Something sacred about sitting on the porch

by DRM

This sum­mer has a pat­tern and a habit that winds through it: com­ing down to the kitchen in the early morn­ing, the only one awake in the house; slid­ing the latch on Bella and Charlie’s crate; Bella skit­ter­ing behind me in a hurry and then right­ing her­self when I open the door off the kitchen while Char­lie sniffs his way over to the garbage, on the far side of the island, and I have to whis­tle him over; mak­ing the first cup of cof­fee, decid­ing where to sit, assess­ing the feel of the air, while the cof­fee sys­tem heats up and goes into its rinse cycle; get­ting the note­book and the com­puter, the cof­fee, and walk­ing out to the porch; the first sips look­ing out over the back yard; the muted sound of the high­way in the distance.

The dif­fer­ence with this pat­tern is that I am home. The rou­tine ebbs and flows with the sea­sons. Now, in the full throt­tle of sum­mer, the grass is thick, the gar­den wild, the sea grasses by the pool tall and plump, the trees rich with leaves. The fall air hasn’t moved in yet. Every­thing alive in the yard is still filled with lazy poten­tial, a lit­tle dazed from the full rush of Spring.

In other sum­mers, we’ve turned into squat­ters, gone to a new place lock, stock and bar­rel, to cre­ate a whole new rou­tine. The effect has been dis­rup­tive. This has been our eas­i­est sum­mer, I tell T. We’ve just stayed home and the rou­tines that help to anchor us are eas­ing us into ritual.

That goes to the sacred­ness of this place. If sacred is part of rit­ual actions, and grows from shed­ding self-awareness  for the unthink­ing rhythm of rou­tine, sur­rounded by totems and sym­bols that sig­nal the ele­va­tion of spirit and the sub­sum­ing of the self in wit­ness of a greater force, then Sun­set Farm has some­thing of the Sacred in it.

This house has sat here for a long time, and gen­er­a­tions of lives have passed here. When my grand­mother lived in Green­wich nearly 100 years ago, she could have come to this house and sat on a stone patio approx­i­mately where I am sitting.

She would have seen far­ther: the trees were not so full and the fields were open for farm­ing for miles. The per­spec­tive from this seat would have been of a long stretch of work and poten­tial from the land. The lower yard would have been open all along the shore of the pond. Wher­ever she looked, she would have seen signs of indus­tri­ous­ness, things that would take time and energy to complete.

The land has changed since then. From the porch, the per­spec­tive is fore­short­ened by the tall trees that form a semi-circle around the back of the house, flank­ing the wood fence on the left, the stone wall at the bot­tom and Nichols Road on the right, enclos­ing an acre of grassy lawn. The hori­zon is close. It spills over the uni­form tree tops. The sky is framed, cut off at the top by the bead-board edge of the porch ceiling.

Growth and sea­son is the sub­ject that changes in this frame. Con­tained in it, so that the things that do change are con­stant ele­ments, the per­spec­tive from this seat is the same every day. To find the change, you have to look. You have to come out of your­self and sink into the pic­ture, reg­is­ter what is new and altered in an incre­men­tal, but sig­nif­i­cant way.

This is the con­flict of wor­ship, the push-pull between the escape of the self and the engage­ment with the world out­side you, the expres­sions of faith, the ulti­mate moments of epiphany that change how you see things, and the dis­tract­ing chat­ter of your inter­nal self, its urgent, fevered voice of wishes, won­ders and concerns.

Euland admon­ishes: Look at the details. A painter paints the same tableau over and over not get to the pic­ture right, but to under­stand it bet­ter, to show it in each dif­fer­ent moment, to share every experience.

This morn­ing I notice that the chest­nut tree is heavy with fruit and that the light at 7 a.m. is cut­ting over the top of the house and illu­mi­nat­ing the left side of the yard, cut­ting it in two — a soft sum­mer haze of blues and yel­lows and greens con­trasted with the muted dusk of the early morn­ing of blacks, greys and greens.

The fruit of the tree is potent, apple-sized balls with pierc­ingly sharp thorns.

I am not wear­ing my hear­ing aids. I’m largely embraced by Silence. The birds must be singing. Just now a jet roared over­head. It flew low to the house, going in to land at Westch­ester Air­port. The path and alti­tude is unusual: the planes typ­i­cally approach along the hori­zon. At night we can see the lights of approach­ing planes flash in the dis­tance from our bed­room win­dow. They trace a line above the inky black of the treetops.

These are the pat­terns of rit­ual, these details, and I believe they give us access to what is sacred in our life, if we can expe­ri­ence them over and over but remain aware.