Walking Woman
Wildcat Canyon
Dear Reader,
The year was 2020. Springtime.
I’m living near the Wildcat Canyon, in the hills east of San Francisco, near Berkeley.
Just a couple of months before, I’d had twelve large fibroids removed from my uterus and spent two weeks bedridden. I was thirty-four, living alone in my own apartment in Toronto for the first time in my life. A few months before the myomectomy, I’d left a four-year relationship with someone kind, someone creative, who had come to feel more like a roommate than a lover. It was the first time I chose to leave. The first time a union ended in honesty, in conversation, in love.
It led me to a three-floor Victorian house. Mine was the second floor. The living room became the studio, became an ancestor altar, became a gathering space for tea, where close friends would sit with me on the floor, and some nights would stretch into early mornings of conversation, tea, and kinship. I loved that space. It held me, and my visions, through the whole of 2019.
Then, because of a dream, another first happened. I enrolled in dream studies in Berkeley, and there I met a man with a three-year-old son, for whom I thought I’d be moving to the Bay Area for good.
Springtime in the East Bay felt like home. I’ve moved countries, cities, and villages most of my life. Since becoming a mother in 2021, I’ve lived in eight different homes, moved house eight times, and road-tripped exactly twenty-seven times. Twenty-seven stops. Places that wanted me and places that didn’t. The only place that felt like a memory of the home I held before the war in Bosnia was Wildcat Canyon at the edge of El Cerrito.
I wake up crying. I had left my community, home, and studio, donated and sold all my belongings, and moved to the Bay Area with only one piece of luggage.
I’m living alone in a tiny cottage at the back of a Mexican family’s home. Covid is declared a global pandemic. The man and his boy I thought I had moved to California for are gone, not to be returned again. The tears soak my pillow, and I rest my cheek on wet linen.
It’s 6am and I know it’s time for a walk. It isn’t ordinary for me to walk in early mornings; sunset is usually when I come alive. This feels different. I’m ready for a little adventure. I open the sliding glass door. The entire hillside is covered in a white veil of fog, and at the bottom of the four porch steps in front of the cottage, right next to my moon blood Bottlebrush Tree, a family of deer is grazing.
This is the way to wake up.
My soul needs tears, wildness, and magic in the air to move.
I sit on the steps and watch the deer. I eat my chia parfait, tighten my boots, pull on a warm wool poncho the family next door had gifted me, and start walking.
Ordinarily I climb toward Wildcat Canyon, but this time the Hillside Natural Area in El Cerrito called me. There are three different Coast Live Oaks I have befriended in the area, two in Wildcat Canyon, and one in the Hillside Natural Area. I walk toward them every day. I bring them my offerings and all of myself. I listen to them, sing with them, read poetry to them, and nap beside them. These three Oaks know me more than most people in my life.
I thought I was moving to California for a man. It turns out it was for the Oaks.
To get to the Oak, I move along a hillside street lined with architect-designed homes, mid-century and Japanese in style, tucked among the Oaks and overlooking the Bay.
These are woodsy cul-de-sac streets, quiet and folded into the trees. It feels like they were built for people who wanted silence, canopy, and a long view back toward the city they left. I pass each home, peeking a little inside, and imagine myself living there.
There is nobody on the streets. It’s early morning, and it’s Covid. My mask is on, and I’m ready to stay six feet apart from anyone who approaches me, which is closer than I usually allow.
I’m inside the Hillside Natural Area. To get to the Oak, I jump over a large rock where a snake had slithered out from under just a few days before. I pass still-sleeping California poppies, curled into themselves, and follow the winding foggy road and the smell of eucalyptus.
As I walk, the tears fall again. I don’t feel alone. The whole world, both the small one I had built and the wide one outside, has pulled back, and the only direction I know is toward that Oak. I close my eyes and think of home. I feel like I belong here, but I know I need to go. I’m confused, worried, my breath quickening.
I arrive at the Mugwort patch I always visit. They ask for a strand of my hair. I don’t know why, but I always give it. I sit beside them and share my feelings, unsure what to do.
They remind me of something I had already known but lost hold of, that my art is a home I built with my own hands, so I would never be without one again. My spirit knew this before my body caught up, that every artwork hanging on a wall somewhere in the world is a piece of me, at home.
Love,
Vanja
Thank you Rachel, I'm honored to be walking this path with you, even if it's miles away! Together, in spirit ✨🐚
Beautiful words, beautiful images! Loved every bit. And I can relate to being in relationship with the natural world 🙏🏼💜 And how healing tears are. Same for me.