Life Curiously Sprung From Death

 The trails we cleared last year through the woods have been one of my favorite improvements to the property.  Through the prairie, or around and behind the chicken yard, the path extends into the trees, over a creek, up a hill and onto the bluff, and then out again.  It is an extraordinary walk even on the most ordinary of days, but especially in winter; especially in winter with snow; especially in winter with snow, while it is snowing. 

We missed that magical window of opportunity last weekend when five inches of snow settled over the farmstead, but with temperatures in recent days moderating enough for the snow to soften we seized the moment yesterday before the blanket completely melts away.  Reminded by a neighbor in recent weeks that hunting season is underway, we bundled up for warmth, and then wrapped ourselves in neon jackets, just to be on the safe side.  With the dogs settled in for naps, we tugged on our boots and stepped off onto the trail.

 

Even in the best of times, it’s easy this time of year to feel “enclosed.”  The warmth of the hearth is hard to exchange for the icy wind outside.  Sedentariness is a struggle to interrupt with physicality.  But left to themselves, these quiet “comforts” can, without noticing the loss of emotional oxygen, quietly and psychologically strangle.  

 

That’s in the best of times.  And these aren’t those times.  Even with a vaccine on the horizon, the havoc wreaked by the global pandemic has demoralized us.  Even with the election behind us, our collective partisanship embarrasses us, and offers little promise of anything but more angry and paralyzing dysfunction to come.  Perhaps it is that we are simply weary of it all, or maybe it all really is as ominous as it seems.  All we know is that we smile less; tears wet our eyes more readily.  It doesn’t feel like the week of Christmas.

 

As we trudged into the woods, then, the chilly air felt renewing in that bracing way it can, and the hushing silence that only woods can beckon began to quiet that persistently disquieting drone deep within that we hadn’t been able to still in recent weeks.  We pushed aside fallen branches that cluttered the path – “nature’s pruning,” we call it.  We noted the various tracks and trails of wildlife who know this tree cover as home far more than we.  We noticed the remnant green leaves that remain on the miscellaneous branch tips, and mouthed the Peter Mayer song lyrics that spontaneously came to our lips, 

“Even when white obscures the scene

Still, in winter, there is green.”

 

And then we turned a corner, deep into the woods, and saw a broken tree trunk a short way off the trail.  The tree was clearly dead, and yet it was just as clearly alive in a completely new way.  I am no expert in flora fungi, but my subsequent reading on the subject suggests that the fungus that has happily taken hold of this fallen tree is opportunistic, rather than malignant – not causing the tree’s demise, but using that death to nourish its own vitality.  In a demonstrably vivid biblical sense, new life out of death.  A beginning, birthed by an ending.

 

I needed that curious discovery.  Preoccupied by death and dying of so many kinds, on so many fronts, I am profoundly grateful for the metaphorical reminder that all this cultural mess; all this rotted wrangling and hollowed out body politic; all this literal disease and death just might collectively represent some type of birth pangs.  Compost, in my line of work; “holy shit,” as Gene Logsdon once described it in his helpful book with that title.  

 

If that is the case, then whatever might be struggling to be born will have ample nourishment; there is plenty of…compost…to sustain it.

 

The fallen tree back in the woods doesn’t eliminate the stench of all that is seeming to suffocate us, but I’ve taken the image of it back along the trail, into the clearer spaces of my life as a curiously hopeful reminder of that which I know – and trust – but still forget:

 

Life will have its way.

 

May it be so.