Recently I started getting a fuzzy impression that I might need to run away by myself every once in a while. Let me be clear: I am not inclined to solitude. I can tip back a can of Alone Time every six weeks or so, and I’m good. (Those of you who thirst for it daily as the deer pants for the water, I see you.) Still, there is a hand-on intensity to parenting young children and being an inflexibly social person that has brought me to the end of myself more than once in these latter days. Quiet not only appeals; it appears necessary.
I don’t need a new life like Pappamoomin thinks he does, but sometimes I do need a break. Enter a small cadre of family and friends (Thanks Mom et al.!) who agree to care for my youngest and drive the oldest and make other arrangements for me to have a glorious stretch of several hours to do something of my own devising every month or so. The first time I did this, I drove away thinking of five different ways to inhabit the time; while I still think about them, only one of them has ever materialized.
I go to the woods.
The one thing that has fascinated me the most about these recent ventures is how the forest literally reminds me of my own body and teaches me how to use it again, limb by limb. I take off my shoes and let my feet feel dirt, tree roots, gravel, wood chips, streams. I wait patiently while my eyes readjust to small movements in lieu of large ones. Soon a cardinal with her beak muddy-purple with chokecherries looks over her brown shoulder and I swear she winks welcome back.
Soon my own fingers are stained with wild raspberries. Can I manage to delicately harvest that nettle over there for soup without picking up a handful of itchy barbs? Bees browse amongst the goldenrod in these late-summer days and I wonder at their sheer capacity for work. The shrill song of the great-crested flycatcher song is amplified by the canopy while the great horned owl’s HOO hoo HOO is muted. Fragrant bedstraw smells and tastes sweet and wood sorrel is sour, and both are good. I learn how to “associate the rhythm of the life of the body to that of the world; to feel constantly this association and to feel as well the perpetual exchange of material by which the human being is bathed in the world.” So says the mystical Frenchwoman Simone Weil. I say I feel good again.
It is strange that a woodsy area seems especially suited to show me how to properly inhabit not only space but time along with it. (Is it this way for you?) I guess in our usual human-dominated world it is easy to flatten out “what it means to be” to about 80 years of career, family and hopefully not too much pain at the end. And lots of emails in the meantime. By contrast, in the forest we are more obviously surrounded by a myriad possible timelines or arcs of existence. There is a chrysalis whose jewel-like appearance makes me gasp at its extravagance now, and yet within a month (my time) it will be emptied, decaying, whisked away by the wind. The stunner of a butterfly that will emerge will live for about 2-6 weeks (again, “my time” not theirs), unless they’re lucky enough to be the last generation of the year, in which their life span is about five time that long.
The metallic whzzzzz of cicadas heralds the end of summer but the old oaks to which their abandoned shells will soon be affixed predate my own birth by a long shot. Going back (way) further I run my hand along rough limestone which holds fragments of bryozoa from several hundred million years ago whose bodies and lives paleontologists spend their days piecing together.
I cannot hope to piece together the whole around me given the dizzying implications of all of these millions of forms of life on different schedules (not to mention their interconnectedness). And yet there is something about being among them which instructs the pieces of my own body to work together again as a glorious whole. This little dip in the path is the Valley where my members rejoin and rejoice. The dry bones are told again to live.
Simone Weil also mentions that this bodily connection to the earth takes a long, trying time to learn. (It’s not just a walk in the park.) Consider these suggestive and poetic fragments from her journals:
May the whole universe be me for me, in relation to my body, like the stick of the blind man to his hand. There is no longer actually feeling in his hand; it’s concentrated in the end of the baton. This is something we must learn.
We must change the relation between self and world just as, through apprenticeship, the worker changes the relationship between self and tool…
Wounds, too, are the workmanship entering the body. May all suffering cause the universe to enter my body…
…What does it matter if it be pleasure or pain? If my hand is clasped by a dear person I have not seen for a long time, what does it matter if he shakes it hard and it hurts?
What I take her to mean is that as we open up to the world around us and take it all in (through senses, body, heart, etc.) this immersion is slowly teaching us to use the entire universe as a kind of additional “sense.” The earth is our instrument or tool to understand reality, be it a pleasurable experience or a painful one. This is a mystery but I feel like she’s onto something.
My sons and I noticed a cicada bursting out of its skin on a tree half a block up from our house last week so they decided to check on it several times over the course of the day. Finally it came to nothing. On our last visit, metamorphosis had been frozen in place and time and much to our shock, the entire dead insect was already being repurposed by the local ants. (So resourceful.) I couldn’t help but feel something like woundedness, loss. But on the other hand I wanted to absorb this reality just as much as the material as the cells of that creature were being re-assimilated by the real and beautiful work of the ants who have their own schedule to keep.
Maybe it is as the farmer-poet Wendell Berry has said:
May light, the great Life, broken, make its way
Along the stemmy footholds of the ant,
Bewildered in our timely dwelling place,
Where we arrive by work, we stay by grace.
(Berry, Sabbath Poems, 1983, IV)