Once I open my eyes, slip out the door, coffee still bitter on my tongue and the cool morning air chafing my face, something frantic seizes me, something in my animal nature compels me to push on and push out and gather. In these early moments of the late summer and fall, crunching through the parched or frost-bitten grass, I am stopped only by the poetry that stamped itself into the earth overnight while our eyes were shut and that now whispers a multitude of patterns and rhythms into the quiet. I am stopped by land that reveals sites that do and don’t make sense. Land that reveals hollows and dens and contours and always something upturned or some minor yet somehow significant upheaval – a small plant uprooted and left lying in a path, its silken roots splayed across a clump of soil, a lichen-scaled limb broken and lying anomalous in the vegetable garden, a vine ripped from a tree and collapsed onto itself, a nest abandoned in a thicket, a fistful of shorn fur coiled on the grass like a fallen nest.
I often write these musings while walking, clippers in hand, speaking them into my phone because I love nothing more than to walk as I write.
I have always been restless, darting here and there, from one thing to the next, and outside for my early morning forage I feel relief because finally all this flitting seems right. How can I not run from here to there? How can I not hunt and gather? So much to smell to touch to see and to hear; a thorn in my finger as I push a branch aside and no sooner than I’ve pushed past it the bite of blood on my tongue as without thinking I bring the wounded finger to my mouth and move on, onto the next curiosity, hunting, always hunting and sometimes gathering. Now they have made so many names and diagnoses for this behavior – this unbridled lust for life where untethered, un-demanded of, I flit and dart and study and recoil…and feel so blissfully animal and human.
Am I without focus, or am I simply awake and alert and following patterns and rhythms?
Yes, this darting from one interest to the next, now they diagnose this behavior, but in the dim – in the dawn – when I read the ground and its stories, I have no label, I reject all diagnoses. I am not even wife or mother or friend; I am only human animal.
And in the bleak winter months, in the long dark stretch that is January and with fresh snow on the ground I feel the pull of restlessness again. I am hunting more than gathering, as with some feeble excuse I wrap myself in wool and the heaviest of boots, compost can in hand, mumbling something about taking the compost and returning with firewood and I seal my little family inside the house with a gentle slam of the door, as I slip out, dropping the compost tin into the middle of the snowy field before I’ve even made it to the heap because I am onto some tracks in the snow, darting off again. Tracing evidence of some great chase that took place in the night while sleeping so easily with our doors shut and locked, we dreamt of surveys and boundaries, of land that is ours.
But now, in the cold, the tracks all around, the tufts of last year’s growth poking up through the snow, I understand the absurdity of these dreams. Of this belief that we can actually own this land, decide what will grow here, the conviction that we will fence it and grow within these fences and then keep it all for ourselves. We will do this with our wires and our ‘no trespassing’ signs stapled to trees. We think it is our territory. But look at the symbols/signs that stamp themselves so crisply into the snow, or more blurrily into the spring muck and mire that we foolishly guard with our paper and pens and staples.
I treasure these walks where I’m reminded again and again that we control nothing – such ideas are simple farces that we breathe into our pillows while the land lies open in the night. While we fart into our comforters and snore into our pillows, dreaming the soundest dreams of lines and boundaries and borders, the clearest lines of all are being stamped indisputably into the brittle crust of day-old snow.
Prints and tracks I now detect with my restlessness. With my endless hunting. Within the walls of a clinic they would diagnose it, this flitting, this relentless searching. But what other diagnosis is there than the human condition? The curse of forever seeking and never entirely finding what you are looking for. You glimpse a glimmer or a trace of what you desire, maybe, but never grasp a true handful…You pivot and head the other way where you once caught a whiff of something you sought only to find the birds have gotten to it first… A woodchuck or the deer or perhaps the drought has snuffed the fruit you were after, dried it all up and left it collapsed into itself like an old woman’s cheeks.
Perhaps this is why other peoples did not speak of ownership or of restlessness … because they were simply reading the land…
