We should do everything as if we had a thousand yearsto live and as if we were going to die tomorrow.-Mother Ann Lee
Down below the western slope, where saxifrageblooms on the outcrops, a spring comes to lifebeneath the forked roots of an ancient sycamore.What can one make of all these daily resurrections,these miracles that seem as common as starlings?Seneca wrote of the forest’s lofty dignity and saidwe should worship at the source of great rivers.I think he might have been right about that.My own river crawls to light in the Cumberlands,among blasted mountains and abandoned stills.Acid leaks orange from old mines, while a hundredmiles downstream, I walk beside the poison watersof this crumbling republic. But once at a landing upthe road, a small group of Shakers loaded flatboats withbutter and hemp bound for Natchez and New Orleans.Then up on these meadowlands, those true believersgot down to the business of building paradise on earth.Work was their constant prayer, and they held allthings in common as the Book of Acts decreed.Their village had everything but banks and jails.They took in fugitive slaves and runaway brides,bred long-horn bulls and invented the clothespin.They engineered their own salvation in the kingdomof God, which just happened to be a farm in Kentucky.Today the believers’ last surviving bull drowses inthe shade of a bur oak, while I wander the ruins ofEden, high above the river that brought a self-chosenpeople here. But it wasn’t the impossibility of theirvision that sacked the Shakers. That’s just whatwe tell ourselves to justify these small, compromisedlives. No, it was Confederate hooligans and industrialdreams that razed this place called Pleasant Hill,birthed upon a nation the ugliness and vitriol thatremains our true inheritance. Down at Shaker Landing,I crank to life the motor of my own small boatand head back downstream, past a heron rookerythat looks to me now like its own timeless utopia.I myself am learning by the day how to live in suchan animal present, where the past can’t bind meand what’s to come doesn’t look so daunting.It’s been seven months since I last had a drink.When I pass under the herons’ raucous colony,one regal blue sets off from its crowded nestand glides down the river as if leading me home.
Photo by Marc Zimmer on Unsplash