our time

I stayed outside at dusk the other night for a long while, looking and listening, steeping in the rose-tinted mild evening air.  The end of autumn is always poignant to me but it’s especially so this year.  Perhaps you feel it, too.

With so much uncertainty, loss, and anxiety in our world, we’re all a little frayed and tender.  The one thing everyone seems to agree on is that we want  whatever’s next to happen.  We want next week to be over.  We want the election behind us, we want all the votes counted, and the results to be fairly, legitimately resolved.  We want, especially, to know which way we’re going.

No matter how things turn out, the road ahead will be hard.  There will be more losses to come, more work to do, and so much grief and anger and failure to process.  There will be chaos and confusion. I’m trying to hold onto faith there will be healing, too, and mending, and building.  I try not to let myself get too hopeful.  At the same time, I definitely do need to hope.

I felt quietly hopeful on that evening last week as I lingered in the yard watching the last light drain out of the sky.  There were still golden leaves clinging to the maple tree that stands silent guard outside our kitchen and, for a moment, just before the sun went down, the leaves seemed to glow as if lit from within. That tree is as much a part of our days here as the view of the mountains, the hum of the freezer, the sound of the back door slamming shut.  I know this old friend well  – its graceful curves, the secret owl face hidden in the bark if you know how to look from just the right angle, the way the squirrels chase each other through the branches, the way the nuthatches travel headfirst down the trunk, foraging for insects.

And, after days of raking, tarping, hauling, and mulching  leaves, I also knew we weren’t quite done. Getting the yard and garden ready for winter is a long, physically demanding process. Always, the  radiant maple is the last tree on this hilltop to drop its golden leaves, signaling the end of one season, the colder, darker beginning of another.   Tomorrow, I guessed, or the day after, the maple, too, would finally, silently, undress. It is the last of October, after all.

As I stood there, sore and tired from a long afternoon of yard work but reluctant to call it a day and go inside and start dinner, the sky around me became suddenly alive with birds. First a few and then more and more arrived, as if summoned by some invisible bell.  Swift and straight as arrows they flew, small black silhouettes in the shadows, approaching from all directions, slipping without pause into the maple’s sheltering branches until surely there were a hundred birds or more enveloped in the tree’s embrace.

The sight of all those birds winging their way home to roost filled me with awe. We have lived in this house for fourteen years and I’ve never once seen such a sight. And yet, for all I know, it happens every night.  I turned at last to go indoors with my head full of questions. What kinds of birds were they? Would they all remain tucked in there together till dawn? Does this great homecoming migration happen all year long? How could I have missed it?  And: what else am I not seeing?

In this year of staying home, my own roots in this place have grown deeper, my awareness of its rhythms heightened.  The more I look, the more I see.  The quieter I become, the more I hear.  The slower I am, the more attuned I become to the eternal pulse of nature, to the slow turning of the seasons, the movements of animals, the cycles of life that sustain and shape and support us here on this mysterious, intricately balanced earth.

Lately I’ve found it almost impossible to sit still long enough to write more than a text or a grocery list.  Every time I turn on my computer, I’m awash in a sea of words – entreaties for money for good causes, another batch of emails to answer, breaking headlines to process, polls and scandals and tragic Covid numbers to absorb, thoughtful articles and essays by writers I admire and long to read. And, too, a sense that there’s never enough time to give any of these things the attention they deserve.

And I will confess: All of this writing, analysis, information, and projection only increases my jangled sense of overwhelm and anxiety. My fight or flight response quite often leads me away from the screen and straight out the door, where there is always physical, tangible work to be done — a garden bed to be cut back, pots to empty, another load of leaves to haul to the compost pile. And, too, where there is always beauty, silence, and a kind of holiness.  At my desk, in my house, or staring at my phone, my heart is often heavy, my jaw clenched, my stomach flipping.  Outdoors, though, it’s a different story.  With the sky overhead and the earth beneath my feet, I become part of a larger narrative, a longer, deeper one in which my own place in things falls back into perspective.  We humans are so small, so briefly here.

One way or another, we’re all white-knuckling our way toward Tuesday.  I’ve probably made too many impulse donations to candidates I believe in, but I regret none of them.  My husband, son, and I have written letters and held signs.  In our small town, we’ll don our masks and vote in person. Beyond that, my approach during these last days has been to stay outdoors as much as possible. I can’t control the outcome of anything that matters, but I can keep the birdfeeders full.  I can sweep out the shed, rake up the leaves, and pull out the petunias.  I can stay grounded in the simple, necessary tasks of my own life.  And I can look at the sky, at the now bare maple tree, at the snow that covers the ground this morning in a frosting of white, and trust in the forces at work in the world that are far beyond my own limited seeing and my own narrow understanding .

One day last week, I rounded the corner of the house pushing the wheelbarrow and was stopped in my tracks by the sight of fifty or sixty robins hopping about in the front yard, a gathering as uplifting to me as the determined crowd of citizens who have showed up downtown every Saturday all through the fall to stand in silent solidarity with Black Lives Matter, voting rights, and democracy. When we looked up from breakfast a few days ago to see a herd of deer just outside the window, they seemed almost like silent messengers sent to remind us that we share this time, this place, with others and that we’re all connected, for better and for worse.

I stood in the garden one day last month surrounded by Monarchs; two weeks later, I watched a lone butterfly alight on a stalk of fading verbena, certain somehow this would be the last one until next year. I’ve watched chilled bees wobbling from one late-blooming cosmos to another.  I’ve born witness to every sunrise, gazed at clouds, dug in the dirt, searched for the season’s last nasturtiums, made salads from the garden’s final gleanings, and potted up geraniums to carry inside for the winter.  I’ve watched the landscape change from lush green to fiery reds and golds to brown and bare.  As the last leaves drifted down, I was there to catch them.  This morning I stepped outside and lifted my face to the year’s first snow.  And then, as always, I headed back indoors feeling a bit more centered, a bit more able to take in the truth of everything else that’s happening at this fraught moment.

For today, even with so much at stake, I must summon some trust in the enduring cycles of things. Trust there will be both another spring in our future and healing in our country.  Trust that somehow  justice will prevail. There is so much we don’t know.  And yet there’s also a kind of knowing, or faith, that comes with opening to what’s right here, right now.  Paying attention means being reminded, again and again, of how transitory this all is.  Change will come, one way or another.

Although our waking hours may feel suffused with politics, pain, and outrage, the opposite is also true.  There is energy and kindness and fierce commitment in every corner of our country. Good people are rising up. Together, we will breathe our way through this hard season and find our way into the next, whatever it turns out to be.

In the meantime, may we continue to take good care of ourselves and of each other. May we mend the part of the world within our reach, hold each other up, welcome every fleeting moment of delight, and embrace the mystery of being here for all of it.  For this, dear friends, is our time. A time not of our choosing but the one we have been given, to make of what we will.

We Did Not Ask For This Room

We did not ask for this room,

or this music;

we were invited in.

Therefore,

because the dark surrounds us,

let us turn our faces toward the light.

Let us endure hardship

to be grateful for plenty.

We have been given pain

to be astounded by joy.

We have been given life

to deny death.

We did not ask for this room,

or this music.

But because we are here,

let us dance.

~ Stephen King (for the TV adaptation of 11/22/63)

 

 

 

 

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