“ And I’m split in half, but that’ll have to do, ooh, ooh…”
Noah Kahan, “Stick Season“
“The beauty of things was born before eyes and sufficient to itself, the heart-breaking beauty
robinson jeffers, “Credo”
Will remain when there is no heart to break for it.”
My friend Jane recently wrote that there are two great things about living in Juneau: leaving and coming back.
I’m catching up on being home. It is good to be back. Most recently, I withstood the sensory shock of blue skies, palm trees, and balmy weather in Southern California. Monday morning in the woods with Cedar filled my lungs and spirt with some dark moist November version of joy and dread—a feeling evoked in my twisted brain by T.S. Eliot’s phrase “woodsong fog.”
Walking the big trees, I realized we’re smack dab in the middle of what Vermonters call “stick season.” My old buddy Jim introduced me to Noah Kahan, and it turns out that Katie’s a fan, too.
While I’m not planning on “drink[ing] alcohol ’til my friends come home for Christmas,” as Kahan puts it in “Stick Season,” (a lament of a lost love from a pining [ha ha] young man), I get the temptation.
We have no snow. So the sticks stand out. But this ain’t Vermont. In our temperate coniferous rain forest, stick season gives a nice foil for all of the green that’s thriving. This week, I’ve been struck by the intricacy and resilience of the mini-verdure: sugar-scoop, water parsley, bunchberry dogwood, hairmoss, and Parmeliacae lichen, to name just a few.
Today the same Jane posted on social media a piece about how she needs to open herself up to view art. She scolds the “been there done that” iPhone snapping crowd in front of the Mona Lisa.
“What did they miss? ‘The actual appalling presence,” Robinson Jeffers would call it….Stand there in front of [The Mona Lisa] for ten, twenty, thirty minutes and let it look you in the eye. Then it will show itself to you in a way you never expected. It will not show itself that way to anyone else’s eyes but yours.”
Jane, Facebook
It hit me that maybe I’m doing something similar to Jane in her art museums here on my daily dog trods. I’m letting myself see what some might see in thirty minutes in front of a painting; it just takes me a lot longer.
Today I marveled for the thousandth time about the “trees on tiptoes,” and thought about the now invisible nurse stumps that formed their perches. I had some big half-thoughts about how my father’s absence now shapes my foundation, and how through a similar process, my other ancestors may be absently formative in the shapes I take in the world.
And then Cedar brushed by me en route to some crazy smell party, and I thought about Robinson Jeffers some more. I take some consolation these days in what I used to see as his bleak attitude. The ragged, dying and thriving forest behind home is good testament to the fact that things keep on going in a pretty good and green way long after me.
That’ll have to do, ooh, ooh.
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