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| Floodplain forest |
Despite an incident (again) with two off-leash pit bulls at the halfway point, my down time with Amos walking the Lower Susquehanna Heritage Greenway Trail was uneventful, quiet, and alone. I'll leave it to the reader to link in to a better explanation of this trail in the Notes below. My focus for this quiet mid-week/morning walk was to experience some time unplugged and unencumbered. Just walk. I do my best thinking when walking and with now two big writing assignments looming ahead of me this November, I needed this time to start thinking about them. This kind of time is rare in my life and I crave it more and more. Just walk.
I've picked up one of my favorite books again and note that it must be almost November. I happened to mention May Sarton to a group of nature journal workshop participants the other day and I haven't been able to shake her off since. Her work moves me. Her work speaks to the challenges of managing depression, social anxiety, exhaustion. Poet and journal writer, Sarton laid these personal vulnerabilities and fragilities at the feet of her readers. Kick them around, she invites. Stomp on them. Tease or taunt, if you want. This is how it is and this is what helps and I dare you to sentimentalize. Of course, she is speaking to herself.
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| Stafford Flint Mill furnace |
"So much of my life here is precarious. I cannot always believe even in my work. But I have come in these last days to feel again the validity of my struggle here, that it is meaningful whether I ever “succeed” as a writer or not, and that even its failures, failures of nerve, failures due to a difficult temperament, can be meaningful. It is an age where more and more human beings are caught up in lives where fewer and fewer inward decisions can be made, where fewer and fewer real choices exist. The fact that a middle-aged, single woman, without any vestige of family left, lives in this house in a silent village and is responsible only to her own soul means something. The fact that she is a writer and can tell where she is and what it is like on the pilgrimage inward can be of comfort. It is comforting to know there are lighthouse keepers on rocky islands along the coast. Sometimes, when I have been for a walk after dark and see my house lighted up, looking so alive, I feel that my presence here is worth all the Hell."
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| Furnace look-alike: Shaggy Mane |
My friend Joy, who was my former graduate school professor for a class called Ecological Thought, and who sadly has recently passed away, introduced me to May Sarton under the premise of ecological pilgrimage, a term we framed together as we did some post-doc work on long distance walking and solitude. Sarton's "inner pilgrimage" (from her book Journal of a Solitude ) to find and re-find solitude after busy weeks of teaching, public speaking, or traveling for her publishing house was only possible by returning to her little farmhouse in Nelson, NH. There she would recuperate from the outside world. She could only write when in solitude and she could only achieve that space when she observed and immersed herself in the nature of her rural homestead and let everything else go - every angry outburst, every thought of suicide, every fear of failure or criticism taken in so deeply and painfully to heart. The way the October light slanted into her "cozy room" (her writing studio) or watching the meadow shiver with blustery November wind fwould illuminate her darkest days into the hopeful and prayerful space of aloneness she craved and how she wrote! How this touches me, a salvation.
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| Broad-leafed Goldenrod |
May Sarton craved Octobers and Novembers. She loved giving attention to the transitions of sky and flowers and trees. She loved watching the nearby mountains transform under cloud cover and sunsets. the clouds were "gifts" and brought the promise of longer nights and less travel and more time to just be alone. "There is only one possible prayer: Give me to do everything I do in the day with a sense of the sacredness of life. Give to me to be in Your presence, God, even though I know it only as absence," she writes in the closeness and quiet of her cozy room, for "Tomorrow the world crashes in again."
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| Conowingo Dam |
I have another one of Sarton's books, The House By the Sea lined up for when I finish A Solitude but it may be a while before I start in. Though her journals are small books, I savor them line-by-line and sometimes I can only handle one day's entry one day at a time to allow her words to nestle inside me as I too crave what she craves and sometimes I feel what she feels. November is on the doorstep and winter awaits. And after a mostly peaceful and alone walk, I begin leaning in to her heartfelt longing for the deep peace this time brings.
Meditation in Sunlight
Notes:
Trails Link for Lower Susquehanna Heritage Greenway Trail
The Marginalian on May Sarton https://www.themarginalian.org/tag/may-sarton/
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