30 Days of Sit-Spots

I am again participating in the Wilderness Awareness School's 30-Day Sit Spot Challenge, in which folks commit to sitting outside in one spot for at least 20 minutes a day for one month. Today is the first day.

Day 1, 9:30 p.m.

I'd been wondering where to do my sits up until a few days ago. I was given a precious and rare couple of hours to myself by a babysitting relative, and had planned to use them to run some errands. But as I prepared to leave the house, I felt in no uncertain terms that I should instead be using the time to be outside. Not to do any particular thing, simply to GO OUTSIDE, not on errands. I tried and tried to reason my way into the shopping trip, so I could call it done, but eventually sat down for a minute and acknowledged that my inner voice always knows what is best for me, though more often than not its directions are in conflict with what I plan and what I want to do.

So out I went, weaving my way around the yard as I felt called, and after a bit found myself perched joyously and perfectly in the strong arms of a great white pine in the backyard. The very tree under whom I sat for the Sit Spot Challenge two years ago, but whom I hadn't considered for this challenge, having brought home two deer ticks from the brush around it in the past.

So tonight, out I went with a certainty that I was going to the spot that I had been directed to. I stalked through the yard, following my guidance as to which path to take, intent on leaving the mourning doves in the pines I passed undisturbed, having flushed them many a time as I've moved mindlessly through the yard at dusk. It was a roundabout path I was pulled on, and I trust that there were solid reasons for it, though these reasons may never come clear to me.

The branches of the pines I passed formed a visual framework between me and the sky, framed the glowing windows of my house, framed the moving lights of the cars on the road. I wondered who was asleep, or awake, in the trees above me. Was I moving quietly enough to keep the birds asleep, or was the whole forest awake and alerted to my presence? The songs of a few spring peepers danced from afar. Why so few tonight, when often they are in grand chorus?

I stalked closer to the tree, awkward in my hiking boots. I could feel the pressure of larger twigs under my boots as I moved to place them on the ground, but I couldn’t judge with any certainty that the ground I shifted them to didn’t have smaller twigs or leaves, waiting to snap or crunch, and several times I announced my presence to everyone within earshot.

I had an unease about being in these woods at night, small as this cluster of trees is, and familiar as the yard without it is. The external appearance of this little patch of woods is an everyday sight for me, but I don’t often venture into it, and never at night. Ringed on all sides by moderately-mown yards, many would scoff at the thought that it is “wild,” but it certainly held a wildness for me tonight. Who is asleep in the trees above me? Who nests on and under the ground around me? I’ve heard many a creature descend the trees around here at nightfall, the scraping of their claws on the bark calling out across the grass to my porch. Were any of them in my sit spot tree? If I were still for long enough in the lower branches, might they descend and become angry upon discovering me in their path?

As it turned out, I spent much of my 20 minutes stalking within a few feet of the tree, such was the quantity of twigs on the ground around it, and only made it up into the tree for a couple of minutes before it was time for me to go back into my house. As I slowly began my stalk down from and away from the tree, my sense of alertness and caution quickly ebbed, and I found myself re-writing my experience there: It wasn’t actually frightening at all – it’s just a tiny forest! Why would I think I could possibly get hurt?!

How much of the intensity of life do we obscure through our untruthful paintings of the past?

I stalked back through the yard toward the house, still listening and following the guidance as to when to step, when to pause, which direction to take, where to look.

While at the tree, I had heard a tiny chipping/gnawing sound from time to time a couple of yards from the base of the tree, and a few sounds much like a rabbit makes when moving in tall grass. It had occurred to me yesterday that I’ve never seen a rabbit on any of the land around our house in the few years we’ve lived here. Perhaps I will learn through this month of sits that they do share this land with us, after all.

As I came inside and moved quietly past the conversation and in to another room to check for ticks, I felt the confinement of the walls around me. How much of the world they block out! The sky, the breezes, the sounds of the night animals, the sense of weather and moon and sun…we lose them all by living in these houses, completely divorced from everything but humans and those things that human hands or machines have made. Is physical comfort, the consistency of temperature and humidity and space to store our hoards of belongings worth the loss of these gifts?