Wonder-ing
Meditation on All Things Wild
I wonder as I wander, out under the sky,. —-Sharon Olds, "Wonder as Wander"
Hello Lovelies—
Buckets of gratitude for reading A Woman’s Place Is In the Wild. I appreciate all of you who sustain and help me grow these weekly meditations by reading and commenting or sharing and supporting my work with a paid subscription. Your generosity means the world to me. Thank you for being here.
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Each weekly meditation of A Woman’s Place is in the Wild is an offering, an evocation of the world around me. You will rarely find me writing about climbing to the top of a mountain or counting the miles I’ve walked as if collecting notches on a belt.
Instead, I want to adventure in.
This is the kind of nature writing needed now, narratives of place—localities, with its root in the Latin, locus, for place—the kind that rise over time out of relationship, that allow us to understand that we are place, too. As the Scottish writer, Nan Shepherd says, “The first law of ecology is that everything is connected to everything else.”
8 July, Kesäkuu - Waning Summer Moon
As the season tilts away from mid-summer, the days hold two things at once: the hotter days that bloom in July and August and the imperceptible but certain ebbing of light. Summer is both her most expressive and most poignant.
There is a knife edge here—the knowledge that these fulsome days carry with them the inevitability of autumn and winter, that the wheel of the year turns even still.
Aware of how precious the bloom of these days are, I spend my time wonder-ing, collecting wonder.
Wonder-ing is the way I gather mornings in my journal, writing about the slant of light against trees; the strangely gorgeous, smoke-filled sunrise; the sound just now of wind making the forest speak in tongues.
Wonder-ing are my walks with Yuki. The moose we startled the other day, a juvenile who seemed more afraid of us, freezing in place as if she could disappear into the forest-scape.
Wonder-ing is this time out of time, a respite from my duties at the university and the press of having to be present somewhere at a specific time or bowing to the overlords who manage education now as not just as a business but as a corporation.
When the rain comes one afternoon. More wonder. Relief, however small, for the big fires burning across the southern part of the state.
On another morning, wonder in witnessing an emergence in landscape.
Yuki and I are walking along a path littered with the bodies of fallen ponderosas, one that descends from a dry exposed point into a gulch, when I see her: a strange, fairy-like creature with a white, trumpet-like face and sharp blue wings.
Aquilegia coerulea. Rocky Mountain Columbine.
At first, one appears, and then another. I let my eyes adjust until I see a dozen or more of the otherworldly forms emerging from the forest floor, lifting heads between juniper and among golden banner.
Columbines reveal themselves slowly, only after you take the time to take them in. You must earn their beauty with patience, with wonder.
All at once, I realize I am stand in a colony of blossoms, in the presence of the ethereal.
I have always felt Columbines as a mysterious presence in the landscape, the way their heads rise like a silent song, like prayer. Their orchid-like strangeness makes a cathedral out of the landscape they inhabit.
In the Celtic tradition, Columbine opens the doorway to other worlds and represented the world of the Fae. They could ward off evil.
Greg has planted them in our aspen garden, which we call the fairy garden, where I leave gifts for the small spirits of the forest in a small ceramic house we have placed there. Over the seasons, the columbines have reseeded and spread. This year they fill the spaces between aspens, rising above wild strawberry and lady’s mantel.
I stop to listen to the flowers. Their language is the language of story told in delicate blue wings and and beauty, in the threshold they represent not just to another world, but in the the summer season, where they mark this time of ripening before decline.
The summer forest begins to reach maximum biomass: flowers are in bloom, berries form on the vine, conelets solidify into pinecones, and birds and mammals who inhabit the woods have had their babies.
Now is the time of ripening before release. The columbine is the threshold, the harbinger of the season, coming at this pivot point, representing both fullness and ebb.
And, like the flower and the season, aren’t we holding two things at once? These are terrible days, friends. I cannot pretend that the world is not burning, that I cringe at the news, or read less and less about world (stopping) events.
But each day I learn my response from the natural world. A world where columbines give up their beauty freely, expressively, where baby squirrels canter along the deck ignoring Yuki who stalks each silently and slowly as if her presence can be made invisible by the care she takes with each step.
There is wonder in the world, still. This is my salvation and my prayer. Still will I gather it while I may.
The light dwindles, the season begins to flow away in the same way sand ebbs beneath the feet with the out-going tide. Fires are burning in the West. America is not America any more. But look here: at the fledgling chickadee shimmering her wings on the iron rail, asking to be fed; at the fat robin dipping at the bird bath; at the clouds that seem to promise more rain.
O to wander in all of this wonder.
It is enough.
Hold onto beauty, friends, and to each other. Carry hope. And practice being human, practice loving the earth and each other, each day. Thank you for reading.
Big love,
Karen
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Writing Wild: Ritual
Sunday October 4th 10-3:30
6 Spaces Left
As we prepare to enter enter fall, this daylong workshop focuses on not only helping your understand your own writing rituals (best times + places for inspiration, how to keep coming back to writing over and over) in order to help you feed your creative self, but also on inspiring some new ones. Plus, we’ll take a deep dive in the mystery with an intuitive inspiration hike and using tarot cards to help us access images, stories, poems swimming in our subconscious bodies.
This week I encountered the phrase "collapse aware" for the first time. It feels a notch up (or down?) from "climate grief," with that word "collapse" -- it stopped me short at first, the stark calling out of what's happening around us. That's why essays like what you write on Wednesdays matter so much, the reminder to be present, to notice the small and miraculous, and name that too. Like, I just looked up columbine because I'd couldn't picture them, even though they're all over the Midwest! Now I'll look for them on my hikes. Thank you for that gift.
Beautiful. I needed this! Just this morning, my partner and I were walking past the flower garden outside the library, and a huge swallowtail butterfly stopped us in our tracks. We spent the rest of the walk talking about magic and mystery and sensing the divine....and refusing to partake of the collective trance that keeps us chasing productivity instead of wonder. Your post made me feel part of a community. Solidarity. THANK YOU (always).