HOW RICH CAN YOU BE?

We may try with our fences to cage the wind, or trap the songs of the birds. But ownership is not that simple

Ownership is not that simple.

We call our home Hollyhock Hill. It is on a gentle southern slope where myri - ads of these old-fashioned flowers stand like great multicoloured candlesticks lighting the back garden from May to September. I like to wander among them, smell their summery odour, feel the delicate tissue of their petals, and observe the fat bumblebees at work. It is one of my stations for meditation. Here and in other well-loved places – an old stump beneath a canopy of apple-tree branches, a bench beside a grey weathered shed – I think, ask questions and supply durable, homemade answers. Why are all floating things – a leaf, a silken, unanchored spiderweb, a bit of thistledown – so graceful? Is it because they have surrendered their will to a power greater than their own? Why are these sprouts coming up so vigorously around this dead stump? Because the force of life is stronger than the force of death.

In one corner I sit up high where I can see over rooftops to far fields, creeks and woods, and I ask, “Who owns this land? Who owns that hawk sailing over Kirchdoerfer’s cornfield, and those black and white cows grazing in Schonhoff’s pasture? Everyone and no one. I do. You do. Anyone can. For, in the real sense, who can own land? A cow? The colour and symmetry of a bluejay’s feathers? The song of a cricket? The smoke from a chimney? Are not all these delights an expression of the Creator, just as the things are which grow on the land; just as the sky and the wind are as they interact to make things grow? A cow is a cow. A man is a man. A dandelion is a dandelion. But it is all one. Only as we absorb from, interact with, rub against, change into, appreciate to the fullest, do we own.

Some days when my thoughts hang like damp spiderwebs in mouldy cellars my answers do not come readily. A practical part of me will say, chidingly, “But you cannot walk into Schonhoff’s pasture and bring a cow home. You cannot sell one of Schonhoff’s cows.” But on other days when the mind goes beyond worldly logic I tell myself, “True. But I see the cows at morning, coming, freed, from the big dairy barn atop the hill, kicking their heels and switching their tails. I see them at noon, lying in cool shade; I see them at sunset, going home, sweet with milk. I hear their bawls. Pictures of them standing knee-deep in the creek hang on the walls of my mind. With all this, who can say I do not share in the ownership of these cows?”

I did not always feel this way about ownership. I thought in terms of legal papers, safes, possessions on pantry and cellar shelves. When we first came to Hollyhock Hill, with the deed in a strong metal box, it seemed good to erect fences – stout cedar posts with stretched woven wire.

For several years, I was only vaguely conscious of the great elms, oaks and hickories that swept the sky not over 200 feet away, the daisy fields that sloped up to the horizon, but, alas, outside our fences. When the redbird flew out of our yard into our neighbours’ I was prone to dismiss its song and look and listen instead for one within our own boundaries. How green grew our grass! How straight and healthy our trees! How homey the smoke from our chimney!

THEN ONE SPRING, while transplanting something from the Outside into our yard so that we could own and thus enjoy it, I unearthed a rusty horseshoe. Another deeper thrust of the shovel brought up an Indian arrowhead. I felt that if we went deeper we would unearth, layer by layer, artefacts of all the people who had once owned our slope. Owned? For the first time, that word penetrated my consciousness. Suddenly I realised that someday other people would live here, and our land would be theirs. But the qualification came tardily, only temporarily and under a manmade covenant, as was our ownership and others’ before us.

It was a painful thought at first, as if some silent thief had passed by and taken our treasures away. But at that moment a mockingbird in my neighbours’ yard flew high in the air and came down in a dizzy cascade of song. And something waking in me whispered, I own that mockingbird song. For does it not belong to anyone who has heard? How else can anyone own a birdsong?

I looked, really looked, at the elms and hickories to which I had paid scant attention before. They seemed to nod in the breeze, welcoming me back into the true world from which I had strayed. The sun glinted on a patch of leaves as if the golden notes of the bird’s song had been blown there and tangled in the branches. And I saw now that we had tried, with our fences, to cage the wind, to selfishly trap a bit of the universe, and succeeded only in trapping ourselves.

Sitting there by the pile of fresh soil, I made a covenant. No longer would deeds and fences prevent me from owning the grace and sweep of neighbours’ stately trees. No longer would birdsong cease to be mine if it emanated from outside our fences. The sunshine glinting on the back on some woolly sheep in the valley of Kashmir, half a world away, shines for me. May someone, walking half a world away, think on ‘my’ hollyhocks and know they bloom for him.

Now, far from the stump, the woodpile, or walking where the fences used to be, I ask occasionally, “How rich can you be?” And back comes a sturdy answer. In proportion as you refuse to limit yourself. In proportion as you perceive that all of God’s creation belongs to all of His creatures. In proportion as you claim the universe!