My knees are stiff and sore, punished by yesterday’s walk up and down gravel hills. Still, I consider a long walk because it is Saturday—I have more time to roam.
On the other hand, I know that at the click of flat, bright buttons on my phone there is something to distract me from the pain for a good long while. One glowing path will lead to another and another, some paths intriguing and others intruding, and I will have never left my bed.
Here’s the thing: sometimes I have Ann Patchett envy. Besides being a brilliant writer, she vigorously eschews smartphones, social media, and the Internet. Sometimes I wish I had done the same. Maybe there will come a phase in my life where I pare device use to nearly naught—or chuck technology altogether—laying down the restless and writhing weight of digital clutter.
Buddy’s ever-inquisitive beagle nose is eager to get outside, to probe the early autumn air. I see that he yearns equally for the leftover pizza crusts in last night’s box on the counter. This reminds me of my own push and pull. Gluttony or grit today? Meander or mission? Phone warm in palm or zipped away in pocket—or left altogether at home?
I decide we will set out, slipping the phone to nestle beside my left hip. I clip on Buddy’s leash and we head for the Jones Lane loop—walking the capital letter P, with West Bridge Street the stem, Jones Lane and Union Street completing a rough circle at the top of the letter. Dogs bark from their patches of sunlit lawn. I find a blue jay feather laying on a yew hedge. I notice that the leggy roadside plants for which I have no name are now a brittle, rusty red. I think about how the anthill entrances disappear each winter, and how perhaps in ant time these former constructed portals are perceived as splayed ruins of another era, gradually pecked away by the elements.
I am alert and seeking, mirroring the canine guru pulling hard on the leash. There are breadcrumbs to follow, stories to reconstruct. How high was the jay in the sky when his feather fluttered down to the yew? When did those wispy plants in the shoulder’s thin dirt change color? What are the ants doing, now that the cold is pushing through the thinning green cloak of summer? Attending to these things, retracing them, feels important. I am dictating things I notice and wonder about into my phone, so I can mull them over as I rest my sore knees later.
My mind wanders to yesterday, when my son Gavin and his friends footed the long slope up to Mount St. John, less than a mile from here. They harvested autumn olives, the fruit of an invasive plant that landed here from Asia in the 1830s, initially meant to be decorative with the side effect of helping to control erosion. The teens will separate silvery leaf from red fruit and embark on a boiling down process, for jam.
Sometimes an entire bush will topple from the sheer weight of the autumn olive berries. I am intrigued by this irony—being flattened by abundance, laid low by an embarrassment of fruit. I tell my phone to make a note—write about autumn olives. The phone reads back my dictation, but only after having edited: “Write about all of my loves.” The abundance I was thinking about boomerangs back to me, with a twist.
This isn’t an isolated incident.
One morning, I got out especially early. The morning opened before me. I saw the full moon and the rising sun, and a fox crossed in front of the car. I watched the sun, spreading yellow as it began its ascent through the trees. It called me to linger and watch the world. I was pulled into the sacredness of the day.
I still had an hour before I had to be at my desk and drove to a nearby canoe launch, a favorite place for watching the tidal marsh’s ripples and floats. I ambled toward where the ospreys nested and dictated notes into my phone. Time expanded. My spirit widened to fill it:
I drove to a place of reeds and blackbirds,
muskrats, wild rice.
“Crack of,” the phone said,
misquoting my reminder to
write about the place: Pratt Cove.
Yes, here we are at crack of dawn, phone.
Crack of dawn as in
the sky falling open like a well-split eggshell
spilling endless, unfolding streaks and swoops,
boastful colors across the firmament.
The trove was up there the whole time
in its fragile case,
bright yolk only packed away
until the night show took its leave.
Last fall, I took the long drive from Connecticut to Tennessee for a writing residency. It was a fraught time at home—my mother leaving us under the glacial weight and pace of dementia, Gavin bewildered by what to plan for after high school. Unsettled grief about my brother’s death continued to knock about as I tried to get a grasp on all this.
I relished the space and time I’d traveled into and walked the ragged pasture-side road, eager to zoom in on birds with my dusted off binoculars, eager to find comfort in the lively world. Again, the musing while walking, again the dictation to help me remember:
It turned out
the hasty, scolding rasp from the brush
belonged to a tufted titmouse, mostly grey,
sporting a pink wash along his side.
He surprised me, coming out of his bramble.
Flew past me so close.
It made me want to make a poem.
I commanded, “whirring wings,” into my phone,
to carry my shorthand until I could
unfurl the full thought on the page.
Whirring didn’t quite get at it—
I didn’t mean I could hear the mechanics of flight.
No. Something lifted in me.
The phone worked on my words.
It has me “wearing wings.”
Yes.
I felt a flutter for which I had no language.
I sampled the smallest taste of embodying the breeze.
The titmouse took me with him back into the brush.
For a sliver of a moment, I took to the air.
For a phantom minute, I was the bird.
I think about it a lot: When does the phone, small enough for my smallest pocket, act as an unyielding albatross? When does the computer on my lap become the enemy of the sacred, yanking me away from the hope for greater meaning? Will I ever come to a purer place, where I only want to read astonishing prose and poems, and to meditate and create, eschewing the human tragicomedy that is the news app on my phone, or the fictional hunt for serial killers in the Criminal Minds series on my laptop?
I realize the Criminal Minds detectives are all way too good looking and that their scripted work must be a far cry from the ugliness of the real world, but I am comforted by the idea of people who perform work that most would avoid at any cost, because to them it matters. And I like how the show’s writers start and end each episode with a quote. The one from Helen Keller stayed with me for a long stretch: “Although the world is full of suffering, it is also full of overcoming it.”
As for the news on my phone, it is a baby-bathwater kind of scenario. There is so much bathwater we could all drown in it, but today the news features a headline from The Guardian that makes me feel less alone, in which poet and songwriter Patti Smith says, “I feel the unrest of the world in the pit of my stomach.” A CNN piece recounts how neighbors of a North Dakota farmer who had a heart attack banded together to harvest his crops. Another piece is a stomach-churning account of a homicide at a New York party. And then there is the tale of the homeless woman whose story was featured on TV. Her family saw the show and brought her home after 26 years apart.
Engaging in such a swirl sometimes makes me want to spin out to the edge of it all, where things must look clearer than they do in the vortex. This impulse is what makes me envy those who seem decisive and purer of purpose. They spend less time sorting particles, eddies, and tumbleweeds. Maybe they are living more deeply.
But, then—Wendell Berry said, “There are no unsacred places, there are only sacred places and desecrated places.” I am coming to see that desecration is a choice, at the level of a soul. For my soul, staying in bed and mindlessly swiping away the morning on my phone would have been a desecration, in comparison with the crisp Jones Lane walk where I wondered about so many things, instinctively probing for the root of creation. Walking the loop with my gaze on the bright screen, tapping and clicking and missing the tiny, curbside changes of autumn, would, also, have been a desecration.
The reworded offerings voiced by my phone were simple, circuit-driven happenings, but it would have felt like desecration to let them go unnoticed. I didn’t want to waste the reminder that autumn olives could call up all of my loves, or the sideways reference to the crack of dawn at Pratt Cove. My phone’s commentary on wearing wings underlined the fullness of a moment when I felt a palpable lift. It put words to a momentary uncovering of unheeded harmonies.
This unlikely soup brewed from mechanical algorithms and the flush of epiphany recalls the astonished gush in Gerard Manley Hopkins’ Pied Beauty, the “fresh-firecoal chestnut-falls; finches’ wings” followed by “all trades, their gear and tackle and trim”—the manmade alongside the God-made.
Yes, the sacred often seems to ask for a quiet room, a separate place. But it is also larger than all the distractions we have created for ourselves, and larger than what we define as an ideal way to live. It seeps in, in the same surprising way an outsized, amorphous octopus – who I grew transfixed with on Netflix the other night – can contort its body to slip into impossibly small openings. The sacred reaches out to us like the octopus did when the man extended his hand. Each small sucker had a way of feeling and knowing the man, wordless senses tuned to his essence while he floated there in equally wordless awe.
The sacred is coming at us. It is powerful enough to reach us whether our hands are idle in our pockets or busily poking away at our machines. We are fools to think we can capture it or contain it with our devices. But it can slip in and capture us, even amid the strung-together packets of noise and haste that are so often our daily commerce.
One way to seek the sacred is to battle our baser human tendencies, adopt routines that seem to court the right frequency, calling up prayer and meditation to aid us in our alchemic quest. But the longer I am here, the more it looks like this shifting, ever-pressing, ever prodding gift runs through it all, blasts past our efforts to tune into it, saturates the circuits. Sometimes the dense, buzzing molecules part for just an instant, and there it is.
Katherine Hauswirth is a writer and amateur naturalist finding reasons to be hopeful about the natural world. Learn more at First Person Naturalist.