I See Your Halo
A little over a year and half ago, my family—along with our dear neighbors—became the stewards of a twelve-acre parcel of land in Western Oregon. Surrounded by wilderness, run through with a year round creek, it is a startling gem of a place. And…a confronting place. A place that shows myself to me, that points to the corners where I still hide or where I’m still defended. Here’s an example:
The first night I spent on the land was with my dear friend Nell, one of my partners in the land’s stewardship. We’d spent the afternoon and evening in ritual, and as our ceremony work settled and the stars came out, we were drawn to take a late-night walk. We set off from the cabin heading east, past the barn and meadow and onto a trail bordered on one side by the creek and on the other by wetland. We settled across from one another on two fallen trees and we were just drifting into the night sounds—the water, an owl, the humming stars—when Nell spotted something behind me on the trail.
I turned around and looked at what appeared to be a floating lamp. Unaccountably, my first impression was of a sturdy person walking with a child balanced on their shoulders. This pieced together, I suppose, by the way the light moved. But it was near midnight, and we were—if not in the middle of nowhere—remote enough that any hiker, let alone one bearing a child, would be odd in the extreme.
It’s strange what the mind constructs in such moments. Moving fast through the legible possibilities—our reclusive neighbor? a hermit come down from the forest access road?—my discernment was also lurchingly slow, in retrospect. The light continued to move, but what was it about that sway? Then, about a hundred feet off, the light stopped moving and settled into what we suddenly came to understand was a stare. The fixedness of its glowing cast an unmistakeable halo around the head of a creature now according us its full attention. Or, I should say, we were now giving it out complete attention; it would have been behind and aware of us all along.
Its eyes shown out, a luminous rose gold. The halo described a perfect sphere in my memory. And inside of this sphere…the unmistakable relief of a cougar’s head.
I want to tread with care here. With at least as much care as we took gathering ourselves and moving toward the road that night, unable to talk until we were at the cabin door and then moving jelly-legged inside. Nell will have her own account of the experience, but for me there was something of my whole life, perhaps many lives, rising up to meet me in this moment. Something that wove in with and explained a knowing I’d carried dormant in me. The knowing that it wasn’t always like this. It hasn’t always been like this.
There are, of course, as many ways to interpret our encounter as people and inclinations. If you’re inclined to regard the world entirely in material terms, for instance, one read is that two mostly urban dipshits wandered into the woods at night and nearly became the meal of an apex predator. But if you’re inclined to the disposition of the animist, if you not only believe but understand that everything is animated by Spirit, that everything is sentient and bears the capacity to be in communication with everything else, then there’s another way to consider it.
Nell and I had spent much of the afternoon and evening singing. Two women singing our gratitude to the land that now held us, the string of miracles that had grafted both our family’s names onto the deed and our bodies to the place. We sang in the far meadow, imagining a jewel box temple. We sang by the water, imagining our voices mingled with ancient others. And she—somehow I understood that the cougar was a mother—she heard us. And later, when a quiet had settled around us and there was nothing to separate us from her but the night, she came down.
When white people first settled the area where Sweet Root Hollow is situated, they clearcut it. We know this from aerial photographs taken by the county in the 1940s and they are an aching thing to behold. You can still hear echoes of this dumb desecration throughout the area. We learned from a friend, for instance, that the #timberunity yard signs so present along nearby Highway 101 are the branding work of an East Coast timber conglomerate, a predictably cynical campaign that successfully mines the grievance of the men and women of this dying industry.
Our friends own a home nearby along the Wilson River, where this summer a massive clearcut was carried out just behind the forest opposite them. In the weeks after, the air was redolent with herbicides dispatched by helicopter. Displaced and possibly poisoned creatures began appearing by the river’s edge. Wolves hadn’t been sighted in the area in a generation, but a grainy photograph of a full wolf pack was passed between neighbors. Whoever took the photo, bless them, would not reveal where it came from. As you might expect, poaching isn’t unheard of here.
And what is the poaching of a wild animal? What is clearcutting, if not the opposite of animism? It’s a crude and ill-considered dominion over something. And it’s the short-sighted and increasingly smoke-filled air we breathe here in the West. And even as I write this I’m in touch with the part me that would protect herself from fully loving the land. Lest it be taken somehow, lest the Siuslaw to the north of us be logged again, or the dry summers continue to lengthen and fires visit the area. But there’s also, perhaps even more tenderly, the part of me that would protect herself from being loved by the land. That would brace herself from receiving its generosity. Here lives the tension in me between the meritocratic, materialist way I’m trying to forget, and the animistic cosmology I’m trying to remember.
Which is why a cougar meeting me in the wilderness and fixing me in her stare feels like such a hinge in my life. A moment of seeing that’s quickened upon itself, so that more and more I find myself not merely looking at her eyes, but through them. There’s warning in them, yes. But there’s also fierce reception here. To see clearly and far. To see in the dark. To let myself love my life and so to be loved by it.