The Wonder Of Place

I’ve spent a long time listening, and the story is still being told. The four seasons of nature instill within us the hope that our own life seasons will somehow blend into this seamless transition that lie between each turning as it comes.

This last year has found me starring out of windows, out of doorways and out from beneath boughs of evergreens and hardwood branches laden with life. This has been a difficult season, one of great beauty the likes of which I would venture to say I’ve never known in any of the 29 years that have preceded it. Also one of unprecedented despair, chilling loneliness and debilitating hopelessness that’s brought me to my knees and woke me from sleep, defenseless and starring into the void from my bedside long past the midnight hour.

The tension between utter insanity and irrevocable bliss has never been strung tighter. Never before has the lens of perception been so tightly focused on the natural world around me. The spiritual is something I am learning about, a new way of viewing my place on this planet and the planet that holds me in place. I am not learning new boundaries, only the ancient boundaries that have always been known by those who are watching. It is a way of respecting this place and the people that inhabit it. It is a way I have to relearn, a way that a part of me has always known but is now in the process of remembering.

I am in the midst of what seems to be the almost glacially slow process of trusting myself again. Through learning to trust nature, learning to trust the cycles of life, decay, rebirth and renewal I come out from within that frightened place in my mind and step into wonder.

It’s been said that the mind is a terrible thing to waste, even more so I am realizing that the mind is a terrible place to waste away inside of. The movement from mind to heart is a slow, almost imperceptible journey. Yet a journey is underway.

This place I stand, this middle place somewhere between all that has come before and all that may lie ahead, this is a good place to be. No, not an easy place, and not an altogether pleasant place, but a beautiful and authentic place nonetheless.

I’ve been in this place before, but I was very young and the memory of it is too far way, lost in the dense forest of growth that springs up in the mind as the seasons fade from one year to the next.

As Barry Lopez once said, “We simply do not understand our place in the universe and have not the courage to admit it.”

With this in mind I continue on a journey that is nothing more than a human trying to admit his lack of understanding of the “place” he finds himself. I do not know this place but I know that this place, this place most assuredly knows me.