HIGH RAIN - Love Letters to the Central Coast

Prologue

This book came together as many things have for me, pushing forward, calling my name. It has in fact, been yelling at me for a while now.  While I was working on a public poetry event in San Luis Obispo in March of 2019, the form emerged and I was able to lead all of her pages to one place.   

Being a writer is probably not ever a comfortable thing, closer perhaps to having an inner dragon who, huffs and blows fire, wafts around the ether somewhat out of control, but is later able to befriend you and take you for the occasional sweet ride.

The animals, the land, and the ocean of the Central Coast of California are the heart that beats within this book.  My own poetry, prose and photography have become both the letter that I write to myself and one I sing to this special place.  The act of bringing them together and setting them free in the world was apparently the only way to get the ticket to the next literary expedition.

Not perhaps evident initially, the constants are the patterns, the textures, the often invisibles that connect us to each other as humans to humans, but also humans to animals and finally animals and humans to the earth/sea space we call home here.

It is personal.  It is not personal.

I believe the work will allow for deep dives, light moments, and resting places, where you might pause and look up to the clouds, hear the wind, smell the grassy field, or take off your shoes and feel the actual earth or walk in the waters. It also might draw your eyes 

to see the patterns that only you can see, right at your feet.

                                           

 Morning Fog on the Back Bay

                             

A fine grey veil

lifts in a single sheet

from the surface of the water.

Vapor rising, aspiring to cloud, 

but falling, 

falling back onto itself.

A thin ribbon of mist,

laying quietly again upon the bay.

How often of a morning,

have I too, 

tried to lift myself 

beyond the 

pull of the deep water,

the dark sea,

and found myself instead

hovering, 

waiting to be evaporated into sky.

                                    6/2018

                                            Los Osos, California

Beyond The Coyotes

Nothing is beyond the Coyotes in the night

calling and pulling me to their party.

I envy their revelry of time,

held only by the scent ahead,

the feast at their feet.

Always now,

and now

now.

Shedding my human skin 

I find my way up the mountain 

and sit by the remnants of the fire.

My heart howls.

Without my body I know peace.

Dying or singing with coyotes...

Same thing.

                                    11/17/17

                                             Contemplations on the Irish Hills 

                                             Los Osos, California

 

                    Now available on Amazon.

(BOOKS:    HIGH RAIN - Love Letters to the Central Coast )

Enjoy.

August 6, 2019

INSIDE OUT

I have been gone awhile from this site. Sometimes life takes us away from ourselves, sometimes closer. We must follow the path until we see what the world is bringing us. I think this diversion for me allowed me to own and bring into focus a better sense of my time. So I welcome myself home to this site and wish you all, those who have waited for me the blessings of the day. More to follow.




On this Day of Women, March 8th 2017, my thoughts are these. As a Jungian therapist I see the world as mirror. Many times our personal world will reflect an inner truth, often unconscious or unwanted. I believe that the DT presidency is just that. A reflection of a deep greed that exists in our country. We are so blessed, and yet there is no cultural value for ENOUGH. He is the poster boy for ignorant, spiritually vacant, selfish, narcissistic and xenophobic. Like addiction, until we look at that piece of ourselves, however large or small, and own it, work at understanding the power of it, it brings nothing but destruction all the while claiming to be making us happy. As in the recovery process, we have to grasp this reality before we can change. Yes, this lives within me. This is mine. Only then can we begin the work to change. This is not the work of someone else. This mess is mine. Someone else did not do this to us. I did, with my lack of activity, attention, focus, gratitude, participation, ignorance, disconnection from the earth and what it teaches us.... Without this ownership with either addiction or our current political state, we are hopeless to find the change that will heal us....and perhaps this planet, and this cultural symbol will remain. Our apathy about our government reached the level of sickness, and the only cure, will take us back to that old saying from the 60's that went "If you are not part of the solution you are part of the problem." So which is it? And the question is "TODAY and every day forward, what am I doing TODAY to be part of the solution?"

How do I manage my own greed?  How do I nourish my own spiritual journey?  Where is my own selfishness and how does it thread its way into my life?  Where is my fear of what is different and who is different than myself and what can I do to shift this view of the world?  What am I doing today to heal the planet and protect Gaia, Mother Earth?  Today?  Yes, TODAY!

Blessings to you all.  Misty

Los Osos, California

3/8/17

CHOOSE DIVERSITY

It is through diversity that our species survives.  Mixing our genes pool does nothing but strengthen us.  This is simple genetics.  With so many odd and beautiful creatures that we share the planet with, we live in abundance of differences.  A celebration is in order.

Things you may not know about elephant seals:

They can dive over a mile down.

They fast for the entire time they are on land, ranging from a month to 4 months.

They breathe voluntarily and can slow their metabolic function down to conserve calories and enter a semi coma to rest and sleep.

They travel over 25,00 miles a year doing two migrations annually, females out to the north Pacific and males up to the end of the Aleutian islands.

Pups, born on sand, are left alone by parents to learn to swim, dive, and figure out how to hunt and migrate.

Adult males beginning growing their “trunk” at 6 years and although it doesn’t function like an elephant trunk, it gives the male status and others show the older males respect based on it’s size.

What is different can only teach us.  If we learn this lesson our species might just survive here on the blue planet.

Happy March to you….. Get out there in the natural world and enjoy all those things that are NOT like us!

                                               Blessings, Misty  3/18/16

HAPPIEST HEART

TODAY

LET

YOUR

HEART

LOVE

EVERYTHING

IN

THE

WORLD

The world, just now, needs it.

Misty. 2/14/16

WAITING FOR THE MARMALADE TO SET

                             

It is hard to wait.  No matter if it is waiting for marmalade to set or someone to come out of surgery.  We have such hard time just being where we are.  

I heard the phrase recently “waiting for the peace”.  I cannot remember where I heard it, but the sense of it, the feel of it struck me and rippled into me.   It was something like hearing a distant church bell in the countryside, a fog horn in the bay, certainly one of those sounds that you hear long after it has stopped changing the air waves around you. 

But a sound that stays with you, making its own movements inside of us.  

waiting.

Our mind wants to immediately ask  “For what?”,  but the heart wants to  lean into that place of quiet rest.  I wrote the following poem out of this meditation.

 

                         Waiting for the peace

I love that place between things,

the rain and the cloud,

cloud and rainbow.

That place that we are allowed to wait

Without the question.

 

nothing needs to be answered when we lean into the doorframe and watch the rain.

We are at once sound,

Moist opening of spirit,

Patterns of veiled

Downpour.

waiting occurs 

Below the waterline,

Below the blurring of thought, we are flushed with knowing.

something else.

And only then,

Peace.

In life’s dry days,

Long days,

Fast days

We forget.

We cannot remember

Our own ability to wait.

To wait for the peace.

If we could keep our minds by the open door,

Leaning into the heavier air 

as it Slides down the windowpane, 

we would have no war, 

nor rage, 

but only the gratitude

Of knowing 

that the world has forgiven us everything.

forgiven us everything.

Everything.

Every thing.

                     

                     Blessings.  Misty  February 11, 2016

                                                     

SHELTER

                        I feel this,

                        whatever it is.

                        Something like love,

                        maybe love.        Shelter.

It cleaves to the earth

                         like grass in a rainstorm,

                         close.

Shelter.

not a hut

but a hedge,

a hearth.

YOU feel this,

whatever it is.

Something like love,

maybe love.     Shelter.

It lives like a wolf 

in a bramble

gazing out,

through the rain.

YOU know.

That  wolf  knows.

That drenched blade knows,

this place.

   I just have to breathe

   and be still,

   then the sweet water 

   bathes

   wraps,

   shelters,

   loves

   maybe loves.

I awoke from the place where grasses dream

And dogs peer out under brier.

Shelter,

like love,

Or maybe love.

It stays with me.

Finally.

Good holiday week to you all.  Blessings and blessings be with you.

Misty Wycoff  12/18/15

CLEANING FISH

I am privileged to live by the ocean.  The majesty of the California Coastline has been significant always.  It is probably in my DNA makeup somewhere.  My  maternal grandparents lived in the Azores, a Portuguese territory of islands in the Atlantic Ocean.  I traveled there in my twenties and met distant relatives and lived between the islands of Texerica and Sao Jorge.  




Small islands where, isolated from a larger society are deeply dependent on the sea. There are few places on those islands where the ocean is not below you, surrounding you, and being a constant wild force.  When my grandparents came to America, they found land in California along the ocean in Bolinas California, where my mother found her own bond with the deep waters.  I too was raised in close proximity to the sea, and being quite poor, we spent many free hours along the Bodega headlands clamming, rock fishing, surf fishing, wading for abalone, crabbing, and having many a meal from that bounty.  I was lucky then, and          
 I am lucky now. 

Some years ago someone asked me where home was.  I am sure there was the expectation that I would give them some region of the country or a town, and yet what was immediately on my lips was, “The ocean is my home.”  Saying it was strengthening to me, empowering and calming to me at the same time.

Nature is strong. It is always seeking to restore itself to it's best state.  The ocean is strong.  Wild and wonderful, it always seemed to me the same as how people think of God, beyond us, above us, better than us and stronger than us.  




I see that Nature finds ways to clean itself, I know that rivers can return to health, cleaning up the foul things that humans have left behind, and land can be restored to health by rest and introduction of wolves and other natural species.  But perhaps because I do live so close to the sea, I know more about it now and I am so deeply sad at the destruction  of clean healthy ocean waters.

There are many plastic garbage patches or gyres, in the oceans around the world.  There are six major ones in all of  oceans around the world, one as large as the state of Texas.  More research is proving that so many of the sea creatures have ingested or been otherwise damaged by plastics in the waters.  In their original form the marine life gets caught in them and mistakes them for food.  But something much more horrifying is that over time these break down into the small microbeads and become part of the water and every being it has touched.  It used to be true that eating seafood was healthy for you.  If we are not able to change how we deal with plastic, this will no longer be the case.  And probably is now no longer the case.  HELLO.

In the 60”s we used to say/chant  “GIVE PEACE A CHANCE”.  I would like to ask you to “GIVE THE OCEAN A CHANCE.”   Just for today, try to not buy plastic.  Buy glass bottles and recycle them,  Encourage your families to do the same.

I will let these photos speak for themselves.

Now you might ask what this has to do with how we feel as humans.  Well here is the thing.  We DO feel what is happening to the planet.  We DO feel the sadness of the animals, and ocean creatures.  We DO feel sick from the experience of living in this planet that is struggling to clean up our messes. This is sometimes beneath our conscious awareness, but that same sick feeling we get when we hear of senseless shooting and terrorism is a part of our awareness all the time.  It enters our dreams and lives beneath our words like a sickness, a cold or flu that hasn't quite blossomed.At some level we all know that we have seriously damaged our planet,  Maybe we have keep the degree of this damage hidden from ourselves, but we know.  I know.. You know.

                            I believe that Nature is working as hard as it can to clean up our trash.   





SO   JUST FOR TODAY…..  Clean something up.  Take care of the land, the ocean and the animals that we share this space with.  All of that will make you feel better.

Maybe each day we can help that process along.

Today..... clean something up.. 

Pour some water on a plant.  

Pick up ONE piece of trash.

Buy something in glass instead of plastic.

Plant a seed.

It will make the earth happy and your heart smile.

Blessings everyone.  November 18, 2015   Misty 

"In many shamanic societies, if you came to a medicine person complaining of being disheartened, dispirited, or depressed, they would ask one of four questions: "When did you stop dancing? When did you stop singing? When did you stop being enchanted by stories? When did you stop being comforted by the sweet territory of silence?"
Gabrielle Roth