Ministry of the Maples

Good Morning,

It has been awhile since I last communicated. A lot has happened for everyone since November. I bow to you.

I spent the Solstice and deep winterseason tending to the home fires, both in the living room and in the inner chambers of myself. It is important, this time of sitting at the hearth of the soul, gazing into the flame and seeing what is there, and what is not. 

In the cold evenings I often bundled up in carhart bibs and jacket, plus a ancient goose down Camp 7 jacket I bought when I was 17 from the Salvation Army in Cortland (it's gone now, but there was a woman who worked there who would say in a loud brash voice "I don' wanna TALK", a phase that wove itself into the lexicon of my sister and I, and has made periodic peeks into our conversation ever since (particularly right after my sister wakes up but before she's read the news and drank her coffee. She may have her own examples.)

The Camp 7 jacket is a pinnacle of zipper construction. It has not caught nor snagged once in the 30 years I've owned it. The thing has a charm upon it and looks exactly the same as the day I bought it.  I don't but it does. I have a vague memory of trying to dye it red once, but the tan of it's soul persisted despite my best efforts to make it a bit cooler. 

I was 17 in 1995, and the jacket had to have already spent 20 years adventuring by the time I spied it on the metal rod tucked in with all the other kind of gross kind of awesome fur coats and tweed jackets that could accumulate in the 90s detritus of Cortland County.  At the time I was awash is the romance and high adventure of the West, the Rockies, and the far off wilderness of Alaska. The jacket told me it had been to those places, and by nature of its raw realness, I believed. 

This nondescript jacket went to a year of Outing Club up at Clarkson University; moonlite hikes up fire tower mountains in the blue blue silent night of the Adirondacks, then 3 winters in Fairbanks were I biked to and from the University in the 50 below zero darkness, the Northern Lights sweeping above like some giant concert pianist and the snow like sand beneath the bike wheels, so cold there was no little layer of water between them and the snow to cause a glide.

It then spent 2 summers on a five square mile tundra island in the Arctic Ocean where I lived for 10 weeks at a time with only one other person in a little tent, birds so thick in the sky and ground that for years afterwards spring would hearld in on rising sap dreams full of honking geese, crazed colonies of seagulls, tundra swans the size of a small cows trumpeting with their long white necks stretched out as they flew in pairs agains a sun just ducking under the horizon near midnight, the arctic sun illuminating a scene unchanged formillennia untold.

There is a kick and snap of air that I sometimes feel now, cold, fresh and light that brings me right back to Kiggigak, and I am walking next to a tidal slough, Nunivak Island a low mound to the North, the island bursting with more birds than you can imagine, all come from far far away to lay eggs, a mayhem of sudden life that explodes out of the greens, grays and dun yellows of the island sedges, all of it on a little slip of island that rises barely 3 feet above sea level. The Native Alaskans fill pits dug in the permafrost with eggs, layered and frozen for the keeping. 

You know, I think I could write my memoirs by tracing the life of this plain jacket, though plain is a naive word to employ. There is something magic woven into its fabric; I have had to gently reclaim it from more people than seems reasonable over the years, them saying that they just put it on because it was there, and it's magic began to take hold. I will stop now lest I begin the full memoir, and bring us back to a cold wintry evening when I bundled up and tucked in next to the base of one of the big old maples in front of my house.

Here is the protocol to follow in case you want to sit outside next to a big tree when it's below 20: Put on 2 cashmere sweaters, a Camp 7 jacket from 1971 (this may be the hardest item to procure and don't even dream of coming for it here, I'm savy), carhart bibs and jacket, a boiled wool scarf because then it is like armor in the wind, a sheepskin hat, then carry out a sheepskin rug and put it next to the tree, sit down on that, put a hot water bottle swathed in an old cashmere sweater down the front panel of your bibs, then cover up with a Scottish wool blanket, tucking in particularly well around your calves and ankles. Oh yes, and wear a pair of sorels or mukluks that are at least one size to big (for air flow) and a nice pair of socks. 

You're good for at least 40 minutes no matter what the night sends your way  (likely longer if you don't have the metabolism of 20 generations of Polish descent bred into you, genetics that keep stalwart vigil that not a single calorie goes to heat if it can be prevented. Good in famine, not so good in a land of sugar and fat.

Believe me I try to reason with these genetics and persuade them that I will likely not die of starvation if they keep my backside even 1 degree warmer, but they are not having it. So. The only rational thing for me to do is thank them for their incredible devotion to keep me in fat cells rather than heat, and develop the above outlined strategy for wintery meditations by the maples. 

This January, sitting quiet, tucked up tight against the rough whorl of bark, my cat Bone's Eye balanced and purring on my legs, his ears tuning to every crackle in the underbrush, the thrill of his listening transmitted to my legs through the subtle shifts of his paws,  I listened to the night and to the trees. Mmmmmm. Some of the best times and I wonder, as I do each time I'm out there, why everyone isn't doing the same.

The trees and the old farmhouse tell me things, and hold me, cradled like a precious child in their love. And I fill up in a night that could be 1859, the time fluid in its continuity when seen through something other than a human brain.

Once they told me to cover myself with an army of a thousand warthogs and let their thick hides protect me while the soft underbelly of my pain laid up close against the ground, healing in slow time, in the kind of time that daffodils push through the wet brown dirt in spring, in the kind of time that last season's bobolink nest falls from the hazelnut branches and relinquishes itself back to the earth.

Once they told me that the quiet vigil of the old house, perched high high above the hills and valleys of Central New York was holding my son as he grew from boy to young man, and that the house and land loved him with the sweet gentle love of a great granny that softly presideswith a gentle shine in her eye and tender touch of hand. They told me this was happening even if he did not know it, and it comforted me.

The tree roots on which Bone's Eye and I sit upon are not dreaming of Spring. They are here, now, anchored deep in the frozen soil, replete and resplendent in perfect repose, their charcoal branches swept up in silent union with the heavens, not a single atom ticked forward toward the rush of spring. My jacket and I soak it in, the medicine of it sinking into our cells.

To the call of listening to the heaven of God and the heaven within I announce:
 

Friday Evening Silent Meditation & Prayer is starting up again on Friday March 21st, an honoring of the Spring Equinox and all of the histories and legends embodied thus. $10-$40 sliding scale.
Click Here for more information.

Come sit with me and your fellow humans in this Place of Peace. Let's see what there is to see. Let's listen and hear what God murmurs through the pine boughs and what spirit utters under the sussuration of the wind about the eves on a brilliant Spring evening.