Place Where You Live:

Great Unknown Meadow, Connecticut

Home

The sun dawns in a new place, a wall of light through the pine trees in the backyard. It’s a summer sun: peach orange and empire apple red. It begins low, connecting with the dew in the grass, creating more prisms of fairy-like light, making the lawn look it’s on fire. It’s the same dawn of a thousand or million years, one that offers a cleansing for my mind, one that suggests, I can try again to find balance as I walk through life.

As I walk the wild, I see the 6ft. sunflower has opened. So has a native black-eyed Susan. But while it is summer, it is a shifting moment. Treetops and bushes seem to be lighter, maybe drying, readying for the change. Animals and birds have begun to migrate and shift attention to winter preparation. The apples bunch on branches and are ready to fall.

Nature has been ever present to remind me that it is always in flux, never the same day-to-day. Two blue jays were killed. Add to it bugs and spiders, and things I miss, and it’s obvious, one cannot hold it still. Yet life brims: a new beetle hustles up the mint, then a monarch and yellowtail flutter to the black-eyed Susans—all firsts that I almost didn’t notice, too concerned with what has passed, than what was present.

On the return walk, I spot a female goldfinch eating from the coneflowers; a neighborhood cat takes an instinctive stance, watching. I have instincts too, but perhaps am not so in-tuned to listen, to follow my inner guide. Though the more I let go off striving and preconceptions of how the next moment should be, the more the wild-hum, that can’t be explained, takes over, and like the sun, cleanses everything.