Of Mice and Marvels

By Lea Hall

The heart of my woods beats a reminder each day: love and let

go. As the autumn leaves turn and fall, the inescapable message displays in aspen gold, sumac red,oak brown, maple orange.

But come spring, the kaleidoscope will begin again with white on brown and gray. Never have I seen so many large-flowered trilliums as bloomed in the woods this past spring: entire hillsides awash in purity. I was new to this place, and I told myself: this is a forest full of trillium.

But in a matter of days, the white faded to pale pink and small points of pale blue or purple came forth, lower to the ground. Who does not love violets? So I changed the song in my head: this is a forest full of violets. But those faded, to be replaced by a different species and a different color, each week of the spring, summer, and fall. The necessary losses would have made me sad, had the new blooms not pushed the grasping thought aside. By the time I left this northern place for my warmer southern home, the royal purple of Canadian thistles (those I missed with my scythe) punctuated the goldenrod blanketing the meadow.

Forty years ago I moved to a city, thinking I would spend a couple of years there and be done with city life. Cities are seductive. Not until this past spring did I move to the country, meaning to reacquaint myself with nature and learn to live more lightly on the earth. Each day of the four months there brought some new marvel. It took a marvel to interrupt my intense concentration on homesteading! Friends asked if I had any experience with farming, home repair, wildlife management, self defense, country culture. Not really. But isn’t it invigorating to find we have everything to learn? There is no end of projects on a small farm, so I worked virtually all my waking hours. Most of the other beings did the same. Anything that held still for an hour or more became habitat for somebody, it seemed. Amazing. When I picked up an old cotton dress shirt left in the shed for a few days for a rag, thump-- onto the floor fell a little gray mouse with five even smaller pink mice attached to her nipples. She righted herself and ran away, hauling her still-attached young. I thought she gave me a dirty look: you again. I suppose they lived there before I came. This little mother was about an inch and a quarter long, and yet much of my work preparatory to leaving the cabin for the winter was shaped by my knowledge of what she and her kin could do to my belongings. Mighty mice, they are. What they don’t want for food they may chew up for nest materials. Everything must be mouse-proofed, from clothing to vehicles to furniture to electrical equipment, if you want to find it intact when you return.

How is it that such large-brained mammals as we are can be so powerfully affected by such small rodents? This is a wonder, too.

Nature is relentless, from the trillium blooming and producing its seed to the mouse mating and building its nest. Can I harness my own relentlessness in the face of troubled times? My human life is more complex, certainly. The mother mouse doesn’t despair about the news of the day. She responds to life as it presents itself. I should like to do the same. It would be enough, wouldn’t it?

The author offers this question for spiritual reflection:

A Zen Buddhist teacher once advised, in regard to sorting out the too-busy lifestyle and still saving time for meditation: “Just take care of things.” Under what conditions could you “ just take care of things”, knowing as we do that the earth faces such extreme problems?

You are welcome to share your response on our Earth and Spirit Blog.

Photo: Everything Is Permuted Creative Commons