The Fullness Thereof

Yesterday we had lots of muddy, dead grass visible. Along about 3 in the morning today it began to rain, and never let up until we were at church; we drove home in falling sleet on slushy roads, and now it is back to raw cold and snow. This is supposed to continue until tomorrow morning! So I am going to just think about something else.

Last Summer I got into a routine of walking, usually up the road and back. There was some loose idea of getting excercise, but that was, in all honesty, a convenient cover for what the poet described as losing "the little cares that fretted me, out in the fields of God." On one of those evenings when the daylight is longest and the sun westers with hesitation, I got away after supper, and decided to hike up our farmland, for a change. Across the road and up in back of the barns, the land is arranged in a series of three ascending levels. Coming to the top of a rise, there was the beginning of a hedge island on my left. I looked down the slope before me and beheld a doe, not fifty yards away, browsing along the fenceline at the field's limit. The breeze was out of the west with an occasional swirl from southward. I knew she couldn't wind me, so I decided to blend in to her scene by just staying immobile out in the open.

The forty minutes I stood there just watching her, were one of the most memorable meditations I have ever had. It wasn't thinking, only sensing: with my eyes on the doe I focussed my awareness on the grit of dirt that had got into my shoes. I heard a bee bumbling, and the complicated talk of birds. The doe was nibbling her way along the fenceline, reaching up into the overgrowth and climbing cucumber vines that take advantage of sumac trees. She tasted blackberry blossoms, then sniffed about for an acceptable crop of grass. She worked her way left, to the very corner of the plot, then (holding my breath) she began to wander along the hedge towards me. When she had come perhaps twenty yards, she stepped nonchalantly off the field into the hedge island, making her way around the place where we dump rocks picked after Spring ploughings. She was lost to my sight in all the brambles and bushes, so there was no more to do than to turn about and start for the house in the sunset. You might have expected me to be a bit cramped or stiff, with standing so still for most of an hour. But I wasn't. I felt bigger, able to take a deeper breath than before.

I think most people imagine that the farmer is 'close to nature.' Well, we are, in the sense that we live on the fields and under the sky. But we must always be wrestling with nature, with weather, pests, predators. The sense of separation was keen on my homeward way. I looked back and saw that the doe had emerged on the far side of the rough, into an uncultivated meadow area, still unconcerned in her grazing. She did not know that I had intruded on her world for a little while, that I had borrowed something from her. The feel of air, the smell of soil, the plinking of meadowlarks, a certain shade of peach in the sky that I may never experience again. And although I am not given to such gestures in congregation, I felt I needed to acknowledge the gift in some appropriate way. I stretched my arms heavenward and said aloud to the field of infant corn, "The earth is the Lord's, and the fullness thereof."