Page 117 - Dark Matter:Women Witnessing Issue2

spend afternoons building castles and forts with stones. This time, he wrote later, became a turning

point in his fate.

When I first read Jung’s memoir, I’d just thrown off a potentially lucrative and successful career for an

unknown path. I did not think of my own life as mythic or even significant–but I did know I wanted an

existence where the younger self could have some voice and authority.

Over time I looked for guides: poets, nature writers, indigenous teachers, mystics, the spiritual writing

of the ages. But the best teachers were found in the earth intelligences around me: animals, trees,

clouds, rivers, all the living beings who did not use words or walk with two legs, but still flowed, cried,

called, communicated, rejoiced, feared, lived and died. At times all that accompanies us–songbirds,

whales, thousand-­‐year-­‐old redwood trees, the daily miracle of plants eating light and then feeding the

world–overwhelmed me with its beauty. How could such a world–one that is at once both useful and

beautiful–have become itself? What were the currencies that held such a world together?

On the day I first thought about the squirrels, a virus had moved into my neck and I could not raise my

left arm without pain. Still I decided to proceed with a medicine walk of thirty-­‐six hours of silence in

the Sierra Mountain wilderness. Two hours after leaving home I saw a furred creature in a lane next to

a Taco Bell. I have long been broken-­‐hearted with the raw ugliness of road kill. I pulled over and parked

the car.

In the brief moments it took to reach the body, the animal was hit and dismembered two or three

more times. A limb, a tail, a paw, flew across the lane. I darted into the lane and pulled what was left of

the body to the side of the road with my one good arm. Oh, creature. I could not tell what it was: a

domestic cat, a raccoon, a fox? I moved the ravaged remains into grasses by the road. At least he

would not be dismembered by machines any longer, a flattened splat in the road. At least he would be

given to the earth, to the wild birds and insects who transform the dead into soil and loam. I sat with

him for a few minutes, tired, my shoulder aching.

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