Mountain King

In the hall of the Mountain King you must fight the demons, unless you choose to be turned into a cardboard cutout of yourself, and go to sleep. When you wake yourself up, there will still be demons to fight.

So goes the only story on earth.

We are all called to step forward to take our natural places in the world. And if we do, we receive magic. But with the magic we have to fight demons - the demons of torpor and anger, of resistance and fear, of danger, uncertainty and the unknown. Or we can choose to sleep.

If we choose to sleep, we lose the magic and join the queue of the ordinary and turn back into our everyday selves, until we decide to wake again.

This is the only story for humans on earth, because it's the story of the hero's journey. All stories - from Star Trek to Spongebob to Mission Impossible to Brokeback Mountain are the same story. Anyone who tries to write outside of the hero's journey writes a book that won't sell.

The hero's journey is the walk we all take. If you're awake and fighting, joy to those around you. Zap that demon!

In the end, we become the Mountain King. Because his cave is the cave of our hearts, and the demons are places of our darkness, waiting for transformation. Each demon transformed becomes a new magical tool, until we become king over all the demons, the Mountain King himself. We also become the Mountain, and the hero's companion (Dr Spock, Patrick, That Pretty Girl with Tom Cruise) supporting others on their fights to become wholly themselves.

We can continue to pursue our dreams and fight obstacles or we can go back to sleep, to the safe life of errands, to-do lists, and live without a vision. Safety's price is torpor, and the reward of safety is uncertainty.

The vision's price is energy and uncertainty and the fighting of 'demons' - internal and logistical. But the reward of the vision is magic and accomplishment, true security arising from a core of internal peace, and the view from the mountain.

Accident

It's been hard to write today. This morning it's a move your hand for 20 minutes across the page and don't look back kind of start. That's the trick to jumpstart writing. No, I'm not really going to write anything. I'm just going to sit here and doodle in sentences. Then it comes out.

When a big emotion sits in my throat, it's sometimes hard to write. At which angle do I start? What bit do I want to describe? Was it the man from the AAA with his long curly blond ponytail and his lined face, driving us almost into (yet another) ditch as he scrabbled around with the paperwork after he recovered my broken car? Or the baby racoon on the road, newly squashed? As I sat on the roadside waiting for a breakdown truck, I kept hearing this obscene pop as people drove over the small body, until they'd worn a groove through its guts. I wished for a shovel and gloves, to give him a little burial in the woods, or at least scrape him off the road into a plastic bag. I know people who carry shovels and bags for that reason. So far, I haven't been one of them.

We very nearly ended up in hospital on Sunday carting a load of tiles home on our trailer. We had a blow-out which caused the trailer to jacknife several times across lanes of traffic, missing - like dodgeball or jumprope - an oncoming black jeep, then missing a telephone pole and finally into a ditch with a gentle slope and two piles of gravel at the bottom. We coasted to a stop so slight it didn't even engage the seatbelts.

I kept silent as Paolo negotiated the crisis, but remember thinking: "I have to stay alive for my kids. They need me." When we got out of the car we discovered one rear tires off its mud-caked rim, the other too compromised to move, and the left wheel of the trailer had blown. Incredibly (upon incredibly) we lost only one box of tile.

Paolo didn't touch the brake or accelerator and steered in the opposite direction each time. Little did he know he hadn't the use of either back tire. He practices in the snow in the back field with the Ford to improve his driving skills, and that experience kept us from flipping. But the oncoming traffic, the telephone poles - that was sheer serendipity.

Afterwards I watched them cart away my Explorer with it's bumpersticker: "Angels, don't leave home without them," with its corny graphics showing flying angels with lunchboxes.

You do the math.

writing in the woods

Stratford Ecological Center in Delaware provides a great place for rest and retreat. Yesterday, with pen, backpack and sarong for cover from the mosquitos I took their walk down to the river, now a dry bed, for solace and inspiration.

Muggy and buggy, with spiders webs strung across the path, tree to tree every five feet, high season for gnats. Plentiful nets. One spider looked as if it had a moth attached to its back, perhaps a female carrying spiderlets.

I sat down by the river that a friend and I visited two winters ago, then in full flood with bright orange shelf fungus against the black logs, when her marriage seemed dead and I struggled with my family's divisions.

In the morning, I'd prepped myself to write a poem by reading my favorite book of poetry, 'Ants on the Melon' by Virginia Hamilton Adair, which alwasy opens my mind to fresh images and the play of wordsound. Faced with a dry streambed, slapping at the bugs, sitting on a fungus-infested log, I wondered how anything deep could emerge from such an ordinary woodland scene. So I began to play with words in my head, to listen, and got the first line: in a dry riverbed, stones lie with uncovered heads.

After some fiddling, it came through:

August
In the dry riverbed
stones lie with uncovered heads
waiting for water
to run again.
Humidity's potential presses me
air like sea.

September's thunderheads
will bring flooding rain
a log's fungal ears
hear a plish plash refrain.

Shadow is the progeny of sun.
In this swollen cloud
lightning's begun.

After the Pacific Northwest

It's back in Ohio after being out in the Pacific Northwest gorging on crab and salmon, fresh caught, grilled on the beach, smoky salty and sweet all at once. After our engorgement, we lay on the beach under mover's blankets watching the meteor shower with my best friend Dani and her love Andy.

We listened to the swish of waves over the rocks - agates, carnelian, jasper, granite, shale. They knew a beach untouched by tourists, a local's preserve, a teenage hangout on one of the San Juan Islands. We revelled in it - next year it gets new owners and we will be turfed out by watchdogs, human and canine.

I love the beach with a deep love that gets fed by salt water every time I return to my childhood home and memories of swimming in water which numbed us before August and chilled us thereafter. We'd dive into the water with our open wounds, and it would sting and heal us. Any scrape or cut and we'd be sent into the salt with directions to bathe.

Now, returning to the Midwest, I reluctantly launder my clothes. I want the smoke to stick. I want to stink of smoke and salt, and greet the memory of seaweed and kelp when I wear them. I convince myself to wash them, eventually.

Ohio's as hot as ever. Tonight we ate from the garden - peppers, chilis, corn, tomatos with black beans, cumin and coriander. A fragrant, favorite meal. Soon, school begins and the autumn chores of pruning and moving trees. But I collected 38 stones on the beach for a medicine wheel, and keep them in my kitchen in the form of a sacred hoop, with horseclam shells and a sprig of cedar as living memories of the place I will always call home.