There are days when the smell of the good earth is just better, stronger, more fertile, more nourishing. Today is one of those days. As I walk from the top of the meadow down towards the maples by the creek, the smell of wet leaves and mild winter air and moss fills me. After so many weeks of ice that the creek actually froze from shore to shore, the rain has come. Even from here, I can hear it: the rain has filled the creek.
I fell in love again last night.
I like how this seems to keep happening. We keep returning to each other, rooted and whole, even in the wake of intemperate weather. At least, I am. I actually can’t speak for him, other than to say that this morning I saw the face that first I fell in love with. I know this because I took a picture of him that morning, almost a year ago, after we’d spend half a dozen hours awake and talking and not talking, entwined in his bed. I know because I see that face from time to time, when we have put ourselves into each others’ care again, when the soup of life has released us for a time.
I may actually be relaxing and accepting this love.
As I walk down the muddy, grassy hill, the ground is so wet that it almost dissolves beneath me. Sunshine streaks down, barking. There is a family of squirrels, three at least. Squirrels are his greatest desire. It took me years to teach him not to tow me, the skier behind his speedboat, when he spotted a squirrel on our walk. These squirrels are slow or inexperienced, or just a little stupid. As I watch, two of them hesitate, then dash for a tree that is not the nearest tree. Sunshine is very close, he is a blur of gold fur and teeth. He could, for the first time, catch a squirrel. But then he slows slightly, pulls up. I realize that I’ve seen him do this before. He doesn’t know what to do when he gets close.
Sometimes I want to take this love apart and see what it’s made of.
But not last night. It helped that we had some time to miss each other – my cold, his kids. It helped more, I think, that I have been meditating and doing ritual and learning about tree biology, which is to say magic, and reading Starhawk’s new book City of Refuge, which is smart and visionary and political and hopeful and unstinting in its willingness to see the best and the worst that we humans are capable of...
All of this instead of booze and Netflix.
I feel calm inside a lot of the time, now. I am less blinded by the many fears that last year contained. This in spite of all the reasons to panic, not least of them tomorrow’s inauguration.
I am taking comfort in rain. Lately, I can see it again. Today I saw the rain drops on the green rose canes, each one a perfect reflection of the world, turned upside down. In each perfect drop, the pale sky, the spark of the sun, the dark feathers of the trees.
I am not so afraid of my desire, now.
Note on timing- I posted this on Tuesday, January 24, but I wrote it -- you can tell from the future tense reference to the inauguration -- on January 20th. I feel that blogs are supposed to be immediate, but sometimes it takes me a while to get comfy with a reveal, or to edit when I'm busy with marching and meditating. XO.