Sensing Forward

I could smell the Carolina lilies before I could see them. Just the day before, hiking along the Bartram trail upslope from Martin creek, I had been taken by surprise and wonder to find a single lone beauty standing left of the path, where never before I had seen one. I bent to meet her and soaked her fragrance into my whole body. I could feel the core of my being drinking in that sweet melody. I felt the honey slide down from nose to tail, infusing secret places I had forgotten were there. Now, along the winding switchbacks between Otto, NC and Standing Indian campground, the rocky dirt road is bejeweled with the look alike Turk’s Cap lilies and the bright almost quinacra violet-red seed structures of umbrella plants in moist places under black boulders. I pause many times along the way to get closer looks and whiffs of a variety of wildflowers. 

 

The deeply fragrant Carolina or Michaud's Lily (Lilium michauxii) (looks very similar to the Turk's Cap) 

and the Umbrella Leaf(Diphylleia Cymosa) with seed berries

Last night, arriving at Standing Indian, I chose a site I wouldn’t have picked if not for being stuck waiting on a truck and trailer in front of me unable to back into their reserved spot. A little while later, after a rich though brief time in the woods up slope, where dancing vines move between trunks approaching old growth near boulders that appear to have been dropped there as if from a passing star, I made my way back down the trail. As dusk was enveloping my campsite, violin and banjo voices threaded through the trees as I looked skyward from my hammock and felt the solid embrace of cucumber tree and birch with rhododendron reaching over and under me. 

I felt such a deep sensation of welcome. The tall trees above and the trunk my hammock had to lean against felt so solid an embrace and so accepting of my presence. And the soft string music finding me there made this welcome complete. Then I remembered noticing the rock someone had left on the picnic table here with just that word written on it, “welcome." Never underestimate the magic of the word - spoken or written. I remember now the time I was in Charleston and came upon some words left in a public space. 

This morning, as I sit by burning remnants of wood from trees like these, warming my oatmeal and Earl Grey, I am thinking about the tall trees standing around me. They are not ancient, but some of them are older than I am or twice my age, which makes a century. That is nothing to a tree. If only I could see the forest as it should be, as it would be if we hadn’t turned so much of it to lumber and fire and if not so many of the big ones had fallen to disease. I can scarcely begin to imagine the chestnuts in their girth who left such blossoms it looked like snow cover to people who inhabited this place but a couple hundred years before now. 

 

As the sun burns away morning fog, I feel a certain quality of peace under these tall beings - each nearly a hundred feet into the sky - old enough to know that we will come and go, to witness our folly so many times and still feed us the oxygen our lives depend on. I like to think they feel the love from those who bring it to them. But while I know they do appreciate conscious, intentional acknowledgement and interaction, I imagine that what they know is simply the truth of what surrounds them, all that they bear witness to, and we are but a blip. 

Imagine standing in place - in someone else’s place, in a beautiful place, in a place where everyone around you is dying, in a place where everyone is being cut down. You just want to stand and breathe and drink in the seasons and the elements, and provide for your friends and family, and stretch and wave about from time to time. And still, people come through from near and far for a millionth of a second and do the damnedest things then just leave you a moment later - like a woman raped, left with a crying baby, a slave left used up and broken, another other, beaten with a stick and left for dead. Some call it “dominion” and credit the Bible for saying it’s ours. 

(you'll need your speaker turned all the way up to hear the fragile melody)

  

But I, I arrived last evening to the sounds of a fiddle and a banjo - no words, just nourishment of my most delicate and hidden body - the place where the deepest thread remains, still somehow intact. The place in me that knows what is important and the river of grief and longing that is touched by just such a sweet and fragile melody. I am only a visitor here in this great forest. With no cause, it treats me with welcome and grace - respect I have not earned. And it would provide for me whatever I could need. I bristle (or worse) as some who pass through are so injurious to this place and clearly don’t know what’s important. But the forest will see us all come and and go, all the same.

I thought my life was not so different during this time of pandemic. It’s normally very simple, somewhat spare and relatively isolated. I enjoy the nature I am blessed to inhabit, and I love the work I am privileged to be able to do. During this time my work has been almost entirely curtailed, and so I do not have much human interaction where before I had just a little more. But we have all been through several traumas in recent months. The onset of a pandemic with all the fears and concerns we don’t normally have to consider, followed by yet another senseless murder of an “other,” this one so brazenly in our faces that we finally have begun to feel it into our own bodies. For how could we not? And by grace we are finally beginning to respond as a body of people and maybe finding ways to reach toward making repair.  

What I’m noticing here is  - maybe because we all slowed to a halt for just long enough to remember how to feel at all - that things that are normally felt with one or another sensing organ can now be felt into our bodies. When I bent to drink in the fragrance of the Carolina lily by the path, the fragrance came into me in a wholly new way, so deep into my core. When the fiddle and banjo music threaded through the trees that evening deep in the Appalachian woods, my soul was deeply and bodily moved in a way I’ve not felt before. This gives me hope. Hope that as a collective, maybe we can wake up to the truth of what is around us - as those trees who stand in place know so well what is around them. Just maybe, one day soon we can wake up to sensing bodily as the earth, as Earth. And with that thought, I take a deep breath and feel rooted. Grateful. Hopeful.