In the Intervals We grow up. The earth remains a child. Stars and flowers, in silence, watch us go… Rainer Maria Rilke I know a place where in glorious intervals life is eternally new. You come to it through a young wood where pine and oak grow tall. You’ll know you are close when you bend under a weather bleached cedar, and, as you straighten your back you see the elephant skin of an ancient copper beach tree. From the woodland path you can see a river of low growth whose surface is slightly over your head. If you follow the flow down stream, birds will delight you as your foot steps set them in fearful flight. At the top of a knoll, just off the path, I have, on a warm summer’s day, thrown my body out to dry on flat ledge rocks. You can see marsh grass from that ledge. In the early spring the ice, like dirty gray meringue, sticks against the muddy path. There, on shrub size willows, the red winged black birds puff chests and trill at arriving newness. Here on branches, just within reach, thrushes build their nests. If you look closely at the base of those willows you will see twisted and torn stumps, just about the size of the new shoots that are now balancing new life. On a misty morning, after the rain has stopped, you can hear black birds singing several octaves below the sizzling hum of the high tension electric lines. The electric lines must be protected from growing things. So every five years an army of cutting machines is deployed to violently sweep away the black bird perches and thrush nests. In the spring of the cutting year life’s water level is lowered. In my living room I have a remnant of the last time the great machines paraded in formations. I have saved a twisted wood section of life that once grew in that place where life is eternally new. It adorns a window in my living room. I have decorated it with red leaves of a earth creeping vine that grew over my favorite ledge rock. We live in intervals between cuttings. We grow old and die, yet life always remains a child and birds and young shoots know how to celebrate spring. Blessings, Stephen