Notes on Playing in Taut Ravines

When I was a young child, I had a wild heart. I was defiant and feral. When we moved out into the county from the heart of suburbia, I was five and a half years old…and I spent most of my time playing alone outside. I ranged the miles and miles of open, gently rolling hills behind our property, for years, without even a dog’s protection. And, closer to home, I played in a semi-deep ravine, the outlet of our neighbor’s deer pond. Its quiet rich earth seemingly always a moment’s breath away from breaking, the top crumbling down to meet the soft loamy bottom soil below. A drier and deeper ravine lead from a usually dry creek to our opposite neighbor’s stock pond. Both of these ravines were dangerous in their own right. The soft dark and deep chasm to the right of our property seemed a faery realm, but it was only held up by the roots of a perpetually falling burl oak. The other, a dry gash of parched earth, promised rattlers and other dangerous animals.

Once, I found cougar paw prints, and another time, I surprised two orphaned bobcat kittens that were just a touch too old to survive on their own. It was a magical place, the lands to the Southeast of Livermore, California. Our house was the highest on the hill and our fence line backed up to ranching pastureland on all sides. Our neighbors ranged meat cattle there, and very occasionally went for trail rides on their land; but mostly, the land was My Own . When I did see our neighbors, riding western style through the oak savannah on their gentle horses, I would hide so they wouldn’t know I trespassed. Finding cow bone graveyards, and then cow-borne, aloft on a steer I named “Milky”. (I got lucky, his name was actually Bob, a burnt-red and neutered male that was abandoned and bottle-raised in calfdom. He would protect me if the other cows got aggressive, and was so gentle that when I climbed up on his back that ill-advised first riding, he barely budged)

I had so many wild adventures in these spaces. The map of these lands is engraved on every layer of myself and wont be sloughed with the growth of time. In those old times, when I tracked cougars, chased bobcats, called to the coyotes and saw them dance in the morning sunlight. These were days when hawks donated their red tail feathers, eagles their rancher-poisoned bodies, and barn owls their soft, tawny-white wing pieces… When I tied a sun-preserved badger head aloft in the eucalyptus, when I befriended the cows, and challenged the bulls with a literal bull horn, and my bugle. When I howled to the night sky at the top of the hill.

I knew a wild freedom that lives inside of me still. But, this free animal that I know myself to be, has been traumatized by circumstance and chained into a city-walking girl.

The wilderness that was my escape, I call now back into my rebel heart. The lands that fed my soul through neglect and starvation... the divine power held in the open space…I call back to me, and I hope that you all can hear this wisdom of the wide open, the soft still ponds, the far wilds and woods, and the dark and light ravines.