Pineal Forests

By Michael H. Kew

My bed drifts heavy with dreams. Black dreams. With fear and frail fantasy—dooms of deaths and depression—anxiety and mortal awareness—nostalgic pain in sylvan silence.

But then I'm roused by midwinter moonlight, again oiling the exfoliance of nature, my yonic friend. Lubricant for this hole in my brain laced with its ever-brittle threads of a midlife dread.

Rise and step into luxuriance of lunar flower. The pale flood of comfort. Psychonomic zen as a halo wreathes its gibbously-waxing Snow Moon.

Mountain home is the sacred garden. Calligraphies of river and wee-hour whims wheel past the coastal range, a great sweep of bucolia where upon exiting starry bliss and entering blue-hour revival my mind mires in springwater coffee, knowing all this to be a tender axis mundi of transience and cardinal spin.

South: Rivervalley roll to the beach. Pastel raws of winter. Early obscurities and intimate distances. Long shadows are speared from steep slopes. Green jags and misty drainage folds. Sparkling yellow meadows of dew and deer. Voluminous conifers, gaunt deciduous. Frosty roofs—fir fires flaming up through shaded stovepipes.

Fishermens' silhouettes aside the Chetco's steaming grooves that for 55 miles wend pristine privations to public from 3,700 feet up—through deep wildfire wilderness and the national forest of February, down and 'round my bedroom to be sloshed down and out between rough gray city-limit boulders into the Pacific where my bright memories are still freed from the deeps.

Blink.

Sense that?

Your pineal gland. Tiny yin-yanging endocrine gem. The pine cone-shaped melatonin-secreting Horus eye inside your third ventricle. Yes, third eye—your valvular circadian eye—and per Descartes and Shiva et al the link between realms of physical and spiritual.

Spiritual hours brighten to a physical day made absolute. My car—a portal. Listen to the latest Roger Eno album. To Yo-Yo Ma versions of Ave Maria, Thaïs (Méditation), Wiegenlied (Lullaby).

Hear that?

Whoosh of surf reveals a lullaby too.

Beach is befogged. Yet my dense mood untangles to trim time over the ephemeral sandbar. Because ocean is amniotic and surfing is pagan baptism: immersion, self-affusion, aspersion by rainbowed spindrift in sunny days, seared here on the sword of northwesterly wind.

Cloudward I squint into the gloom attempting to grok today's (Feb. 2) synchronal global rites of Imbolc, Old Irish Gaelic for "in the belly" (of Mother Earth) and "to cleanse oneself" per adult spiritual rebirth. "Sin" here is subjective. Hopeful minds are purged and atoned. Contemplations of the precise equidistance between these two holy seasonal poles—dark (winter) and light (spring). Our month itself was named for Februa, a purification ritual (on Feb. 15) in the old Rome calendri; februum is Latin for "religious purification."

West: Sudden seabreeze clears the sky but wrecks the surf.

Sinfully.

East: Return upriver into the new glare and upridge to my distant past. January snows gone from high red crags of the Kalmiopsis. I ease into the abundant sanctuary of southern Oregon's coastal mountains in winter's lull of "false spring"—another Februic ritual. Its light lifts largely and stirringly, magnifying nature's dormant divinity.

Pineal.

Pine-EE-uhl.

Pine!

North: Gravel prairie road near my property. Elevation 2,000 feet. My strange solstice-equinox musing (and car) serendipitously swerve toward a grove of small flaky-barked pine trees. Here in poor rocky soil amongst the post-Chetco Bar Fire (circa 2017) regrowths of tanoak, huckleberry, ceanothus, chinquapin, madrone, and manzanita, I spy the personally sacred specimens of Pinus attenuata. Knobcones. Their fragrant sticky resin is a salve—antiseptic, antibacterial, anti-inflammatory. Their barbed and serotinous ovoidal cones require fire to crack open and release seed. From dark to light—propagation by the will of flame.

Sit quietly with one of the young pines.

From a low fractured limb seeps resin. I press a pea-sized dab of it against the center of my seasalted forehead. Lay on dead grass in birdsong with eyes closed as sunlight fills the future amber. Drowse comes quickly—a resinous reverie—and through this I sip the nectar of solar order, sentience soothing and drifting me back into dreams. To vital sweet dreams. Because in darkness there truly lies light.

It just needs to find you.

(top) Snow-Mooning; (middle) knobcone pines, Curry County coast; (bottom) Imbolc-Februa sandbar. All photos: Kew.