The world we knew is far behind us now.
It’s slow going without the guideposts we’re used to, but I think if we want more compassion and understanding, we must embody compassion and understanding. If we want to be heard, we need to listen. To be free of enemies, we have to allow our animosity to transform; otherwise, when we destroy them, we perpetuate harm and we risk making more enemies of those who love them. Let’s protect ourselves and our vulnerable ones from real and immediate threat when we can, and also let’s be disarming.
In First You Have to Row a Little Boat, Richard Bode talks about the idea of a forgiving boat. Such a vessel rebalances itself if its pilot makes a mistake. It’s not so much like one person apologizing and supplicating and another holding the power to lord it over them—to forgive or not—as it is about the extent to which we rebalance ourselves if someone wrongs us.
Even forgiving boats have their limits. A good relationship has a balance of care and forgivingness on both sides, or the ship capsizes, crashes, or otherwise has to be abandoned.
The lad went down the hill, his bright castles in ruin—even as we all have gone, or must sometime go down the hill with our brightest castles in ruin.
—Harold Bell Wright, The Shepherd of the Hills
I remain in bed a long time before gaining any impetus to arise to a muted, cloudy morning.
The sky is a black and white lattice of branches and rain cloud. A moment not of color or texture but contrast. Highs and lows. Darks and lights. The place where the pain polishes the beauty into gem brightness. This autumn moment when the architecture of the forest becomes uniquely visible has always felt “twinned’ with the self we confront in moments of extreme emotional torque: grief, distress, heartbreak, depression. The shape of our self denuded of its leaves finally shows us where we bent to accommodate another branch, where we permanently stooped into the wind.
—Sophie Strand, “Autumn Soup Recipe”
“David, I never understood until the past months why the Master so often withdrew alone into the wilderness. There is not only food and medicine for one’s body; there is also healing for the heart and strength for the soul in nature. . . .”
—Harold Bell Wright, The Shepherd of the Hills
In the space where a loved one isn’t, the vacuum of absence requires no medication, only adjustment. Time takes care of it.
“. . . It hurt most, when the secret stood between us, and I could not enter into your life, but I understand that, too. I understand why you could not tell me. I, too, came away because I was not strong enough.”
—Harold Bell Wright, The Shepherd of the Hills
What finally lifts me is Raven trilling for walnuts from a tree on the other side of the tent wall and then from directly overhead, making me giggle.
Upon rising, I give nuts and seeds to birds and chipmunks and inhale the scents of the plants, who inhale my exhalations.
A robin perches on the rock in the birdbath and sips.
It is a good day, like other days have been and will be. Whatever happens, there will still be good things; whoever’s left will still be doing good things.
Spending more time at home than usual, and caving to multiple walnut requests per day, I’m growing closer and closer to Raven—literally.
I think the pleasure of feeling right is the pleasure of sweets or candy—quick, addictive and simple. The pleasures of encountering the really real are deeper, as satisfying as a wonderful, complex meal.
—Elizabeth Oldfield, “Expanding Eros, or Why Connection Is My Kink”
She now draws very near while I’m depositing little piles of nuts on the Raven Log.
In fact here she is now, the closest yet: perching on a big mossy stump directly behind my right shoulder, at human conversational distance.
For an instant the two men paused on the threshold. The room was small, and nearly bare of furniture. In the full glare of the lamp, so shaded as to throw the rest of the room in deep shadow, hung a painting that seemed to fill the rude chamber with its beauty. It was the picture of a young woman, standing by a spring of water, a cup brimming full in her outstretched hand.
—Harold Bell Wright, The Shepherd of the Hills
Seated in Pa’s Chair in the outdoor Living Room, with cup of hot sea-saltwater in hand, I turn to a book about Queen Elizabeth I, which fell into my hand at a free library. There is some English in my blood—albeit not as much as Germanic—so perhaps it has something to tell me about my ancestral path (and, indirectly, on how to make course-corrections).
Knowing that I won’t leave empty handed, knowing that something I’m seeking, something I can’t recognize yet, is here.
—Clementine Morrigan, “Breaking into the Holy Spaces”
Another raven asks for walnuts, but I make them wait. I can’t be trekking back and forth all day for them, bless their hearts.
“Here and there among men, there are those who pause in the hurried rush to listen to the call of a life that is more real. How often have we seen them, David, jostled and ridiculed by their fellows, pushed aside and forgotten, as incompetent or unworthy. He who sees and hears too much is cursed for a dreamer, a fanatic, or a fool, by the mad mob, who, having eyes, see not, ears and hear not, and refuse to understand.
“The wind in the pines, the rustle of the leaves, the murmur of the brook, the growl of the thunder, and the voices of the night were all understood and answered by him. The flowers, the trees, the rocks, the hills, the clouds were to him, not lifeless things, but living friends, who laughed and wept with him as he was gay or sorrowful. . . .”
—Harold Bell Wright, The Shepherd of the Hills
The young woman replied with a hug that made her admirer gasp. “Law, child; you’re strong as a young panther. You walk like one too; so kind of strong, easy like.”
—Harold Bell Wright, The Shepherd of the Hills
Then the moon looked over the mountain behind them, turning Mutton Hollow into a wondrous sea of misty light out of which the higher hills lifted their heads like fairy islands.
—Harold Bell Wright, The Shepherd of the Hills
“Others pay the taxes; these hills belong to me only as they belong to all who have the grace to love them.”
—Harold Bell Wright, The Shepherd of the Hills
“They will give you great treasure, that you may give again to others, who have not your good strength to escape from the things that men make and do in the restless world over there. . . .”
—Harold Bell Wright, The Shepherd of the Hills
If you want to shrink something,
you must first allow it to expand.
If you want to get rid of something,
you must first allow it to flourish.
If you want to take something,
you must first allow it to be given.
This is called the subtle perception
of the way things are.
The soft overcomes the hard.
The slow overcomes the fast.
—Tao Te Ching, Verse 36, translation by Stephen Mitchell
I remember, I laugh, and I face the sun.
—Rhyd Wildermuth, “Finding the Sun”
Crickets sing a love song, calling the night in.
A dog barks in the middle distance.
Freedom finds itself in captivity.
—Nick Cave, The Red Hand Files #302
As I sink into bed, I feel grounded, in flow.
A few hours of rain come and go. Just before dawn, a drunk girl whoops, by which I am unimpressed, but a couple of inhuman follow-up calls perk up my ears: that might actually be a mountain lion.
When I go out to pee early in the morning (in the protected overnight spot, with my back to the shower-enclosure rise and one foot on a root), the hills are misty and the sky starry.
From here, all is magic, the actual sort we only talk about and rarely do.
—Rhyd Wildermuth, “Finding the Sun”
Sometimes when we miss the boat, there’s a chance we might find it again—just in time.
“. . . I—I can’t tell you of that summer—when we were together—alone in the hills—the beautiful hills—away from the sham and the ugliness of the world that men have made. The beauty and inspiration of it all I put into my pictures, and I knew because of that they were good—I knew they would win a place for me—and—they did. Most of all—I put it there,” (He pointed to the painting on the wall) “and the crowd saw it and felt it, and did not know what it was. . . .”
—Harold Bell Wright, The Shepherd of the Hills
At dawn, a big gray squirrel who has been coming around lately pulls sunlight through the mist, revealing that things have indeed changed.
The other smiled at the Doctor’s amazement. “I suppose I have changed some, David. The hills have done it. Look at them!” He pointed to the encircling mountains. “See how calm and strong they are; how they lift their heads above the gloom. They are my friends and companions, David. And they have given me of their calmness and strength . . . .”
—Harold Bell Wright, The Shepherd of the Hills
The hills taught him, and they came at last to stand between him and the trouble from which he had fled. The nights were no longer weary and long. He was never alone. The voices in the wilderness became friendly voices, for he learned their speech, and the poor girl ceased to call in the wailing wind.
—Harold Bell Wright, The Shepherd of the Hills