Savouring Life

I sit in my east-facing living room as sunset approaches, watching the lengthening shadows and reflections of sunlight in the northeastern sky. As the evening breeze stills, shades of green in the field are touched with gold, then salmon, before turning to dusk. The eastern horizon changes from blue to blended bands of violet, salmon, and rose, as the sun sets to the west. The watercolored sky fades upward to white before reaching further beyond to pale sky-blue. Waving fields of knee-high blue grama going to seed become still. Trees lose themselves in shadow. A Says Phoebe perches on a young Gravenstein apple tree. Moths flit here and there, and the phoebe darts out for its dinner. It’s a calming view, and I breathe deeply a few times to take in its serenity.

Gazing through the window of space and time, I watch the light and colors change across the fields and on the trees. I feel myself back in the summer drought of 2002 when I’d spent hour after hour, day after day that July watering those young trees. There were dragonflies, horned toads, and ants attracted to the water, which made sucking sounds as the hot and thirsty soil drew it in. There were tracks of rabbits, and lines in the dirt where a snake had passed.

What I had started with here was bare land – enough to graze a handful of cattle or horses through the summer – surrounded with four strands of barbed wire fence. The only structure was a century-old, hand-dug, windmill-powered water well that no longer worked. That’s it. No power. No trees. No water. The nearest people lived a mile away.

Wildlife consisted of a badger or two, a couple of skunks, cottontails and jack rabbits. There were Western Meadowlarks in the summer, and Horned Larks singing life into the fields with their delicate tinkling music year-round. Once in a while there were antelope off in the distance. And there was some kind of rodent that tunneled through the dirt, chewing the roots off of too many of the seedling trees I planted. A pair of coyotes and a lone fox crossed the property at night. Prairie spadefoot toads croaked in the dug clay-lined “stock pond” that would fill once or twice a year in a torrential summer afternoon thunderstorm.

This land offered solitude and peace. It demanded blood, sweat, and tears. More than two and a half decades later, I’m still here.

It dawns on me that what I’m doing now is what I had done all that past summer: savoring. I’m savoring the feel of my land and the trees I had planted and nurtured. I savor the fields and the sky, the birds, and the singing insects. I savor Nature. I savor Life. I savor my Self. And that is what makes one’s life rich. The savoring of Self, of Soul, of Nature, and of Spirit. That is the Gift that this place has given me.

Why am I here? This place called to me, and I stayed.