Singing Grasses In Ireland

I'll never forget the sound of the wind through these grasses- it was something my bones already knew.

Standing Stone

Off the backroads on the Ring of Beara~

County Cork Ireland

Ancient Ireland sweeping in again

with all its unbaptized beauty:

The calm evening,

The Whitethorn blossoms,

The smell from ditches

that were not christian.

-Patrick Kavanagh, Irish poet

I love this place so much. There is something my bones remember, no matter how far removed and disconnected we've become. Being American, my family has lost connection to our ancestral lands. (Most of my ancestors are from the Celtic nations, also mixed with British, German, Dutch & Swedish.) We've even lost the need for an intimate relationship with the land we live on in the present. The dominant paradigm disconnects us from Nature intentionally and projects faith onto a distant and abstract idea instead. But I know that we were once indigenous. I'm a descendant of the tribes of Europe and we were once rooted in land bases for many generations. My bones still know that an intimate knowledge and relationship with the land is possible, even here and now after so much has been done to negate that.

Barr Creek Falls, Southern Oregon

Two Goats

They looked like angels to me.

Circle In The Desert~

I found a circle in the sand at sunset.

Mojave Desert, 2015

As the crickets' soft autumn hum...

Oak Tree, Petaluma California

November 29, 2014

As the crickets' soft autumn hum

is to us

so are we to the trees

as are they

to the rocks and the hills.

~Gary Snyder 

Rock Found At Bean Hollow/Pebble Beach

This stone is the most sacred relic in my home.

To this day, I'm astonished that I found such an immaculately sculpted rock, not sculpted by human hands but by the sea, the elements. At the time, the word "animism" had not even entered my purview, but I knew in my heart that spirit was at work here and that this rock had something to remind me. This rock, and all rocks, as inanimate as they seem, are of spirit. So are the waters, the winds and fires. Everything Is Alive. Everything.

I made this picture in 1999 with a Hasselblad Camera, in an altered state, during a lunar eclipse.

Temple Mary

Temple Mary

Kilmacduagh Monastery Ruins

County Galway, Ireland

Information About Temple Mary

Hail Rock Mother~

Rock Mother

(Pachamama)

She is indomitable. 

Silent. Impenetrable.

Interminable. Still.

Autumnal Equinox, Welcome Fall
Mabon, 2014

The Water Of My Life

I know why the soft animal of my body loves what it loves*

Moonrise Over Gaylor Peak

Upper Gaylor Lake, Yosemite National Park

The Gaylor Lakes, with their pretty streams and stark lands, are on the eastern edge of the Tuolumne River watershed which provides drinking water for the city of San Francisco, held at the Hetch Hetchy reservoir at Yosemite National Park.

Seventeen years of living in California, and I still had not been to Yosemite until last weekend. When I got there, I felt an instant familiarity and bond to the land. It was as if I already have a memory of this place being like home. They were not memories like thoughts, images or words… it was memory known in my body.

It's strange because usually when I go to a new place, engaging with the land's spirit is sort of like a first date experience. I don't come on too strong. I feel out as we go whether or not my spiritual engagement is welcome. Humans have an egregious record of doing terrible things to the land, and some places are dubious about our intentions. Some spirits of the land have retreated far beyond our purview… I have felt this message in some places, "You are still one of them, we don't care how spiritual you think you are. Let us alone, human.  Just let us be." And I've also enjoyed being joyously welcomed by a place as a long lost son. Those are extremes, but most experiences are pretty neutral and every place is unique. Since I choose to be a healer of the land and not an aggressor, I let that place decide whether I move forward or go away. I always respect any boundaries admonished.

"How do I already know you?" I asked. And the answer was… "Through the Water that makes you."

The waters of this land are the same waters that have nourished my body for many years. I have literally been taking the memory of this land into my body- as its memory is stored in the water I take from my tap everyday. These are the waters of my life and I remember and honor my place in the sacred order. I know why there is a deep love for Yosemite in my body. And Hetch Hetchy, the Tuolumne River and its watershed.

* The above "the soft animal of my body" is a reference to the poem Wild Geese by Mary Oliver

Middle Gaylor Lake, Yosemite National Park

You do not have to be good.

You do not have to walk on your knees

for a hundred miles through the desert repenting.

You only have to let the soft animal of your body

love what it loves.

Tell me about despair, yours, and I will tell you mine.

Meanwhile the world goes on.

Meanwhile the sun and the clear pebbles of the rain

are moving across the landscapes, 

over the prairies and the deep trees,

the mountains and the rivers.

Meanwhile the wild geese, high in the clean blue air,

are heading home again.

Whoever you are, no matter how lonely, 

the world offers itself to your imagination,

calls to you like the wild geese, harsh and exciting  

over and over announcing your place 

in the family of things.

Wild Geese

Mary Oliver

For More information:
About the Tuolumne River
Restoring Hetch Hetchy Reservoir
San Francisco City Water

Fog Spirit; Anima Motrix~ Goat Rock State Beach

"We are human only in contact, and conviviality, with what is not human."

Fog Spirit in the golden autumn sunlight. Lichen growing on quartz laden rocky outcrops drinks from the fog rising, twisting, whirling, dancing up off of the sea, speaking to us of the terroir's aliveness and offering to make its personhood known... Beings other than human call us to fully realize our humanity.

"Caught up in a mass of abstractions, our attention hypnotized by a host of human-made technologies that only reflect us back to ourselves, it is all too easy to forget our carnal inheritance in a more-than-human matrix of sensations and sensibilities. Our bodies have formed themselves in delicate reciprocity with the manifold textures, sounds, and shapes of an animate earth--our eyes have evolved in subtle interaction with other eyes, as our ears are attuned by their very structure to the howling of wolves and the honking of geese. To shut ourselves off from these other voices, to continue by our lifestyles to condemn these other sensibilities to the oblivion of extinction, is to rob our own senses of their integrity, and to rob our minds of their coherence. We are human only in contact, and conviviality, with what is not human."

~David Abram from The Spell of the Sensuous