Walking Stinking Quarter Creek in early spring, a pile of empty mussel shells caught my attention.
Mussels ensnare the curious; ask any fish carrying glochidia in their gills.
Their pearl nacre demands to be touched. Caress the polished porcelain interior of a mussel’s umbo and you can feel the surface draw your finger in.
There were dozens of mussels in this midden, and I imagined otters feasting on them.
Trebbe Johnson taught me to make gifts for the forest, forming images with stones and leaves with my hands. Nothing permanent. The wind, the rain, and the animals will take it away. But something profound happens when people make a gift for place out of the materials the place itself provides. Everything that’s needed to make and recognize beauty is already there.
I sat and started to arrange the shells. While I played in the mud with the mussels, a raven flew to the water’s edge. She was a large bird, nearly the size of a vulture, with shining black feathers and a thick beak shaped like a gouge.
She looked at me, then plucked a stray mussel from the ground. The raven carried the shell to where I knelt and dropped it at my side, then walked away to pluck another shell from the dirt.
I laid each shell in the shape of the riverkeeper’s symbol, a hand with an eye in the middle, pearlescent shells facing the sky. When we finished, the raven examined our work and flew off.
The next day, I returned to the creek and the raven spoke to me. She greeted me with a hollow rattle, the sound of a dominant female assessing her territory.
Then a stream of words spilled into my mind from the bird, a rush of thoughts as if I’d slipped into our conversation midway.
“What if Spiralia experiences degradations – penetrations, fires, blights, slippages, putrefaction – not as burdens to be tolerated but rather as pleasure and release?” the raven asked.
“If She consents to her debasement and destruction, pursues it, is made whole by it – isn’t her intent, her purpose to cycle between life and death in an ecstatic state? Why should we hold the view that Spiralia and Rupture are separate entities at all?”
I did not know how to answer.
Hearing the raven’s voice in my head made me feel nauseous and weak, so I crouched on the ground and held my hands over my ears.
I thought I heard her laughing as she flew away.
We met in the mornings after that in an unspoken arrangement. I was drawn to her, and she waited for me. Each day I walked to the creek and found her perched in large beech tree.
She’d named herself Grindl and felt that desire was sacred, dedicated herself to the fulfillment of her pleasure.
She enjoyed discussing desire.
She liked to tease, to insinuate.
“Do these shining feathers stir you?” she asked me.
“Would you eat me if you could? I would eat you. I would start with your eyes, then I’d seek your tongue.”
She told me humans and corvids had partnered for millennia. There were stories of coupling.
She enjoyed watching me recoil and shudder at the prospect of a carnal relationship.
I frowned, imagining her beak pressing into the soft parts of my body, the smell of her carrion breath in my face.
“Don’t let ignorance determine your desire,” Grindl said. “It’s unattractive.”
The bird led me through the woods, guiding me to a red maple, a thick-boled giantess.
The base of the trunk bore a pattern of uniform holes, penetrations where a yellow-bellied sapsucker had drilled the tree’s flesh to lap its dripping sweet sap.
Red maples were hedonistic, pleasure seeking. You could see them reaching for other trees, grasping and enveloping, merging. They grew fast and often died young.
They were one of the most abundant trees in the forest, one of the earliest to flower in the spring. Their sap tasted sweet. Winged samaras flew happily and lazily when they released their offspring into the world.
And their red leaves glowed like flames in the fall.
This beautiful, old maple knew how to get what she wanted. Any time, her lover the sapsucker would return.
Grindl said the woodpecker was nearby waiting for us to leave, so he could sweep in and lap the dripping sucrose pumping through her trunk, and devour the insects drawn to her sweetness.
She told me about their embarrassing pet names for each other – how the tree had formed a mouth in her trunk where she could commune with the bird face to face, where he would gently prod and nuzzle her.
The raven mimed this motion at me, and I shuddered, not because I couldn’t imagine giving myself over to this, but rather because I could.
The next morning when I arrived in the woods, Grindl flapped down from her perch to join me on the trail.
She scanned the ground hungrily.
The forest bloomed with with food.
I realized I was also hungry.
“We eat a lot of these plants,” I said.
I kept wildflower emergence dates in my phenology journals. I’d taught my kids to forage small amounts of wild plants, to acknowledge the connection between their bodies and the forest.
I started to tell Grindl these things and I was swept up in ecstasy. Rapture, I guess. It came on like a trance, these words and thoughts.
I told Grindl how much I loved the flavor of Spring Beauties tiny root tubers, fairy spuds. Their flowers flowed like seafoam.
I told her Trout Lilies stored sunshine in underground corms. The sunshine tasted like cucumbers.
Violets sprouted everywhere and I often ate the blossoms right in the woods.
Green shoots of field garlic grew tall and burst sweet and pungent when I bit them in half.
I pointed to a redbud, a small tree dripping with pink flowers, and pulled a handful of flowers off a low twig and ate them. Their flavor reminded me of raw green beans.
Chickweed grew in every crevice in the forest and tasted like raw corn. I picked a stem and chewed it.
The raven met my gaze as I stood there with scraps of flowers and leaves clinging to my face.
“So you are two then,” she said.
“Two what?” I asked.
Grindl seemed upset, flapping her wings in agitation.
“Something reaches to you through the plants,” she said. “Gather flowers.”
I picked spring beauties, trout lily, hepatica and bloodroot, a sprinkling of redbud, chickweed, and violets. I gathered them gently, pinching without pulling out the roots.
The bird cursed under her breath, impatient and disturbed by something.
“Cast them,” Grindl said, snapping at me as she spoke, agitated. “Show me.”
I threw the flowers on the ground before the raven.
“What do you see?” she asked.
I squinted and tried to see a shape in the pile of petals and stems.
I sensed this was important but did not understand why. I held my breath and asked an image to form in the chaos. Circles. Eyes. Wings emerged.
“An owl carrying the sun in his talons,” I said.
Grindl barked a curse and took off. Her wingbeats scattered the flowers as she flew.