Eternity under an oak tree

Lake Johanna before me, Nazareth Chapel behind. Oaks in front, so many, criss-crossed, a giant’s sideways version of pick-up-sticks. This is the seen, and the unseen is here too: now ahead, down the hill, to the right, by the shore, a small cave sleeps. In it is one awake and watching with sightless eyes—the Virgin Mary, hands upraised, blessing me, sanctifying the water. The sunlight does not reach there.

It does not reach me either. Wrapped in the oak tree’s stretching shadow, I am sitting in its lap, and it lets me be alone. The ground is dry here—drier than the manicured lawns I left minutes ago—maybe because it is happy, not crying, content to be where there are beaches and breezes and a view of the sea. My bare feet are pleased to be dirty, my hair not so pleased to be spitting out twigs onto my homework (I was rude to it when I lay in the dirt two minutes ago). Backpack, papers, Fundamentals of Finance, pens I keep losing, papers that keep blowing, shoes beached on their backs, I carried so much baggage with me when I came here a half hour ago. I should be doing homework. No, actually, I shouldn’t.

There is no one here. There are people, but there is no one here. We all came, this evening, to be alone with the hillside, to listen to the sun and hear the warmth and feel the silence, to believe it is June when it’s actually March, to pretend we are not prisoners in a dizzy anthill that won't let us go.

Beside me, a silent maiden descends the cold old hillside steps—awkward stone stairs too large for one step, too small for two—down toward the water, toward Mary’s shrine. And as she glides, the clouds open to allow glory-light to whisk out its rug ahead of her, making a royal path of heaven for her to walk on, the chosen one.

I am still in shadow. The light did not come for me.

A puffed-up chickadee, mottled black on swirly brown, flits on her song: up and down and down and around—“Hi! Hi! Hi! Hi!”—until an owl with a headache finally shouts, “Hell-oh!” and she stops. Shocked. Muddy bark runs down in rivulets, headwaters in the sky; a good place to be from. Leaves spin and skip, no longer leashed to trees or imprisoned by snow, bouncy now. Clover buds, threads of grass, moss coral, waft out of the ground as steam from winter’s last breath. Just before sunset, all seems sacred—colors more royal, leaves more hallowed, trees more divine. Evenings and mornings were given so we could touch the face of God.

The water was silver before, flat, but now it shatters under the setting sun to reveal a glittering opal center, like the quartz-filled rocks I used to find and line up on my bedroom shelf—the ordinary holy. There is something of forever here, in the psychedelic water and the mahogany trees. Seeing it is like grasping at something you thought you forgot; it is a dreamy reflection remembering vaguely that “beauty is eternity gazing at itself in a mirror” (Kahlil Gibran).

I know my eternity, now, my beauty, for the hillside told me so. Eternity sits under an oak tree with her twiggy hair and dirty feet, brushed by a scepter of light set with gold.

Approaching Christmas

I.

June. Sun. The first day for wearing grass-bale gloves.

The hay is flowing west, sad teary-eyed

Under forest’s farewell breath of blessing.

II.

I waltz with rakes, alfalfa does aerials.

Clover sways to the music, free, and swinging

Her violet skirts, while the mourning dove cries merrily.

III.

Sleeping bales are dreaming on their stubbled bed.

The perfect ones to be cut apart, a sacrifice, and broken

Bales I rattle, scatter, rip, and shake—back onto the queue, to be gift-wrapped.

IV.

Horses will gather, under the tree, and open an intertwined gift

With gratefulness, lifting out clover, letting her dance, sing one last time, an artist

Painting her sunflowers, like Picasso never could.

The nature-learners

My education may well be right; yet nothing I heard in school, nothing I’ve read, no lesson reached by logic has ever convinced me as utterly or stirred me as deeply as did that red-tailed hawk… I learned from the land itself.

Scott Russel Sanders, “Buckeye,” p. 8

It was fuming at me, the snow was. It didn’t, always. Sometimes it seemed to have woken up in a pleasant mood, presumably having had an uneventful trip down from Canada and arriving at our barn door in quite enough time for tea. But some days, the prank-playing prairie birds gave it poor directions and the snake snow fence of my father’s caused a traffic jam and the brash blaring winter winds gave it a headache and by the time it arrived at our red barn door’s stop sign, my shovel was just the last straw.

It was angry today. I couldn’t exactly feel the snow, what with my nuclear holocaust body armor on, and I couldn’t exactly hear it, what with the pack of rabid dogs shrieking inside the barn, but I sure had to deal with it. The barn door, I had to free it, it needed to be rescued. Punch through the crust, heave out a shovelful, toss it a foot away, get it blown back in your face. Whack out the ice, scrape along the concrete, breath-thaw the frozen handle, kick free the frost-frozen door. Don’t stop, it’s your job. Do it.

The child, the shovel, and the snow. And the barn door. Every morning, every day, every week, all month, month after month after month until Minnesota finally got sick of winter and made it go away. That year I had been tasked with shoveling out the barn door, and, unlike when I was Morning Chores Person, my assignment didn’t switch off every week. Every day, no matter how upset the snow was that morning, I had to shovel out that barn door, crusading valiantly against the worst drift on the farm during the worst winter we ever experienced.

I rescued the barn door that year, but what I didn’t know is that it also, in a way, had rescued me. It had been speaking to me all winter but, like a voice carried back to you on the forgotten wind, I didn’t hear its whisper until I had left it years behind. Instead of going to school in nature, I left it for education in the city. And my fellow classmates, they often puzzle me. The December walk to chapel—I hear bitter complaints of the “cold.” Cold? You think this is cold? The early morning talk with a friend—I listen to grumbles about waking up seven minutes before class. But you don’t have any chores, think of that! I feel I don’t fit in here, where I get my education; I went to a different preparatory school.

Nature is a teacher unique among men because it does not follow any rules and speaks with an unadulterated voice. The blessed who grow up in nature, in wide-open spaces and far-flung skies, they think differently, live differently. They work because they have to, because there is no choice, but they are rarely bitter. They are not bitter because nature always reveals the beauty in the pain; that is the way of God. The furious snapping snow bites only because it is made of a trillion sharp diamonds and the sun only burns because it is filling your life with a million bright lights.

I did not find many of nature’s students in my new school, but there are some. We always do seem to find each other, the nature-learners. It is good to be together, to share the experiences of the snowy barn doors and the dragonfly wings and the red-tailed hawks wheeling where earth and heaven meet.