Noisily hauling the recycling bin up the gravel driveway, I was suddenly stopped by the stare of a deer. She fixed her eyes on me, totally still. I stared at her, completely motionless. We had a silent exchange for several minutes during which we acknowledged one another. I found this to be precious. This happened repeatedly with my deceased grandmother as well.
Sifting through photos in search of an urgently needed image, I was halted by the teal hillside in Ireland where my mother’s scattered ashes have become one with soil and grass, wildflower and sheep manure, and perhaps have been carried by now into the ultramarine fathoms of the surrounding sea.
Splashing paint across a small landscape of paper, the magenta unexpectedly ran into the peach and I paused - reminded of a Father’s Day card I once made for my grandfather. Not knowing what to draw for him, I penned a necktie that was orange with pink polka dots.
Glancing out the window two days ago, a cowbird I’ve never met before was perched – nearly at eye level – atop the fence. Though I cannot trace the thread that leads me from him to this: I am instantly hurtled backward to a curvy street of beautiful gardens that I’d go out of my way to walk down on my way home from third grade. When I arrived at my house after one such detour, my beloved, father-like uncle was visiting from across the country – a wonderful surprise I had not expected.
Writing last week about an 0ddly-unpleasant outdoor school experience as a ten-year old, my great aunt’s death woke up within me. A full two decades before I began my own journey of education about death and my entrance into hospice service, I could not comprehend why my distant aunt’s death was hanging like a muddy curtain across my silent lips.
Listening to colleagues reading their ecological writing aloud, I was thrust into the back yard of my childhood home. I was standing barefoot, bare-legged, in the grass among very tall strangers – my paternal aunts, apparently - whose names I could not pronounce and whose faces I never saw again. Those soft, fragrant blades underfoot were a comfort, a familiarity, my kin – where the humans towering over me were not.
***
How can we continually open ourselves to the rich terrain of unexpected reverie that can offer itself to us via nonhuman beings and landscape geographies?
How can we accept the nonlinearity of Nature’s scent, shape, texture, sound that evokes the past and allows what our hungry histories need for nourishment?
It can be as simple as letting go, letting be, becoming present to the tangibility of Earth and turning down the volume on our labels, judgments, assumptions.
We are invited multiple times every day onto the pathway of Materia Naturae …
