| VOLUME XXXI No. 5 | Narrowsburg, NY | February 3 - 9, 2005 |
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Eagles and ice hockey It’s a beautiful sunshiny morning. I glance out the window to check the thermostat on my back porch. It’s a hearty minus-15 degrees. Today is bound to be a long one, I say to myself as I grab my goosedown jacket and heavy duty boots. Why the heck am I living here in what feels to me the tundra? I mumble to myself. I trudge out into the foot and half of snow to get to my car. Of course, I hadn’t shoveled the steps, which now look like a toboggan ramp. The car starts okay and I run back inside while I let it warm up before heading up the river to Narrowsburg. I pause a moment while I think back to another 15-below day some years back. Mating for life A pair of bald eagles spends much of the winter in a tree outside our window on the eddy. They are there every year, sitting side by side, occasionally squawking, always awe-inspiring. Eagles mate for life. A photographic portrait of these two, by Narrowsburg naturalist John DiGiorgio, graces the wall of our bedroom, symbolizing the compact my husband and I made almost 20 years ago in our marriage. There’s a value attached to marriage in our society. It is measured in time more than quality. Knowing what I do about its pitfalls, I find it hard to imagine anyone making it to 20 years, yet I feel sure that we will. What would quality be measured by? Passion? Affinity? Equality? Fidelity? Waking to life No matter how often I walk along my favorite country road, the experience is never quite duplicated. For certain, it is the same road; likewise, I am living the same life I’ve been experiencing since birth, and likely, beyond. But every new moment delivers difference—from preceding and following moments—and this difference invites entry into the portal of the present moment. As author Clark Strand reminds us in the January 2005 issue of the locally produced Yoga International magazine, “This moment will never come again. The next moment, too, will never come again. And the next. There is an endless succession of unrepeatable events.” |
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