by Danile Martens

 

And did you get what you wanted from your life even so?

 

I did.

 

And what was it you wanted?

 

To feel myself Beloved in the Earth.

 

To know myself Beloved.

from Late Fragment by Raymond Carver

 

It is the evening of a satisfying working day, harvesting, weeding, and watering.  I picked blueberries. I was surprised by a couple of quarts of the first green beans ready for picking that I hadn’t noticed before.  Abby dispatched a groundhog that was investigating the area around my garden! I made a delicious meal from our own wealth of produce: beef, onions, the green beans, garlic, tomatoes, cucumbers and tomatoes.  I rode bike on the eight mile loop, then sat outside under the mackerel sky, at first reading about soil,  then just watching the sky as the light faded and John and Murray finished stacking the lumber made today from culled ash trees.

And now, absolute contentment.

I watch the swallows wheel and soar around the barn catching last insects, and the dogs wrestle and then rest, heads erect, Blue with one foot precisely behind the other, Abby scanning the farm. I am one with the blue sky, the grass and the borders of trees.  I am one with the Japanese beetles (which I drown in a bucket) that eat my roses and peach tree foliage, and with the flock of fluttering white butterflies, and with their larva that eat my cabbages which I defend with BT.  I am the phoebe, and the bluebird on the electric wire, and the destructive bittersweet vine, and the gorgeous trumpet flower vine, and the sweet smelling nicotiana.

And this status comes to me by my attention and care for all these things, my acceptance of labor, rest and quiet.  Someday I will become one, not only in spirit and by my love, but physically, when my body nurtures the earth that has nurtured me, held in a new form in this Beloved and loving Earth.

 

This originally appeared on https://restorationfarm15.wordpress.com.