A Promise of Warming Fires to Come

I left my glasses inside.  They wouldn't have been much use where I am headed.  The warm, moist breath inside my balaclava greeting the -2 degree air outside would have resulted in a foggy blindness that I can't afford.  It's foolishness to choose a hike in the woods on a day like today in which frostbite and snow-covered footing make every moment and step precarious.  But the breeze was still and the sky was blue and I am obsessed with the new trails we have cleared beyond the prairie.

Multi-layered, then, from feet to head to hands, I crunched across the glistening snow, smiling at the morning greetings from "Gallo the Younger" and "Sam the Elder" who christen the chicken yard with cock-a-doodle-doos.

It's becoming habit to start where the trail used to end - down the eastern path toward the derelict fire pit now sadly overgrown.  The circling stones have even shifted over time, with the appearance that some are even missing, though I find none fallen or scattered nearby.  It's hard to imagine the squirrels pushing them away or the deer finding for them alternate uses, but there are gaps, nonetheless.

Only once have we filled the ring and ignited it into its intended purpose - shortly after moving to the farmstead, when the kids were visiting.  We stacked kindling and logs and stuffed newspapers and coaxed it all, finally, into flames.  We roasted marshmallows and made s'mores - standing around the fire because we hadn't thought to bring chairs.  It's a fond memory, but we never repeated it for reasons I don't recall.  I have an aversion to dead ends, and perhaps for no other reason, after awhile, this little cul-de-sac in our woods faded from my interest.

Until now, that is, since we have opened a way beyond.  Now my imagination is constantly drawn down that lane, even on a morning like this one when wiser souls remain inside beneath a coverlet, in  a comfortable chair near the fireplace, with a book.  I lunk along inside all my quilted layers, stiffly, like the Sta-Puff Marshmallow Man, the only sounds the crowing of the roosters, the songs of the birds in the branches, and the skittering of the rabbit I've disturbed up ahead.  It's worth the cold to enter this crystalline carpeted, tree-walled chapel.  The path is an aisle; the slope into the valley below a transept; the overreaching branches a dome to rival the Sistine Chapel; the deer droppings, in a surreal sort of way an offering of their own.  Tracks of multiple kinds confirm that this is an active sanctuary.  Cold, yes, but hushed.  Holy. How could I not be here with this congregation?

I walk through, first one direction; then, having completed the circle, repeat it down the opposite way to change my angle of vision.  And then, again, the fire ring - overgrown, but in the snow still distinct.

Purposeful.

Evocational.

Invitational.

"We will kindle fire here again," I promise the silent stones, "and this time we will sit...and linger."

The stones made no response, but I smile with anticipatory satisfaction and resolve.  There is something sacred, after all, about stirring cold embers and a dormant hearth into flame.  Vocational, even - this business of enkindling a spent fire.  A pastoral - prophetic, even - prayer.

That the Real Work Might Begin

After the initiating roar and snip of New Year's Day, the Way-making has continued in our woods these past two days.  The presenting task has been to link last week's new path with an existing access point along the fence line at the northwest edge of the prairie, via a deeper loop of cleared ground.  The stub of a trail has long-since extended past the large cedar tree at that intersection, but quickly dissolved into the thicket of scrub and brush and densely growing trees.  It's passable in winter while the branches are bare, but forbidding throughout the rest of the year as if nature was protecting secrets.

Yesterday consisted of "macro" work, the brush mower snarling its way through saplings and scrub.  It was trial and error progress, the Way more opaque than last week's clearing.  More than once, stumped, I quieted the engine and walked in circles, prospecting the way forward, before turning the key and activating the blades to make the discerned way plain.  I made mistakes, abandoned halted progress, found myself briefly lost, and ultimately followed the way tantalizingly close to the edge of a drainage ravine, eroded there by years - decades - of rain and wash.  Loosely roofing the ruts nearby was a lattice work of roots, the soil below and around them long-since washed away.

Eventually, the cedar sentinel came into view, this first swath, rough cut, completed.

Today the hand work - the "micro" pruning - commenced.  With less difficulty than I feared, I located yesterday's rudimentary efforts and pressed the loppers into more detailed labor.  I had quietly dreaded this slower, more retail undertaking and hoped to quickly snip my way through.  But as often happens, the Way, itself, became wondrous.  The details became distracting.  The woodland floor was littered with branches and twigs naturally pruned through the years - the brittle stories of winters and winds past, written in the kindling.  There were fallen trees - woody elders with whom time had caught up through northers or age or shifts in the soil beneath them.  There were the stubs of dead branches on a trunk's lower reaches, laddering the way up to vigorous older siblings higher up.

And there was deception.  Sturdy, intimidating saplings turned out to be shallowly rooted and easily pulled away.  Harmless looking branches I expected to easily snap out of their encroachment proved dense and solid and beyond the blades of my assault.  Branching, imposing arms the thickness of my own snapped off at the slightest touch, fooling with their faux facade.  A first-impressioned clearing proved canopied by overweaving fingers from mirroring trees on either side.

It was beautiful, it was fascinating, daunting and hypnotizing; and by the time I reached, again, that landmarking cedar I was disappointed that the circuit was completed.  To be sure, there is more trimming and pruning to be done - and no doubt will be in perpetuity.  I need to return, sooner rather than later.  But this time I'll enter with a different set of eyes.  I had broached this quietly strange world with one presumed work to do, but in attending to it, and despite my furtive glances, my loppers had distracted me from the larger labor of seeing and listening, and allowing myself to be...

...led,
informed,
spoken to,
rooted
and taught.

Perhaps that will be the work - the real work - of tomorrow, the weather of this unpredictable winter permitting.

A Fresh Path Despite the Brush, the Mud, and the Thorns

On New Year's Day we cleared a new path.

Literally.

It seemed like the right way to spend this morning of new beginnings.  Indeed, a biblical way, if the prophet Isaiah has it right.

When we purchased the property we would name "Taproot Garden", now well-over 8 years ago, we discovered a path on the eastern edge of our property that led to a clearing with an old fire pit in disrepair.  Perhaps our predecessors - or their children - had camped in the near, but secluded, space.  It has ever since been a beckoning mystery - evocative in its remove - save for one limitation.  The path went nowhere, except to the clearing.  There, the way reached a dead end, with little alternative but to turn around and retrace your steps.  We have dreamed of extending the path to connect with the prairie trail, but the woods are thick and brushy, and the challenge of hacking our way through the trees and the brush perennially dissuaded us.  The dead end has endured...

...provoking;
teasing;
beckoning.

Meanwhile, circumstances changed.  When we moved to this land we inherited a path around the western edge of the field that was to become the native prairie.  The grassy, tended way commenced just beyond our lawn, extended west toward the brushy expanse of the undeveloped property adjacent to us, before bending north toward the woods at the back of our property, eventually turning back eastward at the tree line and then south again toward the house.  The circle occasioned bucolic strolls - on foot during the warmer seasons, and on snow shoes during the whiter months.  Nestled now in the space between woods and tall grass, the way invited a slower, more observant pace while watching for butterflies and birds, noticing animal prints and emerging colors, and breathing deeper.  Eyes seemed sharper, noses more discerning, ears more alert around that path.  The very air seemed to crackle with wonder and intrigue.  More than one apathetic child has stepped onto that path with pronounced disinterest, only to complete the circuit with wide eyes and uninterruptible chatter about the sights and scents and sounds.

The only problem, confirmed by the recent sale of that undeveloped neighboring land, was that this western leg of the surrounding trail is not on our land.  Before, it never really mattered.  Now, of course, it did.

It was easy enough to mow a new path on our side of the line, deeper into the prairie, to replace the section that was lost.  But it abbreviated the walk.  Less an expansive circle, the trail now became a narrow rectangle - less a "way around," and more of a movement "out and back."  Our thoughts were drawn again to that dead end on the other side.

Could we add a new way - through the woods; creating a new linkage, yes, but also adding a new ambiance; a different experience?  The way through, after all, would be hilly - more topographically diverse; in the very midst of trees, before breaking out once more into the grassy lane.  A few days before, wielding a pair of loppers, we picked and stepped and pruned our way along a promising, hypothetical path.  "This could work," we heard ourselves saying, until the way was blocked by a massive grove of multiflora rose - a thorny morass of prickly shoots and vines perhaps 10-feet square, growing in our way.  We had lost track of where we were, and our enthusiasm suddenly felt a sharp deflation, as if pricked by one of those thorns.  And then one of us looked beyond the Medusa-like obstruction and exclaimed, "I see prairie grass just on the other side."

And so it came to pass a few days later, that on New Year's Day we fisted once again the trusty loppers, gassed up and roared the brush mower into life, and actualized the dream.  We cut, we mowed, we got stuck in the mud of the bisecting spring we didn't even know was there, but which only adds a feature of interest.  Eventually, even the thorny morass was nothing more than wood chips paving the threshold from one section of the Way, into a new.  We are already dreaming of the rekindled fires in that old, decrepit pit - perhaps some logs and stumps surrounding it for seating; and a whole new reason to go and come...and, perchance, to pause between the two.

And to wonder what other paths might emerge in this year just beginning, never mind the brush, the mud, and the thorns that obscure them?