eye level at ground level

Lately I’ve been thinking a lot about our little tent in the frozen woods. What it felt like there. What it smelled like. How it felt so solid and still. There’s something reassuring about lying on the frozen ground below you. There’s no give, no space below. It was just soft snow that turned to an icy mound under the heat of a body. For the same reason, I spend hours every winter lying on frozen lakes and ponds, staring up at the clouds. It feels like a conspiracy, some magical spell I’m a part of. Water into ice. Where once I could only swim, now I can rest.

But in the tent there was something more. Something more because it was less. Lately, I’ve found myself daydreaming about those inky black nights. Daydreaming of that cold that nipped at the tip of my nose and insisted I sleep in wool lest it get too close. You don’t really sleep continuously in cold like that. You have to wake up and add logs to the fire and roll yourself over like a rotisserie chicken so all parts get toasted. Every time I awoke, I would wait for sleep to catch up with me again while I watched the flames licking and dancing and hootin’ and hollerin’ in their metal world. Those cleansing flames heating our bodies and burning off the frayed threads in my mind. 

Sometimes the wind howled her fury against our canvas walls and the whole tent billowed, inhaling the night’s cold and exhaling the flames heat. A log too few or a load of wood too late and it was only moments before the cold reclaimed her domain. 

There was something there, in that winter world, that stripped back so much of what I thought was necessary. All this stuff. All this me. Adornment and bobbles and baggage and scripts dangling off me all the time - they stayed behind. No room in the sled for excess. No room for them in a tent for two. I’ve camped before, all my life really, but in that winter cold, there’s an understanding that there’s an element of survival. There will be no roasting marshmallows and that’s okay. That’s the whole point. There’s only room there for what will keep you alive. And a book. But that can keep you alive too.

The thing that’s been claiming my daydreams lately is that fire. Lying on the ground and watching those flames, eye level at ground level. Like an animal. Like the animal that I am. One night I realized that I may have never slept under the escort of flame in all of my life. Even in the army, sleeping as I did outside, there were gas lamps and lanterns. I never went to a kid’s summer camp. Any flames that reached my eyes came up to my level at a bonfire where crowds gathered or music played. This was different. This was me and the fire and God. I was a part of that thick silence, pierced only by the magic of an owl calling or the determination of a coyote to have itself be known. 

It was all of me stripped down into something unfamiliar. I felt almost shy to meet myself there, a little embarrassed for my neglect. I could hear my husband breathing next to me. I was warm under wool and fur. Wood crackled and rolled. The metal stove snapped in expansion and contraction. And I lay there, bewildered by my life, awakening from the spell. How could I have ever got swept into that illusory vortex that shows us what life is when the simplicity of it all was right here all along?

I’m startled by how easy it’s been to convince us that our lives are meant to fit into the structured forms around us. They change the forms and we morph again and again. They shift the rules of the game and we pivot. We buy and we stand in line and we allow them domain over our fears and power over our personhood. And we plod along, accumulating, layering, educating. Like the donkeys weighed down with the peddler’s wares, we laboriously clang and bang our way up the craggy mountain, hoping there is rest just over that next crest.

Sometimes I have imaginary conversations with my ancestors in my head. I would say to them, “Do you know, this winter I fell asleep by firelight every night.” And they would say, “How else does one sleep?” And then I ache for all of the other things that I know nothing of. I ache for the Tara that would have never known the weight of the peddler’s stuff.

But here I am anyway. In this time. In this place. Recognizing, at least I am recognizing, that the longing isn’t a deficiency in character. It’s a calling back to what is real, to where I belong. I trust in God’s wisdom to be here now. I am blessed by my beautiful life with the love I have and give, but I am more today because I am learning to be less. I am finding and remembering and, many times, just being introduced for the first time, to parts of me that lay dormant in the noise and the hustle and bustle of this life. I often think this purposeful. Everything speeding up and expanding so we barely notice the hunger. But I know it’s there. Nothing tastes the same and nothing feels as comfortable as the ache in my hips from sleeping on my icy bed. 

I can’t wait for winter.