Walking is big in poetry. In 1689, Basho set off on a five-month journey to deepen his connection to haiku and to be close to the earth. Along the way, he visited places named in famous poems and wrote his own poems about those places. Gary Snyder, Philip Whalen, and Allen Ginsberg established a walk around Mount Tamalpais in 1965, drawing from Buddhist and Hindu traditions; they saw making a circle around the mountain as a way to mark it as sacred. This walk continues today, four times a year to mark the solstice or equinox. We start in Muir Woods by chanting the heart sutra and 15 miles later drop back down into the redwood groves in the dark. In this poem, I draw on these multiple traditions, asking how they can live in present-day California and how I can write myself into this lineage.•
I am a forest nun, have taken vows not of chastity but full-body immersion soaked through in an atmospheric river peeling my underwear off like a wet swimsuit in the dark of the Muir Woods parking lot on the shortest day of the year
not poverty so much as saying yes to anything without a timesheet or stock options which is why I’m in sneakers with water collecting in the sleeves of my windbreaker
the trail around Mt. Tam goes through dry ocher hillsides and redwood tunnels of mossy air fifteen miles from sea level to East Peak. my training is a coffee shop, a grocery store to build strength, I answer my daughter’s questions, are you going to die before me? when you die can we get a dog?
first, I carried her on my chest, then on my back, and now I hold her hand while she stops for each acorn, oak gall, and pine cone. I pile them in my pocket with the sticks and seedpods and this piece of paper
at the 1967 Human Be-In in Golden Gate Park, Allen Ginsberg urged everyone to do kitchen yoga, meaning to clean up
at an outcropping of green serpentine, we make a new vow—women. life. freedom translated from Kurdish and the protests in Iran with women driving cars or showing their hair
obedience—is that really a vow? how about wildness?
Ginsberg saw this practice as being a forest monk. there’s no female line but I can start from now, expert that I am in kitchen yoga
This poem appears in Issue 31 of Alta Journal.
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Judy Halebsky is the author of three poetry collections, most recently Spring and a Thousand Years (Unabridged) (University of Arkansas Press). Fellowships from MacDowell, Millay Arts, and the Canada Council for the Arts have supported her work. She directs the creative writing MFA program at Dominican University of California.
