May Day and a Virus, Part One

'Old Man's Beard'

 The Tree Fell

Comfortable upon the bed
We talked of feelings,
Bantered opinions
Soft or saucy.
Sentences careful,
Oh too careful until ...
The tree fell,
close.

The tree fell close
Across the road
Marked "Here"
But for the fortunate
Wyrd Heart heard
"Not there!
But here."

But here we rest
A day, a night
Perhaps a week
Or more.
Enough we hope
For Fox or Crow
To slip between
Our skin.
Once more.

 © 2019, Mokihana Calizar, a poem written to remember The Tang of Fox

"The Swallows are back," swooping over head, stopping, barely, to check the wagon's eaves. That was the sweetest report in recent days. In this place of bit illusion wild nature hovers to catch a whiff of herself in our tamed skins.

"Oral culture has always been about local embedding, despite the big human dilemmas that cannot help but sweep up between cultures. This may seem an unimportant detail when you are seeking only to poke around your childhood memories in a therapist's office, but it falls woefully short when this older awareness is reignited -- the absence of wider nature becomes acute, the tale flat and self-centered."

The bright silver bullet of a trailer parked at the dump station. Towed by deeply tinted windows on a black truck, the last two rigs to fill the campground is here. "There goes the neighborhood. They're probably going where the bus was."

The Airstream has filled that space at the edge where once a pair of blonde rag-a-muffins played with their dolls and waved at all us passersby; and where for a month a converted school bus painted navy blue waited out the first month of pandemic lock-down ... before moving on.

  "Now, while it's certainly true that there are stories designed for travel, for thousands of years even a story arriving in an entirely new landscape would be swiftly curated into the landscape of its new home. It would shake down its feathers and shape-leap a little or grow silent and soon cease to be told. No teller worth his or her salt would just stumble through the outline and think it was enough; the vivid organs would be, in part, the mnemonic triggers of the valley or desert in which the story now abided. This process was a protracted courtship to the story itself. It was the business of manners."

"Funny. That was my spellcheck," correcting the wild Old Man's Beard, "Usnea" to "unless." The entangled 'business of manners' turns somersaults with our conversations. Funny. The wild and powerful fungus and algae growing in symbiosis patiently dangles from a fallen limb. Gathered and tinctured Old Man's Beard will find his way into the deep thin darkness of lungs visited by The Virus.

Usnea

 "Once upon a time," there was a lonely hunter. One evening, returning to his hut over the snow, he saw smoke coming from his chimney. When he entered the shack, he found a warm fire, a hot meal on the table, and his threadbare clothes washed and dried. There was no one to be found."

The quotations above are from Martin Shaw's Skatterling's  and were written into a post by Terri Windling on her blog post 'The Tang of Fox' on Myth & Moor.

'Watercolor Forest', Scatchet Head, Whidbey Island

This piece-meal post wanders through me eavesdropping on conversations in my real and everyday world. Tamed, yet hungry to see the magic of this May Day when the Coronavirus has come to heat the temperature of our human everyday.

We have many of us been at home, safe enough or not safe enough this time of pause is a potent pregnancy it seems to me. I have been visited. I have been occupied. I called to check with the Green Witch down the road into the Watershed Valley ... and yes, she has a good stock of tinctured Old Man's Beard should I need him.

And yes, the Auntie has been busy with her reminders about the stories no one is telling. What foolishness this is. "It's the same virus," she says as her conversation with us ends. Straightening her papers, and barely hiding that wicked smile. Her photographs lit by the overhead projector travel the edge of time ... do they still use overhead projectors?

Auntie wisdom, ancestral knowledge impregnates me ... a fallen tree ... a coral polyp. Auntie Ruby's first overhead projected image ... (a similar to the one below)

Soft coral polyps

Without thinking, I connect Auntie's question, "Is that where the virus is?" as she points with her Sharpie pen at the opening of the soft bodied coral. Seated as I was that night I recognized the familiar patterns of the coral with that of the Coronavirus. Auntie says, "The virus comes before evolution."

Coronavirus

 The Kumulipo, the old story, the story of connection is from Hawaii. May Day is still Lei Day, in Hawaii. Awkward yet persistently I thread my lei needle to kui a story. This is a complex yet recurring tale worth digging into. I leave the beginnings of it here to heat things up -- part of the birthing process.


We are in a state of pregnant pause as we point to the Coronavirus. Do you feel the birth pains?