Thanksgiving Song

This week, in observance of Thanksgiving, I offer a post stylistically different than most of my Soul Shelter entries. What follows is part of a lyric essay I wrote a few years back (published in Pilgrimage Magazine). Re-reading this, I see it  as a record one of the most gratitude-infused periods of my life, when my wife and I lived briefly in a half-refurbished barn on a California farm.

During this time I worked graveyard hours seven days a week throwing newspapers from the window of a stuttering Geo Metro. By day I raked leaves, stacked firewood, fed a farm dog and a half-dozen barn cats, and dreamt up new fiction. I had three short stories in print in small-circulation magazines, had finished a novel, and was seeking a publisher.

Looking back, my achievements at that time appear mighty thin, but what strikes me is to notice how full of joy I was, how much promise I sensed in the air, how thankful I felt for what little we had. I want to get back to that condition of peace and contentment. The first step, I know, is unconditional gratitude.

Happy Thanskgiving, Soul Shelter readers. And allow me to say thanks to you for your visits here, for your attention, for your voices.

* * *

November.

The first true storm of the season has just passed. A good muscular storm it was: two days of wind and rain, muggy gusts that broke limbs from the oaks and downed the power lines. Gray air thick as static, as though you’re standing in a broom closet, while above you the sky stretches low and wide.

Night before last, in the wind and torrent, insects thronged our front door. Beetles, wild in exodus from the sopping leaves, spiders, groggy and sprawling in the cracks of our sill, and a slow sleepwalking salamander the color of coffee — green bulbous eyes, limbs that paddle the air softly as though swimming (do the amphibious creatures live the elements in converse order: crawling through water, swimming through air?). It stretched its curving length across my palm before I set it down in the dirt clearing. Later my wife told me they respire through their skin and shouldn’t be touched because the salt of our human bodies harms them. …

*

In the dark mornings, pulling off the property to drive to my graveyard job, I often startle the bucks ambling in the walnut grove across the road. One of them, young magisterial buck, has been in the same place at the same hour for three nights in a row — once alone (when I saw him leap a wire fence in a single supple motion like liquid thrown in an arc), once accompanied by a medium-size stag, and once attended by two big does and a handful of fawns. My headlights do not startle him. He floats calmly away from the light, unalarmed, head held low in his grazing walk. His nostrils smoke, and I watch the yellow gyro sphere of his antlers drift away into orchard darkness.

In medieval art the antlered deer, whose fleetness and sharp sense make its capture difficult, was a symbol for hearing. Ah, to learn to hear. To learn to listen. …

*

This morning, six o’clock, driving back to the property in the moments just before dawn: a luminous, low-spreading fog over the narrow Reliez Valley at the mouth of the Briones suburban wildnerness. Blue smoke rolling over dark fields. Somewhere within it: a light. As if dawn begins in the earth itself, glow of steam unfurling from the soil. …

*

Last week on the hillside, bending to scoop up a pile of leaf, I caught the soft glister of a steely thing — something twisted, coiled like a length of narrow spring. Looking closer I saw the taper at both ends, and prodding it with the rake till it turned I made out the copper-colored back. A little snake, dead, bunched into a stiff figure-eight. He was no thicker than a pencil, no longer than a normal rubber band cut once. His belly was the thing I’d seen first: tiny horizontal bands from nose to tail, bright silver and black, and with a sheen like polished wire. On his back: two or three vertical stripes running his whole length, a lighter orange against the reptilian copper.

I took a piece of twig and lifted him from the leaves and brought him closer to find the tiny tongue lapping blindly at air. The flavor of my presence. Then saw the rigid body slinking over the twig, every infinitesimal scale separating till the body grew in a dripping way. I carried him up the hill and laid him down in a bare place and watched him stretch sleepily to his full length — three times what I’d judged it to be. In a moment or two he moved back toward his winter blanket of leaf, buried his head like a groggy child prematurely awakened. Like I was the goading parent he didn’t yet wish to see. Back to his hillside snake-dreams, his soil-warmth, his four-month torpor of empty-belly silence and sunless contentment. …

*

Evening. Deep dark autumn evening in which the night ages at a rate startling to us creeping humans. Cold air. Not a light in these dark valley hills. The crunch of an animal in the blackness: crumpled oak leaf under hoof, paw, talon, claw. Inside, I am snug and lamp-lit, bent at the kitchen table neighbor to a taper candle’s glow. The kettle sings, aluminum rattling, the water in it still boiling as I pour. Two steaming cups. Then two steps down into the bedroom and through the door to the study where you, my wife, are at work with papers and books. A “thank you” and a “sweetheart” from you, and your lips at my wrist, mine to your head: the crown of dark curls lavender-scented, and in concord with the unnamable smell of you.

Outside: the night, aging. Inside we are aging too — in this slow nightly somersault toward morning, mornings, sequence of mornings, through autumn and on into winter, winter’s nights, then spring. Another evening inside with a journal and some books, earth-colored tea, herbal infusion over the tongue and between the cheeks, steam of the tipped cup touching our faces. We’ll fall back into autumn thoughts, leafy mound of the mind, mulch of the heart and soul. Sod of body accepts the falling detritus from the tree of thought, the tree of feeling.

Now I am in it. Now I am the leaf that falls in the dark of night. Now I am the tree: many-limbed form in the blackness, shape past which the big-pupiled animals slip, crunching. When I step out onto the porch they stop, one paw dangling, one hoof, head up and black eyes slurping at shadows, listening to the sound of someone else in the darkness, sharer of the night, being who is listening to them.

To hear the oceanic blood in my ears, the health of this body vibrant against silence. To lean into the space above this kitchen table, enclosed by it, at home in it for perhaps the first time. To step inside through a door, and inside again, and find the rooms filling up with stars, the walls stretching as high and wide as a sun-scraped autumnal sky, and the breath of these lungs pluming into animal shapes — all that is inward flowing outward. . . . Deer and hawk, lamb’s ear, laurel, footbridge, flagstone, mud field, horse print, asparagus weed, farm road, goat-laughter, hinge-moan, roof-skitter, barn cat, crooked ladder, bale and flake, grain bucket full of rainwater, streak of galaxy, greening storm, the kitten’s dish and a soft thumbless paw kittening the palm of the hand. Contact.

I feel better than I have felt in weeks. Light-hearted. Lucid. Luminous. I feel more alive than I have felt in seasons. Everything seems to speak my thanks.

You might also enjoy:

“Fulfillment: A Work in Progress”

“You Don’t Have To Be An Insider”

“A Moment of Fulfillment“