My son’s friend was on a trip to Cordova for school, and while on the boat late at night to cross back to Anchorage, the northern lights were out in full form. Pinks and purples even, she told me. Most often the lights are a ghostly green that you don’t notice until they begin to move less like clouds and more like spirits. The flame reds and purples are rarer, but much more noticeable as not cloud imposters, but as waving, sun-originating flares that reached these northern night skies.
I looked the next night and couldn’t see anything from our house. I haven’t actually seen them in years. But I couldn’t stop thinking about the image my son shared with me, and how wild it is to think of all that going on in the sky above us while we sleep.
I’ve also been collecting birch water this week—we tapped three trees last weekend, and already have gallons to begin reducing. It takes forever, and there is so little left once it approximates a type of syrup that it feels like perhaps we shouldn’t ask so much of the trees. But there’s an affinity and attention that comes with checking the taps each day, placing my hands on the papery bark, noticing the shift in the volume of the sap.
My dog was intently sniffing and wuffling one evening as I was out on our deck, making sure the birch tap jars were still upright. When I followed his gaze downward I thought he had found a bird that had hit a window—they often do in the spring and I always worry about putting up something on the windows before their frenzy begins again—but I looked closer and it was a furry tribble shape, and as we watched together I realized it was a vole—wholly unconcerned about us, nibbling the only shoots of almost-green along the rim of the south face of the house. I should probably be less keen on a rodent around our home, but I admit I love to see their small beads of eyes and whiskers.
I kept thinking about all of the activity below and above ground that we never see, that remains hidden and known only to birches and other life that lives in the pulse of the soil, root, among rocks and hollows. That glassy, sugared sap rising from below ground, reaching skyward. All unseen. What else do we not see, that is coursing in the veins of animal, root, branch, trunk, feather? I wonder if the birds flying north, arriving here feel the pulse of the sap rising up, reverberating against waves of particles and light that we cannot see or feel.
Yesterday when I checked the taps, I noticed two eagles flying above the trees, the sun warm on their brown stretched wings, caught by the sight of their insouciance in flight so far above ground. How simple they made it look to fly under their own swift power between. Between earth and space, sun and wind, over trees and above all. I’ve never been overawed seeing eagles—they are so impressive, but their iconography in this country has become so ubiquitous, another sign of how corrupting this country on stolen land is when it inextricably ties its false claims with the grace of such an enormous bird. But I ended up watching them for quite a while, because these eagles were noticeably quiet, with a contentment that felt like it was spilling over onto the land below in the growing sunlight. Small chortling soft trills for their calls, which are usually much louder. This sounded like the conversation of birds in companionship, enjoying where they were, what they saw.
What unseen actions, stories, and feelings our bodies and minds must be affected by, yet remain unaware of their pull.
I think about being a tree for many reasons, but one is that they so solidly remain in place their whole lives. How would it feel to remain in one place like that, to know only of other places, other localities from the voice of the wind, the wingbeats that flit in and out of your branches, or fly overhead. To have what you know of the world come to you where you are. I’m curious to know what it feels like to be that anchored. Sylvan anchorites around us, rooted in both earth and sky.
We’ve had to be anchored these past two years, with lockdowns, with illness. As difficult as it has been, I admit that I’ve found myself enjoying the calm of not having or being expected to plan—to chase and calculate ticket prices around limited dates, to pack, unpack, to find care for dogs who remain anchored to this place we’ve chosen for them and yet who appear content day after day of routine. Trying to make sense of the journeys—and why this need for rest or occasion is always expected to take place elsewhere, away from where we’ve made our homes, our lives.
Anchorage is not a place of contentment typically. A post in my feed as I scrolled this morning noted that Alaska is the most violent state in the nation, and Anchorage, as its largest city, contributes the largest portion of that statistic. The violence rankles. It hums.
The extremes of light and dark that swing through the year, bringing cold with it most of the year—it definitely pulls on the psyche. But there is also a violence in the way people are expected to live up here—in artificial light, in artificial darkness. A coercive control enforced on the land and our bodies to make it just like everywhere else—a stubborn refusal to allow that this place, this latitude—and arguably all places, all latitudes—requires something more specific to its rhythms.
I moved to this place, this anchorage, without understanding that roots can pull downward with unseen force. I tried vehemently to refuse, digging up any hint of this place holding a claim on me—traveling away as often as I could, pulling up the roots manically to be elsewhere, not of here. But they still clung on and grew despite that I never knew they were there. Until I was forced to stop moving, to stop the always doing of the self-reliance myth. To leave the roots where they are, find interest in what they draw in.
To stay in place and listen, feel, and wonder about what we draw from the earth and direct skyward.
Think of what the trees learn from their underground connections though, that we are only now really beginning to understand exist. Maybe they are able to feel these sensations as if they are somewhere else. Imagine that!
I was at the ocean this weekend. And I was thinking about that surf, the endless waves, and how no matter where I am – like here at my desk now, 600 or so miles away – they are still stroking that coast. And while I was there, thinking of that, I was thinking of the river I wander along, the creeks I visit on hikes. While I was watching the ocean, they were going on about the business of feeding it.
What a world. This post of yours is about the only thing I've read since logging back on that didn't make me want to make just turn off all this other bullshit and just sink down into it.