Pandora, Worrying About What She Is Doing, Finds a Way Into the Valley Through the Scrub Oak

It’s July 1, 2025. The United States Senate just passed the so-called “big beautiful bill.”

I’m reading Ursula LeGuin’s Always Coming Home as I make my own way home. It’s looking like my home won’t be here in the US in this body for a lot longer since the beautiful bill is going to cripple my ability to take care of my body/mind.

So it goes.

With no further anticipation of “reward” for restraining my ephemeral “right to free speech,” why not share some things I value using my own voice? While time allows.

I hope you enjoy the way Ursula’s perspective about life on Planet Earth puts our little lives into the much bigger picture. She left her body a decade before we fell into the chaos we’re navigating today. I have always found Ursula’s way of seeing — and her way sharing her way — profoundly nourishing.

Protein-fortified trail mix for today’s news, for me anyway.

If you enjoy this piece, you can find it and a lot more gold in a pre-owned copy of Always Coming Home on EBay. A copy will run you from $9 to $200.

NOTE: If you find you don’t enjoy my reading voice, I wouldn’t blame you. It’s old and croaky now. So, I’’ve learned today how to get a transcript from Voice Memos that I can copy below.

The transcript isn’t formatted the way the original piece was published in the copy of Always Coming Home that I own. On the bright side of that, I think the way the transcript was formatted by Notes is actually more screen-readable than the original text is. This transcript may have a small error or two. I tried to catch them all but I suck as a proofreader. It’s mostly right on.

Voice-to-text tech is getting more amazing every year for people like me living with arthritis taking over our fingers. I couldn’t share the text here without the transcription. It’s just too long and too painful for me to type it in on my Mac.

Pandora, Worrying About What She Is Doing, Finds a Way Into the Valley Through the Scrub Oak

Look how messy this wilderness is.

Look at this scrub oak. Chaparo.

The chaparral was named for it, and consists of it mixed up with a lot of other things.

But look at this shrub of it right here now.

The tallest limb, or stem, is about four feet tall, but most of the stems are only a foot or two.

One of them looks as if it had been cut off with a tool, a clean slice across.

But who? What for?

This shrub isn't good for anything, and this ridge isn't on the way to anywhere.

A lot of the smaller branch ends look broken or bitten off.

Maybe deer browse the leaf buds. The little gray branches and twigs grow every which way, many dead and likened, crossing each other, choking each other out.

Digger-pine needles, spider's threads, dead bay leaves are stuck in the branches.

It's a mess. It's littered.

It has no overall shape.

Most of the stems come up from one area, but not all.

There's no center and no symmetry. A lot of sticks sticking up out of the ground a little ways, with leaves on some of them, that describes it fairly well.

The leaves themselves show some order, they seem to obey some laws poorly.

They are all different sizes from about a quarter of an inch to an inch long, but each is enough like the others that one could generalize an ideal scrub oak leaf, a dusty, medium, dark green color, with a slight convex curve to the leaf, which pillows up a bit between the veins that runs slanting outwards from the center vein, and the edge is irregularly serrated with a little spine at each apex.

These leaves grow irregularly spaced on alternate sides of their twig up to the top, where they crowd into a bunch a sloppy rosette. Under the litter of dead leaves, its own and others, and moss, and rocks, and mold, and junk, the shrub must have a more or less shrub shaped complex of roots, going fairly deep, probably deeper than it stands above ground, because wet as it is here now in February, it will be bone dry on this ridge in the summer.

There are no acorns left from last fall.

If this shrub is old enough to have borne them. It probably is.

It could be two years old or 20 or who knows?

It is an oak, but a scrub oak, a low oak, a no account oak, and there are at least a hundred very much like it in sight from this rock I am sitting on.

And there are hundreds and thousands and hundreds of thousands more on this ridge and the next ridge, but numbers are wrong. They are in error.

We don't count count shreub oaks.

When you can count them, something has gone wrong.

You can count how many in a hundred square yards and multiply if you're a botanist. And so make a good estimate, a fair guess. But you cannot count the shrub oaks on this ridge, let alone the scantas, buck brush or wild lilac, which I have not mentioned, and the other variously messy and humble components of the chaparral.

The chaparral is like atoms and the components of atoms.

It evades.

It is innumerable.

It is not accidentally, but essentially messy.

This shrub is not beautiful, nor even if I were 10 feet high on hashish. Would it be mystical, nor is it nauseating, if a philosopher found it so, that would be his problem, but nothing to do with the scrub oak.

This thing is nothing to do with us.

This thing is wilderness.

The civilized human mind's relation to it is imprecise, fortuitous, and full of risk.

There are no shortcuts.

All the analogies run one direction, our direction.

There is a hideous little tumor on one branch.

The new leaves, this year's growth, are so large and symmetrical compared with the older leaves that I took them at first for part of another plant, a toy on, growing in with the wide dwarf oak. But a summer's dry heat, no doubt, will shrink them down and warp them.

Analogies are easy, the live oak, the humble evergreen, can certainly be made into a sermon, just as it can be made into firewood, red or burnt.

Sermo, I read, I read scrub oak. But I don't, and it isn't here to be read or burnt.

It is casting a shadow across the page of this notebook in the weak sunshine of 3:30 of a February afternoon in Northern California.

When I close the book and go, the shadow will not be on the page, though I have drawn a line around it.

Only the pencil line will be on the page.

The shadow will be then on the deep-dead-leaf-thick, messy ground, or on the mossy rock my ass is on now. And the shadow will move lawfully and with great majesty as the earth turns.

The mind can imagine that shadow of a few leaves falling in the wilderness.

The mind is a wonderful thing. But what about all the shadows of all the other leaves, on all the other branches, on all the other scrub oaks, on all the other ridges of all the wilderness?

If you could imagine those, even for a moment, what good would it do?

Infinite good.