The out-breath

Holy darkness and ghosts of the pathless lands

We prepare to enter the Kingdom of Night. Persephone, Lady of Pomegranates, begins to descend once more into the realm of the Underworld.

Meanwhile, in the floodplain forest, time unspools in one long, silent breath.  

All floodplains here along the Mississippi or Minnesota Rivers seem to be manifestations of the same place, dreamed by the same mind. United in hush, uncanny in seeming. Fine, pale sand cool to the touch as it runs through my fingers — I, a human hour-glass wandering a fey, disheveled land of cottonwoods and silver maples. Underfoot lie frayed leaves, muddy hollows imprinted with tracks of deer and raccoon. Overhead, the forest’s imperceptible doings are overseen by sharp-eyed raptors.

Whenever, wherever I walk these forests, the feeling of them is the same: a waiting silence, a sense of walking in two realities at once. A trembling at the threshold of another place you could perhaps step into, the trees suggest, if you keep following the never-ending river just a bit farther.

These borderlands, like crossing points in the turning of the year, possess the enchantment of doubled places. “Land” and “river” are provisional, ephemeral beings; the land on which I walk grows and shrinks, shifts to wetland to river to pools, streams or channels, tirelessly reshaping itself into new expressions.

I came upon a river of flowers, rather than water, in one muddy back channel — a rose-pink expanse of water smartweed, glowing in the sun. Nonplussed, I stood staring out at the trickster river, this time masquerading as a meadow.

One water smartweed (Persicaria amphibia) plant.

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Encountering another human wandering in the pathless lands of the floodplain is rare. Any given forest seems almost uninhabited on an autumn afternoon, at an hour when songbirds are past singing and red foxes sleep.

But just because the inhabitants are unseen does not mean no one is home. Presences here are subtle, I find, layering quietly one upon the other. Eagles and vultures circle silently in their element over the river. An osprey whistles from the banks, deer fade in and out. Here, I imagine opossums and coyotes, raccoons and beavers just out of sight, resting after all-night foraging sessions. There, I wade through a river of ghostly catfish, walleye, snakes and turtles, who in spring swam above this same ground, easily slipping through this chaos of bone-white deadfall I clumsily navigate.

Humans used to belong here, too. There persists the memory of Dakota people who lived and hunted here once, in seasonal villages along these rivers, in these same, now-unpeopled places. Later, hundreds of the people died near the meeting of these two rivers, imprisoned in a concentration camp in a landscape sacred to them.

This land holds great healing but still remembers that sorrow. This land listens for that language to be spoken here once more.

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Do supernatural beings or ancestral spirits inhabit such a place, full of echoes? All I know is that it speaks to me with an archetypal power, as if in a language I once knew. There is a dreamlike quality to the widely spaced trees, the silvery light, the timeless hush … an image that lives in my imagination. A white owl flies there, a messenger from mystery.

An indifferent spotter of owls, I too rarely set eyes on them. But last April, I glanced across the bare forest and saw a barred owl gazing out upon her riverland domain, listening. Hearing, I guess, sounds no human will ever hear: the creeping of vole in his tunnel. A sliver of air passing through a dragonfly’s wings. A single droplet coursing down a frog’s back, the sound the sun makes moving across the sky.

Rummaging for my binoculars, I made some noise and her head swiveled around, dark-eyed stare pinning me to the spot like a beetle, if a beetle can be skewered by reverence. She was so clearly a woodland deity, summing me up then returning her regard to the infinitely more interesting forest floor. But for one thrilling moment, I went weak-kneed to be seen by those unblinking eyes. How would it be, I imagine, to live always under the gaze of the wild? One could feel companioned everywhere; one could almost pretend that our world was whole again.

I was awakened by the barred owl’s kindred speaking to each other as we camped along the St Croix River last week. One near, the other distant, and we lying blessed between their sonorous calls. Could they hear my caught breath, my beating heart? Does wonder make a sound?

The brilliant light of the full moon through the tent’s unzipped window called me out into the warm night. With long, silver needles the moon was knitting a waterfall of light between herself and the earth, her beloved — a light that bathed my face like tears. In the spaces between waving treetops I glimpsed glittering stars whose presence is hidden from me in the city. The night wind touched my skin — of all winds, the one I love most, the one swallowed up by street lights and sirens in a place where I cannot roam freely by night.

In moments, fast-sailing clouds cloaked the moon’s glory, but the great brightness of the dark still sang to me. I had longed so much for this holiness of soft darkness, this boundaryless-ness, this escape from the limits of seeing and being seen. For blessed moments in darkness, the separation between I and the rest of the world was gone.

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Slowly, slowly now, the river slips past the banks, carrying the last of summer away with it. The season swims toward darkness. And in the floodplain, time stands still, balanced on autumn’s in-drawn breath.

Now, we wait for the exhale.

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May the night wind sing you to sleep. May owls guard your rest. May the darkness hold you gently.

Carmine xo