March 15, 2024
Cyclic But Free
This morning, I woke up feeling tired. My wife was still weak, but felt well enough to go to her internal medicine rotation. At least it was Friday. After my wife left, I made some coffee and wrote, waiting for the sun to get closer to the horizon. Once twilight arrived, I slipped on my boots and headed outside into the woods.
As I walked through the pine grove, I saw several spider webs hanging between trees on the trail. I noticed the webs were back a few days ago, but it was time to pick up the shaman stick once again. My wife and I kidded about the shaman stick, which in our minds would be a long skinny branch we shook in all directions to ward off the forest’s evil spirts. Our story included her family visiting the property and how they would think we lost our minds. Then, we would allow them to walk the trail without the divine protection of the shaman stick, observing how long it would take before they realized the stick’s power. For the next six months, we would face a daily decision. Should I find a stick to wave in front of me as I walk, or should I walk face first repeatedly into spider webs? Usually, a person only needed to eat one or two webs, experiencing the unknown horror of gigantic spiders crawling on their face, to convince them to pick up their own stick before each walk into the forest.
As the sky lit, bright bands of pink and blue formed on the northwest corner of the crop field. Slowly but surely, the sun’s position was changing with the seasons, shifting the location of the sun’s setting and rising locations. The birds were active this morning with the usual suspects: wrens, cardinals, robins, warblers, crows, and woodpeckers. When I arrived at Beaver Tooth Rock, I set up my folding stool and sat down to watch the sunrise from the creek bed and ravine that housed it.
I never tired of seeing sunrises and sunsets. I'm not sure if humans turned these events into mere metaphors, or if our physiological time clock intertwined with nature's order, but I always felt that dusk and dawn held more importance than any other part of the day or night. While we could claim that any thirty minutes of a day were special, the entire world briefly changed during these specific times. The sky was full of color; the animals awakened or bedded down, and there was a genuine feeling of starting and ending one’s day.
To me, a sunrise felt full of hope for what the day could bring, while the sunset felt like closure of what happened, allowing for our recovery before the cycle began anew. In this way, nature presented a cycle that had routine markers at the beginning and end of each day, but what happened in-between always felt unwritten, full of potential, and brimming with hope. This perfect marriage of repetition and openness inspired me to improve the relationship between myself and my environment. To me, the sunrise was the starting gun and sunset, the finish line to a daily race that made up life’s grand marathon. Daily I ran. Daily I rested. But daily, the experience was never the same.
I arrived home in time to take a shower and get ready for work. Last night, less than ten hours ago, I ran into four different herds of deer. This morning, I saw none. Signs, however, existed, as I noted a single fresh deer track embedded deeply in the dirt of a narrow trail cleared by the rain. I liked that nature was predictably unpredictable. Cyclic, but free.
During my lunch break, I drove into Bailey to grab some food from the Piggly Wiggly. When I got into my vehicle to drive off, I saw a familiar film that coated my windshield. I turned on my wipers and released the light blue washer fluid. The liquid immediately turned bright yellow. The pine pollen was back. In Austin, cedar trees triggered people’s allergies, but the pollen from pine trees was more intense. In another week, I would walk through the pine grove and, with each step, an enormous cloud of yellow pollen would rise like smoke. During my first spring here, this phenomenon captivated me, until I discovered I was allergic to the powdery poison. Allergies, welcome back from your winter vacation.
After work, I ran the trash to the trash service center down the road. There was a line of cars that cleared quickly. The gentleman on shift told me it had rained a few minutes before. It had not rained on my property even though it was just a few miles down the road. I drove back home and when I turned down the dirt road that leads to the house, my wife was turning in behind me. Work was over for us both, and we were on the cusp of Friday night. How fun and full of promise.
We had a simple dinner and sat outside in the evening. While relaxing on the back porch furniture, we heard the loud calls of a bird. My wife identified a pair of red-shouldered hawks, but I thought the call sounded a little different from usual. We saw the birds land in the trees just above the backyard fence line and, for better or worse, experienced our first hawk mating session. I was happy. We were going to have baby hawks this spring.
Tired from work, we both bathed and got ready for bed. I took the dogs out one last time and stood on the deck under the night sky. There, I peered up at the moon, noticing Venus had moved away toward the west horizon. All the other stars were too dim to see.