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7 December 2019
This week I felt myself tip as if over a fulcrum. Like the kereru gliding upward, suspended in space before falling. The new way of seeing the land became simply the way I see the land. Now I look back on the old way. I wave to it as I would a neighbour, lean on my fence and have a natter.
When we set out on a new path, or in pursuit of a goal perhaps, we reach a point where we are no longer setting out. We are no longer in the pursuit of something, but in the midst of it. We are living it. The point we set out from is the past, the old way, and yet still not divisible from where we now are.
All of our past paths, lives, selves lie folded within. Like pages of a book we can flip pack through them. Nothing is lost. Our life is written, indexed and archived, with blank pages yet to fill.
The land I live on—once forest, then pasture, then garden—is writing another page, and I along with it. The soil holds the history of what was here. Beech trees, hundreds of years old, were sawn down and the land burned. But their underground lives remained. Shrivelled roots became soil and fed the land, drawn up through the roots of new plants, the lives of ancient trees written like stories in new leaves.
I didn’t realise I was in the midst of a new story until this morning. Yesterday I wrote about letting the grass grow, and today I woke and realised I’d tipped over. I’m on a new page.
Wendell Berry wrote a poem which so perfectly captures our shifting relationship to the land. I’ve had it sitting open on my desktop browser for months.
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