Stillness Goose Chase
Dear Friends,
Last weekend, my brother Wil was playing in the Annapolis Chamber Music Festival, so my husband Jake and I got a babysitter and drove up to hear him. We’d made plans to go to an early dinner at a seafood restaurant, then head over to the church serving as the concert venue.
“The clarinetist recommended this place,” my brother said, and pointed us towards a waterfront seafood restaurant with a promising, crab-forward menu.
“They don’t take reservations unless you’re a party of 25 or more,” I said, looking at the website, “so surely that means they have a lot of seating?”
As we neared the restaurant, the road narrowed. All the cars seemed to be moving in the same direction we were.
“Ooh, I don’t know, guys,” Jake said. We arrived at the parking lot.
“This lot’s full,” an employee told us, “but if you head back that way and take the first left, you can park in the backup lot over there.”
We did as we were told, and Jake tactical-parked in the gravel lot. We made our way through the fences and around the first parking lot to the door.
“How long is the wait for a table for three?” I asked.
“About an hour and ten minutes,” the hostess said before the phone rang again.
We headed back to the car. Wil and I pulled out our phones in search of Plan B. Neither of us was getting much of a signal.
“I remember seeing a lot of Mexican restaurants when I looked earlier,” Wil said.
“Here’s a place that’s pretty close to the church,” I said. I couldn’t get photos or a menu to load, but I pulled up the address and the name of the restaurant.
We decided to go for it, as we were down to an hour before Wil needed to be at the church for his call time.
I smelled the first red flag as soon as we walked in the door. Instead of the scent of frying tortillas, sizzling steak, and spicy sauces, I smelled…paint.
The restaurant seemed brand new, and was decorated in a style I can only describe as “influencer southwestern aesthetic.” Arty light fixtures, fake plants, a rack of merch.
“Ooh, y’all, sorry,” I whispered to Jake and Wil as we cracked open the menus. “I led us to hipster Mexican food.” I was gripped by the desire to get out of there. This place isn’t right. This place isn’t for me. But we didn’t have enough time left to make another choice.
Chips and salsa for the table were not complimentary, but instead, $13. You could get a taco salad for $18, but to add a chicken breast, that would be an extra $13.50. Two fish tacos? $27. Fajitas for two were $79.50.
I settled on the “Farmer’s Market Quesadilla” ($17.50), which ended up being a lukewarm cheese quesadilla topped with undercooked, unseasoned, chopped squash and peppers.
We laughed through the whole dinner.
When you don’t have an hour to wait for authenticity, I suppose you can’t complain.
“Anywhere that has branded muscle shirts as merch…” Jake said, shaking his head.
Back in the car, we headed off the main road, further into a wooded area to the Unitarian church. The building looked like a lodge (“It looks like every Unitarian church!” Wil said), with stairs leading up to a wrap-around deck, and a sanctuary of dark wood and wall-to-wall windows. Wil went inside to warm up with the other musicians, and Jake and I decided to wander around the garden out front.
“We’re going to go acquire some mosquito bites,” I told the cellist handing out programs.
A children’s play area and a courtyard with stone inscriptions (Ecclesiastes alongside Mary Oliver and Khalil Gibran) soon turned into a trail that led into the woods. Now that Wil was where he needed to be, we found ourselves with more than enough time to spare before the 7:30 concert.
We followed the trail into the trees. We came upon a fort made of branches, a handmade bow for stick arrows. Here and there, poems tacked to tree trunks marked the path.
“You know I love this hippy-dippy, poetry-in-the-woods crap,” I said to Jake, stopping to read.
Everywhere, the stillness of nature. The most gentle marks made upon it. Evidence of human thought and contemplation, and most importantly, appreciation.
I heard a rustle up ahead and saw a flash of white.
A doe, leaping up the hill ahead. Stopping. Seeing me, but not yet moving. Aware, but not afraid.
I crept closer, trying to take her photo, knowing it wouldn’t do her justice.
She bounded away, deeper into the woods.
We made our way back to the church, scratching, as predicted, our new mosquito bites. The audience was beginning to assemble, now. There was the murmur of anticipation. The surveillance of the refreshment table. The old man eating more than his share of shrimp cocktail. Everyone perfectly happy for him.
We found seats, settled in. The concert began.
The stillness that I felt in the woods continued, this time reflected in sound. My brother played french horn in both movements of Billy Childs’s A Day in the Forest of Dreams, in which the composer recreates the feeling and sounds of morning, then afternoon in the forest. The flute becomes a bird. The oboe and clarinet wave their reeds in the wind.
My favorite piece of the concert was the second movement of Judd Greenstein’s Summer Dances, “In Praise of Summer Heat.”
As the strings began to hum and whine, I leaned over to Jake.
“It’s the mosquitoes,” I whispered.
The music lulled us, transporting us to the hottest day. Stillness on a porch. The way your body slows and your energy fades. The way you have to wait out the heat, preferably asleep, moving as little as possible. Bugs lope about. All the ice melts in your glass. The sweat. The thick air. The endless sun.
There in the lodge-like church, perched up in the trees, we listened and returned to the natural world.
The music, as with the poetry that lined the trail outdoors, was presented so lightly. The human interventions (laminated paper, musical instruments) seemed to move aside, leaving the emphasis only on the real thing.
Here: a clearing in the trees. Here: the sound of a hot day. Here: a doe meets your eye.
How jarring it was to go from paint fumes, hipster capitalism, and appropriation to this.
When we try to seek calm and stillness in our lives, how often are we met with chaos or imitation? How often do we seek out a good experience but have to settle? And when we suddenly find ourselves in the forest, or in the lodge, can we easily relax? Can we accept being transported? Or do we fight against it? Shift in our seats, check for texts from the babysitter? Scratch our mosquito bites?
Are we ready when stillness finally comes?
While I was trying to find the recording of the Greenstein piece to link in this newsletter, the hum of the violins stopped mid-stream, and my speakers screamed an ad for “We Buy Any Car dot com.”
This is our world. If we expect every experience to be all calm, all peace, and no mosquitoes, we are fooling ourselves. Not that we need to lower our standards, but that we may need to accept hipster Mexican food as part of the narrative. Sometimes something that’s not for you can amplify the beauty of what else is out there.
It can be a challenge not to get bogged down when the goose chase takes forever. And, when you finally find the place where you belong, to be bold enough to help yourself to the shrimp cocktail, invite a few mosquito bites, and open your eyes and ears.
The next day, riding with my friend Peggy on the way to a baby shower, I saw that familiar flash of white again, but this time out of context. A doe was leaping frantically through the parking lot of a Huntington strip mall. Each time she lunged towards a patch of green, looking for a way out of the concrete, she was met with a barrier or a fence.
What are you doing over here? I thought. This place isn’t right. This place isn’t for you.
How different the feeling of seeing the same kind of creature, two days in a row. Myself on her turf. Her on mine.
“Feels like good luck,” Peggy said.
Good luck, sure. Or some replay from the universe–some reminder that the stillness is still out there, waiting.
All day I’ve been writing this through noise and distraction. My daughter, demanding a snack, demanding attention, demanding I turn on a television show. Even when Jake finally arrived home and I slipped away, hoping to tie a bow on this letter, she crept up the stairs to “check on” me. I’ve been poked and kicked, whined at. My nervous system is far from regulated. The agitation of knowing the writing is inside my head but not yet on the page grates at my patience.
“Why are you playing this music?” Nora asks me as I try to revisit the stillness I felt during the concert. “This isn’t a happy song. Turn it off!” she says.
Stillness, in this season, may not happen every day. More often, it’s the goose chase of trying to feed and clothe and care for everyone. (And, you know, it’s always at least $79.50.) But when I find myself in the woods, in the lodge, I will be ready.
Take good care,
Dot
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