Yesterday was the first day of spring, and a new moon with a solar eclipse (photo from Longyearbyen on the Arctic archipelago of Svalbard, Norway via APOD details here). As I mentioned yesterday, the first new moon of spring is an ideal time to dig in deep–whether in the soil or within yourself. The days before and after an eclipse are a time for reflection on what you find hidden in the shadow; it’s also when Lord Ganesha roams the earth, there to help us remove obstacles. What is the eclipse revealing for you? What will you plant? What will you grow? Where have you been and where are you growing?

Yesterday, we marked the day with a walk up a steep hill above town at sunset and moon set. Locals call the place “Two Trees.” (Note: I originally published this yesterday with the eclipse and moved it to be on its own post this morning.) This place and these trees help me to stay acquainted with my breathing body so that “the perceived world itself begins to shift and transform” (David Abram, Spell of the Sensuous, 1996, p. 63). What follows is a history of Two Trees –a personal, ecopsychological, depth psychological, and historical version based on my own research and the research of others, including my mom, Suzanne Paquette Lawrence. These trees are my inheritance–they teach me “how the cracks in stones and the veins of leaves parallel the lineaments of the human soul” (Chalquist, 2007, p. 12).

When my great grandparents Elmer Ellsworth and Anna Moore Paquette came from Kansas and Colorado as newlyweds in 1905 to San Buenaventura, home of the newly modernized “Mission by the Sea,” like a beacon on the highest hill above town stood a grove of thirteen Blue Gum eucalyptus trees planted by horticulturalist Joseph Sexton just a few years before. To sustain the saplings, he hired his neighbor to haul water up the steep dry hillsides covered in shoulder high mustard, various short grasses, slender stemmed blue dicks, and lupine with its palm shaped leaves in late winter and rattling pea pods in late spring. Dark green, even then the youthful trees would have stood out huddled against the blue sky and tawny hillsides.

The remaining trees were the first landmark that etched onto my consciousness of place, a navigational north star. Read more…