Evidence

There is a place in the woods below so holy you mistake it for ordinary.

Within a universe of redwoods, spruce, firs, tan oaks, cascara, sword ferns and deer ferns, a leafy lace of sorrel, among trunks felled and mossy, there an enormous burnt-out redwood stump is an old room, containing paw prints and feathers. The blood of the hunted and the blood of the hunter nowhere to be seen.

Each day presents its evidence. The story of what was always in the story of what is.

My husband who was so sure he’d take a death potion when he could no longer dance and cut a trail into the wildness he loves, admits, his voice soft as if speaking a secret, “I don’t want to die.”

If you disturb the earth, you’ll find broken snail shells and the empty skins of spiders among the succulent, white hair of roots and tubers.

On a chair, hanging limp, the clothes my husband wore yesterday still hold him.

What is holy?

I don’t think it’s purity or consecration, only that you feel it with your animal body, a kind of wholeness, welcomed, hushing the mind that thinks too much and often in opposites.

It’s like this. Once I watched a raven pluck a feather from beside a downed, splayed-open Stellar’s jay, taking the feather into the sky, dropping it, letting it drift and spiral, before swooping in to catch it, carry it higher, and doing it all again. Sad and exquisite, fleeting and enduring.