In the Presence Of...

At the market last Saturday, someone tapped me on the shoulder as I was taking care of two lovely customers. I reached back to grasp the fingers responsible, patting only air. The space behind the table is narrow, making it impossible for anyone to slip past me unnoticed. I finished up with the customers, returned credit cards to each smiling face and turned around. Just me and a wall of totes holding the day’s inventory. In the softest of realizations, I understood that I had been Visited.

Sometimes on the walking path parallel to the north woods, I’ll catch a whiff of cinnamon or pipe tobacco or freshly brewed coffee. The neighboring farmhouses are too far away to waft such delights across the acreage. I inhale it and register that in all probability, I am not alone. Another curiosity: at the south entrance to the meadow just below the ridge is a hole dug by unseen hands or paws but it sports no collar of dirt removed. In that place, the ground just sunk into a perfectly round depression, carefully exposing the thinnest taproot of a nearby sapling. It hasn’t gotten bigger in the year it’s been there. Leaves collect in it and sometimes water during a heavy rain. I step carefully around it each time I walk.

I’m not sure that noticing these occurrences is in the “skill” or “gift” categories. This isn’t something I plan to add to my resume anytime soon unless I can really spin it (“observant”, “aware of details”, “sensitive to the presence of others”). I have come to expect that when I walk the land, the chances of my meeting someone I recognize are thin on the ground but…I almost always encounter others. Some are wrapped in fur, some adorned in smooth feathers that look painted on, some noisily scuttling through the dry and tattered leaves with their tiny paws. And some are faceless, shapeless, but unmistakably present.

As I get older, the ranks of cherished family and friends on the Other Side is swelling, as is only natural. I’ve always wondered if and how often they might make a return trip just to see how things are going for the rest of us. Maybe Dad is checking out the state of our Osage orange trees, whose bumpy green fruit keeps roaches at bay (he was convinced of this and collected them off the ground whenever he’d come out for a visit. He also swore by deer whistles attached to the front bumper of pretty much every car he owned). Or maybe my sweet friend, Jeannie, who died eight years ago (has it really been that long?) is making sure the walking stick she gave me several birthdays ago is still up to the task. There was always talk when I worked in hospice care that surviving family members would experience “The Dream” shortly after the funeral, in which their loved one featured prominently and gently, offering reassurance that they were doing fine. There are two sides to that farewell moment—whispering to the dying that they can go, that we’ll be fine after they leave, and them returning the favor by showing up in our REM sleep to ease our grief-furrowed and anxious brows. A spiritual symmetry that is both karmic and kind.

I suppose it’s easier to understand these encounters when they happen in the vast expanse of land and trees and rushing creek water, all of whom we’re still getting to know as the seasons keep unfolding and collecting in our memories. Mystery lives alongside the evidence-based here and we’re left with endless options that include trying to figure it out and sitting silently at its feet. But who’s at the market behind the table, playing tricks on me while I’m selling granola? Who stopped by during one of my massage and acupuncture treatment sessions, calling out a troubled “Hello?…Hello?” as I sank deeper into the healing effects of the needles’ placement in my skin? Naive of me to think our tiny pocket of land-locked paradise is the only place souls can wander about freely. I’m sure they can go wherever they choose, no visas, no traveling tickets needed. And if it’s important to their agendas that they seek me out, I can’t imagine anything that would stop them. Not even a crowded indoor market stand.

For all kinds of reasons, I tend not to walk the land at night. Mostly it feels intrusive to those with whom we share this space. That is their time and I’d prefer we not meet in a startled or unexpected way that would understandably lean toward violence. I’m fine to sit on the porch in late August long after sunset as the Saw-whet owls call to each other from their perches in the sycamores that line the creek. It would be an honor to see them in those moments but it’s also enough to hear their song and be grateful for the miracle of hearing aid technology (It is important to note here that they have never been found sitting in our deck chairs or resting on the car’s side mirrors, suggesting a sort of mutual understanding born of instinct on both sides).

All this to say…there’s still so much I don’t know. Maybe my life’s teachers include the ones I can’t see but still sense when they come around at moments unbidden. I’ll take comfort in that. That, and in knowing that respectful curiosity will most likely be stronger in me than fear. For now, I’ll keep that door wide open.

Before It's Gone

I stepped into the bathroom last night to wash my hands and there it was on the other side of the window—a coppery full moon ascending against the backdrop of a navy-blue sky turning midnight. Handwashing would have to wait while the moon and I gazed at each other for uncounted minutes. I rested my chin on the window frame, my breath fogging the glass. What did I come in here for? Right—clean fingernails. In a minute…

I collect moments like that every day and, at the risk of sounding ungratefully greedy, they’re never enough. There lives within me a perpetual hunger for beauty and mystery as only the land can give. She seems to understand this and keeps the firehose rushing in our direction in all directions so that no matter where we look, there she is in all her ever-changing splendor. The sunrise was easily seventeen different shades of pink, orange and grey this morning before I even made it up the Hill to the west of the field-turned-woods (it’s a trick to keep walking in a straight line while your head is set at a perfect 90-degree angle looking at the sky instead of your feet or the path ahead. Try it sometime and let me know how you get on. Maybe I’m not doing it right). For safety reasons, at some point I need to pay attention to where I’m going; careening into a tree at full walking stride is a bone-rattling event and I listen for the sniggers of rabbits watching from the brambly thicket as I recover my pace and shake bark dust from my hair. Glad I can be their morning entertainment, as I’m not sure how much they get out there, being so low on the forest food chain and always looking so nervous. How they manage to combine that with cuteness I’ll never know. It’s a skill I’d like to master someday.

Until then, I try to show up every day for the wonder that exists all around us and sink into it for as long as I can. We’ve discussed this before, haven’t we? The impermanence of things and the importance of at least acknowledging that, if not actually accepting it. In my head, I know Patrick and I will eventually Move On and this place that we’re so much a part of now will be transformed into something Else, as will we. I cannot begin to imagine how that grand exit might look (there are so many scenarios, from outrageous to frighteningly plausible) so I simply don’t and save that kind of brain energy for the projects awaiting me in the studio, glad for the chance to step outside my brain box and into a more soothing spot where colors and scissors and PVA glue all work together without a single care for the future. It works wonderfully for a while until I wander into the kitchen for something to eat and noodle back around to the day when I no longer get to live here and then I’m melancholy for the better part of an afternoon. Even art has its limits in the respite department.

So what is it, then…this unquenchable thirst for experiencing what the land has to offer? It’s not a volume or quantity thing, there is no ledger tracking every coppery moon sighting or first cabbage of the season or deer tracks close to the back door (though such events do find their way into my other journal meanderings now and again). It’s much bigger and goes deeper than that, into the caverns of our relationship with the living things that move and have their being next to us, with us and around us. Everything is in motion all the time, including us (except for when we’re sleeping) and there are places on the land that still don’t know our footprint, literally, after twenty-five years. I’m fine with that, feeling most days like a benevolent intruder here. Whatever secrets the land holds onto are hers and most days we are happily distracted and delighted by what’s right in front of us or wiggling just millimeters away in our peripheral vision. What’s hidden is hidden and we’re none the wiser. That’s the arrangement for now.

I think I just get wistful now and then because I will miss her when the time comes to part ways. I remember my childhood, growing up in the suburbs and walking on concrete to get to school or church, but those images are fading at the edges, replaced by clearly framed views of the black walnut and crack willows on the ridge holding our spring orioles gently in their leafy foliage while I refill the feeder cups with more strawberry jam. This life I live now is the life I know and it matters immensely to the two of us and the hundreds of thousands of us who inhabit this tiny slice of paradise. I want to live attentively for as long as we all can before it’s gone. Because gone it will be someday.

Strange that those words are both heavy and comforting in one swipe. That I got to be here, was trusted to care for the grass and the mourning doves and the wild grapes for what feels like both an eternity and a smidgen of time is a gift without end. Tonight, I will be grateful for the view out the bathroom window and will pull up a chair so that the coppery moon and I can consider each other once more.

Winter Again, Winter Still

Cottony tufts of snow dot and adorn every notch and crotch in the trees we live among on this fine mid-February morning. Words fall short, though “enchanting” comes pretty close. While my back was turned to the south window of the studio-guest room-home office yesterday afternoon, the skies shook loose a steady shower of snowflakes that were determined to barely touch each other upon landing. Gravity held them gently as they built themselves into airy see-through mounds on every available surface. All of our feeders and birdhouses now sport top hats of chilled fluff and I’ve swept off the porch four times. No trip into town for the farmers market this weekend. I can scarcely find our car.

Two weeks ago, it was sixty degrees. A flock of robins hopped and bounced across the lawn and I saw a solitary dandelion thinking she’d get the party started for the season we all love. “Fool’s Spring”, they call it, and we skip to the nearest hardware store in search of potting soil, mulch and petunia seedlings for around the apple tree out front. But the rolling plant racks are bare and folded up against the wall, and snowblowers still take up most of the entryway’s real estate. We sigh and pick up new gardening gloves (we always need those) and wander over to the paint section with its brightly colored swatches looking like tiny rectangular flowers. Back at home, scarves and fleece-lined boots will stay put for now by the door and we’ll thumb through the seed catalogues one more time in case we missed a new tomato variety.

Friday’s return to a winter we never really left took too many of us by surprise. I rarely look at a forecast anymore with a hybrid remote work schedule that only pulls me into the city two days a week. Stepping outside to feed and release the chickens is easily managed without a lot of wardrobe planning. If I’m over or underdressed for that, it will only last as long as it takes me to trudge back up the driveway to the house. But two weeks of almost jacketless temperatures lulled us into a false spring start and now those same robins looked confused as they perch in the bare branches, their thin feathered shoulders hunched against the north’s stiff wind. Where did the grass go? No one wants to peck through the snow to eat a frozen worm.

We’ve got a few more weeks of this, my friends, no matter what that groundhog in Pennsylvania says. And no guarantees that it won’t snow for a minute in April as we’re setting out the cabbage seedlings. Kale can handle that kind of a weather gear shift but we’ll be babying the tomato starts until we’re sure they can establish themselves without fear of a smack down frost. Until then, it’s snow and fifteen degrees for a while. With the space heater going in the studio and bookbinding supplies spread out on the worktable, I’ll get by.

Underground

We have a most dedicated team of moles with whom we share the land, making us wonder when our house and porch and outbuildings will fall into the open maw of some inevitable sinkhole that they’ll show on the 6 o’clock news from an overhead drone’s perspective.

It’s why all our boots land well above the ankle and knee-high wellies are the footwear of choice in the rainy spring and autumn seasons. Few things are more strangely satisfying than sinking your foot into a grassy narrow speed bump and watching the slurry squirt out from the other end of the tunnel you just collapsed with your weight.

I’ve had the privilege of seeing these industrious land mates of ours above ground, their grey fur the very definition of velvety, their eyes tightly closed against the bright light they know little about. Even rarer is watching them at work just centimeters below the surface, a patch of grass and soil moving almost imperceptibly and the cats frozen in anticipation, their paws gingerly patting the trembling ground. Once I witnessed Bumper (one of our freebie rescue tuxedo kittens) attempting to pluck a critter from its nest by extending the full length of his leg into the hole; he was in up to his little armpit while the rest of his body coiled and twitched in pure feline predator mode. He came up empty-handed (pawed?) but the entertainment value of his effort lingered well past the lunch hour. I admire and envy his tenacity.

All of which tugs at my curiosity (often in tension with my deep respect to let other living beings get about their business without any help or interference from me) as I imagine what goes on beneath our feet or careful watch on a daily, even hourly basis. As a child, I stood fascinated for as long as my parents would allow in the agricultural building at the state fair, watching a glass-enclosed slice of beehive and its occupants crawling and buzzing over one another, their agenda not quite clear to my five-year old mind. It looked like chaos but it didn’t matter. The need for understanding was set aside for the full immersion experience of wonder and awe as only a child can enjoy. I sighed, looking over my shoulder as we moved on to the kitchen gadget demonstrations in the next fairgrounds building.

Every day I face and embrace the limits of my knowledge and understanding, which bedevils the heck out of my curiosity. To the exclusion of my grown-up responsibilities, I want to sit on a fallen black walnut’s massive trunk from sunup to sundown and just watch as the forest unfolds its day before me. You know, notice things that I can’t see from my cubicle on the 21st floor on Wednesdays and Thursdays. There’s a place on one of the field paths where groves of young sycamore saplings join their slender branches over my head. On some of the drier morning walks, I drop my walking sticks and lie down, my spine adjusting to the exposed roots hiding beneath last year’s leaves. What a different view that is…noticing how the sparrows hop along the smooth bark and tilt their heads toward me, assessing the danger I might present. In full summer, I get to see what the underside of those leaves look like without straining my neck muscles, tracing their veins with my gaze until something nudges me to get moving before I’m late for work. More sighing as I stand up and finish the sacred and treasured beginning of my day, wincing wistfully for all I will leave behind.

We get glimpses, don’t we, of the myriad other lives going on alongside our own, drama and simplicity playing out simultaneously just beyond our vision. And then we keep moving, taken up with the details of the plans we made, the deadlines we’ll miss by an inch and what’s for dinner. A coworker’s answer to “how are you?” slides off us on the way to a rare in-person meeting and we have no idea what else she’s walking into for the remainder of her day. Hard battles and cherished joys alike, there’s a thrumming below the surface of our existence that we’ll never see, roots and still waters that run deep and out of sight. Curiosity gives way to respectful trust, the fertile soil of human kindness and somehow, the whole human enterprise chugs forward, no matter what the headlines say. I sometimes wonder if the glue holding us all together comes from the prayers of monks in their monasteries and folks who pick up the trash they see on the sidewalk, even though they’ve got a bus to catch in three minutes, and all the other unseen acts of generosity that never make it above the fold. On this side of the sod, I pray for an awake and alert spirit to catch the slightest movement toward peace, no matter how faint, and the decency to pause, to participate and join the effort.

Beneath the surface…maybe that’s where our hope for survival lies.