Wherever You Are, Stop What You’re Doing

Stop and look at the tangled rootlets of the poison ivy vine climbing the locust tree. Notice the way they twist around each other like plaits in a golden braid, like tendrils of seaweed washed to shore. Stop and look, but do not touch. Never, never touch, not even in winter.

Stop and ponder the skeleton of the snakeroot plant, each twig covered in tiny brown stars. The white petals, once embraced by bees, have dried to powder and now dust the forest floor, but here are the star-shaped sepals that held those fluffs of botanical celebration. Bend closer. Here and there are a few black seeds the goldfinches neglected to glean. Only a few, but enough.

Stop and listen to the ragged-edged beech leaves, pale specters of the winter forest. They are chattering ghosts, clattering amid the bare branches of the other hardwoods. Wan light pours through their evanescence and burnishes them to gleaming. Deep in the gray, sleeping forest, whole beech trees flare up into whispering creatures made of trembling gold.

Stop and consider the deep hollows of the persimmon’s bark, the way the tree has carved its own skin into neat rectangles of sturdy protection. See how the lacy lichens have found purchase in the channels, sharing space in the hollows. Tree and lichen belong to one another. Neither is causing the other any harm.

Stop and peer at the hummingbird nest, smaller than your thumb, in the crook of the farthest reach of an oak branch. Remember the whir of hummingbird wings. Remember the green flash of hummingbird light.

Stop and notice how closely the human teenagers resemble the whistling, clicking, preening starlings.

Stop and contemplate the hollow-boned ducks floating on the water like leaves. Like deadwood. Turtles, too, drift in the sunny water. See the way the bones in the turtle’s webbed foot resemble the bones in the duck’s webbed foot. Hold open your hand. Trace the outline of your fingers.

Stop and think for a time about kinship. Think for a long time about kinship.

The world lies before you, a lavish garden. However hobbled by waste, however fouled by graft and tainted by deception, it will always take your breath away.

We were never cast out of Eden. We merely turned from it and shut our eyes. To return and be welcomed, cleansed and redeemed, we are only obliged to look.