Dreaming the World

A dark, drizzly, chilly early spring day. In spite of the cold, color is returning to the maples and other trees and the magnolia’s buds seem to thicken daily. Lichen on tree trunks have begun to take on more color and the field has a bright green hue between the bare spots. In the garden the daffs are just coming into bloom; they will not mind the chill, or even some snow should that occur.

The breeze has picked up, shaking the top branches of our maples. It has less effect on the evergreens below them, although the stronger gusts shake them vigorously as well. At times, this is all reversed which I find curious and a bit puzzling.

I’ve been working on the same cup of coffee for over an hour, and am down to my last sips. The coffee is, of course, now cold but still tasty. We skipped our morning coffees the past couple of days so to resume the ritual carries a particular pleasure.

I’ve been savoring The Sound of a Wild Snail Eating by Elizabeth Tova Bailey. It’s a tiny, exquisitely written memoir about a bedridden young woman and the woodland snail that comes to live by her bedside. Reading along one is slowly drawn into the shared world of writer and snail, and the ways Nature touches and heals us.

I have found the book to be stragely moving, a reminder that all beings on our small planet share much in common, and may become dear to us if we just spend time with them.

Nori just came by and asked for her lunch, which got me up and downstairs to the kitchen for a moment. The rain has picked up but is still on the soft, luxurious side.

Over the weekend we spent time with young friends who are raising small children. The conversation was rich, covering such diverse topics as the tension between the pull to become more socially engaged and the need to protect one’s family, the desire to make safe spaces for wild things in a rapidly declining world, and the necessity of making wildness accessible to our cultivated gardens. We spoke about the task of building community, and the challenges of telling the stories that demand to be told while protecting the stories’ owners. I imagine the discussion mirrors those happening all over the globe, and harkens back to the complexities faced by people in dark times past.

I am grateful for these moments of dense meaning and possibility.