Spending the Afternoon

"Spend the afternoon.  You can't take it with you." -Annie Dillard

Yesterday, I took a little bit of sewing and played hooky from my studio.  I went to the woods, to a creek that I was introduced to over the weekend.  I couldn't help it.  I knew the water would be low and perfect for wading in.  My ears longed to hear the sounds of water cascading over rocks.  Maybe I feel drawn to it because I grew up by a creek and spent most days playing in it for years... Maybe this connection with nature in something that resides in most of us...  It's an awakening to simplicity and being present. While my friend fished, I mostly practiced seeing and listening.  I watched the trees and try to match the birds with the particular choruses I heard.  I stared at the water, noticing ripples and turtles and the diversity of fish and the sleekness of snakes.  "I walk out; I see something, some event that would otherwise have been utterly missed or lost; or something sees me, some enormous power brushes me with its clean wing, and I resound like a beaten bell" (Annie Dillard).  It is the seeing that enlivens me.  It’s the moments of this dragonfly or that woodpecker that I often miss.  I thought to myself how good it is to just be...and that's it.  I shock myself in that setting with how fully I am content and how the regular expectations of needing to be more dissolve.

"I am a frayed and nibbled survivor in a fallen world, and I am getting along. I am aging and eaten and have done my share of eating too. I am not washed and beautiful, in control of a shining world in which everything fits, but instead am wondering awed about on a splintered wreck I've come to care for, whose gnawed trees breathe a delicate air, whose bloodied and scarred creatures are my dearest companions, and whose beauty beats and shines not in its imperfections but overwhelmingly in spite of them...”  (Annie Dillard).

-quotes from Pilgrim at Tinker Creek by Annie Dillard