Orach and Seabeans: The Taste of the Territory

A mid-summer Sunday in the Northwest, the day of a long-awaited trip to the San Juan Islands.  It's been bright and sunny for days now, and I've let myself believe that the fabled Northwest summer has finally set in: endless perfect days stretch on well into October in my mind's eye.  Visions of riverbank laziness, a tan, enough vitamin D to see me through the winter.  Come Sunday, T and I wake amidst mammoth cedar woods just outside of Bellingham to the light pitter-patter of drizzle on the tent fly.  It's overcast, the air still.  It's actually chilly, honestly quite undistinguishable from many a March day in Portland.  But I make a point of not making or breaking plans based on the weather, and this day is no exception.  We've got a daypack already packed, and all that's left is to load the bikes into the back of T's grandparents' old red pickup and drive to catch the 9:30 ferry to Lopez Island.

A little underslept, a little chilly, we huddle in the waiting area at the station, me eyeing the 90's era arcade machine before turning to my breakfast of eggs, toast, some leftover salmon.  The ferry ride is uneventful, uninspiring: we arrive feeling as blah as the weather continues to be, then pedal uphill towards the island's eponymous village.  Grey skies, farmland, gently rolling blacktop through the fields.  Some petty arguing.  There are days like this.  Times you've looked forward to, but whose pleasure is elusive in the moment.  Times of melancholy, light funk, when it's frankly hard to remember why you were so excited about this [fill in the blank].  Overwhelmingly tempting at such times to blame the nearest target, and at a brief pit stop to shed some layers T and I do just that: squabble at each other, throw minor, restrained, adult-grade tantrums. A part of me watching the childishness as if at a distance, yet is unable shift the other part of me into a more satisfactory pattern.  A third part is amused at this little drama and my frustrated awareness of it.

We keep pedaling, coasting down a steep hill into the village itself.  What's the big deal?  Some tourist shops, coffee places, a used bookstore, an overpriced looking restaurant.  An unremarkable looking rocky beach peopled by a pair of French tourists.  Desultorily, we walk around, looking for a quiet place to perform out respective practices; T is back from a meditation retreat, me from a weekend of intensive Qi Gong retreat, and we're both trying to keep the up the practices daily.  We stumble upon a little wetland nature trail and drag our feet along it.  The air is thick, brighter now but still grey.  We stop at the feathery frond of some wild asparagus, too big now to eat, but below and around the single stalk is a wild black currant bush.  It's got vicious, caltrop-like spikes that serve only to make the small dark fruits more desirable.  There are hundreds of these hidden amongst the barbs, and we both slip into a sort of forager's trance.  Fingers and mouths stained, we amble on along the path.  Still lethargic, still a little grumpy, but now with the taste of the territory in us.  T notices a yearling fawn in the high grass.

The path peters out at a weathered wooden platform.  After a final moment of resistance, there's nothing else to do: we said we would do it, and we both know it's probably what we need.  T sits cross-legged on the bench, and I take up my horse stance, doing my best to straddle the heads of the nails sticking up from the faded planks.  I bring my awareness as best I can into my body and begin to move: a series of warm-up motions learned from my Qi Gong teacher Bill Frazier.  Stretching and loosening the tendons.  Then comes the shaking, a core practice of the Jin Jing Gong lineage: it must look to the deer like I'm having a spasmodic episode as my whole body vibrates and twitches.  I let myself sound and feel the vibrations penetrate deeper into my tissues.  There's a sense of relief in this, of opening to the inevitable.  As usual my mind wanders, and once I notice it's done so I drag it back into the world of sensation: the feel of various organs, tissue layers, anatomical regions as I move through my body piece by piece and shake it open.  Letting out what's stuck, melting what's solid.  After a while, I bring the frequency up until the shaking is so subtle it's gone.  I plant my feet a little wider than shoulder width, feet rooting down, weight on the outside edges as the inside arches contract to draw up the yin of the earth.  Spine stretched straight, an axis mundi.  Head floating as if drawn up by a string from its crown.  Arms stretched round in front as if embracing an evergreen tree.  Breath slow, deep, into the lower abdomen.  Sensing the palms, rooting the feet, drawing up, stretching the spine.  Breathing into the belly.  Relaxing into it.  Shoulders down.  Spine long.  Feet gripping.  Relaxing.  The verbal cues bounce around my head, along with the visualizations and the intermittent sensory awareness, all in what I hope is a productively dynamic tension.  I begin the form.

Forty or so minutes I later I'm hot and sweaty and refreshed.  Not refreshed, maybe, so much as reborn.  Reborn in a tiny way, but one no less miraculous for that: the day is beginning again.  The sun is blazing overhead in a clear sky, mirroring my mood.  It was a good practice today.  I gave it everything I could summon up, and I feel the change in me without a doubt.  They're rare, these days of immediately fruitful effort, and I bask in the feeling as well as the sun.  And now comes the tricky moment that follows any such practice.  How to re-enter the day without losing presence and groundedness?  On this day, I am keenly aware of this moment, and awake to the fact that I don't have to follow old patterns.  I'm in a new place.  No agenda.  I look over at Thandiwe, and see her stretched out on the bench, fast asleep.  The first impulse is to wake her, but why, I think?  Instead I walk slowly over to the faded placards some conservation organization has installed on the edge of the platform.  I learn a little of the history of land use in this tide-washed area and get tipped off to the presence of a few local plants.  Apparently one is a parasitic, non-chlorophyll producing kind of dodder.  I scan the area and notice alarming orange patches amidst the green.  Still barefoot, I step off the platform and move out into a blue-green area carpeted in a soft, rubbery ground cover.  I bend down: it's sea beans!  Am intensely salty, succulent edible that I've seen for $5 a pint at Portland farmers' markets.  In places the sea bean forest in miniature is overrun by what looks like yards of tangled orange dental floss.  This must be the dodder.  I've never seen anything like it.  Tiny tendrils twine around the little sea bean shoots at the edges of the tangles.  Then, as if two new plants weren't reward enough, I soon spy something that looks like pigweed growing nearby.  It's leaves are meaty-tasting, salty but not so much so as the salty-as-olives sea beans (a.k.a. pickleweed).  Unmistakably an edible in the chenopodium (goosefoot) family, a sort of wild amaranth: this one's Atriplex prostrata, a species of Orach, I later learn.

T is stirring, rubbing her eyes, and I call to her to come check out the bounty.  Before long we've filled a plastic bag each of sea beans and orach, and it's time to find some shelter from the sun.  She too has mostly shaken the morning's funk; the day's opened like a flower.