I've been tending to things.
This morning, as the new dawn replaced the full moon, I released the chickens.
I shivered In the cool foretaste of autumn.
I watered flowers and herbs and the sweetgrass I recently planted behind the labyrinth.
I disposed of a dead raccoon.
I sowed native prairie seed, sprinkled compost and watered.
I swept the barn and set up the pen in anticipation of baby chicks arriving soon.
I harvested vegetables.
I added many of them to pots on the stove.
It has been, like each day (though each in its particularity), a juxtaposition of life and death, hope and decay, seed and soil, preparation and completion, nourishment and depletion, salivation and repugnance. My hands and energies the hyphen and comma connecting the disparate words and phrases of living.
And it all belongs – the parts that make me smile right along with the elements that make me gag. Side by side I get to wonder if seeds will grow while delighting in the issue of those that did. I protect, which unfortunately means I also kill. A wondrous alchemy of mundanity and profundity, I marvel at the matter-of-factness of the beauty.
It happens. I do my best to midwife all sorts of nascent possibilities – in the soil and in my mind – with water and compost and weeding and brooding, but I only assist. The rest –
the conceiving, the flourishing and the thriving – is well beyond me. That my hands get wet in the birthing is speechless privilege, coupled with the comic gratitude I continue to feel at the reality of the “me” I have known for 64 years actually being here in the messy, sweaty, earthy reality of it all.
Here in the granularity of it all.
Here in the birth cries and the death throes.
Here in the sowing and the hoeing.
Here in the tending and the disposing.
Here in the perspiration and the chill.
Here in the cacophonous, riotous, exhausting abundance of everyday of life.
Here in the miraculous “here.”
When Mary Oliver poetically asks me what I intend to do "with my one wild and precious life," the most and the best I can think of, by way of response, is...
...to simply notice,
and pay attention.
