We rest in darkness

Gifts from the shortest day

Not long ago, I followed a trail I had never walked beside the Minnesota River. The pale blue sky held a pale winter sun. The day, though, felt autumnal: temperature in the mid-40s, dry. All that remained of a cold week at the end of November were vestiges of river ice along the edges and scraps of snow in the long shadows.

Pale, brittle stalks of dead grasses and wildflowers edged a sandy path that was scattered with the gray leaves of enormous cottonwood trees — those ancient lovers of rivers — whose knee-like roots gripped the river bank. I pause for a ritual: the deeply ridged bark of cottonwood always calls to be touched…and each twig holds a small, hollow star at its center.

The winter wood feels full of summer ghosts. I still hear the silvery, rushing voices of those cottonwood leaves, long after they have fallen to the ground. They are a part of that place, like the slow-moving river. Or the young bald eagle, who folded bronze wings to alight on a branch, piping out high-pitched calls. (Messages for someone, about something. Probably not for me; but still, I listened.)

Open river water, unusual as it is in December, is why some eagles are still here at this time of year. They eat fish, as do the pair of trumpeter swans passing overhead and the herring gulls inscribing circles with their black-tipped wings.

So. There was the gift of sun. The gift of warmth. And the gift of presence.

The riverlands are richly (if cryptically) peopled, by beavers, muskrats, otters. White-tailed deer, racoons, foxes, coyotes. Chipmunks, skunks, squirrels, rabbits. Turtles, snakes, toads, bats, voles. And scores of bird and raptor species; especially in springtime, when bright-winged warblers of from the eastern half of the continent migrate north along our river corridors to their nesting grounds.

Since the leaves have fallen, we can glimpse through the branches those who often live silently alongside us without our noticing. If we do not see the wildlings themselves, we may come across their sign — scat in the middle of a path, a muskrat mound, or beaver-chewed trunks like these.

Off in the leaf litter, I heard a rustling…a smallish, wiry-haired creature was head-down, intently scavenging for food. Aware of being observed, he turned his pointed white face and blinked in my direction. It’s reported that nocturnal opossums visit city yards, but this was the first I’d ever encountered. Opossums are North America’s only native marsupial, and have only moved north into Central Minnesota over the past dozen years.

Imagine these solitary, cat-sized creatures, slowly migrating north on foot. How many generations would it take for opossums to cover a hundred miles? Is it purely biology — the lure of mates and territory — that draws them on, or is there another, more mythic, aspect of their journey? Who is to say that the lives and relationships of opossums are any less rich than ours?

Even with our warming winters, the temperatures here can be too frigid for opossums, and they sometimes starve, or lose their ear tips and tails to frostbite…but many survive to struggle along somehow. As we all do.

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I have been recovering slowly from a bout of illness. This was the first time in a couple of weeks I was able to be outside for more than 20 minutes without feeling exhausted. But I was feeling stronger, ready to leave the tissues and tedium of Sickland behind.  

Breathe. Just the touch of the sacred sun upon my face — all the more precious as we approach the shortest day. Sun, heal me.

The wild air moving through my lungs, my feet standing upon the still-soft ground. Wind, heal me. Earth, heal me.

The Earth is a holistic healer, a place where time slows down, and we can rest. My senses extend outward into a wider landscape that is powerfully coherent and reassuring, which is inhabited by wild kin who fill me with wonder. I am surrounded by life in so many forms. Anxiety falls away. Loneliness retreats. And, in an alchemy I cannot explain, my inner landscape syncs with the outward landscape. As above, so below. As without, so within?

How peace around us becomes peace within us is a mystery; but I know it to be true.

As usual, it is difficult to tear myself away. What would it be like, I wonder, to live alongside wild creatures every day? To not have to leave them behind? As it is, we are visitors. We visit, then go back to our boundaried properties, our straight lines and roads and the increasing flood of artificial light that erases the deep blackness of the night — until even the wild shining of the stars, our ancient birthright, is stolen from our sight.

The thing is: We and the wild belong to each other. Whether or not we realize it, we are bound together, in life and in death. Our cycles, our seasons, our ways of being are the same: the Earth expresses herself through us, and every living thing.

Like the rays of the midwinter sun, at times our light may barely clear the horizon. The long dark sings us to sleep. We wait, to walk out again into the world.