Mystical Tarot Realms
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Pestles on a Pounding Stone
A LAST HOWL
Words and Music by Jim Robbins
Found the pounding stone again
Under a blanket of oak leaves
And heard the cackling woodpecker
Forty years after you died, houses
Crowding closer. Went down on my knees
Before the stone, the mortars
Empty eye sockets, portending an end
Without grace. Had I been asleep--
Hearing the lark as one
Momentary ring appeared in the creek,
Then another, the petals
Of flowers beginning to tremble,
The oak canopy awake
With quiet tapping, whatever
I needed to say lost
In the stillness vanishing
Slowly with my dreams,
The roots quietly sucking up the rain,
The creek beginning to flow again?
On that ridge, I was a ghost
Of another nation, seeing not herds
Of antelope and deer and elk, but a herd
Of cattle in the floodplain, the new freeway
A few miles away, the city
Lost in deepening smog, a last howl
Far off in the distance.
Suite No. 5, Twenty-first Movement:
A LAST HOWL
As I explored the foothills near Fresno, CA, I gradually developed a sixth sense about another civilization that had disappeared just over a hundred years ago. Decades ago, when my wife and I first trespassed to get a closer look at a couple of buckeyes joined at the roots, we also discovered a Native American village site that still contained distinct house pits, as well as pestles in mortars under the drooping limbs of an oak tree.
When my wife and I found the pounding stones near "the couple," which is what my wife and I from then on affectionately called the buckeye trees joined at the roots, a long-buried memory suddenly surfaced: My father loved to go fishing, and once at the North Fork of the Kings River when I was eleven or twelve I found a pounding stone. I had no idea what it was, but, fascinated by its mystery, I stayed with it a long time, hoping that it would eventually communicate its meaning to me. For awhile, I desperately wanted to understand it, as if it held the secret to another order of existence, but I didn't even know how to describe it to my parents, so I eventually forgot about it. Soon after my wife and I found the pounding stone by Fancher Creek, I searched for the pounding stone that I had encountered many years before at the North Fork of the Kings River and eventually discovered it blanketed by oak leaves and moss under a drooping oak tree.
Searching for pounding stones in the foothills and mountains became an obsession. I began to go out by myself at least once a week to look for Native American village sites. Over the years, I have explored extensive areas and have discovered Native American trails, maintained by cattle, leading to village sites all over the foothills, with one especially large, nearly uninterrupted section of land from the Kings River in the south to Dry Creek in the north. Eventually I could sense when I was near a Native American site, as if I had developed some kind of psychic radar that reveals the remnants of the Native American culture in the mountains.
After awhile, my wife got tired of hearing me talk about pounding stones and tried to banish the subject, especially when we were traveling on Watt's Valley Road with friends.
I also became deeply interested in local history, or what might be considered its neglect. I discovered that “the couple” looms near a creek that ended up playing a small role in the development of Fresno, California. Around 1870, a farmer diverted water from the Kings River, using the bed of the creek as a canal. The railroad got wind of the farmer’s bumper crop and it became clear that the Valley could provide food for a booming population in the Bay Area. Soon railroad tracks extended throughout the region. Legend has it that the tracks passed by a pond with an ash tree, hence the name of the town—"Fresno" is Spanish for “ash tree.”
Fresno has grown dramatically in the last fifty years. When my family moved to Fresno in 1971, the population was only 100,000 or so. Fresno now has over half a million people. Due to cultivation and urbanization, the Valley has transformed from a teeming wildlife area with countless flowers to a crazy quilt of farms and rural towns. My wife eventually got tired of me talking about how this piece of the Valley's history is usually ignored.
When my wife and I found the Native American site next to the buckeyes, I felt like a witness to thousands of years of human history, a witness to another civilization that I had remained completely unaware of for most of my life, and I also felt a sense of timelessness that I didn’t ever experience in Fresno. As I stood next to the couple, I realized that when human societies disappear, nature simply continues a cycle unlike the kind of time strictly adhered to by most modern humans.
After my wife left me, I went out to Fancher Creek and found the pounding stones again. Very little had changed after all those years, except that for me the buckeyes are now just a couple of trees by the side of the road.
Dowagers on the Shore
THE SHORE
Words and Music by Jim Robbins
Twenty years since I last saw
the cliffs and the skeletal tree stump
where I had sat in the dusk,
the shore deserted.
A pelican glides above the waves,
tilts a little and plunges.
I don't remember pelicans offshore
twenty years ago.
Only the one
who had left me behind,
the shore timeless,
life irrelevant.
My daughter piles pincers and husks
before me twenty years later in that place
so unaltered that memory
and place match unexpectedly.
Some part of me seems untouched,
yet I could have sworn the years
had altered me beyond
recognition to myself.
In another twenty years,
others will leave me,
the waves growing violet
once again.
A pelican will glide
above the waves, tilting
a little and plunging,
my soul timeless like the shore,
the waves growing violet
once again, my soul timeless
like the shore, like the shore,
like the shore....
Suite No. 5, Twenty-second Movement:
THE SHORE
“The Shore” is another song that my wife loved to sing, perhaps because the lyrics include a description of our daughter piling husks and pincers of crabs in front of me.
It’s another song that I rewrote a little after she left me.
The song describes a beach at Patrick’s Point, which is several miles north of Eureka, CA. When I was a kid, my family spent a week there on vacation. My brother and I explored all the paths in the area even though it was pouring rain most of the time. One day, after hours of dashing along the trails, my brother and I around sunset found a path down to the beach. Suddenly he was gone. He had already ditched me several times that week, but this time his motivation seemed a little sinister since our campsite was far away and it was already getting dark.
My family traveled all over California when I was growing up, and I never really paid much attention to where we landed or how we got there. When twenty years later I found myself on the beach at Patrick’s Point with my wife and daughter, I was thrown back in time. I had had no idea that we were heading back to the same beach where my brother had ditched me years before. Oddly, the beach seemed exactly the same, and I felt like I was simultaneously experiencing two different moments in time—in a timeless place.
The ending of the song is now different. I wanted to focus on how the natural world stays pretty much the same, no matter how much a person is battered by experience—yet there is always a sense of timelessness in the natural world that the soul is able to experience. It’s more than just a sense of timelessness, really: It’s a connection with what the ancients called the anima mundi, the “world soul,” within which everything is connected. Relationships change, horrible events disrupt lives, the physical body breaks down, but sometimes the human sense of time disappears and the soul feels connected to the subtle spirit of the earth and the cosmos, which can bring peace beyond understanding even to those who are suffering.
Poppies and Lupine after the Rough Fire
WHEN WE FIRST GOT TOGETHER
Words and Music by Jim Robbins
We saw an oriole and chased it
from oak to oak until we found
a path of flowers that led
to a creek with frogs and newts
and things we've never named,
and years later we reached
an opening and plunged
into a vast stillness vibrating
between rocks and trees and stars
and within us. Now that you've gone
I sense a crack within all things,
where the stillness vibrates.
Suite No. 5, Twenty-third Movement:
WHEN WE FIRST GOT TOGETHER
When I was growing up, I believed that happiness stems from control, and that the best way to maintain control is by having a lot of money, but over and over, my life has altered due to circumstances beyond my control, and I have only found peace in stillness, the stillness within myself that connects me to to rocks and trees and stars and the dimensions beyond time and space. Sometimes when you're alone in the darkness and you know that everything is mortal and breaks down and disappears, stillness can be terrifying, but often even in that state, you feel that there is something huge in that stillness--that you are somehow experiencing cosmic unity within the vastness of creation.
RISING
Words and Music by Jim Robbins
It could be like this rising
into a greater brightness, close now
to the source where nothing
separates us from the light.
It could be like returning
to a place we had forgotten
from a time before our migration,
rediscovering our home tree by tree,
flower by flower, always
haunted by wings
but now only timeless
like light.
Suite No. 5, Twenty-fourth Movement:
RISING
This song was inspired by a trip to Mineral King in late May. In the lower foothills, the last flowers were blooming profusely on the hillsides. We rose higher and higher on a treacherous single-lane road on a cliff by the Kaweah River, then on a winding dirt road through a high mountain forest, and we eventually encountered the flowers of early spring again. As we drove into the high mountain valley, we passed water cascading down the mountain on every side. The sun seemed so close that we could almost touch it. After we parked the car we found a trailhead and kept rising higher past huge trees and small streams. Suddenly a bear ran across the path twenty feet in front of us, heading for the meadow in the valley below.
We were well above eight thousand feet in elevation, and oxygen was thin. I began to feel a little dizzy. My wife and daughter were unaffected by the thin oxygen level, but we knew that we would have to hike many more miles to get to a mountain lake, and many more miles beyond that to touch the sun, so we rested on the trail before we turned around and headed back. I imagined our souls rising higher and higher into a spiritual dimension where we encountered the Source, a dimension that we had known before we ever came to the earth, a place with its own forest like the one we were exploring. There we would rediscover all the flowers and trees that we had known before, just as it seemed that day we were rediscovering trees and flowers.
Some part of me knew then that we never completely lose anyone, that there is some dimension where we meet again and thank each other for struggling with us through all the trials and tribulations, and I also knew that we thank each other for sharing the mystery and the stunning beauty and the magic of this earth.