Francesca G. Varela's Blog, page 9

Home Flower

[image error]

Listen, I will speak their names–

larkspur,

trillium,

stream violet,

fairy lantern,

vetch,

vanilla leaf.

I look out into the green

and read their leaves, like language, like words on a page.

I hear them speak, and know their songs,

how the wind rustles them,

how the pathfinder-plant flickers green and white,

how the sedge whistles and bows.

I could not be lost, could never be lost, no matter how far I wandered,

as long as these plants were there,

for they are the known world,

the avens with its sticky seeds,

the spirea with its bright pink bursts,

the glow of a dogwood when the sun is above it.

As long as they are with me, I am home.

Fairy Terns

[image error]

Photo by Drew Avery.

Fairy terns fly out to sea each dawn.

White-winged

and delicate,

they travel in small caravans,

drifting softly above the waves

and white-caps.

All day, they relish the sweet sun on their backs,

and the fine salt spray on their bellies,

but then the sun burns low,

upon the flat, mottled Earth,

and the fairy terns

feel the pull of their nests,

of dusky palm breezes,

and they return to shore,

each and every night,

until it’s dawn again.

Time of the Crow

[image error]

Photo from the Seattle Star

Along the river,

at the time of pale-blue,

the crows flow like black curtains,

thousands of them,

tens of thousands,

enumerable and warm and beating.

Just by looking at their wings

I can feel the soft mist,

the growing west wind,

and I can hear the traffic growing dimmer beneath me.

We course through, and over,

we, the relics of ancient days,

we roost together in furled winter branches,

and watch the humans walk by

with their eyes turned down.

Animal

[image error]

How long has it been

since you sat with your back against a tree,

and looked up at the dark, straying rivers

in the sky?

How long has it been

since you knelt at a streamside,

and listened to the soft water

sing of mountain snow,

of old times and canyons walls,

and the kind, red belly of the Earth?

How long has it been

since you felt the wind between stars,

and traced your own pictures there,

faint but warm in the light,

and held each star

one by one,

solid in your animal gaze?

Coastal Forest

[image error]

There are times when the forest seems to exhale clouds, when fog rests so heavily on the tree-tops that the space between them vanishes, and the whole of the forest becomes a white-frothed ocean. There are times, as well, when sunlight finds its way to the ferns and fawn lilies, to the dense, secret streams at the feet of the maple trees, and for a moment the colors lose their dampness, and the soil smells of drying rain, and all the world seems stirred by the sun.

A December Hummingbird

[image error]

Photo by Fine Art America.

December always begins with a string of clear, cold days. This was one of them. I walked home from the bus stop, head down, pace quick, headphones in my ears. The air churned around me, crisp and ancient, and bled of sun. I kept my hands in my pockets. My breath felt hot against the wind. Suddenly, a flash of pink. I stopped. A hummingbird hovered above a yellow-flowered bush in someone’s front yard. She flowed, there, iridescent. A row of pink feathers showed when she turned to the side, two long stripes along her neck. Otherwise she was a deep ocean-green. She faced me for a moment. Music still played in my ears, so I could only see the vibration of her wings as they blurred. She tilted her head, and then flew away. I looked around the usually busy sidewalks, and I found that I was the only one there, standing breathlessly at the edge of dusk, in the cold December wind.

Walking at Night

[image error]

Above the concrete sky, and

the rest of the whimsy,

we could’ve been real.

But you looked down

and laughed,

and wasn’t I cute?

So I pointed for you,

to the flat place in the sky

where it all caves in, and I

guided your hand like a bug on water

all legs and skittish muscles,

and I opened your palm, like a flower blooms,

and I helped string down the moonlight,

so it could fall on your skin.

You laughed again,

and asked where we would go next,

your eyes flat and matte and dead as paved ground,

and you looked away from me,

and the moonlight’s gaze in my reflection.

The Beauty and Peril of Connection

[image error]

Image from Wikimedia

I sat awake, propped up on my elbows at two in the morning, and I scrolled through my phone. I hoped that, somehow, the repetitiveness of social media would help me fall back asleep. Instagram. Facebook. Twitter. Videos. Advertisements. Pictures. All just a blur.

But, then, something caught my eye — a photo of two orangutans, mother and child, lounging together, the child on the mother’s belly, their heads turned sideways, their eyes brown, wide, human. I could see our shared lineage so clearly in their faces. All those many generations of hominids who lived beneath the open sky, and hunted and stalked and foraged and called the moonlight sacred.

I felt that I could stand face to face with these orangutans, and understand clearly the life in their eyes. Even if I knew nothing of science or evolution, I would find those faces familiar; I would know intrinsically that they could feel, and love, and mourn.

And, sitting there at two in the morning, staring at a smart phone in my Portland apartment, I felt, so very strongly, the beauty and peril of my connection to the more-than-human. And I felt more ready than ever to fight for the natural world, for our non-human relatives, for the Earth, and for all that lives.

The Moon and I

[image error]

Sometimes I ask the moon for guidance.

I stand at the window, my breath fogging up the glass,

and I reach my hands up.

The moon is alive in the way of mountains and rivers,

through the long-lived presence of time,

and the humming of old things.

The clean blue moonlight pours through the city air, in a steady stream, as soft as water.

I feel it spill over my skin, through the too-pale crevasses on my palm, through the rivulets of my fingerprints, over the paper-cut on my index finger.

The moon and I are kindred,

nocturnal and unknowable.

I ask the moon what I should do,

what should I do, moon,

and she speaks to me the way a creek rolls across pebbles.

I cannot understand, but I feel something settle within me.

I feel that I am long-lived for a moment.

Wind, or a boulder,

or the bend in the river where the willows hang low.

I wash clean in the moonlight,

ancient, nocturnal, and unknowable,

but home.

The Owl and the Maples

[image error]

The owl waits on the branch of a cedar tree. I drift closer. He looks at me. I pause, there, among the ferns, and atop the old, creek-sweetened leaves. I cross my arms over my chest. I stand still. The owl raises and lowers his wings. This is not a threat, but a stretch. Our eyes meet, for a moment. He looks away. Slowly, and with great patience. He’s not afraid of me. We are simply two animals in the forest. I stand for a great long while. I watch. Wherever the owl looks, I look. A crow calls from across the creek, and the owl’s head whirls backward. A squirrel whistles from the top of the maple, and the owl’s head shoots up. But after every disruption, the owl glances at the sky with something like reverence, and then he closes his eyes, just briefly. The wind blows. We both look up. All at once, the samaras fall from the maples. Like rain. Hundreds of them, twirling as they fall, a rust-brown the color of bark. I remember being a kid and throwing them up in the air, just to see them twirl down like helicopters. Now they are falling of their own accord. The owl and I watch. We breathe. Not one samara hits me. Not one. They fall around me, at my feet. I pick one up, and I throw it in the air.

[image error]