Connections

It’s a deep winter morning just a couple of turns of the earth before the longest night in the year. Like a small steam engine, my breath billows puffs of vapor in front of me, left hanging in the air while I make my way down from the hill where we live to the Center, with only the sound of my shoes crunching softly on a thin carpet of ice. Descending no more than a couple of hundred feet into the protected areas next to Marshall Creek, here beneath the trees it warms and the ice vanishes. I pick up a leaf blower and send the daily fall of redwood, maple and bay off the decks and paths to where it will continue its slow reintegration into mother Earth.

The ‘edges’ between things blur when living this close to the land, our human habit of making distinctions between trees and soil eroded by the daily witnessing of fallen leaves and branches melting into the ground.

Nodding into dormancy, a maple before me gathers its roots into a proud trunk that reaches 60 feet above my head, driven aloft through successive springs and a perennial yearning for the sun. From there, it drops its leaves, yet where does the maple leaf stop and the moist soil begin? I ponder this as my blower makes narrow arcs, coaxing forth the reluctant twigs and sending the huge yellow and soft brown leaves scurrying before it.

It is easier to see the interweave of it all rather than ‘separate things,’ here beneath the canopy of trees of this still wild land. Unsurprising, I suppose, that out of this wells a remarkably physical sense of connection with the world.

I follow the leaves, swaying my blower back and forth, stepping as if my feet had pads like the cougars who also live in these hills. Since my wife and I made the decision to live full-time amidst nature’s quiet uproar, I have begun to learn the importance of walking, as a dear friend and colleague reminds me, “as if your face was on the soles of your feet.” When living close to the Earth, it seems our human awareness naturally slips free from the constraints of our head, dropping perhaps, through our torso and legs, and extending like fingers into the world around us.

As I unplug the blower and begin to coil the cord, I notice a lone hiker standing on the mountain road above me and across the creek. Hands in his coat pockets, he withdraws one to wave a greeting. Even at this distance I recognize the husky frame and warm smile as one of my neighbors who lives up the gulch. I light up with a broad grin and wave a hearty response.

Over the past couple of years, this otherwise unknown individual and I began to wave to each other; he on his way up the road or down, me usually in the midst of tending to this land and these old buildings. It was as though we shared some kind of mutual understanding.

He reinserts his hand into the protection of his pocket and turns to head on down the hill, gathering his coat against the cold, immersed in the complex weave of life and earth around him. As I watch him continue on his way, slowly and at peace, I now understand why it is that we have this connection. Though he was but a small figure against the hillside, his posture and deliberate footsteps were of a man enraptured with the lingering perfume of moist soil, the heady bank of towering trees, and the glistening winter pallet of dark green, yellow, and the softly disolving shades of tan to rich dark brown.

I know these things. I feel this too.