A small travelogue
Since April 2025 I have resided in the Midwest, returning to NYC near the end of June. With a brief 2-week return to NYC in early May, I spent most of the time there living at the Shed. This off-grid building is modest, providing all the comforts a human being might wish for. There is a routine to living with no running water, plumbing or electricity. It provides a reassuring structure to living outside of the technology we’ve all become embedded in.
Space opens for many things. Idle cloud watching. Reading. Drawing, water coloring. Watching residents – of the animal, bird, insect and amphibian kingdoms – go about their days. Wary of the hulky thing moving beneath their nests, they sit on nearby posts and protest my coming and going from inside to outside, outside to in. I protest it, too. There’s a fluidity to the boundary between the inner and outer worlds when one is alone for hours and days at a time. Weeding, planting, pruning; all these things become meditative.
I cannot say that I’ve come away with great insights, wonderful new ideas, or even a modest adjustment to how I am in the world. Simply put, I’ve unwound, sufficiently. The Universe has sent messages, most days more than one. The day after I returned to NYC, this poem appeared in my inbox. His words sum up my Shed experiences. We can all step off the hyperbolic, too fast train of wanting, wishing, manifesting, chasing goals; and breathe, finding that small thing that is gloriously beautiful.
VII
by Wendell Berry
Again I resume the long
lesson: how small a thing
can be pleasing, how little
in this hard world it takes
to satisfy the mind
and bring it to its rest.
Within the ongoing havoc
the woods this morning is
almost unnaturally still.
Through stalled air, unshadowed
light, a few leaves fall
of their own weight.
The sky
is gray. It begins in mist
almost at the ground
and rises forever. The trees
rise in silence almost
natural, but not quite,
almost eternal, but
not quite.
What more did I
think I wanted? Here is
what has always been.
Here is what will always
be. Even in me,
the Maker of all this
returns in rest, even
to the slightest of His works,
a yellow leaf slowly
falling, and is pleased.
"VII" by Wendell Berry from This Day, © Counterpoint Press, 2013.
