Thoughts #43

Another year has come and gone, and I find myself reflecting on how the next chapter of my story will unfold? It seems like just yesterday I was still so young. When I look in the mirror now what I see are weary eyes and long shimmering greyish hair stares back at me. That youthful gaze has gone the way of the last golden rays of sunlight, sinking far into the horizon.

Don’t misunderstand me, I am quite fond of my slowly greying head of hair–and quite happy to still have a lot of it. It’s more what it reveals that transfixes my gaze. I remember as a younger man reading Sam Keen’s Fire in the Belly, and really believing I had that fire. But now, several decades later, I’m not so sure. Not that I disagree with anything in the book per se, and I have tried to find my own way of living an authentic and empower and conscious life in the intervening years, but the fire feels less firey now, more subdued, harder to ignite and requiring much more stoking that seems practical. And yet my desire for that fire and passion really hasn’t gone away, but more the feeling of it in my gut. 

A decade of living in New York, and everything that came with that, have indelibly etched their imprint into my psyche like an Albrech Durer woodprint on a rough sheet of paper. Equal parts wisdom and pain, loving and loss, trial and tribulation. And yet for all that, the thing which kept me inspired–the all-consuming academic drive to secure my PhD and delve full time into academia–has proved elusive, like a shadow that stalks you only to vanishes before your gaze. I can’t shake the feeling that I am still haunted by the shadow of the former life, even as I have tried to embark upon a new one.

And so, like a cliffhanger episode at the end of season 4 of The Life of Chris, I wait with baited breath on the edge of my seat, waiting for the other shoe to drop…

I went for a walk in the slush-encrusted forest today. Followed the tracks of deer and rabbit and squirrel from vernal pool to middens to rotten tree stump. I listen to the ice-encrusted trees as they grinded and shivever amongst themselves. I made my greetings among the grove of Beech and left my offerings on the moss covered rock. I listened to the birds. I listened to the air. I followed the signs of death and decay alongside new growth and infantile buds glazed with ice. I stepped among the wild strawberries and blackberry canes, the ferns, Glechoma and wild grass. I followed the flow of water and the ridges of nurse logs. I peered into the crevices of rotten logs eaten through with black fungal veins a mile long, and traced the frozen caps of mycelial maidens nestled within the cellulose folds of the fallen trees. 

I enjoy the immense stillness of the woods in winter. The sound of woodpeckers calling out as they hop from tree to tree. The wrustle of a squirrel overhead among the branches. There is a certain grace amidst the greenery that is lacking everywhere else. And yet, even here, this restlessness stirs deep within me, ready for the next chapter to unfold, the next clue to reveal itself. 

And so I wait like a seed for spring, ever hopeful, never sure of what comes next…