When the Dream Walks Backward

A five things essay

1.

My farm stands at the intersection of silence and cacophony. The din is mostly in my brain, every night when I lie down to sleep, every morning when I wake, except those few moments when I command it to stop, to enter instead the rising breath, the falling breath, I am. Soon enough—too soon—my mind is revving again, loudly. Yesterday for a brief while I sat and strung a set of pottery shards to make a wind chime, and I tied it to the fence of the garden. All around me are vats of silky silence, smooth pastures of it, seas of it to submerge in. In all this acreage my own cacophony rises—grows like weeds.

I think too much of you under the cold circling winds, wondering how you are, if you are happy. The frost lays on the sere dry fields like a memory.

2.

A squirrel rushes along the railing of the deck to a pottery pitcher, a misshapen reject, that now holds rainwater. The pitcher is heavy enough to hold a squirrel. She perches on its lip, gripping with her back paws, then bends her entire body into the pitcher where at the bottom she drinks. She takes only a sip before she rises out quickly, to look around, and then she plunges again into the vessel, staying a few seconds longer. I’m watching from the window. Finally she stays down and drinks for a long time, maybe 45 seconds, long enough that I wonder if I can reach my camera. She is gray-brown, and I can see her muscles ripple as she bends and hangs inside the pitcher as if inside a well. Her tail, fluffed and feathery, curls out like a second handle.

My grandfather worked with wild squirrels until they ate from his hands, and I sense that one day I’ll be able to do the same. Since I have been sitting outside at sunrise, I notice a difference in the way the animals react and interact. They are less afraid.

3.

I like it when enough rain falls. I like it when I turn on the hose and water still comes out, so I can sprinkle the dirt along the fence where I feed the horses each evening. I like it when I see a single beautiful leaf lying in the sand of the road, just so. I like it when I can pry myself away from the computer and when no one is waiting on me and I have no deadlines and no fear and I remember the canoe down in the lower barn or my hiking shoes and it’s not hunting season and the grasses are brown and tall, heading. I like it when I pick an orange or cut a bunch of collards or bend down to pet a dog.

I have realized that my loneliness is existential. This occurred to me on a Wednesday, when friends from Alaska were visiting. On Wednesday evening two neighbors joined us for supper, six total. On Thursday seven of us went to lunch at a strange inn stuffed with Christmas kitsch. That afternoon I took our guests hiking, three of us. Still still still I felt lonely. When I rode with A. to the farmers market on Saturday, intending to help him sell honey, I told him my epiphany. “The loneliness is existential.”

He likes fixing things. “You have to find what’s missing and fill it.”

I had been trying to tell him that whatever is missing—whatever makes the hole—is not fixable.

4.

I thought the earth was hollow. I thought dead. I thought she was instinct and gut, blood, and a viscous liquid that oozes out of earth worms. I thought she was full of worms. Chaos. Fire. She ruptured, she boiled, she seethed, she rumbled, she erupted. I thought she postulated, she rack-and-ruined, she doomed, she manicked. Divided. Delved, nightmarish, dark—deep-depths, dragon-slaying dark.

But the earth, she’s light, she’s loose, she loves, she plays so hard, she laughs, throws her head back and laughs.

5.

The best part of the holiday was my walk in the morning, with the rain ended and the earth refreshed, one of the coolest days so far this winter, and the seedheads of tan grasses and forbs ready to let go and float away to bare patches of soil. The dogs were delighted and they showed their delight in the way they ran ahead and stopped to look back at me. One vine up the trunk of a loblolly pine was bright pink, at least at the bottom, among late-colored leaves, yellow-gold poplars and the delicate salmon-gold of sweet gums. Deer tracks went everywhere through yet-unleashed seeds.

This is the year I get to know my place, better than I’ve ever known it. The idea is wild in me. I am attempting another kind of happiness.

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The Form

This 5-part essay began in a nature-writing course I guide.

Summer Brennan

wrote about “The Five Things Essay” in her Substack, A WRITER’S NOTEBOOK. I took the form to my writers, and we wrote one while in session.

Tomorrow!

Our JOURNEY IN PLACE course starts tomorrow with Exploration #1. Many thanks to all who have signed up. I wish us all well as we go deep and wide. I truly, sincerely hope we all find what we’re looking for and what we need.

Tonight I did my first interview for a podcast where we get to think about our place-based lives. It was with a woman who used to live at Findhorn, and we had a very interesting conversation on spirits of place. I’ll package that up for you soon.

Thank you again and all the very best.

Nature Journaling School

This course is 1 hour per week for five weeks on Sunday afternoons at 5 pm. The fee is sliding scale—you choose. What we’ll be doing here is field notes—combining words and images to attend to the world. You don’t have to be a visual artist. I certainly am not. I’d love to have you join me. The link is here.