Meditating In The Fields On Christmas Morn

I arose this morning when my dog came to me and wished me Merry Christmas in her way. We went outside, and I walked in the fields as I do on so many mornings.

My neighbor’s cows have been moved to other pastures, so my walk was more solitary than usual. The silence was profound and impenetrable. It seemed that the air was holy. I called a soft “Merry Christmas” to a crow who flew past me, the frozen fields ringing with his rasping voice. Frost adorned every blade of grass and every rock surface. The piper at the gates of dawn had a sublime view while tuning up this morning.

I walked in a far pasture, aware as I always am that when I’m in this particular field, I am at least one mile from any person. The knowledge never makes me feel lonely; I have enough inside myself to conjure my own loneliness without the assistance of silent acres of frosted grass.

I stood at the edge of a ridge, looking down at where I sometimes see large herds of deer fleeing my approach. This particular place reminds me of a ridge on an island in the Outer Hebrides where I stood many years ago in a rough wind and thought some thoughts.

My family’s history being murky, I had decided to research my bloodline, and my investigation had led me to the bleak expanse of land off the western coast of Scotland, where my ancestors, some of the few Catholics in Scotland at the time, had wrestled a living from the salted and unforgiving earth.

I remember feeling disillusioned as I stood on that ridge that morning. I had come to Scotland believing that, after ascertaining my origins, I would finally feel at home in a particular place in the world. But I did not. I felt a definite connection to the island, a sense of blood history, if you will. But I felt like an outsider among the Scots themselves, even though their blood (and probably the blood of the Vikings who raided up and down the Outer Hebrides for centuries) sang just beneath my skin. These Scots were not like me, and I was not like them.

To this day, when I return to my hometown, the feeling is the same. I am not like them; they are not like me. I am as southern as a poke weed, but I am adrift in a gathering of other Southerners. I adore and admire my wife’s Texas roots, and yet when I am in Texas, even in the thrall of the local customs and colors, even mindful that my great-great grandmother was a Texan, I am aware that I am not one of them.

So to whom do I belong?

The only true feelings of kinship for me always arise in the presence of people unknown to me, people who gaze back at me with blue, beseeching eyes. Almost always poor and/or elderly, these rare souls seem to say “Brother!” with their very nearness to me. In the presence of children, I am forever vigilant to spy any sign of one like me…but they are rarer than rare. Children seem different these days…unaware and jaded.

And so I stood on the ridge this morning, grateful for my wool cap and rugged jacket, and I watched the clouds on the mountain tops, and I thought back to Christmases past. I tried to settle –yet once again — in my heart the apparently abiding principle that I will likely feel solitary in all groups for all of my days. I turned back and began to trudge west, back to my little farmhouse, back to my wife in all her poised beauty, back to my dog who waited with elderly patience behind the fence in the yard. I do not feel alone in their presence. And so it is indeed a happy Christmas.

A Merry Christmas to you, if you are reading these sincere words.

~ S.K. Orr