being present

a wild unfurling

oh, time, time, time. there you go inexplicably flying again. will you ever tell us why?

i didn’t move to the little yellow house on the glimmering land across the river over that way. i did go to visit and laenie and i walked together and she showed me the oak savanna and the bluffs where the mountain lion sleeps and the snake savanna where her and her brother once, stoned themselves, took two big slates of rock and made a chair because sometimes you just need a chair made outta rocks and where they used to have campfires and where they probably should clear out some of the brush to make space for that sort of thing to happen again. she showed me how the invasive plants on the hillside “don’t know when to die” and that we can see because they’re all that’s left green when everything else is brittled by the arrival of the cold.

she showed me to the circle of savanna oaks she and her friends had planted a few decades ago or so as an homage and an echo of the celtic tree calendar in their own way. their own personal non-stone henge. many pets were buried in the center there, she told me, and a placenta. sometimes they mow the grass and sit together and drum out there, up on the hilltop with sweeping silent wide skies around them. she told me that every year the trees got taller, the circle they hold gets stronger.

she is exactly the kind of being i would imagine would might become who spends their life in the forest in communion with the wild. she’s jovial and thoughtful, curious about people and enthusiastic about bringing more people to live on the land.

the house was warm and bright and humming quietly with life in a way that only a place so beloved could. we sat at the table she drank tea while i drank coffee that she only keeps on hand for guests after learning from experience that people would drive the 15 minutes one way to town in the absence of it if they woke up to find none on hand and we talked through a list of questions about how we resolve issues with people we live with, what our ideal ambiance for a house would be and other practical things. thistle, the other woman who currently lives there, joined us and we had a casual conversation about what life might look like if we lived it together.

i could have talked with laenie well into the night if i didn’t have to drive home at dusk through winding roads saturated with deer making their pilgrimages from one field to another and she didn’t have plans. there was effortless kinship and deep joy.

there were a few practicalities to be considered. first of all, i don’t have a car. i had magically summoned up a 2010 honda fit with 150,000 miles on it from a queer community connection for $3000 in the day i decided to go out and visit the farm. just a few days after the election, this person was eager to support another member of her community. unbelievable bargain though that was, i have -$1000 in my bank account and owe my dad $8,000 and have more than that on credit cards and while i am aware that i have innumerable gifts that want to be expressed in the world and there are uncountable pathways that actually being able to pay my bills while being at home the truth is that it would have been a major risk to leap without knowing i could bring in money.

the sensation of being laden with possibilities that i don’t know how to take action on them in a way that serves the wider world and my survival in it is not an unfamiliar one. it’s an edge i’ve been tending a long, long, time.

aside from that, the bedroom they’re looking to rent is on the second story up a very narrow and steep staircase that i am certain mona couldn’t climb. and if she did, as she has been, find herself overcome with the energy to climb up it is highly unlikely she would be able to get down and the stairs are too narrow and too steep and she’s too heavy and i’m not strong enough to carry her down reliably. moreover, the house is old and things can be easily heard and if the revolving door of a dance mona and i do between the outside and in every night carried on it would undoubtedly wake both laenie and thistle. they offered me to stay in the guest room downstairs and use the upstairs room but there was too much unknown in terms of what the animals might need. thistle also has a cat, one who left her previous home because she didn’t get along with other cats. sibyl, the cat who effortlessly blesses me with her company, left her previous home because their other cat wouldn’t stop bullying her and she wouldn’t fight back.

unexpectely, her cat looks just like sibyl. both dilute tortoiseshell in coloring, she jumped up onto what would have been my bed as soon as i walked in the room and i got the message: this space is taken.

i will circle back around to more of what there is to say about that land and those people and what feels alive and possible there and what i learned and what i’m still contemplating but as i was considering if it was the right place for me over the next few days, something kept coming up for me: stay where you are. there are things that are about to happen that are happening for you but you have to be there to meet them.

i’ve been letting my resistance erode as the message has refused to change. while at this precise moment it does also mean staying put as practically a bedfellow to a gargantuan beast of a howling heater and that i have to push an old dog up the stairs what seems like a thousand times a day there was a deeper teaching and a deeper message there.

i have been trying to get away for as long as i can remember.

and the stay here was telling me that the things i’ve been dreaming of have been looking for a home and place to actually land and that i need to stay put long enough for them to root.

i started to notice more comprehensively what i have been cultivating here and feeling the web that has been being woven.

i started to feel my body as the instrument of the cosmos as i do often enough but which always tells me that i’m hearing/feeling/sensing something unencumbered by story. it’s just the song of the moment. it’s just the way it is.

—

part 2 incoming.

this has been a prelude that is

like all things

complete unto itself.