Floating in experience,
reaching through fingers upstream,
into dark cool recesses,
under roots and into bedstone crevices,
to the source,
the spring of my soul,
and with my toes, downstream,
to warm open waters of the future,
and feeling all those who have shared,
and will share, this vessel.
Earlier this summer I was repairing fence lines to get animals out on pasture. I had the boys helping me one day as we addressed one of our neighbor’s fields. As I walked around the perimeter, stretching and replacing wire, Timber took an old pair of fencing pliers and went about tapping in loose insulator nails. Bazel was more interested in cutting weeds and brush, so he took the old bayonet and used it like a machete to chop unwanted plants.
As I walked down across the field, soaking up the warm sun on my back, I listened to them each busily attending to their chores. I felt a flush of pride and a feeling of completion as I realized that I was engaged in work with my boys. They were truly contributing to my work, as if they were extensions of my own person. By having them working on portions of a project with me, it was as though I was actually performing the actions through their beings. We were all acting together as parts of a whole.
What gave me goose-bumps was when it dawned on me that they were using tools that had been around when I was their ages. I had picked those tools up from a work-bench, or a tool-box, and put my hand-prints on top of those of my father, and even those of his father.
I could feel myself drawing into my life, the experiences that were made possible for me by my father and my grandfather, and then exuding them outward into the lives of my boys. I could feel on a molecular level the connections, not only from the last, and the next, generation, but I could also feel the flowing of life, in and out, through those connections for undefined distances.
It made me recall an experience that I had in a stream twenty years ago. Prompted by something I had read from the writings of a naturalist, I had floated in the water, reaching upstream with my arms and fingers into the cool dark origins of Gilead Brook, and through my feet, downstream to the warm open waters of Long Island Sound.
On this day working in the field, I could feel this same phenomenon in my family. I could feel all of the lives that have contributed to the energetic experience that I call my own life, that period of time that I have been me. A sense of agelessness overcame me. And I could feel the immortality represented by the beings that are carrying that energy forward.