pācificus

rejecting the use of force as an instrument of policy (Latin, 1548)

I haven’t been able to speak in any meaningful way here or anywhere, really, given what’s going on in our world, but I did, like you, look on in awe at those four beautiful humans returning from the dark side of the moon in a splash in the blue of the Pacific, just two hours away from my bungalow on Orange. Today, I spent some time with a tree, a Montezuma Cypress. I stood under its sinews and looked up and up where it branched, it reached up and out, and I leaned on it and listened to it speak through my palms, our life lines together, it supporting me, supporting us all, I think, ever since it grew, a sapling in a clearing with ancient sacred springs where the Tongva settled. I’m out of sorts, irritable and worried, a litany of complaints small and large, my sense of humor elusive. This weekend, though, I spent hours driving the east and west sides of this beautiful city, wandering around gardens — humble gardens rich with native plants, words like chaparral, water harvesting, swales, rain gardens, western sycamore, toyons. Yellow and orange poppies everywhere. The theme of this year’s tour was ‘Habitats That Heal,” and in someone’s description of their garden — “a living tribute to the restorative power of native plants for our ecosystems, our communities, and our own well-being.”

While nearly all the gardens I toured were small and beautiful places of meticulous care in equal balance with wild abandon, I think my favorite place was Kuruvungna, a place that in the nearly thirty years I’ve lived here, I’d never seen.

Kuruvungna — meaning “a place where we are in the sun” — is a designated Sacred and Historic Site by the California Native American Heritage Commission. Nestled within the West Los Angeles landscape, Kuruvungna is a living village where fresh water still flows from natural springs that have sustained the Gabrielino-Tongva people for thousands of years…Visitors are invited to experience the sound of spring water that nourishes the scent of sage and yerba mansa, and to feel the deep sense of continuity that connects past, present and future in this sacred landscape.

from the 2026 Native Plant Garden Tour guidebook of the Theodore Payne Foundation

Reader, I hope that you are doing well wherever you are. It’s strange and awful being led around by so many little men causing so much destruction and despair, so much stupidity and corruption and meanness. While the little men’s bombs fall on our children our brothers our sisters on the other side of the world, I am aware of this almost ludicrous position, to be standing on land that was nurtured by and stolen from indigenous people, to be placing my hand on the gnarly bark of an ancient tree, to be spoken to and comforted, to feel her grace and force, to remain rooted to this same earth, this same world.

Listen to it.

Here’s a poem.

Mother and Child
by Louise Glück

We’re all dreamers; we don’t know who we are.

Some machine made us; machine of the world, the constricting family.
Then back to the world, polished by soft whips.

We dream; we don’t remember.

Machine of the family: dark fur, forests of the mother’s body.
Machine of the mother: white city inside her.

And before that: earth and water.
Moss between rocks, pieces of leaves and grass.

And before, cells in a great darkness.
And before that, the veiled world.

This is why you were born: to silence me.
Cells of my mother and father, it is your turn
to be pivotal, to be the masterpiece.

I improvised; I never remembered.
Now it’s your turn to be driven;
you’re the one who demands to know:

Why do I suffer? Why am I ignorant?
Cells in a great darkness. Some machine made us;
it is your turn to address it, to go back asking
what am I for? What am I for?