It’s hard to say exactly when I lost the thread of this place. Was it when the heat began to find its way into our bones, sweating pouring down the ridges of our backs, finding ourselves spending hours of summer in a neighbor’s pool or under the feeble fans of our beautiful, if aging, house? Or was it when the bookshop took on bigger dreams and I moved into the whirlwind of realizing them? Or was it another time, on the drive home from the barn finding that the words had fled, migrating like the hummingbirds that are gone from my feeder?
It’s been years since I felt that I knew exactly how I wanted to share my writing with the world. I have a book I’m longing to finish, hour by painstaking hour (and those hours are never 5am, no matter how many motivational advertisements tell me it’s within reach in that particular quiet darkness). I have thoughts, I think, I have images, that should pour out of me. Wasn’t I once a prolific blogger? Didn’t I pour out to the anonymous world the wandering wonderings? What happened, I think.
I was driving to the barn the other day. Come with me. Here is the divot in the road that we always forget, the left wheel rattling. Here is the place where we have to swing ourselves onto a fast moving road that reminds me of a particular turn on 97 in Topsfield, which perhaps you’ve never been to, but you’d see what I mean. The hills hide us from each other, a final act of rebellion after we’ve paved through them. We have to drive boldly here, remember the blind spots are places where we might - or must - trust others.
And here we enter the beginning of Rock Creek, which will stay the same as the landscape on either side gives way. Past the school and the cluster of houses comes the land, the cattle, a house set farther back. Someone’s horse grazes nearby. Someone else has a dog that perches just on the edge of the road and each time he moves I wonder if he will chase me. And we’ll finally see it - the turn into the barn, the familiar horses grazing on our right, and we can roll the window down and breathe air that is the same and not the same.
But I was wondering as I drove down Rock Creek Road, past that school and grazing horse and watchful dog, about whether we really believe we are part of nature. I rarely do, I think - it’s all in my philosophy, tangled with “views” about what humans are or whether animals deserve justice (and what that could mean). But it struck me that the world that I so often observe as if outside it, has gone underground. The horses have grown furry coats, burrowing further under their own skin. The trees and bushes and flowers have shrunk back into the earth, awaiting the secret signal to bloom again. The birds huddle closer on the telephone lines, as if they hide amongst each other, each the protection and the protected.
Why do I think I would be any different? Am I not also a creature who smells change on the wind as the frost sets in? Am I not burrowed under blankets each night, while the cold gains its footing? Am I not, even now, shrinking further into myself, awaiting the secret signal?
Perhaps I am alone in this reckoning, a creative whose spark or seed has appeared vanished, snuffed out. Or perhaps you, reading this, creative yourself (for we all are creating our lives and worlds and receiving others’ creations, aren’t we?) - perhaps you too have thought you were snuffed out, the spark vanished.
But the world tells a troublesome story: the seed that falls underground blooms when it is time. The animals shed their protective shells, the birds take to wings again. Ferns unfurl in the forest with no thought but that it is time to do so.
I am furled, awaiting the secret signal, the mystery of a change in the air and the smell of the rain, I am layered under coats and blankets, awaiting the sounds of spring. I am with nature, wintering, because I must, or perhaps simply because this is where I am.
Perhaps I am beginning to hear change on the wind, here in the world where I write. Perhaps I am remembering that I can unfurl in this space, amongst you. I am grateful for your patience as I hibernated.
May we bloom when the wind changes.
Such beautiful thoughts you've shared. Once I told the Lord (when we lived wayyy out in the country and burned alot of wood in our woodstove) that I felt just like one of the logs in an old pile close to my clothesline. That I felt forgotten and tossed aside. He said to me, What if I told you that I am seasoning you because seasoned wood burns the best. You are not forgotten or tossed aside, simply seasoning to be of more value in the future.
Needless to say I felt so much better after that!
My husband turned to me this fall, after I dropped our youngest child off at college across the country, and said, "You know, God sees all the books you didn't write because of your children and your students and your patients and your parents and your husband and your household."
Also this fall: I returned to teaching after a summer which had provided unforeseen amounts of time and energy to write (which I achieved by herniating a disc and having to cancel, like, everything) and sure enough, the second I entered a classroom, the world-building energy of fiction writing dissipated.
Just sayin'