Time to Bow.

Entering the moment when everyone, everything, bows.

We’ve landed in the heart of winter, if landing could even be assumed as we careen, spin, and wobble round the Sun. It is represented on the Baltic wheel of time as an evergreen tree, with big bowing boughs. Here is a bowing story, to begin this season.

The cat wrestled a weasel, and won somehow.  He brought his kill to the porch, and was berated for his instincts, but the weasel was beautiful, with chestnut brown fur and the daintiest little sharp teeth.  My son, standing at the brink of puberty and perhaps feeling a bit guilty at what harm “his” cat could accomplish, wanted to save the fur, honor the weasel.  This is one way to honor an animal, to have a relationship with it.  He learned this from his most respected mentor, the songs to sing and all.

Some days later, he brings the half frozen body over to a new friend’s house, someone also enamored by animal bodies and how easily they slip from their skins.  But this kid has learned a different way: to plop the skin in one solution after shucking it off, the bones in another, and toss the soft body of the weasel into the woods.  This my son copies, without question, though I imagine the tendrils of a new kind of guilt are already reaching toward his heart.  The hands express what is in the heart, and when our hands do wicked things, it’s the heart, ultimately, that takes the hit.

He comes home after this short adventure – it only takes a few minutes to skin a creature, and a few more to separate it into solutions – looking a little shell-shocked.  He’s familiar with words of gratitude before the first cut, the songs sung while working, the burial of muscle and bone, the arduous task of stretching the skin, then building up a fire to dry it out.  Once dry, the inner skin is scraped until it is taken by the wind, like milkweed seeds.  Then the tanning comes - hours of massaging the skin – creating an intimacy unchecked by time.  He slowly realizes he will miss all of this, as his little weasel skin soaks in ammonia across town.  It’s not that any wrong was done, per say, it’s that his conscience didn’t agree, regardless.

Over the course of the next couple of hours, his body slows to a hunched stillness, like a lump of clay left on the wheel.  He begins to whine, and I try to stop and give him the empathy he needs, but it doesn’t help.  The pelt is still in the solution, and somehow his heart is getting pickled along with it.  This sometimes happens, when we love the world with our whole self.   I can see that something is needed to untangle and right this person back into his center, something I cannot give.  He needs a wider lens.  I send him outside with one direction:  “This is the place that made the weasel, go ask the land what is needed to make this right, and do what is asked.”  I actively forget about him, unlacing myself from his experience, and set to making dinner, tending his sibling, sweeping the forever dirt-filled floor. 

The gloaming cloaks the land before he finally returns, red cheeked and clear eyed.  I glance past him out the door and see a sprawling mess of candles, shells, boughs of evergreen on the stonewall.  I can see clearly that he has bowed to this place, that weasel, his error, and arisen with a heart back in it’s rightful clasp.  There is nothing more to say, there is only the coming dark to illuminate the small flames of genuine reconciliation. 

To bow is to fold the channel of belonging in on itself, to allow the skull to meet the truth of gravity.  A bow is like a small death, not just to an ego, but to the idea that any of us is anything more than another body in the landscape, spiking into existence for a short while before returning to sinew, to rock.  Death is always an offering, no matter how small.

The weasel is still in pieces, organs long ago digested by dozens of other woods dwellers. But the bones are buried outside our house now, the retrieved skin is a silky reminder of the weasel’s grace.  The other kid was curious, not judgmental, as my son feared, about this different way of honoring an animal.  Everything found it’s rightful place, after the bowing was done.

Bowing is something everything does, the doe at the river, the trees against the whipping wind, a grief-stricken heart in the face of loss.  It is a gesture that levels any sense of separation or hierarchy, that strips us down like a bare branch bathed in winter’s moonlight.  When we rise from this deep fold, the horizon is always more beautiful, the body more intelligent.

The cat is sitting on the wall now, bowing low over his paws, squinting into the slanted winter light.