Opaque Waters

Yesterday was weather-wild, and I shied away. There had been rain overnight, then fog, and then that predicted wind pruned trees all around the region. One tall, old poplar is down in our back woods, and limbs of varying sizes all over, but there was no damage to our man-made nest. Four horses in the meadow above the pond were racing with the wind and the afternoon sun, manes and tails flying. They'd cross the pasture, turn and slow, look around and at each other, and then be off again. It looks like such a joyful experience they have sometimes in their own skins.

This morning I built the woodstove fire first thing as usual. I sat there until my front was toasted, then turned and knelt with my arms leaning on the kitchen counter. I positioned myself that way primarily to warm my back, but I was reminded of prayer.

Finding my way slowly (the better to savor) through Kathleen Dean Moore's book Wild Comfort: the Solace of Nature, I have been most recently reading in the chapter titled "Winter Prayer," in which she speaks of the snow-filled woods at night, and her sense of stumbling inadequacy when it comes to some effective prayer practice. I remembered her sentence that I start with here, and then reread the follow on: "I remember that the French philosopher Alain wrote that 'prayer is when the night falls over thought.' When the night falls over thought?" she writes. "I have seen snow fall silently from a night sky, blanketing the burrowing weasels and burned spars, burying the world's scurrying under a great hush. Maybe the forest is a prayer tonight, bent under the wieght of all that winter, the whole world on its knees. Or maybe the prayer is the hush." (64)

A few paragraphs later I turned the page to the next chapter, and in the first sentence it was suddenly Memorial Day in the mountains. I put the book down, and went out into my own morning. There is no substitute for ones own life, after all.

Nearly all the snow has melted here, today, but spring is not yet bold and flamboyant. All through my flower beds bulbs are pushing green shoots. The feel both quiet and eager to me, patient in their waiting for exactly the right natural timing to progress.

The vegitation lies flattened, the newly downed limbs like speed bumps on the forest floor, the voices of the resident geese loud and raucus, squawking to be noticed in the still-cold air. I hear them first. As I leave my property I hear some cheeping and chittering of smaller birds in the trees along St. Omer's where it flows between horse meadows. I lbut do not see them.

Deer Creek is rushing and opaque, its voice insistent, telling of the speed and rocks and depth of the moment. At its mouth, St. Omer's has already begun to regain clarity, slowed as it waits for its turn to enter the rushing crowd with which it joins. Isn't that how it goes? In the rush and swirl and speed of dramatic change it's hard to manage clarity, all becomes murky and discernment becomes all the more challenging. Slowing down allows some clarity to emerge.

Almost home, I notice that the neighbors had one of their big trees at the edge of their woods come down. It even partly blocked the drive. I didn't notice, going out, I was so busy looking the other way trying to notice the small birds I was hearing. How blind we can be to the most obvious things, how we cannot begin to notice all in the chaos of the wide world. Without the shade of that tall, branching elder, the forsythia planted by the road will get much more sun this year.