Cigar Rumination #2

our upper hay field, seen through two Winged elm trees.

I fancied myself the village atheist for many years, until I looked around one day and realized the villagers had usurped my position. So ever the contrarian, I began to farm, and found myself, to my surprise, standing in the vestibule of a now mostly empty church, listening for the words.

Now when I attend, alone and usually in the woods (or occasionally on the front porch), in God’s own cathedral, I sometimes glimpse what I’ve struggled to see. In quiet I’ll often find my focus drawn upwards into the trees, to the branches bending in soft breezes. Here in the unwritten is a certainty spoken with eternal words. In these winds are the forgotten ancient hymns, each leaf falling to an elegy of birdsong.

It is here in the woods when I feel most keenly a peaceful acceptance of this, my small place. It is here on this fallen tree where only in hushed unemotionalism could tears fall.

As another has written and it has seemed true to me, both gods and peasants stop at the city gates, where lives in such places the baleful eye whose glare and reach search wide for ways to separate us from past generations and understandings. It always offers up for free that most seductive and confusing gift: our own individual natures.

I stay a bit longer, to engage in some silent routine dispute with my kith and kin. As I wrestle with those old familiars about the questions of our guilt and my own continual role in this despoilation of the world, I’m reminded of Berry when he says, “There are no unsacred places; there are only sacred places and desecrated places.” I resolve to do better.

My cigar nears its inevitable end, so I rise for the doxology. A hawk screams its praise to creation and dives to the ground. And then I, and the small dying rabbit in its beak, chant the called-upon response.