When the boys asked her what she was looking for on the black, sand beach, she said she had lost her eyes. She was looking for replacements, she said, a pair of perfect gold agates. It was known these could be found here at sunset when the baby selkies lost them in the surf after a day of play.

“But Grandmother!” the boys cried in praise, “You have beautiful pink rose petals for eyes now! Surely your view of the world must be complete.”

“These are not my eyes,” she said. “One days I was walking along Cascade Head minding my own when I heard Coyote inside a Cedar Tree muttering to himself as he pushed his nuts out a hole Woodpecker had just finished drilling for him. The nuts fell on the ground into a pile of cedar shavings. Next came his long golden tail, each of all four legs, his black nosed snout and then his eyeballs connected by the optic nerve. I wasn’t the only one who saw this, and a bunch of us gathered around shushing each other and trying not to laugh out loud so Coyote wouldn’t know we were there.

Coyote ran around reassembling himself, which was a sight to see. He felt around with his paws for his eyes, but Raven stuck out that thick beak of his and snatched them right out from under his pat, pat, patting paws.

Well, I couldn’t help it. I bust out laughing and Coyote’s ears went up. You know he hates to be looking foolish. So he runs into a wild rose bush and comes out the other side with the most amazing rose petal eyes stitched on with a couple of rose thorns. I admit I coveted those sheer pink satin eyeballs and through them Coyote could see my sudden flush of green envy. After all, my eyes grew at the end of stalks and even though I could see in all directions in every color of forest shadow and sea storm, I didn’t know what I had. But Coyote. He knew.

‘Mrs. Snail,’ he said. You know that honey voice of his. ‘I see you admire my rose petal eyes. Shall we trade?’

All my kind loves a good swap and next thing I knew, I was looking at the world with a soft dawn glow—morning, noon, and night. It was Raven who flew by and told me I could find new eyes on the black beach sand.”

The boys laughed and emptied their pockets. Agates dribbled on the sand like two dozen gold selkie eyes. A sneaker wave came up between their legs and like Coyote, ate them all in one bite like yellow marmalade.

Elsewhere in this blog I have posted illustrations from this story about Coyote. He has had to dismember himself to squeeze his way out of a cedar tree and Raven stole his eyeballs. Coyote replaced his eyes with wild rose petals and when Mrs. Snail asked about them, he said, “These are special eyes. With them I see visions. With them I see spirit rays.”

Of course, she trades him her eyes for the rose petal eyes…who tricked whom, Coyote?

I see also that with this mandala, I have honored my dear friend Dusty, who has passed to the other side of the veil and now I’m sure he sees spirit rays and visions.

This is a cosmic image that says, what is, is. Nature bats last, life goes on. Action and movement is our defense against stagnation and death. The planet keeps moving, and logically, since we are part of the planet, we must as well.


Poem for Dusty

Once again the wheel turns-
13 seasons and the golden dog
returns to the sun –
leaving daffodils and tulips
in his wake.
He parted as he came,
in spring.

The way I work, I create one step at a time. I only move to an area when I know what to do. This mandala emerged the evening after an especially rich session with my therapist. When I started I assumed that something would develop for the middle portion. It eventually became apparent that the void was intended for the center. This time of my life is a new beginning as I free myself from old emotions that I no longer need. What is coming next is far from clear, no inkling yet but I am reasonably sure something will show up.

Ghosts at the Night Picnic, Coldwater Creek, Glen Ivy 1981

March 1, 2009
I am trying to balance my chair on the uneven ground under the big oaks. I can hear Coldwater Creek tumbling down the little falls where I know two bottles of champagne are in a weighted bag at the bottom of the catch pond. The stem of my crystal wine glass is cold between my fingers on this hot summer night in 1981, and the late-harvest Zinfandel is the color of a pirate’s trove of rubies and garnets in the firelight.

Greg Botz’s kind and handsome face is ruddy with heat as he tends the steaks on the fire. He’s dressed in a tuxedo even though we’re a rough mile away from the inn where we all live.

I’m wearing a long peasant dress with a little off-the-shoulder black sweater my Aunt Nan gave me. The table under the trees is covered with a red and white checked cloth and a big bowl of steaming spaghetti and a green salad sparking red tomatoes have just arrived by the hands of three more friends emerging out of the dark.

They have hiked the mile up the glen for this dinner in honor of my 31st birthday: Doc Lynn Scecina is one face that comes into focus out of the shadows. And there is Eric Crocker.

If there are any jealousies flowing between us, I don’t know about them; if there are troubles to come, I don’t know about them. I am at a time and a place in my life that feels balanced on a gimbal of timelessness. The forward motion of our lives halts and some part of me steps back, outside the circle of the fire and looks in, clicking the deep shutter of memory, letting all the light in I can.

My personal interest in graphic expression leans heavily toward spontaneous art that lets various aspects of the unconscious have their say in the daylight. Mandalas are particularly suited to this because they are an ancient form understood at a pre-literate level. They are soul maps. In my mandalas, the spiral frequently shows up , and I identify it as my joie d’ vivre, my creative life essence.

• Here I see myself as the spiral energy barrelling along under the central garden.
• The garden is full of my students standing like fireweeds in full bloom with their seedheads blowing away in the wind of change.
• On the right, in the West, is an apple tree, and that is my writing about childhood, an actual manuscript called “West of Wenatchee.”
• The most interesting emergent energy to me is the long path swooping across the bottom under the spiral. I take that to be my novel on the move as I try to wrap things up at the end of the quarter and get ready to go to St. Louis to take a workshop dedicated just to that project.
• The red streak that comes down to join with it is my physicality, but every mandala contains unspoken mysteries, as well.