Morning
Walk
“…we
are in the habit of imagining our lives to be linear, a long march from birth
to death in which we mass our powers, only to surrender them again, all the while
slowly losing our youthful beauty. This is a brutal untruth. Life meanders like
a path through the woods. We have seasons when we flourish, and seasons when
the leaves fall from us, revealing our bare bones. Given time, they grow again.”
Katherine
May (Wintering: The Power of Rest and Retreat in Difficult Times, p.68; Riverhead
Books, New York, 2020)
On our
daily walks now, Liza and I stroll through showers of falling leaves, our feet
making shoosh-shoosh sounds as we cover ground. This evokes an old memory of walking
to school in Chattanooga, TN in the 1950’s with my sister, Jerrie. We walked to
and from school through the woods and along residential sidewalks wearing our
new fall shoes—usually brown and white saddle-oxfords.
Liza
sticks her little black nose into piles of leaves, hillocks of dried, yellow grasses,
and overgrown weeds, and then sneezes. I walk with my eyes on the skies, so I
don’t miss the hawks riding the currents high above. I hear them call to one
another across the clear autumn air. Later today, the temperature will climb
into the 80’s, but for now it’s cool and crisp.
When we
get to the little house that I looked at last month with an interest in buying,
I see that the new owner has cut down every living thing on the lot—front and
back. Stripped down to the ground fifty-year-old cedars, demolished the jasmine-covered
arbor, and piled fractured limbs and white-washed wood twelve feet high on the
streets around the bungalow. I almost cry. I want to gather the cedar in my
arms and carry it home, to somehow comfort its severed ends and still-lovely
fronds. I will never understand why people do this, and I don’t want to. It’s
butchery in my mind.
Still
the day is beautiful, so we continue to walk. Life, as Katherine May says in Wintering,
is not a straightforward path from birth to death. It meanders, twists, and sometimes
leads us into blind alleys. Life has its beautiful, sunny moments and its dark
underworld journeys—sometimes both on the same day. What we city-dwellers seem
to have forgotten is that the other species we share the earth with are also
holy. Cedar trees are living beings. All the things we brazenly rip out of the
ground or chop down are also living creatures. Just because we want a smooth turf
or have some grandiose notion that our rights take precedence over everyone else’s,
does not make us entitled to destroy any life that gets in our way.
Native
Americans have the right idea about the earth—it is a living entity and belongs
to itself. We are temporary custodians, and when we treat it as if we are
superior beings with inalienable RIGHTS, we risk losing our habitat. These are
beautiful days—gorgeous days of clear blue skies and golden sunlight. We are
here to enjoy and explore our domain.
I hope you will go outside
on this beautiful Saturday morning and breathe in the freedom and joy of your
dwelling place. Give thanks for the trees that provide for us and for the
squirrels and birds. This is our home. And it is their home, too.
In the Spirit,
Jane
No comments:
Post a Comment