Walking in the fields

While eating breakfast, I started to feel like I should walk around in the fields. I put off doing it until I almost felt as though ants were crawling all over me and could no longer bear to be inside. Stepping over last year's corn stalks, I zigzagged across my 20 acres trying to memorize the dips in the soil where waters still stands between the furrows that were turned last fall. I noticed the sandy places, and the places where the soil is rich and soft as a buttery biscuit dough. Even someone as inexperienced as I am can see the soil is rich and good.

Within me rose a chorus of old voices that say that this land is the best kind of wealth. Maybe I heard my forefathers who farmed rocky soil or died in poverty if they didn’t inherit the farm. Maybe I heard the voices of those who worked land they could never own, or who lost their land to bankers or armies. I don’t know. I am almost frightened by the fervor, and by the suffering that bubbles just beneath such a longing for good land. I am ashamed that I don’t fully understand how to care for this wealth that I have been given.

As I walked, I also became aware again of this child growing in me, and again I experienced it as a light that accompanied me, listening and watching. We stood on the western border of our property and looked into the golden fields of corn that have been standing all winter, waiting to be harvested. The corn fields are vast, and they whisper in the strong wind. I do not understand them, and I am still not sure whether they feel friendly or not, but I feel awash in colors when I stand near them. We walked again and marveled together at a small hunks of rose colored granite that frost brought to the surface of the soil.

Climbing the gentle slope that leads from the field up to our yard, I knew that I need to take this unborn child out to see the soil and sky every day if I can. We need to listen to plants and trees together. I think this is a fabulous idea, but I am still bewildered. My other two children did not appear to me as light and start asking me to do things with them before I’d even made it through half my pregnancy. I'm starting to wonder what kind of child I might be dealing with here.

I am so grateful to be amid fields, balanced between the dreams of those who came before me and the passion of one who is yet to come. Finally, I am able to see this pregnancy as a wildly generous gift. Finally, I am in awe.