Our blood is a remnant of the great salty ocean in us. It flows with the tides, subject to the moon’s pull.

My blood comes unexpectedly while I’m on my vision quest in the Sierra Nevada; I am not prepared. The September air is soft against my skin as I squat naked, soft as I watch the dark stream trickle from between my thighs, soft as my blood splatters and runs on the lichen-covered slab of granite that serves as my altar. The day is bright with the thin rays of autumn sun. But I see the rains coming soon, washing all trace of my blood into the earth; I see the snow lying on the land; I see the snowmelt and the tiny plants springing from the pungent earth, nourished by my blood. I see the circle close.

Our bodies are the earth of us. They follow the laws of everything else in nature: birth, growth, decline, death, decay. Blood courses through the rivers in our bodies, irrigating our lands.

In my sacred circle of stones, on my granite slab, quiet and inward in the mountains, I see how our culture teaches us to ignore all evidence of our connection to the wild. We are taught to catch our blood with neat white pads, bleached with deadly dioxin; we are taught to flush our blood down white enamel toilets. We are not taught how to complete the circuit, from earth to blood, blood to earth. This knowledge is kept from us, this knowledge of how securely we are woven into the web. This is the knowledge that is forbidden in our culture and so we live lives of mistaken identity.

A wild rhythm pulses in our blood. A wild river pulses in our blood.

I know a woman who gathers her blood on cloth pads, soaks them in a bucket of water, uses the enriched water to nourish her garden. What an appropriate gesture to honor the truth of our lives. Back from my vision quest, I often let expediency rule my life, instead of beauty, or appropriateness, or truth, or wilderness. But I know now, and I don’t have to go to the mountains to remember, because my blood in the wilderness woke me to the wilderness in my blood.