Trading

I made a deal with the spirit world, Creator, the universe today. A small one, but significant to me.

On a recent canoe trip with my father and my boy, I found, half buried in a sandy portion of the riverbed, a small, smooth, flat shard of clay. I cannot help but believe that the clay is a broken piece of pottery that was shaped by human hands ages ago, that people used it beside or in that river, that somehow it found its way beneath the sands of the riverbed. I came upon it a few days after very heavy rains, which had, perhaps, unearthed it from where it had been resting.

The veracity of my beliefs aside, this flat little triangle of rust-colored clay holds great weight for me. In its presence on the windowsill above my sink, in the experience of holding it in my hands, I feel graced by tangible evidence of our past. Of our old connection to the earth, from the days when we used the gifts she provided easily, building our vessels, our belongings, from resources that did not harm her either in their making or in their decaying. I feel connected to the person - most likely a woman, if our histories are correct - who fashioned that particular vessel out of that clay. To her family, to her village, to the plants and animals they knew and understood. It helps me to believe, to truly trust, that there was a time when all humans knew how to live off the earth. To envision our people knowing how to survive, raise our children, pass on our cultures to future generations, independent of everything but our local communities and the earth.

I questioned, that day, my decision to bring it home with me. Was its rightful place not there in the river, where its original owner had left it? And yet, what a gift it is to me to hold it and look at it, to have an ancient scrap of my species' history in my own home, reminding me of who we have been, who we can be.

We returned to the river today, and as I packed for the trip, I took it off the windowsill in preparation to return it to the sands I'd taken it from. In holding it again, I again felt its significance to me, the medicine in it for me, and I longed to keep it in the house. So I offered to trade for it. I touched the earth, waited for a feeling, a knowing of what would be a fair offer.

In exchange for this piece of our past, I have committed to sit outside and to write here every day for a week. Perhaps these will be the hearty, shapely writings I prefer to post, or perhaps they will more resemble notes or vague impressions. But I will do it for a week, in thanks for the pottery.


Tonight, after a long day riding on the gentle waters of that river, I sat out in our back yard under a bright moon, beside the little cherry sapling we planted two years ago. I lay back on the ground in the dark, listening to an urge that I generally dismiss out of hand, not wanting the dew to moisten my clothing. I have been lately humoring these little urges more, these whims, so vibrant in childhood, that add so much to our lives and that so often are silenced and ignored, to our detriment, in our honed, convenience-seeking adulthood. I lay back on the grass, felt the moisture on my back, and gazed up from my new vantage point. I found myself looking up through the cherry, where I have only ever looked down at the little thing. The night sky and moon shone beyond the darkness of its leaves.

The branches it now feeds and raises to the sky are the same that it will hold up in twenty years, with any luck. Today they seem so haphazard, as such small amounts of growth have generated each, but they are the shape of what is to come. They already tell us the tree's plans for growth, for shape; they have only to change in size, weight, shadow.