First you get on
the back of a great blue heron. Then you stalk the shoreline. Later, fly into
the rook in the trees. Stretched out, a heron can cover a city block. Their
necks are longer than anyone can say, plus or minus two percent. They’re like
the coastline of barrier islands, like New Jersey’s Long Beach Island or
Norway’s fjords; impossible to measure. You’d need a new math. Herons roost in
trees with osprey. I’ve seen it many times. Nothing like that ever gets old.
The light changes everything every second. There is always beauty here. There
are deep shadows. But there is often sun. There are lazy, quiet rainy days when
the water runs down the tree trunks, slides unnoticed off the eagle’s aged
yellow beak, drops onto the river and fools the fish near the surface thinking
its gobbed-up bread balls.
Somehow,
time passes even though each moment feels like nothing else is possible.
The
water’s surface is a perfect skating rink for some bugs. I’ve watched them and
can glide with the best of them. I’ve covered the surface at the back end of
the river ten times. Can’t get the hang of the skimmers though, you need a crew
for that. Still I glide with the best of them. Until I fly on the phragmites
leaping from one dry, crackling stalk to another. Sometimes I just like to bend
it just above the surface of the river and watch the fish. Sometimes I go
plunk. I have even gone kerplunketty plunk. Or I skip my body across the water
as if it were the smoothed inner curve of a clamshell that I often find on the
beach. I can toss myself sideways and skip over fifteen times, sliding sweet
and low. It is like shine on silver. Still can’t make it across all the way but
I don’t want the eagles thinking someone’s coming to visit either, so that’s
good. They like to keep to themselves. That’s why when they soar overhead, and
it’s around the time you needed a sign, that’s plenty good enough.
When
dawn comes each day, and dusk each evening, do they realize they never meet
each other? One is captured by the morning, whether the sun is out or not; and
the other is captured by the evening with and without stars twinkling. The moon
is no help and doesn’t convey or link their separation from each other. Yet
they have so much in common. These times are the bewitching times; and what’s
more they have a big moment in the calendar where the whole of everything that
they touch can cross a bridge to multiple worlds; where dragons and the Old
Woman might swim freely from one watery world to another, through a field of
energy, like a body of water, blue through green depending on the light. I’m
guessing the Old Woman knows my tricks and then some. Bet she can skip across
the river in two or maybe three sweet low, long glides.
Old
women are not solely in the autumn of their lives. Winter is not the end.
Seeing the aging in each other, tender as it is. we also see our strengths.
Like the tarot cards, misleading trails seeming to be the end of things are
always the beginning. You cannot forget that. Every season in my life contains
moments, even days, when other seasons play through with their themes. Just as
grief has many stages. Just as joy has an arc like the sun’s from dawn to dusk.
Just like coming to terms with your abilities and disabilities. How many of us
old women are artists but took two, three, maybe five decades to speak those
words, “I am a writer.”; “I am an artist.” This is the time to proclaim your
love and yourself, for autumn has summer in it; and spring; and winter is a new
beginning. I proclaim, which means to
cry out, that I am connected to the earth and this place that I love. These
wetlands carry my soul in every movement, every stillness, every living plant
and being. When I am here I feel loved into my proper place in the world.
I
have found my true North and it turns out that it is East. And if you head
further east, you’re at the beach. It’s how I line up with what feels like the
right direction and from this place I know all other places.
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