Now + Then = When?

writings. right now.

I’ve been writing. I haven’t been posting. I’ve been letting myself think of this space as non-transactional, more in the realm of a gifting economy. This is fairly necessary, because the minute I start to think I must write you something, I drop out of now, which is where I need to be to write.
There are plenty of people who start with apologies for ‘missing’ a post - this strange self-imposed posting (or posturing, or posing?) that I can’t imagine those of us on the receiving end feel when something drops into the old inbox. “damn lazy writer, this should have been here days ago!?!”. I barely read what I receive, and words take up more space than I think any of us realize. So why the self-imposed deadlines? Are we all so worried we’ll forget about each other? How many body systems are susceptible to the stories of ‘not enough’?

There’s a chipmunk in my basement with me. I imagine my cat friend brought in the poor stunned guy for her kitten to play with, then they left and forgot all about him. He won’t go out the wide open door, so we are here together as I send a few thoughts I found and stitched together to circulate with the season. I hope they give you (and this little whistle pig) some comfort.

The local fields by the river were all planted with wheat this year. After standing at the edge of one in the last amber light of the day, I finally see what the 12,000 year long love affair is all about with this grass we call Tricitum aestivum, also spelt, durum, emmer, einkorn, Khorasan or Kamut.

Each seed head holds the balance between the blue-green bounty of stalks rising up into the red-orange light. The alchemy of fire and water is shown right here in stalk, seed, and sun. This weaving of sun and water is what we are, wheat and human and meadow vole and mushroom. Have I ever seen anything more beautiful than now? When?

Speaking of beautiful. Joanna Macy, a teacher and mentor to so many that I get to humbly include myself among, is dying. She’s spreading out into widening circles right now, and I can feel awe her thick on the breeze, even 3,000 miles from her last breaths. This is how it is with people who die awake, they spread out and inhabit us all. As the first albizzia flower overflows in a frenzy of pink stamens, I feel Joanna and all the ways she got out of her own way and simply loved the world. She is/was/will be medicine.

This season, fireflies have brought the sky down to our feet. Walk through the dark moon night in midsummer and you run into the illusion that starlight is something only the sky has to offer.

But starlight is here, dancing in an effervescent whir of firefly light.

They could be different, the fireflies. They could be bigger, or brighter, or they could be another color. Bright red or cold blue. But they aren’t. They are the exact same size and shape, and even color, that stars are. How can this be? Do they know of their deep mimicry –do they see their reflection in the dark?

This season, coasting season, the tracks I’m leaving on the land are light, continuous, and without a strong push of the toe. Coasting because the peak of light has passed, and whether we tell the story or not, we are tipping back towards the downhill watery dark. If there’s ever a moment in the year to just let the flow take us, it’s Now.

• 
  

  
  [
  The equation is probably not when,
  but where.
  now + then = where?
  ]
  

---

Here, I’m trying to live my life as a landscape, so listening with my feet is essential. In doing so, I find others, in the form of tracks. I follow them, wandering slightly behind in time and allowing the narrative to unfold. It’s a soft way to inhabit a place, looking for the stories that others have left, and feels so right in this moment of big human drama. Not to avoid or disengage with where I’m needed, but to re-calibrate out of a chest-always-leading stance to a slightly more spine centric one. The re-calibration leads me to feel centered, not in myself per say, but in place.

Recently I stood inside such a moment, staring quietly and sinking into the shallows of a curve of the Connecticut River. My spine slightly curved, my gaze long and low. Just beyond my toes I noticed deep depressions in the underwater sand, as if someone had tried bowling with golf balls. As I lifted my gaze, patterns began to emerge, then disappear into the deeper waters. I registered in slow motion that I was seeing endless tracks in the water, pushing through the sand like a loose weave. I relished the time spent not knowing - this is my favorite thought space to inhabit - until my eyes finally fell on the tiny little torpedo near my toes, at the end of a particularly long path.

A mussel. A mussel!! What a name, what a creature!

And just like that my eyes re-focused again and I saw a mussel at the end of each little lane, digging themselves in slow motion into their own little cul-de-sac. The fact that these creatures move, and deeply, with varied trajectory, somehow gives me hope that though the various dramas and traumas that can stop us in our tracks, they cannot stop the ones who steadily move inside a different story, with a different relationship to time all together.

Paws and prints sink into the land as if she wants to take us back.
And She does, oh She does.
We resist only by leaving our legacy,
our own clear tracks in a place.
May they be awe-filled.

p.s. the chippy made it back out to the stone wall safe and sound…the trail of blueberries seemed to help.