(with acknowledgment and apologies to John McPhee, a great writer)
A friend who lives up the road from here put it this way:
“I like to just go along, to let everything be the way it is. If a tree falls, I figure it was supposed to fall there, so I leave it. Sometimes it gets so quiet, and nothing is really going on. It’s almost like I’m not here.”
How does that strike you. Is it a little chilling. A little scary, this notion of almost…disappearing?
But no. It isn’t that at all. It’s actually very beautiful.
First of all, Dan is always doing something. One day, when he said he hadn’t done anything, he’d chopped down a tree, then spent four hours cutting up and stacking the wood.
Not exactly the same as letting a tree fall and just lay there.
What he means, really, is being in flow with these woods and this wildlife he lives within, so that all sense of being anxious or driven by anything falls away. Rules fall away. Society falls away. He forgets himself for awhile.
If I could say it any better, I’d have said it myself.
My experience isn’t exactly that. I came here this week determined to make progress with my novel. And I spent lots of time struggling with it, trying to free myself of the eternal editor so that the writer could romp.
And even so, I fell into a rhythm that was as much the sun rising, and the fog gathering over the lake in the night, and the geese with their periodic summonses to one another
as it was my enduring battle with time, to have purpose, to matter, to achieve.
Time humbles me when I let myself be absorbed by it, let it insert space between my molecules and I suddenly breathe to a different rhythm.
Is it true, as Einstein said, that time and space are one?
I’m not so fixed in either from this place. Not so certain or definite at all. Yes, I understand that bit about almost not being here.
A friend who lives up the road from here put it this way:
“I like to just go along, to let everything be the way it is. If a tree falls, I figure it was supposed to fall there, so I leave it. Sometimes it gets so quiet, and nothing is really going on. It’s almost like I’m not here.”
How does that strike you. Is it a little chilling. A little scary, this notion of almost…disappearing?
But no. It isn’t that at all. It’s actually very beautiful.
First of all, Dan is always doing something. One day, when he said he hadn’t done anything, he’d chopped down a tree, then spent four hours cutting up and stacking the wood.
Not exactly the same as letting a tree fall and just lay there.
What he means, really, is being in flow with these woods and this wildlife he lives within, so that all sense of being anxious or driven by anything falls away. Rules fall away. Society falls away. He forgets himself for awhile.
If I could say it any better, I’d have said it myself.
Willow on Fawn Lake in Addison, New York
My experience isn’t exactly that. I came here this week determined to make progress with my novel. And I spent lots of time struggling with it, trying to free myself of the eternal editor so that the writer could romp.
And even so, I fell into a rhythm that was as much the sun rising, and the fog gathering over the lake in the night, and the geese with their periodic summonses to one another
as it was my enduring battle with time, to have purpose, to matter, to achieve.
Time humbles me when I let myself be absorbed by it, let it insert space between my molecules and I suddenly breathe to a different rhythm.
Is it true, as Einstein said, that time and space are one?
I’m not so fixed in either from this place. Not so certain or definite at all. Yes, I understand that bit about almost not being here.
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