​From the Nordic triad of weaving Goddesses, the Norns, we are given the vision of Wyrd, the whole world as one interconnected web.  Wyrd is a luminous field of energy that vibrates in constant communication among all living beings here.  We each have our unique thread in this vast tapestry that we call our world.  Becoming conscious of ourselves as a thread in the Wyrd we are initiated into a grand collaboration, it revives a bone deep sense of meaning in our lives, right here, right now.  – Chameli Ardaugh
 
In nature nothing exists alone. – Rachel Carson
 
Several months ago, on an early June morning, I was driving to Arcadia to visit my site when I saw what could easily be taken for a small dinosaur trudging along the sidewalk on Pleasant street, near the Manhan River bridge.  It was in fact a rather enormous mother snapping turtle on her annual pilgrimage to her nesting ground.  I pulled over to watch, ready to redirect traffic if she started into the street (see the bottom of this article for info about how to help turtles crossing streets.  Unless you are a Certified Snapping Turtle Wrangler or have no particular fondness for your digits, please do not attempt to handle them!!).  The efficient and noisy indifference of the passing cars was in utter contrast to the turtle’s silent, deliberate progress.  I watched in amazement as she lumbered alongside the traffic, lifting and placing each craggy-armored foot with achingly slow precision.  I wondered how many years she’d been making this trip and how the landscape of her home-ground had changed in that time.  I wondered how many road crossings she had survived and how many hatchlings she had brought into the world.  I wondered how many of the passing commuters even noticed her.

​After the turtle had regained the safety of the river, I continued on to my site – a patch of red maple and hemlock forest along a small tributary of the Manhan, where I’ve been making daily visits for many months.  As I do on most days, I began by sitting alongside the brook, listening to the sounds of the forest.  In the hemlocks behind me, I hear the insistent hoof-strikes of a deer as she signals her uncertainty about my presence.  A few minutes later she’s returned to feeding.  The three chipmunks closest to my spot by the creek are used to me and forage unwarily nearby, but one farther away makes the repetitive chipping call that signals a mammalian predator.  A robin swoops onto a low hemlock branch across the creek with a soft nervous whinny, pausing to stand sentinel-like as he peers in my direction.  This tangible call and response between my presence and my living surroundings helps re-anchor me into the web of the world.  Artist Jenny Odell observes that “groundedness requires actual ground."  This patch of forest has become the actual ground in which my nascent felt-sense of interconnection takes root and draws nourishment.

​Re-anchoring into the physical, biological, and spiritual ground of the earth has become an imperative for me nearly on par with breathing.  In this age of globalization and hyper-connectivity, it’s become almost impossible to trace or directly experience the far-flung and wildly tangled threads of our impacts on the world.  The ground we are impacting is often not the ground our lives are staked upon, and our effects on our local environment can be hard to perceive from within the confines of modern life.  The resulting disconnect leads even well-meaning people to unwittingly damage the earth.  My daily forest-sitting is an attempt to begin to heal this disconnect within myself – to root into my home-ground and directly experience myself as a thread in the tapestry of both the local landscape and the larger family of things.
 
Through this daily practice of sitting in the woods, I have started to develop a new understanding of how I am connected to the mother snapping turtle; the deer I see on a near-daily basis; the hemlock tree I lean against as I take in the forest sounds. This understanding is very different from what I could imagine at the outset of this project, when my ecologist-self hoped I’d acquire new insights into the facts of these creatures’ lives and their intersection with my own.  What I’ve found has been qualitatively different, and to me, more profound.  It involves no additional knowledge, no accumulation of data, but rather a bone-and-sinew understanding of my fundamental kinship with both the turtle and everything else in this forest.  The act of routinely stepping outside the sphere of human concerns and opening to the unhurried complexity of the forest has made me keenly aware: we are made of the same stuff, governed by the same natural laws.  Like the largely-ignored forested matrix that surrounds and interpenetrates our human communities, we are endlessly unfolding processes that respond to an infinite array of inputs, conditions, and relationships.  As long as we experience ourselves as separate from nature, we imagine the damage we do as something apart from ourselves.  But beyond destroying our planetary life-support systems, I now more deeply understand a subtle but critical way we harm ourselves: the essence within us which is like the turtle – slow, cyclical, obeying natural laws, mysterious, unprofitable – is also marginalized, is also threading its way through an unyielding landscape that is foreign to its nature and needs.

On a bright morning in early September, I get ready to leave my patch of woods by the brook and begin the hour-long walk home.  The creek has dwindled to a rusty trickle – clogged with undulating orange plumes created by a bacterium that feeds on iron – and the woods resound with the knocking calls of chipmunks warning each other of avian predators as they busily stock their winter stores.  Under the auspices of the Mt. Tom ridgeline, I thread my way between rolling corn fields and the lily-pad-choked crescent of Danks Pond.  As I walk I think of the mama snapper I saw three months before, and ideas I’ve been silently gestating begin to form in my conscious mind as the impetus for this article.  Just before I reach the Manhan River, I encounter two tiny travelers crossing the road: a pair of hatchling snapping turtles, each significantly smaller than my palm.  I linger gratefully until they are safely across.
 
 
 
 
*In a few months it will be turtle egg-laying season again, and mother turtles will be crossing roads to reach their customary nesting sites.  Whenever you encounter a turtle on the road, there are safety issues involved: obviously the turtle is at risk from the traffic, but please remember that you are too!  The ideal situation is to allow the turtle to cross on its own with as little interference as possible.  If it’s safe to do so, this may involve being a crossing guard and alerting other drivers to the turtle’s presence.  Use your common sense!  The turtles know where they are going, so please do not redirect them, or move them from the path they’re taking.  If the turtle is *not* a snapping turtle, and the situation requires you to move the turtle in order to keep it (and you) safe, you can pick the turtle up by grasping it firmly on either side of its shell, midway between the front and back legs, and moving it off the road in the direction it was heading.  While snapping turtles can be lifted safely (and are more gentle than most people realize), it takes some know-how to do it without putting yourself or the turtle at risk, and I don’t recommend trying it if you haven’t been shown by someone experienced.  Finally, NEVER pick up a turtle by its tail! 

​The idea for this project was born on a perfect spring day a little over a year ago.  I sat above the Manhan River on a recently fallen sycamore tree – fresh enough that its doomed twigs were leafing out – thinking about how rare it is to enjoy aimless time in nature.  Even as a long-time naturalist, artist, and self-proclaimed wood sprite, I often find it hard to get out from under the responsibilities of life and the pressure to produce (with its churning of to-do’s and mental preoccupations) long enough to drop into accord with the rhythms of the non-human world.  This particular day was an irresistible invitation to form such an accord: the canopy of newly-unfurled leaves gleamed like a cathedral of spun gold above me, laced with birds rioting songfully; the temperature was a clement 72 degrees; and there was not a single biting insect to interrupt the perfect pleasure of it. 

​As I sat on the trunk basking in the spring’s first warmth, I stared at length into the river’s shallows, which were tinged invitingly with hues of warm green and tannic brown.  I watched small fish nose into the current, gangly water-striders adjusting their position with jerks of their long limbs, caddisfly larvae trundling along the bottom & leaving looping trails in the mud.  Holy smokes – the caddisfly larvae!  They are so well-disguised in their cases of leaves and sticks and bits and bobs that it took me a while of looking before I realized there were hundreds of them EVERYWHERE (which incidentally speaks well of the Manhan’s water quality, as caddisflies tend to be sensitive to contamination).  In this extended and agenda-less looking, I experienced something I hadn’t encountered for a long while: the unspooling of the mind and subsequent upwelling of joy, fresh perspective, and creativity that comes from embracing the fine art of doing nothing – especially while immersed in nature.  This profound and re-balancing moment felt like the missing yin to our culture’s jangley yang, and through it I reconnected with a deep longing for an extended period of unstructured time in nature to cultivate deeper presence, develop intimacy with a particular place, reconsider my relationship to nature and my local landscape, and make fertile space for the seeds of new ideas and creative forms to take root within me.  As an interpreter and artist, all such longings ultimately feed the same root: the desire to connect with my fellow humans in service and celebration of our shared natural heritage and local landscape. 

​It’s been about 160 years since Henry David Thoreau wrote about the “lives of quiet desperation” being led by many of his contemporaries and retreated to the solitude of Walden Pond to seek an antidote in nature.  There’s a lot that Thoreau wouldn’t recognize in our modern world – from towering skyscrapers, automobiles, and internet memes, to the profusion of mind-boggling technological devices – but I think he would recognize that the same strain of desperation has since grown to a cacophonous roar.  The technologies that are meant to make our lives easier and more connected seem in many ways to be having the opposite effect, as studies show their rising ubiquity correlates with epidemic rates of depression and social isolation.  Our global environmental crisis points to a parallel disconnect from the earth herself.  I believe it’s more essential than ever to ask ourselves what we’re missing by staring at our phones and devices, and moreover what we risk losing entirely in our distraction and disconnection from the land that supports and nourishes our existence, and from our own deepest selves.

Thoreau’s lineage of thought (and longing for a simpler life connected with natural rhythms) can be traced back at least as far as the Roman poet Virgil, whose famous “Eclogues” were set in Arcadia – an idyllic land representing humans living in harmony with wild nature (it’s telling for me that over 2000 years ago, Westerners were already lamenting our disconnect from nature!).  It seems fitting given that tradition that I should choose a site at Mass Audubon’s Arcadia Wildlife Sanctuary in my adopted home town of Easthampton as the focal point for this project.  Beginning in August of 2018, I have been visiting the same small patch of woods and stream at Arcadia almost daily and will continue to do so until a full year has passed.  In that time, I’ve been sitting in silence, watching, listening, feeling, dawdling, wandering, writing, drawing, painting, thinking, photographing, researching, and investigating.  The resulting project (of which this blog is one piece) is part natural history exploration, part art experiment, and part extended meditation.  It’s at once deeply personal to me, and also, I hope, a gift to my community.  Join me as I track the year on our local landscape -- foraying into topics as diverse as freshwater macroinvertebrates and the divine feminine, bedrock geology and bird language, forest ecology and mindfulness.  I will say more in subsequent posts about the culminating art show and presentation that will begin its tour of the local area this fall.  Thanks for reading and stay tuned!  Please leave comments: I’d love to hear from you.