I love the land, and I love it best when I am sharing it.

The approach to the property, as the highway leaves Wilton and leans into a slow ascent, as it curves to follow the hill’s hips, as it dips into the warm valleys, then feels its way toward the North Pack by narrower and narrower ways, calls up so many memories: of the White Mountains (if not in altitude, then in presence); of the Southwest (if not in aridity, then in silence); or of the Boundary Waters in Minnesota (if not in liquidity, then in spirit)…

These are places to which I have been drawn for renewal and for retreat, and having found pathways in, toward simpler strengths and away from imagined necessities, have led others to the quiet I had discovered. (An aside. I was going to say, humbly, that I was fortunate to have discovered them; however, I have been looking for that clarity and stillness my whole life, everywhere, and always: when traveling or working or together with my partners… so I was fortunate, yes, but it is not accurate to say it was accidental, but good fortune that had been invited.)

Now, the retreat that fills me is where I will live! And I will reach out for the kinds of connections and communities that can bring extra sound, when desired, to this deep loud quiet.

~

Beneath my bedroom window, when it is open to the night air, you can hear the brook running over stones and through fallen branches, in that perfect multitude of voices that manages to sound as one. It’s a companionable sound: not the rush of a larger river that floods your dreams, and not that diminutive whisper of a smaller flow, that you must strain to hear (as though it didn’t wish to be heard). Instead, its voice calls a constant “I am here, I am here, I am here”… nothing one wants more than that constant, easy affirmation of presence.

Between two trees, there is just enough room to tie my hammock — the one from Brazil, that reminds me of hotter days, and how big the world inside me is — and that hammock swings you to and fro, “to” being over the small swatch of lawn beside the house, and “fro” being the baby’s-crib security to offers, as your body flies out into the air above the gorge. Careful pruning of the limbs and bushes around the house will grant a longer reach out for the eyes, a deeper reach in for the sound.

On the other side of the house, there is an apple tree and a broad drive, whose ample parking admits the possibility of parties. There is the stone wall where my mother, always content to clear a garden when it needs a good weeding, found her 80-year-old bones (which, by the way, hold no apparent relation to her 20-year-old spirit) even more content to arrange the windflowers and grasses while standing, and at shoulder height. “Well, here’s a good idea! I never knew stone walls could be so useful!”

On the slope above the wall is a fire pit that will receive many good visits, summer into fall, spring into summer. And above the fire pit, the slope reaches up through fields, filled this time of year with wild strawberries (ah! far more satisfying than those wooden, lifeless, airlifted west-coast berries, is to place one of those pea-sized bursts of color on your tongue, fully ripe, just from the bush, and squeezing the juice and tiny seeds against your palate… no super-sized gluttony, but pure, just-so pleasure) and later, along the margins, with wild raspberries or blackberries or any of their lesser-known cousins. Up, out of the field and into the wood – yet another biology, other creatures – and rising higher, broader vistas, changing land beneath the feet, more stone; finally opening up near the top of the mountain (still on the same property!), and a real retreat-at-height, a place to sit and to breath, to let the thoughts and the demands of the day seep into the soil.

~

When you travel, every sight is new – even when you are older, and have seen so much, every day is fresh (look carefully!) even if there are familiar voices that echo from the shaded places. So the words tonight: they are from a single afternoon’s walk. I wonder how these first impressions will deepen… again… to become fuller and more important to me as our intimacy grows, the greatest beauties and surprises in relationship those that are watered by time, fed by love and loss, and remembered in a few quick lines.

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