Labor as Re-Membering
For the next few weeks, I’ll be posting portions of my newest book-in-progress named “Seventy Acres of Contemplation”. Of course, the book title will evolve through time. I’ll also toss in some of my up-close photography along the way. Enjoy!
The forest dances today, beyond the gravel road—and not just the trees. Wind has driven the surf high on the great lake, too, threatening old walkways and moorings. Neat yards are wildly ruffled with leaves, and ripe apples thud and thump on wet ground. Gravity doing her thing, even without a head to fall upon.
I fill myself with watching, with listening. I’m storing up experiences like a small squirrel, planting this flower here, this chestnut there, all nestled in the folds of gray matter. I need the wind today, to muss up my observations, tumble them around, softening them like the meat of a late-winter nut.
Deep middle age is an age of observing. Like a second-breath chance at being three and discovering the soft underbelly of the toad, the smooth ridges of the snake, the brilliant flash of the sunfish. It’s a time of transition, dropping off the summer coat of shining, short hairs for the longer, rougher, more somber colors of fall. I don’t need to shine so much anymore, after all. It’s all wrapped up in that word “need”. Let it go, and it’s like pulling the strings free from the mask I’ve worn my whole life.
I used to know all my names—poet, educator, yoga instructor, mom, daughter, just like I know the names of the birds at the feeder, or the trees in my woods. But names only categorize—what we name, we think we know. But I am only now beginning to feel the deep lightning-scar on this old birch tree, the way this maple doesn’t change colors at once, but only grimly, branch by branch, spots itself into autumn. I’ve placed my hands on their breathing skins. So much I do not know about them. I’m doing that with myself, fingertips beneath my many masks, only touching, a little at a time. Scars and smooth skin, not quite ready to fall into wrinkles and dry remembering.
My husband, Mike, and I work long hours nearly every day at our hunting property, carving out fields and trails, pruning the 60+ apple trees we’ve found hunkering in the deep forest, craving and leaning toward what light they can find. We’re blessed with moss covered rocks, with a flowing diversity of a cedar swamp, hardwood ridges and little caverns carved from the limestone by ice and rain. Owls whisper between the branches, pileated woodpeckers split the silence with their jackhammer drilling, and turkey and grouse flit in the shadows or explode in a rush of feather and air, pounding our hearts with surprise and amusement.
Nine buildings used to perch on the land, leaning, decomposing, sinking back into the thin dirt. They were stuffed with treasures—old record players, small zebra statues, paintings by one of a string of owners, a fireplace that used to belong to an old church in town. It took months to clean them out, more months to nurse a few of them back to the point where they could again shelter lives. Some we simply cannot save, and we’ll repurpose what we can of them in time. People worry we are working too hard at 56. I like to think we were learning the term “labor of love” at a visceral level. Each day, we continue to haul off metal, burn molded books, tear out old walls, re-build sagging roofs. Each day, we leave the property a little better than before. It doesn’t use us up; hard work re-members us into the larger story of the land.
Fall begins to loosen my fingers. They ache again, the familiar curve of the writer furling inward so I can reach outward. Words become windows, symbol and the thing it points at, married in my mind. And so, I begin this work, an exploration of land and old buildings, of middle age and Spirit, of creativity and the task of becoming whole. Open to any chapter and find what you need to read this day. Stuffed with poetry, essays, questions for discussion and activities to try, you’ll find this work as organic as wave-washed stone or an unfurling bracken. I hope to be good company on your hike through sacred lands.