Before It's Gone

I stepped into the bathroom last night to wash my hands and there it was on the other side of the window—a coppery full moon ascending against the backdrop of a navy-blue sky turning midnight. Handwashing would have to wait while the moon and I gazed at each other for uncounted minutes. I rested my chin on the window frame, my breath fogging the glass. What did I come in here for? Right—clean fingernails. In a minute…

I collect moments like that every day and, at the risk of sounding ungratefully greedy, they’re never enough. There lives within me a perpetual hunger for beauty and mystery as only the land can give. She seems to understand this and keeps the firehose rushing in our direction in all directions so that no matter where we look, there she is in all her ever-changing splendor. The sunrise was easily seventeen different shades of pink, orange and grey this morning before I even made it up the Hill to the west of the field-turned-woods (it’s a trick to keep walking in a straight line while your head is set at a perfect 90-degree angle looking at the sky instead of your feet or the path ahead. Try it sometime and let me know how you get on. Maybe I’m not doing it right). For safety reasons, at some point I need to pay attention to where I’m going; careening into a tree at full walking stride is a bone-rattling event and I listen for the sniggers of rabbits watching from the brambly thicket as I recover my pace and shake bark dust from my hair. Glad I can be their morning entertainment, as I’m not sure how much they get out there, being so low on the forest food chain and always looking so nervous. How they manage to combine that with cuteness I’ll never know. It’s a skill I’d like to master someday.

Until then, I try to show up every day for the wonder that exists all around us and sink into it for as long as I can. We’ve discussed this before, haven’t we? The impermanence of things and the importance of at least acknowledging that, if not actually accepting it. In my head, I know Patrick and I will eventually Move On and this place that we’re so much a part of now will be transformed into something Else, as will we. I cannot begin to imagine how that grand exit might look (there are so many scenarios, from outrageous to frighteningly plausible) so I simply don’t and save that kind of brain energy for the projects awaiting me in the studio, glad for the chance to step outside my brain box and into a more soothing spot where colors and scissors and PVA glue all work together without a single care for the future. It works wonderfully for a while until I wander into the kitchen for something to eat and noodle back around to the day when I no longer get to live here and then I’m melancholy for the better part of an afternoon. Even art has its limits in the respite department.

So what is it, then…this unquenchable thirst for experiencing what the land has to offer? It’s not a volume or quantity thing, there is no ledger tracking every coppery moon sighting or first cabbage of the season or deer tracks close to the back door (though such events do find their way into my other journal meanderings now and again). It’s much bigger and goes deeper than that, into the caverns of our relationship with the living things that move and have their being next to us, with us and around us. Everything is in motion all the time, including us (except for when we’re sleeping) and there are places on the land that still don’t know our footprint, literally, after twenty-five years. I’m fine with that, feeling most days like a benevolent intruder here. Whatever secrets the land holds onto are hers and most days we are happily distracted and delighted by what’s right in front of us or wiggling just millimeters away in our peripheral vision. What’s hidden is hidden and we’re none the wiser. That’s the arrangement for now.

I think I just get wistful now and then because I will miss her when the time comes to part ways. I remember my childhood, growing up in the suburbs and walking on concrete to get to school or church, but those images are fading at the edges, replaced by clearly framed views of the black walnut and crack willows on the ridge holding our spring orioles gently in their leafy foliage while I refill the feeder cups with more strawberry jam. This life I live now is the life I know and it matters immensely to the two of us and the hundreds of thousands of us who inhabit this tiny slice of paradise. I want to live attentively for as long as we all can before it’s gone. Because gone it will be someday.

Strange that those words are both heavy and comforting in one swipe. That I got to be here, was trusted to care for the grass and the mourning doves and the wild grapes for what feels like both an eternity and a smidgen of time is a gift without end. Tonight, I will be grateful for the view out the bathroom window and will pull up a chair so that the coppery moon and I can consider each other once more.