Notes from The Field

by Erin Gorman, ORLT Stewardship Director

Two tall, steep hillsides slope down towards one another, meeting at the banks of a clear stream. They are studded with huge, sentinel-like boulders, looming over the earth that falls away beneath them. Moss covered and stoic, their ancient presence deepens the forest’s silence. The awe they demand is natural, not due to consequence or title, but because I am a baby beside them and they, it seems in my smallness, are guardians. They are proof of an existence much, much older than mine, jutting out from the hillside they watched take shape. Did they rise from plates, or were they carved by the stream below? The boulders know. I could ask them if I were very quiet, and very still, for a very long, long time.

The respect they demand is natural. It comes not from their need but from mine – a humility drawn out from within by that which has stood eons and will stand for many more. Monuments to the hand of time, to the march of change – to stillness. To sameness. To that stable center within this rolling wheel.

They watch the gently flowing, flowing, flowing stream, so quiet that they hum. I swell and shrink beside them. These living altars are my teachers today.