the rhythm and wonder of a place takes time...

Settling into the rhythm and wisdom of a place takes time - or, at least for me, it takes time. I am a slow learner, often "late to the party" in a host of ways as quicker spirits like to quip. In owning this as fundamental to my soul, I find myself regularly on the look-out for allies. One who stands on common ground with me is T.S. Eliot in his Four Quartets:

To arrive where you are, to get from where you are not,
You must go by a way wherein there is no ecstasy.
In order to arrive at what you do not know
You must go by a way which is the way of ignorance.
In order to possess what you do not possess
You must go by the way of dispossession.
In order to arrive at what you are not
You must go through the way in which you are not.
And what you do not know is the only thing you know
And what you own is what you do not own
And where you are is where you are not.

As I slowly read and research how the land, trees, flowers, grasses, and animals of my home are gentle wisdom-keepers in the Berkshires - guardians of the tender path of knowledge concerning how to live in balance here - the history and culture of the Mohican people takes on new importance. Not, I pray, in some New Agey, romantic fascination that reeks of privilege and cultural appropriation. But rather as one voice singing in the chorus of experiential creation spirituality for this region. As I try to say often, I am a novice to these hills. I need to listen to all the elders and sages when they talk about living in harmony and sustainability. Some partners are contemporary - like the New England Native Plant/Seed Share and Trade group - others speak from history. My hermeneutic of suspicion tells me this is especially true when it comes to the voices of our invisible, abandoned, and discarded past. So, in the spirit of the Algonquin people who told their children stories of the community during the winter, I am using the cold to read their histories. And research how they farmed for squash, corn, beans, and sunflower seeds. Later today we will walk with Lucie in the wetlands and then explore some seed catalogs and order a few more native plants for the garden.        

There are other voices to take in, too as I settle in slowly to this small place of ordinary wonder: the poets, the authors, the preachers, the English and Dutch colonizers. It is time to take in the mystical encounters of Jonathan Edwards with nature as well. He was not just a one dimensional, New England revivalist. He was a mystic. A man of magnificent intellect who was banished from the cream of the Anglo crop by his kin to society's periphery in the Mohican settlement of Stockbridge. His Stockbridge sermons are saturated with stories of how the holy can be seen and experienced in the roses. Or the silkworm. Or the dance of the spiders in the sunlight. His heart was changed, too both by his exile and the beauty of nature. Wise, old Wendell Berry, who has devoted his life to learning the wisdom of the holy through intimacy with the land of his Kentucky farm, is another comrade I like to listen to as in this slow settling-in:

It may be that when we no longer know what to do,
we have come to our real work
and when we no longer know which way to go,
we have begun our real journey.

The mind that is not baffled is not employed.
The impeded stream is the one that sings.