Morning Fog

Before dawn, fog moves up from the river, through the forest, and fills the woods behind my house. It’s a bit gloomy. Yesterday we had sunshine, and the brightness brought a surge of energy. Today, not so much. I want to put on a sweater, sit in a soft chair by the window, drink hot tea, and read a book about someone else’s adventures.

As the sun rises slowly, the white particles of mist float and turn on the whims of the breeze. At first glance, it looks like fine snow is drifting down.

Then I see it.

The three closest trees are in sharp focus, like an Ansel Adams’ photograph. I can see the different patterns of their bark, how deep they go. I notice the way one tree bends slightly to the left before straightening, and the tree with a branch that must have broken off during the ice storm last winter. How did I not notice these details before? Normally there are hundreds of trees and a thousand feet of woods behind my house. Now I can see only three trees and twenty feet. The rest of the forest has disappeared in the fog.

The three trees are magnificent. They stand silently like sentinels. Or like Don Quixote, Sancho Panza and someone else battling injustice. Mystery is afoot in the woods.

Sometimes I need a fogged-in day to see what is in front of me, what nature wants to show me.

Most of the time, I take in everything all at once in my constant rush to get work done. Specificity becomes an opaque blur. It’s the difference between mingling at a party and talking to everyone, or sitting on the side with one person, watching that person’s face and eyes, and seeing in them the history and struggles behind what is being spoken.

We listen to the spaces between the words we share.

We think that we want to understand everything. We want to believe that more knowledge will bring us more happiness. But knowledge is not understanding, nor wisdom, nor compassion, and many things we do not want to know.

We like the illusions that allow us to live our happy, protected lives. We do not want to know how many people are hungry today because family farms have been paved over with highways and shopping malls, how many animals are being abused in food factories so that we can have cheap meat, or how much of the wilderness is being bulldozed and polluted in the name of making money. Destruction has nothing to do with integrity or building community.

What we want, what each of us really do want, no matter how many illusions we hold on to to prop us up, is to experience a moment each day that is utterly real, a moment that gives us vision, hope, or a taste of the transcendent. We want to connect to something specific, something honest and true, like what the trees are doing for me this morning. Soon the fog will dissipate on the breeze, but I will remember.

We live for these moments.

If we do not slow down and pause for moments like this, then we will never see the trees, the dancing of the fog, or each other.