A solid block of beeswax melts on the stove. Relenting to the heat, thick wax disappears into yellow amber liquid. I poke at the wax with a toothpick, urging the small blobs to let go and embrace their new state. Rolling wax between my fingers, I consider the space between who I am and who I want to be. On the good days it’s right close, a stream of light through the kitchen window next to where I stand, warm liquid in my chest, a lightness, difficult to put to words, but palpable. But when I’m out of sorts and imbalanced, the better version of me is a charcoal smudge at horizon’s edge, out of reach and not looking back. The troubling state of the world is on my mind, both in its present state and its precarious future. Am I doing enough? Do the small things make a difference? At my core I believe that they do, but some days it’s difficult to trust this.
Sitting around with friends recently, the question came up: What does the world need more of right now? There are a billion answers: hope, empathy, action, understanding, collaboration, acceptance, generosity, courage. But there is another word that keeps coming up for me: less. What this heavy, burdened planet needs more of right now is, well, less. Less consumerism. Less co2 emissions. Less air travel. Less shortsighted decision-making. Less plastic. Less stuff. Also less divisiveness, less hatred, less bickering. Less heaviness, less worry, less distress.
Pines sway in the December woods. They pull me from the indoor warmth of their burning cousins and outside into their scented arms. Come. See. Smell. Listen. Several partially completed projects are suffering from my indoor attention deficit at the moment. They are no match for the call of daylight on snow. And so I take my troubles out into the trees and breathe in the icy air, climb up the ridge through fresh powder to meet up with the ochre light on the mountains and a patch of evergreens encased in frozen white.
Along the way Lewie spooks a flock of turkeys. They gurgle in panic and lurch awkwardly out of the snow and up into branches, rest for a moment, then one by one fly heavily away. No one has been out yet, only our tracks from last night and those of some deer whose paths criss-cross as they take turns pawing through the snow to feed on woody browse and mast. The air is cold on our tight cheeks and our pace is easy, sustainable, pleasant.
This, right here, this is one of my very favorite things, my true north — being out in the woods on a snowy cold day with Tom. We exchange few words, just togetherness in the quiet parallel shared experience of winter woods exploration. Later we startle turkeys again, perhaps some members of the same flock who have dropped down off the ridge to find the sturdier branches of this giant white pine. We grow too near for their comfort and they take off, big meaty things flapping between dense trunks and branches, soon out of sight.
Our walkabout complete, we trade the towering pines and beeches and winter air for blocks of maple tossed in the wood stove. Cheeks and toes tingle as they warm. I pour melted beeswax and coconut oil into small glass jars, struggling to keep the wicks centered and upright until the wax hardens. Snowshoes drip in the mudroom, and Lewie dreams his little or big dreams about the mole burrowing through the snow that he did not notice earlier today.