The sky is heavy with snow, leaden with snow, bleak with snow that has only just begun to fall. The slush from yesterday’s hike has refrozen in the night and I can still make out my congealed bootprints, a previous me frozen into place. Less than 24 hours ago, I picked my way down this steep deer trail, in pursuit of nothing more than another step, another breath. Yesterday, and two days before that, and one day before that, I moved through these same woods, jacket zipped high and cap pulled low, but I do not remember who I was then, not really. Did I lose myself in thoughts about who was right or wrong, or good or bad, about the petty or warranted criticisms that augmented or diminished me? Did I fall into these austere winter woods like a marionette carried along by the well-worn wires of my habitual impulses, distracted by the tickertape of mostly useless thoughts? The evidence that I was here is before me, the unmistakable ridges and imprints of my distinctive boots—there can be no real doubt that I was on the scene—but I don’t quite believe it. I cannot grope my way through memory to feel myself into that person’s subjectivity. Someone wearing my clothes trudged through yesterday’s chilled, soupy landscape, but, as fresh snow covers those tracks, it feels like a lie to say it was me.
But today is today and here I am, right? It is subjectively, phenomenologically unmistakable that this is me, isn’t it? My gloved left hand gripping a tree for support as I seek purchase between icy roots and unreliable piles of frozen, muddy leaves. And because I am focused on the ruts and the branches and my feet, I do not see the trio of deer—a doe and two smaller ones—until I am almost upon them. Her limpid, affronted eyes appraise me and for a split second, I am back in junior high, walking past pretty girls preening at their lockers. I inhabit my pre-teen self: palpable shyness, the wrong brand of sneakers, a jaw I had yet to grow into. Meanwhile, the doe, with her penetrating stare and graceful curves, sees me for what I am: awkward interloper with no idea what to do or say. I try to give a wide birth—avoid, avoid, avoid—but it is not enough. The doe huffs impatiently and the three of them explode away, leaping so high and fast they seem to create a vortex, the air and falling snow trailing them like a comet’s tail. They are not fleeing me—I am not important enough—but are being molded and moved by the impending snowstorm through these nervous woods. Under pewter skies, as chunky snowflakes soften and blur all line and shape, the deer must move ever onward. In their creaturely way, they paw at the ground of the now, browsing through the tender shoots of immediacy, and surge up and away again and again and again.
And then I am alone, as small and unremarkable as an acorn shell discarded by a squirrel. And so, like the deer, I begin to run, too, no longer caring if the thorns tear at my coat or if I stumble in the ruts of my own frozen yesterdays. I run because it is winter and the moisture that had gathered over Lake Michigan now falls on me, in my mouth even, filling this forest snow-globe I both project and inhabit. I run because I have strong legs and a skittering mind, and people who expect me to be this me again and again and again. I run because I am an animal in the midst of a snowstorm so potentially fierce that it makes my muscles hum. And in such a now-moment it makes no difference if I am a deer, a seventh-grader, or a woman on the edge of invisibility. I need not be anything more than one rising note in this symphony of cold quiet. I am here alone, raising my glove again and again to dab at the joy in my eyes. Even though I can no longer make out the path behind or before me, I move like water into the next moment, knowing, in the way that animals do, that this is what I am here for.
If you’d like to be notified by email of new posts, hit the menu button above to find the link to subscribe.
OtherWise Philosophy 