nature – Alyssa Bittner-Gibbs

What the Water Knows

There are people whose ethos reach us through a sentence, from many miles away, long after they claimed it. Since this summer, Wendell Berry has been keeping me company. Others may leave a garden, a footpath, a stubborn patch of green that might so easily have become something else. In today’s world, we may struggle to remember that we inherit more than what has gone wrong. We also inherit what humans before us loved enough to keep. So with Berry in mind, I’m trying to think more about life’s quieter bequests. The places that still make room for us. The words that arrive at just the right time. The care we never witnessed, but whose consequences we are able to enjoy. What would it mean to recognise this inheritance while it is still alive, and leave something living in return?

The List

The autumn equinox arrives with a checklist. Naturally, I have supporting documentation. Beauty, fierceness, care, reckoning: a little personal accounting as the season turns. Loving balance and possessing it are, apparently, separate boxes. And the woman who thinks so much about what makes a life worth living would quite like to live some of it, thank you.

Left Behind

A missed bus gave us an unexpected morning together, a field of dahlias, and one magnificent flower already occupied by a bee. After twenty-one years of marriage, perhaps love is partly this: thousands of ordinary acts, and knowing what to do with the time life unexpectedly gives back.

Before the Highest Place

There are moments we remember not because they changed what came next, but because they briefly returned us to a scale larger than whatever was closing in. I did not yet know what the following days would bring. I only knew that, for one Icelandic evening, nothing required an argument from me, and the world was vast enough to hold what I could not yet name.

natureA collection of 4 posts