daydreaming in the woodpile

Last year, in trying to take care of the sweet piece of dirt we love so well, to remedy the abuse and neglect it's been suffering for so long, we cut a lot of sick trees. We stacked the wood, or sometimes the uncut logs, in the places where the trees had been. We fully expected we'd have the woodshed ready for the wood by winter - and then we decided we'd get it done by this winter.

But we've got other things going on -- a toolroom, a bunkhouse, a garden fence... all to be built before the woodshed. So, we're stacking the wood now, all in one place and covering with a tarp.

All day yesterday, I loaded wheelbarrow after wheelbarrow full of wood and carted it to the location for the cords of stacked wood. There are times when I story while working and there are times when I pray while working and there are times when I recite facts or chants or poems I want to memorize. Yesterday though, I didn't think of anything at all. I just worked. I was all in one place, being there in the present, seeing the wood, feeling the air, tasting the day.

Down late, late in the evening, a kind of funny thing happened. In the middle of my kind of BE HERE NOW attitude, wholly involved in the work I was doing, I had a sensation of being watched. Usually, it's a bird or a deer or some such. This time, nothing was there. But I started thinking about Grandma Hall -- very strongly. I was hearing a memory of my Grandma tell me about her mother cutting wood.

Now, there is one story about my great grandma cutting wood that I don't much like to think about, when she had an accident and the head flew off the ax and did her some serious damage. But this wasn't that. This was all about hands, Great Grandma, Grandma, Mom and me all working at the same thing, getting wood together for the winter. It was as if all this was overlaid, one scene over another over another -- all there in the same place.