Yoni

Vulvas, my land, and I.

There’s a place at Palatine - where the road loops around to avoid the need to back up a car. The loop is shaped like a teardrop, and the space it leaves in the center feels very much like a vulva. Papa used to call it the “The Yoni of the Land” and the name has stuck.

Since he died, I’ve been looking at the land with owner’s eyes - and changing things. My soul’s desire seems to be in stone - I see the possibilities of low stone walls defining every boundary. I’ve gone several times to the new clearcuts nearby to gather stones - big stones that I could barely lift - and bring them home. There is something about boundaries that will last. Walls to separate the tamed from the untamed.

Yesterday I cleared a section of land behind my house in preparation for a bathhouse I’ll build there. Christine set about building berms against the logging land I am suddenly so conscious of behind the house,  while I rolled huge logs on their sides and split them with a maul. When I’d asked her to help she’d set a good boundary.
“My back can’t move those things”
“Clear brush instead?” I suggested, “I mostly just need the company.” Papa asked me to split this wood . . . a year ago? It’s a daunting task.

Today, my hands hurt from rough hemlock and sharp salmonberry. I awake early after a late night - Eithne calling at 1am to express her overwhelm. I stay in bed late, dickering on my newly installed internet, first trying to find a native name for devil’s club - something less derogatory. It has many names, but I finally settle on the Sanich word Qʷá�"pəɬč,and having found it, have to learn to pronounce it. Hours later I’ve deciphered it to something close to  kwa,pu(th/l)ch - a weird breathy L, with your tongue where a th would begin - and have decided to learn Chinook Wawa, the oversimplified trading language that coastal Salish spoke, and some still still speak, between language groups.

After I’ve downloaded an app to help me learn the language, I grow restless and head out into the sunny day,sun partly hidden behind a curtain of trees. I set my phone to tell me a story, Coyote and Bear, in Chinook Wawa - just listening to the stilted rhythm of it, the simplicity and repetition of words I do not yet know and cannot yet pronounce.

Finally, I decide I don’t want to do battle against salmonberries again so soon, so I grab my sword and head out to the Yoni of the Land. One idea I’ve been playing with is to make a circular stone wall around the roundest part - currently covered in Salal and Sword fern. Then a trail into the center would lead to a private sitting area. Maybe a fire pit. The added edge space will be a great boost for the salal berries - which are already quite good in this patch, tending more towards sweet and less towards sand.

Listening to the cadence of the story on my phone, I swing and slash my way into the center. Then I run and grab a grub-hoe and clippers as the better tools for this job. I clear a small section, then measure to each end to make sure I have roughly the center. One side dips and I start a brush pile there to help obscure spot. As I had been thinking about the project, I’d been imagining that if this was the Yoni of the Land this sacred circle I was creating at one side would obviously be her pleasure, but as I dig deeper I realize I was wrong. The orientation is such that the c**t should be at the top of the teardrop - where a now useless phone box sticks out of the earth. What I’m creating - uncovering? - is the vagina.

I suddenly feel a little skeptical of myself. I just rushed in here and started clearing. Yes I’ve been thinking about this project for months. Yes I listen to my land and its desires. But vaginas are  . . . best approached slowly. How like a man to just rush in without ritual. Come in chopping with my sword to uncover the entrance to the earth. Attack with my grub-hoe.

Yesterday I told the Christine the story of coming back from Evergreen, working with my hands for the first time in months, and remarking, “there’s nothing to be proud of in my masculinity at college, but here my strength is worth something.”

Recalling this eventually led to me asking her “What’s your favorite thing about being a woman?”

She paused for a long time. “I’m trying to think of something unique to being a woman,” she finally said. “My favorite thing about being a human is the squishy feeling of mud over my fingers and toes.”

She finally decided on either: that uniquely female capacity to picture things clearly and then exert her will to bring others into alignment with her vision, or not having to be obsessed with sex all the time - which brought a barking laugh from me.

“My favorite thing about being human,” I told her, “is giggling fits.”

I hit something hard as I try to pull up a fern, and feeling around, discover a brick. Soon I’m pulling out pieces of a broken concrete brace. A copper pipe. A plastic pot, ceramic plate.   An old thing of fishing twine - definitely mine. I’m unsure what all of these things are doing in the brush.

My story is over now, and in the silence I recall a Vagina Monologue from Eve Ensler’s show - an old woman dreams of her vagina flooding the world: beds and boats and cats and fish - all floating out of her and picking up the town and carrying it away. I giggle at that. You never know what you’re going to find in a vagina.

I put my phone on shuffle, just wanting music now. Of course the first to come on is one of the songs Papa played for us the day he died. Dangerous songs they are, and I don’t know why I have them on my phone except that they force me to feel. I feel his loss viscerally as I snip back salal, wondering what he would think of this project.

Keeping his civilized spaces civilized was important to him. Every year he’d take clippers to the invaders. But there were also wild spaces - like this one - that he allowed to be wild. Am I cultivating wild woman? Creating sacred space so that this vagina will bare me more fruit? Do I value the Yoni of the Land more for that pregnant capacity than for its wild ferocity? Would I dare civilize such a place?

Apparently so - I keep clipping. Now I’m remembering another monologue - a woman who’s husband demands that she shave her p***y. I was sitting there next to my girlfriend of the time who I had just asked to shave her p***y and her experience had been an itchy and awful one. As the woman spoke of the value of hair - the maturity as opposed to prepubescent fantasy - I swore to myself I would never ask that of a woman again.

And now, clipping away the greenery from the Yoni of the Land, I cannot help but imagine that I am denuding her of her protective covering. But I’m not taking it away. In fact this brush pile I create on the far side will be fertile ground in a few years - this death leading to more life. This space will be a place to celebrate beauty, surrounded by the still remaining vegetation. I’m just giving her a little trim . . . I remain unconvinced by my rationalizing brain.

Then the music shifts over to Ayla Nereo - singing about woman as nature, but with compassion and ease. The capacity for forgiveness and reciprocity. I get out of my head and into my hands, dirty now, and still hurting from yesterday, but damp with fallen leaves. There’s an underlying sliminess to the debris I move aside, and I smile at that too. There are so many parallels between this space and a vagina. As I continue to clear the area, I imagine building a hand dug well right here. Not quite the centerpiece of a fire, but still fitting.

Then the music shifts again, to “You’ve got magic inside your fingertips,” and just like that my perception changes again. I become aware of the bare soil I’ve uncovered, and my sexuality - being the bizarre creature it is - I get turned on by it. I feel like a stag, blood racing through my body ready to jump or fight. I get that taste in my mouth I get when I’m about to cross a sexual line for good or bad, and I become uniquely aware of the fact that new plants are going to sprout from this soil come spring. There is a wondering of what this earth will birth. A wondering that such a thing is possible.

Here’s what I settle on: I am not denuding this land - simply opening it.

Horned and horny, I don’t doubt anymore that this is right thing. I feel this project as an act of love. Creating in the Yoni of the Land - a birthing place. Space to gestate in the fire of creation and emerge. Carved in stone that may endure as long as archetype. I look forward to making memories here. I see this place bearing fruit.