I am sitting out on the bench in our yard. Mt. Jefferson is wrapped in a smoky haze from some distant wildfire, giving its contours a soft, floating look. There is still snow on much of its slopes, curving in and out of the dips and falls of its immense girth. Tomorrow I return to Los Angeles. All of a sudden I am not ready to go. Last night, when I was tossing and turning and imagining strange things that go bump in the night, I was more than ready to get back to the city, to husband and friends, to leave this more solitary existence behind. But today, as I sit in the shade of the Ponderosas and listen to the birds chirp and twitter, the grasshopper’s cackle and even the saws and hammers of the construction work across the meadow, I hesitate, realize that I have only just begun to settle in to the rhythms of this place and want more time to absorb it and be absorbed by it.Having two homes is a new experience for me. It is both expansive and confusing. Each place offers so much of what I love and neither is complete in all those things. In Oregon is the solitude, the quiet, time to find my own pace. Here I notice more, my dreams grow larger, my thoughts slow. Here, the earth and sky, the wind and rain, coyote howl and hoot of the owl touch my primitive soul, calling up great longing, as well as the terror of complete vulnerability to the wild, the vast.

Right now a band of quail is bobbing across the grass, a mother hen and her three adolescent chicks. They move away from where I am sitting and are joined by more hens and chicks as they make their way to a woodpile and safe cover. This dodging between exposure and safety, I believe, is embedded in a kind of primal survival pocket deep inside our brains. In love, business, friendship, and art, in mind, body and spirit there is a kind of calculation that goes on: How much can I risk here? What might the cost be? Who will I be if I do this? Who will I be if I don’t?

I don’t want to huddle in the woodpile of my comfort, crouching there in the dark cover, fearing the coyote or the badger, but so often when I am on the verge of change it is where I find myself seeking refuge, feverishly doubting my ability to navigate the wide open spaces of what is calling me over the horizon.

Yesterday, out the window, I watched as flycatchers dodged and swooped to snap up grasshoppers and darting insects. Their agility and acuity had no forethought. They had never taken a workshop or had a mentor to school them in the right moves to make or not make. They were born to it and knew it to be the way of their survival. I believe that under all the things we have learned there is, for each of us, as for the quail, the coyote, and flycatcher, an innate knowing of how we are meant to move in this world–our natural rhythm, where our heart, our head and our soul converge and we move across the fields and rivers of our life in harmony, not fearing the perils, but welcoming them as a vital part of the journey.

Even as I prepare in these next two days to leave one part of this earth and fly to another I will still carry with me the scent of the pines, the touch of the breeze on my shoulder, the call of the flicker and the nuthatch in the chill morning. And if I emerge from the dark of my doubt (and I will) and out into the wide open spaces of possibility, I know I will know that there is no coming or going, no here or there, no now or then anywhere but in my mind. I will know in that place of convergence inside of me, that all that exists is memory–a vivid, radiant, undying memory–of how courageously we have lived and how well we have loved.

*************

The quail family

The smoky Cascades

Caught

The buck startles over the fence past
the house and I run from window
to window to see where he has gone,

if he is still near. I haven’t been out
to the meadow in the five days since
I arrived and deny I am frightened now

that the neighbor says a family of coyotes
have a den in the brush. I want to see
them like a movie on the big screen,

like the Discovery channel in my own
backyard, like how I watch the chipmunks
this afternoon, laugh at what is play to me

but might very well be war, with their tails
switching and chasing and tumbling and
I start to think that cutting the grass

yesterday might have left them easy prey
to owls or the mother coyote and how
there is no birdseed in the feeder and I want

desperately to see again the trees near
the stream, felled and gnawed by a beaver,
want to rest my head there on the damp

ground and wait for the insects to come,
the geese to touch down, for night,
to not bolt, to stay, to be rooted like

rabbit, like deer, bear and wolf, to know
what the hunted know and still to call
forth the breath, the will, the morning.

Hari Bhajan

August, 2006