Last night I was talking to another person who lives under the same roof as I do, almost a friend. He said, "You see dude, one has to go through seven relationships to find the One".

I took note of the statistic. I collect random numbers like that so that I can use them in poems like this. Usually numbers of highways that I happen to be travelling then, for some roads do come to an end after that particular journey and some people will never want to see me again, so numbers help me to associate places, faces and times to nightmares when they visit unasked and unwelcomed. Then like a doctor, I can feel the pulse and note clinically, "Oh this is the I-75 nightmare, it has a bumpy ride for the road is full of ruts and cracks from freezing and thawing in alternate winters". It was some freezing and thawing for in the end it tore the Whole apart, into seperate continents.

But then I am digressing, we were talking about seven lives that must be sunk to make real music, well if that hypothesis is good. I have my own reasons to doubt it, mainly because this procession has nothing to do with if you loved or were loved. It has to do with deals that one has to make with life, with god and perhaps even with the devil.

But why am I saying this, this number is as good as anything to belive in and don't I want to desperately belive in something ? A random statistic is simple enough for me to belive in after beliving in such weighty statements as, "I love you" heard many times. So now I have decided to keep track on the number of times I must die before believing no longer abrubtly ends into disbelieving, into countries whose borders are suddenly sealed by machine guns, barbed wire, gaurds and dogs whose barks I can't hear!

2002:07:19 00:32 Atlanta

I am so cold tonight and I am trying hard to find the rythms embedded within me.

I just now lost a 1000 word essay I wrote because I was logged out! While I am a little sad at losing it, given that it was something I had written apart from poetry in sometime, I decided to post this excellent essay from the Audubon Magazine instead as it has a similar theme as my now lost eassy.

Enjoy. Sashi

Note: This post is a little long!

The eviction notice came by registered mail one Saturday in late October. Its arrival was not alarming; I had been told when I moved here that "the Campbell property" would some day be cleared, graded, and landscaped into a golf course. And that the "caretaker's cabin"--my little three-room home in the midst of these 250 wooded acres in northern Indiana--would be leveled. And that I would then have to make a home somewhere else.

Still, after 35 months I had become somewhat proprietary toward these woods and fields, the creek and pond, and had developed a certain kinship with the wildlife here. I knew my stay to be temporary, but I was hoping for more time, perhaps another year or two before the bulldozers arrived. I was given 60 days. So I did what I often did during those solitary days in the middle of my life. I went out back and fished.

I am not a fastidious fisherman. I am not really any kind of fisherman. I found a garage-sale rod and reel and a natural supply of worms, and the pond (about the size of a youth-league hockey rink) had enough fish to keep me entertained. Mostly it had some sunny little bluegill, occasional trout traveling the creek that flowed into and out of the pond, and one large white catfish cruising--a companionable Moby-Dick, apparently oblivious to my idle casting.

Fishing was mostly something I did with my hands while I stood by the pond and thought about things and watched the world around me--the leafy branches of the giant cottonwoods winging in thick summer breezes, and sunlight shimmering on wind-rippled water, and the clouds. I enjoyed hitting spots with my wormy, weighted hook and pulling the lure through the water, and the occasional tug-of-war between me and a fish. In time I realized that what I liked, too, was making that physical connection through fiberglass and fishing line with the things of nature. I could feel in my hands the bait sailing through space, plopping into liquid, dragging through water. I could feel the fight of fish against capture. Elemental bonds were no longer abstract.

On that October Saturday, when the letter told me it was time to go, I understood how those three years of living alone (after a divorce had taken away my wife and children and friends) had delivered me to this healing place, this clarifying moment of connectedness.

I had come as a visitor, knowing this to be an impermanent retreat, but for three years the tiny cottage had offered refuge and anchor when my life broke in two. On a cold Thanksgiving day I moved in, worldly possessions packed into a car, a colleague offering pots and pans and mattress, two forks, some knives, and a plate--housewarming gifts to go along with the armful of stuff I brought from "before." Now came "after," and the intersection of the two was this retreat to the woods.

Though job and city were close by, once I got home, I was in a hermit's paradise--cozy, tidy, and snug, nestled into a tree-canopied hillside overlooking a clear, cold-water creek. The stream flowed through the pond, which I oversaw from a floor-to-ceiling window in a wood-paneled room with built-in bookshelves and a wood-burning stove. West of the house was an open field, and then those 265 acres of woods, undulating countryside, marshy lowlands, thickets, ravines, and grassy glades that I had all to myself--except for the creatures whose routine comings and goings brought beauty and grace, amusement and companionship.

There were foxes and coyotes, fidgety squirrels and skittish, lumbering woodchucks, an occasional opossum and an abundance of raccoons. The bobcat I saw a mile from here. The deer all around.

Even inside, the cabin felt like being outdoors; it was so small and the outside so big and close around. Crickets and moths seemed to come and go as they pleased, and other callers found their way in as well. A groundhog burrowed by the front door, a long scary snake nested by the steps, spiders spun webs in the corners of the window frames. Sparrows made their beds in the attic rafters, and some loud little creatures lived inside the walls, busily digging and scratching, nibbling, chewing, sawing incessantly all winter long. Mice and squirrels sometimes skittered across the hardwood floors, and once a bat got in. I did not mind these occasional visits. It seemed natural to me that they found entrance into this dry, warm place, using it--as I did--for shelter and comfort, the windows and walls semi-permeable barriers between outside and in.

The place was bountifully populated with all manner of birds: crows, flashing red cardinals, great blue herons stilt-walking and sniping in the creek. Each spring migrating waterfowl convened at the pond. The Canada geese were the most fun to watch, perhaps because they came and squawked and fought and stayed awhile, mating, nesting, starting families.

Until I lived here I had not seen Canada geese close up. I knew them only from chilled autumn days when they'd be flying squadrons, aligned in a V, skimming the iron-gray sky. I could hear the faint voices, the trumpeting of encouragement, and watch till they disappeared, the cloud-painted sky but a windblown highway between far-off points on the globe. They were symbols of an extrahuman realm, whose occupations had to do with mysterious celestial chronometry and unimaginable spaces. I had admired them for their familial commitments and loyalty to airborne cohorts.

The pattern repeated each spring. One day they would not be here; the next morning their racket would awaken me, their honking and clatter announcing their robust arrival. Beautiful airborne, the geese are awkward on land. They waddled about, littering the place with pasty green droppings, arguing and flapping nastily. As swimmers, they seemed to glide as effortlessly as clipper ships, but their takeoffs and landings were clumsy, especially at this pond banded by thick, high trees that required steep ascents and descents in defyingly short spaces.

They spent a good deal of time fighting--barking at each other, nipping at rumps and necks and wings. Most of the combat had to do with courtship, I suppose, as the geese soon paired up and became fixed in place beside their nests, built with feathers, goose down, and grass near logs, trees, or bushes. It was not unusual to have five or six nests in the vicinity of the pond, each with a female sitting and the male standing vigil a few feet away. Only twice did I see a female leave her nest in the days and weeks of incubation. They would sit through cold rains and hail, thunder and lightning, occasionally nudging at the eggs beneath their ample bosom.

One Sunday morning I looked across the pond and noticed a mother had walked off her throne. She stood by the pond, and I spied what appeared to be a flurry of yellow-green leaves blowing about her feet. Soon I realized those were not leaves but newborns, wobbly and fuzzy and tumbling down the embankment to the water. They soon made their first crossing (little yellow tugboats in single-file procession), then staggered onto shore, bumping into each other, tagging along behind their mother, falling over tree roots, exploring the world their first day alive.

I would watch these families through spring and into summer as the furry goslings lost their fuzz (swapping yellow for a dishwater gray), growing as spindly and gawky as teenagers, developing personalities, then adding weight to their avian frames. In time--without my seeing how it was learned--the whole herd would up and fly away, leaving the pond pretty much as they had found it, and me missing the company and the show.

My second spring at the cabin I put out seed and bought a bird book and tried to document my sightings. But while I could pick out the commoner breeds, I could not discern the more exotic ones. I had trouble with all the commotion, the fleet arrivals and departures, the airy aviators gusting away on a puff of wind, leaving me to my guidebook, trying to recall the bands and crowns and markings. Male or female? Chickadee or finch? So I stopped.

I was happier when I quit consulting the book, quit trying to classify, categorize, and list, when I abandoned the taxonomy and the keeping score. I really learned to watch then, and to see. And my delight, my wonder was no less because I didn't know their given names. In fact, in those years at the cabin I learned a lot about ways of seeing. And being.

I was fortunate, I suppose, that in my middle years I had such a sabbatical, that I could step outside my life and see it from some distance--where I had been and where I might go. The retreat, the isolation, the view from that lone cabin was a blessing; most of us are not given such lucrative exile in the midst of our lives. Too often we are swept up in the currents of human trafficking, too consumed by the immediate demands of job and family to get free, to see over the walls of the maze.

In those nights and weekends spent alone--immersed in that primary existence--I was afforded the luxury of having little, of reducing life to its bare essentials. I had no clock, no radio, no TV, little clutter of any kind. And yet, by standing apart, I saw the value in replacing individual ambition, personal needs, and selfish desires with fitting in, finding the way, becoming part of a more genuine whole.

There was a time when our species lived close like this to the land and its inhabitants, when there was less stuff between us and the natural order of things, when we were less estranged and our dependence upon the natural world was so much more obvious. It was essential to watch the comings and goings, paying attention to signs and seasons. Because of this, those deepest ancestors--intimate with the geography of their existence--saw in the landscape something more, something within the rock, on the wind, in the sky, in the look of a deer, that is today forgotten or ignored, disregarded as being unscientific and unsophisticated. But those years in the woods reminded me how natural it is to perceive the world as being infused with spirits or gods, deities or the divine. Our forebears saw the divine in radiant sunsets, the spiritual in the flight of a hawk, God in a starry sky. Now I, too, began to look for signs of the creator in creation.

In this autumn twilight, casting my bait into still waters, watching dried leaves twirl slowly down from lofty treetops, I thought back over the years and the transformation that had taken place in me. I remembered thunderstorms and lightning, sleeping on a blanket in the sun, summer breezes kissing my bare skin. I remembered winter nights when the snow was knee-deep and the temperatures well below zero. And how clear the night sky could be and how radiant the moonlit snowfall. I can still see two deer one winter night, bolting downhill and hitting the frozen pond, not expecting ice, so skidding, flailing, stumbling, and sliding into a snowdrift. And jumpy white-tailed rabbits and the smell of lilacs and the glitter of lightning bugs in June and the mulberry trees and raspberry vines flush with fruit and lemon-drop daffodils growing wild in the woods in springtime.

And I thought how at some point I had stopped looking for God in all this. I stopped looking for signs, for a signature, for evidence of the holy. I stopped because it was all right here--and it is all one thing. Body and soul, matter and spirit. An indivisible whole.

In those days fishing the pond, surrounded by geese, sharing my house and yard with far-distant relations, I settled into the landscape. Without really being conscious of it or knowing when it happened, I came home to the land. And so stopped looking for spirits and souls, as if there were a dividing line or wall somewhere, a border between the seen and unseen, between creator and creation. As so often happens, when I stopped looking, when I put away the books and lists, when I sat still long enough for the fox and the deer to come to me, I saw.

It was luck that brought me here, random chance. But as I walked and watched out the window and fished, as the seasons passed one to the next, I came to see the healing qualities of nature, the rightness of life, its rhythms, its ebbs and flows, its enduring, eternal forms--and my place within it all. So it is for us as a species. At some point in our past we moved away from here, divorced ourselves from the seen and unseen reaches of our universe. Our best hope for redemption is to find ourselves again within its embrace.

I took some comfort, casting my line into the autumn twilight, in knowing these spaces would be golf course and not mall, parking lot, or subdivision. And yet I wondered, watching the wildlife prepare for winter, how those who come after us will connect with the divine in nature when there is so little nature left. Here, too, we close another window onto a landscape offering redemption, further diminishing the ways we can know ourselves and God.

Kerry Temple is the editor of Notre Dame Magazine, based in South Bend, Indiana.