Heaven's Coast - Mark Doty [27]
Today we follow the trail only a little ways before a grove of scrubby pines and verdigrised lichens calls me off the path and up onto the sandy slopes. The dogs are always pleased to leave the macadam; they prefer unpaved paths, though they walk in the open dunes with a different kind of poised energy, a different sort of containment, because they are unsure where we’re going next. They both explore and keep close watch on where I am going, since they can anticipate the direction of only a bit of the coming walk.
This landscape yields particularly intense contradictions. Sheer expanses of sand alternate with low thickets of bearberry (Uva-ursi, beautiful name) and shrub. Bleached sand walls of North African proportions loom over hummocks of wild roses. In the deeper pockets between dunes are forests of pine—from tiny brave stunted things, a few cones tenaciously clinging, to cool and shady groves where, in the most sheltered places, the trees have made for themselves a community, the earth between them paved with rusty needles, mosses, and—a month or so from now—lady slippers. Now they’re only gray-green shoots, but here in the sun are newly leafing rugosas, the bronzy, barbaric-looking claw of beach pea unfurling, and the bee-pestered wedding lace of beach plum.
Now an especially dense grove glows below us, lush in the shreds of the fog, luminous. The needles seem to have a new light about them, a more evident pulse, the life-energy in them quickened. I am drawn down the steep dune side along a little path—deer trail? human?—through the bayberries. The dogs see where we’re headed and hurry to be there first.
This grove feels set apart, its quiet underlined. The distant waves blur here into a kind of low continuous shush, an aspiration. Why is it that places removed from human habitation bring us so swiftly into ourselves? I walk into this village of durable pines—tall ones for this sand terrain, which seems the very definition of “infertile”—and I am immediately thinking of how abstracted I’ve been feeling, how far from myself. Not depressed—I have been operating in the world competently enough, though I’m not trying to do much but get by these days—but distracted. Not focused on what I am experiencing, not quite present with myself.
The state of mind above which my distraction floats like fog is suddenly perfectly clear, though the right word for it is less immediately available. Grief is too sharp and immediate; maybe it’s the high pitch of the vowel sound, or the monosyllabic impact of the word, as quick a jab as knife or cut.
Sadness is too ephemeral, somehow; it sounds like something that comes and goes, a response to an immediate cause which will pass in a little while as another cause arises to generate a different feeling.
Mourning isn’t bad, but there’s something a little archaic about it. I think of widows keening, striking themselves, clutching at handfuls of dust—dark-swathed years, a closeting of self away from the world, turned inward toward an interior dark. This sounds, for one thing, like more of a removal than the late twentieth century will quite permit. Mourning suggests that nothing else can enter into the mourner’s attention. It doesn’t suggest the weird interpenetration of ongoingness and endings, of this spring’s sprouting life and my continuing sorrow.
Sorrow feels right, for now. Sorrow seems large and inhabitable, an interior season whose vaulted sky’s a suitable match for the gray and white tumult arched over these headlands. A sorrow is not to be gotten over or moved through in quite the way that sadness is, yet sorrow is also not as frozen and monochromatic, to my mind, as mourning. Sadness exists inside my sorrow, but it’s not as large as sorrow’s realm; it comes and goes without really touching the overarching whole. This sorrow is capacious; there’s room inside it for the everyday, for going about the workaday stuff of life. And for loveliness,