The Edge

I've been hearing on the radio about two young women who were kayaking in Maine this week, disappeared, and later were both found "unresponsive" in the 48 degree water - dead. First they had not shown up when they were expected to, then their empty kayaks were found, and finally their bodies were found. They were 18 and 20.

With our world-wide media, tales of young people dying come to us all the time, and we can develop a numbness to this information out of necessity. But something about these girls' story struck me deeply. I heard about it when they were simply missing, and then again once their bodies had been recovered. I can imagine them going out happily for their Sunday kayaking, I can imagine a variety of waves, accidents that could have flipped one and then the other into the water, their last moments in this life. And I can imagine the people who love them, mourning them now and forever.

Their deaths came to them with such swiftness; not through an illness in which it could have been anticipated, but just by an accident that happened to befall them both that day. In the morning they were alive, planning an adventure, and later that day their lives were done.

The knowledge of what has happened to these two young women reminds me forcefully, deeply, that we are all right at the edge of death all the time - potential death, at least. Are we not? A gas explosion, a heart attack, food caught in our throats as we eat alone... A few years back, a man in western Mass was walking down the sidewalk when a manhole cover was blown high into the air by a freak explosion in the sewer pipe and landed on him, crushing him. Death is with us, around us every moment, and we simply don't know when it will take us. (Garrison Keillor's chosen poem for today's Writer's Almanac touches this subject, as well.)

This knowledge is a gift: we are straddling the line between life and death at every moment. When this knowing comes to mind, it offers an effortless route to an especially sacred presence. Because if I might die in five minutes (or one minute), then it does not really matter if I get through my to-do list for the day. It matters that I really listen to and look at my boy as he chatters about his world to me. It matters that I drink in the astonishing sheen on the swallow's feathers out the window. That I notice and point out to my boy the gentle way the clouds are moving across our sky. What a precious gift, this awakening to what actually matters, when we are also gifted a little more time to love it all.

Intentions

Now that the challenge has ended, I'm going to return to my use of this blog as a place to record, reflect upon, and share a variety of my experiences, mostly in the natural world, some at my sit spot, and some otherwise.

Reverie - May 11

Afternoon sit.

Robins, jays, red-winged blackbirds. Someone repeated a high, falling “peee-oooo,” just like the initial whiz of fireworks immediately before they “pop”.

After a cold morning, a tickling, playful wind was sweeping through, just warm enough to keep it comfortable, buffeting against me as I sat on the limb.

The little maple claiming its ground under my sit pine has fanned its leaves out into a sheet, which was catching the afternoon sunlight head-on. Older, larger leaves reached out on long stems to make room for a scattering of sizes of smaller leaves closer to the branch, each with stem length relative to size. The combined effect was a fluttering, glowing, green work of art.

Sit Spot, Day 31 (May 10)

Afternoon sit. Thought about what someone said about revisiting an old sit spot. During this last day of the challenge, I looked down to my old sit spot at the base of the tree I sit in now and welcomed any memories of those sits that wanted to reveal themselves. What came up didn’t include any specific insights or learnings, but rather filled me with a sense of having been complete during that time, having been deeply in touch with who and what I am. A knowing welled up within me that during those sits during last year’s challenge, I had been nurturing myself in a way that helped me be the person I am supposed to be in this life, the person I am capable of being when I work at it.

This raises the question of whether I am walking that path as closely now as then, since I have been sitting and reflecting on my sits as regularly recently as during that time. I can certainly see that I’ve settled into awareness and silence when I sit – I’m worlds away from where I was when I started this 30-day challenge. But I wouldn’t say that I feel decidedly closer to walking my true path than before. Perhaps growth of this sort can only been seen in retrospect.

I thanked the tree for holding me and hosting my sits, thanked the Earth and her inhabitants for being with me and teaching me during the sits.

aaargh!

My (very powerful) demon whose sole purpose is to try to prevent me from ever completing tasks caught on to the fact that I have only one more post to do before officially completing the 30-day challenge.....hang on....I'll write this weekend (travelling tomorrow, so tomorrow will be genuinely hard).

Balancing...

Been working on balancing my home life with my sits, now that the imagined obligation of the challenge is over. Sat yesterday and today, but gave up the writing time for other pursuits. Plan to write tomorrow.

Sit Spot, Day 30

Last day of the 30-Day Sit Spot Challenge, hosted by Wilderness Awareness School's Kamana program, though the end date was originally set at May 10, so I'll consider it done tomorrow.

Twilight sit, at the tail end of another Parrish sky.

Brisk, hearty, cold wind shoveling down from the North. It was a strong presence over the land tonight, calling up the voices of every tree and bush, every whistling corner of every house.

The familiar sound of leaves rustling in the wind took me by surprise, after a season's absence. The maple leaves have completed just enough growth to offer up their own rendition of the wind's music.

The nearer cricket in the back yard was silent for half my sit, then started up with a slow selection of quiet, weak calls. Is it the cold slowing him down, or the remembered terror of the lawn mower passing by this afternoon? Peepers also were silent for some time, then two of them struck up a duet just before I went inside.