So here I am all at once, thrown into this brier patch, a beautiful place to be tossed, though I would not have chosen to get here this way. I still feel like a stranger in my own country, but less so than last month. Three months from now, will I be more content with my lot? Will I be by then so immersed in this place that I look like it, become invisible against it, evolving, camouflaged and part of the landscape myself? Will I become lost here, or found?

Gravity pulls me down and I lie on my back, on cool stone horizontal, before a mock-infinity of space, wondering: what is my place in this world of men and of words? Do I deserve to be so blessed among Earth’s teeming humanity? What must I do in the warmth of this gentle epiphany that is revealed to me tonight and how should I then live? Maybe I will try to find the words in the morning, after the house is quiet again and the fireflies have gone to bed and the world smells of heat and ozone and toast.

We approach each blind curve with care, and on slowing down, see the graceful way that light slips past hemlock branches and how the creek eddies flash in the shadows of rhododendrons. We would never see this on a fast road. As we near home one bend at a time, our meandering road becomes a welcomed part of the detoxification ritual that brings down our blood pressure, calms our racing minds, and brings us to center again on the simple act of living here in the present moment. I imagine I am as busy as my city friend, but I know I am not as hurried.

A revelation of radiant webs like prayers floating unseen above my head for fifty autumns has made me conversant with floating spiders. Perhaps they are angels. What wonders hide beneath my boots or hover in air just above my skin, I cannot imagine. Look up. Miracles must be everywhere.

Morning on Goose Creek in the September of our lives sounds like this: drops falling from dew-wet branches; bush crickets whirring, one from a goldenrod along the pasture whose song blends with the next, higher up in the meadow, and a dozen more in monotone requiem to summer past; and beneath all other sounds, and around them, the rift of water over rock, falling into the hollow of itself, a spattering, tinkling liquid philharmonic of peace. If there were no humans on earth, this is what it would sound like. And there are two, standing utterly still, and thankful.

Ann, the dog and I walk up the field, along the creek and back every day. The green peace there feels as if it has always been just so, waiting for us to come into the open, our field of dreams. From the far end of the grassy floodplain, we look back down the narrow valley over the flat earth and see the barn and north ridge, and at night from the middle of the clearing, a golden light glows from inside our house. Overhead, more of Heaven swirls around me than I can comprehend.

What they know about buoyancy and loft, about milkweed toxins and about the geography of the continent is hardwired, ordained, immutable and the same from one butterfly to its offspring—truth unchanging through an infinite procession of a thousand generations. A Monarch, with its tiny speck of brain simply knows that it knows what it knows and that is enough. These orange and black wisps of will know where they’re going and how to get there, born with Heaven in their wiring and their wings.

We aren’t taught to value what our noses could tell us about the world, and this indifference makes poorer those moments in our lives at which, had we smelled more intentionally for memory’s sake, we might remember now more clearly.