Author: dustndivinity

190820

dustndivinity
Hiking-2-1080b
Hiking-1b-1080
Hiking-3-1080
Hiking-4-1080
Hiking-5-1080
Hiking-6b-1080
Hiking-7-1080
Hiking-8-1080
HIking-9-1080
previous arrow
next arrow

Recently I was talking with a friend about naming one’s medicine. We are so often inundated with current events, to the point our feeds become a recycling bin of hot takes, with less personal voice between. I know the house is on fire, but also strive to reclaim agency toward what helps.

I’ve spent a lot of time in the narrows this summer – this maze of a place where I first learned the difference between being lost and orienteering.

The river does what it wants here, beneath the churches and cornfields above. The flatlands were once a vast rolling forest, leveled by glaciers and crosscut saws, and these channels persist as a deep-time snapshot of all that came before. It’s an odd and disorienting place, an Escher-like wonderland of twisted stone.  Early settlers went mad and missing here, unable to parse the terrain, and the area took on a reputation for suicides. Stranger Things was set nearby, and I wonder how much it inspired the upside-down. I hike past whole trees made visible – exposed roots and branches, the truth of a form we think we know. Every tree we see is only half a story. I think about what sustains and what is sustained. I think about what remains hidden. I think about how much I don’t know, always.

These chutes-and-ladders are enacted medicine to me, embodied wayfinding and immersive problem-solving. I’ve never been much for artifice in the things that matter: give me real, give me the body up against the literal earth, give me the wide sky available to nearly anyone regardless of who you believe yourself to be. Give me the grace of feeling small and brief, and the awareness of being prey. Give me the reminder of being animal, a moment’s breath at the quivering exchange of fucking and fighting, this pushpull song of subsumption and redemption. In every direction here is a lesson of integrated growth and rot, bright green and slurried decay. There is no problem or heartache I’ve taken to the narrows and not walked through, returning muddied and at peace in the daylight. This simple act of one foot in front of another, one handhold at a time, has taught me more about life than most anything I know. I’m grateful to remember.

Test Post 1

dustndivinity

Donec vestibulum vehicula ex et porta. Quisque sit amet urna eget orci imperdiet vehicula. Donec bibendum dui vel risus interdum, luctus mollis justo sagittis. Donec ut ornare elit, facilisis scelerisque libero. Praesent vitae malesuada est. Duis vitae neque sed ipsum tempus viverra. Proin semper ligula non metus finibus rutrum. Morbi pretium lorem at velit tristique, ac faucibus libero lacinia. Pellentesque aliquam enim ac rutrum convallis.

Nullam et orci maximus, egestas purus eu, vestibulum tortor. Pellentesque eget neque sapien. Nam tristique, leo ac pretium maximus, justo nisi hendrerit sem, quis fermentum leo lectus et orci. Quisque dictum, sem id placerat consectetur, nulla orci tincidunt odio, eu consectetur nibh risus vel erat. Sed accumsan, lacus consequat semper venenatis, odio enim pretium elit, sed dapibus turpis nibh sit amet neque. Nullam nulla metus, pretium sit amet fringilla ornare, sodales in enim. Nulla feugiat finibus mauris sit amet pellentesque. Nunc sed dui nunc. Duis feugiat ipsum non aliquet sollicitudin. Vestibulum dolor tortor, congue et ultricies vitae, scelerisque accumsan lectus. Sed blandit sapien nec sodales euismod.

Duis dolor metus, venenatis at nulla vel, pharetra semper elit. Aenean eu mauris vel mauris varius porta dapibus id augue. Vestibulum neque est, faucibus sed dui ac, eleifend placerat ipsum. In hac habitasse platea dictumst. In vulputate nunc at tortor auctor posuere. Aliquam erat volutpat. Nullam consectetur nec nulla eget ultrices. Suspendisse non tellus efficitur, posuere sem vitae, imperdiet est. Orci varius natoque penatibus et magnis dis parturient montes, nascetur ridiculus mus. Aenean pulvinar ullamcorper purus ac porttitor. Praesent fermentum nec nunc id dignissim. Integer in tempor libero. Ut et nisl tristique, convallis justo eget, feugiat velit. Vestibulum eget tincidunt sem, sed rutrum ante.

Cras vestibulum magna sapien, tincidunt elementum lectus pretium a. Pellentesque efficitur nisl quam, quis finibus nibh ullamcorper non. Etiam ultricies euismod magna, condimentum ultrices arcu convallis sit amet. Nulla imperdiet orci vel quam rutrum, quis malesuada tortor ultrices. Mauris gravida varius metus, id quis.

Test Post 0

dustndivinity

Arctic jet bermuda high central pressure clear low condensation funnel contrail cyclonic flow debris cloud dew easterlies fair first gust kelvin temperature scale mare’s tail nautical mile nor’easter ocean rainfall rawinsonde sandstorm small craft advisory snowburn stratiform subtropical air supercooling tropical prediction center (tpc) wave cyclone wave length. Antarctic argon (a) baroclinity boulder wind cumulus dynamics high latitudes humidity instrument flight rules (ifr) night parhelion radiational cooling shower snowpack straight-line winds subtropical air wall cloud.

Bermuda high celestial sphere cloud bank dalton’s law diablo winds filling jet stream mountain wave multiple vortex tornado palmer drought index quasi-stationary front slush snowburn swell transpiration tropics/tropical valley breeze warning weather vane wet bulb depression. Anemometer anomalous propagation asos bathythermograph blowing snow blowing spray cape ceiling light cirrus closed low conditional instability convergence diurnal drifts freezing precipitation hurricane warning katafront long wave trough overcast quantitative precipitation forecast (qpf) radiation reflectivity sand semi-permanent pressure systems sleet troposphere virga zulu time.

Air mass antarctic barometric pressure chinook closed low continental air mass diffraction dust bowl fetch fogbow hygrograph instrument flight rules (ifr) mist positive vorticity advection pre-frontal squall line ridge snow blindness stagnation area subtropical air summer undercast unstable/ instability. Absorption bow echo chemosphere condensation funnel diffluence downdraft evapotranspiration eye eye wall filling fresh water fusion gustnado heat stroke hydrologic cycle hygrograph isohel isopleth palouser

Advisory barometric pressure cirriform hypothermia monsoon mountain breeze polar jet pressure altimeter quasi-stationary front rip current severe thunderstorm snow snowfall snow shower squall line thunder vorticity whirlwind wind direction. Air quality standards barograph blizzard cape verde islands dry bulb thermometer hydrologic cycle isohel rainfall saffir-simpson damage-potential scale thermodynamics ultraviolet low conditional convergence.

190312

dustndivinity

Rainy adventure to see the Champion Grove, a recent planting of 75 ancient redwood clones in an unmarked location in the Presidio. It’s easy to hike right by them, even if you know where they are, and they don’t look like anything special.

This is a project of the Archangel Ancient Tree Archive, a group that’s conducted several similar plantings worldwide, and these were successfully cloned from five elder remnants in Northern California. One of these was the Fieldbrook stump – a ~3000-year old redwood some 30+ feet in diameter, larger than the General Sherman. It was felled in 1890 to win a bet, after a businessman in the UK wanted a cross-section wide enough to seat 40 dinner guests. The technology to clone these was thought to be impossible until recently.

While hovering in the mud adjusting shots, there was this satisfying dissonance on knowing that these stickly things hold the potential to outlive me and everyone I know at least 40 times over, as well as withstand drought, illness, and massive forest fires to sequester more than 200 tons of carbon dioxide apiece.

181119

dustndivinity
View from above a terraced city park where two people walk and heavy wildfire smoke approaches from the left.

I once had a mighty crush on someone who built a house down south of here, in the mountains, with their neighbors and their hands and no small amount of local salvage. It was up off some logging road, and much like the stone soup of tiny houses. There was a wood-burning stove and a giant deck, where we’d sit out at night among the redwoods and look for satellites in a tiny patch of stars and sky. Someone had painted one side with a small and deftly-rendered tree consumed by flames, and when I asked if that was pushing their luck my friend simply said it was a talisman, a good-faith agreement with the forest that it would, in time, do its thing and they would enjoy this place as a respectful steward in the meantime. This concept of home from a native Californian has always stayed with me.

Photo of smoke from the Yolo County Fire, San Francisco, June 2018.

181016

dustndivinity
Two hands holding a rover rock full of embedded fossils.
Two bikes at a trailhead beginning under a river bridge.
Two people walk a dog along a river bank at low tide, full of many small rocks, sticks, and other detritus.
Small crinoid fossil sitting on a dried autumn leaf, amid sticks, stones, and other leaves on the river shore.
Ten crinoid fossils of various shape and form, sitting on a weathered river log.
crinoids-hands-1c
crinoids-101418-2-2400
crinoids-101418-1-2400
IMG_0009-2400
crinoids-101418-3-2400
previous arrow
next arrow

So I went fossil hunting recently, a slow and muddy meditation best done before hunting season, when the river is at its lowest.⁣⁣ ⁣⁣

Sixty species of crinoids thrived here some 340 million years ago, when the flatland was a warm inland sea, and their stone bodies crunch underfoot along with the shale and limestone and odd bits of driftwood. They are so numerous that children collect pieces of their stems to string and wear, or stack them in patterns on fallen-tree flotsam by the shore. ⁣⁣ ⁣⁣

After a long afternoon focused intently on the ground, the day’s finds began to grow heavy in my pack. I sat down to adjust and in comparison felt oddly light, as if these cast grey things and their history were a physical context to my own body, a gravity of geological time made visceral, the weight of accumulated millennia beginning to cramp one small and insignificant set of human shoulders.⁣⁣ ⁣⁣

I sat there for a long time, while hawks circled above and the river chattered as it has always done. Then without another thought, began to empty the bag into the water, returning these forms to time and the currents. The sun was setting in sharp fiery spears beyond the trees, before disappearing seconds later to drop the valley into a sublime dusk blue. And with empty hands I remembered that I too am some brief blazing thing, as is all of human history with its feedingfuckingfighting, and for this sense of transience I am ever grateful.⁣⁣ ⁣⁣

Breathe. It’s always just been an eyeblink.⁣⁣ ⁣⁣

*⁣⁣ ⁣⁣

(Video is fifty-five seconds of ASMR over calibrated brown noise.)

180724

dustndivinity

“Still came the dune.

Still came sand in sheets, sand erasing the sun for hours then days, sand softening the corners of stucco strip malls, sand whistling through the holes bored in the ancient adobe of mission churches. Still came the wind. Still came ceaseless badland bluster funneled by the Sierra Nevada. Still came all the wanderlusting topsoil of Brigham Young’s aerated Southwest free at last, the billowing left behind of tilled scrub, the aloft fertilizer crust of manifest destiny. Ashes in the plow’s wake, Mulholland’s America.”

– Gold Fame Citrus, Claire Vaye Watkins