Earth has qualities of darkness, yin, depth and quiet. I feel it with my toes, just below the surface of the crystal clear water of Long Pond. I’m about knee deep in this kettle pond on outer Cape Cod. Yellow and brown leaves dot the surface of the cream-colored sandy bottom. About 20 feet from the shoreline, there’s a sudden dropoff, where the rim of the “kettle” meets the deep-bottomed, dark part of the lake. Swimming there on a summer day a few years ago, that sudden dropoff evoked a visceral reaction – a fear of the abyss. I shoved the feeling aside and kept on toward the middle of the pond. No bottom? No big deal – just whistle past the graveyard, tread water for a few minutes, then swim back to the friendly, shallow-bottomed shore. For the moment, the monsters of the deep rest undisturbed.
Below the water, there is earth, rock, sand. On the ocean, I sometimes experience a similar, uneasy sensation. It’s deep and the bottom is mysterious—dark yet vigorously and primordially alive. What is below? Simply the earth dissolving. The leaves on the sand decay and disintegrate, then become silt at the bottom—whether it’s the sunny shallow end or the dark deep end. Dissolving is an inevitable result of water and life.
Standing in my garden on a dry September day, I hold a half-burnt sage leaf fragment. Its velvety texture feels rich between my fingers, and its grey-green-blue contrasts with the brown mulch and darker dirt. The sage is what’s left of a burning ceremony, where smoke rose, particulates mixed with the air and fell to earth, joining with the solid, unburned fragment of the leaf. All become earth. Decay unites.
Now it’s early November, and everyone agrees that it’s been an unusually beautiful autumn. No hard freezes or fierce winds have interrupted the natural process of the leaves. They’ve had time to slowly turn colors and dry out, slowly relinquishing their grip on the branches. When they reach that tipping point, boom! Down they come. Overnight, a plushy heap of vibrant red sits beneath a maple tree that was a big fiery lollipop one day earlier. The smell of decaying leaves wafts up between my feet as I scuffle and rustle along. Anything left in the street will undergo a winter transformation, absorbing rain and snow to become heavy, laminated, goopy slabs to be pried out from between the tines of the rake and placed on the garden. They are well on the way to becoming earth – dark, deep and nourishing for the new buds on the branches above.
Earth also speaks to belonging and the power of place. A few years back, while visiting the town where I spent most of my childhood, I went to the cemetery. It’s small enough that I don’t get lost looking for the family headstone. The smaller stones mark the individual burial spots, and not long ago, my cousin placed the ashes of her father, then moved his stone and her mother’s stone so that the upper left and upper right corners are touching. Another stone had a small American flag next to it, since Memorial Day had recently passed. I had parked my rental car on the street and walked in. Every single gravestone had a name that I recognized. They were surnames of neighbors, classmates, shop owners, town councilmembers, family. That spoke so powerfully of belonging – to the earth and to a place on it.
I like belonging, but I came late to the party. When I seven, my parents separated and my mother and I moved to what was my sixth place of residence: Belvidere, New Jersey, her childhood home where her parents still lived. I was a shy child, and I had a hard time making friends and finding a place in the social circles of a small town. But my family, particularly my cousins, provided a backstop of rootedness. I automatically belonged with them. As much as I felt like a misfit and an outsider, I was someone’s granddaughter.
Then there was the pull of nature, which always lay close by. The centerpiece was the beautiful, wide Delaware, ever changing and beloved by all. To this day, there’s a hole in my Thanksgiving day, because back then, the day wasn’t complete until we took a leisurely walk to the river after the meal. Next came a light supper of turkey sandwiches.
The echoes of that place are deep and numerous. A letter from my mother, written in 1993, catches my heart in its reference to one of those small, dear connections to the familiar. It instantly puts me in a very specific spot: the kitchen of the apartment where we lived for about six years. She wrote: “As I was thinking of these things, and of what happened so many years ago, a truly amazing thing happened. It is a warm spring night tonight, and I had the window open in the kitchen, where I was drinking my coffee after supper. All of a sudden, from the outside somewhere, I heard the unmistakable, thin, beautiful song of the white-throated sparrow—the first time this year. I hadn’t heard him last year at all, and I think he was trying to tell me something, which I will pass on to you. His message is, live in the present, enjoy its beauty, don’t spend time thinking about what is dead and gone, or you will miss something wonderful which is happening right now.”
Right now, as I think on these things, a leaf floats down to rest in the hollowed-out spot below the bird feeder in the back yard. The juncos step on and around it; soon it will dissolve into the dark.
