Chewonki is a place of breath, in and out, a tapestry of looped threads. A place of repetition, and of cycles.
I notice this morning one. It is barely bright and we overturn soil. It steams with a hundred million microbes scurrying through the stages of decomposition- our food will become rich dirt spread on the gardens, will become tall stalks beaming with produce, will become chopped and braised on and off white plates and stainless steel serving bowls, will become compost once again. I am falling in love with this nutrient flow. I am falling in love with heaving heavy buckets and rusted trowels. I am falling in love with the farm’s aggressive pungent urgency.
Chewonki is a place of breath, in and out, a tapestry of looped threads. A place of repetition, and of cycles.
I continue to fall in love. With sheep’s coats softening into spools of wool, yarn circling around wooden needles, making hats, and wearing them when feeding sheep. With nutrient fixers, with solar-powered lighting fixtures. With the echo of past wood splitters in Gordy’s fire: with a mall in my hands, I guide it down to a birch chunk, making my own reverberating sound. With the tides I watch, and sine functions I graph.
Chewonki is a place of breath, in and out, a tapestry of looped threads. A place of repetition, and of cycles.
I fall in love with the Neck, woods thick with ferns and birches, hemlock, spruce, oak, and pine. My stride is circular as I run, forefoot brush, flick of the heel. My paths weave in and out, loops longer and wider each time. Passing, the air becomes cold, and the colors warm. And I watch the forest shift, saddened by a sooner dusk and comforted by the dawn which spring will be.
Chewonki is a place of breath, in and out, a tapestry of looped threads. A place of repetition, and of cycles.
It is a place of these things; it surrounds them, facilitates them, makes life feel sacred and everlasting, and which makes the realization that Chewonki is itself not a cycle, that my experience at Chewonki is but a segment, a blink, in a long, mostly linear life, makes this feel tragic.
But I am touched with the importance of these systems and circles. And I know that as my experience continues, as I go back home, to a more rushed and less thoughtful community, each time I breath I will cycle a bit of Chewonki through me, remembering clear as ever that it is barely bright and we overturn soil. Shovel in hand, sun scraping the farm with brilliance. The way the world rotates on in puffs of the compost piles’ steam.
Alice, Bryn Mawr School, MD
