Rebecca Leeman
When I was eight years old, one of my favorite things to do at my grandparents’ house in Vermont was to follow stone walls through the woods. I started out by walking upon them, balancing and falling, engaging the challenge of staying atop like a gymnast. My grandpa told me one day to respect the stone wall and walk beside it because it was old and precious. It was an adventure to follow the stone wall, beginning from the back corner of my grandparents’ lawn with its boundary of aromatic garden flowers and a few protected trillium, past the climbing maple tree, to ascend the hill for what seemed like miles. It was a safe enough venture because the stone wall marked many property boundaries along a dirt road–farms on the left and deep woods on the right. When I was with my mother in these woods, I collected ground cedar for making wreaths. When I was alone, I would pretend that I was walking back in time, to when the woods were fields and there were older generations of barns and chickens and farm girls and boys doing chores.
Lichen and ferns have grown over the stones over time. Some parts of the wall have missing teeth, gaps as wide as doors. I reflect today that there was a soft presence of humanity in the stone walls blending in easily with the wildness of the woods. I feel whispers of early learning from having been in the presence of a gentle positive footprint of human history in Nature. The ecological succession over a hundred years and more has turned the human endeavor of ploughing and planting fields into the emergence of what a forest wants to be if it gets to make that choice, cast seeds, and grow branches, needles, leaves, and fronds, club moss, and bracken.
I visited the stone walls again in 2017. Even with the development of new homes deep in those woods, I still felt an essence of wild Nature emanating from the stones. I reflect now that even into this century with the aging, dominating ideal of technology over Nature, people still celebrate their woods, their rivers, and meadows. We may claim that the Earth belongs to us, that it is our patch of ground to do whatever with. However, ferns take over, bracken covers the footprints of humankind. Time and circumstance could make our species irrelevant. If we return with listening and gratitude to attune to the rhythm of Earth, we might catch the sense of responsibility to move and act with the best interests of our natural world. With more sensitivity to our Earth home, there is a potential to come back into balance, such that social inequity and war, greed and violence could become embers and die down. This prayer lifts my spirits when I absorb the sociopolitical chaos in the field of the world within my body, mind, and heart space. For me, it just takes a stone wall to envision that.
Rebecca Leeman is a nurse-midwife who calls New Mexico home between the Rio Grande and the Sandia mountain range. She writes poetry, prose and short stories for the magic it brings and for processing grief.