April 8, 2024

Insignificant Other

My watched buzzed, waking me up from a deep sleep. When I stood up from bed, my muscles felt sore from working on the trails, the pain gripping my arms and back. I felt better after a cup of coffee and some ibuprofen, but it was one of those rare mornings when my wife and I were dragging. I had forgotten how thrilled we were last fall when we cut the grass for the last time before winter. The break since then had erased memories of the work the property demanded during spring and summer. Farm Fit was back.

After washing up, I was surprised to find my wife studying outside in the hammock. It was cold, but she wanted to fit in more outdoor time before going to work. I checked to see if she needed anything, watching the vapor from my breath float out into the cold air, and then went inside to grab another cup of coffee. We kept the morning slow, writing and studying as best as we could. My wife left early to get gas and then returned home to pick up cookies she forgot. She baked some treats for us yesterday, but she also made a batch to take to the office where she was working.

Of course, the big news today was this afternoon’s solar eclipse. Surprisingly, I wasn’t excited about the eclipse, despite my love for nature, including outer space. It was in the news everywhere and I knew several photographers who were traveling hundreds of miles to catch the perfect image. I wondered what was turning me off and came up with two impressions.

First, people only seemed interested in natural events that were exceedingly rare or overwhelming in scale. While I should have felt optimistic people around the world were interrupting their routines to watch nature, I felt disheartened knowing their interest would wane as soon as the eclipse was over. While a solar eclipse grabbed the attention of tens or hundreds of millions of people, something as important as global warming wouldn’t even enter their minds, even after nature struck a chord in them.

Second, many people were trying to place their own ideas on the eclipse’s meaning. As if the event wasn’t remarkable enough, people had to add in their absurd ideas that had nothing to do with reality. Trying to pull some meaning out, a uniquely human trait, was taking something much larger than us, and trying to cram it into our smallness. Using nature as a prop, instead of learning from it, highlighted the limits of the human mind. While it had the power to break through its inherent weaknesses, it had very little interest in doing so.

I ate a small lunch, finishing it quickly and then ran an errand in Bailey for my wife. I arrived home with thirty minutes before my work began, so I grabbed my boots, gloves, and rake and headed into the woods where we left off clearing the trails. For thirty minutes, I raked the forest floor, extending the trail to a large rock we used as a landmark. I wasn’t sure if the work made my soreness feel better, but I arrived home feeling hot and ready for some cold water, which I chugged down during a meeting.

We received lots of deliveries today, most notably an outdoor table with six chairs that we’d put together over the next several days. I also received the dress shirts my wife ordered, and some medicine for Bodhi’s irritation issues, which entailed treating both his skin condition and sour attitude toward the other mutts. Before I knew it, it was six o’clock and my wife was home. I had a couple of late things come in, so I didn’t finish work for another half hour, but after, we snuck out of the house and into the woods.

I showed my wife the work I did on the trail and where I found ants that were way too large. As we walked inside the tree line, my wife spotted two deer standing in the northwest corner of the crop field. We waved hello and kept moving. When we came to an S curve in the trail that took us closer to where we saw the deer, the two does were standing in the same spot, watching us and feeding. We were about thirty yards from them, and it surprised me they didn’t spook. Two more deer emerged from the northern tree line, but we kept walking toward Beaver Tooth Rock.

Once we arrived, we set up our folding stools, opened a refreshing drink, and talked about our day. My wife was dealing with an authority figure in her rotation who was abusing their power and today, she resolved the issue through her school. We both took a deep breath and felt thankful her program took swift action and did the right thing. The sunset was quiet, and for the first time in a while, I could tell my wife felt more relaxed, despite the unsolicited pressures of her graduate program.

After enjoying some silence, we made our way home. When we arrived back near the grove, there was a lone deer just inside the tree line near my ground blind. We kept moving and after a few seconds; the doe barked and several deer took flight across the empty crop field. Although I saw fresh deer tracks yesterday, I had not seen the deer in a few days. This evening, I was happy to encounter them twice while we were out.

My wife fell asleep outside on the new hammock for about an hour, but when I crawled into bed, she was already there. I kissed her goodnight and set my head down on my pillow, thinking about the day. People were so good at treating nature like some pandora’s box that we opened and peeked into, admiring a vastness that we held in our hands. However, the actual world was exponentially larger than us, and we could never constrain it in a tidy package under our control. Instead of holding nature, it was holding us. I believed we placed ourselves at the center of the universe because we were too scared to accept our insignificance. I wondered if we would ever find the courage to realize these fears were pointless, and that the fastest way to embrace our power was to admit we had none. Before falling asleep, I snickered, realizing humans were just the universe’s insignificant other.