Sky Spirits: Reading Outside in Late May — dedicated to my Grandma Judee (June 4, 2022, the severed branch)
Although the sky spirits tempt me with their travels, I am content below with my book
Above: A view from a hike in the Upper Peninsula (photo my own)
Dedicated to my Grandma Judee, who loved to sit in this same spot listening to the wind.
The shapes of leaves move back and forth upon the page. Transparent shades of gray continuously cover and uncover certain paragraphs. Between the shadows swinging about across the text, the gold paper shimmers in a dazzling and unfiltered sunlight. The ink itself shifts vividly between vibrant degrees of black.
Without taking my eyes off the words, without fully leaving the novel’s world, I listen. Flying through the leaves as if they were wind, the ghosts in the sky spread a rustling turbulence across the canopy. They are going somewhere; they are on a journey, and they wreak commotion as they pass. The shadows on the page move in sync with the drama above, quickly and unpredictably. The stirring I hear in the branches may as well come from the trees surrounding the characters in the book.
My mind happily occupies a narrow boundary between fantasizing about nearby plants and accurately apprehending the more objective world inside the novel. Although once I might have wanted only to follow the spirits above without any concern as to our ultimate destination, today I remain helplessly seated. I must dwell urgently on the printed pages of the artwork itself. I adore the lively changes in the paper as its surface drifts rapidly between light and shadow.
In new books, the paper is raw and shiny when it first sits outside. The delicate font stands out sharply in those realms. The effect is particularly dramatic in poems. The unfaded black ink sits magnificently isolated in a vast and empty space. Each line is like a dense sparkle of creation, materializing like a miracle in the middle of a bright white empty world. Across this creamy dimension sway the many silhouettes of nature. Phantoms of leaves and twigs float gently onto the stanzas. They continuously emerge from the sheer white around them, and then they recede back into it before slowly gliding back onto the words. They are seesawing forever to an always-changing beat. The leaf-like specters’ twirling dances render the syllables so unceasingly altered that every letter glows with a different kind of brilliant blackness; even the points of punctuation take on their own vitality. It is almost religious just to look at the commas. Isolated words penetrate my understanding before does any sentence.
But with old books like the one now in my hands, the paper is sometimes tan and gilded. It glows yellow and gold and brown in the sunlight. The colors are somewhat different from page to page and space to space. Shadows catch differently in these regions, their darkness and coloration less predictable, so that each paragraph is like a uniquely enchanted painting which I can caress and absorb through my skin. And as the disturbances in the maples are exacerbated, the shadows move faster on the page.
Beginning another sentence, I gently move my fingers across the expertly enticing text. My nails journey irresistibly through the slight gradations which characterize the paper’s ancient and corroded texture. Even as I am picturing the world contained within, some part of me is contemplating the miracles of erosion playing out on the exterior. My reading’s physicality pulls me deeper into the story, granting it an atomically substantive reality. If I am distracted, it is only because I find myself within a material manifestation of a supposedly fictional story. And if this hinders me from reading as quickly as I might have in my youth, that it is only because, as an old man of 34, I am both corporeally and spiritually l fingering within the places I love most. I have learned across the decades that such beauty must be cherished here and now. Why leave it behind just yet? Why not spend a little bit more time on this page?
I am not just seeing and touching the paragraphs I love. I am listening to them too. I am listening to the wind coming out of them, and sometimes I whisper them aloud. I am watching the story’s scenery as it reflects off the page. Soon, I gently lift the paper. While turning it, I pause briefly so that I can feel it in my hands. I hold it between my fingertips for a little while, even after I have begun the new page. Then I let it go. It falls pleasantly onto the preceding moment, and here I discover something new.
The sounds of the sky spirits begin to fade away. The shadows are moving very slowly. The brushing of leaves overhead grows increasingly inaudible; the invisible explorers, carried so suddenly across this yard like a powerful breeze, have gone somewhere else. In the distance, I can still hear those frantic and fluttering adventurers, who by their stunning velocity seem desperate to find something marvelous far away from here. How envious I once was of creatures who are always searching and never content.
Here, where I remain with my book in the aftermath of their departure, the canopy returns steadily to a state of peace and order. Stable, for now, are the patterns of light and shadow which just seconds before were dancing so wildly across the pages. Inside the story, they must be tranquil too. I enjoy the brief stillness in the artwork which nature has cast upon these precious pages, hoping that soon it will all move again.
Yet another group of sky spirits is on the way from somewhere. To where, I cannot say, and probably neither can they, though I know that old longing which inspires souls toward aimless, urgent travel. Though faintly, I can hear the far-away leaves which sway serenely in their path. I can just make out the tremor of branches in the distance. Finally, I can’t help but look up in anticipation. Are they coming here? I can’t tell yet, at least not from looking at the trees. Perhaps not even they know yet.
A few youthful squirrels create occasional quivers in the thick greenery above. Otherwise, several elderly maples around me are relaxed, still, and elegantly composed, standing rooted and tall over lush shrubbery and fresh-cut grass. As the sound of the charging wind draws near, many hundreds of seedlings already covering the ground suggest that the trees must consider themselves blessed by the periodic arrival of these ghostly gusts. How happy they must be if the travelers are coming here! I look off toward the incoming convulsions. Although the branches I can see remain still, the far-off whispers grow louder and more forceful with every second.
An alluring disorder, far more disruptive than the last, is advancing rapidly through the forest. As to its direction, there is no longer any doubt that this great hoard of ghosts, like a vast ripple of wind, sets out on an odyssey toward me and my maple companions. With every passing second, its mystifyingly musical beauty grows louder and more urgent. When will it arrive? The whole canopy shakes and shivers with the spirits’ swift and sudden appearance. The effects cannot be felt where I am. This invisible and spectral storm, just below the sky, is only for the trees.
Although the travelers intensify their speed, they still do not touch me. I am a sedentary reader, a piece of scenery, a strange creature remaining where he is. Only my eyes move now. And when I look out into the tiny meadow tucked between the dense hedges, there are hundreds upon hundreds of maple seeds slowly sinking down toward the grass. Once they break free of the branches, they waltz fiercely with the wind. But as they approach the soil, their movements shift into something gentler. They seize my eyes, and for a few minutes I simply watch them parachuting from the sky by the thousands. As their wings beat, they catch the light at alternating angles, so that half of them are constantly glistening and sparkling against a towering backdrop of hundred-year-old trees. All the while, the leaves behind them and above them and to the sides of them are moving this way and that; the stirring in the branches never ceases, so that additional samaras are cast away into an ever-thickening stream. I think about how my grandmother used to sit out here before she died. She listened to the breeze rushing through these same trees; she watched the same branches move above her head. She loved the way you could see and hear the wind, but not feel it. Though not touching me, the flow of whispering beings through the treetops is a constant now. The swishing of the leaves is only quickening. When I look down, at least two of the helicopter seeds have lodged themselves into a crease between the golden pages. Another one suddenly jumps off my head and onto a paragraph.
Ah yes. My book. Jane Austen, how I love her. How I admire her for the genius by which she created people who are still among us after two centuries of change. How intensely I am treasuring the hours during which I live among these enduring characters. Decades from now, I will cherish the days when I was happily immersed inside her captivatingly crafted prose. How I wish to return to Lizzy Bennet and Mr. Darcy. Romance - how it soothes me, how it makes me so happy, what a wonderful literary genre. But first, I must behold this new migration of sky spirits pass through in its entirety. And so I revive my easy focus on the meadow and the trees. Realizing suddenly that only a few short years ago I’d have been desperate to join them on their odysseys, it is strange to contemplate my present instinct to simply sit here and listen.
I can still hear a powerful turbulence from the direction in which those great beings, so recently my most seductive role models, must be continuing their journey. Yet the murmuring of leaves in my immediate vicinity is growing slower and softer with every passing moment. Of the many remaining would-be adventurers of the sky, it is only the stragglers who remain here. They struggle to catch up to the elements surging onward. And it is only by generating increasingly short-lived sways in the canopy that they make themselves known to the likes of me. Yet I continue to listen and to watch until, up there in that place I will never go, almost all the movement has truly stopped.
Finally, what appears before me is all so perfectly calm. Only a dozen or so seeds still descend through the air. A dense, tranquil foliage obstructs all views of the advancing agitations. Hauntingly, these are still nearly as noisy from here as they were mere seconds ago, as they hope to remind me that I might still give chase. And yet I feel no temptation to follow them; my only yearning is to watch, my satisfaction is to sit.
I listen to that happy rustling recede gradually into the distance. Before finally disappearing altogether, the whispering air transforms steadily into the faintest and most distant breeze. The affected treetops, though hardly heard, must be in their own state of leafy upheaval. But eventually even these events are occurring much too far away for me to perceive.
Who can say where they’ve gone off to? I wonder if their strength has diminished or if they are still wreaking a calming and reassuring havoc for another audience somewhere. Perhaps they are inspiring a friendly outdoor reader to contemplate their precipitous arrival and gradual departure. But then where did their journey begin? And where will it end? After leaving so much commotion and longing in their wake, where will the sky spirits at last come to their final rest?
As I return to the pages of my book, I hear another ripple approaching from the distance. This time, even as the wind-like force of their movement bursts with a sedating frenzy into the surrounding trees, I keep reading. I listen dreamily to the daytime ghosts in the sky overhead. But rather than travel alongside or watch them, I crave only to thoughtfully massage the fabric of the paper in my hands.
The shifting shadows draw me inexorably into the mystical space of the book’s gorgeous and glimmering pages. I am eager to engage with the text in all its physicality. I appreciate the individual words of each and every sentence and all the uneven surfaces they contain within. Whole paragraphs, covered now in light and next in shade, tempt me to stop and memorize them. Submitting to their aesthetic appeals, I linger; I reread several sentences once or twice. I move my fingers slowly along the tender surfaces of the paper, and my nose sucks up its scent. It will now take me two joyful hours to finish a mere 22 pages. Speed is of no concern to me today.
In the story, I am outside at this moment with Lizzy Bennet. Perhaps that is why the crease between those wonderful pages smells so richly of trees! Perhaps this is why I no longer feel a need to pursue those restless sky spirits into the unknown. As the latest group of travelers slowly dwindles away toward a destination not even they can name, they leave me behind with my book. I look up again at the maples. They are calm. I read the next page with only silence around me. Although the occasional easy breeze might shuffle the shadows on my book, and although I must always delight in the soft sounds of the fluttering leaves, it is the stillness which calls to me now.