Category: nature

The land is the appointed remedy for whatever is false and fantastic in our culture. The continent we inhabit is to be physic and food for our mind, as well as our body. The land, with its tranquilizing sanative influences is to repair the errors of a scholastic and traditional education, and bring us into just relations with men and things. The habit of living in the presence of these invitations of natural wealth is not inoperative, and this habit, combined with the moral sentiment which, in the recent years, has interrogated every institution, usage, and law, has naturally, given a strong direction to the wishes and aims of active young men to withdraw from the cities and cultivate the soil.

   —Ralph Waldo Emerson

If, mid-winter, you crave the comfort of warmer temperatures, then you’re going to have to settle for cloud-befuddled skies, fog patches, and mists rising from every snowy field.

With coldness comes clarity. Stars gleam brightest when temperatures are plunging. Then the air stings like iron and brings a flush to your cheeks. It stiffens your fingers and makes you pause mid-stride, testing your gloves and taking stock of your endurance.

How long can you withstand the chill?

Cold teaches you something about time.

You might grimace and stamp your feet—but oh that light! Those distances!

Everything is defined.

(Photo by kronerda Creative Commons, Some Rights Reserved.)

The workman fixing the window plays his radio all day, and except for late afternoons when I hear country songs, Rush Limbaugh and his colleagues fill our yard with bitter ranting.

There are news organizations and politicians that would have us spend our days rehearsing anger.

Better, I think, to spend our days appreciating what we have. If I give more thought to John Boehner than my daughter today, I’m a fool. Let’s stay informed, but perhaps we should treat the news like a Northern lake on a winter day: a brief immersion suffices to remind of us of vast inhospitable depths.

Look at all that’s around us that might otherwise go overlooked.

Walking the dog today, I saw sumac leaves as red as coxcombs, bittersweet berries like golden beads draped on trees. By the spruce trees, a turkey vulture circled low, just above the treetops, sharing its shadow.

On days when there’s barely a breeze, you’ll still see children running through yards, determined to get their kites aloft. Their young spirits appreciate even the faintest brush of air.

As a Zen teacher would say: Just this. Just this.

We’re in the season of mists and mellow fruitfulness—and this year, lots and lots of crabapples.

A cloudy morning. The pickers had gone. I took the dog for a walk. We were heading toward the back of the property, when suddenly Sadie began sniffing at the base of a row of fir and spruce. A friend of mine and I had cleared under these trees in the spring, and the ground there seemed empty now except for some tendrils of bittersweet attempting to snake up into the branches. Half an hour earlier, when I had been picking blueberries on the other side of these trees, I had had this corner of the field to myself. As then, all seemed quiet and calm.

Sadie pushed further under the boughs. I heard “chook, chook, chook”—then all was raucous commotion as a flock of turkeys lifted into the air, just beyond Sadie’s startled face. Brown wings beating and beaks a-jabber, they exploded in a panic, criss-crossing in flight, and scattered into the high boughs of pines and firs and birch along the back of the field.

I laughed out loud at the sudden transformation of the air. It was as though Sadie’s curiosity had conjured the birds from the ground. Now the birds hung in the trees, waiting silently like rabbits that had done their duty and been produced out of a hat.

What would the day produce next from this ordinary, silent, spring-loaded stage?

It’s rained almost every day for a week, and we haven’t mowed, so the grass stands five inches or taller in the fields, and that’s not counting the long gauzy stretches we’ve let go wild to offer the bees their due of clover and dianthus.

Walking the dog the other day—in silence, since we both know the route—I noticed a shimmering movement in the grass before me: a little thin milk snake, a pale stripe on its dark back, slithered away in the grass, inches before my boots. I haven’t seen a snake on our land in over a year, and I was pleased for this sighting, however brief, which reminded me, among other things, that we are surrounded by much that we can’t see or that we simply overlook.

This is a loud time in New Hampshire. On weekends and sunny evenings, motorcycles roar past with radios blaring loud enough to be heard a couple of blocks away. Two nearby race tracks offer their own distinct varieties of noise: the dragway emits repeated throaty crescendos while the NASCAR track serves up a persistent up-shifting and down-shifting hum. And in the land of Live Free or Die, citizens set off their own fireworks for weeks on either side of Independence Day. Usually they’ll wait until dark, but occasionally a mild afternoon will be punctuated with an percussive boom that echoes off the tree line.

I enjoy a good fireworks show, and I don’t begrudge anyone their enjoyment of racing, but I am thankful for these these moments when walking (not driving) through a meadow (not a track or roadway) I discover nature in miniature showing itself, and I am attentive enough to notice.

There’s a lurking, slithering, whispering world out there, and too often we miss it.

I always enjoy the bustle of Manhattan—or of San Francisco or even Berkeley—but I equally enjoy the quiet and stillness, especially evident early in the morning, of rural New England.