos, so I spent several weeks sorting hundreds of photos. I asked photographers Lowell Downey, Deborah O’Grady (author of the foreword), and Bill Hocker, all partners in various aspects of this work for the environment, if I could include some of their magnificent photographs. They generously agreed.

The daily walk images bring you with me. So much of my experience on our ranch is nonverbal. When you walk with goats, you learn to listen. The goats entrust you to watch out for predators. Suddenly everything is sharper. You heed the quail’s clicking, stepping by quietly so as not to disturb the puffballs of his brood. Is that trashing in the forest above a deer? It matters!

The photos not only show you this ranch I love but also the land that I spend my retirement joining with others to bring the best science and ethics to protecting. It is up to us to protect these sentient beings speaking through scent and sound, light and color.  Nature teaches the paradox of impermanence and resilience.  The necessity to act to protect Earth is a strong theme of Fruits.

The photos have brought challenges to the book design.  The publication date moved from April 15 to June 15, and now it’s July. But it is coming—timing being one of Eden’s lessons!  But wait I must. We have to get it right. As my friend Jimalee says, patience is a bitter seed with a sweet fruit.

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Sheep, Grass Management, and Happy Events

I like to think it was an omen. Just as we arrived to meet Christopher, the shepherd who had brought over one hundred sheep to the pulled vineyard waist-high in cayuse oats, vetch, and various perennials, I spotted a tiny black lamb.  It stood with its mother apart from the herd at one end of the fenced area. Christopher said it had been born an hour or so ago. My son Casey pointed out the lamb to his two sons, Wesley and Sabien, aged 11 and 9, and my granddaughter Grace, aged 2, as Christopher and I discussed the business of the sheep. How far down to the bare earth did I want the grass grazed, and how far into the nearby forest?  When I stepped into a fresh pile of sheep manure, he remarked that these sheep deliver over 600 pounds of manure to the fields each day. As we spoke, his guardian dog kept placing its paws on my shoulders as if to say, do not get too close to the sheep!

And then, something strange began to happen. A string of mucus oozed from the ewe’s tail end, followed by a white lamb that hung wiggling midair for a minute before falling to the ground. Grace had just learned that Mommy had a baby in her tummy and that she was going to be a big sister. She kept repeating the baby came out of the mommy. My friend Debby later quipped that she hoped Grace didn’t think her new sibling would be a lamb.

In the middle of this drama, my phone rang. It was my other son Jesse, Grace’s father. Did I know where Grace’s mother, Lisa was? They were negotiating escrow for their first home, and he had to talk to her immediately.  Having been outbid numerous times by all-cash buyers offering $200,000-300,000 over asking, Jesse was taking no chances on timing.

He reached Lisa within a couple of minutes, they entered escrow, and we all are anticipating a new family member joining us in November. The two lambs are happily nursing this morning when they aren’t dancing around their mother and the other sheep. The sheep are busy reducing fire danger by eating down the grasses while fertilizing the soil. Grazing at this time of year also selects for the native perennial grasses, which also reduce fire danger. What could be better?

I enjoy the happy surprises of life that, bidden or not, sometimes just happen. Some are everyday pleasures; some portend significant changes. But big or small, they bring that welcome feeling that at least today, things are going well!

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Phase One of Implementing Our Forest Management Plan

My friend Norma says the forest looks like a painting with its lithe, dark trunks of oak and madrone silhouetted against the sunlight. The crew has thinned out young bay laurel and the bushy, tall stands of poison oak and invasive Himalayan blackberries. Yes, I always thought of the forest as verdant, but the over-the-top growth was strangling the oaks and madrone. Besides, the ladder fuels reaching into the treetops and tangled brush below created a fire hazard. 

For the first time in the 30 years I have lived here, I can see the undulating contours of the earth itself. Some places are steeper than I imagined; others more gentle and welcoming. Each evening at 4 pm, when the chain saws and chipper stop, I walk the path down the old wagon trail, broadened so equipment could move deeper into the ranch. When I reach the driveway, I follow it back up to the house, marveling at the differences. In places, I can see through the trees far down to the little house on Dry Creek Road where Casey, Melissa, and their sons live. Already I forget what the forest looked like before. 

Jesse first questioned the health of the forest twenty years ago when he was a botany major at Humboldt State. He pointed out the overgrowth and the proximity of the many bay to the oaks and madrone, bay being a vector for sudden oak death. The certified forester with  Natural Resource Conservation Service (NRCS) agreed, saying we had about 16,000 more bay throughout the ranch than we should. 

About the time Jesse drew our attention to this overgrowth, we began to see increased tree death. Before, Donald would scan the forest each spring for a fallen oak, which he would then cut up, split and stack to dry.  We would use the wood to heat our house throughout the following winter.

But the numbers of oak and madrone succumbing to oak boar and sudden oak death increased, and we quit burning firewood. Fires make black carbon, a problem in global warming. Add to this the prospect of wildfire. Since 2017, almost 45% of Napa County has burned.

This is when we consulted NRCS. They brought in a certified forester, walked the ranch, made the forest management plan, and awarded a grant to cover up to about 50% of the work. (For more on this, click here and here.

Forest management is a controversial topic in California. There are various theories about what should or should not be done. Our century-old Smokey, the Bear practice of putting out every fire, has delivered us to the situation we are now in. 24% of California forest land is privately owned. Controversary or not, we must study the best way to manage our forests. It is predicted that all of California will burn. Fire is, after all, indigenous. Maybe we can make it less catastrophic when it does arrive.

Before the thinning and brush clearing.

Yes, the thinning is more drastic than I imagined, but the process renders a beauty I did not expect. I like to think the oaks and madrone will have access to more water and that fewer will die, that this rather extreme measure is good for the forest. This is not clear-cutting a forest for vineyards or other purposes; it is thinning for the health and well-being of the forest. 

This madrone grew under thick brush and a coastal live oak, searching for light.

What is also clear is that this is only the beginning. Poison oak and Himalayan blackberries will grow back in force, particularly in these areas now more open to sunlight. Bay trees will re-sprout. It is a sharp learning curve. And it may make all the difference in how the ranch endures drought, wildfire, and floods, these changes brought on by climate disruption.

 

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His Last Song

Many years ago, my friend Karlyn gave Donald a saxophone that had been her father’s during the Big Band era. Her father had played with Spike Jones when they were in college. That beautiful instrument has a historical lineage, which I am sure Donald felt.

Donald had it restored at a small shop in a funky strip mall outside Sebastopol, CA. They replaced several of the bell keys and gave it a general cleaning. Donald did not attempt to learn to play it for at least another decade.

Then, in 2018, a few years after his diagnosis of Alzheimer’s Disease, I gave him a Christmas gift of lessons at Napa School of Music. Donald was trepidatious but was fortunate to get two kind teachers who assured him of his progress and encouraged him to keep going. They were gifted in working around his memory issues. Each time on the drive there, he would agonize that he was disappointing his teacher with his progress. I assured him that doing things that were hard helped his brain. This motivated him to keep going. When I picked him up, he was energized and happy, holding a pile of papers with notes for his daily practices.

Mostly he practiced when no one else was in the house. I would be outside weeding the lavender, and suddenly the most abrupt blast— or was it a squawk? emanated from the house.  Then, our dog Brambleberry would emit a low, long howl, rushing to the door where Donald was. I tried to keep him out of the part of the house where Donald practiced, but this didn’t work. He insisted on howling outside the door where Donald was playing. I had no idea that our relatively small labradoodle could sound like that. Was he trying to get Donald to stop–  or was he trying to join him?

When we traveled, Donald took the saxophone with us. When we went to a friend’s cabin in Groveland, he had the saxophone waiting in its case by the door. It is the only thing he packed. When we went for a weekend to Sea Ranch, again, the saxophone case was by the door. I made room for it in the car even though I knew he would not play it on the trip. He had entered a time when imagining playing and playing were one and the same thing. He was also always sensitive to disturbing others.

The pandemic shut down the lessons, but not Donald’s playing. His favorite piece was Bach’s “Jesu, Joy of Man’s Desiring.” It took an act of the imagination to identify it, but I came to recognize the complicated rising and falling of the notes over time. It is a piece we both had loved. Karlyn told me that it is a part of Bach’s Cantata #147, written for the Feast of the Visitation of Mary, which celebrated Mary and Elizabeth rejoicing together in being pregnant.

In December 2021, Donald’s health took a severe turn when he had a brain bleed. He passed from this world on December 11. We were able to have him at home until the end. As we stood around his bed and he took his last breaths, “Jesu, Joy of Man’s Desiring” came over the airways. It was as if the somber joy of his transition filled the room through the clear, soft notes of a piano.

I was comforted then, as I was the day his youngest daughter Genevieve helped me pack his clothing to take to Good Will. As I sat in his chair afterward, again, over the airwaves came “Jesu, Joy of Man’s Desiring.” Again, I was soothed. He is okay. He doesn’t need this clothing anymore.

The day we sorted some of his files and paperwork, and the task felt heavy and going on too long, I came upon the score to “Jesu, Joy of Man’s Desiring,” along with his teacher’s notes, lying on top of a pile of papers. Okay. This is okay.

The mystery of death continues to live with me. Is music a kind of internet of the soul? I know the fact of this piece’s recurrence—his last song–comforts me and reminds me of the joy of life and the immensity of new beginnings, even those brought in the transition of death.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

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Tending Trees

When I spoke with Charlie Toledo last week about the forest on our ranch, she said she was always concerned about the overgrowth. First People would have kept the forest thinned with cultural burning so the stream would be accessible to deer and coyotes, so there would be reeds for baskets and the acorns, healthy. 

The forest plan for our ranch done by NRCS (Natural Resource Conservation Service) is coming into focus. It will be spread out over three years, beginning, weather permitting, in January. It includes weaving willow along the eroding gully below the goat barn and removing and disposing of 16,000 small bay trees. In anticipation, I have studied ways of the healthy forest as I talk with various experts who know something about these matters.

I never thought forest management to be something that Donald and I would have to consider. I suspect that most of us guardians of forest and oak woodlands just assumed trees take care of themselves. We had no idea how much First People did over millennia to ensure these forests were healthy and resilient. At least, I didn’t.

There are decisions to be made: How to thin out 16,000 bay, and who will do it? What to do with the bodies of the bay? What about carbon sequestration? What to do when the bay trees re-sprout? Use the recommended herbicides or bring in goats? Because we have ignored forest management for almost 200 years, we now have a situation that will have negative consequences no matter what we do. But before I leave this ranch one way or the other, I want to make it less likely that wildfire will be destructive when it comes.

I’ll be honest; I love the undergrowth. It affords privacy. But then, when I see some of the areas on the boundary of our ranch near the PG&E pole where workers limbed up oaks and weed-whacked around them, I reconsider. The effect after the rains brought fresh grass is vibrant. And when we work the deer paths into trails, clearing brush either side to make fire breaks, we afford an intimacy with less accessible reaches of the ranch.

The NRCS forest plan states it has a ten-year life. If we don’t keep tending the forest, it will all regrow in 10 years.  This is a lifestyle change. In place of using herbicides, it’s clear that goats and/or prescribed burning will be necessary on an ongoing basis. Isn’t that going back to what First People’s did? There is a lot to learn from those people left who remember traditional forest management practices. 

I imagine a crew who offer prayer as they begin, people who respect the forest beings and work with them. We need indigenous reverence as much as traditional knowledge as we address what western European hubris has wrought. 

In her talks at our Harms Vineyards and Lavender Fields Open House many years ago,  Charlie said that First People’s agriculture was so different that white men couldn’t recognize it. We are living with the sad results. Our first lesson as we suffer the ravages of wildfire is humility. 

May the plan address the needs of a healthy forest: fewer bay trees, strengthened oak and madrone, vectors for sudden oak death removed, and fire welcomed in again in less destructive ways. May the forest’s care bring my ear a little closer to Earth. 

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Nature’s Inescapable Demands

It takes two inches of rain to awaken the annual grass seeds in the savanna, and we definitely got two inches of rain last week. It started slowly, with 0.6″ on the first day followed by 1.5″ on the second. I was overjoyed. The dryness of the drought chokes the land. We were all suffering. And it’s increasingly rare to get two inches in October.

And then, the main event– the atmospheric river– began! The next day it started raining in the evening, and it did not stop for the next 36 hours. Each time I turned on the courtyard light in the night, I saw the usually placid mirror of water in the fountain being pelted as if it were boiling. I got the flashlight and ventured outside to read the rain gauge. (I later discovered I could do the same with the new binoculars if there were just a smidgen light.) Each time I emptied the gauge, I was shocked at how quickly we received 1.6″; 2.5″; 1.2″. I recorded each total with the date on a card I keep for each rain year. October 21-22 added up to 11″ —13.1″ if you include the amounts from the first two days. We received more rain in five days than we had the previous rain year of 2020-2021.

I love storms, and this was a doozy. The valley oaks swayed and shook leafy boughs. At times the rain pounded the glass of the western, usually protected, windows and doors. When I rose early Sunday, I waited for the light to walk the road. I wanted to see if the upper pond was filling.

But what quickly became apparent was that I had ignored a more pressing issue. The ditches along the driveway were rushing streams, scouring the stones lining them, which prevented them from being gouged even deeper. But as the water gushed through the ditches, it had washed leaves and branches downhill onto the grated inlets for the culverts, quickly covering them. Driveway gravel covered the leaves a foot deep, making it impossible to see where the drainage should be. As a result, the stream grew angrier and larger, breaching the ditch and erasing the edges of the driveway.

Since the steeper part of the driveway is paved, I had worried less about the impact. In years before we paved it, Donald and Ramon patrolled the driveway at all hours during a storm like this, keeping the inlets clear. I called Casey, and together we dug out the inlets, a demanding job hard on backs. We usually have the ditches raked clean of debris before the rainy season to prevent such an emergency. This was to happen the following Saturday.

Once we dug out the inlets, we proceeded to the upper pond, which was filling rapidly, something it had not done in two years. Satisfied, we decided that, since the electricity was still on, it was a good afternoon for a movie.

But within minutes of Casey’s and the boys’ departure after the movie, I got a call. “Mom, this is a mess. I am going to get tools. Don’t drive. Better walk…” and then exclaimed something that I couldn’t make out. I put on a dry set of rain gear (I went through 3 sets in 24 hours) and walked down our steep driveway past what should have been draining culverts to the spot where the road starts to climb. The deluge of water had carved great gouges eight inches deep in the graveled driveway. It looked like corduroy.  At the lowest point, the road had become a river.

We took shovels and rakes once again, climbed to the top, unearthing the inlets to relieve the ditches of excessive flow.

This sounds terrible, I know. It was pouring, we were soaked, and it was getting dark. If Casey were not there, it would have felt awful. But instead, I was oddly peaceful. Water decides where it goes, and you work with it. Casey’s strong shoveling of wet gravel onto the driveway, my raking the debris to the other side, was a rhythm. Each time a vortex of draining water formed and the culvert was again doing its job, we worked our way to the next inlet.

At times like this, I often go into reverie. I was reminded of the Loma Prieta earthquake many years ago. Four of us candidates in training at the San Francisco Jung Institute arrived for classes shortly after the quake and ended up spending the night, flakes of plaster snowing down on us with each aftershock. Someone had a bottle of whisky in her car, and we drank it as we watched fires across the city from the library window and heard screaming in the streets (“The bay bridge has collapsed!) and heard sirens throughout the night. In response to such chaos, we filled five-gallon bottles and every large kettle we could find with water—my rural training, I guess. If the electricity goes off, the well pump does too.

Working with water has a way of calming me, even in what has an edge of catastrophe. I told Casey that the work of digging out the culverts is a dialogue— a dialogue with Earth about this driveway we have cut into her hillside, a dialogue with water, and where water will go. Through this process, I am sensitized to the land in ways that I take for granted most of the time. Jung once wrote, “Nature must not win the game, but she cannot lose. And whenever the conscious mind clings to hard and fast concepts…as is unavoidable… Nature pops up with her inescapable demands.”

Digging out culverts or suffering the consequences during an “atmospheric river” is a quick study of this principle! Perhaps it offers to bring us back in some semblance of balance with natural forces.

Nature’s first green

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We Protect What We Love

I have worked before with Dyane Sherwood, the publisher of Fruits of Eden: Napa Valley 1991-2021 (which is currently being typeset. Dancing Raven Press, an imprint of Analytical Psychology Press).  I know her propensity to mix visual imagery with the written word, a process quite different from the written word alone. “Take pictures of the oaks in all seasons,” she suggested and continued with talk of tiffs and pixels, a language I will never learn.

But she got me started on the long process of sorting through photographs of the last thirty years here on the ranch. Yes, I have photos of the oaks in every season: the first unfolding of tiny reddish leaves and dangling blooms which, fertilized, will become black oak acorns, the fullness of summer valley oak boughs, and the sculpted bareness of their wintering form. I have photos taken on my daily walks with the goats along deer paths to the ridge and down through the gully of the ephemeral creek, of the Buddha meditating by the full stock pond, and then, six months later, of my hiking booted feet standing on the dry, cracked bottom of the same.

The more I sorted the photos onto the piles of related chapters, the more I was drawn into the joy of land that I figured would take a lifetime to know. The arc of sunrises and sunsets across the east and the west, sundials of seasons. The march of wildflowers beginning with winter rains and extending into June. The gouged antler shed in a fight in the most remote area of the ranch—a bobcat hunting gophers by the garden.

Photos introduce that right brain connection, an openness to what is present, collected like shells on a shoreline of life, like bones and feathers from the trail. Then there is the culling–they can’t all be there, like life: what we will and will not do, what we will attend to, and what we won’t.

I chose others’ photos, too, photos by professional photographer friends who traveled this activist path with me out of love for what needs to be protected. Bill Hocker’s reflections on light and ash after the 2017 and 2020 fires almost burned his home. Lowell Downey’s photo of the valley oak west of our home as it arched over the rows of helichrysum, the golden leaves transparent in the late afternoon sun. Deborah O’Grady’s photo of a stately valley oak standing alongside a dirt road.  One year an intern, Cristin McDonald, photographed our old dogs Leo and Moka on a goatwalk, and there’s my sister Judy’s photo of the 500-year-old white oak in the cemetery where my great grandparents are buried. The book is a kaleidoscope of memories frozen in image, catalysts of reflection.

I have written books before. Each is like a child—unique in itself. That is true of Fruits of Eden as well. The writing was in part an act of desperation. When land and the environment are commodified, so much is at stake. But this work on the design reminds me of what really motivated my land-use activism. We protect what we love.

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Foreword to Fruits of Eden: Deborah O’Grady

Sometimes meaningful patterns of life’s events are revealed only in hindsight. What guides our lives? Is there a subterranean stream that carries us—if we let it?

Such is the case in how I came to meet fine art photographer and videographer Deborah O’Grady. These many years later, I am delighted she has agreed to write the Foreword for Fruits of Eden: Napa Valley 1991-2021.

I first met Deborah when the two of us participated in a conference by the C. G. Jung Institute of San Francisco celebrating the upcoming UC Berkeley Cal Performances of Olivier Messiaen’s From the Canyons to the Stars. Deborah had collaborated with the St. Louis Symphony on a multimedia presentation played concurrently with the musical performance. We both gave papers on the environmental crisis witnessed in the southern Utah landscape, which inspired Messiaen’s composition.

We immediately discovered the common ground of our love of trees. I told her of the oaks in the savanna, those dear beings that got me into the activism that inspired Fruits of Eden, and particularly of a knoll on the property next door upon which ancient valley oaks were uniquely grafted together. She wanted to photograph them, but by then, our new neighbors, who I call “the Sinclairs” in the book, would no longer allow me to visit the trees. Deborah told me of her concern for the coastal conifer forests and oak woodlands threatened by vineyard development in northern Sonoma County, where she had a home. Oaks were an immediate bond.

I had never visited the southern Utah desert and was unfamiliar with Messiaen’s work.  So in April 2015, I left Guanajuato (where I began Fruits of Eden) in the early hours, a taxi carrying me to Leon where I caught a plane to Los Angeles and then on to Las Vegas to meet Donald. We rented a car and drove to Zion National Park and, after a couple of days, on to Bryce Canyon with its hoodoos. I had never heard of hoodoos until then, those eroding layers of prehistoric rock standing like aging sentinels, telling tales of old oceans and seismic events long before humans appeared.  Over the next week, I took my iPhone on long hikes, listening to From the Canyons to the Stars in the very land that convinced Messiaen to say yes, he would compose this piece.

Messiaen’s work is challenging, particularly to the untrained ear, such as my own. But those hikes brought me into a state of consciousness that I wondered if he meant to invoke. As I later wrote, “The music is oddly familiar, and not. It is almost birdsong, but not birdsong, the rhythm recognizable and yet foreign. If we can leave the shores of the known, as we do listening to Messiaen’s music, if we can leave our beliefs about reality behind, if we can be curious, it is possible we can know the other, whether that other is the person sitting before us, a coyote, a sage brush, or an enigmatic, eerie spire.” (from “The Alchemy of Catastrophe: Climate Change, Spirit, and Matter,” later published in the San Francisco Jung Journal, Vol. 12, No. 1 2018.)

Deborah’s 75-minute multimedia presentation, projected on an enormous screen behind the musicians throughout the performance, brought the listener into a state of active receptive consciousness where the other is revered, a consciousness that I believe is critical if we are to find a new way to survive on our planet. We gave our presentations in December of 2015 and then again at a conference in Santa Fe the following summer. For me, one of the most significant takeaways from these experiences was getting to know Deborah.

I am delighted that she is writing the Foreword as she knows the heartwood of the struggle: the love of Earth, the great grief of Nature’s demise due to human behavior, and the challenge of consciousness it brings.

 

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