“Nonlinear structures–the shapes found in Nature–are the visible remnants of the movement of life through matter.”
–Stephen Harrod Buhner, The Secret Teachings of Plants
I’ll wait awhile to let the clouds clear if they will before I go take some photos of the stacked wood I have left from the twenty-eight cords that dropped off a portable mill’s conveyor belt parked in the back along the treeline made when the Catskill Watershed Corporation and Bruce Utter put in our septic to protect New York’s water–and which in the next year I stacked and having gone through one substantial wall of it last year realize if i don’t take photos of it it will be gone before you know it, or even I do, as though it never was, which would be a shame as it’s been a total delight to move among the quartered sixteen-inch logs these triangular wedges that I can’t think about without thinking about Darwin and his and all the learning that goes into stacking wood and this collaboration and evolution of the land to these lines I’ve felt for some time represent a signal, more than a letter or sign–as though there were something to communicate between them–which for me was mostly happiness to be engaged in making something even if it was just arranging and generally caring for and opening it in different directions.
“It is such a simple observation that there are no straight lines in Nature. But it is a door into Nature’s heart.”
–Stephen Harrod Buhner, ibid.
The one thing I took particular delight in was having the wood ford the seasonal and big-storm water run along through there, and it was some challenge it turned out in terms of maintenance because I couldn’t see straight and way misaligned where I thought it went in and out–I mean hours trying to get it to flow right and could not figure it out–and drained a trench thinking it had something to do with gravity–and showed my daughters who also couldn’t figure out why it wasn’t draining–until for no particular reason except the end of the line in terms of efforts I decided I would measure the two sides and wham! where I was digging out on one end was about a foot off from where I was digging out on the other. I don’t ascribe what happened to any signal I acquaint with this place–yet I mean there is something here–or this grey between-storm afternoon–though the feeling of connecting the two ends was incredible–to see the sunlit through the tunnel again after months of idiocy.
This place has been a sanctuary, where I’d sit panting heavily between exertions heaving and leveling and trying to hold the line and evolve a complex of walls. I imagined them as habitats with a roof of sky, though always more dry under the cedar, and to be that way inside them trying to figure them out, a portrait of shatter. For that time it was this camp I felt, like a one alighting awhile making dwelling–one place I went through and left better.
And best will be when it isn’t there.
