Hail Yess!

7:30 in the morning about a week before leaving Vermont a month ago after 28 years.  What I presumed was a snapping turtle headed across the lawn toward the dirt road in front of my house.  A safe crossing could use my help I surmised.  

I’d assisted smaller turtles in the past by simply picking them up by the shell and ferrying them out of harm’s way.  But this old soul was at least 5X the size of those.  Plus, being the first of its kind I’d ever encountered, I chose not to test my ignorance.  Instead, I phoned a snapper savvy friend.  

“You’ll know it if it bites you,” she counseled.  “Or scratches.  Have you seen the claws?”  

Who says snow shovels aren’t useful in the Vermont summertime?  The plastic business end scooched under Turtle’s rear, its front legs motoring with abandon, we zipped across that road in two shakes.  

Settled on the other side, I felt its gratitude, its blessing.  May my arrival in Santa Fe feel the same, I thought.

Among more than a few civilizations Turtle is the oldest symbol for planet Earth.  It is the personification of the goddess energy, and the eternal Mother from which our lives evolve.  Turtle asks that we honor the creative source within us, to be grounded in the Earth, to observe any situation with motherly compassion.  

I first learned this, not from a turtle, but from the land on which I grew up from seven to seventeen in New York’s Finger Lakes.  Grandmother Earth is how it felt.  Elemental purity.  The animating force of creation.  The spirit of the Iroquois.  Endless acres of fields, vineyards, woodlands, streams, all connected to a substantial lake.  And me the only kid around this side of a long walk.

It saved my life. 

The world as interpreted by the various well-meaning stewards most of us meet growing up (parents, teachers, clergy, et al) made little sense to me.  

Talking about God, going to church, all that stuff, even spending more than half of high school in a seminary, didn’t satisfy my hunger to actually experience God––a desire set afire in a life before this one I’m sure. 

And how could I take seriously the opinions of those who claimed superiority to others, thus felt unkindness okay.  My father was a bigot, which I know now just meant he was asleep.  Of course, bigot wasn’t all he was; it’s not all anybody is.  His example, for instance, has helped me take risks vital to healthy ambition.  But his rigidity was enough for me to know that he, for one, could not teach me what I most wanted to learn: 

• • How does the universe work?  
  • What does every smidge of existence have in common?  
  • How do I feel God in every moment the same way I feel the lake whenever I dive in on a hot day?

My only consistent source of solace was the land, instilling in my bones and heart without my appreciating it until years later lessons in beauty, harmony, the interconnectedness of existence, the sacredness of everything, including us humans no matter how oblivious we can be. 

I was nearly 40 before destiny led me to the spiritual teacher who introduced me to principles and practices that continually deepen my attunement to what Grandmother Earth awakened all those years earlier.

I recently revisited the home turf of my youth as part of leaving Vermont and stepping into the mysteries that await in Santa Fe.

And what I learned most from that visit was how the earth’s vibration that enlivened my every cell more than 60 years ago, and is the foundation of my fundamental take on reality, is something I have been pursuing all these years without realizing just how avidly. 

Only knee-deep in this essay did I amaze myself with the following calculation.

In almost three decades in Vermont, I spent as many as 15 thousand hours hiking the mountains, no matter the season. 

Possibly any healthy idea I’ve had in these years has been born, or at least nurtured, in the wild.  

Clients knew that whenever I had a gnarly problem of theirs to sort out I’d be looking for inspiration from the mountain.  It was always fun to hear, “Steve, take a hike.”

Meanwhile, over the same span, there were some six thousand hours in the warmer months building stone sculptures on my farm.  

My love affair with stones, many hefty enough to need the tractor’s bucket to move, was more than communing with the earth.  As I did as a kid next to Keuka Lake, I found myself in rapport with those men and women who, over the centuries, had made our common stretch of earth their place of toil and reward.  

Of course, for them the stakes could be life or death.  My priorities maxed at self-understanding and creating beauty.  Well, that and avoiding fat boulders smooshing fingers and toes.

In this context, moving to Santa Fe, adorned with mountains more than twice the height of any in Vermont, is no big deal.  It’s the same Grandmother Earth I’ve held in my heart all these years.

After an eight day cross-country road trip that included paying homage to two of America’s most sacred places, the National Memorial for Peace and Justice in Montgomery and the Civil Rights Museum in Memphis, my sweetheart and I arrived in Santa Fe on a Friday night.  The next afternoon we visited our new home, nestled quietly among trees bordering an arroyo, a stream that flows only when the mountain runoff is robust enough, a rare event in the desert.  While there that day, however, the heavens opened and hail all but completely covered the ground.  Within the hour, ever so briefly, the arroyo flourished.

I took this as an auspicious sign.  

A friend, with whom I shared this story via text, shot back, “Hail yess!”

Turtle and I had crossed the road in gratitude.