Dear friend,

This is an exhale.

There is a lake out here that I’ve been retreating to. In the evenings, the sun pushes light and wind in the same direction. I wade in up to my neck and close my eyes… opening one of them just a crack to let the light dance past my eyelashes. The sun bounces off the water and breaks through… Electric SHAKy blue like a sparkler.. it writes on my eyelid.

July has been a month of flesh. Of reminders of tumors. Of cough and fever. Lost toenails and cougars. Of gutted fawns and speckled hide. Dragged and pulled and cut apart. And the heart that sleeps in my freezer.

Things are dying here all the time. This is not new. I watch new wild flowers open and close each week. Confident squirrels get filled with water and covered in wakeful moss. The skins of animals stretch and yawn in the sun - a job well done. Dried spiders fall from my open ceiling into the kitchen sink. I wash them down the drain. I sobbed for a bumpy raccoon that I hit in the dark. Other animals skirt and dodge: squirrels, deer, skunk. It’s a dance of “almost dead, but not yet.” Where do I do my skirting? How close have I come? And yet! A pouring out! A blooming! Fumbling! Spilling! Curling! Brimming! Tripping life!

And the awe that I feel:

I feel my heartbeat in my hands. Invisible march. It shakes my eyeballs and knocks under my skin. Sometimes it rips and spills out. I do forget that she’s blue in there. I’m no horse shoe crab.

Gerda lost her vision but could still climb mountains in her dreams. In a world that had become one singular visual field, her internal world became the brightest thing.

The first day I sat with her, she asked me to put out her orange and pink tablecloth. “I can’t see it but I like those colors together” she whispered. We see different tablecloths; I see what is outside of me, and she sees what is draped inside her memory.

Arabian bangles, icon paintings and Japanese bells, silver plates and hand-thrown mugs, wooden recorders, colored glass, and dried poppy pods; she described the blurred black and white field that these faded into. Together we held the objects. Her fingers danced as I described them in words until they surfaced in her memory with lost secrets. One by one, they were let go to her people. A scattered web. A weaving, a leaving.

One morning before I made her breakfast, she confidently handed me the scissors and requested that I cut her hair. We left the silver for the birds. She was a silver smith after all.

She speaks to me in prisms now. And waved to me through the poppies that bloomed backwards in time as I moved West this June.

Sometimes I close my eyes and imagine her hands. They were searching. Seeing. Mottled and jaundiced and visible.

The djembe skin broke last month. He pinned a tiny talisman in the belly of the drum before stretching a new skin. But he won’t tell me what’s hidden in there and I admire that.

There are secrets in this room. I have one in my pocket and one in my ear. And I leave them in these words for some of you.

On the strawberry moon, I grinned and fed a blackberry to the center of the cascade-siskiyou labyrinth. I ate one, too. Two bellies full.

I started hiding things there three years ago. Is it a hiding spot if I tell you that? Is the sacredness lost if I tell you what’s hidden? First-quarter moon. Edelweiss. Peppered moth. The secrets decay silently and leave bones behind for the next pilgrim to wonder about.

When I stand there, I like to imagine I am wearing a pale skirt. It fans out to the widest circle and bunches and folds when I walk out. Brushing away my footsteps and yours.

After Gerda passed, I had a dream that I climbed a ladder from the center of the labyrinth into the earth below.

———

Underground, I can hear the earth turn. I am eyelevel with the worms and the bones and the sounds of churning. I spend four days in this great nesting doll. Earth, mountain, cave, me, womb.

The usual field of light and scattered objects closes. I open my eyes and it’s still black. Crocodile double-lidded darkness. I keep imagining my hands in front of me. Phantom limb. Sensation is like a stubborn figure 8 ball - things emerge slowly and loosely.

But it is kind. I pull the shadows up over my eyes and things light up inside. My heart casts my spine into shadow and my eyelids beat green green purple. Dreams bleed into thoughts with no light to signal morning. I play the harp alone in the branches before it melts down the ivory sycamore antlers. Below, I can hear Margret’s broken voice as she trots across the yard, belly swinging. Did you hear that? Further away, a bear sings from inside her cave and pauses, waiting for the deer to respond. I wade through the venice biennale and pink temples frowning. I am missing my flight under the staircase and Spanish wars and rushing business men and walking away. I can hear the recorders play. I can see her silver hair shake; chin tilted up to the music she can’t see. Listen for the quietest sounds.

There is a stillness required of listening. Find that and hold it in both directions: inward and out into the dark. A crossover occurs. Notice how they speak to one another. Where do the edges of my body meet the darkness? I open my eyes and let it spill in, so that I become invisible.

By the third day, I’ve forgotten what I look like, but I know how my belly sounds. There is blood behind my eyes and the walls talk back. These are the only mirrors in the dark. It snows above me. I am being watered in my seed coat. Who knows, I might sprout from any shadow in the world! Under a silent clover or stretched at the base of the Segovia aqueduct. Maybe I will crawl out of my own.

Before I leave the dark retreat, I put a blindfold on. A guiding hand leads me out of the earth and into cold air. It smells of sweet pine and January snow. My eyelids fill with a bright red before opening. The invisibility cracks. I look out at Green mountain. I look down. I see my hands. My eyes inhale. Giddy.

I am available. For the cavities that I see in lost bones. Spiderwebs lifting dew. Scaly lime lichen. Fuzzy buds cling coldly. Deer tracks in the mud. My breath in the air. Hangnails and fingerprints and hips and lines.

I weep for my shadow. I missed my old friend. The sun traveled all this way, only to be interrupted a few feet before hitting the ground. It warms me instead. When I lose my shadow for good, I hope someone casts her in plaster and turns my bones into charcaol.

I take a pinch of soil that buried me in the darkness. For hiding. I carry it back up the ladder with me and leave it in the center. Our secret. I walk out of the labyrinth and fly east just in time for the funeral. A focused room filled with people from her scattered, silver web.

Seven months later, on the other side of the lake from me, a helicopter scoops water and dumps it onto a smoking mountain side. Lightning is less forgiving in Oregon than it is in the east. One thunderstorm cracks a constellation of fires.

I have been lighting fires, too, though with more care. I appreciate the light, but I grin at what rests when it’s gone. Charcoal is a skeleton.

Someone told me a secret about these bones. If you bury them away from the light of the fire, everything burns in the heat, but the charcoal respects the original form. A shadow is born. Subtraction sometimes just reveals what was already there. Great equalizer.

I continue to keep my eyes open for quiet secrets, but sometimes they yell. Last week, a frog jumped onto me in the car while I was driving. I almost flew off the cliff into our valley. The gravel tangos the river and leads us away from the lake. It goes on for miles and carries us deep into hiding. Here, the kids snack on mallow from the garden and barter the jawbones they find for pieces of my charcoal. They go down to the swimming hole fourteen times a day on average. Bare feet are well broken-in when the blackberries arrive. By the end of the summer, there is bear fat in my sink drain and a deer heart in the freezer.

What else do I know of this place?

I moved out here in late spring when fawns first wobble. Across the yard, the birthing teepee stands tall. It belongs to a dark-haired woman who is lending me her harp. Rabbits sit quietly in their rotating pins. Ringtailed cats make mansion out of the treehouse. Poison oak waves at my ankles. I can hear the wind rushing through the valley from a mile away before it shakes the trees above me. Late sun turns Green mountain purple, and we are cast into her shadow before our own can stretch out. Up the hill, there are three people underground. Not dead, but sitting in the dark just like I did last winter. I make their meals and think of Gerda.

The midwife helped me dig out the ladder. I put it in a tree to dry, but a cougar dragged it off. I ate a plumb that day. Bright red. You looked the same size in my palm.

By midsummer, my yurt is a hollow sundial. Light stretches across the walls and slices the center of the room at bold noon. When I lay awake at night, the sky is hidden, save for a pinhole that peeks up at the constellations. I imagine a labyrinth draped on the roof. If the sky was on the back of a wobbly fawn, what happens when she loses her spots to October? Will we lose Cassiopeia and Ursa, too?

The listening can still happen both ways. Like simultaneously seeing into water and the reflections on its surface. I can see inside and outside. Let it stir and blur. Breathe in a secret and whisper one out.

My own heart hangs somewhere on the ladder between the earth and moon. I have climbed nine miles up the mountain to complete this work among old friends. Tonight, I sit up straight and listen to the candle tremble. The Cascade-Siskyou labyrinth sleeps across the road from me. My chair creeks. I carve O’s out of pine and down the road a fawn loses her last spots. The wax trickles quietly. The sky hides my trembling. On the full sturgeon moon, my friend found an older ladder near the labyrinth. She told me about a deer who had a fawn inside her when she died. I bow. Brimming.

I try to hide behind language, but it tears me open instead. At home, locusts leave their skin behind of their own accord. But how do you skin a fawn? How do you hold a heart kindly? Where was I climbing when you were born? Were those your footprints in the snow or were they your mothers?

Let’s share secrets. What color hides behind your eyes? Maybe I’ll tell you where I buried the heart.