Dear friends,
Here in southeastern TN it’s finally acorn season. My friend Michael can't sleep. The fruit of the seven white oak trees towering over his home play his tin roof like a steel drum. Even though there are bountiful oak trees on the mountain I call home, I am going to his house this week to gather my acorns anyway, because community is hard these days and it feels important to connect with my friends and hope for winter feasts.
Today in our public school professional development meeting a strong siren sounded. I think one of the presenters forgot a YouTube timer as the interruption remains unexplained. The whole room buzzed with low panic. It's not Wednesday, it's not noon. Was it finally happening? The potential disaster our local nuclear power plant, Sequoyah, practices for on the first Wednesday of each month? As the siren faded, we all looked around, some of us checking the news, others simply sighing because anyway what's another disaster, after all. Thirty minutes later, once we collectively accepted a false alarm, an ESL teacher leaned over and asked how she was supposed to get across Chickamauga dam to pick up her two-year-old from daycare if the sirens were ever telling the dreaded truth. No one had an answer.
Moments like these always make me ask big questions. The rest of the room kept working while I silently began my internal existential investigation: have I written enough words? Have I even lived enough life to write words worth reading? Have I seen what I’ve lived clearly? Can my insight and intuition even be translated into words, especially English words, the diminutive language of homogenization? I wish to write in ponderosa prose, straight to the point, connecting all my puzzled layers as I rise toward the light. Or maybe I could say what I mean with the pattering rhythms of autumn fruits, how wholeness is both completion and the start of something new - the final resounding chord contains the DNA of a brand new melody.
What about you? Do you know the way your woods smell in autumn? I want to share with you that story. I want to take us home. I want to make you acorn flour pancakes and listen together to the music dropping from the branches above our heads without thoughts of sirens, without visions of cracks in the dam.