Lift it all up. And then your roots will go down and all will be green and fresh. (Elizabeth Goudge)
COTP — or Coffee-0n-The Porch — is one of my favorite traditions that has evolved over the forty years I’ve spent here on the farm. Whoever is here (and at least semi-awake) gather on the porch overlooking the mountain in the early half-light of dawn, sometimes wrapped in quilts, sometimes barefoot, and listen to the birds singing sleepy secrets, and watch the deer graze on the edge of the woods, and fend off the cats who are all too eager to have-a-little-cream-forget-the-coffee-thank-you. It’s been a time to laugh and to share dreams and reflections and to enter gently into the day.
We don’t have nearly as many comings and goings at the farm these days as we used to, so now, more often than not, it’s just me and our 100 pound Heinz-57 rescue dog Hank enjoying the scene and exchanging deep thoughts. This morning I was contemplating the dismaying fact that, yep, I’m growing older — there are creaks where there used to be leaps, and hearing is “hard”; seeing has a little AMD, the doc cheerfully tells me; and my bones are getting brittle. Knees don’t work quite the way they used to either, and starting off in what I think is a linear direction sometimes turns out to be a little zig-zaggy. Hank wasn’t much interested in this line of thought, so I was left to stew in my own juice.
Brooding on growing older doesn’t make for an uplifting start to the day, so I gave myself what my mother called “a good talking-to.” This moment is all I have, I told myself, this precious moment, wrapped in the green and gold of early morning, a soft mist falling, a mockingbird singing its heart out from a nearby tree, Hank’s head on my foot. And on this morning, as I stared into the green, and concentrated on the aroma of the coffee, my fears about the future, my regrets about the past, everyday concerns faded away.
It doesn’t always happen that way. My version of “mindfulness” doesn’t always work, and I’m often less than successful in being in the moment. I am a worrier, and given an opportunity can obsess about almost anything. But you know, I asked my mom one time why she “worried” so much, and she smiled and said that was her way of praying. So now I don’t worry so much about worrying — it becomes a conversation, and the green and the birdsong and the aroma of the coffee and the warmth of Hank nearby become part of the Whole.