Snow is almost gone. I’ll take you on a snowy walk from last week, since we’re not likely to see more this year. We’ve had about half the usual snowfall this winter, but then nothing’s usual.
Sometimes I like to walk toward the Bay. Along the edge of the hospital, there’s Kid’s Creek, that’s recently been “upgraded,” making it more winding and lining its edges with native plants to make the water clearer. I love the way snow hangs over the edge like marshmallow creme. The creek seems like a secret, slipping under.
As soon as it snows, the sidewalk plows are out in the main part of town. I’m glad for them, because plowed snow makes walking a lot easier on my back. I love the shadows of trees, moving across as I walk. I think you need to have a quiet mind to see what moves. Not quiet as in passive, or empty. Quiet as in holding still enough to see the movement of things.
Sometimes I’m stepping delicately on a patch of ice, concentrating on all parts of me at once—which is what the body has to do to balance—to get to better traction again. Sometimes there’s a bare place where I can pick up my pace. You can’t help but think about the body when the going is uneasy.
The body is a composite of plant, animal, and mineral memory and impulse. I learned a new word: holobiont—an assembly of life forms coexisting together as a multiple and as one—a person with a name, for example, that absorbs the unnamed members of their mutual body.
A person is a multiple and is continually in flux, changing within environmental conditions that are also always transforming.
The human body has numerous holes, apertures, and openings, where life flows within and through—the body is synthetic of its interaction with nature—cell with cell, viscous, mineral.
We touch something and it touches back.
(Italics lines are from an essay by Brenda Iijima in the latest Georgia Review, “Who We Are as Floral, Faunal, Mineral Beings”)
Back to the snow, which is nothing but a big heap of fractals, each shape building on the next. More multiples. And then someone comes along and makes a funny little deer out of logs, and a little dog, I guess it is.
They’re a combination of found materials someone joyfully built on the blankness. We have this impulse to do something with the blank page, to make a mark, to decorate. The impulse itself is nothing but life flowing through. We touch something and it touches back.
And then our art fades. A snowman turns dark and withering. Continually in flux.
I don’t know what you think of when you’re out walking, but this is me. I am a little uneasy from the risk of walking on snow, with occasional patches of ice. But that, too, is a joy. And there are my footprints, the only art I have to work with at the moment. I notice that the tread of my boots is different from the others. I love the sound of my feet in snow, especially if it’s firm snow. The crunch. Who doesn’t like that crunch?
Then here is this yard with all the bushes carefully covered for the winter. They look just like the upright rocks. With the orange sticks, the whole thing is a sculpture, a little Stonehenge.
Another response to the environment. How can we possibly continue to think we are the only doers? The environment is doing things, we respond. We do things, it responds. We touch something, it touches back.
P.S. Don’t forget that I’m reading for the International Women’s Writing Guild on March 11. Please Join me for this. I’ll read for 10-15 minutes, have a conversation plus Q & A for another 10-15 minutes, then there’s an open mic. You can log off at any time. Register free at https://iwwg.wildapricot.org/event-4173813