Home Stream

There are blessed, unending cycles in this world. We leave and return to the same places again and again, as if we are called by some force greater than we know. Perhaps we can't help it–we are a round planet traveling a circular orbit around a great spherical Sun. Every day we live cycles deep in our bones: day and night, moon waxing and waning, we slip in and out of the dreaming and non-dreaming worlds like a seal diving into the waves and splashing up for air. We leave home and we return, like whales traversing great oceans, or winged creatures traveling hundreds of miles each year to track light and warmth. When it is time to make new babies, salmon leave the ocean to swim upcurrent through rivers and streams, precisely back to home stream, the place where they were birthed.

Returning. The year I turned thirty, I met a woman. I had heard her name years before, because someone had mentioned intimate letters that this woman and a friend had written to each other over many years. One day they brought their intimate lives public and read these letters to an audience. This woman and her friend, as young mothers and emerging writers, would squeeze hard-won writing time together–and then go into separate rooms to write to each other. Something about this writerly intimacy, this act of breathing a letter out onto the page in a way that brought out the truth more deeply than anything that could be said, cut deep into my young heart. Here lie the essence of what written language could do to bring us together, cutting past the mundane world to touch what is authentic, melancholy, true in the soul. This is what that woman knew.

One night I saw her read her poetry, and sat dazzled. And in a rare moment after the reading when everyone was talking excitedly to each other, I turned to find her standing alone, a smaller being than she had seemed at the podium, suddenly stranded and a little shy. It was as if the waters had parted unexpectedly, and only momentarily– and though I was young and unformed and entirely undone by life and injury–I found it in myself to do the thing that would utterly and irrevocably change my life. I walked up to the poet Deena Metzger, stuttered a greeting, and told her I wanted to write.

So many of us have these stories. I think they are creation myths, stories of how our births came about, how we found the person fated to provide a signpost, saying Here, come this way, look up the canyon into these hills, see the light moving across the land. Look. It is possible to see, to look, to truly be alive. This is my writer's birth story: how I came to find Deena--creation-woman, animal dreamer, wise healer, luminous poet riding the night sky. For fifty years she has sought and created beauty in the written word, tracking like a lover the great language-song floating all around us on streams of pure air.

Deena. She is my home stream, that place I return seasonally in the endless cycles of growth and death. She is the place I come to as I wend my way through life's tempering dance, the spawning of what is new and laying down what is old. It has been two decades since the night we met, and we have become teacher and student, beloved friends, kin, and colleagues. And each year, like a magnetic pull, I follow the night stars, or my sense of smell, or some pulling force like tides at the new moon, and ride the waves towards her. Home stream, where I learned anything that mattered to me, and found the Self who could live this life and bear it. Deena activated and sheltered my writing and my soul for years, then when it was time for me to leave her town, like any good mother she gently released me into my life and work and ancestral destiny. And still, always and everywhere, every year: I return.

This first week of June is like any other week in these Sister-filled days: I check email and affirm details and gather people and poets and musicians and plan like a weaver our Sisters Singing gatherings. The river I am in is rushing wildly, great fast-moving Sister-tides sweeping me along, and I am tumbling and exuberant and managing to stay afloat and ride it all. But too, this week is not like any other week, for in three days I will enter again my own beloved, constant cycle: I will travel south towards home stream. And I will land at the home of Deena Metzger.

How many times have I done this? How many journeys have there been, packing the car and traversing the waves southward, following the scent that was imprinted on me twenty years ago when we first met and I sat haltingly– quiet girl with quiet pen–in a circle in her home and began to write? Who could have known, then, what was to come? But we cannot imagine our fates, and our futures are as unwritten and even unlikely as the future that young girl is now living. We simply cannot know, in any way, what is coming.

Some time in 2006, when I began to have a sense of the marvelous book we had in Sisters Singing, I wrote to my beloved Deena and asked if she would read the manuscript and write a Foreword. I left a huge binder at her home, and one day, in the weeks that followed, on my screen in that great transmission of electric wires and pure love, it arrived in my lap. Her Foreword is a stunning piece of writing about women and the sacred and the beauty of our book. It was one of those moments when perhaps I glimpsed the future that Sisters Singing would necessarily have. I sat back, in silence. Sucked in my breath. And prayed.

Now this: the joy of reunion. Sisters Singing moving into the world with great light and happiness, me gathering up the Sisters where I can find them so that we can be together and continue to thread the web that the grandmothers want us to weave and live. Here is the woman who showed me the way, who first taught me that the ancestors and grandmother spirits are not just stories or hopeful dreams. They are real and they have intentions and we are their partners. She taught me how to do what I do, and in that, Deena is the original blessing of Sisters Singing, and the reason the book exists.

I sit in my little upstairs room and gaze at the redwoods out the window. A moment ago as I was writing a great black Crow flew by. A squirrel family lives in these trees; baby squirrel yesterday was hopping our fence and checking out our garden. This is a sign of the newness of the spirit, I think, the possibility of the coming time. Soon Jean and I will pack ourselves and our things, put some books in the trunk, point our hearts and steering wheel southward, and make our way towards home stream. And on Saturday June 6 in LA, in my great happiness I will stand before an audience and welcome Deena Metzger and her poetry and her light and her great, astonishing heart. And together with Sisters Singing, we will introduce to the world her new collection of poems, Ruin and Beauty–dazzling pieces of vision of which the beloved writer Susan Griffin says, 'If as a poet I have long believed that poetry can save the world, what I want to say now is: this poetry can save the world.'

This poetry can save the world. This is the landscape we have entered. All of it: these praise songs to the divine in Deena's language and in our luscious book of Sisters prayers. I think of June 6 and am thrilled: so many beloved poets and writers will read that night that I can hardly imagine the joy of it all. And so I prepare, keep things in place, navigate details and flyers and books and sound systems. But in my heart, there is a great tingling. I often say that Sisters Singing is a great gathering of community. The home stream where I am going is one of those places where community hums and the great heart at the center of the world pulses with love.

Soon I will look out on the hills of Deena’s land, hold her beloved self. She is, always, smaller in body than I expect, and for all her largeness of mind and heart, she is still a little shy. I like to sweep her up in my arms and hold her close. And this I will do, in just a few days.

There are moments in our lives that are made of universal breath, when our eyes are opened and we awaken to ourselves, and to the pure Beauty at the core of Creation. Deena provided such a moment for me. Some debts are unpayable, except to be named as such. Or, the way to pay the debt is to fully live the gift. So here I am. I fully live what you offered me, my Deena. There are cycles in this world, over and over, around and within. In this life, my beloved, wherever you are, I will find your scent, I will follow your imprint, in whatever realm you reside, I will always return to you.