this christmas face

Does it get any better than Christmas as a four year-old?

I will bring you happy flowers from the mountains, bluebells,

dark hazels, and rustic baskets of kisses.

I want

to do with you what spring does with the cherry trees.

~Pablo Neruda

autumn wolf mountain love...

Seems every time in the last couple of years my soul has needed a soft place, I have returned to Wolf Mountain. I always think, "This, this is the perfect season to be on this mountain." Truth is, of course, any season is the perfect season; there is no better healer than the Great Mother. Lately, fear of death and illness--and the mad machinations of worry--have taken hold of my body, hijaked my brain, and left me forgetting how to trust the flow and abundance of life, forgetting my own honorable and luminous goodness. (Don't worry: we're all perfectly healthy and fine--I just get this way every so often, anxiously projecting and wringing my hands, especially if someone close to me suddenly has something heartbreaking or scary happen.) My husband and my two best girls patched me up and propped me up in the midst of the fear, just in time for me to catch a ride with Fate to the mountain. Thank. God. It was the perfect prescription for wholeness.

We drove up to the mountain for the day today to celebrate my dad's 59th birthday. Part of the afternoon was spent lounging on the deck, watching a family of hawks--there must have been about seven of them--glide effortlessly on the thermals. I have to think they were doing it not to hunt prey, and not simply because that's what birds do, but for the joy of it. The way they gave their bodies to their flight was the way children, legs outstretched and heads tilted back, abandon themselves to the complete and simple thrill of a swing.

Later we took a long walk in the glorious fall breezes and long, honey-lemon sunshine, and found ourselves at the top of the driveway in a field of tall grass. It was a day so beautiful, so perfect in every way, my dad and brother could not help but lie down right there in the field, the sun kissing their beaming, peaceful faces. The kids swam through the grass in fascination, brushing the soft grass tops with their cheeks, their silky palms. And many times Tavish paused to sit and be very still in the swaying, sparkling grass.

　
I cannot think of a better way to celebrate one's birthday, to find oneself quite happy to have been born, quite lucky to be on this green and breathing earth. I gave my father this poem for his birthday, written by one of the greatest poets ever to walk this planet, Pablo Neruda. The poem and the bliss of this day were kindred spirits woven together, singing me songs of reminders that life is good, and to be trusted.

Ode to Age
　
I don't believe in age.
　
All old people
carry
in their eyes
a child,
and children
at times
observe us with the
eyes of wise ancients.
　
Shall we measure
life
in meters or kilometers
or months?
How far since you were born?
How long
must you wander
until
like all men
instead of walking on its surface
we rest below the earth?
　
To the man, to the woman
who utilized their
energies, goodness, strength,
anger, love, tenderness,
to those who truly
alive
flowered,
and in their sensuality matured,
let us not apply
the measure
of a time
that may be
something else, a mineral
mantle, a solar
bird, a flower,
something, maybe,
but not a measure.
　
Time, metal
or bird, long
petiolate flower,
stretch
through
man's life,
shower him
with blossoms
and with
bright
water
or with hidden sun.
I proclaim you
road,
not shroud,
a pristine
ladder
with treads
of air,
a suit lovingly
renewed
through springtimes
around the world.
　
Now,
time, I roll you up,
I deposit you in my
bait box
and I am off to fish
with your long line
the fishes of the dawn!

If ever a place had my heart...

Every July my extended family gathers for several days at a place we call “The Cabin” on Wolf Mountain, a swath of rolling land overlooking the Rockfish River in in the mountains of Virginia. We’ve been coming here for about 30 years and it’s always the same: no internet, no television--just the family, the cabins, the mountain, the river. This year there are 30-some of us--four generations--and like every other year, we live commune-style, taking turns cooking dinners, passing children among us in a fluid dance of responsibility, gathering in ever-shifting groups at the river during the day, coming together nightly for dinner, then retiring to the deck for the sunset.
　
The path to the river still smells the same after all these years: warm pine needles and ripe currants. As we make our way along the path, my children are gleeful as they pluck the small, wild berries and pop them in their surprised mouths. I can recall skipping through these woods to the river in the rippling summer heat with sweet, warm currants in my mouth, the brush gently thwacking my skinny legs, then swaying in my wake.
　
I help my wobbly, eager boys down the steep path--we find spiders in perfect, sunlit webs, curious and untouched lichen, a babbling, joyful creek. The air gets cooler as we slip and stumble from the steamy mountaintop deeper into the woods, until we find ourselves on the quiet, shady riverbank where the feel and sound of silt and stone underfoot is familiar as a lullaby.
　
At the cabin, if you’re a kid or a parent/grandparent of one, most of your days are spent at the river--the kind of days without watches or any sense of time at all. Hours line up seamlessly as the children splash and hoot in the shallow, gentle water, catching tadpoles with their bare hands, finding box turtles in the brush, amassing rocks in a big metal pail, chasing schools of minnows, digging up clay for sculptures, and watching in awe bugs that skate on the water's surface.
　
It is here Caleb catches his first fish with his daddy and puts his head under water again and again, each time popping up to exclaim, "It wasn’t bad at all!!" Meanwhile, I roam the shallows collecting heart-shaped rocks and chase Tavish as he toddles into the current. Some of us have built a dam--every year it is rebuilt--and we lounge on sprawling, warm rocks, listening to the song of the current as the kids collect like minnows in the dam’s pool.
　
This year, something coiled deep unravels for the first time in a long time. A new distance--a blessed, bittersweet distance--grows between my children and me as they build with their cousins an impenetrable child-world, frolicking in the low, clear river all long and lingering afternoon; piling together in a shady, rainbow-colored hammock, the musky smell of warm leaves rising from the earth all around them; roaming in a happy, boisterous flock--seven kids under the age of 9-- dripping popsicles in-hand, their lithe and little bodies flashing like strobe lights in mid-day sun under a canopy of towering trees.
　
All week-long, my childhood days on this mountain stretch out in my mind, like an intricate, lovingly made quilt taken out of storage and laid out in a sunny room. It doesn’t feel so long ago I was this little, careening through these woods and plunging into this river with my cousins--a group of five, all of us born within two years of one another. Now all of our kids are gathered in this place, and witnessing the continuum does something quite lovely to my heart.
　
Every morning my grandfather, now in his eighties, gladly stands for hours at a griddle in the kitchen, taking orders. GDaddy’s pancakes have become something of a legend--some teenagers have even been known to pry themselves out of bed before noon for them, and in the weeks before we leave for the cabin, my eldest son speaks in a reverent whisper of these pancakes, his eyes wide with expectation. One morning I walk in the kitchen and there GDaddy is, sure as the sun rises every morning. Suddenly I am struck with the realization that even after he is long gone--for the rest of my life surely--every time I walk in that kitchen I will remember him there, our jolly pancake maker.
　
In the same way, I know I will always think of my grandmother whenever I take a walk in on this mountain, recalling all the walks we have taken, and remembering, in particular, a walk she and I took one fall when I was no more than thirteen up the long and winding driveway where we lingered for what seemed like hours, crouching down every few steps to admire all the different kinds of mushrooms. The longer we looked the more we noticed, and pretty soon we lost count of all the colorful, wondrous varieties growing alongside the driveway. We walked until long after the sun had slipped behind the mountains, squinting in the evening’s blue light to glimpse just one more, just one more.
　
That’s how it so often is at the cabin: you slow down enough to enter the world, to really, really be here. You slow down enough to listen to the chorus of cicadas; to glimpse the quick, striped lizard; to notice how the breeze sounds coming through the trees, how generously it brushes your body. You begin to take in everyone around you, and pretty soon you are falling in love all over again with their gorgeous and quirky humanity.
　
You remember what it was to be a child--a free and loved child of these people, this whispering, breathing mountain, this chuckling, winking river. You remember what it was to walk into these woods and lose yourself in the best possible way--to become so lost in a womb of flickering leaves and shadows, you actually became the mountain. You remember what it was to give your lanky child-body fearlessly to the wild rush of a river cloudy and swollen with yesterday’s rain--fearlessly, because your daddy stood at the bottom of the rapids, cheering as you tumbled squealing and laughing into his waiting arms.
　
You cry one evening in private because gratitude has ballooned too large for your body to hold--gratitude for how your grandparents gave all of you this glorious place. They just gave it to you. And if they ever asked for anything in return, it was only that you love it. And you think that just might be as close to being godly as anyone gets. Later, as the family gathers on the deck at sunset, you hold your son in your lap, drawing your breath slowly, taking in the smell of the river in his silky hair. And when your uncle spots a hawk, you watch with everyone in hushed admiration her weightless, elegant flight across a deepening sky.

happy anniversary, love...

057_Wolf-MulliganS, originally uploaded by mother writer healer.

when the illness lifts...

and you come downstairs, shaky and sore from yesterday's heaving, to find joyful children ecstatic to see you and flowers from your mother's garden on your kitchen counter...

sometimes heaven is right under your nose

cabin 2010 294, originally uploaded by mother writer healer.

this is the view from the deck of "the cabin"--a place my family has in the mountains of virginia i've been coming to since i was a young girl--taken on the fourth of july. it's a view i grew up taking for granted, but which i now treasure more and more with each passing year. we just spent a week up at "the cabin" with my extended family--thirty-some of us--and it was a week that cradled my soul in new and blessed ways. more on that in an upcoming post...