Running Away

Every woman knows the days that make you want to run away. All it took for me, today, was a single moment, a single line of letters, and that was all. Somewhere in the midst of considering how this could be accomplished, I found myself on the phone with a friend-who-knows-how-to-be-friends and I was complaining of how I don't run enough anymore. We ended the call and I began my ritual, exhausted, eating, and reading. But this time the book I was beginning was focused on the societal anger of women in general, and it hit me, I am not alone, and I CAN run away sometimes.
So, with only 2 pages, in, I laced up my new purple and silver running shoes and off I went. Tansy was only too happy to lead the way, her sassy rear end showing every bit of happiness that a dog can muster when her best friend has gotten her 36 year old, cellulite-ridden ass off the couch and put on those delightfully smelly running clothes.
Spring was waiting for me. She was even more beautiful than I remembered her from years past. It seems this way each April, when the willows cascade over themselves with greeny-yellow leaf drops, and the creeks dance along in the sunshine. Running away brought me to the edge of a swamp, filled to bursting with deafening spring peepers.
It was there in the woods that I found myself again. I found myself in the curls of the fiddleheads, the floating green duckweed, the smell of the change from oak forest to pine woods, and the white puddle of swan tucked away on her nest waiting for life beneath her.
I was no longer running away. I was found again. I could stay in that lovely woods or I could continue home, and either one was going to be just fine, because the woods and the springtime would stay with me, the packed dirt beneath my feet, the green and the frogs and the buds all sprouting away inside of me.
T.

Look Up, Look Down, Lock On

Today my students played a game of "Lock On". This is meant to practice eye contact, and it's fun as well. The way you play is to stand in a circle, and the leader says, "Look up, look down, lock on." and you all look up, look down, and then lock your eyes on someone in the circle. If they happen to be looking back at you, then you sit down with them. Otherwise, the game continues until all but 2 are sitting. I like to vary it by altering whether I say, "look up" or "look down" first.
Tonight in the ever-greening spring woods, I felt like I was playing a version of "Lock On" that kept me looking up, looking down, and locking on constantly! I couldn't make up my mind which direction to look. There were rewards either way, but if I looked up to see which bird was making that amazing sound, then I missed the frogs leaping from my toes to the swamp. When I looked down and saw that garter snake, I missed the flash of red wings that flew by my head. While I was gazing upward at the vine-choked trees, I didn't see all of the fresh wintergreen at my feet.
I felt like Owl at Home, when he can't make up his mind about whether to be upstairs or downstairs, and finally sits on the middle step. Except, on a beautiful spring night in the woods, there is no middle step. There are sticks to be thrown for Tansy, foam peanuts to get out of the swamp, logs to be walked on, moss to be patted, flowers to admire, mushrooms to examine, peepers to stalk, fiddle-heads to photograph... I cannot look only up; I cannot look only down. I need eyes in the back of my head and under my feet and in all of my finger tips! I want to lock-on with each of these, without missing the others.
T.

Use It While You've Got It

I could rant about video games and how very much I despise their existence at any given time. I can quote all kinds of statistics and research, and I can point to the evils of how it affects children so detrimentally. I don't really have anything new to add to that, but today I saw something that made part of my thoughts on this topic explode with frustration all over again.

We were at a backyard concert on a beautiful, sunny, 65-70 degree June day. There was a plethora of kids available, and a climber, swing set, and foam thingies with which many boys were busily whacking each other, which is What Boys Do. Better yet, in my opinion, there was an inviting green hill, away from the boring grown ups, but still in safe sight. The hill had tempting trees all around and nearby it, and the mystery of what was on the other side of the hill as well. There was an enormous and beautiful evergreen tree, which just begged to be inspected, and the entire front yard which was also a grown up free zone. I heard tell there was a lake nearby as well.

As I stood up to stretch my sore, cramped, out of shape legs, and shake out my joints which cannot be in one position for too long, I turned around and my How Things Should Be temper flared. Sitting, or rather, growing, in two camp chairs, were two young boys. Their bodies were folded forward and their eyes were glued to the cute, portable, plastic video games in their hands. The only moving parts were their fingertips and possibly they blinked. I was outraged. I wanted to hunt down their parents and lecture them. I wanted to march up there and take those damn games and chuck them in the lake.

I wanted to shout, "WAKE UP BECAUSE YOU ARE MISSING YOUR CHILDHOOD!!!! Your body can still move and jump and run and heal with ease and beauty! Get your ass out of those chairs and go PLAY! Make trouble, climb a tree, have a sword fight with dangerous sticks and get your ankles scratched and mosquito bitten! Go breathe deeply from running hard, and just WONDER what is over that hill! Notice that the sky is clouding up and that the air is changing. Know the difference between the different birds and bugs that fly by you. You have who-knows-how-much of your life left and you are spending this precious time in a virtual world that means nothing and will not benefit you emotionally, socially, or academically. You will be old someday and all you WILL be able to move are your fingertips and your eyeballs! Use your legs and arms and muscles while you can! Go tame Nature or let it tame you. Or at the very least, TALK to each other! Giggle and laugh and find out what other people are doing or thinking. BE a child."

But I settled for staring and making one or two disgusted comments, which probably earned me some more "negative hateful" reputational perspectives.

Now, I have to get my ass out of this chair and my eyes and fingertips away from this computer, and go talk to my husband and watch my bird feeder.

T.

A Sunshiny Morning With Mushrooms

Normally I take pride in being able to find beauty on a gloomy, rainy day. I enjoy going out in my color-splashed rain boots and rhino coat to do things around the yard or take a walk in the dripping woods. Yesterday I went for a run in those woods, with rain loaded leaves drooping into my path. I was able to delight in the mushroom celebration that is going on at this moment in the dark of the woods, but I wasn't able to translate that delight into written words. Some days are just dark, and yesterday was one of them.

Today I woke, finally, to the sun and blue sky. I confess, despite my disdain for people's inability to enjoy anything but "sunny and 70", there are times when it is all I long for. This moment, with sun shining through my filthy windows and polishing up my dark hair, warming my arms, I am miles happier than I was yesterday or the many rainy days prior.

Now I am able to bring the mushrooms into the sun. They don't like it, which is why they are all out there joyously (for mushrooms) mucking about in the black wetness of the undisturbed woods. I have never in my life seen so many nor such a variety. For all that I know about my local nature, I know next to nothing about mushrooms. It is good for my brain to wonder about new things.

Along and sometimes in the path are fungi literally springing to life before my eyes. Wet, black dirt one moment, and at the next glance, tiny, electric yellow caps, elongated and surely poisonous. Further on my way I am halted by the appearance of a literal forest of what seem to be sea coral sponges! Pale, yellow-ish orange, with all the intricacies of coral, and they carpet the forest floor in multitudes. Most common are the flat mushrooms, capping the ends of longish stems, and with varying degrees of white and cream, they often have what appear to be bites out of them. I imagine some small elf trotting along munching one bite out of each mushroom, as we might out of a box of chocolates. To my hungry imagination, the next batch looks temptingly like large, whole wheat pancakes. I run by with syrup in mind. Sprinkled throughout the woods are startlingly beautiful red fungi, with curled lips and thick bases. They are the red of fall; the deepest red of maples and dusky apples. The most obviously poisonous, (though they may not be, for all I know), are what I think of as toadstools. They conjure what Disney mimics in its rendition of movies like Alice in Wonderland. Egg-yolk yellow with bumps and spots all over, perfectly shaped little umbrellas. I am without a doubt that fairy-folk dance 'round these each night while I sleep. 

Later I will take my camera into the woods and try for a mushroom photo gallery. I suspect they will hide from me then, not wishing to be exposed to the world in the midst of their fungus revelry. I shall have to be very sneaky.

T.

Four Walls Vs. The Elements

Today my husband and dog and I went for a ski in the woods. We chose the "red" trail, which was new to us and a bit challenging in terms of curves and hills. At one point as I stopped to rest on a little, wooden bridge over a dark and cold stream, I just stood and breathed. I could hear the softness of a light snow on the trail, the sounds of Tansy splashing into the creek, and the flutter of wings in the lower branches of nearby bushes and trees. My cheeks were cold and the rest of me beat in time with my heart and was toasty warm. I felt like lying down on that snow-covered bridge and just becoming part of everything around me.

The interruption of Doug's cell phone was a text message from his youngest daughter who was "getting to go bowling". Instantly my mind was transported to one of those places and I felt like shuddering the image away. No wonder bowling is an activity I have always abhorred. For me, the dim, smoky, airless room filled with the smell of fried food, cheap beer, and people's socks is one of my worst nightmares. To be trapped without a window or light, beneath ceilings that feel as if they are closing in on me... I pushed the mental image away and let the white light of the woods enter me again, and I knew then that I will not spend a minute of my life in places that make me unhappy unless I am forced to do so. My soul feeds on the movement and stillness of my body through places that have plants, earth, water and air.

The older I become and the more often I find myself contrasting places that I love with places I avoid, the more I realize what is essentially me. Even in my own home, during the hours I spend between walls, I choose to have living plants draping over my arm-chair, ivy crawling up my curtain, photographs of Lake Michigan and tree tops, and when there is light to be had, my curtains are flung wide to capture as much as possible. There are no artificial scents to be found, and so my nose can smell the earth of my plants, the coming of snow, and the scent of my own skin, so that I know myself to be non-artificial and whether clean or unclean, I am real.

These things which grow and die, and are silent in their purposes, though their purposes are obvious, are where I find myself and my spirit. I am ever more convinced that this is the critical connection for all people, but I can only make this choice for myself, and watch as my loved ones struggle with all that is between four walls.
T.

Swamp Concert

I should not write incessantly about spring. I do it every year. They say that all writers succumb to springtime and the follies of writing it inspires, and so I, being oppositional, want to prove Them wrong. Perhaps truly gifted writers find and give inspiration on those dullest of February Michigan days when dirty snow piles are all that remain of winter, and grass refuses to consider the color green. I must not be gifted, because I can’t. If I write on those days, it is because something else has inspired me, and usually it is my own fury over the state of society or the idiocy of certain members of my community.
But Spring. I can’t help myself. Out There, I feel things that the poets have already used up. Alive, connected, thrilled. It’s a chorus of earth things calling, croaking, trilling, singing, exclaiming. Something even laughed, and while I’d love to think it was laughing at my leaky polka-dot muck boots, I don’t disillusion myself that I rank as anything other than a mild disturbance out there in the swamps. Peepers peeping away like mad. Cranes warbling somewhere nearby. Red-wings trilling and flirting. Cardinals, robins, chickadees all change to their spring dialect. I found fern clumps starting to swell, and a fallen tree that was collapsing last fall is now only soft red, fibrous dirt snuggling down to become new flooring in the woods. Ducks don’t seem to belong somehow, in their colorful, carved looking perfection. The wood duck sits awkwardly in a tree momentarily, trying to balance on those silly feet. I tell it that ducks don’t sit in trees, so it obligingly flaps down and finds its way to the water with a great deal of commotion.
Tansy drops her stick and bounds into the swamp to chase a surprised muskrat. Muskrat disappears beneath the water and swims her way through the murky stems while Tansy looks after her in surprise. What kind of cat or squirrel can jump into the water and swim away?
I see Deb’s tent is up, blending greyly into the tree trunks. She must be watching the fox den again. I wish I could take a week off from work and do the same, but Tansy would ruin the experience, I am sure. I wonder if the foxes know?
Where once we skated, now bugs skate on black water. The ice is gone and duckweed rims the edges. I spy a delightfully lowered tree trunk, curved to form a swing and just skimming the water’s surface. Knowing my boots will be full of water in seconds, I decide it’s worth the wet to find a perch on that curving trunk. Feet wet, but soul is content. I am sitting on the water and the swamp settles into its un-practiced, unharmonious concert again.
I am torn between wanting to share it and wanting to keep it to myself. I want to tell you not to miss a moment of it, but I want to own it exclusively. It is mine, and it should be everyone’s. Today it sat in my boots and under my palms. Every sense was engaged, including one that only happens in the spring. The sense to come home and write, to strive to capture what no camera, video, or paintbrush can. It is hearing the birds and frogs, plus seeing the green things, plus feeling the bark under my hands, smelling the black muck on Tansy’s fur, and tasting the wild chives as I walk past a tree festooned with white fairy mushrooms… it equals … This.

T.

Spring Weekend

Running allows me to see things I've never seen before. Each time I do, I feel a wonder that I've been privileged in this way. I question whether anyone else has noticed and whether I'm the only one who finds these to be small miracles? Just Saturday I ran up a hill of the tree farm. This is the same hill I've encountered dozens of times on foot and on skis. On this Saturday morning it was frosty outside except where the sun had been wandering. Running south, the sun on my left, the Christmas trees on that side cast perfectly cone-shaped shadows, and each shadow was colored in with white frost also in the perfect shape of a cone. In between where there was no tree or shadow, the grass was dry and clean. There was something just so cool about seeing those frost shadows; I've never noticed anything like that before.

On my way home I stopped to let Tansy wallow at the in-between where the lakes meet. While she submerged herself, I turned to look out over the bigger lake and noticed a pair of mallards courting. They hopped up out of the water on to the sheer, thin ice and I waited for it to break. It remained firm and they slipped and slid, waddling on their little, orange webs, across the ice, and I wondered if they wondered why the water was hard.

Later I found that the sun was still beckoning, so Tansy and I went back to the woods, this time just to walk to my Watching Log. Well, walking, sitting, and relaxing was my purpose, but Tansy's was to entertain me by repeatedly whacking the backs of my legs with her muddy stick in an effort to entertain me by letting me throw the stick into the swamp for her. In between tosses, I was able to sit on a dry patch of fairy moss and breathe in the coming spring. The red-wings are back, and the geese that fly over now have a new element to their calls. The ferns haven't yet begun to unfurl, but I can pull away leaves and old ferns to see the tightly curled fiddle-heads-to-be. I saw few bugs, and only one basking snake. I walked out into the swamp as far as i could manage on the old fern hummocks. Just as I intended to make the leap to one at jumping distance, I took a closer look at the branch I intended to grab for balance. It's a good thing I checked because it was entirely bristling with the sort of thorns you'd find on an old fashioned rose bush. I wondered what it was, and began noticing more and more of them. I've never seen them before, and without leaves I couldn't identify it. Do roses grow in swamps?

Tansy paddled toward me with her stick in her mouth, happy eyes glowing above the floating, green duckweed. I hastily retreated, knowing that I'd soon be the recipient of a swampy shake. This is nothing like a Shamrock Shake. I continued my walk along the edge of the swamp, sticking as close to the water as possible without skewering myself on autumn olives or the mysterious thorn bushes. I remember reading that life is found on the edges. The edges where land meets water or the edges where one type of habitat changes to another. These are where I focus.

I notice a tree with a tiny wild rose plant sprouting in the fork of the two main trunks. It amazes me how life finds footholds everywhere we let it. (Not that humans let it hold much!) I am admiringly grateful every year that even after such a long, cold, snowy time, life comes back. Every year it does this. All winter I walk or run in that woods and think, "There will come a day when there are green things here and I will be wearing shorts." and every summer I walk or run in that woods and think, "There will come a time when I am bundled into my warmest clothes and there will be nothing but snow and ice here." Both times are hard to imagine when they are so far away in time and experience.

While lying on the Watching Log, I hear two crows snarking at each other. Perhaps they aren't, really, it's just their tone of voice, but it seems cranky. In a pause of their conversation, I hear the laughing bird, (I don't know who it is), laugh at whatever the crows have been saying. It makes me laugh too, though for all I know, they're talking about me. I don't really have illusions like that though; I have utter respect for that woods. I know it has nothing to do with me and it goes on whether I put words to the page or snap its picture or not. It is impossible to take personally anything that goes on there. It just IS.

This is probably what I love best about how I feel there. It is a place and time that I can also just BE. There is no doing. There is no anxiety or worrying. Just Being. No expectations, no deadlines, no needs. Whether I notice that cool, gnarled piece of tree knot, it will still be there. All that happens around me has nothing to do with me. The red log that I noticed 2 years ago when it began to get softer, spongier, and full of the little lives that help it break down, is now only a fibrous sort of dirt. By the end of summer, there will be no trace of it. This is another wonder. Nature manages itself quite well without us.

I follow a deer trail back out to the human trail. I see where they have come down to drink at the water's edge. I love the smell of the black swamp muck, rich with growth. Soon there will be turtles and tadpoles. I leave with my mind, body, and spirit back in line, readjusted and awakened to what matters. Things are only things, and I too will someday be only a sort of dirt, ready to grow new life.

T.

Ice

The vista before me is defying words, denying a camera.  Each branch, each twig, every small stalk of any kind is sheathed in ice.  In some lights and angles it is a forest dipped in pure silver.  In others, the sheer clarity of the ice is breathtaking.  Sun glimmering off of every slick surface gives no rest to the eyes.  Every craving I’ve ever had for glitter and sparkle, every strand of tinsel ever draped; it is indulged a thousand times over. 

In the dark of the pines, the ice has brought down hundreds of small branches, and the scent of pine sap reaches me.

Following my trail to the tree farm I stop to gasp at the entrance. Large and small branches block my path, and I feel a certain reverence as I duck beneath ice encased trees.  I can’t help stopping to put a bare hand to the cold tree limb sealed tightly in its beautiful burden.

The tree farm is all that I had hoped for when driving past earlier.  I’d caught a tantalizing glimpse on my way home and was not disappointed.  On one side, each tree was normal, green and bristling.  But viewing the other face, like a two-featured mask, they were dripping with decorations one could never purchase at the store.  Every needle on that side, every pine cone and seed was draped in solid, sparkling crystal drops.  I thought of the phrase, “genuine Swarovski crystal” and laughed out loud in delight, realizing yet again how superior nature is to anything people might create or purchase.  At that moment, with my whole world spread out and shining, I wouldn’t have traded places with a queen.

T.