The Granary Tree, Volume 4 - Mountain Shadows Moon

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Life during Volume 4 turned a bit dramatic as the biggest

wildfire in California history began to sweep through the

Lake Almanor area in Northern California.

Although the official evacuation for my area has ended, 

the air quality is still Hazardous and 

I'm staying in Southern California

until it's safe to breathe up there.

Print copies are available ... email jwycoff at me dot com.

Sample pages:

back cover

 

A Forest Walk with Kimberly Ruffin

 

Pedestrian walk-way over Hamilton Branch

My new favorite source for wisdom and stories is Emergence Magazine, especially their podcasts which almost always touch a deep place within. On my walk this morning, I listened to Kimberly Ruffin’s podcast, “A Forest Walk.” You can do this meditative walk in your back yard, a park, or in a forest if you happen to have one handy.

This morning was cool, sunny with a dotted, white cloud sky. As I walked along a route that has almost become routine, Kimberly’s voice invited me into different ways of engaging in what she calls a “walk of faith.”

From Emergence Magazine: Kimberly Ruffin is a Certified Nature and Forest Therapy Guide and author of Black on Earth: African American Ecoliterary Traditions. As a companion to Kimberly’s past Emergence essay “Bodies of Evidence,” she created a guided practice of walking through the forest. For Kimberly, faith is a continuous exchange of belonging, an experience that’s palpable among trees.

Click here:  A Forest Walk Podcast

 

Along the walk she invites listeners to engage all their senses, witnessing the world around them. I felt a heart tug when she invited me to engage with all the life witnessing me and found myself pulled into words  …

I am water and stardust
walking through sky
treading on earth
receiving a cedar branch
receiving belonging

watching sunlight make sugar
in the graceful, bright Ponderosa needles
watching a bee gather nectar in a yellow flower

me witnessing him
he witnessing me.

When I sat in a small picnic area next to Hamilton Branch, I thought …

Time is not what the world wants.
It wants my attention,
my devoted, passionate attention. 

The Granary Tree, Volume 3 - Flower Moon

LINK: https://issuu.com/joycewycoff/docs/granary_tree_vol_3_pdf

 This issue of The Granary Tree could be summarized by the back cover quote: "The whole of life lies in the verb seeing." -- Teilhard de Chardin.

I've seen a lot in the past three months ... from snow in Julian to the peaceful expanse of Lake Almanor. From black oak spring to scarlet snow plants. From a crab on the northern coast to a lost feather to a story about trying to give a pill to Major Bear. Also, two color master guest artists and two photographers who hiked into the Eastern Sierra in order to capture the supermoon eclipse of the Flower Moon.

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Photo: Vahé Peroomian

 

Art: Gerald Stone

Palomar Mountain granary tree

Artist: Carol McIntyre

Journey through Northern California, including FreakOut

Major Bear

Peaceful Lake Almanor

Snow Plants

Biophilia

 

Spring black oak leaves

The digital version of the The Granary Tree is free, however your support is always greatly appreciated. Feel free to share your generosity through this link: paypal.me/joycewycoff1

And, if you would like a full-color, autographed printed copy, they are $20 including shipping within the  U.S. Use the above PayPal link and include your shipping address.

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Entangled Life, or whose body is this anyway?

“Sheldrake awakens the reader to a shapeshifting, mind-altering, animate world that not only surrounds us but intimately involves us as well. A joyful exploration of the most overlooked and enigmatic kingdom of life, and one that expanded my appreciation of what it means to be alive.”—Peter Brannen, author of The Ends of the World

Imagine walking through a landscape of two-story tall mushrooms.  

Jurassic Park? No, these giants appeared some 400 million years before the dinosaurs stomped about. Long before back-boned animals waded out of the water, while the tallest plants were barely as tall as yard-sticks. But this giant, whose fossilized remains have now been declared a fungus, was only the first of this kingdom to amaze us.

As if he were as powerful as his name-sake wizard, Merlin Sheldrake weaves a story that spins my head, setting off identity alarms with no known off switch. We are not a body, not a carefully evolved big-brained species known as Homo Sapiens. We are an upright-walking ecology of animal, bacteria, fungi, and who knows what else we’re going to find lurking in our inner world. 

As an under-educated wanderer setting out to explore the wonders of nature, I had little comprehension of the depth of my ignorance. Picking up a book about fungi with an engaging cover, I thought: mushrooms, simple little things growing in the dark woods … colorful and fun to photograph. It wasn’t long before I fell into an endless spiral of complexity rivaling Alice’s journey into Wonderland.

When I first learned about the tree of life, everything was either plant or animal. All too soon it got more complicated, branching forever away from that either/or pattern. Microscopes opened up the unseen world, and Domains and Kingdoms danced around in circles, baffling those of us who thought we had a firm grip on what life was. All those unseeable thingys were just waiting to demand their rightful place in the family.

By 1969, the whirling about settled into a 5 Kingdom certainty, but only after two mysteriously obscure Empires were invented. See 5 Kingdom below.

Unfortunately, for the average person trying to make sense of the world, this certainty lasted less than a decade before it became the 6 Kingdom proclamation. See 6 Kingdom below.

Faster than an eye-blink, that morphed into an 8 Kingdom movement and then the new 6 Kingdom model which lasted less time than its ancestors before the 7 Kingdoms became the final word … at least until the next word came along and basically scrapped Empires, demoted Kingdoms, and settled on 3 Domains. See 3 Domains below. 

Focusing on just the Eukaryota … those of us with nuclei in our cells … gives us plants, animals, fungi, slime molds and a bunch of other relatives whose names offer few clues about who they are.

I have zero confidence that this dance is over or that I will ever know exactly who is traveling with me in the body I thought was mine.

 

More: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kingdom_(biology)

Five Kingdom

Six Kingdom

Seven Kingdom

Three Domains

Overly simplified definitions:
Prokaryota: cellular organism lacking a nucleus
Eukaryota: cellular organism with a nucleus
Monera: single cell organisms such as bacteria which were among the first life forms to appear on earth
Protista: cellular organism with a nucleus that is not an animal, plant or fungus.

Note: A simplified version of this article will be part of The Granary Tree, Vol 3, a quarterly report on wandering through a world of wonders. Annual subscription: $55 via PayPal (jwycoff@me.com) or check - Joyce Wycoff, Box 292, Julian, CA 92036.

The Granary Tree, Vol 2: Snow Moon now available

 

The Granary Tree, vol 2, honoring Snow Moon is published! You are welcome to explore the online magazine (which will now be quarterly) for free. However, I plan to order a limited edition of printed copies. If you're interested, please comment below.

Here's the free link:

Back cover