Blurring the Edges

A pond view at Mt. Cuba Center in Hockessin, DE

While we rounded the native plant gardens at Mt. Cuba Center, walking literally at a snail’s pace and enamored with unfurling ferns and spurts of hidden beauty, our docent Lauri spoke to us about edging. There is the canopy—the vertical forest, the high-up umbrella, the celestial sky touchers, the cloud mates, the trees. They sway in gentle bows and arcs, rustling newly formed leaves. Below the bird nests and owl haunts, lives the forest floor—the blanketed earth dwellers, the lay of the land, the ground lovers, the short-statured panoply, the low cover art. 

As you pan from the trees to the underbrush, your eye might glaze across the neighboring meadow, a wide open space swept with an open-hearted feeling and a smattering of small birds. But go back. Slowly pan backwards to the base of the trees. Right on the outskirts. There. Between the forest and the meadow is an edge. It’s not a hard-stop, but a gradual gradation of vegetation…a whole other habitat. 

At Mt. Cuba, they encourage purposeful edging. The edge of the forest is not manicured and trimmed like a formal garden. It’s more amorphous and subtle. It meanders. It changes. It flows. The gardeners allow an edge to not be an edge. It’s not sharp or cutting or clean. They foster the role of edges as transition, as places in-between. 

Yesterday, while teaching yoga, while shifting my weight forward and back and side-to-side on my feet, I thought about edging. I thought about how I often describe our feet as snow shoes. I use the image to explore the function of feet as easeful weight bearers, wide and long. I imagine my Snow Shoe Feet moving out infinitely in all directions, touching the base of the walls and moving out beyond and beyond. And so, in that moment of shifting weight, edging made sense. There is no hard-stop between the skin of my feet and the surrounding air. There is a much less-definable boundary between “me” and “you.” There is a breathable transition, a slow slope between my body (and what I imagine it to be) and the rest of the world. 

This edge might be an aura. Or energy. Or the prickling of hair standing upright on arms. It could be the breeze or wings or a draping of sunlight. It’s a glow, a blush, a hush. It’s heat rash, a good sweat, and waves of emotion. It’s both a chill and a warming rush. 

My edge is the part of me that reaches out, the part that feels the magic of expanding my arms out into space. That’s not nothing. In fact, it’s everything. Because part of you is standing stock still, watching the cherry blossoms blow in the wind. And part of you is riding the air with them, just out of reach. 

The edge is the part of you that intimately knows the moon and her moods. The part of you that knows the joys and the sorrows of the ocean. 

We can breathe life into our edging, allowing it to be exactly what we need…protection, safety, comfort, peace, possibility, support, strength, buoyancy, uplift, empathy, instinct. We can surround ourselves with the light we emanate. There is no hard-stop between our feet and the floor, between the breeze and the back of your neck. 

Now when I wander through towns and houses and gardens, I see hard-stops everywhere. 

This is my space, that is yours. My land is here, don’t go past this line in the dirt. The path is clean-cut and clear. My mulch is not yours. This is the end of the forsythia, there is no more. The weeping cherry has an embarrassing bowl cut, it can’t reach out in surprising tendrils. The boxwood can’t brush your legs accidentally. 

And I am looking for softness, empathy. 

I am starting to think about what thrives in my in-between spaces, in my edges as they blur. I am thinking about my edges as I approach you with the wind moving through open palms. 

Shadows loom large over the underbrush at Mt. Cuba 

a cup of weird and wild

WONDERFUL (adj.):
"way up in the sky, like a witch," as defined by Princess

WEIRD (adj.):
"to turn, to wind, to become"

WILD (adj.):
"fantastically irregular, inhabiting the forest"


The coffee heats in the pot as I watch--mystical, magic, mysterious. It's a simple task I do every day, heating coffee on the stove. Today was different. Today I am alive. My eyes are wild, my brain is unhinged and I finally (oh) saw what happens.

And I have no earthly idea how it happens--change. Coffee into steam. Heated so hot there is no other choice but to "yeowp!" and become air.

This pot, this steam, it transcends...just because I opened my eyes today and watched it. I actually watched a pot boil. No music, no radio, nothing on. Just me in silence with a silent wet dog sitting just as attentively at my feet. She has the gift of seeing, of wanting to see. She taps into the world through animal instincts--her starts and her fits and her need to see everything that catches her eye or her nose. Freezing mid-step to listen, to see way, way, way off into the distance. No future, just now. Friend or foe? Something delicious? The feeling of warm wind as we move forward.

I feel more grounded. The screen on my window beside me is smeared with rainwater. Earlier, I saw pansies in pots drowning in rain. They'll dry or they won't. They'll die or they won't. There will be more. I am here, writing. Carrie said, write! And I am. I resisted the urge to go to the store or settle into some unimportant task. This is the thing. This is the fire. If I don't follow it, I'm...

I am following it. I am writing. I am collecting and gathering words. I am here. I am calling out for words. And sentences! I am ready. I am doing the writing and I AM SAFE HERE.

I am moving through the fear with this small pen. It may run out of ink, but I won't. My new pens say, "ink joy" on them. That's the kind, the line, the brand, the style. I was a copywriter for years and I know when something hits, when something lands. I know I bought those pens because they say "ink joy" on them. I am calling out to the pens, "Pens! Please, Pens! Let the joy come through, the weird and the wild joy. The WONDER.

Is that was that was? Wonder? Finally! Standing over a pot and watching it boil. Well, almost. No one wants burnt coffee. Standing over a pot, wonderful like a witch, watching the air call to the coffee, enticing it to let go, to become steam, then air, then something...else. I know how that all happens, of course. The changes. Or I know at least how it happens. You heat something, add an edge. And at a certain temperature, "yeowp!" you have steam. But how wonderful! What a mystery. This steam circling the pot, rising, disappearing into thin air. What an illusion, this trick. Here, not here. How beautiful! How weird. Turning, winding, becoming. "Having power to control fate."

I don't feel like I am controlling fate. If I've learned anything in this coffee-spilling world it's that I have control over NOTHING.

BUT.

(Ring of my wind chimes. The wind is changing.)

I do feel that I have dropped into something...else...my intuition. A smidge. An iceberg tip. I have come to a deeper knowing of my body down here in this stream below my every day. In the pulse, I know what I am, what I have always been, and will always be (even when I am a lilac bush--soft, purple, quiet).

I will be weird, wonderful and wild.

I am here.

In the thick of brain meeting body meeting, I..."oh, hello soul. So nice to see you."

The steam is changing into air, into rain, into stream, a deeper seeing. I won't always swim here. I won't always drop down. I won't always watch the coffee almost boil with white hot intensity.

But today I did.

And that is everything.





With a nod and a tip of the hat to Julia Cameron and Natalie Goldberg.