Landing
Why here and why now?
Driving off of Beach Hill today a thick mist was laying just below the tops of the newly fluorescent green canopy. It was storybook beautiful. Fairytale mythical. High definition magnificence for anybody willing to glance in that direction. The bright greens and grays, the reds and browns all perfectly arranged into a day and a place and a life. This precious moment of the year, this pocket of days after the red turns to bright green, just before the leaves open into the thousand shades of ‘other green’, is one that I am only aware of after years of meeting it from the same vantage point.
Looking out the same window on a changing world is something we all do without much thought most of the time. We mostly consume it like it’s there for us. Watching the junk boats sail past in Victoria Harbor, seeing lightening strike Hundskopf in the high peaks of the Tyrolean Alps, watching the traffic in Union Square…all of these scenes have whizzed by my open or blurry eyes like a tv show and the world has turned.
I have turned with it.
I have churned in it.
Only now, in my 48th year, can I see what I am looking at.
I can see the delicate, ornate and fleeting dance of life living. I can see the hill I live on for the bursting community of love and longing that it is. I can feel in my bones that it is not mine, not here for my consumption, but rather it’s a mirror and a parent and an invitation and an offering to bow to.
Landed is what I am and am becoming.
The work of re-indigenizing to this Earth is work we all need to do. Whether we’re glowing in skyscrapers, out at sea, toes in the Earth, or somewhere in between, we are all being called home.
I’m finding my way there, slowly but surely, and every once in a while I get a glimpse of the bright green electric pulsing world around me and I realize I’m there.
Home in my body.
Home in my heart.
Home on a hill in the northeast corner of Vermont, on the way to nowhere and smack dab in the center of the Universe.
Letting that impossible green penetrate my deep brown eyes, drip back into my dark grey matter, and seep through my skin and into my heart is life-giving. It’s medicine and magic and it’s crying out, singing out, to be praised and venerated and devoured.
What does the color green taste like?
Like the spicy alive wild garlic - ramps - that love the eastern slopes and trout lillies.
Like the smooth supple spears of tulip leaves that insist on tip toes and good posture.
Like the tender seedlings who still need to be tucked in with a blanket at bedtime.
Green tastes like life and possibility and resilience and remembering. It tastes like the deep knowing that life will keep living and breath will keep breathing and the song will keep singing.
This time of year, wet with the medicine of the east, I remember why I shovel all the snow and bear the heavy, dark forever that is winter on Beach Hill. I remember that I am right here, right now for a reason…
to bear witness
to participate
to live.