Restoring The Waters

Before I address the fact that I’ve not posted in a long time, I want to share a story. My three rescue dogs and I walk through our woodlands three times a day, maybe four, maybe more, depending on how the day is unfolding. We walk through a predominantly white pine forest, with some birch, maple, oak, poplar, and beech. The first walk of the morning whether 6:00 am or 7:00 am is a meditative walk for me. It is always a surprise when I hear my voice for the first time each day, and I prefer to do it in private. Lately I have been re-learning how to whistle. I don’t want anyone to hear that, either.

I carry kibble in my pocket for the dogs, and although they take off from time to time, after squirrels – which they can never catch or mice (they can’t catch them either, their underground labyrinth is of such complexity) – they always come back because they know what is in my pocket. By the time they come back, I have reached the neighborhood pond.

I long to make friends with the trees along our various trails, I name them (some of them), and, on the first walk of the day, gift them with the kibble, which I place in niches in their bark. It gives me joy to gift the trees, and I hope/trust they know I honor them. It gives me joy to envision the other-than-human beings who discover the offerings, the creatures of the woods. I know that someone(s) is enjoying these gifts, because the kibble rarely remains by the noonday walk.

One noonday walk, as I checked out the trees where I’d left kibble five hours earlier, I discovered who was benefiting. Slugs. Slugs. I discovered slugs had wrapped themselves around three offerings I’d left on one white pine – my grandmother white pine – and two more on the one adjacent, one of the water protectors.

I laughed with joy over the insanity of it. In my desire to honor and befriend the denizens of the woods, I had been building up a great population of slugs. I laughed because my “growing up normal” had taught me that there was no creature of greater or of lesser value than the human creature, not even slugs. I laughed because I could not pry those slugs off the kibble. It has to be a metaphor for something, but I haven’t figured it out yet.

I tell that story as a kind of farewell, although I don’t know exactly what I mean by that. Maybe I am saying goodbye to a kind of white-bread vision that has failed.

It is true, I have not posted in a long while. Part of the hiatus makes sense; I have been completing a workable draft of my next book. When focus of that particular kind is required, trying to write other things is too distracting. Not that I don’t have time, I do. Focus is the operative word.

The rest of the explanation is more difficult. My desire and intent for the writing I do on this site has always been to lift up what I have assumed (mistakenly, as it happens, and I might have seen this long ago) are the heart longings and heart breakings on behalf of our beloved lands and waters, an earth community crying out to us humans that it is way past time that we find our way back. I have hoped – and by way of confession, this is certainly born of my fear of alienating anyone – that I could propel my words like lifelines directly to our hearts.

I have been mistaken.

I have learned the word entanglement from my brother/mentor/friend Bayo Akomolafe, who – in his redeeming the word from any negative cultural context – has reframed my own reality. We are entangled: human, other-than-human, and our elemental lives of earth, water, air, and fire.

Everything is connected. For fear of alienating those who have clicked “like” on the www.restoringthewaters.com FB page, or, even better (and fewer) who have found the RSS button on the website itself, historically, I have pulled back from divisive opinions but for one: the urgency with which we humans must relocate ourselves within a reality which is web-like. Entangled.

The writing of my book-in-progress is about connecting the dots; nothing exists in isolation. The writing of my book-in-progress has transformed the lens(es) through which I see this world. I am not yet sure what that means in terms of this blog site, but fair warning. . .

The early 14^th century Sufi poet Hafiz writes:

Listen to the music.
I am the concert that flows from the mouth of every creature,
singing with the myriad chords.

The story from The Daily Good to which this verse was attached was titled Singing to Tomatoes, and it caught my fancy. I am enthralled with the science which at last offers substance to the capacity of cognitive communication and vibration – human and non-human – taking place all the time, among all that make up the earth community.

I am thinking now about the trees and the granite boulders on the land I walk with our dogs. There are three trails on this land, trails that stretch through the woods from our home to Tannery Pond. I vary the walks – three or four each and every day, the first one attempted in the first light of the morning when my joints are not yet oiled. Sometimes the dogs and I negotiate which trail we’ll take. Other times, the dogs get their way, because they are ahead of me, and so I follow. From time to time I insist on my own way. Three trails: the Outer Loop, the Ridge, and the Highway. The Highway goes straight from house to pond. My daily goals have to do with time and distance: at least two hours and at least three miles. I combine the trails; any two of them make a mile. If we stay at the pond for ten minutes or so, each walk takes forty minutes.

The trails are not the only ones with names. I name trees: white pine, birch, maple, oak, poplar, and beech mostly. From time to time, names just come to me and I know the power of them: Beauty and the Birch. Other times I wait until I can hear the communication – tree to me. Not infrequently, I name them out of my own projection, and find that they have a different idea. If a tree is reluctant to introduce itself, I simply greet noname – no-na-me, three syllables. Is it too fanciful to think that trees like introducing themselves?

Rocks have names, too.

I can shut my eyes and name the trees and rocks of the Outer Loop:

The Sentinel
Turning Point
Slippery Rock
Spike Lee (one of several young pines by the same name – quite the family)
 The Twin Peaks (granite boulders)
Upper Slingshot
Grandfather Fallenbe

Grandfather Fallenbe is a tree which has fallen. At his foot stands a white pine who, for a long time, did not share her name. After weeks of greeting her daily, I heard the name: Elephant Tears. Two knots are reminiscent of sad elephant eyes, and from them the bark flows down, rivulet to rivulet.

Then:

Great Uncle Bones
Lil Brother Lean on Me
Auntie
Papa Bentwood
Grandfather Bolt and Little Sister

And then I greet the pine known (formally) as Lower Slingshot. People who know her well call her Granny Sling. I call her Grandmother Dear Tree. Across from her is Standing Rock –  it’s why we’re known as the Granite State – twelve or fourteen feet high. Then comes:

Bob Wire (barbed wire over the years has grown into this tree). Bob is a trans. He used to be Barb Wire, but he transitioned.)
Mama Bentwood and quite a few young Bents
Buckhorn (an antler rub)
Beauty and the Birch
Whale Maiden (granite)
Old Paint (Poplar with moss)
Softly Dying
RT (RT was my recliner. I could lay back on her and gaze through the branches of several trees into the clouds. RT split in two one day, and I could no longer recline. Because her bottom half has been rotting, I named her R2 and then R-squared, but she prefers RT.
Then Papas Bill and Bob, fraternal twins, one a pine, the other a birch, twins named after friends from elementary school.Uncle Willie and Uncle Charlie – these are my great grand uncles, both fallen.
Uncle Willie and Uncle Charlie were my grandmother’s uncles, and they were brothers. One fought for the Union, the other for the Confederacy. Both died. Not in the same battle, so I’ve been told.

As I come up over the rise, the beeches sing. I love the beeches in winter. They keep their light brown leaves, and when there is wind, they rattle. I have a friend whose name is Beecher, and so I have named these Beecher Woods. They seem to like it – they rattle a lot.

Tre (pronounced tray) is a stump of a birch which Jim had to cut, because he was ready to fall.

At last the dogs and I arrive at Tannery Pond. I have two friends (so far) at the Pond. One is an altar of stone, in honor of Jim’s brother John. On the stone live two hippopotamus(es?) because John loved hippos. He died in 2016, and asked that the family scatter some of his ashes in Tannery Pond. The stone altar with hippos is his gravestone, Hippocampus.

Great Grandfather lives on the bank of Tannery Pond. He is old.

Before the dogs and I go on any walk, I fill a pocket with kibble. As we walk, I offer kibble to the trees, seeking (and finding) crevices in the bark or woodpecker holes to leave them, a great game for the dogs who love to sniff them out.

Walking through this community of tree and rock gives me a profound sense of belonging. It’s hard to be lost when you know the names of the denizens of the woods. I like to think they know my name. I wonder.

I once thought that my husband Jim and I had bought and therefore owned this beautiful land parcel in Central New Hampshire. But over the years we’ve lived here, the idea that we actually own the land we walk – or any other land, for that matter – has become increasingly untenable. We do not own the land we walk, but we do walk it. I no longer look east to Jerusalem for the Holy Land. The Holy Land lies under my every footfall.

The first years we were here, our walks consisted of traveling the ready-made path from our house to the waters of Tannery Pond and back. Sometimes with dogs, sometimes without. Sometimes with hearts in our throats as the pond ice began its melt, and the resident bear started to wake up, other times with the confidence that our black neighbor had moved further into the mountains for her summer foraging.

One year we carved a second trail, up an over the ridge, where we can look down upon the vernal pools that are home to the spring frogs whose throaty crackling shouts of awakening sometimes sound like someone or something is being tortured. Not the case, of course. I like to think of it as the joy of awakening.

This winter has been an odd one, with very little snow, but enough rain and sleet to create solid paths of ice, treacherous even to me in my crampons, which I keep on my boots from December to April. So the dogs and I have had to find new ways. As we meander off path, I sing this song composed by my friend Alaan Classen, whose lyrics, in part, read:

Degaje . . . degaje

Somehow we will find a way

Where there’s no way, there’s a way.

By wandering where the ice is not, we have begun to form relationship with various trees, rocks, and vernal pools. As I sing, I give them names:

Upper Slingshot

Lower Slingshot (pictured)

Green Lagoon

Rock Watcher (above)

The Gates (below)

I love to do this, as it connects me deeply – and so much more deeply than in years past – with every part of the land we walk. I like to think the trees, pools, and rocks tolerate with curiosity my need to name them.

“What’s in a name?” they ask one another. “Why does she feel the need to name us?”

I do know that I am always glad to see them, denizens of the woods who’ve been there far longer than I, especially the granite. The trees were clear-cut a century ago, and I suspect, or at least hope, that my naming them honors their resilience and insistence to rise again.

Does naming matter? I don’t really know, other than the naming brings me closer in, helps me into a state of greater mindfulness. Perhaps – although none of them has yet to admit it – they really enjoy my erstwhile efforts to make connection.

*degaje is the name given to a ballet movement, when one leg disengages with another