Blog Entries by lindsay

The fields of our residential community: the little one behind Pinestone, and the larger one that embraces the garden and often hosts the sheep, are awash in shades of green. The grasses are growing, it seems, more than an inch every day. The hummingbirds are back, dancing in the azaleas; the whippoorwill sings like a fool in love outside our windows and doors every night. Rabbits and squirrels hop and scamper. In the garden, radishes are busting out of the earth, lettuce and kale and an array of other growing things make a thick green blanket from fence to fence. Insects buzz and hum and chirp and whirr. The wood frogs trill and the air is thick with pollen dust and the smell of warm earth. The rain and chill of only a couple weeks ago is another world.

Once, around this time of year, I walked alone into the creek valley behind Foxfire, where Bob had made a small pool in a bend of Deer Spring Creek. I was headed past this, on my way to the Meditation Shelter, when I heard an eerie racket, like banshees in an argument, or ravens in battle. A few yards away from the pool, I stopped in my tracks. The usually still water was rolling and frothing, embroiled in a mini-tempest, a witch's cauldron. I took a step or two closer and then, as if an invisible hand had abruptly dropped a veil over the scene, all was still. The pool returned to its looking glass state and was profoundly quiet. I waited. Nothing moved except the occasional water skimmer. Then I glimpsed a small brown back just under the water surface; then another. I slowly backed off and went on my way.

Today the air is raw again. Bare-branched trees sketch tangled patterns in a leaden sky. The forest scene is painted in straw and pewter. The spring equinox was a week ago, and I am trying to have a right relationship with the bitter breezes and hard-scrabble ground.

On an intensely cold and sunny day, in a lovely old church in Rhinebeck, (in the Hudson River Valley north of New York City), Scot and Linda watched their son Galen marry a vibrant, intelligent, and beautiful woman. A few days later, as snow fell here at Rolling Ridge, we received an email from Mary Ann about the death of five-year-old Jacii, the nephew of Mary Ann's foster daughter, Karen. He had that morning lost a long battle with leukemia. Mary Ann wrote how Jacii had loved snowmen, and the movie Frozen, and that the family had gathered at his bedside, singing a song from that movie, as he died. Later that day, Josh, Kate, Emma, Wren, and Ana made a snowman for Jacii, rolling and rolling the powdery and sparkling snow. Then they took a picture and sent it to Karen.

It is cold. The mud on the path to the Meditation Shelter has frozen up in small bubbles and lumps. It crunches and crackles underfoot. The tree trunks and tangled branches are etched crisply against a pale sky, the high contour of the ridge clearly visible through the dry air. There are long pauses in the conversations of the forest creatures: a woodpecker's thunk-thunk, silence, a blackbird's caw, silence. The water in Deer Spring creek has stopped in icy patterns against the stones. I am reminded of the phrase we use when calling on the directions at the beginning of restorying retreats: "let us turn to the North, place of frozen stillness and quiet waiting, home of wolf and the season of winter..."

The shadows of the trees in the creek valley behind Foxfire and Pinestone in mid-afternoon are long and slender strips. The sun's rays slant almost horizontal and deeply gold through the forest. It is nearly the winter solstice, and the dark comes early in this third week of Advent. It is a thin time, perhaps the thinnest of all: a threshold time of waiting and expectancy.

The trees are beginning to unveil their skeletal frames, releasing leaves of truest hue to carpet the forest floor. Autumn is in middle age, and while bursts of scarlet and amber still explode in the woods, for the most part the trees stand dark and airy, branches crossed and twining against the blue and pewter sky.

I'm looking through my east window at the maple tree next to the woodshed. I can't take my eyes off of it. It's on fire, or at least pulsing with red-gold light, moving ever so slightly in a light autumn wind. For sure it's the angle of the sun's rays this time of year, hitting aslant, that makes the tree glow, framed elegantly by its still-green neighbors.

On the other side of our house, out the west window, this morning before dawn, the moon hung near the horizon. A full moon, it was almost completely eclipsed, a delicately traced dark circle holding a slender crescent of light.

If I were Mary Oliver, I would exclaim, "Have you ever seen anything in your life more wonderful..." or "every day I see or hear something that more or less kills me with delight..." and then I would write simply magnificent poetry.

I suppose it's customary on a work day that falls on Labor Day to reflect on the transformative power of using our bodies and minds to create, restore, sustain, build, and assist life on this planet. At least, in some small way, that's what we hope we are doing as we split and stack wood, weed, sweep, and plant. During our last work day in March, we took a moment to recognize the beginnings of a new and hopeful vision for work among the Rolling Ridge community, whose members are exploring ways to help one another live and work in relationship with the land and ecosystems that surround us. We realized that this vision went against the tide of conventional expectations about how to make a living, but we felt it was a good vision and one that felt right for our community and that we should try.