The Wild

I fell in love slowly. Only once I understood the skies, and the storms, and the bend of the trees by the pond, and those by the bay, and those by the field.

It took a long time to know this wild space. The thicket I walked right past for years, until I noticed, finally, its small orange berries one lonely fall day. The squiggled tree where the egret sits, the pine tree where the owl calls, the way the grasses turn red in late August.  All of this I misunderstood, because I didn’t stand still, or stay quiet, or look up, or look closer.

Sometimes, years went by from the couch or the chair, and the world rose quickly from the pane of a window someone else put before me, or I put myself behind — and all that was wild went on without me. Elsewhere. On snow days and summer nights, in fleeting moments between staring at screens, I had dreams of lands I’d never know, and imagined beauty that belonged to everyone else. It’s true, I heard the peepers and the saw the full moon on the first warm night; even I could hear the loon cry, and feel the ancient yearn of a sky full of stars or swallows. Even then, the wild called to me.

But I didn’t know the way she was. That she was more than the backdrop for my morning commute, and that there was more to be known than a Saturday could teach. I didn’t know the way she was at all.

I fell in love slowly. Only once I saw the way she moves in solitude, by a grey sea, or green hill, or through the narrow path across the shadowed margins of the day. Only once I knew where the apple blossoms were, and the hollowed trunk, and the massive roots. I know now how the chill comes, the way the frost heaves, and all the ways the sky is blue. Like all great loves, I know the curve of her now. She is my home, now.  And I would be nowhere else but here, in this late afternoon light; wild, seen, known, and loved.