Youth Nature Awareness

Native Eyes was off this week, so I'm updating with a Story of the Day from the Riekes Center Nature Awareness group of youth that I lead every Friday in Huddart Park. No photos for this one.

We began the day by each randomly choosing one of eight Guardian roles and making a statement to the group about how we'd fulfill those roles: Our Hydration Guardian would ask people if they'd drunk water at lunchtime, the Poison Oak Guardian would point out poison oak when she noticed it, the Ranger Watch Guardian would announce when she heard a ranger's truck, etc. Our Bird Language Guardian committed to watching and listening for junco alarm calls throughout the day.

We started off on a wander to find friction fire materials and tan oak acorns. Everyone was loud and boisterous, and speaking at eachother in city-volume voices. We played some rowdy games to burn off energy. Then we settled down for a snack and I told a story of one of my first bird language experiences, in which birds told me that a predator was near but I didn't listen, and then I scared a fawn into the waiting jaws of a bobcat (the predator that the birds had been shouting about) because I forgot to be attentive, quiet and respectful in the woods.

As we finished the story, all the juncos that had been feeding to the west of us started chipping excitedly, and moved in a wave overhead toward the east. They disappeared into the woods and were silent. Our Bird Language Guardian excitedly pointed out the junco's activities to the rest of the group. A minute or two later, the NEWTS appeared from the west. After the NEWTS moved through, the juncos returned. The whole group, with huge grins on all faces, discussed this newly-noticed pattern that the birds had shown us and speculated about how we might use it to sneak up on the NEWTS in the future.

We continued on our wander, finding few fire materials and no acorns anywhere we went. We did go through some tall and healthy manzanita bushes, though, and picked a good supply of the berries to make cider.

We wandered around back toward the parking lot making sure to take a different way, and on the way found a very fresh trail of coyote tracks, along with a fresh addition to the coyote's latrine where the trail joined the road. The scats were of many different ages, and we realized that we could read a little of the shifting life of the coyote in their differences. We decided to check back often for more coyote news.

As we approached the parking lot, motion caught my eye off the road -- a grey squirrel. But he had something in his mouth. We all stopped to watch, wondering what the oblong white object was. We watched him sit there, looking at us, gnawing on his white object like it was a corncob. When he was done he sidled a little ways off, turned his back to us, dug a shallow hole in the duff, and buried the object. When he was well up his tree we clambered up the hill to find out what the object was. A bone! It was aged and dry, and covered with short grooves gnawed into the surface by the squirrel. We wondered where it came from, and why the squirrel wanted to chew on it. We put the bone back and thanked the squirrel for sharing his secrets with us.

Back at our fort in the woods, we took some time to go to our sit spots. After everyone had gone to sit I rustled through my bag for a snack, crackling wrappers and muttering to myself until I realized that I was the only one making any noise. Everyone else was completely silent at their spot. In place of the usual sounds of fidgety people and quiet chit-chat between neighbors, all I heard was the wind in the treetops and the soft calls of feeding juncos. I sat very still and listened.

When we gathered again, I found out that some of the youth, in particular our Bird Language Guardian, had been surrounded by feeding juncos at their sit spots. They wanted to stay quiet and still out of respect for the birds. Others had been sitting still, making cordage and listening to the quiet sounds of the birds feeding by their classmates. None of them wanted to come back in when I called.

In the past, I've tried to get groups to pay attention to junco alarms by calling the birds Ninja Birds, doing skits about them, and otherwise building up their roles as the stealthy guardians of the forest. But never have I seen such successful bird language awareness in a whole youth group as today, when just one person in the group was asked to pay attention to just one kind of call from just one kind of common bird. The whole group ended the day with new respect and understanding of the role of birds as the communication network of the woods.

Mind of Mentoring and Village Builders Training

The new year of Native Eyes kicked off with a Tweeker – a two-week training retreat, the intensity of which may tweak participants out by the final day. The first week, entitled Mind of Mentoring and Nature Connection, was awash in flip charts and lecture. The second week, entitled Village Builder’s Training, was much less structured.

The first week appealed greatly to my analytical, logistics-preoccupied mind. We sat in lecture most of the day, watching various people draw various versions of a circle with eight radiating lines, and writing various words about these diagrams. We hung the charts together on the wall. Toward the end of the week a visitor remarked that it looked like we were designing the Death Star. The name stuck – I still can’t help but think of Darth Vader when I look at those diagrams. But I did learn a great deal about the ideas and structure behind this 8-Shields approach to mentoring and culture building.

We had a free weekend between the two weeks, in which some of the other Native Eyes crew, some Cultural Mentors, and some other attendees got some unstructured time together. We went to the beach and skinny-dipped in the chill ocean at sunset, played tag, sang songs and told stories. We hiked around the woods near Santa Cruz, found beautiful manzanita and huckleberries to eat, climbed trees, and goaded complete strangers into running around like kids with us. Though the people we met on the trail started out intimidated by the mere thought of eating wild berries, they finished the day with tongues nearly and purple as ours, grinning, climbing trees, throwing stones, hiding, seeking, and chasing each other like 8-year olds.

We launched into the second week still exhausted from the previous one, and it showed. The Acorn (our support team who managed and executed the event) still had bags under their eyes. This week had been planned as an exercise in village culture, rather than an educational program with lectures and flip charts. I think that varying interpretations of what that meant, along with the evident fatigue in the leadership group, and the ambitious project we had set for ourselves, made this week much rockier than the previous one.

Essentially, we took 60 or so humans from Western urbanized, individualistic, capitalist and technologically-dependant cultures and attempted to create a communal earth-based village culture using consensus, peaceful action, and positive words, within one week. We fell into many pitfalls. We also built beautiful, supportive, and regenerative relationships among our temporary village, which will continue to build independent of that retreat. On this week, we lit the embers of many future village fires.

Food and Medicine

This week we were at Venture again, and spent the day with the RDNA crew. Our focus for the day was herbs, herbal medicines, and local and wild foods. The day was so creative and varied that I think this’ll have to be one of my longest posts ever. Apologies for the unbalanced text-to-photos ratio.

(We found the snake while wandering the grounds. He doesn’t have much to do with the day’s activities, but I thought he was beautiful enough to share anyway. I think his Latin name translates to “fierce bush snake from Hell.”)

We started the day with a blindfolded string walk. The Cultural Mentoring group strung a string down paths, around obstacles, and ended at a group meeting point. We were blindfolded and allowed to guide ourselves along the string using touch.



I found that I was far more comfortable going without shoes than with, and given the extra tactile connection to my environment, along with the string guide and the other sensory information from scent and sound, I felt totally comfortable, safe, and happy walking the landscape blind. With sight deprived, textures and temperatures, rather than sights, furnished the beauty in my landscape. Even the clammy grass and sharp gravel felt good on my feet, as it gave me that much more information about the world.

The one source of frustration I found was with negotiating my path in the presence other people. I found it easy to tell when the person in front of me had stopped, but harder to tell when they started up again. I didn’t want to bother the person in front of me by touching them if they were still there, but sometimes there was so much shuffling going on that I couldn’t tell if the person in front of me was walking or just fidgeting, or if an instructor was moving in front of me instead. I found myself worrying and fretting about holding up the line by waiting too long, and anxious about annoying the person ahead of me by poking her too often. This social worry was so strong that by the time I got to the end of the string, I was fuming about the bad design of this exercise, and how the presence of other people ruined the sensory immersion experience.

When we debriefed the exercise, an often-repeated point about nature connection practices came to the fore again: the stuff that comes up in these exercises is the stuff that participants bring to them. Likely, the blockages one comes up against in nature connection are the same blockages that one repeatedly engages in life. Like so many other personal practices, nature connection brings one’s blockages out of their familiar context and into a new and different light. I went into the next exercise musing on these thoughts and hoping to erode my anger with new understanding.

(Unlike other personal practices like martial arts or meditation, practicing nature connection allows for more feedback than that provided by one’s individual point of view and that of the mentor. Nature connection brings one’s blockages into an environment where not only mentors and students can reflect them to you, but where birds can shout at you about them, fox and mink can honor you for your progress, and trees can offer comfort and grounding in a crisis. And practicing nature connection with others on the same journey offers that many more eyes and ears and hearts and minds to perceive that feedback, push you when you’re unwilling to push yourself, and help you incorporate the feedback into your development.)


(Photo from CalPhotos)

The next exercise was a simple plant sit. We were told to find a plant, sit down with it, and talk with it, aiming to get to know some of the plant’s “spirit medicine”. We were advised to begin with a question, such as “what’s your name?” or “what story do you have to tell?”

I wandered away from most of the group and sat down by a big, beautiful Scrophularia plant. My question was, “what’s your role here,” a variation on the get-to-know-the-stranger line of, “so what do you do?” After sitting with it for a time, spacing out and being distracted by very cool looking hoverflies, I was feeling a little unfocused and ineffective at my task. I reconsidered my question, and sent a wordless request for communication with the plant, opening this “conversation” to let it say whatever it needed to say. Quietly, I watched bugs crawl over it, saw the discarded skins and honeydew excretions of now-absent aphids on a young stem, inspected leafminer tracks in the newer leaves, and noted that most of the mature stalks and leaves were free of insects. I inspected the flowers and wondered about their pollination.

Holding the plant stalk between my thumb and forefinger, I realized that physically, the plant’s body and my body were part of a continuum of matter, that the divisions of individuality between human and plant were arbitrary and that in fact one body merged into another and into the air and the earth, and more, in a continuum of matter and energy. I thought that perhaps spirit might be similar, and wondered, with silence rather than words, about participation in plant spirits and the continuity of spirit between apparent individuals.

Then the coyote howl came to gather us back, and we moved on to another project.






After a fun communal journaling session and a lunchbreak that included more journaling, (I got to learn about the medicinal and toxic properties of Bleeding Heart wildflowers) we launched into the afternoon activity, a lesson on intuitive cooking from one of the Cultural Mentors.



We had each brought at least one food local to our homes, meaning harvested less than 100 miles away from where we live. I brought snow peas and fava beans from my former garden (I had to negotiate with the landlord to get in an pick them), winter squash from the last fall harvest in my garden, and duck eggs from the Eco House nearby. Others brought many citruses, greens, peas and other vegetables. One person brought some ground beef, another some kefir, a jar of dried huckleberries (yum), and the star of the show was fresh abalone from Bolinas.

Our challenge was to create an appetizer dish for the rest of the class using only these ingredients. We grouped into teams and selected our ingredients. My group wound up with the kefir, the huckleberries, and lots of veggies. We were frustrated at first with our luck, getting such an odd collection of ingredients, but we came up with a plan and created a dish. Vibrant, energetic chaos ensued in the kitchen.

Our dish, a sweet stirfry using greens, sugar snap peas, celery, and apple with a sauce of huckleberry kefir flavored with lemon zest, nettle, and lemon balm herbs turned out to be an improbable success. Others made equally delectable dishes: herb meatballs with dipping sauces made from fava beans, tomato soup, or mustard; toasted kale chips (delicious and simple creations that result from tossing kale with oil and salt and toasting the leaves in the oven); stuffed beet leaves; carrot and greens salad alongside abalone that was breaded (with locally dumpstered bread), seasoned, and fried in olive oil; squash, herb and dandelion flower fritters; and squash stuffed with an herbed duck egg scramble.







With dinner over, three rounds of dishes done, and the sun setting low, we gathered in the main room for more herb work. Some of our musicians jammed with drums, guitar and mandolin while we milled about and waited for everyone to settle. Only settling never quite happened, and finally the energy of the music took over the room with dance and improvised song. Rather than fight the energy, our instructors began to sing their instructions for the next activity. Demonstration flowed into dance, questions came out sung in time to the beat, and spontaneous poetry erupted. We learned and processed herbs for the next hour with music fueling our motions. This was by far the most fun herbal class I’ve ever attended. My grandmother would be overjoyed to see this kind of learning going on.







Finally, we finished out the evening with a council circle, discussing sex and gender issues. The men asked the women’s circle questions, and vice versa. It raised many more questions, and opened new avenues of communication that I think will continue to be explored for these last five weeks of class.

Forgiveness and Evaluations

Before launching into my recap of this week’s class, I’d like to give some background to the events. This entry centers on a custom called Mihi Kala, a description of which follows. Also note, I managed to kill two sets of camera batteries in a row, one right after the other for no apparent reason, so I could not use my camera for this class and this entry will be text only.

Mihi Kala is a custom from Hawaii that centers on the asking and granting of forgiveness. It’s said before the thanksgiving for the evening meal, like a precursor to Grace. The intent of Mihi Kala is to relieve people of the dross of the day and thus to make space for thanksgiving for the gifts of the day. It is a simple process of speaking aloud the harms one has dealt others, the mistakes one has made, any actions one regrets or feels badly about, and of asking for forgiveness for those things. Once others grant forgiveness, it’s important that one also states forgiveness of oneself. This ritual helps bring everyone into presence with each other (and themselves), and what remains in a person after forgiveness is granted is genuine, peaceful thankfulness. Mihi Kala, if practiced honestly, brings the bothersome and painful mental stuff accumulated through everyday life out into the open and releases it with words of forgiveness, clearing the way for a genuine feeling of thankfulness to shine through one’s life.

In Native Eyes, we learned this custom after our buckskin day and crab feast. The seven of us gathered in the yurt and spoke in turn of our regrets and trespasses thus far in the course, and each in turn received forgiveness from the group and from themselves. As everyone said their piece, the spark of hot migraine pain that had been smoldering all day rekindled behind my right eye. When everyone else had spoken and it came to be my turn, I found couldn’t speak. A full-blast migraine blazed in my forehead and my throat tightened up, allowing no more than a squeak to escape. Swamped with pain, frustration, anger, and grief, I just sat in the circle and cried.

We ended the evening without my having said a word. I curled in my sleeping bag under the redwood tree for a long time, feeling the cool night brush by my face, waiting for sleep to bring an escape from the nauseating pain, and from the frustration at not being able to speak from my heart.

In the intervening week, my thoughts on Mihi Kala gestated and finally coalesced into a letter, which I sent out to the Native Eyes crew. Here is an excerpt of my Mihi Kala email:

… I find it very hard to own my flaws, and in asking for forgiveness I've got to state plainly that I do things wrong sometimes, and that I don't live up to my ideals. I think my rational mind panicked and hid at that, and all the more so at speaking from my heart about my own experience.

Please forgive me for acting pridefully, and for trying to look like I do things right all the time. I know this is a strong, entrenched flaw in my personality, and I don't think that just by identifying it I've released it. But I am working on it.

Please forgive me for being less observant and careful than I could be. I think despite my intentions I'm very callous, self-centered and ignorant at times, and I'm sorry for that. I feel like a clumsy toddler in a very subtle, complex and elegant world, but I know I have the potential to be just as subtle, complex and elegant. Forgive me for stumbling around in my self-centered focus and kicking up a bird plow sometimes, and for forgetting to be thankful or ask permission before taking something that I think I need. I have, of course, grown up in urban America, a culture that we all know promotes self-centered callousness. I'm working my way toward a dignified and present adulthood from an artificially lengthened clumsy adolescence, but I'm definitely not grown up yet.

I'd like to ask Mikko especially for forgiveness, as well. I feel a familial closeness with you, and I have a tendency to get annoyed with family. Please forgive me for having a shorter temper with you than I have with others. I love you like a brother. I think perhaps I tend to have less patience with loved ones because I believe I can stop trying to prove myself worthy, and allow myself to have flaws like a bad temper. Regardless of the origin of my behavior, though, I don't like snapping at you Mikko. Please forgive me for being snappish and having a short temper, and for being prickly and distant at times. As with the previous issues, it's something I'm working on.

When I came back to Native Eyes the next week, all of my classmates except for Mikko had read and responded to my letter. I felt lighter having heard forgiveness from them, and I was touched that they empathized, but things also felt unfinished. I had not yet stated aloud forgiveness for myself, and I hadn’t heard anything about Mihi Kala from Mikko.

On Wednesday morning we had an awesome and enlightening bird sit, which I’ll detail later on. After mapping, Native Eyes broke from RDNA and piled into cars to go tracking in the Bolinas mudflats.

Except we weren’t just tracking. The staff had decided to pop-quiz us with a mock Cybertracker evaluation. The format was similar to the Alien Test in the beginning of the year, in that we toured a series of stations answering specific questions about the tracks at each one. We turned in our answers at each station, and were not permitted to discuss or comment on the station until everyone had turned in their answers.

It was fun at first, taking the time to examine tracks in as great a depth as I wanted and challenging my intellect with questions that danced beyond the edge of my understanding. But my weekly headache had resurfaced and with each wrong answer (and about half of them were wrong) I was getting tenser. I hunched my shoulders and curled my ribcage over the ball of fury growing in my belly.

We moved out to another station. When we passed a clump of tall grass the resident Marsh Wren started giving us hell, buzzing his little head off in our direction. I’m sure everyone else heard the little loudmouth rattling on about my bad mood, but at that point I was so off-balance over the test that I didn’t care what kind of bird alarms I set off. I was furious with the world for not providing me with the information to ace this test as I should, and furious with the Native Eyes staff for giving the test and smoking out all my ignorance and lack of skill. Mostly I was furious with myself for being so damn wrong.

Finally I realized that I had to relieve the pressure or I wouldn’t be able to participate in the activity. I decided that I simply wouldn’t turn in my answers, but I’d write them down and otherwise participate normally. I’d get the advantage of learning from the answers without having to expose my ignorance to the world. True, the stated reason for this test was not to evaluate us, per se, but to find our edges so that our instructors could teach us more effectively. But I still resented showing my ignorance.

When I decided to refrain from sharing my answers, I unexpectedly felt the pressure to be right lifted off. I straightened up, my belly relaxed, and began to breathe more deeply again. The wren quieted down, too. And at the end of the testing session I felt light and confident enough to turn in my answers anyway, even though I knew many of them to be wrong.

It helped that I got the last four questions right. But mainly I had desperately needed a respite from the parents-and-public-school-borne pressure to give right answers. I didn’t know how to stop applying that pressure to myself while still participating in the evaluation. After I removed myself from the evaluative context of the activity, though, I could engage on my own terms and I found that I could decide to let myself be wrong. At the end I found that I could judge my success not according to how many questions I answered right, but on whether I chose to move past old and damaging patterns of thought and begin to create new more effective patterns. Granted I fall into old patterns more often than not, but since I’m the only one evaluating myself using these criteria, I can decide to appreciate what progress I do make, rather than think badly about myself for the times I fall back into old patterns. Or I can choose to think badly about myself, as I often do. It’s my decision, not my teacher’s or my parent’s or my boss’s. And the wren, along with his passerine compatriots, will tell me with certainty whether I’ve released those old habits or not.

The following Friday, after class had been over for more than a day, Mikko and I were up predawn and getting ready for our internship with the Riekes Center. Mikko was sitting on my couch reading email as I packed up a lunch. He closed the laptop, walked up silently, and ninja-hugged me from behind, saying, “I love you too, and I forgive you.” I’d forgotten about the Mihi Kala email but now the remainder of a weight I hadn’t known I was carrying lifted, and I breathed easier.

The next morning I woke up with a single phrase resounding in my mind: “Thank you.”

Native Eyes and the Art of Mentoring

I’ve just come back from the Art of Mentoring, held at Commonweal Garden in Bolinas, California. It was quite an experience. I’ve tried to write my experience coherently, but it was such an intense one (the class was an intensive, after all) that I find I need to write it as a semi-fiction, to step back a step and inhabit a different point of view in order to communicate my impressions. What follows, then, is a travelogue from the point of view of a Western explorer visiting an exotic culture, one so different that they are named as a new species of humans.

Homo funis and the Ars Rector festival

I’ve returned from a different land. There are people there, but of an entirely different species than those I live alongside at home. The people are remarkable in their behavior, being social and independent at once, compassionate and welcoming, as well as stalwart in their maintenance of boundaries and rules. They are different enough to warrant a new specific epithet, and have come to be known by some as Homo funis. The land, too, is uncommon in its contradiction and cohesion, being a managed wilderness, wild nature worked like a tool but possessing diversity, complexity and resilience not seen in civilized life, and is sometimes called by the name Ortus Bonus Communis, or simply Ortus. This journal chronicles my contact with this people on this land.

First, some background: I initially encountered rumors of these people years ago, while at school. At that time the rumors were few and garbled, so I continued on my way and filed the information away for later. But as our body of data on Homo funis grew, these people seemed increasingly like a worthwhile subject of inquiry. My explorations then brought me to Africa, where I witnessed both broken and vibrantly vital cultures. The people there inhabit both at once. They do so with deep compassion and readiness to help, held forth from a simple and matter-of-fact understanding: life is hard, but people help each other so that life is possible. The children of villagers, who grew up hunting and farming with their elders, especially exemplify this understanding. When I returned home I vowed to learn my land as well as they knew theirs and to seek out and live from that same understanding in my own culture.

I remembered the rumors of Homo funis and their land, and set off in search of them, for if the rumors were true, those people would posess a similar understanding to the one I encountered in Africa. After much wandering and exploration, I met another explorer in my own country, and we decided to pool our efforts. We met travelers from Ortus, and learned from them for a time. We encountered more of the stories and practices of Homo funis, and through them began to learn more about our land. We joined others on similar journeys and learned from them, and more people saw what we were doing and some came to practice with us. Finally my companion and I received an invitation to join the people of Ortus on their land and learn from them more directly. The meeting place was only a day’s ride away, so we were eager to embark. We packed our saddlebags with three day’s rations and set out riding high in our saddles, ready to chronicle our discoveries and bring them back to our civilized community.

The first meeting would be brief, only two nights and a day. We rode along the coast through thick fog, up the faces of mountains and down again over their drizzle-slick flanks. We arrived at Ortus Bonus Communis, and there were greeted as friends. We camped for the night and made plans for our time with the Homo funis. We were told that we would be able to participate as part of the scout society at the upcoming festival and to seek out one of the elders. The name of the festival is untranslatable into our culture but I have chosen to identify it here as Ars Rector. We returned to civilized land two days after, and made preparations.

We had received word of highwaymen on the coastal route and so rode to Ortus over the mountain instead. After a grueling mountain passage, we arrived in the mid-evening and all was raucous chaos. The village held many times the inhabitants that it had previously, most of whom appeared to be visitors like ourselves, come to celebrate the Ars Rector. My traveling companion and I were soon absorbed into separate Clans and Societies and were given new names, with the elder who we had met previously still nowhere to be found. We made camp and, feeling uncertain and still very bewildered, gathered around the fire.

The first few days it seemed that most of the visitors, including myself, felt a general apprehension and reluctance. None of us knew exactly what would happen here at the Arts Rector, only that we liked what we had heard of the Homo funis culture and came to learn more. Our first lesson came as the greeting custom of Thanksgiving and uniting our minds as one for the festival, a beautiful litany of things in creation with greetings and thanks for each part, and a final statement of unity of mind. Many of us loved the words, but still felt uncertain about our presence there.

Our second lesson came as an introduction to another of the tools of Homo funis culture, moieties. Each of us had been invited into a Society and a Clan. Each Society had a specific role to play, and each Clan had at least one representative from each Society. The Clans became the basic unit of the people for the duration of the festival, and functioned smoothly with different Society members performing different functions for their Clan. My Society held as its responsibilities greeting, welcoming, and warning, among other things. Each Clan also had one or more experienced Homo funis people, to help guide the newcomers in the Ars Rector. Though everyone participated in the activities of the festival, it was clear that some were more knowledgeable than others in these practices. Those who were more experienced took positions of leadership and guided the newcomers.

As the week progressed, most of our number let go of their trepidation and fully integrated into festival life. There was singing, storytelling, many impromptu childlike games, organized gaming, and feasting. Their finest cooks collaborated to give us the best food any human palette has yet encountered, much of it from their own lands but some imported from other villages as well. We were given permission to wander the land and explore beyond the village gates, and some of us adopted special places on the landscape where we felt particularly able to hear the rhythm of the land, and touch its spirit. We wandered to these alone in the morning or at dusk, and kept watch over the landscape. We also gathered frequently to hear the Elders speak, and they told stories and spoke deeply on the Homo funis culture. We stayed up late into the night around the fire, singing and telling jokes and stories. We rose early to listen to the land, and engaged in solemn ceremony. We laughed and cried together throughout the day.

Many of the participants came to love the village and the Homo funis people during our stay, but we all knew that the festival would come to an end, which saddened many. The greeting custom of giving thanks and bringing our minds together has another side to it, though, created to ease parting. This part of the custom consist of participants stating that they are now separating their minds. I have participated in other cultural gatherings of similar intensity, but never have I encountered as effective a mechanism to ease the inevitable parting.

Though the Homo funis claimed that the Ars Rector was an example of their culture in action, it was far more intense than everyday village life for these people. The Ars Rector is, more accurately, an initiation into Homo funis traditions and culture. The festival does not present their culture as it is lived on a day-to-day basis, rather serves as an intensive introduction to culture that creates new behavior in participants.

My traveling companion and I left late on the last day, having packed our supplies and readied our steeds. We made the journey over the mountain in time to see the sun set over the ocean, dipping quietly into a sea of summer fog that sat beyond the shining ribbon of water. The fog sat on the edge of the world with the presence of a Pleistocene glacier, gray and heavy on the horizon, waiting for the sun to sink before advancing to envelope the world. As we rode, we passed this landscape that now seemed to take on an intense animate presence, and at times we talked animatedly but at other times we rode in silence. As the light bled from the Western sky and the darkness enveloped the East, we mounted the bridge to the City. Creat golden girders and steel cables sliced between the coast and ourselves, and to the South we saw the glitter of countless lights piled up in concrete towers. We entered the City once again.