Wonder Log

At least twice a week,I try to take a Wonder Walk, a walk of half an hour or more during which I open myself to minutia's wonder. You might try it: Walk wherever you wish. Along the way, tune in with your senses. Record the most naked sensory impressions without "literary embellishment." And note, too, your internal workings with wonder. Even if you're angry at your spouse or anxious about your life, you can step back and ask, "Isn't it strange to be full of anger or anxiety? What is this thing called anger?" With those questions floating around, suddenly shift your focus to the gum on the sidewalk or the milkweed in the meadow, and you can't help but wonder what it is to be human. 

2 December 2004: winding through the mountains
Wind whips through the mountains like a crazed woman. I live in a mountain bowl, an area of the Catskills surrounded by mountains on every side, so when wind comes it comes, like all of nature's faces here, in full force, blowing down from the mountains, across the meadow, and on every side of the farmhouse. 

A chair and welcome mat fly across the front porch. She screams at and rattles every window. She tears dried limbs from trees. Enraged yell. Ecstatic yawp. Explosive exhale. She demands attention and respect.

When she seems to cool down, I walk between the ponds and toward the meadow for an afternoon stroll. The air, remarkably warm for autumn's last month here, feels framed by an underlying layer of coolness. Suddenly, without warning, she channels through air's rivets and roars like the stream, risen and rolling from this morning's fierce rain, across my bare face like an iced tongue. An Eastern bluebird struggles to keep its flight pattern steady from maple to maple. Her bracing touch sends my thoughts flying.

Wind, related to "wander," not far from "wonder." A friend of mine recently told me she feels she was raised by wolves, wind, and wonder. I'd like that upbringing--howling at the moon, floating across the continent, awestruck by a luna moth's dusty wings. Your mother wolf brings you breakfast and then teaches you how to hunt for yourself. Your aunt wind takes you on day trips to California to introduce you to your relatives, the Santa Anas. And your grandmother wonder lulls you to sleep with stories about rivers that wear diamond necklaces and dance with bears at midnight. 

She's still wailing outdoors, your aunt, and now she just turned out all of the lights and turned off the electricity. Pay attention.  Maybe we should just sit still and listen to what she has to say.
* * *
Who knows how old the wind is?
If the dead come in rain and if former lovers fall in snow, who comes in wind?
Why does fire love wind so much?

22 November 2004  8:22 am: stopping for death
Death drives right past us, sometimes, and sometimes we're too busy to notice. 

The yoga class I taught yesterday morning flowed richly. A room full of students, willling and receptive, the music grooving, the class charged me as much as it seemed to zing them. I focused the class upon the Buddhist practices of living a life of joy in each moment and of turning distraction into practice for being present. One student had even continuously chuckled at her body as it twisted and turned, and everyone seemed to take the laughter as practice--practice for living with joy. So, after class I drove home, buzzing and reflecting upon the power of human exchange, of giving and taking from one another. As I drove along one of the familiar bends, a squirrel darted across the road and, this time, didn't jut back the opposite way and didn't make it past the car tires. In the rearview mirrior, I saw the small furry body stopped cold on the road.

I pulled into the nearest driveway and stopped for death. About twenty yards back, I walked along the road and from a distance could see its little torso--splayed--still pumping for air. I groaned, picked up a stick, and walked toward it. Afraid it might bite me in fear, I used the stick to nudge its body to the roadside so another driver wouldn't finish it off. As I tried to maneuver the soft creature's body off the road, it writhed and contorted, every cell and instinct gasping and grasping to protect itself. Its wide-open hazelnut eyes gawked at nothing.

Once on the grass, it relaxed flat on its belly. The stream flowing in the small ravine below played a melodic backdrop. I stroked its back trying to placate its instinctive terror as much as my instinctive guilt. Its torso swelled and then contracted. Swelled, held, and contracted. Each breath, full and long, seemed its last. I tried to speak it into accepting death and letting go, but it held on. For a second, I thought about finding a rock to crush it and end its misery quickly. I considered tossing it to the stream.

But maybe it was just stunned, I began to think. There was no blood. Its limbs didn't seem broken. Then, suddenly, its body writhed in a ball, lifted off the ground a few inches, and dropped. Its last gasp, I thought. But its torso continued to swell, hold, and release. Then, without warning, its whole body lifted off the ground and landed again, and just as it landed, its four paws pushed off and outward. It leapt, and I yelled, "Yes! Go! Go!", and it flew directly down the ravine, knocked its head on a stone near the stream, and shook in convulsions on a streamside rock. Unable reach it down in the ravine, for several minutes from the roadside I watched it take what I was sure were its last breaths, and when I thought I saw no more movement, I moped back to my car. 

One minute you're charging across a road, calling upon every muscle and bone your body grants you. The next minute, you're slammed by a mammoth machine whose size is beyond your vision, your head seemingly no longer attached to your body. You're not sure what you feel, if you're dead or alive, what direction you're facing, up or down. Fire races through your spine, and light balls flicker in your eyes. Something pokes you. Moves you. And you begin to regain more sensation. You hold on. You'll make it. You rest until you're certain it's safe, and when you know the creature with the stick isn't going to kill you, you feel your body and mind gather everything, you feel your muscles and organs and remaining wits working for you, and so you do it--you run for your life and leap, spread out all your limbs, catch the wind with your belly, and fly--you are flying!--and land your skull on a stone that sends your near-unconscious body into uncontrollable fits. This is life, you think, and rest.

This is life, I thought, and drove home.
* * *
This morning, I drive past the ravine and pull over in the same driveway. I walk the twenty yards again, dermined to find a way down the ravine to retrieve and to bury the body. But it's gone. No traces. Maybe it was eaten, taken further into winter's recesses. Or maybe it got stunned again, stunned by life's twists and bends, these utterly alien moments that halt your heart a few seconds until your tongue and mind and bones catch up. Then, with its limbs in tact, its wits mostly restored, it crawls off, maybe back to the hollows of a birch's body where it and another soft creature its size and shape have squirreled away a season's hoard of nuts. This evening, to its friends it tells the story, second by haunting second, of how death kicked it in the head twice and survived. 
* * *
What does desperation feel like flush against the cheeks?
When leaves fall, do they blame trees--or thank them?
Do trees have favorite leaves that they try to hold on to?
How does a deer's or duck's heart vibrate to the sound of a hunter's feet crunching dead leaves?

12 November 2004 6:50 am: guardian angels for snow
Outside my bedroom window, I see white powder spread across the meadows and more of it continuing to fall. I'm struck at once by annoyance and glee. "It's too soon for snow," I bemoan, having held out hope that after this week's first frost we might have a day or more of an indian Summer. But by the time I'm downstairs, glee has won out. Thermal longjohns, fleece-lined pants, wool socks, Sorrell snow boots, my favorite handstitched wool sweater from Nepal, the scarf my former wife wove for me, the wool cap my girlfriend stitched for me, ski gloves, and the wool coat made for me in the Himalayas--all gathered and donned as the joyous accoutrements of a snowtime Wonder Walk.
* * *
Walks in snow evoke nostalgia. When I was 20 and living in Austin, having just gotten in a new relationship that would last several years, I took a walk and relived a few rare winters when we had full snowfalls in Texas. The piece I wrote then was a sentimental look at boyhood snow days. This morning, I'm surrounded by lovers. I feel my girlfriend's hands on my head in the hat she has knitted for me, and I long for her to walk beside me and see things I miss. I feel my former wife's hands around my neck in the scarf she knitted for me two winters ago and hear her groan at the thought of another cold winter. I hear the inquisitive voice of a former lover from Texas ask about the landscape up here. I hear the desperate voice of a former lover from Alabama who left a phone message yesterday. I hear my first true love in Texas of over twenty years ago giggle as she hurls a snowball at me. The Dine-Navajo view types of rain as forms of the dead. Maybe snowflakes are forms of lovers, present and past in one. Possibly since the beginning of life, everytime two creatures fall in love a snow flake is formed in the clouds. Snowflakes fall to remind creatures of the magical shapes of falling in love. That's what snow is: a blanket for the earth woven by billions of creatures who have fallen in love.
* * *
A line of snowflakes hangs suspended in the air. Among the evergreens that line the big meadow, a spider web thread hanging from a limb has captured a ball of snowflakes and strung them out, giving them an unexpected respite just seconds before hitting the ground. From the thread, each flake's form becomes distinct. When a boy, I had thought snowflakes had the shape of dirt clods--the shape they have when falling in mass. I thought the symmetric snowflakes we schoolkids cut out from paper plates were simply stylized fantasies (although I never used those words then). The real things, though, hanging here, captured by a lucky dream weaver, fascinate this gray-haired man more than did snow clods or snow plates did that yolk-haired boy. Wonder assumes richer textures with age.
* * *
Snowflakes vanish in the pond. Boots crunch the snow. Snow presses against the soles. An unseen plane looms somewhere. Hush.
* * *
From a squatting angle along the pondside: Snowflakes appear to be falling while others appear to be rising up. In the pond's reflection, some snowflakes look as if they hit the pond surface, pop up a few inches from the impact, and fall again into its mouth.
* * *
How does the pond keep its feet warm when it snows? Does the pond blush when snowflakes kiss their cheek? Do snowflakes fall to earth after they die? Is earth the place for snowflakes' afterlife? Do snowflakes have stories about angels on earth? Who among us is a snowflake's guardian angel?