Another Season.

Year by year we count our ages in candles and stages--but among the woods and the wetlands-- among wild things-- life's count does not stop for anniversaries. Wandering and wondering in the winter woods yesterday I sensed an urgency underneath the leaf litter. The damp mustiness hanging heavily in the decay ultimately means rebirth. Seeds and soil are a promise for another season waged against weather and chance.

 A doe's skull found bare and shining like ivory on the white oak ridge meant that something else might live to see another season.

I wonder if coyotes make wishes on such things? Did the canid skull I found in the fern-ful creek bottom mean that the god of wild things had exacted some kind of karma and taken a song dog's  life for a deer's? I let lie the evidence to become something else.

Yes, there is something lying in wait in these winter woods -lying and waiting in root and stem and shoot--waiting for the sun to shine at a more intense angle and for the light to linger a little longer with each passing day. The wild ginger blooms modestly where no one can see. A wren sang somewhere in a shaft of light  that fractured the chill.

In the depths of what we call the dormant season frogs a-peeping in secret pools and maples a-blushing against a bare-boned forest are sign certain that life will out and impatiently so--

And so today I count time cycling again.  Yes, I do so in human years but with an acute appreciation for the cycling that goes on everyday with only soil and sun and chance to meter the passage. I am another year closer to some things and yet another further removed from others. I count life's few certainties and its infinite uncertainties all as fortune I'm fated to. The years have been good. Very good in fact and I am thankful for another season of wandering and wondering among the wild things and kindred spirits with whom I am blessed to share this time and this space. Happy Birthday indeed.

Peace,
Drew