Open Your Skin
[NOTE: This is a short preamble to a video recording of me reading a winter meditation entitled “Open Your Skin” with jazz guitarist Don Latarski. If you’d rather just cut to the chase and watch the video, click here.]
These are strange days. In the Northern Hemisphere, Earth turns her face away from Sun like a bashful child overwhelmed by his exuberance. The days become even stranger for humans perched on the precarious edge of northwestern North America, an emerald scythe of land that bristles with conifer needles and cuts relentlessly into the steely heave of the Pacific Ocean. As if we need more reasons to feel small, winter storms regularly make landfall. Rain-washed dawns open like creeping gray container ships. Sepia daylight makes a token appearance, shriveled by the upcoming Solstice and subdued by rainclouds. Around midday, the glisten from spreading water becomes a winter perversion of sunshine. Too soon, always too soon, dusk rushes in from the east, swallowing everything in a flash flood of blackness.
In the heart of the Coast Range, far from the fibrillated pulse of holiday lights and traffic, the weirdness settles in unabated. On the drive in, sunrise is a soft brush of goose feathers over the eastern hills. At the Johnny Gunter place, I build a fire in the stove, then promptly defy the caffeine circulating in my bloodstream and fall asleep for an hour. Awake and better rested, I relight the fire and venture out. The rains have paused. The overcast forms a layer cake of grays and not-so-grays. The thermometer needle on the front porch registers a balmy 62 degrees. This is December in the Pacific Northwest––we don’t do 62 degrees.
From the meadow's edge, the silent air is cracked apart by a creak, like an old chest being forced open on leather hinges. An answering call follows from up the hill. From the other side of the house comes another. Male Pacific Tree Frogs are on the move, letting one another know they are heading toward the swampy valley bottom for a holiday party. In another week or so the din of their breeding chorus will rise like mist on the night air. Females will follow, looking for a mate to ensure the future of these frogs. Humans often refer to this testosterone-fueled emanation as joyful. It is––for us. Yet while I love listening, I’ll remain agnostic on the issue of what constitutes joy in a tree frog. For that matter, I’m agnostic on what constitutes joy in humans. Strangeness abounds …
Joyful or not, amphibians thrive in this warm wetness. Their exquisitely thin skin is complex and full of specialized cells that make slime and pheromones and facilitate the uptake of water and oxygen. Yes, they do “breathe” through their skin. They also drink, taste, choose mates, and sometimes poison a would-be predator via this amazing organ. Human skin is boring by comparison.
A few years back, I sat on a ridge in the cold blackness of a winter night attempting as best I could to gather in the immensity of the coastal mountains. What emerged was a meditation entitled “Open Your Skin” that imagines us embracing the unity of life by emulating the ability of amphibians to engage the world through their skin. The piece appears in my collection Palindrome: Grateful Reflections from the Home Ground. Laura Dubois, executive director for the project Connecting from the Heart, brought in jazz guitarist Don Latarski and me for a music and spoken word recording, with Ryan Zimmer engineering the video mix and Don handling the sound. In our only rehearsal, Don and I let this piece slip through the cracks, and in a what-the-hell moment decided to record it anyway. What you see and hear is our first and only take, a tiny world premiere. Did I say that we like it? We do. And we hope you’ll find some light here for the upcoming winter.
Click here to watch the YouTube video.
View the video from the CFTH homepage here, and make a holiday donation to CFTH here.
Find more of Don Latarski’s music through his website, see his recent albums with Heart Dance Records, and download from your favorite service.
On January 12, catch Don with Rue D’acoutic at Tsunami Books in Eugene, Oregon. Find tickets are here. (Rumor has it that Tom will be making a guest appearance.)
Order a signed copy of Palindrome: Grateful Reflections from the Home Ground directly from me, purchase one from Tsunami Books or J. Michaels Books in Eugene, or buy online.