RACING HOME

Through the empty branches the sky remains.


It is what you have.


Be earth now, and evensong.


Be the ground lying under that sky.

Be modest now, like a thing


ripened until it is real,


so that (he)* who began it all


can feel you when (he) reaches for you.
-Rainer Maria Rilke

             translation by Joanna Macy and Anita Barrows 

Book of Hours, II 1

                                                                                     *My parentheses

Dearest Readers,

Portland to Peacham, May 2016

Driving from Portland to Peacham this Spring was a 3,100 mile cross-country race home. I was outrunning the inevitability of a limited number of years left on this planet, and feeling the need to churn out the artistic questions about this love affair I have with the trees, forests, and the Green Mountains of Vermont–my ancestral home. This is the place where my great grandparents arrived from Ireland, escaping the Potato Famine of the 1840’s and the oppressions of life under English colonial rule. Some fought in the American Civil War a decade or so later, 

Peter Fagan-16th Vermont Infantry-Grand Army of the Republic

and most are buried in the same town of Rutland Vermont where they first put down roots, raised families, and where I spent the later years of my childhood. I am grateful to them for taking the risk of immigrating to a new land and making this place their home. 

Bridget Hickey Dunn

Margaret Conlon Fagan

Patrick Fagan in Civil War uniform

Thomas Dunn

Because of the Dunns, the Conlons, the Fagans and the Hickeys, I’m sitting in my 2^nd floor bedroom scanning a vast sky over a lush green Vermont forest brimming with the inexorable creation and destruction that is the wildness of Nature.

My window view of sky above and forest  below at sunset

It is in me too. I fit into this landscape. My mind is the mind of the land interwoven with the continuous  progression of generation, growth, decline, death, decay, and regeneration. Outside my window is a cathedral. I stop, look and listen.

The Mother Hole-West Rutland Vermont 2012

If you remember, dear readers, I have in recent years burrowed myself a tunnel into the earth to satisfy my itch to claw into this Vermont-y-ness. I descended on a hand-lashed ladder, and I climbed out.

The Thinking Place-Peacham Vermont 2014-2015

More recently I fashioned a womb-like stick hut in the field outside my window. I cleared, I dug, I sawed, and wove the branches into a quiet thinking place. My friend Cynther added the leafy boughs.

Today the burrow is filled in, and the hut dismantled and rearranged into a pile of branches that has been home to hummingbirds, white throated sparrow and the ubiquitous, resourceful ground hogs.

Home is place, culture, memory, an old homestead, family, a community of friends and neighbors who help each other out, living gently and reciprocally on the land.

I call my road here in Peacham “the Hall of the Ancient Mountain Maples”. They too are weathered and stalwart. 

I feel the wind in my thinning hair. I walk and walk and walk my gnarly feet across the dark brown earth.  I turned 70 last week.