Fall: Burning Leaves, Bird Migrations—Foretelling

As a girl, I liked to rake dry leaves into a pile by the road edge and hold a lit match under a few to start the burning. I was the guard. I breathed in the smoke—then breathed it in a little more deeply. It had a good smell. The sugar maples continued to turn yellow, but I had to wait for a bird migration to pass over our home. The noise of their cries would alert me. I’d look up, and the sky would have changed. Hundreds (more) of birds, in formation, would be blocking out most of the blue. Even in the few minutes of my following them, their shape in flight would change. I watched until the last bird was out of sight—my sense of wonder still with me. Writing this, I felt that my childhood of watching birds migrate could not have been more apt for what was to come in my later years.

As I grew older, my awareness of the trees in fall centered on the sugar maples. No matter fall’s official start date, for me it came with the cold snap that led the trees to cut off the circulation of water, nutrients, and sugar to their leaves, causing the green chlorophyll to disintegrate. Existing but before that moment unseen pigments of red, orange, and yellow then shone through.* Our yard in western Massachusetts had two sugar maples. A maternal one out front, roped for a child’s swing, had fall leaves the color of soft morning sun. But out back, behind the garage, in the neighbor’s woods, a teenage one, bold with leaves that flamed red in their dramatic dying, stood independent before a backdrop of tan, faded leaves. As I stepped onto the side porch each morning, I stopped to stand for silent moments and just look at its beauty, feeling fortunate.

The Connecticut River Valley is known for bird migrations,* and I watched several every year. With head craned back and body in a reliable stance, I gazed in wordless fascination until the travelers became invisible beyond the horizon of tall trees and the pounding of their wings no longer reached my ears.

In my 60th decade, I became an annual migrator, flying halfway around the world to India, traveling from home to home in seasons of opportunity.

My realization is, “An insight in older age may reveal that an earlier attraction bore far greater import (even a message) than was understood at the time.”

* From my research. https://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2007/10/071012104737.html

* Western Massachusetts and especially the Connecticut River Valley have it all, from warblers to eagles to the Great Blue Heron! http://blogs.massaudubon.org/yourgreatoutdoors/great-bird-migration-spots/

A Granddaughter Reignites My Love for Riding

The day I arrive at my daughter’s home, I begin to pass my granddaughter’s room, and with a glance inside, instead step in. Hanging on the nearest wall is a horse drawing that has made an instant impact on my attention. Looking, I take in the courage and independence that emanates from this horse, its visionary look into an unknown future, its qualities of leadership and pride, and its role of protector, as it stands in a powerful pose of stated freedom—embodied in its name as well—“Spirit.” Spirit is the hero character my granddaughter chose for a book report, which also includes the history and behavior of mustangs. From later research, I learned that Spirit’s grayish-brown coat is called dun and the escaping black flames of his mane and tail also identify him as a mustang. I visualize the mustang’s strength of heart and mind and understand these as my granddaughter’s qualities, too.

My character name is Spirit. Spirit is a stallion or a horse/mustang. [He] is a wild mustang. Most herds of mustangs live in open ranges of the west [around] dunes, marshes, and tidal flats. Horses eat grass, apples, hay, and leaves. They use their lips to pick apples and their front teeth to cut grass. Mustangs walk with their hooves. Their back hooves replace where their front hooves just stepped. Mountain lions, gray wolves, and grizzly bears hunt mustangs. Mustangs are not endangered but they were almost put on the endangered species list. Mustangs are descendants of Spanish horses. The name mustang comes from the Spanish name mustengo, which means “ownerless beast.”

Not expecting to go to one of my granddaughter’s riding lessons during my visit, I’m thrilled to learn that I will. This will be my first time watching my fifteen-year-old granddaughter ride. I know that she began lessons on a pony and now plays polo.* As she gets out of the car, I sense the same self-confidence she exudes in other sports. She is wearing sturdy boots that I’ve also noticed are her daily footwear.

Pat, the horse farm owner, welcomes us, and her gregarious nature is apparent in her conversation that comes in bursts of enthusiasm as she keeps up ongoing comments about horses and riding. The two head off talking about horses while I mosey behind, taking in a full view of the buildings and the grounds. The large stable doors are open, and I walk down rows of stalls on either side of an aisle until at the back, where the light is dimmer, I find my granddaughter. She has led her horse, Pepolina, out of her stall and is putting on a halter. Pepolina is tall with a brown coat and a short black mane and tail. Pat assigns a horse to a rider both for the horse’s temperament and the rider’s ability level. Pepolina is cross-tied, with three ropes attached to rings on her halter and to the walls on either side of the aisle, while my granddaughter talks to her horse as she brushes her. Pat is commenting and doing a little brushing. I note how my granddaughter responds with smiles, laughter, or just a nod of her head. I breathe in the horse and manure smells. I feel at home. In my grandparents’ barn as a child, I would linger in the stalls where the boards still retained the smell of animals of former years; Pat’s barn awakens my memory. Walking in step with Pepolina’s ambling gait, we leave for the riding arena located in the barn.

Inside, it is clean, airy, and bright from the sunlight that enters through outside doors wide enough for horses to be led through. Pat positions herself with her back to the doors, and I slip into a small area for viewing from behind a railing. Each time my granddaughter passes by, our eyes meet above simultaneous smiles. I watch her practice starting, halting, walking, trotting, and cantering. She responds well to Pat’s instructions, and by her nearly constant smile, I know her love for being here. Trotting to the far end, and without breaking the gait, she uses her riding techniques of use of her reins, body position, shifting weight, thigh pressure, and heel to turn Pepolina down the centerline toward the first opening in a row of three between seven-foot poles. I hear her clicking her tongue in encouragement to her horse. In quick changes of direction, the two go through each of the openings, circle the last pole and reverse to the starting point. Within the seconds it has taken horse and rider to do this, Pat has helped with instructions: “Now remember. Pick up your inside rein. Look. That end pole is always your problem pole. Don’t lean. Sit up straight when you’re going around a pole. Pick up your inside hand.” That completed, with Pepolina in a canter, they go straight down the centerline to where Pat stands. Pepolina, now in a halt, gets my granddaughter’s slaps of approval on her neck. Facing the arena, my granddaughter twists her body around to the right to look over her shoulder at Pat and grin—“We did it!”

At fifteen, my English-style riding experience was an unsuccessful one, but this afternoon, my love for riding has been reignited. I have learned the right riding experience for me—it is watching my granddaughter.

Since then, she has graduated to a new horse, Impression, one that I understand will challenge her more in its temperament and therefore be right for her next riding horizons. I’ve learned how much there is to accomplish in order to become a horsewoman. After today, I know that my granddaughter is on her way.

My realization is, “Our guidance does not necessarily 'deny and forget' what once struck our heart, but may instead inconspicuously keep it alive to be transformed later into a double blessing.”

* Polo is a team sport played on horseback. Players use a long-handled mallet to drive a small white plastic or wooden ball into the opposing team's goal to score.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Horse_tack

Spiritual Images: Peach, Lake, Wood’s Stream

At my request, a healer and friend here on pilgrimage and visiting on our only opportunity, guided me to lie down on the sofa. Seated behind me, he then spoke in gentle tones, “On an in-breath of three, breathe in the peace and breathe in the calm and breathe in the tranquility and breathe out the anxiety and breathe out the worries and breathe out the aggravations.” As he repeated this, I began to let go, until I was in an altered state, distanced from the sofa and watching inner abstract visions. He had been sharing a lengthy story of healing himself when doctors couldn’t that had taken two years. I was absorbed in listening, identifying with my personal journey, when my arms and legs began to move with kinetic energy, making it difficult to focus, until it became impossible, and I had abruptly interrupted him to ask for a healing.

As he was leaving in two days, knowing that I wanted to record his meditation, I took the one chance that I might meet him and did. Every morning and evening I would listen to the recording. Then one morning it would not play. My disappointment felt stuck. But then I understood—I was becoming reliant on his voice. The peace and the calm and the tranquility had to be prompted in my own voice, so I created a short version.

Thinking that I would like to write about these three words (peace, calm, and tranquility), I wrote peach on a piece of paper. Seeing my mistake, with an “ah,” I smiled, for I recognized a long-time pattern. Almost any time that I have started off to write “peace,” I have looked at the paper and seen “peach.” This day, however, I looked for a reason why, and found one. It was a prompt used in creative writing workshops by my mentor of many years, Pat Schneider, and one that I had written to many times. “Begin to write with something that your eye sees.”*

After years of reading while eating, I stopped this practice in May and have since eaten in quiet.

Now, at breakfast, I see a peach as I repeat “peace” several times in inner voice. My memory is of going with my granddaughter, then twelve (and now fifteen), to an open-air fruit stand for peaches, and more. Home, I took a big one from the bowl, its fuzzy roundness cupped in my hand. I lifted it to my nose to sniff its sweetness, then taste just how sweet, and juice had run over my lip onto my chin.

Two more images appeared, one for “calm,” and one for “tranquility.” At my noon meal, I see a lake I went to in my teenage years. My boyfriend—who would become my first husband—and his family had a camp on a seven-mile-long lake in the secluded woods of Maine. Mornings, I stood hip-deep in cool, greenish water, glass-clear to my feet, which were placed in a solid stance, for the stones were few. Turning my head, I looked out at a long view of the lake filling the cove.

At supper, I see open woods with a stream and leaves and moss and twigs and different shapes of stones under the water and sticking out and on its surface the trees above serenely moving up and down, going nowhere. I had been going down a wooded road after visiting a new friend, Anna.* An older and more experienced writer, she had liked my writing and invited me to visit. Driving away, once when I glanced to the side, I had seen an opening in the woods and stopped to explore. Thirty years later, not having seen Anna since that day, and just before the end of her life became apparent she had been the original editor of my first book, A Flower for God.

My realization is, “We are sensory receivers in a world of details. Any may prompt a recognition of quiet that lingers within us in silence for years, until it later reappears.”

*Pat Schneider, How the Light Gets In, Writing as a Spiritual Practice (New York, NY: Oxford University Press, 2013) 226.

* Anna Kirwan-Vogel, The Jewel of Life (New York, NY: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1991).