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0930blog
Renewal Is Coming
As I walked the trail along the Musconetcong River this morning, I saw that the warm, welcoming, life-sustaining and altogether rare sun was trying to find its way around the black and grey storm clouds that had gathered last night and seemingly forever over Schooley’s Mountain.
Last night the cold, black, star-less skies, that have been deathly visible for so long, had opened up to a persistent, drenching rain that promised to cleanse the earth. This morning buzzards circled overhead, ready to pick the meat off the bones of the decaying, dead carrion that had accumulated over night. Soon there will be nothing there, no signs of the beasts that had flourished for all too long.
The leaves are falling off the trees, ready to prepare for a winter’s rest when they will gather strength and new leaves will grow, with trees healthier than they’ve been in years. The sun has won, for now, and blue skies are overwhelming the black clouds that withered and dissipated and disappeared, leaving without a trace of their deadening impact.
I had to watch my step as I walked around a tiny, dead bat on the trail and I wondered how it lost its life. Was it a sudden attack by a natural predator, an owl or a hawk, or did it succumb over time to a disease that invaded and slowly devoured everything that gave life to the small animal and so many other animals?
It seems the squirrels, groundhogs, and even the mice that I see scampering away from me are malnourished physically and most likely in every other way, just like their two-legged relatives. Even the towering maple trees seem less towering and somehow punished and ignored as they have come down with a general disease that can only be explained as malaise and neglect.
Our senses have been stripped away from us for a very long time but there is no doubt that the coming revival will quickly help us take back our smell, sight, hearing and touch so we can once again enjoy the differences of the forest.
The air is crisp and the leaves are turning into brilliant shades of yellow, orange and red. Nothing can stop the leaves as they fall silently to the ground, preparing to blanket everything that is dying or has died. The stultifying temperatures are falling, leaving behind the summer heat that saps everything of energy. The cool air is clean, cleaner than it has been in a very long time and it so welcome, so welcome. The past many months have been like a huge, moth-eaten blanket that offers no protection and that has been kept around for too long, promising but never delivering any warmth or relief from the elements.
I can smell the newness coming, like water flowing again to a parched land that has thirsted and felt bereft of any nutrients for so long. The air has a smell that I have not experienced in many months, it is a fresh feeling, starkly different than the stagnant air mass that seems to have descended and coated everything in recent months and years making even it difficult to even breathe.
The fields have been stripped of their stalks and plowed under, in preparation for a new growing season when a great variety of different kinds of foods will be plentiful rather than the same recent steady diet of rancid scrapings that make all pay a price in weakened bodies and spirits.
Soon I will walk along the river and hear the melodies of the sparrows and bluejays among the many other creatures that have been unaware and blameless as they became muffled and muted almost out of existence for so many months.