The View From Earthsprings

November 29, 2006

These days, at age 67 and counting, I find that my “view,” my awareness and my noticing, can be a scattered, spotty, hit and miss sort of thing, sometimes intense and spiritually profound, sometimes intellectually stimulating, sometimes analytical or metaphor-making, and sometimes just a sort of semi-paying attention while things float by, accentuated by meaningless snippets of “sound bite” consciousness.
This morning was no exception. It was so full, so varied, yet so evocative of soul, that I wanted to share.

First there was the walk in the autumn splendor. Never have I seen the forest in East Texas more colorful. Each day I think it has “peaked,” and then the next day it is even more wondrously beautiful.

Usually it is all too easy simply to see the forest as a whole, as a unit—a forest—or perhaps to see only a conglomerate of species of trees, massed together. Only occasionally is there special awareness of the individual trees themselves that together make up the whole dense, green forest.

But in the autumn, the individuals pop out in all their unique glory. Here a hickory, early to color itself into the most vivid of golds, there a little sumac bush that is hardly a tree at all but is powerfully crimson, here a dogwood going red while still spotted with fading shades of green, there a red oak or a willow or a sycamore, each one with its own shape and shade and color, an artist’s dream of naming the various mixes of yellow, red, orange, brown, salmon, gold, crimson, showing off vividly in thousands of varieties of unique blends of glorious color.

It takes your breath away to see it, year after year. I wait each fall for certain trees to “step out” so I can see them, as they paint themselves in colorful contrast to the constantly dark evergreens with which, during the rest of the year, they blend quietly in variegated shades of green. But not in the fall. There’s no blending in then. They just show themselves off something wonderful.

This morning I meditated on the notion that only in the autumn, when the leaves are actually about to fall away, do the trees show their individuality and their potential to be spectacular and colorful and flamboyant and, well, most beautiful. It’s like the “darkest before the dawn,” only it’s “most individual and colorful before the falling away to bare branches.”

And of course, being the metaphor-making poet philosopher that I am, I had to think about how people are like that. Think Joseph Campbell, whom I heard give various lectures in California for years; wasn’t he the most outrageous and outspoken and wonderful in his last few years? Think Jimmy Carter. Always humanitarian, was he ever so personally involved, so individually in contact with all sorts of people, so direct and courageous in his public statements as he has been in these “autumn” years of his life?

“Well, then,” this morning I said to myself, “there you go, Glenda. There’s your bit of powerful inspiration for your own next years. Never mind that so many things are falling away from you like autumn leaves—eyesight, memory, whatever else—never mind, because, like the trees, you’re going to be your most glorious, old girl, in these last years of your life.” Nice thought, that.

Then, shift. Big, loud machines, coming down the road from the mailbox toward Earthsprings. The big old lab with me barks furiously, challenging any intruder to identify itself immediately. The big machines do not do so, but veer off on a side-road, back into the nearby National Forest. The dog and two of the cats and I speed up our walk and hasten to encounter them.

“What are you doing here?” I ask the driver of the second big machine, the first having rumbled on into the woods before I get there.
“Seismic crew, mam.”
“You do know you are not supposed to do any of that on my land, which, along with my water well, is right over there…my water well that I don’t want contaminated or ruined,” I say, pointing over the fence toward Earthsprings, toward the Cottage and my well.
“Yes, mam, we’re headed over that-a-way.” Pointing away from Earthsprings.
“Are you planning to blast today?”
“No, mam, couple of months. We’re just drilling the holes and putting the dynamite in today.”
“You’re leaving dynamite for a couple of months, out here in the National Forest, with hunters all around?!?”
“It’s down in the holes, mam, perfectly safe. They’ll run the cables next week.”
“You’ve got flags up all through my land.” (Bright pink and blue plastic strips in a line, right though Earthsprings, right behind the Lodge, for example.)
“Yes, mam.”
“You’re not doing anything on my land…”
“No, mam. And they may not do anything at all up here. They’re planning to start, if they do, down around Highway 21.” (Probably thee to five miles from me, according to my own sources.)
“Well, here’s the thing. This, right here, this isn’t my land, but that is.” (Pointing again.)
“And I need to say that I greatly object to you people coming on my land every few days without even announcing yourselves, except the first ‘courtesy call’ from a very nice man who told me you’d be crossing the land, but the rest of the guys, like the ones on the four wheelers that buzz in, right in front of my house, and don’t even tell me they are coming or that they are there, or why…that isn’t right. At least, you or they can let me know when you are coming on my land. It’s very unnerving, don’t you see?
“Yes, mam, I’d feel the same way.”
“Well, and, for one thing, there is to be a control burn on my property any time now, and I would assume you would not like to be caught out there in the midst of a forest fire!” (Bit of an exaggeration there, but, well, I am into this good.)
“I’ll sure tell ‘em, mam. We have a meeting this evening, and I’ll tell ‘em. What’s your name, mam?”
“Taylor. What’s yours? I’m writing down the names of all of you I encounter, in case there’s a problem later.” (Jim Lemon advised me to do this. Good idea. They seem to straighten up and pay attention after I carefully write down their names, when I can catch them.)

He tells me his name, and tells me again, what I already know, that a big, powerful oil and gas company plans to put 70 deep gas wells in Davy Crockett National Forest alone, and that they may or may not be drilling a gas well in the National Forest somewhere within the 600 or so acre unit adjacent to Earthsprings fence line in the National Forest. When will we know?

“Depends on our seismic,” he says. We both are silent then for a few minutes. I can see that he understands my concern and has no answers for me.

So, after I comment again about my fence line and my water well and my nerves and various other pertinent items on my worry list (what is going to happen to us here, I wonder), he makes his escape, with his big, grey, mud-spattered machine rumbling away.
The dog and cats and I go back onto Earthsprings land, there to continue our task of wrapping water pipes and winterizing buildings for the hard freeze predicted for tomorrow night.

Shift again. The noise of the machines gone, there is the usual forest quiet. Occasional call of crow or hawk, acorns falling on the metal roof, mostly just the gentle wind in the trees. But then, as I am wrapping a pipe beside the Lodge, with Lucy, the kitten, batting away at the dangling insulation and tape in my hands, we hear a different noise.

Bird sound, lots of bird sound. A migration, I realize, coming toward us, as yet unseen, but the chirping and chittering gets louder and louder, a cacophony, and then the lead birds are in sight. Not in a V shape like ducks or geese, but a scatter of scouts of smallish birds, five, ten, twenty, a hundred, and then there are thousands of them, coming right toward us.

The kitten runs right out into the clearing to check it out, while Tux, the tomcat, backs up and backs up until he is right under what he must think is the security of me. The dog just lies there and gazes solemnly up at them, as though he’s seen it all before and is aware that these many, many little creatures are working hard and fast, headed south ahead of the coming cold weather that could kill them if it catches them. (I once saw dead wild birds lying all over the ground in Nacogdoches after a particularly hard freeze.)

“Good speed and safe journey, little brothers and sisters,” I whispered to them. I watched as they slowed their flight, fluttered down, and began landing in the trees very near to me. Hundreds, thousands of dark colored birds settled onto every limb of the vividly colored oak trees right in front of me, and onto all the other trees nearby, mixing their dark colors everywhere right in with the colors of the vibrant autumn leaves, as many birds as leaves, I thought.

“They are resting,” I whispered to the dog and cats, “it must have been a hard, desperate flight so far today, getting ahead of this storm.”
I imagined, foolishly, that I could hear the little birds individual heart beats, as they sat there, perfectly still, catching their breaths, so to speak. I stood very still myself so as not to disturb them, as I tried to determine what kind of birds they were. Smallish, not blackbirds. I couldn’t tell what they were, but they were beautifully shaped and dark all over.

Here and there one or two of our own little local birds who normally hang out in those trees went darting up, trying to get out of the way of the on-coming bird traffic, making a funny, squawking protest, but being so outnumbered greatly, they flew off in another direction for a little ways, flew northeast instead of south, toward my house, and got themselves settled up in a pine tree out of the way of this vast array of other, different, feathered friends.

Then the magic. The whole company of thousands of birds (I’m not exaggerating here about the numbers, really, I’m not) only rested for a very short time. I guess the urgency of the dark clouds massing in the north was obvious to them
.
And so, all at once, without any warning, I heard a single, great “whooosh” of sound, very sudden, very loud, then the sound was gone, and the chittering and chattering began again.

It took me a minute to figure out what had happened, what the sound was, until I realized that it was the sound of thousands of wings of individual birds, all at once, simultaneously, giving one simultaneous flap, all together at once, and taking flight. All at once, I say—without any apparent signal, they all lifted off, into the air, as one, and their little feathered wings, collectively, made that incredible, single sound. A sound at once soft, feathered, but loud in air, a dichotomy of sound, at once gentle and yet also almost explosive, sudden wind under wings.

“Whooosh.”
I stood there in awe, watching them move up and away, and then I heard it again, the sound, father away, as another flock did the same thing, out of trees father away from me, a sudden, loud, simultaneous lift off sound. “Whoooosh!”

I almost wept with the majesty of it. The “flocking” together, the species wisdom, the courage of these little beings, moving thousands of miles back and forth, spring and autumn, trusting their instincts to guide them safely through the mysteries and perils of the land and space before them. Dangers and uncertainties they surely faced. Changes in the terrain below from the last time they flew one way or the other. But fly they did, anyway.

The little stragglers flying in at the last, not getting any rest at all, just flapping to catch up to the rest, touched my heart. “May gentle winds carry you safely,” I prayed, as again, I wished them good speed and safe journey.

I reminded myself, of course, afterward, that other creatures are not just here for my own selfish metaphor-making or medicine-taking, and I did honor them just for who they are, in their own right. But I couldn’t help taking in this gift for myself and this lesson too—their trusting and courage and inner wisdom and communal purpose and perseverance, and, well, simply their perfection of being.

Taking in the “medicine gift” of their having rested so near to me so that I could so clearly see and hear them, I touched my own heart (which has been doing some fluttering of its own lately, causing me to rest also, more than usual).

Standing there, looking south, gazing into a now birdless expanse of sky, I told myself that we humans no less than birds can follow our own perfect patterns and paths through peril and mystery. Whatever the future brings, I and Earthsprings will experience it as it comes. “Give me the courage of the little birds,” I thought, “and the awareness of the connectedness of the community I flock with.”

I thought of a phrase used as a book title by an upcoming and very interesting politician, the phrase being “the audacity of hope.” The writer of this book stresses, in our age of divisive politics and conflicting religions, that in the interest of peace and cooperation, we must pay attention to the values we have in common. Surely the love of the natural world and of its beauties and wonders is just such a value.
I leave you there in my day. Wonder, beauty, wisdom, challenge, hope--all of it. Scattered, spangled, speckled. My day here at Earthsprings.
What is it about me, isolated so much of the time here, that I must send off my musings to you this way? Often I ask myself, “Isn’t it enough just to experience? Why do you need to share?”

This morning I answered that question easily. “It’s just my nature,” I said. “I can’t help it anymore than those birds or those trees. And if people don’t have time or interest to read, well, it doesn’t hurt my feelings if they just delete my little musings. But I can’t help sending them out any more than the bird can help chirping or the kitten can help her forays into everything that appears to be so amazingly, miraculously delightful to her.

I send you my love, perhaps more pure in this moment, thanks to the leaves and the birds and the unknown future challenges of big machines in the hands of methodical men. I hope you think of me as you move into this holiday season, for I shall be thinking of you and of your own innate and incredible wisdom and beauty.

Glenda Taylor
Nov. 29, 2006
Earthsprings