The Sitting Still House
The lemon seeds I planted in February have germinated and as they have grown and flourished I’ve been thinking of the two strongest as Cookie and Lisa, in memory of my departed friends. I will attempt to overwinter them in the greenhouse, wrapped snuggly in a sheep’s wool jacket (packaging from a recent order). If any of them survive the winter, they will need a very sunny spot to be planted in.
It is a wonder to think that these little seedlings are experiencing everything for the first time: the first leaves stretching out to feel the first touch of sunlight warming and triggering photosynthesis, the first touch of rain quenching the thirst, the first breeze ruffling the leaves and bending their flexible stems. Everything is a first.
It’s easy to lose sight of the experiences of ‘first-time’ as you age. Perhaps that’s why humans spend so much time dashing around, looking to find the wonder of the ‘first-time’, or glued to the latest tv/streaming offering to feel the hit of something new. Apparently, research shows that a constant stream of newness – like digital content of which this blog is a part – creates a dopamine hit, a feel-good chemical and the body wants to keep that going, so repeats the behaviour that created it.
In direct opposition to that, I’ve been fortunate to have had some health concerns that have encouraged me to sit still, to be in one place and to find a way to be satisfied with that, find a way to experience newness, first-timeness. And I have, although it’s been creeping up on me so slowly that I’ve only recently become aware of it.
In one of the essays in his book Practice of the Wild, Gary Snyder relates what a Crow elder told him;
“You know, I think if people stay somewhere long enough – even white people – the spirits will begin to speak to them. It’s the power of the spirits coming up from the land. The spirits and the old powers aren’t lost, they just need people to be around long enough and the spirits will begin to influence them”
This resonates so very deeply with me. Reflecting on my life here at Sitting Still House (I’ve lived here eighteen years and been mostly at home for six years) I’ve spent a great deal of time in the forest and garden, watching, observing, caring, interacting. The garden has witnessed and soaked up my blood, sweat and tears quite literally. I have become part of the land and place here, I belong to it in a very profound way, a physical way. Every Spring I see the new buds, leaves and flowers, the next generation of all the creatures that live here. All of them are completely new, energetically distinct from those that came before. Each one is a ‘first’. This year, when the new fox cubs came to visit and explore, I welcomed them all, understanding in a way I never had before that they are a new creation, and will have hundreds of those ‘first-time’ and ‘new’ experiences.
Now, I no longer observe the seasons, I’m part of them, they are within me and I experience them with my whole being. I’ve witnessed generations of small birds, insects, plants and many other living creatures here over eighteen years until now, they witness me and are comfortable with me. We interbe and interare. There is a sense of a ‘spirit’ or ‘angel’ of land and place here – a singular expression of all the living individuals that make their home here and the ancestors that came before them, a Deva of land and place if you will.
I may not have traveled widely beyond my land of birth but I’m traveling wisely at Sitting Still House, letting the ‘spirits’ or ‘angels’ or Deva (all of which, in my personal view, are an energetic manifestation of the Divine) speak to me and influence me, showing me that everyday is a new and first-time encounter with Life.