Last Writes

Watching Autumn give way to Winter in Boise, Idaho this past month

I was laying in some former farm house erected in the 1940s. The pains in my abdomen had been thieving life away from me hour after hour. My left leg was feeling the fatigue of a limb that has seen better days. I mustered myself upright for that gluttonous meal this indebted government still dares to call holy.

Grateful for the family and friends I would see, I still felt the mystic being pulled from out of me. The congestion of California’s cities combined with their gods of Comfort and Deception were extracting my soul from my senses. Here even healthy trees always look like they are dying.

I must lament I still wished to see more people. Friends from past congregations and those I have only known from the internet will have to wait. I made haste for home in the wild in hopes of healing.

Arriving in what felt like the dead of night, this time of year it was just past five, the constant clenching in every fiber of my body finally released.

I built a fire in the stove to heat our near freezing home. Within an hour of arrival, a glow returned to our windows. Turning the knob at the bathroom sink I felt the cold water cleaning me. Water so cold the flows cleanse to the bone. Unlike the droughts that have attracted the masses, we have an abundance in the wilderness.

This morning I read from the Proverbs, then Walden. My son sat beside me scanning the trees beyond the windows for the scenes of frost weaving its way into every fiber of the world. There is a stillness to the sights beyond our panes and porch. Our outer world is an influence on our inner beings.

Even with fewer sun stained hours, town has slowed. With less, we are our happiest, not searching for the edifices of outsiders we are warmed by one another. I look forward to trading stories over hard ciders and mulled wine. With spices in our water and cinnamon in our teas, smiles are traded easily.

Meditating on Thoreau, I recalled he had died not many years beyond my own. But he lived. Walden is his testament to a life one would not see in a century of living in a city. How deceived I once was to believe all there could be to living was commuting and traveling. The most living I have ever done in my life was here in this forest, here by these mountains, here on this lake, splitting wood for a fire and drinking water that came down like manna from God.

I am no medical professional yet I have found more healing in forests than hospitals. The middle earth medicine I need is a daily pyre in the irons, the scents of green things generously ceasing their striving to be green, at least for a season. They serve as inspiration.

Once I believed subconsciously that consumption could be cured by consumption. Perhaps this is the great deceit of every city. Cessation is the sword strong enough to sever the warts of our worries worn like crowns on our heads. The great regality of reality is resting with friends.

Until next week,

-Steven

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