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Ecstatic Practice
A grouse drummed emphatically through the night as if he’d just discovered himself and could not get past astonishment to the blindered state that most of us need to exist in to keep existing. His drumming reached my dreams. I woke up believing I was his drumming log, which I’m acquainted with because I love that log and I’ve flushed him off it every time I’ve walked up that side of the hill lately. It’s the old carcass of a massive beech, hulking there like a shipwreck, bigger than any other tree here for centuries and oriented so that his drumming really pounds and scatters through the hills. The tree lay in an opening it made for itself while it was still standing, its crown taking up a holy amount of space that the surrounding canopy still hasn’t filled and into it always shines some form of celestial light –beams, blazes, coronas, halos sweep across the crumbling brown body from all angles as the sun moves through each day and the moon through each night. The tenuous drama of the light there gives the impression that something is about to happen or just has. Having the body of this tree as my own in the slick moments of half-sleep, I learned that bodies are for ecstatic practice and that’s all. Go see the pink spring frogs in every wet ditch this week to prove it.
My morning ritual, lately, is to climb down the ladder and hug and kiss my dog Sal like I haven’t seen her in a million years. This part of the ritual isn’t new but remains my favorite and I repeat it in the afternoon and evening. Then I make a fire, then tea, and we go outside to pee and chat with yard birds —this morning, the pair of Phoebes who nest in our eaves every year. They just came back from their winter home and it’s good to be together, they say, again and again. Then I practice my hen-yelping in the yard. Turkey season opens in a few weeks. I listen to hear if I get any response from the neighborhood tom. My morning voice gives a natural rasp and I get more gobbles than in the afternoon. After a series of yelps to each direction, I go inside and set a small, crystalline lump of pine resin onto a piece of hot charcoal set in a soapstone bowl. I jump up and grab the pull-up bar mounted to the floor joists of the loft and I let my body hang while the white smoke curls into the room and I time travel.
I peeled this resin from the mortal wound of a thigh-thick pine that came down in a windstorm, laying down all the younger pines in its wake, creating a brush-blind haven for snowshoe hare, so that’s where I hunted them. I didn’t shoot through the thick brush, but there were windows, doors, and trails coming and going and I used them. The hares there seemed to stamp their huge, felted feet louder than hares anywhere else and I could often follow them by ear when I couldn’t see them. I hear this soft, bounding, thud when the resin starts to smoke and I get to go back and follow it again. It smells not like a forest fire or even a controlled burn but a balm—the clean, clear essence of the place, held in amber.
What a year, 2022. I killed a deer and a hare on that place–just a few acres in the Hiram hills where vultures come in great black clouds to kettle–an ancient grove of sweet fern, gnarled and up to my neck.
The beaver pond down back has a sense of humor— the rascal friend who keeps you on your toes. Slash piles with foot-sized holes, switching winds, every species of tattle-tale bird, purebred-mad-as-hell red squirrels - there was no stalking up on anything there so I sat–against stumps and stones or the big rock wall, my rifle resting ready on top, toward a bright white field, glass eels in the eye from staring at snow, expecting it to animate, or not. Meanwhile, a field mouse snuck pumpkin seeds from my left pocket, stashing them in the rock wall, and a whole bottle of doe piss spilled in my right, salting my wild cherry lozenges. I wasn’t the butt of every joke, though, we saw a crow get his head stuck in a wood-duck box and the geese and grackles rioted while he pried. I found a bear skull on a hemlock stump overlooking the pond with a finger-sized hole between the eyes and presumed he’d laughed himself to death like some kind of monk and something had wormed in after levity and eaten his nirvanic brain. When the doe fell, she painted a white stoneface red, her body’s last ecstatic act here, re-enacted on every white plate now, with hot, red pooling.
Sitting against my car in the dirt drive after killing the deer, resting, telling friends, having a beer, and watching a woodcock strut just ten feet from my outstretched legs - a truck crept up with two teenage boys whisper-yelling that if I wanted to shoot a deer, there was a big doe bedded just on the other side of the drive in the skinny strip of woods that one tends to ignore. The woodcock flushed and I told the boys I’d already gotten one. They cheered and asked if I needed help dragging her out and I didn’t so they sped off, cheering again, for all of us —one of those sweet interludes that fortifies us for everything else, and it did. We were alive in a pandemic. We had lost people who served as our major organs but there we still were, bodies housing whatever it is they house, feeling around for what we’re supposed to be doing out here on this small peninsula of the immeasurable heaven, sensing something right—within our reach, but we don’t know how to release it from our substantia nigra—that pearl of darkest matter in the universe just sitting in the center of our brains. It seems we need permission to explore the irrational but we’ve forgotten from who.
This time-traveling can only last a few minutes until my weakening hands give out and slip from the bar. The resin burns a while longer while I acclimate my feet to the floor and step through the astonishment of walking, in two places at once. By the time the sticky, slack lump snuffs itself out, I’ve got my blinders back on to move forward and not spill everywhere at once, but I saw it–a wisp of what I’m here for. I’ve seen ads lately for laundry detergent that makes your clothes smell like designer perfume. This is an antidote to that, in some way. Then I wash my face in the mirror, beneath a mask of my grandmother's face—like mine, but she has three eyes, one closed, titled on the back in her loose, looping hand - “I Wink Because I Can” and then I go cook my eggs or whatever I’m doing next and that’s the end of the ritual. It all devolves from there, but it’s a good start.
Thanks for being here with me.
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