. . . the quiet teachers are everywhere, pointing us to the unlived portion of our lives. (Mark Nepo)
It was a muggy, sodden morning on the beach this morning as a result of heavy storms in the night. I was wet when I finished my triking and walking routine. The water was almost totally still, the tiniest of waves lapping lazily at the shore, almost like Pickles cleaning her whiskers after a saucer of milk. And upon my return, it is very still and humid, with even birdsong and squirrel scolding hushed. No one is stirring; RVers sleep late at the beach. It’s always interesting to see the remains of the parties the night before, since I am sound asleep when they are going on.
This is my last day here; tomorrow Pickles and I will go home, leaving husband and Hank to do some RV maintenance and spend some guy-time for a few days. Pickles and Hank have gotten to be almost-friends while they’ve been here, and it’s sweet to see them cuddled up together, at least for the ten seconds until Pickles wants to play, and Hank takes exception to her overtures — guess he’s gotta maintain his dogly-standards.
Since I’m big on being present where I am, I’ve been surprised this morning to keep finding my mind wandering to another place and time. A few years ago, while staying at a bed and breakfast on the northern coast of Maine, I took an early morning walk through the empty streets of the small town in which we were staying. As I walked, the cool dampness was intensely apparent; fog wreathed itself in changing patterns in the streets and wrapped around the buildings in fantastical patterns. Muffled waves lapped at the nearby shore, and the briny smell of the sea was all-encompassing.
It was a very different landscape from this place, and from the small mountain town where I grew up, and where my mountain-bred mother had spent her entire life. She had died a few years earlier, and was on my mind that morning as I walked. Always, it seems as if in death there are so many stories still untold, so many bits of wisdom and advice that you wished you had gleaned, so many unexpressed emotions and gratitude you wish you could have given, so much of value that was yet to have been learned.
As I passed an old, weather-worn building announcing itself as the village library, I noticed a glass enclosed case on the small front lawn, filled with a few damp papers. I opened it and took one, and found a single sheet with a poem entitled An Observation, by May Sarton. This is what I read:
True gardeners cannot bear a glove between the sure touch and the tender root; must let their hands grow knotted as they move with a rough sensitivity about under the earth, between the rock and shoot, never to bruise or wound the hidden fruit.
And so I watched my mother’s hands grow scarred, she who could heal the wounded plant or friend with the same vulnerable yet rigorous love; I minded once to see her beauty gnarled, but now her truth is given me to live, as I learn for myself we must be hard to move among the tender with an open hand, and to stay sensitive up to the end, pay with some toughness for a gentle world.
I thought at the time, and still do, how astonishing so-called coincidences are; it’s as if time and place collapse and dissolve, so that there is no difference between that place and this, and the conversation I wish I could still have with my mother, I am still having. It all becomes part of the Whole.
And I know beyond any shadow of a doubt that all the pieces of this moment that I’ve just described are in the same way teaching me something. And just maybe it’s something about the prices we must pay for a “gentle world.”
