The other day when I returned from the gym I noticed my cat Zinnia's head was severely distorted. She was angling it back over her shoulder and she looked wilder and more alien than usual. She had seemed fine in the morning. and this seemed horrible in the extreme so I rushed her to the vet, not knowing whether she had been bitten by a snake, or poisoned somehow; whether she had been caught on some hidden wire and dislocated her neck; or whether it was a disease process coming to the fore. For the entire 40 minute drive I'm just talking to her, saying "Zinnia, please stay with me. Please stay." I've lost too many friends recently, too many loved ones and I'm not getting more accustomed to it, more resilient, I'm becoming more eroded in some ways, like an old mountain, although the space of light in which I sense this wearing away seems ever more golden…. … accommodating, and embracing. A strange bardo tension that I both grieve as well as find solace within....
Many days later, Zinnia is with me in bed in my studio, sleeping. Her head is almost normal now and she is more present after being medicated for the toxoplasmosis pathogen that the vet believed was causing her symptoms. She's so happy to get back out to tease the fickle sunny grasses, but I keep her close at night. Meanwhile my body continues to process the tolls of concern.
I've been traveling for work and will leave again shortly but presently am on the land I return to in the remote Blue Ridge mountains of southwest Virginia that I used to passionately call home. But life, both personal and transcendent, has changed in deep ways so that now I have no name for this place other than Restfulness, Beauty, Magic, Aliveness, Timelessness. Embrace. These are ways of being "at home" that are different but still sheltering and that deeply nourish me and are ways I take with me, hopefully, on my journeys away.
My body has taken quite a few big hits the past several years, and presently the wave is a low trough of pain and somewhat restricted mobility. For this sort of episode, all I know to do is to keep moving, to walk and walk some more, even if it feels at times like staggering. My body doesn't really like sitting much or lying for too long. We are nomadic in history and made to move upright and that movement and verticality seem to maintain so much of my over-all equilibrium.
So despite today's pain and last night's sleeplessness of concerns, I walked. Down the single-lane gravel road which bisects the land cultural brainwashing says “belongs” to me, in and out of sunlight. (Though I know I belong to her, however long she’ll have me.) The springs on the hillside to my left keep the road wet at all times and in late summer and into fall smelling like the rampant mint and sparkling with the iridescent colors of Great Blue Lobelia. In all the puddles, there are throngs of butterflies feeding on the minerals released here. They press together on the tiny rocks or on the occasional lump of scat, looking like quivering rainbow bouquets, mostly Swallowtails; Eastern Tiger, Spicebush, Black, and Pipevine, and with the occasional sulpher. As I walk down the road, they swirl up in random, disjointed patterns, leaving the damp gravel for only an instant, or else moving into the fields on my right that are covered in the purples of flowering Ironweed, pinks of Joe Pye, oranges of Jewelweed, Butterflyweed and the heavy yellows of the blooming goldenrods and fading perennial sunflowers and Black-eyed Susans. And greens………. everywhere lush, fecund and never-ending.
Soon I pass the great two acre pond, some of the water that originally drew me to this land, with the overgrown and wild island in the middle. This pond is fed by a mountain spring gushing from a spot up the hillside in the woods where there is no human habitation, no industry, not even cattle grazing. The trout, bass and ubiquitous bluegill swirl the waters; blue and green herons stalk the shallows or peer from over-hanging trees, white egrets swoop in on misty days for brief visits; swallows dive and chatter through the insect hordes; kingfishers let loose their long raucous cries, secretive watersnakes thread through wet grasses, cattails erupt with cacophanies of blackbirds and the booming frogs startle in a gulp of surprise.
I keep walking with my dogs to the other side of the pond where I can turn off the road and walk through sheltering trees on springy moss, feeling my body begin to loosen and ease a bit into grace. I see this time that a beaver has returned after years of absence. Several young poplar trees are down across my path with the tell-tale signs of their industrious chewing. Many years ago they had a big lodge in the pond as well as a dam across Elk Creek, and at dusk I'd go down to check on them, wading out in the water a bit to sing just to them. Soon they would swim languidly over to me and just swirl slowly around my feet, gazing at me with unimaginable dreams in their liquid dark eyes. They are easy to love, these fervent life-bringers.
So often, on these walks, I'm talking to every earth being I meet, as there are certainly no people anywhere near. And often these are conversations of praise and gladness, of whimsy and secrets, of play and curiosity, but sometimes are also litanies of my longings and cries from the arid, untouched places within. How solitary I often am and for how long and when will this end? How much death I've experienced and how hard it is and when will that end? How painful it can be to live in this world of such suffering and recklessness and will that ever end in other than our own species collapse? Cries sometimes more of the abandoned child self than of the mature woman as I flicker in and out of time. ….... but today one grandmother Poplar seemed to have pulled up her roots to step right in front of me, she was that insistent and intent on me. She simply shone as she called me, radiant. And so, finally, I stopped talking. I quieted. Ohhhhhh.... the relief! Just simple relief. Then recognition, communion, nourishment and ultimately such delight. I listened to her and to so many others who came streaming forward as well to share what they had to offer. Such generosity, kindness, such strength. And so much all encompassing delight....
I've been grieving more than usual lately. Too many deaths, too many I miss, too much physical diminishment, too much uncertainty, too little family/community embodied love and affection, and very too much destruction of and on this pulsing, sensate Earth. When I feel all that's occurring on this my Mother-home, occasionally the sensation of delight— of personal delight— can seem almost a betrayal. But the Poplar and others were moving in a dance different from my own compressed reticence and they had the purpose and power to entrain me to them and their ways. Just to notice them and to feel their presence sent the deepest pleasure through me. My bones shook loose with music, my blood began humming its heat and I felt my own skin begin to shine as well; and then the elementals, those great ancient spirits, reconfigured their dance within me to express this moment, this eternity of rapture.
And this tall gray and green grandmother Poplar reminded me, again, of the imperative of delight; the need to anchor our own personal joy of this relationship with each other into the world as food for our living Earth, and how this joy grows green, lusty and regenerative from our gratitude and sensual correspondence with all of life in its myriad shapes and songs. So, again, and again, even and especially when holding hands with grief, I re-orient to face the animate delight of this drumming heartbeat, of this erotic, magnificent physicality of expressed spiritlife that is Earth, from this body/soul/mind that feels, responds and initiates relationship in the immanent fields of love, where walks grandmother Poplar, shining so delightfully right now, just because she can……