I went to Sky Camp where the ridgeline descends to the sandy line of Limantour beach. I went to find a place where the body could speak and be heard beyond the lure and drone of ghostly ruminations. I went to hear the voice of the land speaking in the rustling of leaves and birdsong. The body speaks in heat, in cold, in stiffness, in light, in the gritty texture of soil against the naked flesh of soles. She speaks in feelings, in myth, in ways of seeing and listening that change us. To hear her call, is to be changed, to fall into a web of being with knowledge beyond human logic.

I camped above the ocean, looking down on the crescent of beaches below. The ocean laps against the shore and I am quieted for a moment. It is in the quiet that the earth can speak. It is in the quiet that undoing takes hold. The Great Mother invites us into the undoing, to hold taut the thin drum made of animal skins against our firm boundaries of feeling, that we feel the anguish and love of each moment, against which she can expound her teaching, beating out her songs, the rhythms of our days, the echoing resonating outward in wider circles, giving life. It is in the quiet that the heart recalibrates, and the drum song of a steady rhythm returns.

Why so much busyness? The layers of rhythms, of the heart, the breath, the waves beating on the shore woven together are symphonic. Isn’t it good to let the days slow to a trickle and let the body surrender to its deepest longing? What is it about aimlessness that terrifies the human species? I’ve come here to Sky Camp to let the quiet blow away the dry leaves that have accumulated around the tree trunks within. I turn on the news and see images of children fleeing war, with no home to return to, parents lost. I either let it burn through in the present, or it leaves a dry husk of leaf waiting for feeling, on the heart’s topsoil.

The days have piled up this kindling as if preparing for a bonfire. Words upon words, images upon images, build up like thin branches of dry wood to the base. Worries like fallen leaves in a perfect layering in preparation for flames, so when the match ignites, the fire grows out of control. When the flame is too large, my body seizes up and searches for refuge outside itself, forgetting the only home it has is here. There are too many refugees of body, who walk through their days with no home within, where the body hurts from the accumulation of unwept tears, and so live like ghosts hovering above the poisoned ground of the earth as a human body. There is no place to go.

I go to the land for a controlled burn, where the wild creates a boundary that holds the edges of the fire. To prepare for fire season in California, firefighters have dug fire lines and burned within the circle. They burned all around the edges of the wilderness, that when the fire sweeps through, it has a boundary. I come to places devoid of human chatter to build a fireline of silence where I can set an inner match and let it burn out to make way for the present.

I see signs of fire around the campsite– charred logs, blackened with soot.  A fire seared the land here two years ago and the campsite just reopened. Slowly shrubs are reclaiming the ground. Mugwort grows in a clearing. I put some in my water bottle, and taste the fragrance of dream medicine.