Fall, 10-10-2020

This is the time of year I feel most alive, ironic since so many things are beginning to die, an easy and delightful death, the most exuberant, most colorful, most playful of deaths.The thrill of honking wild geese hidden by heavy cover, the symmetry of their V formation when they clear the weather. The startling explosion of grouse from cover. Bears scavenge their last bits of food for winter. White tail coats darken. Heavily racked stags fight for domination. You rarely see this, if ever, but sometimes you hear the muffled crash of racks somewhere in the deep woods. Trees flush with color, "cotton candy", my kids used to say. Other seasons seem to last forever compared with this one. From the day it begins we mourn its end. Of course, other seasons change, too, but those changes are so subtle they barely seem to change at all...until they do. There's a beautiful melancholy in the air. It's easier to see. We're coming into hunting season, although good local hunters  have been scouting since August. I am one of those local hunters, although it's been awhile since I've been out there taking game. Even so, I am hunting, always hunting. My eyes automatically focus on the edges, where fields meet woods. I'm studying my world in a different way for another purpose. It doesn't matter that I'm not out there this year or last year or next.

The nerves are never so alive, the senses never so keen. The air teems with whispers and ten thousand scents, each one a driblet of information. They become attuned to the tiniest movements in the thickest brush. You don't look for the whole but the piece, for the ear that twitches, for the sun glinting on a tine, the flick of a tail. You're aware of the shifting breeze, the breeze you always want to keep in your face. You walk the way you walk in the woods - glacially, flat footed. White-tail deer. Their hearing is beyond human comprehension. Where do they bed down? What are they eating, and where do they eat it? Where do they water? When? Is that scat fresh? You'll know everything a bear's been eating by its scat, but not deer. Details. In the morning when they are still bedded down on some high slope, your scent will carry up. If you're on that high slope late in the day, your scent will carry down. Oak has made a resurgence and has been migrating down the mountain, so there you will find fresh acorns. Details. And the rifle you will carry must be sighted in so as to assure accuracy. Know what your rifle can do. Does it pull? Which way? Know the bullet you use - its weight and purpose. Know its trajectory at 25 yards, 50 yards, 100 yards. Details. When I was in the Marines we had to take our rifles apart and put them back together again - in the dark. In sand. It's your responsibility. Details. All this, and then what you must do is, "Sit still". If you're gonna do it, do it well. Sit still.

Every year is new but like the year before and the years before that. Was this the genesis of reincarnation? One tree engendered the tree growing next to it. Each creation propagates itself. Ontology recapitulates phylogeny. If I were an ancient telling legends from before time told time and time again and again, what conclusions would I come to? What stories would I concoct? Metamorphosis happens atom by atom. Becoming a part of all this simply means, "Be here now". This state is not limited to monks and seekers, the more earthiest of us can experience it, too.