Tag Archives: nature

My True Self Was Hidden in the Woods Long Ago

Posted on by under Time & Place

There’s no easy way to access the woods behind my grandparent’s former home in suburban Philadelphia. But before my grandmother sold the house, I took one last rambling trip into the woods with my fiancée, Julie. She needed to see this place with me before we lost our access to it forever.

The stone steps that I used to tramp down were covered with dirt and leaves;  no one had set foot on them in years. We wound our way through some overgrown bushes that had taken over the trail, and hit the old dirt bike track that a kid down the street used to zip around on all summer. In the winter that steep, narrow trail had been a kind of toboggan track. The steep starting point was made all the more exciting with the large bump toward the bottom that sent my plastic sled shooting into the air. The massive rocks that popped out here and there added to the excitement when we didn’t have enough snow.

We passed the massive tree that had fallen over and had served as the bench for countless teenagers who ventured into the woods at nighttime to make massive bonfires. In the morning I used to poke sticks around in the ashes they left behind.

2015-06-Life-of-Pix-free-stock-photos-trees-forest-light-jordanmcqueenLooking up from the fallen tree, we could see the ridge line where my friend had seen a deer for the first time. Those woods were jam packed with deer, and hardly a day passed without seeing a few. He was maybe nine or ten years old, and as a child of the suburban edge of Philadelphia’s city limits, could only shout, “It has a tail!!!”

But nothing in these woods compared to its real treasure: the stream. It wasn’t much of a stream. It was hardly wider than 8 feet at most points, and who knows what kinds of pollutants had run off into it. But this stream, had always served as my main destination.

Along the shallow points I built bridges out of carefully piled rocks. Along the deep parts I skimmed pebbles. In the winter I slipped around on its smooth, icy surface with my wooden ice hockey stick and a hard rubber puck. Some days I even carried my hockey net down so that I could practice elevating the puck.

I don’t remember thinking all that much about those woods as a kid. I just remember being drawn to them every day. I never had to weigh whether or not I “wanted” to go into the woods by myself. If the weather was clear and I had the time, I typically headed down without a second thought.

I wish I could remember when I stopped going down into the woods. Something changed in me. As I grew up and “matured,” I lost sight of the freedom I found in the woods. I started thinking about it more. Going off into the woods suddenly felt a little riskier, even though I was far larger and stronger than I had ever been as an elementary school child.

At a certain point I stopped wandering in the woods. I never came close to rediscovering that desire to roam in the woods until going away to college. Perhaps the weight of guilt to pray more prompted me to take more walks in the woods, but soon the tiny patch of woods became a sanctuary of solitude again. When Julie and I returned home for that last visit in the woods behind my grandparents’ home a few years after graduating, I was finally remembering that something significant and sacred had taken place in those woods.

But concurrent with this realization, the path to those memories was becoming obscured and uncertain–like steps covered in leaves and dirt.

These days I feel a tiny tug to get better at seeking solitude, to love it the way that little boy loved venturing into the woods. My days are crammed with screens, conversations, and tasks. Somewhere deep within myself, I can sense a part of myself trying to find his way back into the woods. Something craves that solitude, to make it automatic and natural and to feel completely safe and at home in my own company apart from the noise and worries of life.

Was my time in the woods was just the product of youthful leisure? Or was it the purest expression of myself, now overgrown? Did I just go through a phase that is now dead and gone, or did my young mind try to set something in motion that I have needed so desperately as I enter middle age?

I like to think it was a divine mercy that prompted me to take that final trip into the woods with my future wife, and to mark off that place, in our shared memory, as something significant and worth sharing. If I have any hope of finding my true self, I suspect that it can be found wandering in my grandparents’ woods.

Ed bio YAH

Creeping Myrtle

Posted on by under Reclaiming Place

I’m puttering happily in my yard, hand-picking dead leaves from around newly-sprung bulbs and perennials. Sometimes a new shoot bursting from the earth has, in its green exuberance to reach the sun, pierced a dead leaf: a sword slaying winter. Those are my favorite leaves to gently remove—an affectionate greeting, like tucking a wisp of hair behind a daughter’s ear upon her arrival home from school.

IMG_4155Hello there, fierce beauty. It’s good to see you again.

Late spring is my favorite time to garden. It’s more leisurely and satisfying than early spring, when there is at once so much to do—so many soggy leaves and fallen branches to gather—and so little you can do other than wait for the sun to do its work. And by mid-summer the heat has risen and I’ve lost much of my initiative; all I want to do is sit back and sip iced tea, not face the dull but pressing work of weeding and watering.

But in April and May, nature has begun to give the garden shape. Visits to my yard remind me which returning plants I’ve rooted where, while the gaps between them spark ideas about new plants I might want to try. I’m energized both by what’s there and what’s possible, and the dreaming takes me often to the brick patio where my iced tea and go-to gardening book wait.

13162129724_05e0aa9e05_bAs I sit at the table flipping through the “Annuals” section of my book, the groundcover that borders the patio on two sides seems non-threatening and innocent. It has no plans for the summer, it seems, no big goals or bucket lists. It’s just hanging out, looking green like it should and showing off the pretty little blue flowers that earned it the name “Periwinkle.” For the moment I’m able to forget another name the plant is known by: “Creeping Myrtle.”

So I ignore it. I’m busy deciding how many flats of annuals I can reasonably justify buying to add spots of color to our shady property. I’m also daydreaming about our family’s first al fresco meal of the season, and what I might ask my husband to cook on the grill. Meals on the patio are, to me, the closest city dwellers can get to a family getaway without packing up the car and leaving home.

There’s something about physically separating ourselves from the dirty dishes in the kitchen, the laptops, our separate places behind separate closed doors, that touches on the many meals of my childhood that were cooked and consumed under the shade of tall trees at campground picnic tables, and the playground picnics we spontaneously put together when our girls were little. Meals outside are meals that say, “This is just about us, here and now. Everything else can wait.”

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If only time and nature knew how to wait.

In my garden, by late June, the Periwinkle has morphed into Creeping Myrtle mode and is well into its insidious advance into my territory. The precious borders of the patio begin to diminish. Gradually, as the vines inch onto the bricks, chairs are inched away by guests. As a result of the shifting chairs, the large rectangular table eventually gets pushed out to make more room.

It’s an imperceptible migration from one week to the next, until, one day, I walk out to the patio with plates and silverware and notice the table seems almost centered on the rectangle of bricks rather than shifted to the south edge, as intended. In fact, that rectangular foundation is looking rather square. I set the plates down and walk over to grab and lift a handful of vines.

They look as if they’re rooted where they lay, but they easily lift up, exposing a surprisingly wide swath of bricks below. I keep lifting the tangled growth, revealing more and more bricks, until finally the roots—in soil, where they belong—are exposed.

Those territory-hungry plants can infringe on a foot of patio in a month, it seems! What they see in bricks is beyond me, but it seems they haven’t put much thought into it. They’re motivated only by a vague sense of world dominance, without any concern for the path they’ll take or what they’ll do when they arrive.

“You can’t turn your head to focus on the flowers for even a couple of weeks without some aggressive vine trying to ruin everything,” I think to myself, heading to the garage for gardening gloves and clippers.

I ruthlessly attack the Creeping Myrtle, extreme in my hacking as I know it’s only a matter of time before nature’s wild, raw inclinations begin again to dominate, erasing subtlety, variation, and any boundaries I’ve decided to draw. It is, of course, worth it—all the battles waged against the encroaching weeds as well as all the coaxing and care of what I find beautiful. In the end, it’s all about the table we set and sit down around, to claim what is ours.

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Kristin bio YAH

A Still Life

Posted on by under Creating Place

A small antique dining table, repurposed as my writing table, sits by a large window in the breakfast room. The cherry wood has a smooth rich patina ripened by age and signed by watermarks from a continual parade of tea cups, coffee mugs, flower pots, and leaky bud vases.

Out the window, the arborvitae along the fence line sway in the breeze like a happy gospel choir. Sunlight from the east plays with leaves hanging on high branches; light darts in and out between the green like a hummingbird searching for nectar.

The sudden appearance of a chipmunk perched on the head of my garden statue—the sculpture of a little boy sitting cross-legged with a rabbit in his lap—startles me. I gasp. The chipmunk’s bushy tale drapes down the side of the little boy’s head like a furry hat. The animal blends into the concrete. A still life.FullSizeRender(20)

Cardinals, sparrows, and house finches engage in a noisy flurry at the birdfeeder. With an abrupt turn of his head, the chipmunk pauses, perks up like a meerkat, and scampers into the low-lying shrubbery.

A male cardinal, proud and red, with a wisp of red plumage atop his head, wins the battle for position at the feeder. His female counterpart is thin, grayish, and pale. He—I named him D’Artagnan after the most valiant of Dumas’ characters in The Three Musketeers—pecks at the safflower seed in the hanging wire silo, captures a seed in his mouth, cracks it with his sturdy beak and passes it to his lady, like a lover giving a gentle kiss to his beloved.

With a swoosh, Mae West, a round-breasted mourning dove, alights on top of the feeder, causing it to sway as she sashays about with her full bustle. Because of their size, the doves hold the keys to the coffer of seeds. They make merry and dine and grow bloated with time. There are no leftovers. Not one crackle.

*****

In early 2013, I was diagnosed with cancer. My world went still, folding in on itself like useless bellows.

The chemotherapy I received was a benevolent poison; while killing the unhealthy cells, it attacked healthy cells, also, resulting in extreme fatigue, an inability to concentrate, and a weakened immune system.

Words became hazy on the page of a book; it was hard to read a whole paragraph and understand it. The computer screen’s light altered my vision; tears salted my cheeks. It was as if someone had stuck me in a tightly bound book, slammed it shut, and shelved it.

My husband installed birdfeeders in our backyard outside the breakfast room window. He stocked them with thistle seed and safflower.

I watched and waited.

Every morning, I crept toward the kitchen, grimacing when the old wood floors creaked, hoping not to scare away my first visitor. A study in red—D’Artagnan—was perched at the feeder one morning as I tiptoed around the corner from the den.FullSizeRender(23)

On subsequent mornings, brilliant goldfinches, chickadees, tufted titmice, and doves arrived. The rare appearance of indigo buntings and a rose-breasted grosbeak—his chest splashed with red like blood from a dagger wound—pulled me from my chair. Adam must have felt the weight of words when God said: Name them. 

I sat down. With a shaky hand, I scrawled fragments of sentences in my journal.

*****

A small young dove slow-steps along the brick window sill. As I rest my elbows on the table, its old joints creak. The bird stops, turns his slick gumball head, considers me with his black bead of an eye, and with his slender beak commences a gentle tapping on the glass. Tap. Tap. Tap.

He is not looking at me, but at his own reflection wrought by the play of light on the glass making a mirror image of himself. His kinfolk arrive and with a whistling of his wings, he shoots away to the trees.

My blank computer screen stares at me. My journal is open beside me on the table. I begin to type: In early 2013, I was diagnosed with cancer….

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 Images by Lisa Taylor Phillips

The Creek Less Traveled

Posted on by under Memory & Place

There were many bodies of water to enjoy and explore at my grandparents’ cabin—it was Northern Michigan, after all, where bodies of water are as common as fields of corn where I live now, in Central Illinois.

The small, inland lakes had their appealing features: sandy shores for digging, floating rafts to dive from, and glass-like surfaces that perfectly mirrored the evening sky until the canoe you paddled broke through the stillness.

But of the many tempting bodies of water, it was the creek that enticed me most. The creek had something the lakes didn’t: It had mystery, a destination.

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We called it simply The Creek, but on a detailed-enough map it has a proper name: Canada Creek. It probably winds for miles, but our encounters with the creek took place in the far upper-east corner of Michigan’s lower peninsula—right where the cuticle of your index finger would settle in the mitten-shaped map.

As elementary-aged kids, my older brother and I were allowed to walk together down a curving sand road until it became a one-lane bridge at the creek. The road was rarely traveled, like all the roads in the area—we were somewhere in the midst of 20 square miles of woods and water known as Canada Creek Ranch (only a fourth of which was dotted with a few hundred cabins).

At the creek, my brother and I stood on the bridge for a while, tossing stones into the water to hear them plink and plunk their varying notes. Then we slid and scrambled down the gravely bank to the creek’s shore, where we inevitably ditched our canvas sneakers and sweaty socks to wade in the cold, clear spring water. It was sandy and shallow by the bridge; I liked to stand very still, hoping a dragonfly might land on me, while the tadpoles investigated my toes.

But how long could a kid stand still in a creek? After all, the creek had places to go and things to show us.

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PICT0023I’m guessing that we schemed and planned our first creek walk when I was about seven, sitting around Grandma’s breakfast table, pancakes piled high and studded with wild blueberries we had picked the day before. I’m sure my brother and I were persuasive in our desire to follow the creek. Not only did it beg to be further explored, but the creek held potential for so many stories. The grownups were apparently just as intrigued, because a new summer tradition was born (one that continued into our teen years, as seen in the photo): The Creek Walk.

On Creek Walk day my brother and I set out as adventurers, eager to play the characters in our favorite books—to live out their stories, or more likely a compilation of their stories. Laura Ingalls, Davey Crockett, Lewis and Clark and Sacajawea each took a turn being embodied by us as we forged the stream.

Sometimes we talked through our stories as we walked, staying in character as we navigated over or under a fallen tree. At other moments I broke from character to yelp as I slipped on a rock and nearly went under, or to complain when my brother, leading the way, fooled us with his favorite trick: gradually bending his knees then walking on them until the water was up to his neck, which suggested it would be well over my head. (A few times he wasn’t joking, and it actually was that deep.)

And then there were spells when all of us were quiet, amazed by just how quiet the world could be, save for the swish of our legs displacing the water as we walked, and the song of a Goldfinch from somewhere above. Now that I think of it, I don’t recall ever encountering another person on our many creek walks.

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After three or so hours of pressing on, the heat and deer flies became more bothersome, as did the ache in our legs and the rumble in our stomachs. Grandma began searching for a place to exit the creek—an opening in the tangle of brush where the bank wasn’t too steep and we could make our way from the creek’s winding world into the woods.

How Grandma had any idea where we were, I’ll never know. But she had hiked and skied those acres for years, and could confidently point us in the direction of Little Joe, one of the remote lakes on Canada Creek Ranch. We followed deer paths or forged our own way in the direction she pointed, motivated by what we knew we would find at our destination: Grandpa, firing up the grill for hotdogs. Each year on Creek Walk day he put the cooler Grandma had prepared into the car and drove the two-track roads through the woods to meet us at Little Joe’s lone picnic table.

After our feast, we all packed into Grandpa’s car, soggy and worn, to drive back to the cabin. The hotdogs and the lift home were luxuries Sacajawea never had, but by that point I was ready to be a modern-day little girl again, tucked into bed where more creek adventures could be spun in my dreams.

Island, Dharma, Cup

Posted on by under Alone in Place, Guest

“It was a bad breakup that brought me to the dharma,” a teacher once told me. The dharma — and whether or not I’ve been brought to it — is an open question yet. But it was surely a bad breakup that brought me to the island. And the island that made me whole — not just once but twice, so far. It’s good knowing there’s a place that heals heartbreak, because life can be generous with the heartbreak sometimes.

I first found the island in the pages of a catalog. I was just twenty years old, stuck in a humid, landlocked city and itching to get free of a relationship that was hurting. I felt bound to my lover by the delicacy of her mental health; if I went for a long walk to look at the magnolias, I might come home to find her in the bathtub, bloody from a half-hearted suicide attempt. I couldn’t even get to the “bad breakup” stage until I got her some Prozac or something, but that was easier said than done. Going away to college seemed like it might let her down gently. So I looked for the furthest college I could find and found it: a bare refuge of a school, small, out of the way, on the northern ocean’s edge. A place I could start again.

When I told my lover what I hoped to do, she applied and got accepted herself. So my triumphant ride to freedom was on a Greyhound, half the country over with a woman who, by the end, would barely speak to me. That was a pretty bad breakup.

Halfway UpWe went such different ways that few would believe we’d ever known one another. Free, finally, to take long walks without having to worry what sadness might be waiting for me on my return, I fell hard in love with that island. I got a bike and rode it off roads and on, deep into woods bringing nothing with me but my thirst; and I drank from dripping rocks and soaked moss and boughs laced with fog. I would throw my bike into the brush at the base of a mountain trail and climb over red rocks up into a sky that fell over ocean and pine. Until I was finally strong enough to leave.

And it would be there, to that island, that I would drive almost 20 years later, having learned that marriage can be a multiplier of loneliness. That your heart can break with longing for love, despite the ring on your finger and the child you created together out of your two bodies.

I found myself, once again, climbing those rocks up into the sky, this time with a daredevil child in tow and an old dog that preferred the gentler trails. We climbed higher than the vultures and watched their finger-wings glide below us. We’d walk out like dancers on bits of board into a swamp and sit quiet to hear the peepers. I carried my daughter on my back when she got weary, pulled ticks off the dog and I woke early, to see the sun purple the nearest hillside before anyone stirred. And my heart knit itself back together in the astonishing, delicious aloneness.

I wasn’t lonely there, until a few years passed and brought me into love again — unexpected, unsought — and yet there it came, just as thunderous as heartbreak, just as undeniable as the ocean. And I mourned to leave the island, but love rendered it the wrong place to be; if I stayed, I stayed alone, with my love far from me. So I followed love, back to the mainland and away. It nearly broke my heart to do.

It’s been five years now and I haven’t been back since. And I haven’t really needed to.

There’s a story about a teacher who describes the dharma by holding up his teacup. “This is my favorite cup,” he says, “I love it in every way. And I consider it broken already.”

I like tea and I like teacups and I first heard this story as a caution against getting too attached to things. I could also hear it fatalistically: nothing lasts forever, so be ready. But the first part of the story is essential, I think, the part about loving something in every way. Because one of the ways things can be is broken — and hurt, diseased, suffering. What kind of love encompasses even what our hearts rebel against?

On the island, I can be alone and whole, not aching for any place but where I am. But I’m not from there, I’m from away. From the places where I’m broken already, and learning to love, with this heart I have, in every way.

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Alison on a rock“Island, Dharma, Cup” is by Alison Coluccio. Alison lives with her partner and teenaged daughter in Ithaca, New York, in an urban eco-village, where she loves gardening to build bird habitat and fun food. In her not-spare time, she studies plant genetics at Cornell in a USDA lab. She’s worked with people and plants in Togo, West Africa and Irapuato, Mexico, and her writing on seeds and spirituality has appeared in Parabola. (Landscape vista photo, above, taken by Caitlin Regan.)