Meditative Prose
Wednesday, 2 January 2008
Flowers and Stone
Happy 2008, everyone. In lieu of enabling comments (which I may eventually do), I offer instead a link to email me at the bottom of the sidebar on the left there. For the time being, I’m adopting Ran Prieur’s mode of handling comments: you email me about anything at all, and if I have something interesting to say about it, I post your comment here along with my own commentary. Hopefully that will lead to more insightful comments from good people like yourself. Yeah, you.
The photo above is from my family home in southwestern Pennsylvania. The stone in the background was originally part of the house, a 168-year-old stone farmhouse and former Quaker meeting house, and has since been incorporated into a wall my dad built.
Home remains wonderfully timeless and comfortable, despite the changes from year to year. My trip home last week was all too brief and more than a little stressful. The best part was a long walk in the woods with Sarah. We followed deer trails and turkey droppings, and walked among the ruins of the stone barn that stood on a small hill not far from the main house. We saw what’s left of the stone spring house, with the water still trickling through the north wall. I could write a book about that place. Someday I will.
At one point, we sat on the trunk of a fallen tree with the intention of being quiet until something showed itself to us. The stream a few feet away gurgled pleasantly the whole time, and after fifteen minutes a mess of birds settled in the trees along the edge of a field not far away. The birds would talk to each other for a while, then take off all at once and dive and sweep over the field before landing in the trees again. Eventually they settled right above our log, and what seemed like light rain — after all, it was fifty degrees in Pennsylvania — turned out to be milky-white bird shit.
After a few seconds, I remembered that I wasn’t merely an observer and clapped my hands together twice to remind the birds of my presence. They obligingly moved on to other trees, and we moved on too — to the end of the woods, a road, a field, horses, an owl, a toy car, and a possum skull. I couldn’t really tell you what happened for the rest of my short Christmas break, besides lots of TV and beer. But those two hours in the woods were just what I needed.
