AS THE SAP BOILS

After the April snow joked around with my faith in the coming of spring, I began to notice a certain parallel between the process of boiling off the water from the sap and tuning my mind to a more friendly and supportive bunch of self talk tapes. Or perhaps the awareness comes from being grounded by my wounded knee which seems to keep getting injured as I keep trying to accomplish more than my physical body will allow. Or maybe the awareness is a gift of being unemployed and therefore undistracted by outer events that draw my focus away from the task at hand. In any event...the Soap that I'm living right now is clearly called As The Sap Boils....and for whatever reason, the distilling process reflects a refining of my ability to extract the sweetness from every aspect of my present moment.

Stephen is clearly the farmer of the maple trees. For 28 years, I have observed and appreciated how accomplished he is at balancing his work time with play time. At times, I have been a bit envious. I am prone to being over-dutiful and denying myself playtime in favor of finishing up what I consider my "responsibilities". I don't really know where this trait comes from...but it smacks of a Puritan work ethic and the image I have in my mind is the depression painting called "American Gothic"of the farm couple with their stern faces holding the tools of their trade. Stephen's joyous passion and sunny dispositon defy that image...but at times I can see myself in that mirror. Every spring almost...we go through the ritual of making syrup. Some years I am more helpful than others. Most years though, Stephen sets the taps, hangs the buckets and commits to the daily collection of tree sap. He also builds the evaporating stove and contendedly sets up his boil where he eats peanuts, drinks a few beers and soaks in the early spring sunshine. I imagine myself as his assistant. I keep the boil going when he has to work and I am in charge of the sanitation of the jars and putting up the finished product. This year I've been totally unable to help collect the sap because of my knee. Even walking up to our funky red barn has been challenging because the snow is soft and yielding under foot and it can throw me off balance easily...tweaking my knee. This year...he sits on his boil while I ice my knee by the fire inside. My inability to do the usual routine causes irritation and frustration. Mostly, the problem is that I'm not able to get my usual amount of exercise. Suddenly, where I generally find myself mentally avoiding exercise but forcing myself to JUST DO IT...now I am fantasizing about doing physical things that I just can't do. I sit. I sit and I see the circles that my mind is so fond of creating. And I write about it.

I write out my frustration and sometimes a poem or a whimsical thought comes. I am just like Sadie gnawing on her bone...chewing on the hard things in my life...the places that could soften and melt...the issues that I can't quite sink my teeth into. This bone is about 28 years old. I bury it and forget about it for a long while and then some unconscious impulse stirs me to run and dig it up and bring it in to chew on all over again. And it never is really gone. I just hide it from myself until the bone calls me and I heed the call...dig it up and gnaw somemore. When I chew on it, I generally bring up the issue in conversation and Stephen and I are drawn into a conversation that we always have but never quite resolve. I wonder if it is a Karmic bone...or maybe a dinosaur bone from a past that is so long gone that I can't identify it's source. When we chew on it together, a struggle usually ensues. He tries to tell me how to fix the bone and I keep trying to blame him for it. When I realize I'm trying to blame him and apologize, he listens without trying to fix and we are able to forget about the bone and get back to the distillation of sweetness. One year we were so busy playing tug of war with the bone that we burned a batch of syrup...a sad but necessary lesson in losing focus...and not easy to clean up.

Now it's April. The birds are coming back. A flock of Robin scratches around the yard. The immature Eagle and Coopers hawk we saw are at the headwind of the returning raptor migration. The 8 inches of Foolish snow is almost melted. I've re-tweaked my knee and Stephen pulled the taps last night. I've chewed long enough to recognize this old bone and I have matured enough to claim it as my own. As Stephen sits by his boil happily shelling peanuts, I sit with my ice and realize that my joy depends on digging around in my soul with my Gel pen. I write myself home. I use the pen to distill the sweetness of my life and unlike Maple sap becoming syrup...I must not bottle up what I render. Farming is a metaphor for growing your earthly gifts and luckily, it's a new time...despite what things look like...there is a green growing under the snow and a Spring coming regardless of the weather. I'm actually grateful I'm being forced to sit and focus while Stephen sits on his boil because I am writing in sweetness and a joyful lightness of being into my image of toil. Its a kind of composting the soil.