I had been contemplating going inside when the hawk flew by. It was so close, it could have grazed the branches of my apple tree. It also could have been an eagle, or a vulture, it was that big. Later, it circled the sky while I watched in wonder.
Instead of brining my writing inside, where it was warmer, I let my head fall against the edge of the couch, my eyes blurring into reverie as I wondered where the former inhabitants of the fallen forest had gone. You can come here, the thought passed through my heart and I let it go before I held onto it.
The truth is, I have been riddled with the guilt of what ifs. Yet, in that quiet moment of surrender, the unexpected occurred. As I gazed out the window, Noah’s Ark in feathered form arrived, along with more than a few squirrels. For the next half hour I watched in wonderment as my backyard filled with winged life. There are no pictures to tell the tale, as I watched transfixed and filled with gratitude. Peace replaced anger and the pervading sense of futility I had so long been feeling.
Most of them are gone now, perhaps because I don’t have feeders to keep them around for too long. But, in that glorious half hour or so, I was graced with the presence of several woodpeckers, flickers, nuthatches, chickadees, blue jays, mourning doves and more, while the hawk flew sentinel through the skies, which parted their clouds to the sun.
To me it’s like entering a war zone. A complete annihilation of life at a heart-stopping speed. Part of me wants to rage. To point fingers. To blame. To say to the collective masses, “This is what you cheered for, as though it is a victory.” I cannot help but be angry. I have only entered the second stage of grief.
Aren’t you glad it’s not your home?
For some this is a victory, but I can’t help thinking about squirrels running down the supporting structures of their homes as they fall like dominoes, wondering if they made it to safety in time. Birds, flying the nest. Chipmunks hiding beneath the ground, unable to hold their ears against the maddening roar of destruction.
How much life was lost?
There were coyotes and deer and this forest. There were countless insects and the life that lives beneath the ground, and only sometimes comes to the surface. Not to mention the hundreds of trees and plants, razed in one day.
The dead trees are piled, too neatly. One thinks of the Holocaust.
Should we be proud of this?
A week ago my children ran and laughed under a canopy of trees.
I want to believe that we can make peace with this land, that we did before it was destroyed, but the truth is, we haven’t. There was no collective ceremony. No giving thanks and asking for forgiveness, only a righteous justification in a belief that it was ours to dispose of as we wished.
“We bought the land for this purpose thirty years ago.”
In 30 years a forest of life grew and flourished. In 3 days it was gone.
It rained all day yesterday, and the dogs and I decided to stay near home. Today, though, is beautiful. It feels like April instead of March, the air soft and warm.
Where I was stopped.
Last night I dreamt of a hummingbird. I was sitting outside, on a warm sunny day, and the hummingbird, larger than life, flew into my field of vision and hovered before me. It wore the colors of the forest. The colors of the heart. A rich green cloak over a gold breast, reminding me that the heart beats for life, but also for joy.
A living embodiment of resilience, and a reminder that joy is the nectar of life.
This time I was stopped at the edge, where the yellow caution tape three days ago embraced a forest filled with life. I thought of the beautiful struggle of a seed, smaller than my fingernail, quietly, valiantly, growing into the full breadth of a pine whose trunk once spanned the embrace of my arms three times over. What did it take to grow to those great heights? Perhaps 50 years.
There once was a forest.
It took less than 3 days to lay waste to the forest. Each time my breath catches in my throat with loss, my heart beats towards life. The last bird I heard singing inside the forest was a cardinal. Today, the 3 crows that have been by my side faithfully, flew to the edge where I stood and bore witness with me. Two nights ago I dreamt of an eagle.
Tomorrow has arrived, and the forest I knew has begun to turn into yesterday. I can think of little else.
The trees by the roadside are being felled first
I want to bare witness to each fall of life, and I also want to stay tucked inside my home. This morning, as if by happenstance, I was given the grace of friendship by my side while I walked the path of memory. We heard the saws long before we saw the evidence, and while I listened to their unyielding power, I swallowed back grief and regret.
Life is a series of sacrifices. Life, by nature, cannot be possible without death, yet I struggle to make sense of loss. Especially when ceremony is replaced with a belief in ownership. This distancing of connection. A forgetting that we are of the land, intricately tied together in this beautifully complex, strong, yet fragile, web of life.
How many days, I wonder, will it take for the last of my friends, destined for death, to fall to the ground? In mere seconds, when we reached the edge of the woods, by way of the field, I watched a whole group of them fall nearly at my feet.
The only people stationed to warn were beside the paved road, as though they have already forgotten that feet pass through the forest often. That life is abundant, even with the leaves have yet to bud into bloom. If we had not been aware, we could have fallen with them.
The winds brought her howling and moaning to the bottom of the stairs where her powerful claws scraped aside the wallboard to rush up the stairs so she could howl and moan at the baby gate. Her first visit occurred somewhere between 12:30 and 1:00am, and it felt like I had just fallen into a nice, comfortable sleep. My husband hustled her back down the stairs, re-secured the “gates,” two or three times. The entire household now wide awake, except the 12 yr. old who had taken some Melatonin and was sleeping soundly like we all should have been.
The hound would not give up though, she was terrified. Who knew what horrors she had lived through in the first three years of her life, roaming the streets of the south. Tornadoes, hurricanes…my mind was going to all corners of possibility as I pulled on my exercise pants, grabbed my pillow and made my way down the stairs.
“Don’t stay with her, she’ll just get used to it,” my husband warned, calling forth words used long ago when our youngest used to be terrified at night. I took his advice, as I once had, trying to assuage her fears, then, after creeping back up the stairs with her scrambling after me twice, I gave in. Just like I had 8 years before.
First we tried to nestle onto the couch, but after lying awake for about 1.5 hrs, I decided to pull it out into the bed hidden beneath its cushions. Still shaking like a terrified child, my companion for the remainder of the night finally settled into the nook of my folded legs and fell into a snoring slumber.
Just as sleep began to descend upon my lids, the guinea pig decided it was meal time. At around 3:00am, I found myself, once again, wide awake, listening to “Kisses” vigorously lapping the metal ball of her water bottle for what felt like an eternity. She stopped, briefly, then began again. Two more times.
I thought of putting her in the basement, with the cat that was now howling, cage and all, or taking away her water source for the remainder of the night. Would that be considered animal cruelty, I wondered? I can certainly make it through a night without drinking.
But, as the wind howled outside, and my canine companion’s breathing body of warmth was nestled happily beside me, my thoughts turned to how lucky I am. I have a home after all, and a bed to sleep in, even if it was, at that moment, a pulled out couch with no sheets and not enough blankets. I have shelter and comfort. I had love, pure, unconditional love, snuggled beside me, and I felt full and content. Some nights, 3 hrs of total sleep is enough. Especially when you’ve got a home filled with love.
I didn’t intend to write a blog post this morning among the list of things I wanted to accomplish, but sometimes what plan to do is not what we were meant to do.
When I walked out of the door this morning, Crow greeted me as she often does these days, from somewhere hidden among the tall trees in my yard. She continued to call each time I brought more boxes to the end of the drive for donation, and I thought of her, later, when I stepped into the woods with my two canine companions. I’m almost certain a third was with me, in spirit. Tomorrow will mark the year of her passing, but I did not weep for this loss.
In truth, I had not been thinking about Daisy, but about the life that lives in the woods down the road from my house, where I have long enjoyed walking with my dogs and family. Once, my daughter and I saw a pack of coyotes running through the trees. Today, I noted the tracks of deer and wild rabbit marking paths home through the fresh snow.
The morning was quiet, aside from the incessant hum of traffic that always filters through the trees, and the soft tread of my feet, accompanied by the dogs runny ahead of me. Rosy and Zelda were filled with joy, as they always are when they step inside these woods.
About a month ago I had a dream. I was sitting on the hillside below the forest, where children sled in winter, and families gather in the summer to listen to music. I was looking at the vast sky above where dragonflies dance, when the message came through, “Don’t let them bulldoze this sacred ground.”
Now, weeks later, long ropes of tape mark off the boundaries around several acres of trees. Wooden stakes in the ground label potential gravel dumps and irrigation ditches. There is even one that says “pond” where there is no water. I almost laughed at the irony, but instead I cried. Standing among the sentient beings of the forest who speak in a language most have forgotten, I wept for this sacred ground that so many call home. When did we forget? I wondered. We are of the Earth.
Perhaps we need to forget in order to remember. I know that each time I have forget my sacred connection to my Truth, and the much wider Truth of Life, my body/mind/spirit becomes out of alignment until I have no choice but to remember.
We are of the Earth, but we do not own the Earth. She, in fact, owns our bodies, where are made from her nutrients. Long before we walked her surface, she was here, flourishing with life. She will be here long after we leave, broken perhaps, but she will heal. We depend upon her, she does not depend upon us.
At some point, the collective consciousness of humanity chose to forget. There are times when I think it is almost a burden to feel everything, but this is one of those mornings when I am so very grateful that I have chosen to reside in a vessel that remembers how to feel this sacred connection to all life. I believe we all have this ability to feel, this innate knowing, but many of us have chose to forget.
We value our homes. We love the beauty we create, and the money we make is invested into making our homes as beautiful as we can, yet what about this larger home we all share, that we all depend upon? When did we forget that we walk upon sacred ground? When did we forget to that the air we breathe comes from the lungs of Earth we call trees?
Clean air and water have become a universal gift of a long forgotten past, because of us. I walk the woods to remember Home. I walk the woods to feel whole again. When there is a rip in the web, we are all affected.
It has sadly become an abnormality. An uncool condition. A label of scorn…to remember connection. To remember Home. To remember that all life is sacred, and that the “I” cannot exist without the “We.”
It was a one of those nights when sleep arrives slowly and is interrupted mid-dream, ensuring that you will recall the scenes upon waking. One of my children was worried about ghosts in the bedroom. “You clear them, don’t you?” I was asked. The room felt unoccupied to me, but some protective measures where taken none-the-less. Turns out a scary YouTube video that was supposed to be comedic had been watched.
As a result, the lights went on several times during the night, and each time I woke from a new dream that seemed unrelated from the one to follow it until I rewinded the night during daylight.
My dreams began in that popular place where magic is contrived. I was eating lunch with my mother at one of the park’s restaurants. She had ordered the double hotdog special because it also came with a peanut butter and jelly sandwich for later. I munched the fries, uninterested in eating the hotdog, while we sat at a booth. Then, suddenly, I found myself asleep, and when I woke my mother was gone. It had all been a ruse, a trick, a way to leave her child behind. Still groggy from the drug that had been placed in my drink, I searched the streets, knowing she would not be found.
The next flick of the light found me on a park bench, reaching out to hold an infant that belonged to someone else. The child was a harmony of light and dark, with symbols covering his or her head (there was, fittingly, no sense of gender). The mother generously allowed me to enfold her baby in my arms. They followed me home, and while the child’s mother and I sat on the quilt I had made long ago with my own mother, she told me that the bedroom closet was too small for what it held inside.
“I’m a builder,” she assured me, and I watched as she threw open the doors and let loose that which was contained. Shoes and clothes piled out. “There is too much stuff in here,” She told me. “And the location is all wrong. Suddenly my closet was being lifted in her strong arms until it found a new home. A complete reconstruction and expansion was in order.
As I moved outside of the bedroom to watch, I discovered a house under construction. Some rooms were finished, others held the frame of potential. My home, though, was vast. Limitless rooms unfolded before me as I traveled (actually I believe I was flying through) the upstairs hallways.
Once again, a light went on, and I found myself inside of another dream. This time, I thought I was someone else who was not me. A beautiful boy who wanted to be a girl (this is significant on many levels, one being that in this life, I as expected to be born a boy by my parents, but was born a girl instead). Here I was, inside this child, being told that my father wanted me outside by the pond with him. I felt resistance build within me, and the struggle to be free erupt into wings.
I was the child of Pan, running gloriously wild, racing up the trunks of enormous trees and into a house held within the boughs. I was weightless with wings. There was nothing to stop me from being pure joy, except my own fears. Before I woke, I found myself in one of those upper rooms, looking outside at nebula exploding into being. Suddenly, I tasted fear. Could I, I wondered, leave it all behind? The Universe was calling…was I ready to follow that birthing of light?
The Light Behind the Story 