Full Moon. September Moon. Harvest Moon. Moon of Leaves beginning to turn. A sort of excitement, a restlessness as heady as ancestral memory being carried on the cool night breeze. A coyote nearly as large as a German shepherd lopes across the road where Bell Brook flows under Route 9N, just north of Wing Road. Two deer, one a gangly this-year’s fawn, stand facing each other on either side of South Greenfield Road, halfway between my son Jesse’s A-frame where my two grandchildren are sleeping and the house half a mile further down the road where my Slovak grandparents lived. A rabbit bolts from the drying blue-eyed chicory near the rail tracks that stitch across Bockes Road. And the gray fox I’ve seen a dozen times this spring and summer goes leaping across Plank Road to dive down into the apple orchard below the embankment. I climb out in front of my cabin, stand transfixed in the light from the oldest grandmother’s face. At first the only sounds I hear are the thud of the car’s door and the soft irregular tink of its cooling engine. It’s forty degrees and the frogs whose choirs had been incessant only five days ago have been stunned into silence by the oncoming autumn. But then I hear it. Almost subliminal, an undercurrent as subtle as the flow of a wide stream. The slow chorus of crickets. Still there, still part of the fabric of the night. My cabin is far enough down Ridge Road, high enough up into the Kaydeross Range, that it’s embedded in the sort of soundscape that no city dwellers experience. Now and then the distant wail of a siren may carry up from the valley as a truck leaves the Porter Corners Fire Station. And an occasional motor bike or ATV may rev along Plank Road. But not this late. Not this last moon of summer night. There’s enough quiet to open the wind. Opening the Wind. It’s an old way of deepening your awareness of the voices most folks don’t hear. I learned how to follow that way from my old friend Norman Russell. Norman was a man deeply proud of his Cherokee ancestry, a poet and a professor of Botany. Author of numerous collections of lyric poetry, he also wrote a book on Botany called AN INTRODUCTION TO PLANT SCIENCE. But it was unlike any other science textbook before or since. Not only did it scatter poems throughout its pages like seeds dropped into furrowed rows, it urged anyone studying a tree, for example, to first spend time with that tree. Embrace it, sit down on the ground beneath it. Taste the soil, then lean back and dream beneath its limbs. One day, three decades gone, as I sat with Norman Russell on the back porch of his home in Oklahoma, he taught me how to open the wind. Taught me the way I’ve learned so many things from my elders—by telling me the story with the expectation that I would then go on and try to live it. “When I was a boy,” Norman said, “my Cherokee father showed me how to open the wind. What you do is find a quiet place at night. Maybe your back stoop. Then you sit there by yourself. Imagine a circle around you as wide as your outstretched arms. Close your eyes and listen till you hear everything within that circle. It might just be the scrape of your own shoe against the floor, the rustle of your clothing, your own breathing. Then you begin to hear your heartbeat. Now double the size of that circle of listening. You may catch a cricket just under the steps, a mouse scurrying across. And now double the circle again. Pretty soon you begin to take in things that are far away. A bird calling way off on the other side of the field, people talking in that house a hundred yards off.” Norman stopped talking then and we sat there for a long time, just listening as the echo of his words kept opening the wind around us. I hold onto that memory of Norman’s deep, gentle voice as I stand here in the driveway. Then I walk up to the deck, my feet rustling the grass. It’s one of the brightest full moons I have ever seen. Bright enough to read by? I go into the house and bring out the book of poems by Billy Collins I picked up last week at the new Northshire Bookstore in Saratoga Springs. HOROSCOPES FOR THE DEAD. I open it at random. Read the title aloud. “Vocation.” A poem that begins with the line “I watched the night sky. . .” Sowi. Which means something along the line of “Cool!” in Abenaki. I put the book down on the picnic table, a feast to return to later. But right now, I have business with this night and this moon. I walk away from the cabin and take the path that leads down between the tall pines, beeches, basswoods, and maples to Bucket Pond. Halfway along the hill trail I pause. One moonbeam cutting down through an opening in the canopy has shone a shaft of light like a spotlight onto an ironwood sapling. It stands there as gracefully as a ballet dancer, pausing in a plie before flowing back into the dance. When I reach the edge of the pond, it’s almost as visible as it would be in the day. The line of trees along the opposite side so perfectly reflected in the calm water that the shoreline looks like the shaft of a giant feather. But the thousand shades of green that would be visible in the light of the day star have been transmuted. Everything verdant has been recast as hazy silver and misty grey. And though there are a few stars reflected up from the old pond’s face, only the brightest of those most distant lights can be seen in a sky washed pale by moonlight. I look off to the northeast. Beyond those tallest trees, two miles away is Cole Hill. The homestead where my Abenaki grandfather and his twelve brothers and sisters were born. This pond which a piece of paper says I own, is where he used to fish when he was a boy. All of those generations before me owning this land more-- without deeds of ownership--than I do now. Though I do feel pretty good that the signs I’ve posted read PLEASE RESPECT OWNER’S PROPERTY, DO NOT DAMAGE OR LITTER rather than KEEP OUT. I stand there for a while, listening to the chirr of the crickets, the occasional rustle in dry leaves of a hunting shrew, a soft splash from further a hundred yards further down the pond that tells me Raccoon is dipping his man-like paws into the water in search of mussels. I breathe in the night, my arms and my ears open. Grateful to be where I am, as small as I am, embraced by this place, no more or less important than any other being that is part of this giving land, watched over and blessed by the pure face of the one my ancestors knew as our oldest Grandmother. Then I walk back up the hill to my human life.
Posted on: Thu, 19 Sep 2013 15:26:14 +0000
Trending Topics
© 2015