The Pilgrim's Path

I have a pot of green tea steeping in the kitchen. I’ll only be a minute. Things echo off the darkness. The cabin is still and quiet in the night. I can hear and feel both the fire in the fireplace and the fire in the wood stove across the big room. They’ve both been going for days now, constantly burning, embers flaming and then waning with every descendant load of wood that gets added. Did I mention how quiet it is? It is mind-shatteringly quiet here. The hillsides are barren of leaves and undergrowth, bluish white snow carpets the midnight Appalachian Mountains. There is a red hound dog asleep on the bed. Her legs and arms are outstretched as if in mid run. Occasionally she will have a fit in her sleep, dreaming of chasing deer I imagine, and her legs and arms will twitch and jerk and she will begin to talk and howl in her dream.

Well I made it here. Moved up here in late May of last year and writing this as of January of 2011. It was a bit of stunt to pull for sure. Even for me. I’d lain really low for six years and licked my wounds after having to come to terms with my alcoholism and drug addiction. I’d just buried my dear father and off I go and decide to move once again to the farm in West Virginia. There was definitely more than a bit of grandiosity to it. But there always was in the past too. My mind has a real love of grandiosity. Anyway, the difference this time has been being a man instead of a boy. I really can’t put it any better or simpler than that. My heart has shifted significantly over the past several years. I’ve grown and there’s no sense denying it…I’ve aged.

I haven’t been listening to music much here at the cabin. I prefer the silence. I listen to the fire burning, the crackle of wood in the flames, the creaking of the old cabin, the wind howling on the window panes and through the fluted trees. I can literally hear

the snow melt, the drip drip drip off the roof top, the sound of slushy week-old snow under boot. I’ve long admired the pace of nature, the rhythms of the natural world. I’ve always sought to get connected. All my life I’ve wanted to live here on this farm so I could be close to nature, so I could learn from it. I’ve learned the ways of the cities of the world. It’s not for me. It never was for me. But I played along. I chased it. I thought I’d find happiness behind the wheel of the latest new thing all the while knowing what my heart truly desired was ancient wilderness.

Is it in fact feasible and possible to live a different kind of life? The kind of life I’ve always dreamed of living. Well, I’m finding out right now. Once the grandiosity of the Big Move wore off it was down to brass tacks and daily living in a 40+ year old summer cabin with often dodgy utilities. And it’s been a crash course in country living for this suburban boy ever since. This place is already marking me up, claiming me as one of its own once again. In all honesty, I fit right in here. I’ve been reconnected to my tribe, the hard-working blue collar people of southern West Virginia. From them I arose into life and to them I now return. I left when I was twelve years old, a neat bookend to my childhood, a closing of the door on that wondrous time of life and the opening of another door into the whacked out mania of puberty and adolescence. Then of course young adulthood with its own dramas and comedies…and now…middle age.

My past has been full of more twists and turns than these mountain roads I now drive daily. And everything, all the minutiae of my personal path and journey has led to this dead end road down in the holler. This is truly the end of one long and winding road for me. I’ve not made it through the winter yet but I know I will. I won’t be run off like I was those other times. This time will stick. I’m making a home here, a base, a pastoral life. Everything I’ve learned up to this point is golden, every experience, every failure, every struggle, and every disappointment. They are all like money in the bank. Things I thought I’d never be able to understand are now just common knowledge to me, no big deal in the Grand Scheme of things. The seasons shift, the heavy snows and icy throes of winter will blend into the muddy rains and pale green longings of Spring which will ease almost imperceptibly into the bright neon green leafy glory of a warm summer, that then slowly fades as the light recedes, leaves fall, temperatures drop…and the snow comes again.

And I’ll be here, living, watching, learning, growing…listening. Just a pilgrim on his path.