Positions

Bradbury Mountain, in Pownal, due West of Freeport.

My last day of vacation saw me follow my interior compass North, looking for pine cones and small branches to fill tall glass flower containers given to me by a colleague.

I love having luminaries in the window seat - their light is easier to live with and think to. The branches didn't work but piles of colored stones and pine cones, along with fairy lights, fill the vases which are glistering with warm, rich light.

I spoke to my Father while seated on the rock. He's fine, I'm going to fly back to OK to visit him in a month.

The whole plan "had" to be a certain way, I had to walk the mountain first, sit and call Dad, stand on the edge while my "guts" churned deep inside my abdomen, fear, a sudden feeling that I'd get too close and try to leap off the edge with the specific purpose of flying.

A message to a Facebook friend was answered while I was still sitting - very good reception for a granite outcropping with the honorific of "Mountain" when "hill" seemed more to the point.

"What do you see?" my friend asked. She knew about trees and sky - she'd lived in that very neighborhood.

So, what did I see?

I saw the bones of the land, the solid shafts of the trees, stones embedded in the leaves from last year, the rich, soft beginning of new soil.

I love this time of year, of feeling the raw shape and power of the land, it's strength and presence both lying dormant through the false Spring we had this year.

The sounds, especially as I neared the crest of stone that beetles over the woods surrounding the hill. If I took a stick and started scraping I'd hit the stone very quickly.

As you walk your steps boom in the deep mulch layer under what little growth there is, they boom like a hollow drum, like there are hidden rooms under the ground, a palace of stone, perhaps.

There are birds singing, rich piping against the soughing chords of wind in evergreen boughs, a rushing, rising, falling progression of chords, a background that gives even more power to the birdsong.

Underfoot is the smell of mould, wet, moist earth, rich decay - some whiff of pine needles which I cannot place. A Peloton of people running in a flight up the hill, water bottles strapped to their hands, talk about investments drifting back as I return to my car and more shopping for my luminaries.

The morning is cool but exertion warms me, a sit on a flat rock at the summit, basking in clear sunshine, thinking no thoughts but trying very hard to just listen, to be one with the place.

So there is sound, there is light, there is tension inside and beauty outside. The stone waits for my contemplation, my questions and it waits from me to calm down enough to hear it speak.

And a stone will talk to you if you let it, patient and slow, secure of its ground.

Stillness leads to awareness, inner and outer.

And then I descend the mountain, ready for a new day.