A WILD TRUST
by Mary Hayes Grieco

"I don't know what I need!"

I cried with frustration to the attentive members of my women's support group. I was facing one of the greatest dilemmas a person with low self esteem can face: a positive opportunity. My husband's five-year court battle was recently resolved, and now we had a respectable bundle of money to use for something beyond the month-to month bills. I was acclimated to struggle, and the arrival of an opportunity for choice and ease was so foreign that it was stressful. Strangely, it brought up a deep depression.

"I know what you need," one of my friends suggested confidently. "Just trust me on this."

So, a week later I was on my way to a five-day treatment center for the family members of alcoholics. On the first day, my counselor said a few simple things that uncorked a river of tears that flowed without interruption for most of the time I was there. I allowed myself to be herded along from group to group, from morning to night, and I learned to see my crisis orientation as a fallout effect of my father's disease. I grieved the loss of childhood, and the physical and emotional neglect I experienced as a child. By the end of the program a significant change occurred: I went home with a small but sturdy understanding that I am a person who deserves to have what she needs.

But what was it? Should I move out of the inner city to a quieter neighborhood? Take that trip to Ireland? Go to art school? I didn't know. I started by looking at different neighborhoods. I looked for a few months, but always found myself saying, "It's just not quiet enough to warrant the trouble of moving, and there aren’t enough trees." Was I being a perfectionist? Even the premier neighborhood of Minneapolis, Linden Hills, was not quiet or pretty enough for me.

One day my best friend called up and said, "Let's go to the meditation program tonight. I feel really drawn to it so I bet it'll be a good one." We went and it was nice---nothing stellar. But after the program I was talking to a woman there who said, "I don't know why I'm telling you this, but there is this beautiful piece of land that I know of, and the owner needs to sell it. He might even already have sold it to the government, but I just think you should go to see it."

"What the heck," I thought. "It's May. A beautiful time for a field trip."

So Fred and I followed the lead, and made arrangements to see the land, even though the owner thought the government was going to buy it soon. The land was located on the St. Croix River, in an area almost completely surrounded by forest and a protected wild river country. We had been told that there were only seven permanent dwellings in a ten mile radius. We left the pavement and the farms behind and crunched for miles down a long gravel road. As we passed a field, a black shape caught my attention. It wasn't a cow.

"Fred, stop! That's a bear!"

We stopped the car. The bear ambled through the sunny field right towards us, his blue-black fur gleaming with health. He was the spirit of relaxation itself, and his whole manner communicated the ease of a wild thing who feels safe in his habitat. He was mellow. Then he saw us, and loped away into the brush.

"A bear! A bear!"

I was beside myself with simple, mindless joy. My whole being was energized. I remembered what a friend of mine predicted for me during our Spring Equinox meditation. "You are going to meet a wild animal this year, and it's going to awaken a part of you that you have forgotten about. It's going to change your life." I couldn't imagine what she meant then, but I could feel a big change happening now. When we got to the land and pulled into the long driveway, Fred said, "I have the strangest feeling that I'm coming home."

We toured the house and the forty acres, accompanied by Dan, the son of the owner, Dick. In a way, the visual appearance of the land was unremarkable; the forest was kind of bare and scruffy because the sandy soil could only support jack pines, birches, and oaks. Things grow slowly there, and fall down if they get too big. This pine barrens forest and grassland area had almost a desert quality. But there was something remarkable, something shimmering just within every blade of grass on the property. This place was saturated with the palpable feeling of love. The garden, the bird-houses on trees far and near, the tubs of water placed strategically for the deer to drink from---all spoke of the owner's deep appreciation for nature. And beneath and beyond his relationship with it, the place was infused with wildness.

As we entered a large field under the open sky, I was embarrassed to find myself nodding off into a trance, while the three of us were standing there talking. I excused myself before it was too noticeable and went off to sit alone for a while in the middle of the field. I went into a deep meditation there, the likes of which I have only experienced a few times in a very holy place. In utter silence, I could sense the still heart of the Earth beneath me, and I could feel her consciousness breathing freely from her center to the outer stratosphere. "Here", I thought, "she still breathes deeply---unencumbered by cement and human inventions."

To make a long story short, all potential obstacles melted before us, and upon their son Dan's advice, Dick and his wife Viola decided that Fred and I should be the next stewards of their beloved land. They withdrew the deal from the government. When I met Dick and Viola for the first time at the bank closing, I had every intention of proceeding with dignity, but instead I burst into uncontrollable tears of happiness right there in the bank lobby.

"There, there," Viola said, patting me and offering me a Kleenex. "You're going to have many wonderful years there, just like we did."

She held my hand in her wrinkled one as I quietly snuffled and hiccupped over all the papers the banker passed around the table. It was a four-hanky signing, and everyone but the banker was moist by the time we were done. We went out to lunch to celebrate, and I was touched to see how much this land meant to Dick. He tried to tell us so many things about it, but his sentences trailed off in confusion, his mind crippled by the stroke that had forced him to leave it and move to town near his children.

"I used to be so smart, so strong---I could do anything---I'm just a dunce now! I don't like who I am any more."

"Oh, Dick", Viola said, "Now don't talk like that."

"I see that you really hate these limitations," I said. "I don't blame you for feeling like you do."

Six days later, Dick died. He succumbed quickly to a heart condition that had not been previously diagnosed. His family had a small service in his home, and Fred and I were the only people who were not the immediate family who were invited. Looking around the crowded living room, I had the eerie feeling that I knew every one of these people already. Even though the Fundamentalist service was different than my own beliefs, there was a sense that I was among kindred spirits. They embraced Fred, Tara, and I as one of their own. I stood up during the speaking part of the service and thanked all of them for bringing so much love to the land at their family gatherings over the years. When I invited them all to walk there any time they wished, the entire group heaved a collective sigh of relief. They lost Dick, but they wouldn't have to lose the land.

During the course of the evening everyone came up to us one by one to tell us their favorite stories....the time the bear came to the window...the time Mother saw the black snake and made the neighbor man move it and he fainted afterwards... the deer who brought her new fawns to show Dick because he was her friend...the night they saw the UFO---what else could it have been?... I collected their stories in my heart like the wild strawberries they all gathered in baskets in the spring when they were children. My child and her friends will gather them now.

We lingered outside in the sunset when it was time to go, reluctant to dissolve this experience of unexpected community. Suddenly, a large monarch butterfly flew from the doorway of the house, right between my head and Fred's, beating a straight path for the horizon. It flew with a strength and a focus that seemed uncharacteristic of a butterfly.

"Fred, that was Dick!"

I knew it was his spirit signaling a joyous farewell. I could sense the completion of this passage of land, and the freedom he enjoyed from dropping his limited body.

My land has been my healer. Season by season, year after year - it nurtures a new trust in life that is growing in my heart. For now, we straddle two worlds, inner city and remote country. It is a perfect balance. I feel safe there, in a place that is so silent that you can hear the wind coming to you long before it reaches your face. We have seen eagles, hawks, porcupines, beavers, deer, all sorts of birds, a few snakes, and two more big black bears. The sight of a wild creature living in it's own way fills me with excitement that lasts for days. I can't explain the joy I feel when I am walking in the scruffy woods and I stumble upon a hole in the sand that is obviously a doorway to someone's home. Whose? Fox? Badger? I must remember these footprints, and look them up....

One weekend, Fred was at the land by himself, and I stayed in the city. He told me that he found himself being guided from place to place around the forty acres, and at each place he found traces of Dick's unfinished odds and ends.

"It's just uncanny," he said. "It's like he's here showing me around."

That night I dreamed peacefully of Fred walking and working the land, a large monarch butterfly resting on his forehead.

“In wildness is the preservation of the world.” - Henry David Thoreau