How is your Karma?

A day worth telling about

Today was spiritual on the second try.

The day starts slow. I was up till four the night before, heat dragging me into repetition, too tired to stop. I awake at noon. Get up by the half hour. Eat my breakfast of eggs and greens, who's species I still have yet to ascertain. Fireweed perhaps?

I make my way to the college, and its air conditioned quiet lounge. Wonder why I left so much so late, and wade into my calculus revision, due at five. My mathematics lead me to dead ends. Here an imaginary answer, there, a division by zero. Without another pair of eyes to check my work, I'm stuck.

At five I make my way towards Krishna's office. A small bald white man in a rainbow knit hat approaches me, as if for directions .

“Are you a student here?”

“I am.”

“Are you a good student?”

Is he offering me a job? I shrug. I´m not a bad student, but then I've been struggling with calculus for the last three hours. I don't feel like a good student.

“I am a monk from a temple in Seattle. How is your Karma?”

I smile. “Been better been worse.”

He extends several books towards me. “We are trying to raise awareness, by bringing books to college campuses.”

The books are in that typical hindu style, bright colors and Sanskrit characters. “Yoga” is scrawled across the smaller one.

“No thank you. I won't read them.“

He pulls out another book. “This is the Bhagavadgita - “

“-I’ve read it I say.” Not technically true, I’ve had an abridged version read to me, but close enough.

OH - so you are ready for the next level! He says excitedly pulling out another book that he insistently presses into my hands. Srimad Bhagavatam reads the title.

“The temple prints these and gives them away free of charge but we do accept donations.” He looks at me expectantly.

“I’m sorry.” I say instinctively, holding up my hands and shaking my head. Summer makes me even more miserly than usual.

“Not even a penny?” - he says it as if he would be honored if I pulled out a penny and dropped it in his hands. Suddenly I realize what I'm doing and pull out a five dollar bill to give to him. You don't be stingy to monks you meet on the road.

I really have to turn this in before the doors lock, but he continues talking.

“What are you taking here?”

“Mythology and Physics.”

He likes that combination.

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After I turn in my incomplete revision I go hide my backpack and coat in the pottery graveyard, and make my way with only a bag, towards my woodland nettle patch to look for my phone.

Itś not there. I don't know why I thought going and looking again would help. I meander through the patch, all the nettles still topless from last time I was through. I pick a few I missed before.

There used to be a huge patch down the road, and I head that way to see if I can fill my bag. I sidetrack down some trails, wander past some people's houses and a barking dog, bushwhack through some Salal to make my way back to the road and arrive to find this patch has all gone to seed. I pick a few disconsolately and begin to wander back.

I learned last year that the more you get stung by nettles the greater resistance you build to their sting, until they hardly feel like more than a tingle. I pick nettles barehanded now, holding one side with a hand and cutting with my knife to make a clean slice. The nettles like it better that way.

A tingly feeling will build in my hands rather than the sting - a feeling I've begun to call nettle magic, wreathing my hands in the imagination that I can make anything happen.

On a whim I take a sideroad, mostly to see what's down it, but as I go further, and get thirstier, it becomes a quest for water. I have no desire to go back. I cut a thistle and strip off the thorns, sucking on it as I walk.

Some time, a rooster’s crow, and me crowing back at it - later, I hear water. I try and make my way down to it, get barked at by a dog for getting to close its yard, and find another way. There's a fast moving part where I cup my hands and drink, again and again. Roadside thistles are not sisters to their southern cacti counterparts. Not much water.

The day is hot and I take some time to sit by the creek, thinking about heat capacity of water and if its the hydrogen bonds that make it so much cooler down here. I watch the current and notice a distinct line across the water, spend some time moving rocks to see if it moves or goes away, and wonder at fluid dynamics, chaos, imaginary numbers, emergence - and how this bizarre line is possible.

Finished with that, I leave my bag and clamber golemlike through the pipe that leads under the road.

On the other side I emerge into a sunlit ravine. I clamber up onto a mossy log and look around. Kudzuu (eww) cedar, alder, swordfern - and is that . . . ? A few feet down the way is a giant Devil's club - at least three meters tall, almost a tree.

I know Devil's club from herbalism, but this is the first time I've met one in the wild. I approach, running through what I know in my mind. Warming, stimulant, antibacterial, expectorant, tonic. I remember when we tried the tincture, enjoying it - stimulants make me dizzy, but not this one.

I am fascinated by plants with thorns and the medicines they bring. Hawthorn makes space for the heart. Rose allows you to be gentle. Devil's club allows you to thaw.

I can't for the life of me remember how you're supposed to harvest Devil's club though. I look closer and find thorns as expected, but yikes! They’re everywhere.

Then I see an old dead stalk sticking off to one side. It breaks off in my hand. I know a gift when I see one. This plant is the clearest cleanest speaker I have ever met. No nonsense. None of this blackberry thing, with sweet fruit and sharp thorns. This plant knows who it is, knows what it wants, and lets everyone around know both of those things.

Not wanting to be greedy, but feeling like I should take something green, I decide on a small leaf and set to work trying to cut it off with my knife. The Devils club lets me know this isn't ideal, but isn't unhappy either. I have never felt so comfortable with a plant on first meeting, and this one has thorns! Maybe it's because of the thorns.

I find another dead stalk that just falls into my hands before I leave, a parting gift as I crawl back through the drainpipe.

Emerging back on the other side, I suddenly become aware that this side is surrounded by stinging nettle. Not a lot, but enough to make me smile. Plants show themselves when you're ready to see them. I harvest a bit, thank the place, stare suspiciously at the line in the water one last time, and make my way back up to the road.

***************************************************************************************

At this point I've guessed that this road will loop back around to the organic farm, where I can harvest as many nettles as I like. I continue down it, pausing to scoop a dead bird off the road, stopping to watch a deer and her much too cute spotted fawn grazing their way down towards someones garden. Then sure enough the farm comes into view.

Its after hours, so as is my custom, I toss my bag over the fence and climb over myself, more quietly today than usual because there's a man on the far end weeding that I saw coming in.

I make my way to the nettle patch, a massive thing, the largest I've found in Olympia, and begin picking. Nettle patches have characters. The one where I lost my phone is a wild thing. It borders the parking lot, but is comfortable with humans only as much as a raccoon is. It lets me know this by stinging me more often than most. Nonetheless it's that one which I love the most. I'm a sucker for hard to get.

The one on the side of the road is distant. I always arrive too soon or too late. It's flighty, unpredictable, and often disappointing. Not tame but not mysterious either, just baffling.

The patch in the organic farm is tame. Like a donkey or the farm cat who weaves its way around my ankles. It took ten minutes of me touching all over to see if they were real nettles before one stung me, they hardly sting me now, just the light tingle of accumulated touch.

Where in other patches the nettles hide, here under a sword-fern, there behind a fallen tree - this patch advertises its bounty like a low cut blouse. I never harvest everything. I could come to this patch every day for a week and not make my way through it all. This patch is an easy lover, always present with open arms. I don't love this patch so much as I feel a comfortable appreciation for it. And I keep coming back.

Bag full and brimming I make my way back, picking up a discarded pair of scissors I find in the orchard, and stashing my bag in a hole in the fence so I won't have to throw it over. Unfortunately there are a lot of people buzzing around outside. I sit in the orchard waiting for it to empty out so I can leave.

I've just gotten back up, contemplating jumping another stretch of fence, when a woman in a pink shirt comes towards me. Damn.

“Are you supposed to be here?”

“Probably not”

“How did you get in?”

“I hopped the gate” I give her a slightly sheepish smile.

“Oh no no no - you're not allowed to do that.”

She begins walking towards the gate and I follow.

“Do you have a bag?”

“No” - I lie instinctively. Wondering why a moment after. Now I have to roll with it.

She unlocks the gate.

“I'm really sorry about this.”

“Don't do it again.”

I walk off towards the trail, with her eyes on my back, unable to go retrieve my bag.

I sit at the first bend for ten minutes, swatting mosquitoes, and cursing myself for being a storyteller. Then I make my way back. Shes right there. My stomach sinks.

“I found your bag.”

“I don't know why I lied” I tell her.

“I saw you with the bag earlier. I knew you had a bag.”

“Of course. There was no reason to hide it. Doesn't look like anyone else picks them.”

“It's not the harvesting nettles that's the issue, its being in the farm after hours. It's a liability issue.”

“I'm sorry. I won't again.”

“My name is Jen.” She sticks her hand out at me.

“Pan” - I shake it.

A pause. “So can I have my bag?”

A pause. “Sure.”

We make our way to the farm office where she locked them inside. I'm glad I ran into her.

“So what are you going to do with them?”

“Soup.”

“-- Soup.” She sounds surprised. Must be an herbalist, used to using it as tea.

“Thank you.”

I make my way back up the path for the second time, realizing that I can't jump that fence anymore. Not because it's wrong - so what if there are liability issues, I know I won't sue - but because I was given a boundary and I promised.

And if I can't respect people thorns, what then?