Suppose we answer the most important question of existence in the affirmative. There is then only one question remaining: How shall we live this life? Despite all the technologies of thought and feeling we have invented to divine an answer — philosophy and poetry, scripture and self-help — life stares mutely back at us, immense and indifferent, having abled us with opposable thumbs and handicapped us with a consciousness capable of self-reference that renders us dissatisfied with the banality of mere survival.
Beneath the overstory of one hundred trillion synapses, the overthinking animal keeps losing its way in the wilderness of want. Not so the other animals. Having let a muskrat be her teacher in unselfconsciousness, she recounts her lens-clearing encounter with a weasel in an essay originally published in her 1982 packet of revelations Teaching a Stone to Talk, later included in The Abundance: Narrative Essays Old and New (public library) — one of my all-time favorite books.
I startled a weasel who startled me, and we exchanged a long glance. Twenty minutes from my house, through the woods by the quarry and across the highway, is Hollins Pond, a remarkable piece of shallowness, where I like to go at sunset and sit on a tree trunk. Hollins Pond is also called Murray’s Pond; it covers two acres of bottomland near Tinker Creek with six inches of water and six thousand lily pads.
In winter, brown-and-white steers stand in the middle of it, merely dampening their hooves; from the distant shore they look like miracle itself, complete with miracle’s nonchalance. Now, in summer, the steers are gone. The water lilies have blossomed and spread to a green horizontal plane that is terra firma to plodding blackbirds, and tremulous ceiling to black leeches, crayfish, and carp.
This is, mind you, suburbia. It is a five-minute walk in three directions to rows of houses, though none is visible here. There’s a 55-mph highway at one end of the pond, and a nesting pair of wood ducks at the other.
Under every bush is a muskrat hole or a beer can. The far end is an alternating series of fields and woods, fields and woods, threaded everywhere with motorcycle tracks — in whose bare clay wild turtles lay eggs. So, I had crossed the highway, stepped over two low barbed-wire fences, and traced the motorcycle path in all gratitude through the wild rose and poison ivy of the pond’s shoreline up into high grassy fields.
Extract — continue reading at the source.
