EXCERPT from Singing Meadow

Finding a Name for Our New Home

When I finally began the joyous process of learning our new land, I wanted a name for our place. The need for a name felt like a kind of claiming, but I also saw it as an expression of love for what felt like “home at last”.

Over the long years when I dreamed of land of my own, I felt sure the name would be ‘Heart’s Desire’. What else could express my longing for a country place to care for? Although I treasured the rented areas where we lived, especially beautiful Foley Mountain  where we raised our sons, I felt a need for a sanctuary greater than renting could give.

When I first stood feeling the morning heat of high summer rising from the water meadow, ‘Still Point’ was the name that came to me. It is here that I want to end my days, learning to focus more narrowly and deeply. I want to study a different kind of praise that breathes in and absorbs the sorrow as well as the glory into an earthy whole. Yes, ‘Still Point’ was right, I thought then. This will be a convergence point for becoming one with what I care for.

And yet. There has never been a time when I have looked out over the beautiful spreading meadow in the valley beyond our house when I have not felt a powerful singing quality to it. Yes, of course, this comes when I hear a chorus of peepers through my open bedroom window. And yes, there is the piping call of the snipe, the exuberance of the redwings, in fact, a whole summer of birds. But there is more to this singing. There is the wind blowing through lush spring grasses, and a different sort of wind whispering through the sere brown seed heads of last summer’s goldenrods and black-eyed susans. But perhaps the most resounding time for me in the meadow is on a snowbound day such as this, when I am surrounded by an eloquent silence. Singing Meadow.