spoils of the weekend

It's Sunday afternoon and my dining room table is overflowing with apples, blackberries, figs, tomatoes, calendula flowers, and seaweed. The apples, a bit bug-bitten and bruised, will eventually emerge as sweet and leathery rings from the dehydrator, a perfect snack. The blackberries stained my fingers purple, and there's a streak of tomato juice and seeds drying out on my cutting board. The figs are just perfect. And the seaweed was a trade for three or so hours of my enthusiastic saleswomanship at the Grand Lake farmer's market yesterday, hawking my friend and teacher Trish's mineral-rich wares from the sea.

The calendula flowers? Harvested in front of my friend David's apartment in Berkeley, before we drove up to a farm in Sebastopol this morning for a four-hour plant medicine class. We got there a bit early so I got to spend some time plucking blackberries from the bramble and picking apples off the ground.

During the class I sat with a living stand of calendula flowers for a long time. It's a simple, strong plant that wakes with the sun and sleeps with the night, a renowned topical healer. I talked with it for a while. Just open yourself to the world and shine out your light, it said. Don't question your choices. Just live, love, give your healing gift, rest when the night comes.

Over my time out there today I felt myself slowly coming into a human pace; my frenetic heartbeat smoothed out. Getting in the car and driving back to Oakland felt like a contraction.

I live in this city because this is where my life is, my community, the people I choose to experience life alongside, and who have similarly chosen me. I live here because my work is here, because I learn so much from the urban-based eco-intelligentsia's discourse on the environment, the world scene, the self and the spirit. I live here because it's fun and interesting, with great music, varied cuisine, and sexy people.

But when it comes down to it, I use that word "live" pretty loosely. When I am in the city, I do many things, I grow, I learn, I enjoy, I work and I play. When I am on the earth, though, I live. What's the difference? The best way that I can describe it is to say that when I am close to nature, my heart feels like it can open up and smile with life. Here in the city, the rushing and the fear tend to close my heart, or even break it.

That sounds dramatic, I know. But last weekend I got to witness part of a birth; I was there for about six hours while my dear friend labored, and then I was there the next day when their beautiful, miraculous baby girl was just a few hours old. The experience brought me into a visceral awareness of our fundamental embodied-ness, our fundamental animal-ness. We are mammals! We're given life by the waters and the plants and the sunshine around us. Women's bodies even cycle with the moon, which cycles with the tides, which cycle with the seaweeds, which bring nourishment to the community. We're part of this earth and when we deny that, there is always pain, however subtle.

It is when I am out on the earth that I feel the pain of this exile, when subterranean longings surface and come into sharp focus.

When am I moving to the countryside, you might ask? Not anytime soon. For now, I remain compelled to seek love and fortune within the urban grid. So I continue to eat wild foods, learn the plants, practice listening to the world, slow down every day. And give thanks for all of the abundant blessings that grace my life, including the greatest blessing of life itself, each day no matter where I am.

*In memory of and in gratitude to Frank Cook, master plant teacher, who left this world too soon*