Two weekends ago, I suddenly had the idea that we should go camping in the pasture.
This is an idea I regularly have in late autumn, but usually don’t act upon. I’m sure it’s because after the first deep frost, the reality of what’s coming settles in, but it’s already too cold to camp comfortably.
Still, it’s only going to get colder from now until May, so there’s a very real sense of urgency. Unexpectedly, when I brought it up this year, the kids didn’t think I was totally crazy, and agreed to join. The Man of the Ranch, deep in the throes of his busiest and most stressful season, declined but was happy to have a quiet night to himself.
Tucked into the teardrop camper — which is basically just a bed on wheels and really isn’t big enough for an adult and two medium-sized children, plus the thousand blankets I packed because I was worried we would get cold — we lay snuggled together with the door thrown wide open, outlining the sparkly stars above the dark grass. And the next morning, we watched the sun rise the same way. It was perfect.
So perfect, in fact, I drove back out the next night after putting the kids to bed and slept there by myself. I did the same thing this weekend.
When I was a touring musician, I once spent a few weeks on the road with a bluegrass band full of hippies. They’d set up the tour — I was just the opener — and I didn’t fully know what I was getting myself into. We traveled from Minnesota all the way down to the Carolinas and back, weaving our way through mountains and meadows, playing mostly traditional venues, with a few notable surprises. It was early April, still cold up north, but fully spring by the time we made it to Kentucky, where we played a show on the front porch of a ramshackled farmhouse.
The farmhouse was also where we were supposed to spend the night, but there wasn’t much room inside, so I slept in a tent in the front yard. The farmers served us beer and brats, and they had a pig roast for concert attendees in full view of the pig pen where the roasting pig’s siblings happily shuffled and snorted beneath the shade of towering oak trees.
I was a city kid. A conscientious vegetarian. I’d once spent a whole summer in a tent traveling across the U.S., so I was no stranger to sleeping outside, but I was a stranger to every single aspect of farm life. When I woke up under those oak trees in Kentucky, full of a peace I had never experienced before, I earnestly wondered if I could find a way to never sleep inside again.
I didn’t find a way that year, but we made it back to Minnesota to watch a second spring unfold, and I was alive to that unfolding in a way I had never been before. And I also started to think I might not be such a city kid after all.
So now, after an adulthood of hard travel, I’m trying to think of a word for the kind of pilgrimage that requires you to stay instead of go. A word for the kind of journey that doesn’t cross rough, unfamiliar terrain in search of wisdom, but reawakens us to the grandeur of everyday life — the wisdom inherent in our own bodies and the body of the land that surrounds us.
The word “Pilgrimage” is derived from the latin root “pelegrinus,” or traveller, and “agri” for land (the same root as we use for “agriculture.”) The best I’ve come up with for my new word is: Still-grimage, a practice that requires you to stay still, to be present to the wind and the weather of your own front yard, or the park down the street, or the east pasture, with its lone cottonwood, almost leafless now but still singing to the constellations as they slowly dance overhead.
