IN WILDNESS
A dreary February day. Gray.
Dirty snow melting.
Then suddenly there are three
yellow crocus, petals shining,
looking up expectantly for sun:
fresh, open, children waiting to be
fed.
The leaves around them green and
crystal clean
Thrust up through ground that only
days ago
Was frozen solid. So suddenly
flowers.
Sweet tears come. And then from
above me
Come cries of snow geese hidden
In that sky the crocus blossoms
look to:
Forms invisible in soft gray clouds
until,
Abruptly, Seen!--those white far-flying
Creatures, shining wings tipped in
black,
Wavering skeins of hundreds of
birds
Skittering and slipping across the
Watery sky. Silvery confetti ,
Animate, feathered, aloft. Calling,
urging.
Perhaps rejoicing?
Then atop the voices of the geese,
Shrill purling cries:
And sandhill cranes appear, rowing
up high
Through the clean currents of the
atmosphere,
In ancient ritual travel to the arctic
north.
And then I too cry out!
Some
involuntary, throaty,
Foolish, inarticulate noise pressed
out of me
So sharp I half expect a neighbor
to call
And ask if I am hurt. "Yes," I would answer.
"Always.'
Every time.
"In wildness is the
preservation of the earth."
In wildness is it hidden—that which
will wrench
Your bones, compress your heart in
earnest:
Even the crocus, which we humans
plant,
We do not, cannot cause
To live. To surge through icy mud
And show their colors, share their fragrances,
To skies and
birds, to us, to secret others.
"In
wildness is the preservation." In
wildness
Is
it hidden, that which will wrench your
Bones,
compress your chest, in earnest,
Not
always pretty, as spring flowers, or awesome
As
sandhill cranes migrating, but also sudden animal
Snarling,
Death,
Wounds that bleed
dark blood,
Fountaining
out: then the reflex gasp, the noise
In
the lungs rattling, the russet feathers spread
Across
the garden soil where something struck.
It
springs upon us sometimes by surprise.
We
take a breath, we start, we stop.
And when the hidden spring's revealed,
again,
Again like children playing hide
and seek
Who laugh and shriek,
we sometimes even
cry.
And don't know why,
for even
that is hidden
In our secret
long-before-Pleistocene connections
To the core and secret motives of
the earth.
Earth spells Heart.
Look. It's
true.
And the earth whirls our hearts through
Vast and inconceivable miles of
space
At speeds that dizzy and blind our
vision.
When the mother first sees the
baby,
Newly born, one of these hidden
connections
Tightens on her heart and impels a
noise,
An opening of her throat,
a
blossoming at her breasts;
that motive power
Which hurls the earth away yet
holds it fast
In always-close proximity to the
sun,
Inhabits her.
And that's the hidden
web
Which makes me gasp at spring and
life
And holds me fast in fact of death
and winter.
Nine sandhill cranes head north
along
Invisible magnetic tracks, without
Our management or comprehension.
Flowers that rise from a
dead-seeming root
In the icy dark. Power unharnessed,
And self-sustaining, self-directed,
Outside and beyond the human social
brain.
I
cry out some involuntary thing,
Some
inarticulate noise erupts,
So
sharp I half expect someone to call
And
ask if I am hurt. "Yes," I
would answer.
"Always." This wound
direct to the heart
To be a witness of this awe-full
mystery,
Our world with all its wonders
whirling
In unfathomable nebula-gleaming
space.
This joyous hurt to the
heart always to
Be a witness to these mysteries.
Is this why also flying geese
Are crying, and cranes call out and
dance?
Is this why tiny flowers in the
snow
Open astonished eyes, coming to
life?
Again? And again surprised? Is this why
Men and women fling their bodies
together
And make such wildness in their
voices
And with flesh and bone press
together?
We serve the hidden source of life
and do not own it, or know wherein
it lies.
"In wildness is the
preservation of the earth."
Jubilation and terror.
--Juanita Rice, a February
The Miracle of Mindfulness: An Introduction to the Practice of Meditation by Thich Nhat Hanh
