The Thinking Point

This is a collage of family photos which I have entitled "The Thinking Point"-- to represent an actual promonotory of ledge looking westward to the Berkshire hills where generations of both sides of my family once perched.

Our grandfather had cleared  a trail lined with wild blueberry, teaberry and mountain laurel amongst the giant pines.   He managed to do this in secrecy until my brother's 8th birthday. On that auspicious day, with an air of conspiracy,  he announced that we were to embark upon a "scavenger hunt".  

We were each handed a burlap sack and a scroll of birch bark tied with twine upon which he had etched a list of items:  blue jay feather, mica, pine cone, hickory nut, dryad saddle, red eft, indian pipe, milkweed (with monarch caterpiller)...  the Red Eft and Caterpillar had to be seen by at least one other person and were not to be placed in the sack.   

Only later did I learn that the word scavenger applies to animals who eat what has died due to anything but predation.  I suppose, roadkill would qualify.  I knew a woman who lived on roadkill.  But, I digress... See?   This is where my thinking can take me.    All I know is that what I collected in my sack that day, and on many more forays into the woods, was priceless to me and certainly fed my appetite for wondrously wild treasures. 

It wasn't a long trail; but, it was winding and it was our first tender venturing into the forest around us. 

As the trail tapered out to a clearing,  it was like the parting of a great green curtain opening onto  a sun-drenched and treeless ledge jutting out over a cleared hollow where the forest picks up again on a much lower footing.  It was dizzying looking down upon this natural amphitheater encircled by the tops of trees  and above  me to the huge dome of sky and even as I write, I am there/here... drenched in the mingled scents of pine and laurel, crushed blueberries staining my bare feet, dappled light through the canopy and then--suddenly-- a huge cornflower sky...

On that spot, my grandfather  had cobbled together a bench from the same weathered barn-board he had used to panel the converted chicken coop, which was our summer shelter.  And  there he anchored it in place by nailing it across two pitch encrusted stumps about two yards from the precipice.  He gathered us to him and said, "Welcome to 'The Thinking Point'."  

I havn't any pictures of that exact spot--only the ones burned into the inside of my eyelids and my memory of a succession of sunsets and stars.  So, the collection of people, seasons and woodlands in the photo above only "point"to the actual "Thinking Point".   For I suspect that the land herself arranged this summons long before the spark of a trail entered  my grandfather's mind and the rest of us came tumbling on behind him... but, oh, the stars that stitched us together on those long and hallowed summer nights....

As I look back over the arc of my life and the finely honed moments that shaped me on that spot, I weep in wonder...

Linoleum Cut by M.K. Rodman Feighan

Inspired by Samuel Barber's Music

"Knoxville: Summer 1915" from 

James Agee's Death in the Family

and his poem

"Sure on this Shining Night"

Sure on this shining night

of starmade shadows round

kindness must watch for me

this side the ground.

The late year lies down the north

All is healed, all is health

High summer holds the earth

hearts all whole

Sure on this shining night

I weep for wonder

wandering all alone

Of shadows on the stars