A Generous Offer of Acorns and Song

By Tara Marchant

Nov 15, 2024

The Oaks Generous offer of Acorns and Song

The deepest of gratitude for the ones living and holding on to the knowledge.  Holding on to, and teaching the practices of our elders and our first peoples, who were in the deepest of symbiotic partnership with the land.  

What does it mean to steward a place?  How can we, who have land that is both wild, yet tended, invite deeper belonging and access to remember and reimagine?

The gathering was a meandering of friends and strangers who heard the call from the place called Riversbend in Philo, CA. 

Oaks and Redwoods and the Navarro river that bends and winds down to the sea. The call to tend at the bend to the many elders (White, Black, Oracle, Live Oak trees) that were dousing the soils with a bumper crop year of acorns.  It had been scarce the past two years.  But this year…my goodness~

Can you tell the difference?  Our guides Tom and Carin inquire. Why is the light tan acorn called the Black Oak? And that one the Oracle?   Look to the leaves, for the oak leaves provide the map.   Look at the shape of the long thin body.   The rounded tops and bottoms.   They tell their story.

Some of them held their crowns and branches, several were already penetrated by the industrious weevils and their larvae.  But all species of trees had acorns scattered thoroughly and longed for our human relation.  To gather, dry, clean, ground and more.  

A few present had spent years learning from the Native American local tribes and local land stewards how to collect, select, separate, dry (often for a year) and then ground and leech.  My goodness, leeching is a process. Talk about patience. 

The generative welcome of the community was so enriching.  Gathered around the first and second night by the fire where songs and music were shared.  Musicians brought out standards like the guitar.  Yet there was the base, the hand drum and the rattle.  And one surprise artist, a musician by true gift and skill, invited their Harmonium to our feast one morning. 

We all were so in awe with the pines, the redwoods, the flock of turkeys and the quiet.  The stillness.

Let’s go down to the River!  

There, as we walked along the large rocks and cold river, our human body neared the edge. Where in total faith we learned how to pour the cold water through the green pine leaves, over the linen fabric that held our acorn mush.   A song longed to be the collective vibration versus idle talk. 

It came, albeit in fragments - “I went down to the river to pray, … Oh sisters let’s go down- let’s go down come on down, Oh sisters let’s go down-Down to the river to pray”. So familiar.  Yet not fully remembered.  A song of a time, long ago, and still here. 

Another song leaped in — by Mamuse - ‘Finding my way, finding my way, finding my back home-  Oh River, I see you, hear you calling me…Oh River, Who will I be when I reach the sea” 

The song sifted through our light bodies, as the water sifted and cleaned the acorn meal.  We sang for a good 20 minutes.  And then we did what makes us humans industrious and excellent makers.  We tied the mesh cloth into a bundle.  Attached it to a stick.  Placed it in the rocks, just where the stream was flowing.  We would return in a few hours, when the job would be fully complete with the aide of the river’s force. 

The oaks call us into relationship.  For they need all the creatures (squirrels, woodpeckers, humans) to be in right relationship.  And as we collect acorns and offer controlled burns, we create healthier habitats and soils for new growth. 

And sometimes... the trees whisper and sing back to us and tell us their stories, if we are listening…we can capture their songs

We Are~

From the Ground

Comes the Sound

We are Found

We are~

From the Stars

Where ever we ARE

By Tara Marchant  November 2024