In-betweenness

Shifting light, shifting life

I’m haunted, unsettled. I know so many millions share this sense of accelerating disorder in our human world and in the natural world on which we depend for our survival. I could write about that, but it’s my inner experience that I think I know best, so I’m coming from this perspective. Another way to express this feeling came to me yesterday while walking in the shifting light and clouds, warm sun and cool shadow and cold wind, late morning blending into afternoon. It’s the in-betweenness of right now.

It’s April, and it’s a cold day, not winter and not spring, and I’m on the lookout for first sightings of trout lilies and Dutchman’s breeches, hepatica and spring beauties. The first flower I see blooming in the woods is none of these familiars, it’s bell-shaped, electric blue, and I stop in my tracks in one area near the river that’s almost carpeted with them. It’s such a pretty scene. I do a search and find that it’s invasive non-native Siberian squill. I try to report it on the invasive species app on my phone, but the interface is clunky and I can’t tell if the report goes through.

Siberian squill in bloom .. isn’t it beautiful? But it’s not supposed to be here.

After the trail turns away from the river, a coyote emerges from the stiff, golden prairie grass, gaze fixed on me from 50 yards away, never breaking stride, melting into the understory of the windbreak treeline. He or she saw me first, and my gaze struggles to catch up as I side-step to follow, too late for anything to register as a mutual recognition. I would have welcomed that, but the coyote declined to form any kind of connection, however brief.

Nevertheless, the prairie always responds to the invitation for connection.

     sun, sky, restless wind,
     prairie light through my tearing eyes
     memories and spirits wave in the grass
     & far above & away,
     a red-tailed hawk screams

Personally, the in-between of this chapter of life, a possible bifurcation just ahead. The path I’ve been on this past few years, all the good and wonderful things I’ve attended to, continuing to build capacity to do all the things I tell myself I’ve wanted to do and have not done, my so-called life goals for myself. Still the same things: meditation and study, writing larger works, creative expansion with my photography. Dealing with my reluctant, wandering, not-quite-discipline to do these things in a more dedicated way. Another lane comes into view, a potentially-emergent really-right situation, alignment of people, place, and cause with my values and strengths and desires to continue making contributions in the world; a path with tradeoffs, though, like all paths.

Many trails toward the goal of right livelihood, one life.

Yesterday afternoon I walked the broken, abandoned Augusta-Climax road to to the remains of a home foundation among old and new sugar maples and black cherries. These woods border a restored prairie that used to be a farm field that once was plowed from a prairie. I’ve visited this location in winter and summer but never before at this narrow early-spring interval.

Out there on the back side of the old foundation, away from the old road, in a thick row on either side of a hundred-year-old sugar maple, is a vibrant set of daffodils, green and yellow-bright bursts, a shock and surprise for the eyes among greys and browns and moody cloud-blues. I have to believe some loving, creative soul planted them fairly recently, but of course the impression is that these are the remains of a hundred-year-old garden. A living reminder of a forgotten family’s backyard a hundred or more springs ago. A lesson in anonymously leaving beauty for others to find.

Where am I? When am I?

I swear I heard a woman’s voice in the wind-noise, as if in conversation with someone, as I stood there under all those waving limbs. Restless again, I walked back forty paces or so onto the old road. If someone else was out here, I’d point out the daffodils to them and we could wonder together how old they might be. But with no one around anywhere, I was as alone as I’d been, alone with my discordant mind. Suddenly the in-betweenness again, an agitation — what am I doing out here?

so many questions …

Later on, indoors, with pen on paper I try to settle my mind into a more balanced position. I wonder on the page if I can see myself toward a state of equanimity regarding the paths ahead, a grasping preference for neither, an embrace of the good facets of whichever option materializes. No answers emerge, just more words, but filling pages seems to help, as I name these swirling thoughts.

Some of the words that came forward were the familiar opening and closing lines to Robert Frost’s ‘The Road Not Taken’:

“Two roads diverged in a yellow wood

And sorry I could not travel both

And be one traveler…

…

“Two roads diverged in a wood, and I—

I took the one less traveled by,

And that has made all the difference.”

I wrote these lines down, and then paused, as I remembered hearing that the warm commencement-speech-comfort of our common interpretation of this poem has possibly been a collective cultural misreading, and indeed an alternate take emerges from a closer consideration of the words.

Who knows what Frost actually meant with his poem? I don’t think it matters, but great literature rarely distills to a simple platitude or advertising slogan. This alternate take is deeper and more complex, and so much more interesting — an observation of the ways we tell ourselves our life-stories, how we deceive ourselves by reason and rationale and self-narrative, how what we attribute to our own freewill can be random chance. Yet we have this innate need to make ourselves the agent, the center of the story.

This in-betweenness is a self-narrative too. The grasping of a worry-prone mind for the stability of naming, classification, categorization, the need to organize elements of experience into buckets of belonging. A craving for the security of ‘everything in its right place.’ Security that is really only found in illusions or wishes or dreams.

And now that I’ve named it, I may (again) have written myself out of the discomfort and into some kind of understanding, some kind of balanced perspective — at least for the next ten minutes, or until the light shifts again.

upon further reflection … I don’t have anything figured out, but maybe that's the point.