For many years now one of my favourite little hobbies has consisted of searching out trails – out of the way, if possible; little travelled and largely secret to the general population. Yesterday I found one whilst driving aimlessly down every dirt road I could find (in defiance of shelter-in-place suggestions: like most of us, desperate for the outside and a good leg-stretching)
There was a swampy-edged lake and ancient maples. The path was boggy in places, with evidence of ATV tracks. It’s late spring, but it’s been chilly, so it’s my favourite kind of spring – stretched out and slow. There’s time to absorb each new nuance of newness: the day the grass greens, pussy willows for days, brand new tiny buds daily swelling as if inhaling slowly, slowly, the damp air. This week, baby leaves are just starting to unfurl with that gladness of the brightest, softest green. The best colour in the world; signifying life and emergence and rebirth and second, third, and 64th chances.
A partridge, perfectly unnoticed until then, explodes out of its hiddenness. I stop and watch it go. I stand and absorb the straight line of grandfather and grandmother trees. Someone planted these maples: over a century ago, perhaps, this was a farm.
I hear Mary Oliver and Annie Dillard in my head. I hear phrasing and language that beats my heart with their authentic, beautiful, specifically personal voices, and am re-inspired. How does one begin to write at 64 years old, when you’ve passed that voice over for decades, most of a life, in favour of being useful? Is using your voice not useful? Or is it that the unconscious refrain of “not good enough” that has run the life since childhood ….was running the life, and shutting down that voice, saying “no one wants to hear it”. After years of therapy and meditation and opening into the hopeful truth that the not good enough “person” does not exist, maybe the voice can begin to express its own authentic, beautiful, specific sense of things.
So many people write. Who are we writing for, and why? For me, it’s not posterity. I’ll be dead, I won’t care. It’s just the now of it, the deep enjoyment of exploration into what wants expression, in praise of not just the burgeoning up into creation of the swampy-edged lakes and ancient maples and exploding-into-air partridges, but to marvel also this specific hologram of consciousness, and the unending unfolding it contains.
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